This proposition the Quakers usually make out in the following manner: 

It is, in the first place, admitted by all Christians, that the scriptures were given by inspiration, or that those who originally delivered or wrote the several parts of them, gave them forth by means of that spirit, which was given to them by God.  Now in the same manner as streams, or rivulets of water, are subordinate to the fountains which produce them; so those streams or rivulets of light must be subordinate to the great light from whence they originally sprung.  “We cannot, says Barclay, call the scriptures the principal fountain of all truth and knowledge, nor yet the first adequate rule of faith and manners; because the principal fountain of truth must be the truth itself, that is, whose certainty and authority depend not upon another.”

The scriptures are subordinate or secondary, again, in other points of view.  First, because, though they are placed before us, we can only know or understand them by the testimony of the spirit.  Secondly, because there is no virtue or power in them of themselves, but in the spirit from whence they came.

They are, again, but a secondary guide; because “that, says Barclay, cannot be the only and principal guide, which doth not universally reach every individual that needeth it.”  But the scriptures do not teach deaf persons, nor children, nor idiots, nor an immense number of people, more than half the Globe, who never yet saw or heard of them.  These, therefore, if they are to be saved like others, must have a different or a more universal rule to guide them, or be taught from another source.

They are only a secondary guide, again, for another reason.  It is an acknowledged axiom among Christians, that the spirit of God is a perfect spirit, and that it can never err.  But the scriptures are neither perfect of themselves as a collection, nor are they perfect in their verbal parts.  Many of them have been lost.  Concerning those which have survived, there have been great disputes.  Certain parts of these, which one Christian council received in the early times of the church, were rejected as not canonical by another.  Add to this, that none of the originals are extant.  And of the copies, some have suffered by transcription, others by translation, and others by wilful mutilation, to support human notions of religion; so that there are various readings of the same passage, and various views of the same thing.  “Now what, says Barclay, would become of Christians, if they had not received that spirit and those spiritual senses, by which they know how to discover the true from the false?  It is the privilege of Christ’s sheep, indeed, that they hear his voice, and refuse that of the stranger; which, privilege being taken away, we are left a prey to all manner of wolves.”  The scriptures, therefore, in consequence of the state in which they have come down to us, cannot, the Quakers say, be considered to be a guide as entirely perfect as the internal testimony of their great author, the spirit of God.