persons of the times of which he wrote, and they are all both probable in themselves and confirmed by the testimony of other writers; but this highly improbable story stands upon the very doubtful authority of this Gospel alone, unsupported by the evidence of any other writer, sacred or profane. Josephus and the Roman historians give us particular accounts of the character of this Jewish king, who received his sovereign authority from the Roman emperor, and inform us of other acts of cruelty which he was guilty of in his own family; but of this infamous, inhuman butchery, which to this day remains unparalleled in the annals of tyranny, they are entirely silent. Under such circumstances, if my eternal happiness depended upon it, I could not believe it true: but though I readily exclaim with Horace non ego, I cannot add, as he does, credat Judæus apella; for I am confident there is no Jew that reads this chapter, who does not laugh at the ignorant credulity of those professed Christians, who receive such groundless, improbable stories for the inspired word of God, and lay the foundation of their religion upon such incredible fictions as these.

After all, however, we find that this barbarous inhumanity was in vain; for, in obe. dience to the divine admonition of a dream, Joseph, we are informed, preserved the life of the infant Jesus, by escaping with him into Egypt; and, to give a sanction to his story, he makes this circumstance also the completion of another prophecy of the Old Testament, as he does likewise the massacre of the innocent children, referring us to Hosea, c. xi. v. 1. But as his not understanding the meaning of Micah's prophecy proves the author not to have been a Jew, so his application of a pretended prophecy in this, and the two following instances, prove him to have been a writer who had adopted the maxims of the Pythagorean, and Platonic schools, that deceit and falsehood were allowable in promoting what he deemed the cause of christian piety; for the very reading over the passage of Hosea, here alluded to, is sufficient to convince any man, that the prophet's words in this place have not the least reference to any future event, but are an upbraiding of the Jewish people, for the ungrateful return they had made to God, for his kindness to them, in the infancy of their nation, when he delivered them from their bondage in Egypt. In

the same manner, the passage of Jeremiah, c. xxxi. v. 15, is only a prophecy of the restoration of the Jews from the Babylonish captivity, fully completed in that event many centuries before the birth of Christ; and which the writer, whoever he was, must know could not, in any sense, apply to the transaction he has recorded; because, the very next words are, "Thus saith the Lord, Refrain thy voice from weeping and thine eyes from tears for thy work shall be rewarded, saith the Lord, and they shall come again from the land of the enemy. And there is hope in thine end, saith the Lord, that thy children shall come again to their own border.” As to the prophecy mentioned in the last verse of this chapter, that the Messiah was to be called a Nazarene, it is not to be found any where else, and therefore must be the mere production of the writer's own fertile imagination, to account, in some manner, for our Lord's being so often spoken of by the title of Jesus of Nazareth; but in the account he has thought fit to give us of the cause of his dwelling at Nazareth, in Galilee, he has betrayed an ignorance of the Geography of Palestine, which cannot be attributed to Matthew, nor to any other native of that

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country. He tells us, that Joseph, on his return out of Egypt, after the death of Herod, finding that his son reigned in his stead, was afraid to go into Judea, and therefore, by divine admonition, "turned aside into the parts of Galilee." Here the reader is requested to remark, first, that Galilee having been as much under Herod's jurisdiction as Judea, and his kingdom having been divided amongst his sons after his death, it was a son of Herod who reigned in his stead, in Galilee as well as in Judea, consequently the child Jesus could be no securer in one province than in the other. He is next desired to cast

his eyes upon the map of Palestine, and observe how impossible it was for Joseph to have gone from Egypt to Nazareth, without travelling through the whole extent of Archelaus's kingdom, unless he undertook a long peregrination through the deserts, on the north and east of the lake Asphalites, and the country of Moab, and then either crossed the Jordan into Samaria, or the lake of Gennesareth into Galilee, and from thence went to the city Nazareth: and if it were at all credible, that the latter was the case, with what propriety could such a tedious journey have been denominated, turning aside into the parts of Galilee?

III. IN the history of John's Baptism, recorded in the third chapter, there are many sentences copied word for word from the Gospel according to Luke, notwithstanding which, it contains one very essential differ ence, and one direct contradiction to it. The first is in the second verse; where we are told that John preached, "saying, Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." If this account were true, then Jesus and his Apostles could not be the first preachers of the Gospel ; for these are the very words they use, to announce the commencement of the Gospel Covenant to the Jews: but Luke informs us, not only in the parallel place of his first history, but also in a speech of Paul, related Acts xix. 4, that John only "preached "the Baptism of repentance for the remis"sion of sins ;"* and since our Saviour tells the Jews, Luke xvi. 16. that the Law and the Prophets, that is, the Mosaic Covenant, subsisted until John, but that since John's time, the New Covenant of the kingdom of God was preached, we may be certain, that

* The advocates of the doctrine of atonement and satisfaction would do well to consider, how the supposed sacrifice of the death of Jesus could be necessary to the Deity's pardoning the sins of mankind, when, before the ministry of Jesus, John was commissioned by God to preach the remission of sins, on condition of repentanc only,