I exceedingly love, and highly reverence the divine authority of the sacred writings of the apostles and evangelists, and would gladly persuade everyone, to be as deeply affected with them, and pay as profound a regard to them, as they would to an Elijah, a St. John Baptist, or a Paul whom they knew to be immediately sent from heaven with God's message to them. I reverence them as a literal truth of and from God, as much the greatest heavenly blessing that can be outwardly bestowed upon us. I reverence them as doing, or fitted to do all that good amongst Christians now, which the apostles did in their day, and as of the same use and benefit to the church of every age, as their planting and watering was to the first.