In whatever age,
therefore, after Moses, these forgeries were committed, it were
impossible they should have been believed--every one must have known
they had not even heard of them aforetime, much less been taught all
these burdensome precepts by their forefathers."
"Still the cunning and wily priests might have prepared men's minds for
the discovery, having themselves deposited these writings in the ark."
"A manifest impossibility, my lord, and for this plain reason: those
writings profess to be a book of statutes, the standing law of the land,
a code of ordinances by which the people had all along been governed.
Could any person invent a body of statutes for this good realm of
England, and make it pass upon the nation as the only book of laws which
they had ever known or observed? Could any man, could any priest, or
conspiracy of priests, have persuaded the Jews they had owned and obeyed
these ordinances from the time of Moses, when they had not even so much
as heard of them in times past?"
"These rites, it is most likely, having their origin in the simplest
occurrences, might still have been practised prior to the forgeries; and
these books, by allusions to them, deceived the nation, causing it to
believe they were performed in memory of some miraculous events which
never happened.
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