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Could they believe him to be snatched away in a whirlwind to a state of annihilation? Then they must have believed, that the only adequate reward of supereminent piety was to be reduced to nothing, or to undergo (what Bishop Warburton deems) the penal sentence pronounced upon sinful man, several centuries before the then ordinary time of undergoing it: in other words, they must have believed, that the sole reward, which he obtained for walking carefully with his God, was a premature extinction of being. Could they believe him to be snatched away to a future state of misery and punishment? Such a belief were yet more absurd and self-contradictory than the last: for, in that case, they must have believed, that the piety of Enoch was rewarded by his being hurried away to torment before his natural term of life was half run out, while to the wicked was granted a longer period of enjoyment and a longer respite from misery. What then could they have consistently believed, save that he was snatched away to a future state of happiness and full reconciliation with God? But, believing this, would they stop here in their belief? I should think not. Fully as they might allow the preeminent piety of Enoch, they would clearly enough perceive, that the distinguishing reward granted to his piety was not a future state of happiness, but an exemption from the penalty of temporal death. Hence, even without any special"

revelation on the subject, they must have inferred analogically from the whole creation of God, that, as like ever consorts with like, the souls of the pious would at length be gathered to Enoch, though their road to happiness might lie through the dark portal of the grave. From the mere well known FACT of Enoch's translation, I see not how the antediluvians, unless their method of reasoning differed most strangely from our own, could possibly have argued in any other manner '.

By a most singular confusion in reasoning, the bishop would in truth prove the ignorance of the antediluvians as to the FACT of Enoch's translation from the alleged obscurity of the PASSAGE in which Moses records that fact. Now, let the passage be as obscure as it may, what has its obscurity to do with the knowledge of the antediluvians? If indeed any writer had been so ludicrously absurd as to maintain, that the antediluvians derived their knowledge of the FACT from the RECORD of Moses; then, doubtless, the alleged obscurity of the RECORD would have been a fair argument against their knowledge of the FACT. But, as their knowledge of the FACT cannot have the slightest concern with either the obscurity or the clearness of a RECORD, written many hundred years after they had all been removed by the hand of death: nothing surely can be more nugatory, than an attempt to prove their ignorance of the FACT from the obscurity of the RECORD penned by Moses. Very possibly Aben-Ezra and Jarchi may have understood the RECORD as intimating nothing more than the immature death of Enoch, and very possibly some among ourselves might have understood it in the same sense had it not been authoritatively explained by the inspired apostle to the Hebrews. But what then? Is this any proof, that the antediluvians were

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- This is the whole, that is necessary to my argument: nor can the belief of the contemporary antediluvians be at all affected by any obscurity in the mode, wherein the Hebrew lawgiver communicated the fact of Enoch's translation to the long posterior Israelites. But, in truth, the Israelites themselves, notwithstanding the gloss of the individuals Aben-Ezra and Jarchi, discerned no such darkness visible in the passage. Even the most careless observer must have been struck with the studied difference of expression, between the manner in which the removal of Enoch is described, and the manner in which the removal of EVERY OTHER antediluvian patriarch is specified. Of ALL, with the single exception of Enoch, it is said, HE DIED: of Enoch ALONE it is said, HE WAS NOT, FOR GOD TOOK HIM. Now, if the removal of Enoch had differed only from the removal of the other patriarchs in the single circumstance of its prematurity; it is impossible to conceive, why Moses should have used, what

ignorant of the FACT? That the FACT itself did occur, we know with absolute certainty from the inspired comment of St. Paul. Hence it is plain, that the knowledge of this FACT, so far as the antediluvians are concerned, would depend upon THE PUBLICITY AND NOTORIOUSNESS OF ITS OCCURRENCE, not upon THE RECORD LONG SUBSEQUENTLY PENNED BY MOSES. Had Moses never written a syllable upon the subject, the knowledge of the antediluvians, as to a contemporary FACT, would clearly not have been one jot affected by his silence.

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on such a supposition must have been, a singularly quaint and affected mode of speaking. Why could he not have said, as any other writer would have done, analogously to his universal method of expression throughout the whole antediluvian genealogy: And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years; and HE DIED? Why should he depart from this natural mode of speech, as if purposely to excite curiosity and to set speculation at work, in order to tell us, with ill-timed variation of phrase, that Enoch walked with God, and HE WAS NOT; FOR GOD TOOK HIM? Accordingly, the opinion of the Hebrew Church, previous to and independent of the authoritative interpretation of St. Paul, seems decidedly to have been, that Enoch was translated to glory without tasting death. The Seventy employ a Greek word, of which the strictly literal versión is God TRANSPOSED him': and, if Josephus be somewhat ambiguous on the subject in his account of the ten antediluvian generations, he afterwards places the abreption of Enoch and the abreption of Elijah upon the very same footing; for he teaches us, that, according to the sacred books, they alike vanished away from the eyes of men,

and their death no one beheld'. But the author of the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus, who

1 Μετέθηκεν αυτον ὁ Θεός. Gen. v. 24.

* Εν ταις ἱεραις αναγεγραπται βιβλοις, ότι γεγονασιν αφανεις, θαναTov d' avtwv sdeis older. Ant. Jud. lib. ix. c. 2. § 2.

flourished at the latest nearly two centuries before the Christian era, is most full and unambiguous and unhesitating on the subject. He directly asserts, that upon the earth no man was created like Enoch: and the reason which he gives for his peculiarity, is, that he was translated or that he was taken from the earth'. Nay even the gloss of Aben-Ezra and Jarchi, unreasonable as it may well seem, leads still to the same doctrinal conclusion, though by a some-. what different course. If the translation of Enoch without death clearly proved to those Israelites, who so understood the passage, that there certainly is a future retributory state: the premature death of that eminently pious man must have equally proved the same doctrine to those Israelites, who favoured the interpretation which has been advocated by Aben-Ezra and Jarchi; for, had they believed that there was no future retributory state, they stood pledged to believe also, that the reward of holiness was a premature extinction of being, while the reward of impiety was length of days and great temporal prosperity.

2. As the antediluvians learned the doctrine of a future state of reward from the miraculous translation of Enoch, so they would equally learn the doctrine of a future state of punishment

1 Ecclesiast. xliv. 16. xlix. 14.

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