answer, before he can have any solid reason for his faith. It will not do to call upon us to prove the negative; for, even if we could not prove that it is impossible from the Bible and private reason to become infallibly certain of the genuine sense of the word of God, it would not follow that we can from them obtain the infallible certainty without which there is no faith, and, if no faith, no salvation. He who affirms the proposition must prove it, not for the sake of meeting the logical conditions of his opponent's argument, for that is an affair of small moment; but for himself, for his own mind, to have in himself and for himself a well grounded faith. Now, how will he prove this proposition, that from the Bible and private reason alone he can ascertain the genuine sense of the word of God, and know infallibly that he has that sense?

Will he prove this proposition from the Bible? He is bound by his own principles to do this; for this is his rule of faith, and his rule of faith should rest on Divine authority. But he admits no Divine authority but the Bible. Then he must prove it from the Bible, or admit that he has no sufficient authority for it. Can he prove it from the Bible? Not in express terms, for the Bible in express terms does not assert it, as is well known. It can be proved from the Bible only by means of certain passages which are assumed to imply it. But whether these do imply it or not depends on the interpretation we give them. It can be proved from Scripture, then, only by a resort to interpretation. But the interpretation demands the application, the use of the rule, as the condition of establishing it. But how determine that the interpretation which authorizes the rule is not itself a misinterpretation, especially since it is an interpretation which is disputed? Can the rule be proved from reason? Not from reason, as the faculty of intuition; because the fact, that from the Bible and private reason alone we can infallibly determine what it is that God has actually revealed, is evidently not intuitively certain. From reason, as the vis ratiocinativa ? From what data shall we conclude to it? It may be said, that God is just, that he has made a revelation, commanded us to believe it, and made our belief of it the condition sine qua non of salvation; but that he would not be just in so doing, if this revelation were not infallibly ascertainable in its genuine sense by the prudent exercise of natural reason. Ascertainable by natural reason in one method or another, we grant; but by private reason and the Bible alone, we deny the consequence: for God may have made the revelation ascertainable only by a di

vinely commissioned and supernaturally guided and protected body of teachers, and the office of natural reason to be to judge of the credibility of this body of teachers. From the fact that the revelation is addressed to reasonable beings, and is to be believed by such, and therefore must be made intelligible, it does not necessarily follow that it must be intelligible from the Scriptures and private reason alone. For this would imply that the Scriptures were intended to be the medium and the only medium through which God makes his revelation to men; the very question in dispute.

Can it be proved as a matter of fact, from experience? We have before us the history of Protestant sects for the last three hundred years. A three hundred years' experience ought to suffice to demonstrate the possibility of their ascertaining the sense of God's word, if it be thus ascertainable. be thus ascertainable. Yet Protestants during this long period have done little else than vary their interpretations, dispute, wrangle, divide, subdivide, and subsubdivide, on the question of what it is God has revealed. They are now split up into some five or six hundred sects. There is not a single doctrine in which they all agree; not a single doctrine has been asserted by one that has not been denied by another. The writer in the Examiner is a conscientious and devout Unitarian, and yet how large a portion of his Protestant brethren will not deem it an excess of courtesy on our part to treat him and his associates as Christian believers ? The Gospel according to the late Dr. Channing has very little affinity with the Gospel according to Dr. Beecher. Now, truth is one, and can admit of but one true interpretation. Of these many hundred Protestant interpretations, only one at most can be the true interpretation; all the rest are false interpretations, and their adherents are no Christian believers. Can any Protestant say with infallible certainty that his interpretation is the true one? If not, how can he elicit an act of faith? If he cannot elicit an act of faith, how can he be a Christian?

The writer in the Examiner makes very light of these different interpretations of the word of God, and thinks difference of interpretation can do no great harm, because, in his judgment, over it all there may prevail a harmony of sentiment and a harmony of life." But he mistakes the end of unity of faith. Unity of faith is essential because truth is one, and there can be but one true faith, and without this true faith salvation is not possible, as before proved. Sine fide impossibile est placere Deo; and this must needs be the true faith, not a false faith, which

in fact is no faith at all. Our Unitarian friend seems to imagine that what we are required to believe is, not the truth, but what we think to be the truth; that is, we are required to believe the truth not as it is in Jesus, but merely as it is in ourselves! Does he find any proof of this convenient doctrine in the Scriptures? Can he adduce a "Thus saith the Lord" for it? If not, according to his own principles, it rests only on human authority, on which he does not allow us to believe; for he makes it the duty of the believer to stand up firm against all human dictation in matters of belief. In this he is right, and we must have higher authority than even his, before we can consent to regard any man's constructions of the truth, unless we have infallible authority for believing them the true constructions, as the truth Almighty God commands us to believe, and for not believing which we must lie under his wrath and condemnation.

No argument can be drawn, it is evident, from experience, to prove that from the Bible and private reason alone we can determine with infallible certainty what is the revelation of God. So far as experience throws any light on the subject, it warrants the opposite conclusion, and makes it pretty nearly certain that without something else faith is out of the question. Protestants, in fact, have no faith; nay, so far from having any faith, nearly all of them deny its possibility, in the sense in which it is any thing more than a strong inward persuasion. They have, as we have seen, no authority from the Bible, from reason, or from experience, for their rule of faith; and they cannot be such poor logicians as to infer that they can have faith by virtue of a rule which is not authorized. This is, no doubt, a serious matter for them; for, ever must ring in their ears sine fide impossibile est placere Deo,- qui non crediderit condemnabitur. We must, then, either give up the possibility of faith, or seek some other than the Protestant answer to the question, Who or what is the witness to the fact of revelation?

3. The insufficiency of this answer has been felt even by Protestants themselves, and some of them have proposed a third answer, which we may denominate Private Illumination, because it is a revelation made for the special benefit of him who receives it, and not a revelation to be communicated by him for the faith or confirmation of the faith of others. It is contended for under various forms, but the more common form, and the one which principally concerns us in this discussion, is the Calvinistic, or what is usually denominated Christian Expe

rience. This concedes the defectiveness of the logical evidence of the fact of revelation, and pretends that it is supplied by a certain interior illumination from the Holy Ghost in the fact of regeneration, whereby the believer is enabled to know by his own experience the truth of the doctrines he believes or is required to believe. The famous Jonathan Edwards was a great advocate for this, and sets it forth with considerable ability in his Treatise on the Affections, and especially in a sermon on The Reality of the Spiritual Light, preached at Northampton in 1734. It is insisted on, we believe, by all our Protestant sects that claim to be Evangelical. Indeed, this, in their estimation, constitutes the chief mark by which Evangelicals are distinguished from Non-evangelicals.

That there is a Christian sense, so to speak,-internal tradition as it is called, to distinguish it from the external, which belongs to Christians, and which makes them altogether better judges of what is Christian truth than are those who are out of the pale of Christendom, and that the regenerate, the elect, those who belong to the soul of the Church, have a clearer perception, a more vivid appreciation, of the truth, beauty, grandeur, and worth of Christian faith than have the unregenerate, we of course very distinctly and cheerfully admit. We also admit, and contend, that "faith is the gift of God," not merely because it is belief in truth which God has graciously revealed, as our Unitarian friends apparently maintain, but because no man can believe, even now that the truth is revealed, without the aid of divine grace, that is to say, without grace supernaturally bestowed. Faith is a virtue which has merit; but no virtue possible without the aid of divine grace has merit, that is, merit in relation to the reward of eternal life. The grace of faith is absolutely essential to the eliciting of the act of faith. So far we recognize our Calvinistic brethren as orthodox.

But wherein lies the necessity of this grace, and for what is it needed? Not to supply the defect of evidence, but to incline the will. Unbelief is a sin, and a sin of no small magnitude; but this sin is not in the intellect, for sin is predicable only of the will. Yet, if the evidence of a given doctrine were insufficient to convince the intellect, there could be no sin in the will's refusing to believe it. No man is to blame for not believing what is not infallibly evidenced to his understanding. The sin is in refusing to believe what is so evidenced; for such refusal can result only from some moral repugnance to the truth, or perversity of the will, which withholds the man from the con

templation of the truth and consideration of its evidence. God has made a revelation, and given infallible evidence that he has made it, and men refuse to believe it because they have a moral repugnance to it. Herein is the sin of unbelief. The grace of faith is needed not to strengthen the evidence, nor even to open the eyes of the mind to its completeness, but to overcome this repugnance, and to incline the will to believe. Here, in the region of the will, divine grace is indispensable to eliciting the act of faith.

But the view which makes the grace of faith necessary to supply the defect of logical evidence cannot be admitted. If the grace bestowed in the fact of regeneration be necessary to supply the defect of evidence, it follows, that, prior to regeneration, there is no sufficient evidence for believing. But where there is no sufficient evidence for believing, the refusal to believe is not a sin. Therefore, prior to regeneration, unbelief is not a sin. The obligation to believe does not begin till the evidence be complete. The unregenerate, then, are under no obligation to believe, and do not in any manner sin by not believing. This is evidently not the Christian doctrine, for God commands all men to repent and believe in his Son.

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But the fact of regeneration, according to our Calvinistic brethren, consists preeminently in the communication of the grace of faith and they would at once deny the reality of the conversion, if there were not both habitual and active faith. There is, according to them, no amissibility of grace. which it follows, that, after regeneration, unbelief is impossible. Before regeneration it is possible, but not a sin. Therefore unbelief is never a sin, a most consoling conclusion to all infidels and misbelievers. Yet the New Testament makes want of faith in Jesus Christ, or, what is the same thing, the rejection of the Son, a ground of condemnation.

In another form, the doctrine of private illumination is made to mean not merely the confirmation of the believer's faith in a revelation previously made and propounded for his belief, but the medium of the revelation itself. It regards all external revelation, all that may be called historical Christianity, as unnecessary, and teaches that each man has, by grace, the infallible witness in himself, that the Spirit of Truth, promised by Christ to his Apostles to lead them into all truth, is in every man, and has been in every man born into the world, from Adam to the present moment, and is in each man an infallible teacher, revealing and confirming to each man all the truth