near, he sent his servants to the husbandmen, that they might receive the fruits of it. And the husbandmen took his servants, and beat one, and killed another, and stoned another. Again, he sent other servants, more than the first, and they did unto them likewise. But last of all he sent unto them his son, saying, They will reverence my son. But when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, This is the heir, come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance. And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him. When the Lord therefore of the vineyard cometh, what will he do unto those husbandmen? They" (that is, your Scribes and Pharisees, before whom he delivered this remarkable parable) "say unto him, He will miserably destroy those wicked men, and will let out his vineyard unto other husbandmen, who shall render him the fruits in their seasons."—Our Saviour afterwards added, (ver. 43,) “Therefore the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof." Has not this prophecy been as awfully fulfilled as that of Moses?

The continuance of your calamities shews that the cause of the Divine displeasure against you is not only something wrong done by your ancestors, but also something that is approved, and persisted in, by yourselves: and it is not for immoralities of a common kind that God punishes you with so much severity. For other nations have been, in these respects, as wicked as you; but no nation ever suffered as you have done.

It is in vain to allege that you are now suffering for all the sins of your ancestors from the beginning of your nation, and even for that of the golden calf. God expressly says, (Exod. xx. 5,) that he visiteth "the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third or fourth generation" only; whereas many generations have passed since you have been wholly expelled from the land of Canaan. Besides, you were punished for all your sins prior to the Babylonish Captivity, by that captivity. Your restoration to your country is a proof of that; and God would not punish you again, and at the distance of so many ages, and with so much more severity, for the same offences.

Consider also, that a captivity of seventy years only, without any peculiar hardships during the continuance of it, was deemed a sufficient punishment for all your offences committed before that period; whereas you have experienced unspeakably greater calamities, and of much longer

continuance, since the promulgation of Christianity, than the amount of all your sufferings previous to it. Besides, you have sufficiently repented of your ill-usage of all the preceding prophets, and nothing more is requisite to obtain the Divine forgiveness, and the return of his favour.

Be not, therefore, offended, if, with great sincerity, but with equal affection, I must observe, that according to appearances, there is no other cause of God's displeasure against you besides your rejection and persecution of the prophets of your own nation, Christ and the apostles, who were sent to you in the first place, and who confined their instructions to your nation, till, being rejected by you, they were directed to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles. This circumstance contributed to inflame the hatred of your ancestors against the preachers of the Gospel, and against the Gospel itself; and the same spirit (so hostile to the Gospel, and to God, if he be the author of it, and which must necessarily have excited his displeasure against you) has actuated your nation, in a greater or less degree, in all ages, even to this day. But when, duly humbled and instructed by your afflictions, you shall be more disposed to hear and attend to the voice of God speaking to you by his servants, so that some of you, at least, shall shew a better disposition towards Christianity, (which does not at all interfere with your attachment to the laws of Moses,) he may have mercy upon you; and your complete conversion may, perhaps, be reserved till your return to the land of Canaan. For the sake of a righteous few, God may have compassion on the many. But he only knows what his own secret purposes are. Of this we may be satisfied, that the Judge of all the earth will do that which is right,” (Gen. xviii. 25,) and least of all will he be unjust to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

LETTER III.

Of the historical Evidences of the Divine Mission of Christ.

REVIEW, I intreat you, the history of the times in which the Gospel was published, and the conduct of your ancestors in them; and you will find that they rejected those who came to them from God, bringing the same testimonials of a divine mission that Moses and the preceding proplets had brought before them. For, like them, they also did

what no men could have done, if God had not been with them. They healed all diseases by speaking a word, they even raised the dead, and Christ himself rose from the dead after he had been publicly crucified.

As a true prophet, Christ foretold the dreadful calamities which befel your nation in that generation, and with the truest sympathy he even shed tears on the prospect of them. Thus we read in one of our Gospels, written before the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus: Luke xix. 41-44: "And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! But now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another, because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation."

That Christ performed miracles, your ancestors, who saw them, did not deny; but they weakly ascribed some of the most remarkable of them to the aid of Beelzebub; and it has since been said by your writers, that he performed his miracles by means of some ineffable name of God, which he stole out of the temple.

I will not affront your understandings so much as to refute such pretences as these. If God could permit Christ to impose upon your nation, and the world, in this manner, he might have suffered Moses to do the same, and there could be no guard against the grossest impostures. Assure yourselves, therefore, that God, the God of your fathers, could never suffer your nation to be deceived in this manner. The powers of nature will never be controuled but by the God of nature, and by persons actually commissioned and impowered by him.

Think not that I wish to undervalue the evidence for the divine mission of Moses. I give as firm an assent to it as any of yourselves can do. The history of Moses is most essentially different from the fabulous histories of Greece and Rome; his history having been written in the age in which he lived, and the history of your nation having been continued without interruption from that time to what is universally allowed to be the time of certain history, and in such a manner as that the connexion gives the highest credibility to the whole.

Such a history as yours could never have been received as true, in the age of Moses itself, and in all following ages, if it had not been so. Your nation, which by its long continuance in Egypt had acquired a fondness for its superstitions, was exceedingly averse to the laws and constitutions of Moses, and therefore would never have been brought to submit to them, if they had not been persuaded, by evidence in which they could not be deceived, that they were prescribed by God.

The evidence for the divine mission of Moses was, I say, of such a nature, as that it was impossible that your ancestors should have been imposed upon with respect to it. The miracles were not things done in the presence of a few interested witnesses, but in that of both Egyptians and Israelites. Your whole nation walked on dry land through the Red Sea, and through the channel of the river Jordan. They all heard the voice of God speaking to them distinctly (not a single articulate word only, but all the Ten Commandments) from Mount Sinai, and they were fed with manna from heaven forty years. In things of this public nature no people could be imposed upon.

It is not, indeed, possible to account for your ancestors (who were not in other respects more knowing than the rest of the world, and who were inferior in science to the Egyptians and Babylonians) having a more perfect knowledge of God, and a purer method of worship than other nations had, but on the supposition of their having been favoured with such divine communications as your history gives an account of. Where but in your scriptures, in all the periods of antiquity, and in the most polished nations, shall we find such compositions as those which are contained in your book of Psalms? It is in vain that we look for such sentiments of reverence for the universal providence and righteous government of one living and true God in any hymns composed by writers of other nations. A religion so authenticated as yours, is certainly entitled to your most zealous attachment.

But it is not sufficient to obey one messenger of God only, and disregard others who come with the same commission. The reverence which your ancestors had for Moses did not excuse them when they rejected Elijah, Jeremiah, and others whom God sent. If, therefore, John the Baptist and Jesus Christ, were actually sent to you with a commission from God; if they and the apostles were really prophets, your adherence to Moses and the other prophets will not excuse

your rejection of them. For it is a rejection of the authority of God, by whom they were sent.

Now, without any disparagement to the evidence for the divine mission of Moses, that of Christ may be shewn to be even clearer and stronger, at least to us at this day; because the history of his miracles is more within the limits of certain history.

Are the books of Moses genuine, the real production of the age in which the events recorded in them are said to have taken place? So are our four Gospels, and the book of Acts. For they, also, may be traced up to the time in which the events recorded in them happened; so that they could never have been received as they were, if it had not been well known that the particulars contained in them

were true.

Were your forefathers so disposed that they would not have submitted to the institutions of Moses, without the most satisfactory evidence that they were prescribed to them by God? The apostles also, and thousands of your countrymen, in the age of Christ, were no less averse to receive such doctrines as those which he taught them. Would they have received such a person as Jesus, a crucified malefactor, a dead man, for their Messiah, if the clear evidence of the miracles wrought by him in his life-time, and especially that of his resurrection from the dead, had not compelled them to it? They were no less attached to the opinion of the Messiah being a great prince and a conqueror than you are at this day. But being men of ingenuous minds, they not only abandoned that favourite doctrine, but every thing dear to them in the world, and even life itself, for the sake of truth and a good conscience. If you examine the particulars of the miracles of Christ, you will find that, though none of them can be said to vie with some of those recorded by Moses in point of splendour and magnitude; yet, that with respect to notoriety and frequency, they were abundantly sufficient to shew, that there could be no trick or collusion in the case; and most of them were such as also mark the great benevolence of his character. He healed the sick; and not one or two only, but, during a great part of his public ministry, he went about healing all that were brought to him, and especially diseases of the most obstinate kinds, which seldom yield to any medical treatment, and such as, if ever they be cured, it is only in a long course of time, as palsies, leprosies, lunacies, and cases of blindness. He raised no less than