this solemn admonition! If transcribers, translators, interpreters of every denomination, had religiously considered, that the word they were handling was the word of God! a word, not to be new modelled by them; not to be wrested to serve their own conceited purposes; but designed for the rule of their conduct here, and their judgment hereafter, at the tremendous tribunal of its Author! If this had been sufficiently attended to, we should have had no room to complain of the practices taken notice of in the following parts of this discourse; my design in which is to shew the several ways of taking away from the holy scripture; and to point out, at least, the most obvious instances in which this guilt may be contracted.

I. And, first, we may observe, with reference to the verse immediately preceding the text, that men may in effect take away from the holy scriptures by adding to them. By adding to them unsound and inconsistent parts, they take away from the authority of the whole; and by placing mere human compositions upon an equal foot with the divine, they debase the purity of the latter, and render both their sufficiency and genuineness suspected. No society of Christians is so justly chargeable with this as the church of Rome; which does indeed increase the bulk and number, but depreciates the value of the sacred books by apocryphal writings and tradition. The word of God, it seems, is not a perfect rule of faith and manners; and therefore the words and inventions of men must be called in to complete it. In pretence indeed to complete it, but in truth and reality to subvert it! for as the holy scriptures are not at all serviceable to their cause, so their testi

mony is almost neglected; and recourse is had to those useful supplements, the traditions of the church, which may be made to speak nearer to their purpose. Of this kind likewise was the attempt to make the Clementine Constitutions pass under the character of inspired writings; only in order to overthrow a fundamental doctrine of those that really are so. All such practices as these are subversive of genuine scripture. The pretended writings contain doctrines inconsistent with it; and therefore, so far as they obtain in the world, take away from it; and by raising disputes about the canon may lead unsettled men to think it precarious, and that even the present books which compose it are not of unquestionable authority. But,

II. A more direct means of taking away from the holy scriptures, is taking away from their inspiration; and entertaining very low and moderate thoughts of that portion of the Spirit, which influenced those who wrote them. As scripture is of various kinds, we may, no doubt, admit various degrees of inspiration. Some of the sacred writers had, as it were, a double portion of the Spirit; but all had so much as was necessary to prevent their falling into error, and to keep them from deceiving, and being deceived. With regard to the purely prophetical parts there can be no debate at all. As it is the prerogative of God only to know the events of futurity, so, whenever men truly foretell them, they must speak as they are moved by the Holy Ghost. With reference too to the doctrinal and moral parts of scripture, it is not an ordinary measure of the Spirit that will be sufficient. Errors here may easily be incurred, and yet of the most

dangerous and fatal nature. Upon this account the writers must be supernaturally guided and directed in a very extraordinary manner. Otherwise they may overlook doctrines of the greatest importance; they may deliver others of a mischievous consequence, and many of no consequence at all: necessary duties may be omitted, trivial ones preferred, and the whole system of morality placed upon a wrong foundation; pernicious in some instances, and defective in more. Mere human writers may easily run into all these mistakes; and what could render the divine superior to them, but a very extraordinary measure of the divine Spirit? Thus far then there seems to have been a necessity of a supernatural guidance in every step they took. Objections lie chiefly against those books of holy scripture which are purely historical. Here it may be asked, what need is there of inspiration? men may know the transactions of their own times; and from ancient records they may learn the transactions of the past. In some cases, and in some measure, they may so perhaps. But is there then no need at all of a superior influence and direction to preserve them from the effects of human fallibility and human frailty. The histories of an author's own times are not always to be depended upon, through his own mistake and misapprehension, or misinformation of others. Men are apt enough to impose on themselves; they are easily enough imposed on by others: there is a partiality and prejudice which often clings so to mere mortals, that, though they are in the main honest men, they cannot entirely divest themselves of it. This may lead them to represent things unfairly; to place them in an impro

per light, or to paint them in worse or better colours than in reality they deserve. These considerations may tend to shew, that though an author does know the transactions of his own times, yet something more may be needful to preserve him from all danger, and all temptation, either of mistaking or misrepresenting them. This case of an author's relating the transactions which happened within his own knowledge, is that of the evangelists in their gospels. They write the history of the life and actions of their blessed Master, with which some of them, at least, were personally acquainted. But is it any just inference from hence, that therefore a supernatural guidance was absolutely needless? Were they capable of writing this history, artless as it is, without it? their education was mean; their abilities moderate; their prejudices many and powerful. Yet notwithstanding these disadvantages they have compiled a history full of various wisdom; which contains many sublime and mysterious truths, though of the greatest importance to be known; which discovers a morality above the very ideas of the former masters of that science: and in the management of this, they write with the greatest simplicity, impartiality, and fairness; they record their own ignorances and failings without disguise or palliation: in short, they seem to have divested themselves of their former selves, and, in their own emphatical expression, to have become a set of new creatures. If any thing like this, of this exalted strain and spirit, could have been naturally expected from a few poor, illiterate, prejudiced Jews, I am contented that the evangelists should pass for writers entirely uninspired. But if a divine influence be not alto

gether needless as to those who write what happened within their own observation, it is much less so with respect to such as give an account of what was done in the old times before them. Supposing there be original records, yet may not these be mixed with error and falsehood? And must it be left to a compiler's own sagacity, in a book of such importance as the Bible, to distinguish between the sound and the unsound parts? But, as this is more particularly the case of Moses, it does not appear that he collected his history from any thing of this kind that was extant before him. There was, no doubt, an authentic tradition delivered down as to the most remarkable events, such as the creation, the fall, the flood, and the like; but will any man say that the whole Mosaic history depends upon such tradition? Upon what then does it depend, if neither upon written records nor oral tradition? Is it fiction and fable, the product only of his own invention? so indeed unbelievers will say, who must be answered in another manner. Our argument is not with them; but against such as allow a revelation, and yet deny the inspiration of some of those books which contain it. What account then will the men of this character give us? I see no medium; but if these relations once cease to be received as divine, they must of course be rejected as fabulous and invented. And indeed, to do them justice, they are so far consistent with themselves as to own it. They are fables and fictions, specimens of that political lying which all wise lawgivers scrupled not to practise for the benefit of their people. Thus, for instance, Moses, in the course of his his