perfections in the works of creation and Providence, had lost all their convictive force and energy. In this gloom of more than midnight darkness, the sun of righteousness arose on a benighted world, with meridian splendour.

When Jesus Christ began his ministry, he courted neither Jew nor Gentile-declaring the Jewish œconomy at at end, and fully completed in him; and showing, that all the other nations" had changed the glory of the incorruptible God, into images made like corruptible man, and to birds and four footed beasts, and creeping things; wherefore God hath given them up to uncleanness, through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves-being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity, whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful.”

Does this black catalogue contain a picture, likely to attract the friendship of those, who were said to be the originals? Had it a tendency to prepare the minds of the Gentiles to believe the author to be a Son of God?

The author of the Age of Reason must have well known, if he had given himself time to reflect, that there was a wide difference, in the estimation of the Gentiles, between their ideas of deifying a man, who had pretended to have been begotten by some imaginary God, and who would claim divine honours jointly with a thousand other Gods of the like origin,

and the claim of Jesus Christ to an exclusive worship. He not only severely, and with sovereign power, reproved their abominable practices, as a moral teacher, but he declared himself in an exclusive sense, (though apparently the son of Joseph and Mary, and confessedly incarnate and the son of man) the only begotten Son of God, begotten before all worlds, even from eternity-the Creator of all things

-one with the Father, the sole object of all true worship in Heaven and earth-who was, and is, and is to come-the first and the last-the beginning and the end-and besides whom there was no God.

Is there any thing in all the mythology of the ancients, that tended to prepare the minds of the people, for such a story as this? Or is not every word and every idea totally repugnant to all the notions ever formed by the wisest among the Gentile nations of the earth, on the subject of religious worship?

Add to all this, that Jesus Christ not only thus declared himself to be the Son of God with power, in his preaching, and proved the claim by doing the works that no man before him ever did; but that the crime for which he was crucified, was, that "being a man, he had made himself equal with God;" and this imputed crime he confessed at the bars, both of the high priest of the Jews, and of the Roman governor, Yet Jesus Christ is acknowledged by this author, "to have been a virtuous and amiable man; and the excellent morality he preached and practised, to have been of the most benevolent kind, and not exceeded by any who had gone before, or succeeded him."

How a man, pluming himself on the title Common Sense, can reconcile Jesus Christ having been a

preacher of such excellent morality, with his own principles detailed in this extraordinary treatise, I leave others to determine.

Is it possible that this writer could have seriously believed, "that Jesus Christ, or the Messiah of the Jews, being the Son of God, was a doctrine of no higher a date, than the birth of Christ; and that therefore it was a wretched story, formed for the critical moment, when the peoples minds were prepared for the belief of it, by the peculiar complexion of the heather. mythology?"

Nothing could have convinced a reader of this fact, but the author's apparent want of knowledge, in both the Jewish and Christian histories, when he asserts, "That the Jews who had kept strictly to the belief of one God and no more, and who had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited the story,"

It is almost incredible, that any man, however absurd his conduct might have been in some other respects, should have attempted so important a subject, without reading the sacred writings of the Jews, with the opinions of their chief authors. To these I appeal for a conclusive answer.

Their prophetical books expressly foretold, (besides the declaration to Adam, that the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent's head) many hundred years before the event, that in the fulness of time, God would send his prophet (so termed by way of eminence) to whom the people should hearken, and that in the seed of Abraham, all the nations of the earth should be blessed. The prophecies relating to the promised Messiah, were delivered at dif

ferent times, and under very differing circumstances. To Adam and Eve he was promised, in general, as a man, the seed of the woman.

It is somewhat re

markable, that we never read of the seed of the woman but in the instance of the promised Saviour: We hear of the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—of Aaron and of David, but never of the seed of any woman, but that of the Virgin Mary, the mother of our Lord according to the flesh. To Abraham he is promised as his seed, or the seed of his posterity. Thus (in the words of the sacred Biographer*) " He who was promised to Adam, immediately on the fall, under the obscure description of the seed of the woman, who should bruise the head of the serpent, was now announced to the world as the seed of Abraham, in whom all the families of the earth should be blessed. And hence-forward, we have prediction upon prediction-ordinance upon ordinance—promise upon promise-event upon event, leading to, rising above, improving, enlarging upon each other, like the gradual light of the ascending sun, from the early dawn to the perfect day; we perceive types, shadows, ceremonies, sacrifices disappearing little by little: patriarchs, priests, prophets, lawgivers and kings, retiring one after another, and giving place to the Lord our Judge, our Lawgiver, our King to save us, as the twinkling fires of the night hide their diminished heads; and as the vapours disperse before the glorious orb of day."

To Jacob, the Messiah is promised as one descending from the tribe of Judah. To David, that he

* Vol. ii. 17.

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should be of his family, and of the fruit of his body. That he was to be a great King forever and ever→ the anointed of the Lord-his only begotten Son, who should have the heathen for his inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession.Yet he was to be forsaken of his God; to be despised and laughed to scorn; his garments were to be parted among his persecutors, and they were to cast lots for his vesture. He was to be betrayed by his own familiar friend, who eat of his bread. To Isaiah it was foretold, that the spirit of the Lord should be upon him, that his birth should be miraculous, and his mother a virgin :-that he should be a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and that the chastisement, by which our peace is to be effected, should be laid upon him, his death being for the redemption of mankind; yet the government should be upon his shoulders, and his name should be called, Wonderful Counsellor the Mighty God the Father of the Everlasting Ages-the Prince of Peace.

To

To Micah, he was to be born in Bethlehem. Daniel was made known the precise time of his suffering. To Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, that all these events should be accomplished before the destruction of the second Temple. The not breaking a bone of the paschal Lamb-the rending the garment and casting lots for his vesture-the offering gall and vinegar-the looking on him whom they have pierced the prophecies relating to the humiliation and death of the Messiah, and the spirituality of his office, all tend to elucidate and show the established doctrines of the Jews with regard to their expected Messiah.