III. That the Christian religion is productive of all the advantages we have been detailing, ONLY IN PROPORTION

AS IT IS ALLOWED TO DEVELOPE ALL ITS STRENGTH AND

ENERGY. If our religious profession sinks into formality, the good effects of Christianity sink with it. If the heavenly medicine be diluted or mingled with foreign ingredients, its virtue is proportionably diminished. Christianity will not contribute effectually to the temporal good of man, except it be exhibited as the remedy for all his spiritual - maladies. The life-blood must flow warm at the heart, in order to cherish every extremity of the frame. The shape and lineaments of a man, without warmth, and circulation, are of no avail. Around the living substance of Christianity, temporal blessings will be collected, as comeliness and form and flowing garments around the person of a prince. But remove the substance, and the appendages vanish with it. If you would have the secondary benefits of religion, you must cultivate the primary ones. If you would have its palpable good effects in implanting the principles on which national welfare depends; if you would have its good effects in banishing enormous vice, mitigating every moral evil, and conferring substantial benefits on your people, you must have a vital Christianity, pregnant with its first virtue, founded on the doctrine of the fall, glorying in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, and honoring the Holy Spirit of grace. This will give you the promise of the life that is to come; with that of the life which now is. But if Christianity be stripped of her peculiar attributes, if she be separated from the person and sacrifice of the Son of God, and the operations of his Spirit, if she be employed by the artful and enterprising, as the instrument of spiritual tyranny, or by the worldly and speculative, as the means of promoting civilization merely, she resents the indignity, she claps her wings and takes her flight, leaving nothing but a base and sanctimonious hypocrisy in her room. We must take the whole of the divine doctrine, in order to share permanently any part of its sacred effects. Then it is of sovereign

(0) Dewar.

virtue; then it is productive of the highest as well as lowest scale of blessings; then it is true to all its simple, and yet inestimable designs, whether it be viewed in its minutest effects on the regulation of an individual action, or in its widest operations in the salvation of mankind. Thus it resembles all the works of God in nature, "which are not like the puny productions of human workmanship, which serve only one particular purpose; but are capable of being applied to ten thousand different uses: thus, in the midst of complication, preserving a grand simplicity, and thereby bearing the unambiguous stamp of divine authority; like the principle of gravitation, which while it is subservient to all the purposes of common life, keeps at the same time the stars in their courses, and sustains the harmony of worlds."P

37

(p) Wilberforce.

LECTURE XII.

THE INSPIRATION OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES.

2 TIM. iii. 14-17.

But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them. And that from a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and 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.

We concluded in the last lecture the series of arguments for the divine authority of the Christian religion. The Holy Scriptures are proved to contain a revelation from God to man. We now proceed to consider the aid and guidance of the Holy Spirit afforded to the sacred authors, by which their books are constituted the word of God, the unerring standard of truth, the divinely-inspired writings-or, in the terms of the text, the scripture given by inspiration of God."

We might have conceived, indeed, that no question could have been raised on this topic. As the Christian religion

(2) Γραφὴ θεόπνευστος.

has been proved to be divine, and to have been committed to writing by those who received the revelation and first promulgated it with the attestation of miraculous powers, we might have supposed that no doubt would have existed concerning the character of what they thus wrote. If the scriptures are the records of the Christian religion and were written by the Apostles, (as we have fully proved,) then undoubtedly those records have the same inspiration as the other communications made by the same persons, from the same authority, and on the same great subject. And thus the case was viewed for sixteen or seventeen centuries. The New Testament was universally considered as the infallible word of God. It is only in modern days that its plenary inspiration has been disputed. Many considerable writers on the evidences of Christianity of late, have satisfied themselves with proving its divine authority generally, and have tacitly, but most inconsistently, given up or denied the infallibility of the books in which it is recorded. They speak of authenticity, veracity, credibility, but not inspiration. Some have limited the assistance of the Spirit to the prophetical parts. Others have extended it to the doctrinal, but excluded the historical. Whilst many have lowered the whole notion of inspiration to a mere aid occasionally afforded to the sacred penmen. Thus the impression left on the minds of their readers has been, that the Bible is authentic indeed, and credible, and contains a revelation from God; but that it was indited by good and pious men only, with little more of accuracy than would belong to them as faithful historians. An intermixture of human infirmity and error is thus by no means excluded; and the scriptures are considered as the work of fallible writers, doing their best, and entitled in all their main statements to full belief, but not under that immediate and plenary influence of the Holy Spirit, which renders all they write concerning religion, the unerring word of God.

The question, then, before us is of unspeakable impor

tance.

It is true, that even on the lowest ground that can be taken, the conscience is bound to receive and obey the

scriptures. If they were written only with the same degree of fidelity as ordinary faithful historians, no man could reasonably reject them. The chief facts are so prominent, and the doctrines and duties are so repeatedly and fully detailed, and the whole style and manner are so perspicuous and forcible, that they would guide every sincere inquirer into the way of truth. No man could be misled who came to them honestly for religious instruction.

But still, such is the ignorance and weakness of man, that we must not esteem lightly the declarations of Almighty God as to the infallible inspiration under which the books of scripture were written. If it be once granted that they are, in the revelation which they communicate, alloyed with error, however small, an opening is made for the admission of every imaginable corruption. For who can guarantee from mistake even the best and wisest of men, in their conceptions of a religion so new, so mysterious, as that of the Bible, and in the representations they have given of it in their writings? Who is to distinguish their incidental errors, and separate them from the facts and doctrines with which they are interwoven? If the Bible be not divinely inspired throughout, we are still in want of an infallible standard, to which all other books and instructions of every kind may be referred, with which they may be compared, and by which they may be judged.

Here then we must make a decided stand.

The question is, in what sense are the Holy Scriptures said to contain a divine revelation? Is it merely because the sacred penmen communicate a revelation received from God, according to their best judgment, and of course with some intermixture of human frailty? Or is it because these penmen communicate a revelation under a plenary direction and superintendence of the Spirit of God, so as to have been preserved from every kind and degree of error relating to the religion, and to have indited books, in the strictest sense of the terms, under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost?

Now nothing can be more easy than the determination of this question, because we have arrived at a part of our gen