of God as no other man ever was; and that his writings are, as they claim to be, a new and divinely authorized revelation; and yet we may believe that his illumination was not precisely the same at all times; that he was not absolutely infallible; that his pen, and even his thought on some minor points, might momentarily have slipped, making him teach or seem to teach in one place, something contrary to his general teaching upon the same subject.
But an admission of this man's claim, or the belief that his writings are a new dispensation of spiritual truth to men, does involve the belief, that, upon all important doctrines—upon all questions which have hitherto engaged the attention of Christians, and in which they are likely always to feel a deep interest—he has spoken with authority, because he wrote under an extraordinary divine illumination. It involves the admission that, in what he wrote and published concerning the Lord, the Sacred Scripture, Redemption, Regeneration, Salvation, the Resurrection, the Judgment, the nature and duration of Heaven and Hell, and all the great facts and laws of the spiritual world, he has not given us his opinion merely, but the truth which God was pleased to reveal through him. It involves the belief that, upon such momentous themes he was illumined by the Holy Spirit, and has taught only what the Lord authorized and directed him to teach. So that what his writings contain on such subjects, is not his own opinions or conclusions merely,
