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doctrines of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus the Messiah, cannot long be delayed, and in anticipation of that momentous change, the present Work, embodying the results of many years' serious study of our Lord's personal history, has been written.

LONDON,

Thanksgiving Day, 1872.

Page 26, line 23, for or to some God read as to some God; or, more

properly, as if (he were) a God-Christo quasi Deo.'

JESUS THE MESSIAH.

CHAPTER I.

THE FIRST STATE OF MAN.

In the imaginary conversation which Cicero relates in his 'Treatise on the Nature of the Gods,' one of the interlocutors says, 'If you ask me what God is, or what his nature and attributes are, I would imitate Simonides, who, when the tyrant Hiero proposed the same question to him, demanded a day to reflect on it. When, on the following day, the king required his answer, Simonides begged for two days more; and then, instead of replying, he kept on doubling the number of days. Hiero, in amazement, asked him why he did so. "Because," replied he, "the longer I meditate on the question, the more difficult does it appear to me." 999

In the discussion which ensued, another speaker exclaims, 'How inconsistent it is that, when you view a statue or a picture, you know it to be a work of art; when you behold the course of a ship afar off, you have no doubt of its being moved by reason and skill; when you look at a dial or a clypsedra, you understand the hours to be shown by design and not by chance; and yet that you should believe the universe, which contains all these works of art, and the artificers, and every thing else, to have been made without design or reason!' He then gives an illustration from the poet Attius of a shepherd who had never seen a ship, and who, when from a mountain he perceived afar

B

off the ship Argo, surprised and terrified at the novel object, after remaining some time in suspense as to what it could be, at length concluded it was some marine monster: '—in which figure, it may be remarked, the poet forestalled the Mexicans, who so regarded the ships of Cortes. And Cicero's speaker then goes on to say, 'And so, though philosophers may be perplexed by the first sight of the universe, yet, when they have observed its regular and even motions, and how all is regulated by settled rules and immutable constancy, they ought to understand that not only is there some inhabitant of this celestial and divine mansion, but that he is likewise the ruler and governor, as well as the architect, of so mighty a fabric.'

This argument of the heathen Roman philosopher supplied our English Christian divine Paley with that of his 'Natural Theology,' in which the supposed accidental discovery of a watch, and the conviction of the finder that it must be the work of an intelligent maker, lead to the inference of the separate existence of the Almighty Designer and Creator of the universe.

Nevertheless, the arguments of both writers, however able, are alike defective in one material respect. Cicero speaks of this conclusion as that of 'philosophers;' for his shepherd remains impressed with the notion that the Argo was a sea-monster. Paley, for his part, assumes the finder of the watch to be an intelligent being, competent to examine it, and to reason on the nature and uses of its various parts, and thence to draw the inference on which his argument is founded. But let the discoverer of the watch be supposed to be either a child or a savage,-a man in the state of nature, as it is so absurdly called,-would either of these treat the machine in the way suggested? Certainly not. The former would instinctively carry it to his mouth, and then probably let it drop; or, if old enough, he would listen to its ticking, would pull or knock it about, and would end by destroying it; unless, indeed, when tired of it as a plaything, he should cast it aside, for the sake of the stone, perhaps, which forms the subject of the opening part of Paley's argument.