of reading this law once in seven years to the people was neglected, and when they had actually no body of law extant among 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,

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 afterward 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

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 neighbouring 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 tradi tions, 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 it's truth;

but

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 introduces 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 meaned, 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.

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

founded on such, it consists of little else, and if it were not a history of them, it would be a his tory 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 us. 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