accustomed
themselves to practise on the Canaanites, whose country they had
savagely invaded, under a pretended gift from God, they afterwards
practised as furiously on each other. Scarcely half their kings died a
natural death, and in some instances whole families were destroyed
to secure possession to the successor, who, after a few years, and
sometimes only a few months, or less, shared the same fate. In 2 Kings
x., an account is given of two baskets full of children's heads, seventy
in number, being exposed at the entrance of the city; they were the
children of Ahab, and were murdered by the orders of Jehu, whom Elisha,
the pretended man of God, had anointed to be king over Israel, on
purpose to commit this bloody deed, and assassinate his predecessor. And
in the account of the reign of Menahem, one of the kings of Israel who
had murdered Shallum, who had reigned but one month, it is said, 2 Kings
xv. 16, that Menahem smote the city of Tiphsah, because they opened
not the city to him, and all the women therein that were with child he
ripped up.

Could we permit ourselves to suppose that the Almighty would distinguish
any nation of people by the name of his chosen people, we must suppose
that people to have been an example to all the rest of the world of
the purest piety and humanity, and not such a nation of ruffians and
cut-throats as the ancient Jews were,--a people who, corrupted by and
copying after such monsters and imposters as Moses and Aaron, Joshua,
Samuel, and David, had distinguished themselves above all others on the
face of the known earth for barbarity and wickedness. If we will not
stubbornly shut our eyes and steel our hearts it is impossible not to
see, in spite of all that long-established superstition imposes upon the
mind, that the flattering appellation of his chosen people is no other
than a LIE which the priests and leaders of the Jews had invented to
cover the baseness of their own characters; and which Christian priests
sometimes as corrupt, and often as cruel, have professed to believe.

The two books of Chronicles are a repetition of the same crimes; but the
history is broken in several places, by the author leaving out the reign
of some of their kings; and in this, as well as in that of Kings, there
is such a frequent transition from kings of Judah to kings of Israel,
and from kings of Israel to kings of Judah, that the narrative
is obscure in the reading. In the same book the history so