The first of these parties, constituted of the Romish Church, and its disguised favorers, affirms the subordination of the authority of Scripture to that of tradition and the Church. This is a doctrine of slavery and of ignorance, which the mere progress of knowledge and of civil liberty must overthrow, if it be not first exploded by other means. The second party comprises the sceptical sects of the Protestant world, which agree in affirming the subordination of Scripture to the dogmas of natural theology; in other words to every man's notion of what religion _ought_ to be. These sects, having no barrier between themselves and pure deism, are continually dwindling by desertions to infidelity; nor will they be able to hold their slippery footing on the edge of Christianity a day after a general revival of serious piety has taken place. The third party, comprehending the great majority of the Protestant body, bows reverently, and implicitly, and with intelligent conviction, to the absolute authority of the word of God, and knows of nothing in theology that is not affirmed, or fairly implied, therein. The differences existing within this party, how much soever they may be exaggerated by bigots, will vanish as the mists of the morning under the brightness of the sun, whenever a refreshment of pious feeling descends upon the Church. They consist, in part, of mere misunderstandings of abstract phrases, unknown to the language of Scripture; in part they hinge upon political constitutions, of which so much as is substantially evil is by no means of desperate inveteracy: in part these differences are constituted of nothing better than the lumber of antiquity, the worthless relics of forgotten janglings handed down from father to son, but now, by so many transmissions, worn away to an extreme slenderness, and quite ready to crumble into the dust of everlasting forgetfulness. Surely men are not always so to remain children in understanding, that the less shall be preferred to the greater; nor shall it always be that the substantial evils of schism are perpetuated and vindicated on the ground of obscure historical questions, fit only to amuse the idle hours of the antiquary. This trifling with things sacred must come to its end, and the great law of love must triumph, and the Christian Church henceforward have "one Lord, one faith, one baptism." SECTION V. THE ENTHUSIASM OF PROPHETIC INTERPRETATION.