any more than of disclosing faint, partial, and fallible words of God. The material universe is incapable of doing any more than to give, in many varying colours, faint reflections of the light of the spiritual world.

It may be asked, "May not a revelation in nature, though incomplete, be inerrant as far as it goes?" To this it may be replied, yes, if it go only so far in its incompleteness as to issue forth from God Himself. But if it go so far as to enter into the realm of external nature and mingle with the physical it will go so far as to lose its inerrancy. The inerrant word of God in nature can be determined only by eliminating the essential word from all the colouring and all the formal inexactness and deflection from the normal, which its environment in nature involves.

2. The revelation of God through the patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament was sometimes accompanied by theophanies. In theophanies God manifests Himself to the human senses of sight, hearing, and occasionally of touch, by assuming some form discernible by the senses. Usually God appears in some form of light or fire, sometimes as an angel or man, sometimes in a voice and sound. These forms are not the real form of God; they are forms which He condescends to assume for a purpose. They do not any of them give an inerrant representation of the invisible God. The law forbids Israel to represent God under any external form whatever.1 Those who worship Him, worship Him in spirit and in fidelity. God does not give an inerrant representation of Himself in the forms of time and space within the material universe. And yet these manifestations are the stepping-stones of Biblical History. The theophanies of the Old Testament lead on to the Christophanies of the New Testament.2 They are indeed the fundamental realities upon which all the divine revelation in word depend.

3. If God does not reveal Himself inerrantly in the great works of nature, or in theophanies, why should we suppose that He makes an inerrant revelation when He makes a communication through the human spirit? It is quite true that 2 See p. 542.

1 Deut. 415-19.

we are now rising from the material into the spiritual world. Man is akin with deity by the inheritance of the reason and all the wondrous faculties associated therewith. God may, therefore, reveal Himself as Spirit to the spirit of men, far more freely, fully, and clearly than in the forms of the material universe. And yet we have to consider the immense distance between the condescending God and the most exalted human spirit. If the human spirit is capable of receiving an inerrant word, we may believe that God would communicate it. But is the human spirit capable? We know in our experience in communicating one with another how extremely difficult it is to transmit an inerrant message. The utmost pains have to be taken. We cannot trust the mind; we must make a record that cannot change. We know that it is impracticable to teach the truth inerrantly to the ignorant and the unprepared, even so far as we may have it. The instruction must be adapted by the teacher to the pupil. The same truth must be taught differently in an infant class, from the pulpit, through the daily press, in the college class-room, in a scientific treatise. A different training and different qualifications are necessary in order to do successfully any of these different things. In each one of these the truth is necessarily deprived of some portion of its completeness and truthfulness. It seems to be impossible for a teacher to convey the truth exactly as he sees it, or to avoid so stating it that errors may not spring up on every side. We know in part, we tell what we know in part. We are true so far as we can be; but we cannot be inerrant in our speech or in our writing, even with regard to that measure of truth which we really possess. If this is true in the relation of human spirit with human spirit, how much more may it be true of the Divine Spirit in its relation to the human spirit?

4. Jesus had many things to say to His disciples that they could not bear, that they could not understand.1 The Divine Teacher could not teach them because they were incapable of receiving His teaching. If the apostles were incapable of the teaching of Jesus, who condescended to become a man, to live with them, and to speak to them in their own language, in their

1 John 1612.

own idiom, in their own methods of instruction; if He had to employ parables, which still remain the mysteries of the Gospels, which are capable of numerous erroneous interpretations; if His own wonderful sentences of wisdom are so capable of erroneous application, how much more difficult for the Divine Spirit to communicate to men by internal suggestion divine truth in such inerrant forms that the prophets and apostles could only deliver it in speech and pen in the same inerrant forms in which they received it. You may say that the parables and sentences of Jesus are inerrant, that the fault is in the interpretation. But why were those parables and sentences not given in such words and sentences as would make their meaning clear for all time and avoid erroneous interpretation? The only answer we can give is that Jesus could not give His teaching in inerrant forms; the Holy Spirit could not communicate the inerrant word to men without, in a measure, depriving it of its inerrancy.

Thus the analogy of divine revelation in other forms, and of the communication between men and men, and especially between Jesus and His apostles, make it altogether probable that the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures does not carry with it inerrancy in every particular. It was sufficient if the divine communication was given with such clearness as to guide men aright in a religious life; it was sufficient that they knew assuredly that God could not deceive or mislead them, but would give them true, faithful, reliable guidance in holy things. The errors of Holy Scripture are not errors of falsehood, or of deceit; they are such errors of ignorance, inadvertence, of partial and inadequate knowledge, and of incapacity to express the whole truth of God as belong to man as man, and from which we have no evidence that even an inspired man was relieved. Just as the light is seen, not in its pure, unclouded rays, but in the beautiful colours of the spectrum, as its beams are broken up by the angles and discolorations which obstruct their course, so it is with the truth of God. Its revelation and communication meet with such obstacles in human nature and in this world of ours, that men are capable of receiving it only in divers portions and divers

manners, as it comes to them through the divers temperaments and points of view and styles of the biblical writers. Few men are capable of discerning more than one portion of these colours-the most capable know in part. Not till the day which closes the dispensation dawns will any one know the whole; for not till then will men be capable of seeing the Christ as He is, and of knowing God in His glory.

The major premise of the a priori argument is not an intuition; it lacks sufficient evidence to sustain it. All the evidence that we can gain points the other way. The only thing that we can say is that God's word to man will be as inerrant as possible, considering the human and defective media through which it is communicated. There is an intrinsic improbability that we have a Bible inerrant any further than that religious instruction extends which is necessary for the guidance of God's people in every successive epoch in the development of divine revelation.

III. GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE HEBREW RELIGION

The position we have thus far attained enables us to dispose of the greater difficulties which lie in the way of the truthfulness of Holy Scripture. These are religious, doctrinal, and ethical difficulties.

The religion of the Old Testament is a religion which, with all its excellence as compared with the other religions of the ancient world, inculcates some things which are hard to reconcile with an inerrant revelation. The sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter, and the divine command to Abraham to offer up his son as a whole burnt-offering,2 seem unsuited to a divine religion. There are many who try to explain these difficulties away by arbitrary exegesis and conjectures supplementary to the narratives, but in vain. The narrative in Judges leaves upon our minds the indelible impression that Jephthah did a praiseworthy act when he sacrificed his daughter to God; and there can be no doubt that God commanded the sacrifice of Isaac, even if He subsequently accepted a sub

stitute in an animal victim. There is, indeed, no prohibition of the offering up of children in the earliest codes of the Hexateuch. The prohibition was first made in the Deuteronomic code and originated somewhat late in the history of Israel. The early Hebrews shared with the Canaanites and other neighbouring nations in the practice of offering up their children in the flame to God. From the point of view of sacrifice nothing could be more acceptable than the best-beloved son, except the offerer himself. The higher revelation teaches the offering of the whole body and soul to God in the spiritual sacrifice of an everlasting ministry. But it required centuries of training before that divine lesson could be taught and learned. The Hebrews were taught the principle of sacrifice as they were able to learn it. God accepted the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter. He graciously accepted the ram instead of Isaac, though He stated His rightful claim upon the beloved son. He provided a sacrificial system which gradually grew in wealth of symbolism through the ages of Jewish history; and animal and grain sacrifices were made the normal form of worship.

But the prophets, with great difficulty and increasing opposition from priests and people, gradually taught them that the sacrifices must be of broken and contrite hearts, and of humble, cheerful spirits. But what pleasure can God take in the blood of animals or in smoking altars? How could the true God ever prescribe such puerilities? This is the inquiry of the higher religion of our day. We can only say that God was training Israel to understand the meaning of a higher sacrifice; even the obedience of the Christ in a holy life and a martyr death in the service of God and of humanity, and of the similar sacrifice that every child of God is called upon to make.

The offering up of children and of domestic animals and grains was all a preparatory discipline for the religion of Christ. The training was true and faithful for the time. But it was provisional and temporal, to be displaced by that which is complete and eternal. Did the sacrifice of children express the inerrant will of God for all men? Did the sacrifice of

1 Rom. 121.