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alive for themselves. I see nothing in this proceeding, but good policy, combined with mercy. The young men might have become dangerous avengers of, what they would esteem, their country's wrongs; the mothers might have again allured the Israelites to the love of licentious pleasures and the practice of idolatry, and brought another plague upon the congregation; but the young maidens, not being polluted by the flagitious habits of their mothers, nor likely to create disturbance by rebellion, were kept alive. You give a different turn to the matter; you say that thirtytwo thousand women-children were consigned to debauchery by the order of Moses."-Prove this, and I will allow that Moses was the horrid monster you make him-prove this, and I will allow that the Bible is what you call it a book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy-prove this, or excuse my warmth if I say to you, as Paul said to Elymas the sorcerer, whọ sought to turn away Sergius Paulus from the faith, "O full of all subtilty, and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord?"-I did not, when I began these letters, think that I should have been moved to this severity of rebuke, by any thing you could have written; but when so gross a misrepresentation is made of God's proceedings, coolness would be a crime. The women-children were not reserved for the purposes of debauchery, but of slavery;-a custom abhorrent from our manners, but every where practised in former times, and still practised in countries where the benignity of the Christian religion has not softened the ferocity of human nature. You here admit a part of the account given in the Bible respecting the expedition against Midian to be a true account: it is not unreasonable to desire that you will admit the whole, or show sufficient reason why you admit one part, and reject the other. I will mention the part to which you have paid no attention. The Israelitish army consisted but of twelve thousand men ;

a mere handful when opposed to the people of Midiai: yet when the officers made a muster of their troops after their return from the war, they found that they had not lost a single man! This circumstance struck them as so decisive an evidence of God's interposition, that out of the spoils they had taken, they offered" an oblation to the Lord, an atonement for their souls." Do but believe what the captains of thousands, and the captains of hundreds, believed at the times when these things happened, and we shall never more hear of your objection to the Bible, from its account of the wars of Moses.

You produce two or three other. objections respecting the genuineness of the first five books of the Bible. -I cannot stop to notice them: every commentator answers them in a manner suited to the apprehension. of even a mere English reader. You calculate, to the thousandth part of an inch, the length of the iron bed of Og the king of Bashan; but you do not prove that the bed was too big for the body, or that a Patagonian would have been lost in it. You make no aliowance for the size of a royal bed; nor ever suspect that king Og might have been possessed with the same kind of vanity which occupied the mind of king Alexander, when he ordered his soldiers to enlarge the size of their beds, that they might give to the Indians, in succeeding ages, a great idea of the prodigious stature of a Macedonian. In many parts of your work, you speak much in commendation of science. I join with you in every commendation you can give it: but you speak of it in such a manner as gives room to believe that you are a great proficient in it; if this be the case, I would recommend a problem to your attention, the solution of which you will readily allow to be far above the powers of a man conversant only, as you represent priests and bishops to be, in hic, hæc, hoc. The problem is this-To determine the height to which a human body, preserving it similarity of figure, may be augmented, before it will perish by its own weight.

When you have solved this problem, we shall know whether the bed of the king of Bashan was too big for any giant; whether the existence of a man twelve or fifteen feet high is in the nature of things impossible. My philosophy teaches me to doubt of many things; but it does not teach me to reject every testimony which is opposite to my experience. Had I been born in Shetland, I could, on proper testimony, have believed in the existence of the Lincolnshire ox, or of the largest dray-horse in London; though the oxen and horses in Shetland had not been bigger than mastiffs.

LETTER IV.

HAVING finished your objections to the genuineness of the books of Moses, you proceed to your remarks on the book of Joshua; and, from its internal evidence, you endeavour to prove that this book was not written by Joshua.-What then? what is your conclusion?" that it is anonymous and without authority."-Stop a little; your conclusion is not connected with your premises; your friend Euclid would have been ashamed of it. "Anonymous, and therefore without authority!" I have noticed this solecism before; but as you frequently bring it forward, and indeed your book stands much in need of it, I will submit to your consideration another observation on the subject. The book called Fleta is anonymous; but it is not on that account without authority.-Doomsday book is anonymous, and was written above seven hundred years ago; yet our courts of law do not hold it to be without authority, as to the matters of fact related in it. Yes, you will say; but this book has been preserved with singular care amongst the records of the nation. And who told you that the Jews had no records, or that they did not preserve them with singu

lar care? Josephus says the contrary and, in the Bible itself, an appeal is made to many books, which have perished; such as, the book of Jasher, the book of Nathan, of Ahijah, of Iddo, of Jehu, of natural history by Solomon, of the acts of Manasseh, and others which might be mentioned. If any one, having access to the journals of the Lords and Commons, to the books of the treasury, war-office, privy-council, and other public documents, should at this day write an history of the reigns of George the First and Second, and should publish it without his name, would any man, three or four hundreds or thousands of years hence, question the authority of that book, when he knew that the whole British nation had received it as an authentic book, from the time of its first publication to the age in which he lived? This supposition is in point. The books of the Old Testament were composed from the records of the Jewish nation, and they have been received as true by that nation, from the time in which they were written to the present day. Dodsley's Annual Register is an anonymous book; we only know the name of its editor; the New Annual Register is an anonymous book; the Reviews are anonymous books: But do we, or will our posterity, esteem these books as of no authority? On the contrary, they are admitted at present, and will be received in after ages, as authoritative records of the civil, military, and literary history of England and of: Europe. So little foundation is there for our being startled by your assertion, "It is anonymous and without authority."

If I am right in this reasoning (and I protest to you that I do not see any error in it), all the arguments you adduce in proof that the book of Joshua was not written by Joshua, nor that of Samuel by Samuel, are nothing to the purpose for which you have brought them forward: these books may be books of authority, though all you advance against the genuineness of them should be granted. No article of faith is injured,

by allowing that there is no such positive proof, when or by whom these, and some other books of holy Scripture were written, as to exclude all possibility of doubt and cavil. There is no necessity, indeed, to allow this. The chronological and historical difficulties, which others before you have produced, have been answered, and, as to the greatest part of them, so well answered, that I will not waste the reader's time by entering into a particular examination of them.

You make yourself merry with what you call the tale of the sun standing still upon mount Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon; and you say that " the story detects itself, because there is not a nation in the world that knows any thing about it." How can you expect that there should, when there is not a nation in the world, whose annals reach this æra by many hundred years? It happens, however, that you are probably mistaken as to the fact: a confused tradition concerning this miracle, and a similar one in the time. of Ahaz, when the sun went back ten degrees, had been preserved among one of the most ancient nations, as we are informed by one of the most ancient historians. Herodotus in his Uterpe, speaking of the Egyptian priests, says "They told me that the sun had four times deviated from his course, having twice risen where he uniformly goes down, and twice gone down where he uniformly rises. This, however, had produced no alteration in the climate of Egypt; the fruits of the earth, and the phenomena of the Nile, had always been the same." (Beloc's Transl.) The last part of this observation confirms the conjecture, that this account of the Egyptian priests had a reference to the two miracles respecting the sun mentioned in Scripture; for they were not of that kind which could introduce any change in climates or seasons. You would have been contented to admit the account of this miracle as a fine piece of poetical imagery; you may have seen some Jewish doctors, and some Christian commentators, who consider it as such; but impro

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