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would, therefore, practice many abominable, horrid, and atrocious rites.

The religious ceremonies, and the general character and practice of the heathen world, abundantly prove, that idolatry was not a mere speculative mistake, a thing only foolish and absurd, but of a very serious and alarming nature; and that it was therefore nothing that could be called jealousy in the true God, to take such extraordinary measures as the history of revelation represents him to have taken, in order to cure mankind of their proneness to idolatrous worthip. It was a part which it became the fupreme God, the benevolent parent of all his offspring, to take, and what a regard to their own happiness required. The mischief was of so alarming a nature, that the greatest severities were necessary, and therefore proper, to be employed for this purpose ; and they must know nothing of the nature and tendency of the ancient idolatry, who find any thing to censure in the severity with which the Israelites were ordered to act, with a view to the extirpation

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of it from among themselves, or the nations inhabiting the district that was destined for them.

It is not possible to imagine any instructions, or regulations, more proper to effect the extirpation of idolatry, and to guard the people from it, than the laws of Moses, interpreted by his repeated and earnest remonstrances on the subject with respect to the Israelites. Let the reader only peruse the book of Deuteronomy, and then form his judgment. And yet, so se

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, ducing were the idolatrous customs of those times, that their whole history shews how prone the Jews always were to abandon their own purer religion, and more simple rites, though, to appearance, sufficiently splendid, and having little of austerity in them. For they had only one fast day in the whole year, and three great

festivals. But the intention of the Divine Being, was equally answered by the obedience or the disobedience of that people; and after a series of discipline, they returned from the captivity of Babylon, with a new heart B 3

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and a new spirit, in this respect. For they never discovered the least proneness to idolatry afterwards ; but, on the contrary, always shewed the most scrupulous dread and jealousy on this subject. Nay, to a neglect of their religion, there succeeded the most superstitious attention to the smallest punctilios relating to it.

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CHAPTER I.

That the Jews in all Ages were Believers in the Divine Unity..

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T is impoffible to read the facred books of the Jews (with minds freed from the ftrongest prejudices) without perceiving that the doctrine of the divine unity is most rigorously inculcated in them. It is the uniform language of those books, that one God, without any affiftant, either equal or fubordinate to himself, made the world, and all things in it, and that this one God continues to direct all the affairs of men.

This is fo evident from the bare infpection of the books, and the well known principles of the Jews in our Saviour's time, that even the chriftian Fathers, defirous as they were to find advocates for their doctrine of the trinity, and preffing even Platonism into the fervice, could not but allow it. They ranfacked every part of the Old Teftament,

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Testament, as we have seen, for proofs, or intimations, of the doctrine of the trinity, or of the divinity of Christ; but, though they imagined they found many such, yet they always acknowledged that the doctrines. were delivered so obscurely, that the bulk of the Jewish nation had not perceived them.

They thought, indeed, that Moses himself, and the prophets, were acquainted with these doctrines ; but that there were good reasons why they did not endeavour to make them intelligible to the rest of their countrymen ; partly, left it should have hindered the operation of their religion to divert them from idolatry, and partly, because the doctrines were too sublime to be communicated at so early a period, and before men's minds were properly prepared for them.

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