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showed that her best defenders in the times subsequent to the Reformation, whether those who maintained her cause against Popery, as Jewel; or those who maintained it against the Puritans, as Hooker, still stood upon this ground, that she was the Church brought back to the primitive model; the Romanist having deformed that Church by the addition of Purgatory, Transubstantiation, Communion in one kind, and the like; the Puritan having defaced it by a contempt for an Apostolical Succession and Episcopal Orders, and a general depreciation of ordinances and sacramental rites.

That first Lecture, however, rested the argument upon the mere declarations of the Church to such being her principle. It occurs to me that I shall strengthen the reasoning there advanced, and thus increase your appetite for an acquaintance with the Fathers, through whom our knowledge of this Primitive Church is chiefly to be obtained, if I now do more than state her declarations, and point out some particulars in her structure and forms, in which this principle is actually and confessedly carried out in her; and if in so doing I shall have to use terms or touch on topics which are received with jealousy, and in these days excite suspicion, I must beg you not to be alarmed at them on the instant, but to remember Lord

Bacon, and hear, "not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider."

I venture therefore again to suggest, that as Churchmen we cannot afford to decline all obligation to the Primitive Church, being beholden to it in various ways, as the depositary, the guardian, the medium of Ecclesiastical Tradition, of which our Church certainly avails itself avails itself, agreeably to the precedent of the Apostle, who in a particular instance silenced those who were contentious, by saying, "we have no such custom, neither the churches of God'." Nor is it our Church only which takes advantage of such tradition, but even those persons who depart from us, and exclaim against the thing itself, and are unconscious that they are guilty of any inconsistency whilst they do so.

I. First of all then, how are we to determine the Canon of Scripture? For during the first four centuries Apocryphal Scriptures are referred to, the very titles of which occupy five octavo pages in Jones. Can it be done safely from internal feeling and internal evidence alone? I am aware that there have been those who maintained that we receive the Scriptures 2 Jones on the Canon, Vol. 1. p. 107.

1 1 Cor. xi. 16.

we do, "as the only sacred and canonical books, not because the Church receives them as such, but because the Holy Spirit witnesseth to our consciences that they proceed from God, and themselves testify their authority'." But would this be a trustworthy way of determining the Canon? Though the heart must and does warm to Scripture as bearing the impress of the love of God; and the understanding acknowledge it as marked with his ways; still this argument must be used in corroboration of another, not to the exclusion of it: for would it suffice to make answer to an unbeliever who questioned you on the reason you had for considering such and such Scriptures canonical, that you felt they were so? If this were a satisfactory manner of fixing the Canon, possibly Tradition might be dispensed with, and the Fathers who preserve it be passed by; though even then, if such external help in fixing it were refused, the same inward feeling must guarantee the correctness with which those Scriptures had descended to us; the integrity of the text; and their general identity with the works under the same names which proceeded from the pens of the Evangelists and Apostles. "It may be, and oftentimes hath

1 Confess. Belg. Art. v., quoted by Jones on the Canon, Vol. 1. p. 42.

been demanded," says Hooker, "how the books of Holy Scripture contain in them all necessary things, when of things necessary the very chiefest is to know what books we are bound to esteem holy? which point is confessed impossible for the Scripture itself to teach.” And to this difficulty he replies by saying, that "albeit Scripture do profess to contain in it all things that are necessary unto salvation, yet the meaning cannot be simply of all things. which are necessary, but all things that are necessary in some certain kind or form; as all things which are necessary, and could not at all, or could not easily be known by the light of natural discourse; all things which are necessary to be known that we may be saved, but known with presupposal of knowledge concerning certain principles whereof it receiveth us already persuaded, and then instructeth us in all the residue that are necessary. In the number of these principles one is the sacred authority of Scripture. Being therefore persuaded by other means that these Scriptures are the oracles of God, themselves do then teach us the rest, and lay before us all the duties which God requireth at our hands as necessary unto salvation"." Indeed, even Baxter and the more thoughtful Puritans would not

2 Eccles. Pol. B. 1. c. xiv. 2.

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go so far as to affirm the Canon to be discoverable by any witness to it within us; nor open such a door to abuse as this might prove. "For my part," says he in his Preface to the Second Part of the Saints' Rest', "I confess I could never boast of any such testimony or light of the Spirit nor reason neither, which, without human testimony, would have made me believe that the Book of Canticles is canonical, and written by Solomon, and the Book of Wisdom apocryphal, and written by Philo. Nor could I have known all nor any historical books, such as Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, to be written by divine inspiration, but by Tradition.'

Neither did the Apostles themselves think it enough to rest the Canon of the Scriptures on the testimony of the Spirit making its appeal to the conscience through the virtue breathing out of them, sublime as it is; for St Paul refers the readers of his Epistles for the proof of their genuineness to the homely evidence of his own handwriting; subscribing the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians in these words, "The salutation of Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in every Epistle; so I write 2;" a caution which seems to have been meant to put the people of Thes

1

1§ 6, quoted by Jones, Vol. 1. p. 47

2 Ch. iii. 17.

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