Ib. p. 160.

  Some indeed have sought the ‘star’ and the ‘sceptre’ of Balaam’s
  prophecy, where they cannot well be found, in the reign of David; for
  though a sceptre might be there, the star properly is not.

Surely this is a very weak reason.  A far better is, I think, suggested by the words, ’I shall see him—­I shall behold him’;—­which in no intelligible sense could be true of Balaam relatively to David.

Ib. p. 162.

The Israelites could not endure the voice and fire of Mount Sinai.  They asked an intermediate messenger between God and them, who should temper the awfulness of his voice, and impart to them his will in a milder way.

‘Deut’. xviii. 15.  Is the following argument worthy our consideration?  If, as the learned Eichhorn, Paulus of Jena, and others of their school, have asserted, Moses waited forty days for a tempest, and then, by the assistance of the natural magic he had learned in the temple of Isis, ‘initiated’ the law, all our experience and knowledge of the way in which large bodies of men are affected would lead us to suppose that the Hebrew people would have been keenly excited, interested, and elevated by a spectacle so grand and so flattering to their national pride.  But if the voices and appearances were indeed divine and supernatural, well must we assume that there was a distinctive, though verbally inexpressible, terror and disproportion to the mind, the senses, the whole ‘organismus’ of the human beholders and hearers, which might both account for, and even in the sight of God justify, the trembling prayer which deprecated a repetition.

Ib. p. 164.

To justify its application to Christ, the resemblance between him and Moses has often been deduced at large, and drawn into a variety of particulars, among which several points have been taken minute and precarious, or having so little of dignity or clearness of representation in them, that it would be wise to discard them from the prophetic evidence.

With our present knowledge we are both enabled and disposed thus to evolve the full contents of the word ‘like’; but I cannot help thinking that the contemporaries of Moses (if not otherwise orally instructed,) must have understood it in the first and historical sense, at least, of Joshua.

Ib. p. 168.

A distinguished commentator on the laws of Moses, Michaelis, vindicates their temporal sanctions on the ground of the Mosaic Code being of the nature of a civil system, to the statutes of which the rewards of a future state would be incongruous and unsuitable.

I never read either of Michaelis’s Works, but the same view came before me whenever I reflected on the Mosaic Code.  Who expects in realities of any kind the sharp outline and exclusive character of scientific classification?  It is the predominance of the characterizing constituent that gives the name