mankind; a covenant of faith; instead of that of works, wherein some truths are absolutely necessary to be explicitly believed by them to make men Christians; and therefore those truths are necessary to be known and consequently necessary to be proposed to them to make men Christians. This is peculiar to them to make men Christians. For all men, as men, are under a necessary obligation to believe what God proposes to them to be believed; but there being certain distinguishing truths, which belong to the covenant of the Gospel, which if men know not, they cannot be Christians; and they being, some of them, such as cannot be known without being proposed; those, and those only, are the necessary doctrines of Christianity I speak of; without a knowledge of, and assent to which, no man can be a Christian.

To come therefore to a clear decision of this controversy, I desire the unmasker to tell me,

XLI. What those doctrines are, which are absolutely necessary to be proposed to every man to make him a Christian?

XLII. 1. Whether they are all the truths of divine revelation contained in the Bible?

For I grant his argument, (which in another place he uses for some of them, and truly belongs to them all) viz. that they were revealed and written there, on purpose to be believed, and that it is indispensably necessary for Christians to believe them.

XLIII. 2. Or, whether it be only that one article, of Jesus being the Messiah, which the History of our Saviour and his apostles' preaching has, with such a peculiar distinction, every where proposed?

XLIV. 3. Or, whether the doctrines necessary to be proposed to every one to make him a Christian, be any set of truths between the two?

And if he says this latter, then I must ask him,

XLV. What they are? that we may see, why those, rather than any other, contained in the New Testament, are necessary to be proposed to every man to make him a Christian; and, if they are not every one proposed to him, and assented to by him, he cannot be a Christian.

The unmasker makes a great noise, and hopes to give his unwary, though well-meaning readers, odd thoughts and strong impressions against my book, by declaiming against my lank faith, and my narrowing of Christianity to one article; which, as he says, is the next way to reduce it to none. But when it is considered, it will be found, that it is he that narrows Christianity. The unmasker, as if he were arbiter and dispenser of the oracles of God, takes upon him to single out some texts of Scripture; and, where the words of Scripture will not serve his turn, to impose on us his interpretations and deductions, as necessary articles of faith; which is, in effect, to make them of equal authority with the unquestionable word of God. And thus, partly in the words of Scripture, and partly in words of his own, he makes a set of fundamentals, with an exclusion of all the other truths delivered by the Spirit of God, in the Bible; though all the rest be of the same divine authority and original, and ought therefore all equally, as far as they are understood by every Christian, to be be lieved. I tell him, and I desire him to take notice of it, God has nowhere given him an authority thus to garble the inspired writings of the holy Scriptures. Every part of it is his word, and ought, every part of it, to be believed by every Christian man, according as God shall enable him to understand it. It ought not to be narrowed to the cut of the unmasker's peculiar system; it is a presumption of the highest nature, for him thus to pretend, according to his own fancy, to establish a set of fundamental articles. This is to diminish the authority of the word of God, to set up his own; and create a reverence to his system, from which

the several parts of divine revelation are to receive their weight, dignity, and authority. Those passages of holy writ which suit with that, are fundamental, choice, sublime, and necessary: the rest of the Scripture (as of no great moment) is not fundamental, is not necessary to be believed, may be neglected, or must be tortured, to comply with an analogy of faith of his own making. But though he pretends to a certain set of fundamentals, yet, to show the vanity and impudence of that pretence, he cannot tell us what they are; and therefore in vain contends for a creed he knows not, and is yet nowhere. He neither does, and which is more, I tell him, he never can, give us a collection of his fundamentals gathered upon his principles, out of the Scripture, with the rejection of all the rest, as not fundamental. He does not observe the difference there is between what is necessary to be believed by every man to make him a Christian, and what is required to be believed by every Christian. The first of these is what, by the covenant of the Gospel, is necessary to be known, and consequently to be proposed to every man, to make him a Christian the latter is no less than the whole revelation of God, all the divine truths contained in holy Scripture: which every Christian man is under a necessity to believe, so far as it shall please God, upon his serious and constant endeavours, to enlighten his mind to understand them.

The preaching of our Saviour and his apostles has sufficiently taught us what is necessary to be proposed to every man, to make him a Christian. He that believes him to be the promised Messiah, takes Jesus for his King, and, repenting of his former sins, sincerely resolves to live, for the future, in obedience to his laws, is a subject of his kingdom, is a Christian. If he be not, I desire the unmasker to tell me what more is requisite to make him so. Until he does that, I rest satisfied, that this is all that was at first, and is still necessary to make a man a Christian.

This, though it be contained in a few words, and those not hard to be understood; though it be in one voluntary act of the mind, relinquishing all irregular,

courses, and submitting itself to the rule of him, whom God hath sent to be our King, and promised to be our Saviour; yet it having relation to the race of mankind, from the first man Adam to the end of the world; it being a contrivance, wherein God has displayed so much of his wisdom and goodness to the corrupt and lost sons of men; and it being a design to which the Almighty had a peculiar regard in the whole constitution and economy of the Jews, as well as in the prophecies and history of the Old Testament; this was a foundation capable of large superstructures: 1. In explaining the occasion, necessity, use, and end of his coming. 2. Next in proving him to be the person promised, by a correspondence of his birth, life, sufferings, death, and resurrection to all those prophecies and types of him, which had given the expectation of such a Deliverer; and to those descriptions of him whereby he might be known when he did come. In the discovery of the sort, constitution, extent, and management of his kingdom. 4. In showing from what we are delivered by him, and how that deliverance is wrought out, and what are the consequences of it.

3.

These, and a great many more the like, afford great numbers of truths delivered both in the historical, epistolary, and prophetical writings of the New Testa ment, wherein the mysteries of the Gospel hidden from former ages were discovered; and that more fully, I grant, after the pouring out of the Holy Ghost upon the apostles. But could nobody take Christ for their promised King, and resolve to obey him, unless he understood all the truths that concerned his kingdom, or, as I may say, mysteries of state of it? The truth of the contrary is manifest out of the plain and uniform preaching of the apostles, after they had received the Holy Ghost, that was to guide them into all truth. Nay, after the writing of those epistles, wherein were contained the unmasker's sublimest truths; they every where proposed to unbelievers Jesus the Messiah, to be their King, ordained of God; and to this joined repentance and this alone they preached for the conversion of their unbelieving hearers. As soon as any

VOL. VII.

A A

one assented to this, he was pronounced a believer; and these inspired rulers of the church, these infallible. preachers of the Gospel, admitted into Christ's kingdom by baptism. And this after, long "after our Saviour's ascension, when (as our unmasker expresses it) the Holy Ghost was to be sent in an especial manner to enlighten men's minds, and to discover to them the great mysteries of Christianity," even as long as the apostles lived: and what others were to do who afterwards were to preach the Gospel St. Paul tells us, 1 Cor. iii. 11. "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, even Jesus the Messiah." Though upon this foundation men might build variously things that would or would not hold the touch, yet however as long as they kept firm to this foundation, they should be saved, as appears in the following verses.

And indeed, if all the doctrines of the Gospel, which are contained in the writings of the apostles and evangelists, were necessary to be understood, and explicitly believed in the true sense of those that delivered them, to make a man a Christian; I doubt whether ever any one, even to this day, was a true Christian; though I believe the unmasker will not deny but that, ere this, Christianity (as he expresses it) "is by certain steps climbed to its height.'

But for this the unmasker has found a convenient and wise remedy. It is but for him to have the power to declare which of the doctrines delivered in holy writ are, and which are not necessary to be believed, with an additional power to add others of his own that he cannot find there; and the business is done. For unless this be allowed him, his system cannot stand: unless his interpretations be received for authentic revelation, we cannot have all the doctrines necessary for our time; in truth, we cannot be Christians. For to this only what he says concerning the "gradual discovery of the doctrines of the Gospel" tends. "We are not to think," says he, "that all the necessary doctrines of the Christian religion were clearly published to the world in our Saviour's time: not but that all that were necessary for that time were published; but some