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.