otnote 6: Friend, Vol. I. Essays X. and XI. 3rd edition--Ed.]

[Footnote 7: See Table Talk, pp. 282 and 304. 2d edit.--Ed.]

* * * * *

NOTES ON DAVISON'S DISCOURSES ON PROPHECY. 1825. [1]

Disc. IV. Pt. I. p. 140.

As to systems of religion alien from Christianity, if any of them have
taught the doctrine of eternal life, the reward of obedience, as a
dogma of belief, that doctrine is not their boast, but their burden
and difficulty; inasmuch as they could never defend it. They could
never justify it on independent grounds of deduction, nor produce
their warrant and authority to teach it. In such precarious and
unauthenticated principles it may pass for a conjecture, or pious
fraud, or a splendid phantom: it cannot wear the dignity of truth.

Ah, why did not Mr. Davison adhere to the manly, the glorious, strain of
thinking from p. 134 ('Since Prophecy', &c.) to p. 139. ('that mercy')
of this discourse? A fact is no subject of scientific demonstration
speculatively: we can only bring analogies, and these Heraclitus,
Socrates, Plato, and others did bring; but their main argument remains
to this day the main argument--namely, that none but a wicked man dares
doubt it. When it is not in the light of promise, it is in the law of
fear, at all times a part of the conscience, and presupposed in all
spiritual conviction.

Ib. p. 160.

Some indeed have sought the 'star' and the 'sceptre' of Balaam's
prophecy, where they cannot well be found, in the reign of David; for
though a sceptre might be there, the star properly is not.

Surely this is a very weak reason. A far better is, I think, suggested
by the words, 'I shall see him--I shall behold him';--which in no
intelligible sense could be true of Balaam relatively to David.

Ib. p. 162.

The Israelites could not endure the voice and fire of Mount Sinai.
They asked an intermediate messenger between God and them, who should
temper the awfulness of his voice, and impart to them his will in a
milder way.

'Deut'. xviii. 15. Is the following argument worthy our consideration?
If, as the learned Eichhorn, Paulus of Jena, and others of their school,
have asserted, Moses waited forty days for a tempest, and then, by the
assistance of the natural magic he had learned in the temple of Isis,
'initiated' the law, all our experience and knowledge of the way in
which large bodies of men are affec