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favour a conclusion to which we are led by so many independent lines of inquiry. It is sometimes said that all such objections are very stale, and have been refuted over and over again. They exhibit, however, a strange vitality, if they rest upon nothing but perversity and error. They have, in fact, never been satisfactorily set aside; and yet we may believe that the Church gave the correct solution of the problem which was submitted to it in ancient times. It was assumed that the divine and the infallible were one; and the alternative presented to the Christian mind was the acceptance of every part of the Bible as alike the Word of God, or yielding to the attacks of unbelievers and renouncing the faith. But this alternative no longer exists. We have learnt that the Spirit of God works through imperfect instruments, and that the highest spiritual exaltation, though it may afford visions and revelations of the Lord, and enable a man to utter truths which he has seen and known, is no guarantee against intellectual error or defective knowledge of fact; and hence it is possible now for a man to remain a Christian, and yield himself to the religious power of his faith, and yet acknowledge that

the Word has been made flesh, and the human has never been absorbed in the divine.1

Another order of criticism-that which is moral and spiritual has also been applied to the Bible. As we have seen, we have the authority of Christ himself for saying that the morality of the Old Testament is not

1 The foregoing remarks are only confirmed by Mr. Sayce's interesting work on The "Higher Criticism" and the Verdict of the Monuments. Having been invited to curse the higher criticism, he has blessed it-[I observe that this allusion to Balak has been used by Mr. T. Tyler in his review in the Academy; but as my words were written before I saw that review, I allow them to stand-by accepting its large conclusions and method. No man can read that book attentively, and retain the old view of the Bible. There is a "flat contradiction" in the account of the Exodus (p. 257). A statement in Joshua is "inconsistent" with a statement in Judges (p. 309 sq.). "The chronology of the Second Book of Kings is more than forty years in excess" (p. 319). There are "unimportant errors of detail" in the Biblical narrative, "as in all other historical documents" (p. 395). "The Biblical chronology must be rejected" in the Book of Kings (p. 406 sq.). "The Biblical writer has made a mistake" in calling Seve "king of Egypt" (p. 418). "The story of Esther is an example of Jewish Haggadah" (p. 475). The Book of Daniel is not historical (p. 531 sqq.).These are examples of statements scattered through the book, and it is surely a very significant event that such a work has been published by the "Society for promoting Christian Knowledge." No more damaging blow has been dealt in recent times at the old view of the Bible.

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the same as that of the New. To the instances adduced in the last Lecture, let us only add, by way of example, the words, "Happy shall be he that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the rock,"1 or the fearful curses of the 109th Psalm, and try to imagine them issuing from the mouth of Christ; and do we not feel an incongruity which proves the presence of a spirit far different from his ?2 Again, there is a religious development in the Bible, from

1 Ps. cxxxvii. 9.

2 Professor Sanday says, in reference to the Psalter: "It must be admitted that sometimes we are conscious, not only of human limitations, but of the violence of human passion."-Inspiration, the Bampton Lectures for 1893, p. 197. His whole work shows what a profound change is taking place in the views of the most cautious inquirers, who are anxious to conserve all that is of permanent religious value in the older forms of thought. See, for instance, the statement: "There are no doubt well-marked grades of inspiration in the Canon; and there are some books which have their place quite upon the outskirts of it, and one or two in which inspiration is hardly perceptible at all" (p. 208). What a contrast does this present to the manifesto quoted near the beginning of the Lecture!

Mr. Gore quotes from the Fathers some interesting passages in which the moral imperfection of the Old Testament is clearly recognized, and explained through the necessity of adapting moral education to the age and capacity of the persons to be educated. (Lux Mundi, essay on the Holy Spirit and Inspiration, p. 329 sqq., 1st ed.)

the simplicity and anthropomorphism of patriarchal faith to the soaring flight and pure spirituality of the Pauline Epistles; and it is one of the inestimable services of modern criticism that it has filled the ancient Scriptures once again with human interest, and shown us how the revelation of God has grown from more to more, while the primeval thought of communion between God and man has slowly unfolded its contents, and adapted itself to successive conditions of the world. Further, the study of comparative religion has given us a fuller knowledge of the religious history of mankind, and has co-ordinated with extrabiblical events much that used to seem quite exceptional. We are at last beginning to believe the old Christian saying that God has never left himself without a witness, and that in every nation he that feareth him and worketh righteousness is accepted of him. It is not that Christianity is sinking down into the common mire of a profane humanity, but that everywhere the heavenly idea has been present, however the falsity and meanness of earth may have failed to comprehend it, and has striven to lead men on towards the divine humanity of Christ. Those who consider these things, and see them in their natural bearing,

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may indeed place the Bible at the head of religious literature, and give it a unique position in history, and in their own grateful reverence; but they can no longer place it in a class entirely apart, and endow it with a miraculous infallibility.

Such, then, are the reasons which, in so many minds, have shattered the old doctrine of the Bible. To those who are not familiar with the process it naturally appears destructive and alarming, and we cannot be surprised that there is much uneasy questioning and much ineffectual protest. The ground on which men thought they stood has vanished beneath their feet, and the value of the Bible as a mere external authority is gone; for we can no longer assume that a statement is true simply because it is between the covers of the venerable book. Let us not shrink from seeing clearly this inevitable conclusion. The instinct is correct which says, that if a single error be admitted, the whole edifice must crumble into ruins; for if there be an error here, there may be an error there, and the basis of belief must be shifted from the Bible to some other ground of judgment.1

1 If I may venture to say so, I think this result is hardly recognized with sufficient clearness in Professor Sanday's admirable