think were jesters; and so you may call the seven wise men of Greece; but you will never convince the world that Solomon, who was wiser than them all, was nothing but a witty jester. As to the sins and debaucheries of Solomon, we have nothing to do with them but to avoid them; and to give full credit to his experience, when he preaches to us his admirable ser-, mon on the vanity of every thing but piety and virtue.

Isaiah has a greater share of your abuse than any other writer in the Old Testament, and the reason of it is obvious-the prophecies of Isaiah have received such a full and circumstantial completion, that unless you can persuade yourself to consider the whole book (a few historical sketches excepted) "as one continued bombastical rant, full of extravagant metaphor, without application, and destitute of meaning," you must of necessity allow its divine authority. You compare the burden of Babylon, the burden of Moab, the burden of Damascus, and the other denunciations of the prophet against cities and kingdoms, to "the story of the knight of the burning mountain, the story of Cinderilla," &c. I may have read these stories, but I remember nothing of the subjects of them; I have read also Isaiah's burden of Babylon, and I have compared it with the past and the present state of Babylon, and the comparison has made such an impression on my mind, that it will never be effaced from my memory. I shall never cease to believe that the Eternal alone, by whom things future are more distinctly known than past or present things are by man, that the Eternal God alone could have dictated to the prophet Isaiah the subject of the burden of Babylon.

The latter part of the forty-fourth, and the beginning of the forty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, are, in your opinion, so far from being written by Isaiah, that they * could only have been written by some person who lived at least an hundred and fifty years after Isaiah was dead-these chapters, you go on, "are a compliment to Cyrus, who permitted the Jews to return to

Jerusalem from the Babylonian captivity above one hundred and fifty years after the death of Isaiah:"and is it for this, Sir, that you accuse the church of audacity and the priests of ignorance, in imposing, as you call it, this book upon the world as the writing of Isaiah? What shall be said of you, who, either designedly, or ignorantly, represent one of the most clear and important prophecies in the Bible, as an historical compliment, written above an hundred and fifty years after the death of the prophet? We contend, Sir, that this is a prophecy, and not an history; that God called Cyrus by his name; declared that he should conquer Babylon; and described the means by which he should do it, above an hundred years before Cyrus was born, and when there was no probability of such an event.-Porphyry could not resist the evidence of Daniel's prophecies, but by saying, that they were forged after the events predicted had taken place; Voltaire could not resist the evidence of the prediction of Jesus, concerning the destruction of Jerusalem, but by saying, that the account was written after Jerusalem had been destroyed; and you, at length (though, for aught I know, you may have had predecessors in this presumption), unable to resist the evidence of Isaiah's prophecies, contend that they are bombastical rant, without application, though the application is circumstantial; and destitute of meaning, though the meaning is so obvious that it cannot be mistaken; and that one of the most remarkable of them is not a prophecy, but an historical compliment written after the event. We will not, Sir, give up Daniel and St. Matthew to the impudent assertions of Porphyry and Voltaire, nor will we give up Isaiah to your assertion-Proof, proof is what we require, and not assertion: we will not relinquish our religion in obedience to your abusive assertion respecting the prophets of God. That the wonderful absurdity of this hypothesis may be more obrious to you, I beg you to consider that Cyrus was a Persian, had been brought up in the religion of his

country, and was probably addicted to the Magian superstition of two independent Beings, equal in power but different in principle, one the author of light and of all good, the other the author of darkness and all evil. Now is it probable that a captive Jew, meaning to compliment the greatest prince in the world, should be so stupid as to tell the prince that his religion was a lie? "I am the Lord, and there is none else, F form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil, I the Lord do all these things.'

But if you will persevere in believing that the prophecy concerning Cyrus was written after the event, peruse the burden of Babylon; was that also written after the event? Were the Medes then stirred up against Babylon? Was Babylon, the glory of the kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees, then overthrown, and become as Sodom and Gomorrah? Wasit then uninhabited? Was it then neither fit for the Arabian's tent nor the shepherd's fold? Did the wild beasts of the desert then lie there? Did the wild beasts of the islands then cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces? Were Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, the son and the grandson, then cut off? Was Babylon then become a possession of the bittern, and pools of water? Was it then swept with the besom of destruction, so swept that the world knows not now where to find it?

I am unwilling to attribute bad designs, deliberate wickedness, to you, or to any man: I cannot avoid believing, that you think you have truth on your side, and that you are doing service to mankind in endeavouring to root out what you esteem superstition. What I blame you for is this that you have attempted to lessen the authority of the Bible by ridicule, more than by reason; that you have brought forward every petty objection which your ingenuity could discover, or your industry pick up from the writings of others; and without taking any notice of the answers which have been repeatedly given to these objections,, you

urge and enforce them as if they were new. There is certainly some novelty at least in your manner, for you go beyond all others in boldness of assertion, and in profaneness of argumentation; Bolingbroke and Voltaire must yield the palm of scurrility to Thomas Paine.

Permit me to state to you, what would, in my opinion, have been a better mode of proceeding; better suited to the character of an honest man, sincere in his endeavours to search out truth. Such a man, in reading the Bible, would, in the first place, examine whether the Bible attributed to the Supreme Being any attributes repugnant to holiness, truth, justice, goodness; whether it represented him as subject to human infirmities; whether it excluded him from the government of the world, or assigned the origin of it to chance, and an eternal conflict of atoms. Finding nothing of this kind in the Bible (for the destruction of the Canaanites by his express command, I have shown not to be repugnant to his moral justice), he would, in the second place, consider that the Bible being, as to many of its parts, a very old book, and written by various authors, and at different and distant periods, there might, probably, occur some difficulties, and apparent contradictions in the historical part of it; he would endeavour to remove these difficulties, to reconcile these apparent contradictions, by the rules of such sound criticism as he would use in examining the contents of any other book; and if he found that most of them were of a trifling nature, arising from short additions inserted into the text as explanatory and supplemental, or from mistakes and omissions of transeribers, he would infer that all the rest were capable of being accounted for, though he was not able to do it; and he would be the more willing to make this concession, from observing, that there ran through the whole book an harmony and connexion, utterly inconsistent with every idea of forgery and deceit. He would then, in the third place, observe, that the mira

culous and historical parts of this book were so intermixed, that they could not be separated; that they must either both be true, or both false; and from finding that the historical part was as well or better authenticated than that of any other history, he woulds admit the miraculous part; and, to confirm himself in this belief, he would advert to the prophecies; wellknowing that the prediction of things to come, was as certain a proof of the divine interposition, as the performance of a miracle could be. If he should find,. as he certainly would, that many ancient prophecies had been fulfilled in all their circumstances, and that some were fulfilling at this very day, he would not suffer a few seeming or real difficulties to overbalance the weight of this accumulated evidence for the truth of the Bible. Such, I presume to think, would be a proper conduct in all those who are desirous of forming a rational and impartial judgement on the subject of revealed religion. To return.

As to your observation, that the book of Isaiah is (at least in translation) that kind of composition and false taste, which is properly called prose run madI have only to remark, that your taste for Hebrewpoetry, even judging of it from translation, would be more correct, if you would suffer yourself to be informed on the subject by bishop Lowth, who tells you in. his Prelections" that a poem translated literally from the Hebrew into any other language, whilst the same forms of the sentences remain, will still retain, even as far as relates to versification, much of its native dignity, and a faint appearance of versification." (Gregory's Transl.) If this is what you mean by prose run mad, your observation may be admitted.

You explain at some length your notion of the misapplication made by St. Matthew of the prophecy in Isaiah," Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son." That passage has been handled largely and minutely by almost every commentator; and it is too important to be handled superficially by any one : I

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