ecessary
to a Christian, and the most useful of all to the man who may not be
one, only requires reflection upon it to impress the mind with love of
its author and resolution to fulfill his precepts. Virtue never spoke in
gentler terms; the profoundest wisdom was never uttered with greater
energy or more simplicity. It is impossible to rise from the reading of
it without feeling a moral improvement. Look at the books of the
philosophers with all their pomp, how little they are compared with
this. Shall we say that the history of the gospel is a pure fiction?
This is not the style of fiction, and the history of Socrates, which
nobody doubts, rests upon less evidence than that of Jesus Christ; and,
after all, this is but shifting the difficulty, not answering it. The
supposition that several persons had united to fabricate this book, is
more inconceivable than that one person should have supplied the subject
of it. The spirit which it breathes, the morality which it inculcates,
could never have been the invention of Jewish authors, and the gospel
possesses characters of truth so striking, so perfectly inimitable, that
the inventor would be a more astonishing object than the hero.--_J.J.
Rousseau, vol. 36, pp. 36, 39._

* * * * *

Have infidels been martyred on account of their infidelity? Men are not
so foolish as to have themselves devoured by wild beasts or perish in
slow fires rather than recant from a theory they never espoused, Col.
Ingersoll to the contrary, _notwithstanding_. Men do not prefer red-hot
iron chains to denying a Lord in whom they never believed. Infidels have
nothing to lose by recanting. Colonel Ingersoll says, "I think I would.
There is not much of the martyr about me," _so we think of the Colonel_!

THE JEWISH RELIGION AND INSTITUTIONS KNOWN AMONG HEATHEN WRITERS.

BY HENRY KETT, B.D.,

_Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Oxford. Published first in
1812._

"The transactions and literature of the ancient Jews were too remarkable
to escape the attention of the learned and inquisitive Pagans when Judea
became a province of the Roman Empire. Many particulars relative to the
eminent character of Joseph as a minister to Pharaoh, and as an inspired
prophet, to the emigration of the Jews from Egypt, their miraculous
passage through the Red Sea, their settlement in the Holy Land, the
institutions and ceremonies of the law, the splendor of Jerusalem in its