of a divine authority may be found in the writings of Moses, and, from this consideration, we shall find reason, perhaps, to be the less concerned that we have not those which Tillotson kept to himself on this occasion. In the mean time, let us continue to judge of Moses, as we should do of any historian, since it is all that is desired of us.

Now to constitute the authenticity of any history, these are some of the conditions necessary. It must be written by a cotemporary author, or by one who had cotemporary materials in his hands. It must have been published among men who were able to judge of the capacity of the author, and of the authenticity of the memorials on which he wrote. Nothing repugnant to the universal experience of mankind must be contained in it. principal facts, at least, which it contains, must be confirmed by collateral testimony, that is, by the testimony of those who had no common interest of country, of religion, or of profession, to disguise or falsify the truth. That Moses was not a cotemporary author is allowed, and that he could have no cotemporary authority, for the greatest part of what he advanced concerning the creation, is proved. Thus far then his writings have no historical authenticity. Let us see whether they have it in any of the other respects which I have mentioned. Were they published among people able to judge of them and of their author? Huetius, who wrote an evangelical demonstration, and died a sceptic, admits, in his demonstration, that a book, to be deemed authentic, must have been received, as such, in the age which followed immediately the publication of it, and in all the ages which followed this. Has it been sufficiently proved, that the Mosaical history was so received? I believe not. There was, it is said, by Abbadie, I think, a law of Moses, before Esdras, before Josiah, and even before David, since this famous prophet and king speaks continually of the law of God; and since all the other prophets quote the most important passages of Deuteronomy. The Pentateuch must have been in their hands, since they show, very clearly, that they had an exact knowledge of the facts contained in Genesis, the least circumstances of which are referred to by them as circumstances that no man could be ignorant of. İf Moses wrote the history contained in the book of Genesis, he wrote all the other books that compose the Pentateuch. Abbadie assumes that this cannot be denied, and that Moses must needs have been a good scribe, since it was he who recorded, in writing, the words of the covenant made at Horeb.

It would be hard to find an example of greater trifling: for when we have allowed that the authors of the Old Testament, from David down to Esdras, speak not only of the law, but refer VOL. III.-3

to many of the facts related in the Pentateuch, it will not follow necessarily that the Pentateuch, which we have in our hands, was published in the time of Moses or immediately after it. Much of the history, and some of the law, perhaps, contained in the writings ascribed to Moses, came down to those who quote them, by traditions of uncertain original, though they were all alike ascribed, by the Jews, to the same legislator. This cannot appear improbable to any one who considers, that establishments said to be made according to the law of Moses, when the custom of reading this law once in seven years to the people was neglected, and when they had actually no body of law extant amongst them, are mentioned sometimes in the Bible. This had been the case when Hilkiah found the law in the temple, which had been lost long before, and continued to be so, during the first eighteen or twenty years of good Josiah's reign. That the book, thus found, contained nothing but the law of Moses, strictly so called, or than the recapitulation of it, made in Deuteronomy, not the Mosaical history, we may, nay we must conclude, from the little time that the reading the book in the presence of the king, and before it was sent by his order to the prophetess Huldah, took up.

The Jews had an oral, as well as a written law, and the former has been deemed even more important than the latter. The former however consisted of nothing more than traditions, which the rabbin Juda Hakkodosh, or the holy, compiled, six or seven centuries after Esdras had compiled the canon of the Scriptures. In short, there seems to have been two collections of ancient Jewish traditions made at different times; and the authors, who preceded Esdras, might quote those of one sort, as authentic facts. and divine laws, just as well as the doctors, who preceded rabbi Juda, quoted those of the other, as a commentary on them given by God himself on Mount Sinai. It will be said, I know, that the authenticity of the Pentateuch, given us by Esdras, is sufficiently proved, by the conformity it has, in most instances, with the Pentateuch of the Samaritans, that is of the Cuthæans, a people sent from the other side of the Euphrates by Salmanasar to inhabit the country of Samaria, which he had depopulated. This people knew nothing of the Mosaical law till Asarhaddon, the successor of Salmanasar, sent a priest of the Jews to instruct them in it, who might carry, for aught we know, a Pentateuch written in ancient Hebrew characters with him. I enter into no examination of these precarious accounts, lest I should go out of my depth; neither need I to do so: for if we allow that the Pentateuch was public before the time of Esdras, Josiah, or even David, will it follow that it was so as early as would be necessary to answer that condition of authenticity, which we speak of here? Was there not time more than enough between Moses and David

to make fabulous traditions pass for authentic history? Did it take up near so much to establish the divine authority of the Alcoran among the Arabs, a people not more incapable to judge of Mahomet and his book, than we may suppose the Israelites to judge of Moses, and his book, if he left any, whether of law alone, or of history and law both?

The time that the Israelites passed from the Exode under Moses, and the four centuries that they passed afterwards under their judges, may be compared, well enough, to the heroical age of the Greeks. Marvellous traditions descended from both, and their heroes were much alike. Those of the Greeks were generally bastards of some god or other, and those of the Jews were always appointed by God to defend his people, and to destroy their enemies. But Aod, one of these, was an assassin, and Jephtha, another, was a captain of banditti, as David was, till, by the help of the priests, he obtained the crown; after which, under him, and his son Solomon, the government of the Israelites took a better form; arts and sciences were cultivated; and their historical age might begin. It has been urged, by those who scruple little what they say, that the four centuries, which the Israelites passed under their judges, were times of adversity and oppression, wherein they had something else to do than to invent fabulous traditions, or that if any such were invented so near the times of Moses and Joshua, they must have been detected by the Israelites themselves, who would have been far from encouraging traditions so injurious to neighboring nations, of whom they had reason to stand in awe. Thus it seems that times of ignorance, barbarity, and confusion, were the most unlikely to give rise and currency to fables, and the most proper to preserve the truth of traditions, which must, for this ridiculous reason, have come down uncorrupted and unmixed. One can hardly imagine any thing so extravagant, and yet I can quote, from Abbadie, a way of reasoning that is more so. You have thought, I doubt not, hitherto, like other men of sense, that the consistency of a narration is one mark of its truth; but this great divine will teach you, that the inconsistency, not the consistency, is such a mark. Moses, he says, is so inconsistent with himself, that he establishes the existence of one God, and then talks as if there were many. He introduced Jacob wrestling against God, and the mortal comes off victorious. Could he have advanced such an apparent absurdity, if the fact had not been true? He advanced it, because he knew it to be true, though he did not understand it. Just so he talked of several lords, who appeared to Abraham under the forms of angels, without knowing what he said, though Abbadie knew that the angel of the covenant was one of them: by which I profess myself not to know what Abbadie meant,

or what they mean, who say, that this angel was the Son of God. Thus a new rule is added to the canon of criticism by this learned divine.

us.

Another condition of the authenticity of any human history, and such alone we are to consider in this place, is, that it contain nothing repugnant to the experience of mankind. Things repugnant to this experience are to be found in many, that pass, however, for authentic; in that of Livy, for instance: but then these incredible anecdotes stand by themselves, as it were, and the history may go on without them. But this is not the case of the Pentateuch, nor of the other books of the Old Testament. Incredible anecdotes are not mentioned seldom and occasionally in them. The whole history is founded on such, it consists of little else, and if it were not a history of them, it would be a history of nothing. These books become familiar to us before we have any experience of our own. The strange stories they relate, represented in pictures or in prints, are the amusements of our infancy; we read them, as soon as we learn to read, and they make their impressions on us, like the tales of our nurses. The latter are soon effaced, though sometimes, with difficulty; because no one takes care to preserve them, and care is taken, in a good education, to destroy them. But the others are industriously renewed, and the most superstitious credulity grows up along with We may laugh at Don Quixote, as long as we please, for reading romances till he believed them to be true histories, and for quoting archbishop Turpin with great solemnity; but when we speak of the Pentateuch, as of an authentic history, and quote Moses, as solemnly as he did Turpin, are we much less mad than he was? When I sit down to read this history with the same indifference as I should read any other, for so it ought to be read, to comply with all that archbishop Tillotson requires of us, I am ready to think myself transported into a sort of fairy land, where every thing is done by magic and enchantment; where a system of nature, very different from ours, prevails; and all I meet with is repugnant to my experience, and to the clearest and most distinct ideas I have. Two or three incredible anecdotes, in a decade of Livy, are easily passed over; I reject them, and I return, with my author, into the known course of human affairs, where I find many things extraordinary, but none incredible. I cannot do this in reading the history of the Old Testament. It is founded in incredibility. Almost every event contained in it is incredible in its causes or consequences, and I must accept or reject the whole, as I said just now. I can do no otherwise, if I act like an indifferent judge, and if I give no more credit to Moses than to any other historian. But I need say no more on this head. No one, except here and there a divine, will presume to

say, that the histories of the Old Testament are conformable to the experience of mankind and to the natural course of things. I except here and there a divine, because I remember one, who, speaking of the conversation of the serpent with the first woman, and the other circumstances of the fall of man, (that he may avoid the explanations given by the rabbins of this story, or that of Philo, a little less extravagant than the others, all which turned the whole into allegory,) has the front to assert, that there is nothing incredible in this relation, literally understood.

The next condition of historical authenticity is this, that the facts, the principal facts at least, be confirmed by collateral testimony. By collateral testimony I mean the testimony of those, who had no common interest of country, of religion, or of profession, to disguise or falsify the truth, as I expressed myself above. Thus too it is necessary that we express ourselves in order to prevent a common theological sophism. Huetius says, in the place to which I have referred already, that a history is deemed to be true, when other histories relate the same facts, and in the same manner. But it is not enough that the same facts are related, even in cotemporary, or nearly cotemporary books; since if the authors of these books were such as I describe, all these testimonies would be in effect but one, as all those of the Old Testament, which confirm the Mosaical history, are in truth but one, the testimony of Moses himself.

Josephus attempts to support this history by collateral testimonies, those of Egyptians, Phoenicians, Chaldæans, and even Greeks. But these testimonies, were they never so full to his purpose, would cease to be collateral testimonies, by coming through him who had a common interest of country and religion to disguise and to falsify truth. If we examine the use he makes of the fragments he cites from Manetho, concerning the shepherdkings, and many other citations in his works, we shall find abundant reason to suspect him of both. Eusebius is a collateral witness, as little as he, and yet from these two quivers principally have all the arrows, employed to defend the authenticity of the Old Testament, been drawn. They are blunt indeed, and nothing can be more trifling than the use that has been made of them by ancient and modern scholars. Whenever these men find, in profane history or tradition, the least circumstance that has any seeming relation to sacred history, they produce it as collateral testimony, and sometimes even the similitude of sounds is employed for the same purpose, with a great apparatus of learning. But nothing can be more impertinent than this learning. The man who gives the least credit to the Mosaic history for instance, will agree, very readily, that these five books contain traditions of a very great antiquity, some of which were