ink of this chain of proofs he can find a
flaw? And I would ask him, too, as a moral and honest man,
whether any Jew, in his right mind, could, without setting at
nought what he conceived to be the word of God, receive him as
the Messiah? The honest and upright answer, I believe, will be,
that he could net. And, accordingly, it is very well known, that the
Jewish nation have never done so. And this their obstinacy, as it is
called, will not by this time, I think, appear unreasonable to any
sensible man; and he will now be able to appreciate the justice of
that idle cant about "the carnal Jews," and their "worldly-minded"
expectation of a temporal prince, as their Messiah. Certainly, the
Jews had very good reason, from their prophecies, to expect no
Messiah but a Messiah who should sit on the throne of David, and
confer liberty and happiness upon them, and spread peace and
happiness throughout the earth, and communicate the knowledge
of God, and virtue, and the love of their fellow-men to every
people. Whether this (carnal or not,) would have been better than a
spiritual kingdom, and a throne in heaven; together with the ample
list of councils, dogmas, excommunications, proscriptions,
theological quarrels, and frauds, and an endless detail of blood and
murder, I leave to the judgment of those capable of deciding for
themselves.

Neither, in fact, is it true, that the Jews were so "carnally minded"
as to refuse Jesus as their Messiah, because he was poor and in a
low estate. On the contrary, did they not ask him not to evade, but
to speak plainly? "How long (said they) dost thou mean to keep us
in suspense? If thou be the Messiah, tell us plainly." These very
men were willing to hazard, in his favour, their fortunes, their
families, and their lives, in his cause, against the whole power of
the Roman empire. Nay, so urgent were they, that they were going
to make him their king by force, and he concealed himself from the
honour. The evasions he used to avoid their pressing questions
upon the subject, are known to all who have read the evangelists;
and so timed was he in acknowledging himself as the Messiah, that
he did not do so, till Simon Peter told him that he was. And can
any candid man, after all this, wonder at, or condemn, "the
blindness," as it is called, of the Jews? or can he refrain from
smiling at the frothy declamations in which divines load that nation
with so much unmerited reproach? These Jews had just rea