st 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 institutes 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 lustre, 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 God'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