you shew yourselves to be the worthy sons of the great patriarch from whom you are descended. You have suffered more than any other nation under heaven, but you justly believe it is no more than was foretold by your great prophet Moses, and what you have brought upon yourselves. And, believing in the equity of the Divine proceedings, and in the veracity of that God, who has distinguished you as his peculiar people, you cannot entertain a doubt, but that whenever the cause of his displeasure is removed, he will turn from his fierce anger, and remember the covenant which he made with your fathers, to be a God to them, and to their seed after them. He will "make a full end of all other nations, that shall persecute and oppress you, but you he will never utterly destroy. He will only "correct you in measure," as we read, Jer. xxx. 11, xlvi. 28.

Your dislike of Christians, and your abhorrence of their faith, is not to be wondered at, when it is considered how much you have suffered by their cruel oppressions, and how contrary their doctrines have been to the fundamental principles of your religion. You are the worshippers of the one living and true God. But, besides him, the generality of Christians have paid divine honours to Jesus Christ, and in a great measure also to those dead men whom they have called saints, who were no more the proper objects of worship than images of wood and stone, the work of men's hands. But at this day the cruel usage you have met with from Christian nations is happily much abated. Christians in general, and especially the more civilized among them, are disposed to treat you with equity and humanity; and if you now make inquiry into their faith, you will find that many of them have rejected, as abuses and corruptions of it, those doctrines which you so justly abhor.

Jesus Christ, who was of your nation, was a worshipper of the same God with yourselves. He taught his followers to worship the same great Being, and no other, and to regard himself as their muster, but as nothing more than the messenger and servant of God, a prophet like unto Moses; and the apostle Peter calls him (Acts ii. 22) a man approved of God, by miracles, and wonders, and signs, which God did by him." This rational doctrine prevails more and more among Christians; and by reading the New Testament you will easily satisfy yourselves that there has been no more just reason why Christians should pay divine honours to Christ, than your ancestors had to worship Moses.

For many ages your fathers were continually relapsing into idolatry. But God, in the course of his providence, has at length entirely cured you of the least propensity to it. lu like manner he thought proper to permit Christians to fall into similar idolatrous practices, but he is now opening their eyes, to shew them their abominations, and to bring them back to the worship of himself alone; that, with us, as well as with you, God may be one," and his name one.” Zech. xiv. 9.

As I believe in the same God with yourselves, and worship and serve him only; so I, with some other Christians, believe in the perpetual obligation of all the laws which Moses prescribed to your nation; and that circumcision, and other customs derived from your ancestors, were intended to distinguish you from all other nations, as the peculiar people of God, to the end of the world.* Jesus Christ expressly said, (Matt. v. 17, 18,) that he came not "to destroy the law, or the prophets-but to fulfil" them; and that "till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law.' The apostle Paul saith, (Rom. iii. 31,){ that "through faith" in the Gospel, we do not "make void the law," but establish it. Both Christ and his apostles, being Jews, strictly conformed to all the rites of your religion, and taught the same to all other Christian Jews, though they were not, authorized to enjoin the same observances on Christians of other nations. Had they done this, there would have been nothing to distinguish the posterity of Abraham from the rest of the world.

"

Since, therefore, well-informed Christians believe in the same one, living, and true God, with yourselves, it may be hoped that our mutual prejudices will in time abate, and that you will be prevailed upon to attend with calmness to the reasons that may be laid before you, why you should believe in the divine mission of Christ, as well as in that of Moses, and consider his religion as designed to be a blessing to the Gentile world as well as to you.

The same God is the benevolent Father of us all, and he has given us equal powers of serving him, and being happy in his favour. We are all equally the subjects of his moral government here, and are by nature equally capable of being heirs of immortality hereafter. Permit us, therefore, to claim the title of your brethren, while we acknowledge you

• See Vol. XII. pp. 442—482.

as the elder branch of the family, and do not envy you the pre-eminence that you are entitled to as such.

If you consider the tenor of all the promises of God to Abraham and your great ancestors, you will find that none of them respect the favour of God in a future world, but only in this. And though you have had peculiar advantages for knowing and serving God; yet unless these be properly improved, having more to answer for than other nations, you will certainly subject yourselves to a greater condemnation. As God has never spared your nation whenever you have sinned and revolted from him, but has always punished you, even with more severity than he has done other nations who were less favoured by him in this world, the same will, no doubt, be the case in the world to come. If the respect that God has for your ancestors will exempt you from punishment hereafter, it certainly would have done so here.

To you, as the posterity of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, God has promised the possession of the land of Canaan. But your greatest and most honourable distinction is, that, when all the rest of the world was fallen into idolatry, and the abominable and horrid vices connected with it, God instructed you in the true knowledge and pure worship of himself, so that by means of your nation, that most important doctrine of the divine unity has, together with the spirituality of his worship, been preserved in the world through all ages, even to this day.

You have been as "the salt of the earth," and by the knowledge which has been diffused from you to other nations, it has been preserved from universal corruption. From your nation God has made choice of his prophets, by whom he has revealed his will, not to yourselves only, but to all his offspring of mankind. By Jesus Christ and his apostles, who were all Jews, he has taught his will to the whole world, calling upon "all men every where to repent,” (Acts xvii. 30,) not that they may share in your peculiar privileges and honours here, but that they may obtain immortal happiness, together with all the virtuous of your nation, hereafter.

At present your nation is under the cloud of the Divine displeasure, and therefore you have no prophets among you. But when you shall be obedient to God, and when, in consequence of it, he shall restore you to the possession of your own country, divine communications will be again

imparted to you, and by you to the rest of the world, as we read in Isaiah:

It shall come to pass in the latter days;

The mountain of the house of Jehovah shall be established

on the top of the mountains;

And it shall be exalted above the hills:

And all nations shall flow unto it.

And many peoples shall go, and shall say;

Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah ;

To the house of the God of Jacob:

And he will teach us of his ways;

And we will walk in his paths:

For from Sion shall go forth the law;

And the word of Jehovah from Jerusalem,

And he shall judge among the nations;

And shall work conviction in many peoples:

And they shall beat their swords into plough-shares,
And their spears into pruning-hooks:

Nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
Neither shall they learn war any more.*

LETTER II.

Of the present dispersed and calamitous State of the Jewish Nation.

I REJOICE exceedingly in the prospect of the glorious times announced in the prophecy quoted in my last letter, times so glorious for you, and so happy for all the world; and I trust that God is now disposing things in the course of his providence, so as to hasten their approach. But assure yourselves that till some obstacle, now existing, be removed by yourselves, those times of honour and prosperity to your nation cannot come. The promises of God are sure. "He is a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he." Deut. xxxii. 4. And as surely as he threatened to expel you from the land of Canaan for your disobedience, and has executed his threatenings in the most dreadful manner, so surely will he fulfil his promise to restore you to it again, when you return to your obedience. But this is the indispensable condition of his favour. Attend to the word of God by Moses.

Deut. xxx. 1-6: "And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind, among all the nations whither the Lord thy God hath driven thee, and shalt return unto the Lord thy God, and

• Ch. ii. 2-4. Bp. Lowth. See Vol. XII. pp. 443, 445, Notes *.

shalt obey his voice, according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy children, with all thine heart, and with all thy soul; that then the Lord thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return, and gather thee from all the nations, whither the Lord thy God hath 'scattered thee. If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven, from thence will the Lord thy God gather thee, and from thence will he fetch thee. And the Lord thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it, and he will do thee good, and multiply thee above thy fathers. And the Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live."

Your present dispersed and calamitous situation is certainly a proof that you are at this very time under the Divine displeasure. Otherwise his hand would not be so heavy upon you. Examine, then, impartially what is the real cause of it, and make it your business to remove it. The chief cause of God's displeasure against you in former times, was your falling into idolatry: of this you were effectually cured by the Babylonish Captivity. But another cause was the obstinacy and incredulity with which your ancestors were charged, when they were called a stiffnecked and rebellious generation, disobedient to the prophets whom God from time to time sent to them.

It is with reluctance that I bring these things to your remembrance, and only from a principle of sincere good-will to you. How many prophets of God were cruelly treated, and cut off, by your forefathers, as your scriptures testify! But their descendants repented of this, as we read in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, where you have an excellent pattern of national humiliation for national sins, and an account of the return of God's favour in consequence of it. Bear with me, I intreat you, if, on this occasion, I remind you of a serious warning given you by Christ, which at the same time shews his prophetic spirit, and the true case of your present sufferings. It was delivered in your temple, a few days before his death; Matt. xxi. 33—41 : There was a certain housholder, who planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged a wine-press in it, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far country. And when the time of the fruit drew

* Yet see Dodson's Isaiah, pp. 156–161.