acceptable to the gods; but in the law of Moses nothing is mentioned with greater abhorrence, and they are expressly declared to have been a principal cause of the expulsion of the idolatrous inhabitants of Canaan. The right of the Deity indeed, to claim the life which He has given, in any way that may please him, is evident, and is intimated by the command given to Abraham, to offer up Isaac. But when the faith of the Patriarch was proved, the offering was declined, and a ram substituted in his place.

6. If the heathen had any Temples before the time of Moses, which is uncertain, and not probable, they were constructed in a very different manner from the tabernacle, or the temple of Solomon. We no where read of such divisions as that of the Hebrew temple; of such a symbol of the divine presence as the covering of the Ark between the Cherubim, in the Holy of Holies; there was no table of shew-bread, nor such a candlestick as was in the holy place. The fire and the lamps, also, evidently had their use, as appointed by Moses, but though sacred, there was nothing in them to divert the reverence of the worshipper from the invisible Jehovah. This could not be said of the perpetual fires, either of the Persians, or of the Vestals at Rome: These were debasing superstitions.

7. Both the Hebrews and the heathen allowed the Privilege of Asylum to those who fled to their temples. But with the heathens this was carried to a length equally superstitious and dangerous to the community; because, whatever was the crime with which any person was charged, the criminal could not be apprehended, and much less could he be punished, without incurring the vengeance of the Deity, who, it was supposed, protected him. (Potter's Antiquities, p. 201.) But no person, charged with any crime, was protected by flying to the altar of the Hebrews, except till the cause could be heard by regular judges; when, if he appeared to be guilty, he was ordered to be

taken from the altar itself, and put to death. Even the City of Refuge could not protect him, who was found, upon inquiry, to have killed his neighbour with design.

8. Had Moses copied any thing from the heathen, he would probably have introduced something of their Mysteries, which were rites performed in secret, and generally in the night; to which peculiar privileges were annexed, and which it was deemed the greatest crime to reveal. The most remarkable of these mysteries were the Eleusinian, which were celebrated at Athens every fourth year. Whatever these rites were, (and they were of a very suspicious nature,) it was made death to reveal them, and if any person, not regularly initiated, was present at this exhibition, he was put to death without mercy. Vile as these mysteries must have been, according to the habits of the initiated, yet it was taken for granted, that those who had performed them, lived in a greater degree of happiness than other men, both before and after death.-Potter's Antiquities, vol. i. p. 389.

Nothing like this can be found in the Institutions of Moses. There was no secret in the Hebrew ritual. Every thing is described in the written law; and though none but the Priests could enter the holy place, and none the Holy of Holies, besides the High Priest, every thing that was done by them there, is as particularly described, as what was to be done by the people without.

9. The heathen had their Oracles, as well as the Hebrews; but the difference between them was very great. With the Hebrews, the responses were in a clear, articulate voice, free from ambiguity, and given only on solemn occasions, and with a solemnity becoming a message from God. They were also perfectly gratuitous, and confined to no particular time. But the Oracles of the heathen were always obscure, and generally ambiguous, delivered in a frantic manner, only at particular seasons, and always attended with great expence.

10. The heathen had also their Purifications; but how very different from those of the Hebrews! Nothing was used by them for this purpose, but pure water, evidently emblematic of inward purity. The only obscure article, in this respect, was that prescribed for cleansing after the touch of a dead body, on which occasion the water was mixed with the ashes of a red heifer; and certainly there was no precedent for this among the Egyptians, or any other nation. But the heathen used mixtures continually, and with such superstitious regard to particulars, as evidently taught the worshippers to reverence the creatures used, instead of the Creator. The purifications also among the Hebrews tended to recommend cleanliness, and consequently to promote health; but some of the most sacred rites of the heathen were filthy and disgusting,-as the Tauribolium, in which the person so purified, was covered with blood, his hair and his garments full of it, and in this condition he continued as long as he could, without washing himself or changing his dress!

11. Religion directed the choice of proper articles of Food, both with the heathen and the Hebrews; but with the latter, the most wholesome food was allowed, and nothing was forbidden for any reason which tended to nourish superstition. But no good reason can be given for the Egyptians abstaining from mutton, the Syrians from fish, the Hindoos from the flesh of cows, or the Priests, in some countries, from the flesh of animals of any kind. The only reasons given tended to superstition. The Hebrew priests also were not obliged to practise any peculiar austerities. They might drink wine, except during the time of their actual ministrations. They might marry and have families. The heathen priests on the contrary, (Potter, p. 391,) were obliged to submit to austerities equally superstitious, cruel, and debasing.

12. Moses assigned no part of the national worship to Females, but in the heathen temples there were Priestesses

as well as Priests, and the Oracle at Delphi was always delivered by a woman. In this respect a very striking difference exists between the heathen and the Hebrew worship.

13. Where, in all the world, could Moses have obtained the idea of his Annual Fast, for the purpose of a general confession of sin? Where could he find any thing like the striking lesson exhibited on that occasion, first of the dreadful wages of sin, and secondly of the removal of it, by the fine emblems of a goat sacrificed, as suffering the penalty, and another goat dismissed, over the head of which the confession had been made? Many rites of the heathen were celebrated with the appearance of grief and deep affliction, but for no such moral purpose; on the contrary, the worshippers soon passed to every species of licentiousness. Such were the festivals of Adonis in the East and in Greece, but it was only a commemoration of his death in the first instance, and of his re-animation in the second.

14. A weekly Sabbath, continually reminding the Hebrews of the Creation of the world in six days, as opposed to the general opinion of the Heathen, that the world had existed from eternity, without any intelligent author :-a Sabbatical Year, reminding them, that the country they occupied was not their own but God's, who only gave them the use of it under such terms as he thought proper :-and a Jubilee, (to be mentioned hereafter,) were institutions peculiar to the Hebrews, and what Moses could not have borrowed from any other nation.

15. Had Moses borrowed any thing from the heathen, he could not have overlooked their various modes of Divination, Sorcery, and Witchcraft; their omens, their distinctions of days into lucky and unlucky, &c. But so far are we from finding any thing of this kind in the writings of Moses, that they are spoken of with the greatest abhorrence, and they who learn of the heathen, are ordered to be put to death.

In fact, the truth of the Mosaic revelation appears, in few points more strongly and forcibly than in this; for the edicts which were repeatedly enacted against every species of it, the peremptory statutes which interdicted wizards, soothsayers, and those pretending to familiar spirits, and forbad, as unworthy of the veracity of the God of Israel, every artifice by which the public mind had been led astray, are no unimportant vouchers of that inspiration which Moses claimed, being corroborative in every point of the legal mode of ascertaining the Divine will, by Urim and Thummim, which he records. The belief, indeed, of fatidical responses, appears to have been so deeply rooted, and to have acquired such strength from the long adoption of divination and oracles, that possibly the Israelites would have attached no credit to a system in which every mode of obtaining divine responses had been wanting; but miracles, and visible proofs of the attending Deity, had so completely authenticated the disclosure of their law, that they were supplied with superabundant evidences, that the answers returned to the High Priest, within the precincts of the sanctuary proceeded, indubitably, from God. Hence, instead of wearing amulets, talismans, and other fancied repellents of evil, like their former oppressors, they were taught to seek protection in obedience to the divine commandments, and desired to bind the law of God as a sign on the hand, and as frontlets between the eyes, and to write it on their houses and gates.

16. The general system of Civil Government laid down in the institutions of Moses, is essentially different from any thing that he could have seen, or heard of, in his time, and infinitely more favourable to personal liberty, and consequently to justice, truth, and happiness.

In the time of Moses, all the neighbouring countries, of any note, were governed by kings, whose will, as far as appears, was the only law. But the government instituted