likewise, before the invention of the shuttle, and of all other trades.

Some, who play the fool with their pens, have contrived a whimsical sort of calculation; the Jesuit, Petau, in his sagacious computation, at the epocha of only two hundred and eighty-five years after the deluge, gives the earth a hundred times more inhabitants than can be supposed to be in it at present. Cumberland and Whiston are no less ridiculous in their calculations. Good men! had they only consulted the registers of our American colonies, they would have been astonished. They would have seen how very slowly the human species multiplies; and very often, so far from increasing, it diminishes.

Let us, therefore, who are but of yesterday, descendants from the Celts; who have but just cleared our wild countries from the forests with which they were over-run; let us, I say, leave the Chinese and the Indians in the quiet enjoyment of their fine climate and their antiquity; especially, let us forbear calling the emperor of China, and the soubah of Decan, idolaters. Neither are we to be infatuated with Chinese merit. The constitution of their empire is, indeed, the best in the whole world, the only one which is entirely modelled from paternal power (the mandarins, however, chastise their children very severely;) the only one, where the governor of a province is punished, if, at the expiration of his office, the people do not show their approbation of his conduct by loud acclamations; the only one which has instituted prizes for virtue, whilst, every where else, the laws only punish vice; the only one whose laws have recommended themselves to its conquerors, whilst we are still swayed by the customs of our conquerors-the Burgundians, the Franks, and the Goths. But it must be owned, that the commonalty, who are bonze-ridden, are no less knavish than ours; that foreigners are extremely imposed on, as amongst us; that, in sciences, the Chinese are two hundred years behind us; that, like us, they have a thousand ridiculous notions; that they give credit to talismen and judicial astrology, which was also our case for a long time.

It must further be owned, that they were amazed at our thermometer, at our way of freezing liquors by salt-petre, and with Torricelli and Otho Guerie's experiments, just as we ourselves were on our first seeing those physical exhibitions : further, their physicians do not cure mortal distempers, any more than ours; and the slighter illnesses nature alone cures there, as here. Notwithstanding all this, the Chinese, four

thousand years ago, when we did not know our letters, were masters of all that is essentially useful in that knowledge, which we so much value ourselves on at present.

CHRISTIANITY.

HISTORICAL DISQUISITIONS CONCERNING CHRISTIANITY.

In vain, have several of the learned expressed their astonishment, that in the historian Josephus, they meet with no trace of Jesus Christ, the little passage relating to him in that history, being now universally given up as interpolated. Yet Josephus's father must have been an eye-witness of Jesus's miracles. This historian was of the priestly lineage; and, being related to queen Mariamne, Herod's wife, is minutely particular on all that prince's proceedings, yet wholly silent as to the life and death of Christ. Though neither concealing nor palliating Herod's cruelties, he says not a word about his ordering the children to be massacred, on an information that a king of the Jews was just born. According to the Greek calendar, the number of children put to death on that occasion, amounted to fourteen thousand.

Of all the cruelties ever committed by all the tyrants that ever lived, this was the most horrible: a like instance is not to be found in history.

Yet the best writer the Jews ever had, the only one of any account with the Romans and Greeks, makes no manner of mention of a transaction so very extraordinary, and so very doubtful. He says not a word of the new star which had appeared in the east at the Saviour's nativity; though a phenomenon so singular could not escape the knowledge of such an accurate historian as Josephus : he is likewise silent as to the darkness which, at noon day, covered the whole earth for the space of three hours, whilst the Saviour was on the cross; the opening of the tombs at that awful time; and the number of the just who rose from the dead.

It is not less a matter of wonder to the learned, that these prodigies are not taken notice of by any Roman historian, though they happened in the reign of Tiberius, under the very eyes of a Roman governor and garrison, who naturally would have sent the emperor and senate a circumstantial account of the most miraculous event ever heard of. Rome itself must, for three hours, have been involved in thick darkness; and,

surely, such a prodigy would have been noted in the annals of Rome, and those of all other nations. But God, I suppose, would not allow that such divine things should be committed to writing by profane hands.

The same learned persons likewise meet with some difficulties in the evangelical history. They observe that, in St. Matthew, Jesus Christ says to the Scribes and Pharisees, that upon them should come all the innocent blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to that of Zachariah, the son of Barac, whom they slew between the temple and the altar.

In all the history of the Hebrews, say they, we meet with no such person as Zachariah, killed in the temple, before the coming of the Messiah, nor in his time; but Josephus, in his history of the siege of Jerusalem, (chap. xix. book iv.) mentions a Zachariah, the son of Barachiah, who was killed in the middle of the temple, by the faction of the Zelotes. This has given rise to a suspicion, that St. Matthew's gospel was not written till after the taking of Jerusalem by Titus. But, if we consider the infinite difference there must be, between books divinely inspired, and such as are merely human, all these doubts, difficulties, and objections, immediately vanish. It was God's pleasure that his birth, life, and death, should be shrouded in a cloud of respectable darkness. His ways in all things are different from ours.

The learned are also at a great loss to reconcile the difference of the two genealogies of Christ. In St. Matthew, Joseph's father is Jacob, Jacob's is Matthan, Matthan's is Eleazar; whereas St. Luke says, that Joseph was the son of Heli, Heli of Matthat, Matthat of Levi, Levi of Janna, &c. They cannot reconcile the fifty-six ancestors in Christ's genealogy from Abraham, mentioned by Luke, to the two-and-forty different ancestors in the genealogy from the same Abraham, given by St. Matthew; and they are shocked, that Matthew, mentioning forty-two generations, enumerates no more than forty-one.

They likewise are at a stand about Jesus not being the son of Joseph, but of Mary. They farther have their doubts concerning the MIRACLES OF OUR SAVIOUR, and quote St. Austin, St. Hilary and others, who interpret the account of these miracles in a mystic and allegorical sense; as the cursing and withering the fig-tree, for not bearing figs, when it was not the time of figs; the sending the devils into the swine, in a country where those creatures were not permitted: the turning the water into wine, towards the end of an entertainment, when

the guests were already heated with liquor. But all these cavils of the learned are put to silence by faith, whose merit is enhanced by these difficulties. The scope of this article is purely to follow the historical clue, and give a just and precise idea of those facts, which nobody offers to controvert.

First, Jesus was born under the Mosaic law; in conformity to this law, he was circumcised; he conformed to all its precepts; he kept all its feasts, and preached only morality; he made no revelation of the mystery of his incarnation; he never told the Jews that he was born of a virgin; he received John's benediction, being baptized by him in the river Jordan, a ceremony to which great numbers of Jews submitted; he said nothing about the seven sacraments, nor did he institute, in his life-time, the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He concealed from his contemporaries that he was the Son of God, generated from all eternity, consubstantial with God; and that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father and the Son; he did not inform them, that his person was composed of two natures and two wills: these great mysteries were, in after-times, to be declared to man by persons illuminated by the light of the Holy Ghost. During his whole life he did not, in the least, deviate from the law of his forefathers. He showed himself to the world only as a just man, acceptable to God, persecuted by envious doctors, and condemned to die by prejudiced magistrates. It was his pleasure that all the rest should be done by the holy church which he established.

Josephus, in the twelfth chapter of his history, mentions an austere sect of Jews, then recently founded by one Judas Galileus, "They make light," says he, "of all earthly evils. Such is their resolution, that they brave tortures, and, on an honourable motive, prefer death to life. They have chosen to be burnt, to be slain, and even their bones to be broken, rather than utter the least word against their legislator, or eat any forbidden food."

This character seems to belong to the Judaites, and not to the Essenes; for Josephus's words are, "Judas was the author of a new sect, totally different from the other three; that is, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes." And further on he says, "They are, by nation, Jews; they live in a close union among themselves, and hold all sensuality to be vicious and sinful." Now the natural import of this phrase, shows the author to be speaking of the Judaites.

However it be, these Judaites were known before Christ's disciples began to make any considerable figure in the world.

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The Therapeutes were a society differing both from the Essenes and the Judaites, and had some affinity to the Indian Gymnosophists and Bramins. "They have," says Philo, impulses of heavenly love, by which they kindle into all the enthusiasm of the Coribantes and the Bacchanalians, and are raised to that state of contemplation after which they aspire. This sect had its rise in Alexandria, where the Jews were very numerous, and spread exceedingly throughout Egypt."

John the Baptist's disciples likewise spread a little in Egypt, but especially in Syria and Arabia; Asia Minor also. was not without them. The Acts of the Apostles, chap. xix. says, that St. Paul met with several at Ephesus; and asked them, "Have you received the Holy Ghost?" they answered, "We have not so much as heard that there is a Holy Ghost." He inquired, "What baptism then have you received?" They replied, "The baptism of John." For some little time after Jesus' death, there were several different sects and societies among the Jews;-the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, the Judaites, the Therapeutes, the disciples of John, and the disciples of Christ, whose little flock God led by paths unknown to human wisdom.

Thus

Believers first had the name of Christians at Antioch, about the sixtieth year of our common era; but, as we shall see in the sequel, they were known in the Roman empire under other appellations. Before that time they distinguished themselves only by the name of Brothers, Saints, and Faithful. God, who had come down on earth to be a pattern of meekness and self-denial, founded his church on very weak, and apparently mean beginnings, and kept it in the same humble and mortified condition in which it pleased him to be born. All the first believers were of low parentage, obscure men, working with their own hands. The apostle, Paul, intimates that he supported himself by making tents. St. Peter raised

to life Dorcas, a sempstress, who used to make garments for the brethren and the believers of Joppa used to hold their meetings in the house of one Simon, a tanner, as may be seen in chap. ix. of the Acts of the Apostles.

The faithful secretly spread themselves in Greece, and some went from thence to Rome, mingling with the Jews, to whom the Jews allowed a synagogue. At first they continued with the Jews, and so far practised circumcision, that, as we have elsewhere observed, the first fifteen bishops of Jerusalem were every one circumcised.

The apostle Paul, on taking with him Timothy, whose fa