and class.  Do not even our own statute laws, though co-existing with a separate religious Code, contain many ‘formulae’ of words which have no sense but for the conscience?  Davison’s stress on the word ‘covet’, in the tenth commandment, is, I think, beyond what so ancient a Code warrants;—­and for the other instances, Michaelis would remind him that the Mosaic constitution was a strict theocracy, and that Jehovah, the God of all, was their ‘king’.  I do not know the particular mode in which Michaelis propounds and supports this position; but the position itself, as I have presented it to my own mind, seems to me among the strongest 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.