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The geometricians shall go without an answer, for they pay no regard to any thing but their lines, their surfaces, and their solids; but to the divine it may be said, How am I a Manichee? There is a heap of stones which no architect has made, but with them he has built a vast edifice. Here I do not admit of two architects; only the rough stones have submitted to the operations of power and genius.

Happily, which ever system be espoused, morality is hurt by neither; for what signifies it, whether matter be made, or only arranged? God is equally our absolute master. Whether the chaos was only put in order, or whether it was created of nothing, still it behoves us to be virtuous. Scarcely any of these metaphysical questions have a relation to the conduct of life disputes are like table-talk, every one forgets, after dinner, what he has said, and goes away where his interest or inclination lead him.

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MESSIAH,

OR Meshia, in Hebrew; Christos, or Celomenos, in Greek; or Unctus in Latin, signify anointed.

We see, in the Old Testament, that the name of Messiah was often given to idolatrous, or infidel princes. God is said to have sent a prophet to anoint Jehu, king of Israel; he signified the sacred unction to Hazael, king of Damascus and Syria, those two princes being the Messiahs of the Most High, to punish the house of Ahab.

In the forty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, the name of Messiah is expressly given to Cyrus. "Thus hath the Lord said to his anointed (his Messiah), whose right hand I have holden to subdue nations before him."

Ezekiel, in the twenty-eighth chapter of his revelations, gives the appellation of Messiah to the king of Tyrus, whom he also calls Cherubim. Son of man, says the Eternal to the prophet, lift up thy voice and utter a lamentation concerning the king of Tyrus; and say unto him, thus saith the Lord, the Eternal, thou wast the seal of the likeness of God, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty; thou wast the Lord's garden of Eden; or, according to other versions, thou wast the Lord's whole delight. Thy garments were of Sardonix, topaz, jasper, chrysolite, onyx, beryl, sapphire, carbuncle, emerald, and gold. What thy tabrets and thy flutes could do,

was within thee; they were all ready on the day thou wast created; thou hast a Cherubim, a Messiah.

The title of Messiah, or Christ, was given to the kings, prophets, and high-priests, among the Hebrews. The Lord and his Messiah are witness, 1 Kings, xii. 3; that is, the Lord and the king whom he hath set up; and, elsewhere, touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm. David, who was divinely inspired, in more than one place gives the title of Messiah to Saul, his rejected father-in-law, who persecuted him. God forbid, says he frequently, that I should lay my hand on the Lord's anointed, the Messiah of God!

As the name of Messiah, or anointed of the Eternal, has been given to idolatrous kings and reprobate persons, very often has it been used to indicate the true anointed of the Lord, the Messiah, by way of excellence, the Christ, the Son of God; lastly, God himself.

If all the oracles usually applied to the Messiah were to be compared, it may give rise to some seeming difficulties, and which the Jews have made use of to justify their hardness of belief and obstinacy, did it admit of an apology. Several eminent divines allow that the Jews, groaning under an oppressive slavery, and having so many repeated promises from the Eternal, might well long for the coming of a Messiah, who was to deliver them and subdue their enemies; and that they are in some measure excusable for having not immediately perceived Jesus to be his deliverer and conqueror.

It was agreeable to the plan of Eternal Wisdom, that the spiritual ideas of the real Messiah should be unknown to the blind multitude; and so far were they unknown, that the Jewish doctors have denied, that those passages which we produce are to be understood of the Messiah. Many affirm that the Messiah is already come in the person of Hezekiah; and this was the famous Hillel's opinion. Others, and these are many, that the belief of the coming of a Messiah, so far from being a fundamental article of faith, was only a comfortable hope, no such thing being mentioned in the Decalogue, or in Leviticus.

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Several Rabbins tell you, that they do not in the least question the Messiah's being come at the time decreed; that he is not however growing old, but remains in the world concealed, and waits till Israel shall have duly celebrated the Sabbath, to reveal himself.

The famous Rabbi, Solomon Jarchy, or Raschy, who flour, ished during the beginning of the twelfth century, says, in his

Talmudics, that the ancient Hebrews believed the Messiah to have been born on the very day of the final destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. This answers to the common saying, of sending for the doctor when a man is dead.

The Rabbi Kimchi, who also lived in the twelfth century, preached that the Messiah, whose coming he imagined to be near, would drive the Christians out of Judea, which was then in their possession. The Christians, indeed, were dispossessed of the Holy Land; but this was done by Saladin; and / had that conqueror taken the Jews under his protection, it is very probable that, in their enthusiasm, they would have made him their Messiah.

The sacred authors, and our Lord Jesus himself, often compare the Messiah's reign, and the eternal beatitude, to a wedding and banquet; but these parables have been strangely wrested by the Talmudists. According to them, the Messiah will gather together all his people in the land of Canaan, and give them an entertainment, where the wine will be that which Adam himself made in the earthly Paradise, and which he keeps in vast cellars, dug by angels in the centre of the earth.

The first course will be the famous fish called the great leviathan, which at once swallows a fish less than itself, yet it is three hundred leagues in length; and the whole mass of waters is supported on this leviathan. God at first created a male and a female; but, lest they might overturn the earth, or crowd the universe with their offspring, he killed the female, and salted it down for the Messiah's banquet.

The Rabbins add, that there will likewise be killed, the bull called behemoth, of such a monstrous size, that every day it eats the herbage of a thousand mountains. This bull's female was slain at the beginning of the world, to prevent the multiplication of such prodigious species, which must have been extremely detrimental to other creatures: but they say that the Eternal did not salt it, cow's flesh not being so good salted as that of the female leviathan. So firmly do the Jews believe all these rabbinical chimeras, that it is common among them to swear by their share of the behemoth.

With such coarse ideas concerning the coming of the Messiah and his reign, is it to be wondered at that the Jews, both ancient and modern, and several even of the first Christians, unhappily prepossessed with all these reveries, could not raise their conceptions to the idea of the divine nature of the Lord's anointed, or perceive God in the Messiah? "To acknowledge a man-god," say they, " is imposing on one's self; it is forming a monster, a centaur, the strange compound of two

natures, incompatible with each other." Adding that the prophets never taught the Messiah's being Man-god; that they expressly distinguish between God and David; that they plainly declare the former to be master, and the latter servant, &c.

It is sufficiently known that the Jews servilely adhered to the letter of the scriptures, never, like us, penetrating into the spirit.

When the Saviour appeared, the prejudiced Jews declared against him. And Jesus Christ himself, that their blindness might not be too much irritated, seems extremely reserved in the article of his divinity, meaning, says St. Chrysostom, insensibly to accustom his hearers to believe a mystery so very much above bare reason: his assuming the divine prerogative of pardoning sins, shocked all the by-standers; his most manifest miracles convinced not even those for whose relief they were operated, that he was God. When, with a modest circumlocution, he owned himself the Son of God before the high-priest's judgment seat, the high-priest, filled with indignation, rent his clothes, and cried out, Blasphemy! Before the mission of the Holy Ghost, the apostles themselves had not the least apprehension of their master's divinity. He asks them what the people think of him; and their answer is, that some took him for Elias, others for Jeremiah, or some other prophet; and it was by a particular revelation, that St. Peter knew Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of the living God.

The Jews being irreconcileably scandalized at the divinity of Jesus, have left no stone unturned to explode it; perverting the sense of their own oracles, or not applying them to the Messiah. They affirm that the name of God, Eloi, is not peculiar to the Deity; and that it is by sacred authors given to judges, to magistrates, and, in general, to all persons in authority they do indeed quote a great number of passages which countenance this observation, but without in the least invalidating those strong and clear terms of the ancient oracles, which manifestly relate to the Messiah.

Lastly, say they, if the Saviour, and, after him, the evangelists, the apostles, and the primitive Christians, did call Jesus Son of God, this august term, in the gospel-times, imported no more than the contrary to the sons of Belial; that is, a good man, a servant of God, in opposition to a wicked man, or to one who does not fear God.

The Jews, besides denying Christ his quality of Messiah, and his divinity, have omitted nothing to render him contemptible, exposing his birth, life, and death, with all the ridicule,

virulence, and contumely, which their guilty rancour could suggest.

Of all the works which Jewish blindness has produced, none in extravagance and impiety exceed the ancient book intitled, Sepher Toldos Jeschut, which has been rescued from the worms by M. Vagenseil, in the second volume of his work entitled Tela Ignea.

This Sepher Toldos Jeschut has a most shocking history of the life of the Saviour, written with the utmost falsity and malice for instance, they have dared to write that one Panther, or Pandera, who dwelt at Bethlehem, seduced a young woman, married to Jochanan; and the fruit of this foul commerce was a child, whom they named Jesus, or Jesu. The father being obliged to fly the place, withdrew to Babylon. As for young Jesus, he was sent to school; but, adds the author, he had the insolence to raise his head, and uncover himself before the priests, contrary to the usage, which was to appear in their presence with the head hanging down, and the face covered; a petulance for which he received a smart check. This occasioning an enquiry into his birth, it was, consequently, found to be impure, and he became exposed to public ignominy. This book was known so early as the second century: Celsus cites it with exultation, and Origen, in his ninth chapter, refutes it.

There is another book, which likewise bears the title of Toledos Jesu, published in 1705, by M. Huldric, which is more consonant with the evangelical history of the Saviour's birth, but swarms with the grossest anachronisms and other errors. It makes Christ to have been born and have died under Herod the great; and affirms that the complaint of Panther's adultery with Mary, the mother of Jesus, was brought before that prince.

The author, who calls himself Jonathan, and, if his word may be taken, was contemporary with Christ, and lived at Jerusalem, affirms that Herod, relatively to Jesus Christ, consulted the senators of a city in the land of Cesarea; but such an absurd author, with all his contradictions, we shall leave to himself.

These calumnies, however, serve to foment the implacable hatred of the Jews against the Christians and the gospel: so that they have stuck at nothing to falsify the chronology of the Old Testament, and to spread doubt and difficulties about the time of the Saviour's coming.

Ahmed-ben Cassum-al Anacousy, a Moor of Grenada, who lived towards the close of the sixteenth century, quotes

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