is full of exhibitions of the most marvellous and unflagging ingenuity, in inventing new interpretations of Scripture, to keep pace with the growth of human thought and the progress of knowledge and science."

"Almost every scientific theory that comes into existence is found to conflict in some point or other with the theological notions which an unscientific past has handed down. But the theologians are ever on the alert; and war to the knife is at once declared against the scientific intruder. All friends of the Bible are summoned to the holy war. The conflict rages fiercely and shows no sign of abatement until it is seen that the scientists are getting the day; then, it begins to be discovered by the theologians that, after all, the new theory is harmless! indeed there is no discrepancy between it and Scripture! The discrepancy that had been supposed to exist grew out of a wrong Scripture interpretation. In fact, instead of the two being in conflict, the scientific theory is really taught in the Bible."

4.-Infallible Bibles must be Infallibly preserved.

"Grant even that the Bible was originally infallible, that is to say, grant that the books were written in such a marvellous way as to insure their infallible correctness at the time of their writing; and grant that all the books which have been excluded from the canon of Old Testament and New by us Protestants, are just the ones that ought to be excluded, and that all which have been included are just the ones that ought to be included, and that all which have been lost were spurious, so that the loss does not affect at all the perfectness of the canon-grant all that; yet even now how far have we got toward certainty that this Bible which we hold in our hand to-day is infallible-is infallible as it comes to us? In other words, grant that the stream as it began its course away back yonder in Palestine twentytwo or twenty, or eighteen, or sixteen centuries ago, was infallible in its outset, what assurance have we that now, after wandering and winding down through the dark maze of the ages, it is still infallible? For mark after we have got the writings all infallibly written, and then after we have got them all collected together just as they should be into a canon or infallible collection, we have still got to devise a way to get them down to our time, without error or change."

5.-The Translators must be Infallible.

"To-day translators are very fallible beings. Have the translators of all the ages, who have translated Hebrew into Greek and Latin, and Greek and Latin into English, and Hebrew into English, in connection with the Old and New Testament books, been miraculously preserved from making errors? If so, what mean the many thousands of errors which the great Commission of English scholars, who made for us a new English translation of the Bible, found in the common translation or version of King James?

"The whole number of various readings of the text of the New Testament that have hitherto been noted exceeds a hundred thousand, and may perhaps amount to a hundred and fifty thousand. Some of these variations, it is true, are very slight, and in no way affect the sense. But others again are very marked, and affect the sense most materially. For example, the celebrated text (I. John v. 7, 8) of the three heavenly witnesses, which has been for a thousand years the strongest scripture bulwark of the doctrine of the Trinity, is admitted now on all hands to be an interpolation."

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'So, then, what becomes of our infallible Bible? It has melted away into thin air if there be one single link imperfect in all the two-thousand-years-long chain of preservation and transmission of the original writings down to us."

6.-Miraculous Inspiration no longer Credible.

"The Bible does not claim to be infallible. While in places certain claims of superior inspiration or guidance of God are doubtless put forth, there is not even one single book of the Bible that claims to be infallible."

"The doctrine of the infallibility of the Bible, in the rigid sense in which it is widely held and taught now, was unknown to the early Christian church. Indeed it did not come into existence until the sixteenth century, not having been held even by the earliest and greatest of the Reformers. The Catholic church has never adopted it."

"The doctrine of the New Testament's miraculous inspiration is no longer a doctrine that can be entertained by any person who is at the same time honest, thoughtful, and intelligent.

This is a frank expression; but I am confident it is a saying that will stand. Omit the honesty, the intelligence, or the thoughtfulness, and the saying thus mutilated would not hold good. Taken in its entirety, its force cannot be broken. Show me an intelligent man who entertains this doctrine, and the chances are ten to one that he lacks either thoughtfulness or honesty. Show me a thoughtful man who entertains it, and he must be lacking either in honesty or intelligence. Show me an honest man who entertains it, and either intelligence or thoughtfulness is a missing link in the chain of his individual completeness. For every man of honesty, intelligence, and thoughtfulness knows that the result of criticism is, that of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament the authorship of only four is absolutely certain. But to elevate into the position of a supernatural revelation a book the authorship of six-sevenths of which is extremely doubtful, is manifestly an unwarrantable procedure. We may be tolerably sure of the authorship of another seventh. This is the extremity of critical concession."

7.-Higher Criticism rescues and exalts the Bible.

"Nor could the surrender of the dogma of the infallibility of the Bible hurt the volume, as some fear, as a book of devotional and practical religion. Rather, in important respects, it would help it as such. For, as already intimated, the loss of the idea of infallibility would affect not in the least the higher and more spiritual teachings of the Bible-these portions that are 'profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.' It would be simply the letting in of a healthy wind to blow away such chaff as has no power to feed anybody. For example, the imprecations of three or four of the Psalms; the brutal exploits of Samson; exaggerations like those that I have pointed out in connection with the number of years lived by the patriarchs, and the number of soldiers in the armies of Jeroboam and Abijah; the falsehood of Abraham when he denied that Sarah was his wife; the various contradictions between Scripture and science."

"We are driven to the alternative either of confessing that God is a superhuman tyrant, an infinite devil, or else denying that the Bible can be infallible. Does any one fail to see which of

the two is the religious as well as the reasonable thing to do? Surely there is a weighty and solemn religious obligation resting on us to deny the truth of a dogma which aims so cruel a blow at the character of the Being we worship, and the validity of our moral intuitions. The highest and holiest things of religion and life are very deeply at stake. As we care for religion, therefore, we must not shrink; when we come upon representations of God in the Bible that are degrading and immoral, we must say, 'They are wrong; the men who wrote them had the low and imperfect ideas of their age; we, to-day, standing in the light that shines from Jesus, and from the eighteen centuries since, worship a God vastly more exalted and holy.'"

8.—Immoral Influence of the old Ideas of the Bible, especially upon the Young.

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Think of millions of Sunday-school children, with their young and plastic minds, being systematically taught from Sunday to Sunday, for years, such things as that it was right for Joshua to perpetrate his massacres of men, women, and babes, and for Jehu to murder all the house of Ahab, and for Hosea to break the seventh commandment, and for Moses and Aaron to lie to Pharaoh, and for the Jewish people to put witches to death and hold slaves, and the like (things, all of them, which we are told God commanded), and then reflect what a foundation all this lays in these millions of children, upon which to build virtuous characters and sensitive consciences, and pure and high manhood and womanhood! Can anything ever compensate for, or make good, such an utter confusion and perversion of moral ideas in the minds of the young? Can we expect anything else but that children thus instructed will have low and confused ideas of right and wrong, and blunted consciences, as well as unworthy conceptions of God, when they grow up to be men and women?

No! while we continue to hold earnestly to the Bible, we must discriminate. While we cannot appreciate too highly the rich legacy of moral and religious truth and sentiment that comes down to us in its revered pages, let us not be guilty of the fatal folly of concentrating error because it happens to be associated with truth. While we may well keep the Bible in our Sunday schools, and churches, and houses, as our great, and in a

true sense, our sacred book of religion, to be studied reverently and appreciatively by ourselves and by our children, we must beware that we do not make it a curse instead of a blessing, to ourselves, and especially to them, by accepting it and teaching them to accept it as what it is not, viz., an infallible book."

9.—The Essential Truths of the Bible are, of themselves, Self-evident.

If there are errors and imperfections in the Bible—that is to say, if the Bible is not all infallible inspiration, how are we to know what parts are true and inspired, and what parts are untrue and uninspired-in other words, what parts we should keep and what parts we should cast out? This question, I know, often causes real trouble to earnest and conscientious minds, and yet it seems strange that it should; for the answer is surely very simple and plain. With reference to all scientific and historical questions, and all questions of fact, connected with the Bible, doubtless we are to find out what is truth and what is not truth in exactly the same way that we find out truth and falsehood anywhere else, viz.-by inquiry and investigation. By honest inquiry, and candid investigation, almost all the more important of these questons of fact can doubtless be solved. That so many remain still unsolved, is undoubtedly due in large measure to the fact that as yet so little really honest and unbiassed investigation has been made."

"And so, too, with regard to the great spiritual teachings of the Bible-these also all carry their credentials and authority in themselves. Such utterances as the Golden Rule, the Beatitudes, and Paul's chapter on Charity, it is impossible that men should mistake about. The whole matter reduces just to this-and nothing could be simpler-whatever in the Bible, as men read it, helps them, strengthens them, gives them nobler conceptions of God, increases their faith in humanity, widens their sympathies, purifies their desires, deepens their earnestness, brightens their hope, sends them forth with a more abiding consecration to the true, the beautiful, and the good, is certainly of God-and is to be received as such with as much assurance as if it were spoken to every one by an audible voice from the skies. Whereas, on the other hand, whatever is in the Bible, or anywhere else, that tends to degrade men's conceptions of God, or confuse moral