And, further, if Moses was not inspired directly from God to write his code, then it follows that he—­a man pre-eminent for wisdom, piety, and knowledge—­was an impostor, or at least, like Mohammed and George Fox, a self-deceived and visionary man, since he himself affirms his divine legation, and traces to the direct agency of Jehovah not merely his code, but even the various deliverances of the Israelites.  And not only was Moses mistaken, but the Jewish nation, and Christ and the apostles, and the greatest lights of the Church from Augustine to Bossuet.

Hence it follows necessarily that all the miracles by which the divine legation of Moses is supported and credited, have no firm foundation, and a belief in them is superstitious,—­as indeed it is in all other miracles recorded in the Scriptures, since they rest on testimony no more firmly believed than that believed by Christ and the apostles respecting Moses.  Sweep away his authority as an inspiration, and you undermine the whole authority of the Bible; you bring it down to the level of all other books; you make it valuable only as a thesaurus of interesting stories and impressive moral truths, which we accept as we do all other kinds of knowledge, leaving us free to reject what we cannot understand or appreciate, or even what we dislike.

Then what follows?  Is it not the rejection of many of the most precious revelations of the Bible, to which we wish to cling, and without a belief in which there would be the old despair of Paganism, the dreary unsettlement of all religious opinions, even a disbelief in an intelligent First Cause of the universe, certainly of a personal God,—­and thus a gradual drifting away to the dismal shores of that godless Epicureanism which Socrates derided, and Paul and Augustine combated?  Do you ask for a confirmation of the truths thus deduced from the denial of the supernaturalism of the Mosaic Code?  I ask you to look around.  I call no names; I invoke no theological hatreds; I seek to inflame no prejudices.  I appeal to facts as incontrovertible as the phenomena of the heavens.  I stand on the platform of truth itself, which we all seek to know and are proud to confess.  Look to the developments of modern thought, to some of the speculations of modern science, to the spirit which animates much of our popular literature, not in our country but in all countries, even in the schools of the prophets and among men who are “more advanced,” as they think, in learning, and if you do not see a tendency to the revival of an attractive but exploded philosophy,—­the philosophy of Democritus; the philosophy of Epicurus,—­then I am in an error as to the signs of the times.  But if I am correct in this position,—­if scepticism, or rationalism, or pantheism, or even science, in the audacity of its denials, or all these combined, are in conflict with the supernaturalism which shines and glows in every book of the Bible, and are bringing back for our acceptance what our