Romanists. This excellent man brought Christ home to this remote island, and with him the knowledge of letters, as well as an introduction to some degree of civilization. The legendary fables that have been tacked to his name, should not prevent our veneration. He came to cure the natives of idolatry, and superstition; and so far succeeded, that had they not, in after-times, departed from his instructions, into new modes of both, they might have been to this day among the best and happiest people in the world; for certain it is, there is no race of mankind better disposed by nature to be good Christians. Among all the ecclesiastical appointments ever thought of, that of Good Friday is founded on the strongest reason, sets before us a train of the most useful and affecting thoughts, carries up the understanding to the greatest transaction ever exhibited throughout the universe, and inspires the heart with sentiments of gratitude and love, more sublime, than, for aught we know, can be felt by angels themselves. The eternal Son of God, to save us from endless misery, and entitle us to endless glory, dies on a cross, to which he was nailed by our own hands. After saying this, would there not be a sort of presumption in attempting to proceed any farther on the ineffable subject? No words, no feelings, can do justice to it. If there is no sorrow like our sorrow, no gratitude like our gratitude, for this death, uo more will be expected of us by our infinite Benefactor. But we have still a heart of stone, yea, harder than stone (for the rocks rent at his death), if our grief and gratitude bear no proportion to this death. Is there any thing that can steel them against either? Yes, sin, and sin alone. What! sin! which Christ died to atone! Is it possible, that this enemy of him and our souls, can be still set above him in the human heart? If this is the case, no atonement hath been made for us, and Almighty goodness itself cannot save us. We can never become objects of mercy to his Father, until humility, contritious sorrow, and horror at ourselves, have burst the chains of sin, and forced our hearts open to gratitude and love. Until, as Christ hath passed through the shadow of death for sin, we also pass through the shadow of a death unto sin, we can never emerge into the elevated region of that gratitude, or that love. The sun itself put on mourning at the death of Him that made it; and in what blackness of darkness ought the sinful soul to sit at the death of Him who died to save it? How ought this soul to hasten, through the gloom of repentance, into the light of God's countenance, who offers to it mercy and pardon for the sake of its dying Saviour? Faith alone can bring us to this; and the Spirit of God alone can work in us that faith. Let us, therefore, do our best by meditation, prayer, and vigilance, that God, seeing our earnes endeavours, and pitying our weakness, may do the rest. Had Christ said, If you love yourselves, keep my commandments, self. interest would have easily understood the great propriety and force of this language, as being the language of men. But, to raise us to motives of action more noble, he saith, "If you love me, keep my commandments; that is, if you have any gratitude in you, fly from eternal misery, and come to me, my Father, and heaven. This language of God and heaven seems somewhat odd, and hardly intelligible to the sons of earth, who have neither conceptions, nor words, into which they may translate it. Had not Christ loved us more than his own life, he had never died for us; and, if we love him not more than our own lives, we are unworthy of him. What are our lives, compared with his? If a man shall lose his life for Christ, he shall find it,' shall find his wretched temporal converted into an endless life of happiness and glory. This fruit of our gratitude is pulled from the very tree of life, that is, from the cross of Christ. 169. In An Appeal to Common Sense, lately published, I endeavoured, plainly and briefly, as addressing myself to the unlearned, to vindicate the purity of the holy Scriptures, so far as they are or may be intelligible to the lower capacities of mankind, in our translations. But an attack hath been made, and urged, with no small confidence, on the very originals, by Arians, Socinians, Deists, and infidels of every denomination, whether open or covert, as if revelation were too much corrupted in the very fountain, to be drank in the streams. They pretend that these writings have been miserably interpolated by the hands through which they have come down to us, to serve the purposes of sects and parties, more especially of that which calls itself orthodox. This they do with an assurance little short of that which men may shew, who have recovered the writings of Moses, and all from him to St. John inclusive, in their own hands. If we call upon them to produce a list of particular interpolations, they have recourse, and that only in general, to the collections of various readings gathered out of ancient manuscripts, by ourselves, such as by Lucas Brugensis, Walton, Mills, &c. in order, by collation, to come at the original and genuine text, a method used with admirable success, and scarcely avoidable, in the recovery of all other ancient writings. Of these varieties, thus scrupulously noted, there is hardly one in a thousand of any consequence to the sense of a single passage, no more than the various readings of our printed Bibles, of Homer, or Livy, would be, were they drawn together in the same manner, although they would compose a catalogue, ten thousand times longer. If a man cannot make sense of a particular passage in his Horace, erroneously printed, is it not a satisfaction to him to find that passage in another copy so printed as to do justice to that most accurate writer, and to his critical readers? It is worth observing, as hath been already done by the very ingenious Mr. White, that this clamour about interpolations is the expiring cry of heresy and infidelity. Let me add, that our covert infidels, having tried all their arts of forced interpretation, and found the word of God too refractory for their cunning, are now determined, as their last shift, to fling away their mask and the Bible together. They are more honest than their predecessors in infidelity. They perceive the Bible cannot be wrested to their opinions; and, therefore, there is nothing left for them, but to try if they can explode it. If, however, this sacred volume is once thrown aside, what will become of all that the Arians and Socinians have written? As to what the orthodox have written against them, the loss of that will not be lamented; and good reason, for they too have run into metaphysical refinements and fooleries, which the simplicity of revelation almost equally abhors. But, certain it is, that the book of God will continue to furnish plain and wholesome food for the rational soul, when all the French cooks of opinion shall be extinct, both they and their fires. But let us return to the subject of interpolation itself, and let us ask, when it was, that the Scriptures were so corrupted! It could not be in the dark ages of monkery, when the spirit of controversy was fast asleep; when the world thought all in one track, or thought not at all.. Besides, we have manuscripts of the Scriptures, a thousand, and more than a thousand years old, which carry us back a good many centuries anterior to that era of ignorance. And it is from these very manuscripts, that all the Bibles in present use have, after most accurate collations, been published. Well, but might not the Bible have been corrupted by the orthodox, the Monothelites, the Eutychians, the Nestorians, the Macedonians, the Sabellians, the Photinians, the Marcionites, the Arians, the Manichæans, the Gnostics, the Ebi onites, the Cerinthians, the Donatists, the Novatians, or the Orthodox, as they were called, &c? Were there not enough of these paddlers in the stream to raise up mud? Yes, in the stream, but not in the fountain. These very men, Providence for wise purposes permitting them, were too bitterly engaged against one another, and still more bitterly against the orthodox, to suffer the expunction of an old text, the insertion of a new one, or a material corruption of any one which concerned the controversies agitated, to creep in or out of the Scriptures, to which all sides had their sole and continual recourse for arguments and decisions. How could a passage be changed, all at once, in all or most of the copies, as well in the hands of the opponents as defendents? How changed in the memories of all the controvertists, or in the greater number of the translations? Again, how could wilful omissions, substitutions, or mutilations of passages, so sure to be detected, have served the cause it was employed in? A cause too, not worth serving, if in any degree indefensible, without a fraud so impious. To stare out of all countenance these talkers about interpolations, we have all the passages fairly standing out in the sacred text, as quoted of old by the orthodox, and by all the sects and heresies, recorded in the genuine works of Athanasius, Hilary, Basil, Nazianzen, Jerome, Augustin, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Ecumenius, Theophilact, but more especially of Vigelius Tridentinus. The texts to be found in these, and a crowd of others, and found also in their proper places of Scripture, shew to demonstration that those Scriptures were then the same they are at this day; and yet these are the very passages of Scripture with which the ancient disputants were most tempted to make free. As to passages of a more moral nature, they stand out so thick in the writings of the fathers still extant, and so exactly the same with those in our present copies of the Bible, that no room for doubt is left concerning them. The Syriac, the Arabic, the Vulgate translations, all vouch the sameness of Scripture from the closing of its canon to this day. So much of the old Italic translation as is extant bears the same testimony; and, though perhaps indirectly, supports the genuineness of 1 John v. 7, the most disputed text in all the Bible, which Tertullian and Cyprian appear to have quoted, and where else they found it, but in that version, is, now-a-days, very hard to say. Had it been in the power of the Roman church, after it became papistical, it is hard to say what attempts she might have made in the distress she felt to maintain her usurpations by two or three texts, but slightly seeming to favour them, and in the midst of maný tenets adopted by her, directly contrary to those Scriptures, for which she pretends to be the only voucher, and yet, on account of which, she shuts up those Scriptures from all, but her licensed bigots. But Popery, properly so called, had not its birth till early in the seventh century, Gregory the First, deservedly styled the Great, having utterly disclaimed, and indeed refuted its fundamental pretension, in the latter end of the sixth, by his elaborate letter to John of Constantinople. It was then too late, as I have briefly, but abundantly shewn, to tamper with the Scriptures, so that nothing but an infallibility of interpretation could serve the turn; and those interpretations were to be swallowed as infallibly right, though self-evidently wrong. Among other objections to the word of God, this one of interpolation was set up along with oral tradition, as more to be depended on, and from that cry, all that is now thrown about by Arians, Socinians, and Deists, is poorly borrowed. The violent contentions about Easter, about the Filioque, but more especially episcopal supremacy, set the eastern and western churches in such a flame against each other, and that for more than a thousand years, that neither durst venture on interpolations of Scripture. While the author of evil, taking the advantage of human corruption, raised all the above-mentioned heresies and schisms, God permitted them, that his word might thereby be kept pure and unsophisticated. Besides, he had always in every age of his church, so many wise and faithful servants to detect and expose all attempts of the wicked to pervert his word, that nothing could be more impracticable than material changes therein, such as are now insinuated, but not particularly pointed out, much less possible to be proved. We have, at this day, Homer and Herodotus, books much older than the New Testament, in very good order; and why not the New Testament, for the preservation whereof in its genuine purity an infinite number of persons, good and bad, learned and unlearned, were deeply engaged at the risk of their parties, opinions, and souls? Had any other book so many watchers to guard it, text by text, and word by word, in every hour of its duration as this? I place bad and unlearned men in the class of watchers, as I do now the present talkers about interpolations, who would not fail, were a single text any where foisted in, or but one word added to point an old one against |