agreeable to a sensual, groveling people. The transition from the habits which they had contracted in Egypt was an easy one. The object

communicating his will and issuing his commands to one of his intelligent creatures respecting a great religious dispen sation to be introduced into the world by human agency,is likely to secure to Dr. G. an eminence in singularity from which he is in no great danger of experiencing the slightest disturbance.

I cannot however yet dismiss this subject, and still less can I dismiss one so serious with an air of levity. However ludi. crous and however contemptible the wild fancies and the im. potent scoffs of this traducer of Scripture truths may be, yet the awful importance of that sacred book with which he has connected himself in the capacity of translator, (a treacherous one in every sense of the word) bestows upon his labours by association a consequence, which (barely) rescues them from present neglect, though it cannot operate to secure them from future oblivion. In the declaration of his creed, (Pref. to crit. Rem. p. vi.) and in the vindication of himself from the charge of infidelity, he affirms "the gospel of Jesus to be his religious code; and his doctrines to be his dearest delight": he professes himself to be a sincere though unworthy disci ple of Christ." "Christian (he says) is my name, and Catho lic my surname. Rather than renounce these glorious titles, I would shed my blood": &c. Now in what does this Ca tholic Christianity consist? Not merely as we have seen in de nying the divine mission of Moses, and in charging the messenger of that dispensation which was the forerunner of Christianity, with the fabrication of the most gross and infa mous falsehoods, but in attributing to our Lord himself a par ticipation in those falsehoods by their adoption and application to his own purposes in his conferences with the Jews. For the establishment of this, it will be sufficient to appeal to our

of their worship was changed, BUT LITTLE OF ITS

MODE: FOR IT IS NOT NOW A QUESTION AMONG

THE LEARNED, whether a great part of their ri

Lord's solemn attestation to the truth of Moses's narrative of the transaction alluded to. "And as touching the dead, that they rise: have ye not read in THE BOOK OF MOSES, how in the bush GOD SPAKE UNTO HIM, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." (Mark xii. 26.) What the Catholic Christianity of Dr. Geddes amounts to, may be sufficiently inferred from the com parison of this single passage with the positions which he main tains in direct opposition to the authority of our Lord him. self.

But it will appear still more satisfactory from a short sum mary of his services in the cause of holy writ, presented to us by the pen of an accurate and judicious writer, in the pages of a well-known periodical publication.-"The method taken by this Catholic Christian, of strengthening the foundation of the faith of Christians, seems very extraordinary. For it consists in tearing up all the foundations, which the learning and the piety of the divines of former ages had been employed to lay. It would perhaps be doing more justice to his great en terprize, to say, that it is an attempt to tear up the founda tions which the SPIRIT OF GOD has laid. He attacks the cre dit of Moses, in every part of his character; as an historian, a fegislator, and a moralist. Whether Moses was himself the writer of the Pentateuch, is, with Dr. G. a matter of doubt, But the writer, whoever he might be, is one, he tells us, who upon all occasions gives into the marvellous, adorns his narra. tive with fictions of the interference of the Deity, when every thing happened in a natural way; and at other times dresses up fable in the garb of true history. The history of the crea tion is, according to him, a fabulous cosmogony. The story of the Fall, a mere Mythos, in which nothing but the imagina.

tual were not derived from that nation." (Geddes's Preface to Genesis, p. xiii.) Thus easily is the whole matter settled by this modest, cautious, and pious commentator.

He

tion of commentators, possessing more piety than judgment, could have discovered either a seducing Devil, or the promise of a Saviour. It is a fable, he asserts, intended for the pur pose of persuading the vulgar, that knowledge is the root of all 'evil, and the desire of it a crime. Moses was, it seems, a man of great talents, as Numa and Lycurgus were. But, like them, he was a false pretender to personal intercourse with the Deity, with whom he had no immediate communication. had the art to take advantage of rare but natural occurrences, to persuade the Israelites that the immediate power of God was exerted to accomplish his projects. When a violent wind happened to lay dry the head of the gulph of Suez, he persuaded them that God had made a passage for them through the sea; and the narrative of their march is embellished with circumstances of mere fiction. In the delivery of the Decalogue he took advantage of a thunder storm, to persuade the people that Jehovah had descended upon mount Sinai; and he counterfeited the voice of God by a person in the height of the storm, speaking through a trumpet. He presumes even that God had no immediate hand in delivering the Israelites from the Egyptian bondage. The story of Balaam and his ass has had a parallel in certain incidents of Dr. Geddes's own life. The laws of Moses are full of pious frauds. His animal sacrifices were institutions of ignorance and super. stition. The conquest of Canaan was a project of unjust ambition, executed with cruelty; and the morality of the Deca. logue itself is not without its imperfections.In the end he comes to this very plain confession. "The God of Moses, Jehovah, if he really be such as he is described in the Penta,

Now what says Dr. Priestley upon this question which has been so completely set at rest by the learned? "They who suppose that Moses himself was the author of the institutions, civil or religious, that bear his name, and that in framing

teuch, is not the God whom I adore, nor the God whom I could love, &c." (Brit. Critic, vol. xix. pp. 3, 4.)

Such are the views of the Hebrew Scriptures entertained by the man who undertook to be their translator; and who to these qualifications for the task, superadded those of a low and ludicrous cast of mind, a vulgar taste, and an almost total unacquaintance with the idiom of the English language. Whether then upon the whole I have dealt unjustly by this writer, in exemplifying his profane ravings by the brutal intoxication of the Spartan slave, and in conceiving the bare exhibition of the one to be sufficient like that of the other to inspire horror and disgust; I leave to the candid reader to determine. If however any taste can be so far vitiated, or any judgment so weak, as to admit to serious and respectful consideration that perversion of the sacred volume which he would dignify with the title of a translation, I would recom mend at the same time a perusal of the learned and judicious strictures upon that work contained in the XIVth and XIXth volumes of the journal from which the above extract has been made, a journal to which every friend of good order and true religion in the community must feel himself deeply indebted. As a powerful antidote against the poison of the work, Dr. Graves's Lectures on the four last books of the Pentateuch, whilst embracing much larger and more important objects, may be most usefully applied. In this valuable performance the authenticity and truth of the Mosaic history are established; the theological, moral and political principles of the Jewish Law are elucidated; and all are, with ability and success, vindicated against the objections of infidels and gainsayers,

them he borrowed much from the Egyptians, or other antient nations, MUST NEVER HAVE COMPARED THEM TOGETHER. Otherwise they could not but have perceived many circumstances in which they differ most essentially from them all.” He then proceeds through a dissertation of some length to point out the most striking of those differences and among these he notices the sacrificial discrepancies as not the least impor

tant.

66

Sacrificing (he says) was a mode of worship more antient than idolatry or the institutions of Moses; but among the heathens various superstitious customs were introduced respecting it, which were all excluded from the religion of the Hebrews." Having evinced this by a great variety of instances, he observes; "As Moses did not adopt any of the heathen customs, it is. equally evident that they borrowed nothing from him with respect to sacrifices. With them we find no such distinction of sacrifices as is made in the books of Moses, such as burnt offerings, sin offerings, trespass offerings, and peace offerings, or of the heaving or waving of the sacrifices. Those particulars therefore he could not have had from them, whether we can discover any reason for them or not. They either had their origin in the time of Moses, or, which is most probable, were prior to his time, and to the existence of idolatry.""Lastly, (he re