Certainly, I for my part fear I should not love God if I should think so strangely of Him.

Again, when you say that unlearned and ignorant men cannot understand Scripture, I would desire you to come out of the clouds, and tell us what you mean; whether, that they cannot understand any Scripture, or that they cannot understand so much as is sufficient for their direction to heaven. If the first, I believe the learned are in the same case. If the second, every man's experience will confute you; for who is there that is not capable of a sufficient understanding of the story, the precepts, the promises, and the threats of the Gospel? If the third, that they may understand something but not enough for their salvation; I ask you, first, Why then doth St. Paul say to Timothy, The Scriptures are able to make him wise unto salvation? Why doth St. Austin say, Ea quæ manifeste posita sunt in sacris scripturis, omnia continent quæ pertinent ad fidem, moresque vivendi ? Why does every one of the four Evangelists entitle their book, The Gospel, if any necessary and essential part of the Gospel were left out of it? Can we imagine that either they omitted something necessary out of ignorance, not knowing it to be necessary? or, knowing it to be so, maliciously concealed it? or, out of negligence, did the work they had undertaken by halves. If none of these things can without blasphemy be imputed to them, considering they were assisted by the Holy Ghost in this work, then certainly it most evidently follows that every one of them writ the whole Gospel of Christ; I mean, all the essential and necessary parts of it. So that if we had no other book of Scripture but one of them alone, we should not want anything necessary to salvation. And what one of them hath more than another, it is only profitable, and not necessary; necessary indeed to be believed, because revealed; but not therefore revealed because it is necessary to be believed.

Neither did they write only for the learned, but for all men. This being one special means of the preaching of the Gospel, which was commanded to be preached, not only to learned men, but to all men. And therefore, unless we will imagine the Holy Ghost and them to have been wilfully wanting to their own desire and purpose, we must conceive that they intended to speak plain, even to the capacity of the simplest; at least, touching all things necessary to be published by them and believed by us.

(From The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation.)

FAITH AND UNDERSTANDING

THE third condition you require to faith is, that our assent to Divine truths should not only be unknown and unevident by any human discourse, but that absolutely also it should be obscure in itself, and, ordinarily speaking, be void even of supernatural evidence. Which words must have a very favourable construction, or they will not be sense. For who can make anything of these words, taken properly, that faith must be an unknown, unevident assent, or an assent absolutely obscure? I had always thought that known and unknown, obscure and evident, had been affections not of our assent, but the object of it; not of our belief, but the thing believed. For well may we assent to a thing unknown, obscure, or unevident; but that our assent itself should be called therefore unknown or obscure, seems to me as great an impropriety, as if I should say, your sight were green or blue, because you see something that is so. In other places, therefore, I answer your words, but here I must answer your meaning; which I conceive to be, that it is necessary to faith that the objects of it, the points which we believe, should not be so evidently certain, as to necessitate our understanding to an assent, that so there might be some merit in faith, as you love to speak (who will not receive, no, not from God himself, but a pennyworth for a penny), but as we, some obedience in it, which can hardly have place where there is no possibility of disobedience; as there is not, where the understanding does all, and the will nothing. Now, seeing the religion of Protestants, though it be much more credible than yours, yet is not pretended to have the absolute evidence of sense or demonstration; therefore I might let this doctrine pass without exception, for any prejudice that can redound to us by it. But yet I must not forbear to tell you, that your discourse proves indeed this condition requisite to the merit, but yet not to the essence of faith; without it faith were not an act of obedience, but yet faith may be faith without it; and this you must confess, unless you will say either the apostles believed not the whole Gospel which they preached, or that they were not eye-witnesses of a great part of it; unless you will question St. John for saying, "That which we have seen with our eyes, and which our hands have handled, etc., declare we unto

you"; nay, our Saviour himself for saying, "Thomas, because thou seest, thou believest; blessed are they which have not seen, and yet have believed." Yet, if you will say, that in respect of the things which they saw, the apostles' assent was not pure and proper and mere faith, but somewhat more, an assent containing faith, but superadding to it, I will not contend with you, for it will be a contention about words. But then again I must crave leave to tell you, that the requiring this condition is, in my judgment a plain revocation of the former. For had you made the matter of faith either naturally or supernaturally evident, it might have been a fitly attempered and duly proportioned object for an absolute certainty natural or supernatural, but requiring as you do, that faith should be an absolute knowledge of a thing not absolutely known, an infallible certainty of a thing, which though it is in itself, yet is not made to us to appear to be, infallibly certain," to my understanding you speak impossibilities. And truly for one of your religion to do so, is but a good decorum. For the matter and object of your faith being so full of contradictions, a contradictious faith may very well become a contradictious religion. Your faith, therefore, if you please to have it so, let it be a free, necessitated, certain, uncertain, evident, obscure, prudent and foolish, natural and supernatural, unnatural assent. But they which are unwilling to believe nonsense themselves, or persuade others to do so, it is but reason they should make the faith, wherewith they believe, an intelligible, compossible, consistent thing, and not define it by repugnances. Now nothing is more repugnant, than that a man should be required to give most certain credit unto that which cannot be made to appear most certainly credible; and if it appear to him to be so, then it is not obscure that it is so. For if you speak of an acquired rational, discursive faith, certainly these reasons, which make the object seem credible, must be the cause of it and consequently the strength and firmity of my assent must rise and fall, together with the apparent credibility of the object. If you speak of a supernatural infused faith, then you either suppose it infused by the former means, and then that which was said before must be said again; for whatsoever effect is wrought merely by means, must bear proportion to, and cannot exceed, the virtue of the means by which it is wrought. As nothing by water can be made more cold than water, nor by fire more hot than fire, nor by honey more sweet than honey, nor by gall more

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bitter than gall: or if you will suppose it infused without means, then that power which infuseth into the understanding assent, which bears analogy to sight in the eye, must also infuse evidence, that is, visibility into the object and look what degree of assent is infused into the understanding, at least, the same degree of evidence must be infused into the object. And for you to require a strength of credit beyond the appearance of the object's credibility, is all one as if you should require me to go ten mile an hour upon a horse that will go but five; to discern a man certainly through a mist or cloud, that makes him not certainly discernible; to hear a sound more clearly than it is audible; to understand a thing more fully than it is intelligible: and he that doth so, I may well expect that his next injunction will be, that I must see something that is invisible, hear something inaudible, understand something that is wholly unintelligible. For he that demands ten of me, knowing I have but five, does in effect as if he demanded five, knowing that I have none: and by like reason, you requiring that I should see things further than they are visible, require I should see something invisible; and in requiring that I believe something more firmly than it is made to me evidently credible, you require in effect that I believe something which appears to me incredible, and while it does so. I deny not but that I am bound to believe the truth of many texts of Scripture, the sense whereof is to me obscure, and to human understandings incomprehensible; but then it is to be observed, that not the sense of such texts, nor the manner of these things, is that which I am bound to believe, but the truth of them. But that I should believe the truth of anything, the truth whereof cannot be made evident with an evidence proportionable to the degree of faith required of me, this I say for any man to be bound to do is unjust and unreasonable, because to do it is impossible. (From the Same.)

SAMUEL RUTHERFORD

[Rutherford was born near Jedburgh in 1600, and educated at Edinburgh University, where he became Professor of Humanity in 1623. In 1625 he left the University, and from 1627 to 1639 (with a temporary ejection for non-conformity), he was minister of Anwoth in Galloway. In 1639 he was appointed Professor of Divinity at St. Andrews. From 1642 to 1647 he was in London as a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. On his return he became Principal of the New College in St. Andrews, and subsequently Rector of the University. He died in 1661. His principal works were Exercitationes Apologetica (Amsterdam, 1636), Plea for Paul's Presbytery in Scotland (1642), The Due Right of Presbyteries, and Lex, Rex (1644), The Trial and Triumph of Faith (sermons, 1645), Divine Right of Church Government and Excommunication (1646), Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself (sermons, 1647), A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist (1648), A Free Disputation against Pretended Liberty of Conscience (1649), The Covenant of Life Opened (1655), Influences of the Life of Grace (1659), and An Examination of Arminianism, and the Letters (dating from 1639 to 1661), both of which were published posthumously. Several editions of the Letters have been issued in the present century, and at least one of Lex, Rex.]

RUTHERFORD is a writer most of whose works have a memorial only in the graveyard of history. There was a moment when the Church which Knox had founded in the North seemed about to triumph in England also. Rutherford was at that moment the literary champion of Presbytery, and as such he was pilloried by Milton in the famous sonnet : "On the new Forcers of Conscience," ending in the line "New presbyter is but old priest writ large." His principal controversial work, Lex, Rex: The Law and the Prince, a Dispute for the just Prerogative of King and People, is a medley of politics and theology. In this book the revolutionary theories of the Scottish school which Buchanan and Knox had inaugurated, were for the first time expounded for the practical guidance of Englishmen. Fifty years before, Sir Robert Cecil expressed the current theory of sovereignty, when he described himself as "A vassal to the Creator's celestial crea