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Again, as the woman had finned through the crafty fuggeftions of the ferpent, the words, I will put enmity between thy feed and her feed, receive an additional degree of propriety in a paffage, (wherein God pronounces fentence on the serpent, her great enemy; it,' her feed, shall bruise thy head.'

Laftly, as Adam's carnal knowledge of his wife, and the confequent birth of Cain, are not related, till after their fall, and expulfion from the garden of Eden, it may be prefumed, that Eve did not bear him before this event took place; and that Cain was her first child may be collected from her words on the occafion, I have gotten a man from the Lord.' Admitting then. this to be a certainty, which is only a probability, the peculiar aptitude of the expreffion, her feed,' in this paffage, cannot but strike us in every point of view. By the mode of expreffion, her feed,' is plainly intimated the method ordained by God for a future multiplication of the human fpecies, the feed of man brought forth from the womb of a woman, when perfected into a

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had taken out of man.' The rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made," or, according to the Hebrew, builded, 'he a woman; but future men and women were to exist, as Paul expreffes it, by the woman,' that is, by the inftrumental concurrence of the woman, in producing from her womb the feed of man, ripened into a perfect, living, human fœtus. This divine arrangement of human propagation seems to have been altogether unknown at the time of the fall, and was pertinently pre fignified by the expreffion, her feed," which, in this fole properly qualified sense, is applyed to Eve's pofterity, human kind in general, and confequently to her great defcendent, the Meffiah, in common with his fellow-men.

The preceding rational explication of the expreffion, her feed,' is, I think, warranted by the pofitive teftimony of prophecy which,

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which, being filent concerning the mitad culous and merely maternal birth of Chrift, effected without the previous carnal interposition of an human father, directs us to understand, that the glorious Son of David, the Meffiah, prefignified by Ifaiah, as ‘a Man of Sorrows, was to be the joint offpring of a man and a woman, lawfully begotten by the one, on the body of the other, Accordingly, this man and this woman are. reprefented as an hufband and wife, by name Jofeph and Mary, He is, in express words, defcribed to be of the house and lineage of David;' Luke ii, 4. fo that their fon Jefus was lineally defcended from David, as well on the fide of the father, as on that of the mother; and, if he were not the genuine fon of Jofeph, furely no true evangelift would have prefumed to give him that denomination,

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any man be fo adventurous as to affert, that the filence of the prophecies, in refpect to the fuppofed fupernatural birth of Chrift, is no proof against the reality of this extraordinary tranfaction, I anfwer, that he thereby gives encouragement to an endless multiplication of the monftrous

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figments of the human brain in every species of metaphyfical abfurdity," and confequently, furnishes matter of triumph to fcoffing unbelievers, who defervedly refent every grofs impofition on their understandings; and, indeed, in refpect to this incomparably abfurd dogma of the Christian Platonists, I am an infidel, and frankly acknowledge,

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Correfpondent to the paffages, where Jefus is defcribed to be the fon of Jofeph, are thofe of Luke ii. 41 and 48. In the first it is said, his parents went to Jerufalem,' &c. and in the laft, as I obferved before, his mother, Mary, in her tender expoftulation with him, makes use of this expreffion, thy father and I have fought thee forrowing. By thy father is plainly. meant Jofeph, and by his parents, Joseph and Mary; and if Jofeph were not his father, were not one of the parents of Jefus, I would freely interrogate the evangelists, Luke and John, if they were now alive, why they dared to call him fo.

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To the preceding paffages of Chriftian Scripture, which effectually invalidate the abfurd hypothefis of the miraculous con→ ception of Chrift Jefus, in the womb of a virgin, and which incontrovertibly establish his complete manhood, that is, represent him, in conformity to the only true idea we can form of a man, fince the creation of the first human pair, as a man begotten by a man on the body of a woman, by the husband, Jofeph, on that of his wife, Mary, I shall only add a reference to those texts, where, both by prophets and apostles, Jefus is exprefsly reprefented as the fon of Da vid, the feed of David,' and the fruit of his body.'

It is not in the power of language to devife expreffions, which can more fuccefsfully militate against the miraculous conception than these; for, if Jefus were of the feed of David, it is impoffible that a man fhould not be his father. Ingenious as fystem-mongers are, in wrefting the plain meaning of the evangelifts to a coincidence with their own pre-conceived fanciful metaphyfical hypothefes, thefe fimple expreffions, the fon of David, the feed of David,'

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