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LETTER IX.

To JAMES BROWN, Esq. &c.

THE SECOND FALLACIOUS RULE OF FAITH.

DEAR SIR,

AFTER all that I have written concerning the Rule of Faith, adopted by yourself and other more rational Protestants, I have only yet treated of the extrinsic arguments against it. I now, therefore, proceed to investigate its intrinsic nature, in order to show more fully the inadequacy, or rather the falsehood of it.

When an English Protestant gets possession of an English Bible, printed by Thomas Basket, or other Printer to the King's Most Excellent Majesty,' he takes it in hand with the same confidence, as if he had immediately received it from the Almighty himself, as Moses received the tables of the Law on Mount Sinai, amidst thunder and lightning. But how vain is this confidence, while he adheres to the foregoing Rule of Faith! How many questionable points does he assume, as proved, which cannot be proved, without relinquishing his own principles and adopting ours.

I. Supposing then you, Dear Sir, to be the Protestant I have been speaking of, I begin with asking you, By what means have you learnt what is the Canon of Scripture, that is to say, which are the books that have been written by Divine inspiration; or, indeed, how have you ascertained that any books at all have been so written? You cannot discover either of these things by your Rule, because the Scripture, as your great authority, Hooker, shows, (1) and Chillingworth allows, cannot bear testimony to itself. You will say that the Old Testament was written by

(1) Eccles. Polit. B. iii. sec. 8.

Moses and the Prophets, and the New Testament by the Apostles of Christ and the Evangelists. But admitting all this, it does not of itself prove that they always wrote, or indeed that they ever wrote under the influence of inspiration. They were, by nature, fallible men: how have you learnt that they were infallible writers?. In the next place, you receive books as canonical parts of the Testament, which were not written by Apostles at all, namely, the Gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke; whilst you reject an authentic work of great excellence, (1) written by one who is termed in Scripture an Apostle, (2) and declared to be full of the Holy Ghost, (3) I speak of St. Barnaby. Lastly, you have no sufficient authority for asserting, that the sacred volumes are the genuine composition of the holy personages whose names they bear, except the tradition and living voice of the Catholic Church; since numerous apocryphal Prophecies and spurious Gospels and Epistles, under the same or equally venerable names, were circulated in the Church, during its early ages, and accredited by different learned writers and holy Fathers: while some of the really canonical books were rejected, or doubted of by them. In short, it was not until the end of the fourth century, that the genuine Canon of Holy Scripture was fixed: and then it was fixed by the tradition and authority of the Church, declared in the Third Council of Carthage and a Decretal of P. Innocent I. Indeed it is so clear that the Canon of Scripture is built on the Tradition of the Church, that most learned Protestants, (4) with Luther himself, have (5)

(1) St. Barnaby. See Grabe's Spicileg. and Cotlerus's Collect.

(2) Acts xiv, 24.

(3) Acts xi. 24.

(4) Hooker, Eccl. Polit. c. iii. s. 8. Dr. Lardner, in Bishop Watson's Col. vol. ii. p. 20.

5) We are obliged to yield many things to the Papists-that with them is the Word of God, which we received from them; otherwise we should have known nothing at all about it.' Comment on John xvi.

been forced to acknowledge it, in terms almost as strong as those in the well-known declaration of St. Augustin. (1)

II. Again, supposing the Divine authority of the Sacred Books themselves to be established, how do you know that the copies of them translated and printed in your Bible are authentic? It is agreed upon amongst the learned, that, together with the Temple and City of Jerusalem, the original text of Moses and the ancient Prophets were destroyed by the Assyrians, under Nebuchadnezzar; (2) and, though they were replaced by authentic copies, at the end of the Babylonish captivity, through the pious care of the Prophet Esdras or Ezra, yet that these also perished in the subsequent persecution of Antiochus; (3) from which time we have no evidence of the authenticity of the Old Testament, till this was supplied by Christ and his Apostles, who transmitted it to the Church. In like manner, granting, for example, that St. Paul wrote an inspired Epistle to the Romans and another to the Ephesians; yet as the former was entrusted to an individual, the Deaconess Phebe, to be conveyed by her to its destination, (4) and the latter to his disciple, Tychicus, (5) for the same purpose, it is impossible for you to entertain a rational conviction that these Epistles, as they stand in your Testament, are exactly in the state in which they issued from the Apostle's pen, or that they are his genuine Epistles at all; without recurring to the tradition and authority of the Catholic Church concerning them. To make short of this matter, I will not lead you into the labyrinth of Biblical criticism, nor will I show you the endless varieties of readings with respect

(1) I should not believe the Gospel itself, if the authority of the Catholic Church did not oblige me to do so. Contra Epist. Fundam. (2) Brett's Dissert, in Bishop Watson's Collect. vol. iii. p. 5 (3) Ibid. (4) Rom, xvi. See Calmet, &c.

(5), Ephes, vi. 21.

to words and whole passages, which occur in different copies of the Sacred Text, but will here content myself with referring you to your own Bible Book, as printed by authority. Look then at Psalm xiv. as it occurs in The Book of Common Prayer, to which your Clergy swear their consent and assent; then look at the same Psalm in your Bible: you will find four whole verses in the former, which are left out in the latter! What will you here say, Dear Sir? You must say that your Church has added to, or else that she has taken away from the words of this Prophesy! (1)

In

III. But your pains and perplexities concerning your Rule of Faith must not stop even at this point: for though you had demonstrative evidence, that the several books in your Bible are Canonical and authentic, in the originals, it would still remain for you to inquire whether or no they are faithfully translated in your English copy. fact, you are aware that they were written, some of them in Hebrew, and some of them in Greek: out of which languages they were translated, for the last time, by about fifty different men, of various capacities, learning, judgment, opinions, and prejudices. (2) In this inquiry the Catholic Church herself can afford you no security to build your faith upon; much less can any private individuals whosoever. The celebrated Protestant divine, Episcopius, was so convinced of the fallibility of modern translations, that he wanted all sorts of persons, labourers, sailors, women, &c. to learn Hebrew and Greek. Indeed it is

(1) The verses in question being quoted by St. Paul, Rom. iii. 13, &c. there is no doubt but the Common Bible is defective in this passage.-On the other hand, Bishop Marsh has published his conviction that the most important passage in the New Testament, 1 John v. 7, for establishing the Divinity of Jesus Christ, is spurious.' Elem. of Theo. vol. ii. p. 90.

()see a list of them in Ant. Johnson's Hist. Account. Theo. Col. leet. p. 95.

obvious, that the sense of a text may depend upon the choice of a single word in the transla. tion: nay, it sometimes depends upon the mere punctuation of a sentence, as may be seen below. (1) Can you then, consistently, reject the authority of the great Universal Church, and yet build upon that of some obscure translator in the reign of James I.? No, Sir, you must yourself have compared your English Bible with, the originals, and have proved it to be a faithful version, before you can build your faith upon it as upon The Word of God.-To say one word now of the Bibles themselves, which have been published by authority, or generally used by Protestants in this country: those of Tindal, Coverdale, and Queen Elizabeth's Bishops, were so notoriously corrupt, as to cause a general outcry against them among learned Protestants, as well as among Catholics, in which the King himself (James 1.) joined; (2) and accordingly ordered a new version of it to be made; being the same that is now in use, with some few alterations introduced after the Restoration. (3) Now, though these new trans lators have corrected many wilful errors of their predecessors, most of which were levelled at the Catholic doctrines and discipline; (4) yet they have left a sufficient number of them behind, for which I do not find that their advocates offer any excuse whatsoever. (5)

(1) One of the strongest passages for the Divinity of Christ is the following, as it is pointed in the Vulgate: Ex quibus est Christus, secundum carnem, qui est super omnia Deus benedictus in sæcula. Rom. ix. 5. But see how Grotius and Socinus deprive the text of all its strength by merely substituting a point for a comma: Ex quibus est Christus, secundum carnem. Qui est super omnia Deus benedictus in

sæcula.

(2) Bishop's Watson's Collect. vol. iii. p. 98.

(3) Ibid. (4) These may be found in the learned Greg. Martin's Treatise on the subject, and in Ward's Errata to the Protestant Bible.

(5) Two of these I had occasion to notice in my Inquiry into the Character of the Irish Catholics, namely, 1 Cor. xi. 27, where the con junctive and is put for the disjunctive or, and Matt. xix. 11, where can not is put for do not, to the altering of the sense in both instances. Now, though these corruptions stand in direct opposition to the origi

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