to disbelieve them both? Suppose I should meet a peasant coming from a fair, pretending he had seen the king with his guards, and if I should find this to be untrue, would I not deserve to be laughed at, if I credited that he had wrestled with a spirit, or that he was carried up to heaven? This, however, is the case with the Bible. Here we are told that the sun stood Still to protract the bloodshed of that villain Joshua, while, in another place, we read that a city was taken 370 years before that event. Your vaunted prophets were soothsayers, psalmists, and orators, who were generally employed in writing the public records. It is a word applied in the Bible to holy men. These prophets, like the augurs of the heathen, were often detected in falsehoods, and, in the time of Samuel, it would appear, by the Bible itself, that to raise ghosts was a trade as common as that of tailors in our days. You now come to Samuel. You are candid enough to acknowledge with Hartley, that he could not have been the author of the second book, nor of most of the first that go under his name, yet this has been the opinion of the church; and I know of no direct proofs that he wrote the remainder: by what logic do you or Hartley conclude, that Samuel wrote any part of the books ascribed to him? An author is proved not to have written most part of a work ascribed to him, who then would, without direct proofs, proclaim him the writer of some small passage, or any particular part of the work? Who but a clergyman would build a system upon a mutilated, spurious, and insignificant collection of absurdities and wonders? It is, I allow, probable that Samuel wrote something: your quotations prove no more; but what this was, we are, I presume, equally unacquainted with. That the scribes also composed some records of the lives of their kings, I will not deny. The question is, what degree of credit does the mutilated, contradictory, and fabulous collection, said to be made out of these records, deserve?