tholic. In fact, for a Catholic the question is not susceptible of any difficulty, whatever. One word will shew that we are right. WHICH WAS PRIOR? The bible or the church? Manifestly, the bible was the older. The apostles did not wait to have thousands of bibles copied, and to freight vessels with them, and sail as supercargoes of the heavenly merchandise, to the distant nations of the earth."Faith," says St. Paul, 66 comes from hearing." There were millions of converts to Christianity, whole nations were converted to the Savior, by preaching, before the different books composing the present bible, were determined to be genuine Scripture and collected into one volume. This was not done before the beginning of the fourth century. The church was therefore prior to the bible: and if the bible had never been written, the gospel could have been preached and believed, as it was in the early ages, without its aid. How did the apostles make converts without the bible? They addressed themselves to the reason of the unconverted nations. They convinced them, if necessary, of the existence of God, by the spectacle of the divine wisdom and power, displayed in the creation and preservation of the world. They appealed to the natural law, whose precepts were written by the finger of God, on tablets of flesh, the hearts of men, before they were engraven on stone, amidst the thunder and lightnings of Sinai. Thus did they find the great primary truths of natural religion, with regard to both doctrine and morals, inculcated by the contemplation of the visible wonders of creation and the testimony of the human heart.

They next proceeded to convince their hearers of the unity of God, and the sinfulness and grossness of idolatry, of their having departed from the moral law, of the darkness in which sin had involved the human race, of our incompetency for our own cure, of the divine commiseration of our misery, of the descent of Jesus Christ, his doctrine, his miracles, his charity, his establishment of his church, his sacraments and the various means of grace, his promises to be with his apostles, He and his Holy Spirit, for ever, his death, &c. The holiness of the apostles' lives, the cruel death with which they sealed the truth they had proclaimed, conciliated the belief and completed the conversion of their hearers. 66 I willingly," says Paschal, "believe the witnesses, who let their throats be cut to attest the truth of what they declare." The bible could not shed its blood to attest its divine origin. The ignorant, who are a large proportion of the human race, could not read it; the learned, and the pious, and the sincere, as every one knows, found it a task far above their strength, to distinguish genuine from spurious scripture. Before the invention of printing, men could not procure bibles: since the invention of printing, they read them to introduce a flood of new sects; so that there are now as many religions, almost, as there are different versions or different readers of the scriptures. If, on the contrary, there is anything clearly taught in the scriptures, it is the authority of the church, which, without aid from the bible, not all composed when the first apostles preached, had fully established her authority, and, independently of her miracles, proved, by the preternatural success of her preaching, that God was indeed with her, as he had promised, teaching all nations, and perpetually suggesting to her all truth. Hence, we believe in the church first; and on the faith of the evidences which I have enumerated, we believe in the bible, which the church presents to us, vouching for its purity and authenticity.

The bible obtained, sanctions the authority of the church, and confirms our faith. Here, all is consistent, and our submission to the church is reasonable. The Protestant divines, Hooker and Chillingworth, allow that the bible cannot bear testimony to itself: even Luther was forced to acknowledge it. "We are obliged," says he, "to yield many things to the papists; that with them is the word of God, that we received from them; otherwise, we should have known nothing at all about it." (Comment on John, c. 16.) Hence the remarkable saying of St. Augustine: "I should not believe the gospel itself, if the Catholic church did not oblige me to do so." Will my friend inform me, why he rejects an authentic work, of great excellence, written by St. Barnabas; who is termed, in scripture, an apostle, and declared to be full of the holy Ghost, (Acts xiv. 24, xi. 24;) and receives, as canonical, parts of the New Testament, which were not written by apostles at all, viz. the gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke? The original text of Moses, and the ancient prophets, was destroyed with the temple and city of Jerusalem, by the Assyrians under Nebuchadnezzar; and the authentic copies which replaced them, perished in the persecution of Antiochus. How were these books restored? Paul wrote his Epistle to the Romans, and entrusted it to the deaconess Phoebe. His Epistle to the Ephesians, he confided to the disciple Tychicus. How can we be sure of these epistles, as they now stand in the Testament? Was it not the corruption of the bible by Queen Elizabeth's bishops, that caused James I. to have a new translation to be made? But, 1 should be endless, if I enumerated all the insurmountable difficulties, which a Protestant encounters at the very first step of his journey in quest of a religion. He must turn Catholic at the very outset, and take the bible, as he gets it, on authority, or remain an unbeliever all his life. And he must believe that authority to be infallible, or he can never be sure that the bible it gives him is divine. Catholics have faith by baptism, as Protestants have; but the latter lose it when they adopt, on arriving at mature age, the Protestant principle, that every man must find out his religion for himself, from the bible. Many Protestants are not admonished of the danger of their situation, and do not themselves reflect on these difficulties. As long as they are sincere, and do the best they can to obey God and conscience, the Catholic church excuses them, in the words of St. Augustine: "Let those treat you harshly, who know not how hard it is to get rid of old prejudices. Let those treat you harshly,、 who have not learned how very hard it is to purify the interior eye, and render it capable of contemplating the sun of the soul, truth. But, as to us: we are far from this disposition towards persons who are separated from us, not by errors of their own invention, but by their being entangled in those of others. We are so far from this disposition, that we pray to God, that in refuting the false opinions of those whom you follow, not from malice, but from imprudence, he would bestow upon us that spirit of peace, which feels no other sentiment than charity, no other interest than that of Jesus Christ, no other wish but for your salvation." Had we been born Mahommedans, we would, perhaps, live Mahommedans. Thank God, we are not. But, this does not require us to throw away our faith. It would be too long to notice all the gentleman says. I attend to the most important.

Now, I will venture to assert, that there is not a Protestant in this house, who can say, that he has found out all the tenets which he be

lieves, by reading the bible alone. He believes them, because his parents, and teachers, and minister, his catechism, taught them; or a hundred other influences may have been brought to bear upon his mind and his affections, favorable to those peculiar tenets. It is not at all the case with Protestant children, any more than with Catholic children, that reason is the first to lead them to their belief. Let each one candidly examine his own heart, and ask himself if he was not as much educated in those doctrines which he now professes, as the Catholics were in theirs.

How can he be sure, if he indeed possess an authentic copy of the scriptures, that he understands them? "The word of God," says the Protestant bishop, Walton, "does not consist in mere letters, whether written or printed, but in the sense of it; which no one can better interpret than the true church, to which Christ committed this same pledge." (Polyglot. Proleg. ch. v.)

My opponent says, there was a copy of the scriptures found, which the fingers of a monk had never soiled. And how does he go about to establish this proposition? He quoted Horne. I will take up this very work, and prove, while I admit that Horne was a learned writer, that he fell into some very unlearned blunders. But how does Horne say that my friend is right? He says, that this very manuscript was found in one of the twenty-two monasteries of Mount Athos!! Lo! there was a monk at the bottom of it after all! [Time expired.]

MR. CAMPBELL rises

Four o'clock, P. M.

My friends, there is any thing but order in our discussion-I mean logical order, as respects the duties of a respondent. Now, certainly, this will abundantly appear in the report of this debate.

The gentleman has not once, as yet, replied to my speeches in regular sequence; but, after the interval of a night, a day, and sometimes two days, he responds to some point or argument: and then his reply consists either in accusing me of misunderstanding, or misstating what he has said; or perhaps in denying my authorities, or by introducing some extract, or tradition, or opinion, from some great Protestant, or some good Catholic, or some excogitation of his own. His last speech was a happy illustration of Ovid's

"congestaque eodem

Non bene junctarum discordia semina rerum."

[Metamor. lib. I.

And, certainly, his mirthfulness and gravity were in unison with the dignity of his reply; and equally fallible as respects effect of any sort upon his audience. This rhetoric soon wears out. It is but an echo, a sound, a shadow; the crisis calls for something more solid. But if it cannot be found, I must submit to interruption, and turn aside to notice the gleanings of his last and best reflections upon the prophecies. The gentleman has given us from his library some ridiculous puns upon the name of Mahomet. He does not, and under his hard destiny he cannot, always discriminate the precise point in debate. It is not about the name of an individual, such as Ludovicus, or Mahomet; but of a people-a community-a kingdom. His second mistake is, that if it were a personal name, the number of the name of Mahomet as given in his example only makes 502. His name properly written is equal to only 463. He ought also to have decipher

ed, or his author, whether his name should be taken as it is written in Arabic or in Greek. But whether he take it in Arabic or in Greek, it will not in Grecian numerals, and certainly not in Arabic, equal 666. So fails his effort at both reason and ridicule to dispose of this morning's argument from prophecy. I again repeat, that on this point, as on every other, my argument appears unassailable.

Yesterday my opponent was asked, where infallibility resided; today he answers by asking, where shall we find the mind? In the head, stomach, hands, feet, or where? This is not a parallel case. The question is, as usual, mistaken, or misapplied. It is, where is the mouth of infallibility? when I desire an infallible response, where shall I hear it? Where is the tongue of infallibility? If the church possess infallibility and never decides a question by any organ-never can utter an answer, it is worth no more than a diamond in the depths of the Atlantic.

The alpha and omega of the proofs offered by the bishop for the existence of infallibility, which has been so often repeated, and which I promised sometime to notice, is this: "I am with you.' "Now, logic asks, what means "I am with you?" as proving infallibility, unless "I am with you," is a phrase already incontrovertibly established to mean infallibility. But what says bible fact? There are, at least, four meanings of the phrase. I am with you, personally, providentially, graciously, or with miraculous power. It could not be the first: for he was leaving them personally. It could not be the second; because that was common to all good men. Thus God was with Joseph, with Jacob, with all the patriarchs, and with all good men. It could not be that God was to be with them graciously; for that too, is common to all christians. As the apostles said to all good christians, "The Lord be with you all," it could not be a special promise to the apostles. What remains then? Mark, the evangelist, explains: "These signs shall follow. In my name shall they cast out devils: they shall speak with new tongues, serpents shall they take away; and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them. They shall impose hands on the sick and they shall be whole." So the Rhemish Testament reads Mark's account of the promise, "I am with you." Again : after the ascension of the Messiah, the evangelist relates, v. 20. "But they" (the apostles) "going forth preached every where our Lord working with all, and confirming the word with signs that followed."

This, then, is the proof of infallibility, as interpreted by Mark in the canon Catholic Testament. Now, does not this confine the promise to the apostles? Can the popes work miracles? Can the bishops?-Such a miracle, forsooth, as the existence of the Roman Catholic church in the western empire, after the rise of Mahometanism in the east! A splendid miracle, truly! That proves as much for Mahometanism and Paganism, as for the popes of Rome: for all these systems rose upon the ruin, and also withstood the shocks of other systems!

When Peter said to the cripple, "Silver and gold I have none; but such as I have I give thee-In the name of Jesus take up your bed and walk," he felt that he possessed something in the promise "I am with you." Can any of his successors speak in this style: silver and gold I have none: but such as I have (the power of Christ) I give thee?

The gentleman's dissertation on the vicious circle, leaves him

where it found him; believing the church first and the bible afterwards; and making the one prove the other: but he will never dispose of it. He is like the eccentric witness, whose veracity could only be proved by the principal: and yet the principal depends for his veracity upon the witness. The bishop for a little while turned Protestant, and then he affirmed that he believed in Christ on the evidence of his own miracles; and that evidence he found in the bible, and that bible he interpreted for himself. Thus he became a Protestant, when he attempted to solve that Gordion knot. But as soon as he had, by the Protestant rule, obtained faith in Christ, he instantly relapsed into the embrace of holy mother, and denounced the bridge over which he escaped from the island.

But the gentleman asked a question which has puzzled wise men to answer. A child however of four years old could have asked Newton a question that he could not have answered in a thousand years. "How can you prove the bible?" says the bishop. Does it prove itself? I will imitate him, this once, and ask, does nature prove itself? Does God prove his own existence without his works or by his works? Must there be another universe created to prove this ?This is a question no one will put, unless on the hypothesis that no man can prove a universe to exist but by other testimony than itself. So the bible proves itself to be the word of God, as nature proves itself to be the work of God. Thus has the supreme intelligence stamped the impress of himself both on nature and revelation. David says, "Lord, thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name." I have other reasons, if necessary, to prove how the bible was put together. Many a christian has been made so by the single testimony of one evangelist; or by a single epistle of Paul. We have four gospels; but one would have been enough; and as much as many individuals had. The whole christian doctrine might be learned from Paul alone, from perhaps the half of his epistles. Paul and Peter wrote, and said much more by divine inspiration than is preserved or recorded. So did the ancient prophets. We need not to prove, in order to our faith, who collected the writings into one volume, any more, than who collected all the words of Christ, that are reported.

Cardinal Bellarmine says: "There is sure to be some doctor at the head of a schism." Heresiarchs are generally men of letters. Where then the pertinency of those remarks about the unlearned wresting the scriptures? The original means untaught, untractable persons rather than unlearned. Philosophers, as they love to be called, are generally the most unteachable, and the greatest wresters and perverters of the scriptures. Peter had those too wise to learn, in his eye, when he spoke of wresting the scripture; and not the simple, honest and unassuming laity. Let a man sit down as Mary sat, at the feet of Christ, and humble himself as a pupil ought; he will then hear the voice of God, and understand it too. He will then discern how it is, that all God's children are taught by God, and that there is none that teacheth like him.

Rather wittily than logically, the gentleman gives the monks some credit, for handling the Alexandrine manuscript. Be it known however, that monkery began in St. Anthony's time; and that this said copy is older than the founder of monasteries. Because Tacitus, Livy, Horace, and Virgil passed through their hands, are we dependent on them