VI. ART. and after him all inspired persons, to put things in writing, could be it could be no other than to free the world from the uncertainties and impostures of oral tradition. All mankind being derived from one common source, it seems it was much easier in the first ages of the world to preserve the tradition pure, than it could possibly be afterwards there were only a few things then to be delivered concerning God; as, That he was one spiritual Being, that he had created all things, that he alone was to be worshipped and served; the rest relating to the history of the world, and chiefly of the first man that was made in it. There were also great advantages on the side of oral tradition, the first men were very long-lived, and they saw their own families spread extremely, so that they had on their side both the authority which long life always has, particularly concerning matters of fact, and the credit that parents have naturally with their own children, to secure tradition. Two persons might have conveyed it down from Adam to Abraham; Methuselah lived above three hundred years while Adam was yet alive, and Sem was almost an hundred when he died, and he lived much above an hundred years in the same time with Abraham, according to the Hebrew. Here is a great period of time filled up by two or three persons: and yet in that time the tradition of those very few things, in which religion was then comprehended, was so universally and entirely corrupted, that it was necessary to correct it by immediate revelation to Abraham: God intending to have a peculiar people to himself out of his posterity, commanded him to forsake his kindred and country, that he might not be corrupted with an idolatry, that we have reason to believe was then but beginning among them. We are sure his nephew Laban was an idolater: and the danger of mixing with the rest of mankind was then so great, that God ordered a mark to be made on the bodies of all descended from him, to be the seal of the Covenant, and the badge and cognizance of his posterity: by that distinction, and by their living in a wandering and unfixed manner, they were preserved for some time from idolatry; God intending afterwards to settle them in an instituted religion. But though the beginnings of it, I mean the promulgation of the law on Mount Sinai, was one of the most amazing things that ever happened, and the fittest to be orally conveyed down, the law being very short, and the circumstances in the delivery of it most astonishing; and though there were many rites, and several festivities, appointed chiefly for the carrying down the me VI. mory of it; though there was also in that dispensation ART. the greatest advantage imaginable for securing this tradition, all the main acts of their religion being to be performed in one place, and by men of one tribe and family; as they were also all the inhabitants of a small tract of ground, of one language, and by their constitutions. obliged to maintain a constant commerce among themselves they having further a continuance of signal characters of God's miraculous presence among them, such as the operation of the water of jealousy, the plenty of the sixth year to supply them all the Sabbatical year, and till the harvest of the following year: together with a succession of Prophets that followed one another, either in a constant course, or at least soon after one another; but above all, the presence of God which appeared in the cloud of glory, and in those answers that were given by the Urim and Thummim; all which must be confessed to be advantages on the side of tradition, vastly beyond any that can be pretended to have been in the Christian Church: yet notwithstanding all these, God commanded Moses to write all their Law, as the Ten Commandments were, by the immediate power or finger of God, writ on tables of stone. When all this is laid together and well considered, it will appear, that God by a particular economy intended them to secure revealed religion from the doubtfulness and uncertainties of oral tradition. It is much more reasonable to believe, that the Christian religion, which was to be spread to many remote regions, among whom there could be little communication, should have been fixed in its first beginnings by putting it in writing, and not left to the looseness of reports and stories. We do plainly see, that though the methods of knowing and communicating truth are now surer and better fixed than they have been in most of the ages which have passed since the beginnings of this religion; yet in every matter of fact such additions are daily made, as it happens to be reported, and every point of doctrine is so variously stated, that if religion had not a more assured bottom than tradition, it could not have that credit paid to it that it ought to have. If we had no greater certainty for religion than report, we could not believe it very firmly, nor venture upon it: so in order to the giving this doctrine such authority as is necessary for attaining the great ends proposed in it, the conveyance of it must be clear and unquestionable; otherwise as it would grow to be much mixed with fable, so it would come to be looked on as all a fable. Since then oral tradition, when H VI. ART. it had the utmost advantages possible of its side, failed so much in the conveyance both of natural religion, and of the Mosaical, we see that it cannot be relied on as a certain method of preserving the truths of revealed religion. 6,9. In our Saviour's time, tradition was set up on many occasions against him, but he never submitted to it: on the contrary he reproached the Jews with this, that they Mat. xv. 3, had made the laws of God of no effect by their traditions; and he told them, that they worshipped God in vain, when they taught for doctrines the commandments of men. In all his disputes with the Pharisees, he appealed to Moses and the Prophets, he bade them search the Scriptures; for in them, said he, ye think ye have eternal life, and they testify of me. Ye think is, by the phraseology of that time, a word that does not refer to any particular conceit of theirs; but imports, that as they thought, so in them they had eternal life. Our Saviour justifies himself and his doctrine often by words of Scripture, but never once by tradition. We see plainly, that in our Saviour's time the tradition of the Resurrection was so doubtful among the Jews, that the Sadducees, a formed party among them, did openly deny it. The authority of tradition had likewise imposed two very mischievous errors upon the strictest sect of the Jews, that adhered the most firmly to it: the one was, that they understood the prophecies concerning the Messias sitting on the throne of David literally they thought that, in imitation of David, he was not only to free his own country from a foreign yoke, but that he was to subdue, as David had done, all the neighbouring nations. This was to them a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence; so their adhering to their traditions proved their ruin in all respects. The other error, to which the authority of tradition led them, was their preferring the rituals of their religion to the moral precepts that it contained: this not only corrupted their own manners, while they thought that an exactness of performing, and a zeal in asserting, not only the ritual precepts that Moses gave their fathers, but those additions to them which they had from tradition, that were accounted hedges about the law: that this, I say, might well excuse or atone for the most heinous violations of the rules of justice and mercy: but this had yet another worse effect upon them, while it possessed them with such prejudices against our Saviour and his Apostles, when they came to see, that they set no value on those practices that were recommended by tradition, and that they preferred pure and sublime morals even to Mosaical ceremonies themselves, and set the Gentiles at VI. liberty from those observances. So that the ruin of the ART. Jews, their rejecting the Messias, and their persecuting his followers, arose chiefly from this principle that had got in among them, of believing tradition, and of being guided by it. 11. The Apostles, in all their disputes with the Jews, make their appeals constantly to the Scriptures; they set a nigh character on those of Berea for examining them, and Acts xvii. comparing the doctrine that they preached with them. In the Epistles to the Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews, in which they pursue a thread of argument, with relation to the prejudices that the Jews had taken up against Christianity, they never once argue from tradition, but always from the Scriptures; they do not pretend only to disparage modern tradition, and to set up that which was more ancient: they make no such distinction, but hold close to the Scriptures. When St. Paul sets out the advantages that Timothy had by a religious education, he mentions this, that of a child he had known the holy Scrip- 2 Tim. iii. tures, which were able to make him wise unto salvation, 15, 16. through faith which was in Christ Jesus: that is, the belief of the Christian religion was a key to give him a right understanding of the Old Testament; and upon this occasion St. Paul adds, all Scripture, (that is, the whole Old Testament) is given by divine inspiration; or (as others render the words) all the divinely inspired Scripture is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works. The New Testament was writ on the same design with the Old; that, as St. Luke expresses it, we might know the certainty of those things wherein we Luke i. 4. have been instructed: These things were written, saith St. John xx. John, that ye might believe, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son 31. of God, and that believing ye might have life through his name. When St. Peter knew by a special revelation that he was near his end, he writ his second Epistle, that they might have that as a mean of keeping those things always 2 Pet. i. 15. in remembrance after his death. Nor do the Apostles give us any hints of their having left any thing with the Church, to be conveyed down by an oral tradition, which they themselves had not put in writing: they do sometimes refer themselves to such things as they had delivered to particular Churches; but by tradition in the Apostles' days, and for some ages after, it is very clear, that they meant only the conveyance of the faith, and not any unwritten doctrines: they reckoned the faith was a sacred depositum which was committed to them; and that ART. VI. was to be preserved pure among them. But it were very easy to shew in the continued succession of all the Christian writers, that they still appealed to the Scriptures, that they argued from them, that they condemned all doctrines that were not contained in them; and when at any time they brought human authorities to justify their opinions or expressions, they contented themselves with a very few, and those very late authorities: so that their design in vouching them seems to be rather to clear themselves from the imputation of having innovated any thing in the doctrine, or in the ways of expressing it, than that they thought those authorities were necessary to prove them by. For in that case they must have taken a great deal more pains than they did, to have followed up, and proved the tradition much higher than they went. We do also plainly see that such traditions as were not founded on Scripture were easily corrupted, and on that account were laid aside by the succeeding ages. Such were the opinion of Christ's reign on earth for a thousand years; the saints not seeing God till the resurrection; the necessity of giving infants the Eucharist; the divine inspiration of the seventy Interpreters; besides some more important matters, which in respect to those times are not to be too much descanted upon. It is also plain, that the Gnostics, the Valentinians, and other heretics, began very early to set up a pretension to a tradition delivered by the Apostles to some particular persons, as a key for understanding the secret meanings that might be in ScripIren.l.iii.c. ture; in opposition to which, both Irenæus, Tertullian, 1,2,3,4,5 and others, make use of two sorts of arguments: The one is the authority of the Scripture itself, by which they 20, 21, 25, confuted their errors: the other is a point of fact, that 27, 28. there was no such tradition. In asserting this, they appeal to those Churches which had been founded by the Apostles, and in which a succession of Bishops had been continued down. They say, in these we must search for apostolical tradition. This was not said by them as if they had designed to establish tradition, as an authority distinct from, or equal to, the Scriptures: but only to shew the falsehood of that pretence of the heretics, and that there was no such tradition for their heresies as they gave out. Tertul. de Presc. cap. When this whole matter is considered in all its parts, such as, 1st, That nothing is to be believed as an article of faith, unless it appears to have been revealed by God. 2dly, That oral tradition appears, both from the nature of man, and the experience of former times, to be an incom |