his conduct, and that the Bible was never intended to supersede the necessity of all other knowledge,-those now detailed must have this effect. The great difference between Christians of the present day, who regard these executions as great crimes, and the pious ministers who inflicted and the serious people who witnessed them, consists in the superior knowledge possessed by the moderns, of physical science, which has opened to their understandings views of Nature and of God, widely different from those entertained by their ancestors under the guidance of the Bible alone.

Nothing can afford a more convincing proof of the necessity of using all the lights in our power, by which to ascertain the true meaning of Scripture and the soundness of our interpretations of it, than the wide diversity of the opinions which even the most learned and pious divines have based upon the Bible. Another fact of some importance in relation to this matter is, that the manuscripts which handed down the sacred writings to us from ancient times vary in many important passages, sometimes through the ignorance and carelessness of transcribers, and sometimes in consequence of wilful corruption and interpolations by contending sects. The following passages, extracted from a celebrated treatise by one of the greatest ornaments of the Church of England, Bishop Taylor, are exceedingly instructive on this subject. 'There are,' says he, 'so many thousands of copies, that were written by persons of several interests and persuasions,-such different understandings and tempers,-such distinct abilities and weaknesses,—that it is no wonder there is so great a variety of readings both in the Old Testament and in the New. In the Old Testament, the Jews pretend that the Christians have corrupted many places, on purpose to make symphony between both the Testaments. On the other side, the Christians have had so much reason to suspect the Jews, that when Aquila had translated the Bible in their schools, and had been taught by them, they rejected the edition,

many of them, and some of them called it heresy to follow it. And Justin Martyr justified it to Tryphon, that the Jews had defalked many sayings from the books of the old prophets....I shall not need to urge, that there are some words so near in sound that the scribes might easily mistake....The instances of this kind are too many, as appears in the variety of readings in several copies, proceeding from the negligence or ignorance of the transcribers, or the malicious endeavor of heretics, or the inserting marginal notes into the text, or the nearness of several words....But so it is that this variety of reading is not of slight consideration; for although it be demonstrably true, that all things necessary to faith and good manners are preserved from alteration and corruption, because they are of things necessary, and they could not be necessary unless they were delivered to us,-God, in his goodness and his justice, having obliged himself to preserve that which he hath bound us to observe and keep; yet, in other things which God hath not obliged himself so punctually to preserve, in these things, since variety of reading is crept in, every reading takes away a degree of certainty from any proposition derivative from those places so read: and if some copies, especially if they be public and notable, omit a verse or a tittle, every argument from such a tittle or verse loses much of its strength and reputation.'--Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying, sect. iii. § 4.

As to consulting the Scriptures in the original tongues, this, says the Bishop, 'is to small purpose: for indeed it will expound the Hebrew and the Greek, and rectify translations; but I know no man that says that the Scriptures in Hebrew and Greek are easy and certain to be understood, and that they are hard in Latin and English: the difficulty is in the thing, however it be expressed--the least is in the language. If the original languages were our mother-tongue, Scripture is not much the easier to us; and a natural Greek or a Jew can with no more reason or authority obtrude his interpretations upon other men's con

sciences, than a man of another nation. Add to this, that the inspection of the original is no more certain way of interpretation of Scripture now, than it was to the fathers and primitive age of the Church; and yet he that observes what infinite variety of translations were in the first ages of the Church, (as St. Jerome observes,) and never a one like another, will think that we shall differ as much in our interpretations as they did, and that the medium is as uncertain to us as it was to them; and so it is: witness the great number of late translations, and the infinite number of commentaries, which are too pregnant an argument that we neither agree in the understanding of the words nor of the sense.' 'Men,' he adds most justly, 'do not learn their doctrines from Scripture, but come to the understanding of Scripture with preconceptions and ideas of doctrines of their own; and then no wonder that scriptures look like pictures, wherein every man in the room believes they look on him only, and that wheresoever he stands or how often soever he changes his station.'—Sect. iv. § 5, 6.

The folly of setting up any isolated passage of Scripture against truths brought to light by experiment and observation, is rendered still more obvious by what Bishop Taylor says respecting the extreme difficulty of discovering the real meaning of many parts of the Bible, even where there are sufficient grounds for believing the text to be genuine. Since there are in Scripture,' he observes, many other mysteries, and matters of question, upon which there is a veil; since there are so many copies with infinite varieties of reading; since a various interpunction, a parenthesis, a letter, an accent, may much alter the sense; since some places have divers literal senses, many have spiritual, mystical, and allegorical meanings; since there are so many tropes, metonymies, ironies, hyperboles, proprieties and improprieties of language, whose understanding depends upon such circumstances that it is almost impossible to know the proper interpretation, now that the

knowledge of such circumstances and particular stories is irrevocably lost: since there are some mysteries which, at the best advantage of expression, are not easy to be apprehended; and whose explication, by reason of our imperfections, must needs be dark, sometimes weak, sometimes unintelligible: and, lastly, since those ordinary means of expounding Scripture, as searching the originals, conference of places, parity of reason, and analogy of faith, are all dubious, uncertain, and very fallible; he that is wisest, and, by consequence, the likeliest to expound truest in all probability of reason, will be very far from confidence; because every one of these, and many more, are like so many degrees of improbability and uncertainty, all depressing our certainty of finding out truth in such mysteries, and amidst so many difficulties. And therefore a wise man, that considers this, would not willingly be prescribed to by others; and therefore, if he also be a just man, he will not impose upon others; for it is best every man should be left in that liberty from which no man can justly take him, unless he could secure him from error.'Sect. iv. § 8.

On this subject the reader is referred also to an able 'Essay on the Plenary and Verbal Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, by Donald Fraser, D. D., Minister of the Gospel, Kennoway, Fifeshire.'* The following passage illustrates the propriety of acting upon Bishop Taylor's suggestions: Be it observed, that when the New Testament writers, in quoting from the Old, affirm that the Scripture was fulfilled, they do not always mean that an ancient prediction was literally accomplished. In some instances they apply this term to the verification of a type; as when John, after relating the circumstance of the soldiers not breaking the legs of Jesus, adds a quotation respecting the paschal lamb: These things were done that the Scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken.' (Chap. xix. 36, compared with Exod. xii. 36.) In other places

* Affleck, Edinburgh, and Rutherglen & Co. Glasgow, 1834.

they only accommodate the_citation to the subject of their narrative. Thus, Matthew, after relating Herod's cruel murder of the babes in Bethlehem and its vicinity, immediately adds: Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying, In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.' (Matt. ii. 17, 18, compared with Jer. xxxi. 15.) That is to say, the great lamentation and inconsolable grief amongst the mothers of Bethlehem, occasioned by Herod's imbruing his hands in the blood of their unoffending children, may be happily illustrated by the prophet's description of the sorrows attending the Babylonish captivity; where, by a beautiful figure, he represents Rachel as bitterly deploring the loss of her offspring.

'An important critical observation of the late Dr. Campbell's must not be here omitted. He justly observes, that, in many passages of the New Testament, it would have been proper to render the original term aλngow by the English word verify, in preference to fulfil; for this last word" has a much more limited signification, and gives a handle to cavillers where the original gives none. It makes the sacred penmen appear to call those things predictions which plainly were not, and which they never meant to denominate predictions." Verify is, accordingly, the term which that distinguished interpreter usually prefers in his own Translation of the Four Gospels.'-Chap. iii. § 7.

In the remarks offered in the present chapter I do not depreciate the importance of the Bible; I only very humbly endeavor to vindicate the study of the Creator's will in His works as well as in His word,-to show that the human mind needs illumination from both to direct our conduct towards virtue, and to prove that, without knowledge of the former, we may grievously misunderstand the meaning of the latter. In the words of Archbishop Whately, I consider that we are bound to use our own natural faculties in the