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True criticism indeed never dissects the Bible as if it were a dead body. It treats each book of the Old Testament, for instance, as 'a fragment of ancient life,' not to be fully comprehended or justly appreciated without a sincere effort to enter into sympathy with the thought and circumstances of the age in which it was written1. Yet criticism after all moves on the plane of human science; it is concerned mainly with the natural and historical side of Holy Scripture; it deals with that which Origen aptly calls 'the flesh of the word.' But the Christian student will ever bear in mind that beneath the outward veil which with the aid of the critic he reverently scrutinizes, there breathes a living Spirit, who directly appeals to conscience, will, and faith. There is the living word of God, the word that quickens and converts, that pierces and heals, that enlightens and guides the spirit of man; the word that claims to be the food of souls, the light of the conscience, the sword of the Spirit, the mirror of humanity, the unchanging witness to the work and office, the authority and glory of the Son of God 2.

II.

Our inquiry then presupposes and takes as its foundation the fact of the divine Incarnation, and so far we have been engaged in considering some of the features which such a fact, supposed to be true, would lead us to anticipate beforehand in the written records of revelation. Students of the history of doctrine will further notice that there has been a tendency in regard to Scripture analogous to that which may be observed in some stages of the evolution of Christology. The human element has occasionally been minimized or altogether forgotten. Men have been tempted, says

1 Cp. Robertson Smith, O. T. in J. C. p. 16.

2 Cp. Heb. iv. 12; Pet. ii. 2; 2 Pet. i. 19; Jas. i. 25; Eph. vi. 17; John v. 39.

Archbishop Magee, to make of the Bible 'not a supernatural book, which it is, but an unnatural book.. They were determined to find the whole Bible as it were in every text of the Bible. . . . They were for ever turning rhetoric into logic, vision into history, poetry into hardest and most literal prose.' They forgot that in the Bible Almighty God 'was using human hearts, human thought, human knowledge, human peculiarities of character, in order that in and through them His word might be conveyed to us'.' Rabbinical methods of scriptural exegesis supply one example of this tendency; the theory of verbal inspiration another. But without further enlarging on the subject I proceed to mention another truth presupposed in these lectures, namely the fact of the inspiration of Scripture 3. What, speaking generally, ought we to understand by this term? To this inquiry some provisional answer at least is necessary at this point. It shall be as brief and clear as the conditions of the subject will allow.

It is to be observed in the first place that the doctrine of inspiration is designed to explain a fact which is quite independent of human theories. It is an attempt to give a rational account of the unique religious influence which has been exercised by the Bible. That influence is not dependent upon a particular doctrine, the form of which may have varied at different periods. The word,' it has been finely said, 'which is like a fire and like the hammer that breaks

1 The Gospel and the Age, p. 321.

2 e. g. the theory expressed in the Formula consensus Helvetica (1674), can. 2: Hebraicus V. T. codex. . . tum quoad consonas, tum quoad vocalia, sive puncta ipsa sive punctorum saltem potestatem, et tum quoad res tum quoad verba θεόπνευστος . ad cuius normam, ceu Lydium lapidem, universae quae extant versiones, sive orientales sive occidentales, exigendae et sicubi deflectunt revocandae sunt.' See the passage in Augusti, Corpus Librorum Symbolicorum, p. 445.

3

Driver, Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament, pref. p. xix: Criticism in the hands of Christian scholars does not banish or destroy the inspiration of the Old Testament; it presupposes it; it seeks only to determine the conditions under which it operates, and the literary forms through which it manifests itself.'

in pieces the rocks, does not need to be accredited by any human theory as to its origin '.'

Next we should bear in mind that inspiration in its primary sense does not properly describe the character of a sacred book, but rather denotes the living action of God on the faculties of men. Revelation takes the form on the one hand of an outward historical movement. It implies an actual movement towards man on the part of a living Being, possessed of perfect freedom to act, to intervene, to manifest Himself on behalf of His good purpose 2. Revelation, in a word, means the historical self-manifestation of God in redemptive action, and it may be remarked in passing that miracle is an antecedently probable element in such action. Divine will and purpose must have at least the same scope in the universe that is open to the mind and energy of man. But parallel to this outward action of God is an internal operation of His power upon human faculties. The outward course of history is accompanied, so to speak, by the Spirit of prophecy, which acts upon the constitution of man in such a fashion as to enlarge his capacity to apprehend and to correspond with the outward self-manifestation of the divine character and mind. The New Testament takes it for granted that there have existed prophets since the world began, men indwelt by the Spirit, organs of revelation who were enabled to apprehend and sympathize with the purpose of God while it was in actual process of historical realization. 'Israel's religious teachers,' says Prof. Schultz 3, are prophets, not philosophers, priests, or poets. Hence the Old Testament religion can be explained only by revelation, that is by the fact that God raised up for this people men whose natural susceptibility to moral and

1

Oettli, Der gegenwärtige Kampf um das A. T. (1896), p. 5.

2 Phil. ii. 13.

3

Theology of the Old Testament, vol. i. p. 54 [Eng. Trans.]. Cp. J. Darmesteter, Les Prophètes d'Israël, p. 220, and Ewald, The prophets of the O.T. [Eng. Tr.], vol. i. pp. 3-8.

religious truth developed by the course of their inner and outer lives, enabled them to understand instinctively the will of the self-communicating, redeeming God regarding men; that is, to possess the religious truth which makes free, not as a result of human wisdom and intellectual labour, but as a power pressing in upon the soul with irresistible might. Only those who frankly acknowledge this can be historically just to the Old Testament.' When in fact we examine the Old Testament religion, and ask ourselves how out of the rude polytheistic nature-worship which was common to the Semitic race, there arose a religion which so evidently contained the secret of a lofty spiritual development, we are practically forced to find the explanation in the fact of inspiration; in the immediate action of the living Spirit of God, arousing at least in the leading figures of the Hebrew race a consciousness of God1. For it is not necessary to assume-indeed the Old Testament itself contradicts the suppositionthat a lofty conception of God was at any time, at least before the exile, a paramount force in the life or thought of the masses of the Hebrew people 2. Certainly however, the unique development of Hebrew religion, and its constant elevation above the level of kindred faiths surrounding it, irresistibly suggest the conclusion that there were from the very earliest dawn of the history, individual men on whom the Holy

1 Observe the importance of the religious genius in revelation. 'It is a defect,' says Pfleiderer (Gifford Lectures, i. 183),' of the present realistic theory of development, that it underestimates or entirely overlooks the significance of personality in history, and endeavours to find the active forces of progress only in the masses. The masses however are never spiritually creative. All new world-moving ideas and ideals have proceeded from individual personalities, and even they have not arbitrarily devised them or found them out by laborious reflection, as men find out scientific doctrines by investigation; but they have received them by that involuntary intuition which is also participated in by the artistic genius, and which everywhere forms the privilege of original genius, to whose eye the essence of things and the destination of men are disclosed... yet... the revelation of the religious genius is the expression of what the best men of their time have divined and longed for, the unveiling of their own better self, the fulfilment of their own highest hopes,' &c.

2 See Riehm, Alttestamentliche Theologie, p. 11.

Spirit of God was directly acting, leaders of religion of the true prophetic type, quick to apprehend the meaning of those successive acts in which Almighty God revealed His own character, His control of history, and His purpose for mankind at large. Inspiration then in the first instance is an idea correlative to that of revelation. It means a divine action on man's faculties, by which his intellect is continually trained to more intelligent apprehension of divine purposes, his conscience to deeper knowledge of moral requirement, his heart to worthier love, his will to more exact response. For He who is the object of knowledge Himself imparts the faculty to know; and it follows that the essence of a revealed religion is absolutely dependent on prophecy. Without it we have only natural religion or philosophy. Indeed the fundamental characteristic of Hebrew religion is the conviction that God is a self-communicating Being, who does not isolate Himself from the world, but by His Spirit awakens in His creatures the capacity to know and execute His will. That a true knowledge of God is possible, that it depends upon His self-imparting grace, that the word of God actually comes to individual men, making them messengers of the divine will to their fellows, that God speaks to them in modes and under conditions of His own choice and appointment, that He admits them to communion and converse with Himself—this is indisputably an axiom of Israel's faith, and indeed of any supernatural religion 2.

Now, believers in inspiration maintain that in regard to the Bible there can be apprehended by the spiritual mind a special action of the Holy Spirit akin to that which manifests itself in the prophets. This action is discernible, partly in the providential formation and preservation of the Scriptures, partly and chiefly in their intrinsic quality and characteristics. Inspiration

1 Schultz, op. cit. i. 237.

2 Ibid. ii. 118. Cp. Sanday, Bampton Lectures, pp. 124-128.