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Page 84
4. Because, admitting (as indeed it never was, or can be denied) that
many passages of scripture, and of prophetical scripture especially,
must be figuratively taken; yet, we must always put a wide difference
between a sense not just as the words in their first signification
import, and a sense directly the contrary of what they import. And yet
we complain that this latter is the sense which Christians labour to
obtrude upon the gainsayers. We say, that a kingdom of this world, and
not of this world; contempt and adoration; poverty and magnificence;
persecution and peace; sufferings and triumph; a cross and a throne;
the scandalous death of a private man upon a gibbet, and the everlasting
dominion of a universal monarch, must be reconciled, and mean the self
same thing, before the prophecies appealed to, can do their cause any
service. Granting, then, the goodness of God (according to them,) to
have been better than his word, by giving spiritual blessings, instead
of temporal; yet, what will become of the truth of God, if He act
contrary to his word, even when it would be for our advantage, if He
misleads people by expressions, which, if they mean any thing at all,
must mean what the Jews understand by them?
In short, it seems to me, that if Providence has, in truth, any concern
with the predictions of the Old Testament, it could not have taken more
effectual care to justify the unbelief and obstinacy of the Jews, than
by ordering matters so, that the life and death of Jesus should be so
exactly, and so entirely, the very reverse of all those ideas under
which their prophets had constantly described, and the Hebrew nation as
constantly expected of their Messiah, and his coming; and to suppose
that the Supreme Being meant to describe and point out such a person as
Jesus by such descriptions of the Messiah as are contained in the Old
Testament, is certainly substantially to accuse him of the moat
unjustifiable prevarication, and mockery of his creatures.
In order that the subject we are examining, and the arguments we make
use of, may be clearly understood by the reader, he is requested to bear
in mind, that the author reasons all along upon the supposed Divine
authority of the Old Testament; which is admitted by both Jews and
Christians. Whether the supernatural claims of the Old Testament be
just, or not, is of no consequence in the world to the controversy we
are considering. For the dispute of the Jew with the Christian is one
thing, and his dispute with the sceptic is another, totally different.
For whether such a personage as the Messiah is described to be, has
appeared eighteen hundred years ago, is quite a different thing from the
question, whether such a personage will appear at all. The Christian
says, that he has appeared in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This the
Jew denies, but looks forward to the future fulfilment of the promises
of his Bible, while the Sceptic denies that the Messiah has come, or
ever will.
But the subject at present under consideration is the dispute of the Jew
with the Christian, who acknowledges the Old Testament to be a
Revelation, upon which a new Revelation, that of the New Testament, is
founded and erected. To him the Jew argues, that if the Old Testament be
a Divine Revelation, then the New Testament cannot be a Revelation,
because it contradicts, and is repugnant to, the Old Testament, the more
ancient, and acknowledged Revelation. Now God cannot be the author of
two Revelations, one of which is repugnant to the other. One of them is
certainly false. And if the Christian, conscious of the difficulty of
reconciling the New, with the Old, Testament, attempts to support the
New, at the expense of the Old, Testament, upon which the former is, and
was, built by the founders of Christianity; then the Jew would tell
him, that he acts as absurdly as would the man who should expect to make
his house the firmer, by undermining, and weakening its foundation.
So that whether the Christian affirms, or denies, he is ruined either
way. For he is reduced to this fatal dilemma. If the Old Testament
contains a Revelation from God, then the New Testament is not from God,
for God cannot contradict himself: and it can be proved abundantly, that
the New Testament is contradictory, and repugnant to the Old and to
itself too. If, on the other hand, the Old Testament contains no
Revelation from God, then the New Testament must go down at any rate
because it asserts that the Old Testament does contain a Revelation from
God, and builds upon it, as a foundation.--E.
* There was nothing which gave the author, in writing this Book, so much
uneasiness, at the apprehension of being supposed to entertain
disrespectful sentiments of the Founder of the Christian Religion. I
would most earnestly entreat the reader to believe my solemn assurances,
that by nothing that I have said, or shall be under the necessity of
saying, do I think, or mean to intimate the slightest disparagement to
the moral character of one, whose purity of morals, and good intentions,
deserve any thing else but reproach. That he was an enthusiast, I do not
doubt, that he was a wilful impostor I never will believe. And I protest
before God, that from the apprehensions above-mentioned alone, I would
have confined the contents of this volume to myself, did I not feel
compelled to justify myself for having quitted a profession: and did I
not, above all, think it my duty, to make a well meant attempt, which I
hope will be seconded, to vindicate the unbelief of an unfortunate
nation, who, on that account, have for almost eighteen hundred years,
been made the victim of rancorous prejudice, the most infernal
cruelties, and the most atrocious wickedness. If the Christian religion
be, in truth, not well founded, surely it is the duty of every honest
and every humane, man, to endeavour to dispel an illusion, which
certainly has been, notwithstanding any thing that can be said to the
contrary, the bona fide, and real cause of unspeakable misery, and of
repeated, and remorseless plunderings, and massacres, to an unhappy
people; the journal of whose sufferings, on account of it, forms the
blackest page in the history of the human race, and the most detestable
one in the history of human superstition.--E.
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