ordinary vitality, as a people, to natural causes. Those causes, if they mean any thing, must be their religion and social institutions. But whence did institutions possessing this remarkable property of making the actual decay of one nation more protracted than the whole date of the existence of any other, derive their source? Still we must revert to the same, and the only satisfactory solution. Secondary causes have been more specially directed in their instance, and throughout the whole of their history, to the promotion of some remarkable result, than in that of any other branch of the human race. If it be asked, why has this been so, the Christian stands in no need of an explanation. On the contrary, he sees in this fact only one link the more in the chain of consistent events; another proof of the Divine superintendence, manifesting itself, as in the earlier ages of the world so in the present, in confirmation of the religion which he acknowledges. On the other hand, the sceptic must add this to the already overcharged list of difficulties with which his cold and hopeless theory is encumbered, and which (as to us it would seem so inconsequentially) he adopts, rather than submit to acknowledge that the sublimest spe cimen of religious philosophy and of social ethics which the history of human knowledge records could possibly be, under any circumstances, the direct gift of the Creator to his creatures.*

*The great Condè is said to have replied to certain infidel arguments, that it was perfectly vain to assail the credibility of the Christian revelation, so long as so singular a miracle as that of the existing state of the Jewish people could be appealed to in its support. The additional lapse of a century and a half since the death of that eminent person has assuredly not rendered the miracle to which he alluded less convincing.

CHAPTER XVII.

Of the tendency of the prophetic Books of the Old Testament.

THE object of this dissertation being chiefly to point out the general congruity of the Holy Scriptures with themselves, and with the universally acknowledged phenomena of human nature, in other words, to dwell more immediately upon the internal evidence which they bear of their own authenticity, it will scarcely fall within its design to dwell upon the very strong confirmation afforded by prophecy to the truth of Christianity. In a work so limited in compass as the present, it were impossible to do justice to so extensive a subject, and which has already been cogently illus trated in many first-rate standard works:* nor would the minute and circumstantial detail, which such an examination would require, accord with the very general view of the more superficial and popular objections to the credibility of our religion, which is all that is now attempted to be taken. With regard, therefore, to this truly important branch of the Chris tian evidences, it will be our object to dwell chiefly upon the more broad and general character of the writings of the Jewish prophets, as forming a kind of intermediate dispensation between the Levitical institutions, the strict and formal letter of which they are calculated to spiritualize, and the covenant of the Gospel, of the real nature and destination of which they gave the first clear intimations.

Now, among the foremost impressions left upon our minds by their perusal, is that of the internal

*Few more satisfactory works, in confirmation of the inspiration of Scripture, have appeared within our own time, than that of the Rev, Alexander Keith, entitled "Evidence of the truth of the Christian Religion, derived from the literal fulfilment of prophecy." We know of no work of the same length so well adapted to direct the attention of sceptical minds to the serious investigati n of that subject.

proof which they bear of their own authenticity, from the total want of system and definite purpose which they display, and the entire absence of any personal interest or advantage to their respective authors, if we put out of the question the appropriate position which they are calculated to occupy between a religion of types and one of antitypes, between one of ritual expiations and one of spiritual holiness; and the strong testimony which they thus afford retrospectively to the truth of the Mosaic, and prospectively to that of the Christian covenant. It would most assuredly be impossible to account for the composition of the larger and more prominent proportion of these truly remarkable documents, by referring it to the ordinary human motives of self-interest, or of national or personal vanity. That they were not written for the purpose of giving an additional sanction to the Levitical institutions is obvious from the fact, that they frequently speak of them in language so depreciating, as almost to imply a spirit of hostility: whilst, on the other hand, that their object was not that of casting any slur upon the authenticity of that ritual is equally evident, from the fact that they explicitly assert its Divine origin, and attribute the severe visitations which befel their countrymen to the wrath of Providence, for their continued violation of its enactments. Now, admitting that the Jewish prophets were sent into the world at their respective epochs, for the purpose of weaning the public mind gradually from the provisional establish ment of Moses, and preparing it for the reception of evangelical truth, all these characteristics which mark their writings are precisely what might have been expected: but, we repeat, no other solution with which we are acquainted would meet the case. Any idea of personal aggrandizement, as the motive of the line adopted by their authors, was again obviously out of the question. To the Jewish community they must have appeared, from their continued anticipa

tions of national calamity and discomfiture, any thing rather than patriotic and by the uncompromising censure with which they lashed the vices of the sovereigns of the day, they must have expected to draw down, as we know that they actually did, the most violent persecution upon their own heads. Yet with all these apparently unpopular characteristics, their books (such we must presume was the unanswerable evidence of their inspiration at the time of their production) have been received as infallible oracles by the very people whose crimes they denounced, whose religious prejudices they offended, and whose political ruin they foreboded; and, from that day to the present, have been reverentially transmitted from father to son, through every change of evil and good fortune, and referred to in their original language by that inflexible people under almost every possible modification of manners, and in almost every climate of the earth.

The gradual preparation for a new and better system than that of the provisional institutions of Moses, as hinted at by himself, and slowly developed in the subsequent writings of the prophets, seems to have been admirably contrived by Providence, according to the continually shifting circumstances of the Jewish people. Moses, it has been already remarked, alludes to the eventual abrogation of his own ritual by the substitution of the covenant of the Gospel, in language sufficiently precise to satisfy us that he was fully aware that such would be the fact, though in a manner not so prominent as to derogate from the veneration claimed for his own enactments, by announcing more boldly than was expedient their real character. But as time advanced, and when after a course of successive ages the Levitical rites had been sufficiently long established to have completely identified themselves with the national habits, the Almighty appears purposely to have become more and more explicit in his intimation of his ultimate purpose.

The substitution of spiritual, in the place of ritual, holiness; the one efficient expiation of sin, destined to be once for all offered and completed in the sufferings and subsequent glorifying of the Messiah, and the communication of the blessings of the Gospel to the Gentiles equally with the Jews, are expressly alluded to so early as the time of David, in many of the Psalms attributed to that monarch and his contemporaries, in a manner obviously calculated to subtract from the then existing reliance upon the efficacy of the sacerdotal sacrifice. "I will not reprove thee," are the words of the 50th Psalm, "for thy sacrifices, or thy burnt-offerings, have been continually before me. I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he-goat out of thy folds; for every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills, I know all the fowls upon the mountains, and the wild beasts of the fields are mine. If I were hungry I would not tell thee; for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof. Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?* Offer unto God thanksgiving, and pay thy vows unto the Most High, and call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee and thou shalt glorify me.' Again we read in the 40th Psalm,

Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire: mine ears hast thou opened: burnt-offering and sin-offering hast thou not required. Then said I, lo I come in the volume of the book it is written of me, I delight to do thy

*The words of Isaiah are exactly to the same purport. "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord; I am full of the burnt-offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of goats. When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts? Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with: it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them. And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes: cease to do evil learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge the father less, plead for the widow," Isaiah i. 11, et seq.