he books of which they are
composed, out of the mass of literature current among the early
Christians. The logical acumen of Augustine showed him that the
authority of the Gospel he preached must rest on that of the Church to
which he belonged.[10]

But it is no less true that the Hebrew and the Septuagint versions of
most, if not all, of the Old Testament books existed before the birth of
Jesus of Nazareth; and that their divine authority is presupposed by,
and therefore can hardly depend upon, the religious body constituted by
his disciples. As everybody knows, the very conception of a "Christ" is
purely Jewish. The validity of the argument from the Messianic
prophecies vanishes unless their infallible authority is granted; and,
as a matter of fact, whether we turn to the Gospels, the Epistles, or
the writings of the early Apologists, the Jewish scriptures are
recognised as the highest court of appeal of the Christian.

The proposal to cite Christian "antiquity" as a witness to the
infallibility of the Old Testament, when its own claims to authority
vanish, if certain propositions contained in the Old Testament are
erroneous, hardly satisfies the requirements of lay logic. It is as if a
claimant to be sole legatee, under another kind of testament, should
offer his assertion as sufficient evidence of the validity of the will.
And, even were not such a circular, or rather rotatory argument, that
the infallibility of the Bible is testified by the infallible Church,
whose infallibility is testified by the infallible Bible, too absurd for
serious consideration, it remains permissible to ask, Where and when the
Church, during the period of its infallibility, as limited by Anglican
dogmatic necessities, has officially decreed the "actual historical
truth of all records" in the Old Testament? Was Augustine heretical when
he denied the actual historical truth of the record of the Creation?
Father Suarez, standing on later Roman tradition, may have a right to
declare that he was; but it does not lie in the mouth of those who limit
their appeal to that early "antiquity," in which Augustine played so
great a part, to say so.

Among the watchers of the course of the world of thought, some view with
delight and some with horror, the recrudescence of Supernaturalism which
manifests itself among us, in shapes ranged along the whole flight of
steps, which, in this case, separates the sublime from the
ridiculous--from Neo-Catholicis