subjection to the Pope, as Christ's vicar, and universal bishop, and head of the church. The number of his name six hundred and sixty and six; most probably this relates to the particular point of time, near about which he came to have his name or power as universal bishop; which was in the 666th year of the Roman monarchy, A. D. 606, when it was given him by Phocas.

(2.) In the 17th chapter, the light whereof hath shined so powerfully on divers of the more sober, even Papists themselves, that they have been forced to acknowledge, that Babylon the Great, there spoken of, ver. 5, can be no other than Rome, the city built upon seven mountains, ver. 9; and if so, then the woman, the whore sitting upon it, who else should it be but the Papacy?

Making the kings and the inhabitants of the earth drunk with her fornications.

And herself drunk with the blood of the saints and martyrs of Jesus, ver. 6; being arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, as the Pope and his cardinals are; literally taken, decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls, as their whole gaudy, pompous worship is ver. 4, making merchandize of the souls of men; cap. xviii. 13, over whose ruin the ship-masters, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, shall mourn, ver. 17, 18, saying, Alas! alas! that great city.

Reason 5. From his likeness to Antiochus Epiphanes, spoken of in Daniel, who was the Antichrist of the Old Testament. Speaking great words against the Most High, and wearing out the saints, and changing times and laws, cap. vii. 5: exalting himself, and magnifying himself above every God; speaking marvellous things against the God of gods, cap. xi. 26.

Reason 6. Either the Pope or some other; but no other; therefore, the Pope.

Not heathen Rome, guilty of no apostacy.

Not the Turk; because he sits not in the temple of God, neither doth he call himself Christ's vicar.

Not Bar-Cochba, nor any other Jew to arise hereafter, of the tribe of Dan, pretending to be the Messiah, it being nowhere said in Scripture of the Antichrist that he should do so.

These arguments, and such like, though they be not, perhaps, demonstrative and convincing that the Pope is the Antichrist; yet, however, as was the saying of Sir Francis Bacon, (Lord Verulam,) they may serve to cause us to lay hold on him upon suspicion, as we use to do when hue and cry is sent forth to apprehend a thief, till such time as he shall clear himself, which is not yet done; or else that we meet with some other to whom these Scripture marks and characters may better agree.

(To be continued.)

DR. BENNETT ON THE INSPIRATION AND SPIRITUAL SENSE OF THE SONG OF SOLOMON.

(To the Editor.)

GRIEVED at the article which Dr. Smith has inserted on Solomon's Song, and convinced that the interests of truth demanded an answer, I yet shrunk from the task of appearing as the opponent of such a man. I endeavoured, therefore, to harmonize my feelings with my duty, by offering to submit this paper to his inspection before I sent it to you; but as he declined my proposal, I now ask the insertion, to which you are in some measure pledged, as you have invited replies.

I regret, then, that the well-earned reputation of his treatise on the person of Christ is employed to give currency to an attack on the Canticles in particular, and on the common opinion concerning the inspiration of the Old Testament in general. The same reasoning that can justify this, would give colour to the introduction of almost any other irrelative topic. To me it appears, that the whole work is enfeebled by the Doctor's theory of inspiration; for almost every text he has adduced to prove the divinity of Christ may be rendered inconclusive by a very plausible application of his own principles.

But my surprise and regret were most painfully excited by the manner in which he meets, or rather does not meet, the arguments which one of his clerical correspondents has urged for the Canticles --that it was contained in the Jewish code, to which our Lord gave his sanction. If Dr. Smith notices this at all, it is only by the introduction of a sweeping theory, which would expose many other parts of the Old Testament, if not also of the New, to the artillery of the same argument. Are we to suppose that a battery is taken, simply by exposing an increased number of choice troops to be swept away by its grape shot?

It does not appear, that Dr. Smith denies the Canticles to have been a part of those scriptures to which our Lord appeals as infallible, saying "the scriptures cannot be broken." But our esteemed divine humbly requests that it may be considered, what is meant by the term canon, or rule, and whether that meaning can be attached to the Song." This is most strange. For every one knows that the canon means not each distinct part, but the whole of the Old and New Testament, which the Westminster divines term "the only rule of faith and practice." The Canticles, which are but a part of the canon, are not obliged to answer to the definition of the whole.

But my chief object of animadversion is the following:

"When I reflect upon the difficulties, using the mildest term, which arise from an endeavour to convert passages containing matter merely genealogical, topographical, numerical, civil, military, fragments of antiquity, domestic or national, presenting no character whatever of religious matter,-into a rule of faith and manners,—I feel it impossible to accept the conclusion; I can find no end to my

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anxiety, no rest for my faith, no satisfaction for my understanding, till I embrace the sentiment, that the qualities of sanctity and inspiration belong only to the religious and theological element which is diffused through the Old Testament; and that, where this element is absent, where there is nothing adapted to communicate doctrine, reproof, correction, or instruction in righteousness,' nothing fitted to 'make the man of God perfect, thoroughly furnished into every good work,' then, we are not called to acknowledge any inspiration, nor warranted to assume it. Thus I regard as inspired Scripture, all that refers to holy things, all that can bear the character of • Oracles of God;' and admit the rest as appendages, of the nature of private memoirs, or public records, useful to the antiquary and the philologist, but which belong not to the rule of faith or the directory of practice. To this extent, and to this only, can I regard the sanction of the New Testament as given to the inspiration of the Old."

Dr. Smith should, after this, favour us with an edition of the Bible, which shall place the inspired part in the text, and the rest in note, or an appendix; and if I understand his theory, we shall then find that a third, or perhaps the half, of the Bible shares the fate of Solomon's Song. I am well aware that he would shrink from this task; for, perhaps, he has not yet made up his own mind concerning what is inspired and what is not; but reads his Bible like other Christians, as if the whole were inspired. If so, what is the value of a theory that cannot be reduced to practice? Why publish to the world that which gives the anxious student of scripture a right to ask this further step, which Dr. Smith would not venture to take? Were he to attempt to give us a table of the inspired and uninspired parts of the Bible, would he not hesitate, at each book, chapter, or verse, and treat his table as an algebraic equation, making his negative and positive quantities frequently change sides? What he blotted out from the inspired part to-day, he would restore to-morrow, having discovered inspiration where before he could perceive none.

Is not Dr. Smith's theory substantially that of the Socinians? This, I admit, does not prove it false; nor should we employ such an argument to render an opinion odious; but we should take care that we do not reject the same thing, when it comes from them, which we admit when professed by Dr. Smith; as if we regarded, not what is said, but who says it. The ill odour of Socinians renders their errors comparatively innoxious; while the reputation of a work directed against their views of the person of Christ, may give currency to a theory of inspiration which would sanction any error. Neither Priestly, nor any of his associates, denies the inspiration of every part of the Bible; for the men of that school admit that prophesies required divine suggestion; but, then, they contend that we must judge by common sense what is inspired and what is not. Will Dr. Smith inform us wherein his theory differs from theirs? That he has not borrowed from them we may candidly infer, from the antagonist position in which he has placed himself throughout the work which contains his censurable theory of inspiration. But

the German neologists have evidently too much influence over him. Those writers, who unsettle every thing, and prove nothing, he frequently obtrudes upon cur notice, when it is difficult to see why, except that the sentences were originally written in German. Moses Stuart's works, which have been unduly commended to the public, are full of this fault; for we are there entertained with long discussions on what some German has said, which, after all, is pronounced too ridiculous to deserve notice. The technicalities of his critical discussions are a very inadequate compensation for the errors he has broached; and the truth he has elicited may be put in a nutshell. The useful illustrations in his work on the Romans bear no proportion to the pernicious errors. It is high time that some effectual check were opposed to the abuse of biblical criticism.

It would be difficult to find a more painful specimen of this abuse than Dr. Smith's critique on Solomon's Song. It is learning and fancy run riot. But as he does not attempt explicitly to deny that the Song was in the Jewish sacred code; though he would sweep away this and many other parts of that code, it becomes us to advert to the evidences of its inspiration. Our Lord always appeals to what the Jews called, by emphasis, the Scriptures, meaning those which they deemed inspired of God. Far from hinting that they had rendered this collection an unsafe guide, by mingling with what was given by inspiration, works which deserve the character given by Dr. Smith to Canticles, and by palming on the sacred writers the whims of uninspired men, Christ, who was the light of the world, said, "Search the Scriptures; for in them you yourselves judge you have eternal life, and these are they that testify of me." If the Jews had inserted into these scriptures works which were no part of the divine testimony, would not our Lord have made a distinction, instead of appealing to the scriptures in the gross ?

Again; our Redeemer said, "Is it not written in your law, I said ye are gods? and the scriptures cannot be broken." Now, as this passage is not found in the Pentateuch, called the law by emphasis, but in the Psalms, is it not manifest that our Lord stamped with the authority of law all that the Jews included in the Scriptures? Of every expression in them, he says, "it cannot be broken." In like manner, the apostles, whom Dr. Smith will own to be inspired, ask, "what saith the scriptures?" appealing to those writings which the Jews held sacred, as divine, and therefore infallible. The chief advantage which the apostle Paul concedes to the Jews is, that "to them were committed the oracles of God." Now, if they had been unfaithful to that trust, adulterating the record, by admitting into it such writings as were not the oracles of God, but deserving the character Dr. Smith gives to Solomon's Song, was not this a crime to be noted?

Do we not receive the Old Testament from the Jewish church, just as a Jew, on his conversion, receives from us the New Testament? Is there any other mode in which we can satisfy ourselves of the divinity of many parts of the Old Testament; but by ascertaining that they are parts of those scriptures which received the sanction of Christ and the apostles? What Dr. Smith says of the

only mode in which he can find satisfaction, is to me most surprising. It appears like the repose of the nautilus on the waves of the ocean. On his hypothesis, every text would be the theme of anxious and interminable debate. Luther seems to have acted upon this theory, in rejecting the epistle of James, as a letter of straw, which he afterwards received as divine, because he saw that, instead of teaching justification by works, it was in perfect harmony with the doctrine of Paul.

If Dr. Smith had received, immediately from the hands of Christ, the whole Hebrew Bible, as we now find it, containing the parts of which he has spoken so strangely, would not he, who has uttered hard things of Solomon's Song, finding this in the volume thus sanctioned, have said something like what follows? "It is true, this appears to me a strange book, of which I know not what to make; but it has been handed to me, as a part of the oracles of God. There are other portions of those oracles which I do not clearly understand; but I hope that increased knowledge, wisdom, and grace, will make clear to me what is now dark; as I am conscious that I can at present see much truth and beauty in passages that were once inexplicable; and others see, in this very book, evidences of divinity which I cannot discover. But should the whole church be unable to understand this book, which appears so strange to me, is not this analogous with the vision of the temple in Ezekiel? May not some part of the scriptures be destined to instruct a future and more enlightened age?"

It remains, then, that we remind your readers of those considerations which should guard them against the injurious influence of Dr. Smith's statement.

1. It is unquestionable that Solomon's Song, and all those other passages that would be included in Dr. Smith's sweeping censure, were parts of those scriptures to which our Lord and his apostles appeal, as the infallible oracles of God.

2. The Song, and all such passages, were translated by the seventy as integral portions of the Jewish code. I will not appeal to the sanction which the New Testament is supposed to give to the Greek version of the Old, but content myself with the fact, that the Alexandrian translators did treat the Song as they treat Moses and the prophets, and the Psalms.

3. The Targums, or Chaldee paraphrases, include Solomon's Song. I have given a specimen of the Targum, on the Song, in your number for August.

4. The Syriac version contains the Song, not to mention the Arabic, which is of less weight.

5. The Vulgate, also, shows that the Latin, or Western Church, received the Canticles from the Eastern.

6. Walton, in his Prolegomena, p. 84, § 12, says, that Galatin expressly quotes some fragments of the version of the Song by Jonathan.

7. Josephus says, "how all have believed in our own scriptures

VOL. I. N. S.

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