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have made them sensible of the propriety # > fconfining their discourses to the doctrine which they had received from him , without entering -into-dispute , with their adversaries about the objects of their worship . Thus he instructed them to
Inculcate on their-hearers , the existence and government of one true God ; the certainty of a future state ; the necessity of repentance add reformation as preparatory to tfinai retribution . His own example had already Illustrated the wisdom and utility of this precaution . Our Lord
had no object nearer his heart than the destruction of idolatry , and of | be im * moral practices which it entailed on its votaries ; yet during the whole of . his ministry , he never gave a ^ hint that this was his ultimate end , until the time was ripe for its accomplishment ; and even
then his commission to the apostles was * to * go , not to destroy the gods of the nations , but to initiate the nations in the knowledge vf one common Father—to bless and reform them with the gospel of his Son , and finally to sanctify and confirm them by the gift of the Holy Spirit / In a ward , his advice to them seems to have been to communicate to
the people whom they addressed , a few momentous truths , which when received could not fail to undermine their vices and errors without unnecessarily inflaming their prejudices . The apostles , with Paul in the number , strictly conformed to this wise injunction of their divine Master . Questions that came within the
province of reason , they left to the progress of reason to determine . They neither disputed with the Heathen philosophers respecting the nature of God , of the human soul , or of a future state ; nor with the Pagan priests about the vanity and immoral tendency of their worship . On the contrary , by holding
forth a few grand points , for the truth of which they had the evidence of their senses , and which constituted the fundamental principles of the gospel , they sought to supersede the whoJe mass of Heathen superstition with as little violation as possible to the previous habits and prepossessions of its votaries . " - —Pp , 7 , 8 .
We concur entirely in this welldrawn picture of apostolic labours , and therefore we demur to the statement in p . 5 , that our Lord discarded the popular notion of the immortality of the soul , as unworthy of attention .
The heads of Chap . II . are , " The Disciples at first did not expect to be called upon to publish Memoirs of their Divine . Master .- —Luke wrote his Goepel to set aside certain false Gosfwte circulated in Egypt . «~ The mira-
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culous Birth of Jesus taught in those < xespeis and contradicted as false by Luke . " We have ' here some acute observations on the preface to Luke's Gospel compared with the preface to the Acts of the Apostles . From the latter Dr . Jones draws the conclusion
we liumbiy think illogically , that we have the Evangelist ' s €€ authority for saying that the first two chapters now found in his Gospel , never came from his hands , but are a forgery ascribed to him in after-days /* P . 12 . There is more reason in the following argument upon the introduction to the Gospel of Mark :
* ' Mark is thought to have written his Gospel at Rome , and under the inspection of Peter * His narrative , therefore , has the sanction of that Apostle , and their omission of the miraculous birth imputed to Jesus stamps upon it the character of falsehood . The Christians at Rome had
no authentic history of Christ , but that which was composed for them by this Evangelist : nor is it to be supposed that he would have left them ignorant or uncertain on so important a subject as the supernatural birth of Jesus , if the story were really true . It is in vain to plead
that Mark has passed over in silence many other things in the ministry of his diving Master . The miracles and sayings which he has recorded , are / sufficient to prove his delegation from Gpd . Tlie miracles omitted by hini , could not prove more than this . The doctrine that Christ
was born in a supernatural manner , was intended to prove th&t he is a supernatural being , and inasmuch as Mark is &ilent 5 n regard to this proof , it is obvious that neither the proof itself , nor the object of it , was in the opinion of thi ? honest man founded in truth .
• " It is a remarkable fact , that , as ws shall presently &ee , the miraculous birth of Jesus < w ; as taught by certain ijnpostors in Rome ^ before Mark published his Gospel . This Evangelist was therefore callrf upon by his peculiar situation , not ouly n ^ to give his { sanction to this story , but to set it aside as a fictipn unworthy of
credit . Hi 3 Gospel , rendered verbatim from the original , begins thus : The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Chris * the Son of God ( as it is written in thtf prophets , Behold , I send my messenger before thy face , who shall prepare thy way in thy presence ) was a voice crying in > the wilderness , Prepare the way of the Lord , and make his paths straight /
*« According to the tale of our Lord s miraculous birth , he was pointed out as < King of the Jews * at the very time in which he was born . If this were true ,
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476 Review . —Ben David ' s Reply to Two Deist teal Works .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1824, page 476, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2527/page/28/
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