man means.

Their rescue from the power of Egypt;

their protracted existence in the barren wilderness; their conquest of the more warlike and powerful possessors of their promised land; their primary consent, and permanent submission, to the unprecedented burthens of their law; and their eventual preservation from heathenism, notwithstanding their own backsliding reluctance, and the contagion of seductive example; unquestionably demanded that miraculous aid, which we know to have been administered. Exclude the agency of Heaven, and their whole story is obscure, and inconsistent, and incredible ;-cause and effect have no intelligible relation or proportion to each other;-admit it, and consistency is at once restored. If the Israelites yield to disobedience or idolatry, the meanest of their neighbours, Moabites, Midianites, Amalekites, even the subject and tributary Canaanites, can rise in arms to their discomfiture and degradation. Let them serve the Lord faithfully, and “one” of them may "chase a thousand"," and "the daughter of Zion may shake her head" at the countless hosts of "the great king, the king of Assyria."

"Joshua xxiii. 10.

2 Kings xix. 21.

To shrink therefore from the admission of preternatural agency in a narrative, which thus of necessity presupposes it, is just as unphilosophical and unreasonable, as to admit with unhesitating credulity the prodigies of profane history, amid the ordinary transactions of ordinary men. And he, who, in the vain hope of more closely adapting his relation to the comprehension of his readers, obscures the lustre or weakens the effect of the miracles of Scripture, is in truth only rendering it the more incomprehensible; and besides his responsibility in a religious point of view, is obviously compromising his own fidelity as an historian of the Jews.

There is yet another and a very serious impediment to a satisfactory history of the Hebrew nation, politically treated. The historical Scriptures have no claim to the character of national annals, recording a regular series of political occurrences;-they are rather a compendious statement of those events, often wholly insulated and unconnected, which are best calculated to illustrate the attributes of God, as sensibly displayed in the government of his peculiar people;-reduced into their present form by a

succession of inspired prophets, from more abundant materials, from chronicles since lost, to which, however, perpetual reference is made; and selected, we may be assured, entirely for their religious value.

This is particularly remarkable in the book of Judges, which is chiefly employed in relating certain highly memorable and miraculous, but generally unconnected, deliverances of the Israelites from the oppression of their heathen neighbours, to which the Almighty had subjected them for idolatrous apostasy, and from which he relieved them on their repentance. Several intervals of forty, and one even of eighty years, in which "the land had rest'," are silently passed over;-add to which, some of their divinely commissioned deliverers appear to have been judges merely of a portion of the tribes, which had separately incurred the discipline of subjugation, while the rest presented no feature adapted to the important object of sacred record. Should it therefore be argued,

that there were certain seasons, in which the extraordinary interpositions of Providence were neither required nor exerted, (which however is at variance with the plain principles of their acknowledged theocracy,) they were precisely those periods, of which we have no memorial, while we read of those only, in which God himself is conspicuously on the scene, and in which those mighty deeds were displayed, and those divine lessons inculcated, which, as they were recorded for the instruction of Israel, so also, as the highest authority has assured us, "were written for our learning."

On the establishment of the monarchical government, indeed, the succession of their kings, especially and for manifest reasons those on the throne of Judah, presents a chain of events somewhat more connected. But the result is nearly the same;-the more prominent mercies and judgments of Heaven alone engage the attention of the inspired penmen ;-the emphatic repetition of the ominous characteristic, with which each succeeding monarch is introduced to notice, that "he did that which

Romans xv. 4.

was right in the sight of the Lord," or "that which was evil," at once discloses the complexion of his fortunes almost as certainly as the prophet, who is employed to announce them. And, on the other hand, the besetting curse of the Israelitish throne," the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin," which, with more or less of idolatrous aggravation, stamps the character of every king, draws down the unfailing repetition of Jeroboam's penalty; the extirpation of the reigning family, prophetically denounced, and sooner or later effected, by the bloodstained hand of an usurper; who himself in his turn incurs the same fate, for the same causes, and by similar means, till the scene of crime and horrors closes in an earlier and an unredeemed captivity.

If the career of Judah be traced from their captivity to their providential restoration, and onwards to the close of the sacred canon, the same prominent display of Divine interpositions", with a

D

The miraculous deliverances vouchsafed to Daniel and his three friends, completely eclipse the very little that is else known of the condition of the Jewish people during