our forefathers and ourselves, who delivered us from slavery, who selected our nation to perpetuate his worship, who appointed us laws, who superintends our observance of them this is the fundamental principle and the uniform language of the Hebrew code; a language acknowledged, as it every where appears, by the hearts of the people, even while their rebellious actions ceased to correspond with it. The fact is not merely, that a belief of the unity and power of the Creator existed among the Hebrews; but that on this belief their whole civil government was raised. The fact is not merely, that God was worshipped by them as the common Father of all mankind; but he was esteemed their own immediate ruler and protector; the king of their nation, the author of the laws which bound them as individuals, and of the civil polity which united them as a community. The majority of the enactments of a voluminous ritual have the purity of his worship for their object. To him they looked for punishment of their violation of his commands, and for the rewards of their obedience. To him they referred their national as well as their per

sonal prosperity.

Each individual took

home to himself the promise which concludes the code: "If thou shalt hearken "unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to "observe and do all his commandments, "blessed shalt thou be in the city, and bless"ed shalt thou be in the field*." Under this impression they consented to observances so rigorous, and so universally obligatory, as could only have been proposed by a lawgiver conscious of his divine commission, to a people equally conscious of his supreme authority.

Undoubtedly it was common among the ancients to dedicate their cities to some particular deity, who was specially invoked in cases of public danger, and whose supposed office seems to have resembled that of St. Nicolas in the Greek church, and the various tutelar saints of the Romish calendar. Thus Athens was sacred to Minerva; Delos to Apollo; Ephesus to Diana; Argos to Juno. But we find nothing in the laws, nothing in the customs, nothing in the piety of these states, which

* Deut. xxviii. 3.

can carry us one step farther in the comparison. Austerities are appointed by Lycurgus; but they are directed to the strength of the state. Austerities are enacted by Moses; but their object is the worship of the Creator. Where shall we look for an institution similar to that solemn ceremony among the Jews, by which the first-born were sanctified to God? not only to preserve the memory of their deliverance from Egyptian tyranny, but to implant most strongly a sense of the duties of religion in the head of every family. "Thou shalt set apart unto the Lord all "that openeth the matrix; the males shall "be the Lord's. And it shall be, when thy son asketh thee in time to come,

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saying, What is this? that thou shalt

say unto him, By strength of hand the “Lord brought us out from Egypt, from the "house of bondage; and it shall be for a "token upon thy head, and for frontlets "between thine eyes*." No room is left among these strict injunctions, for a distinction between natural and civil theology, as if the philosopher and the legislator had

* Exodus, xiii. 12.

separate gods. Faith is treated as a moral duty, and as uniformly required from all, as temperance or justice. And to what cause can we ascribe this superiority, if we reject the one assigned by Josephus*; who observes, that the heathen lawgivers, not being acquainted, like Moses, with the true nature of God, and not defining any accurate knowledge of him, even as far as they had it in their power to attain it, for this reason established their communities after a different form.

The only exception to these remarks which can be urged from antiquity, or thought to bear the least comparison with the language of the Mosaic code, occurs in the preamble to the laws of Zaleucus; who shows an evident anxiety to introduce a philosophical belief in the existence of the gods, excited indeed by a view of the public welfare, but still far more explicit than we find elsewhere. In the preface which opens his system, he laid downt, "that

* Contra Apion. p. 1386, ed. Huds.

See Diod. Sic. 1. 12, p. 84; Rhod. 300, Steph.; and Stobæus, Serm. 42 and 37. The procem of Charondas who gave laws to the people of Catana, &c. is in the same

first of all it is necessary for the inhabitants of a state to be persuaded and believe the existence of divine beings: that this belief must arise from a contemplation of the heavens, and the universe, and their order and arrangement, which cannot be the work of chance, or man: therefore that the gods should be worshipped and honoured, as the authors of all our real blessings. Let each individual therefore cleanse his mind from every kind of pollution; and labour to be virtuous according to his power, in thought and deed, as he wishes to render himself acceptable to the gods: but should the evil dæmon haunt him, exciting him to wickedness; let him resort to the temples and altars, and there entreat the gods to deliver him from sin, the worst and most relentless of tyrants."

The spirit of this passage has been deservedly admired*. But there is an ob

spirit, but more concise: Τὼς βελομένως καὶ πράττοντας τις ἀπὸ θεῶν ἄρχεσθαι χρήτὸ γὰς άριστον, τὸν θεὸν ἔιμεν ἄιλιον πάντων τελῶν. ἔτι δὲ φάυλων πραξεων ἀπέχεσθαι, καὶ μάλιστα διὰ τὸν πρὸς τὸν θεόν συμβελίαν· ἔδενος γὰρ ἀδίκε θεὸν κοινωνεῖν.

* See Hume, Nat. Hist. of Relig.; Warb. Div. Leg. ii. s. 3. I have no concern with the controversy as to the