without culture, indeed, produce nothing, but which, by human industry in a happy climate, may be made to vie with soils naturally the most prolific. 2. It appears, from the vast numbers which this country actually sustained in the most flourishing times of the Theocracy, that it well answered the character their Lawgiver had bestowed upon it, of a land flowing with milk and honey. 3. The Israelites, when they took possession of it, certainly found it to come up to the character which Moses had given them, of a place where they should find great and goodly Cities which they had not builded, houses full of good things which they had not filled, wells digged which they had not digged, and vineyards and olive-trees which they had not planted*. If, I say, they had not found it so, we should soon have heard of it, from the most turbulent and dissatisfied people upon earth. And it was no wonder they found it in this condition, since they had wrested it from the hands of a very numerous and luxurious People, who had carried arts and arms to some height, when they, in any sense, could be said to have Cities fenced up to Heaven. But the Poet has a solution of this difficulty; for to the Israelites, just got out of their forty years captivity in the Wilderness, this miserable country must needs appear a paradise, in comparison of the Deserts of Param and Cadish Barnea . Now it is very certain, that no Desert thereabout, could be more horrid or forbidding than that of Judea, as the Poet has here drawn the landscape. But does he think they had quite forgot the fertile plains of Egypt all this time? And if they compared the promised Inheritance to the Wilderness on

Deut. vi-viii.

Ce pais fut pour eux une terre delicieuse en comparaison des Déserts de Param & de Cades-Barpé. Ib.

the

the one hand, would they not be as apt to compare it to Egypt on the other? And what Judea gained by the first, it would loose by the second. But he will say, that Generation which came out of Egypt, fell in the Wilderness. What if they did? they left their fondness for its flesh-pots behind them, as we are sufficiently informed from the excessive attachment of their posterity for Egyptian luxury of every kind. 4. But let us admit his account of the sterility of the promised Land, and then see how the pretensions of the Mosaic Mission will stand. We will consider this sterility in either view, as corrigible, or as incorrigible.

If corrigible, we cannot conceive a properer region for answering the ENDS of Providence, as Moses has delivered them unto us, with regard to this People. The first great blessing bestowed on mankind, was to be particularly exemplified in the posterity of Abraham, which was to be like the sand on the sea-shore for multitude: and yet they were to be confined within the narrow limits of a single district: so that some proportionate provision was to be made for its nume-, rous Inhabitants. Affluence by commerce they could not have; for the purpose of their separation required that Idolaters should no more be permitted to come and pollute them, than that they should go amongst Idolaters to be polluted by them: And accordingly, a sufficient care was taken, in the framing of their Laws, to hinder this communication at either end. Thus the advantages from commerce being quite cut off, they had only agriculture to have recourse to, for subsistence of their multitudes. And the natural sterility of the land would force them upon every invention to improve it. And artificial culture produces an abundance, which unassisted nature can never give to the most fruitful soil and most benignant climate. Add to this,

that

that a People thus sequestered, would, without such constant attention to the art, and application to the labour, which the meliorating of a backward soil requires, soon degenerate into barbarous and savage manners; the first product of which has been always seen to be a total oblivion of a God.

But if we are to suppose what the Poet would seem to insinuate, in discredit of the Dispensation, that the soil of Judea was absolutely incorrigible; a more convincing proof cannot be given of that ExTRAORDINARY PROVIDENCE which Moses promised to them. So that if the corrigibility of a bad soil perfectly agreed with the END of the Dispensation, which was a separation, the incorrigibility of it was as well fitted to the MEAN, which was an extraordinary Providence. For the fact, that Judea did support those vast multitudes, being unquestionable, and the natural incapacity of the country so to do being allowed, nothing remains but that we must recur to that extraordinary Providence, which not only was promised, but was the natural consequence of a Theocratic form of government. But I am inclined to keep between the two contrary suppositions, and take up the premisses of the one, and the conclusion of the other to hold that the sterility of Judea was very corrigible; but that all possible culture would be inadequate to the vast numbers which it sustained, and that therefore its natural produce was still further multiplied by an extraordinary blessing upon the land.

To support this system, we may observe, that this extraordinary assistance was bestowed more eminently, because more wanted, while the Israelites remained in the Wilderness. MOSES, whose word will yet go as far as our General Historian's, says, that when God took Jacob up, to give him his LAW, he found

him indeed in a desert Land, and in the waste-howling wilderness; but it was no longer such, when now God had the leading of him. "He led him about," [i.e.

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while he was preparing him for the conquest of the promised Land] "He instructed him," [i.e. by the LAW, which he there gave him] "He kept him as the แ apple of his eye," [i.e. he preserved him there by his extraordinary Providence ;] the effects of which he describes in the next words,-" He made him ride on the high places of the earth," [i.e. he made the Wilderness to equal, in its produce, the best cultivated places]" that he might eat the increase of the fields; "and he made him to suck honey out of the Rock, "and oil out of the flinty Rock: Butter of kine, and "milk of sheep, with fat of lambs, and rams of the "breed of Bashan" [i. e. as large as that breed]" and

tr

goats, with the fat of kidneys of wheat,” [i. e. the flour of wheat] " and thou didst drink the pure blood " of the Grape."

That this was no fairy-scene, appears from the effects-" Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked: thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick, thou art covered "with fatness; then he forsook God which made

66

him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salva"tion*," &c. This severe reproof of Moses certainly did not put the Israelites in an humour, to take the wonders in the foregoing account on his word, had the facts he appeals to been the least equivocal.

On the whole, we can form no conception how God could have chosen a People, and assigned them a land to inhabit, more proper for the display of his almighty Power, than the People of Israel and the land of Judea. As to the People, the PROPHET in his Parable of the Vine-tree, informs us, that they were natu * Deut. xxxii. 10. & seq. C

VOL. V.

rally,

rally, the weakest and most contemptible of all nations and as to the land, the POET, in his great Fable, which he calls a General History, assures us, that Judea was the vilest and most barren of all countries. Yet somehow or other this chosen People became the Instructors of mankind, in the noblest office of humanity, the science of true Theology: and the promised Land, while made subservient to the worship of one God, was changed, from its native sterility, to a region flowing with milk and honey; and, by reason of the incredible numbers which it sustained, deservedly entitled the GLORY OF ALL LANDS.

This is the state of things which SCRIPTURE lays before us. And I have never yet seen those strong reasons, from the schools of Infidelity, that should induce a man, bred up in any school at all, to prefer their logic to the plain facts of the Sacred Historians.

I have used their testimony to expose one, who, indeed, renounces their authority: but in this I am not conscious of having transgressed any rule of fair reasoning. The Freethinker laments that there is no contemporary historian remaining, to confront with the Jewish Lawgiver, and detect his impostures. However, he takes heart, and boldly engages his credit to confute him from his own history. This is a fair attempt. But he prevaricates on the very first onset. The Sacred History, besides the many civil facts which it contains, has many of a miraculous nature. Of these, our Freethinker will allow the first only to be brought in evidence. And then bravely attacks his adversary, who has now one hand tied behind him: for the civil and the miraculous facts, in the Jewish Dispensation, have the same, nay, a nearer relation to each other, than the two hands of the same body; for these may be used singly and independently, though

to