MODES OF INSPIRATION.

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intimations as to the quality and authority of the Biblical writings as the oracles of God which, if words have meaning, put those writings--as to their total character-on a level different in kind from all other literature. I find nothing to forbid me to ask, with deep reverence, whether human personality and natural process were not factors to the product; and I assuredly find that they were. But I find it emphasized with vastly greater earnestness and fulness that so did the other factor of ultimate divine Authorship govern and manipulate the lower factor that the true Designer and Architect of the Book has had His way all along, in the total and in the details too.

I find nothing to enable me to define, in any full or exhaustive way most certainly, the mode of the supreme Author's management of the subordinate authors. I find nothing to tell me "what it felt like to be inspired." In many and many a case, I can well believe, it "felt like "-nothing; nothing distinguishable from other things. I can well believe that when St Paul wrote to Philemon he "felt" nothing supernatural, any more than when Luther wrote

to Melanchthon, or Newton to Cowper. I do not say that it was so; but it may have been so, for all that we are told. On the other hand I not only can believe, but am sure, that Daniel and St John received their revelations in a state manifestly and entirely abnormal, as Abraham and Moses on certain occasions had done before them; unless we are to put quietly aside the profoundly solemn assertions to this effect made in Scripture as if they were so much poetical and imaginative excrescence, or framework, because there is so little in human experience outside Scripture, outside this Record of the divine Redemption of fallen man, to verify them. Yes, it is impossible to define or describe Scriptural inspiration as a subjective experience. The mode, as to any general account of it, is unknown. "Our theory is not to have a theory." But I do find abundant testimony on the historic surface of the New Testament Scriptures for the strong and unalterable conviction, sure as the historical reality of Jesus Christ our Lord, that a humanitarian, naturalistic view of Scripture is wholly and gravely inadequate to meet the mysterious facts.

TESTIMONY OF CHRIST.

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I find our Lord and Master Himself handling the Old Testament Scriptures with the manner of One who not only owns their general significance but personally cherishes, I dare to say reveres, their authority, even in details of expression; and I find Him doing this not only in the early stages of His course but even more in the latter, in the last. And I see Him doing it nowhere more fully and unreservedly than when He has overcome death, and Luke xxiv. come back from the Unseen in the power of endless life. And when, exalted into heaven, He "sends" the blessed Paraclete, His own promised Representative, the Spirit of Truth, I find that one main result of the glorious emission was the incessant use by the Apostles of the writings of the Prophets, in precisely the spirit, no less and no more, of their Master before them.

And I observe one remarkable phenomenon of the whole case. I find that the Lord and the Apostles make comparatively little, if I may reverently say so, of the sacred writers of the Old Testament and comparatively everything of the sacred writings. They dwell not

so much on who said it as on what is written. No grades of authority appear in their estimate. What stands within the scrolls of what we familiarly call the Old Testament, and what He called the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms, is in the eyes of Jesus Christ His Father's Word, whatever else it is. As such it is His weapon in the Temptation, His credential on the Mount of the Sermon, His mysterious solace in the Garden, His death-word on the Cross, His theme upon the Emmaus Road on the Easter afternoon and in the Upper Chamber where He stood that evening in His immortality. Oh blessed road and blessed chamber! Let us often take our Bibles out with us on the one, up with us to the other. We shall be the less likely then to think that to "look on the Bible as on another book is to look upon it "wisely," even from the point of view of the strictest induction of truth from facts.

But now all this mysterious Divinity of the Bible, this properly miraculous character of it, this nature of it so entirely refusing to be accounted for by natural process and human

THE SPIRIT IS THE TRUE AUTHOR. 57

consciousness, is assigned by itself not to God in general only, but to the HOLY SPIRIT in particular. This is our immediate concern in this enquiry. The statement of the fact is almost all the treatment I give to it; but what a fact it is to state!

He who was the divine Agent in the blessed Incarnation, He who made and sustained the Manhood of the Second Adam, adjusting it with infinite skill to the blessed Filial Godhead, it is He who was the divine Agent in this glorious parallel process, the construction of Scripture. He, the all-blessed Spirit, in that double union of His with Christ of which we spoke above, so managed the long antecedent march of prophecy, both its substance and its phraseology, that Moses, whatever was the Prophet's consciousness in writing, wrote John v. 46, 47. of Christ, and " David in the Spirit" Matt. xxii. 43. called Him his Master, and Isaiah John xii. 39-41. saw His glory and spake of Him; yes, so that the risen Redeemer Himself found "in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself." So did He design, mani- Luke xxiv. 27. pulate, and accomplish, that "every Scripture