intended the publication is UNKNOWN.-Unit. Improved Version, Introduct. p. 9.

2. It does not appear that the editor was in possession of any manuscript.-Ibid.

3. This edition, however, being elegantly printed, &c., it was UNACCOUNTABLY TAKEN FOR GRANTED, that it exhibited a pure and perfect text.-Ibid.

4. THIS, constitutes the received text.-Ibid.

5. The early editors of the New Testament, possessed but few manuscripts, and those of inferior value.-Ibid. p. x.

6. Those of the Complutensian Editors were destroyed; but they were not numerous nor of great account.*

7. Erasmus consulted only five or six.

8. Robert Stephens, only fifteen.

9. They were collated, and the various readings noted, by Henry Stephens, the son of Robert, a youth about eighteen years of age.-Ibid. 8.

10. This book, being splendidly printed, with great professions of accuracy, by the Editor, was long supposed to be a correct and immaculate work.-Ibid.

11. It was published, A. D. 1550.-Ibid.

12. It differs very little from the received text.-Ibid.

13. It has been discovered to abound with errors.-Ibid.

14. Attempts have been made to correct the Received Text, by critical conjecture.-1bid. xv.

15. The Orthodox charge the heretics with corrupting the text; and

16. The Heretics recriminate upon the Orthodox.-Notes on Luke i. Unit. N. V. page 121.

17. The works of those writers who are called Heretics, such as Valentinian, Marcion, and others, are as useful in ascertaining the value of a reading, as those of the Fathers who are entitled Orthodox; for the Heretics were often more learned and acute, and equally honest.-Introd. p. xv.

18. For, as yet, (i. e. the fourth century,) there was no law enacted, which excluded the ignorant and illiterate from ecclesiastical preferments and offices, and it is certain, that the greatest part, both of the bishops and presbyters, were men entirely destitute of learning and education. Besides,

19. That savage and illiterate party, which looked upon all sorts of erudition, particularly that of a philosophical kind, as pernicious, and even destructive of true piety and religion, increased both in number and authority.-Mosheim, vol. i. p. 346.

20. A l'égard du Nouveau Testament l' Heresiarque (scil. Manicheé), entreprit de la corriger, sous le frivole pretexte, que.

* 1 have shown, however, (though it makes against my own argument,) that they were more respectable than the Unitarian Editors, or Bishop Marsh himself, at first, apprehended them to be.

les Evangiles n'etoient point des Apôtres, ni des hommes apostoliques dont ils portent les noms ou que s'ils en étoient, ils avoient été falsifiez par des Chrétiens, que étoient encore a demi juifs.

21. L'impartialité, si essentielle a un historien, m'a obliger de justifier les Manichéens de' l'accusation qui les Catholiques leur ont intenteé, d'avoir corrumpu les livres du Nouveau Testament par des additions, ou des Retranchemens sacrileges. Je l'ai examineé, et l'ai trouvée sans fondement. Mais je n'aipû m'empêcher de remarquer a cette occasion, qu'il y'eut des Catholiques assez temeraires pour oter quelques endroits des Evangiles.Beausobre, Histoire de Manichée, preface xi. a Amsterdam, 1734.

22. Si les heretiques ôtent un mot du texte sacré, ou s'ils en ajoutent un ce sont de sacrileges violateurs de la santété des ecritures; mais si les Catholiques le font, cela s'appelle retoucher les premiers exemplaires les reformer pour les rendre plus intelligibles.-Ibid, p. 343.

The reader will be pleased to observe, that the above is the passage in the text of Beausobre, upon which the statement about Lanfranc, in the Manifesto, is a note illustrative, which it was convenient for this Doctor of Divinity not to see, or seeing which, it was convenient to his conscience to charge the Manifesto Writer with dishonesty for doing, what the Manifesto Writer was not doing, but what he was doing himself.—Steal! and cry Stop thief! is gospel all over!

23. The Latin version is the source of almost all European versions.-Marsh's Michaelis, vol. 2, page 106.

24. No manuscript now extant is prior to the sixth century; and what is to be lamented, various readings which, as appears from the quotations of the fathers, were in the text of the Greek Testament, are to be found in none of the manuscripts which are at present remaining.-Ibid. page 160.

This is but a spicilegium which the reader may safely multiply by a hundred, of the gross forgeries, and no such passages, and no such things as are imputed to them, but which there, in his face and in his teeth all the while, I might have obtruded on the angry Doctor's patience, in comprobation of the position of the Manifesto.

But the Manifesto is an index, not a dissertation, and enough was given there, as perhaps more than enough is given here, to prove, from the admissions of the most learned critics, the infinitely suspicious origin of the received text.

The claim of the scriptures, therefore, in any existing version of them, to resemblance or identity with their original, God only knowing what that original may have been, seems to be in much the same predicament as that of the Irishman's knife, which had

unquestionably descended from the first king of Conaught, though it had had seventy thousand new blades, and fifty thousand new handles.

But to evade the pregnant conclusion of the matter which forces itself into his own reluctant admissions, the doctor rings the changes again on his eternal sophism about the Greek tragedians and historians, as if it were proof enough for the claims of a divine revelation, to prove as much for it as can be proved for a pagan romance, or a barbarous melo-drame. We write better poems, and more accurate histories, than any of the Hesiods or Homers, the Herodotuses or Livys of antiquity-there is no Eschylus, Euripides, or Sophocles that ever produced a play that would be endured in a British theatre, much less be worthy of an hour's study of the man who could read SHAKESPEAR! What are Virgil or Pindar to Byron and Moore? the man who had read Horace, and the Iliad, might possibly attain the beauties of style, and fervour of expression that appear in the Answer to the Manifesto-the man who had studied Shelley's Queen Mab would become a gentleman. After all that could be urged for the coequal claims of ancient poets, and as ancient evangelists, is, all that can be urged, enough? or shall the ground which is solid enough to pitch a tent on, be a sufficient foundation for a castle?

But surely, to argue that it is only of late years, and since the world has been blessed with the critical ingenuity and industry of a Mill, Wetstein, Griesbach, Middleton, Knapp, and Voter, that we are in possession of the correct, or probably correct text of scripture, is little else than to transfer the authority of apostleship from the first writers to the modern critics. By the same argument it may be inferred, that subsequent critics may make subsequent discoveries, which may give us as good reason to alter the text from our present reading, as we have for holding the present reading at present the best. We do but arrogate to our own times an infallibility which we deny to others, when we presume to think that the text, as we have it, can be depended on, or that it may not be a thousand years to come, and after another hundred and thirty thousand various readings shall have been discovered, ere mankind shall have a right to felicitate themselves on reading a text in the closest accordance with the original.

But if we are to take the knock-down dictum of an insolent priest, who will call us "obstinate untractable wretches" for resisting his arguments? If we must, on the ipse dixit of a pretended prince of critics, believe that "that text is competently exact even in the worst manuscript, nor is one article of faith or moral precept either perverted or lost in it," why, there's an end on't! and what use of any other critic upon earth but he? What use of a revelation from God, when the prince of critics can brush up any dirty lumber into gospel, and give it us with his "Take

that, or BE DAMNED ?" (Mark, xvi. 16.) or what use of any God on earth, when any canting fanatic, in the very slavering of learned idiotcy, shall be so ready and so able to officiate in his damnable capacity, to launch his curses, and denounce his vengeance?

END OF SECTION VIII.

SECTION IX.

IMMORAL TENDENCY OF THE SCRIPTURES.

1. "Here is, indeed, the highest pitch of daring."

"Here," (exclaims the Doctor, in a strain that makes humanity hope his constitution may have no tendency to apoplexy)-" Here is the first born of calumny."

He might as well, however, have left it to his readers to determine, whether the Manifesto demonstrates that its writer defies all truth and justice-for truth and justice will determine, that however ill a man may think of his enemy, it is not his enemy's guilt, that constitutes his innocence; nor is it the devil's blackness, that makes an angel white.

2. "Study the passages to which he refers, in their respective connexion, and in their relation to the other parts of the New Testament," says this learned Divine.

But no! say common sense and honesty. If a thing be apparently right and fair; if it be manifestly founded in reason―loyal, just and pure-what occasion is there for study? Shall palpable villainy, seen, caught, and held in the very act and article of crime, defeat our indignation, and bilk us into terms of peace, by the sophistical evasion-"You don't know me-you don't see the bearings and connections of the matter-study this part of my conduct, in relation to other parts of my conduct, and you will find it forms no exception to the SPOTLESS PURITY, the HOLY BEAUTY which animates the whole of my divine composition. I pick a pocket, and I cut a throat, now and then! but how unfair to suspect my general character."

Will Dr. Smith shew that there ever was, or could have been, any religion on the face of the earth, so vile and wicked, that it might not have been defended by precisely the same argument? Can the imposture of the Koran, the Shaster, the Vedas, the Pourannas, or any other pretended Divine Revelation, be pointed out, by any fairer demonstration of the cheat, than that which should show, that amid all their pretended sanctities and sublimities-their spotless purity and their holy beauties-there were passages enough to be found in them, to betray the craft in which they originated, and the deceit which they intended? Might not the institutions of Lycurgus-the laws of Draco-or the bloody statute of Henry the Eighth, be vindicated upon the principle

of "studying them in all the connections and relations that might be imagined to appertain to them," and explaining away the gross sense of the atrocities that they contain, by taking their own word for the sincerity of the philanthropy they profess?" Might not the language of Doctor John Pye Smith himself, be supposed to be such as a gentleman and a scholar could have used, if we are obliged to give him credit either for the truth of his professions, or the sincerity of his motives?

The Doctor himself admits, that there are difficulties in the Bible, but seems incapable of the ingenuousness that should own, that those difficulties are difficult enough to appear to have an immoral, vicious and wicked tendency, in which appearance all their difficulty consists. He begs off this, by the complete surrender, of putting the WORD OF GOD, on as good a footing as the fabulous legends of antiquity, and claiming that the same allowance should be made for the inspirations of infinite wisdom, as for the madrigals of Drunken Barnaby.

3. "The rational method of resolving them, is by acquiring the information necessary to go to the bottom of each instance," says the Doctor, (p. 37.) And so, 'tis the rational way to catch sparrows, to put a little salt upon their tails.

4. "And those who cannot do so, possess, in an enlightened protestant country,"

Where's that?

5. "The inestimable advantage of consulting learned and judicious commentators."

But was not the advantage greater in a CATHOLIC country, of consulting commentators, who were not merely learned and judicious, but absolutely infallible, and who, when the difficulty was propounded to THEM, would have answered it perhaps, without giving you worse names than you might get from a Methodist parson, for your pains?

6. "With respect to the passages enumerated by this contemptible writer, a man must have little understanding indeed, whose careful examination cannot dissipate whatever of difficulty is pretended."

There, reader! half of that is for yourself, for if your examination should not be careful enough, or should not lead to such a complete dissipation of the difficulty, as Dr. Smith opines must be its issue, he gives you hint enough that you shall be contemptible too.

7. "For, if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory, why yet am I also judged as a sinner?" Rom. iii. 7. How this can be the language of an objector and not the Apostle's own language, an apostle only can shew How its most frightful and revolting sense-which is at least the apparent one, is incompatible with the character of one who calls himself "the chief of sinners," and who calls the other

us.