It is a lying testimony, therefore, and we cannot receive it.' Yet do we
find the children of Israel commemorating, handing down, and instructing
their children from age to age into the meaning and design of these
memorials, which instruction must at some time or another have had a
beginning, having its commencement with the very events to which they
refer, which events it would then have been impossible to make the
people believe against the plain evidence of their senses. Is the chain
complete, my lord?"
"But what has all this to do with thy religion?--a system far different,
methinks, from the primitive institutions of these remote ages."
"The self-same reasoning will apply, and in precisely the same mode, to
the miracles of our Lord and His apostles, together with their
transmission by records from their times. The histories of the Old and
New Testaments could not have been received at the time they were
written, if they had not been true, because the priesthoods of Levi and
of Christ,--the observance of the Sabbath, the passover, and
circumcision,--the ordinances of baptism and the eucharist, are there
represented as descending by uninterrupted succession from the time of
their respective institution.
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