OF TAX. UNIVERSITT OF CALIFORNI THE PAPAL & HIERARCHICAL SYSTEM COMPARED WITH THE Religion of the New Testament. CHAPTER I. ON THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. NO ONE who has investigated the subject can seriously entertain the notion that the canon of Scripture has been arbitrarily fixed by the authority of man. When our Lord Jesus Christ was upon earth, as a teacher and preacher amongst the Jews, it was his constant practice to refer to those books which were regarded by that people to be divine; and while he never failed to speak of them as such, he made no distinction between one book and another, as it relates to their authority. The B law, containing the five books of Moses, the Prophets, including the historical books as well as the major and minor Prophets, from Joshua to Malachi —and the Psalms, or Hagiographa, comprising the book of Job, the Psalms of David and others, and all the works of Solomon, were alike sacred in his view an indivisible collection, from which nothing might be taken, and to which nothing might be added, except from the same immediate and plenary inspiration. This collection of writings-all in the Hebrew language, and all studiously preserved among the Jews from ancient times-and guarded, since the coming of Christ, both by Jews and Christians-is unquestionably the same as that which is now in our hands, and which is universally known and accepted as constituting the Old Testament. These are the writings, to the exclusion of all others, to which the apostle Paul alludes, when he says to Timothy, "From a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation, through faith which is in Christ Jesusall Scripture is given by inspiration of God," &c. The writings which comprise the New Testament are individually established to be the genuine work of the apostles and their companions, and therefore of divine authority, by a variety of historical, critical, and internal proofs, which have satisfied not merely the wisdom of the hierarchy, but the good sense of the world. And now at the end of about eighteen centuries from the time when these works were written, there is less dispute among men, respecting the canon of the New Testament, than in any preceding age of the church. Under the gracious superintendence of a good Providence, the truth of that canon has been established on so broad a basis, both of learning and experience, as to be incapable of being ever again shaken. So early as in the days of Eusebius (A.D. 315), the four gospels, the book of Acts, the thirteen epistles of Paul which bear his name, and the first epistles of John and Peter, i. e. about five-sixths of the whole volume, (very generally diffused as these writings were, and freely read by all descriptions of people) were "universally acknowledged" as genuine compositions and Holy Scripture. Some persons, indeed, in those days, doubted the authenticity of the remaining books, viz. the second epistle of Peter, the second and third epistles of John, the epistles |