THE RELATION OF SEMITICS TO RELIGION 79 



mon, in reply to Porphyry, says, " the divinity comprehends every- 

 thing in us, but exterminates entirely our own proper consciousness. 

 The divine possession also emits words which are not understood by 

 those that utter them." And Philo says, God plays upon the soul of 

 the prophet just as the musician plays upon the flute. He uses the 

 lips of the prophet without any cooperation on the part of the prophet. 

 As the flute was not conscious of the music it produced, so the prophet 

 was not conscious of his message. This pagan doctrine was widely 

 adopted in the early Christian church and has come down to modern 

 times. Hengstenberg advocates it strongly in his Christology of the 

 Old Testament, differing from Philo only in making the prophet 

 aware of what he was saying. In one form, or another, this super- 

 naturalistic theory has found and finds many advocates. Among 

 English writers, it has been stated in its extreme form by Lea, who, 

 in his work on Inspiration, declares that the sacred authors were 

 but the "instruments" used by God in the communication of his 

 word; that they occupied the same relation to God as the pen does 

 to the hand of the writer. It is implied also in the teaching of theo- 

 logians nearer home, who would account for all defects and errors in 

 the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments by the absurd theory 

 of an "infallible original." 



The study of the works of Mohammedan philosophers and theo- 

 logians shows how Mohammedanism, starting out from the same 

 point, by accepting the revelations of Mohammed as divine, developed 

 a doctrine of sacred scripture that equals the extremest views of 

 Christianity. The Shafi'ites with their doctrine of tradition outran 

 the thought of the Princetonites, and that almost one thousand 

 years in advance of them. Over against those who have insisted 

 upon the literal meaning of the word, are others, like the Shi'ists, 

 who look for a higher spiritual meaning in the verbal form, similar to 

 the Schoolmen who taught the multiplex intelligentia, which they 

 borrowed in turn from the Talmudists and Kabbalists. Then again 

 we have the Mutazilites, who held that the Quran was the work of 

 Mohammed, but was produced under divine influence, that it had, 

 therefore, a human as well as a divine side. Those things in it which 

 were not conformable to the truth, as they conceived it, could be 

 ignored. In the same way modern theologians refer the irreconcilable 

 views or teaching of the Bible, for example, the unfulfilled and unful- 

 fillable predictions of the prophets, to their human origin. The facts, 

 they say, which point to a human origin of the prophetic teaching, 

 " are no less striking than those which point to a divine origin." (They 

 should say they are much more striking.) This is the admission of 

 the Mutazilite professors in our present orthodox theological semin- 

 aries. There were those who held that the Quran was uncreated, and 

 those who held that it was created ; those who, like Ahmad ibn 



