and Enfield his
epitomizer, concludes in these words. 'Ethics were so little understood
among the Jews, that, in their whole compilation called the Talmud,
there is only one treatise on moral subjects. Their books of morals
chiefly consisted in a minute enumeration of duties. From the law of
Moses were deduced six hundred and thirteen precepts, which were divided
into two classes, affirmative and negative, two hundred and forty-eight
in the former, and three hundred and sixty-five in the latter. It may
serve to give the reader some idea of the low state of moral philosophy
among the Jews in the middle age, to add, that of the two hundred
and forty-eight affirmative precepts, only three were considered as
obligatory upon women; and that, in order to obtain salvation, it was
judged sufficient to fulfil any one single law in the hour of death;
the observance of the rest being deemed necessary, only to increase the
felicity of the future life. What a wretched depravity of sentiment
and manners must have prevailed, before such corrupt maxims could have
obtained credit! It is impossible to collect from these writings a
consistent series of moral doctrine. (Enfield, B. 4. chap. 3.) It
was the reformation of this wretched depravity of morals which Jesus
undertook. In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should
have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been
muffled by priests who have travestied them into various forms, as
instruments of riches and power to themselves. We must dismiss the
Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the
Eclectics, the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations,
their Logos and Demiurgos, AEons, and Daemons, male and female, with a
long train of &c. &c. &c. or, shall I say at once, of nonsense. We must
reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the
very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphiboligisms into which
they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had
fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta,
and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood
themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and
benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have
performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out
of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his,
and which is as easily di