On this page

• Text (1)

  Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

  • 

    Untitled Article

• Transcript

  • Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

    Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.

    Untitled Article

    then , with whatever difficulties it may be embarrassed , Seems to represent most faithfully the genuine tradition of \ he Jewishjpeople . And even the adoption of either of the other systems woutd ^ fill leave us straitened for room , in which to dispose of the Egyptian dynasties . It should , however , be remembered , that as yet the chronology of

    Manetho , anterior to the invasion of the shepherds , has not received that confir-r mation from monuments which has given credibility to his subsequent history . Nor is this all ; from the statements of M . Champollion it should seem that there is no hope of our ever obtaining such a confirmation * ** The more , " says he , " we became acquainted with the inscriptions which cover the edifices which remain on both banks of the Nile , and by their

    means with the date of their erection , the more we shall be convinced that there remains scarcely any thing anterior to the \ % th Diospolitan dynasty * It is to the long residence of the Hykshos , and the devastations which accompanied their dominion , that we are to attribute exclusively the almost entire disappearance of the public edifices , reared under the kings of the preceding sixteen dynasties . " Lettre II . p . 8 . Such an event , while it deprives us of the means of confirming history by monuments , must also impair the certainty of the history itself , because these very monuments were

    the materials from which , had they been spared , copious and authentic history would have been constructed . The invasion of the shepherds was to Egypt , what the invasion of the Gauls was to Rome ; and as Livy , when he tells us that historical documents , " incensa Urbe plerseque interiere , " absolves us from the obligation to believe implicitly what he had related before , so the history of the earlier Egyptian dynasties must always be received with considerable doubt . Indeed , independently of this violent annihilation of monuments , Time destroys even in Egypt , and therefore remoter periods are ipso facto attended with more obscurity and doubt .

    We must be content , therefore , to leave this question at present undecided : but supposing the result of further inquiries to be an extension of the Egyptian history to a longer period than we can reconcile with the chronology of Genesis , no friend of revelation need be alarmed at such a discovery . Had we indeed been told , either by the historian who has preserved the genealogies of the patriarchal ancestors of the Jews , or by any other of the sacred writers , that the transmission of them had been miraculously guarded

    from those errors or imperfections to which every other tradition is liable , or that they had been derived not from tradition but from immediate inspiration , the case would have been different : but no such authority is claimed , and we are not at liberty gratuitously to assume it . Those who think that when the accuracy or the completeness of a narrative is questioned , they can quiet doubts by appealing to its inspiration , forget that in so doing they beg the whole question and more besides . It is a perilous expedient for the

    honour , and even the security of religion , to bring her authority to decide questions in science , against the evidence of facts and arguments . Yet such is the practice of many persons at the present moment , who will not allow the philosopher to read any thing in the archives of nature , nor the historian in the early annals of the world , which is not consistent with what they deem the authority of revelation . They acknowledge no difference between the blind and eager spirit of scepticism , which to destroy the authority of Scripture thinks all weapons and all modes of attack legitimate ; * and the * It Is a lamentable fact , that during the ascendancy of the Constitutionalists iu-Spain , an abridgement of the work of Dupuis , Oi igine dc tous lcs Cultes , was widely

    Untitled Article

    320 "Biblical Gleanings .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1827, page 320, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1796/page/8/