FRAGMENTS,

OR

MINUTES OF ESSAYS.

CONTINUED.

XXI.

HAVE quoted from father Simon, in one of my Letters to my Lord Cornbury, a divine of the faculty of Paris, who held, that the authenticity of these books, and divine inspiration of their authors, should be understood to extend no further than to matters purely of doctrine, or to such as have a necessary connection with these. Upon the same and even a stronger principle of reason, we may assert, that as the sacred writers have no claim to inspiration, when they write on other subjects; so neither have they when they write any thing on these, which is evidently inconsistent with right reason, in matters that are proper objects of reason, and with the first principles of natural law, which are, at the same time, the first principles of christianity. What the French

VOL. VIII.

* Let. III.

B

divine

Of this I have

divine advanced, and what I have advanced here, will be treated as an impious paradox by some of those trifling solemn dogmatists in criticism and theology, who have advanced so many absurd and impious, really impious, paradoxes of their own. But let us see, in the present case, on whose side the paradox and the impiety lie. I say, that the law of nature is the law of God. the same demonstrative knowledge, that I have of the existence of God, the All-perfect Being. I say, that the All-perfect Being cannot contradict himself; that he would contradict himself if the laws contained in the thirteenth chapter of Deuteronomy, to mention no others here, were his laws, since they contradict those of nature, and therefore, that they are not his laws. Of all this I have as certain, as intuitive knowledge, as I have, that two and two are equal to four, or that the whole is bigger than a part. From these indisputable premises I conclude, that all those expressions in the text, which ascribe these laws to God, are uninspired, perhaps interpolated, but undoubtedly false. What now does the dogmatist do? He begs the question, and he pretends to demonstrate. His premises are precarious, and his conclusion is a paradox. He imputes, directly, to the Author of nature, what he is forced to own unjust and cruel, according to the laws of nature; and he pretends to justify the All-perfect Being, whom he has thus accused, by inconclusive and sophistical arguments.

I have touched this point above; but since I recollect

recollect that Mr. Locke has insisted on a solution of the difficulty, which, I think, and am not afraid to call inconclusive and sophistical, it is worth my while to bestow a few more words upon it. There is a respect due even to the mistakes of that great man, the respect I mean of giving a reason for not submitting to his authority, which I would not pay to every dull commentator, nor frothy declaimer, that should argue like him, or from him. We know, from some of his writings, how easily he received every hypothesis that favoured, or that seemed to favour, the authenticity of the Jewish Scriptures, notwithstanding all he said in his chapter of probability; and Mr. Coste, the translator of his famous Essay, who knew him well, accounted for this, and some other contradictions, by a strange timidity of temper, which made him often waver in his own abstract philosophical notions, when he came to apply them to any of his religious prejudices. Ie believed, on very insufficient authority, that the one true God was known to the Jews alone, and that the rest of mankind were polytheists and idolaters from the beginning. Thus he might receive too some other theological assumptions: this, for instance, as presumptuous and impertinent as it is, to assign the sufficient reason, that Infinite Wisdom had for doing in one manner what Infinite Power might have done in several, "that "it was necessary God should separate a chosen

46

people from the rest of mankind, in order to preserve among mankind the knowledge of

B 2

"himself

"himself in his unity :" or this, that "the choice "fell on the Israelites not for their own merit," since no nation upon Earth could have less toward God or man, but, "for the merit of their "forefathers," of Abraham, famous in the east, the patriarch of the Arabians as well as of the Jews, of Isaac, his son, and of Jacob his grandson; of whom it is said, in the Scriptures, that they were preferred in the womb to Ismael and to Esau, without assigning any apparent reason for this preference, since they could have no personal merit so early; and the reason of which must have been, therefore, this, that the Israelites were to descend from them; which looks as if the fathers were chosen for the sake of the sons, rather than the sons for the sake of the fathers. Mr. Locke, who could embrace such hypotheses as these, might easily assume, as he did assume, that "in "order to keep up this separation, and to secure "the effects of it, the Supreme Being submitted to "be not only the tutelary deity of this people, as he had been of their fathers, and to make

a covenant with them, but to be their local deity, and even literally as much their king as "their God."

That he was such a king, Mr. Locke asserted, and on that assertion he distinguished between the Mosaical and all other laws, in his letter concerning toleration. By the former, idolaters were to be rooted out, he says; but the former is not obligatory on Christians, and therefore urged by intolerants very absurdly in favour of persecution.

The

The Jewish commonwealth, different from all others, was an absolute theocracy; no difference could be made between that commonwealth and the church; religious laws were the civil laws of that people, and part of their political government, in which God himself was the legislator. The citizens, therefore, of that commonwealth, who apostatised, were proceeded against as traitors and rebels, guilty of no less than high treason. Let it be so. The objections of injustice and cruelty to these laws will remain in their full force, and be of more weight to prove them human, than all these hypotheses to prove them divine. God was king, and idolatry was no less than high treason; no objection, therefore, can lie against the punishment of it. None certainly, but every objection to the manner and degree, in which this punishment was to be inflicted, stands good; for if we can believe God to have been a king, we can never believe him to have been such a king as he is described, nor to have given such laws as Moses gave in his name. It is not enough to deduce, in our notions, the Supreme Being to the state of an earthly monarch, unless we degrade the All-perfect Being, in them, to the character of an unjust and cruel tyrant, who authorised, and even commanded his ministers expressly to punish without measure, without discernment, and without forms of justice? Can it be obligatory on a Christian to believe this, which Mr. Locke believed? Surely not; no more than to believe, that it is obligatory on him at this day,