they were, they might be content with it, and silently repose and rest themselves upon it. But their inward uneasiness prompts them to be saying something, however silly and trifling; and so at the same time that they are defending infidelity, they sufficiently discover that they are not satisfied with it, nor can ever enjoy it with any true peace. In a word, they are "like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest," through the consciousness they have of their detestable principles and practices and then what wonder is it, if they perpetually “cast up "mire and dirt?"

SCRIPTURE VINDICATED;

IN ANSWER TO A BOOK

ENTITLED,

CHRISTIANITY AS OLD AS THE CREATION.

PART II.

TO WHICH IS ADDED

A POSTSCRIPT,

In Answer to such as pretend that the Bulk of Mankind, for Four Thousand Years, were without Revelation, and had no other Guide but Reason.

EXODU S.

HAVING concluded my First Part with Genesis, I have nothing now to do but to go on directly to Exodus. There has indeed appeared a pamphlet called a Second Address, which pretends to make some exceptions to what I had written upon the former texts: but the performance is so low, that my readers would not excuse my stopping one moment about it. The author, I perceive, had exhausted himself in his great work, and it is but very little reinforcement we are to expect from him. He has shewn that he can rail, which nobody doubted of; and so he might as well have spared himself this new trouble. He shall say what he pleases, for the present, of the Vindicator. I have Apostles, Prophets, and holy Patriarchs to defend, in the first place, against his unrighteous accusations.

So, with God's assistance, I proceed to the work I had undertaken, to maintain the authority and purity of the word of God against the foolish imaginations of perverse men.

EXOD. II. 12.

HE SLEW THE EGYPTIAN, AND HID HIM IN THE SAND.

a

The Objector has a fling at Moses, for slaying the Egyptian (as he conceives) without sufficient warrant or authority. But it will be proper to let the reader know, how this gentleman introduces his censure upon that servant of God. He insinuates in the page before, that a spirit of cruelty (though he, out of his great modesty, "dares not call it so") had prevailed much under the Old Testament: and he brings in the Prophet Elias as an example of it. Then he proceeds as follows:

a Christianity as Old &c. p. 269.

b Ibid. p. 268.

"And if it be contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, even to "wish to imitate that great Prophet, so favoured of God; the same will hold as strongly in relation to all the actions that are "of a like nature, of other holy men, though quoted with ap"probation in the New Testament: as Moses is for acting the "part of a magistrate, when a private man, in destroying his "fellow-subject. And if there is a contrast between the spirit "of the Old and the spirit of the New Testament, ought not we "Christians to stick to the latter? &c."

What "we Christians" ought to do, is very well understood by honest and sensible Christians, who want none of his insidious instructions or abusive admonitions. Old Testament precedents (which he here alludes to) may be as safely followed as any in the New, if they be really and strictly precedents; that is, if the cases be similar, and the circumstances parallel. But without that, they are no precedents. As to the formal tale he tells of a contrast, or contrariety, between the spirit of the Old, and the spirit of the New Testament, it is (in the sense he takes it) mere invention and romance. That good and great Prophet Elias did no more than was proper for a man so 'favoured of “God” to do in his circumstances: yea, what he did was God's doing, the same God both of Old Testament and New, and the same spirit. Elias did nothing contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, nor with any other spirit than St. Paul acted by, when he struck Elymas the sorcerer with blindness; or St. Peter, d when he denounced present death upon Ananias and Sapphira. What the Objector builds upon is nothing but a misinterpretation of Luke ix. 55, 56. which shall be distinctly considered in its place to examine it now would lead us too far from the business in hand.

However that matter stands, the Objector shews no acuteness in bringing in the instance of Moses, to make out his pretended contrast between the Old and New Testament. He should have found out some express approbation of that act of Moses in the Old Testament, and then have confronted it by something in the New, in order to shew the contrast. But instead of this, he cites a precedent of the Old Testament, "quoted" (as he owns) "with approbation in the New :" there it seems is the contrast between Old and New, that both agree in the self-same thing,