APPENDIX, CONTAINING COMMENTS AND ESSAYS. (A.) IN this use of the word "sufficiency," I pre-suppose on the part of the reader or hearer, a humble and docile state of mind, and above all the practice of prayer, as the necessary condition of such a state, and the best if not the only means of becoming sincere to our own hearts. Christianity is especially differenced from all other religions by being grounded on facts which all men alike have the means of ascertaining, the same means, with equal facility, and which no man can ascertain for another. Each person must be herein querist and respondent to himself; Am I sick, and therefore need a physician ?-Am I in spiritual slavery, and therefore need a ransomer?-Have I given a pledge, which must be redeemed, and which I cannot redeem by my own resources?-Am I at one with God, and is my will concentric with that holy power, which is at once the constitutive will and the supreme a reason of the universe?-If not, must I not be mad if I do not seek, and miserable if I do not discover and embrace, the means of at-one-ment? To collect, to weigh, and to appreciate historical proofs and presumptions is not equally within the means and opportunities of every man alike. The testimony of books of history is one of the strong and stately pillars of the church of Christ; but it is not the foundation, nor can it without loss of essential faith be mistaken or substituted for the foundation. There is a sect, which in its scornful pride of antipathy to mysteries (that is, to all those doctrines of the pure and intuitive reason, which transcend the understanding, and can never be contemplated by it, but through a false and falsifying perspective) affects to condemn all inward and preliminary experience as enthusiastic delusion or fanatical contagion. Historic evidence, on the other hand, these men treat, as the Jews of old treated the brazen serpent, which was the relic and evidence of the miracles worked by Moses in the wilderness. They turned it into an idol: and therefore Hezekiah (who clave to the Lord, and did right in the sight of the Lord, so that after him was none like him, among all the kings of Judah, nor any that were before him) not only removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves;' but likewise brake in pieces the BRAZEN SERPENT that Moses had made: for the children of Israel did burn incense to it. To preclude an error so pernicious, I request that to the wilful neglect of those outward ministrations of the word which all Englishmen have the privilege of . attending, the reader will add the setting at nought likewise of those inward means of grace, without which the language of the Scriptures, in the most faithful translation and in the purest and plainest English, must nevertheless continue to be a dead language: a sun-dial by moonlight. C. (F.) Not without great hesitation should I express a suspicion concerning the genuineness of any, the least important passage in the New Testament, unless I could adduce the most conclusive evidence from the earliest manuscripts and commentators, in support of its interpolation: well knowing that such permission has already opened a door to the most fearful license. It is indeed, in its consequences, no less than an assumed right of picking and chusing our religion out of the Scriptures. Most assuredly I would never hazard a suggestion of this kind in any instance in which the retention or the omission of the words could make the slightest difference with regard to fact, miracle, or precept. Still less would I start the question, where the hypothesis of their interpolation could be wrested to the discountenancing of any article of doctrine concerning which dissension existed: no, not though the doubt or disbelief of the doctrine had been confined to those, whose faith few but themselves would honor with the name of Christianity; however reluctant we might be, both from the courtesies of social life and the nobler charities of humility, to withhold from the persons themselves the title of Christians. But as there is nothing in v. 40 of Matthew, c. xii. which would fall within this general rule, I dare permit myself to propose the query, whether there does not exist internal evidence of its being a gloss of some unlearned, though pious, christian of the first century, which had |