been conquered; nor perhaps more than was necessary to preserve them from being again attacked, as their enemies carried on a war of extermination against them. But, except in the case of the seven nations, their laws of war were much mollified, more, probably, than those among their neighbours; for before they besieged a city they were10 to offer peace, and if the offer was accepted, they were not allowed to put the inhabitants to death, but to make tributaries of them. The Amalekites 11 were devoted to utter destruction: they were a nation entirely of freebooters, making perpetual inroads on their neighbours, carrying off women and children, from whom none could be safe: they had no cultivated lands from which their enemies could draw reparation, and thus force them to make and keep peace: they stood to all the adjoining countries in the relation which the Algerine corsairs do to the civilized nations around them, and whom they would be justified in uniting to destroy*.

We are to consider also that the conquest of the land, and of course the extermination of its former inhabitants, was to take place by degrees, as the Israelites increased in number and power; and was often suspended by their relapses into the practices of those, whom they

10 Deut. xx. 10-18.

11 Exod. xvii. 8-16. 1 Sam. xv. * See Note 24.

were to subdue. As they neglected to drive the Canaanites out at first, God seems to have1o recalled or at at least suspended his promise. In after-times 13 David did not treat the conquered inhabitants according to the rigor of the law: they might have been changed and become more like the Israelites, and then the reason of the law ceased, or there might have been some treaty between the ancestors of each; which, as in the case of the Gibeonites, it was not lawful to break. To view the whole, as it really took place during four hundred and fifty years, it appears to the attentive observer, like one of those revolutions, which history often records, of two nations contending for one country, and the stronger by degrees destroying and establishing itself in the room of the weaker; with this peculiar circumstance, that the Israelites had a divine command for that, which the others do upon their own authority: they placed their confidence in that Divine Providence which upheld them; while the others ascribe the whole to their own prowess.

The objection at last resolves itself into this; that it is not credible God should give assurance to the Israelites that he would assist them in destroying the Canaanites, because we think he ought either to have forcibly changed the sentiments

12 Michaelis, Art. 62. 13 1 Kings ix. 20, 21.

Judges ii. 3-21.

2 Chron. i. 17, 18.

of the whole nation to a sudden state of gentleness and civilization; or have given them a law to that effect, which he knew they could not, with their state of manners and society, observe; or have fixed them in their new habitation in some way different from the usual methods of his providence, which we see take place continually: but as this reasoning proceeds upon the supposition that man is a proper judge what God ought to do, such objections can be of no weight against clear evidence of what he has done: concerning which it is beyond our powers to make any other decision than that it must be right.

In the Romans we see a people raised from small beginnings, who carried devastation and slaughter to an infinitely greater extent than the Israelites did, and by the successful use of the sword got possession of the then known world; whose attainment of universal dominion was foretold, and seems to have been one step in the dispensations of Providence in order to produce an universal peace and ready intercourse, by which the true religion might be speedily extended to all nations. But against the truth of their history no one objects, because he thinks it unworthy of Divine Providence, for any purpose to allow the massacre of so many unoffending people with the women and children; while there are found those who object to the truth of the Israelitish history, because they say it is a thing unfitting in God to

authorize the extermination of an abandoned race by executioners expressly appointed.

Meditate on the rise and fall of any of the conquering nations of antiquity, and you will find them to be like the Israelites and their neighbours, instruments of Providence for the accomplishment of his purposes; with this difference, that the Israelites were expressly sent to do, what, without divine order they would never have attempted, and without divine aid they could never have accomplished. It was foretold what should be the fate of their neighbours, who harassed and oppressed them; which they having done to gratify their own ambition, and being permitted to do for the sins of the Israelites, God threatens them with a severe after-reckoning, to which it is evident he has called them; using the swords of these warriors against each other to the utter destruction of empires once so powerful and splendid, but of which no trace now remains. The people whom they oppressed still survive; an evidence of their divine designation to the purposes which they have fulfilled, and of those which the prophecies intimate are yet to be accomplished. The fate of the others exhibits an authoritative though neglected warning to the Christian nations, lest they also in the day of account shall be found to have destroyed "and cut off nations, not a few";"

and fall under the prophetic denunciation of their meeker Master: "All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword." Matt. xxvi. 52.

CHAPTER IV.

David.

THE real or supposed misconduct of particular individuals, who were distinguished instruments of God in completing the conquest begun by Joshua, is also urged against the authority of the Revelation and the holiness of its author. Of these it is convenient to begin with David, because, against him in particular, for the commendation given of him, that he was a man after God's own heart', the most severe sarcasms have been uttered; and because his conduct, contrasted with that of others, establishes beyond controversy the conclusion, that God is neither to be considered as the author of the crimes committed by his instruments, neither do their faults, in some respects, invalidate the evidence of their mission in others. His unexampled integrity during a persecution of many years, shewed that he considered the divine appointment to the throne of Israel to have been

11 Sam. xiii. 14. Acts xiii. 22.