up into passable likenesses of purgatory, Popery, the Inquisition,
and other monstrous abuses. But would you have a Protestant instance
of the superstitious use of Scripture arising out of this dogma?
Passing by the Cabbala of the Hutchinsonian School as the dotage of a
few weak-minded individuals, I refer you to Bishop Hacket's sermons
on the Incarnation. And if you have read the same author's life of
Archbishop Williams, and have seen and felt (as every reader of this
latter work must see and feel) his talent, learning, acuteness, and
robust good sense, you will have no difficulty in determining the
quality and character of a dogma which could engraft such fruits on
such a tree.

It will perhaps appear a paradox if, after all these reasons, I
should avow that they weigh less in my mind against the doctrine,
than the motives usually assigned for maintaining and enjoining it.
Such, for instance, are the arguments drawn from the anticipated loss
and damage that would result from its abandonment; as that it would
deprive the Christian world of its only infallible arbiter in
questions of faith and duty, suppress the only common and
inappellable tribunal; that the Bible is the only religious bond of
union and ground of unity among Protestants and the like. For the
confutation of this whole reasoning, it might be sufficient to ask:
Has it produced these effects? Would not the contrary statement be
nearer to the fact? What did the Churches of the first four
centuries hold on this point? To what did they attribute the rise
and multiplication of heresies? Can any learned and candid
Protestant affirm that there existed and exists no ground for the
charges of Bossuet and other eminent Romish divines? It is no easy
matter to know how to handle a party maxim, so framed, that with the
exception of a single word, it expresses an important truth, but