Joseph dreamed that he saw an angel, that the angel told him his wife was with child by God himself, (the Holy Ghost being God), and ver. 24, "Then Joseph being raised from his sleep, did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him, and took unto him his wife." But did Joseph dream? Perhaps he did; but whether he did or did not, clear enough it is that he, and he alone, could relate that he had dreamed; whether or not he did make such a relation we are not told, but we are left to infer that he did, because somebody, nobody knows who, has written that he did say he had dreamed. But if he had dreamed, and had personally related his dream to every one of us, would that be any reason for our believing that God had got his wife with child, and that an angel had been sent to tell him so? Talk of blasphemy; in what can this relation be paralleled as blasphemous, except indeed by the grossest credulity? A poor, ignorant man relates a dream, and all the world are called upon not only to believe his relation of that dream, absurd, abominable, and ridiculous as it is, but to place their everlasting happiness upon the absurd relation, to inculcate a belief for it into their children, to waste their substance in paying people to preach it, and to persecute to death those whose minds cannot receive the monstrous doctrine as undoubted truth. Moral evidence there is none, there can be none;--there is nothing in the story which can be compared and contrasted; there is nothing out of it which can elucidate it; it is nothing more than a pretended relation of a credulous man--_That he, being a sleep, had dreamed a dream._: According to the account given by St. Luke, not one word of all this story is true. St. Luke. Chap. I.--Here the story is altogether, from the beginning to the end, a different one from that told by Matthew. Here there is no account, 1. Of Mary being found with child. 2. Of Joseph's intention to put her away. 3. Of Joseph's dreaming. 4. Of the angel appearing to him. 5. Of his changing his mind, and resolving to keep her. It should be observed, that these five items include the whole account in Matthew. So, in Luke, not one of the circumstances related are told by Matthew. In Matthew, Joseph is made the important personage, while poor Mary seems to have been ignorant of all that was passing; in Luke she is made the important personage, and poor Joseph is now as ignorant as Mary was according to the former relation.