Of contradictions presumed betwixt passages of Scripture.—I am not unacquainted with the קרי Keri, and the כתיב Cethib, nor the תקון ספרים Tikkûn Soph’rîm, in the Old Testament, nor yet with the variæ lectiones, especially those of the eastern and western Jews, as they are called, taken notice of by modern critics in the Hebrew text of the old, as well as in the Greek of the New Testament. I am not neither altogether a stranger to the difficulties to be met with in making good the citations we find made of divers texts of the former of those sacred instruments in the latter; in which they seem not unfrequently to differ much from what we find extant in the ancient Testament, as to the words, and sometimes too as to the sense. These things, I say, though by some much urged against the Scripture, I am not ignorant of. But I think it not fit to consider them in this place, not only because those that are much better qualified for such a work than I, have done it already, but because these objections relating rather to the truth or the authority than to the style of the Scripture, the nature of my present task does not oblige me to examine them. Especially, since I have already said something of them, and may say more, in what I write on the behalf of the Christian religion. And it is upon these grounds, Theophilus, that I also decline at present the consideration of what is wont to be objected, as if there were a great many self-contradictions to be met with in the Scripture. Only I shall in the meantime invite you to take notice with me, that it is not oftentimes so much the various aspects of the texts, as the divers prepossessions and interests of the expositors that make books seem replenished with interfering passages and contradictions. For, if once the theme treated of do highly concern men’s interests, let the book be as clear as it can, subtle and engaged persons on both sides, perusing it with forestalled judgments or biassed passions, will be sure to wrest many passages to countenance their prejudices, and serve their ends, though they make the texts never so fiercely fall out with one another, to reconcile them to their partial glosses. Of this I might produce an eminent instance in Aristotle’s physical writings, alleged by so many dissenting sects of schoolmen to countenance their jarring opinions; the injured Stagirite, employed as second by every one that quotes him, being by every sect brought to fight with its antagonists, and by them all to give battle to himself. Thus do the dissenting sects of Maho-metans quarrel as well about the sense of their Alcoran as we do about that of our Bible, and make the one as much a nose of wax as the Roman Catholics say we make the other. Which brings unto my mind, that not only the δυσνόητα τινα, the ‘some things hard to be understood,’ in St. Paul’s Epistles, but also the λόιπαι γράφαι, ‘the other Scriptures’ are by St. Peter said to be by the ‘un-: learned and unstable wrested to their own destruction.’1 When a sober author finds an impartial reader, who takes his words in their genuinely obvious acceptation, wherever the context doth not manifestly force another on them, in which then the reader acquiesces, the writer is easily understood; but when nimble and forestalled wits peruse an author, not to sit down with his sense, but to make him speak theirs, whether it be his own or no, and giving themselves the pains and leisure of considering all the possible acceptations of a word or phrase, and the liberty of pitching upon that which best serves their present turn, allow themselves to conclude, that because it may signify so and so elsewhere, therefore it does so here; an author must be much warier than Homer and Virgil, whom Eudocia and Alexander Ross have made evangelists, to keep his words from being tortured into a confession of what was never in his thoughts. And a very pregnant instance of this truth we may observe in the law of our land, whose very end being to prevent or abolish strifes, and which being written so punctually and expressly, and in so peculiar and barbarous a style, clogged with supernumerary repetitions, that nothing but their being conducive to so good an end could make it supportable, is yet by men’s concerned wits so misconstrued and perverted, that not only in private men’s cases we see the judges so puzzled that suits oftentimes outlast lustres; butthe prince’s party and the subjects kill and execute one another; and, as charity tempts me to presume, think they may do so by the law, and do so for the law. In this belief, that we often impute to the Scripture our own faults or deficiences, the instances of those anti-scripturists I have conversed with, have very much confirmed me; though I have still esteemed that the best as well as shortest way, is not to wrangle with them about every nicety, where the defeat of their objections give us no victory over their incredulity, and by but evidencing the Scripture’s not being either false or absurd, can serve but to justify our reverence to them, not to impart it; but by solidly asserting the divine origination of the Scripture, reduce men to ascribe their scruples to the true cause, and persuade us to the temper of the apostles, who, when Christ had uttered a hard saying, which so unsettled many of his disciples that they deserted him upon it; though (their gross misapprehensions of numerous other much less obscure passages will easily persuade us,) they relished it not aright, yet would by no means forsake him for their master, because, says their spokesman, Peter, ‘thou hast the words of eternal life, and we believe, and are sure that thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God:’2 teaching us with one grand and comprehensive truth, to silence particular scruples. And one thing would not be unworthy our objectors’ considering; that the truth and authority of the Scriptures, and consequently their not being contradictory to themselves, hath, as we may elsewhere have occasion to manifest more at large, been immemorially believed by the learnedest men in the world, many of whom may be very reasonably supposed to have examined opinions without any other concern in their inquiries than that of not being deceived, or any other end than that of finding out the truth, and most of whom, though by their sedulousness and their erudition they discovered difficulties in the Bible that our querists could never have dreamt of; yet did they all conclude the belief of the Scriptures, grounded on as much reason as is consistent with a due latitude for the exercise of faith, which possibly needs some dimness or reluctancy in the understanding, to be an acceptable virtue of the will; faith and the twilight seeming to agree in this property, that a mixture of darkness is requisite to both, which too refulgent a light would destroy, the one vanishing into knowledge, as the other into day. And now faith thus casually presents herself in my way, it will, perhaps, not be impertinent to observe, that Christ often deals with new believers as he is recorded to have done with Nathanael; for, as when that guileless Israelite had acknowledged him the Messias, upon the bare evidence of his having been discerned by him under the fig-tree, our blessed Saviour tells him, ‘Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig-tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than these;’3 which in the next verse he proceeds to mention; so when men once have embraced the persuasion of the Scripture’s being divinely inspired, that faith is a thing so acceptable to God, that he often discovers to them, to confirm them in their belief, arguments much clearer than those that induced them to it, and convinces them of the reasonableness of having submitted their reason to him that gave it them. And, as if there were mysteries in which faith doth more prosperously make way for understanding, than that is set a-work to introduce faith, it happens to them as it did to the two blind men mentioned in the Gospel, in whom our Saviour first required faith, and having found that he then opened their eyes.4
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