REVIEW.
Observations on the Use and Abuse of the Sacred Scriptures, as exhibited in the Discipline and Practice of the Protestant and Catholic Communions. By the Rev. W. B., Ullathorne. V. G.
In the eighth page of his pamphlet, the Rev. Mr. Ullathorne informs us, that He (the Roman Catholic) presumes not to take into his hands the uninterpreted Scriptures, to exercise his own unassisted reason upon; nor could his pastor sanction such a course; for 1st. He considers that it is unnecessary. 2ndly. He believes that it is unjust. 3rdly. He sees that it is inexpedient. And, lastly, he knows that it is impossible. Unnecessary, forsooth, unjust, inexpedient, and impossible for a christian man to do what the people of Berea are expressly commended for doing in the Acts of the Apostles, viz. searching the Scriptures to ascertain whether those things which even an Apostle preached to them were so ! If the Pope and the Romish priesthood generally were not conscious that what they preach to their people is something very different from what the Apostles preached, and from what is contained in the Holy Scriptures, they would not be afraid of trusting the sacred volume, as it is, without note or comment, in their people's hands. Again ; If it were necessary for each individual to read and judge of the Holy Scriptures, it could only be so because of some law and command of Christ. But 1st., Christ gave no such command. 2ndly. It would have been inconsistent with his divine wisdom to have given such a command. In reference to this precious specimen of Roman Catholic special pleading, we would observe, that when one man writes a letter to another, he does not require to write upon the back of it, " I intend this letter to be read." The fact of its being a letter sufficiently intimates the intention of the writer. But if the writer be a main in authority, writing to his subordinates or inferiors, the very circumstance of his writing the letter implies a command to read it, and argues insult and contempt of authority if that command should be disobeyed. But if the writer should be the Supreme Divinity, the source of all authority, and the centre of all power, as is the case in regard to the Holy Scriptures, God's letters to men, the implied command becomes infinitely more binding, and the danger of disobedience incomparably greater. If then the Holy Scriptures are God's letters to men, and not to the Romish priesthood exclusively, as even Mr. Ullathorne would scarcely venture to deny, it follows that they are not only intended to be read by all men, but that all men are bound to read them at their peril. . . .
In pages 8 and 9, Mr. Ullahthorne quotes several passages from the Douay, or Roman Catholic, version of the New Testament, to prove that Christ did not command the people to read the Scriptures, but to hear and obey his ministers. True, Christ did give such a command ; He that hears you hears me: Teach all nations: Preach the Gospel to every creature : He who will not hear the Church, let him be accounted as the heathen : [N. Test. Douay Version.] But,then, how are we to distinguish the real ministers of Christ from the wolves who come to us in sheeps' clothing, preaching another gospel than Paul preached, but by appealing, as Paul himself insists on our doing, to that gospel itself. Mr. Ullathorne perpetually takes it for granted, that the Roman Catholic clergy are Christ's ministers, and that we must therefore receive the law at their mouth. But knowing, from indubitable authority, that so early as the apostolic age there were men who professed themselves Christ's ministers, who were nevertheless divinely declared to be of the synagogue of Satan; we naturally enough suppose that a similar imposture may occur again, and we therefore bring every man who pretends to be Christ's minister "to the law and to the testimony." The Protestant minister most willingly submits to this scrutiny; for the Bible and the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants. The Roman Catholic priest refuses to submit to it. Why ? Why, just because something else than the Bible is the religion of Roman Catholics.
In the 10th page, Mr. Ullathorne endeavours to prove, that because multitudes in the present day cannot read, Christ could never have commanded or required all men to read the Scriptures. But God commands all men everywhere to repent, and yet there are millions in the present day who have never heard his command. In what manner God will act towards myriads of our fellow creatures whose ignorance of his word and will is thus involuntary, is no concern of ours; our business is simply to send the word of God, that is, his word both preached and printed, to those who are yet ignorant of it, and to instruct those who have it already within their reach, to read the words of eternal life.
We learn from ancient history, and partly from themselves, that most of the books of the New Testament were written from accidental circumstances, and not from any express command.— Observations, &c.
Oh! Sophonisba! Sophonisba! Oh!
Is it necessary to remind Mr. Ullathorne at this time of day, that there are no accidents in that system of infinite wisdom, agreeably to which God governs the world. Even their own Roman Catholic poet, Pope, in his famous Essay on Man, denominates—
All chance direction which thou canst not see.
The circumstances out of which the composition of the books of Holy Scripture arose, were all doubtless clearly foreseen, prearranged, and foreordained, in the Divine mind, from all eternity.
Neither will it serve Mr. Ullathorne's purpose to tell us, as he does in the 11th page of his Observations, that Bibles at one time cost 40l. to 50l. each, and that nations have been converted to Christianity into whose vernacular tongues the Scriptures had not been translated. Our Lord Jesus Christ is not a hard master, reaping where he hath not sowed, and gathering where he hath not strawed. He will deal gently, we may rest assured, with those who have thus remained in involuntary ignorance of much of his written word and revealed will. But our business is not with such cases at all; and to bring Mr. Ullathorne back to the point, we would remind him that the question is, whether in the case of a country, like that of Great Britain and her colonies—in which the Bible, translated into the language of the country, can be purchased for a few shillings, or procured gratuitously by those who cannot afford such a sum, and in which the. art of reading is attainable by all—it is not the duty of all and sundry to learn to read, and having so learned, to read the sacred Scriptures. In reference to such a question, what have we to do with the state of things five hundred years ago, or ten thousand miles off? It is with things as they are, and as they are now that we have to do; for it is according as we act in our present circumstances that we shall be judged hereafter.
The letter killeth, says St. Paul, it is the Spirit that giveth life. The Word of God consists, not of the letter of the Bible, but of the spirit: not of the words which are written, but of the sense which they embody—of that sense and meaning which the sacred writers intended and which the Holy Spirit inspired.— Observations, &c., page 12.
Now, in endeavouring to ascertain what " the sense and meaning of the sacred writers" are, Mr. U. informs us that we are not to exercise our own judgment—that faculty which God has given us for the very purpose, and for the exercise of which we are responsible to him alone—but we are to submit implicitly to the judgement of a junta of Italian priests calling themselves the Church, and retailing, in that assumed capacity, the opinions first entertained, perhaps, by a set of ignorant monks in the darkest age that the church has ever seen. It may be worth while to afford the reader an instance of the manner in which this junta profess to express the sense and meaning of the sacred writers; thereby setting at defiance the common sense of mankind, from which they do well to appeal to their own authority, and propagating under the abused name of Christianity the most monstrous and revolting heresy that priestcraft ever palmed upon the ignorance and credulity of men. In the sacred narrative of Pharoah's dream, we are told by the patriarch Joseph, declaring the mind of God, that the seven fat cattle ARE seven years, that the seven lean cattle ARE seven years, that the seven full ears of corn ARE seven years, and that the seven withered ears ARE seven years. All this is quite intelligible to a man of the commonest understanding. It is a form of speech common to all languages; and ignorance itself would at once tell us that the word ARE in these passages merely stands for the word signify or represent. The Italian junta acquiesces in this decision of common sense upon the meaning of a portion of the Word of God, and we are accordingly given to understand by that concentration of all human and Divine wisdom, the Romish Church, that when Joseph says that the seven fat cattle ARE seven years, he means merely, the seven fat cattle represent seven years. But there is a passage of exactly similar form and construction in the New Testament, in which our blessed Lord, when pointing to a piece of bread on the table before him, says to his disciples, who were at supper along with him, This IS my body. Common sense would unquestionably interpret this expression in exactly the same way; conceiving that the word is stands for the word signifies or represents, as in the case of the expression in Pharoah's dream. But it so happened that—in those dark ages in which sovereign princes had to make their mark when required to sign their names, because they were no scholars, and in which the art of reading was so rare that it was deemed sufficiently meritorious to save a convicted murderer from the gallows—an ignorant French monk, who knew no language but his own, and who was consequently utterly ignorant of the Hebrew and Greek originals of the Holy scriptures, took it into his foolish head to imagine that the expression in question was to be understood literally, and that our blessed Lord not only meant to say that the bread before him was actually his body, but that every Romish priest, duly ordained, should have the power of transforming bread into that very body to the end of the world. It was a considerable time before this monstrous doctrine could worm itself into the Romish creed, even in an age of the grossest darkness and the foulest corruption; but its abettors being more obsequious to the See of Rome than its opponents, and the occupants of that See perceiving that so entire a prostration of intellect, as the reception of this famous doctrine evinced, would naturally be followed with implicit obedience to the Popedom in other particulars, it was at length adopted into the Romish creed and proclaimed as a truth of the Christian religion, which, according to the Council of Trent, we shall all be damned, if we refuse to believe.
Luther gives us his opinion of the original Scriptures by a translation of them; the Zuinglians offer theirs in another; OEcolampadius affords a third translation; Munster provides a fourth; Calvin produces a fifth ; Beza presents us with a sixth ; Castalio furnishes us with a seventh ; Servetus brings out an eighth!; the English divines under Queen Elizabeth proffer us a ninth; the divines under King James set forth a tenth ; and the Catholics have their own which is different from all these; each of which professes to have brought away the true sense of the originals. Whilst Bucer and the Osiandrians condemn. Luther's translation—the Protestants, Staphylus and Emserus; all the while accusing him of one thousand four hundred heretical corruptions—Luther condeinns the Zuinglian translation, Zuinglius condemns Luther's translation. Luther condemns Munster's translation. Beza condemns Castalio's trans lation. Castalio condemns Beza's translation. Calvin condemns the translation of Servetus. Illyricus condemns the translations of Beza and Calvin. The English divines of King James condemn the translation of the English divines under Queen Elizabeth. The Catholics, and in many cases the Protestants, condemn the translation of these last divines under James; And yet all these counter-condemned translations, brought into light by the great founders of Protestantism, profess, each and all, to have penetrated the original sense of the sacred writings,and to have brought away and presented to their readers, that one true meaning which the Holy Spirit inspired. And upon these cross-grained, un-adhering, repellant corner-stones, disunited together into one foundation, is reared up that curious heterogeneous modern gothic edifice, decorated with towers and turrets, and pinnacles and spires, springing up from every position, in all varieties of design, with its large hills and small chambers, and passages, and ascents and descents, and communications of all sorts for every purpose, running through and across and interfering with each other in every direction, which, to a Catholic, appears of so singular a fancy, and which is called, by its admirers, " The Great Work of the Reformation."
Upon the translation of each master builder, which was generally condemned by all the rest, their respective followers built their faith. And this condemned translation was their only security, for the true sense of the original Scripture.—Observations, page 14.
How unfair, Mr. Ullathorne ! Protestants do not condemn each other's versions of the Scriptures, in the Roman Catholic sense of the phrase. They conceive, indeed, that individual translators, have, in the exercise of their own unbiassed judgement, and notwithstanding all the helps they could individually procure, nevertheless mistaken the meaning of particular passages of Holy writ; and of all the different Protestant version is of the Scriptures, they conceive, moreover, that there are some good, others better, and others again the best in their respective tongues. But they universally admit that the passages in which the sense and meaning of the original have been misrepresented in the different Protestant versions of these Scriptures are very few, and that in all of them, even the most inferior, a man of common understanding, who earnestly seeks for the way of salvation, will be sure to find it. Of course, we do not include among Protestant versions of the Scriptures the miserable Socinian version of the New Testament; for although Mr Ullathorne pays us this compliment, with others equally unmerited, Protestants do not consider Socinians as Christians at all, the latter being men who, as the ancient Roman historian describes them Christum, quasi Deum celebrant, "worship Christ as God." But the sin of ignorance committed by any honest man or set of men, (for both the English and the German authorized versions were made by sets of men, and these the most learned of their age) in mistaking the mind of the Spirit in particular passages, when translating the Holy Scriptures into the vernacular language of any people, is a venial sin (to use a Roman Catholic, but most unscriptural expression) when compared with the enormous guilt of the Romish priesthood of Great Britain and Ireland, in never yet giving the millions of Roman Catholics in the latter island a version of the Holy Scriptures at all, in their vernacular, or Irish, tongue.
When the doctors of the Reformation are thus in arms against each other respecting the true meaning of the Scriptures, how, shall the unlearned and the lowly ; the weak-minded and the labourer for his bread; the impoverished in mind or in fortune, provide himself with light and time sufficient to clear up the obscurities in which the letter has enveloped the sense ?—Observations, page 14.
Unfair, exceedingly unfair again! The passages of Holy Scripture about the signification of which the doctors of the Reformation disagree, are not one in ten thousand, compared with those in regard to which they are at one. And as the numerous various readings in the different manuscripts of the Holy Scriptures in the original tongues, are not sufficient, in the estimation of all Christians, to invalidate or affect a single doctrine of the Christian religion; so all the words and phrases, about the meaning of which Protestants differ from each other, are insufficient, in the estimation of all Protestants, to invalidate, or affect a single doctrine of the Protestant Reformation.
The Colonist 9 April 1835,
In the eighth page of his pamphlet, the Rev. Mr. Ullathorne informs us, that He (the Roman Catholic) presumes not to take into his hands the uninterpreted Scriptures, to exercise his own unassisted reason upon; nor could his pastor sanction such a course; for 1st. He considers that it is unnecessary. 2ndly. He believes that it is unjust. 3rdly. He sees that it is inexpedient. And, lastly, he knows that it is impossible. Unnecessary, forsooth, unjust, inexpedient, and impossible for a christian man to do what the people of Berea are expressly commended for doing in the Acts of the Apostles, viz. searching the Scriptures to ascertain whether those things which even an Apostle preached to them were so ! If the Pope and the Romish priesthood generally were not conscious that what they preach to their people is something very different from what the Apostles preached, and from what is contained in the Holy Scriptures, they would not be afraid of trusting the sacred volume, as it is, without note or comment, in their people's hands. Again ; If it were necessary for each individual to read and judge of the Holy Scriptures, it could only be so because of some law and command of Christ. But 1st., Christ gave no such command. 2ndly. It would have been inconsistent with his divine wisdom to have given such a command. In reference to this precious specimen of Roman Catholic special pleading, we would observe, that when one man writes a letter to another, he does not require to write upon the back of it, " I intend this letter to be read." The fact of its being a letter sufficiently intimates the intention of the writer. But if the writer be a main in authority, writing to his subordinates or inferiors, the very circumstance of his writing the letter implies a command to read it, and argues insult and contempt of authority if that command should be disobeyed. But if the writer should be the Supreme Divinity, the source of all authority, and the centre of all power, as is the case in regard to the Holy Scriptures, God's letters to men, the implied command becomes infinitely more binding, and the danger of disobedience incomparably greater. If then the Holy Scriptures are God's letters to men, and not to the Romish priesthood exclusively, as even Mr. Ullathorne would scarcely venture to deny, it follows that they are not only intended to be read by all men, but that all men are bound to read them at their peril. . . .
In pages 8 and 9, Mr. Ullahthorne quotes several passages from the Douay, or Roman Catholic, version of the New Testament, to prove that Christ did not command the people to read the Scriptures, but to hear and obey his ministers. True, Christ did give such a command ; He that hears you hears me: Teach all nations: Preach the Gospel to every creature : He who will not hear the Church, let him be accounted as the heathen : [N. Test. Douay Version.] But,then, how are we to distinguish the real ministers of Christ from the wolves who come to us in sheeps' clothing, preaching another gospel than Paul preached, but by appealing, as Paul himself insists on our doing, to that gospel itself. Mr. Ullathorne perpetually takes it for granted, that the Roman Catholic clergy are Christ's ministers, and that we must therefore receive the law at their mouth. But knowing, from indubitable authority, that so early as the apostolic age there were men who professed themselves Christ's ministers, who were nevertheless divinely declared to be of the synagogue of Satan; we naturally enough suppose that a similar imposture may occur again, and we therefore bring every man who pretends to be Christ's minister "to the law and to the testimony." The Protestant minister most willingly submits to this scrutiny; for the Bible and the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants. The Roman Catholic priest refuses to submit to it. Why ? Why, just because something else than the Bible is the religion of Roman Catholics.
In the 10th page, Mr. Ullathorne endeavours to prove, that because multitudes in the present day cannot read, Christ could never have commanded or required all men to read the Scriptures. But God commands all men everywhere to repent, and yet there are millions in the present day who have never heard his command. In what manner God will act towards myriads of our fellow creatures whose ignorance of his word and will is thus involuntary, is no concern of ours; our business is simply to send the word of God, that is, his word both preached and printed, to those who are yet ignorant of it, and to instruct those who have it already within their reach, to read the words of eternal life.
We learn from ancient history, and partly from themselves, that most of the books of the New Testament were written from accidental circumstances, and not from any express command.— Observations, &c.
Oh! Sophonisba! Sophonisba! Oh!
Is it necessary to remind Mr. Ullathorne at this time of day, that there are no accidents in that system of infinite wisdom, agreeably to which God governs the world. Even their own Roman Catholic poet, Pope, in his famous Essay on Man, denominates—
All chance direction which thou canst not see.
The circumstances out of which the composition of the books of Holy Scripture arose, were all doubtless clearly foreseen, prearranged, and foreordained, in the Divine mind, from all eternity.
Neither will it serve Mr. Ullathorne's purpose to tell us, as he does in the 11th page of his Observations, that Bibles at one time cost 40l. to 50l. each, and that nations have been converted to Christianity into whose vernacular tongues the Scriptures had not been translated. Our Lord Jesus Christ is not a hard master, reaping where he hath not sowed, and gathering where he hath not strawed. He will deal gently, we may rest assured, with those who have thus remained in involuntary ignorance of much of his written word and revealed will. But our business is not with such cases at all; and to bring Mr. Ullathorne back to the point, we would remind him that the question is, whether in the case of a country, like that of Great Britain and her colonies—in which the Bible, translated into the language of the country, can be purchased for a few shillings, or procured gratuitously by those who cannot afford such a sum, and in which the. art of reading is attainable by all—it is not the duty of all and sundry to learn to read, and having so learned, to read the sacred Scriptures. In reference to such a question, what have we to do with the state of things five hundred years ago, or ten thousand miles off? It is with things as they are, and as they are now that we have to do; for it is according as we act in our present circumstances that we shall be judged hereafter.
The letter killeth, says St. Paul, it is the Spirit that giveth life. The Word of God consists, not of the letter of the Bible, but of the spirit: not of the words which are written, but of the sense which they embody—of that sense and meaning which the sacred writers intended and which the Holy Spirit inspired.— Observations, &c., page 12.
Now, in endeavouring to ascertain what " the sense and meaning of the sacred writers" are, Mr. U. informs us that we are not to exercise our own judgment—that faculty which God has given us for the very purpose, and for the exercise of which we are responsible to him alone—but we are to submit implicitly to the judgement of a junta of Italian priests calling themselves the Church, and retailing, in that assumed capacity, the opinions first entertained, perhaps, by a set of ignorant monks in the darkest age that the church has ever seen. It may be worth while to afford the reader an instance of the manner in which this junta profess to express the sense and meaning of the sacred writers; thereby setting at defiance the common sense of mankind, from which they do well to appeal to their own authority, and propagating under the abused name of Christianity the most monstrous and revolting heresy that priestcraft ever palmed upon the ignorance and credulity of men. In the sacred narrative of Pharoah's dream, we are told by the patriarch Joseph, declaring the mind of God, that the seven fat cattle ARE seven years, that the seven lean cattle ARE seven years, that the seven full ears of corn ARE seven years, and that the seven withered ears ARE seven years. All this is quite intelligible to a man of the commonest understanding. It is a form of speech common to all languages; and ignorance itself would at once tell us that the word ARE in these passages merely stands for the word signify or represent. The Italian junta acquiesces in this decision of common sense upon the meaning of a portion of the Word of God, and we are accordingly given to understand by that concentration of all human and Divine wisdom, the Romish Church, that when Joseph says that the seven fat cattle ARE seven years, he means merely, the seven fat cattle represent seven years. But there is a passage of exactly similar form and construction in the New Testament, in which our blessed Lord, when pointing to a piece of bread on the table before him, says to his disciples, who were at supper along with him, This IS my body. Common sense would unquestionably interpret this expression in exactly the same way; conceiving that the word is stands for the word signifies or represents, as in the case of the expression in Pharoah's dream. But it so happened that—in those dark ages in which sovereign princes had to make their mark when required to sign their names, because they were no scholars, and in which the art of reading was so rare that it was deemed sufficiently meritorious to save a convicted murderer from the gallows—an ignorant French monk, who knew no language but his own, and who was consequently utterly ignorant of the Hebrew and Greek originals of the Holy scriptures, took it into his foolish head to imagine that the expression in question was to be understood literally, and that our blessed Lord not only meant to say that the bread before him was actually his body, but that every Romish priest, duly ordained, should have the power of transforming bread into that very body to the end of the world. It was a considerable time before this monstrous doctrine could worm itself into the Romish creed, even in an age of the grossest darkness and the foulest corruption; but its abettors being more obsequious to the See of Rome than its opponents, and the occupants of that See perceiving that so entire a prostration of intellect, as the reception of this famous doctrine evinced, would naturally be followed with implicit obedience to the Popedom in other particulars, it was at length adopted into the Romish creed and proclaimed as a truth of the Christian religion, which, according to the Council of Trent, we shall all be damned, if we refuse to believe.
Luther gives us his opinion of the original Scriptures by a translation of them; the Zuinglians offer theirs in another; OEcolampadius affords a third translation; Munster provides a fourth; Calvin produces a fifth ; Beza presents us with a sixth ; Castalio furnishes us with a seventh ; Servetus brings out an eighth!; the English divines under Queen Elizabeth proffer us a ninth; the divines under King James set forth a tenth ; and the Catholics have their own which is different from all these; each of which professes to have brought away the true sense of the originals. Whilst Bucer and the Osiandrians condemn. Luther's translation—the Protestants, Staphylus and Emserus; all the while accusing him of one thousand four hundred heretical corruptions—Luther condeinns the Zuinglian translation, Zuinglius condemns Luther's translation. Luther condemns Munster's translation. Beza condemns Castalio's trans lation. Castalio condemns Beza's translation. Calvin condemns the translation of Servetus. Illyricus condemns the translations of Beza and Calvin. The English divines of King James condemn the translation of the English divines under Queen Elizabeth. The Catholics, and in many cases the Protestants, condemn the translation of these last divines under James; And yet all these counter-condemned translations, brought into light by the great founders of Protestantism, profess, each and all, to have penetrated the original sense of the sacred writings,and to have brought away and presented to their readers, that one true meaning which the Holy Spirit inspired. And upon these cross-grained, un-adhering, repellant corner-stones, disunited together into one foundation, is reared up that curious heterogeneous modern gothic edifice, decorated with towers and turrets, and pinnacles and spires, springing up from every position, in all varieties of design, with its large hills and small chambers, and passages, and ascents and descents, and communications of all sorts for every purpose, running through and across and interfering with each other in every direction, which, to a Catholic, appears of so singular a fancy, and which is called, by its admirers, " The Great Work of the Reformation."
Upon the translation of each master builder, which was generally condemned by all the rest, their respective followers built their faith. And this condemned translation was their only security, for the true sense of the original Scripture.—Observations, page 14.
How unfair, Mr. Ullathorne ! Protestants do not condemn each other's versions of the Scriptures, in the Roman Catholic sense of the phrase. They conceive, indeed, that individual translators, have, in the exercise of their own unbiassed judgement, and notwithstanding all the helps they could individually procure, nevertheless mistaken the meaning of particular passages of Holy writ; and of all the different Protestant version is of the Scriptures, they conceive, moreover, that there are some good, others better, and others again the best in their respective tongues. But they universally admit that the passages in which the sense and meaning of the original have been misrepresented in the different Protestant versions of these Scriptures are very few, and that in all of them, even the most inferior, a man of common understanding, who earnestly seeks for the way of salvation, will be sure to find it. Of course, we do not include among Protestant versions of the Scriptures the miserable Socinian version of the New Testament; for although Mr Ullathorne pays us this compliment, with others equally unmerited, Protestants do not consider Socinians as Christians at all, the latter being men who, as the ancient Roman historian describes them Christum, quasi Deum celebrant, "worship Christ as God." But the sin of ignorance committed by any honest man or set of men, (for both the English and the German authorized versions were made by sets of men, and these the most learned of their age) in mistaking the mind of the Spirit in particular passages, when translating the Holy Scriptures into the vernacular language of any people, is a venial sin (to use a Roman Catholic, but most unscriptural expression) when compared with the enormous guilt of the Romish priesthood of Great Britain and Ireland, in never yet giving the millions of Roman Catholics in the latter island a version of the Holy Scriptures at all, in their vernacular, or Irish, tongue.
When the doctors of the Reformation are thus in arms against each other respecting the true meaning of the Scriptures, how, shall the unlearned and the lowly ; the weak-minded and the labourer for his bread; the impoverished in mind or in fortune, provide himself with light and time sufficient to clear up the obscurities in which the letter has enveloped the sense ?—Observations, page 14.
Unfair, exceedingly unfair again! The passages of Holy Scripture about the signification of which the doctors of the Reformation disagree, are not one in ten thousand, compared with those in regard to which they are at one. And as the numerous various readings in the different manuscripts of the Holy Scriptures in the original tongues, are not sufficient, in the estimation of all Christians, to invalidate or affect a single doctrine of the Christian religion; so all the words and phrases, about the meaning of which Protestants differ from each other, are insufficient, in the estimation of all Protestants, to invalidate, or affect a single doctrine of the Protestant Reformation.
The Colonist 9 April 1835,
No comments:
Post a Comment