other test than the quality of these compositions, we never, by means of this criterion alone, could have made our way to them, or found them all out. It makes all the difference in the world, when the search is defined and limited to a certain number of books for the purpose of verification— instead of our being cast abroad on the interminable sea of all authorship; and there left to our own measures, or to steer as we may for the purpose of discovery. The question, Are these inspired books? is a truly different one from the question, What books are inspired? To satisfy the former question, the moral and experimental probation might be altogether competent-while utterly powerless so to guide the inquirer, as that he shall be able to cull and to select the few writings which are inspired, out of the mighty and numerous host which lie around him. It is by the historical probation that we discover the authorship of the Bible and of all its parts-even as at the termination of the middle ages, we discovered the authorship of Homer and Virgil and Cicero. It is by the experimental probation that we verify this authorship.

14. In these circumstances we must perceive the importance of a Church, as an institute for the secure and copious transmission of the records of inspiration. Even though in centuries of corruption and darkness, the use of or demand for the scriptures should have so far subsided, as that all the copies of them, which, in better times, might have been found throughout the habitations of the people, had either been destroyed by the hand of

violence, or perished by their own natural decay,— the same causes of extermination did not take full effect in those numerous establishments, which had been raised for the maintenance and accommodation of ecclesiastics, by the piety or the superstition of other times. They were in fact the monks and men of various sacred orders in the Christian church, who performed the same service in behalf of the scriptures, which, under the old dispensation, was done by the priests and Levites of Israel. It is true that they partook in the general lethargy of the period; and very many of them made little or no use of their sacred records-yet it is well that these found an asylum in the bosom of convents; and were suffered to lie, though perhaps to lie unread, in places of keeping, respected even through the days of fiercest barbarism, and where, if not useful, at least they were safe. And we know that light and learning did not undergo a total extinction among the ecclesiastics of Christendom-insomuch that to their numerous transcriptions, we mainly stand indebted, both for those manifold copies of the Bible, and those precious relics of ancient literature, to which the mind of Europe awoke at the commencement of the middle ages. It is thus that the scriptures were piloted across this thick and dreary millennium, and that with hundred-fold greater certainty and abundance, than were the best and most respected classics of Greece and Rome. In other words, at the revival of learning, the learned or the priesthood had a hundred-fold better materials for the determination of their questions, respecting the genuine

ness and authorship of the sacred writings-than the learned of general society had, for the genuineness and authorship of all other writings. To the Jewish and the Christian churches respectively, were committed the oracles of God: and so adapted were both institutes, even in spite of the numerous corruptions into which they fell, for the safe custody and the sure transmission of themthat, greatly beyond all the other memorials of past ages, have the Old Testament on the one hand and the New Testament on the other, descended on a firmer historic pathway and with a far surer light of historical evidence, by which to identify and recognise them.

15. Now at the commencement of the great disunion which took place in Christendom, when the old Papal hierarchy was rent asunder, and new Churches sprung into existence-the controversy did not begin with the unlearned of the people, but with the learned of the priesthood. And in settling the public articles of their respective establishments, more especially the books which they should receive and submit to as the directory of their faith, they were the facts of history, and the external evidence grounded thereupon, which formed the proper weapons of their warfare as much so indeed, as prophecy and miracles formed the great means, by which the Jewish and Christian dispensations obtained their first acceptance in the world. And, in determining between genuine and apocryphal scriptures, as between those works of Peter by which though dead he yet speaketh, and the spurious composi

tions of an impostor, they had to proceed on external evidence, even the evidence of testimony -just as much as the superiority of the living Peter over Simon Magus, was vindicated by the palpable superiority of his miracles, or by an external evidence, even the evidence of the senses. The fathers of Protestantism in the work of reforming theology, had the same sort of evidence to proceed upon, with a hundred times greater amount and certainty thereof, in ascertaining both the written relics and the actual state of primitive Christianity that the great parents of the revival of learning had, in ascertaining the relics and the state of ancient literature. The same documentary evidence which awoke the mind of Europe to a purer literature, also awoke it to a purer Christianity, and what the discovery of a Bible did to Luther, that great restorer of a better theology, the discovery of a Virgil may perhaps have done to some restorer of a better learning. An impulse no doubt may have been given to each from the subject matter of their respective volumes, from the elevated doctrine of the one, from the noble and graceful poetry of the other; but the proper track of investigation to which it carried them both, in their search, whether after the sacred or the secular compositions of other days, was altogether an historical one. This, more particularly, was the right and proper ground for the founders of the Reformation to travel on-in determining between the genuine and the counterfeit, on the great question which be the oracles of God. the settlement of this, it was with the manuscripts

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and memorials of other times that they had properly to do, which had been preserved from the wreck of ages, and which Providence had put into their hands. The controversy was held in an upper region. The decision, in the first instance was in the hands of the learned; and it was for them, on the foundation too of an historical evidence, to fix the canon of scripture, or to tell the church at large which be the genuine scriptures of the Old and New Testament. They, by means of the historical probation, made discovery of these; and it was left for the people, by means of the experimental probation, to make verification of them. Calvin antedated the matter wrong, when, in his controversy with the learned of the church of Rome in behalf of the scriptures, he made appeal to that internal evidence which is felt and appreciated by the unlearned-at the time when, fighting his adversaries with their own weapons, he should have urged the argument critically and historically. He has charged it as preposterous, to plead this argument distinct from the internal evidence. But we should reverse the proposition, and call it preposterous in this matter, to place the internal before the external evidence.* In the Christianization of individuals, the experimental probation is the only one resorted to, and the only one real

* Paul cautions the churches against counterfeit epistles as from him; and, to distinguish his own genuine ones from these, he set a particular mark on them. (2 Thess. ii. 2, and iii. 17.) It is a felicitous remark of Jones, "If it be, as Calvin says, preposterous to endeavour by any solid argument to beget a solid credit to the scriptures, distinct from their internal evidence, then it was certainly preposterous in St. Paul to add that mark to his epistles, as an evidence they were his."