The history says, "The king of Babylon gave judgement upon Zedekiah," or, as it is more literally rendered from the Hebrew, "spake judgements with him at Riblah."-The prophet concludes this part with, "And thou shalt go to Babylon:" the history says, "The king of Babylon bound him in chains, and carried him to Babylon, and put him in prison till the day of his death:" (Jer. lii. 11.)" Thou shalt not die by the sword." He did not die by the sword, he did not fall in battle." But thou shalt die in peace." He did die in peace, he neither expired on the rack, nor on the scaffold; was neither strangled nor poisoned; no unusual fate of captive kings! he died peaceably in his bed, though that bed was in a prison."And with the burnings of thy fathers shall they burn odours for thee." I cannot prove from the history that this part of the prophecy was accomplished, nor can you prove that it was not. The probability is, that it was accomplished; and I have two reasons on which I ground this probability. Daniel, Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego, to say nothing of other Jews, were men in great authority in the court of the king of Babylon, before and after the commencement of the imprisonment of Zedekiah; and Daniel continued in power till the subversion of the kingdom of Babylon by Cyrus. Now it seems to me to be very probable, that Daniel, and the other great men of the Jews, would both have inclination to request, and influence enough with the king of Babylon to obtain, permission to bury their deceased prince Zedekiah, after the manner of his fathers.-But if there had been no Jews at Babylon of consequence enough to make such a request, still it is probable that the king of Babylon would have ordered the Jews to bury and lament their departed prince, after the manner of their country. Monarchs, like other men, are conscious of the instability of buman condition; and when the pomp of war has ceased, when the insolence of conquest is abated, and the

fury of resentment subsided, they seldom fail to revere royalty even in its ruins, and grant without reluctance proper obsequies to the remains of captive kings.

You profess to have been particular in treating of the books ascribed to Isaiah and Jeremiah.-Particular! in what? You have particularized two or three passages, which you have endeavoured to represent as objectionable, and which I hope have been shown, to the reader's satisfaction, to be not justly liable to your censure; and you have passed over all the other parts of these books without notice. Had you been particular in your examination, you would have found cause to admire the probity and the intrepidity of the characters of the authors of them; you would have met with many instances of sublime composition; and, what is of more consequence, with many instances of phetical veracity:-particularities of these kinds you have wholly overlooked, I cannot account for this. I have no right, no inclination, to call you a dishonest man: am I justified in considering you as a man not altogether destitute of ingenuity, but so entirely under the dominion of prejudice in every thing respecting the Bible, that, like a corrupted judge previously determined to give sentence on one side, you are negligent in the examination of truth?

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You proceed to the rest of the prophets, and you take them collectively, carefully however selecting for your observations such particularities as are best calculated to render, if possible, the prophets odious or ridiculous in the eyes of your readers. You confound prophets with poets and musicians. I will distinguish them thus many prophets were poets and musicians, but all poets and musicians were not prophets. Prophecies were often delivered in poetic language and measure; but flights and metaphors of the Jewish poets have not, as you affirm, been foolishly erected into what are now called prophecies-they are now called, and have always been called, prophecies,-because they

were real predictions, some of which have received, some are now receiving, and all will receive, their full accomplishment.

That there were false prophets, witches, necromancers, conjurers, fortune-tellers, among the Jews, no person will attempt to deny; no nation, barbarous or civilized, has been without them; but when you would degrade the prophets of the Old Testament to a level with these conjuring, dreaming, strolling gentrywhen you would represent them as spending their lives in fortune-telling, casting nativities, predicting riches, fortunate or unfortunate marriages, conjuring for lost goods, &c. I must be allowed to say, that you wholly mistake their office, and misrepresent their character. Their office was to convey to the children of Israel the commands, the promises, the threatenings of Almighty God; and their character was that of men sustaining, with fortitude, persecution in the discharge of their duty. There were false prophets in abundance amongst the Jews; and if you oppose these to the true prophets, and call them both party prophets, you have the liberty of doing so, but you will not thereby confound the distinction between truth and falsehood. False prophets are spoken of with detestation in many parts of Scripture, particularly by Jeremiah, who accuses them of prophesying lies in the name of the Lord, saying, "I have dreamed, I have dreamed :-Behold, I am against the prophets, saith the Lord, that use their tongues, and say, he saith; that prophesy false dreams, and cause my people to err by their lies and by their lightness." Jeremiah cautions his countrymen against giving credit to their prophets, to their diviners, to their dreamers, to their enchanters, to their sorcerers, "which speak unto you, saying, Ye shall not serve the king of Babylon." You cannot think more contemptibly of these gentry than they were thought of by the true prophets at the time they lived; but, as Jeremiah says on this subject, "What is the chaff to the wheat?" What are the false

prophets to the true ones? Every thing good is liable to abuse; but who argues against the use of a thing from the abuse of it? against physicians, because there are pretenders to physic? Was Isaiah a fortune-teller, predicting riches, when he said to king Hezekiah, "Behold, the days come, that all that is in thine house, and that which thy fathers have laid up in store until this day, shall be carried to Babylon: nothing shall be left, saith the Lord. And of thy sons that shall issue from thee, which thou shalt beget, shall they take away, and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon." Fortune-tellers generally predict good luck to their simple customers, that they may make something by their trade; but Isaiah predicts to a monarch desolation of his country, and ruin of his family. This prophecy was spoken in the year before Christ 713; and, above an hundred years afterwards, it was accomplished; when Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem, and carried out thence all the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king's house (2 Kings xxiv. 13.), and when he commanded the master of his eunuchs (Dan. i. 3.), that he should take certain of the children of Israel, and of the king's seed, and of the princes, and educate them for three years, till they were able to stand before the king.

Jehoram king of Israel, Jehoshaphat king of Judah, and the king of Edom, going with their armies to make war on the king of Moab, came into a place where there was no water either for their men or cattle. In this distress they waited upon Elisha (an high honour for one of your conjurers), by the advice of Jehoshaphat, who knew that the word of the Lord was with him. The prophet, on seeing Jehoram, an idolatrous prince, who had revolted from the worship of the true God, come to consult him, said to him— "Get thee to the prophets of thy father and the prophets of thy mother." This you think shows Elisha to have been a party prophet, full of venom and vut

garity-It shows him to have been a man of great courage, who respected the dignity of his own character, the sacredness of his office as a prophet of God, whose duty it was to reprove the wickedness of kings, as of other men. He ordered them to make the valley where they were full of ditches:-this, you say, t: every countryman could have told, that the way to get water was to dig for it:"-but this is not a true representation of the case; the ditches were not dug that water might be gotten by digging for it, but that they might hold the water when it should miraculously come, without wind or rain," from another country; and it did come from the way of Edom, and the country was filled with water."-As to Elisha's cursing the little children who had mocked him, and their destruction in consequence of his imprecation, the whole story must be taken together. The provocation he received is, by some, considered as an insult offered to him, not as a man, but as a prophet, and that the persons who offered it were not what we understand by little children, but grown-up youths; the term child being applied, in the Hebrew language, to grown-up persons. Be this as it may, the cursing was the act of the prophet; had it been a sin, it would not have been followed by a miraculous destruction of the offenders; for this was the act of God, who best knows who deserve punishment. What effect such a signal judgement had on the idolatrous inhabitants of the land, is nowhere said; but it is probable it was not without a good effect.

Ezekiel and Daniel lived during the Babylonian captivity; you allow their writings allow their writings to be genuine. In this you differ from some of the greatest adversaries of Christianity; and in my opinion cut up, by this concession, the very root of your whole performance. It is next to an impossibility for any man who admits the book of Daniel to be a genuine book, and who examines that book with intelligence and impartiality, to refuse his assent to the truth of Christianity. As to