ever used by child to parent as a common mode of address: between husband and wife it was; but I cannot think that μrep and yúval were equivalent terms in the mouth of a son speaking to his mother. No part of the Christopædia is found in John or Paul; and after the baptism there is no recognition of any maternal authority in Mary. See the two passages where she endeavors to get access to him when he is preaching:-"Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and my mother”*: and also the recommendation of her to the care of John at the crucifixion.

There may be dictation without inspiration, and inspiration without dictation; they have been and continue to be grievously confounded. Balaam and his ass were the passive organs of dictation; but no one, I suppose, will venture to call either of those worthies inspired. It is my profound conviction that

* Mark, chap. iii. ver. 35.

Observe, there was revela

St. John and St. Paul were divinely inspired; but I totally disbelieve the dictation of any one word, sentence, or argument throughout their writings. tion. All religion is revealed; — revealed religion is, in my judgment, a mere pleonasm. Revelations of facts were undoubtedly made to the prophets; revelations of doctrines were as undoubtedly made to John and Paul; — but is it not a mere matter of our very senses that John and Paul each dealt with those revelations, expounded them, insisted on them, just exactly according to his own natural strength of intellect, habit of reasoning, moral, and even physical temperament? We receive the books ascribed to John and Paul as their books on the judgment of men, for whom no miraculous judgment is pretended, nay, whom, in their admission and rejection of other books, we believe to have erred. Shall we give less credence to John and Paul themselves? Surely the heart and soul of every Christian give him sufficient assurance that, in all things that concern

him as a man, the words that he reads are spirit and truth, and could only proceed from Him who made both heart and soul.

Understand the matter so, and all difficulty vanishes: you read without fear, lest your faith meet with some shock from a passage here and there which you cannot reconcile with immediate dictation, by the Holy Spirit of God, without an absurd violence offered to the text. You read the Bible as the best of all books, but still as a book, and make use of all the means and appliances which learning and skill, under the blessing of God, can afford towards rightly apprehending the general sense of it - not solicitous to find out doctrine in mere epistolary familiarity, or facts in clear ad hominem et pro tempore allusions to national traditions.

Tertullian, I think, says he had seen the autograph copies of some of the apostles' writings. The truth is, the ancient Church was not guided by the mere fact of the genuineness of a writing in pronouncing

The

it canonical; its catholicity was the test applied to it. I have not the smallest doubt that the Epistle of Barnabas is genuine; but it is not catholic; it is full of the yvwσis, though of the most simple and pleasing sort. I think the same of Hermas. Church would never admit either into the canon, although the Alexandrians always read the epistle of Barnabas in their churches for three hundred years together. It was upwards of three centuries before the Epistle to the Hebrews was admitted, and this on account of its yvwσis; at length, by help of the venerable prefix of St. Paul's name, its admirers, happily for us, succeeded.

So little did the early bishops and preachers think their Christian faith wrapped up in, and solely to be learned from, the New Testament, indeed, can it be said that there was any such collection for three hundred years?-that I remember a letter from

*

* I have lost the name which Mr. Coleridge mentioned. - ED.

to a friend of his, a bishop in the East, in which he most evidently speaks of the Christian Scriptures as of works of which the bishop knew little or nothing.

April 4. 1832.

UNITARIANISM.

I MAKE the greatest difference between ans and isms. I should deal insincerely with you, if I said that I thought Unitarianism was Christianity. No; as I believe and have faith in the doctrine, it is not the truth in Jesus Christ; but God forbid that I should doubt that you, and many other Unitarians, as you call yourselves, are, in a practical sense, very good Christians. We do not win Heaven by logic.

By the by, what do you mean by exclusively assuming the title of Unitarians? As if Tri-Unitarians were not necessarily Uni