done by a Gentile in the
same case, and as it is related Samuel had done by Agag, and Moses by
the women and children, they endeavoured to save him, though at the risk
of their own lives: for the account says, "Nevertheless [that is, though
Jonah was a Jew and a foreigner, and the cause of all their misfortunes,
and the loss of their cargo] the men rowed hard to bring the boat
to land, but they could not, for the sea wrought and was tempestuous
against them." Still however they were unwilling to put the fate of the
lot into execution; and they cried, says the account, unto the Lord,
saying, "We beseech thee, O Lord, let us not perish for this man's life,
and lay not upon us innocent blood; for thou, O Lord, hast done as it
pleased thee." Meaning thereby, that they did not presume to judge Jonah
guilty, since that he might be innocent; but that they considered the
lot that had fallen upon him as a decree of God, or as it pleased
God. The address of this prayer shows that the Gentiles worshipped one
Supreme Being, and that they were not idolaters as the Jews represented
them to be. But the storm still continuing, and the danger encreasing,
they put the fate of the lot into execution, and cast Jonah in the sea;
where, according to the story, a great fish swallowed him up whole and
alive!

We have now to consider Jonah securely housed from the storm in the
fish's belly. Here we are told that he prayed; but the prayer is
a made-up prayer, taken from various parts of the Psalms, without
connection or consistency, and adapted to the distress, but not at all
to the condition that Jonah was in. It is such a prayer as a Gentile,
who might know something of the Psalms, could copy out for him. This
circumstance alone, were there no other, is sufficient to indicate that
the whole is a made-up story. The prayer, however, is supposed to have
answered the purpose, and the story goes on, (taking-off at the same
time the cant language of a Bible-prophet,) saying, "The Lord spake unto
the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon dry land."

Jonah then received a second mission to Nineveh, with which he sets
out; and we have now to consider him as a preacher. The distress he is
represented to have suffered, the remembrance of his own disobedience as
the cause of it, and the miraculous escape he is supposed to have had,
were sufficient, one would conceive, to have impressed him with sympathy
and benevolence in the execution of his mission; but