my friend Mr. Addison; but the answer was, that the phyficians had given order that no-body should be admitted to fee him: I replied, that notwithftanding fuch order, if he knew I was there, I believed he would fee me; but I could not prevail; fo I faw him not. As to Sir Richard Steel, he has given a character of me in his addrefs to the pope, but tis too ludicrous to appear in this place. Sir Richard was indeed eminent for wit; yet was he deftitute of true wifdom, in the whole conduct of his life he wrote very well, but lived very ill: he was a chriftian in principle, but not in practice: however, not to go too far out of my way in his character, I fhall only fet down one encounter I had with him at Button's coffee-house, when he was a member of parliament, and had been making a fpeech in the house of commons, in the days of king George I. to please the court, but against his own confcience, for the South-Sea directors, then under the great difgrace of the nation; and against which South-Sea fcheme, he had before, for fome time, written weekly papers, till he faw he could not recover his poft of cenfor of the playhouse, from which he had been turned out, which ufed to bring him fome hundreds a year, without making fuch a speech. I accofted him thus. They fay, Sir Richard, you have been making a speech in the house of commons, for the South-Sea directors. He replyed, they do fay fo. To which I anfwered, How does this agree with your former. writing against that fcheme? His rejoinder was this: Mr. Whifton, you can walk on foot, and I cannot. Than which a truer or an acuter anfwer could not have been made by any body.

As to my principal hearer and friend, the lord Stanhope, I knew him well, and efteemed him to be a perfon of uncommon natural probity. Yet after he had been fometime a courtier, I freely afked

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him, whether he had been able to keep his integrity at court? To which he made me no reply; whence I concluded he had not been able to do it. For he would never tell me a lie. Which opinion is but too certainly confirmed by another paffage, which I had from the beft authority: it was this; lord Stanhope was once in company, but leaning on his arm, in a mufing pofture, feemed to take no notice of them. At last he started up, and in a kind of agony faid, well, I am now fatisfied, that a man cannot fet his foot over the threshold of a court, but he must be as great a rogue as ever was hang'd at Tyburn. And tho' fuch a faying may be esteem'd fufficiently extravagant, yet have I seen so few, or rather none at all, either of the clergy or laity, men or women, made better by a court, and its preferments, and fo great a number utterly ruined thereby, as is very melancholy for a good man to think of. It puts me in mind of what that excellent preacher and liver bishop Fleetwood, as I have been informed, faid upon the like occafion. This good bishop once came to the house of lords a little too early, and over-heard certain perfons debating this question, Whether a courtier could be a Chriftian or not? and when, at length, the company perceived he was there, they would needs have his opinion: he reply'd, He was no courtier, nor would determine that queftion: but he acknowledged, that he had learned fo much by their discourse, that it was not very fit for a good Chriftian to go to court. Had I been there, I should probably have given the fame reason that I had once a particular occafion to give myself there alfo, viz. That the maxims of a court are against the maxims of Christianity; the maxim of a court is this; that you must always fay and do as the firft minifter would have you: The maxim of Christianity is this; that you must always say and

do

do according to your own judgment and confcience. Yet alas! alas! all our prefent bishops and deans, &c. are made by the court! Hinc ille lachrymæ ! But to proceed.

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In this year, 1721, I publifhed A Chronological Table, containing the Hebrew, Phænician, Egyptian, and Chaldean antiquities, compar'd together, both before and after the deluge; from the Samaritan Pentateuch, Jofephus, Sanchoniatho, Herodotus, Dicæarebus, Manetho, Eratosthenes, Abidenus, Berofus, Varro, Ptolemy of Mendes, the Egyptian obelifk, the Parian marble, and all the other original authors: begun by bishop Cumber-` land, by me improved, and brought down to the æra of Nabonajar. Whence Dr. Prideaux, in his Connexion of the Old and New Testament, and Mr. Marshall's edition of bifhop Lloyd's Chronological Tables, carry on the feries 'till the times of Chriftianity. In two large fheets, price 2 s. See Collection of Authentick Records, page 1011, 1041, 1055, 1068. and Supplement to Literal Accomplishment of Prophecies, page 124, 125. and Essay on the Old Teftament, Appendix, page 223, 224, 225. of which laft immediately.

In the year 1722, I publifhed An Efay towards reftoring the true Text of the Old Testament, and for vindicating the Citations made thence in the New Teftament. With a large Appendix. Containing, in the treatise itself, the following propofitions.

I. The prefent text of the Old Testament is, generally fpeaking, both in the history, the laws, the prophecies, and the divine hymns, or, as to the main tenor and current of the whole, the fame now that it ever has been from the utmost antiquity.

II. The Greek verfion of the Old Testament, called the Septuagint verfion, as it stood in the R 3

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days of Christ and his apostles, was agreeable to the genuine Hebrew text, as it was in that age.

III. The prefent Hebrew copies of the Old Teftament are different in many places, from thofe genuine Hebrew and Greek copies thereof, which were extant in the days of Christ and his apostles.

IV. The modern copies of the Septuagint verfion, fince the second century, efpecially fince the days of Origen, are alfo confiderably different from those genuine Hebrew and Greek copies, which were extant in the first century, in the days of Chrift and his apostles.

V. That intire change, which has been made in the characters of the Hebrew Bible, from the Old Samaritan, to the New Chaldee, was not done by Efra, as the modern Jews pretend; but by the Jews themselves, about the beginning of the fecond century of Christianity.

VI. The Samaritan Pentateuch, even as among us, is generally a faithful and uncorrupt copy of the five books of Mofes, as that Pentateuch was extant, both in Hebrew and Greek, in the days of Chrift and his apoftles.

VII. The prefent Septuagint verfion of the Pfalms of David, efpecially as ftill preserved in its most ancient Latin verfion, the Roman Pfalter, is a faithful and uncorrupt copy of that facred book, as it ftood both in the Hebrew and Greek copies of the first century.

VIII. Philo the Jew, the facred authors of the New Teftament, the Apoftolical Fathers, with the primitive Greek and Latin writers now extant, of almoft four intire centuries, do every one make their citations out of the Old Testament, not from the prefent Hebrew original, but from one agreeing with the Septuagint verfion thereof; or from fome Latin tranflation made according to that Septuagint verfion, IX. Jofephus,

IX. Jofephus, the famous Jewish hiftorian, cotemporary with the apoftles of our Saviour, always made use of the then Hebrew copies of the Old Testament, and not of the Septuagint verfion, in his Antiquities.

X. The genuine chronology of Jofephus agrees neither with the prefent Hebrew, nor with the prefent Greek, but almost always with that of the Samaritan Pentateuch.

XI. The particular periods of Jofephus's chronology stated.

XII. The Jews, about the beginning of the second century of the gofpel, greatly altered and corrupted their Hebrew and Greek copies of the Old Teftament, and that in many places on purpose, out of oppofition to Christianity.

XIII. The texts cited by our Saviour and his apoftles, and the rest of the writers of the New Teftament, out of the Old, were truly cited by them, and in agreement with the genuine Hebrew and Greek Bibles of that age.

The APPENDIX contains,

I. The variations of the Samaritan Pentateuch from the Hebrew.

II. A demonstration that the Apoftolical Conftitutions were written in the first century.

III. That Sefoftris was that Pharoah who was drowned in the Red-fea.

IV. A collection of original monuments referred to in my Chronological Tables.

To which I added the next year, 1723,

A Supplement, proving that the Canticles is not a facred book of the Old Testament, nor was originally owned as fuch by the Jewish or Chriftian church, 8vo. Price together, 6s. 6d.

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