has been understood by many, but of himself, who seems to me to be spoken of in them, in inferior, figurative, and preparatory degrees to the very high one in which he appears in the Gospel; and they ought to have sought Christ, or his Spirit, in them, instead of continuing to understand literal things.

Finding in John, 19. 33, 36. that Christ is the Lamb of which it is written in Exo. 12. 14. and in Num. 9. 12. they might have inferred that it was wrong to understand it literally, as their ancestors had done. It ought to have occurred to them that since Christ was that lamb, the eating of it could not refer to the natural body, but to the soul; and that it was his doctrine, of the meekness of which a lamb is an emblem, that she was to feed upon, to be enabled to get out of the Egypt in which she was evidently another than the visible one, which, till then, they had supposed to be mentioned in Moses.

When they did read in 2 Cor. 8. 4. that Christ was the Rock, the Spiritual Rock that followed the Fathers in the wilderness, and of which they drank, they ought to have concluded that they had been mistaken, when they understood it materially; and that the water that came out of that Spiritual Rock was not common water, but Christ's instructions; which he gives in abundance to quench the thirst of the soul that is in a state of dryness, and longs for them. They ought also to have seen that, since the Scriptural Rock refers to the soul, so must the wilderness in which it appears, and that they could not with propriety take any longer the desert spoken of in Moses, for that of Arabia and adjacent countries, as it had been understood by their forefathers.

Had they paid attention to Gal. 4. 22, 23, 24, 25, I

think they might have perceived that the bondmaid and the freewoman, by whom Abraham gets two sons, are not such women as those we know, but religious systems or doctrines, which are allegories of the two Covenants, and seem to me to teach separately the doctrine of human works, and that of spiritual faith; of which both the sons cannot be natural, but rather are spirits that proceed from them. They might have inferred from it that their ancestors had been strangely deceived, when they thought that they were Abraham's natural descendants: which they might also have concluded from John 8, Romans 9, and Galatians 3. Further they ought to have seen in the above-quoted verses that the two Jerusalems are the two Covenants; (in a higher degree of religion, I suppose, than the bondwoman and the freewoman, or than the two preparatory systems that represented them;) and that, considering the connexion between the two Testaments, it was not likely that it was written in the Psalms and in the Prophets of the material Jerusalem which their fathers had inhabited, but rather of a doctrine of which the children, or the souls who come from it, are gendered in bondage, or in notions that enslave them; because it is imperfect, and differs from the perfect Jerusalem or religion, which, by the knowledge of the truth, gives to the soul freedom from error, gendering her in the spirit of Christ, instead of the spirit of Adam. They ought then to have given up also fancying that the Scripture spoke of their visible Jerusalem.

If the early converts had diligently compared together what is said in the Old Testament and in the Revelation of St. John, respecting Babylon, they would have admitted,

I presume, that the Babylon that is mentioned in the Prophets, is the same as that which is to be destroyed previously to the end of the world, or a figure of it: and that they had erred, when they believed that the Sacred Writings had alluded to the town of that name. which their predecessors had known; (which had been taken, but not entirely destroyed by Cyrus, since it existed still few centuries after him, as it appears from civil history;) and they would not have persisted to take it for the Babylon of which the inspired Prophets foretell the sudden fall, when the time of her visitation will come. Besides what is said in Isaiah, 44. 28, and 45. 1, 2, 3, 4, of Cyrus, the Lord's anointed, seems totally inapplicable to the Pagan King who has figured on this earth under that name: quite as much as most of the verses concerning the Scriptural Babylon are inapplicable to our ancient Babylon. As there are two Jerusalems, the superior and the inferior, I shall observe that there may be likewise two Babylons, the philosophical and the spiritual: both dangerous to the soul by their errors; the last more particularly so, on account of the powerful evil spirits that govern her.

(As there is not in civil history any admissible proof that there ever existed in ancient Babylon such a king as the Scriptural Nebuchadnezzar, and that the Jewish nation was transferred by him to that city, I think that the old Jews, if they had not been most infatuated with the belief that they were the very people of God mentioned in the Holy Writings, might have seen that it was impossible to reconcile with the prophecies the fact reported by historians that there were Jews settled in Babylon few centuries before our era; for, if they had

been that people, it would have been the Almighty who would have caused them to be carried thither in captivity (Jere. 29. 14); then, according to the prophecies, He would have recalled them all, after a seventy-years' residence, and brought back every one of them to Jerusalem (Ezek. 39. 23, 25, 27, 28): just the same as, according to the common way that Exodus is understood, he had brought the whole of Israel out of the land of Egypt, wherein to he had made their fathers descend, that the prophecy in Gen. 15. 13, 14, should be fulfilled. Josephus says that there were Jews who preferred to continue in Babylon, for the sake of carrying on their usual traffic, rather than to return to Jerusalem. Their abiding in that city, some centuries before his time, being quite inconsistent with the prophetic revelations, seems to me a sufficient demonstration that they were not the people and the Sons of God spoken of in the Prophets.)

It appears to me that the converted Jews did not divest themselves of the false notions of their first education; did not benefit by the knowledge of the New Testament, so much as one would have expected, for a better intelligence of the Old; and, though told by Christ in the Gospel, that it was written of him in Moses, in the Psalms, and in the Prophets, did not seek him therein; nor even supposed that he was mentioned in them, under various names and denominations, expressive of different degrees of perfection. It seems that it did not strike them that the religious system of their forefathers, not admitting Christ as an essential and an indispensable part of it, as the foundation on

which it ought to have been built, must have been erroneous, discordant with the Scriptures. They did not see that they ought to give it up entirely; and that by preserving some of their first notions, in the formation of a new system, they could not frame but a very imperfect one, that would partake of their former errors. It is to be regretted for them, and for their successors who unfortunately have trodden in their steps and mistakes, that in studying the Old Testament (or the first will or doctrine to be obeyed and followed) with the light of the New, they were not convinced that their ancestors had been deceived in understanding literally the Egypt, the wilderness, the Babylon, the Jerusalem, and the whole of the creation alluded to in the Sacred Writings; it is a pity that they did not perceive that those things were of a different nature from ours, at least probable that it was so; a pity that they did not endeavour to find out what could be the Scripture earth, and did not arrive at the knowledge of that unknown world, of its Egypt, wilderness, Babylon, Jerusalem, Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Herod, Cæsar, &c. of which world it is possible that this visible earth in all her parts, inhabitants, productions, &c. is but an emblem which we do not understand. From the conviction that the Holy Scriptures do not speak of this world, neither of vulgar things and actions, such as those mentioned in human and profane books, but of invisible ones, whether philosophical, whether spiritual, of concern for the soul; things which it is not in the power of such degenerate men as we are to know by themselves; from that conviction, I