concerning the nature, and attributes, and counsels of the Godhead, so entirely beyond the limits of any natural faculty of our reason, that they can only be received upon the credit of the Sacred Oracles; being, to our apprehensions, incapable of any thing resembling scientific demonstration. If, therefore, in matters even of this description, our reason might be allowed to overrule the written word, where could we cast anchor in the depths of moral and metaphysical speculation? Where would be our security against errors, however pernicious, which the devices of human imagination might suggest, and of which the capricious standard of every man's corrupt or fallible judgment would be made the criterion?

The dangerous position, (dangerous, that is, when taken in its broad and unqualified acceptation) that the authority of Scripture must bend to that of reason, has been the source of numberless errors and corruptions among persons professing the Christian Faith. In the earliest periods of its history, we find the Gnostics distinguishing themselves

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themselves (as their assumed title implied) by pretensions to profounder attainments than those of their fellow Christians, and boasting of the improvements they were enabled to engraft upon the Christian religion, by the aid of human philosophy. Of some who drew their notions of the Gospel from these interpreters, it is remarked by Mosheim, that " they looked it as a noble and glorious task, to bring the doctrines of celestial wisdom "into a certain subjection to the precepts "of their philosophy, and to make deep "and profound researches into the inti"mate and hidden nature of those truths "which the Divine Saviour had delivered "to his disciples." This vain affectation of a wisdom superior to that which dictated the revelation they professed to receive, prepared the way for many a wild and incoherent system of imaginary truths, for daring innovations on the Faith, and, in not a few instances, for an almost entire desecration of the Sacred Oracles. Many of the early Heretics rejected large portions of Holy Writ, and even the whole of the

Old Testament, not upon any alleged ground of their want of authenticity, but solely because they found them irreconcileable with the philosophical tenets they had espoused, and from the mere wantonness of speculation on matters above the reach of human conception. Tertullian, Origen, Augustin, Jerome, and other Fathers of the Church, continually charge them with the rejection, or the mutilation, of various parts of Scripture, for the unwarrantable purpose of adapting them to their own extravagant persuasions.

To the same source may also be traced most of the errors among philosophizing Christians in after times; especially the many strange and fantastic theories which gained acceptance, respecting the doctrine of the Trinity, and that of the two-fold nature of our blessed Saviour. Vain attempts to explicate points which, to our present apprehensions, must ever remain enveloped in a certain dégree of mystery, and to make them conformable to opinions wholly incapable of proof or evidence, led multitudes to "make shipwreck of their Faith."

This evil is perhaps inseparable from the propensity to make Revealed Religion subservient to philosophical theories, and from regarding the Scriptures as secondary to human science. It arises from not rightly distinguishing between the objects with which each is exclusively conversant, and thus assigning to neither its proper rank and office. As the Scriptures were not intended to instruct men in human philosophy, so neither can human philosophy instruct them in the matters which the Scriptures reveal. This, however, is to be understood of that only which is properly the subject-matter of Revelation; of facts and doctrines which it was its express purpose to make known to mankind; not of matters incidentally connected with it which may be capable of physical demonstration. And surely there are truths of Revealed Religion sufficiently attested to us by its general evidences, which it is not in the power of the human understanding to refute by arguments grounded on any antecedent principles. Can, for instance, the doctrines respecting the essen

tial nature of the Godhead be brought to any test of human science? Can the Miraculous Conception, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Ascension of our Lord, or any thing properly miraculous in the Christian dispensation, be proved or disproved otherwise than by competent evidence, on one side or the other, respecting the alleged facts? Or can the doctrines of Atonement and Grace be established or invalidated by any abstract reasoning on their necessity or expediency? The utmost that our limited reasoning faculty may, in such cases, attempt is, in the first place, to satisfy itself of the genuineness of the text and its Divine authority, and so to interpret the doctrine that Scripture shall not be made to contradict itself; and, in the next place, to make it harmonize, as far as may be, with those moral and physical truths, of which we have, from other sources, clear and indisputable evidence, and which are even recognized as true by the general tenor of Holy Writ.

Nevertheless, in these latter as well as in former times, Socinians and other sects professing