conversed with the patriarchs, talked with Moses in the bush, displayed his tremendous glory at Sinai, and spake by the prophets, is what St Chrysostom thought the Hebrews not far enough advanced in the theory of revelation to bear. If he thought them too weak, to bear the general doctrine of our Lord's DEITY, his judgment would be of little weight, since St Paul thought otherwise. For, in the second verse of the first chapter of this epistle, the apostle enters upon that abstruse subject, which, in the first verse, according to Dr Priestley's interpretation of St Chrysostom, he is supposed to shun; in the third verse, he goes deep into the mystery; and, in the eighth, he applies to Christ what the Psalmist of God, that "his throne is for ever and ever, says the sceptre of his kingdom a sceptre of righteousness:" and the manner, in which the words of the Psalmist are introduced, shews that the apostle thought, that they, to whom he wrote, could not but join with him in this application. Dr Priestley, I suppose, thought it as well to keep it out of the reader's sight, that St Chrysostom, in this very passage, speaks of Christ as the Jehovah of the Old Testament. He thought it best to keep the true meaning of the passage out of sight; and for this reason he chose to take up the corrupt and senseless reading of the Heidelberg edition. (a bad copy of the Veronese text, in a very small

part only collated with the Palatin and Augustan manuscripts,) and rejecting an emendation unanimously received by later editors, who took the pains to rectify the text by a laborious collation of many manuscripts, to make the best of the passage for himself, by correcting in the wrong place. Thus indeed we have a beautiful specimen of an ancient father corrected by an Unitarian!

14. I must not quit the subject of these quotations, without observing, that the learned reader, in his first homily of St Chrysostom upon the epistle to the Hebrews, will find St Chyrsostom's own confutation of the proof, which Dr Priestley' attempts to bring from his works; that it was a thing known and admitted in his time, that the apostles had been silent upon the subject of our Lord's divinity; and that the orthodox, to account for this acknowledged fact, were reduced to the necessity of supposing, that they temporized. What the silence of the apostles, upon this subject was, may be learned from the epistle to the Hebrews. What St Chrysostom's opinion of their temporizing caution was, may be learned from his first homily upon that epistle. Whoever reads only the two first sections of that homily, will perceive, that the prudence, which St Chrysostom ascribes to the apostles, was a prudence in

the manner of preaching mysterious doctrines, not a dishonest caution in dissembling difficulties. Had he ascribed to them any such base art, the epistle to the Hebrews had been his confutation. His first homily on that epistle is the confutation of those, who, in ignorance, or in art, would ascribe to him so unworthy a notion of the founders of our faith.

CHAPTER SECOND.

Of the church of Elia, or Jerusalem, after Adrian-Mosheim's narration confirmed.—Christians not included in Adrian's edicts against the Jews.-The return from Pella, a fact affirmed by Epiphanius.-Orthodox Hebrew Christians existing in the world long after the times of Adrian.

THE next fact that comes in question, is the existence of a body of orthodox Hebrew Christians at Jerusalem, after the final dispersion of the Jews by Adrian,

2. In the seventh of my letters to Dr Priestley, I stated briefly, what I take to be the true account of the changes, which took place in the ecclesiastical state of Palestine, upon the banishment of the Jews by Adrian, The ecclesiastical history of those times is so very general and imperfect, that whoever attempts to make out a consistent story from the ancient writers, which are come down to us, will find himself under a necessity of helping out their broken accounts by his own conjectures. In the general view of the transactions of that time, I agree almost entirely with Mosheim; who, in my judgment, hath, with great penetration, drawn forth the whole truth; or what must seem to us the truth, because it carries the highest air

of probability, from the obscure hints, which the historian Sulpitius furnishes, connected with other hints, which, though unobserved by Dr Priestley, are to be found in other writers of antiquity. Dr Priestley speaks of a series of facts,* and of many circumstances, which, he says, I have added to Mosheim's account, and "must know that I addcd." If Dr Priestley consulted that part of Mosheim's work, De Rebus Christianorum ante Constantinum, to which the margin of my letters referred him (but in Mosheim, as in Grotius, it is likely that he turned to the wrong place), if he opened Mosheim in the place to which I referred, he must know that I have added no circumstance, to Mosheim's account; but such as every one must add, in his own imagination, who admits Mosheim's representation of the fact in its principal parts. He must know, that three circumstances in particular, which he is pleased to mention among my additions, are affirmed by Mosheim: the conflux of Hebrew Christians to Elia; the motive, which induced the majority to give up their ancient customs; namely, the desire of sharing in the privileges of the Ælian colony; and the retreat of those, who could not bring themselves to give their ancient customs up, to remote

• Second Letters, p. 192.