CORRESPONDENCE, 183G-46. 141 



ing question : Do yon believe that the God of truth has so mis- 1836. 

 led the world as to give it a religion the essential parts of which 

 cannot be gathered from the manner in which those who first 

 taught it admitted proselytes ? Certainly a newly baptised 

 Christian, if sincere, did not perish everlastingly if he died the 

 moment after his baptism. But your Church positively declares 

 he did unless he believed what they call the ' Catholic faith.' 

 N"ow ask of yourself in sincerity, where is it set down in such a 

 manner that a wayfaring man, though a fool, could not err, that 

 the Apostles taught this creed, or anything like it ? 



Again, take another test. Certain of the Apostles wrote 

 accounts of the life and doctrines of Jesus Christ. Matthew 

 wrote in Hebrew, no doubt for the Jews ; Luke in Greek, for 

 the Gentiles. These books were never collected into one till 

 centuries after Christ, nor is there any proof that the earlier 

 Jews ever saw the Greek Gospel, or the Greeks the Jewish one. 

 It is most obvious that each of these accounts must contain the 

 essential parts of the Christian religion. It is also most obvious 

 that an epistle of Paul to a town in Greece must not be joined 

 with one written to Romans, both of which were never seen for 

 many years in Judea (so far as can be shown), to make up a doc- 

 trine essential for the salvation of Jews. Now try again. Make 

 up your creed out of any one of the Gospels, if you can. Surely 

 two fairer tests cannot be proposed to any person who knows 

 what reason is; and still more when it is merely a question 

 whether one person ought to believe that another must suffer 

 eternal punishment because he will not treat as one book a 

 number of different books in a manner which would be laughed 

 at if applied to Livy and Tacitus. And yet they both wrote 

 Roman history at periods as near to each other as those at which 

 the books of the New Testament were written. 



All this has no reference to the question whether the creed 

 could be got out of the whole New Testament together if per- 

 mitted. Before God I declare that I have examined closely the 

 history of the early Church, together with abundance of contro- 

 versy on both sides, not forgetting the books of the New Testa- 

 ment on which they are written, and can find nothing like the 

 creed of the Churches of Rome or England. The former does not 

 pretend to find what you call the essential doctrines of Christi- 

 anity in the New Testament, but appeals to tradition. It is easy 

 to rail at them, but to the best of my knowledge and belief, 

 derived from historical reading and actual observation, the 



