better word indulgence, or allowance been employed, the meaning of the passage would have been unequivocally presented, namely, I say this by way of allowance for you, not of command to you.

In the tenth and eleventh verses, the Apostle discusses the Law of Marriage, introducing his decision with the words, "And unto the married I command, et not I but the Lord." Now the idea is, that in this passage he distinguished between his own commands, and those received by revelation from Christ. But this is not so. He is, says Mr. Alford, "about to give them a command resting not merely on inspired Apostolic authority, great and undoubted as that was, but on that of the LORD HIMSELF,* so that all supposed distinction between the Apostle when writing of himself and of the Lord, is quite irrelevant." In other words, he is re-stating a command which our Lord gave while he abode on earth, and the contrast lies simply between that, and what he, as an Inspired Apostle, might give; not between different commands of his own, given at different times, and under different conditions. Meyer and even De Wette are obliged to admit this; and the former says, "He . . . distinguishes here, not between his own and inspired commands, but between those which proceed from his own inspired subjectivity, and those which Christ maintained by his objective word." This passage, then, affords no real ground for the objection.

por

But still, it is urged, in verses twelfth and twenty-fifth, the Apostle says, "To the rest speak I, not the Lord," and again, "I have no commandment of the Lord, yet I give my judg ment." Now, in the first of these passages, he is speaking of marriage, where one of the parties is an unbeliever, and in the second, he is giving directions concerning virgins; and by the language he employs, "he is supposed to intimate that, in certain parts of Scripture, the author may write according to his own uninspired human judgment, although guided in other tions of his work, by the Holy Ghost." But the fallacy lies in supposing that the expression, "the commandment of the Lord," means a communication made by the Holy Ghost to the Apostle; whereas it merely signifies an express direction of Christ, given while He abode on earth, and which had now become historical. So that again, the Apostle is not here contrasting what he says by the Spirit, and what he says of himself, but what he says reiterating already expressed commands of Christ, and what he says by the Spirit, in reference to cases, of which,-

The command of Christ, is in St. Mark x, 12.

since they did not then exist,-our Lord had not, while He was on earth, spoken. Thus, Olshausen well remarks: "We find that the Apostle distinguishes between what he says, and what the Lord says; between a definite command of Christ, (śwayń,) and his own subjective judgment, (yvápn) ... Suppose, therefore, that Paul had no traditional command of Christ upon a certain subject; yet we must esteem his inspired conviction as equivalent to such a command, for Christ wrought in him by His Spirit."

In all these three cases, then,-and they form the whole foundation of the objection under consideration,-the Apostle is contrasting, not his own condition of Inspiration at one time, and non-Inspiration at another; but, express commands of our Lord delivered while He was yet on earth, "appropriated and recalled by the assistance of the Spirit," and the inward suggestions of the Holy Ghost, by which He was guided in the work of His Apostolate. In the first case, he declares that he is not uttering one of these inward suggestions, but is recalling and reiterating a law once spoken by our Lord's own lips. In the last two cases, he declares, that he is not recalling and reiterating such a law, but is giving utterance to these inward suggestions. Still, in each and every case, he is under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, he speaks as an Inspired Apostle. In the first, the Spirit is fulfilling one part of our Lord's twofold promise in St. John, that He should bring all things to the remembrance of the Apostles, which Christ had said. In the last two, he is fulfilling the other part of the same promise, that he should teach them all things and guide them into all truth. The objection, therefore, falls; and the witness which the New Testament Scriptures has to the Inspiration of their authors, is untouched, consentient, and complete.

Such being the testimony of the Scriptures themselves, we may next proceed to enquire, did the Universal Church receive the Scriptures in accordance with that testimony, and so continue and carry it on? In answering this question, it is necessary to observe, that we are not to look in the early ages for "any elaborate theory, or series of systematized propositions on the subject of Inspiration." The very nature of the case forbids us to expect anything of the kind. "Distance," says Mr. Westcott,* is a necessary condition, if we are to estimate rightly any object of vast proportions." And the very living

In his General Survey of the New Testament Canon; a work which for ma one of the invaluable Series of Theological Manuals, now in course of publication at Cambridge,-not in New England.

consciousness of the Christian body, the very fulness of its gifts and life, while it prevented men in that age from fully realizing that the then forming Canon, contained all that the Church could ever need, forbade them also, to undertake a dogmatic teaching on Inspiration, which the very harmony of opinion rendered needless. But they do make just that distinction between the New Testament Scriptures and their own or other writings, which affords the most valuable proof for our purposes; a proof which, if it were more systematized and dogmatic, might well, by every rule of Historical criticism, be regarded with suspicion. While the very absence" of recognized theory or system, serves but to exhibit in bolder relief how profoundly incorporated with the Christian consciousness of those times, was the belief in the Inspiration of Scripture; and undesignedly represents its depth, its fervor, and its source.

Time and space alike forbid us to attempt to exhibit the testimony of the Church to the Inspiration of the New Testament Scriptures in detail. We can only refer our readers to the elaborate Appendix of Mr. Lee on the "Judgment of the Fathers;" where the testimony is drawn out at length, with a minuteness and care, which render this one of the most valuable portions of his work. The result alone can be briefly stated. The line is unbroken from Clement of Rome to Augustine, and farther it is not necessary to follow it out; and the voices multiply as time goes on. Through the age immediately following the Apostles, through that of the Greek Apologists, when Christianity was no longer a work of silence but of strength, when it conquered the intellect as well as the heart, through the Diocletian persecution, far into the Conciliar age, the line extends. From the great centres of Christendom, from Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Ephesus and Rome, from East and West alike, the witnesses come forth. And while their witness varies endlessly in form, and is accompanied with unnumbered illustrations, still for substance it is all the same. It echoes and continues the witness of the Scriptures themselves, that they who wrote them, wrote them by the Spirit of God. There is a unanimity in the testimony that can only be accounted for by its truth.

And yet, withal, there is just enough of exception to the unanimity, to bring it out in bolder relief, and present it with greater distinctness. There are the possible denials of Theodore of Mopsuestia, and the undoubted ones of the Anomoans.

Mr.

The mention of the New Testament is not intended to imply that there is not the same testimony to the Old. It alone is named, because it alone is here under consideration.

Lee certainly makes the case of Theodore more than doubtful. That of the Anomoans, in the fourth century, he does not question. But the indignant manner in which their assertion that here "the Apostle spake as a man," is treated as a thing before unheard of, proves that they were herein only denying the consentient belief of the Church. It is a case, where, most strikingly, the single exception proves the rule. And now we will sum up this testimony of the Church, in the eloquent words of Mr. Lee, feeling that no apology is requisite for the length of our extract. This belief was no merely speculative tenet; nor did it rest upon some general feeling that the writings which taught the doctrines of revealed religion were deserving of reverence. Their conviction of the divine source of that faith which the Bible unfolds, was not more firm than their conviction that the origin of the records which contain its history was, in like manner, divine. Proofs, equally incontrovertible, were given of both. The soldier of the Cross, in our day, goes forth to heathen lands, supported, it is true, by the sense of duty, and animated by his glorious message: but he is also cheered on his path, and stimulated in his toil, for he is but man, by the consciousness of universal sympathy, and the tokens of public applause. Once this was not so. There were days when the Christian missionary, although in the land of his fathers, and surrounded by the civilization of the world, was encountered on every side, did he suffer his thoughts to dwell upon aught but the task before him, by the certainty of persecution, and contumely, and wrong. If the Tiber,' says Tertullian, floods to the walls, if the Nile does not irrigate the fields, if the heavens are shut, if the earth quakes, if there is a famine or a pestilence, at once the cry is raised, CHRISTIANOS AD LEONEM. In attestation of the truth and origin of the facts on which Christianity relies, no more convincing proof can be alleged than the endurance of such trials, and the triumphs thus achieved. The proof, too, is one of which Christian Apologists in every age have not been slow to avail themselves. But the argument should not pause here. It exhibits the Church's belief in the divine character and inspiration of the Bible, no less than in the truth and heavenly origin of its contents. Jew and Christian alike were eager to sacrifice life itself, not merely in defense of the doctrines of revealed religion, but of the very documents in which those doctrines were contained. Within so short a space of time as ten years before the public recognition of Christianity, the persecution of Diocletian carried torture and death to every section of the Church. The trial of the martyr's faith was not now to sacrifice to the

gods, or to adore the Emperor;-the edict went forth, 'Give up your sacred writings, or die.' There was no longer that actual knowledge of the facts of Christ's life, or of the teaching of His Apostles, which had cheered the martyr Stephen, and supported the dying Polycarp. The personal recollection of such matters had now ceased'; the belief in the facts had become, as with us, but historical: and yet such was the firm conviction of the divine inspiration and heavenly origin of the Scriptures of Truth, that death with all its horrors was embraced, rather than resign them to the heathen. To use the profound observation of Pascal: 'This is a sincerity which has no example in the world, nor its root in nature.'

Thus, then, the matter stands as to the Divine origination, or Inspiration of the New Testament Scriptures. We find the genuineness, the authenticity, the credibility of those Scriptures established by a mass of rational evidence, such as pertains to nothing else: thus established, these same Scriptures, alike in the promises of Him on whom they rest, and by the recorded lives and words of those whom He commissioned to speak and write His truth, testify to their having done both under the guidance of the Holy Ghost; and this claim is admitted by those to whom their words first, and then their writings, came, and it is carried on and continued, as the Immemorial Doctrine of the Church of God. Well, then, may a late writer say, "When the Church is asked for her proofs of the Divine authority of the Scriptures, her first word is-Testimony; her second word is-Testimony; and her third word is-Testimony."* And if this testimony is rejected, then with it, all historical belief of every kind, and relating to everything, must be abandoned.

Thus far, we have been concerned with the fact of the Inspiration of the New Testament writers; we now approach a subject which requires great delicacy of handling, and where there is much room for misapprehension, the theory of Inspiration; that is, in other words, the inquiry how the Holy Spirit acted upon those who wrote. Here Holy Scripture is silent, and doubtless it had been better if men had followed its example; if they had contented themselves with the fact, and attempted no analysis or explanation of what, in the very nature of things, must be a profound mystery. For apart from some

* Of course, this is not intended to exclude the inward witness of the Holy Ghost, setting the final seal in individual cases; and lifting the teachings of the Holy Scriptures out of the regions of human testimony, into those of Divine But this follows on, and completes the work now under considera

assurance.