in his “Reasonableness of Christianity,” to ascertain the exact meaning of the New Testament, by casting aside all the glosses of commentators and divines, and applying his own unassisted judgment to spell out its teachings.  He did not disdain to use the lights of extraneous history, and the traditions of the heathen world; he only refused to be bound by any of the artificial creeds and systems devised in later ages to embody the doctrines supposed to be found in the Bible.  The fallacy of his position obviously was, that he could not strip himself of his education and acquired notions, the result of the teaching of the orthodox church.  He seemed unconscious of the necessity of trying to make allowance for his unavoidable prepossessions.  In consequence, he simply fell into an old groove of received doctrines; and these he handled under the set purpose of simplifying the fundamentals of Christianity to the utmost.  Such purpose was not the result of his Bible study, but of his wish to overcome the political difficulties of the time.  He found, by keeping close to the Gospels and by making proper selections from the Epistles, that the belief in Christ as the Messiah could be shown to be the central fact of the Christian faith; that the other main doctrines followed out of this by a process of reasoning; and that, as all minds might not perform the process alike, these doctrines could not be essential to the acceptance of Christianity.  He got out of the difficulty of framing a creed, as many others have done, by simply using Scripture language, without subjecting it to any very strict definition; certainly without the operation of stripping the meaning of its words, to see what it amounted to.  That his short and easy method was not very successful, the history of the Deistical controversy sufficiently proves.  The end in view would, in our time, be sought by an opposite course.  Instead of disregarding commentators, and the successions of creed embodiments, a scholar of the present day would ascend through these to the original, and find out its meaning, after making allowance for all the tendencies that operated to give a bias to that meaning.  As to putting us in the position of listening to the Bible authors at first hand, we should trust more to the erudition of a Pusey or an Ewald, than to the unassisted judgment of a Locke.

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II.  “What constitutes the study of a book?” Mere perusal at the average reading pace is not the way to imbibe the contents of any work of importance, especially if the subject is new and difficult.

There are various methods in use among authoritative guides.  To revert to the Demosthenic traditions:  we find two modes indicated—­namely, repeated copying, and committing to memory verbatim.  A third is, making abstracts in writing.  A fourth may be designated the Lockian method.  Let us consider the respective merits of the four.

[STUDY BY LITERAL COPYING.]