sincere idolaters (if the expression may be allowed) became infidels. Simple superstition was the first stage of the corruption among priests, no less than laics; and simple superstition hath no freedom in the pursuit of ends, no determination in the choice of means, but is the slave of fear and habit.

Habit therefore previously formed would for some time preserve a respect for the records of the ancient church, when the pure religion was forsaken. And while this habit operated, fear would prevent any corruptions of them by wilful mutilation, changes, or erasures. They would be liable however to a corruption of another kind. The priests receiving false oracles with no less veneration than the true, and zealous for the credit of superstitious rites of worship, would make large additions of fable to the historic part, and of feigned predictions of impostors to the prophetic. Still the original true history and true prophecy. would be preserved, and, blended with the false, would, from age to age, while the corruption lasted, be carefully laid up under the care of the priests, and make a part of the treasures of the heathen temples.

Nor is the strange mixture of sense and absurdity, of rational religion and impious superstition, which

appear in the lives and opinions of the wiser heathens, to be traced with equal probability to any other source.

The purest morals in the ordinary life, joined with obscene and impious rites of worship; a just notion of the moral attributes of the Deity, accompanied with a belief in the subordinate power of impure and cruel dæmons; a clear understanding of the nature of the human mind as an immaterial substance and a voluntary agent, connected with a persuasion of the influence of the stars on the affairs of men, not only in the revolutions and commotions of empires, but on the private fortunes of every individual. These were the inconsistencies, not only of the popular creed and the popular practice, but of the creed and of the practice of the wisest and the best of their philosophers. Socrates himself, pure as his morality and sublime as his theology were, so far as the supreme God was their object, worshipped the gods of his country according to the established rites.*

Now, how may we account for these contradictions in the opinions, and these inconsistencies in

* That he died a martyr to the doctrine of the unity of the divine substance, is a vulgar error.

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the conduct of wise and conscientious men? For such, it must be confessed, many of the heathen philosophers were, notwithstanding the abuse which is sometimes so liberally bestowed upon them by ignorant declaimers. Whence was it, that the same men should practise rational devotion in the closet, and come abroad to join in a rank superstition? That they should form themselves to the general habits of sobriety and temperance, and yet occasionally partake of the indecent liberties of a Greek festival? Unless it was that they found the principles of true religion and the rites of an idolatrous worship established on what appeared to them the same authority, upon the credit of their sacred books, in which both were alike inculcated; books, to which they could not but allow some authority, at the same time that they had no certain means of distinguishing the authentic part from later and corrupt additions. Be that as it may, whether this might be the true source of that inconsistency of principle and practice, which was so striking in the lives of virtuous heathens, and is really a phenomenon in the history of mankind, (which I mention, only because it affords a collateral argument for the truth of perhaps the only supposition by which it may be satisfactorily explained; the existence of such books as I have described, composed of fable joined with

true history, and of false prophecies of great antiquity added to more ancient predictions of God's true prophets), will hardly bear a doubt. Since it is the necessary consequence of principles which cannot reasonably be disputed, that in early ages the worshippers of the true God would use all means to preserve the memory of the first revelations, and that the first idolaters retaining a blind veneration for these ancient collections, when they no longer knew the real importance of them, would not be less careful to preserve the false oracles in which they equally believed. If such books existed, it cannot bear a doubt that they made the ground-work of all the idolatrous worship of later ages, and together with the corruption, were the means of perpetuating some disguised and obscure remembrance of true prophecies. So. wonderfully hath Providence overruled the follies and the crimes of men, rendering them the instruments of his own purpose, and the means of general and lasting good. It was to the remains of these books which I have shewn you to have been in fact the corrupted and mutilated records of the patriarchal church, that the Greek phi losophers were probably indebted for those fragments of the patriarchal creed, from which they drew the just notions that we find scattered in their writings, of the immortality of the soul, a future retri

bution, the unity of the divine substance, and even of the trinity of persons. For of this the sages of the Pythagorean and Platonic schools had some obscure and distorted apprehensions. And to no other source can we refer the expectation that prevailed in the heathen world at large, of a great personage to arise in some part of the East for the general advantage of mankind.

And in this I think you will now agree with me, if you bear in mind the fact that I set out with proving from historical evidence, that certain books which were preserved as a sacred treasure in the heathen temples, contained explicit prophecies of Christ; which are more likely to have been ancient prophecies preserved in the manner I have described, though not without a mixture of corruption, for which too I have accounted, than the involuntary effusions of the impostors of later ages, occasionally uttering true predictions under a compulsive influence of the divine Spirit: an opinion which, I am persuaded, would never have been adopted, had not the severe notions that too long prevailed of an original reprobation of the greater part of mankind, made men unwilling to believe that heathens could be in possession of the smallest particle of true prophecy, and of course cut off all inquiry after the means by which