THE NECESSITY OF A NEW REVELATION--THE ARGUMENTS OF MODERN CHRISTIANS AGAINST IT CONSIDERED. I shall take it for granted that those who have followed me to this point are convinced that the world has need of a new witness for God; that the Church of Christ was destroyed; that there has been an apostasy from the Christian religion so complete and universal as to make necessary a new dispensation of the gospel. I have already remarked, in noticing the Protestant claim that the Church of Christ was re-established by the Reformers of the sixteenth century, that the gospel having once been taken from among men, and divine authority lost, the only way that either one or the other could ever be restored would be by the Lord giving a new revelation, and re-commissioning men with divine authority, both to teach the gospel and administer in its ordinances. This is a proposition so obvious to reason that I can scarcely persuade myself that it requires either argument or proofs to sustain it. If there are those, however, who think that the plan of salvation might be clearly defined from the fragmentary documents which comprise the New Testament, without the aid of more revelation, I ask them to consider the Protestant effort to accomplish that task. The Protestants accepted the Bible as an all-sufficient guide in matters of faith and morals and church discipline. But when they undertook to formulate from it a creed that should embody the whole plan of salvation, and prescribe a government for their church, it was found that well nigh each Doctor understood the Bible differently. One saw in it the authorization of the Episcopal form of church government; another the Presbyterian form; and another the Congregational. One saw in the Bible authority for believing there was a trinity of persons in the God-head; another that there was but one. One saw authority for believing that God had predestined an elect few to be saved; another that salvation was equally within reach of all. And so on through all the vexed questions that have distracted Protestant Christendom and divided it into a hundred contending sects. It must be remembered that to this effort to construct from the New Testament scriptures a creed which would embody all the principles and ordinances essential to salvation, and re-construct the Church of Christ, all the zeal and learning that we can hope to see brought to such a task was possessed by Protestant "Reformers," and they failed miserably; for the confusion grows greater by the constant multiplication of sects, led by men making the vain attempt to re-construct the Church of Christ and define the gospel by their own wisdom from fragmentary Christian documents.