far as they need to be dealt with; Celsus will ever, as of old, be sufficiently answered by Origen, and Spinoza by Butler. But for the entire security of her position, it may confidently be said that

'Non eget his armis, neque defensoribus istis.'

Her grounds of belief are exactly what they have been from the beginning, whether such defenders are raised up or not. Clouds may pass over her sun, or spots be detected upon its disk; but the orb itself has in no whit the less certainly, on the evidence of irrefragable testimony, been placed in her firmament by Almighty God Himself. He hath made it fast for ever and ever; He hath given it a law which shall not be broken.'

The Church's reply, then, to all exceptions on the score of discrepancies, inconsistency with results of scientific research, or the like,—in a word, to the threatened extinction, by the powers of modern exegesis and science, of the claim set up for the Scriptures, as being of divine authority,-is not unlike that which was made on the occasion of a similar threat by a power no less would-be tyrannical, and equally illogical and inconclusive: 'We are not careful to answer thee in this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning 'fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast, 'set up.' These cavils will ever be made to the end of time, and be gloried in by some, and dreaded by others, as fatal to the authority of Scripture; and sometimes they will be better answered, and sometimes worse. But whether they are answered well or ill, or not at all, the Church utterly refuses to suspend her faith on any such issues. In testimony, the sources of which lie so deep that they cannot be meddled with, she has just such a ground of confidence as the Three Children had in the goodness of the cause which they represented. Whether their God would save them on the instant, how they should pass through that particular trial, they had no certainty: of one thing only, on grounds of old Israelitish faith, they were quite certain, viz. that the test proposed was a fallacious one altogether; the burning fiery furnace had no sort of commission to serve, negatively, as an assay of their pretensions as servants of the Most High God; though it might positively, as in the event it did, confirm the truth of them..

The application of all this is obvious; so much so, that it would have been superfluous to dwell upon it, but that, as we have said, the impugners of Scripture have contrived to mystify the defenders of it, as to the true issue upon which alone they have any commission to rest their cause. Books on exegesis, harmonies,

and hoc genus omne, are useful enough to confirm the authority of Scripture, but they are absolutely without power to shake it; just as the experiment tried upon the persons of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, turning out as it did, was a valuable confirmation enough of the existence of the God of Israel, but would have been absolutely null and void (and was indeed protested against before trial) as a presumption against it. And we do not hesitate to say that more harm than good is done to the Christian cause by the best and most successful' book that can be written in its defence, if it proceeds upon the notion that Christianity depends for its position upon answering all possible cavils and objections: first, because it is impossible that all cavils can be answered, either in themselves or to the satisfaction of all men,—ἁπλῶς οι πρός τινας; and next, because such a course involves the abandonment of the one ground which no cavil can touch or reach..

Mr. Lee's, then, is an excellent book; but not for the particular purpose for which it seems to have been written; viz. to give the true bearings of the whole question of the inspiration of Scripture. It does not do this. On the contrary, by its structure and its line, it entirely misleads the unwary as to the relative importance they should attach to the different kinds of alleged proof in the matter of Inspiration; and as to our capacities for defining with exactitude the nature and limits of that divine agency. Its chiaro oscuro, so to speak, is defective in more ways than one. It does not assign to different kinds of proof their due proportions; and it magnifies unduly our faculties for separating and discriminating the human and the divine. This defect is not peculiar to Mr. Lee; it is the fault incident to the whole class of writings-such, for example, as Mr. Westcott's otherwise valuable Elements of the Gospel Harmony.' All such works are apt to be looked upon as so many advances towards a sort of exegetical millennium, in which all difficulties' will have disappeared in the light of a science' at once sound in its processes and orthodox in its results; their appearance is hailed as if they were the great discoveries of the day-the very saviours, pro tanto, of the Christian cause. Whereas, except so far as their true place is clearly understood and habitually assigned to them, their influence, on the whole, will be, as we have already ventured to affirm, rather mischievous than beneficial.

We cannot better illustrate what it is that we desiderate in Mr. Lee's work, as far as regards the importance to be attached to different species of proof, than by drawing attention to his second lecture, entitled, The Immemorial Doctrine of the Church of God.'

'No inquiry,' says Mr. Lee, respecting the subject of Inspiration can possess greater importance than that which will exhibit the degree and kind of estimation in which the writings, which contain those "oracles," have been always held. . . . . I propose, in the present discourse, to give the leading outlines of the doctrine respecting the Inspiration of the Divine Scriptures held by the Jews, as well as by the Christian Church from the earliest period. The importance of such external evidence is too obvious to permit us to pass it over without due consideration, or, as is too frequently the case, to assign it a subordinate place in our chain of proofs.'-P. 40.

So far, good. Shortly after, he well states what we may call the phenomena of the original testimony, as follows:

The facts to be explained are briefly as follows:-Firstly, from a multitude of writings extant among the ancient Jews and Christians, a selection of certain books was made, to the exclusion of others. Secondly, the several books thus selected were received as infallible and divine; those which were excluded being regarded as fallible and human. Thirdly, in defence, not merely of the doctrines and religious system contained in these books, but of the very books themselves, both Jews and Christians have submitted to persecution and death.

To the first class of facts I can only advert in the most cursory manner. The selection of the writings acknowledged as sacred by the Jews cannot have been owing to their antiquity merely, for we learn from the Book of Numbers, that even in the days of Moses, there was extant a record entitled, "The Book of the Wars of the Lord." Nor, in order to confer divine authority upon any book, was the fact sufficient, that it had been written by a prophet known to have received revelations from Heaven; for, if so, why do we not find in the Canon "The acts of Uzziah first and last," written by "Isaiah the Prophet, the son of Amoz?" Nor, again, did the circumstance of a document having been composed in the Hebrew language secure its recognition as divine; for the Jews never admitted among their sacred writings the Book of Ecclesiasticus, which was undoubtedly drawn up in Hebrew, and whose author, moreover, assumes the prophetic tone, and lays no small claim to authority. Add to all this, the astonishing fidelity and affection with which the Jews preserved the writings which they did receive into their Canon,—writings, too, which were not the memorial of their glory, but of their shame; and in which their lawgiver, from the very first, calls heaven and earth to witness against them.

'The case of the New Testament is no less peculiar. It is plain that the primitive Christians did not consider apostles as alone qualified to compose inspired documents; for, were such their belief, how can we account for the reception of the Gospels of S. Mark and S. Luke? Nor is the admission of these Gospels to be explained by saying, that no other memorials of the life of Christ existed than the four evangelical narratives, and that the early Christians gladly collected every fragment of their Master's history: for not only, as the best criticism explains, does the introduction of S. Luke's Gospel refer to "many who had taken in hand to set forth" a narrative of the works of that period, but the earliest of the Fathers also (e. g. S. Irenæus, A.D. 167) describe the Apocryphal Gospels as being "countless in number." Nor, again, can we account for the admission into the New Testament of the writings of S. Mark and S. Luke, by alleging that, as companions and friends of the Apostles, these Evangelists had opportunities of gaining such accurate information respecting the doctrines of the Christian faith as was not within the reach of others: for, if this be so, why did the Church never recognise as canonical the Epistle of S. Clement of Rome-" my fellow-labourer," writes S. Paul, "whose name

is in the Book of Life;" or, which is still more remarkable when we recollect the relation of S. Barnabas to S. Paul, how comes it to pass that the Epistle of S. Barnabas was rejected from the New Testament, while the Gospel of S. Mark, "his sister's son," was received ? '—Pp. 43—46.

But then follows the conclusion, containing our author's comment on these correctly-stated phenomena.

The several details connected with the general question here considered belong, (?) however, to another department of theology. I would merely add, and this even the most reluctant are forced to admit, that the reception of the different parts of the New Testament as Scripture, took place without external concert,-from an inward impulse, as it were, at the same time and in the most different places; and that, with scarcely an exception, each writing which it contains was all at once, and without a word of doubt, placed on a level with the Old Testament, which had hitherto been regarded as exclusively divine. In short, the authority conceded to this new component of the Scriptures, seems to have grown up without any one being able to place his finger upon the place or moment when adhesion to it was first yielded.’—P. 47—49.

This extract contains a singular mixture of correct and incorrect conception. It is rightly pointed out, that with scarcely one exception, each writing was, all at once and without a word of doubt, placed on a level with the Old Testament, and that the authority conceded to them seems to have grown up without any one being able to place his finger on the place or moment 'when adhesion to it was first yielded.' But it is surely most surprising that our excellent author should, after predicating such great things of it at the outset, treat this part of his subject so slightly and cursorily after all; saying that the details of it belong to another branch of theology,' (we would fain know what branch.) But the account itself, rendered or suggested, of the universal reception of the New Testament Scriptures, manifests a strange misapprehension as to the real state of the case. It is set down to some inward impulse pervading the Church.' We are unable to see the difference between this view and that of Dr. Tholuck, which Mr. Lee himself seems to disallow; viz. that the primitive Church was led, by an unconscious but sure historico-religious tact,' to receive such and such writings into the Canon. This is only one instance out of many in which Mr. Lee has allowed himself to be led away from the plain state of the case by his German guides, and by the mysterious phraseology in which they couch their oraelcs. The whole thing was, as we have said again and again, a matter of testimony from beginning to end. On that ground, and on no 'inward impulse, by no historico-religious tact,' were the pretensions of candidates for admission to the Canon decided. Another and equally feeble reason is given in the following passage:

It may be urged, in explanation of such facts, that the very nature of the books themselves occasioned the preference given to them. It may be

said, that the difference in point of style, and manner, and contents, as well of the books of the Old Testament from the Apocrypha, as of the New Testament from the writings of the Apostolical Fathers, is such as admits of no comparison; that the superiority of the books of Scripture is uncontested and incontestable; and that, as Hooker observes of the sacred writers, "a greater difference there seemeth not to be between the manner of their knowledge, than there is between the manner of their speech and others." And, finally,-it may be further argued,-without any need of supposing special divine guidance, the simple facts of the case account for the formation of the Canon, and enabled the early Christians, not only to judge certain writings to be unworthy of the name of Scripture, but also to select others as deserving such acknowledgment. Be it so; such an explanation but serves to exalt the critical accuracy, the profound insight, the refined taste, of those who passed that judgment, and made that selection. The admission which such an explanation involves I claim wholly on the side of the present argument, and at once transfer it to the cause of Inspiration. That continued exercise of solid judgment, which selected such writings, and such writings only; that critical sagacity, which the most ingenious and subtle investigations of modern times have never been able to prove at fault; that unceasing caution and anxious vigilance, which never admitted into the Canon a single book for the rejection of which any valid reasons have ever been shown-such qualities, conceded to the Fathers of the first ages of the Church, only serve to enhance the value of their opinions upon every point connected with the Scriptures, and, above all, upon the subject of their Inspiration.'-P. 50.

This time we are invited to repose our belief in the authenticity of the Canon on the critical sagacity,' taste,' solid judgment,' &c. of the first ages, exercised in the selection and discrimination of the true Scriptures from the false. Was ever anything much more preposterous? It is true this is only thrown out as an argumentum ad hominem. But why suggest so baseless a view at all?

The pith of the whole matter has been correctly enough stated by authors referred to by Mr. Lee,-Doddridge, for example :—

I greatly revere the testimony of the primitive Christian writers, not only to the real existence of the sacred books in those early ages, but also to their divine original: their persuasion of which most evidently appears from the veneration in which they speak of them, even while miraculous gifts remained in the Church.'

And again, by Sack :

'The recognition of any book by the Churches of either Old or New Covenant, is a fact at least as important as its having been written by such or such a person. For the question does not so much relate to the author in his individual capacity, as to the circumstance that, as a matter of fact, he was acknowledged by the Church as a person divinely qualified or called to write of divine things for the Church.'

We are glad, again, to find Mr. Westcott, in his work on the Canon, already referred to, speaking in the following terms:

It is of the utmost importance to remember that the Canon was never referred, in the first ages, to the authority of Fathers or Councils. The