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

alism, and transcendentalism, no doubt a great deal; but is not the faith required. The command is not to believe that the Bible is an authentic record of the revelation, but to believe the truths revealed, not the Bible, but what the Bible, rightly interpreted, teaches. The truths revealed are the object, or, as the theologians say, objectum materiale of faith; and these evidently are not believed, unless the Bible be believed in its genuine sense, even assuming the Bible to contain them all.

We insist on this point, because it is one on which there are frequent and dangerous mistakes. The matter of faith is these revealed truths, which are fixed and unalterable, universal and eternal, and which must be carefully distinguished from our notions or apprehensions of them, which are dependent on our mental states or conditions, and change and fluctuate as we ourselves change or fluctuate. These notions are not the matter of faith, and to hold fast these is quite another thing from holding fast the truths themselves. If these notions, which are our interpretations or constructions of the truth, were the faith required, the faith would be one thing with one man, another thing with another, and one thing with the same man yesterday, another to-day, and perhaps still another to-morrow. The true faith is an undoubting belief of the TRUTH, not what a man honestly thinks to be the truth, but what really is truth; or otherwise men could be saved under any form of faith, and under one form of faith as well as another, so far as faith is requisite to salvation, for there is probably no form of error which has not its honest adherents. Sincerity in the belief of error cannot be the substitute for Christian faith; for we have found that the faith which is the condition sine qua non of salvation is belief of truth and not falsehood, and of that very truth which Jesus Christ revealed. But this truth we do not believe, unless it lie in our interpretation as it lay in the mind of Jesus Christ himself. If it do not so lie, then we misinterpret it, and the misinterpretation of truth is not truth, and to believe this misinterpretation is to believe not the truth, but something else. If, then, we do not believe the revelation made in the Scriptures, in its genuine sense, in the sense intended by Almighty God, we do not believe the revelation at all.

Now, it is necessary not only that we seize, without any mistake, this genuine sense, but that we be infallibly certain that we have seized it, and not another sense. Even admitting that with nothing but private reason we could hit upon the genuine sense of Scripture, it would avail us nothing, unless we had

this infallible certainty; because without this infallible certainty we could not have faith. Will any man pretend that it is possible by private reason alone to be infallibly certain that we have the genuine sense of the Scriptures? We may, perhaps, feel certain; but this feeling certain is not faith. Faith is a firm, unwavering, and unwaverable conviction of the understanding, as well as a cheerful assent of the will, resulting from the presence of full and infallible evidence. The mere feeling is worth nothing. Every enthusiast, every fanatic, has the feeling; but he who has nothing else is a mere reed shaken with the wind, or a wild beast let loose in society, as unacceptable to God as unprofitable to himself or dangerous to his associates. It is not this Almighty God demands of us, and it is not for the want of this that he places us under condemnation and suffers his wrath to abide upon us. No; we must have certainty, an intellectual certainty, certainty which the mind can grasp, and its hold of which all the craftiness of subtle sophists, all the allurements of the world, all the temptations of the flesh, and all the assaults of hell, cannot induce it for one moment to relax. We must have a faith which can be proof against all trials, come they from what quarter they may; for our life is a warfare, an incessant warfare, and there come to all of us moments when nothing but a firm, fixed, and unalterable faith can sustain us, moments when feeling, when the dearest affections of the heart, when all that can powerfully affect us as creatures of time and sense, conspire against us, and we must stand up against them and even against ourselves. O, in these terrible moments, in the sacred name of Christian charity, mock us not with a faith that melts away into mere feeling, and vanishes in mere caprice!

Now, it needs no words to prove that a faith which is not grounded on the word of God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived, will not answer our wants, will not be proof against the many fiery trials" to which it must needs in this world be subjected. But we have no such faith merely because we have the Bible in our possession, nor because the Bible contains the word of God, nor because we read and study it and believe that we believe it. We have such a faith only on condition of knowing infallibly that what we take to be the meaning of the Bible is God's meaning; for the faith is belief of the truth as it is in Jesus, not as it may be in us. We ask again, Can private reason give us this certainty?

This is a serious question, and one which the Protestant must