and man's life was contracted nearly to the present span, How should Horace know this? Or how should Hesiod know it, from whom he borrowed it? for it is precisely the doctrine of the Mosaic history. And as it carries us back to the times before the flood, of which no human history was ever written, it must have been taken either from the Scrip ture itself, or from some tradition, which, if it could be traced, would carry us back to the same original. These things then, though they are in Horace, are not of Horace; nor are they of the Greeks or the Romans; but of Divine revelation and it is remarkable, that we should meet with so many sacred doctrines in so small a compass. I take the opportunity to speak of this while the ode is under our consideration but when you are farther acquainted with heathen learning, you will find abundant evidence of the same sort, which they who are disaffected to the Christian system, and would set up the classics against the Bible, will never like to hear of; but will endeavour to discountenance all such things, and dismiss them in the lump, as if they had no relation to the sacred history, but such as fancy or partiality hath given them. LETTER LETTER XV. ON THE SAME SUBJECT. AS you seemed to be entertained with those passages of Horace which are parallel to the Sacred History, I shall lead you on to some more passages of the same sort in other authors; and if you should not understand all of them critically at present, I hope the time will come when you will find little or no difficulty in any of them. Herod, you know, who was king in Judæa at the birth of Christ, slew all the children in Bethlehem. By birth and education he was a Jew, and as such would eat no swine's flesh. Macrobius, a learned heathen writer in the earliest times of the Church, tells us, that the slaughter of infants by Herod was so sudden and indiscriminate, that Herod's own child, then at nurse, was put to death among the rest; which fact being told to the emperor Augustus, he made this reflection upon it,, that "it was better to be Herod's hog than his son." You will naturally argue upon this case, that if Augustus actually said this, He rod's rod's child was slain: if so, the infants were slaughtered in Bethlehem; Jesus Christ was born there; the Wise Men of the East came to worship him, and reported his birth to Herod, &c. as the Gospel relates; for all these circumstances hang together, and account for one another. Tacitus and Suetonius, both bitter enemies to the Christians, agree in relating that extraordinary circumstance of a persuasion gènerally prevailing among the heathens, about the time of Christ's birth, that a king should come from the East. The Roman senate were in such a panic at the apprehension of a king, that they were about to make a decree, that no child born in a certain year should be brought up, lest this great king should arise among themselves. Some temporizing Jews, called Herodians, flattered Herod that he was the king expected; and it is probable this opinion, which they had infused into him, made him so jealous of a rival, when the birth of Christ was reported to him. Persius, in his fifth satire, alludes to the extraordinary pomp and illumination with which Herod's birth-day was celebrated even in the reign of Nero. But But the manner in which this tradition operated upon Virgil is still more extraordinary, and little short of a prodigy. It produced from that serious and cautious poet the wonderful eclogue entitled Pollio; the imagery and expressions of which are so different from the Roman style, and so near to the language of the prophet Isaiah, that if this eclogue had been written as early as the days of Hesiod, the infidels of this time would most probably have undertaken to prove, that the prophet had borrowed from the poet. Bishop Lowth has shewn, with great judgment, that this eclogue could not possibly be meant of any one of those persons to whom heathen critics have applied it and it does not appear how we can give any rational account of it, unless we allow that the poet had seen the predic tions of the prophet, and accommodated the matter of them to the prevailing expectation of the times; ascribing them unjustly to a Sibylline oracle of heathen original, because nothing great was to be allowed to the Jews. It will be worth your attention to consider some of the particulars minutely. He calls the time in which this wonderful person is to be born, ultima atas, the last days, manner of the Scripture: God, after the saith the apostle, apostle, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son. According to the prophet Daniel, the Messiah was to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity. So saith the poet: Te duce siqua manent sceleris vestigia nostri, The prophet Isaiah saith, unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given; and his name shall be called, the mighty God, the Prince of Peace: the sense of all which is thus expressed in the eclogue, Ille Deum vitam accipiet, divisque videbit Permixtos heroas, et ipse videbitur illis, Pacatumque reget patriis virtutibus orbem. Chara Deûm soboles, magnum Jovis incremen→ tum. The scenery by which the prophet hath figuratively signified the times of the Gospel is minutely adopted, being extremely beautiful and poetical-The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose; the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, &c. VOL. XI. At |