It has been said, and well said, that history repeats itself. If there was one thing which marked the religious impulse that Protestantism gave to the world, it was an utter rejection, in the decision of religious opinions, of everything but Bible authority. The voice of Martin Luther even now seems to reverberate in our ears, as—when fighting the very battles which Sabbatarians am being called upon to fight over again—he retorted in sharp and stinging words upon his cowled and priestly opponents, who were ever citing patristic evidence, The Bible, and the Bible alone, is our rule of faith. Again, as we read the words addressed by him to those friends who were hopefully waiting the expected reply from the Romanists of his time, to a courageous assault which he had made upon them from the stand-point of the Bible, it seems as if they were designed to be prophetic of our time, rather than descriptive of his own. He said: “You are waiting for your adversaries’ answer; it is already written, and here it is: ‘The fathers, the fathers, the fathers; the church, the church, the church; usage, custom; but of the Scriptures—nothing!’”—_D’Aubirgne’s Hist. Ref._, vol. viii., p. 717. Wearisome as these repeated conflicts may be to the child of God, there is a satisfaction in the thought that we hold in our hands the same weapons, and bear aloft the same banners by which, under the blessing of God, victory, complete and universal, has been attained in the past. The opponents of Bible truth have never yet been able to stand before the thunder of its power, or to balance the ponderous weight of its influence, in the decision of religious questions. The homely phrase of the great reformer is just as potent and irresistible in the present contest as it was in that for which it was framed “When God’s word is by the fathers expounded, construed, and glossed, then, in my judgment, it is even like unto one that straineth milk through a coal-sack, which must needs spoil the milk, and make it black; even so, likewise, God’s word of itself is sufficiently pure, clean, bright, and clear; but through the doctrines, books, and writings, of the fathers, it is very surely darkened, falsified, and spoiled.”