(I. John i. 3), "That which we have seen and have heard, we declare unto you." They had no need of written documents to remind them of these wonderful events, which, even had they tried, they could not forget.

And it was on their personal testimony, supported by the miracles which they worked, and which made it evident that the Holy Ghost was speaking by their lips, that their converts, the first Christians, believed in Christ. They read no Bible; they needed none.

After a while, one by one, the books of the New Testament were written by six of the apostles, Peter, Paul, Matthew, John, James, and Jude, and by two of their companions, Mark and Luke. The four Gospels were written to put in a permanent form the principal events of our Lord's life and death, to give an authentic record of it for posterity, and also for the use of those who, even in the times of the apostles themselves, might have occasion to instruct others in it, and who had not perhaps the advantage of being eye-witnesses of what they had to tell, and at any rate not the special Divine assistance promised to the apostles themselves.

But these Gospels were necessarily incomplete accounts of the great matter of which they treated; St. John himself says, in the close of his, that "there are also many other things

that Jesus did," and to show that he does not mean merely the things narrated by the other evangelists, but not by himself, he adds, that if all were written, the world could not contain the books.

It is impossible, of course, to take these words literally; but still they mean a great deal. And let it not be said now, that these other things omitted by the evangelists were unimportant; St. John evidently is not speaking of such things as walking, eating, or drinking, but of miracles which our Saviour worked, or instructions which He gave. Indeed, we do not need St. John to tell us that our Lord must have said much more to His disciples than is recorded in these short Gospels, and especially in the time between His resurrection and ascension, when he was, as St. Luke tells us (Acts i. 3), "for forty days appearing to them and speaking of the kingdom of God."

The other books of the New Testament, with the exception of the Acts, which is as it were a continuation of the Gospels, but in a certain way still more incomplete, being principally occupied with the acts and words of only one of the apostles, and of the revelation of St. John, which we can hardly use confidently on account of its mysterious nature, are epistles written from time to time, evidently principally

to Christians, and therefore intended not so much to teach the world Christian truth as to instruct Christians more fully, or to remind them of what they had already been told.

It is, then, perfectly clear that the apostles did not take the New Testament as the ground of their instructions. It would have been absurd for them to use each other's epistles as the basis of their preaching; the Gospels were no doubt more frequently appealed to as time went on. But substantially it is plain that Christianity went on during the first century with comparatively little appeal to the Bible, and with little need to use it. And it could not have been used as a whole, and therefore, according to Protestant ideas, Christianity must have labored under great difficulties until the end of the first century; for the Bible was not completed till about that time. I trust, then, that it is clear that this book, holy and precious as it undoubtedly is, was not the principal foundation of Christianity in the early Christian times.

Let us now see whether the view can be held that it is the only foundation on which we can safely rest our religion now.

The Protestant theory is that the pure Christian truth, as held in the days when the Bible was written, was gradually corrupted and obscured by human additions and interpretations; and that the only way to get rid of these

is to sweep everything else away at one stroke, and depend on the Bible alone.

Now, it must be respectfully submitted that this theory is unsatisfactory. For, granting that the Bible as we have it is a faithful record, so far as it goes, of the actions and teaching of our Lord and of His apostles, and that the picture which it presents of primitive Christianity is, so far as that picture is clear and certain, a true one; nevertheless it is plain that this record and this picture are far from being as complete or as clear as they should be. That the text of the Bible is not clear and conclusive on many points of doctrine on which it does treat, is sufficiently proved by the very discordances of those who attempt to deduce doctrine from it without any other aid; that it is not complete is equally manifest. As has been said, there are great gaps in its account, notably its almost entire silence on the instructions given by our Lord during the time of His risen life on earth; and it is an absolutely gratuitous and unwarrantable assumption to take for granted that the matters which it omits were of no importance. Nowhere is it said in the Bible that such is the case. Some, it is true, imagine that St. John means to say this, where in the close of his revelation-which is also, as we have it, the close of the Bible itself— "if any man shall add to these things, God

shall add unto him the plagues written in this book." But it hardly needs to be remarked that St. John speaks here of the prophecies contained in this particular book of revelation which he had written; for the Bible itself was not collected into one book at the time at which he was writing.

We have, then, no guarantee that there are not important matters of Christian faith which are not to be found in the Bible at all. We may indeed say that the points accepted by the Catholic Church are inconsistent with or even contrary to the Bible; but that does not help us. That others have added something erroneous does not show that there was nothing true and important which should have been added.

It does not get us out of the difficulty that our Bible record is fragmentary. If we use it alone, we are in the same position as those would be who should try to construct a complete Roman history simply out of the books of Livy or Tacitus, reliable as these books might be. If we act honestly, we must confess that we have no certainty, if we proceed on these lines, that we have the whole Christian faith or can ever obtain it; it is something which the apostles had, but which has, perhaps, now to a great extent been lost; we have some pieces of it, but not with any certainty the whole. It is, as has been said, merely a wreck which has

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