APPENDIX.

ON THE BOOK OF JOB.

An excellent writer having freely and candidly examined the late Bishop of London's collection of sermons, and in page 165 of his Examination, asked this question; Where was idolatry ever punished by the magistrate but under the Jewish economy? The Oxford professor, in the second edition of his Prelections, concerning the sacred poetry of the Hebrews, thinks fit to give the following answer:-" It was punished under the economy of the patriarchs, in the families and under the DOMINION of Abraham, Melchisedec and JoB. Idolatry spreading wider and wider, Abraham was called by God from Chaldea, for this end, to be the father of a people, which, divided from all others, might continue to worship the true God; to be set up for an exemplar of true religion, and to be ready to give testimony against the worship of vain deities. Was not Abraham, therefore, (exercising the SOVEREIGNTY in his own family) to punish idolatry? Were not Melchisedec and Job, and all the SOVEREIGNS of tribes of that time, who still retained the knowledge and worship of the true God, amidst the general defection of all the surrounding people, to take care that their own did not backslide? To curb offenders, and to inflict punishment on the obstinate, the REBELLIOUs, and on all those who spread abroad the contagion of this vice."-Ad quæstionem respondetur: Sub economia patriarcharum; in familiis, et sub DOMINATU Abrahami, Melchizedechi, Jobi, cæterorumque. Ingruente idololatria divinitus evocabatur ex Chaldæa Abrahamus: eum in finem, ut fieret pater gentis, quæ ab aliis omnibus divisa, verum Deum coleret, publicum proponeret exemplum puræ religionis, contraque cultum vanorum numinum testimonium perhiberet. Nonne erat igitur Abrahami, in sua familia PRINCIPATUM exercentis proprium officium et munus, in idololatriam animadvertere? Nonne Melchizedechi, Jobi, omniumque tunc temporis in suis tribubus PRINCIPUM, qui veri Dei cognitionem et cultum in communi fere gentium circumvicinarum defectione adhuc retinebant, cavere, ne sui deficerent; coercere delinquentes; obstinatos et REBELLES, et sceleris contagionem propagantes, supplicio afficere? - Supplementum ad primam Prælectionum Editionem: Addit. Editionis secundæ, 312.

This is so pleasant an answer, and so little needing the masterly hand of the examiner, to correct, that a few strictures, in a cursory note, will be more than sufficient to do the business.

1. The examiner, to prove, I suppose, that the book of Job was a dramatic work, written long after the time of the patriarch, asks; Where was idolatry ever punished by the MAGISTRATE, but under the Jewish economy? The professor answers, It was punished under the JOBEAN ECONOMY. And he advances nothing without proof. Does not Job himself say, that idolatry was an iniquity to be punished by the judge ? The examiner replies, that the Job who says this, is an airy phantom, raised for other purposes than to lay down the law for the patriarchal times. The professor maintains that they are all asses, with ears as long as father Harduin's, who cannot see that this is the true and genuine old Job.In good time. Sub judice lis est: and while it is so, I am afraid the learned professor BEGS THE QUESTION; when, to prove that idolatry was punished by the magistrate, out of the land of Judea, he affirms that KING JOB punished it. If he say, he does not rest his assertion on this passage of the book of Job alone, but on the sacred records, from whence he concludes that those CIVIL MAGISTRATES, Abraham and Melchisedec, punished idolatry: I shall own he acts fairly, in putting them all upon the same footing; and on what ground that stands, we shall now see.

2. The examiner says; Where was idolatry ever punished by the magistrate, but under the Jewish economy? A question equivalent to this, -" Where was idolatry punished by the civil magistrate on the established laws of the state, but in Judea?" To which the professor replies, - " It was punished by all the patriarchal monarchs, by king Job, king Abraham, and king Melchisedec."

Of a noble race was Shenkin.

But here, not one, save the last, had so much as a nominal title to civil magistracy: and this last drops, as it were, from the clouds, without lineage or parentage; so that, though of divine, yet certainly not a monarch of the true stamp, by hereditary right. The critic therefore fails in his first point, which is, finding out civil magistrates to do his hierarchical drudgery.

3. But let us admit our professor's right of investiture, to confer this high office, and then see how he proves, that these his lieges punished the crime of idolatry by civil punishment. ABRAHAM, and the patriarchs his descendants, come first under consideration. What! says he, was not Abraham, exercising the SOVEREIGNTY in his own family, to punish idolatry? Hobbes is, I believe, the only one (save our professor) who holds that "Abraham had a right to prescribe to his family what religion they should be of, to tell them what was the word of God, and to punish those who countenanced any doctrine which he had forbidden." - Leviath. chap. 40. But God speaking of Abraham, says, I know that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord, &c. Gen. xviii. 19. And Hobbes and our professor, I suppose, regard this declaration as a clear proof of the divine doctrine of RESTRAINT in matters of religion; especially when interpreted by their darling text of-force them to enter in. On the contrary, those who have been bred up in the principles of toleration, hold it to be a mere testimony (a glorious one indeed) of Abraham's pious and parental care to INSTRUCT his family in the law of God. And it is well it can go for no more, or I should fear the learned professor would have brought in Isaac as a backslider to idolatry; and his father's laying him on the sacrificial pile, as a kind of auto da fe. Now, except in these two places of Abraham's history, of such wonderful force to support intolerant principles, the patriarch appears in all others so averse to this inquisitorial spirit, that where God comes down to destroy Sodom, the father of the faithful intercedes, with the utmost importunity, for that idolatrous as well as incestuous city. The truth is this: The usurped right of punishing for opinions was first assumed and long engrossed by idolaters. And, if tradition may be believed, Abraham himself narrowly escaped the fire for preaching against its divinity. But this is not all. From his own conduct, and from the conduct of his posterity, he seems to have made one part of that fidelity in keeping the way of the Lord (for which he is so nobly distinguished by God himself) to consist in inculcating the divine doctrine of toleration. When JACOB and his family, without leave-taking, had departed from Laban, Rachel stole away her father's gods. The old man followed and overtook them; and complaining of the theft, Jacob frankly answered: With whomsoever thou findest thy gods, let him not live. Now, I would ask, was this condemnation on the offender denounced for idolatry, or for the theft? The words of the patriarch, which immediately follow, determine this-Before our brethren discern thou what is thine, with me, and take it to thee. Well, Rachel, by a female stratagem, contrived to keep her father's gods, for no better purpose, we may be sure, than that for which the good man employed so much pains to recover them. The theft, indeed, had it been discovered, would have been punished by the judge: but as for the idolatry, which, from its nature, could not be long hid, the silence of scripture shows it to have been coram non judice. And so far was Rachel from being doomed to the fire, that we do not find, even her gods underwent this punishment.

After the affair of the Shechemites, Jacob, by God's command, goes to Bethel: and there, in pious emulation of his grandfather's care to keep the way of the Lord, the text tells us, he commanded his household and all that were with him, to put away the strange gods from amongst them. They obeyed, all was well; and not a word of punishing by the judge.

Indeed, these patriarchal judges were much better employed, and more suitably to their office, in punishing civil crimes and immoralities, as appears from the adventure of Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar,

MELCHISEDEC's story is a short one; he is just brought into the scene to bless Abraham in his return from conquest. This promises but ill. Had this king and priest of Salem been brought in cursing, it had had a better appearance: for, I think, punishment for opinions, which generally ends in a fagot, always begins with a curse. But we may be misled perhaps by a wrong translation. The Hebrew word to bless, signifies likewise to curse, and, under the management of an intolerant priest, good things easily run into their contraries. What follows, is his taking tithes from Abraham. Nor will this serve our purpose, unless we interpret these tithes into fines for nonconformity; and then, by the blessing, we can easily understand absolution. We have seen much stranger things done with the Hebrew verity. If this be not allowed, I do not see how we can elicit fire and fagot from this adventure; for I think there is no inseparable connexion between tithes and persecution, but in the ideas of a Quaker. - And so much for king Melchisedec.

But the learned professor, who has been hardily brought up in the keen atmosphere of WHOLESOME SEVERITIES, and early taught to distinguish between de facto and de jure, thought it needless to inquire into facts, when he was secure of the right. And, therefore, only slightly and superciliously asks; "What! was not Abraham, by his very princely office, to punish idolatry? Were not Melchisedec and Job, and all the heads of tribes, to do the same?" Why, no: and it is well for religion that they were not. It is for its honour that such a set of persecuting patriarchs is no where to be found, but in a poetical prelection.

4. For in the last place, let it be observed, that as these patriarchs did not de facto (which appears from their history), so they could not de jure (which appears from the laws of nature and nations) punish idolatry by the judge. Because, as hath been shown, idolatry is not amenable to civil justice, but where it becomes crimen læsæ majestatis. It could not become the crime of lese-majesty under the patriarchs, unless they had been GODS as well as KINGS. Indeed, they were as much one as the other. However, it is not pretended that their government, though regal, was theocratical likewise. The patriarchs, therefore, could not punish idolatry by the judge.

From the examiner, the professor (without the least provocation given him) proceeds to the author of the Divine Legation; who, he will show, is as ignorant, absurd, and madbrained, as father Harduin himself.

The author of the Divine Legation had said, that the writer of the book of Job observed decorum, in imitating the manners of the early scene which he had proposed to adorn. Το this, the professor objects, -" I can never bring myself to allow to a SEMI-BARBAROUS POET, writing after the Babylonish captivity, such a piece of subtilty and refinement." - A mighty piece of refinement truly, for a writer, who lays his scene in an early age, to paint, the best he could, the manners of that age. -" Besides (says the professor), which is the principal point, the style savours wonderfully of antiquity, and its peculiar character is a certain primitive and noble simplicity. So that they who degrade this book to the times posterior to the Babylonish captivity, seem to judge almost as insanely of Hebrew literature as father Harduin did of the Roman, who ascribed the golden poems of Virgil, Horace, and the rest, to the iron ages of the monks."-Verum poetæ semibarbaro post captivitatem scribenti tantam subtilitatem ut concedam, impetrare a me non possum. Porro vero stylus poematis, quod vel maximum est, præcipue vetustatem sapit; est ejus peculiaris character ἀρχαϊσμος. Adeo ut qui id infra captivitatem Babylonicam deprimunt, non multo sanius in Hebraicis judicare videantur, quam in Latinis Harduinus; qui aurea Virgilii, Horatii, cæterorumque poemata, ferreis monachorum sæculis adscripsit.-Idem ib.

The learned professor is a little unlucky in his comparison. The age of Job, as fixed by him, and the age of the writer of his history, as fixed by me, run exactly parallel, not with the times of Virgil and Frederic Barbarossa, as he would insinuate, but with those of Ennius and Virgil. Job, the hero of the poem, lived in an age when civil society was but beginning to show itself, and what is more, in a country where it never yet was formed: and Ezra (whom I suppose to be the author of the poem) was an eminent citizen in the most perfect civil government in the world, which he was sent home to restore, laden with the literary treasures of the east; treasures that had been long accumulating under the warm influence of a large and powerful empire. From this second transplantation of the republic, science got footing in Judea; and true religion took deeper root in the hearts of its inhabitants. Henceforward, we hear no more of their absurd idolatries. A strict adherence to the LAW now as much distinguished them from others, as did the singularity of the LAW itself. And a studious cultivation of the LANGUAGE, in which that law was written, as naturally followed, as it did amongst the Saracens, who cultivated the Arabic on the same principle. And to understand how great this was in both, we need only consider, that each had the same aversion to a translation of their law into a foreign language. It is true, that in course of time, when the Jewish policy was abolished, and the nation was become vagabond upon earth, while the Arabs, on the contrary, had erected a great empire, a manifest difference arose between them, as to the cultivation of the two languages. -Yet for all this, the professor calls Ezra a SEMI-BARBARIAN; though we agree that he wrote by the inspiration of the Most High; amidst the last blaze indeed, yet in the full lustre of expiring prophecy.

But the learned professor has an internal argument from taste,* full as good as the other from chronology. "The book of Job savours of antiquity, and those who cannot relish it, have as depraved a taste as father Harduin, who could not distinguish partridge from horse-flesh."

The truth is, the Greek and Latin languages having, for many ages, been the mothertongues of two of the greatest people upon earth (who had shared between them the empires of eloquence and of arms) became daily more and more copious by the cultivation of arts; and less and less pure by the extension of commerce. In these two languages there yet remains a vast number of writings on all sorts of subjects. So that modern critics (in the foremost rank of whom will always stand the incomparable BENTLEY) had by long application to them, through their various and progressive refinements and depravations from age to age, acquired a certain sagacity, in passing a tolerable judgment concerning the time of the writer, by his style and manner. Now pedantry, which is the ape of criticism, would

* See what hath been said on this head in the preceding volume, book vi. sec. 2.

mimic the same talent of discernment, in the narrowest and most barren of all languages; little subject to change, both from the common genius of the east, and from the peculiar situation of a sequestered people. Of this language, long since become a dead one, the only remains are in one small volume; the contents of which, had not providence been mercifully pleased to secure, while the tongue was yet living, by a translation into Greek, the HEBREW VERITY, transmitted to us in the manner it was found in the most ancient MSS. where no vowel-points are used, nor space left to distinguish one word from another, and where a great number of terms occur only once, would at this day be a mere arbitrary CIPHER, which every rabbinical or cabalistic juggler might make the key of his unrevealed mysteries." Idem accidit etiam Mahometanis (says Abraham Ekell) ante inventa ab Ali Abnaditalebo puncta vocalia: tanta enim legentium erat dissentio, ut nisi Othomanni coercita fuisset auctoritate, et determinata lectio punctis, quæ Ali excogitaverat, JAM DE ALCORANO ACTUM ESSET." And if this had been the case of the Arabic of the Alcoran, a copious and living language, what had become of the Hebrew of the Bible? a very narroW and a dead one. Of which an ancient Jewish grammarian gives this character: "Lingua ista [Arabica] elegans est, et longe lateque scriptis dilatata, et qui eam loquitur nulla dietione deficit: lingua vero sancta pauca est præ illa, cum illius nihil extet nisi quod in libris scripturæ reperitur, nec suppeditet omnes dictiones loquendi necessarias." Yet this is the language whose peculiarities of style and composition, correspondent to every age and time, the professor seems to think, may be as easily distinguished as those of the Greek or Latin classics. So much for the author of the Divine Legation: and indeed too much, had not Mr LOCKE's defence been involved in his: that excellent person having declared (speaking of the words of Job, that idolatry was an iniquity to be punished by the judge) "THIS PLACE ALONE, WERE THERE NO OTHER, is sufficient to confirm their opinion who conclude that book to be writ by a JEW."

From the Divine Legation, the learned professor turns again to the examiner, who seems to sit heavy on his stomach. This excellent writer desired to know of the learned, Where they could find a civil or religious constitution out of Judea, which declared that the children should suffer for the crime of their parents. To which the professor replies in these very words-In præsens Horatiano illo versiculo contentus abito examinatorum omnium CANDIDISSIMUS For the present, let this MOST CANDID of all examiners go about his business, and be thankful for this scrap of Horace,

Delicta majorum immeritus lues,
Romane.

This is true poetical payment: he is called upon for his reckoning, and he discharges it with an old song. But the examiner is not a man to take rhyme for reason. He asked for an old system of laws; and the contemptuous professor gives him an old ballad: but a little more civility at parting had not been amiss; for he, who did not spare the bishop, would certainly demolish the professor, should he take it into his head to examine the prælections as he hath done the sermons.

NOTES ON BOOK VI.

P. 377, A. To give an example only in Bishop BULL, whose words in a Latin tract, for a future state's not being in the Mosaic dispensation, I have quoted in the fourth section of this sixth book; yet in an English posthumous sermon, he seems to speak in a very different manner. I should not have illustrated this censure by the example of so respectable a person, but for the indiscretion of my answerers, who, to support their own ill logic, have exposed his morals.

P. 382, B. Job's life, by means of the devil and his false friends, was an exercise of his patience; and his history, by means of criticism and his commentators, has since been an exercise of ours. I am far from thinking myself uuconcerned in this mischief; for by a foolish attempt to support his name and character, I have been the occasion of bringing down whole bands of hostile critics upon him, who, like the Sabeans and Chaldeans of old, soon reduced him back to his dunghill. Some came armed in Latin, some in English, and some in the language of Billingsgate. Most of them were professedly written against me; but all, in reality, bear hardest on the good old patriarch.

If

However, though I am, as I said, to be reckoned, along with these, amongst Job's persecutors; yet I have this to say for myself, that the vexation I gave him was soon over. I scribbled ten pages on his back, my adversaries and his have made long furrows and scribbled ten thousand. Now, though amongst all these Job found no favour, yet by ill-hap my system did: but to whom I am most obliged, whether to those who attacked it, or to those who espoused it, is not easy to say; for, by a singular event, the assailants have left me in possession of all its supports, and the defenders have taken them all away: * the better, I presume, to fit it to their own use. Learned naturalists tell us of a certain animal in the watery waste, which, for I know not what conceit, they call Bernard the hermit; and which, in courtesy, they rank with the testaceous tribe, though nature (so bountiful to the rest of its kind) hath given this no habitation of its own, but sent it naked and unhoused into the world. In recompence, she has enabled it to figure amongst the best of its tribe: for, by a noble endowment of instinct, it is taught to make its way into the best accommodated, and best ornamented shells of its brethren; which it either finds empty, or soon makes so, to fit them up for its own ease and convenience.

P. 382, C. But if the reader would see the absurdity of supposing the book of Job to be written thus early, and at the same time, to teach the resurrection and a future state, exposed at large, he may read the third chapter of 'The free and candid Examination of the BISHOP of London's Principles.'

P. 383, D. Calmet makes the following observation, in his comment on the 1st verse of chap. xxxviii. L'ecrivain de cet ouvrage a observé de ne point employer ce nom de Jehovah dans les discours directs, qu'il fait tenir à Job et à ses amis: mais dans les recits, qui sont au commencement, et à la fin du livre, il use de ce terme, comme font d'ordinaire les écrivains Hebreux. Ce qui demontre que l'ouvrage a été écrit par un Juif, et depuis Moyse; puisque ce nom incommunicable ne fut connu que depuis l'apparition du buisson ardent.

P. 385, E. The Cornish critic thinks otherwise. "These false friends," says he, "are described as having so much fellow-feeling of Job's sufferings, that they sit with him seven days and nights upon the ground without being able to speak to him. If this be the dramatic way of representing false friends, how shall we know the false from the true?"-P. 19. Sempronius, in the play of Cato, is all along warmer than even Cato himself in the cause of liberty and Rome. If this be the dramatic way of representiny a false patriot (may our critic say) how shall we know the false from the true? I answer, by observing him with his mask off. And do not Job's false friends unmask themselves, when they so cruelly load their suffering acquaintance with the most injurious reflections? Indeed the critic deserves our pity, who cannot see that the formal circumstance of sitting silent seven days

See Mr. G.'s discourses on the book of Job.