Is any one so uncharitable as to believe that all these Christian students have combined in a conspiracy of scepticism? or can we fail to see that the number and eminence of the names show the enormous weight of the evidence which has compelled them, in the interests of truth and honesty, to abandon views which the revealing light of God has shown to be no longer tenable? Is this consensus of scholars-approved as it is by almost every eminent theologian in our English, Scotch, and American Universities to be waved aside, as a matter of no moment, by any worshipper of humanly-invented dogma, however incompetent and however ignorant?

'Upon the very threshold,' says Mr. Gladstone in his 'Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture,' 'I embrace, in what I think a substantial sense, one of the great canons of modern criticism, that the Scriptures are to be treated like any other book in the trial of their title.'

welcher noch an der Irrtumslosigkeit der h. Schrift festhält, das ist Herr Prof. D. Nösgen.' Rohnert, p. 2. He examines and tabulates the opinions of such men as Professors Von Hofmann, Luthardt, Frank, Zahn, Dieckhoff, Kübel, Zöckler, Grau, Cremer, Volck, Schmidt, and shows their general accordance in the conviction that complete infallibility is not an attribute of Scripture. To these may be added hosts of other names even more distinguished.

CHAPTER III

THE BIBLE COMBINES IMMENSE VARIETY WITH

ESSENTIAL UNITY.

Heb. i. 1 : πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως.

Ps. xlv. 9: 'In vestitu deaurato, circumdata varietate.'

ἡ πολυποίκιλος σοφία του Θεου. -Eph. iii. 10.

'Slowly the Bible of the race is writ,

And not on paper leaves nor leaves of stone,

Each age, each kindred adds a verse to it,

Texts of despair or hope, or joy or moan;

While swings the sea, while mists the mountains shroud,
While thunder's surges burst on cliffs of cloud,

Still at the Prophets' feet the nations sit.'-Lowell.

FROM what we have already seen, it follows abundantly that the contents of the Bible are not all of the same value; not all of the same importance.

In one sense this is a truism; but when it is our object to clear away clouds of false hypothesis and erring tradition it is necessary to recall attention to the most obvious facts. And obvious as this truth is, the neglect of it has deluged with calamities both the Church and the world.

Let it not be overlooked that the view is not only sanctioned but expressly laid down by both our Lord and the

Apostles. Moses had permitted divorce. It might therefore have been argued, and was argued, that divorce was permissible under Divine sanction. Such was not our Lord's decision on that question. He treated the Mosaic concession as unprimitive and in itself undesirable. 'Moses for the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives, but in the beginning it was not so.' St. Paul, and St. Peter, and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, had thoroughly grasped the force of that lesson. The vision of St. Peter on the roof at Joppa emphasised in his mind the parable about what goeth into a man and what cometh out of him, in which Christ had reversed the law of Moses and made all meats clean. St. Peter and St. Paul did not hesitate to speak of the Levitical ordinances as 'a yoke that neither we nor our fathers were able to bear;' as 'the curse of the law;' as 'dead works;' as 'weak and beggarly rudiments.'1 The writer to the Hebrews gradually carried on his convincing argument till at its climax he ventures openly to treat the law as the mere scaffoldage of religion, and to declare that its institutions had now become inherently weak and profitless; that they were in fact mere 'carnal ordinances.' 3

The preciousness of the Bible as a revelation of God through the minds of men is indefinitely increased by

1 Acts xv. 10; Gal. iii. 13, iv. 3, 9; Heb. vi. 1.

2 Heb. vii. 18. 'The way in which the New Testament writers use the Old Testament shows the complexity of the whole subject. Reverence and appeal to authority are everywhere manifest, but also a measure of freedom for which we are hardly prepared, and an evident desire to dwell on the substantial meaning rather than the form of the record, the spirit rather than the letter of the Word.’— Prof. Davison.

3 For similar views in the Prophets see Jer. iii. 16, vii. 21, 22, xxxi. 31–33; Is. i. 11–17, &c.

these differences of standpoint. For truth is many-sided, and the total effect of Scriptural teaching is enhanced by its exquisite variety. The Bible is not, like the Qur'an, or the Zend-Avesta, or the Analects of Confucius, the work of a single intellect. It speaks to us in various languages, it speaks to us in many voices. It furnishes us with the wisdom and experience of widely different ages; it springs from the deep heart of humanity under the most opposite conditions of patriarchal simplicity or complex civilisation. The stream of revelation is swollen by multitudes of rills from different fountain-heads, in mountain ranges separated from each other as far as the east is from the west. God, as we are told in the singularly pregnant introduction to the Epistle to the Hebrews, spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets 'fragmentarily and multifariously,' 'in many parts and many manners.' The wisdom enshrined in Scripture is, as St. Paul said to the Ephesians, a wisdom 'richly variegated.' For this reason the old writers delighted to compare the Church to 'the King's daughter' of the Psalmist who is 'all glorious within,' and who is 'brought unto the King in raiment of needlework, wrought about with divers colours'— circumamicta varietatibus:—

God's Spouse knows what will please her Lover best,
And in a various-coloured Robe is drest.1

This variety of Scripture is one reason why it is of all books the most universal. Why is it that it has proved to be equally dear to men of all nations, of all times, of all conditions? Why does it come home alike to the profoundest philosopher and to the little negro child? Why is it to be found in the wigwam of the sub-Arctic Indian

1 Bishop Ken.

and in the cabinet of emperors; in the knapsack of the rough soldier and on the bed of the dying maiden? Because its deepest truths came from stirrings of the Spirit in the common heart of mankind which is the same essentially amid all differences and under all disguises.

What other book or literature furnishes us with so many points of insight into the working of men's minds? Now a single Eastern emir is called out of an idolatrous world to preserve the knowledge of the one true God; now a great lawgiver delivers his moral code to a perverse multitude of slaves and fugitives from a granite crag in the wilderness; now seers and kings address a nation in the zenith of its prosperity or on the eve of its desolation; now priests or courtiers console its melancholy exile or inspirit its feeble resuscitation; now a little band of 'unlearned and ignorant men' record the life of its Divine yet rejected Messiah; now a converted Pharisee preaches that new Gospel with intense fire and wisdom; now a Galilean fisherman utters words of the deepest spirituality and clothes in mystic gorgeousness his heart-thrilling Apocalypse. Peoples and languages-Egypt, Palestine, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, Rome-contribute their quotas to its wisdom.

As the three greatest nations of antiquity uttered their involuntary testimony to Christ in the title on His cross, so did they add the best results of their history, their language, and their organisation to the totality of His power. It is true in a deeper sense than Philo grasped that 'the servant of the Law is necessarily the best citizen of the World.'

Nor have we even now exhausted the diversity of the elements of which this revelation is composed. On one page we are reading the passionate pleadings of an afflicted