SERMON X.

REV. xxii. 19.

And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.

THOUGH these words have a more immediate relation to the book of this prophecy, of which they are the conclusion, yet they have a remote reference, as they may be fitly enough applied to the whole book of God. All scripture is given by inspirationa; is equally sacred as to its divine original, and should therefore be all equally screened from the fraudulent practices and corrupt arts of men. And indeed as this revelation to St. John was the last which God was pleased to make to mankind, it may justly enough be supposed, that the Holy Spirit intended the solemn warning and admonition in the text, to be at once the close and security of the canon. It is in a way not much different from this, that the prophet Malachi shut up the words and sealed the book of the Old Testament; Remember ye the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and judgments. As if he had said, Ye are now to expect no more extraordinary interpositions; you have a standing revelation given you

by Moses, which, together at least with the subsequent instructions of the prophets, will lead you into all necessary truth, and teach you all, that you are to observe, and do, under the present dispensation. Towards the end of it, Behold, God will send you Elijah the prophet, a person of his character and spirit, who will turn the heart of the fathers with the children, and the heart of the children with the fathers, in order to prepare them to receive their so often promised, their so long expected Messiah, the Lord and Prince of the future age. In this manner, and to this purpose, the prophet of the gospel, who finishes the evangelical writings, endeavours to guard them from all injury and encroachment. You have now the whole book of God, and the whole revelation of Christ, abundantly sufficient to direct you to glory and virtue; preserve them as the most valuable trust, as the most sacred depositum, without tampering with them, or trying practices upon them, without adding to or taking from them: expect no further prophecies, no new revelations, for they are needless; make no alterations, no abatements in what you have already, for they were not given in vain. There is no scheme of salvation, no future economy of religion, to succeed the present, as that did the past; but when our Lord Jesus Christ comes again, it will be at the consummation of all things, in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and dead. And he which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly; Amen. Even so, come Lord Jesus.

Happy would it have been for the church, if men had always paid that awful regard which is due to c Mal. iv. 5, 6.

C

this solemn admonition! If transcribers, translators, interpreters of every denomination, had religiously considered, that the word they were handling was the word of God! a word, not to be new modelled by them; not to be wrested to serve their own conceited purposes; but designed for the rule of their conduct here, and their judgment hereafter, at the tremendous tribunal of its Author! If this had been sufficiently attended to, we should have had no room to complain of the practices taken notice of in the following parts of this discourse; my design in which is to shew the several ways of taking away from the holy scripture; and to point out, at least, the most obvious instances in which this guilt may be contracted.

I. And, first, we may observe, with reference to the verse immediately preceding the text, that men may in effect take away from the holy scriptures by adding to them. By adding to them unsound and inconsistent parts, they take away from the authority of the whole; and by placing mere human compositions upon an equal foot with the divine, they debase the purity of the latter, and render both their sufficiency and genuineness suspected. No society of Christians is so justly chargeable with this as the church of Rome; which does indeed increase the bulk and number, but depreciates the value of the sacred books by apocryphal writings and tradition. The word of God, it seems, is not a perfect rule of faith and manners; and therefore the words and inventions of men must be called in to complete it. In pretence indeed to complete it, but in truth and reality to subvert it! for as the holy scriptures are not at all serviceable to their cause, so their testi

mony is almost neglected; and recourse is had to those useful supplements, the traditions of the church, which may be made to speak nearer to their purpose. Of this kind likewise was the attempt to make the Clementine Constitutions pass under the character of inspired writings; only in order to overthrow a fundamental doctrine of those that really are so. All such practices as these are subversive of genuine scripture. The pretended writings contain doctrines inconsistent with it; and therefore, so far as they obtain in the world, take away from it; and by raising disputes about the canon may lead unsettled men to think it precarious, and that even the present books which compose it are not of unquestionable authority. But,

II. A more direct means of taking away from the holy scriptures, is taking away from their inspiration; and entertaining very low and moderate thoughts of that portion of the Spirit, which influenced those who wrote them. As scripture is of various kinds, we may, no doubt, admit various degrees of inspiration. Some of the sacred writers had, as it were, a double portion of the Spirit; but all had so much as was necessary to prevent their falling into error, and to keep them from deceiving, and being deceived. With regard to the purely prophetical parts there can be no debate at all. As it is the prerogative of God only to know the events of futurity, so, whenever men truly foretell them, they must speak as they are moved by the Holy Ghost. With reference too to the doctrinal and moral parts of scripture, it is not an ordinary measure of the Spirit that will be sufficient. Errors here may easily be incurred, and yet of the most

dangerous and fatal nature. Upon this account the writers must be supernaturally guided and directed in a very extraordinary manner. Otherwise they may overlook doctrines of the greatest importance; they may deliver others of a mischievous consequence, and many of no consequence at all: necessary duties may be omitted, trivial ones preferred, and the whole system of morality placed upon a wrong foundation; pernicious in some instances, and defective in more. Mere human writers may easily run into all these mistakes; and what could render the divine superior to them, but a very extraordinary measure of the divine Spirit? Thus far then there seems to have been a necessity of a supernatural guidance in every step they took. Objections lie chiefly against those books of holy scripture which are purely historical. Here it may be asked, what need is there of inspiration? men may know the transactions of their own times; and from ancient records they may learn the transactions of the past. In some cases, and in some measure, they may so perhaps. But is there then no need at all of a superior influence and direction to preserve them from the effects of human fallibility and human frailty. The histories of an author's own times are not always to be depended upon, through his own mistake and misapprehension, or misinformation of others. Men are apt enough to impose on themselves; they are easily enough imposed on by others: there is a partiality and prejudice which often clings so to mere mortals, that, though they are in the main honest men, they cannot entirely divest themselves of it. This may lead them to represent things unfairly; to place them in an impro