3. According to this definition, in order to esta blish the Canon of Scripture, it is necessary to skew that all the books of which it is composed are of divine authority ; that they are entire and incomipt ; that, having them, it is complete with out any addition from any other source ; and that it comprises the whole of those books for which divine authority can be proved. It is obvious that, if any of these four particulars be not true, Scripture cannot be the sole and supreme stan dard of religious truth and duty. If any of the books of which it is composed be not of divine authority, then part of it we are not bound to submit to ; and consequently, as a whole, it is not the standard of truth and morals. If its sepa rate parts be not in the state in which they left the hands of their authors, but have been muti lated, interpolated, or altered, then it can form no safe standard ; for in appealing to it, one can not be sure that the appeal is not made to what is spurious, and what, consequently, may be erro neous. If it require or admit of supplementary revelations from God, whether preserved by tradi tion or communicated from time to time to the Church, it obviously would be a mere contradic tion in terms to call it complete, as a standard of the divine will. And if any other hooks were extant, having an equal claim with the books of which it is composed to be regarded as of divine authority, it would be absurd to call it the sole standard of truth ; for in this case the one class of books would be quite as deserving of our reverence as the other.
4. Respecting the evidence by which the Canon is thus to be established, there exists considerable difference of opinion amongst Christians. Some contend, with the Catholics, that the authorita tive decision of the Church is alone competent to determine the Canon ; others appeal to the concur rent testimony of the Jewish and early Christian writers ; and others rest their strongest reliance on the internal evidence furnished by the books of Scripture themselves. We cannot say that we are satisfied with any of these sources of evidence exclusively. As Michaelis remarks, the first is one to which no consistent Protestant can appeal, for the matter to be determined is of such a kind, that, unless we grant the Church to be infallible, it is quite possible that she may, at any given pe riod of her existence, determine erroneously ; and one sees not why the question may not be as suc cessfully investigated by a private individual as by the Church. The concurrent testimony of the ancient witnesses is invaluable so far as it goes ; but it may be doubted if it be sufficient of itself to settle this question, for the question is not en tirely one of facts, and testimony is good proof only for fizas. As for the internal evidence, one needs only to look at the havoc which Semler and his school have made of the Canon, to be satisfied that where dogmatical considerations are allowed to determine exclusively such questions, each man will extend or extruncate the Canon so as to adjust it to the Procrustean couch of his own preconceived notions. As the question is one partly of fact and
partly of opinion, the appropriate grounds of deci sion will be best secured by a combination of authentic testimony with the evidence supplied by the books themselves. We want to know that these books were really written by the persons whose names they bear ; we want to be satisfied that these persons were commonly reputed and held by their contemporaries to be assisted by the divine spirit in what they wrote ; and we want to be sure that care was taken by those to whom their writings were first addressed, that these should be preserved entire and uncorrupt. For all this we must appeal to the testimony of compe tent witnesses, as the only suitable evidence for such matters. But after we have ascertained these points affirmatively, we still require to be satisfied that the books themselves contain nothing obvi ously incompatible with the ascription to their authors of the divine assistance, but, on the con trary, are in all respects favourable to this suppo sition. We want to see that they are in harmony with each other ; that the statements they contain are credible ; that the doctrines they teach are not foolish, immoral, or self-contradictory ; that their authors really assumed to be under the divine direc tion in what they wrote, and afforded competent proofs of this to those around them ; and that all the circumstances of the case, such as the style of the writers, the allusions made by them to places and events, etc., are in keeping with the conclu sion to which the external evidence has already led. In this way we advance to a complete moral proof of the divine authority and canonical claims of the sacred writings.
5. The books specified as canonical in the 6th Article of the Church of England, and the 1st the Confession of the Church of Scotland, are received as such by the majority of Protestants. To these the Church of Rome adds, as part of the Old Testament, ten other books, or parts of books, which Protestants reject as Apocryphal. [Apo CRYP1IA.] For the evidence in support of the genuineness and divine authority of those books universally regarded by Christians as canonical, taken individually, we shall refer here to the arti cles in this work under the titles of these books respectively. The remainder of the present article shall be devoted to a sketch of the formation and history of the Canon, first of the Old Testament, and then of the New.