The Puritans were in radical opposition to Rome. They were maintaining the formal principle of Protestantism. If they had not taken this position, they would have been powerless. As Reuss says:

"Nothing was more foreign to the spirit of Luther, of Calvin, and their illustrious fellow-laborers, nothing was more radically contrary to their principles, than to base the authority of the Sacred Scriptures upon that of the Church and its tradition, to go in effect, to mount guard over the fathers, and range their catalogues in line, cause their obscurities to disappear by forced interpretations and their contradictions by doing violence to them, as is the custom of our day. They very well knew that this would have been the highest inconsistency, indeed the ruin of their system, to attribute to the Church the right of making the Bible after they had contested that of making the doctrine; for that which can do the greater can do the less."

1

There never had been a period in which the authority of Holy Scripture was more hotly discussed than in the times of the English Commonwealth. In 1647 the London ministers (many of whom were members of the Westminster Assembly) issued their testimony against false views of Holy Scripture as well as of other matters. They mention as

"Errors against the Divine Authority of the Holy Scripture, That the Scripture, whether true Manuscript or no, whether Hebrew, Greek, or English, it is but human; so not able to discover a divine God. Then where is your command to make that your rule or discipline, that cannot reveal you God, nor give you power to walk with God? That, it is no foundation of Christian Religion, to believe that the English Scriptures, or that book, or rather volume of books called the Bible, translated out of the originall Hebrew and Greek copies, into the English tongue are the Word of God. That, questionless no writing whatsoever, whether translations or originalls, are the foundation of Christian Religion." 2

1 Reuss, Histoire du Canon, p. 313.

2 A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ and to our Solemn League and Covenant. Subscribed by the ministers of Christ within the Province of London, Dec. 14, 1647. London, 1648. Similar testimonies were signed in many of the English counties during the same year. In the McAlpin collection of the library of the Union Theological Seminary, N. Y., there are ten of them.

William Lyford, an esteemed Puritan divine, wrote a commentary on this testimony of the London ministers.1

After controverting the "foure fold error: (1) of them that would place this authority (of Scripture) in the Church; (2) of them who appeale from scripture to the spirit; (3) of them that make reason the supreme Judge; (4) of them that expound scripture according to Providences," he goes on to expound the position of the Puritans.

...

"The authority and truth of God speaking in the Scripture, is that upon which our faith is built, and doth finally stay itselfe: The ministry of the Church, the illumination of the Spirit, the right use of reason are the choicest helps, by which we believe, by which we see the law and will of God; but they are not the law itself; the divine truth and authority of God's word, is that which doth secure our consciences. . . . If you ask what it is that I believe? I answer, I believe the blessed doctrines of salvation by Jesus Christ; if you ask, why I believe all this, and why I will venture my soul to all eternity on that doctrine? I answer, because it is the revealed will of God concerning us. If you ask further, How I know that God hath revealed them? I answer, by a two-fold certainty; one of faith, the other of experience; (1) I do infallibly by faith believe the Revelation, not upon the credit of any other Revelation, but for itselfe, the Lord giving testimony thereunto, not only by the constant Testimony of the Church, which cannot universally deceive, nor only by miracles from heaven, bearing witness to the Apostle's doctrine, but chiefly by its own proper divine light, which shines therein. The truth contained in Scripture is a light, and is discerned by the sons of light: It doth by its own light, persuade us, and in all cases, doubts, and questions, it doth clearly testifie with us or against us; which light is of that nature, that it giveth Testimony to itself, and receiveth authority from no other, as the Sun is not seene by any light but his own, and we discerne sweet from soure by its own taste. . . . (2) Whereunto add, that other certainty of experience, which is a certainty in respect of the Affections and of the spiritual man. This is the Spirit's seal set to God's truth (namely), the light of the word; when it is thus shewen unto us, it doth work such strange and supernatural effects upon the soul; . . . It persuades

1 The Plain Man's sense exercised to discern good and evil, or A Discovery of the Errors, Heresies, and Blasphemies of these Times, and the Toleration of them, as they are collected and testified against by the ministers of London, in their Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ. London, 1655.

us of the truth and goodness of the will of God; and of the things revealed; and all this by way of spiritual taste and feeling, so that the things apprehended by us in divine knowledge, are more certainly discerned in the certainty of experience, than anything is discerned in the light of naturall understanding."

"They that are thus taught, doe know assuredly that they have heard God himselfe : In the former way, the light of Divine Reason causeth approbation of the things they believe. In the later, the Purity and power of Divine Knowledge, causeth a taste and feeling of the things they heare: And they that are thus established in the Faith, doe so plainly see God present with them in his Word, that if all the world should be turned into Miracles, it could not remove them from the certainty of their perswasion; you cannot unperswade a Christian of the truth of his Religion, you cannot make him thinke meanly of Christ, nor the Doctrine of Redemption, nor of duties of Sanctification, his heart is fixed. trusting in the Lord. So then we conclude, that the true reason of our Faith, and ground, on which it finally stayeth itself, is the Authority of God himself, whom we doe most certainly discerne, and feele to speake in the word of faith, which is preached unto us."1 This is the true doctrine of the Puritans, in which they know no antagonism between the human reason, the religious feeling, and the Divine Spirit in the Word of God. It is a merciful Providence that they were guided to this position, for, if they had gone with the Swiss scholastics in basing themselves on Rabbinical tradition as to the Old Testament, they would have committed the British churches to errors that have long since been exploded by scholars.

IV. DISCUSSION OF THE CANON IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

British Christianity had to struggle with the Friends (or Quakers), who exalted the authority of the inner light above the letter of Scripture, as well as with the Roman Catholics, who subjected the Canon to the authority of the Church. But there was also the contention between the Puritan doctrine as stated in the Westminster Confession and the doctrine as stated by Bishop Cosin. Few were willing to abide by the simple and indefinite statement of the English Articles of Religion. 1 l.c., pp. 39 seq.

Bishop Cosin misled Anglicans, and even later Presbyterians, into a false position. How can we ascertain the voice of the Church as to the Canon, and how determine the genuine Christian traditions? There is no voice of the universal Church. As we have seen, prior to the Reformation, only provincial synods spoke, and these differed, one following the Hebrew Canon and another the Greek Canon, and thus exposed the differences which have always been in the Church.

At the Reformation the Roman Catholic Council of Trent decided for one Canon, the Protestant synods for another Canon. We must wait for a reunited Christendom before the Church can give its authority to fix the Canon, even if it has in itself the divine authority to do so. The Protestant Confessions deny the right of the Church so to do. It remains to be seen whether Protestantism will ever consent to an ultimate definition of the Canon even by the Reunited Church.

It will hardly be claimed that we should submit the question of the Canon to a majority vote of the Fathers. Even if we were willing to do this, we could not secure the voice of the majority, because the writings of the majority have perished. It will hardly be claimed that we should follow the maximum of the writings regarded as canonical. If we should do this, we would have to enlarge the extent of the Canon beyond that of the Council of Trent. If we should follow the minimum, we would limit still more than the Protestant Canon. Shall we pursue the via media? But who shall define the width of even the middle way? There is no pathway to certainty in any of these directions.

The conflicts of conformists and non-conformists, and the struggle between evangelical faith and deism in Great Britain, and of scholasticism with pietism on the continent, caused the scholastics to antagonize the human element in the sacred Scriptures, and to assert the external authority of traditional opinions and of Protestant orthodoxy over the reason, the conscience, and the religious feeling; while the apologists, following the deists into the field of the external arguments for and against the religion and doctrines of the Bible, built up a series of external evidences which were sufficiently strong to over

come the deists intellectually, and to drive them into atheism and pantheism. All this was at the expense of vital piety in the Church; for the stronger internal evidence was neglected. The dogmatists forgot the caution of Calvin: "Those persons betray great folly who wish it to be demonstrated to infidels, that the Scripture is the Word of God, which cannot be known without faith" and they exposed the Church to the severe criticism of Dodwell:

"To give all men Liberty to judge for themselves and to expect at the same time that they shall be of the preacher's mind, is such a scheme for unanimity as one would scarce imagine any one would be weak enough to devise in speculation, and much less that any could ever prove hardy enough to avow and propose to practice," 2

and led some to the conclusion that there was an "irreconcilable repugnance in their natures betwixt reason and belief." 3

The efforts of the more evangelical type of thought which passed over from the Puritans into the Cambridge school, and the Presbyterians of the type of Baxter and Calamy, to construct an evangelical doctrine of the reason and the religious feeling in accordance with Protestant principles, failed for the time, and the movement died away, or passed over into the merely liberal and comprehensive scheme, or assumed an attitude of indifference between the contending parties. The Protestant rule of faith was sharpened more and more, especially among the Independents, and the separating Presbyterian churches of Scotland, after the fashion of John Owen, rather than of the Westminster divines; whilst the apologists pressed more and more the dogmatic method of demonstration over against criticism.4

The Reformed faith and evangelical religion were about to be extinguished when, in the Providence of God, the Puritan .vital and experimental religion was revived in Methodism, which devoted itself to Christian life, and so proved the saving element in modern British and American Christianity.

The Churches of the continent of Europe were allowed, in 1 Institutes, VIII. 13.

8 In l.c., p. 80.

2 Religion not founded on Argument, pp. 90 seq. • Lechler, Gesch. d. Deismus, 1841, pp. 411 seq.