enormity, is, according to a third, permitted, and therefore no sin at all; and thus the teaching of the New Testament is at variance with itself, and the sacred writers contradict each other, and that, too, upon one of the most important questions which can affect the moral and social welfare of mankind. But no man, who believes the Scriptures to be the Word of God, can for a moment admit a proposition so monstrous; he assuredly must maintain, that these sacred oracles are consistent, and that what is prohibited by one is not permitted by another; and if certain premises lead inevitably to an opposite conclusion, then those premises must themselves be false. How, then, is the present difficulty to be met? How are we to construe these different texts of Scripture, so as to save them from the objection of being contradictory or inconsistent? That the language of the Evangelists varies, is indisputable; and that this variation is such, as to lead many persons to assert, that St. Matthew's authorises divorce a vinculo matrimonii in cases of adultery, although they admit that neither St. Mark's nor St. Luke's allows any exception, is notorious. The question therefore is, whether this can be satisfactorily explained; whether those, who claim the authority of St. Matthew's gospel for these divorces, are entitled to do so; or whether the fair interpretation of Scripture, of the one gospel as of the others, does not require us to hold, that they are absolutely unlawful?

Now taking Scripture as the only test, being that

alone by which Protestants profess to abide, I see but two modes of reconciling the Evangelists: either to blend, as it were, the three gospels together, and then, if St. Matthew's really contains the exception which it is said to do, to carry the same exception by implication into St. Mark's and St. Luke's, so as to include it as part of their meaning, although inconsistent with their expressions ;-or to maintain, that St. Matthew's gospel really contains no such exception, that the words, which have been supposed to warrant it, need not be, and ought not to be, so understood, and that there is no inconsistency at all between this and the other two gospels.

Of these two modes of meeting the difficulty, the former is that which has generally been adopted ;-as is said by Selden, in his Uxor Hebraica, chap. xxii. : "Cum hâc distinctione (the exception in the case of adultery), ea quæ simpliciter de uxore non dimittendâ habentur apud Marcum, Lucam, et Paulum sumenda, quod et interpretibus optimis plane consonum." And the same is asserted by Bishop Cozens, in his argument in the Duke of Norfolk's case (State Trials, vol. xiii. p. 1332); an argument which is cited in the First Report of the Commissioners on the Law of Divorce, with an encomium which seems to me singularly undeserved. The view, however, thus taken, is undoubtedly popular, whatever may be thought of Bishop Cozens, and though Selden ventured rather too far when he said, that it was optimis interpretibus consonum."

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The view, however, is inadmissible, be its supporters who they may; and this for a very plain reason. Each of these narratives was written, not only by different authors, and in different countries, but at different times, and for the immediate use of different churches and converts. Each was altogether independent of the others; and there is no evidence to show, that any one of the three Evangelists, whose gospels we are considering, had, when he wrote his own, seen either of the others. St. Mark's gospel has indeed been called, I believe by St. Augustine, an epitome of St. Matthew's; but it is very doubtful whether more was meant by this, than that it related many of the same events in a more condensed or compendious form, not that it was really an abridgment. The probability seems to be, that neither St. Mark nor St. Luke had seen or known any thing of St. Matthew's; and there certainly is no reason to suppose, that any one of the three imagined, that the particular converts, for whom he wrote, would ever have access to any other authentic history of our Saviour's life and death. It was not till long after the age of these writers, that the Scriptures of the New Testament were collected together, and placed side by side in a single volume; and the difficulties which then existed, in multiplying copies of any work, and transmitting them to distant countries, would naturally prevent any author from making the true sense, or meaning, of his own composition dependent upon the chance of some other being cir

culated, and placed in the hands of his readers; and certainly, if the work contained no reference to any other, and gave its readers no hint that they were to look elsewhere for any further information, it never could be presumed to have been intentionally thus left imperfect. In each of these three gospels, there are abundant proofs, that the writer regarded it as complete in itself, and that it was not in any respect a supplement to any other; and if the facts are so, it is evident that we are not entitled to say, that any two, or even one of them, must have meant something very different from what they have written, when their words are perfectly clear and exclude any such meaning, simply because the third has said something to that effect, or which may perhaps be so understood. We can have no right, if St. Mark and St. Luke really differ from St. Matthew, to contend, that they must have contemplated the introduction of something inconsistent with their own narratives, because St. Matthew has introduced it, when they never refer to St. Matthew, and probably knew nothing of what he had written. If the narratives are inconsistent, and we are bound to choose between conflicting testimony, the more natural course would be, to make the one witness yield to the two, (all the three being equally trustworthy,) than to make the two yield to the one; and unquestionably, if the one is at all obscure,—if his meaning is not quite so clear as that of the others, if, by any interpretation not absolutely absurd, we can construe his doubtful ex

pressions, so as not to be repugnant to their plain ones, we are bound, upon every principle of fairness and of common sense, to adopt that course, and not the converse of it. It is far more probable, even humanly speaking, that we should have mistaken the sense of St. Matthew's gospel, in two passages not in themselves free from difficulty, than that both St. Mark and St. Luke should have mistaken our Lord's meaning, and supposed that He intended to forbid all divorces a vinculo matrimonii, when He only meant to forbid those which were not on account of adultery. If any body could construe their words, so as to show an ambiguity in them, or raise any doubt as to their obvious meaning, the case would be different,-there would then be some reason for taking another course; but if this cannot be, it is flying in the face of all the rules of criticism, to deal with these writers as the advocates of divorce claim to do.

But further; if St. Matthew's gospel contains an exception in favour of divorce, where adultery has been committed, then I should be glad to know, why it is that neither St. Mark's nor St. Luke's contains the same? Each, as I have said, was written independently of the others, and each was evidently intended to give the rule propounded by our Lord; each, too, was dictated by Divine inspiration, so that it should be an infallible guide to those for whose use it was designed. Why, then, have these two suppressed so material a proviso ?-What object