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Gentiles begun to gather to, and obey our Saviour, when the Jewish church and state were quite overturned, the distinction of tribes for ever finished, the genealogies being lost. It is true they pretend since, to have had heads of their captivity; but where is their evidence, or where is the nation in which they have authority from their tyrannic masters, to judge and determine in any important point? Where is there any country under Heaven, where they have had, or now have, any share in the government? If they cannot produce tokens of power, for 1800 years past, the Messiah must certainly be come, and Jesus of Nazareth be the person.

I next proceed to lay before you some prophecies of Isaiah, a man of exalted birth, and extensive learning, for he is supposed to have been of the blood royal of the kings of Judah, and it is certain he wrote the purest

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purest language of all the Hebrews, than whom no one of the prophets spoke more fully or more circumstantially of the Messiah. First of all, let us notice those passages of his which represent our Saviour's kingdom as a reign of peace; that the wolf should dwell with the lamb, the leopard, lie down with the kid, and that the lion should eat straw like the ox. That this prophecy may probably be directed to the nature and expected effects of Christianity, and to the manner in which it should be propagated, neither by the sound of the trumpet, nor by the clash of arms, but by the still voice of reason and conviction, I by no means deny; its precepts are calculated for, and adapted to, the peace and happiness of empires: but surely we should not entirely pass over the wonderful circumstances of that period, in this respect. The Romans, and their imperial master,

underwent

underwent a sudden and a total change, at the coming of Christ; that people, who, for near two centuries, had been constantly engaged in war, now enjoyed a repose of several years; for at this time there was a general peace all over the world: this awful moment of tranquillity commenced one year only before our Saviour's birth; it continued for twelve years; a proper prelude for ushering in his coming, who was the Prince of Peace, Christ our Lord.* A remarkable alteration took place in the temper and character of Augustus. He, who in his early life had been noted for an

* Milton has a fine allusion to this circumstance:-
"No war or battles sound

"Was heard the world around:

"The idle spear and shield were high up-hung
"The hooked chariot stood,

"Unstain'd with hostile blood;

"The trumpet spake not to the armed throng;
"And kings sat still with awful eye,

"As if they surely knew their sov'reign Lord was nigh;"

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unsparing and savage cruelty, who had refused the rites of burial to a fallen enemy, saying, "He would find a grave in the "bellies of the vultures who devoured him," now pardoned repeated treacheries, and was seen in a court of justice pleading the rights of a common soldier; he gave his people the blessings, he taught them the arts of peace; he reformed their manners, he restrained the combats of the gladiators; and, above all, convinced even from common reason and the light of nature, how much the happiness of society depends on the purity of the female character, he taught the Roman women a strict attention to decency and decorum; he forbade them dancing on the public stage, or being present at the gymnastic exercises; he made his own family an example of reformation; and the same person who, in his youth, had not scrupled to take away the wife of another

another man, in his later years banished and punished his own daughter, for her licentious conduct. To what can we attribute this marvellous change, but to some great light, which the unseen hand of God was pleased to flash on his mind. We find the Augustan age most distinguished for the number of men of letters, one of whom* described the completion of some extraordinary prediction, and the appearance of some extraordinary person, though he knew not who he was, nor whence he came.

I have confined my observations, in this discourse, to the Roman empire only, because, as before mentioned, Judea was become a Roman province, and Greece, and many other countries, swallowed up in the enormous mass of her conquests, had lost their separate national existence. Though some philosophers of both countries had sense enough, from the light of nature, to

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