judgment: they knew that no man could escape damnation but in the way of being personally united to Christ by faith, and personally renewed from sin to holiness, of which, I suppose, they saw no evidence in his highness; and, therefore, they would not flatter him with the false hope of his being saved, by his merely remaining in their communion. The statement of the fact, under his highness' own hand, does great honour to the Protestants with whom he had conferred. It proves that they were not time-servers; but faithful ministers of Jesus Christ, who invites the high as well as the low to partake of the blessings which the gospel brings to their view, not in this communion, or that communion exclusively, but by coming to the knowledge of the truth, and submitting to the righteousness of God.

One main pillar in the Romish idol temple is, that the salvation of men is secured by their being in her communion. Let poor simpletons submit to this, and the priests take all the rest upon themselves. If they can prevail upon poor, ignorant, wicked persons, at the point of death, to believe in their miraculous powers, which may happen in some instances, for the sake of the false peace in which they would rather die than without any peace at all, they submit to be baptized and anointed by priestly hands, and absolved by certain Latin words from a priestly tongue; and then the poor sinner says, Peace, peace, to himself, when there is really no peace; and he goes down to the grave with a lie put into his mouth by his ghostly deceiver. Such are the conversions of Protestants at the hour of death, which Dr. Milner boasts of as so frequent; but I again challenge Mr. Scott to produce a single instance of the kind under his ministry.

My mercantile readers understand what is meant by a guarantee commission; and they are aware that this is, or ought to be, in proportion to the degree of risk. No doubt, therefore, the duke of Brunswick paid largely for the risk which the priests took upon themselves; and if this number of mine should ever reach a descendant of that illustrious house, from which our own royal family is sprung, I request that strict search may be made in the archives of the family, in order to ascertain what his highness really paid for the accommodation which the priests granted to him. It must have been something very considerable; and yet, if we can suppose that these priests received a pecuniary consideration, for taking the duke's damnation upon themselves, we must suppose them to have been infidels of the most abandoned description. In this, however, there is nothing worse than what happens every day, in their trafficking for the release of souls from purgatory.

CHAPTER CLXXXIX.

DOCTOR MILNER'S TRUE RULE DISCUSSED.

HIS REMARKS ON TRADITION. RELIGION

THE SUBJECT OF REVELATION FROM THE BEGINNING-NOT OF TRADITION. MEANING OF THE WORD TRADITION AS USED BY THE APOSTLES.

SATURDAY, February 23d, 1822. IN taking leave of what Dr. Milner calls the second false rule of faith, I remark, that I have not attempted to reply to all the nonsense VOL. 11.—46

which he has introduced; but have endeavoured rather to maintain the general principle, that the Bible alone is sufficient for the instruction of men in matters of religion; and that those who believe the heavenly doctrines which it contains, are certain of what they believe, and substantially agreed about it; while those who rely on the traditions of men, possess no more than a dead image of certainty and unity; while in reality they have neither faith, nor unity, nor certainty about any thing, seeing they have no higher authority for what they believe than the bare word of creatures like themselves.

I come now to what Dr. Milner calls "The true rule," which he lays down in the following terms:-"The Catholic rule of faith, as I stated before, is not merely the written word of God, but the whole word of God, both written and unwritten; in other words, scripture and tradition, and these propounded and explained by the Catholic church. This implies that we have a twofold rule, or law, and that we have an interpreter or judge, to explain it, and to decide upon it in all doubtful points." Letter X.

There is here, as usual, a little trick by which the unwary may be deceived. Dr. Milner professes to take as his rule the "whole word of God," by which he insinuates that Protestants do not so: and he introduces tradition as forming part of that word, as if this were admitted by Protestants, while yet they refuse to submit to it. Now I say, that Protestants receive the whole word of God, without the exception of a syllable or letter of it; and that his foisting in "tradition" as forming part of that word is begging the question in dispute, and which is denied by his opponent. To the whole word of God we implicitly submit; but this implies no submission to the immense heap of rubbish that lies under the name of tradition.

On entering upon the proof of his proposition, Dr. Milner lays down the following as an indisputable axiom-"I enter upon this subject with observing, that all written laws necessarily suppose the existence of unwritten laws, and, indeed, depend upon them for their force and authority. Not to run into the depths of ethics and metaphysics on this subject; you know, dear sir, that in this kingdom we have common or unwritten law, and statute or written law, both of them binding; but that the former necessarily precedes the latter." Letter X. We are then favoured with a view of the law of England, which, according to "Judge Blackstone, may be divided into lex non scripta and lex scripta, as Dr. Milner gravely tells us: but the Christian reader will naturally inquire, what has this to do with the "true religion," which is not founded upon the laws of England, however good these are in their own place, and for their own purposes? For the "true religion" we must have recourse to the law and to the testimony that existed many ages before England made any figure among the nations of the world. We are sure, therefore, that the laws of England can afford us no light while pursuing an inquiry of this kind.

Dr. Milner says that all written laws necessarily suppose the exist ence of unwritten laws, and depend upon them for their force and authority. For this he gives us no higher authority than his own word. To put him to the proof of his proposition, I ask him, whether the law of the ten commandments, which was written by the finger of God, upon tables of stone, on Mount Sinai, necessarily supposed the

existence of another law that was prior to it, but not written, and upon which this written law of the ten commandments depended for its force and authority? To be consistent, Dr. Milner must answer in the affirmative. He must maintain that there is another law antecedent and superior to that of the ten commandments. I shall feel extremely obliged to him if he will tell me what that law is.

I suppose he will refer me to the patriarchs who lived before, and after the flood, down to the time of Moses, when the law was first written: and he will tell me that these patriarchs lived under the authority of lex non scripta; that is, the unwritten or cominon law; but this will not serve his purpose, unless he can show that this was something different from the written law of Moses,-something superior to it, and from which the law of Moses derived its authority. I know he can show no such thing; and that what he asserts with so much confidence is a mere imagination of the carnal mind.

On this subject, however, I must dwell for a little, because one great argument which Papists advance for the authority of their tradition is connected with the history of the patriarchs. They tell us that the faithful had nothing but tradition to guide them for above two thousand years; that is, from Adam to Moses;-and why should not we take the benefit of tradition from the birth of Christ to our own time, which is a shorter period? I reply, that the argument is founded on a falsehood, for it is not true that all, or that any of the patriarchs had to depend upon mere tradition, in the sense in which Papists use the word. The patriarchs were honoured by direct communications from God; and what he revealed to them, and they communicated to their families, was not human tradition but divine revelation, as much as the written word is, and it served all the purposes of divine revelation until the law and the testimony were written. Supposing the moral law, and the promise of a Saviour to come of the seed of the woman, had been matters of mere tradition, they passed through so few hands that they might have been preserved till the time of Moses without any great mixture of error; for Methusaleh was cotemporary with both Adam and Shem, and the latter was cotemporary with Isaac, so that the whole narrative of the creation, the fall, and the promise of redemption, came down to the family of Jacob through only four hands, whereas no apostolic tradition can have come down to us without having passed through ten times as many generations. But I do not admit that the family of Jacob received the knowledge of the will of God by such tradition, even through hands so few and so clean. God revealed his gospel to Enoch, to Noah,' to Abraham, and to Jacob himself, who were all, therefore, inspired men, as much as any of the prophets or apostles were; indeed in Psalm cv. 15. they are called prophets; and their living voice supplied the place of a written word until Israel went down to Egypt; and even after this for nearly a century they enjoyed the ministry of Joseph, who was

* Dr. Milner's words are:-"It is, then, certain, that the whole doctrine and practice of religion, including the rites of sacrifice, and, indeed, the whole sacred history, was preserved by the patriarchs, in succession from Adam down to Moses, during the space of 2400 years, by means of tradition : and when the law was written, many most important truths, regarding a future life, the emblems and prophecies concerning the Messiah, and the inspiration and authenticity of the sacred books themselves, were preserved in the same way." Letter XI. page 107.

endowed with the prophetic spirit. If the children of Israel had at any time nothing but tradition to depend upon, it must have been during the short period that elapsed between the death of Joseph and the calling of Moses; when, no doubt, they were reduced to great ignorance as well as great misery; yet we do not know that they had no prophet among them even then. There is reason to think that Moses' own parents had a divine intimation, when he was born, that led them to the means by which his life was preserved. Be this as it may, I hope it will appear from the above, that there is nothing in the history of the patriarchs who lived before the word of God was committed to writing, that can give countenance to the doctrine, that the word which has been written by inspired men must depend, for its meaning and authority, upon the unwritten traditions which have come to us through many ages of gross darkness, and through hands polluted by every crime.

If I have made this intelligible, I hope the reader will be convinced that there is nothing in the history of the patriarchs, or in the state of religion in their time, that gives the least countenance to that sort of tradition on which the faith of the church of Rome is chiefly founded.

Now, with regard to the apostles, great stress is laid by Dr. Milner, and all popish writers, on the command of Christ to go into all the world and preach the gospel-" by word of mouth," is added by Dr. Milner, though that is not in the commission as Christ gave it, and is not necessarily implied in the words, which are a command to publish, and make known, by whatever means. The additional words, however, are of great use to popish writers, and they could not get on without them; for as they take for granted that all their bishops and priests are successors of the apostles, and endowed with the same authority and power, they could not prove the authority of their oral teaching, without referring to that of the apostles. Now, there is no dispute about the authority of what the apostles taught by word of mouth. The question is, what is it that they so taught? and where is it to be found? Protestants maintain that it is all summarily contained in the New Testament: Papists maintain that a great mass of it was never written at all, but handed down from age to age, by word of mouth; and what has thus come down to the present age, is as much the word of God as that which apostles wrote; and it is expressly called by Dr. Milner "The unwritten word" of God. He represents this as analogous to the lex non scripta, the unwritten and common law of England; and as this gives force and authority to the written or statute law, so tradition gives authority and force to the written word of God.

This is the substance of some long and laboured paragraphs in Dr. Milner's work, which I would have given in his own words, had not his style been so extremely diffuse, that I cannot afford space for one tenth of his verbiage. I am not, however, conscious of misrepresenting a single iota of his doctrine. Indeed his own words quoted in this number will be found to imply all that I have said. And thus the foundation of his faith, and his certainty, is that which no man would depend upon, if he had an acre of land, or the value of it, to be secured to himself and his heirs. Undisputed possession for a certain period will indeed allow a man to claim a piece of land as his own; but he will take care to put the fact upon record, if he desires to preserve his right. But here the church of Rome teaches her children to rest their