cess to the writings of the evangelists and apostles, believed the proposition. All the antient fathers of the church considered it as the corner-stone of the Christian fabric. The most celebrated of the Reformers held it in the same light. The divines who followed these adopted it as their creed also; and by these it has been handed down to other Christian communities, and is retained as an essential doctrine by the church of England at the present day.

The Quakers adduce many authorities in behalf of this proposition; but the following may suffice:

"It is the inward master," says St. Augustine, "that teacheth. Where this inspiration is wanting, it is in vain that words from without are beaten in.”

Luther says, "No man can rightly know God, unless he immediately receive it from his Holy Spirit; except he find it by experience in himself: and in this experience the Holy Spirit teacheth, as in his proper school; out of which school nothing is taught but mere talk."

Calvin, on Luke x. 21, says, "Here the natural wisdom of man is so puzzled, and is

at

at such a loss, that the first step of profiting in the school of Christ is to give it up or renounce it. For by this natural wisdom, as by a veil before our eyes, we are hindered from attaining the mysteries of God, which are not revealed but unto babes and little. ones. For neither do flesh and blood reveal, nor doth the natural man perceive, the things that are of the Spirit. But the doctrine of God is rather foolishness to him, because it can only be spiritually judged. The assistance therefore of the Holy Spirit is in this case necessary; or, rather, his power alone is efficacious."

Dr. Smith observes, in his select Discourses, "Besides the outward revelations of God's will to man, there is also an inward impression of it in their minds and spirits, which is in a more especial manner attributed to God. We cannot see divine things but in a divine light. God only, who is the true Light, and in whom there is no darkness at all, can so shine out of himself upon our glassy understandings, as to beget in them a picture of himself, his own will and pleasure, and turn the soul (as the phrase is in Job) like wax or clay to the seal

of

of his own light and love. He that made our souls in his own image and likeness, can easily find a way into them. The word, that God speaks, having found a way into the soul, imprints itself there as with the point of a diamond, and becomes (to borrow Plato's expression) a word written in the soul of the learner.' Men Men may teach the grammar and rhetoric, but God teaches the divinity. Thus, it is God alone that acquaints the soul with the truths of revelation."

The learned Jeremy Taylor, bishop of Down and Connor, speaks in a similar manner in his sermon de Via Intelligentiæ. "Now in this inquiry," says he, "I must take one thing for granted, which is, that every good man is taught of God. And indeed, unless he teach us, we shall make but ill scholars ourselves, and worse guides to others. No man can know God, says Irenæus, except he be taught of God. If God teaches us, then all is well: but if we do not learn wisdom at his feet, from whence should we have it? It can come from no other spring."

Again: "Those who perfect holiness in

the

the fear of God, have a degree of divine knowledge, more than we can discourse of, and more certain than the demonstrations of geometry, brighter than the sun, and indeficient as the light of Heaven.-A good man is united to God. As flame touches flame, and combines into splendour and into glory, so is the spirit of a man united to Christ by the Spirit of God.-Our light, on the other hand, is like a candle. Every wind of doctrine blows it out, or expends the wax, and makes the light tremulous. But the lights of Heaven are fixed, and bright, and shine for ever."

Cudworth, in his Intellectual System, is wholly of the same opinion. "All the books and writings which we converse with, they can but represent spiritual objects to our understandings, which yet we can never see in their own true figure, colour, and proportion, until we have a divine light within to irradiate and shine upon them. Though there be never such excellent truths concerning Christ and his Gospel set down in words and letters, yet they will be but unknown characters to us, until we have a living Spirit within us, that can decypher them;

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them; until the same Spirit, by secret whispers in our hearts, do comment upon them, which did at first indite them. There be many that understand the Greek and Hebrew of the Scripture, the original languages in which the text was written, that never understood the language of the Spirit."

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