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ment is a book written in a language peculiar to itself.

very much mistake, and misunderstand his meaning, and render the sense very perplexed.

These are intrinsic difficulties arising from the text itself, whereof there might be a great many other named, as the uncertainty, sometimes, who are the persons he speaks to, or the opinions or practices which he has in his eye; sometimes in alluding to them, sometimes in his exhortations and reproofs. But those above mentioned being the chief, it may suffice to have opened our eyes a little upon them, which, well examined, may contribute towards our discovery of the rest.

To these we may subjoin two external causes that have made no small increase of the native and original difficulties that keep us from an easy and assured discovery of St. Paul's sense, in many parts of his epistles; and those are,

To these causes of obscurity, common to St. Paul with most of the other penmen of the several books of the New Testament, we may add those that are peculiarly his, and owing to his style and temper. He was, as it is visible, a man of quick thought and warm temper, mighty well versed in the writings of the Old Testament, and full of the doctrine of the New. All this put together, suggested matter to him in abundance on those subjects which came in his way; so that one may consider him, when he was writing, as beset with a crowd of thoughts, all striving for utterance. In this posture of mind it was almost impossible for him to keep that slow pace, and observe minutely that order and method of ranging all he said, from which results an easy and obvious per- First, The dividing of them into chapters and spicuity. To this plenty and vehemence of his, verses, as we have done, whereby they are so may be imputed those many large parentheses, chopped and minced, and as they are now printed, which a careful reader may observe in his epistles. stand so broken and divided, that not only the Upon this account also it is, that he often breaks common people take the verses usually for distinct off in the middle of an argument, to let in some aphorisms, but even men of more advanced knownew thought suggested by his own words; which ledge, in reading them, lose very much of the having pursued and explained, as far as conduced strength and force of the coherence, and the light to his present purpose, he reassumes again the that depends on it. Our minds are so weak and thread of his discourse, and goes on with it, with- narrow, that they have need of all the helps and out taking any notice that he returns again to assistances that can be procured, to lay before what he had been before saying, though some-them undisturbedly, the thread and coherence of times it be so far off, that it may well have slipt any discourse; by which alone they are truly imout of his mind, and requires a very attentive rea-proved and lead into the genuine sense of the auder to observe, and so bring the disjointed mem- thor. When the eye is constantly disturbed with bers together, as to make up the connection, and see how the scattered parts of the discourse hang together in a coherent, well-agreeing sense, that makes it all of a piece.

loose sentences, that by their standing and sepa. ration appear as so many distinct fragments, the mind will have much ado to take in, and carry on in its memory an uniform discourse of dependent Besides the disturbance in perusing St. Paul's reasonings; especially having from the cradle epistles, from the plenty and vivacity of his thoughts, been used to wrong impressions concerning them, which may obscure his method, and often hide his and constantly accustomed to hear them quoted sense from an unwary, or over-hasty reader; the as distinct sentences, without any limitation or frequent changing of the personage he speaks in, explication of their precise meaning from the renders the sense very uncertain, and is apt to place they stand in, and the relation they bear to mislead one that has not some clue to guide him: what goes before, or follows. These divisions, --sometimes by the pronoun I, he means himself, also, have given occasion to the reading these sometimes any Christian; sometimes a Jew, and epistles by parcels and in scraps, which has fur. sometimes any man, &c. If speaking of himself ther confirmed the evil arising from such parti in the first person singular has so various mean- tions. And I doubt not but every one will confess ings, his use of the first person plural is with a far it to be a very unlikely way to come to the undergreater latitude; sometimes designing himself standing of any other letters, to read them piecealone, sometimes those with himself, whom he meal, a bit to-day and another scrap to-morrow, makes partners to the epistle; sometimes with and so on, by broken intervals; especially if the himself comprehending the other apostles, or pause and cessation would be made as the chappreachers of the gospel, or Christians: nay, ters the apostle's epistles are divided into, ending sometimes he in that way speaks of the converted sometimes in the middle of a discourse, and Jews, other times of the converted Gentiles, and sometimes in the middle of a sentence. It cannot sometimes of others, in a more or less extended therefore but be wondered, that that should be sense, every one of which varies the meaning of permitted to be done to Holy Writ, which would the place, and makes it to be differently under-visibly disturb the sense, and hinder the understood. I have forborne to trouble the reader with standing of any other book whatsoever. If Tulexamples of them here. If his own observation ly's epistles were so printed, and so used, I ask hath not already furnished him with them, a little whether they would not be much harder to be attention will satisfy him in the point. understood, less easy and less pleasant to be read

In the current also of his discourse, he some-by much, than now they are? times drops in the objections of others, and his answers to them, without any change in the scheme of his language, that might give notice of any other speaking besides himself. This requires great attention to observe; and yet if it be neglected or overlooked, will make the reader

How plain soever this abuse is, and what prejudice soever it does to the understanding of the sacred Scripture, yet if a Bible was printed as it should be, and as the several parts of it were written, in continued discourses where the argument is continued, I doubt not but the several parties would

but just what he meant whereas those others of a quicker and gayer sight could see in them what they pleased. Nothing is more acceptable to fancy than pliant terms and expressions that are not obstinate; in such it can find its account with delight, and with them be illuminated, orthodox, infallible at pleasure, and in its own way. But where the sense of the author goes visibly in its own train, and the words receiving a determined sense from their companions and adjacents, will not consent to give countenance and color to what is agreed to be right, and must be supported at any rate, there men of established orthodoxy do not so well find their satisfaction. And, perhaps, if it were well examined, it would be no very extravagant paradox to say, that there are fewer that bring their opinions to the sacred Scripture to be tried by that infallible rule, than bring the sacred Scriptures to their opinions, to bend it to them, to make it as they can a cover and guard of them. And to this purpose its being divided into verses, and brought as much as may be into loose and general aphorisms, makes it most useful and serviceable. And in this lies the other great cause of obscurity and perplexedness, which has been cast upon St. Paul's epistles from without.

complain of it as an innovation, and a dangerous had a mind to see nothing in St. Paul's epistles change in the publishing those holy books. And indeed those who are for maintaining their opinions and the systems of parties by sound of words, with a neglect of the true sense of Scripture, would have reason to make and foment the outcry. They would most of them be immediately disarmed of their great magazine of artillery wherewith they defend themselves, and fall upon others, if the holy Scriptures were but laid before the eyes of Christians in its due connection and consistency: it would not then be so easy to snatch out a few words, as if they were separate from the rest, to serve a purpose, to which they do not at all belong, and with which they have nothing to do. But as the matter now stands, he that has a mind to it may, at a cheap rate, be a notable champion for the truth; that is, for the doctrines of the sect that chance or interest has cast him into. He need but be furnished with verses of sacred Scripture, containing words and expressions that are but flexible, (as all general, obscure, and doubtful ones are,) and his system, that has appropriated them to the orthodoxy of his church, makes them immediately strong and irrefragable arguments for his opinion. This is the benefit of loose sentences, and Scripture crumbled into verses, which quickly turn into independent aphorisms. But if the quotation in the verse produced were considered as a part of a continued coherent discourse, and so its sense were limited by the tenor of the context, most of these forward and warm disputants would be quite stripped of those, which they doubt not now to call spiritual weapons; and they would have often nothing to say that would not show their weakness, and manifestly fly in their faces. I crave leave to set down a saying of the learned and judicious Mr. Selden: "In interpreting the Scripture," says he, "many do as if a man should see one have ten pounds, which he reckoned by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; meaning four was but four units, and five five units, &c. and that he had in all but ten pounds. The other that sees him, takes not the figures together, as he doth, but picks here and there; and thereupon reports that he had five pounds in one bag, and six pounds in another bag, and nine pounds in another bag, &c., when, as in truth, he has but ten pounds in all. So we pick out a text here and there, to make it serve our turn; whereas if we take it altogether, and consider what went before, and what followed after, we should find it meant no such thing." I have heard sober Christians very much admire why ordinary illiterate people, who were professors, that showed a concern for religion, seemed much more conversant in St. Paul's epistles, than in the plainer, and as it seemed to them, much more intelligible parts of the New Testament: they confessed, that though they read St. Paul's epistles with their best attention, yet they generally found them too hard to be mastered; and they labored in vain so far to reach the apostle's meaning all along, in the train of what he said, as to read them with that satisfaction that arises from a feeling that we understand and fully comprehend the force and reasoning of an author; and therefore they could not imagine what those saw in them, whose eyes they thought not much better than their own. But the case was plain these sober, inquisitive readers

St. Paul's epistles, as they stand translated in our English Bibles, are now by long and constant use, become a part of the English language, and common phraseology, especially in matters of religion. This every one uses familiarly, and thinks he understands; but it must be observed, that if he has a distinct meaning when he uses those words and phrases, and knows himself what he intends by them, it is always according to the sense of his own system, and the articles or interpretations of the society he is engaged in. So that all this knowledge and understanding which he has in the use of these passages of sacred Scripture, reaches no further than this, that he knows (and that is very well) what he himself says, but thereby knows nothing at all what St. Paul said in them. The apostle wrote not by that man's system, and so his meaning cannot be known by it. This being the ordinary way of understanding the epistles, and every sect being perfectly orthodox in its own judgment, what a great and invincible darkness must this cast upon St. Paul's meaning to all those of that way, in all those places where his thoughts and sense run counter to what any party has espoused for orthodox; as it must unavoidably to all but one of the different systems, in all those passages that any way relate to the points in controversy between them?

This is a mischief which, however frequent and almost natural, reaches so far, that it would justly make all those who depend upon them, wholly diffident of commentators, and let them see how little help was to be expected from them, in relying on them for the true sense of the sacred Scripture, did they not take care to help to cozen themselves, by choosing to use and pin their faith on such expositors as explain the sacred Scripture in favor of those opinions that they beforehand have voted orthodox, and bring to the sacred Scripture, not for trial, but confirmation. Nobody can think that any text of St. Paul's epistles has two contrary meanings; and yet so it must have to two differ

epistle, the chief branches of his discourse wherein | How then came it that the like was thought much

he prosecuted it, the arguments he used, and the disposition of the whole.

This, I confess, is not to be obtained by one or two hasty readings; it must be repeated again and again, with a close attention to the tenor of the discourse, and a perfect neglect of the divisions into chapters and verses. On the contrary, the safest way is to suppose that the epistle has but one business, and one aim; till, by a frequent perusal of it, you are forced to see there are distinct independent matters in it, which will forwardly enough show themselves.

It requires so much more pains, judgment, and application to find the coherence of obscure and abstruse writings, and makes them so much the more unfit to serve prejudice and pre-occupation when found, that it is not to be wondered that St. Paul's epistles have, with many, passed rather for disjointed, loose, pious discourses, full of warmth and zeal and overflows of light, rather than for calm, strong, coherent reasonings, that carried a thread of argument and consistency all through them.

ers,

wanting in his epistles? and of this there appeared to me this plain reason: the particularities of the history in which these speeches are inserted, show St. Paul's end in speaking; which being seen, casts a light on the whole, and shows the pertinency of all that he says. But his epistles not being so circumstantiated, there being no concurring history that plainly declares the disposition St. Paul was in, what the actions, expectations, or demands of those to whom he wrote required him to speak to, we are nowhere told. All this, and a great deal more, necessary to guide us into the true meaning of the epistles, is to be had only from the epistles themselves, and to be gathered from thence with stubborn attention, and more than common application.

The

This being the only safe guide (under the Spirit of God, that dictated these sacred writings) that can be relied on, I hope I may be excused, if Í venture to say, that the utmost ought to be done to observe and trace out St. Paul's reasonings; to follow the thread of his discourse in each of his epistles; to show how it goes on still directed with But this muttering of lazy or ill-disposed read- the same view, and pertinently drawing the several hindered ine not from persisting in the course incidents towards the same point. To understand I had begun: I continued to read the same epistle him right, his inferences should be strictly observover and over, and over again, till I came to dis- ed, and it should be carefully examined from what cover, as appeared to me, what was the drift they are drawn, and what they tend to. He is and aim of it; and by what steps and arguments certainly a coherent, argumentative, pertinent St. Paul prosecuted his purpose. I remembered writer; and care, I think, should be taken, in exthat St. Paul was miraculously called to the minis-pounding of him, to show that he is so. But though try of the gospel, and declared to be a chosen I say he has weighty aims in his epistles, which vessel; that he had the whole doctrine of the gos- he steadily keeps in his eye, and drives at it in all pel from God by immediate revelation, and was that he says; yet I do not say that he puts his appointed to be the apostle of the Gentiles, for the discourses into an artificial method, or leads his propagating of it in the heathen world. This was reader into a distinction of his arguments, or gives enough to persuade me that he was not a man of them notice of new matter by rhetorical or studied loose and shattered parts, incapable to argue, and transitions. He has no ornaments borrowed from unfit to convince those he had to deal with. God the Greek eloquence; no notions of their philosoknows how to choose fit instruments for the busi- phy mixed with his doctrine to set it off. ness he employs them in. A large stock of Jew- enticing words of man's wisdom,' whereby he ish learning he had taken in at the feet of Ga- means all the studied rules of the Grecian schools, maliel; and for his information in Christian know which made them such masters in the art of speakledge, and the mysteries and depths of the dis-ing, he, as he says himself, 1 Cor. 2. iv., wholly pensation of grace by Jesus Christ, God himself had condescended to be his instructor and teacher. The light of the gospel he had received from the Fountain and Father of Light himself, who, I concluded, had not furnished him, in this extraordinary manner, if all this plentiful stock of learning and illumination had been in danger to have been lost, or proved useless, in a jumbled and confused head; nor have laid up such a store of admirable and useful knowledge in a man who, for want of method and order, clearness of conception, or pertinency in discourse, could not draw it out into use with the greatest advantages of force and coherence. That he knew how to prosecute his purpose with strength of argument and close reasoning, without incoherent sallies, or the intermixing of things foreign to his business, was evident to me from several speeches of his recorded in the Acts: and it was hard to think that a man who could talk Whether a superficial reading, accompanied with so much consistency and clearness of convic- with the common opinion of his invincible obscurition, should not be able to write without confusion, ty, has kept off some from seeking in him the coinextricable obscurity, and perpetual rambling, herence of a discourse, tending, with close, strong The force, order, and perspicuity of those dis-reasoning, to a point; or a seemingly more honorcourses could not be denied to be very visible. I able opinion of one that had been rapt up into the

neglected. The reason whereof he gives in the next verse, and in other places; but the politeness of language, delicacy of style, fineness of expression, labored periods, artificial transitions, and a very methodical ranging of the parts with such other embellishments as make a discourse enter the mind smoothly, and strike the fancy at first hearing, have little or no place in his style; yet coherence of discourse, and a direct tendency of all the parts of it to the argument in hand, are most eminently to be found in him. This I take to be his character, and doubt not but he will be found to be so upon diligent examination. And in this, if it be so, we have a clue, if we will take the pains to find it, that will conduct us with surety through those seemingly dark places and imagined intricacies, in which Christians have wandered so far one from another as to find quite contrary senses.

For, granting that he was full-stored with the knowledge of the things he treated of, for he had light from heaven, it was God himself furnished him, and he could not want: allowing also that he had ability to make use of the knowledge given him, for the end for which it was given him, viz., the information, conviction, and conversion of others; and accordingly that he knew how to direct his discourse to the point in hand, we cannot widely mistake the parts of his discourse employed about it, when we have any where found out the point he drives at: wherever we have got a view of his design, and the aim he proposed to himself in writing, we may be sure that such or such an interpretation does not give us his genuine sense, it being nothing at all to his present purpose. Nay, among various meanings given a text, it fails not to direct us to the best, and very often to assure us of the true. For it is no presumption, when one sees a man arguing for this or that proposition, if he be a sober man, master of reason or common sense, and takes any care of what he says, to pronounce with confidence, in several cases, that he could not talk thus or thus.

third heaven, as if from a man so warmed and illu-view. When he gave his thoughts utterance upon minated as he had been, nothing could be expect any point, the matter flowed like a torrent, but it ed but flashes of light, and raptures of zeal, hin- is plain, it was a matter he was perfectly master dered others to look for a train of reasoning, pro- of: he fully possessed the entire revelation he had ceeding on regular and cogent argumentation, received from God, had thoroughly digested it, all from a man raised above the ordinary pitch of hu- the parts were formed together in his mind into manity to a higher and brighter way of illumina- one well-contracted harmonious body: so that he tion; or else whether others were loath to beat was no way at an uncertainty, nor ever in the their heads about the tenor and coherence in St. least at a loss concerning any branch of it. One Paul's discourses, which, if found out, possibly may see his thoughts were all of a piece in all his might set him at a manifest and irreconcilable dif- epistles; his notions were at all times uniform, and ference with their systems; it is certain that what- constantly the same, though his expressions very ever hath been the cause, this way of getting the various. In them he seems to take great liberty. true sense of St. Paul's epistles seems not to have This at least is certain, that no one seems less tied been much made use of, or at least so thoroughly up to a form of words. If then, having by the pursued as I am apt to think it deserves. method before proposed got into the sense of the several epistles, we will but compare what he says in the places where he treats of the same subject, we can hardly be mistaken in his sense, nor doubt what it was that he believed and taught concerning those points of the Christian religion. I know it is not unusual to find a multitude of texts heaped up for the maintaining of an espoused proposition, but in a sense often so remote from their true meaning, that one can hardly avoid thinking that those who so used them either sought not or valued not the sense; and were satisfied with the sound, where they could but get that to favor them. But a verbal concordance leads not always to texts of the same meaning: trusting too much thereto, will furnish us but with slight proofs in many cases; and any one may observe how apt that is to jumble together passages of Scripture not relating to the same matter, and thereby to disturb and unsettle the true meaning of Holy Scripture. I have therefore said that we should compare together places of Scripture treating of the same point. Thus, indeed, one part of the sacred text could not fail to give light unto another. And since the providence of God hath so ordered it, that St. Paul has written a great number of epistles, which though upon different occasions, and to several purposes, yet are all confined within the business of his apostleship, and so contain nothing but points of Christian instruction, amongst which he seldom fails to drop in, and often to enlarge on the great and distinguishing doctrines of our holy religion; which, if quitting our own infallability in that analogy of faith which we have made to ourselves, or have implicitly adopted from some other, we would carefully lay together, and diligently compare and study, I am apt to think would give us St. Paul's system in a clear and indisputable sense; which every one must acknowledge to be a better standard to interpret his meaning by, in any obscure and doubtful parts of his epistles, if any such should still remain, than the system, confession, or articles of any church or society of Christians yet known, which, however pretended to be founded on Scripture, are visibly the contrivances of men, (fallible both in their opinions and interpretations,) and, as is visible in most of them, made with partial views, and adapted to what the occasions of that time, and the present circumstances they were then in, were thought to require, for the support or justification of themselves. Their philosophy also has its part in misleading men from the true sense of the sacred Scripture. He that shall attentively

I do not yet so magnify this method of studying St. Paul's epistles, as well as other parts of sacred Scripture, as to think it will perfectly clear every hard place, and leave no doubt unresolved. I know expressions now out of use, opinions of those times not heard of in our days, allusions to customs lost to us, and various circumstances and particularities of the parties, which we cannot come at, &c., must needs continue several passages in the dark, now to us at this distance, which shone with full light to those they were directed to. But for all that, the studying of St. Paul's epistles in the way I have proposed, will, I humbly conceive, carry us a great length in the right understanding of them, and make us rejoice in the light we receive from those most useful parts of divine revelation, by furnishing us with visible grounds that we are not mistaken, whilst the consistency of the discourse and the pertinency of it to the design he is upon, vouches it worthy of our great apostle. At least I hope it may be my excuse for having endeavored to make St. Paul an interpreter to me of his own epistles.

To this may be added another help, which St. Paul himself affords us, towards the attaining the true meaning contained in his epistles. He that reads him with the attention I propose, will easily observe, that as he was full of the doctrine of the gospel, so it lay all clear and in order open to his