the Americans by the Spaniards, or the universal deluge?

In answer to all these objections, arising from the Old Testament, I shall observe in general, that the defenders of Christianity often undertake too much, and by endeavouring to support what is by no means essential to their cause, they weaken the evidence of what is really susceptible of proof. I think Paley has put this point on its true footing, by admitting that Christianity does not depend on the truth of every particular recorded in the Jewish Scriptures. The supposed necessity of receiving every word contained in them as an article of faith has arisen from the supposition that every word in the Old and New Testament was written by inspiration-a supposition which is totally at variance with the internal evidence of those writings.

It is plain, from numerous passages in the New Testament, that though the Apostles were occasionally distinguished by divine communications and endowed with supernatural powers, yet they were not always under the influence of immediate inspiration. It was some time before they understood that they were commissioned to preach the Gospel to the heathens as well as the Jews, and this was revealed to Peter in a vision; which, if he had been always inspired, would surely have been altogether unnecessary. It was a matter of doubt among the Apostles whether the heathen converts were bound to observe the law of Moses before they were admitted to baptism. We hear of a dispute between

St. Peter and St. Paul; which could not have happened had they both been always inspired. And in their exhortations, the Apostles make a distinction between what they advise as a matter of opinion, and what they deliver in a more peremptory style as a doctrine revealed to them. This shews that on many occasions they were left to their own judgment, and that it was only occasionally, and when necessity required, that they were assisted by divine inspiration.

Even divine inspiration would be no security for the accuracy of the Scriptures as they are handed down to us; for though the original writers should have been inspired, yet unless the same inspiration was extended to every transcriber and translator of those books, many alterations or corruptions might, through inadvertence or design, have crept into the sacred text.

The Jewish Scriptures are certainly not transmitted to us with the same authority, nor with the same degree of credit, as the writings of the New Testament. It is not easy to ascertain the time or the persons by whom many of the books were written: they were in the custody of the priesthood for a great length of time: many of them being purely historical, are therefore to be considered in the same manner as other ancient histories; and we may reasonably withhold our belief from some particulars without rejecting the whole, which is the judgment we form every day on reading the early annals of Greece and Rome.

I do not mean, however, to infer that the miracu

lous events recorded in the Old Testament deserve no more regard than the events of the same nature which we find in other histories. The very peculiar government, religion, and customs, of the Jewish nation, the superior knowledge which, notwithstanding their inferiority to the rest of the world in every other branch of learning and improvement, they possessed respecting God and his attributes, are strong arguments that they did not obtain their religious instruction from the same source whence other nations derived their absurd superstitions, and give no inconsiderable weight to their pretensions of having received it from the Deity himself, and the accomplishment of several of the predictions of their prophets proves that their claims to prophecy were not unfounded. We may, therefore, give credit to predictions, when we find them confirmed by the events, without believing every thing recorded in their annals. We may believe that they were a people set apart from other nations by the immediate providence of God, because this is attested by their whole history, and more especially by their continuing to this day to subsist as a distinct people, notwithstanding their dispersion. As it appears that they were appointed as the instruments of communicating the Divine dispensations to mankind, and that for this purpose they were placed in a peculiar manner under the especial guidance of Providence, it is not unreasonable to believe those extraordinary facts transmitted down through them, for the promulgation of which their whole economy seems to have been insti

tuted, especially when those facts are confirmed by the Gospel. The facts I principally allude to are the creation of man and the fall of our first parents, which cannot be rejected by a believer in the Gospel, as the resurrection from death is there represented as a redemption, through the obedience of the second Adam, from the penalty incurred by mankind in consequence of the disobedience of the first.

CHAPTER XII.

ON THE ADOPTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

As I am not writing to support a system, or merely to make the most of an argument, I am ready to admit that the evidence in favour of revelation consists merely in probability, though, in my opinion, such strong probability as amounts nearly to moral certainty. I make this admission, because it appears to me infinitely more probable that Providence should miraculously interpose with a divine revelation, than that a few ignorant and uneducated men should have formed so extravagant a design as to change the religion of the world by unfounded attempts to impose on the credulity of mankind, -that men, plain and artless as they appear to have been, should have conceived the most artful system of fraud and imposture, that men without education or intellectual abilities should have devised a system of morality more pure, more perfect, extensive and unexceptionable than any that the wisdom of the wisest philosophers had ever produced-that they should, on the authority of their own affirmation,-obscure, insignificant, and contemptible as they were-have