But though, upon the forementioned accounts alone, the Scripture would deserve to be looked upon as highly conducive to the practice of piety and virtue, yet it is far from being true that it is destitute of such moral documents, which it needs not, to deserve to be looked upon as a book very instructive in reference to good life: for there being two sorts of virtues requisite to an embracer of the gospel, which have been conveniently enough called for distinction sake, the one Christian, and the other moral or ethical, I suppose it will not be doubted but that the rules of those virtues that are properly Christian, must be sought for in the Scrip-ture; that being acknowledged by Protestants to have such a sufficiency as to matters of mere revelation, (which restriction too many do inconsiderately enough leave out,) that in matters of that nature, divines often do, and in many cases may, argue negatively, as well as affirmatively from the Scripture; which eases us of many things obtruded as duties, merely by its not either expressly or by consequence imposing them upon us. So that, as to things of this nature, there is such a fulness in that book, that oftentimes it says much by saying nothing, and not only its expressions but its silences are teaching; like a dial, in which the shadow as well as the light informs us. Nor must we think that the Bible is destitute of the best sort of such precepts, exhortations, and dissuasives as we prize in ethical books, because they are not expressed and ranged in the Bible, as they are wont to be in systematical composures; for not only there is extant in the Scripture, to them that know how to constellate those lights, a very excellent body of moral precepts, but there are likewise scattered the forciblest motives to the several duties, and the most retracting dissuasives from the contrary vices. And truly, it hath long lessened my esteem of our heathen morals, that the ethics being but the doctrine of regulating our passions and directing our faculties, in order to the attainment of felicity, they have been hitherto handled by those to whom the nature of the faculties and passions of the mind was but very little known: whereas to the author of the Scripture morals, the frame and springs, and faculties of our souls, being intuitively and most perfectly known, the most proper and powerful ways of working on them cannot be unknown to him: and then, certainly, one unacquainted with the trade, will be much less likely to mend a watch that is out of order than a watchmaker. And indeed, even in reference to that other sort of virtues which are wont in the more confined sense of the word to be called moral, there are I know not how many excellent notions and directions relating to them, dispersed up and down in the Scripture, though by reason of their not being drawn up by themselves, and of their being mingled with other matters, they are not so readily taken notice of by ordinary readers. Whereas, those studious perusers that search the Scriptures with a due diligence and attention, are not only wont easily enough to descry the moral counsels and prescriptions overlooked by the other readers, but take notice of many excellent documents that are plainly enough intimated or hinted there, to knowing and diligent perusers, though not clearly and expressly enough to be found of those that think them not worth seeking.

Wherefore, as to those religious persons mentioned in the last proposed objection, I cannot but think that by neglecting the Scripture for ethical composures, or even books of devotion, they as well wrong themselves as the Scripture; and therefore I shall take leave to think the worse, rather of the practice of the men than of the book of God. Scarce any thing has given me a favourabler character of Luther, than his wish, that all his books of devotion were burnt, when he once perceived that the people’s fondness and over-valuation of them produced a neglect of the study of the Bible; to which you will find, Theophilus, that the best of that nature being compared, are but (not to draw to our present purpose that of Seneca to his mother, Paribus intervallis omnia divina, ab omnibus humanis distant:⁷ “All things divine are distant from all things human by an equal, that is, infinite interval”) like the stars compared to the sun, whose emanations confer on them their lustre, but whose presence drowns it: for though I deny not books of devotion a due degree of praise and usefulness, yet I refuse them the superlative degree of either; and since the writers of the best of that kind of composures, either steal their best things from, or acknowledge that they borrowed them of the Bible, I would not have Christians neglect the fountain for the streams, and unwisely, as well as unthankfully, elect to read God’s word, rather in any book than his own, in which to encourage us to study the precepts of a virtuous and holy life, we have such peculiar and encouraging invitations. St. Paul seems to make it the end and the result of the several usefulnesses he attributes to the Scripture, ‘that it can make the man of God perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works;’ and is able, (as he speaks a little higher) σοφίσαι εἰς σωτηρίαν, ‘to make us wise unto salvation.’⁸ There are indeed many excellent instructions given us in other books; but they giving us directions only towards the attainment of the advantages, conveniences, and ornaments of life, the ignorance of them, only makes us miss those particular ends, whereto they give addresses, or whereof they facilitate our pursuits; but the knowledge whose acquist or neglect imports endless joys or torments we need seek only from the Scripture: a Christian to understand the duty of his faith and life, needing to understand no other book than the Bible; though indeed to understand the Bible well, it is ordinarily requisite, that a pretty number of other books be understood. Christians, then, have reason to study most that book, which understood, all others are needless to salvation, and which ignored, they are insufficient. If St. Peter’s vision had been a reality, he would scarce, hungry as he was, have ranged abroad to hunt in this desert or that forest for game, when he had a vessel let down to him from heaven, containing in itself all manner of four-footed beasts, and other objects of appetite, attended with a commanding invitation from heaven, ‘Rise, Peter, kill, and eat.’⁹ So when God sends us from heaven, in one volume, an at least virtual collection of all those divine truths and holy precepts others scatteringly and sparingly glean out of human books, the Christian cannot but prize a book so comprehensive, which by making it safe for him to ignore others, by so merited an antonomasia, wears the title of “the book,” (for so the Bible signifies in Greek, as the Hebrews call it Mikra, which by excellence signifies “what is to be read.”¹⁰ … … . There are precepts enough of virtue, and motives enough to conform to them, held forth in the Bible, if the contents of that divine book were believed and considered as they ought to be. It is a mistake to think that a large system of ethics, dissected according to the nice prescriptions of logic, and methodically replenished with definitions, divisions, distinctions, and syllogisms, is requisite or sufficient to make men virtuous. Too many of our moralists write as if they thought virtue could be taught as easily, and much in the same way as grammar; and leaving our rational motives to virtue, and determents from vice, with other things that have a genuine influence on the minds and manners of men, they fall to wrangle about the titles and precedencies of the parts of ethical philosophy, and things extrinsical enough to vice and virtue: they spend more time in asserting their method, than the prerogatives of virtue above vice; they seem more solicitous how to order their chapters than their reader’s actions, and are more industrious to impress their doctrine on our memories than our affections, and teach us better to dispute of our passions than with them. Whereas, as the condition of a monarch, who is possessed but of one kingdom or province, is preferable to that of a geographer, though he be able to discourse theoretically of the dimensions, situation, and motion, or stability of the whole terrestrial globe, to carve it into zones, climates, and parallels, to enumerate the various names and etymologies ofits various regions, and give an account of the extent, the confines, the figure, the divisions, &c. of all the dominions and provinces of it; so the actual possession of one virtue is preferable to the bare speculative knowledge of them all. Their master, Aristotle, hath herein been more plain and less pedantic, who (by the favour of his interpreters) hath not been nice in the method of his ethics. And indeed, but little theory is essentially requisite to the being virtuous, provided it be duly understood, and cordially put in practice: reason and discretion sufficing, analogically to extend and apply it to the particular occurrences of life; (which otherwise being so near infinite as to be indefinite, are not so easily specifiable in rules;) as the view of the single pole-star directs the heedful pilot, in almost all the various courses of navigation. And the systems of moralists may (in this particular) not unfitly be compared to heaven, where there are luminaries and stars obvious to all eyes, that diffuse beams sufficient to light us in most ways; and as I that with modern astronomers, by an excellent telescope, have beheld perhaps near a hundred stars in the pleiades, where common eyes see but six; and have often discerned in the milky-way, and other pale parts of the firmament, numberless little stars generally unseen, receive yet from heaven no more light useful to travel by than other men enjoy; so there are certain grand principles and maxims in the ethics, which both are generally conspicuous, and generally afford men much light and much direction; but the numerous little notions (admit them truths) suggested by scholarship to ethical writers, and by them to us, though the speculation be not unpleasant, afford us very little peculiar light to guide our actions by. When I remember those ancient heroes that have ennobled secular, and are ennobled by sacred story, and whose examples suggested the precepts of virtue, before there were any written ones to conform to; I am tempted to say, that virtue was scarce ever better practised than whilst men had not yet talked of the definition of it; as many an alchymist begs with rare notions of the nature of gold, which fills the coffers of merchants that never saw mine nor furnace. The grand precepts of morality are fruitful seeds, which industriously cultivated, will bring forth fruits still affording other seeds. And as for the motives to pious, and dissuasions from sinful practices, though out of the many voluminous books of morality, there may be divers collected, not extant in the Bible; yet may a dexterous reader find in that heavenly book, many more invitations to virtue, and determents from vice, than most men are aware of; and some of them of an importance that renders one of them as much more considerable than many ordinary ones; as one fair pearl out of a jeweller’s shop, outvalues a score of those little pearls that druggists sell by the ounce; or doth comprise many inferior inducements, (which wise men judge not of by tale but value,) as a piece doth twenty shillings. And though human authors do often, in their parenetical treatises, allow themselves to be lavish in ornaments, to expatiate into amplifications, and to drain commonplaces; yet whilst they want an intimate admission, all these are too often unable to reform, I say not those that read them, but even those that write them; whereas the experience of the primitive and heroical ages of the church does gloriously manifest, that the inducements and dissuasives held forth in the Bible, though destitute of those embellishments and advantages, where they are conscionably entertained and seriously pondered, are sufficient to raise virtue to a pitch philosophy durst scarcely aim at. Nor indeed is the number great of pertinent and rational incitements or determents, relating to virtue; and in discourses that have them for theme, how far soever the bows may extend, yet generally the knot lies in a little compass; and the analyzer that shall crack many of those composures, having severed the shells, shall find their kernels to be much alike. What this writer compares to one thing, that writer likens to another: those ungrateful persons towards God, that one resembles to swine, who eat the acorns without ever looking up to the tree they fall from; another compares to cattle, that drink of the streams without considering what fountain they flow from. These but present us several dresses of virtue and vice, where, though the novelty and variety of habit serve to engage attention in all, and want not influence, at least, upon easy and flexible natures, yet in considerate and discerning persons, they alter not much the notion under which the qualities themselves are entertained. Nor will such be apt to quarrel with the author of the Scripture, because the motives and dissuasives extant there, are many of them old and known, or frequently repeated, the efficacy of them being so too. Were it not strange a physician should decline exhibiting of mithridate, because it was a known medicine, and famous for its cures many ages since? Doth bread less nourish us, or is it less used, because it was, as men suppose, contemporary to Adam, and the most common food of all nations in all ages? And as to the repetition of the same allegations and inducements, as often as men’s condition returned to need them, the paucity of ponderous considerations in the ethics, often necessitating either (disguised perhaps, yet) repetitions of the same, or the substitution of those that must be much inferior to be new; such persons as little admire that reiterated employment of the same truths, as they would to see a soldier use a sword, though he and legions many ages before him have constantly made use of that weapon; or a general encourage his engaging soldiers, by representing to them honour, duty, spoil, necessity, and those other known topics used by himself at the head of his army, as often as he had occasion to lead it on to fight. To all this I am invited by this occasion to subjoin, that upon the score of God’s being both an omniscient Spirit and the supreme lawgiver to the whole creation, the same truths, counsels, exhortations, dissuasions, &c. oftentimes have, and always ought to have, another guess efficacy and prevalence on a Chris-tian reader, when he finds them in the Scripture, than if he should meet with the same in the books of heathen moralists, though learned and eloquent. And certainly, those that with such reverence read the writings of those great wits of antiquity, that have made the greatest discoveries of truth, because they believe them to have been endowed with very illuminated intellectuals, ought to pay them, and a book published by an omniscient enditer, a reverence somewhat proportionate to the disparity of their authors. Since men (as Elihu speaks in Job) ‘are but of yesterday, and know little or nothing;’ a wary person reads the wisest authors with a reflection, that they may deceive him by being themselves deceived; and undergoes a double labour, the one in investigating the meaning, and the other in examining the truth of what they deliver: but in the Bible, we are eased of the latter of these troubles; for if we find the sense of a text of Scripture, we cannot miss a truth; being never deceived by that book but when we deceive ourselves by presuming we understand it when indeed we do not. I am otherwise affected to find the vanity of the world proclaimed and depreciated by him that enjoyed all the delights and glories of it, than when I meet with the same truth from some beggarly cynic, that never was admitted to taste those luscious and bewitching pleasures, and needs no great philosophy to despise a world he judges of by the scant share the narrowness of his condition allows him of the joys of it; and of which, consequently, his criminations should as little move, as a blind man’s of a blackamoor; whom though he may, perchance, truly style ugly, yet he were of a somewhat easy faith that should think her so, barely upon the testimony of so incompetent a witness. Thus, when God himself is pleased to reveal what is vice or virtue, sublime or despicable, truth or falsehood, happiness or misery, I have another guess acquiescence in his decisions, than in the same met with in a human author, who, having necessarily frailties and passions, is both obnoxious to mistake and capable to deceive. And therefore it is no wonder that the slighting of God’s dictates should receive an aggravation, upon the score of their being his; as our Saviour gave the precedency of the Ninevites converted by Jonah, to them that repented not at his preaching, because he was ‘a greater than Jonah.’¹¹ And therefore, though I have formerly been no very negligent peruser of books of morality; yet knowing that they have a power but to persuade, not to command, and that the penalties of sin or death are not inseparably annexed to the disobedience of their prescriptions, I confess I often find myself but faintly wrought on by them. For I must acknowledge, that frequently assuming the liberty of questioning the reasonableness of what human writers, whether philosophers or fathers, are pleased to impose upon us, I find those specious and boasted allegations, the apothegms of the sages, the placits of the philosophers, the examples of eminent persons, the pretty similes, quaint allegories, and quick sentences of fine wits, I find all these topics, I say, such two-edged weapons, that they are as well applicable to the service of falsehood as of truth, and may by ready wits be brought equally to countenance contrary assertions. And really, most moralists, except in those few duties that nature herself hath foretaught us, to a man whose restless curiosity leads his enquiries to all times and nations, will appear little other than fencers with wit; (I mean those that have any;) for each of these popular topics, is such an unsolid or uncertain foundation, that one man can build little on it that an equally able antagonist may not, with as specious probability overthrow. And I fear, most of us have but too often found our corruptions sophisters enough to elude any such thing that pressed that as a duty which they had no mind we should peform. But when I find any thing enjoined in the Scripture, my consciousness to its being imposed by that ‘Father of Spirits,’¹² (who has both right to enact laws, which must be therefore just, because he enacts them; and power to punish the transgression of them with no less than eternal death,) I then leave roving, and see where to cast anchor; I think it my part, without disputing them, to obey his orders, and acquiesce more in that imperious ἄυτος ἔφη, ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ than a whole dialogue of Plato, or an epistle of Seneca. I therefore love to build my ethics, as well as my creed, upon the rock; and esteeming nothing but the true, proper, and strict sense of the Scripture, and what is convincingly deducible from it, to be indispensably obligatory, either as (in matters of mere revelation) to faith or practice, it is no wonder if I study God’s will most in that book wherein alone I think it revealed: and, truly, finding in myself no motive more justly prevalent to obedience than his right to exact it that requires it, few men are more ready than I in distinguishing what indeed God says from what man would make him say. And if I allow myself such liberty to discern the text from the gloss, in the writings of our vulgar interpreters, (of most of whose comments, for reasons prosecuted in another paper, I am no great idolater,) and even of the fathers of the church; I hope I shall not need to tell Theophilus, that in all other moralists I like the freedom to like or disapprove, as upon examination, my impartialest reason relishes them; or that I frequently fear their harangues will hardly pass for demonstrations with those wary testers, that like not to be cheated so much as into virtue; but choose to act as rational or Christians, as well in relation to the inducements as to the nature of what they do.

… … . . Amongst the thirteen articles of the Jewish creed, one acknowledges the very expressions of the law, or Pentateuch, to have been inspired by God. That saying of the rabbins is not altogether so hyperbolical as a perfunctory reader would imagine,—that upon each tittle of the law whole mountains of doctrine hang. I shall not mention as any proof of this, the strange mysteries they fancy in the strange accenting of the ten commandments in the original, since their soberer doctors have in free discourse confessed to me, that it is as much a riddle to them as us. Nor shall I insist upon the Jews reducing the whole law to six hundred and thirteen precepts, affirmative and negative, according to the number of the letters of the decalogue, thereby insinuating that all the laws that regulate man’s duty are virtually or reductively comprised there; although this rabbinical notion (not to call it whimsey) be in such request amongst them, and so known to those that are any thing conversant in Jewish authors, that I have sometimes suspected that the conceit entertained by so many Christian divines, that all the precepts that relate to any part of the whole duty of man, are but just consequences deducible from the decalogue, had its rise thence. But I shall not, as I said, ground my opinion of the pregnant instructiveness of the Scripture upon such questionable, not to say altogether proofless conceits. That which may better persuade a considering man is, that besides those more resplendent and obvious truths, wherewith the Scripture does evidently abound, there are many instructions exhibited, many truths asserted, many errors confuted, and many mysteries hinted in the very expressions of Holy Writ, to an inquisitive and concerned peruser, which a heedless vulgar reader is not wont to take notice of. God, who in the Scripture is said, ‘to cover himself with light as with a garment,’¹³ justifies that expression in the Scripture, where (as the first words that he is recorded to have ever spoken were יהי אור yehi-or, ‘Let there be light’¹⁴) the very words and phrases, that clothe the sense are not alone emphatical, but oftentimes mysterious. The apostle assures us, ‘whatsover things were written,’ even in the Old Testament, ‘were written for our learning.’¹⁵ But yet, besides those many particular sentences of the Bible that are not destitute of instructions, there are some so pregnant with them, that we may easily find this difference betwixt them and human writings, that those first-mentioned contain more matter than words, and the other more words than matter. Nay, many of the very flowers of rhetoric growing there, have (like the marigold that in hot countries points at the sun) a virtue of hinting the usefulest and the sublimest truths: the Bible being in this like the tree of life, (flourishing in the New Jerusalem,) which not only afforded seasonable fruit, but of which the very ‘leaves were for the healing of the nations.’¹⁶ As for those who have in this and the last age made bold to depreciate the Old Testa-ment, by pretending that to Christians, the New is sufficient; I am at present apt to think that the doctrine of the gospel, together with the light of nature, (which it excludes not but rather supposes,) contains all those duties which are absolutely necessary to be performed by all Christians, in order to salvation. And that consequently, many divines, both Catholics and reformed, do inconsiderately enough press many things enacted in the Old Tes-tament, as laws properly so called, which are not now, upon the score of their being there enacted, obligatory to us Christians, nor perhaps ever were to any but the Jews, and some kind of Jewish proselytes. But I think withal, that though it be hard to show that any thing is a necessary duty to Christians, in the sense above declared, if it cannot be shown to be so either by the New Testament or the light of nature; yet not only there are many particulars relating to such duties, of which the Old Testament may excellently assist us to give ourselves a more distinct and explicit instruction than is easy to be collected from the New; but of the mysteries of our religion there are many things delivered more expressly or more fully in some passages of the Old Testament, than in any of the gospel, as I could easily evidence, if I thought it requisite. So that the use of it is very great, as to the credenda in divinity, though not perhaps absolutely necessary as to the agenda. But I consider further, that both the matters and the expressions made use of in the Old Testament, are so very frequently and almost upon all occasions related to in the New, (as if the wisdom of God were like rivers and seas, that affect to flow in the same channels themselves had made before,) that there is scarce a page of the latter, to the better understanding of which the study of the former is not either absolutely necessary, or at least highly useful. Should God be pleased to instruct us as he did Jonas, by the shadow of a weed,¹⁷ it were our duty to acquiesce; how much more, then, when he vouchsafes to speak to us in almost as glorious a manner as he did to Moses; in a Scripture that hath such resemblances to the sanctuary, which contained the law of God, exhibited the mercyseat, (the type of Christ) and wherein the two golden cherubims, like the two precious and harmonious Testaments, looked towards one another, and both towards that mercy-seat that typified the Messias!¹⁸ We should therefore, not only with acquiescence, but gratitude, look upon God’s having appointed the Scripture to be the light in which his Spirit regularly shines upon his church; since the luminary is as well refulgent as the choice of it His whose blessing can prosper any means of grace, as without his blessing no means of grace can prosper.

And, Theophilus, since among those that are so far mistaken as to postpone the study of the Bible to that of some applauded books of morality and devotion, there are not wanting divers persons otherwise eminently religious; I hope you will easily excuse me, if for fear their example should prove a temptation to you, and add to the discouragements you must expect from the darkness of some texts and the opposition that will be given you, especially at first, by the grand enemy to the Author and design of the Scripture, I venture to superadd to all that I have said already concerning these men’s practice, that it is not only a commendable, but a much more improving custom than it is by many thought, to read daily and orderly some set portion or chapters of the Bible: and not to desist from that practice,though (as Naaman dipped himself six times in Jordan, without being cured¹⁹) we should not perceive a sudden and sensible benefit accruing from it; for in diseases, bodily or spiritual, though the mouth be out of taste, and cannot relish what is taken in, yet wholesome aliments must be eaten, and do effectively nourish and strengthen, though they be then insipid (perhaps bitter) to the distempered palate. We must with the eunuch read divers texts we understand not when we read them;²⁰ and though at first we be not able to penetrate the senses of some portions of God’s word, we must at least make our faculties as hospitable to it as we can; and make our memories admit and embrace it, till our understandings be grown up to do the like: it becoming the disciples of our Saviour, herein to imitate his holy mother; of whom it is written, that ‘They (the blessed Virgin and her husband) understood not the sayings which he spake unto them, ——— but his mother kept all these sayings in her heart;’²¹ and to think it may very well be, that as our Saviour said to Peter, ‘What I do, thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter;’²² so by the welcome he disposes you to give his word into your memory, he says to you, ‘What I say thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter:’ and the apostle’s motive to hospitality, ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares,’²³ will, without being overstretched, take in the texts of Scripture we are unacquainted with: for we may easily in them entertain, with Abraham and Lot,²⁴ greater guests than we were aware of; and who, when their true condition appears, may recompense our entertainment of them, by showering blessings on us, and rescuing us from the company and destiny ofthe wicked. And sure, if the pagans laid up with awful reverence, those dark and squinting oracles, that came (at least many of them) from the prince of darkness and father of lies, we should blush to refuse attentive pesusals and lodging in our memories, to those λόγια ζῶντα, those ‘lively oracles,’ those λόγια τοῦ Θεοῦ, ‘oracles of God,’ who is ‘the Father of lights,’ and an essential truth ‘that cannot lie.’²⁵ And the most enigmatical texts we meet with, which seem meant purposely to pose us, we may make useful admonitors of our weaknesses, and take for welcome opportunities to evince how great a reverence we pay God’s word, upon the single score of its being so. Nor let those disturbances with which the devil seldom fails to obstruct or discourage our first progress in a study so ruinous to his malicious ends upon us, deter us; for these are commonly but the throes and strugglings of Christ new formed in us; or else like those horrid fits and outcries which preceded the ejection of that unclean spirit mentioned in the first of Mark:²⁶ such parting ceremonies being not unusual to the dislodging devil, who, when he finds himself upon the point of being expelled, ‘hath great wrath, because he knoweth he hath but a short time.’²⁷ And though ‘the God of peace,’ however he ‘will bruise Satan under your feet shortly,’²⁸ should for a while try us even with desertions in the study of the Scripture; let us not for all that desert so improving a study, but resolutely persevere in the constant and faithful use of the means of grace: as the moon, when she suffers an eclipse, forsakes not her orb or motion, but by continuing her unretarded course, regains the irradiations she was deprived of. We find the word of God compared to seed, (that deathless seed by which Saint Peter saith we are born again,²⁹) and that, we know, may seem for a long time as well dead as buried in the ground, and yet afterwards spring and grow up into a plentiful harvest. Nor must our proficiency any more dispense with us, from the being conversant with the Scripture, than our frailties: ‘I will never,’ saith the Psalmist, ‘forget thy precepts, for with them thou hast quickened me.’³⁰ And, indeed, the word of God is not to be used like active physic, taken once that it may not be taken again; but it is compared to food, which indeed it is, of the soul; in which sense it may be literally enough said, ‘that man liveth not by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.’³¹ Now as our having fed never so well and heartily on excellent and nutritive meats yesterday, will not keep us from needing to eat again to-day or to-morrow, and so daily, as long as we continue in these ruinous cottages of clay;³² so in spiritual refections with full, without repeated meals the soul will scarcely thrive. And as, generally, the more healthy and lusty men are, the frequenter and stronger appetites they have; so the best Christians, and (witness David) the greatest proficients in Scripture knowledge, have the keenest stomachs to this food of souls; and the vigorousest piety, by a desuetude and neglect of it, is subject to faint and pine away.³³ Nor have we just cause to repine at any engagement to assiduity in the Scriptures; for there are not near so many things that will require, as there are that will deserve and recompense a serious study in a book, where both the strict sense and the circumstances and expressions that clothe it are richly instructive: like that aromatical fruit, of which not only the kernel is a nutmeg, but the very involving skin is mace. This inexhausted fulness, occasioned that panegyrical precept of the rabbies concerning the law; הפוך בה והפיך בה ארי כולי בה ‘Turn it over, and again turn it over, for all is in it:’ concurrently to which the Jew that translates the Arabian Apopthegms into Hebrew thus pronounces: “There proceedeth not a true sentence out of the mouths of this world’s wise men, that is not intimated in our law.”

The usefulness of divers texts is such, that we should not only have them in our possession, but in a readiness; and as David distressed by his mortal enemies, took Goliath’s sword from near the ephod, to wear it withersoever he went, so Christians, prosecuted by ghostly enemies, should be diligent, not only to have an armoury well furnished with spiritual weapons, but to wear this ‘sword of the Spirit’³⁴ always by their sides, to ward and thrust with upon all occasions; without needing to depend upon any such things as concordances, which often cannot be come by, and oftener, not soon enough to keep us from being foiled by the father or the champions of lies. But now, to engage us to grow ready Scripturists, it is not only true, that as the texts of the Bible interchange light with one another, and every new degree of Scripture-knowledge, is not only an acquist of so much, but an instrument to acquire more; so is that book a theme so comprehensive and so fertile, that the last hour of a Christian’s longest and industriousest life will still leave undiscovered mysteries in it: this, I say, is not only true, but it is also true that the doctrines of it are of that importance, and find that opposition in our depraved nature, that even those truths that require but few perusals to be understood, require many to be duly impressed: our preposterously partial memories being rarely like quicksilver, wherein nothing will sink but (that preciousest of metals) gold; for that alone is heavier than mercury. The word of Christ, must not be as a passenger,³⁵ or sparingly entertained in our minds, but must dwell there, and that richly: and the word, which Saint James pronounces, ‘able to save our souls,’³⁶ he describes as a graff, which must not only be closely embraced, by that wherein it is to fructify, but must continue there, to bring the stock and graff to, if I may so speak, concorporate. And, indeed, we are so indisposed to admit, and so obnoxious to deface, religious impressions, that we need, during our whole life, be conversant with the precepts of leading it piously. But it is scarce more faulty in, than incident to the froward nature of man, to be ever quarrelling with God’s method of prosecuting his intentions; and, as if he were wiser than his Maker, to criminate his conduct in his dispensations. Even that excellent person, the gloriousest of virgins and of mothers, whom all ages must deservedly call blessed, incurred her divine Son’s reprehension, for an intimated offer to alter his purposed method in disclosing himself.³⁷ But God is too just to himself and too merciful to us to degrade, as it were, his omniscience so far as to suffer himself to be swayed against the dictates of it, by such purblind and perverse tutors as we: his goodness concerns him too much in our instruction, to suffer him to let our fancies endite his word: to attain his own ends, he makes choice of his own means and instruments, without needing our purblind eyes in the election; and what with unfathom- - able wisdom he hath been pleased to contrive for man’s instruction, with a gracious though often misunderstood constancy he persists in. He knows that many who are disposed to cavil at the present contrivance or style of Scripture, would be apt to take exceptions at any other: for something or other it must necessarily be; and the unimaginable diversity of humours, judgments, and prepossessions is such, that as these now say, why thus, and not so? others would, in case of alteration, be ready to ask, why so, and not thus? It is questionable, whether the Israelites were greater murmurers at Pharaoh in Egypt or at Moses in the desert: and the children complained of by their companions in the market-place, have had either posterity or predecessors in all ages,³⁸ which have still been of the disposition of those Jews, who imputed the more than prophet’s rigidness of virtue to the great enemy of that lovely quality, and the greater than Solomon’s condescensions to the vices he designed them to destroy. But the great physician of mankind is too compassionate and wise to let his distracted patients prescribe their own course of physic; or, to decline our fond and peevish quarrels, shuffle or discompose those mysterious and profound contrivances, whose wisdom engages the attention and exacts the wonders of those heavenly unclogged spirits,³⁹ that are scarce more advantaged over us by their native abilities than by the means they have of improving them. And, therefore our Saviour refused to descend from the cross, though they whose malice served to fix him there, the chief priests and scribes themselves, declared that on those terms they would believe on him.⁴⁰ And though we are but too apt to fancy that we should be won to our duty, if it were taught or pressed in such or such a way, yet we may be pleased to remember, that it was one in hell that would needs have another means than the Scripture of having sinners preached to, and one in heaven, that, referring them to the Scripture, declared, ‘that if men heard not Moses and the prophets, neither would they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead to preach to them.’⁴¹

If I addressed what I write, not to so intelligent a person as Theophilus, but to promiscuous readers, I should add to what I have said of the several exceptions against the Scripture, a cordial advice to all, whose parts and leisure give them not a just hope of being able solidly to vindicate it either to themselves or others, to decline as much as discreetly they can, the listening to objectors or objections, of what sort or under what disguise soever, against that heavenly book, especially if proposed by plausible and insinuating wits. For it not being necessary, nor indeed possible, for every private Christian to know the opinions and reasons of all dissenters about the Scripture, no more than for every traveller to be a geographer; nor requisite to the knowledge of the way to heaven, to know all those in which they that miss it wander; (as to learn the way from Dover to London, I need not teach those that lead not thither;) itis not prudent to run a very probable hazard of disquieting one’s faith, and a not improbable one of subverting it, only to gratify a needless curiosity, an itch, which we are delighted to have scratched, but which is exasperated by being so. And frequently, though your design seem innocent, as only to hear without believing, and please yourself with something of wit and novelty, yet these conversations rarely enough prove harmless, and, as too frequent and sad experience proclaims, generally either abate a degree of your faith, or qualify some ardour of your love, or lessen your reverence for that matchless book, or put some strange and disquieting scruples into your thoughts, which it is much easier to confute than to silence. Wherefore, as in infectious times, when the plague reigns, physicians use more strictly to forbid the smaller excesses and inordinances of diet, and the use of meats of illdigestion, or apt to breed any distemper, because every petty fever becomes, through the malignity of the air, apt to turn into the plague; so now that anti-scripturism grows so rife, and spreads so fast, I hope it will not appear unseasonable to advise those that tender the safety and serenity of their faith, to be more than ordinarily shy of being too venturous of any books, or company, that may derogate from their veneration of the Scripture; because by the predominant and contagious profaneness of the times, the least injurious opinions harboured of it are prone to degenerate into irreligion. But I fear you will think I preach.

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Footnotes

1. Matt. xiii. 44. ↩

2. Gen. ii. 9. ↩

3. 1 Pet. i. 12. ↩

4. 2 Tim. i. 10. ↩

5. 1 Pet. i. 3. ↩

6. 2 Pet. i. 3, 4. ↩

7. Seneca de Cons. ad Helviam. cap. ix. ↩

8. 2 Tim. iii. 15, 17. ↩

9. Acts, x. 11, 12, 13. ↩

10. Mikra, Lectio. ↩

11. Matt. xii. 42. ↩

12. Heb. xii. 9. ↩

13. Psalm civ. 2. ↩

14. Gen. i. 3. ↩

15. Rom. xv. 4. ↩

16. Rev. xxii. 2. ↩

17. Jonah, iv. 6. ↩

18. Exod. xxv. 16—22. ↩

19. 2 Kings, v. 14. ↩

20. Acts, viii. 30, 31. ↩

21. Luke, ii. 50, 51; see verses 18, 19. ↩

22. John, xiii. 7. ↩

23. Heb. xiii. 2. ↩

24. Gen. xviii. and Gen. xix. ↩

25. Acts, vii. 38; Rom. iii. 2; James, i. 17; Tit. i. 2. ↩

26. Mark, i. 26. ↩

27. Rev. xii. 12. ↩

28. Rom. xvi. 20. ↩

29. Matt. xiii. 19, 20, &c. 1 Pet. 1, 2, 3. ↩

30. Psal. cix. 93. ↩

31. 1 Pet. ii. 2, and elsewhere; Matt. iv. 4. ↩

32. Job. iv. 19. ↩

33. Τροφὴ ψυχῆς ἡ γραφή. Athanas. ↩

34. Ephes. vi. 17. ↩

35. Col. iii. 16. ↩

36. James, i. 21. ↩

37. Luke, i. 48; John, ii. 3, 4. ↩

38. Matt. xi. 16—19. ↩

39. 1 Pet. i. 12. ↩

40. Matt. xxvii. 42. ↩

41. Luke, xvi. 31. ↩