illustrations and figurative language, and making use of the history,
chronology, and other sciences of the age, as vehicles or helps. This
principle will explain those seeming contradictions [to science] which
result from the use of popular language, as when the sun and moon are
said to stand still, or when the sun is said to go from one end of the
heaven to the other, etc. It will also account for many actual errors in
science, chronology, and history, should such be found to exist. The
Scriptures were not intended to teach men these things, but to reveal
what relates to our connection with moral law, and the spiritual world,
and our salvation. In teaching these things, the writers availed
themselves of the _popular_ language, and the current science and
literature of the age in which they lived. As in the present day a man
may be well instructed in Christian doctrine, and have the unction from
the Holy One, while ignorant of the teachings of modern science, so
likewise it was possible to those who first received religious truth and
were commissioned to declare it. The presence of the Holy Spirit no more
preserved men from errors in science in the one case than in the other.
One may as well seek to study surveying in a biography of Washington, as
the details of geology or chronology in Genesis.

'The proper test to apply to the Gospels is, whether each gives us a
picture of the life and ministry of Jesus that is self-consistent and
consistent with the others; such as would be suitable to the use of
believers.

'Many of the apparent contradictions of the Bible may be explained by
the mistakes of transcribers, or in some other way equally natural; but,
as the Bishop of London has well remarked, 'When laborious ingenuity has
exerted itself to collect a whole store of such difficulties, supposing
them to be real, what on earth does it signify? They may be left quietly
to float away without our being able to solve them, if we bear in mind
the acknowledged fact, that there is a human element in the Bible.'

'What if many of the numbers given in Exodus should, as Bishop Colenso
asserts, be inaccurate? What is to be gained by assertions or denials
relative to matters which have for ever passed out of the reach of our
verification? And what if, here and there, a law should seem to us
strange and unaccountable; an event difficult to comprehend; a statement
to involve an apparent contradiction? What has all this to do with th