documents whereby his mission, and authority are, as it were, established. But it is not only so; we do not believe the church primarily, in its first simple sense, upon the authority of the Scripture, we believe it on the authority of Christ; and if the authority of Christ had been recorded in any book besides the Scripture, upon such testimony, that we must know him to have said so much, we should believe in the church equally the same. We consider the Scripture, therefore, in the first place, merely as the book announcing to us, the divine authority of Christ, who laid down the law in this regard. We take his words; we examine what he tells us; and we thus discover, that it is supported by all those evidences of his divine mission, which shadowed forth to the world, that he appointed that authority to teach; and therefore, that authority does not merely confirm, but obliges us, or enforces us, by the power that Christ has invested in it, to receive this sacred book.

But some among you may, perhaps, think, that a similar line of reasoning, with a very little difference, would conduct those who admit not our rule of faith, to precisely similar consequences in favour of theirs. For instance, to a certain point, we go step by step, through the same process; we both of us take up the sacred volume; we both of us, upon human and historical testimony, come to receive all that Christ has taught. It is then that we diverge: we take those authorities which appoint the church to teach; they take those authorities which commend the Bible to be the rule of faith.

Now, my brethren, this is an argument to which I beg your particular attention, while I point out to you the differences between the two courses; for, in the first place, while according to the Catholic's doctrine we not only receive the one class of passages, but we are willing, also, to receive the other, to the fullest extent; because we know, that whatever argument will prove the Scriptures, abstractedly taken, to be the rule of faith, that argument a Catholic will receive, and receive with gratitude; because the Catholic, while he admits the authority of the church to define what has been handed down, independently of the written word, he receives the written word as the foundation of faith, and consequently, is as anxious, by every argument, to uphold this authority, as another can be. But, on the other hand, while he is willing to admit any text which may be brought in proof that the Scripture is a rule of faith, all those passages which give authority to a living power to teach, all these must be removed, must be rebutted, must be answered by the others. With them, the two are not compatible; with us, they are compatible: we have no difficulty, whatsoever, in admitting whatever arguments they can bring; at the same time, that they will find themselves obliged to answer strong and powerful documents and arguments in our favour.

But, in the second place, the appointment of Scripture as the rule of faith, is primarily, as I said before, compatible with the existence of an

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authority to teach; for the existence of an authority to teach, excludes, not the Scripture, but the all-sufficiency of the Scripture; for where there is a supreme authority given, and where men are commanded to obey that authority - from that command, there certainly can be no retreat; and therefore, all Scripture may, indeed must be, received; but it must be so received as having need of a supernatural assistance— as having need of something which can be reconciled with the existence of the supreme authority, constituted in the church of Christ.

In the third place, we must have texts equally strong, which do not merely say that the Scripture is useful, that the Scripture is good, that the Scripture is profitable-but we must have texts that will say as expressly, that Scripture is sufficient. There must be, too, the proof— the words of Christ-the words of his apostles, which tell us expressly, that we are to make use of no rule but that of Scripture. For you will observe, in constituting the rule or principle whereby men are to be guided, it is necessary, not merely that the principle should be somewhere laid down, but it is necessary that the principle should be expressly defined ; as much so as that men should be told, that that is the rule for their conduct, that that is the law by which they are to direct themselves individually; therefore it would be necessary to discover in Scripture, not merely appeals to itself, not merely the claim of its authority, as vouchers of the doctrines there taught by our Saviour, but an express definition, that this is the rule of faith, and that laid down as clearly, as I shall show, that it has been laid down, that men are to believe, and to obey, and to follow, the church of Christ.

But there is another essential and important distinction. I observed to you, that the moment the Catholic had taken the first step from profane to holy ground-that the moment he had come to the conclusion, that the teaching of our blessed Saviour was divinely authorized-from that moment he returns not back again to the line of his argument; there is a divine sanction to every step which he takes, before he arrives at his last conclusion. Our blessed Saviour communicates his divine authority to the church; the church gives her divinely-authorized sanction to the book of Scripture, and to its inspiration. But suppose the other course of reasoning. Suppose, then, you have arrived at a knowledge of Christ's divinity, and of the authority of his apostles, you take those passages, in which they say that the Scripture is the rule of faith. Be it so you have a vague authorization of something, to be called the Scriptures, which was not collected together, which was not even written for a rule of faith. Now take your next step, and define which are the Scriptures; define what books are inspired. You must go back to the ground you left; you must go to human testimony; you must go to human tradition; you must go to something which you have rejected by your principle of faith, before you can resume the thread of your argument. This forms the essential, the most important flaw, in the rea

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soning which I endeavoured to explain to you at our last meeting. Such, therefore, is the course which the Catholic church pursues; and which every Catholic, when he thinks it necessary to refresh in his mind the evidences of his belief, whenever he chooses once more to go over those grounds which have been explained to him-such is the course of reasoning which he follows, to arrive at a perfectly logical, and correct consequence, regarding the authority of the Holy Scriptures.

But before leaving this portion of the subject, and that I may not have to interrupt more important matters hereafter, allow me to observe, that a comparison between the old and new law, regarding the rule of faith, gives very strong and important lights, tending, essentially, to confirm the view which we have taken; for we find, indeed, to the Jews was given a written law; and there was the most express command to write that law; that Moses was ordered to register all those precepts which God had given, to even the most minute circumstances; and that this law was to be read to all the people, in a most solemn manner, at the feast of tabernacles; that besides this, that this law was purposely, if I may so speak, so completely interwoven with the daily actions, with the very feelings, and most domestic concerns of all the Jewish people, that it was absolutely necessary, that the law should constantly be before their eyes, that they should possess copies of it, and study, almost at every turn, in what way they were to regulate their conduct.

This, therefore, is what I consider, and should think, and should conceive to be, the nature of the written law; that is, that the law should be not merely collected together accidentally, but that, if it is to be the rule of faith for all men, provision should be made, that the rule should be communicated to all men. One would expect, naturally, therefore, in the law-if it was our Saviour's intention that men should be guided in the knowledge of these truths, and in the practice of the duties he inculcated by some written code of faith and morality-that he would have expressly said to the disciples, All these things which you see me do, all these discourses which you hear from me, take care that you register them carefully, and that you preserve the volume from all danger and risk, by multiplying and diffusing it among the faithful; or that each of you should write the whole, and form that code whereby men will have to conduct themselves, whereby they shall be guided.” But I meet, in the new law, with nothing of this sort, with not a hint, not an intimation, that our Saviour ever intended one word of what he delivered, to be written down.

I find, moreover, that in examining the history of these compositions, they were every one of them the offspring of chance. That they were all the result of some passing, some casual circumstances, which seemed to call them forth; that if particular errors had not arisen in the church, just at that moment, we should probably have been for ever deprived of

the most beautiful writings of the New Testament. If the blessed St. John had not been preserved to a protracted pilgrimage, notwith. standing having suffered, what in others would have been the torments of martyrdom, he would not have been spared to complete the sacred volume. We find that Luke and Matthew wrote, obviously, for a certain class of readers, for one country only, or for even a particular individual; that the epistles of St. Paul were manifestly directed to particular churches, intended merely to silence the doubts, or to answer the difficulties proposed by themselves, or else to correct or amend, some accidental and local abuses; and that the great body of his epistles treat only, as it were, incidentally of the most important doctrinal matters. For if you will examine the construction of many of them, you will find, in the greater portion, that the most important dogmas delivered in the epistles of St. Paul, are only casually, parenthetically, or illustratively introduced. Now all this seems decidedly at variance with the idea of settled plans for delivering a code of laws; and the contrast be. comes infinitely greater when placed beside the Mosaic dispensation, in which such strict injunctions are given to record the written law; and even to preserve with the greatest care, both by memory, and by the deposit of them in the archives of the sanctuary, the laws which had been registered by the divine command.

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But this is not merely the whole of the difficulty, for it is essential to observe, that, although in the Mosaic law we have all the characteristics of a written law, although we have the express injunction to note down whatever was to be taught, yet there can be no doubt whatsoever, that by far the most important doctrines were not committed to writing: that among the Jews there was a train of sacred tradition containing in itself more important dogmas, I have no hesitation in saying, than are written in the inspired volume. I have been following the reasoning of a very learned man, who has within these few years published a very elaborate treatise upon this subject and it is, perhaps, one of those instances to which I might have alluded in my opening address, of persons who had been brought to the Catholic religion by the most opposite train of argument. The person to whom I allude is one who has been brought up from his infancy in the Jewish religion; one who had made himself master of all the writings of the Jews, to whom all the Rabbinical writers are as familiar as the most ordinary classic to the wellfinished scholar; and it is evident from the whole train of his argument, that he has been brought to the Catholic religion, and to be one of its most beautiful defenders, simply by finding, that there was among the Jews a series of traditions, which could only receive, and only did receive, its development in Christianity; and that a train of tradition, on one point, in what is commonly called mystical theology, had been manifestly continued in the church of Christ. Now, he has taken immense pains to trace the doctrines of the Jews in this regard, and to

point out in a way which I believe has been considered convincing by those who have read his works, that, from the very beginning, from the very delivery of the law to Moses, there was a great mass of precepts which was not written, but which was committed to the keeping of the priesthood, and by them gradually communicated or diffused among the people; but, yet, so as hardly ever to be mentioned in any even of the later writings of the sacred books.

A little consideration and examination would convince any of you of this important fact; for it is certain, that, at the time our Saviour came, the Jews were in possession of many doctrines which it is exceedingly difficult to trace in Scripture, and yet of vital importance. You are doubtless aware, that a learned divine and bishop in the established church, wrote a very learned treatise to prove the divine legation of Moses, on the extraordinary ground that Moses was able to achieve the great work of organizing the Jewish republic, of constituting laws which regulated the people, without such a thing as the sanction of a future state. He maintained with the strongest arguments, at least, with plausibility, that you cannot discover in the writings of Moses, or of the early Jews, any single positive text in proof of the future existence of the soul, and of the existence of a future place of rewards and punishments; and, I am sure, that any one of you who is well versed in Scripture, if he will only run through his mind his recollections on the subject; if he will only endeavour to collect for himself such a train of arguments as would convince any one of you from Scripture, he would find out the extreme difficulty of constructing an argument which will bear the scrutiny of accurate examination. But, yet, did the Jews disbelieve in these doctrines? Did they not possess them? Most certainly they did; they possessed them at the time of our Saviour; they possessed them even earlier; for there are traces of them in some of their own works. But here, then, we have an important dogma, a dogma not merely of natural religion, but an important element in revealed religion-one expressly revealed, at least, confirmed and repeated by the new sanction in the new law, which must have been handed down among the people entirely by teaching, entirely by secret tradition.

We find, in like manner, that our Saviour, in reference to this very subject, makes use of an argument which would be almost irreconcilable with good reasoning according to our ideas, and of which the key is only to be found in Jewish tradition. When, for instance, our Saviour deduces a future state, or the resurrection, rather, of the body, from God saying, that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; and that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, it is exceedingly difficult to discover the link between these two members of the argument, how the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is to be proved by God calling himself the God of Abraham. But, by knowing the Jewish form of reasoning, and by knowing the methods which they pur