Book of Acts

“ The engraved title-page of the translation which appeared with his privilegium puts into his mouth the expression 'Thy word is a light to my feet.' The order soon followed to place a copy of the Book of books in every church: there every man might look into the disputed places, and convince himself, by this highest of codes, as to the rightfulness of the procedure that had been chosen. ”

“ The Scriptures aver their existence: to the jurisconsults will you dispute the existence of a crime against which our statute-book and the code of almost all civilised countries have attested by laws upon which hundreds and thousands have been convicted; many, or even most, of whom have, by their judicial confessions, acknowledged their guilt and the justice of their punishment? It is a strange scepticism, they might add, that rejects the evidence of Scripture, of human legislature, and of the accused persons themselves.'94 Reason was hopelessly oppressed by faith. ”

“ Behind the Literature of History, which can be called so in the finer sense, lies a great body of the Documents of History, which are unattractive to the casual reader, but which even he must sometimes have an urgent wish to consult. Full and carefully chosen texts of a large number of the most famous and important of such documents—charters, edicts, proclamations, petitions, covenants, legislative acts and ordinances, and the constitutions of many countries—have been accordingly introduced and are easily to be found. ”

“ The external authority for these books reduces to exactly this. Those who insist that all parts of the Old Testament are of equal value and authority, and that a questioning of the sacredness of one book casts doubts upon the whole collection, ought to look these facts in the face and see on what a slender thread they suspend the Bible which they so highly value. ”

“ In this bill there was a clause inserted (whether industriously with design to overthrow it) that the author's name, and place of abode should be set to every printed book, pamphlet, or paper; to which I believe no man, who has the least regard to learning, would give his consent; for beside the objection to this clause from the practice of pious men, who, in publishing excellent writings for the service of religion, have chosen, out of an humble Christian spirit, to conceal their names ”

“ The judgment, which experience passes whether on establishments or on education, as a means of maintaining religious truth in this anarchical world, must be extended even to Scripture, though Scripture be divine. ”

“ Law—as operative in nature, as regulating each man’s individual character and actions, as seen in the formations of societies and governments—is equally a manifestation and development of the divine order according to which God Himself acts, is the expression in various forms of the divine reason. ”

“ I know that there are a great many wise people who copy in the courts, and can even read civil documents, but who, if you were to put into their hand a simple prayer-book, could not make out the first letter in it, and would show all their teeth in derision. These people laugh at everything you tell them. ”

“ Suppose I adhere to your testimony, that the doctrine I believe is not true, and abandon it as a heresy, preach it down to the utmost of my ability, and the doctrine at last, when you and I stand before that judge who knows the hearts of all men, should in final evidence of the law and prophets, prove true, of which I have not the least shadow of doubt in my mind, with what a blush must I give up my account! ”

“ Legal documents, documents of the most technical kind, are the best, often the only evidence that we have for social and economic history, for the history of morality, for the history of practical religion. ”

“ When I shall have learned thy righteous judgments I will keep thy statutes. We cannot keep them unless we learn them; but we learn them in vain if we do not keep them. Those have well learned God's statutes who have come up to a full resolution, in the strength of his grace, to keep them. ”

“ The Scriptures are not to be regarded as a storehouse of facts, promises, and precepts, without relation or dependency; but a volume in which may be found a collection of glorious truths, all forming one great and well-balanced system. ”

“ Some were regulative in the department of the legal and ethical ; the prophetic claimed a divine origin ; the lyric or poetic touched and elevated the ideal faculty on which religion acts. The nation, early imbued with the theo cratic spirit, and believing itself the chosen of God, was favourably inclined toward documents in which that stand-point was assumed. ”

“ Every book has a right to claim that the reader shall be governed by It’s own meaning of the technical terms it employs, and surely the Bible has the same right. It is but reasonable that we should compare scripture with scripture to arrive at the sense in which certain words and phraseology are employed therein. ”

“ Having received the word of God from these various sources, we can rejoice this day in the great truth that the doctrines we teach, the ordinances we have submitted to, and that have been and are being administered to us, and that our lives when we live as we should, are in strict accordance with these three records, which we know to be the word of God, but particularly in accordance with the Bible, which the Christian world acknowledge to be true. ”

“ The whole subject of writing, editing, publishing, and reading books, pamphlets, tractates, periodicals, and journals, comes within the scope of the spiritual authority, and is rightly subjected to ecclesiastical discipline. ”

“ It is a great mercy that we have the law written, that we have it thereby reduced to certainty, and that thereby it is capable of spreading the further, and lasting the longer. Having it written, it is our duty to read it, to read it with understanding, and to treasure up what we read, so that when there is occasion, we may be able to tell what is written in the law, and how we read. ”

“ But that it may be possible for the nature of this decree and of our benevolence to come to the knowledge of all men, it will be your duty by a proclamation of your own to publish everywhere and bring to the notice of all men this present document when it reaches you, that the decree of this our benevolence may not be hidden. ”

“ Every law, every commandment, every promise, every truth, and every point touching the destiny of man, from Genesis to Revelation, where the purity of the scriptures remains unsullied by the folly of men, go to show the perfection of the theory [of different degrees of glory in the future life] and witnesses the fact that that document is a transcript from the records of the eternal world. ”

“ For the present we offer the oldest and therefore most important Acts. That these Acts cannot be ignored because they form an important contribution to the primitive literature of the Church, the reader can readily see from the special introductions and literature. ”

“ When there is divine authority in the administration of an ordinance here on the earth, that ordinance is sacred and holy, and is recorded here and in the heavens, and the records of heaven will agree with the records of earth; and by these records and books will mankind be judged. ”

“ God breathes, not speaks, his verdicts, felt not heard—Passed on successively to each court, I call Man's conscience, custom, manners, all that make More and more effort to promulgate, mark God's verdict in determinable words, Till last come human jurists—solidify Fluid results,—what's fixable lies forged, Statute,—the residue escapes in fume, Yet hangs aloft a cloud, as palpable To the finer sense as word the legist welds. ”

“ He charges them to keep God's commandments (v. 2) , to do them (v. 5, 14) , to keep and do them (v. 6) , to perform the covenant, v. 13. Hearing must be in order to doing, knowledge in order to practice. God's commandments were the way they must keep in, the rule they must keep to; they must govern themselves by the moral precepts, perform their devotion according to the divine ritual, and administer justice according to the judicial law. He concludes his discourse (v. 40) with this repeated charge: Thou shalt keep his statutes and his commandments which I command thee. ”

“ I answer that, Since law is the art, as it were, of directing or ordering the life of man, as in every art there is a distinct division in the rules of art, so, in every law, there must be a distinct division of precepts: else the law would be rendered useless by confusion. We must therefore say that the judicial precepts of the Old Law, whereby men were directed in their relations to one another, are subject to division according to the divers ways in which man is directed. ”

“ As already stated, these details, in so far as they are based on the Acts, have no claim to historical credibility. Allard also characterizes the Acts as the work of a later author who was more concerned with writing an edifying narrative, abounding in miracles, than in transmitting historical traditions. ”

“ A law-book never recites the utility, the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would lose the imperative tone, the “thou shall,” on which obedience is based. ”

“ Execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates. Let the judges that sit in the gates in all their judicial proceedings have regard both to truth and to peace; let them take care to do justice, to accommodate differences, and to prevent vexatious suits. It must be a judgment of truth in order to peace, and making those friends that were at variance, and a judgment of peace as far as is consistent with truth, and no further. ”

“ But many wrest the Scriptures to their own destruction, and what heresy is not defended as by their authority?
Answ. 1. And many thousands receive saving knowledge and grace by them. The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. All Scripture is profitable to instruction, &c. to make the man of God perfect. It is the incorruptible seed by which we are born again, and the sincere milk, by which we are nourished. ”

“ When we consider the enormous multitude of books, the diversity in the forms of process, and the difficulty of legal cases, and, further, the huge mass of imperial constitutions which, hidden as it were under a veil of gross mist and darkness, precludes man's intellect from gaining a knowledge of them, we have performed a task needful for our age, and, the darkness having been dispelled, we have given light to the laws by a brief compendium. ”

“ It embraces a period of thirty-eight years, and its contents are necessarily of a very miscellaneous character. The unity of the book is chronological, history and legislation alternating with each other in the order of time. A full enumeration of the numerous incidents which it records, and of the new ordinances from time to time enacted, is not necessary. ”

“ As the prime and sole universal legislation belongeth to Jesus Christ, so the final judgment, universal and particular, belongeth to him, which only will end all controversies, and from which there is no appeal. ”

“ The supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other than the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture. ”

“ As the scriptures in all fundamentals are clear, and expound themselves, and in the first instance condemn heresies; so all laws of men in their fundamentals, which are the law of nature and nations, are clear. ”

“ If we had known our Bibles only a tithe as well as we knew our newspapers, we should have seen that all we were glorying in, under the name of 'Progress,' was but a perfecting of human systems, leaving God, and His purposes, and His plans utterly out of the question. ”

“ Who shall refuse to receive, for sacred and canonical, the books of Holy Scripture in their integrity, with all their parts, according as they were enumerated by the Holy Council of Trent, or shall deny that they are inspired by God, Let him be anathema. ”

“ We only pretend to assert, what every one that pretends to reason must acknowledge, namely, that there is a manifest distinction between an express Scripture declaration, and the conclusion or inference which may be deduced from it ”

“ The tribunals, in former times, when good taste prevailed, were greatly adorned by our advocates, when orators of spirited eloquence—laborious and accomplished scholars—shone pre-eminent in genius, honesty, fluency, and every kind of embellishment of language. ”

“ In a word, so many elements of judgment are to be taken into account in determining the relative weight of authority that belongs to a given manuscript, that the right decision of the question requires large observation combined with much critical tact. ”

“ For in this way, too, we are able to satisfy our hearers, as the nature of the word itself carries the conviction [7] with it in that we affirm what we allege on the authority of the Scriptures themselves, or verily make the proof of our statements all the clearer also by illustrations taken from them. ”

“ Such an attitude is not commended in the Scriptures themselves, nor was it the practice of the reformers and Westminster divines. The Bible says that all Scripture is profitable for doctrine, not just some. ”

“ We must cease to be clairvoyants and become analysts, verifying our intuitions by positive investigation. For the old term Commandment, which implies the will of a sovereign, our present condition of knowledge leads us to substitute the new term Law as defined above. ”

“ For it is the true office of history to represent the events themselves together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgment. ”