er
meaning of Christ and of His words, we had at least nothing to unlearn
in later times, or to feel that our parents had ever told us what they
themselves could not have held to be true. Our simple faith was not
shaken by mere questions of criticism, or by the problem how any human
being could take upon himself to declare any book to be revealed,
unless he claimed for himself a more than human insight. The simplest
rules of logic should make such a declaration impossible, whatever the
sacred book may be to which it is applied. Granted that the Pope was
infallible, how could the Cardinals know that he was, unless they
claimed for themselves the same or even greater infallibility? It is
far more easy to be inspired than to know some one else is or was
inspired; the true inspiration is, and always has been, the spirit of
truth within, and this is but another name for the spirit of God. It
is truth that makes inspiration, not inspiration that makes truth.
Whoever knows what truth is, knows also what inspiration is: not only
_theopneustos_, blown into the soul by God, but the very voice of God,
the real presence of God, the only presence in which we, as human
beings, can ever perceive Him.

How often have I in later life tried to explain this to my friends in
France and in England who endured mental agonies before they could
arrive at the simple conclusion that revelation can never be
objective, but must always be subjective. I may return to this
question at a later period of my life, when I had to discuss with
Renan, at Paris, with Froude, Kingsley, and Liddon, in England, and
tried to show how entirely self-made some of their difficulties were.
At present I have only to explain how it was that I had never to
extricate myself from a net in which so many honest thinkers find
themselves entangled without any fault of their own; as Samson, when
he awoke, found himself bound with seven green withs and had to break
them with all his might before he could hope to escape from the
Philistines. The Philistines never bound me. During my early
school-days these difficulties did not exist, but I have often been
grateful in after life that the seven locks of my head have never been
woven with the web.

I remember a number of small events in my school-life at Dessau, but
though they were full of interest to me, nay, full of meaning, and not
without an influence on my later life, they would have no meaning and
no interest for others,