y."

"But surely if this great transaction, the passage of the Red Sea, had
really happened, and in the way thou hast pointed out, the evidence
would not have been suffered to rest solely on the frail and uncertain
records to which thou hast referred. Books of laws, for instance, the
writings of Mahomet, we know have been forged, as even thou wilt
acknowledge."

"True, but those books refer not to miracles and the testimony of
eye-witnesses, nor to laws and ordinances handed down from generation to
generation, even to that time. That Mahomet pretended not to the working
of miracles, he tells us in the Koran. The ridiculous legends related by
his followers are rejected as spurious by the scholars and expounders of
the prophet; and even his converse with the moon, his night journey from
Mecca to Jerusalem, and from thence to heaven, were not performed before
witnesses. The same may be said of the absurd exploits related of the
heathen deities."

"But had not the heathen their priests, their public rites and
sacrifices, equally with the Jews?"

"They had. But it was not even pretended that these rites commenced at
the time when the things which they commemorate were said to have
happened. The Bacchanalia, for example, and other festivals, were
established long after the fabulous events to which they refer. The
priests of Juno and Venus were not appointed by those imaginary deities,
but arose in some after-age, and are therefore no evidence whatever to
the truth of their worship."

"But where is thy proof in the unwritten evidence--monuments which
cannot lie, bearing silent but convincing testimony to the truth of
these miracles?"

"Twelve stones" it is said, were set up at Gilgal to commemorate the
passage over Jordan."

"Ay, in thy book we read it."

"But mark the intention, to which no lying imposture durst have
referred,--to the end, it is written, that when the children of those
who had witnessed this miracle, and their children's children, should
ask their meaning, it should be told them. Now the miracle for which
these stones were set up as a memorial by the eye-witnesses themselves,
could not, as before proved, have been imposed upon the people at the
time it happened, had it not really occurred."

"All this I can safely grant. Yet thou lackest wherewith to conclude
thine argument."

"Bear with me, my lord, until I have made an end. Let us suppose, for
one moment, there was no such miracle wrought as t