Every Israelite must assuredly have thought, that Moses, and after him Joshua, were absolutely mad: every Israelite must have rejected, with inexpressible laughter, such strange appeals to themselves in regard to what they all knew to be completely false.

We are not positively informed, what reply the people made to Moses: but the continuator, who has subjoined the last chapter of the Pentateuch that so it might end with the death of the lawgiver, assures us, that the children of Israel wept for him in the plains of Moab thirty days; and he adds, that there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses whom the Lord knew face to face, in all the signs and the wonders which the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh, and to all his servants, and to all his land, and in all that mighty hand, and in all the great terror which Moses shewed in the sight of -all Israel.' The answer of the Israelites to Joshua

is duly recorded. God forbid, that we should forsake the Lord, to serve other gods. For the Lord our God, he it is that brought us up and our fathers out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; and which did those great signs in our sight; and preserved us in all the way wherein we went, and among all the people through whom we passed."

Still then upon the supposition that no miracles were wrought, what shall we think of this even Josh. xxiv. 16, 17..

1 Deut. xxxiv. 8, 10–12,

inore strange reply to a sufficiently strange oration? The speaker gravely reminds the people of certain miraculous events, which he describes as having very lately taken place: the people no less gravely acquiesce in the narration, without a single individual offering a word of contradiction and yet, all the while, not a syllable of truth has been uttered on either side!

Such is the absurdity, which attends upon a denial of supernatural interference, after it has been shewn that the Pentateuch cannot but have been written in the days of Moses: and thus inevitably does the establishment of that last point involve an admission, that both the exodus and the whole journey of the Israelites were distinguished by a series of the most stupendous miracles.

2. But, if Moses were empowered to work the miracles recorded in the Pentateuch, he must have been a prophet sent of God: and, if he were a prophet sent of God, he must have received such a measure of inspiration as was sufficient to fit him for a due discharge of his important office. Here therefore we are brought to another grand result; which, like the former, is a consequence necessarily flowing from the established point, that the Pentateuch was written by Moses.

If then the Pentateuch were written by the thaumaturgic and inspired prophet Moses, it must in effect be the word of God: and therefore, as every precept must have been dictated by infinite wisdom; so there must have been an impossibility of error in any part of the historical narrative,

whether treating of events synchronical with the heaven-taught legislator, or detailing facts which preceded the age wherein he flourished.

Doubtless the Israelites, who were contemporaries of Moses, must, by tradition from their pious ancestors, have been acquainted with all the leading circumstances recorded in the early history of the Pentateuch. For, though I am inclined to follow the lengthened postdiluvian chronology of the Samaritan in preference to the short postdiluvian chronology of the Hebrew; still the time between Abraham and the deluge was such, that that awful catastrophe and the subsequent dispersion from Babel must have been perfectly familiar to him.' The Gentiles indeed themselves, to a much later age, preserved, in all main points, a sufficiently accurate remembrance of the flood: for they made it even one of the grand foundations of their extraordinary theological system. Much more then must Abraham have known the fact, when we consider both the period in which he flourished and the exactness with which his genealogy from Noah was preserved. But, as it has often been remarked, such was the longevity of the antediluvian patriarchs, that, in the possibility of oral communication, there is only a single middle link between Adam and Noah: for each of those personages might have conversed with one and the same intermediate connecting individual, Under such circumstances, the Israelites, in con

1

See my Origin of Pagan Idol. book vi. c. 2. § v. 5.

sequence of their being preserved from idolatry during the entire period between Abraham and Moses, would possess the patriarchal traditions in their plain historical form, undisguised by the fictions and symbols and allegories of the pagan hierophants.

Still however it is to be expected, that their accounts of these early matters would be characterized both by inaccuracies and additions and omissions. As yet, in the patriarchal Church, there was no inspired written word. That defect, since the world had now extensively apostatised into idolatry, was to be remedied upon the inauguration of a new and limited dispensation, which was appointed to be as a lamp shining in the midst of surrounding darkness. Moses therefore was enjoined to commit to imperishable writing, what had hitherto subsisted only in rapidly deteriorating tradition: and for this purpose, as God's prophet, he must have received such a measure of divine inspiration, as precluded in his narrative the possibility of error.

The reason is obvious: unless we admit this to have been the case; we shall be obliged to suppose, that the man, who was empowered to work miracles and to deliver from God himself a Law to the Israelites, was yet suffered to prefix to that inspired Law an uninspired and frequently erroneous history. Such an opinion however seems to involve a self-contradicting absurdity.

AN establishment of the position, that the Pentateuch was written by Moses, inevitably draws after it the position, that the history which he gives of his own times is an authentic history. For, as the author studiously courted publicity in his life-time, as his work was openly read to the people through a long series of generations from the very day of its original composition, as the matters recorded were not done in a corner, and as every contemporaneous Israelite must have been an adequate judge whether they occurred or not: it is abundantly clear, that no history, written by Moses or indeed by any person who flourished synchronically with him, could have been unreservedly adopted and afterwards have been zealously maintained; if, all the while, each indivi dual, who left Egypt under his guidance, had had the testimony of his own senses that the whole