positive difference of kind--a chasm, the pretended overleaping of
which constitutes imposture, or betrays insanity. Of the first kind
are the Law and the Prophets, no jot or tittle of which can pass
unfulfilled, and the substance and last interpretation of which
passes not away; for they wrote of Christ, and shadowed out the
everlasting Gospel. But with regard to the second, neither the holy
writers--the so-called Hagiographi--themselves, nor any fair
interpretations of Scripture, assert any such absolute diversity, or
enjoin the belief of any greater difference of degree, than the
experience of the Christian World, grounded on and growing with the
comparison of these Scriptures with other works holden in honour by
the Churches, has established. And THIS difference I admit, and
doubt not that it has in every generation been rendered evident to as
many as read these Scriptures under the gracious influence of the
spirit in which they were written.

But alas! this is not sufficient; this cannot but be vague and
unsufficing to those with whom the Christian religion is wholly
objective, to the exclusion of all its correspondent subjective. It
must appear vague, I say, to those whose Christianity as matter of
belief is wholly external, and like the objects of sense, common to
all alike; altogether historical, an opus operatum--its existing and
present operancy in no respect differing from any other fact of
history, and not at all modified by the supernatural principle in
which it had its origin in time. Divines of this persuasion are
actually, though without their own knowledge, in a state not
dissimilar to that into which the Latin Church sank deeper amid
deeper from the sixth to the fourteenth century; during which time
religion was likewise merely objective and superstitious--a letter
proudly emblazoned and illuminated, but yet a dead letter that was to