As to systems of religion alien from Christianity, if any of them have taught the doctrine of eternal life, the reward of obedience, as a dogma of belief, that doctrine is not their boast, but their burden and difficulty; inasmuch as they could never defend it. They could never justify it on independent grounds of deduction, nor produce their warrant and authority to teach it. In such precarious and unauthenticated principles it may pass for a conjecture, or pious fraud, or a splendid phantom: it cannot wear the dignity of truth. Ah, why did not Mr. Davison adhere to the manly, the glorious, strain of thinking from p. 134 ('Since Prophecy', &c.) to p. 139. ('that mercy') of this discourse? A fact is no subject of scientific demonstration speculatively: we can only bring analogies, and these Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, and others did bring; but their main argument remains to this day the main argument--namely, that none but a wicked man dares doubt it. When it is not in the light of promise, it is in the law of fear, at all times a part of the conscience, and presupposed in all spiritual conviction. Ib. p. 160. Some indeed have sought the 'star' and the 'sceptre' of Balaam's prophecy, where they cannot well be found, in the reign of David; for though a sceptre might be there, the star properly is not. Surely this is a very weak reason. A far better is, I think, suggested by the words, 'I shall see him--I shall behold him';--which in no intelligible sense could be true of Balaam relatively to David. Ib. p. 162. The Israelites could not endure the voice and fire of Mount Sinai. They asked an intermediate messenger between God and them, who should temper the awfulness of his voice, and impart to them his will in a milder way. 'Deut'. xviii. 15. Is the following argument worthy our consideration? If, as the learned Eichhorn, Paulus of Jena, and others of their school, have asserted, Moses waited forty days for a tempest, and then, by the assistance of the natural magic he had learned in the temple of Isis, 'initiated' the law, all our experience and knowledge of the way in which large bodies of men are affected would lead us to suppose that the Hebrew people would have been keenly excited, interested, and elevated by a spectacle so grand and so flattering to their national pride. But if the voices and appearances were indeed divine and supernatural, well must we assume that there was a distinctive, though verbally inexpressible, terror and disproportion to the mind, the senses, the whole 'organismus' of the human beholders and hearers, which might both account for, and even in the sight of God justify, the trembling prayer which deprecated a repetition. Ib. p. 164.