of the equally accurate accomplishment of his other predictions, demonstrates him to be a true prophet. Such being the case, his recognition of Moses must inevitably demonstrate the inspiration of Moses also: for one prophet, that hath the testimony of another prophet, is supposed to be true. Thus complete and irrefragable is the argument from prophecy. 2 D VOL. I. CHAP. VII. THE DIVINE INSPIRATION OF THE PENTA TEUCH PROVED FROM ITS INCULCATING THE UNITY OF THE GODHEAD. THERE is yet another argument, which seems to me very strongly to prove the divine inspiration of the Pentateuch, though its tendency may not at the first appear quite so obvious: I mean the argument which may be drawn from the circumstance, that the unity of the Godhead is strenuously inculcated, as a necessary article of faith, both in the writings of Moses and in all those other subsequent writings which profess to build upon them; so that this tenet became the most prominent doctrine of the Hebrew republic. I. From the wide diffusion of Christianity and (it is but fair to add) of Mohammedisin, our minds are now so familiarized to the grand tenet of the divine unity, that we find it even difficult to imagine how any other opinion could ever have prevailed. The doctrine, in short, approves itself so entirely to our reason; it so well harmonizes with the palpable unity of design, which pervades the whole creation; and it appears to present itself so naturally to any thinking mind that the very circumstance of its obviousness might well prevent its being adduced as any proof, that the code, which inculcates it, was delivered by divine inspiration. But, in thus viewing the subject, we forget the times in which we are placed. Would we view it justly and accurately, we must transport ourselves in imagination to that long and dreary period, which preceded the rising of the Sun of righteousness upon a benighted world. II. Now, when we have thus transported ourselves, what do we find to be the naked matter of fact with respect to this apparently so obvious proposition, that it need only be adduced in order to be immediately received? The naked matter of fact is this the whole world was plunged in idolatrous polytheism, without any difference being effected by different degrees of civilization; the cultivated and the barbarous were alike determined worshippers of a multiplicity of gods; and the doctrine of the divine unity, as the received national creed, was confined to a single small people. Such is the undoubted fact: and the question is, how we are to account for it. 1. Shall we say, that the Israelites, by the higher cultivation of their intellects and by their habits of more closely reasoning backward from effect to cause, were brought to the universal admission of a truth, which others attained not to, merely on account of their mental inferiority and their less advanced progress in abstract discussion ? If such be our proposed solution, it stands directly contradicted by history. Never perhaps was there a people less addicted to refined speculation than the ancient Israelites. Both their natural humour and their national habits alike precluded them from entering deeply into abstract reasoning. They were coarsely given to regard only sensible objects: they were a race of complete agriculturists, tied to the soil by the very machinery of their statutes, and prevented by the same constantly operative cause from enlarging their minds by an extensive commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind. Nor is this all: so far from having themselves excogitated the doctrine, they shewed a strange and perpetual inclination to abandon it, plain and obvious as it may appear to minds constituted like our own. They so incessantly lapsed into the polytheism of the Gentiles, that they were never cured of this depraved tendency to palpable error until the time of the Babylonian captivity; nor, even after that period, were they entirely free from a strong Hellenizing propensity. Yet, notwithstanding these departures, the doctrine of the divine unity may assuredly be deemed the most prominent feature of the national creed, from their first settlement as a people down to their dispersion over the face of the whole earth. It is abundantly clear then, that the doctrine was not philosophically excogitated by the Israel ites themselves and accordingly we find it, not artificially and abstractedly demonstrated in their sacred books, but only dogmatically and authoritatively enforced in them. The perfect rationality of the tenet indeed is undoubted: but how happened it, that the Hebrew legislator alone publicly maintained and inculcated it? Whence did he himself receive such an opinion? Egypt, the very land of bestial and vegetable gods, were but an indifferent school for the education of a professed iconoclastic monotheist. Or, even if the divine unity were the esoteric doctrine of a mysterious priesthood, how came Moses to depart so far from the principles of his instructors as to communicate unreservedly so sublime a dogma to the profane multitude? 2. But from the monotheistic Israelites let us turn to the polytheistic Gentiles. Here I would make little account of harbarian tribes; for it might naturally be said, that with them polytheistic idolatry was but the offspring of a degraded and uncultivated intellect, which beheld a present deity auspicious or malignant in whatsoever benefited and in whatsoever molested them : but how shall we account for that worship of multifarious gods which equally prevailed throughout the most civilized empires of antiquity, if we contend, that in the first instance there was no need of inspiration authoritatively to enjoin monotheism and authoritatively to prohibit polytheism? Why was the divine unity the established doctrine of the rustic and little-inquisitive Israelites; while the philosophic Babylonians, the sagacious Egyptians, |