116 VEN. ARCHDEACON WILLIAM SINCLAIR, ON 



its favour. Of the two instances quoted by the last speaker, one is 

 irrelevant and the other is rather adverse to the doctrine. He 

 urged, in favour of it, the stress to be laid on the present tense in 

 the declaration " I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," but 

 I believe that the original Hebrew has no verb at all, neither " am " 

 nor "was." With regard to the quotation from Galatians iii, 16, 

 " He saith not, and to seeds, as of many," as indicating the inspiration 

 of a single letter, it is observable that, though St. Paul, in that 

 passage, bases his argument on the singular " seed," as referring to 

 one, Christ, yet in Eomans iv, 16, 18, and ix, 7, 8, he most distinctly 

 treats the singular " seed " as referring to a multitude, and the 

 singular unquestionably does so in Genesis xiii, 16, which is the 

 original passage. His remark in Galatians iii, 16, can scarcely, 

 therefore, be called an inspired argument or proof. It was merely 

 an illustration or analogy such as is acceptable to the Eastern mind, 

 but does not harmonize with Western modes of thought. 



Mr. Howard said the difficulty which had arisen was due to the 

 absence of a definition of "verbal inspiration." The fact is, human 

 words are inadequate to express even human thought and infinitely 

 more Divine thought, and these discussions on minutise of language 

 are not profitable. The minds of the East and the West though 

 meaning the same things will probably express them quite 

 differently. 



Lieut.-Colonel Alves thought that none of the Higher Critics,, 

 indeed no Englishman, and probably very few Jews, possessed ih&i 

 mastery of Hebrew necessary for a literary critic. Such a critic 

 needed not only a knowledge of words and grammar rules, but also 

 of the idiom and genius of the Hebrew mind and language. 



Mr. Martin L. Rouse disputed the claim of the Higher Critics 

 that the Book of Deuteronomy resulted from the labours of the 

 Prophets Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah, by showing that a 

 passage from this Book was quoted a whole generation before the 

 earliest of these prophets, see ii Chronicles xxv, 4. 



The Chairman said : We have wandered in our discussion too 

 much into details, and I wish to revert to the broad arguments of 

 the paper. But in passing I would say that the real transgressors 

 in the direction of verbal inspiration are the Higher Critics them- 

 selves, who build up their arguments on the verbal accuracy of the 

 Massoretic text. This recoils on the critics themselves, for these 



