Our Father, &c.

The grace of our Lord, &c.

NOTE 1. On Toland's theory of the Pillar of Fire and Cloud guiding the Israelites from Egypt through the Red Sea and the wilderness. Superstition is the chief promoter and cause of Infidelity.

The best definition of religion may be said to be given by St. Paul-a "reasonable service." It is the spiritual and rational observance of precepts and principles, which are reasonable because they are commanded by the God of Revelation. The word religion is derived, by some, from "relegere," to reconsider; by others from "religare," to bind fast both meanings are included in the word 2. Religion is the reconsideration, or contemplation, which binds the soul to the reasonable and spiritual service of God. Superstition, therefore, which is the perversion of religion, may be defined to be, the observance of precepts and principles which are not commanded by the God of Revelation; which are not well considered, and which ought not, therefore, to bind the soul 3. Now there has never been more than one true religion. All superstition, therefore, whether in ancient or modern times, is but the corruption or misapprehension of that original truth. If the Almighty, at the very creation of man, had not revealed Himself to man, the human being would have no more conceived nor imagined a Deity than would an ourang-outang. He would have been the first and most perfect of animals, but he would never have been a religious being. Religion and superstition are alike founded on one principle-the existence of a God, who is pleased or displeased with the actions of men, and who will, therefore, in some manner punish or reward; and they both also, it may be said, rest on the same

1 Rom. xii. 1. λογική λατρεία.
2 Cicero de Nat. Deorum, ii. 28.

3 Cicero defines the two words, "Horum enim sententiæ omnium, non modo superstitionem tollunt, in qua inest timor inanis Deorum, sed etiam religionem, quæ Deorum cultu pio continetur." Cicero, De Nat. Deor., i. 42. Delphin edit., vol. xi. p. 876, where "inanis" is used in the sense of unreasonable or irrational.

basis of the original and continued revelation. But, that religion may never become superstition, the Creator of the human mind has implanted in man the power to discern, by examining evidence, and deducing inferences, truth from error, right from wrong, good from evil; and as superstition is the perversion of revelation, while it is the offspring of revelation, so infidelity is the perversion of reason, while it is the offspring of reason. And one chief cause of infidelity, in every age, in addition to the love of evil, and hatred of the restraints which control evil, has ever been, the identification of religion with superstition; and the rejection of the truths and commands of religion at the same time when men reject the errors and follies of superstition. The circumstances of France, England, Germany, Geneva, and the Continent, in our own age, demonstrate the truth of this hypothesis. The infidelity of Voltaire, and of all the false philosophy which caused the irreligion attendant upon the political convulsions of the first French Revolution, proceeded from the contempt of the people for the superstitions, which had been so long built upon, and identified with the papal perversions of the simplicity of Christianity. Deism and infidelity never flourished in England till the religion which had been wisely though but partially restored to its primitive form, was so deserted by the leaders of the people, that personal piety, and continued change, became identified with regicide and rebellion. The infidelity of Geneva is the opposite extreme to the severity of its former Calvinism. The Neology of Germany may be shown to result as much from the Deism of England, as from the speculative presumption of the German reasoners; and there never will be, nor can be, a termination to the triumph of infidelity till the world shall be leavened with the principle on which the Patriarchal, Mosaical, Christian religion, in all its stages has been established-the principle of commending religion to reason, by satisfying reason first

by evidence, and secondly by its freedom from superstition. When there is most religion without superstition, there will be most reason without infidelity. These remarks are suggested to me by the allusions I discover in Rosenmüller to the theory of Mr. Toland, namely, "that the pillar of cloud and fire which guided the Israelites through the wilderness was not miraculous, but a mere signal-beacon, or portable watch-fire, which was elevated on a pole to be a sign when they were to move by day or by night-in the day the smoke would be visible, in the night the blaze of the fire; and that this custom of guiding armies by similar beacons was practised by other nations 2."-Mr. Toland was educated a Roman Catholic. He renounced the doctrines of the Church of Rome at the age of sixteen, the

In Exod. xiii. 21, p. 251. 253.

He

The treatise is entitled "Hodegus." It forms the first of four tracts, published together in 1720, the year of Toland's death. The book is hence called Tetradymus. It is very rare, having never reached a second edition. It comprises thirty sections; and from the labours of Rosenmüller (Exod. xiii. 21), Vitringa (Observationes Sacræ, lib. v. cap. xiv. p. 156, who, however, does not mention Toland by name), Deylingius, whose essay is a reply to Toland, Observationes Sacræ et Miscellaneæ, 4to, part iv., Lipsia, 1757. De Angelo Domini Israelitarum per vastas Arabiæ solitudines ductore, p. 7437611, and the authors referred to by Rosenmüller, we may infer that the book is better known on the continent than in England. The chief answers it received in England are that by Parker, in his Bibliotheca Biblica, vol. ii. p. 166-179, Oxford, 1722; and that in the Bibliotheca Literaria of Dr. Wasse and Dr. Jebb, 1722, No. v. Both these were published within two years after Toland's death, and the publication of the Hodegus. Leland (View of the Deistical Writers, letter iv.) takes no notice of the Hodegus, though he gives a list of Toland's other works, with the names of many of the continental writers who answered his Amyntor, Christianity not Mysterious, &c. Toland, like many other authors who explain away the miracles, denied that he was an infidel. had been a papist; he rejected popery; and if he was a Christian, he formed his own creed, and built his own Church. None believed as he did; none worshipped with him. He gives a list of his opinions at the end of his Mangoneutes (the last tract in his Tetradymus, p. 223), and declares that civil liberty and religious toleration were the main objects of his writings. He abuses alike the primitive, the reformed, and the English Churches. He died without Daming the name of Christ, though expressing a bedef in a resurrection, without personal identity. "Spiritus cum ætherio Patre," he says, in his selfcomposed epitaph, "à quo prodiit olim, conjungitur; expus item, naturæ cedens in materno gremio repositur. Ipse vero æternum est resurrecturus, corpus idem futurus Tolandus nunquam."-May God in His mercy preserve us from the nonsense of the philosophical immortality of Deism, and grant us to have that hope which is expressed by St. Paul-" absent from the body, present with the Lord;" or by St. Stephen-" Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." The Christian immortality is the continuance of the personal identity of the same being, who, in this stage of his existence, begins that communion with God and Christ, of which the death of the body is only the same kind of interruption, as a fainting fit, a fever, or a dream. The world of spirits is around us, and the death of the body is only the breaking of the bars of the dungeon which separates our own souls from the perception of their unmanifested presence.

period at which Mr. Gibbon, who professed them for one year only, declared himself also to be a papist. Toland, at the age of sixteen, and Gibbon at the age of seventeen, renounced the superstitions of Popery, to be placed under the religious influence of the professors of the opposite extreme. Toland pursued his studies at Leyden; Gibbon at Lausanne. Neither of them appear to have been, at that time, instructed in the principles of the Church of England, which, while it rejects one class of superstitions, avoids all other, and which reconciles the freedom of thought with adherence to the religion of Revelation, as it was received and interpreted before the superstitions of the Church of Rome or of Geneva were known; and both, from being Papists, became among the most influential of the English infidels. The Hodegus of Toland-for we cannot attend to any other of his Deistical lucubrations-is founded on the supposition that the narrative of Moses, as well as the more poetical portions of his books, was written in a very hyperbolical style; and he was anxious, by changing the seemingly miraculous circumstances into natural events, that the histories of Moses may be more clearly understood, and more easily believed. For this purpose, he would first change the pillar of fire and cloud into a moveable beacon; he would then explain away the meaning of the word pillar; and thirdly, prove that Hobab or Jethro guided the people through the wilderness, and therefore, that the supernatural guidance of the pillar of fire and cloud could not be necessary. As the book is rare, and the controversy is important, I will as briefly as possible reply to these statements.

1. It is utterly impossible by any criticism, or any other theory than that Moses was a deceiver of the people, to reconcile the descriptions of the fire and cloud with the notion that the Israelites were guided by what Toland calls "ambulatory beacons 2." I have so often, in former notes, spoken of the angel Jehovah, that I can now only refer to some of the passages which describe the pillar of cloud and fire, to show that the appearance of a man was manifested from the cloud; and that this, with the other descriptions of the phenomenon, render his theory absurd. We are told that Jehovah went before them as they marched (Exod. xiii. 21); and that when the danger was great, the angel of the Lord, that is, the same Jehovah, or angel Jehovah, removed from before them, and went behind them; and that the pillar of the cloud went from before them, and stood behind them (Exod. xiv. 19); and after He had done so, that the same Jehovah looked unto the host of the Egyptians, through the

1 Preface to Hodegus, p. 2.

2 Hodegus, sect. iii. p. 7.

3 Sect. v. note 1; Sect. xlii. note 1, of this work.

L

pillar of fire, and that He troubled the host of the Egyptians (Exod. xiv. 24). The Hebrew is all rightly translated; and the words "went," "looked," and "troubled," respectively denote the actual moving of the being who was present in the cloud; the looking through the cloud as through a lattice, in which sense it is applied in Judges v. 28; and the miraculous causing of terror among the Egyptians, either by the issuing forth of thunders and lightnings, as Josephus and the Jewish commentators affirm, or by his own supernatural appearance'. Upon the primitive meaning of these words, Toland says nothing; yet all these passages are as irreconcileable with the notion of the pillar of cloud and fire being only an ambulatory beacon, as the long description of the movements of the cloud in Numbers ix. 15-23; x. 11-13; Exod. xiv. 19, &c.; or with the express declaration in Numbers xiv. 13, 14, "The Egyptians shall hear and report it to the Philistines, that Thou Jehovah art seen face to face, and that thy cloud standeth over them, and that Thou goest before them, by day-time in a pillar of cloud, and in a pillar of fire by night." Is it possible to imagine, that by these noble expressions Moses intended only to say, "O Lord God of Israel! the Egyptians shall hear and tell the Philistines that I have commanded a beacon to be set upon a pole, and the people see at night the blaze of its fire, and they see in the day-time its smoke?"-This is but one average specimen of the philosophy of the deism and infidelity which banishes God and his Providence from His own world, and which makes the Christian ironically exclaim, (like the prophet of old, when he witnesses the contortions of the folly which rejects the miracles of Revelation,) "Cry aloud, for He, the God of thy falsehoods, is a God. Either he is in a journey, away from his own world, or he is asleep, and his providence is asleep; and his world, and himself, and his providence, and miracles, and revelation, are all dreams alike."-"Professing themselves to be wise, such men become fools." (Rom. i. 22.) How much more reasonable is the literal interpretation-that the Lord, the angel Jehovah, moving from the front of the camp of Israel, between them and the Egyptians, was seen by both, and confounded the enemies of Jehovah and His people in the manner alluded to in Psalm 1xxvii. 16-20: "The waters saw thee, O God, the waters saw thee; they were afraid: the skies sent out a sound. The voice of thy thunder was heard: the lightnings lightened the world: the earth trembled and shook." "The Egyptians," we may add, "were troubled, when Thy way was in the Red Sea, and Thy path in its great waters, and Thou leddest Thy

.are the three words,,יהם שקף הלך 2

people like sheep through its depths, by the hand of Moses and Aaron."-As Adam, Abraham, and Jacob, saw the God of Israel in the preludes to His incarnation, so also was He seen as He will be again manifested at that future period which we call the judgment-day. As Moses beheld Him in the burning bush, so also may we believe that glimpses of His awful form appeared, from time to time, through the occasional openings of the flame and cloud 2. And that He was seen, as Dr. Arnold beautifully expresses himself when realizing to his own serious, manly, thoughtful mind, the conviction, that to believe only in the Supreme Being, or the Deity, in such vague and general terms, served only to repel the mind to an infinite distance from God; and that there must be some nearer manifestation of the Creator to the soul; he sought that which Revelation alone can give, and he expressed himself in that very language, though without any allusion to the passage before us, which best describes the manifestation of the Jehovah angel in the pillar of cloud and fire. "There is one object, he says, on which our thoughts and imaginations may fasten, no less than our affections, that amidst the light, dark from excess of brilliance, which surrounds the throne of God, we may yet discern the gracious form of the Son of man 3." There is no rest for the soul of man till he can worship Christ, as God manifest in the flesh.

For the second objection of Toland to the ancient, uniform, and literal interpretation of the pillar of cloud and fire, I must refer the student to the treatise of Deylingius, and observe only that the word Ty, is derived from T, stetit, substitit, constitit, mansit, duravit, moratus est 5,' &c.; and that though it is used in Job xxvi. 11, to denote the clouds of heaven, yet its first meaning is, a stationary pillar or column, like those erected either for the tabernacle or the temple (Exod. xxxv. 11. 17, &c.); and to describe the stationary pulpit, which was probably supported by a column (2 Kings xi. 14). And even when the word is applied to the clouds of heaven, it is only because the clouds appear to rest at the horizon upon the earth, and thence to reach to the highest part of the heavens. It is impossible to believe that the , "the

1 See former notes.

2 See the beautiful reasoning of Faber, Hora Mosaicæ; or Bampton Lectures, vol. ii. p. 102; or sect. i. ch. ii., 2nd edition, 1818.

3 Stanley's Life of Dr. Arnold, vol. i. p. 32. It may be wished that Mr. Stanley had not published some letters of Dr. Arnold, on the prophecies of Daniel, &c. I am convinced that his friend would have altered his opinion on that subject, if he had lived and reflected. 4 See notula d.

5 See Calasio, in verb..

6 See the criticism of Dr. Lee on Job xxvi. 11, notes, p. 388.