ny thorough-going defenders of "plenary inspiration" as there
were timid questioners of that doctrine, half a century ago.
Commentaries, sanctioned by the highest authority, give up the "actual
historical truth" of the cosmogonical and diluvial narratives.
University professors of deservedly high repute accept the critical
decision that the Hexateuch is a compilation, in which the share of
Moses, either as author or as editor, is not quite so clearly
demonstrable as it might be; highly placed Divines tell us that the
pre-Abrahamic Scripture narratives may be ignored; that the book of
Daniel may be regarded as a patriotic romance of the second century
B.C.; that the words of the writer of the fourth Gospel are not always
to be distinguished from those which he puts into the mouth of Jesus.
Conservative, but conscientious, revisers decide that whole passages,
some of dogmatic and some of ethical importance, are interpolations.
An uneasy sense of the weakness of the dogma of Biblical infallibility
seems to be at the bottom of a prevailing tendency once more to
substitute the authority of the "Church" for that of the Bible. In my
old age, it has happened to me to be taken to task for regarding
Christianity as a "religion of a book" as gravely as, in my youth, I
should have been reprehended for doubting that proposition. It is a no
less interesting symptom that the State Church seems more and more
anxious to repudiate all complicity with the principles of the
Protestant Reformation and to call itself "Anglo-Catholic."
Inspiration, deprived of its old intelligible sense, is watered down
into a mystification. The Scriptures are, indeed, inspired; but they
contain a wholly undefined and indefinable "human element"; and this
unfortunate intruder is converted into a sort of biblical whipping
boy. Whatsoever scientific investigation, historical or physical,
proves to be erroneous, the "human element" bears the blame; while the
divine inspiration of such statements, as by their nature are out of
reach of proof or disproof, is still asserted with all the vigour
inspired by conscious safety from attack. Though the proposal to treat
the Bible "like any other book" which caused so much scandal, forty
years ago, may not yet be generally accepted, and though Bishop
Colenso's criticisms may still lie, formally, under ecclesiastical
ban, yet the Church has not wholly turned a deaf ear to the voice of
the scientific tempter; and many a coy d