wise, the Church of England is willing to receive; and the meaning of her article is, that no doctrines necessary to be believed, can be traced to a divine origin, except those which are contained in Holy Writ, or may be proved thereby.

The Church of Rome, on the other hand, in acknowledging that the revealed will of God is partly contained in the written word, maintains also, that, in additon to the Scriptures it is to be learned from Tradition, or the unwritten Word: which is not to be confounded with historical testimony, varying in its degrees of credibility, but is accounted by that church, of equal authority with Scripture itself. That the written and the unwritten Word, are to be regarded as equal and independent sources of the revealed will, is expressly laid down in the 1st decree of the 4th session of the Council of Trent. The words of that decree are these: The council, “ following the example of the orthodox fathers, receives and venerates with sentiments of equal piety and reverence, (pari pietatis affectu ac reverentia) all the books, as well of the Old as of the New Testament, since one God was the author of them both; and also, the Traditions, relating as well to faith as to morals; inasmuch as, coming either from the mouth of Christ himself, or dictated by the Holy Spirit, they have been preserved in the Catholic Church, in uninterrupted succession." The traditions of the church are thus placed on the same footing of authority

with the Scriptures, for this reason;-that, like them, they are supposed to have been originally communicated by inspiration, and transmitted to us in perfect purity. The same decree includes amongst the "written books," of inspiration, those compositions, which, under the name of Apocryphal, the 6th article of the church of England excludes from the sacred "These she doth read" (as St. Jerom says was the practice of the church in his days) "for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth not apply them to establish any doctrine."

canon.

These two questions, then, the one relating to the canon of scripture, and the other to the kind and degree of authority to be ascribed to Tradition, comprehend the whole controversy respecting the rule of faith.

PART 1.

CHAP I.

The Canon of Scripture.

"That the Council of Trent," observes Bishop Marsh, "assumed the privilege of raising to the rank of canonical authority what was generally acknowledged to have no such authority, is a charge which cannot be made without injustice. The power of declaring canonical a book, which has never laid claim to that title, is a power not exercised even by the Church of Rome. In this respect, it acts like other churches; it sits in judgment on existing claims, and determines, whether they are valid or not."--Comp. View, p. 88. The principle, however, on which the Church of Rome grounds her decisions, is widely different from that, on which all other churches have founded their opinion. The latter have submitted the question of the canon to be determined, strictly according to the rules of historical testimony. The former, refusing to have that question deeided solely by historical proof, arbitrarily confirms the disputed authority of the Apocrypha, in virtue of a supposed infallibility of judgment, inherent in herself;-from which she will admit of no appeal.

It will serve, in no small degree, to discredit this arrogant pretension, briefly to shew, that the traditionary evidence greatly preponder

ates against the admission of the Apocrypha into the canon, and to explain the motives, which seem to have induced the Church of Rome to throw the weight of her alleged infallibility into the lighter scale.

That the books in question were composed after the formation of the Canon of Ezra, is agreed on all hands. It is, however, pretended, that some of them were received by the Jews into a second canon, when the seventy-two interpreters were sent into Egypt at the desire of Ptolemy, for the purpose of making the Greek version; and that the rest were admitted into a third canon, in the days of Shammai and Hillel. It will suffice to say, that the Jewish Church has no such tradition. The Apocrypha never formed a part of any Hebrew canon; and the Jews alone were competent to determine, what books their church was aċcustomed to reverence as divine. That these books were not considered as of inspired authority by our Saviour and his Apostles, may be strongly inferred, from their being never cited in the New Testament, amidst the numerous quotations of the Jewish Scriptures.The proof, it may be said, is indirect. We have, then, the positive testimony of Josephus, who expressly enumerates all the books, which the Jews had, at any time, regarded as sacred; and in this enumeration, we find those books, and those books only, which we admit to be canonical. This is decisive. Agreeably to this testimony, the Apocryphal Books had

D

no place in any catalogue of canonical writings, during the first four centuries. The evidence is still stronger. The disputed Books are not merely omitted in the early catalogues, which is alone sufficient to disprove their in-. spired authority, but they are expressly branded as Apocryphal by Jerom, the most learned of the Latin Fathers. In the prologue to his translation of the Books of Samuel and of Kings, supposed to have been written A.D. 392, or not long before, and intended as a guarded head, or beginning with a helmet, " galeatum principium," to all the Books which he purposed to translate from the Hebrew, he informs us, that his object in writing this preface, was, that we might know," that all the Books which are not in his catalogue were to be reckoned Apocryphal: "therefore Wisdom," continueshe, "which is commonly called Solomon's, and the book of Jesus, the son of Sirach, and Judith, and Tobit, and the Shepherd, are not in the canon. The first Book of Maccabees I have found in Hebrew; the second is Greek, as is evident from the style." See Lardner's Cred. vol. ii. p. 540. 4to. What is more, inspiration is virtually disclaimed by the writer of 2d Book of Maccabees-" If I have done well, it is what I desired, but if slenderly and meanly, it is that which I could attain unto." Or as the Vulgate has it; "si quidem bene, et ut historiæ competit, hoc et ipse velim: Si autem minus digne, concedendum est mihi :"." that is," says, Mr. Leslie, "I ask your pardon, if I have not