may be evidenced to natural reason through the credibility of the witness, and therefore, that faith is possible. But because reason is competent to judge of the credibility of the witness, we must not conclude that it is itself a competent witness to the fact of revelation. This conceded, the second answer is inadmissible, for the fact of revelation is neither intuitively certain nor internally demonstrable.

2. The answer just dismissed is that of the Rationalists, and is, in one of its forms, substantially the one which we ourselves gave in all we preached and wrote on the subject while associated with the Unitarians. This second answer is the Protestant answer, and the one, if we understand him, adopted by the writer in the Christian Examiner. This assumes that the Bible is the witness; that is, the Bible interpreted by the private reason of the believer, availing himself of such aids, philological, critical, historical, &c., as may be within his reach. But this answer cannot be accepted, because, without an infallible authority independent of the Bible, it is impossible, 1. To settle the canon; 2. To establish the sufficiency of the Scriptures; 3. To determine their genuine sense.

The Bible can be adduced as the witness only in the character of an authentic record of the revelation actually made; because, according to its own confession, as we may find on examining it, it was not the original medium of the revelation itself. The revelation, according to the Bible itself, in great part at least, was in the first instance made orally, and orally published before it was committed to writing. This is especially true of the Christian revelation, in so far as distinguished from the Jewish. It was communicated orally to the Apostles by Jesus Christ, and by them orally to the public; and converts were made, and congregations of believers gathered, before one word of it was written. The writing was subsequent to the teaching and believing, and evidently, therefore, the primitive believers believed without having any authority for believing, or had an authority for believing independent of written documents. To them what we term the Bible was not the witness. It, then, was not the original witness, or, as we have said, the original medium of the revelation. Its value, then, must consist entirely in the fact, that it faithfully records, in an authentic form, what was actually revealed. It is, then, only as a record that it can be adduced as evidence. But a record is no evidence till authenticated. It cannot authenticate itself; for, till authenticated, its testimony is inadmissible. It must be authenticated by some competent

authority independent of itself. This authentication of the Bible as a record of the revelation made is what we call settling the canon.

Now, it is obvious, that, till the canon is settled, we have no authentic record, no Bible, to adduce. We may have a number of books bound up together, to which the printer has given the title of The Bible; but what we want is not the book called the Bible, but authentic records to which we may appeal as evidence; and if the book we call the Bible contains books which are not authentic records, or does not contain all that are, we cannot appeal to it as evidence; for we may, in the one case, take for revelation what is not revelation, and, in the other, leave out what is revelation. This is evident of itself. We must, then, settle the canon. But where is the authority to settle it?

The authority must be, 1. Independent of the Bible; 2. Infallible. But the advocates of the answer we are considering admit no infallible authority but that of the Bible itself. Therefore they have no authority by which to settle the canon, or to determine what is Bible or what is not Bible.

It will not do to say, the canon is all those books which have been received by the Church as canonical; because the advocates of this answer deny the authority of the Church, and stoutly contend that it may both deceive and be deceived. It will not do to appeal to tradition; for what vouches for the inerrancy of tradition? And what right have Protestants to appeal to tradition, whose authority they do not admit, and which they contend may err and does err on many and the most vital points? Nor will it do to adduce the Fathers; for they only establish what in their time was the tradition or belief of the Church, by no means the intrinsic truth of that tradition or belief. Where, then, is the authority for settling the canon?

There is no authority, on Protestant principles, as is evident from the fact that Protestants have no canon. They all exclude from the canon established by the Church several books which the Church holds to be canonical. As to the remaining books, they dispute whether all are canonical or not. Luther rejects the Catholic Epistle of St. James, which he denominates "an epistle of straw," and also doubts the canonicity of several others. Mr. Andrews Norton, a learned and leading Unitarian, formerly a professor in the Divinity School, Cambridge, rejects pretty much the whole of the Old Testament, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistles of James and Jude,

the second of Peter, and the Apocalyse, in the New Testament, casts suspicion on the canonicity of all the Pauline Epistles, strikes out the first chapters of Matthew and Luke, and such portions of the remaining books as are demanded by the conveniences of his critical canons, or the exigencies of his dogmatic theology. Not a few of our Unitarians restrict the canon to the four Gospels. Several of the Germans strike from these the Gospel according to St. John; while Strauss, Feuerbach, and the Rev. Theodore Parker, the distinguished pastor of the Unitarian church in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, regard the remaining Gospel narratives rather as a collection of anecdotes illustrating the notions of the early Christian believers, than as authentic histories of events which actually transpired; and the great body of Liberal Christians, who are the Protestants of Protestants, agree that the Bible is so loosely written, is so filled with metaphor and Oriental hyperbole, that no argument, especially no doctrine, can be safely built on single words, or even single sentences, however plain, positive, and uncontradicted, or unmodified by other portions of Scripture, their meaning may seem to be. It is evident, from this statement of facts, that Protestants have no canon; that each private man is at liberty to settle the canon according to his own judgment or caprice; and therefore that they have no authentic record to adduce as evidence of the fact of revelation. They must agree among themselves what is Bible, what is inspired Scripture, and authenticate the record, before they can legitimately introduce it as an infallible witness.

But pass over the difficulty of settling the canon; suppose the canon to be settled according to the decision of the Church, and that, by an inconsistency which in the present case cannot be avoided, the authority of the Church to settle the canon is conceded; still there remains the question of the sufficiency of the Scriptures. The record, however authentic it may be, can be evidence only for what is contained in it. If it does not contain the whole revelation, it is not evidence for the whole. If not evidence for the whole, it is not sufficient; for it is the whole revelation, not merely a part, to which the witness is needed to testify.

That the Scriptures do contain the whole revelation is not to be presumed prior to proof; because they themselves testify that they are not, at least only in part, the original medium of the revelation. If the revelation had been, in the first instance, made by writing, and by writing only, then, if we had the en

tire written word, we should have the right to conclude that we had the whole revealed word. But since a part of the revelation, to say the least, was communicated orally, taught and believed before the writing was commenced, we cannot conclude from the possession of the entire written word to the possession of the entire revealed word, unless we have full evidence that the whole revealed word has been written. The fact of the sufficiency of the Scriptures is not, then, to be presumed from the fact of their canonicity. It is a fact to be proved, not taken

for granted.

But this fact cannot be proved by tradition, by the authority of the Church, or by the testimony of the Fathers; for these all, on Protestant principles, are fallible, and not to be depended upon; and, moreover, they all testify against the fact in question. It cannot be proved by reason; because reason takes cognizance not of the fact of revelation, but simply of the motives of credibility. It must be proved by an authority above reason, and, as already established, by an authority which cannot err. But the Bible is asserted to be the only inerrable authority. Therefore it must be proved from the Bible itself. But the Bible proves no such thing, for it nowhere professes to contain the whole revelation which has been made, but even indicates to the contrary. Therefore the sufficiency of the Scriptures cannot be proved. But the sufficiency of the Scriptures must mean that they are sufficient to teach not only the whole revelation of God, but the fact that they do teach the whole; for without this no one can know whether he has the faith God commands him to have, or not. But in failing to prove their sufficiency, they fail to prove this fact; therefore, by failing to prove their sufficiency, they prove their own insufficiency.

It may be replied, that, though the Scriptures may not contain a full record of all that was revealed, they nevertheless contain all that it is necessary to be believed in order to be saved. We considered this in our former number, in our review of the Lectures of Bishop Hopkins, on the British Reformation. We reply now, 1. That the command of God to us is not to believe the Bible, or the written word, but the revelation which he has made; and therefore we are not to presume that we have the faith required, from the fact that we believe the whole written word, unless we have first established the fact that the written word is commensurate with the revealed word. 2. God, we know by natural reason, cannot reveal what he does not re

quire to be believed; for the truth revealed while unbelieved, so far as unbelieved, is as if unrevealed, and therefore its revelation has no sufficient reason. But God cannot act without a sufficient reason. No sufficient reason for the revelation of truth, but that it should be believed, can be conceived, or possibly exist. Therefore God reveals it that it should be believed. Then he requires it to be believed. No one can fail to do what God requires, without sin. If we cannot fail to believe what God has revealed, without sin, we cannot be saved without believing it. Therefore, it is necessary to salvation to believe all that God has revealed. Again:

God cannot make a revelation and require us to believe it, without making it so evident that we can have no intellectual reason for not believing it. Unbelief, then, must be the result of some perversity of the will, some moral repugnance, which withholds us from the consideration of the truth revealed, and the evidences of the fact of its revelation. But this perversity of will, this moral repugnance, is a sin, and as much so in the case of one truth revealed as in the case of another. Therefore we cannot refrain from believing what God has revealed, without sin. Therefore it is necessary to believe all that God has revealed, in order to be saved. Therefore the Scriptures do not contain all that it is necessary to believe for salvation, unless they contain all that God has revealed.

3. But waiving these considerations, it is either a fact that the Scriptures do contain all that is necessary to salvation, or it is not. If it be a fact, it is a fact which must be proved, and proved by a competent authority. The only competent authority, on Protestant principles, is the Bible itself. If the Bible asserts that it contains all that is necessary to be believed in order to be saved, then it must be conceded that it does. If it assert no such thing, then the proposition is false. But the Bible nowhere asserts that it contains all that is necessary to be believed in order to be saved. Therefore, the Bible does not contain all that is necessary to be believed; for this fact itself, of the sufficiency of the faith it does contain, is itself essential to that sufficiency.

But even admitting the Scriptures may contain the whole revelation, it is not possible by private reason alone to be infallibly certain of their genuine sense. To believe that the Scriptures contain the whole word of God is not to believe that word itself. It is merely believing them to be authoritative, which is indeed something, and, in this age of infidelity, ration