REVISED BY ISAAC TAYLOR, ESQ. &c. &c. &c. WITH NOTES FOR THE PRESENT EDITION, BY THE LONDON: PUBLISHED FOR THE PROTESTANT ASSOCIATION, 1863. THOUGHTS ON POPERY. 1. The Sufficiency of the Bible as a Rule of Faith and Guide to Salvation. THIS is the great matter in controversy between Protestants and Roman Catholics. We say the Bible is sufficient. They say that it is not. Now suppose that Paul the apostle be permitted to decide between us. We are agreed to refer the matter to him. Can our opponents object to this reference? Let Paul then be consulted in the only way in which he can be, namely, through his acknowledged writings. It is agreed on all hands that he wrote the Second Epistle to Timothy. Well, in the third chapter of that Epistle, and at the 15th verse, he writes to Timothy, thus, "And that from a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation." That the Greek is here correctly translated into English, any scholar may see. Here then we have what Paul wrote; and I cannot believe that he would write in a letter to Timothy, that the Holy Scriptures are capable of being known by a child, and able to make wise unto salvation, and then say, to be handed down by tradition, that they are so obscure and abstruse that one can make nothing out of them. But what did Paul write to Timothy about the Holy Scriptures? He reminds him that he had known them from a child; that is, he had been acquainted with them so far as to understand them from that early age. Now, either Timothy was a most extraordinary child, of which there is no proof, or else the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament, and of the New, so far as the latter was |