'Tis this that wards the blow, or stills the smart ; Disarms affliction, or repels the dart; Within the breast bids purest rapture rise; Bids smiling conscience spread her cloudless skies. * * These lines I find in a letter written to me by BURNS, forty years ago. He had his memory stored with the finest poetical passages, which he was in the habit of quoting most aptly in his correspondence with his friends;—and he delighted also in repeating them when in company with those of them who enjoyed them. Living, as I did, in habits of close intimacy with him during his residence in Edinburgh, when he published the second edition of his poems, often have I heard him recite these fine verses, which seemed to have made Those who were much impression on him-Poor Burns! best acquainted with him, knew that he viewed and considered these noble and interesting subjects as he ought. The lapse of fleeting years is fast dissipating the remains of unkind feeling with which some latterly regarded him;—and while his country justly appreciates him, his fame will descend to future times, worthy of the Author of THE COTTAR'S SATURday Night. ESSAY IV. AN ENLIGHTENED HEATHEN'S SUPPOSED REFLECTIONS IN JUDEA, IN THE TIME OF CHRIST. "It is impossible to view the immensity, the variety, the harmony, and the beauty of the universe, without concluding it to be the workmanship of a Being infinitely powerful, wise, and good."LORD PRESIDENT FORBES'S Thoughts Concerning Religion. "But him antiquity profaned not, served With self-taught rites, and under various names, And Flora, and Vertumnus; peopling earth With titulary Goddesses and Gods "All the Gods of the Heathen are Idols; but the Lord created the Heavens."-Psalm xcvi. 5. AN ENLIGHTENED HEATHEN'S SUPPOSED REFLECTIONS IN JUDEA, IN THE TIME OF CHRIST. CHAPTER I. Ir is a curious fact in the history of man, that in one part of the world there should have been a people, professing a religion which taught the unity of God, and in which prophecies had been repeatedly uttered foretelling clearly a great deliverer of mankind; and yet that so little should have been known of that people, and nothing whatever of their religion and prophecies, by two other contemporary nations, far advanced in society, among whom philosophy was highly cultivated, and which abounded with men of the first talents, making general knowledge their principal aim. There is no doubt, however, of the truth of the observation; and the Jews on the one hand, and the Greeks and Romans on the other, are the respective parties on whom it is made.* Although that, however, was the relative situation of those several nations in this respect, it is certain, that had any of those enlightened ancients been led to a fair examination of the Jewish Scriptures, and a dispassionate investigation of the great truths contained in them, those writings must have appeared to them of the greatest importance, and produced in their minds the deepest interest. Pursuing such reflections as these, it has sometimes occurred to me, as a useful and instructive speculation, to consider what might have been the trains of thinking, and conclusions, which would have suggested themselves to any of those sages, had his attention been directed to these great subjects; and particularly, if his curiosity had drawn him to Judea in the time of our Saviour. His supposed reasonings and inferences, therefore, on such an imagined occasion, form the subject of the present essay; and I have made it part of this series of treatises, as the topics of his reflections must have entered deeply into both natural and revealed religion. Seneca was a contemporary of Christ, and but two * Aristotle and Plato flourished in Greece a thousand years later than Moses; almost seven hundred years after David; and more than three hundred years after Isaiah, yet in the voluminous works of neither of these illustrious Greeks is there mention made of any of these great individuals, or their writings. |