were idolaters when they came out of it, It was their deliverance from the yoke of the Egyptians, not their fubjection to it, that was the means of inftructing them, and other nations too, as Mofes abundantly teftifies.

In like manner, it will be your restoration to your own country, and not your prefent banishment from it, that will be the means of convincing all the world of the truth of your prophecies, and confequently of the truth of your religion, and of confirming them in the faith and pure worship of the God of your fathers to the end of time, The reflexion on the whole of your remarkable history, of your profperity and adverfity, in connexion with your adherence to the worship of the true God, and your obedience to his prophets, or your neglect of it, and your disobedience, when all the prophecies fhall have had their completion, cannot fail to ftrike and convince all. But the long continuance of your fufferings, unconnected with any future confequences, has no tendency to produce that effect. Nay, the longer you continue in your present state, the

more

more is the faith of mankind staggered, and the greater trial it is to your own faith, Many chriftians, who have the fame respect for the books of the Old Teftament with yourselves, judging from prefent appear, ances, confider you as abandoned of God, and do not believe that you will ever be restored to your country again.

Confider then, I intreat you, your real fituation, and how your calamities presently followed the rejection of Chrift, and the apoftles, by your ancestors (and your nation has perfifted in rejecting them to this day) and think whether your receiving them as true prophets of God (who were sent to your nation in the first place) may not be followed by confequences the reverse of those which followed the rejection of them. According to Mofes, a restoration to your country will always be the confequence of your repentance of those fins for which you would be expelled from it. Deut. xxx, I-5. And it ball come to pass when all these things are. come upon thee, the bleffing and the curfe which I have fet before thee, and thou shalt call them

them to mind, among all the nations whither the Lord thy God hath driven thee, and fhalt return to the Lord thy God, and shalt obey his voice, according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy children, with all thine heart and with all thy foul; that THEN the Lord thy God will return thy captivity, and have compaffion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations whither the Lord thy God hath scattered thee. Why is not this glorious prophecy fulfilled? But because you have not yet complied with the conditions of it. According to Mofes, your return to your country is always in your own power. Do your part, and your merciful God and father will not delay to do his.

LETTER

VI.

Of Daniel's Prophecy of Seventy Weeks.

MR.

R. Levi fays, p. 91, that "the fairest "method to conviction with respect "to the meffiahfhip of Jefus, is to take a "review of all the prophecies concerning

"the

the Meffiah, from Moses to Malachi, and

compare them with the acts of Jesus re"corded in the New Teftament, to fee "whether or no they have been fulfilled in "his perfon." This, he fays, he himself has done. This I have alfo done, and you my fee the refult of my inquiries in the Theological Repofitory, under the fignature of PAMPHILUS. I did not, in my last letters, trouble you with all the particulars of this long examination; contenting myself with mentioning one of thofe prophecies, but it is the only one in which the Meffiah is mentioned by that name in your facred books; and that which must have led your anceftors to diftinguish your future deliverer by that fpecific appellation. I have fhewn that, according to this celebrated prophecy, this Meffiah must have made his appearance about the time of Jefus, but certainly long before the present age.

Mr. Levi gives a very different interpretation of this prophecy, in reality the fame with that which I quoted from your Rabbi Ifaac, but without anfwering my objections

to

to it. He will not allow that the Meffiah, which is twice mentioned in this prophecy, refers at all to the perfon whom you now distinguish by that title; but says that, in the former part of the prophecy, it is to be understood of Cyrus, and in the latter of Agrippa the younger; though, furely, nothing can be more unnatural than to explain it in this manner. Can the fame term, in

two contiguous fentences of the fame prophecy, fignify two different perfons, one of them a heathen prince, and the other a king of Judea, who lived feven hundred years after him?

Mr. Levi fuppofes, with R. Ifaac and S, Jarchi, though he does not distinctly exprefs it, that the going forth of the commandment means the declaration of the divine will to Jeremiah. Ab eo tempore quo Jeremias illam rem proloquutus fuerat, five a capti vitate Zedechiæ ufque ad unctum ducem, qui Cyrus eft, futuras hebdomadas septem, quæ 49 annos complectuntur. Munimen Fidei, p. 338. Tempus dabitur a die devaf tationis ufque dum veniat Cyrus. Farchi

Comment,