One of the most influential arguments, one of those the force of which I feel even more than I see, for the divinity of the New Testament, and with especial weight in the writings of John and Paul, is the unspeakable difference between them and all other the earliest extant writings of the Christian Church, even those of the same age (as, for example, the Epistle of Barnabas,) or of the next following,--a difference that transcends all degree, and is truly a difference in kind. Nay, the catalogue of the works written by the Reformers and in the two centuries after the Reformation, contain many many volumes far superior in Christian light and unction to the best of the Fathers. How poor and unevangelic is Hermas in comparison with our Pilgrim's Progress! [Footnote 1: P. 98, &c. of the edition by Murray and Major, 1830 Ed.] [Footnote 2: See 'ante'. Ed.] [Footnote 3: Prefixed to an edition of the Pilgrim's Progress, by R. Edwards, 1820. Ed.] [Footnote 4: The second of two 'Letters written to persons under trouble of mind.' Ed.] [Footnote 5: Sermon of the certainty and perpetuity of faith in the elect. Vol. iii. p. 583. Keale's edit. Ed.] NOTES ON SELECT DISCOURSES BY JOHN SMITH. [1] It would make a delightful and instructive essay, to draw up a critical and (where possible) biographical account of the Latitudinarian party at Cambridge, from the close of the reign of James I to the latter half of Charles II. The greater number were Platonists, so called at least, and such they believed themselves to be, but more truly Plotinists. Thus Cudworth, Dr. Jackson (chaplain of Charles I, and vicar of Newcastle-on-Tyne), Henry More, this John Smith, and some others. Taylor was a Gassendist, or 'inter Epicureos evangelizantes', and, as far as I know, he is the only exception. They were all alike admirers of Grotius, which in Jeremy Taylor was consistent with the tone of his philosophy. The whole party, however, and a more amiable never existed, were scared and disgusted into this by the catachrestic language and skeleton half-truths of the systematic divines of the Synod of Dort on the one hand, and by the sickly broodings of the Pietists and Solomon's-Song preachers on the other. What they all wanted was a pre-inquisition into the mind, as part organ, part constituent, of all knowledge, an examination of the scales, weights and measures themselves abstracted from the objects to be weighed or measured by them; in short, a transcendental æsthetic, logic, and noetic. Lord Herbert was at the entrance of, nay, already some paces within, the shaft and adit of the mine, but he turned abruptly back, and the honour of establishing a complete [Greek: propaideía] of philosophy was reserved for Immanuel Kant, a century or more afterwards.