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preserved and propagated by other nations, as well as by the Israelites, and by other historians, as well as by Moses. Many of them may be true too; but, I think, they will not serve to vouch for one another in the manner they must do to become such collateral testimonies as are required. That the Israelites had a leader and legislator called Moses, is proved by the consent of foreign, whom I call collateral, witnesses. Be it so. But surely it will not follow, that this man conversed with the Supreme Being face to face, which these collateral witnesses do not affirm. The Israelites were an Egyptian colony and conquered Palestine. Be it so. It will not follow, that the red sea opened a passage to them, and drowned the Egyptians who pursued them. It will not follow, that the possession of the land of Canaan was promised to their father Abraham, four hundred years before, as a consequence of the vocation of this patriarch, and of an alliance which God made with him and with his family. A great number of instances might be brought of the same kind; and such instances might serve to prove the authenticity of those histories, which the monk of Viterbo endeavored to impose on the world under the names of Megasthenes and other ancient writers, just as well as they serve to prove the authenticity of those which we ascribe to Moses, or Joshua, or any other supposed writers of the Old Testament.

The three or four ancient neighboring nations, of whom we have some knowledge, seemed to have had a common fund of traditions, which they varied according to their different systems of religion, philosophy, and policy. We may observe this, if we compare the traditions of the Arabs, descended from the Ishmaelites, with those of the Jews, descended from the Israelites. Human tradition for human tradition, the former deserves as much credit as the latter. Why then do we put so great a difference between them? Have we any reason for it, except the affirmation of one of the parties? Abbadie will tell you that we have, because the Jews were a people of sages and philosophers. The best excuse, that can be made for the poor man, is to say, that he became, soon afterwards, mad enough to study the Apocalypse, and to believe that he found a hidden sense in it. The truth is, that ignorance and superstition, pride, injustice, and barbarity were the peculiar characteristics of this people of sages and philosophers. The principles of their religion formed them to every part of this character. Their priests, who had the care of their religion and the keeping of their records, as we are told, maintained them in it; and whether their history was such, as we see it, before the days of Esdras and Nehemias, or nothing more than broken traditions, collected and put together by them in the present form, thus much is certain, that the same

spirit breathes through the whole, and that the character of the nation appears evidently in every part of the composition. It has been said, I know, of the pride of this people particularly, that their Scriptures were not contrived to flatter them in it, since their revolts, their apostacies, and the punishments which followed them, as well as the discourses of their prophets, filled with the most mortifying reproaches, and the most terrible threatenings on the part of God, are set forth in these books with every aggravating circumstance. But this evasion will strengthen, instead of weakening, what I have said. It is true that the Jews are often represented in them like rebellious children, but they are always represented like favorite children. They abandon God's law and his worship; they depose him; they choose another king in his place; still his predilection for this chosen people subsists, and if he punishes, it is only, like an indulgent parent, to reclaim them, and to show them the same favor as before. In short, he renews all his promises to them; future glory and triumph; a Messiah; a kingdom that shall destroy all others, and last eternally, "consumet universa regna et ipsum stabit in eternum." Thus was the pride of this people kept up by incredible stories about the past, and incredible prophecies about the future; and with their pride, even to this day, their ignorance, their enthusiastical superstition, and in principle, if not in effect for want of power, their injustice and their barbarity. Thus we see that the authenticity of the Mosaical history and the other histories of the Old Testament has no sufficient collateral testimony, but rests, solely or principally, on the good faith of a people who deserve, on many accounts, to be trusted the least; and of whom we may say, that it is improbable their history should have been written, and impossible that it should have been preserved, with a strict regard to truth.

I might rest the matter here, if it did not come into my thoughts to expose a sophism that has been employed by those who defend the authenticity of this history. If they cannot show that it is confirmed by collateral and foreign testimony, cotemporary or nearly cotemporary, they hope to confirm it by assuming that relics continued long among the Jews, and that festivals and ceremonious institutions continue still, all which are so many cotemporary proofs; since they must have been cotemporary, in their origin, with the facts to which they are relative. The proof is precarious, in the mouth of one of your divines, who have abused it to establish so many pious frauds, and the belief of so many foolish legends; but it becomes contemptible, when it is employed by one of our divines, who declaim so much against the use that has been made of it in your church. With what face can he talk to us, like Abbadie, of the rod of Aaron,

of the pot of manna, or of the figures that represented rats and the privy parts of the Philistines? Would the man prove his sincerity to us, as he proves that of Moses, by his contradictions and inconsistencies?

The relics, so long preserved, exist nowhere out of the books whose historical authenticity they are advanced to prove, and if they did exist, we should be obliged to reject them, or to admit many of the grossest impositions that have passed on popular credulity. Did not the priests of Delphi show the very stone that Saturn swallowed, when he intended to devour Jupiter? Was there not an olive tree at Troezena or somewhere in Greece, in the time of Pausanias, which blossomed and bore fruit, which had been the club of Hercules, and which this hero had planted, just as Joseph of Arimathæa planted his stick, that became a miraculous thorn at Glastonbury? The institution of festivals and ceremonies proves as little as relics. Though supposed cotemporary, they may owe their original to some fabulous traditions; or if really cotemporary, they serve as well to prove all the ridiculous circumstances, that have been blended with the tradition, in process of time, as the fact which they were designed to record. The Israelites had their sabbath of days, their sabbath of years, and their weeks of years. Will it follow that God was employed six days in the laborious work of the creation, and that he rested the seventh? The passover and other institutions served to commemorate the departure of the Israelites out of Egypt, and their transmigration into Palestine. But will they serve likewise to commemorate all the incredible circumstances which had been added to the tradition of a very credible, and, no doubt, of a very true event? Collateral testimony proves the event; but these supposed cotemporary institutions cannot stand in lieu of collateral testimony to prove the circumstances. Whether the event be true, or whether it be false, such institutions will confound the truth of the event with the falsehood of the circumstances in one case, and will vouch for both alike, in the other. The death of Moses, who certainly died, is confounded with the circumstances that accompany it in the last chapter of Deuteronomy; circumstances absurd and profane; and yet, if the Jews commemorate the true fact, they must commemorate, on this principle, all the circumstances that are related in the Bible, and in their oral traditions. A good iman believes piously the ascension of Mahomet, on the faith of his traditions, and of the ceremony, by which it is annually commemorated. The ascension and the circumstances of it are false alike, the ceremony vouches for all alike; and he must believe, not only the ascension of Mahomet, but that the angel Gabriel brought, by night, to his sepulchire, a flying horse, called Borak, which the prophet

mounted and rode on horseback into heaven. Shall the annual ceremony, which confirms the whole account alike, make us believe that Mahomet went to heaven, or hinder us from placing this story in the same class with that of Astolphus and his hypogryphe? We shall believe no part of it; but the good iman is obliged to believe the whole.

The little I have said makes it plain enough, and more particulars in so plain a case would be superfluous, that if we take Tillotson at his word, if we give only the same credit to Moses, which we give to every other historian, and no more, his history cannot pass, according to any rule of good sense or true criticism for authentic. But other divines are not so generous; they give up nothing; and, therefore, when they cannot maintain weak arguments of one kind, they have recourse to another hypothesis, and affirm this history to have been written by men under the immediate influence of divine inspiration, and to be, therefore, of divine authority. For this they have the word of Josephus, and the unanimous attestation of the Jewish and Christian churches. But all this will not amount to proof, unless it may be said, that they who cannot give to this history even the appearance of human, can give it the appearance of divine authenticity. That sameness of spirit, which runs through all this history, and which appears in all the writings of the Jewish prophets, confirms one thing that Josephus says. A distinct order of men, priests and prophets, among the Jews, as well as the Egyptians, published the sacred writings of these people, and these writings were received on the faith of this order of men, who had the same temptations to impose, and the same opportunities of imposing, in both countries. Josephus boasts of the integrity of these men, and the strict regard which they paid to truth, in Egypt, as well as in Palestine, and his testimony will be of as much weight in favor of one, as in favor of the other, that is, of none at all. The sacred writings of the Egyptians had no more authority out of Egypt than the polytheism, superstition, and idolatry of other nations gave them; and the sacred writings of the Jews were never received as such, out of Judea, till the propagation of Christianity carried them abroad. Christianity abrogated the law, and confirmed the history of Moses, from the time, at least, when St. Paul undertook, like a true cabalistical architect, with the help of type and figure, to raise a new system of religion on the old foundations.

No proof of this kind, therefore, affording pretence to say, that the Scriptures of the Israelites, any more than those of the Egyptians, are of divine authority; our divines turn themselves to declaim on certain undoubted marks of it, which are to be found, they assume, in the books themselves that the canon of the Old

Testament contains. Let us say something on this subject. It deserves our utmost attention. Let us compare some of these supposed marks of a divine original with those of a human original, which will stare us in the face, and point out, plainly, the fraud and the imposture. I use these words with great freedom. I think myself obliged, in conscience, to do so, and before I conclude, you shall judge of the reasons for which I think in this manner and hold this language.

We are told, in some theological declamations, that the revelation made to the Israelites and taught in their Scriptures, corrected the false ideas of paganism, as it appears by the examples of Socrates and Plato, who borrowed, from the writings of the Jews, the best and soundest parts of their philosophy, which has been proved over and over by learned antiquaries.* It is a sufficient answer to this, to say, that the fact is false. Christians, as well as Jews, have asserted it; but it is false to say, that they have proved it. Neither Plato, nor Socrates, nor Pythagoras, nor the Egyptians and Chaldeans, their masters, appear to have borrowed any thing from the Jews, though Moses had been instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and though the Jews, both before and after Esdras, borrowed evidently, as evidently as any such thing can appear at this distance of time, from the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, and even the Greek philosophers, from Plato and from Zeno for instance. At other times we are told, that the soul of man knows neither whence it came nor whither it is to go, that these are points concerning which human reason must be always in doubt, and which were clearly determined by the Jewish revelation. We find this asserted very magisterially, but, if we have recourse to the Bible, we find no such thing. Moses did not believe the immortality of the soul, nor the rewards and punishments of another life, though it is possible he might have learned these doctrines from the Egyptians, who taught them very early, and yet not so early, perhaps, as they taught that of the unity of God. When I say that Moses did not believe the immortality of the soul, nor future rewards and punishments, my reason for it is, that he taught neither, when he had to do with a people, whom even a theocracy could not restrain, and on whom, therefore, terrors of punishment future as well as present, eternal as well as temporary, could never be too much multiplied, nor too strongly inculcated. Moses, the greatest of their prophets, knew nothing of this immortality, and Solomon, the wisest of their kings, decides against it. The texts in Ezekiel, and others, which are alleged to prove that this doctrine was part of the Jewish system, are too modern to

* Vide Abbadie.

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