A View of Nature (Volume 6); In Letters to a Traveller Among the Alps (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LETTER XCII. MOST of the writers, who have undertaken to prove the divine origin of Christianity, have had recourse to arguments drawn from three heads: the prophecies still extant in the Old Testament j the miracles recorded in the Newj and the internal evidence arising from that excellence, and those clear marks of supernatural interposition, which are so conspicuous in the religion itself. The two former have been sufficiently explained and inforced by the ablest pens; but the latter, which seems to carry with it, if not the most satisfactory, at least the most simple kind of conviction, has not altogether been considered with that attention, which it appears to deserve. My meaning here, you are well convinced, is far from being to depreciate the proofs arising from either prophecies or miracles: they are both of great weight in the general argument. Prophecies Jenyn's Intern, Evid. Prophecies are permanent miracles, whose authority is sufficiently confirmed by their completion, and are, therefore, solid proofs of the supernatural origin of a religion, whose truth they were intended to testify; such as those which I have already mentioned to be found in various parts of the Scriptures relative to the coming of the Messiah, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the unexampled state, in which the Jews have ever since continued; all so circumstantially descriptive of the events, that they seem rather histories of past, than predictions of future transactions. And whoever will seriously consider the immense distance of time between some of them, and the events which they foretell j the uninterrupted chain, by which they are connected for many thousand years; how exactly they correspond with those events, and how totally unapplicable they are to all other events in the h...