XXII. In his eighth application, he tells us, that in a tragedy of Æschylus, Prometheus is introduced saying, that he was the inventor of divining by the inspection of the entrails of victims. Moses regulated all the forms of worship, and the rights of sacrifices practised by the Israelites. What analogy is there between these two things? Between offering victims to false deities, in order to divine by their entrails, and sacrificing to the true God, there is as great a difference, as there is between due worship and superstition. Besides, what stress should be laid upon what a poet, and a Greek one too, says in a theatrical piece? Don’t we know that fictions are essentially material to poems; and especially to those of this kind, as are likewise particular feigned incidents, whether the subject of the piece is taken from true events or common fables? The text of a tragedy, therefore, should never be quoted as authority, when the matter in question is an enquiry into truth. XXIII. In the ninth application, he observes, that Prometheus is spoken of in a dialogue of Lucian, as one who knew future events. Moses was a prophet. The dialogues of Lucian may, without doubt, be as properly quoted in a matter of this sort, as the tragedy of Æschylus. No one is ignorant that Lucian in his dialogues, gives full scope and play to his imagination; and introduces into them, all the pleasing fictions that occur to him; and especially those, which are conducive to turning into ridicule the deities of Paganism. But I will admit, that the antients held Prometheus as a soothsayer: this being however a quality they acknowledged in an infinite number of others, either all those had a right to be called the representatives of Moses, or none of them had; although there is no more reason for identifying Prometheus with Moses on this account, than there is for comparing him with all the other prophets that are mentioned in holy writ. XXIV. In the tenth application, he says, the fire which Prometheus brought from Heaven, may allude to the lightning mixed with hail, which Moses caused to descend from Heaven to terrify the Egyptians, to the fire with which he consumed two hundred and fifty seditious of those who rebelled at Coré, to the fire of the bush, to the celestial splendid rays on Mount Sinai, when Moses spoke with God, to the refulgent glare of the face of Moses when he came down from the mount, or the perpetual fire which God ordained should ever burn on the altar. Allusions between history and fable are very easy to be met with, if finding the word fire in each of them, is sufficient to establish the similitude, without having regard to union or conformity with respect to any other circumstance whatever. At this rate, all that we find written of water in fabulous histories, may be made applicable to all that is said of water in the scripture.