SERMON XIV.

1 THESSALONIANS V. 21.

Prove all things: hold fast that which is good.

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THE best things are liable to abuse ; when abused become prejudicial in proportion to their value when properly employed.— Life, health, and wholesome food, the first of natural blessings, may be, and frequently are perverted from their legitimate and useful ends, to the purposes of excess, sensuality, and sin; and terminate in disease, death, and the terrors of a future judgment. And so it is with our moral advantages. What crimes have not been perpetrated in the name of liberty, when it has been suffered to degenerate into licentiousness! How often has charity become totally extinct, when prudence and frugality, passing their proper bounds, have grown into avarice and rapacity! And

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has not even religion itself been made a curse to mankind, when it has been corrupted by bigotry or fanaticism. It is fit that we should bear these things in mind when we come to the consideration of such propositions as those which are contained in the text; which establish a doctrine of the highest importance to us, and the most consistent with reason; but which is at the same time peculiarly liable to be misunderstood, and has often in fact produced the most lamentable errors.

This doctrine asserts absolutely the right of private judgment in the matter of religion, accompanied with a strong apostolic injunction to exert it. As this is a precept the truth of which cannot be disputed, but which requires great caution and moderation, when we come to reduce it to practice; my object will be to endeavour to explain the limitations and qualifications, which, in common with most general propositions, should be annexed to it, to make it a valuable or even a harmless rule of conduct. I am aware that they who would be most likely to make a good use of it, are precisely those by whom it is little, if at all, adopted; they preferring to trust implicitly in this matter to the ministers of that

Church to which they belong. They, on the other hand, who are most attached to the rule, are frequently apt to carry it too far, to neglect the cautions with which it should be surrounded; and to draw conclusions from it equally prejudicial to themselves and to society.

Before I enter more particularly upon the discussion of this subject, it is proper to remark, that the sense which I affix to the Apostle's words is not precisely that which they conveyed to the Thessalonians. But it is a peculiarity of the Scriptures, and which gives them such inestimable value, that it frequently happens, that when their particular and original application has ceased, they retain a general signification, which will always continue to be profitable, for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. If we make this use of them, they will indeed prove themselves to be to us the words of eternal life: but if we do not, and still more if we pervert their true meaning by unskilful or irrational interpretation, we may contrive to wrest them (as we are told some did from the first) to our own destruction.

The sense then, which for any good purpose to ourselves, we must put upon the words of the text, I take to be this. By proving all things, we must understand that we are to examine the evidences of our faith, that is, the genuineness and authenticity of the Scriptures, by all the means in our power, and not to take them upon trust, or to receive them with a blind and implicit confidence. And then we are to ascertain what the doctrines are which they really contain: which can only be done by a diligent and frequent perusal of them, with the single purpose of discovering the truth, unbiassed by prejudice or interest: but with an earnest prayer to God, for the assistance of his Holy Spirit, to guide us in that most important work. But this could not have been what St. Paul had in view when he wrote to the Thessalonians. The books whose genuineness and authenticity we have now to prove as the foundation of our faith, if then in existence, were probably not known to them and still less that long list of writers whose reference to them forms a chain of historical evidence of their credibility upon which we now rely with the firmest confidence.Instead of these, St. Paul was himself a living

witness of the truth of Christianity, having received it, as he himself declares repeatedly, by immediate Revelation from its Divine Author. Nor did he exhort the Thessalonians to prove the doctrines of Scripture in the same latitude in which we have to discharge that duty, because a great part of those doctrines is to be found only in his own Epistles to other Churches, with which they were unacquainted, and in the other writings which make up body of the New Testament. His injunction to them must have been of a much more limited nature. By proving all things, he

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must have meant them to examine the truth of what he and other teachers of the religion of Jesus taught them, by all such means as were within their competence. He had just before charged them not to despise prophesyings under which expression was comprehended nearly the whole of what he and they had to communicate to them. For to prophesy in the language of Scripture, signifies not only to foretell future events, but to declare any truth, whether predictive or not, by the inspiration of God '. Now it appears that

1 Parkhurst's Lexicon.