pieces were, cast unto the potter, in the house of the Lord, by the prophet, who, in that part of the prophecy, represented, both Judas and the sanhedrim. How circumstantial! Whither had fled the understanding of the atheistical high-priest and sanhedrim, when they did not so much as think of frustrating the effect of this prophecy by offering to the avarice of Judas one or two pieces more? In the multitude of prophecies concerning our blessed Saviour, particularly of the evangelical prophet, I might enumerate many more, as plain and literal as the former; but these may suffice to shew what I intended to prove in this para-graph, that he is plainly and clearly pointed out by the prophets, as well by strictly grammatical, as by figurative predictions, which latter however can be fairly interpreted of none, but him. After all, I am perfectly sensible this mode of proof will have no effect on the enemies of our holy religion, who shut their eyes against the light; but may be of some use to such as mean well, yet through ignorance and weakness are liable to the seductions of artifice and cunning. That the Jews did, and still do expect a Messiah, relying on the prophecies of the Old Testament alone, is known to all men; and that therefore those prophecies were always sufficiently intelligible to them, and consequently may be so to others, is a truth which no arts of the devil, or his agents, will ever be able to invalidate. This great and most important truth is not left to rest on one or two predictions, liable to misinterpretation, but on so great a number, and expressed in so great a variety of ways, and all pointing so uniformly to the single event, as to forestal a possibility, with unprejudiced reason, of mistaking the purport in view, when they were recorded. To wind up this short argument, let the reader hear Isa. xxxv. 4-6; 'Behold your God shall come with vengeance, even God with a recompense, he will come and save you; then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped; then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing. Ibid. lxi. 1; "The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings,' or the gospel, unto the meek.' When John the Baptist sent two of his disciples to Christ, saying, Art thou he that should come, or look we for another? Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and shew John again what things ye do hear and see; the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor Behold here a literal prohuman apprehension, and have the gospel preached to them.' phecy of certain facts impossible to yet literally accomplished, and then appealed to by our Lord, as proofs of his Messiahship in the sight and hearing of a multitude, crowding round him for the benefit of these miracles! It is most evident, that his reference to this prophecy, whereof John, his precursor, could not be ignorant, was intended for a satisfactory answer to the inquiry made by the messengers, satisfactory, I mean, not so much to John as to the messengers, and the people present, the purport of the inquiry having been known to John long before. 159. I have often thought the fine lines of Horace, borrowed from Isaiah, Olim truncus eram, &c. might, though with great diminution of their brilliancy, be paraphrased, and applied to the image-worshippers among our pretended Christians, in some such manner as the following, Olim truncus eram ficulnus, inutile lignum, Cum faber incertus, scamnum faceretve, Petrumve, Of useless timber I an image fram'd, Yet more still, I, with wooden lips, from thence, 160. For lack of objections to Christianity, and invectives against its author, his enemies have charged him with neither encouraging friendship by rewards, nor inculcating rules for its regulation; and it hath been answered, that he hath personally set an example of friendship in his affection for the apostle St. John, who stands distinguished in the gospel by the title of the disciple, whom Jesus loved. If he was not farther particular on the subject, it was probably because he would not countenance such friendships as we are too apt to give into on mistaken and often unjustifiable motives. He called all his disciples his friends, and friends to one another by his lovely injunction, that they should love one another, and by that love distinguish themselves among mankind, as ever ready to lay down their lives for their brethren, in imitation of him who laid down his life for them all. Greater love hath no man, than that of laying down his life for another. It was the intention of our blessed Teacher to discountenance our own narrow-hearted partialities and attachments. It was his purpose so to enlarge our affections, as that we should love all men as our neighbours, and all Christians, as our brothers and sisters. The distinctions of Jew, Gentile, and Samaritan; of bond and free; of Greek and Barbarian; of rich and poor; of high and low; were by him to be removed, and swallowed up in a universal charity. God was to be loved with all our hearts and souls, and our neighbours as ourselves. The 'friendship of this world' was to be considered as enmity with God;' and so extensive was the love inculcated by him, that I cannot help thinking, he saw with a disapproving eye the contracted particularities wherein one man is preferred, and all the rest of the human race left out, at best, as indifferents. We are commanded by St. Peter to 'have fervent charity among ourselves;' and fervent indeed it ought to be, but the Greek word EKTEVη for which our translation puts, fervent, signifies rather extensive, as that which is so widely stretched as to cover the multitude of sins, whether committed by ourselves or others, in order to mutual or divine forgiveness. 161. Our infidels discover a very low kind of spite in crying up the Koran, as not unfrequently they do, with some air of preference to the Gospel. All impostors are a-kin. Mahomet affected no small respect for Christianity; and they, to save the like appearances, do the same in Christian countries, labouring to undermine it by artifice, as he did to oppress it by force and power. Had they been to suffer under the cruel and rapacious hands of this Arab, they would have applauded the meekness and charity of Christ, as more accommodated to their selfish wishes, than to any similarity of heart, for they are deceivers, and when it is in their power, oppressors, not less unfeeling than Mahomet himself. Christ sent forth his apostles to suffer for the lovely religion they published to the world. Mahomet sent out his apostles in steel, as Mr. West expresses it in one of his sermons, to plunder and murder all that had either a property or life to lose. Hypocrisy and cruelty were united in his system, and it prospered in a world too readily disposed to share the spoil of a feeble resistance. Such were the Turks, a barbarous northern nation, who, in search of plunder, broke in upon Persia, Syria, &c. These men, having little or no religion of any sort, before their migration, and finding Christianity and Mahometism in the countries they invaded, did not like the former as too passive for their purpose, and therefore embraced the latter, as a religion of the sword, and perfectly suited to their views of plunder and murder. Mahomet, sensible of this advantage in his scheme, and knowing that the Jews in general had rejected Christ for no other reason, but because they saw in him no prospect of their expected plunder; contrived a sort of religion, well adapted to the wishes of the Arabs, and of all other nations, addicted to violence and rapine. To them Providence gave up the eastern Christians, almost universally debauched, and little better than Christians in name only. To them, too, Providence resigned the eastern idolaters, for these apostles speciously preached, with the points of their swords, the worship of one God only, and abstinence from wine. It was no objection to, but rather a recommendation of their religion, that it gave an almost unbounded licence to lewdness, and even promised the indulgence of it in heaven as a reward for the merit of rapine on earth. Wine was forbidden, because intoxication is an enemy to success in wars; but women were offered, as the most inviting article of plunder, and the most likely temptation to increase the number of proselytes, especially in the warmer climates, where this horrid species of imposture first took place. Christianity considers intemperance in drinking as not only highly criminal in itself, but as the parent of all other vices. Christianity considers ambition as ruinous to the kingdom of Christ, and avarice and concupiscence as idolatry. Our infidels are, in practice, warm adherents of Mahomet in regard to ambition, avarice, and concupiscence; but leave him behind, when they go to a tavern. His own most bigoted followers, of the same stamp with his admirers here, do the same, but secretly as men who hold him for a cheat, when his doctrines oppose their inclinations. Predestination is a principle, too favourable to the ferocity of robbers and murderers, often exposed to danger, and too indulgent to all other vices, to be left out of a system, whose professors would rather charge God with their crimes, than suffer them to lie heavy on their consciences, as the voluntary produce of their own hearts. Of all the instances wherein the pretences of religion, or fanaticism, have been opened as a fountain of the most enormous wickedness, this was the most remarkable, and attended with the most lasting and extensive mischiefs. That practised by Cromwell was, in every respect a close imitation of it; but, to the happiness of these nations, was soon got under; and, to the happiness of the neighbour-nations, did not spread so far, though not a few of his military instruments, all prophets, believed they were appointed to conquer the whole world. This was absolutely taken for granted by such as were landed on the continent, to aid the French against the then formidable power of Spain. Of these it was the common boast, that any one of them was a match for five other men. They thought themselves sure of erecting a fifth monarchy, greater than all the former four, had they all subsisted together in one. 162. Every Protestant knows, and, I trust, the time is hastening forwards when every Papist, recovering the use of common sense, shall consider why the word of God hath been shut up by the church of Rome from the generality of her members, and never opened to any, but on a strong assurance of bigotry in the licensed. The palpable breach of God's two commandments, and the shameful purchase of indulgences for the transgression of all the rest, to say nothing of many other gross enormities, both in principle and practice, held forth as standing doctrines by that church, too glaringly oppose the express, the repeated commands and precepts of God's word, to suffer among them the laudable liberty taken by the Bereans of searching the Scriptures, whether these things are so' in the word of God, as they are held in the church of Rome. The same impious freedom cannot be taken amidst reformers, by Arians and Socinians; but they take another, of still worse consequence, with the holy Scriptures. They impudently impose their own sense on every passage that seems to militate against them; but if it is too refractory to be speciously forced, then its genuineness is to be disputed. If this too in some particulars (and there are many such) appears to be unfeasible, then the Scriptures are represented to their friends the Deists, and to the unlearned, as too corrupt, on the whole, to be trusted. Whiston, one of their chiefs, a man of much reading, and of no judgment, hath laboured to serve them in this their latter purpose, by representing the whole Old Testament, where are found some of the strongest proofs of Christ's divinity, as so corrupted by the Jews, in both the Hebrew and the Greek, that there is no depending on it without a cabalistic method of construction. Here they vilify the Scriptures, because the Scriptures condemn their opinions. Common sense, nevertheless, easily refates the charge, for all the prophets, as they are still read in both Hebrew and Greek, in some hundreds of places, plainly prove Jesus to be the Messiah, and fix the time of his coming into the world. Nay, the Jews to this day insist, that God himself was |