201 



In answer to this formidable apparatus of reasoning and 

 objection, I shall consider, I hope with impartiality and can- 

 dour, the several arguments that have been detailed, and 

 trust I shall be able to demonstrate, that the intrinsic weight 

 and importance of tiie Avhole, should not be sufficient to in- 

 duce us to reject the authority of the text, or to surrender 

 the principles on which we have attempted to explain it. 



I. If, indeed, the assertion contained in this statement, was 

 accurate or demonstrable, little would be the resources of 

 argument, or little the hopes of conviction in favour of the 

 passage : Ingenuity might cavil, dexterity might parry, and 

 talent might sophisticate in vain ; the weapons of controvers\^ 

 would be wielded without success, aud the unbiassed voice of 

 truth must ultimately triumph. But when I know that this 

 assertion is false, in so much as we can depend on the fide- 

 lity of all the versions and ail the manuscripts Avhich indus- 

 try could accumulate or collect during so many ages, and 

 when 1 perceive the learned author, who has proposed it with 

 so much hardihood and decision, has 07//y been enabled to 

 derive it as an inductional result from the few circumstances 



~ i^ " . of 



mitteJ, Samuel must have been too young to have succeeded Eli, who died in the begin- 

 ning ot it; and he could not have been in the decline of life when he annointed Saul to 

 be king, L.Saml. viii. 1. Upon the whole, computing the years of the period upon the 

 principles already pointed oui, and assigning 25 years as the terra of Joshua's adminis 

 nation, and 2 as the intevval between his death and the first servitude, according to 

 Josephus, Apicanus, and other ancient Jewish and Christian writers, the sum will amount 

 5+0 years." K 



