er,
why should we not at least set the Bible side by side with Homer,
Herodotus, Virgil, Horace, and others, which have already taken quite
a space in the present work. The Scripture surely contains,
independently of a divine origin, more true _sublimity_, more
exquisite _beauty_, purer _morality_, more important _history_, and
finer strains both of _poetry_ and _eloquence_, than could be
collected within the same compass from all other books that were ever
composed in any age or in any idiom.

The Bible accords in a wonderful manner with universal history. There
is nothing more common in history than the recognition of a God.
Sacred and profane history alike involve this principle. The fictions
of the poets respecting the different ages of the world coincide with
Scripture facts. The first, or Golden Age, is described as a
paradisiacal state, feebly representing the bliss of the first pair in
Eden, Gen. ii. And the second, or Iron Age, described in the fiction
of Pandora and her fatal box of evils, which overspread the earth, is
in accordance with the history of the introduction of evil into the
world, Gen. iii. The celebrated Vossius shows, with great ingenuity,
the similitude there is between the history of Moses and the fable of
Bacchus. The cosmogony of the ancient Phoenicians is evidently similar
to the account of creation given by Moses, and a like assertion may be
made respecting the ancient Greek philosophy. Travel north, south,
east and west, and you find the period employed in creation used as a
measure of time, though no natural changes point it out as a measure,
as is the case with the month and year. Consult the heathen classics,
the records of our Scythian ancestors, the superstitions of Egypt, of
the Indies, both East and West, and, indeed, of all the varied forms
in which superstition has presented herself, and in one or in all you
meet with evidences of a universal flood, of man's fall, of the
serpent having been the instrument in it, of propitiatory sacrifices,
of the expectation of a great deliverer. The long lives of men in the
early ages of the world are mentioned by Berosus, Manetho, Hiromus and
Helanicus, as also by Hesoid and many other writers quoted by
Josephus, and afterwards by Servius, in his notes on Virgil.
Pausanius, Philostratus, Pliny and several other writers give us
accounts of the remains of gigantic bodies which have been found in
the earth, serving in some degree to confirm Moses