to cause them both to rebound to a point about equally remote from the sober and undisguised medium of revealed statements. And should the Bible become extinct, and in the course of ages a literary amateur should undertake to recover from the fragments of its literature that might then survive, the precise nature of its teachings; and if in the course of his investigations he should meet with either of the above positions, I ask, how much would he know of the real spirit of the facts which relate to this subject? Would not the idea which he should derive from this relic of our present creeds be as remote from the truth, as ours probably is in reference to the fabulous ages of history? Alas, reader, we believe you will justify us in saying it, the best creed in the universe, should it be preserved as entire as an Egyptian mummy, would be but a meager represention of the Bible to the generations that might arise ages after its own blesssd light had become extinct. As well may we, by looking at the shriveled features of the mummy, divine what was the quality of the soul that once animated them. Perhaps the illustration from this old subject of controversy may not be pertinent. Be it so; the point which we designed to elucidate by means of it, that we ought to be cautious and not transfer to mere matters of opinion the same tenacity with which we should hold to revealed facts, I suppose, will be judged on all hands to be true from other grounds of evidence. And that the fact of such a transfer has done much, first and last, to produce dissensions among christians, we think will be deemed equally unquestionable. Far be it from us to discourage reasoning from the materials of knowledge which have been furnished us by supernatural revelation. We suppose it our privilege to wield these materials in our researches for truth, just as we do those which we obtain from oth er sources. God, by bestowing them upon us, has made them our property, and blessed be his name, they have proved the richest part of our inheritance. They unlock the dark mystery of our origin, our duty, our condition, and our destiny. It is not against reasoning from the facts of Scripture that we speak ; but against distorting them, or giving to the conclusions to which we are conducted, the same authority that we do to the facts themselves. No kind of knowledge can be improved by changing the materials of which it is composed into unnatural forms; and it never can fail to produce collisions between different inquirers, for each to set up his own conclusions as the exact measure of belief and investigation in the rest.* Let us advance our opinions and support them by such arguments as have convinced ourselves. What subserves a better purpose in the world of mind than discussion? But, then let us do it as our opinions, and not in an authoritative manner, as if they admitted of no appeal.. "The prophet that hath a dream let him tell a dream, (but be sure and tell it as a dream, and he that hath an opinion let him advance it as his opinion,) and he that hath my word let him * We do not deny to deductions from the Bible, when they are legitimate, the right to control the convictions of mankind. But we do deny to those who make them the right to impose them upon others as measures of belief or tests of fellowship, inasmuch as God has not imparted to the human mind the power of arriving at infallible conclusions in the use of the materials which He has supplied. We might claim for the principles of this work, for instance, the merit of faithfully according to what the Bible teaches. But if we were to put these principles into the form of articles of belief, organize a party on their basis, call it the true church, and then proceed to pass acts of religious disfranchisement upon all who would not adopt them, we should trespass upon the peculiar prerogatives of God. This power can be lawfully exercised on no basis, but the identical thoughts in the identical words which the Holy Ghost teaches, since God has affixed to nothing else the infallible seal of inspiration and miracles. speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord." What is a mere dream or opinion compared with the authoritative sanction of revealed statements? Our dreams and our opinions may be various and conflicting, like the course of darting meteors, but the Bible is a broad sun, whose course and whose luster are always the same. Indeed, there is a necessity from the constitution of our nature that our opinions should differ, that "the divinity which struts from the chair of different professors," made up as it is of abstractions, should be conflicting -and hence, that the wars and fightings of christians should continue, so long as it is made the standard of orthodoxy. But, as soon as we let opinions go for what they are worth, and the teachers of divinity submit to the labor of detailed exegesis of Scripture, or of studying it according to natural and well established principles of classification adapted to embrace the whole of its phenomena, as the botanist and mineralogist do in the departments of nature to which their studies are directed, then one of the principal causes of dissension will cease, and so far as its influence extends peace will be restored. SECTION III. Saving influence connected with erroneousness concerning revealed thoughts. Though the gospel aims at effecting a lodgment of the same thoughts in every mind, or the same subject-matter, yet, from the character of the human understanding, and the medium of their transmission, we should presume that the saving influence might exist with very considerable error, confusion, and darkness in judging of the precise nature of what is revealed. If language is sufficiently accurate for all practical purposes, it is by no means an infallible vehicle for the transmission of knowledge. It probably renders us more liable to false impressions than any one of our organs of sensation. This is true of a living language as it falls from the lips of a living speaker, but applies much more forcibly to one that long since ceased to be spoken. The speaker or writer of a living language may not always be happy in the selection or collocation of words; or those who attend to his communications may, through their own ignorance or carelessness, fail to derive from his language the idea which he has faithfully expressed. Owing to some peculiarity in their previous habits of thinking also, to accidental associations, or to some other circumstance, his words may be so combined with ideas wholly foreign to his purpose, as to produce in them impressions entirely different from what he intended. These remarks, however, apply almost exclusively to the nicer distinctions and minuter parts of a subject; for the prominent points,even though awkwardly expressed, can hardly fail of being seized by minds of ordinary capacity, who give proper attention to the language employed. But a dead language labors under still greater dis advantages in regard to being understood, since the meaning of its words can only be determined from the fragments of it which have survived the ravages of time. And how difficult is it to recall the ten thousands circumstances, physical, moral, political, or religious from which the writer's conceptions took their mould! How much of the force and beauty even of the elegant pages of the unknown Junius, who wrote in our own language less than a century'since, are now lost, on account of the oblivion which has come over many of those features in the posture of the political world, or those characters and events, upon which he animadverts. It is difficult to place ourselves in his condition, so as to feel the influences which operated to give shade to the meaning of his language. And it must be still more difficult to place ourselves in the circumstances of a man who lived thousands of years since, in a different country from our own, and in a state of society now so completely extinct as to leave scarce a wreck behind. And yet, we must be able to do it, or we cannot be expected, in every minute particular, to do justice to his meaning. The ever varying circumstances, therefore, which give rise to different combinations of thought in the mind, together with other causes, must have buried beyond the hope of resurrection no small share of every literary relic of antiquity. ་ And this is doubtless true of the compositions in which the subject-matter of supernatural revelation has been transmitted to posterity. That we have the means of recovering as much or even more of the meaning of those compositions than of any others of a cotemporary date, and indeed, that every thing which is essential to life and godliness still appears with a prominence too great to escape the notice even of a cursory reader, is what every man who has looked into the matter must have discovered. The subjects upon which they treat, especially the New Tes |