great Reformers of our Church), that by the good Spirit were the
spirits tried, and that the light, which beams forth from the written
Word, was its own evidence for the children of light; as long as
Christians considered their Bible as a plenteous entertainment, where
every guest, duly called and attired, found the food needful and
fitting for him, and where each--instead of troubling himself about
the covers not within his reach--beholding all around him glad and
satisfied, praised the banquet and thankfully glorified the Master of
the feast--so long did the tenet--that the Scriptures were written
under the special impulse of the Holy Ghost remain safe and
profitable. Nay, in the sense, and with the feelings, in which it
was asserted, it was a truth--a truth to which every spiritual
believer now and in all times will bear witness by virtue of his own
experience. And if in the overflow of love and gratitude they
confounded the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, working alike
in weakness and in strength, in the morning mists and in the
clearness of the full day; if they confounded this communion and co-
agency of divine grace, attributable to the Scripture generally, with
those express, and expressly recorded, communications and messages of
the Most High which form so large and prominent a portion of the same
Scriptures; if, in short, they did not always duly distinguish the
inspiration, the imbreathment, of the predisposing and assisting
SPIRIT from the revelation of the informing WORD, it was at worst a
harmless hyperbole. It was holden by all, that if the power of the
Spirit from without furnished the text, the grace of the same Spirit
from within must supply the comment.

In the sacred Volume they saw and reverenced the bounden wheat-sheaf
that STOOD UPRIGHT and had OBEISANCE from all the other sheaves (the
writings, I mean, of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church), sheaves