CONVERSATION VI.

Wednesday Evening.-Farther remarks on the Traditions of the Patriarchal Age.

Olympas. What do you mean, William, by tradition?

William. Any thing handed down from our fathers.

Olympas. Our names, goods, chattels, and hereditaments are handed down to us from our fathers. Call you these traditions?

William. Only their opinions, views, and experience.

Olympas. The latter term includes all that we value in tradition. We need not the opinions nor the views of our forefathers half so much as we nead their experience. Their experience is often of great importance to us, and should always be respected.

Reuben. Is tradition necessarily oral, or may it be both oral and written?

Olympas. It is both oral and written.

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that are truly useful are written traditions, or the narratives of human experience. Can any of you recite a passage in Paul's writings that demonstrates his views of tradition as being both oral and written.

Thomas Dilworth. To the Thessalonians Paul says, 'Hold the traditions you have been taught, whether by word or our epistle." This would

imply that traditions, in his esteem, were both oral and written.

Olympas. And how, Thomas, do you define experience?

Thomas. Experience is practical knowledge, or our acquaintance with things from an immediate contact with them. So, I think, our school-master defined the word. He used to say that every man's experience was his knowledge, and that no person knew any thing but by experience.

Olympas. Human knowledge has, indeed, but two chapters-our own experience and the experience of others. Faith invests us with the latter, while memory furnishes the former. But true knowledge is all comprehended under the term experience; all else is theory, hypothesis, conjecture. Tradition, then, is most valuable, as it records the knowledge or experience of past generations. But unfortunately other ideas and things have been called tradition-the dogmas, opinions, and hypotheses of men. Jews and Christians have volumes of written and unwritten traditions, which have no real knowledge or experience in them; and because of the use they have made of these, the very term tradition has fallen into bad repute. The Jews with their oral law, or unwritten written law, and the Romanists with their written unwritten opinions and hypotheses, called traditions, have made faith in tradition a disreputable belief. Still, when properly interpreted, tradition is the record of human experience. It is history, verbal or written. The Bible is, for the most part, tradition; for it gives us the experience of many individuals,

and the divine procedure with them: and saving faith itself is but the belief of the traditions found in the New Testament.

Reuben. Did you not say that "saving faith" was practically more than belief of testimony or the assent to tradition?

Olympas. True: but these traditions respect a person, not a thing. Now the belief of the traditions concerning that person, necessarily imply confidence in him, therefore, when we wish to simplify to the humblest capacity, we say, that saving faith is trust in Jesus; or believing on Jesus as our Saviour; or trusting in God, through him, as the only way to God-as the truth and the life. Every one who trusts in God, and rejoices in Jesus Christ, is a saved person.

Reuben. This is, then, the reason why the saints of the ancient Scriptures are so frequently spoken of as trusting in God, and why they are described as "they that trust in him."

Olympas. But we must return to our lesson. Tradition, when properly defined, is, you will perceive, the most useful of all the sources of intelligence to man. The Bible is a volume of traditions; and they that add to it their own traditions as of equal authority, as far as in them lies, make the word of God of no practical value— they make it void by their traditions.

Thomas Dilworth. Is there any now-a-days, who, like the old Jews, make the word of God of non-effect by their traditions?

Olympas. The doctrine of the church of Rome, according to the Council of Trent, is, that "the truth and discipline of the catholic church are

comprehended both in the ancient books, and in the traditions which have been received from the mouth of Jesus Christ himself, or of his Apostles, and which have been preserved or transmitted by an uninterrupted chain and succession."

Thomas. And what do Protestants say of tradition?

Olympas. That "the Holy Scriptures contain all things necessary to salvation; so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not required of any man that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation." This is safe doctrine, if Protestants would not give it up in practice.

But as all religious truth was in the first place a matter of oral tradition, it was kind to have it conveyed through few hands, and carefully written on the memory of those who were entrusted with it. This was accomplished in the best possible manner, by the persons employed in keeping the oracles of God during the first ages of the world. It was stated at the close of our last lesson, that all the experience of the human family was communicated to Abraham and Isaac by two persons-Methuselah and Shem. How old, Reuben, was Isaac when Shem died?

Reuben. Isaac was born in the year of the world 2108, and Shem died in the year of the world 2156, or five hundred years after the flood. Isaac was therefore in his fifty-second year when Shem died?

Olympas. You said, at our last lesson, that the history of two thousand years reached Shem

through two persons. You presume that Methuselah saw and heard Adam two hundred and forty-three years; that Shem saw and heard Methuselah ninety-eight years; and that Isaac saw and heard Shem fifty-two years. We know they might have done so; and what was possible in such a case is the most natural event; because who, in the time of Methuselah, would not wish to have seen and heard the first man? Who of us would not travel across all Asia to see the first man, so late as the close of the seventh century from creation, and to have heard him tell the wondrous story of his most eventful life!

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Adam, Noah, and Shem must have related their experience more frequently and with minuteness, because so often interrogated, and so universally interesting, than ever did any other men. Hence its superlative accuracy and safe transmission to Moses. Every word stereotyped. If Adam after the year 400, related his experience before and since the Fall, only once for every year, he must have told it at least five hundred times. Surely then he must have remembered it well. This is true of Shem, who carried in his memory the records of the antediluvian ages, as well as of ten generations after the flood. But tell me, Reuben, when you say that all the knowledge, that is, all the experience of two thousand years, must have reached Isaac through but two persons-Methuselah and Shem -do you mean these two only, or those two supported by other witnesses?

Reuben. I presume there were for much of this time, innumerable concurring witnesses; but I