its functions when it opens the New
Testament. It cannot make itself the slave of men, not even though the
men are Peter and Paul and John; no, not even though it were the Son of
Man Himself. It resents dictation, not wilfully nor wantonly, but
because it must; and it resents it all the more when it claims to be
inspired. If, therefore, the Atonement can only be received by those
who are prepared from the threshold to acknowledge the inspiration and
the consequent authority of Scripture, it can never be received by
modern men at all.

This line of remark is familiar inside the Church as well as outside.
Often it is expressed in the demand for a historical as opposed to a
dogmatic interpretation of the New Testament, a historical
interpretation being one to which we can sit freely, because the result
to which it leads us is the mind of a time which we have survived and
presumably transcended; a dogmatic interpretation, on the other hand,
being one which claims to reach an abiding truth, and therefore to have
a present authority. A more popular and inconsistent expression of the
same mood may be found among those who say petulant things about the
rabbinising of Paul, but profess the utmost devotion to the words of
Jesus. Even in a day of overdone distinctions, one might point out
that interpretations are not properly to be classified as historical or
dogmatic, but as true or false. If they are false, it does not matter
whether they are called dogmatic or historical; and if they are true,
they may quite well be both. But this by the way. For my own part, I
prefer the objection in its most radical form, and indeed find nothing
in it to which any Christian, however sincere or profound his reverence
for the Bible, should hesitate to assent. Once the mind has come to
know itself, there can be no such thing for it as blank authority. It
cannot believe things--the things by which it has to live--simply on
the word of Paul or John. It is not irreverent, it is simply the
recognition of a fact, if we add that it can just as little believe
them simply on the word of Jesus.[1] This is not the sin of the mind,
but the nature and essence of mind, the being which it owes to God. If
we are to speak of authority at all in this connection, the authority
must be conceived as belonging not to the speaker but to that which he
says, not to the witness but to the truth. Truth, in short, is the
only thing which has authority for th