"Why, Sir, any person of common sense can easily distinguish between a discovery, and a communication as to matters of fact. However, to account for their superior knowledge on these sublime and recondite subjects, without admitting the correctness of their own testimony,'that God spake to _their fathers_,' is absolutely impossible, unless we believe--what would be an outrage on common sense to imagine--that there is more acuteness in mental dulness than in superior intelligence; and that an untutored people, while devoting themselves chiefly to agriculture and the rearing of cattle, could eclipse, by the grandeur and sublimity of their discoveries, a people who has long enjoyed the highest degree of intellectual culture." "But, Sir, your Scriptures prove that the Jews had amongst them men of genius and of great mental power. Isaiah, for example, in sublimity and lofty grandeur of conception and description, has no superior in any age or country; and the pastoral odes of David equal, if they do not surpass, anything we meet with in Pope or Addison. As a legislator, Moses stands at the head of his order, and, if my memory serves me, the great critic Longinus says he was no ordinary man; and, therefore, it is not a matter of such wonderment that they made discoveries of the Deity which no other philosophers ever made." "But you forget that what you call their discoveries were inspirations, which came upon them from the Source of all knowledge; and to these inspirations they uniformly attribute their knowledge of the only true God, and that scheme of salvation which he had devised on behalf of man. And this belief was entertained by all the tribes of Israel, not simply because their teachers said so, but because, they confirmed the truthfulness of their testimony by signs, and wonders, and divers miracles." "And yet after all their novel and sublime discoveries in regard to these all-important subjects, and after all the miraculous attestations which you say were supplied in confirmation of their truthfulness, we find that they apostatized from the worship of their Deity, and relapsed again and again into idolatrous worship and practices, and became corrupt and debased like the people of other nations."