His pages are entirely free from the affectation of learning; and readers who are not scholars, will find their way through the whole of them, without stumbling upon any formidable array of strange letters, or being impeded by any niceties of critical dissertation. Intelligent readers will assign to the Author, the merit due to a writer who, avoiding every unnecessary display of his learning, knows the uses to which it may be applied, and, without formally assuming the character of a controvertist, renders his labours to the cause of truth in such manner as to expose the temerity and the folly of its opponents. He has produced a brief, but sufficient defence of the early books of the Jewish Canon, which, as they are the most important, have been the most frequently assailed by unbelievers.

In the proofs and presumptions which the Author adduces in his discussion of the question relative to the Authenticity of the books of the Pentateuch, we could not expect to find novel arguments or testimonies before unknown. The industry of preceding writers has enabled them to collect, or their sagacity has suggested to them, whatever of fact or argument can be considered as related to the subject. The Professor has selected his evidences with caution; and in his reasonings from them, he forcibly urges the various proofs which they furnish in support of his positions. Whatever may be said in reference to the first of the five books, (in respect to which the Author accords, in part, with Eichhorn,) the last four are replete with internal evidence that they were written at the very time when the civil and religious polity, of which they are the code, was first formed. They cannot certainly belong to a prior period, and nothing would be more unreasonable than to assign to them a later date. Instances might be cited, of laws being committed to writing long after their first promulgation; but the peculiarities of the Mosaic legislation take it out of parallel or comparison with them. The history is blended with the legislation; many of the laws which are inscribed in these books, were ordained on occasions noticed in the history; the narrative is in some cases illustrated by the laws; and in others, the laws are explained by the record of the transactions; and no other evidence is wanted to prove the contemporaneous origin of both, than that which the books themselves supply. The conclusion is evident, that, if the Jewish legislation and the books of the Pentateuch were produced in the same age, Moses was the writer. Jewish testimony forbids our assenting to any other proposition; and every hypothesis which has been framed in support of other assumptions, is at once evinced to be untenable, by the contradictions and absurdities which it pre

sents.

That there are passages in the Pentateuch on which objec

tions may be grounded against the conclusion that Moses was the writer, cannot safely be denied; but no candid or competent critic will refuse to admit, that these can be accounted for without calling in question the genuineness of the document. The difficulties created by such passages, may all be satisfactorily obviated or explained. It must, however, be confessed, that the methods which have been employed to meet the cavils of objectors, or to clear up the real difficulties, have not always been of the most judicious kind, and have perplexed, rather than aided the argument. Nothing can be more injurious to the reputation of the Jewish Lawgiver, than the superstitious inventions of the Rabbies, intended by them as means of accounting for the apparent discrepancies in the Pentateuch. The notion of an oral law, to correct the errors, or to supply the defects of the written law, is a most preposterous contrivance, which, were it admitted as a true one, would not answer the purpose intended. It has, however, been faithfully copied by the Romish Church, which has also its Talmud, its traditions of paramount authority, to sanction and enforce human devices, when Divine precepts would guide the mind in a direction the reverse of antichristian observances. But in neither case is the authority of the inspired writers supported by these unhallowed schemes. Nor can any objections be more frivolous, than many of those which the Author of the Critical History of the Old Testament has advanced against the ascribing of the Pentateuch to Moses. His notion, too, that there existed among the Hebrews, as a regulation of the Jewish Lawgiver, a class of public writers, who were designated prophets, and whose office it was to collect and preserve the memorials of transactions relating to the national history, is nothing better than a supposition. The passage to which he refers in Josephus contra Apionem, affords no ground for the assumption. It is not reasonable to suppose, that, if these public scribes had been instituted by Moses, the Pentateuch would have been entirely silent as to their appointment. The administration of justice was too onerous an employment for the Israelitish leader; and it became necessary to select persons on whom a part of the judicial functions should be devolved. Their appointment, the circumstances in which it originated, and their specific duties, are described in the Pentateuch; and if the public writers whom R. Simon conceives to have existed, had really been constituted by Moses for the purpose which the hypothesis assigns to them, the institution of their office would have had a place in the record of the Mosaic legislation. Moses, he thinks, was the author of the statutes and ordinances, which he committed to writing, but it was left to the public scribes to register the national transactions. The perusal of the books is sufficient to

enable every honest inquirer to refute this hypothesis, for which the authority of Josephus is solicited in vain.

The doctrines which the Pentateuch develops respecting the existence and perfections of the Divine Being, to whom it ascribes the creation of the world and the origin of all things, must be regarded, by all who are capable of appreciating their sublime import, as supplying decisive proof of a medium of communication peculiar and extraordinary, by which the people who were first in the possession of them were instructed in the primary principles of all true religion. They were, manifestly, not borrowed or derived from any of the prevailing systems in the ancient world, for they stand altogether apart from the speculations of the ancient schools. It is to a Divine source that the author of the Pentateuch attributes his knowledge of God, claiming for the theology it comprises, the character and authority of a revelation from heaven; and the inspiration of these records is a natural and obvious consequence of their authenticity. In this light, every one who fairly examines the subject, must see the connexion between the facts and the inference to which they lead. The Israelites were the very last nation who could be supposed capable of originating a series of sublime and simple truths, in contrast with the gross obscurities and multifarious errors imbodied in the philosophical systems which followed each other in the ancient world, and to which the theology of other nations had no resemblance. The Author has forcibly presented this very striking and most important fact, in the following paragraph.

Do you see that dull people, despised by the human race, pertinaciously confining themselves to a small spot of the earth? But little advanced in civilization, they make no pretensions either to literary or to scientific fame: they boast no celebrated philosophers, no distinguished artists. They are strangers to that intellectual progress which is in their neighbourhood, and which distinguishes the people of Greece and of the East. Their language is poor; their ignorance extreme; their mental powers are undeveloped and inactive. The resemblance which they bear to other nations, is not unlike that which those mis-shapen beings bear to the human race, who, on account of the imperfection of their faculties, are condemned to vegetate in a long infancy. With one thing, however, one single thing, they, and they alone, are acquainted. The knowledge of it was denied to the wisdom of the Greeks, and the pride of the Orientals: it is no less than the eternal and supreme existence of the only God, who, in the beginning, created the heavens and the earth. They alone speak of the Deity in a manner worthy of his grandeur: the rest of mankind are ignorant of the true God. While, in other countries, men of immortal genius, capable of celebrating the glory of the Most High, insult him by their unworthy conceptions; while certain sages feel after him to find him, and rejoice, at most, in the glimmering of some faint and doubtful ray, the

Jewish people worship the only God, before whom men may bow without a blush. The Jewish people, of all people the dullest and most ignorant; who learned from the nations which surrounded them only lessons of idolatry; who spent two centuries of slavery in Egypt,-that Egypt, whose gods, to use the language of the poet, dwelt in stables and grew in gardens,-were the only people acquainted with the most sublime, important, and abstract of all truths! Did they discover it by chance? Were they indebted for it to their own sagacity? Absurd suppositions! which the slightest examination overthrows. Rather hear them when they tell you-God spake to our fathers, God made himself known to Israel.' PP. 23-26.

This is the problem which invites and demands the consideration of unbelievers, who, since they reject the fact which alone explains this peculiarity, are bound to tax their knowledge or their invention, for reasons which might account for the origination of principles of a pure and exalted Theism among a people who never possessed advantages for the discovery of truth, that were unattainable by their contemporaries in other countries. Without the light of Revelation, the human understanding is left blindly to work its way, to collect the elements of its belief, and to construct its theories of religion, which time and circumstances are found modifying, or superseding by the introduction of other systems. Superstitions may indeed become inveterate, and may remain for ages the same; but the intellectual character of the Mosaic Theism shews very distinctly, that it was not by gross representations of the Deity, that its influence was established over the nation. And it never was changed: it was never modified. The unity, the supremacy, the spirituality of the Divine Being, are the same in the later books of the Old Testament, as we find them in the early portions of it. Moses speaks in precisely the same manner of the Supreme Being, as David, and Solomon, and the succeeding prophets. In Greece, on the contrary, the philosophers were ever varying the doctrines of their predecessors, and novel speculations were constantly arising in their schools, to manifest the activity of their minds, and the fertility of their genius. A very extensive range of systems was thus provided; but to which of them can we be referred, as containing the sublime notions of God, expressed in the same simple and majestic language, which we find in the Jewish Scriptures? In which of them shall we find even an approach to the grandeur and simplicity of the terms in which the Hebrew Legislator ascribed greatness to God? How unlike are their subtile disquisitions to the clear, unencumbered declarations which he employs in speaking of the Creator of the world! How marked is the difference, as we compare the dogmas of the Grecian schools, with the annunciations of the Prophet and Lawgiver of Israel, between the suggestions of imagination and

the conjectures of reason, from which they formed their tenets, and the Divine principles which he inculcates! To account for this difference, is the business of those who deny the inspiration of the Mosaic records. Here are the books; their antiquity is indisputable; they are not the fabrication of Christians; they existed long before the name of Christians was known; they are supported by independent evidence, as the production of very remote times; and they stand apart from all other ancient writings, as the depository of essential truths, and are not less remarkable for the manner in which they exhibit them. A comparison of the Pentateuch with the works which have transmitted to us the learning of ancient times, and the religious notions imbodied in the systems of the philosophers, or to be discovered in other connections, would be a process requiring great labour and patient perseverance; but it would furnish results of a very decisive character in favour of the views taken by such writers as Professor Cellérier, in illustrating the genuineness of the Mosaic books. He has briefly treated this subject in his Seventh Chapter, on the knowledge of the true God among the Jewish 'people, compared with the notions of Pagan philosophers."

In his fourth Chapter, the Author notices the 'Testimonies rendered by modern discoveries to the Mosaic Chronology.' After mentioning the preliminary discourse prefixed by Cuvier to his "Recherches," he proceeds to remark on an attempt made by some half-learned infidels, to impugn the authority of the Mosaic records, which many of our readers will remember, and which every one ought to be acquainted with. We must transcribe the Author's account of its signal exposure.

Among the attacks which science has attempted to make upon the authority of the Pentateuch, few are more recent or notorious than those of which Egyptian antiquities have been the occasion. Some distinguished men who were associated in a celebrated expedition, all the perils of which they fearlessly shared; who studied, both with courage and perseverance, the hitherto superficially noticed wonders of ancient Egypt, and naturally enthusiastic on the subject of those monuments which were the objects of their labours and the pledges of their fame, fell into some errors as to their importance and antiquity. The famous zodiacs, among others those of Esné and Denderah, appeared to them to be of incalculable antiquity. This pretended discovery was immediately published, as having decided the question, and carrying back Egyptian civilization beyond the time of Moses, and even of the Deluge. But after the lapse of some years, and particularly since one of these zodiacs has been brought to Europe and exposed to view; since the accumulated researches of travellers have given other learned men an opportunity of examining an abundance of Egyptian monuments, papyri, mummies, temples and tombs, together with their hieroglyphics and inscriptions, circumstances have changed, and it is in favour of the book of Genesis that the question is decided. In the first place, the