had faid fomething which would give offence, returning to his Jewish brethren in terms of the warmest affection and refpect. "I fay "the truth in Christ Jesus; I lie not; my "confcience alfo bearing me witnefs, in the 'Holy Ghoft, that I have great heaviness "and continual forrow in my heart; for I "could wish that myself were accurfed from "Chrift, for my brethren, my kinsmen ac

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cording to the flesh, who are Ifraelites, to

whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, "and the covenants, and the giving of the law, "and the fervice of God, and the promises;

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whofe are the fathers; and of whom, as con

cerning the flesh, Chrift came." When, in the thirty-firft and thirty-fecond verfes of this ninth chapter, he represented to the Jews the error of even the best of their nation, by telling them that "Ifrael, which "followed after the law of righteousness, "had not attained to the law of righteous

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nefs, because they fought it not by faith, "but as it were by the works of the law, "for they stumbled at that stumbling-ftone," he takes care to annex to this declaration thefe

thefe conciliating expreffions: "Brethren, my heart's defire and prayer to God for Ifrael

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is, that they might be faved; for I bear "them record that they have a zeal of God, "but not according to knowledge." Laftly, having, ch. x. ver. 20, 21, by the applica tion of a paffage in Ifaiah infinuated the moft ungrateful of all propofitions to a Jewish ear, the rejection of the Jewish nation, as God's peculiar people; he haftens, as it were, to qualify the intelligence of their fall by this interesting expoftulation: "I fay, then, hath God caft away "his people (i. e. wholly and entirely)? "God forbid; for I also am an Ifraelite, of "the feed of Abraham, of the tribe of Ben

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jamin. God hath not caft away his people "which he foreknew:" and follows this thought, throughout the whole of the eleventh chapter, in a series of reflections calculated to foothe the Jewish converts, as well as to procure from their Gentile brethren refpect to the Jewish institution. Now all this is perfectly natural. In a real St. Paul writing to real converts, it is what anxiety

1

anxiety to bring them over to his persuasion would naturally produce; but there is an earneftness and a perfonality, I may fo call it, in the manner which a cold forgery, I apprehend, would neither have conceived nor fupported.

CHAP.

CHAP. III.

THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE CO

RINTHIANS.

BEF

No. I.

EFORE we proceed to compare this epiftle with the hiftory, or with any other epiftle, we will employ one number in ftating certain remarks applicable to our argument, which arifes from a perufal of the epistle itself.

By an expreffion in the first verse of the feventh chapter, "now concerning the things "whereof ye wrote unto me," it appears, that this letter to the Corinthians was written by St. Paul in answer to one which he had received from them; and that the feventh, and fome of the following chapters, are taken up in refolving certain doubts, and regulating certain points of order, concerning which the Corinthians had in their letter confulted him. This alone is a circumstance confiderably in favour of the authen

ticity of the epistle: for it must have been a far-fetched contrivance in a forgery, first to have feigned the receipt of a letter from the church of Corinth, which letter does not appear; and then to have drawn up a fictitious answer to it, relative to a great variety of doubts and enquiries, purely œconomical and domestic; and which, though likely enough to have occurred to an infant fociety, in a fituation and under an institution fo novel as that of a Chriftian church then was, it must have very much exercised the author's invention, and could have anfwered no imaginable purpose of forgery, to introduce the mention of at all. Particulars of the kind we refer to, are such as the following the rule of duty and prudence relative to entering into marriage, as applicable to virgins, to widows; the cafe of husbands married to unconverted wives, of wives having unconverted husbands; that cafe where the unconverted party chooses to separate, where he chooses to continue the union; the effect which their converfion produced upon their prior state, of circumcifion, of flavery; the eating of things offered to idols, as it was