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to defend, or a notion of an adversary to attack. The posture of students and learners towards it is abandoned by those who yet profess to accept it as their only guide and authority. There must be something very wrong in our belief, when this is our habitual practice. Have we not lost the faith in Inspiration, while we have been talking about it and inventing theories about it? Have we not lost our faith in the Inspirer? I trust to show shortly, in a book which I have been writing for several years on the Gospels and on the Epistles of St. Paul, that I do not receive the words of the Bible less literally, or regard it less as a whole, or submit to it less as an authority, than those who have complained of me because I cannot bear to see their sons driven into hopeless infidelity by their hard and cruel attempts to substitute a tenet concerning Inspiration for the Divine Word.
I ought not to conclude this Preface without referring to the kindness and generosity of the new Bishop of Natal, who chose a moment when he knew that my character was in disgrace with the religious public, and when any acknowledgement of me might be perilous to him, for dedicating to me a volume of admirable Sermons. The very great delight which I felt at receiving such a testimony from such a man, would have been no compensation for my sorrow, that he should have risked his own reputation for the sake of a friend, from many of whose opinions he had expressed his dissent, if I had not seen in this act a pledge of his possessing those qualities of courage and indifference to self, which are so especially needed in a Chief Pastor of the flock, and