Theological Essays/XIII

Any clergyman who ventures to write on Inspiration will be asked whether he is prepared to defend the popular views on that subject. If not, all his more judicious friends will advise him to be silent. He may injure his own reputation; he may do what is much worse,—he may injure the faith of his countrymen and countrywomen.

I cannot undertake to defend the popular views upon this or any other subject. First, I find it very difficult to ascertain what they are. What is called a popular view expands or contracts at the pleasure of writers in newspapers and reviews. It appears to be exceedingly definite; you approach it—it has almost vanished. Popular notions have a considerable vigour for purposes of attack. They can be used with great effect against a supposed enemy of the faith. They only fail when you want them for use and comfort. They are full of warmth and fervour on the platform; in the closet they are as cold as ice. They stir up all the elements of strife and bitterness in the natural heart; I do not find that they stir the spirit to any ​energetic action for God or man. Next, what are called popular notions answer, it seems to me, very ill to their name. They do not come from the people; they do not touch the hearts of the people. They are not like old, racy, homely proverbs, which embody so much of common, and therefore so much of genuine, feeling. They do not call forth any hearty, intelligent response when they are proclaimed among simple men who work with their hands. There is a sickly perfume about them, which denotes them not to have been nursed in the open air, but in flower-pots. The seeds of them may have been sown in the study, but they have ripened in the boudoir; their greatest exposure has been in crowds, in which there is breath enough of some kind, but which the breath of heaven is not suffered to visit. And lastly, adherence to these popular notions is, I think, incompatible with a strict adherence to those Creeds which we solemnly confess—still more incompatible with a continual and direct appeal to the Bible as a guide and an authority. I have explained why I think so in other cases; some of the popular notions about Inspiration, instead of being an exception to either remark, offer, I suspect, the most striking illustrations of both.

What is said about the danger to reputation is perfectly true; every one should consider it for him- self. A man trembles for his wealth in proportion to the insecurity of his investment; the miser, who has been afraid to deposit it anywhere but in some chest or cupboard within his reach, has the best reason of all for trembling. The religious world has a painful feeling that it has been hoarding up treasures for itself, and has not been rich towards God; therefore it is continually in dread of burglars and pickpockets. Let it use all pre​cautions; let it prove how free it is from the maxims of the ordinary world, by banishing trust and cultivating universal suspicion. All of us like its smiles, dread its frowns. We shall take great pains to secure one and avert the other, if there is no smile that we care for more, no frown which we count more terrible. But many of us persuade ourselves,—all of us have probably at one time yielded to the opinion,—that reputation is necessary for the sake of usefulness. Every hour, I think, will show us more and more that the concern about reputation is the great hindrance to usefulness; that if we desire to be useful, we must struggle against it night and day.

That thought suggests the really great argument against meddling with this subject of Inspiration; we may injure the faith of our brothers and sisters. A most potent reason for taking some course in reference to it; whether silence is that course, they may be able to decide who know something of the present feeling of different classes of Englishmen. Can you prevent any set of men, nay, any man or woman, from knowing that this question has been stirred? Do not those who lay down theories of Inspiration, and denounce others for not acquiescing in them, proclaim that fact aloud? Is it not true, as these persons affirm so constantly, that the faith of our countrymen, as well as of other Europeans, in the Bible, is shaken already? Are there not very clear evidences in their restless eagerness to get all objections put down, that their own faith is feeble and tottering? Is it not a duty which we owe to those who confess their doubts,—which we owe quite as much to those who are trying to hush their doubts by making a noise,—not to avoid the subject, but to face it, and to express ourselves upon it ​with as much frankness, as little ambiguity, as possible? To avoid the charge of ambiguity,—of wilfully concealing some opinion which it would be inconvenient to express,—is impossible. No one who has had the slightest experience will expect to do that. The most vehement champion of modern theories about the Inspiration of the Bible,—the most passionate denier of its Inspiration,—will agree in declaring that any person who refuses the shibboleths of either is tampering with his conscience, and does not mean what he says. They are perfectly entitled to their opinion; their harmony upon one point, while they agree on no other, will be a decisive proof with many that they are right. Those who try to disturb so fixed a conviction, will always repent of their pains, and will find that the argument,—probably, which is much more precious, the temper—they have expended, has brought no calculable return. The utmost any one can dream of, or should desire is, that his sincerity should be tried by his peers; that is to say, by those who have felt these difficulties, and have sought, or still seek, a solution of them; not by men of another and altogether superior race, who are quite above human dangers and human sympathies, and are able to look down upon us from a region of self-satisfied, untroubled orthodoxy, or from a region which, being exactly antipodal to this, resembles it in temperature-the region of self-satisfied, untroubled unbelief.

The only legitimate reason which can deter a person who has spoken or written much on theological subjects from entering on this, is, that he must almost necessarily have handled it before. The question of Inspiration touches so nearly upon all the thoughts with which men in this day are occupied, that at ​whatever point one comes into contact with those thoughts, it must be encountered. The fear of repeating the same propositions again and again, besets every one who tries to express convictions which are very sacred to him, and which he thinks his contemporaries have as much right in as he has. As he knows only commonplaces, and cares for nothing else, he cannot deal in novelties. But he must be conscious how much commonplaces lose their force, and are mistaken for the idiosyncrasies of a particular mind, when they come forth frequently clothed in the phrases and forms which education or circumstances have made habitual to him. The dread of giving them merely a personal character grows with his belief that they are truths for mankind. But, however justifiable this feeling is, it must often yield to other considerations. A man will not understand what your convictions are, till you have put them in various lights; till you have given him an opportunity of applying various tests to them. It is not enough to treat of any great subject which an age is busy with, collaterally; you must speak of it directly, must grapple with the very words and forms in which people are wont to see it exhibited; else they will fancy that you and they are not intending the same thing. It is better to run the risk of a hundred repetitions (which, after all, not fifty or twenty persons may be aware of), than to omit an opportunity, when it offers, of relieving the conscience of a fellow-creature from some distressing bondage, or of protesting against some unrighteous attempt to keep it in prison.^[1]

​I shall therefore fix my thoughts on the word Inspiration: our disputes are emphatically about the word. They are not less real for that. They point to facts and to substances; but the best way of getting at these, and of coming to understand what we mean ourselves, and what others mean, is to examine our uses of the name which we feel to be so sacred.

1. We find the singers of the old world asking some divine power to inspire them. In the last age this language of theirs was not much heeded. It had been so much abused by the vulgarest writers who adopted classical fashions (I should be scarcely correct in saying classical forms), that it was supposed never to have had any signification. We have learnt to do more justice to the men whom we profess to admire. We feel that they would be worthy of no admiration, that they could not have won any, if they had not been simple and sincere. If they were merely using a trade phrase when they asked a Muse or a God to teach them, they must have had the fate of similar traders in later times. The rest of their speech is genuine and transparent; this part of it cannot be less so. It must express, not their loosest convictions, but their strongest.

2. But whatever force we allow to this sense of ​the word, are we to suppose it has any, even the slightest, relation to the sense in which religious men speak of the inspiration of the Bible? A number of voices all around us are saying, "There is no real distinction between these books and any others. Inspiration is predicable of both, in the same sense. It can be but a question of degree, and therefore, if you feel yourselves at liberty to exercise all kinds of criticism upon the methods, principles, and authority of the one, you cannot fairly debar yourself or any one else from the same liberty in respect of the other." We hear again a number of voices saying, "You exercise that liberty at your peril. The Bible must be looked upon as the inspired book. To put it on the same ground with any other is to deprive us of all foundation for our faith now, for our hopes in the world to come."

3. But again: religious men,—the most earnestly religious men,—speak of themselves as taught, actuated, inhabited by a Divine Spirit. They declare that they could know nothing of the Scriptures except they were under this guidance. Is this the Inspiration which we attribute to the writers of the Old and New Testament, or is that different from it in kind?

4. A number of religious teachers actually claim to be inspired men, and circles of admiring disciples believe them; nay, crowds run after them, in the faith that they have a divine commission. Here is another fact which well deserves to be examined—a very serious fact indeed. It is one which the peremptory decrees of our schools have certainly not cleared up. They have not prevented the fanatics from appearing by their maxim respecting inspiration. They have not done much to weaken or to explain their influence. ​If fanaticism is to be checked, we must understand ourselves a little better about its nature and cause.

5. But the Church of England, which many religious people say is not spiritual enough, whose sons boast that it is expressly opposed to fanaticism, has used this very word "Inspiration," and has claimed it for these sons apparently in a fuller, larger sense than either of the classes to which I have last referred. On the Fifth Sunday after Easter, we ask "Him from whom all good things do come, that by His holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by His merciful guiding may perform the same." Every Sunday morning, and on every Festival-day, we ask, in our Communion Service, that "the thoughts of our hearts may be cleansed by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, so that we may perfectly love God, and worthily magnify His name." Here are petitions which concern, not a few specially religious men or some illuminated teachers, but the whole flock—to say the least, all the miscellaneous people who are gathered together in a particular congregation. Are we paltering with words in a double sense? When we speak of Inspiration do we mean Inspiration? When we refer to the Inspiration of the Scriptures in our sermons, ought we to say, "Brethren, we beseech you not to suppose that this Inspiration at all resembles that for which we have been praying. They are generically, essentially unlike. It is blasphemous to connect them in our minds; the Church is very guilty for having suggested the association." These are the questions we have to discuss; let us not shrink from them, or dispose of them lightly and frivolously, as if the hearts of tens of thousands were not interested in them.

​1. When St. Paul came into the different cities of Greece he found men whose traditions told them of an Inspiration which poets, prophets, priestesses, received from some divine source. These traditions had facts for their basis. Men were actually seen to be carried far above the level of their ordinary thoughts; they spoke as they did not speak when they were buying and selling; their words entered into other men's minds, and worked mightily there. There was no denying this; the experience of men established it beyond all controversy. And I think the conscience of men, expressed in these traditions, was entitled to bear its testimony as well as their experience. That conscience said, "This power is something which we cannot measure and reduce under rules. It works in us, but it is above us. We may in some sort control its exercises, but we are the subjects of it. It must come from some higher source. A God must have imparted it to us."

The next and more awful question was, "What God, what is His name?" When they tried to consider this question, a number of new facts forced themselves upon their observation. their observation. A man under the influence of some extraordinary afflatus might be raised to a higher and nobler state, might be an inventor of arts, might overcome his inclinations to pleasure, might do heroic acts for the benefit of the world, might have intuitions of the future. Or he might be merely inebriated, maddened, might exhibit wild contentions, might, in the worst and grossest sense, lose the mastery of himself. The theory of a Divine Inspirer must, they thought, explain both these discordant experiences. Every one who reflects upon the legends which cluster about the name of Dionysus, ​and the various grotesque forms which embodied them for the eye, will understand how the heart and imagination of the Greek were exercised by this problem.

How might we suppose that St. Paul would act,—how do we know that he did act, when he brought his Gospel to a people with these notions and traditions? If he had told them that all the thoughts of their ancestors were unmeaning and ridiculous, he would have found a willing and prepared audience in Athens and Corinth. Their sophists had told them so before; the inclination of their minds was to accept the statement. They would indeed have continued to bow down to all manner of idols; why not? they were beautiful objects; worship might do them some good; who could tell? "The people certainly needed such images; it was philosophical to humour the vulgar taste; a very high philosophy might see a meaning in it." But St. Paul did not take this course. The one which he did take must have tended to awaken that old faith out of its sleep; not to smother it in its sleep. For he spoke of gifts of healing; gifts of speech; gifts of government. He spoke of these gifts as proceeding from a Person. He spoke of His presence as the great gift of all. He spoke of that gift as coming to men, because a Man had appeared in the world, and had ascended on high, who was the Son of God. Such language could not but associate itself with all the thoughts which they had before of Inspiration and an Inspirer. We know that it did, for most of the confusions in the Corinthian Church arose from the old dreams of a Dionysiac inspiration. And how are the two distinguished? There would have been nothing to distinguish them, there would have been no witness against idol worship, or demon wor​ship, if St. Paul had said, "Those powers which you referred to Dionysus, or Apollo, or Æsculapius, are not what we are permitted and enabled to exercise;" for the understanding would still have demanded, "What then is the origin of those?" But if he was able to say, "What you have attributed to a dæmon, to a being whom you have fashioned out of a set of phenomena which you could not account for, I come to vindicate for the Father of Spirits, for the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,"—this would indeed have been the most triumphant testimony he could bear, that the reign of the old gods was over, and that the one Lord who had spoken to a poor band of exiles from Egypt was now asserting His dominion over the world. And so—and only so—it would be apparent why He who lifted men into a nobler and freer life could not mean man to be the victim of a frenzy, or of mere animal impulses. The history which the Apostle told was the history of the gradual discovery of man's relation to God, and consequently of man's spiritual condition. That a Divine Spirit should come to meet and raise a spirit hard pressed with animal inclinations, to give it the power of maintaining its own position, of looking up to Him in whose likeness it was made, apart from whom it had no life, was so reasonable, was so necessary a corollary from the previous part of the message, that the heart of the hearers anticipated it, was eager to recognise it. But then, whatever counteracted this influence, whatever led the animal to assert that supremacy to which it had been proved to have no claim, must be either the turbulent and rebellious movement of the lower nature, or the action of some evil power, speaking directly to the spirit, and aiming to destroy it.

​The opposition between the divine and either the animal or the devilish, which had been confounded with it in the old mythology, was manifested just in proportion as those very powers and gifts, which man had felt before he could not ascribe to himself, were ascribed to the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Order and Truth. But it is equally evident that there was another great and broad distinction between the old and new belief. The first had been partial, narrow, peculiar. It had tried to explain how extraordinary men, or men in some extraordinary crisis of their lives, were able to do strange acts, to speak unusual words. St. Paul's Gospel was human and universal. It explained, indeed, the influence of seers and prophets; it asserted the existence of special endowments; it put all honour upon distinct callings. But first, it asserted that the Spirit was necessary for all human beings, and was intended for all. And this human gift it did not degrade below the other, as being a secondary, inferior exhibition of that which the great man obtained in its highest form. The Divine Spirit, the Spirit of Love, who was promised to all, was described as the source and spring of those peculiar endowments which were given to this and that man as He willed. They were to esteem their gifts mainly as witnesses of His presence.

2. But if St. Paul asserted that the inspiration which the Greeks had attributed to false Gods was derived only from the true, what kind of dignity did he claim for the inspiration of his own seers and prophets? I apprehend that he could say nothing more glorious for them than this, that they had spoken as they were moved by the Holy Ghost; that they had consistently disclaimed all wisdom and power for them​selves; that they had been, in the most orderly and divine manner, preparing the way for that manifestation of Him which had been promised to their children, and had at length been granted. Inspiration was not the first idea in the mind of a Jew, as it was perhaps in that of a Greek. The Law took precedence of the Prophets; the Covenant was before either. The Lord had said to Abram, "Get thee out of thy father's house, to a land that I will show thee,"—had promised "that in him and his seed the families of the earth should be blessed." The Lord had declared to Moses His great name, had sent him to be the deliverer of His people, had given them through him commandments and statutes and ordinances. The Righteous King and Judge, who claims men as His servants, who teaches them to judge between right and wrong, is revealed first. The prophet who speaks in His name is still mainly the witness of Unchangeable Right, and of judgments that shall distinguish between it and the wrong. And the Word, who comes to him, and speaks to him, makes him aware how he and his people are related to that Lord God whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain; makes him understand that there is a King on the holy hill of Zion, One whom he can call his Lord, and to whom the Lord is saying, "Sit Thou on my Right hand, till I make Thine enemies Thy footstool." The revelation of this mysterious Teacher, this Divine King, is what he looks for; he gains glimpses of the steps and method of His manifestation through his own sorrows and the trials of his country; he is confident that some day God will be fully declared, and that in that day man, His image, will attain his proper glory.

But how is it that the prophet is able to enter into ​these divine communications? What is there in him different from other men which makes him capable of them? What mean these stirrings within him, this sense of a power which seems at times more than he can bear, this mighty influence to which he must yield, which does not suffer him to speak till it has humbled and crushed him; which, when he does speak, makes him know that his words, though they have come out of the depths of his own heart, are the Lord's, and that they belong as much to all his countrymen as to him? This is surely Inspiration. But who is the Inspirer? How can He be so near to him, to his own very self? For this power is not merely or chiefly one which elevates and transports. It does not merely take hold of some faculty or impart some energy. It carries on the most searching, intimate, terrible converse with him who uses the faculty, who wields the energies.

The answer to this demand came gradually, slowly, like the answer to the other. St. Paul believed that it had come at last most effectually. John the Baptist preached of repentance for the remission of sins. But he preached of One coming after him, that was before him, who should baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire. Jesus (so Paul's companion tells us) had received the Holy Ghost in His baptism, when He was proclaimed to be the Son of God. In the power of that Holy Ghost, He resisted the Tempter, healed the broken-hearted, preached deliverance to the captives, proclaimed the Jubilee of the Lord. Then, when He was going away, He spoke of a Spirit of Truth whom He would send to His disciples from the Father, who would abide with them, who would bring all things to their remembrance, who would show them plainly of ​the Father. He had spoken continually in his earlier discourses of a Father who was both His and theirs; all these words seemed intended to receive their interpretation from what He said to them now of a Comforter. The disciples were perplexed. How could they have another to supply His place? How could He be with His Father, and yet manifest Himself to them? What could He mean by saying that He and His Father would come to them, and abide with them? He told them to wait for the promise of the Father; then they would know what was now dark to them. When He had ascended, and had led them, by that strange discipline I spoke of in a former Essay, to believe that in some wonderful way they were even then to ascend with Him, and be with Him where He was, He again told them to wait; He could not satisfy their desire to know whether the kingdom would be at that time restored to Israel; He could only assure them that they should be endued with powers from on high. On the Festival day, St. Luke says, the sound of the mighty rushing wind was heard; the cloven tongues sat upon the Apostles; they spoke as the Spirit gave them utterance; the multitude heard them in their own tongues proclaiming the wonderful works of God. Herein St. Paul saw the revelation of Him who had inspired the Prophets; the fulfilment of the divine promise; the assurance that the Father of all was indeed claiming the sons of men,—Jews, Greeks, barbarians,—as His children. So soon as he learnt this truth, he became the herald of a new dispensation. This manifestation of the Spirit was that which the world had been waiting for so long. He had taught prophets to speak, He had enabled them to suffer, He had given them glimpses of a glory which their ​children should see, in which they themselves should be sharers. Now it might be proclaimed aloud. "The Baptism which John foretold is for you all. Because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father." All gifts ever bestowed upon prophets were the gifts of a Father to His children, the foretastes of that adoption and emancipation which were awaiting men when their schooling under the elements of the world should be completed.

What a magnificent idea, then, must St. Paul have had of those books which, in his Pharisaical days, had seemed to him merely objects of fear, and of a kind of worship; excuses for Jewish self-exaltation! How every old teacher will have started into life when he contemplated him no longer as a mere utterer of dark sentences, which the scribes copied out and made darker by their expositions, but as endued with that same Divine Spirit which was enabling him to be a teacher of the Gentiles; of whom he could dare to say to each Church, "He dwells with you;" to each member of a Church, "He has made your body His habitation!" What a grand procession those old teachers formed, each one of whom was leading men onwards to that discovery of the Inspirer! What was there in all the rest of the world together that could compare with them, not in their distinct worth alone or chiefly, but in their continuity, their orderly succession, their harmony; their worth as witnesses to the divine method of government in their own day—a method which must be the same in all after generations; their worth as foreseers of that which had now come to pass? What would the history of the rest of the world be but a collection of inexplicable fragments, ​if there were not this revelation to unite them and make them a whole?

But if this was the effect of his New Testament wisdom, how must he have feared any relapse into that state of mind from which he had emerged; how must he have dreaded it for his converts, and for those who should come after them! Can we conceive any view of the Holy Scriptures, either of those he had known from a child, or those he was contributing to form, which would have seemed to him more dreadful than one which, under colour of exalting them, should set aside their own express testimony concerning the unspeakable gift which God had conferred on His creatures? If he would have turned with indignation from those in later days who, pretending to honour the Bible, forbid men to read it, lest it should awaken the questionings in their hearts which it is meant to awaken, and which a Church, instead of stifling, should encounter and satisfy—would he have felt less indignant with those who, talking of the Bible as their only religion and only rule of life, prevent it from being either by saying that its Inspiration has no relation to that of the writers whose dark sayings it illuminates, to that of the human beings it is intended to educate and console?

3. This scribe notion of the Bible was stoutly resisted by the Evangelical teachers of the last age. Francke and Spener have been referred to again and again by their admirers in this country as faithful witnesses against the hard German doctors of their day, who looked upon the Bible as a mere collection of dry facts and dogmas, and who supposed that it could be understood without the aid of such a Spirit as dwelt in the writers of it. Our own Venns and New​tons took up the same language; the orthodoxy as well as the liberalism of their contemporaries was offensive to them, precisely because both seemed equally to separate the Bible from the conflicts and experiences of Christian men. The testimony which they bore, I hope, is not extinct,—has not merely given birth to a set of phrases about "head knowledge," or to charges of "want of vital and experimental acquaintance with divine things,"—phrases which any one can learn by heart, and which may often be used most glibly by those who are half-conscious that they have a very near and personal application. In solitary chambers, among bedridden sufferers, the words of the old men have still a living force. The Bible is read there truly as an inspired book-as a book which does not stand aloof from human life, but meets it; which proves itself not to be the work of a different Spirit from that which is reproving and comforting the sinner, but of the same. It is of quite infinite importance that the confidence in which these humble students read should not be set at nought and contradicted by decisions and conclusions of ours. It is absolutely necessary that we should be able to say that they are not practising a delusion upon themselves; that they are not amiable enthusiasts; that they are believing a truth and acting upon it. But we cannot say this if we must adopt the formulas which some people would force upon us. Either we must set at nought the faith of those who have clung to the Bible, and found a meaning in it when the doctors could not interpret it, or we must forego the demand which we make on the consciences of young men when we compel them to declare that they regard the Inspiration of the Bible as generically un- like that which God bestows on His children in this day. ​I know well how this last remark will be met. Do you not know," some one will say, "that the simple Christians you speak of have the most unfeigned, unquestioning reverence for the Bible? do you not know, also, that those young men of whose consciences you are so tender, avoid explicit statements respecting the Inspiration of the Bible, precisely because they are full of neological doubts and theories about it, which never entered into the heads of the others, and would utterly shock them if they did? What folly or dishonesty to compare cases so dissimilar!" Now, I am perfectly ready to admit that in a great many cases, perhaps in most, scruples which may be called neological are at the bottom of the objections which the younger members of Evangelical families make to the doctrines respecting the Inspiration of the Bible, which their elders require them to accept. But I venture to think, first, that it is neither foolish nor dishonest to protest against the invention of tests to meet a particular case, which—supposing they do accomplish their particular object, and supposing that is a good one—also may promote another which is decidedly and evidently bad. I should have thought that the history of heresies might have taught us that, whenever a dogma has been devised merely to fit and contradict some denial which is prevalent, it has almost always been the parent of some other denial quite as dangerous. But, secondly, I should like to be informed how these neological tendencies have arisen in persons apparently so well secured by their education against them. It seems to me that this is generally the history of their growth. These young men were informed early that no true knowledge of the Bible could be had, unless God's Spirit illuminated the page and their ​hearts. It was intimated to them also (or this was what they gathered from the lessons they received), that they did not at present possess this illumination. In the meantime, they were instructed in what was called the external evidence, which proved that these records were of divine authority. Some of this evidence might be good, such as would pass muster in any English court of justice; some might be tolerable, such as would be listened to if there were nothing to overweigh it on the other side; some was decidedly weak and worthless. But the best could not put in 'the least claim to authority; it would have abandoned all its peculiar boast if it had. All was therefore open to legitimate examination and criticism; that which could not hold water must give way; that which was worthy would often be suspected for its sake. Very soon the book itself, the merits and dignity of which had been staked upon this issue, which the youth had been distinctly told that he was not to receive, merely because his parents or his country received it, which he had been told also that he could not yet receive upon any distinct witness of his own spirit, sank nearly—never quite to the level of the arguments by which it had been recommended to him. He discloses his perplexities; he asks whether this or that passage in the book is not less tenable than the rest: he is told that he must take all or none: the whole is inspired; to doubt it is to renounce the word of God,—to renounce God Himself. This course I hold to be inhuman and ungodly, one which will infallibly make the doubter what you accuse him of being. It is possible to pursue quite a different method—one that may make your children feel that the Bible is their book as it was their fathers', and that no modern wisdom will ​supply the place of it. You may show them that there is divinity here and inspiration there; you may lead them to confess that there are passages which speak to the heart within them, which awaken a heart that was asleep; you may make them know,—if you believe it yourself,—that there is a Divine Word who is enlightening them, that there is a Divine Spirit who is seeking to inspire them. You may then bring them gradually, with many tears and much joy, to trace that Word and that Spirit not only here and there, but connecting, reconciling those various documents which seemed to them so inconsistent with themselves, explaining the facts of the universe with which they appeared to be at war. Be sure, however, that before you can take one step in this course, you must give up the attempt to impose a theory of Inspiration upon them, nay, you must very gravely consider whether the one which you hold is compatible with that belief in Inspiration which belonged to prophets and apostles.

I foresee that some critic will say to me, "It is a cunning method to put forward these young men, and to pretend so much sympathy with them. Every one can see that you are really pleading your own cause. You have some secret unbelief about the books of the Bible, which makes you shrink from this tenet of Inspiration. We are glad to know it. The screw should always be applied where there are any symptoms of tenderness or wincing."

I wish my friend the critic could look me as steadily in the face, while he is making these observations as, if he stood before me, I would look him in the face while I replied to them. I would tell him that I am conscious of just as much unbelief about the books of the Bible as I am about the facts of ​nature and of my own existence. I am conscious of unbelief about those facts; oftentimes they seem to me quite incredible. I overcome this unbelief, and acquire what I think is a truer state of mind, when I turn to the Bible as the interpretation of them. The more difficulties I have found in myself and in the world, the more help has it been to me. The Bible is not the cause of my perplexities, but the resolver of them. Of course, there are a multitude of things in it which I do not understand,—a multitude more in myself which I do not understand. But this has been my experience hitherto, and each year, almost each day, that experience is strengthened. Instead, therefore, of wishing to get rid of those documents which the tradi- tions of my country teach me to hold divine, because they belong to some bygone condition of things with which modern civilisation has nothing to do, I feel the necessity of them increasing with every step which civilisation takes, with every new complication of feel- ings and circumstances in which I am myself involved. Books of the Bible which were lying in shadow for me, in which I could see little meaning, have come forth into clearness, because I met with hard passages in myself or in society which I could not construe with- out their help. And I have found this to be the case more and more in proportion as I have rested my faith on the God whom the Bible. declares to me, and not upon my conclusions respecting the authenticity of different books. These conclusions may be sound,—I hope they are; but they may not be sound. My understanding is very liable to error; and how can those who require me to consider the Bible as alone free from error, encourage me, at the same moment, to transfer that immunity to myself? This they must ​do, if they will not let me first of all accept the canon of Scripture as given to me, and secondly, rise gradually to believe, not on the authority of any Samaritan woman or Church doctor, but because I have heard Christ for myself, speaking to me out of this book, and speaking to me in my heart, and therefore know that He is indeed that Saviour who should come into the world.^[2]

On his way to this discovery, a man may have to pass, as numbers have passed before him, through terrible struggles and contradictions of mind. But you believe it is true, do you not? You think God has revealed it, do you not? You believe He lives, do you not? If so, He can perhaps take about as good care of His truth, His book, His creatures, and the universe, as you or I can. He can teach us without a theory of Inspiration, which is taking the place, it is to be feared, in very many minds not only of faith in Inspiration, but of faith in Him.

​For the different forms in which this theory expresses itself I care little. If any one likes to talk of a verbal Inspiration, if that phrase conveys some substantial meaning to his mind, by all means let him keep it. He cannot go farther than I should in calling for a laborious and reverent attention to the very words of Scripture, and in denouncing the unreasonable notion that thoughts and words can be separated—that the life which is in one must not penetrate the other. If any one likes to speak of plenary Inspiration, I would not complain; I object to the Inspiration which people talk of, for being too empty, not for being too full. These forms of speech are pretty toys for those who have leisure to play with them, and if they are not made so hard as to do mischief, the use of them should never be checked. But they do not belong to business. They are not for those who are struggling with life and death; such persons want not a plenary Inspiration or a verbal Inspiration, but a book of Life; and they will know

​that they have such a book when you have courage to tell them that there is a Spirit with them who will guide them into the truth of it.

4. "But if these words are openly proclaimed, what a plentiful crop of ranters and fanatics shall we have! What crowds will run after them; for who then will have a right to deny their inspiration?" A dreadful prospect! But is it a prospect? Have we not the fanatics and ranters already? Do they not draw disciples after them? You have tried to weaken their influence by telling them that the Bible was the Inspired book; that it is utterly absurd and extravagant for men in these days to call themselves inspired; that the same course has been tried in former times, and has always led to ruin. There is a great apparent justification for this method; it has been used often by very ingenious and sagacious men, with whom it ought to have succeeded, if it was to succeed. But it has not succeeded. It has not cured the immediate evil which it was meant to cure; it has left the seeds which produced that evil always ready for fresh germination. And what is worse, this kind of treatment has destroyed precious seeds which God has planted in men's hearts, and which they cannot afford to lose. You long to expose the impostor, the mountebank, who is deceiving a number of poor simple souls. But do you desire that the earnest, cordial faith, which has been called forth in them, while they are following him, should be taken from them? Do you desire that those fervent hopes, kindled for the first time in men who have been crawling all their days on the earth and eating dust, should be put out for ever? Do you think nothing of the desolation which they will feel when they find that he in whom they trusted ​has failed them utterly, and that what looked the most real of all things was but a dream? Oh! is there nothing dreadful in the unbelief, the prostration of soul, the wretchedness of unclean living which follows such disappointments and discoveries?

"But they must come," you say; "how can we help it?" We could have done this. We could have told the deceiver that he was not exaggerating in the least the blessings of which a man is capable, and which God is willing to bestow on him. We could have told him that instead of a mere power of utterance, which it is evident he possesses, and for which he will have to give an account, the Spirit who has endued him with that power is near him, claiming him as a servant,—near him, and near every one of those to whom he is making his tools. We might say to him, "If you believe this there will come into your mind such an awe, such a sense of the fearfulness of trifling with this gift and blessing,—there will come such a desire to learn, such a fear of the responsibility of ruling over other men, such a conviction that you can only do it without a crime when you give up yourself to the Spirit of Truth,—that nothing will seem to you so great a reason for penitence and shame, as that you have dared to exalt yourself on the plea of possessing that, which if you had possessed it rightly, would have entirely humbled you." And if, with this, we teach the people that the Spirit of God has come down, not on the great prophet only, but for the whole flock of Christ, to keep them from pride and self- conceit and delusion, and to guide them into all truth, I believe we shall do our best that the chaff in their minds may be separated from the wheat, and may be burned up.

​5. For this principle we of the Church of England are, I conceive, especially bound to bear testimony. The collects I have quoted, and the tenor of our prayers, which is in conformity with them, lay us under this obligation. The function which our orthodox men in the last century claimed for us, of being witnesses against fanaticism, is a most honourable function. God grant that we may be able to fulfil it! But we cannot fulfil it in the way they dreamed of,—by setting at nought all belief in spiritual operations, by referring all that is spoken of them in Scripture to the age of the Apostles. That plan has been tried; none ever failed so completely and shamefully. We cannot do it by the course which our modern evangelical school, renouncing the maxims of their forefathers, seem inclined to recommend,—the course of setting up the Bible as a book which encloses all that may lawfully be called Inspiration. That plan is under trial, and, if we may judge by present indications, it is likely to produce a general alienation from the Bible, a widely-spread unbelief in Christianity. There is another method: may we have faith to follow it out! It is that of saying to our countrymen of every order and degree, "The Father of all has sent forth His Son, made of a woman, that you may receive the adoption of sons. He has baptized you with the Spirit of His Son; and that Spirit would be crying in your hearts, Abba, Father. That Spirit would be leading you into fellowship with all your brethren. That Spirit would be making you humble, teachable, courageous, free. That Spirit would claim all things for you; common books, and the chief book, Nature and Grace, Earth and Heaven."

​It may seem to some Unitarian listener, who had hoped that I was going to join him in cursing several of his enemies, that I have blessed them these three times. He might expect from me some more rational theory about Inspiration than that which is current among our Evangelical and High Church teachers. He might think my apparent indifference to their opinions promising. But I have at last come to a conclusion which will strike him as far more distant from his own than theirs is. I have appeared to protest against current theories of Inspiration, because they fail to assert the actual presence of that Spirit, whom it has been one of the standing articles of his creed not to confess.

I cannot deny this charge. I do think that our theories of Inspiration, however little they may accord with Unitarian notions, have a semi-Unitarian character; that they are derived from that unbelief in the Holy Ghost which is latent in us all, but which was developed and embodied in the Unitarianism of the last century. I have not been able to conceal this opinion in the present case or in other cases. I have not tried to conceal it; for I am persuaded that we must go farther from Unitarianism if we would embrace Unitarians; that we shall never know them as brothers, or love them as brothers, till we bring out our own faith more fully, and disengage it from some of the elements of distrust which we, in imitation of them, have allowed to mingle with it. Especially do I look forward to this result, however distant and improbable it may seem, from a full assertion of that portion of our Creed which refers to the Person of the Comforter. I do see in that, such a bond of loving fellowship for all men,—such a breaking down of sect-barriers,—that I long to speak of it, ​even if it be with the most stammering tongue, to those who have been divided from us. I have not entered upon that subject here. Till the question of Inspiration had been fairly considered, I saw no hope of being able to express my thoughts fully and clearly upon it; for nothing seems to me so dangerous as that the Bible should be used to hinder the reception of a truth which can alone make its words intelligible, and apart from which its Inspiration, and all inspiration, is the dream of a shadow.

But as the subject of this Essay is not merely inspiration, but the Inspiration of the Bible, I should like to say one word on a method of treating that book which is characteristic of the new Unitarian school. The members of that school readily recognise the inspiration of Apostles and of Prophets. Where their fathers honoured the letter, they perceive a divine mind in the old seers. But they do not half so much accept them as teachers. It seems to me that the last writer of an article in one of their newspapers or reviews looks upon himself as a much more enlightened man than St. Paul or St. John,—as one who can afford to compliment them upon the approximations which they often made to the wisdom which he has attained. I discover this tendency in men who, I think, really wish to be modest and self-distrusting; who are driven into what must strike us as insufferable arrogance, not willingly, but by the necessity of their position. They defend that position as being the only one which it is possible for men of science and men of progress to occupy. If earnest search is always rewarded with new discoveries, how can we acquiesce in the decrees of the past? If the world is always advancing, is not a third-rate man of ​this day wiser than the greatest of ages gone by? Such questions are not in general fairly met. The understanding is staggered by them, though I believe the conscience in every man revolts at the conclusion to which they lead.

The process of thought by which I have myself been delivered from them is something of this kind. Physical science, it has seemed to me, presumes a world which exists, and which we did not create. Science was impossible while men glorified their own thoughts and speculations more than that which nature presented to them. It has become firm and safe since they have humbled themselves into the condition of learners. This has been the secret of discovery; this has been the security for progress. Is it altogether otherwise, I have asked myself, in moral science? Is self-worship the posture of mind which is most favourable to that, as self-abnegation is the great pre-requisite in the other? Shall we discover because we believe in our powers of discovery? Will the ages to come learn from us if we teach them that all wisdom is concentrated in us? I have not the least reason to think so. I do not meet with any man who does think so consistently. I often see those who ought to hold this opinion, if their other statements were true, clinging to the past with great affection and reverence,—nay, not seldom disposed to appeal to it with even a fond idolatry, when they find themselves pressed down and tormented by the maxims of their own age. And so I have been forced by the inconsistencies of these modern teachers when I liked them best, by the vanity which made me despair of all good from them when they were following their theory to its consequences, to inquire whether that old notion of a Bible, ​—a book of books, a book which sets forth a revelation that has been made of God and His relations to man, a revelation that is complete and cannot receive additions from our researches,—is unfavourable to science, to discovery, to progress; nay, may not be the necessary protection of all three. If Science concerns that which is fixed and absolute, that which is, then to believe that God has declared Himself, that He has withdrawn the veil which hides Him from His creatures, that He has in a wonderful and orderly history enabled us to see what He is, and what He is to us, what those eternal laws and principles are which dwell in Himself and which determine His dealings with us, is to believe that there is a divine and human Science, that we are not left to the anticipations or guesses of one age or of another. If He who thus reveals Himself is light, there must be perpetual openings for Discovery the more we meditate upon His revelation, the more we compare it with our own experiences and the experiences of the world. Instead of being cut off from such discoveries by acknowledging that we are not the authors of them, we enter upon just such a steady and gradual method for arriving at them as the physical student entered on when he exchanged the syllogisms of the study for the induction of the laboratory. If all Progress consists in the advancing farther into light and the scattering of mists which had obstructed it, the Bible contains the promise of such Progress,—a promise which has been most fulfilled when it has been most reverently listened to, when men had gone to it with the greatest confidence and hope. I complain of our modern religious world, not for cherishing this confidence or this hope, but for abandoning it, and robbing others of it. If we come ​to the Bible as learners, it has more to teach us yet than we can ask or think. If we believe that we know all that is in it, and merely resort to it for sentences and watchwords to confirm our own notions and to condemn our brethren, God will show us,—He is showing us,—how great the punishment to us and to our children must be, for abusing the unspeakably precious treasure with which He has endowed us.