The inference is that all the courage of the captains and of the soldiers with them, and all the cunning excellence of architects and artists, and all the holy scriptures-all the good books-are inspired of God. From the inspiration of the writings of the Old Testament the fathers quietly inferred the inspiration of the writings of the New, and this they extended to include the decisions of the great church councils. Not the Bible only but the living Church was inspired. And if the living Church, who shall deny that as God inspired Amos whom the priest of the king's chapel expelled from Bethel, and as God inspired Paul whom the high priest expelled from Jerusalem, so God may have inspired many another who was subjected, like them, to ecclesiastical condemnation? The boundaries of inspiration widen out indefinitely. They are as elusive as the horizon.

We have not yet arrived at a definition, but it is sufficiently plain that our way does not lie in the direction of the theory of "verbal inspiration."

According to this story the Bible is God's book, and the men whose names are attached to various parts of it were only his secretaries, who wrote at his dictation. The result of this supernatural process is an infallible book. "The Book itself," says a believer in this theory, "knows of but one kind of inspiration, and that is an inspiration which extends to every chapter, verse, word and syllable of the original Scriptures, using the mind and mouth, the heart and hand of the writer, guiding them in the least particular, guarding them against the least blunder, and making their utterances the very

word of God to our souls. . . . The Scripture, and the entire Scripture, claims to be, and is in fact, altogether exempt from errors or mistakes of any sort." The proof or disproof of such a theory lies in the book itself. It is a plain question of fact. The doctrine of the infallibility of the Bible is subject to the same sort of examination as the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope. The assertion that the Scriptures are without error or defect of any kind is like the assertion that there is no defect or error in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The answer is in the pages of the book: is there any misstatement or mistake, or not? The determination of the fact is in the province of competent scholars, but it is also within the ability of everybody who is able to read.

Being restrained by the Bible itself from calling its inspiration verbal or mechanical, other descriptive adjectives are "moral," "dynamical," "vital." The phrase "vital inspiration" expresses the common opinion of our time.

In the lives of some men there are moments of unusual vision and exaltation. Into this experience even ordinary persons enter in times of exceeding emotion, but it is the special privilege of those whose difference from the common run of men is called genius. In such moments they see visions of truth and beauty, and hear voices which bring answers to ancient problems. They are unable to give prose accounts of these experiences. They come out of the silence into the street, and, if they attempt to describe what happened to them, they say that they heard the blowing of a mighty wind, and

saw the flames of mystic fires; or some such thing. St. Paul, to whom this happened many times, confessed that whether he was in the body or out of the body, he could not tell. All that he knew was that he was caught up to the third heaven, and "heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter." That was his way of expressing it. Bezaleel and Aholiab, inspired craftsmen, would no doubt have expressed it differently; so too would Gideon and Jephthah, inspired captains. But in all cases it is essentially the same thing. Men are conscious of an impartation and impulse from without. They are lifted above their ordinary selves. Suddenly, the world about them is illuminated, as by a flash of lightning in the dark, and they know where they are, and what things mean, and where to go, and what to do. They come out, and write a poem, or a sermon, or a chapter of a book, or they build a house or a bridge, or paint a picture, or make a new plan of campaign, or put a new resolution into effect.

For this vital inspiration, as the Bible itself suggests, is not peculiar to religion. Neither is it essentially different in religion from what it is in other fields of life. People used to ask, when this doctrine was debated, how the inspiration of Isaiah differed from the inspiration of Shakespeare or of St. Augustine. There was never any very satisfactory answer. It was like asking how the genius of the one differed from the genius of the others. The "spirit of God," as it says in the Old Testament, was upon them all: also upon Michael Angelo and Raphael, upon Copernicus and

Newton, upon Washington and Lincoln. Each of these men was so uncommonly filled with power, or with wisdom, or with insight, or with the knowledge of the truth, that he perceived, and his neighbors perceived also, that he was moved of God. That seemed the most direct and simple explanation. The divine impulse and the divine guidance did not relieve them from the necessity of work, neither did it insure them against making mistakes; neither did it obliterate their individuality, rather it emphasized it. What it did was so to vitalize them, so to enrich and strengthen their souls, that they were able to do great deeds, and to think great thoughts. These men, whether they wrote books of the Bible, or built churches, or ruled states, or made any other contribution to the progress of the world, were inspired of God.

IV

THE PENTATEUCHAL ALPHABET

W

HOEVER ventures even a little way into the literature of Old Testament interpretation comes upon the letters of a mysterious alphabet: E and J, D, P, H, and R. They indicate the source materials out of which the first five books of the Bible were made.

I

It was noticed long ago that these books contain many duplicates. The same event is described in different places differently.

Sometimes the two accounts are set down side by side, as in the first and second chapters of Genesis. Sometimes there are variations in the course of the same narrative, as in the story of the Flood, where the divine command to Noah calls him to bring "of every living thing of all flesh two of every sort" into the ark (Gen. 6:19), and then in the next paragraph the book says that "the Lord said unto Noah. 'Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens.' Also, it says in one place (Gen. 7:17) that "the flood was forty days upon the earth," and in another place in the same chapter, "the waters prevailed upon the earth one hundred and fifty days."

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