rd intended for us, must have three
characteristics. It must be within the reach of everyone; it must be clear
and intelligible; it must be able to satisfy us on all questions relating
to faith and morals.

First--A complete guide of salvation must be within the reach of every
inquirer after truth; for, God "wishes all men to be saved, and to come to
the knowledge of the truth;"(144) and therefore He must have placed within
the reach of everyone the means of arriving at the truth. Now, it is clear
that the Scriptures could not at any period have been accessible to
everyone.

They could not have been accessible _to the primitive Christians_, because
they were not all written for a long time after the establishment of
Christianity. The Christian religion was founded in the year 33. St.
Matthew's Gospel, the first part of the New Testament ever written, did
not appear till eight years after. The Church was established about twenty
years when St. Luke wrote his Gospel. And St. John's Gospel did not come
to light till toward the end of the first century. For many years after
the Gospels and Epistles were written the knowledge of them was confined
to the churches to which they were addressed. It was not till the close of
the fourth century that the Church framed her Canon of Scripture and
declared the Bible, as we now possess it, to be the genuine Word of God.
And this was the golden age of Christianity! The most perfect Christians
lived and died and went to heaven before the most important parts of the
Scriptures were written. And what would have become of them if the Bible
alone had been their guide?

The art of printing was not invented till the fifteenth century (1440).
How utterly impossible it was to supply everyone with a copy of the
Scriptures _from the fourth to the fifteenth century_! During that long
period Bibles had to be copied with the pen. There were but a few hundred
of them in the Christian world, and these were in the hands of the clergy
and the learned. "According to the Protestant system, the art of printing
would have been much more necessary to the Apostles than the gift of
tongues. It was well for Luther that he did not come into the world until
a century after the immortal invention of Guttenberg. A hundred years
earlier his idea of directing two hundred and fifty million men to read
the Bible would have been received with shouts of laughter, and would
inevitably have caused his removal from the pul