many centuries been copied from age to age, and from manuscript to manuscript; and the result, say they, is, that it has been found that the variations of the manuscript have been at least thirty thousand. Had this objection been made in the days of Anthony Collins and the Free-thinkers, to reply might have caused some degree of embarrassment, because the field was then unexplored, and the facts were not completely developed. But since that period those who have investigated this objection have been enabled to pronounce it but a vain pretext, and the rationalists themselves have acknowledged that it must be renounced. Recent scientific researches have placed the faithfulness with which the Scriptures have been transmitted to us in a strong light. Herculean labors have been pursued during the last century, to reunite all the variations which could be furnished by the detailed examination of all the manuscript Scriptures preserved in the several libraries of Europe, by the study of the oldest versions, by a comparison of the innumerable quotations of the sacred books in all the writings of the Christian fathers; "and this immense labor," says the learned Gaussen, "has exhibited a result admirable for its insignificance-imposing, shall I say, by its diminutiveness."

Father Houbigant indefatigably labored in this investigation, and the result was four folio volumes. John Henry Michaelis devoted thirty years to the same study. The famous Kennicott spent ten years in the study of five hundred and eighty-one Hebrew manuscripts. And finally Professor Rossi collected six hundred and eighty manuscripts of the Old Testament writings. And the result of these prodigious labors is, that the hopes of the enemies of Revelation from this quarter have been overthrown. Michaelis says, "They have thenceforward ceased to hope any thing from these critical researches, at first earnestly recommended by them, because from them they had expected discoveries which no one has made." It appears that the learned rationalist, Eichhorn, himself also acknowledges that the different readings of the Hebrew manuscripts collected by Kennicott offer scarcely sufficient compensation for the labor they have cost. M. Gaussen, to whom we are indebted for the substance of these remarks, says, "These very failures, and this absence of discoveries, have been for the church of God a precious discovery. She looked for it; but she rejoices to owe it to the very labors of her enemies, and to the labors which they designed for the overthrow of her faith." "In truth," says a learned man of our day, "if we except these brilliant negative conclusions to which they have come,

immense researches, appears to be a nullity; and we might say, that time, talent, and science, have been foolishly spent in arriving there." But, we repeat, this result is immense by its nothingness, and almighty in its impotence. When we reflect that the Bible has been copied during three thousand years, as no book of human composition has ever been, and will never be; that it has undergone all the catastrophes and all the captivities of Israel; that it has been transported for seventy years into Babylon; that it has seen itself so often persecuted or forgotten, so interdicted or burned, from the days of the Philistines to those of the Selucida; when we recollect, that since the days of our Saviour, it has had to traverse the first three centuries of imperial persecutions, when they threw to the wild beasts the men that were convicted of possessing the sacred books; then the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, when false books, false legends, and false decretals, were every where multiplied; the tenth century, when so few men could read, even among the princes; the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, when the use of the Scriptures in the language of the people was punished with death; when they mutilated the books of the old fathers; when they retrenched and falsified so many ancient traditions, and the very acts of emperors, and those of councils: then we understand how necessary it has been that the providence of God should always have held its powerful hand outstretched, to hinder, on the one side, the Jewish church from impairing the integrity of that word which recounts their revolts, which predicts their ruin, which describes Jesus Christ; and on the other, to secure the transmission to us in all their purity, by the Christian churches, (the most powerful sects of which, and especially the Roman, have prohibited to the people the reading of the Scriptures, and have in so many ways substituted the traditions of the middle ages for the word of God,) of those Scriptures which condemn all their traditions, their images, their dead languages, their absolutions, their celibacy; which say of Rome, that she shall be the seat of a frightful apostasy, where shall be seen "the man of sin, sitting as God in the temple of God, making war on the saints, forbidding to marry, and commanding from meats which God has made;" which say of images, "thou shalt not worship them;" of unknown tongues, "thou shalt not use them;" of the cup, "drink ye all of it;" of the Virgin, "woman, what have I to do with thee?" and of marriage, “it is honorable in all.”

Now, although all the libraries containing ancient copies of the sacred books have been called to testify; although the elucidations given

by the fathers of all ages have been studied; although the Arabic, Syriac, Latin, Armenian, and Ethiopic versions have been collated; although all the manuscripts of all countries and ages, from the third to the sixteenth century, have been collected and examined a thousand times, by innumerable critics who sought with ardor, and as the recompense and glory of their fatiguing vigils, some new text; although the learned men, not satisfied with the libraries of the West, have visited those of Russia, and carried their researches even to the convents of Mount Athos, of Asiatic Turkey and of Egypt, to search there for new copies of the sacred text; "they have discovered nothing," says a learned writer already quoted, "not even a solitary reading which could cast doubt upon any passage before considered certain. All the variations, almost without exception, leave untouched the essential thoughts of each phrase, and affect only points of secondary importance," such as the insertion or omission of an article or a conjunction, the position of an adjective before or after a substantive, the greater or less exactness of a grammatical construction.

Do we ask for a standard for the Old Testament? The famous Indian manuscript, recently deposited in the library of Cambridge, may furnish an example. It is now about thirty-three years since the pious and learned Claudius Buchanan, in visiting the western peninsula of India, saw in the hands of the black Jews of Malabar, (believed to be the remnants of the tribes scattered at Nebuchadnezzar's first invasion,) an immense scroll composed of thirty-seven skins, died red, forty-eight feet long, twenty-two inches wide, and which, in its perfect condition, must have been ninety English feet long. The Holy Scriptures had been copied on it by different hands. There were left a hundred and seventeen columns of beautiful writing; and nothing was wanting but Leviticus and a part of Deuteronomy. Buchanan procured this ancient and precious monument which had been used in the worship of the synagogue, and he has recently deposited it in the Cambridge library. There are features which give satisfactory evidence that it was not a copy of a copy brought there by European Jews. Now Mr. Yeates has recently examined it with great atten. tion, and has taken the pains to compare it, word for word, letter for letter, with our Hebrew edition of Van der Hooght. He has published the results of these researches. And what has he found? Even this; "that there do not exist between the text of India and that of the West more than forty petty differences, of which not one is sufficiently serious to make the slightest change in the meaning and in the interpretation of our ancient text; and that these forty differences consist

in the addition or retrenchment of an i or a v, letters whose presence or absence in Hebrew cannot change the power of a word. We know who were the Masorites, or teachers of tradition among the Jews, men whose whole profession consisted in copying the Scriptures; we know how far these men, learned in minutiæ, carried their respect for the letter; and when we read the rules of their profession, we understand the use which the providence of God, who had confided his oracles to the Jewish people, knew how to make of their reverence, of their rigor, and even of their superstition. They counted in each book, the number of the verses, that of the words, that of the letters; they would have said to you, for example, that the letter a recurs forty-two thousand three hundred and seventy-seven times in the Bible; the letter b thirty-eight thousand two hundred and eighteen times, and so of the rest; they would have scrupled to change the situation of a letter evidently misplaced, they would merely have advised you of it in the margin, and have supposed that some mystery was connected with it; they could have told you the middle letter of the Pentateuch, and the middle letter of each of the books that compose it; they would never suffer an erasure to be made in their manuscripts; and if any mistake was made in copying, they would reject the papyrus or the skin which was stained, to renew their work upon another scroll; for they were equally forbidden to correct a fault, and to preserve for their sacred scroll, a parchment or a skin that had undergone any erasure.*

• Gaussen on the Inspiration of the Scriptures.

CHAPTER V.

OBJECTIONS STATED AND ANSWERED.

HAVING, by clear evidence and plain reasoning, proved the credibility and antiquity of the Old Testament Scriptures, the subject might be safely left with the candid and honest reader. But as a number of objections urged by Infidels, have necessarily been omitted; that every weapon of the enemy may be wrested from him, it may be well, before passing to the consideration of the claims of the New Testament Scriptures, first to notice the most important of these objections.

Mr. Olmsted maintains, that the writer of the first chapter of the book of Genesis must have been a polytheist; he says: “This is apparent from the translation, as we have it, "Let us make man in our image ;" but the most decisive expression is, "behold the man is become as one of us." You tell us that the doctrine of the trinity is taught here, but you have no more authority for saying that the doctrine of three in one is here taught, than of fifty in one. The author does not say how many there were of us; for Trinitarians do not say us or them, and you dare not say one of them, or one of us, when speaking of either person of what you call your Godhead, for fear of incurring the charge of polytheism from your opponents, the Unitarians. It is folly to deny that the expression imports plurality. If an individual should hold to me the following language, "we did all we could to thwart his views and mar his prospects, for fear he would become as rich as one of us," I should be very much surprised, and so would yoù, if that individual should tell me, that he had been talking about his individual self, and intended to include no other. It would certainly be taking an unwarrantable liberty with language. If the expression "one of us," conveys the idea of unity, or does not convey that of plurality, the Bible, which you say is a Revelation from God, must be the most unintelligible book in the world-must be any thing but a revelation.

One reason you assign, (though your God no where assigns it, nor the author for him) why all three of the persons in your trinity were required to make man, is, that he was the masterpiece of God's workmanship; that God the Father alone could make the sun, moon,