“This is the great matter in controversy between Protestants and Roman Catholics. We say the Bible is sufficient. They say it is not. Now, suppose that Paul the apostle be permitted to decide between us. We are agreed to refer to the matter to him. Can our opponents object to this reference? Let Paul then be consulted in the only way in which he can be, viz. through his acknowledged writings. It is agreed on all hands that he wrote the second epistle to Timothy. Well, in the third chapter of that epistle, and at the 15th verse, he writes to Timothy thus: ‘And that from a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation.’ That the Greek here is correctly translated into English, any scholar may see.

Here then we have what Paul wrote, and I cannot believe that he would write, in a letter to Timothy, that the Holy Scriptures are capable of being known by a child, and able to make wise unto salvation, and then say, to be handed down by tradition, that they are so obscure and abstruse that one can make nothing out of them.

But what did Paul write to Timothy about the Holy Scriptures? He reminds thim that he had known them from a child, that is, he had been acquainted with them so far as to understand them from that early age. Now, either Timothy was a most extraordinary child, of which there is no proof, or else the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament, and of the New, so far as the latter was written and recognized at the time, are intelligible to a child. I see not how this conclusion can in any way be evaded. If the child of Eunice could and did know them, why may not my child and your child, any child of ordinary understanding? And what do we want more for a rule of faith, than a Bible which a child can understand? The Bible then cannot be insufficient as a rule of faith, through any want of perspicuity in it. That point is settled.

But Paul says something more to Timothy about these same Scriptures, ‘which,’ he says, ‘are able to make thee wise unto salvation.’ Why, what is the matter with the man? He talks as if he had taken lessons of Luther. When did he live? They say that the Protestant religion is only three hundred years old, but here is a man who lived well nigh eighteen hundred years ago, that writes amazingly like a Protestant about the Holy Scriptures. He says (and I have just been looking at the Greek to see if it is so there, and I find that it is) they are able to make thee wise unto salvation. Now, who wishes to be wiser than that? and if they can make one thus wise, they can make any number equally wise. So then the Scriptures can be known by children, and can make wise to salvation those who know them. This is Paul’s decision, and here should be an end of the controversy. If this prove not the sufficiency of the Bible as a rule of faith and guide to salvation, I know not how any thing can be proved. I will tell you what I am determined to do the next time a Catholic opens his mouth to me about the insufficiency and obscurity of our rule of faith, I mean to take hold of the sword of the Spirit by this handle, 2 Tim. 3:15, and I mean to hold on to this weapon of heavenly temper, and to wield it manfully, until my opponent surrender or retreat. He cannot stand before it.” — William Nevins, Thoughts on Popery (1836), pp. 7-9