punishments in another state; that he never mentions to them the immortality of their souls; that he never encourages them with the hopes of heaven, nor does he threaten them with hell ; his promises and menaces are all temporal.

Before his death, he tells them in Deuteronomy:

"If, after having children and grand chil"dren, you deal falsely, you shall be cut off "from the land, and be made little among the "nations.

"I am a jealous God, punishing the iniquity "of the fathers to the third and fourth gene

❝ration.

"Honour thy father and mother, that thy life "may be long.

"You shall never want food.

"If you follow after strange gods, you shall "be destroyed-

"If you obey the Lord, you shall have rain in spring and autumn; corn, oil, wine, and "fodder for your beasts, that you may eat and "be satisfied.

"Put these words into your hearts, about your hands, between your eyes; write them "on your doors, that your days may be multiplied.

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"Do as I order you, without adding or taking away any thing.

"If a prophet arise among you, foretelling strange things, and his prophecy is true, and "what he says comes to pass; should he say to "you, Come, let us follow strange gods, ye "shall immediately kill him; and all the peo.. ple smite, him after you.

“When

"When the Lord shall have delivered the "nations into your hands, put them all to the "sword, without sparing one single man; thou "shalt not pity any one.

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"Eat no unclean birds, as the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray, &c.

"Eat no creatures which chew the cud and are not cloven footed, as the camel, the hare, "and the cony.

"Whilst you observe all those ordinances you shall be blessed in your houses and in your fields; the fruits of your body, of your "land, of your cattle shall be blessed.

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"If you fail to observe all these ordinances "and ceremonies, cursed shall ye be in your "houses and in your fields.

"Famine and poverty shall come on you; you shall die, distressed by cold, want, and "sickness; you shall have the itch, the scab; 66 you shall have ulcers in your knees, and in "your legs.

"The strangers shall lend to you on usury— "because ye have not served the Lord.

"And ye shall eat the fruit of your bodies, "and the flesh of your sons and of your daugh"ters."

Do not all these promises and threatnings relate intirely to things of time and this world? is there a single word in them concerning the soul's immortality, and a future life?

Several celebrated commentators have thought, that those two capital doctrines were very well known to Moses, and in proof of it produce Jacob's words, who apprehending that his son had been devoured by wild beasts, says in his grief, I shall go down with my son to the grave, in infernum,

fernum, into hell; that is to say, as my son is dead, let me die.

They farther prove it by passages from Isaiah and Ezekiel; but the Hebrews, to whom Moses was speaking, knew nothing of those two prophets, as not living till some ages after.

To dispute about Moses's private sentiments is wasting words to no purpose. The certain fact is, that in his public laws he had never so much as once made mention of a life to come, limiting all punishments and all rewards to the present state. If he was acquainted with a future life, why did he not expresly set forth such an important tenet? and if he was a stranger to it, what was the scope of his mission?

This is a question advanced by several great men and in answer to it they say, that Moses's Lord, who is the lord of all men, reserved to himself the prerogative of explaining to the Jews in his own time, a doctrine which they were not in a condition to understand, when in the wilderness.

Had Moses taught the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, a great school among the Jews would not always have opposed it. Nay, that great school, the Sudducees, would not have been allowed of in the state, much less would they have held the chief employments; and still much less would high-priests have been taken from such a body.

It appears that the Jews were not divided into three sects, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes, till after the foundation of Alexandria. Josephus the historian, who was a Pharisee, says in book XIII. of his antiquities, that the Pharisees believed the metempsichosis. The Saddu.

cees

cees held that the soul perished with the body. The opinion of the Essenes was, that souls were immortal and came down into bodies from the upper regions of the air in an aërial form; that their return thither is by a rapid attraction; and, after death, those which belonged to good persons have mansions assigned them beyond the ocean, in a country where there is neither heat nor cold, wind nor rain, whilst the souls of the wicked go to a quite contrary climate; such was the theology of the Jews.

He who alone was to set mankind right came and overthrew these three sects, but without him we never should have been able to know any thing of the soul: for philosophers never had any determinate idea of it; and Moses, the only true legislator of the world before our divine teacher; Moses, who spoke to God face to face, and who saw only his hinder parts, has left mankind in their natural ignorance of this momentous article: so that it is but seventeen hundred years since there has been any certainty of the existence and immortality of the soul.

Cicero had only surmises; his grand-son and grand-daughter might have learned farther from the first Galileans who came to Rome.

But before, and since that time, in all the parts of the earth, where the apostles had not preached the gospel, every one might say to his soul, Who art thou? whence comest thou ? what art thou doing? whither art thou going? Thou art, I know not what; thou thinkest and perceivest; and wert thou to perceive and think a hundred thousand millions of years, never wouldest thou, by thine own faculties, without

the

the assistance of God, know a jot more than thou knowest now.

Know man, that God has given thee understanding to guide thy behaviour, and not to penetrate into the essence of the things which he has created.

SUPERSTITION (1).

Whatever goes beyond the adoration of one

Supreme Being, and a submission of the heart to his eternal orders, is generally superstition; and a most dangerous superstition is the annexing of the pardon of crimes to certain ceremonies.

"Et nigras mactant pecudes et manibus divis "Inferias mittunt.

"O faciles nimium qui tristia crimina cædis "Flaminea tolli posse putatis aqua”

You imagine that God will forget your having killed a man, only for your washing yourself in a river, sacrificing a black sheep, and some words being

(') The doctrine contained in this article may come very well from the mouth of Cicero, Seneca, or Plutarch; but if it intends to suppress all external ceremonies of religion, it is not suitable to a believer of Christianity. We are taught that every particular or national church hath authority to decree and appoint ceremonies or religious rites, without being charged with superstition. And we believe that baptism and the Lord's-Prayer, which constitute a part of our external worship, were ordained by Christ, and consequently a divine institution. Superstition properly consists in the practice of such ceremonies as are repugnant to reason, or the word of God.