word among all nations,

as it is this day, an

nulled and reversed the judgment of the other portion of his ancient church, who rejected that Prophet and his Apostles; we point to the New Testament Scriptures themselves, which claim that authority and no other. As the electric shock which issues from the battery, is communicated to the hand which holds the remotest link of the longest chain, so the chain of divinely appointed connexion which runs through all the Scriptures of truth, communicates to the faithful of all ages the majestic evidence once for all afforded to this world, when "the earth shook, and the heavens dropped at the presence of God;" when "Sinai itself was moved at the presence of God, the God of Israel."

The course of our inquiry will naturally lead us hereafter to examine the extent to which the New Testament Scriptures make provision for the different essentials of the constitution of a Christian Church, enumerated towards the close of the fifth chapter; or, in other words, to sift the authority of tradition on the other ground on which it is pleaded, viz. its necessity for the satis

66

f Jer. ix. 11; Deut. xxviii. 37. It was in anticipation of this reversal that St. Peter earnestly exhorted the people to save themselves from this untoward generation."-Acts ii. 40.

Ps. Ixviii. 8.

factory settlement of those matters in the church, in regard to which Scripture is alleged to be, if not insufficient, at least not sufficiently explicit. Meanwhile we have gained this additional step in our inquiry, that we have ascertained Scripture, to whatever extent it is the document of the trust committed to the church, to rest on authority and evidence directly and immediately divine, without the intervention of human tradition to give it weight or credibility in the world.

CHAPTER VIII.

The Document of the Church's Trust complete and sufficient for its purpose.

66 EVERY WORD OF GOD IS PURE: HE IS A SHIELD UNTO THEM THAT PUT THEIR TRUST IN HIM. ADD THOU NOT UNTO HIS WORDS, LEST HE REPROVE THEE, AND THOU BE FOUND A LIAR.” -Prov. xxx. 5, 6.

66 BEWARE LEST ANY MAN SPOIL YOU THROUGH PHILOSOPHY AND VAIN DECEIT, AFTER THE TRADITION OF MEN, AFTER THE RUDIMENTS OF THE WORLD, AND NOT AFTER CHRIST."-Col. ii. 8.

HAVING Vindicated Scripture as the standing document of Christianity, from its alleged dependance on the prior authority of tradition, we have to ascertain in the next place, how far there may belong to tradition, as is pleaded by some, any authority concurrent and co-ordinate with Scripture; a question of no mean importance, whether we consider the incubus of traditions, which in a large portion of the visible and nominal church have proved infinitely more hurtful to the truth of the new covenant, than the traditions of the Pharisees were to that of the old, which they had succeeded in making practically "of

none effect;" or whether, on the other hand, we glance at the havoc that has been made of church unity in point of doctrine and discipline, by an immoderate zeal to avoid all that might in any sense be considered traditional; a question of no ordinary difficulty, when it is considered that for more than fourteen centuries all the most learned, and many of the most pious, members of the church have exercised their ingenuity on both sides of it; and a question withal, which, if we would not make shipwreck concerning our faith, we are driven by the daily widening breach of opposite opinions within the bosom of our own church, to take seriously in hand and probe to the bottom.

It would no doubt much simplify our inquiry, if it could be first of all satisfactorily determined what we are to understand by the term tradition, a term used throughout the history of this controversy with so much latitude of meaning that, Proteus-like, it constantly eludes our grasp, and at the very moment when we seem to have laid hold of it, and brought to bear upon it some sound and solid argument, starts up in some other shape, more perplexing than ever. Nor is it the precise meaning of the term tradition only, that is kept in such remarkable indistinctness; but the nature and extent of the authority ascri

bed to it, is generally left equally undefined; so as to hold the mind in a state of painful suspense between the fear of an unwary admission of error, and the dread of a presumptuous denial of truth. It is but an act of justice to the modern writers upon the subject, to acknowledge that this indistinctness has not its origin with them, but is attributable to the various senses which the earliest writers evidently attached to the word tradition, and the different purposes for which they appealed to the thing, whatever it was, which they called by that name. So great is the incongruity arising from this cause, that not only different writers, but different propositions of one and the same writer, contained perhaps even in one and the same book, are utterly irreconcilable with each other; and the question might with little labour be summarily determined upon this very ground, if an argument built upon the advantages which such a state of things cannot but give to the opponents of tradition, could be satisfactory to a Christian mind sincerely desirous of discovering the sure truth and the safe path of duty. But such a mode of treating the subject, while it prepares an ovation for the controversialist, only leaves the sincere searcher after truth in greater pain and doubt; and the course See Appendix, No. iv.

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