disobedience of individuals was to be no less uniformly punished by temporal sickness and distress. From individuals the sanction is extended to the republic itself. If the state faithfully observed the Law, it should be always prosperous and triumphant if it apostatised from the Law, it should never fail to taste the bad effects of its disobedience in unproductive seasons and in the pestilence and in subjugation to its enemies.'

This then being the avowed sanction of the Law; it is plainly built upon a sanction, which no mere human legislator could enforce, and which consequently no impostor would have appointed. For the recorded promises and threatenings were either made good, or they were not made good. If they were uniformly made good; this could not have happened without the actual existence of that very Theocracy, upon which Moses professes to build his Law and, if such a Theocracy actually existed and was in constant operation, then Moses must have been a heaven-inspired legislator. If they were not uniformly made good; Moses must, in a very few years, have stood convicted of palpable imposture: and, if such had been the case, the republic which he founded must soon have fallen to pieces; for its laws would be peculiarly liable to contempt above all other laws, because the glaring imposture of their author had been openly detected by the event. One part or other of this alternative is inevitable from the bare con

1 See Deut. xxviii-xxxi.

struction of the Mosaical Institutes, as we may read them even now with our own eyes. But the Israelites, at no one period of their history, however they might transgress the Law, just as Christians may transgress the precepts of the Gospel, ever pretended to say, that its promises and its threatenings were not uniformly made good. Hence, in the midst of their very worst apostasies, they never pretended to deny the divine authority of Moses. If however this could have been done with any plausibility, we may be morally sure that it would have been done because such a denial, upon grounds which could not be controverted, namely that the promises and the threatenings of the Law were proved by actual experience to be equally futile, were the best possible vindication of their apostatising to the worship of other gods. An argument indeed of this nature is so obvious, that, even if the Israelites had not adduced it as an apology for their conduct, we cannot doubt that it would have been speedily adduced by the priests of the Baalim. But nothing of the sort appears. The divine authority of the Law is never once disputed; which it inevitably must have been, if its promises and its threats had been found by the sure test of experience to be quite fallacious. Therefore those promises and those threats must have been duly made good. But, if they were duly made good: then the Israelites must have lived under the extraordinary Providence of a Theocracy. Whence it will ultimately follow, if the Israelites did live under the extraordinary Pro

vidence of a Theocracy; since no mere human legislator can command through a series of ages a long course of contingent events, that Moses, who did command such contingent events, must have been an inspired legislator.'

2. The only reply, so far as I can judge, which can be made to the preceding argument, is this: that, by universal acknowledgement, the extraordinary Providence of the Theocracy operated no longer after the Babylonian captivity; and yet the Jews ceased not, on that account to regard their Law as sent down from heaven. But, if the nonexistence of an extraordinary Providence after the Babylonian captivity did not shake the faith of the Jews, why should its non-existence before the Babylonian captivity be attended by any different effect?

I

The intelligent reader will easily perceive, wherein this argument differs from the celebrated one of Bp. Warburton. His Lordship's argument requires the admission, that the ancient Israelites were ignorant of a future state of rewards and punishments: for, if they were not ignorant of it, that state would certainly be a tacit and implied sanction of at least the moral Law, notwithstanding the existence of the additional sanction of an equal Providence. My argument, on the contrary, is equally valid, whatever may have been the national belief of the early Israelites as to a future state. Agreeably to this statement, the bishop contends, as his argument required him to do, not only that temporal rewards and punishments were the avowed sanction of the Law; but likewise that Moses did not teach a future state, and that the people were consequently ignorant of it. See Div. Leg. vol. v. p. 174, 175, 182, 196. vol. vi. p. 106, 132, 133, 233. Without the existence of such ignorance indeed, the three first books of the Divine Legation are wholly foreign to his argument.

To this objection it is not very difficult to give a satisfactory answer. So far from invalidating the argument, it serves in reality to strengthen it.

Had the futility of the legislative threats and promises been, from the very first, demonstrated by the event; infidelity, on the part of the Israelites, must have been the inevitable consequence. But, when their punctual accomplishment had been uniformly proved, during the lapse of almost nine centuries, from the delivery of the Law to the Babylonian captivity; the cessation of the extraordinary Providence might indeed excite the wondering speculation of the Jews as to its probable cause; but it would not lead them to doubt the divine inspiration of their Law, which had already been demonstrated by the sure test of long actual experience. Hence it is evident, that the unshaken faith of the later Jews, from the Babylonian captivity down to the present time, can only be accounted for on the ground of their full conviction, that an extraordinary Providence had operated for the space of almost nine centuries, though through the inscrutable wisdom of God it had subsequently been withdrawn.

Thus it appears, that the very faith of the Jews. after the Babylonian captivity requires and supposes the operation of an extraordinary Providence before it. Had no such extraordinary Providence been previously in operation, the ancient Israelites must have been universally infected with infidelity: and the necessary consequence would have been the total abrogation and even oblivion of the Mo

saical Institutes. But, if, without the constant operation of such an extraordinary Providence, this must inevitably have been the case with the ancient Israelites: how shall we account for the singular fact, that the later Jews devoutly believed what their immediate predecessors must have constantly disbelieved; and that, with a direct proof of imposture before their very eyes, they returned to a Law, which those predecessors must have abrogated at least, if not absolutely lost, from a full conviction of its false claims to inspiration?

3. Some of those speculations, which naturally arose in the minds of the Jews when they found that an extraordinary Providence operated no longer, may yet be traced in the Hebrew Scrip

tures.

If we ascribe the seventy third Psalm to Asaph or David; it will prove, that that dispensation, so far as individuals were concerned, was then beginning to be withdrawn : or, if we rather choose to give it to some later Asaph or to a writer after the captivity who inscribes it to the memory of David's friend; it will equally prove the cessation of an extraordinary Providence. In either case, the whole turn of the composition hinges upon the acknowledged circumstance, that such a Providence had once operated: for deny the circumstance, and it is inconceivable upon what principles the ode could have been written. No one, in the present day, would express any violent astonishment at the frequent success of the wicked