Part I. c. 5.
Yet there want not learned writers (whom I need not name) of the
opinion that even the instrumental penmen of the Scripture might
commit {Greek: hamartaemata mnaemonika}: though open that window to
profaneness, and it will be in vain to shut any dores; 'Let God be
true, and every man a lyer'.
It has been matter of complaint with hundreds, yea, it is an old cuckoo song of grim saints, that the Reformation came to its close long before it came to its completion. But the cause of this imperfection has been fully laid open by no party,—'scilicet', that in divines of both parties of the Reformers, the Protestants and the Detestants, there was the same relic of the Roman 'lues',—the habit of deciding for or against the orthodoxy of a position, not according to its truth or falsehood, not on grounds of reason or of history, but by the imagined consequences of the position. The very same principles on which the pontifical polemics vindicate the Papal infallibility, Fuller 'et centum alii' apply to the (if possible) still more extravagant notion of the absolute truth and divinity of every syllable of the text of the books of the Old and New Testament as we have it.
Ib.
Sure I am, that one of as much meekness, as some are of moroseness,
even upright Moses himself, in his service of the essential and
increated truth (of higher consequence than the historical truth
controverted betwixt us) had notwithstanding 'a respect to the
reward'. Heb. xi. 26.
In religion the faith pre-supposed in the respect, and as its condition, gives to the motive a purity and an elevation which of itself, and where the recompense is looked for in temporal and carnal pleasures or profits, it would not have.