HELL AXD TEE DIVIDE VERACITY. 



499 



phemous to suppose that God could be incarnate 

 at all ; 1 whereas Hesiod saw nothing amiss in 

 saying that the heavenly Muses are skilled to tell 

 many lies. 2 But it is not only in pagan authors 

 that such representations as this last are to be 

 found. The Bible, we have shown, speaks of 

 God as deceiving. In another place God de- 

 clares himself to be fallible, and even provides 

 against the contingency of his having been mis- 

 informed. 3 Either this divine statement is true, 

 or it is not. If it is, cadit qucestio : if it is not, 

 the speaker is convicted of misrepresentation in 

 this case, and capable of it in others. Of course 

 it may be contended that God is infallible in 

 himself, but that, when speaking down to our 

 faculties, he has to depict himself as fallible. 

 I do not mean to contest this explanation ; for, 

 in conceding that God as revealed to us is fallible, 

 it concedes all that ray argument requires. 



A different class of objectors may urge that 

 God did not declare himself to be fallible, but 

 was misrepresented by the author of Genesis. 

 This solution, however, only throws the difficulty 

 further back ; for the founders of Christianity 

 asserted, or rather assumed, the divine authority 

 of the Pentateuch ; 4 so that, if the author of 

 Genesis was mistaken, they were mistaken also. 

 And this brings us to a remark about verbal in- 

 spiration. St. Paul believed in the verbal inspi- 

 ration of the Old Testament. 5 Nor can there be 

 any reasonable doubt that Jesus held the same 

 view. Also, he promised his disciples that his 

 teaching should be supernaturally brought to 

 their remembrance ; and that, when taken before 

 judges, they should be verbally inspired. 8 These 

 and similar passages serve to explain the desper- 

 ate efforts that were made to defend verbal in- 

 spiration. In a work whose perfect accuracy is 

 divinely guaranteed, even a minute error in fact 

 involves a grave error in doctrine ; for it proves 

 that inspiration did not know its own limits. 

 Extremes in theology sometimes meet ; and I am 

 glad to find that the views here enunciated may 



1 6/u.oi'tot aaef&ovaiv oi yev iuffat. <f>d(TKOi'Tes tous fleoii? 

 TOis airoBavciv Kiyovtrcv* 



2 ISfiev xj/evSea. jro\Aa Ae-yeiK. 



3 Genesis xviii. 21. In 1 Kines xxii. 20-22, God is 

 represented as at a loss for an expedient and as seek- 

 ing counsel— in the art of deception. 



4 See Mark xii. 26. It is clear that the general state 

 of opinion — the suppressed major premise, as we may 

 call it — which is involved in the assumption that the 

 divine words spoken in the hurning hush were genu- 

 ine, will cover the assumption that the Divine words 

 confessing fallibility were genuine. 



5 Galatians iii. 16. 

 * Mark xiii. 11. 



be confirmed by a quotation from Pr. Words- 

 worth. After rightly premising that the promise 

 of verbal inspiration must be regarded as extend- 

 ing to St. Stephen, he goes on to comment on 

 allegations that the proto-martyr's speech con- 

 tains errors : " The allegations in question, when 

 reduced to their plain meaning, involve the as- 

 sumption that the Holy Ghost speaking by St. 

 Stephen (who was ' full of the Holy Spirit ') forgot 

 what he himself had written in the book of Gen- 

 esis, and that his memory is to be refreshed by 

 biblical commentators of the nineteenth century." 

 This trenchant logic may be fitly coupled with 

 Cowper's sneer at geologists, who 



" . . . . drill and hore 

 The solid earth, and from the strata there 

 Extract a register, by which we learn 

 That He who made it, and revealed its date 

 To Moses, was mistaken in its age 1 " 



One has only to confront Dr. Wordsworth's logic 

 with Alford's correct statment that St. Stephen's 

 speech contains "at least two demonstrable his- 

 torical inaccuracies;" and to confront Cowper's 

 sneer with the first principles of modern geology ; 

 and one perceives what an edged tool every such 

 reductio ad anti-Christianum is. But what con- 

 cerns us is, to note that, as we have said, rational 

 Christians nowadays admit that the Scriptures 

 contain mistakes. Whence it follows that the 

 founders, who believed that the Scriptures (or 

 large portions of them) were free from mistakes, 

 were in that very belief themselves mistaken. 



Moreover, the fallibility of Christ may be dis- 

 tinctly inferred from the Gospels. He is repre- 

 sented " as growing " (and therefore as at one 

 time deficient) " in wisdom." He sought theo- 

 logical instruction from the Jewish doctors. Un- 

 less this instruction was a mere farce, he was, 

 then, if not fallible, at least inferior in knowledge 

 to his fallible teachers. Also, in mature man- 

 hood, he knew not the day or the hour of his 

 coming. 1 Hence his knowledge on some subjects 



1 Mark xiii. 32. This and similar passages are 

 explained away by some Catholics. Thus the pope 

 (quoted by Mr. Gladstone) has pronounced that 

 Christ's increase in wisdom was "only apparent;" 

 whereunto a Neochristian might respond that future 

 punishment will be "only apparent." So, again, the 

 Dublin Review (September, 1865) says that " the Church 

 imperatively requires her children to understand Mark 

 xiii. 32 in some very unobvious sense." If the Church 

 may take this liberty with plain texts in the New 

 Testament, the Scribes and Pharisees (who sat in 

 Moses's seat) must have had a like authority over 

 plain texts in the Old Testament. Why, then, were 

 the Jews blamed for giving a " very unobvious sense" 

 to the fifth commandment (Mark vii. 9-13) ? 



