Sketches of Hebrew and Egyptian Antiquity, Intended as an Introduction to the Pentateuch (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1793. Excerpt: ... N all inquiries after knowledge, prejudice of every kind should carefully be avoided. A man who is improperly credulous, as well as the professed sceptic, is easily drawn into any hypothesis, however absurd, which favours his prepossessions. This often becomes 3 truly pitiable, nay, contemptible, and what is worse, a dangerous situation: when either weak principles or wrong notions of the dispensations of providence, are imbibed to the subversion of pure morality; but when good men, in order to substantiate the evidence of even orthodox opinions, either advance strange and inadmissible theories, founded on an erroneous zeal for solving all apparent apparent difficulties, they are net aware. what injury they do religion, by giving subtle ad.r versaries room for insulting those divine truths which they will not receive, nbt be.? cause they are destitute of satisfactory evi? dence, but because they set bounds to licencious principles. We should not therefore endeavour to account for miracles, for this would be to der stroy revelation; we must not endeavour to explain the manner in which God created the world j we must not strain at an explanation of the sacred Trinity, a doctrine which we should reverently receive on the authority of the scriptures, but should never arrogantly endeavour to investigate. In all religious inquiry, true zeal must be influenced by caution: truth lies obvious to candor and ingenuity, and is to be received in her simplest attire; she needs not the tinsel ornaments of sickly imaginations, nor to be seen through the magnifying glasses of monsterforming comments, which instead of procuring distinct vision, paint her beautiful image in the form of a spectre, terrifying even to common sense. To he guilty of pious fraud, and wilful perve...