and speaking forth what we can hear of heavenly truth?

In all other departments of knowledge, investigation has brought us up
to a higher outlook, where we see the true relations of things better
than before. In all other branches, God has given us new light, so
that we discern things more as they really are. Science has risen by
making a ladder of its earlier errors and by treading them under foot,
reaching to higher truths. The Bible itself is the growth of ages; and
Christian doctrine and Christian creeds have been the evolution of a
still longer period. The dogmas of the churches are most manifold and
conflicting. Is it not rather immodest and absurd for each church to
claim infallibility for its present creed, and that wisdom died when
the book of Revelation closed the Bible, or the Council of Trent or
the Westminster Assembly adjourned its sitting? It seems to me that
the churches ought, instead, to be willing and anxious to receive
whatever new light God may grant them to-day, and with the potent
clarifying processes of reason, separate the pure gold of religion
from the dross and alloys of olden superstition and misguided
judgment.

But to the modern devotees of dogma, any subjection of it to the
cleansing of the reason seems shocking. The forefront of Dr. Briggs'
recent offending, for which he is about to be formally tried as a
heretic, is that he admits errors in the Bible and gives reason (by
which he means, as he explains, not merely the understanding, but also
the conscience and the religious instinct in man), a conjoint place
with the Bible and the Church in the work of salvation and the
attainment of divine truth. To the modern dogmatist, these positions
seem sceptical and pernicious. But to the philosopher, who knows the
laws of human nature, to every scholar who knows the actual history of
the Bible, these positions seem only self-evident. That in the
Scriptures there are innumerable errors in science, mistakes in
history, prophecies that were never fulfilled, contradictions and
inconsistencies between different books and chapters,--these are facts
of observation which every Biblical student knows full well. Granting,
for the sake of the argument, that the Bible was given originally by
infallible divine dictation, yet the men who wrote down the message
were fallible; the men who copied it were fallible; the men who
translated it (some of it twice over, first from Hebrew to Greek, and
then from Gree