Ib. c. 3.--Ed.]
[Footnote 6: Friend, Vol. I. Essays X. and XI. 3rd edition--Ed.]
[Footnote 7: See Table Talk, pp. 282 and 304. 2d edit.--Ed.]
NOTES ON DAVISON"S DISCOURSES ON PROPHECY. 1825. [1]
Disc. IV. Pt. I. p. 140.
As to systems of religion alien from Christianity, if any of them have taught the doctrine of eternal life, the reward of obedience, as a dogma of belief, that doctrine is not their boast, but their burden and difficulty; inasmuch as they could never defend it. They could never justify it on independent grounds of deduction, nor produce their warrant and authority to teach it. In such precarious and unauthenticated principles it may pa.s.s for a conjecture, or pious fraud, or a splendid phantom: it cannot wear the dignity of truth.
Ah, why did not Mr. Davison adhere to the manly, the glorious, strain of thinking from p. 134 ("Since Prophecy", &c.) to p. 139. ("that mercy") of this discourse? A fact is no subject of scientific demonstration speculatively: we can only bring a.n.a.logies, and these Herac.l.i.tus, Socrates, Plato, and others did bring; but their main argument remains to this day the main argument--namely, that none but a wicked man dares doubt it. When it is not in the light of promise, it is in the law of fear, at all times a part of the conscience, and presupposed in all spiritual conviction.
Ib. p. 160.
Some indeed have sought the "star" and the "sceptre" of Balaam"s prophecy, where they cannot well be found, in the reign of David; for though a sceptre might be there, the star properly is not.
Surely this is a very weak reason. A far better is, I think, suggested by the words, "I shall see him--I shall behold him";--which in no intelligible sense could be true of Balaam relatively to David.
Ib. p. 162.
The Israelites could not endure the voice and fire of Mount Sinai.
They asked an intermediate messenger between G.o.d and them, who should temper the awfulness of his voice, and impart to them his will in a milder way.
"Deut". xviii. 15. Is the following argument worthy our consideration?
If, as the learned Eichhorn, Paulus of Jena, and others of their school, have a.s.serted, Moses waited forty days for a tempest, and then, by the a.s.sistance of the natural magic he had learned in the temple of Isis, "initiated" the law, all our experience and knowledge of the way in which large bodies of men are affected would lead us to suppose that the Hebrew people would have been keenly excited, interested, and elevated by a spectacle so grand and so flattering to their national pride. But if the voices and appearances were indeed divine and supernatural, well must we a.s.sume that there was a distinctive, though verbally inexpressible, terror and disproportion to the mind, the senses, the whole "organismus" of the human beholders and hearers, which might both account for, and even in the sight of G.o.d justify, the trembling prayer which deprecated a repet.i.tion.
Ib. p. 164.
To justify its application to Christ, the resemblance between him and Moses has often been deduced at large, and drawn into a variety of particulars, among which several points have been taken minute and precarious, or having so little of dignity or clearness of representation in them, that it would be wise to discard them from the prophetic evidence.
With our present knowledge we are both enabled and disposed thus to evolve the full contents of the word "like"; but I cannot help thinking that the contemporaries of Moses (if not otherwise orally instructed,) must have understood it in the first and historical sense, at least, of Joshua.
Ib. p. 168.
A distinguished commentator on the laws of Moses, Michaelis, vindicates their temporal sanctions on the ground of the Mosaic Code being of the nature of a civil system, to the statutes of which the rewards of a future state would be incongruous and unsuitable.
I never read either of Michaelis"s Works, but the same view came before me whenever I reflected on the Mosaic Code. Who expects in realities of any kind the sharp outline and exclusive character of scientific cla.s.sification? It is the predominance of the characterizing const.i.tuent that gives the name and cla.s.s. Do not even our own statute laws, though co-existing with a separate religious Code, contain many "formulae" of words which have no sense but for the conscience? Davison"s stress on the word "covet", in the tenth commandment, is, I think, beyond what so ancient a Code warrants;--and for the other instances, Michaelis would remind him that the Mosaic const.i.tution was a strict theocracy, and that Jehovah, the G.o.d of all, was their "king". I do not know the particular mode in which Michaelis propounds and supports this position; but the position itself, as I have presented it to my own mind, seems to me among the strongest proofs of the divine origin of the Law, and an essential in the harmony of the total scheme of Revelation.
Disc. IV. Pt. II. p. 180.
But the first law meets him on his own terms; it stood upon a present retribution; the execution of its sentence is matter of history, and the argument resulting from it is to be answered, before the question is carried to another world.
This is rendered a very powerful argument by the consideration, that though so vast a mind as that of Moses, though perhaps even a Lycurgus, might have distinctly foreseen the ruin and captivity of the Hebrew people as a necessary result of the loss of nationality, and the abandonment of the law and religion which were their only point of union, their centre of gravity,--yet no human intellect could have foreseen the perpetuity of such a people as a distinct race under all the aggravated curses of the law weighing on them; or that the obstinacy of their adherence to their dividuating inst.i.tutes in persecution, dispersion, and shame, should be in direct proportion to the wantonness of their apostasy from the same in union and prosperity.
Disc. V. Pt. II. p. 234.
Except under the dictate of a constraining inspiration, it is not easy to conceive how the master of such a work, at the time when he had brought it to perfection, and beheld it in its l.u.s.tre, the labour of so much opulent magnificence and curious art, and designed to be "exceeding magnifical, of fame, and of glory throughout all countries", should be occupied with the prospect of its utter ruin and dilapidation, and that too under the "opprobrium" of G.o.d"s vindictive judgment upon it, nor to imagine how that strain of sinister prophecy, that forebodes of malediction, should be ascribed to him, if he had no such vision revealed.
Here I think Mr. Davison should have crushed the objection of the Infidel grounded on Solomon"s subsequent idolatrous impieties. The Infidel argues, that these are not conceivable of a man distinctly conscious of a prior and supernatural inspiration, accompanied with supernatural manifestations of the divine presence.
Disc. VI. Pt. I. p. 283.
In order to evade this conclusion, nothing is left but to deny that Isaiah, or any person of his age, wrote the book ascribed to him.
This too is my conclusion, but (if I do not delude myself) from more evident, though not perhaps more certain, premisses. The age of the Cyrus prophecies is the great object of attack by Eichhorn and his compilers; and I dare not say, that in a controversy with these men Davison"s arguments would appear sufficient. But this was not the intended subject of these Discourses.
Disc. VI. Pt. II. p. 289.
But how does he express that promise? In the images of the resurrection and an immortal state. Consequently, there is implied in the delineation of the lower subject the truth of the greater.
This reminds me of a remark, I have elsewhere made respecting the expediency of separating the arguments addressed to, and valid for, a believer, from the proofs and vindications of Scripture intended to form the belief, or to convict the Infidel.
Disc. VI. Pt. IV. p. 325.
When Cyrus became master of Babylon, the prophecies of Isaiah were shewn or communicated to him, wherein were described his victory, and the use he was appointed to make of it in the restoration of the Hebrew people. ("Ezra" i. 1, 2.)
This I had been taught to regard as one of Josephus"s legends; but upon this pa.s.sage who would not infer that it had Ezra for its authority,--who yet does not expressly say that even the prophecy of the far later Jeremiah was known or made known to Cyrus, who (Ezra tells us) fulfilled it? If Ezra had meant the prediction of Isaiah by the words, "he hath charged me", &c., why should he not have referred to it together with, or even instead of, Jeremiah? Is it not more probable that a living prophet had delivered the charge to Cyrus? See "Ezra" vi.
14.--Again, Davison makes Cyrus speak like a Christian, by omitting the affix "of Heaven to the Lord G.o.d" in the original. Cyrus speaks as a Cyrus might be supposed to do,--namely, of a most powerful but yet national deity, of a G.o.d, not of G.o.d. I have seen in so many instances the injurious effect of weak or overstrained arguments in defence of religion, that I am perhaps more jealous than I need be in the choice of evidences. I can never think myself the worse Christian for any opinion I may have formed, respecting the price of this or that argument, of this or that divine, in support of the truth. For every one that I reject, I could supply two, and these [Greek: anekdota].
Ib. p. 336.
Meanwhile this long repose and obscurity of Zerubbabel"s family, and of the whole house of David, during so many generations prior to the Gospel, was one of the preparations made whereby to manifest more distinctly the proper glory of it, in the birth of the Messiah.
In whichever way I take this, whether addressed to a believer for the purpose of enlightening, or to an inquirer for the purpose of establishing, his faith in prophecy, this argument appears to me equally perplexing and obscure. It seems, "prima facie", almost tantamount to a right of inferring the fulfilment of a prophecy in B., which it does not mention, from its entire failure and falsification in A., which, and which alone, it does mention.