Testament is in many places contrary to my
convictions of truth and reason. I find that it consists of a great
variety of treatises of various degrees of merit. Even in the same book
it presents often strange contrasts--sublime moral precepts on one page;
on the next, solemn requirements of frivolous ceremonies, utterly
unworthy of God; or solemn narrations of miraculous interferences with
the established course of nature, which, taken literally, are absolutely
incredible. The judicious reader must therefore discriminate between
those divine precepts of morality which were infused into the minds of
the Hebrew sages, and those Jewish prejudices which their education and
character inclined them to regard as equally important; and he must
divest the narrative of facts as they actually occurred, from the
national legends and traditions which the compilers of the Pentateuch
added to adorn the history."

This, it will be seen, at once raises another and very important
question, namely: By what standard are the writings of the Old Testament
to be judged? Or rather it settles the question by taking it for
granted, that every inquirer is to judge them according to his own
notions of reason and truth. But this does not help me out of my
difficulty; for it supposes me already to possess the knowledge, and
the virtue, which a revelation from God is needed to communicate. If I
am able, by my own reason, to construct a perfect standard of morals to
judge the Bible by, what need have I for the Bible revelation? And if I
have the right to refuse obedience to any commands I may judge frivolous
or unreasonable, before I know whether they came from God or not, and am
bound to obey only those which agree with my notions of right, what
authority has the law of God? A revelation from God which should submit
its truths to be judged by the ignorance, and its commands by the
inclinations, of sinful men, would by that very submission declare its
worthlessness. The use of a divine revelation is either to tell us some
truth of which we are ignorant, or to enjoin some duty to which we are
disinclined.

Besides, it is not possible to make any such dissection of the moral
precepts of the Bible, from the miraculous history which forms their
skeleton, as will leave them either truth or authority. It is the
miraculous history that gives sanction to the divine morality, and
without it the ten commandments would have no more hold on any man's
conscience