his time; likewise they are commanded to be read at stated
periods, and to be taught from father to son throughout all generations,
to the end that no imposition might be practised. In whatever age,
therefore, after Moses, these forgeries were committed, it were
impossible they should have been believed--every one must have known
they had not even heard of them aforetime, much less been taught all
these burdensome precepts by their forefathers."

"Still the cunning and wily priests might have prepared men's minds for
the discovery, having themselves deposited these writings in the ark."

"A manifest impossibility, my lord, and for this plain reason: those
writings profess to be a book of statutes, the standing law of the land,
a code of ordinances by which the people had all along been governed.
Could any person invent a body of statutes for this good realm of
England, and make it pass upon the nation as the only book of laws which
they had ever known or observed? Could any man, could any priest, or
conspiracy of priests, have persuaded the Jews they had owned and obeyed
these ordinances from the time of Moses, when they had not even so much
as heard of them in times past?"

"These rites, it is most likely, having their origin in the simplest
occurrences, might still have been practised prior to the forgeries; and
these books, by allusions to them, deceived the nation, causing it to
believe they were performed in memory of some miraculous events which
never happened."

"What! Is it possible to persuade men they have kept laws which they
have not even heard of? If I were to frame some idle story of things
done a long while ago, and say that our Sabbath was kept holy in
commemoration of these events--this I think, my lord, will answer to the
terms of your assertion. Suppose I made an attempt to persuade the
people this day was kept holy in memory of Julius Caesar or Mahomet, and
that everybody had been circumcised or baptized in their names; that in
the courts of judicature oaths had been taken on these very writings I
had fabricated, and which, of necessity, they could not have seen prior
to my attempt; and that these books likewise contained their laws and
religion--ordinances which they had always acknowledged--is it possible,
I ask, that such a cheat could for one moment have existed? An impostor
would not have dared to make any such references, knowing they must
inevitably have led to the rejection of his testimon