The Pleiad : a series of abridgements of seven distinguished writers, in opposition to the pernicious doctrines of deism

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Class E

Book f W

DOBELL COLLECTION

I

Books in support of religion are, in general, read with less eagerness, and remembered with greater difficulty, than those which favour infidelity : and the reason is obvious. Men readily believe what they wish ; and the Christian religion being opposite to fraudulent dealings in our intercourse with others, to intemperance ; the gratification of our own appetites, and to all the sins and vices which men are prone to, it cannot be a matter of surprise that many profligate and many thoughtless persons should listen with greediness to whatever frees them from it's influence.

This principle will account for the fatal avidity, with which the sophistries of Paine, in his ' Age of Reason,' originally possessing little of novelty, have of late been revived and circulated in this country : sophistries, calculated to root out of the minds of the unhappy virtuous all their comfortable assurance of a future recompence ; to annihilate, in the minds of the flagitious, all their fears of future punishment ; and, by giving the reins to passion, to introduce all the public insecurity and the private misery necessarily connected with a state of corrupted mortals. What, indeed, has not society to dread from those, who may have deeply imbibed the wicked opinions of that and similar books ?

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Have their writers, it may be asked, calmly examined all the arguments, by which the truth of Revealed Religion has been, to the satisfaction of learned and impartial men, fully established ? Thousands of such menlaymen too, of the most splendid talents (since priests, it seems, by the liberal apostles of the new Creed are deemed unworthy of attention) have embraced this religion as true. Could all these men be involved in the darkness of ignorance, or shackled by the chains of superstition ?

Without any elaborate inquiry into the authenticity of the Scriptures, which has been so frequently and so ably handled as neither to want, nor perhaps even to admit, farther proof — it may safely be affirmed, in general terms, on the authority of all the ancient books in the world (sacred and profane, Christian, Jewish, and Pagan) that the Bible is the Word of God. This the Deist pronounces to be impossible, because among other things it is therein said, that ' the Israelites destroyed the Canaanites by the divine command/ and that would be repugnant to the moral justice of God ; for ' wherein (he asks) could crying or smiling infants offend ?' Now mark the inconsistency, with which he adduces this oftrefuted objection of former infidels. He admits the universe to be the work of God ; and, of course, he must allow it to be in harmony with his moral justice to suffer ' crying or smiling infants' to be drowned by a flood, consumed by a fire, or starved by a famine. The Christian believes that the earth, at the express command of God, swallowed up Koran, Dathan, and Abiram with their wives, and their sons, and their little children *. This procedure the Deist deems so radically unjust, that he spurns as spurious the book, in which it is related. He reads in other records that Catania, Lima, and Lisbon were severally destroyed by earthquakes, and their inhabitants with their wives, their sons, and their Utile children swallowed up. Why does he not disbelieve these statements also ? Or, believing them, why does he not spurn as spurious the book of Nature, in which

* Xumb. xvi. 27.

they are written ; instead of inferring from the perusal of it, as he does infer, the moral justice of God ? Surely, it is most unfair to urge, as an argument against Revealed Religion, an apparent deviation from moral justice ; when an equally apparent deviation from it is not allowed to have any weight as an argument against Natural Religion.

The Canaanites had been devoted to destruction, as a wicked people, even in the time of Abraham ; but their iniquity was not, then, full. In the time of Moses, they were gross idolaters ; sacrificers of their own * crying or smiling infants/ devourers of human flesh, addicted in short to every species of the foulest profligacy. Was it contrary to the moral justice of God, to exterminate so wicked a people ? By his terrible vengeance, while the surrounding nations were struck with astonishment and terror, the Israelites (who were employed, as his agents, in the infliction of it) could not fail to receive a salutary impression of what they must expect, if they should be misled into the practice of similar abominations.

We cannot but feel that the shortness of our lives, the weakness of our faculties, and the inadequacy of our means of information conspire to make it impossible for us, worms of the earth and insects of an hour 1 completely to understand any part of God's great plan for the moral amelioration of mankind. To some indeed it may appear incredible, that the Almighty should have conversed with our first parents, and entered into covenants with the patriarchs ; that he should have suspended the laws of nature in Egypt ; and partially selecting a single nation as his favourites, should have condescended to draw up for their use a burthensome code of ordinances, ecclesiastical and civil, many of them apparently far below the dignity of a divine legislator. " Nothing similar," says the Deist, " has happened in my time ; and therefore I do not believe that it ever really happened at any time." As well might a man contend, that he never needed or experienced the care of a mother, the attention of a nurse or the discipline of a schoolmaster. God selected one

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family from an idolatrous world ; reared it into a great people ; communicated to it a knowledge of his holiness, justice, mercy, wisdom, and power; and disseminated it, at various times, throughout the earth, as a leaven to leaven the whole lump. Why should what was thus done to a single nation, for the general good, be done to all nations ? Why should the mode of instruction, adapted to the infancy of the world, be extended to it's manhood? Why do we not rather, when we contemplate the dormant intellect of man in his savage state, and his miserable attainments (independently of divine instruction) as to the knowledge of God in a civilised state, admire the wisdom and goodness of that great Being in having thus let himself down, as it were, proportionately to our apprehensions ; and, after giving in the earliest ages extraordinary proofs of his existence and attributes, in having made the Jewish and Christian Dispensations mediums to convey to his rational creatures, throughout all ages, that knowledge of himself which he had communicated immediately to the first ? If it be alleged, that ' such an immediate manifestation of himself is strange/ it may be demanded in reply, " What is there, that is not strange ?" It is strange to each of us, that we are here ; that there is water, and earth, and air, and fire ; that there is a sun, and moon, and stars ; that there is generation, corruption, and reproduction. For none of these things can we ultimately account, without recurring to Him who made every thing. His works, as well as his word, are incomprehensible : but the former we cannot deny ; and the latter has assured us of all that we are concerned to know — that he hath prepared everlasting happiness for those, who love and obey him.

II

As the Deist affects to establish a difference between the evidence necessary to prove the authenticity of the Bible and that of any other ancient work, it may be necessary to state distinctly the difference between the ' genuineness' and the 1 authenticity* of a book. A

? genuine' book is one which was written by the person, whose name it bears as the author of it. An ( authentic' book is one, which relates matters of fact as they really happened. The books containing the novels of Richardson and Fielding are genuine, though the stories themselves are fables. Anson's Voyage, on the other hand, may be deemed authentic, as probably containing a true narrative of events ; but it is not a genuine book, having been written, not by Walters to whom it is attributed, but by Robins.

The Deist's argument, then, stands thus. * If it be found that the books ascribed to Moses, Joshua, and Samuel were not written by Moses, Joshua, and Samuel, every part of their authority is gone at once!" But this, if we concede the hypothesis for the sake of the argument, in fact only affects their genuineness. Their authenticity may remain. Though the names of the authors should be found to be different from what they are generally supposed to be, the transactions recorded in the books themselves may be strictly and universally true. Had the above writers, indeed, asserted that ' they composed the books respectively ascribed to them/ and this had turned out to be false, then the authority of the whole must have totallyvanished ; as such a proof of their want of veracity in one point would have justly invalidated their testimony in every other. The same may be pronounced of works, whose authors are unknown. Anonymous testimony does not destroy the reality of the facts, which it affirms. Had Lord Clarendon published his History of the Rebellion without prefixing his name to it, the events recorded in it would have remained equally certain.

The Deist asserts, that ' the miracles recorded in Tacitus, and in other profane historians, are quite as well authenticated as those of the Bible/ To this assertion, utterly destitute as it is of proof, it may be replied that the evidence for the Bible-miracles is, both in kind and degree, so greatly superior to that for the heathen prodigies, as to have justified the most candid and enlightened of men in deeming the first the work of God, and in wholly disbelieving the latter. There is one signal difference, however, between ancient and modern scepticism. The unbeliever of the third and fourth century allowed, that Jesus wrought miracles ; but he contended, that his Apollonius, &c. wrought miracles also : whereas the later Deist denies the fact of Jesus having ever wrought miracles at all. Aware that if he admits the contrary, he must admit Christianity to be true, he has fabricated a sophistical axiom, that ' no human testimony can establish the credibility of a miracle and upon this, though it has been an hundred times refuted, he still pertinaciously insists, as if it could not be disproved !

Beginning with the first five books of the Bible — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the Deist affects to show, that ' Moses was not the author of them, as they were not written till several hundred years after his time ; being, in fact, no other than an attempted history of his life, and the times in which he is said to have lived (as well as of the times preceding) drawn up by some very ignorant and stupid pretender to authorship/ This difficulty, though no new discovery, was never heard of till the twelfth century ; when Aben Ezra, a Jew of great erudition (with no purpose, however, of discrediting the work in general) noticed some passages, which he thought had been inserted in these books after the death of Moses. Hobbes, Spinoza, and Le Clerc believed that the books of Moses were so called, not from their having been written by him, but in consequence of their containing an account of his life. The latter however, who was an able theologian of the eighteenth century, upon attaining maturity was ashamed of what he had written in his younger years, and publicly retracted his error.

Neither is the Bible the only book, which has undergone the fate of being reprobated as spurious after having been received as genuine and authentic for many ages. It has been maintained, that the i History of Herodotus was compiled in the time of Constantine ; and that the classics, in general, are forgeries of the thirteenth or fourteenth century !'

As a preliminary objection, the Deist asserts, that

4 there is no affirmative evidence that Moses was the author of the books in question.' No affirmative evidence ! In the eleventh century, Maimonides drew up a confession of faith for the Jews, which is admitted by them all at this day. It consists of only thirteen articles, of which one affirms the authenticity, and the other the genuineness, of the books of Moses. This has been the faith of the Jews ever since the destruction of their city and Temple ; it was their faith, when the authors of the New Testament wrote; it was their faith during their Captivity in Babylon; it was their faith in the time of their kings, and their judges ; and no period can be shown, from the age of Moses down to the present hour, in which it was not their faith. Is this no affirmative evidence ? Josephus affirms these books to have been written by Moses : Juvenal speaks of the volume, which Moses had written. But why enumerate the long list of profane authors, all bearing testimony to the fact of Moses being the leader and lawgiver of the Jewish nation ? And if a giver, surely a writer, of their laws. The Scriptures teem with passages * to the same purport.

Even if it were admitted, that some learned Jew composed these books from public records many years after the death of Moses, it would not follow (as it has been already stated) that there is no truth in them. And it cannot be said, that the Jews had no public records ; for the Bible itself furnishes abundance of proof to the contrary. But the arguments (so they are denominated) adduced to prove that these books were not, as to the main part of them, written by Moses, are both weak and trite.

The first is, that ' they are written in the third person " The Lord said unto Moses," or " Moses said unto the Lord," &c This, the Deist asserts, is the stile used by historians in speaking of a person, whose life they are drawing up. True : and it is the stile also used bv eminent men, such as Xenopbon and Josephus, in speaking of themselves. If General Washington had written

* Exod. xxiv, 7. Deut. xxxi. 24, &c. &c

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the History of the American War, in which from his great modesty he might have spoken of himself in the third person, would it be reasonable that on this account, two or three thousand years hence, the truth of his narrative should be called in question ? Caesar writes of himself in the third person ; " Caesar made a speech," " Caesar crossed the Rhine," &c. ; and yet every schoolboy knows, that this is no argument against his being the author of his own Commentaries.

4 But Moses,' it is alleged, 4 could not be the author of the book of Numbers, because he there pronounces himself to have been very meek y above all the men which wtre upon the face of the earth *. Now admitting that this little verse was inserted by Samuel, or any of the other countrymen of Moses who knew his character and revered his memory, would it follow that therefore Moses did not write any part of the five books ascribed to his pen ? And yet he might allowably have given this character of himself, upon the occasion by which it was extorted. Calumniated by his nearest relations, Aaron and Miriam, as guilty of pride and fond of power, he might justifiably affirm in his own vindication, that * his temper was naturally mild and unassuming.'

Again, the Deist comments on what he invidiously calls 4 the dramatic stile* of Deuteronomy. He might as reasonably ask, 4 Where the author of Caesar's Commentaries got the speeches of Ca?sar,' as, 4 Where the author of Deuteronomy got the speeches of Moses V But his argument that 4 Moses was not the author of this book, because the reason assigned in it for the observation of the Sabbath is different from that assigned in Exodus merits a fuller reply.

The name 4 Deuteronomy' imports, in Greek, the 4 repetition of a law.' And this repetition was a wise and benevolent proceeding in Moses ; that those who were either not born, or were mere infants, when that Law was forty years before first delivered in Horeb, might have an opportunity of knowing it : especially, as their

* Numb. xii. 3.

f Compare Exod. xx. 11, with Deut. v. 15.

leader was soon to be taken from them, and they them« selves were about to be settled in the midst of vicious and idolatrous nations. Where then is the wonder, that some variations should be introduced in a law republished many years after it's original promulgation.

Of the institution of the Sabbath the most probable account is, that the memory of the Creation was handed down from Adam to his posterity ; and that the seventh day was, for a long time, held sacred by all nations in commemoration of that event ; but that the peculiar rigidness of it's observance was injoined by Moses to the Israelites alone. However this may be, the two reasons given for it's being kept holy — one, that on that day God rested from the work of creation ; the other, that on that day He gave rest to the Israelites from the servitude of Egypt — involve no contradiction. If an author, writing the History of England, should inform his readers in one part of his work, that the parliament had ordered the fifth of November to be kept holy, because on that day God had delivered the nation from an intended massacre by gunpowder ; and in another, because on that day he had delivered it, by the arrival of King William III., from the establishment of popery and arbitrary power — would any one thence rightly conclude, that he was not justified in both these modes of expression, or that he was not the author of them both ?

The Deist farther pronounces brutal * the law recorded in Deuteronomy *, which authorises parents, the father and the mother, to bring their own children to have them stoned to death for what it is pleased to term stubbornness/ Paternal authority, it should be remembered, among the Romans, Gauls, Persians, &c. extended to the taking away of a child's life. Such an extraordinary power Moses, by this law, hindered from being introduced or exercised among the Israelites: for by it the father and the mother must agree — in what I Not in stoning the child, but in bringing him out unto the elders of the city, to judge whether it was — not merely

' stubborn,* but stubborn and rebellious, a glutton and a drunkard* So that it was a humane restriction of an unjustifiable power.

But 6 priests,' the Deist sarcastically adds, ' preach up Deuteronomy, because Deuteronomy preaches up tithes.' Tithes are not preached up more in Deuteronomy than in Leviticus, in Numbers, in Nehemiah, and in Malachi \ in the Law, the History, and the Prophets of the Jewish nation. The motive, which he invidiously alleges for noticing in the table of contents at the head of a chapter the prohibition of muzzling the ox *, is as incorrect as it is illiberal. It is there noticed, because it was subsequently quoted by St. Paul, when he was proving to the Corinthians that they, which preached the Gospel, should live of the Gospel f. It was St. Paul, not the priests, who first applied this phrase to tithing ; and, as he did not avail himself of the right for which he contended, he was not interested in what he said. The right itself he rests, not upon the authority of Moses or of Christ, but upon a reason founded in the nature of things, and illustrated by the practice of husbandmen, artists, soldiers, physicians, lawyers, &c. viz. that 4 the labourer is worthy of his hire.' Tithes, indeed, were paid in the most ancient times even to kings. Four hundred years before the law of Moses was given, Abramf paid tithes to the king of Salem, who was priest also of the Most High God. But as this rests upon the authority of the Bible, to which the Deist excepts, another instance may be adduced on what he will, perhaps, deem the more satisfactory testimony of a profane author. Diogenes Laertius, in his Life of Solon, cites a letter of Pisistratus, in which it is affirmed that the people of Athens set apart a tenth of the fruits of their land to be expended in the public sacrifices for the general good.'

* Exod. xxv. 4. f 1 Cor. ix. 14= $ Gen. xiv. 20, &e>

Having done with what he calls the 4 grammatical* evidence that Moses was not the author of the books attributed to him, the Deist now advances to his * his* torical and chronological" evidence : and he begins with the single word * Dan/ which he contends is incorrectly found in Genesis ; as it appears from the book of Judges *, that the town of Laish did not receive that name till three hundred and thirty years after the death of Moses ! This reasoning he illustrates in the following mariner : " Havre-de-Grace was called Havre-Marat in 17.93. Should then any dateless writing be found in time to come with the name ' Havre-Marat/ it would be certain evidence that such a writing must have been composed after the year 1793." The conclusion is wrong. Supposing some hot republican should now publish a new edition of any old history of France, and instead of * Havre-de Grace* should substitute * Havre- Marat ;* would any one, two or three thousand years hence, be justified in rejecting on that account the whole history as spurious — especially if he could be referred, for a proof of the genuineness of the book, to the testimony of the whole French nation ? Besides, how is it proved, that the Dan mentioned in Genesis is the same as the town Dan mentioned in Judges ? that it is indeed a town at all, and not a river ? It is merely said, Abram pursued them (the enemies of Lot) unto Dan. A river was full as likely, as a town, to stop a pursuit : Lot, we know, was settled in the plain of Jordan ; and Jordan, we know, was composed of the united streams of the Jor and the Dan.

The Deist next asserts, that the 1 passage in Genesis +/ which speaks of Kings reigning in Edom before there reigned any king over the children of Israel, must have been written after the first King (i. e. Saul) began to reign over Israel, and consequently long after Moses !

* Compare Genesis xiv. 14. and Judges xviii. 29. i Gen. xxxvi. 31—39.

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And perhaps these nine verses may have been Inserted in the book of Genesis, after the book of Chronicles (called in Greek by a name, Paralipomena, importing that it contained things * omitted' in the preceding books) was written. Such interpolations have happened in other works, but have never been considered as invalidating the authority of those works.

The Deist then pronounces, that *' Genesis, stripped of the belief that Moses was it's author, is nothing but an anonymous book of fables, absurdities, or lies V Let him look into a book so common that almost every bodyhas it, and so excellent that no body ought to be without it, ' Grotius on the Truth of the Christian Religion and he will there find, in references to the most ancient profane authors, abundant testimony to all the principal facts recorded in Genesis, the formation of the universe from a chaotic mass, the primeval innocence and subsequent fall of man, the longevity of mankind in the first ages, the depravity of the antediluvians, and the destruction of the world by the flood. The tenth chapter of Genesis, instead of telling us that one nation sprung from a cricket or a grasshopper, another from an oak, another from a mushroom, and another from a dragon's tooth, gives a rational account of the repeopling of the earth, attested by every other book which contains any thing upon the subject.

The saving of the Midianitish maidens*, which is grossly imputed by the Deist to motives of lust, to a purer eye appears the result of sound policy mingled with mercy. The young men might have become avengers of their country ; and the matrons would, perhaps, again have allured the Israelites to debauchery and idolatry : but the young women might without any such hazard be reserved, agreeably to the customs of those times, for slaves. And it may be asked ' Why, admitting the account of the expedition against Midian to be a true account, the Deist does not also admit the miiaculous facts that, 1 of the twelve thousand' Israelites engaged in it, there lacked not one man ? That fact

* Numb. xxxi. IS.

was believed by the captains of thousands and captains of hundreds, at the time when it happened ; for they offered an oblation to the Lord, an atonement for their souls *.

In calculating with affected mathematical precision the length and breadth of Og's bedstead of iron f, the Deist makes no allowance for the size of a royal bed; nor ever suspects, that the King of Basan might through vanity, like Alexander the Great, have intended by the size of his bed to convey to posterity an idea of his prodigious stature. Nor, indeed, is the problem yet solved — * To what height a human body, preserving it's similarity of figure, may be augmented before it will perish by it's own weight.* A person who had never been out of Shetland might, on proper testimony, have believed in the existence of the Lincolnshire Ox, or the i largest drayhorse in London; though the oxen and horses in Shetland had not been bigger than mastiffs.

IV

As to the * anonymousness of the book of Joshua, 9 from which the Deist (with his usual mistake) infers it's total want of authority, it may be replied, that Doomsday Book also is anonymous ; but our courts of law do not, therefore, hold it to be without authority. ' Yes,' he may allege ; 4 but Doomsday Book has been preserved with singular care among the records of the nation.' And who has told him, that the Jews had no records, or did not preserve them ' with singular care ?' Josephus, the historian of the Jews, expressly affirms the contrary. If any one, having access to the Journals of the Houses of Lords and Commons, to the archives of the Treasury, War Office, and Privy Council, should at this day compile a History of the reigns of George I. and II., and publish it without his name ; would any intelligent man, three or four thousand years hence, question the authority of that work, when he knew that the whole British nation had received it as authentic

* Numb. xxxi. 49, 50. + Deut. iii. 2.

B 2 from the time of it's first publication down to the age in which he lived f

The Deist ridicules the story of 1 an angel's descending to Joshua * though his errand was to assure that leader, that the same God who had appeared unto Moses, ordering him to put off his shoes from off his feet because the place whereon he stood was holy grounds, had now appeared to himself. Was this no encouragement to one, about to engage in war with many nations ? Had it no tendency to confirm his faith, and to teach him to obey in all things the divine commands ? And the shallow objector ought to have known, that putting off the shoes was an indication of reverence for the divine presence, and that the custom of entering the temples barefoot subsists in some countries even to this day.

The Deist next makes himself merry with what he calls the ' tale of the sun standing still upon Mount Gibeon and the moon in the valley of Ajalon % asserting, that * this fable detects itself, because there is not a nation in the world that knows any thing about it !' And how can he expect there should, when there is not a nation in the world, whose authentic annals mount to this era by many hundred years ? yet Herodotus says, the Egyptian priests informed him, that i( the sun had four times deviated from his course, without producing any alteration in the climate of Egypt, the fruits of the land, or the phenomena of the Nile." This must therefore, apparently, refer to some temporary deviation, such as that produced by Joshua, and that in the time of Ahaz when the shadow went bach ten degrees^. How thismiracle was accomplished, it would be idle, if not impious, to attempt to explain : but one, who is not able to explain the mode of doing a thing, argues very ill if he thence infers that the thing was not done at all |J. We do not deny that the sun has been formed, or that the planets are retained in their orbits by the power of gravity, merely because we do not comprehend either the one or