your prophecies, and consequently of the truth of your religion, and of confirming them in the faith and pure worship of the God of your fathers to the end of time. The reflection on the whole of your remarkable history, of your prosperity and adversity, in connexion with your adherence to the worship of the true God, and your obedience to his prophets, or your neglect of it and your disobedience, when all the prophecies shall have had their completion, cannot fail to strike and convince all. But the long continuance of your sufferings, unconnected with any future consequences, has no tendency to produce that effect. Nay, the longer you continue in your present state, the more is the faith of mankind staggered, and the greater trial it is to your own faith. Many Christians, who have the same respect for the books of the Old Testament with yourselves, judging from present appearances, consider you as abandoned of God, and do not believe that you will ever be restored to your country again.

Consider, then, I intreat you, your real situation, and how your calamities presently followed the rejection of Christ and the apostles, by your ancestors, (and your nation has persisted in rejecting them to this day,) and think whether your receiving them as true prophets of God (who were sent to your nation in the first place) may not be followed by consequences the reverse of those which followed the rejection of them. According to Moses, a restoration to your country will always be the consequence of your repentance of those sins for which you would be expelled from it. Deut. xxx. 1-3: " And it shall come to pass when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind, among all the nations whither the Lord thy God hath driven thee, and shalt return unto the Lord thy God, and shalt obey his voice, according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy children, with all thine heart and with all thy soul; that then the Lord thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations whither the Lord thy God hath scattered thee." Why is not this glorious prophecy fulfilled, but because you have not yet complied with the conditions of it? According to Moses, your return to your country is always in your own power. Do your part, and your merciful God and Father will not delay to do his.

*See Vol. XV. pp. 288-295.

LETTER VI.

Of Daniel's Prophecy of Seventy Weeks.

MR. Levi says, that "the fairest method to conviction with respect to the Messiahship of Jesus, is to take a review of all the prophecies concerning the Messiah, from Moses to Malachi, and compare them with the acts of Jesus recorded in the New Testament, to see whether or no they have been fulfilled in his person." "* This, he says, he himself has done. This I have also done, and you may see the result of my inquiries in the Theological Repository, under the signature of PAMPHILUS. † I did not, in my last Letters, trouble you with all the particulars of this long examination, contenting myself with mentioning one of those prophecies; but it is the only one in which the Messiah is mentioned by that name in your sacred books, and that which must have led your ancestors to distinguish your future deliverer by that specific appellation. I have shewn that, according to this celebrated prophecy, this Messiah must have made his appearance about the time of Jesus, but certainly long before the present age.

Mr. Levi gives a very different interpretation of this prophecy, in reality the same with that which I quoted from your Rabbi Isaac, but without answering my objections to it. He will not allow that the Messiah, which is twice mentioned in this prophecy, refers at all to the person whom you now distinguish by that title; but says that, in the former part of the prophecy, it is to be understood of Cyrus, and in the latter of Agrippa the younger; though, surely, nothing can be more unnatural than to explain it in this manner. Can the same term, in two contiguous sentences of the same prophecy, signify two different persons, one of them a heathen prince, and the other a king of Judea, who lived seven hundered years after him?

Mr. Levi supposes, with Rabbi Isaac and Samuel Jarchi, though he does not distinctly express it, that "the going forth of the commandment" means the declaration of the Divine will to Jeremiah. §

⚫ Letter, p. 91. (P.) Supra, p. 242.

+ See Vol. XII. pp. 411-442.

"Ab eo tempore quo Jeremias illam rem proloquutus fuerat, sive à captivitate Zedechiæ usque ad unctum ducem, qui Cyrus est, futuras hebdomadas septem, quæ 49 annos complectuntur." Munimen Fidei, p. 338. "Tempus dabitur à die devastationis usque dum veniat Cyrus." Jarchi Comment. II. p. 779. (P.)

But nothing is advanced by these writers to make it probable that "the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem" is coincident with the time of the demolition of it by Nebuchadnezzar. The prophecy of Jeremiah was first delivered in the fourth year of Jehoiakim and the first of Nebuchadnezzar, (Jer. xxv. 12,) and repeated, (xxviii. 1, xxix. 10,) in a letter to the captives, in the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah.

That Agrippa could not be the latter Messiah, (if there must be two of them in this prophecy,) I have shewn, by observing that this prince was not killed at the siege of Jerusalem, but probably ended his days peaceably at Rome, long after. Josephus, in the history of his own life, has given us two letters of this Agrippa, written after he had perused his history, and consequently several years after the destruction of Jerusalem. He is also mentioned by Tacitus, as the ally of the Romans in the Jewish war. And though this writer gives a pretty circumstantial account of the war, t he says nothing of the defection, or death, of that prince in the course of it. By Mr. Levi's own confession, there was a Messiah cut off about that time, and who could this be but Jesus?

Agrippa was too inconsiderable a prince to be the subject of such a prophecy; whereas the figure that Jesus makes in your history is so conspicuous, that it might have been expected that he would have been noticed in your prophecies on some account or other. No Jew, no person of any nation, ever occasioned such a revolution in the religious state of the world (and religion is the great object of your whole constitution) as Jesus Christ has effected. By this single Jew, and his followers, have the idolatrous systems of every nation within the bounds of the whole Roman empire, and far beyond it, been already overturned; and, according to present appearances, independent of the prophecies of the New Testament, by Christianity, and not by the institutions

• Josephus says, he received from Agrippa “ 62 Letters," attesting his correct account of the "Jewish War." Two of these Letters are thus quoted:

66

King Agrippa to Josephus, his dear friend, sendeth greeting. I have read over thy book, with great pleasure; and it appears to me, that thou hast done it much more accurately, and with greater care, than have the other writers. Send me the rest of these books. Farewell, my dear friend."

"King Agrippa to Josephus. -It seems by what thou hast written, that thou standest in need of no instruction, in order to our information from the beginning. However, when thou comest to me, I will inform thee of a great many things which thou dost not know." Life, Sect. Ixv. Whiston, p. 630.

+ Hist. L, v. (P.)

of Moses as such, will idolatry (to which those institutions were particularly opposed) be extirpated out of the world.

But where will you find so distinguished a person in history noticed at all in your prophecies, if he be not the Messiah of Daniel, that Messiah who was "to be cut off," and "not for himself," and the same person who in Daniel vii. 13, 14, is styled "the son of man," who will come in “the clouds of heaven," and to whom will be "given dominion, and glory, and a kingdom," whose "dominion shall not pass away,' and whose "kingdom shall not be destroyed"?

"The seventy weeks," Mr. Levi says, “are, without doubt, four hundred and ninety years, the time from the destruction of the first temple to the destruction of the second."* But if there be any truth in history, the interval between those two events was about six hundred and fifty years; and it is by history that prophecy must be interpreted.

I observed that it must have been from this prophecy that your ancestors first learned to distinguish your great deliverer by the name of Messiah. But Mr. Levi says, "It is not the name of the Messiah, but the character of the person foretold by the prophets, that is to be regarded;"† and he observes that the Chaldee Paraphrasts have used that term, in their interpretation of other prophecies which they apply to your future deliverer. But what could have led them to apply this term to your great deliverer, but their supposing that he was the same person who had been so denominated in this prophecy of Daniel? The term never occurs in any preceding prophecy, except in Isaiah, in which it is applied to Cyrus. And this heathen prince could never have been supposed to be the person whom you now call the Messiah. Undoubtedly, therefore, they who first used this term, as denoting your future deliverer, must have thought that he was the same person who was intended in the prophecy of Daniel; and it cannot have been any thing but your disappointment, in his not coming about the time signified by Daniel, that has led your writers to seek out some other interpretation.

It is manifest that your ancestors in general did expect the appearance of the Messiah about the time of Jesus Christ; and what could have occasioned their expectation of him so much, at that particular time, but a supposition that he was the person intended by Daniel in this prophecy, the accomplishment of which you even now acknowledge falls about that time?

LETTER VII.

The Conclusion.

I CANNOT Conclude this second set of Letters to you, without once more entreating you to give due attention to the proper, that is, the historical, evidence of Christianity. For it is on this, which Mr. Levi has not so much as touched upon, that the controversy between us must hinge. Examine the credibility of the Gospel history, as you would that of any other history that should fall into your hands. Consider at what time the books which contain it were published, and how they were received. If their authenticity be equal to that of other credible histories, so that you can depend upon the truth of the leading facts, (which is all that we can say of any history,) consider what those leading facts are, who appear to have been the witnesses of them, whether they were persons likely to be deceived themselves, or to attempt to deceive others; and whether, if that might have been their intention, it was in their power to do it.

Let me particularly recommend to your careful perusal the Letters I lately addressed to philosophical unbelievers in general, and which I requested that you would consider as addressed to yourselves in particular. If from them it should appear that Jesus wrought real miracles, or did such things as a man could not have done if God had not been with him, you can no more disregard his authority than that of Moses. If, after proving his divine mission by a series of unquestionable miracles, Jesus persisted in declaring himself to be the Messiah of your Scriptures, it will be impossible not to allow his claim. And the difficulty which, from a long-confirmed habit of thinking otherwise, you will feel in reconciling to his character and conduct the descriptions of the Messiah in the prophecies, will at length be overcome by more attentive consideration.

Do not reject without examination the hypothesis I men. tioned in my former Letters, and which I have maintained at large in the Theological Repository, of the distinction between the Messiah who was to suffer, and who alone bears that name, and the prince of the house of David, under whom you are to enjoy your future glory. †

However, if this supposition should not appear to be well