Human persuasion is weak without the divine argument; Spirit's efficacy; Christians would rather die than deny

Proceed against atheists this way. Yet these proofs mostly rest only on human authority and produce only human persuasion — far weaker than Christian faith, unable to persevere in serious contest unless the divine argument from the sacred letters is added (Bellarmine, Bullinger, Valencia, Ficino, Mornay, Grotius).

XIV. So much for human arguments. Next the divine argument: the Holy Spirit's efficacy implanted in Sacred Scripture, by which its persuasive power is raised and breathed into the reader's heart — for which Christians receive it in the spiritual struggle with firm, unmoved, world-conquering, utterly divine assent.

1. Christians who watch for their soul's salvation assent so firmly that they would rather die than deny Scripture's divine truth. 2. This assent depends proximately on nothing else than Scripture itself as self-attesting (αὐτόπιστος), as 1 Thessalonians 2:13 shows: they received the word not as a human word but as the word of God.