Fourthly, That all that has ever been written, is nothing but that which the wisdom of man has devised.
Fifthly, In your discourse at Middletown[[16]], you say, It is but a shadow which may do for young beginners; and may point them to the right thing.
Had the commentators who have preceded you, possessed such fertility of imagination, their works, voluminous as they are, must have been multiplied to an extent which it is difficult to conceive. Yet after all, you appear at some moments to have a view of the true use of Scripture, and of the meaning of that passage which you have perverted to so many purposes, although you conclude by one of those strange involutions of ideas with which your attempts at illustration so often abound.
You say, "All letter written under the influence of God, points us back to the place from whence it came, and this is all; because as the letter never could be written without the spirit which stands above it, the great first cause of all wisdom and knowledge; therefore, unless by the letter we are gathered to the spirit, we cannot see the letter aright, for it is the effect; and when we face the letter we turn our backs upon the cause, just as a man turns his back upon the sun to see his own shadow."[[17]]
Here the sentiment is in itself correct, although the conclusion attempted to be drawn by the puerile conceit with which the sentence ends, is in direct opposition to it. The needle points to the pole, and the careful mariner does not turn his back upon it, but with a steady eye keeps it constantly in view as the guide by which alone he can be directed through the trackless ocean: so the Christian pilgrim, with the gospel in his hand, endeavours to explore his way. The book itself contains not that for which he is seeking, but it has been in mercy handed down to him by the inspirations of infinite wisdom, as a landmark to direct him in the way in which he should walk: it has not only taught him the nature and efficacy of spiritual worship, but it affords a standard by which all his thoughts may be tried, and enables him to distinguish between the wanderings of the imagination and the dictates of eternal wisdom. If contrary to the Scriptures, he rejects them; and whatever you may think of the superiority of your two-fold revelations, and the accuracy of your knowledge of the nature and use of right reason, no reasonable being who is convinced that the Scriptures were given to us by divine revelation, can believe in the truth of any thing which does not accord with them.
Such a tissue of inconsistencies has seldom been brought together—you say that the Scriptures were written under the inspiration of infinite wisdom, and also assert that they only proceed from the wisdom of man: you consider them as the box of Pandora from which the apostacy was derived, and every thing calculated to deceive us may be taken; and still continue to recommend them as proper to be read by young beginners in religion: that they, and every thing else that is received by man through his outward senses, is suitable only to the outward creature; and yet you are continually addressing your hearers through these senses, for the purposes of reproof and spiritual instruction.
That passages of Scripture have often been perverted to purposes far different from the spirit and original intention of them, must be admitted by all; and the sources from which these perversions have been derived it is not difficult to conceive.
It was long before any of the outward professors of Christianity had the hardihood to question their authority: they knew that the whole Christian world considered this book as the standard by which their doctrines were to be tested, and whenever their inclinations, or their vices, impelled them to actions contrary to the pure and obvious meaning of gospel ordinances, they sought to veil their aberrations by the perversion of the book itself. The man of the world found in it so many restraints upon his ambition and fancied enjoyments, that it is not surprising that he should be anxious to avail himself of every pretence to enlarge its boundaries and relax the rigour of his bonds. In this struggle, many of the priesthood were his faithful coadjutors, for they too felt the uneasiness of the straightened path prescribed to them, and that the pure Christian doctrines and principles could afford no field for the indulgence of their vanity by pompous declamation, or for the display of a superiority of mind by subtile disquisition: all was simple and practical, such as fishermen could teach and herdsmen understand.
Then began that system of mysticising and allegorising the Scriptures, a practice which accorded so well with the lively and subtle characters of the modern Greeks, that every priest became a mystagogue, and the pulpit a chair of theological alchymy, from which men were taught "how to reduce divinity to the maxims of the laboratory, explain morality by sal sulphur and mercury, and allegorize the Scripture itself, and the sacred mysteries thereof, into the Philosopher's Stone."[[18]]
Hence the Scriptures became as one of the sibylline books of Paganism, to be opened by the priests alone, for they only could explain the oracles of God; and they acted with more consistency than you have done, by endeavouring to conceal them from the view of the laity; for if they are indeed such as you have described, and they have strove to make them, they ought not only to be concealed from the view of young beginners in religion, but prohibited to all but the initiated.