tions, who harrass the people, and are at length consumed along with them in the unjust exercise of their power.

All the parables of Christ are spiritual discourses, very nearly allied to the form of the fable, and were delivered for the sake of some moral, which would be either obscure without any illustration, or offensive to the hearers if it were delivered to them in plain terms. When the prophet Nathan approached the king, to convict him of his sin and bring him to repentance, the case would not admit of any direct reproof: so, you see, he gains his attention, and steals upon his affections, by putting a case to him, in which he seemed to have no immediate concern: and when his indig nation was raised against a fictitious person, the prophet turned it upon himself, with that striking application, "Thou art the man. Then there was no retracting: he had already condemned himself in the judgment he had passed upon the cruel offender in the parable.

As to Esop, the reputed author of the fables which go under his name, the accounts we have of him are so obscure and contradictory, that his character itself seems to be fabulous. His fables are plainly collections taken from different ages and different countries. In the 13th chapter of the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach, the fable of the Brass Kettle, as a dangerous companion to the Earthen Pot, is clearly referred to, and was therefore a fable of the East. Some others, which we find under the name of Esop, seem to be alluded to in the course of the same chapter. The fable of the Fox and the Grapes must be of the same original; for we never heard that foxes are given tó plunder vineyards either in Greece or Italy; but the fact was common in Palestine, and is alluded to in the

Song of Solomon, ch. ii. ver. 15. The stories which are told of Æsop, that he was a slave, that his mistress persecuted him, that he had a golden cup, and some other particulars, bespeak a very strong resemblance to the history of Joseph, so famed for his wisdom in Egypt, the land of fables and hieroglyphics. The names are plainly the same; and therefore I am rather inclined to think, that the history of Æsop was either borrowed from that of Joseph; or that he was a slave or a captive of that name from the East, who brought much of the traditional wisdom of his own country with him into the West. But when all circumstances are considered, I think the former is the more probable opinion.

LETTER XIII.

ON THE USE OF HEATHEN LEARNING.

IN the middle ages of the church many Christians were very shy of the heathen writers; they were afraid lest the heathen principles of religion, morality, and policy, should be imbibed together with their poetry and oratory, and corrupt the minds of their children and scholars. Much was said of what had happened to St. Jerom; that in a vision he dreamed he was severely scourged for reading Cicero. But St. Austin, who was a man of great devotion, and one of the first scholars of the church, assures us, that one of Cicero's

pieces inscribed to Hortensius, first gave him an appetite to a more divine sort of wisdom, and that he embraced Christianity in consequence of the senti→ ments which that treatise had raised in his mind. Basil, another great scholar of the church, and a man of unquestioned piety, recommended the prudent reading of profane authors to some young people under his tuition. After his example, therefore, I must ad vise you to read with prudence, and with a proper mixture of caution; not trusting yourself to the reasonings of profane writers, till you are well grounded it principles of truth; and then, as the bee can settle upon a poisonous flower without being hurt, and can even extract honey from it, so may you improve your talents for the highest purposes, and arm yourself more effectually for the defence of sacred truth, by studying profane orators, poets, and historians.

Writers are frequently rising up, with ill designs against your religion, who polish their style, and take the utmost pains to adorn it after the pattern of the best writers of antiquity. Some scholars will always be wanted on the other side, to turn the powers of composition against them; and truth wili never fail to add such a force and weight to their embellishments, that the enemy will not be able to stand against them. He that reads the speech of St. Paul to king Agrippa, and considers it as a composition, will never be per suaded that cold and beggarly diction is requisite in a Christian apologist. The apostle, though a rigid Jew by his education, discovered on occasion a familiar acquaintance with the heathen poets.

LETTER XIV,

ON THE CONSENT BETWEEN THE SCRIPTURES AND THE HEATHEN POETS.

SOME ingenious men, of more wit than experience, have objected to the Christian revelation, because they find no traces of it in their favourite classical writers. The testimony of an adversary is always valuable; but upon this occasion we have no reason to expect it from those who had their reasons for vilifying the Jews, and all that belonged to them. If we find any thing to our purpose, we must have it as it were by accident; and of this sort much may be collected.

You have began to read Horace. If you examine his third ode, you will see him confirming the Sacred History of the Scripture in some particulars not unworthy of your notice, which could be derived to the heathens only from the fountains of Divine Revelation, or from tradition proceeding from the same original. What can we understand by the audax Japeti genus, but the posterity of Japhet, that son of Noah, from whom the European nations are descended? Japhet was the first father of the Greeks and Romans after the flood, as surely as Adam was the father of all mankind. Then, what is Prometheus's fraud against Heaven, but that offence, whatever it was, which brought death into the world? Here we have a theft acknowledged against Heaven, and all manner of evils and diseases are sent upon earth in consequence of it:

Post ignem ætherea domo

Subductum, macies et nova febrium

Terris incubuit cohors.

And what is more remarkable, he tells us of the change which was made in the period of human life, with the reason of it;

Semotique prius tarda necessitas
Lethi corripuit gradum.

Here it is affirmed by implication, that death was originally at a greater distance, and that the divine justice shortened human lite slowly and unwillingly, not till the increasing corruption of the world had made it necessary to lessen the opportunities of sin. The lives of men, before the flood, were of many hundred years; but when all flesh had corrupted his way, then the curse took place at the flood, and man's life was contracted nearly to the present span. How should Horace know this? Or how should Hesiod know it, from whom he borrowed it? for it is precisely the doctrine of the Mosaic history. And as it carries us back to the times before the flood, of which no human history was ever written, it must have been taken either from the Scripture itself, or from some tradition, which, if it could be traced, would carry us back to the same original.

These things then, though they are in Horace, are not of Horace; nor are they of the Greeks or the Romans but of Divine revelation: and it is remarkable, that we should meet with so many sacred doctrines in so small a compass. I take the opportunity to speak of this while the ode is under our consideration: but when you are farther acquainted with hea