practice has been to calumniate and
blacken the character of all other nations; and it is from the Jewish
accounts that we have learned to call them heathens. But, as far as
we know to the contrary, they were a just and moral people, and not
addicted, like the Jews, to cruelty and revenge, but of whose profession
of faith we are unacquainted. It appears to have been their custom
to personify both virtue and vice by statues and images, as is done
now-a-days both by statuary and by painting; but it does not follow from
this that they worshipped them any more than we do.--I pass on to the
book of,

Psalms, of which it is not necessary to make much observation. Some of
them are moral, and others are very revengeful; and the greater part
relates to certain local circumstances of the Jewish nation at the time
they were written, with which we have nothing to do. It is, however,
an error or an imposition to call them the Psalms of David; they are a
collection, as song-books are now-a-days, from different song-writers,
who lived at different times. The 137th Psalm could not have been
written till more than 400 years after the time of David, because it
is written in commemoration of an event, the captivity of the Jews in
Babylon, which did not happen till that distance of time. "By the rivers
of Babylon we sat down; yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged
our harps upon the willows, in the midst thereof; for there they that
carried us away captive required of us a song, saying, sing us one
of the songs of Zion." As a man would say to an American, or to a
Frenchman, or to an Englishman, sing us one of your American songs, or
your French songs, or your English songs. This remark, with respect to
the time this psalm was written, is of no other use than to show (among
others already mentioned) the general imposition the world has been
under with respect to the authors of the Bible. No regard has been paid
to time, place, and circumstance; and the names of persons have been
affixed to the several books which it was as impossible they should
write, as that a man should walk in procession at his own funeral.

The Book of Proverbs. These, like the Psalms, are a collection, and that
from authors belonging to other nations than those of the Jewish nation,
as I have shewn in the observations upon the book of Job; besides which,
some of the Proverbs ascribed to Solomon did not appear till two hundred
and fifty years after the death