advance the honour of religion.

But our allowing this, and that there are some disagreements and variations in the evangelists, cannot hurt the gospel. St. Paul

might reprove St. Peter, and speak himself sometimes after the manner of men; yet, we see where they had the divine assistance in

their explications, and the power of working miracles to confirm their doctrine; and there, as rational and thinking men, we must allow

the authority of the sacred books: the few places that have the marks of weakness, only serve to convince us, that the divine writers


of the books made not the least pretension to perpetual inspiration. In suo sensu abundat — aliquid humanae fragilitatis dissentio habet:

(says Jerome.) Human frailty and their own sense honestly appear, when there was not an occasion for infallibility and miracle. But whenever the preachers of the New Testament were wanted for the extraordinary purposes of divine providence,

they were made superior to the infirmities of nature: their understandings were enlarged

and inlightened and an inspired knowledge rendered them incapable of error. This, in my judgment, is so far from ruining the authority

of scipture, that it is the greatest confirmation of its truth. It shows the honesty of the preachers of the New Testament,

in owning they were only occasionally inspired: and when the incredulous see the ingenuous acknowledgement of what is human

in the inspired writings, the truth of our religion must be more conspicuous to their eyes: whereas the truths of the Testament

are hid from them, by making God the dictator of the whole; because they think that impossible, and therefore conclude, the christian religion has no better foundation. In short, there is no reason to believe that the apostles were extraordinarily inspired, when they say it not; and when their discourses have in them no mark of such like inspiration. It is sufficient, (says Le Clerk), if we believe that, no prophet of the New Testament has said any thing in the name of God, or by his order, which God has not effectually ordered him to say; nor has undertaken to foretell any thing, which God

had not indeed truly reveled to him:— that every matter of fact related in the books is true, and the records, in general, the truest and most holy history that ever was published amongst men, notwithstanding the writers may be mistaken in some slight circumstances: — that all the doctrines proposed are really and truly divine doctrines, and there is no sort of reasoning in the dogmatical places of the holy scriptures, that can lead us into error, or into the