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prejudices of tfce nation . He must have done this , as Tiieudas attempted a little while previously , in order to establish his Mefesiahehip on a human basis . But , instead of attempting this ! , it is insinuated that he only allowed and encouraged me delusive expectation that he should some time do it ; and thus was his reMgion
made popular . Was there , then , no limit to delusive expectation ? Did the heart never grow sick with hope deferred ? If these delusive hopes of a temporal Messiah s reign were reall y the motive that led men to embrace the Gospel , what kept them in the profession of it when those hopes were exploded ? The delusion was dissipated some time or other , sooner or later , and
at that point of time , whenever it was , a rational account of their grounds of belief needs to be given . The unbeliever onl y postpones the difficulty , or rather increases by postponing it . Those who found themselyes to have been deluded by a false promise , would require strong evidence to make them continue the disciples of a man who had entrapped them with a cheat at first . Miracles would be indispensable , then , if their necessity had been superseded at first by pious fraud .
On our Lord ' s reserve as to the designed offer of the privileges of the Gospel to the Gentiles , I need not say much . He was reserved ; and it was prudent to be so , if he wished to gain one moment ' s audience before Jews . But he declared more than his prejudiced disciples chose to understand , in his parable of the Good Samaritan , in his conversation with the woman of Samaria
and other inhabitants of Sychem ; in the curing of the Syrophoenician ' s daughter ; in the declaration that he had other sheep not of the Jewish fold ; and similar incidents . Our author ' s argument on this subiect shall answer itself . He labours ( p . 41 , sea . )
to show with what scrupulosity our Lord abstained , during his personal ministry , from all mention of the obnoxious design to extend the Gospel to the Gentiles , in order to conciliate the Jews . But at p . 47 , after giving his own version of Peter ' s first attempt , as recorded in the Acts , to propagate his roaster ' s religion among Gentiles , he remarks , The prejudices , then , of the Christian
Jews were not outrageously inveterate ; they were satisfied by Peter's word . Now , the question is , would reter have scrupled to invent a vision for the furtherance of what he believed a righteous end T To defer the discussion of Peter ' s honesty , our author seems here to have been doing and undoing . He is correct when he describes our Lord as maintaining a prudent
reserve upon this obnoxious feature of his Gospel ; he cannot be correct , still , wjien he speaks of jt as needing no reserve . If Peter needed np miraculpus voucher when he announced it , wh y might not Jesus h ? ve announced it too ? But tfie necessity for niiracles is to Jbe disproved at all events ; so ? to s $ ve miracles , Jesus ahocfcs no Jewish prejudices ; and still , to sfiye miracles , the prejudices miraculously vanish when Peter's preaching would
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Orthodoxy and Uwbetief . % Wi
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1832, page 787, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1824/page/67/
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