serve, the grounds of objection are purely aesthetical, except in
the single argument from the authority of the Eastern Church. What does
he mean by 'unlearned,' or wanting 'majesty,' or containing 'strange
things'? Were ever such vague puerilities collected into one short
paragraph? This is pure impertinence, and _Phil_. deserves to be
privately reprimanded for quoting such windy chaff without noting and
protesting it as colloquial. But what I wish the reader to mark--the
[Greek: tho hepimhythion]--is, that suppose the two Scaligers amongst
the Christian Fathers engaged in fixing the canon: greater learning you
cannot have; neither was there, to a dead certainty, one tenth part as
much amongst the canon-settlers. Yet all this marvellous learning fumes
away in boyish impertinence. It confounds itself. And every Christian
says, Oh, take away this superfluous weight of erudition, that, being so
rare a thing, cannot be wanted in the broad highways of religion. What
we _do_ want is humility, docility, reverence for God, and love for man.
These are sown broadcast amongst human hearts. Now, these apply
themselves to the _sense_ of Scripture, not to its grammatical niceties.
But if so, even that case shows indirectly how little could depend upon
the mere verbal attire of the Bible, when the chief masters of verbal
science were so ready to go astray--riding on the billows so imperfectly
moored. In the _ideas_ of Scripture lies its eternal anchorage, not in
its perishable words, which are shifting for ever like quicksands, as
the Bible passes by translation successively into every spoken language
of the earth.

What then?--'What then?' retorts the angry reader after all this, 'why
then, perhaps, there may be a screw loose in the Bible.' True, there
may, and what is more, some very great scholars take upon them to assert
that there is. Yet, still, what then? The two possible errors open to
the Fathers of our canon, to the men upon whom rested the weighty task
of saying to all mankind what should be Bible, and what should be _not_
Bible, of making and limiting that mighty world, are--that they may
have done that which they ought _not_ to have done, and, secondly, left
undone that which they ought to have done. They may have admitted
writers whom they ought to have excluded; and they may have excluded
writers whom they ought to have admitted. This is the extent of their
possible offences, and they are supposed by some critics to hav