Be this as it may, they decided by vote which of the books out of the
collection they had made, should be the WORD OF GOD, and which should
not. They rejected several; they voted others to be doubtful, such as
the books called the Apocrypha; and those books which had a majority
of votes, were voted to be the word of God. Had they voted otherwise,
all the people since calling themselves Christians had believed
otherwise; for the belief of the one comes from the vote of the
other. Who the people were that did all this, we know nothing of.
They call themselves by the general name of the Church; and this is
all we know of the matter.

As we have no other external evidence or authority for believing
these books to be the word of God, than what I have mentioned, which
is no evidence or authority at all, I come, in the next place, to
examine the internal evidence contained in the books themselves.

In the former part of this essay, I have spoken of revelation. I now
proceed further with that subject, for the purpose of applying it to
the books in question.

Revelation is a communication of something, which the person, to whom
that thing is revealed, did not know before. For if I have done a
thing, or seen it done, it needs no revelation to tell me I have done
it, or seen it, nor to enable me to tell it, or to write it.

Revelation, therefore, cannot be applied to anything done upon earth
of which man is himself the actor or the witness; and consequently
all the historical and anecdotal part of the Bible, which is almost
the whole of it, is not within the meaning and compass of the word
revelation, and, therefore, is not the word of God.