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the end of it all, which, in the Bible, is to reveal God in his relations to man. We hold, then, that the facts of the Bible were reported by men sufficiently enlightened to secure the end intended by those facts. All necessary things, which might otherwise have been forgotten or accidentally omitted, were brought to remembrance by that Holy Spirit which guided them. Of this, in the case of the evangelists, we are assured by Christ's promise to his disciples, and from analogy we may conclude it was the same in every case. It was a supernatural guidance and assistance of the memory with reference to the one great end, the sufficiently exact transmission of all those facts by which God directly revealed himself to mankind.

But we are not to forget that God has revealed himself not only in a sacred history, continuous from Adam to Christ, from the fall to the redemption; but also, within the compass of that history, to prophets and apostles. God spake at sundry times, and in divers manners, by the prophets. Finally, he has spoken to us by his Son, and by those to whom the great Teacher said: "Behold I send the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high." We cannot here, as in the other case, separate inspiration from revelation. We cannot, with any propriety, say of the things "which were written in the law of Moses, and in the Prophets and in the Psalms, concerning Christ," that such things could be written otherwise than by immediate supernatural communication of the truth to the individual minds of those who wrote. We cannot say of Him who testified concerning himself: "My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me: I have not spoken of myself, but the Father which sent me, he gave me commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak," that the inspiration and the revelation were not identically one and the same thing. Neither can we say of the Apostle Paul, who affirms of himself: "The gospel which was preached of me is not after man; for I neither received it of man, neither was taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ," that inspira

tion, in his case, was simply an infallible bringing to remembrance of things he had outwardly witnessed and heard. Nor can it be said of the other Apostles, who had lived with our Lord, and might, therefore, truly affirm: "What we have seen and heard, declare we unto you," that the grand impression left on their minds by our Saviour's life and teaching, and called fresh to their recollection by the Holy Spirit, constituted all the inspiration of which they were the subjects. It is very evident that, in all these cases, inspiration was a direct revelation of the truth in the minds of those who spoke and wrote. This is evident, in the case of the last named Apostles, from the promise expressly given to them: “When He, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth; for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear that shall he speak; and he will show you things to come. He shall glorify me; for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you." And how this was meant, is plain enough from the fact, that it was through the Apostles rather than through their Master, the natural and perfect body of Christian doctrines, so imperfectly understood by them in our Saviour's life-time, has come down to us.

With regard to this inspiration, which is so closely connected with revelation that one cannot be separated from the other, while we admit that, so far as the Spirit's operation is concerned, it remains an altogether transcendent fact, surpassing our power of explanation or of comprehension, yet in another point of view it is not so wholly incomprehensible but that we may know something of its nature by what is manifest in its effects. As our Saviour, who pos sessed the fulness of the Spirit, and at all times uniformly alike, still exhibits, in all that He does and says, the entire self-possession and self-consciousness of His human individuality; as He who presents the highest possible example of inspiration, presents also, at the same time, the most certain evidence of consciously possessing and using the reason, the understanding and the passions of a man, and in uttering what He received as a commandment from the Father, still uttered it as the man Christ Jesus;-so His disciples

after Him and so all the prophets before Him were sober, self-possessed teachers, each fully conscious of his own personality, each judging, reasoning, feeling and speaking, even in the moment of inspiration, according to his own peculiar habits of thought and mode of expressing himself. The individual was still himself, and wrote out of the fulness of his heart and in the entire consciousness of his freedom; as the apostle Paul avows in his second epistle to the Corinthians: "Out of much affliction and anguish of heart, I wrote unto you with many tears;" and again: "We are not as many which corrupt the Word of God; but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God speak we in Christ." Were it possible to express the impulses of personal feeling as well as the entire sense of freedom, more clearly than we find them expressed by this apostle in communicating to the Corinthian church the message which the Holy Spirit was that moment inditing? Which leads us to remark:

Finally, that in these cases of direct revelation or inspiration, the truth was not only tinged, if we may so express it, with the personal peculiarities of the individual organ through whom it came, but was also unavoidably fused with another earthly element, in the historical circumstances, the immediate occasions, whatever they might happen to be, which called it forth. But the divine truth, thus doubly humanized, first by entering into the life of the individual who was its organ, next by coming into contact with the life of the time in which it was delivered, while it lost nothing thereby of its essential purity, gained a practical power, a force of reality, both for the time in which it was announced and for all succeeding times, which it could not have had otherwise. It was the highest eulogium of Socrates that he brought down philosophy from the aerial heights to the business and bosoms of men. But no less can be said of revelation than that it brought down the truth we most deeply need, from the very fountain of all truth, to the comprehension of the poorest and the weakest of our race.

ARTICLE V.

THE GROUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE.

BY REV. CHARLES B. HADDUCK, D. D., FORMERLY PROFESSOR IN DARTMOUTH

COLLEGE.

THE first exercise of our faculties is spontaneous; we begin to acquire knowledge long before we think of proposing it to ourselves as an end. As soon as the objects of knowledge and the cognitive power come into connection, that experience takes place, which, by the constitution of nature, results from this connection, and in which our intellectual life consists. And even after we come to seek for knowledge as an object and to adopt means for its attainment, and discipline, and direct the faculties, whose office it is to discover truth; after we have separated our acquisitions into distinct departments, and given to our various sciences a systematic character and adapted them to practice, it is still a long time before we think of subjecting the process itself by which knowledge is acquired, to a rigid analysis.

Such analysis, however, sooner or later takes place. It cannot be that curiosity, awakened and stimulated to intensity by the world of wonders in which we are placed, should remain forever dormant in regard to the greater wonders in ourselves. The mysterious power to which all truth is revealed, and the mysterious process by which this power unfolds such secrets and appropriates such treasures, is itself in fact the most marvellous and the most inviting and absorbing of all the marvels it contemplates.

At a certain stage of mental culture, therefore, and with persons of the requisite contemplative and introspective habits, the theory of human knowledge, the origin of our ideas, becomes a subject of profound inquiry and commanding interest. The validity of our judgments, the grounds of belief upon which the vast structures of human science rest,

appear to them invested with a dignity equalled only by the grandeur of our moral destiny, and permeated through all their crystal depths by brilliant, grateful rays from the sunlight life above them.

Nor is it as a matter of rational curiosity alone, that the study of the phenomenon of human knowledge is commended to thoughtful men; it is, in truth, indefensible to an intelligent delineation of the proper limits of inquiry in every department of philosophy; without it we remain in ignorance as to what our faculties are capable of teaching us, and equally in ignorance as to what they do unquestionably teach upon any of the thousand subjects within their sphere. The progress of knowledge has consisted as much in rejecting old beliefs as in establishing new ones. Things once generally and strongly believed have been disproved. Errors for which men have been willing to risk not only their reputation as philosophers, but their very life, have been abandoned. System after system of science, so called, has arisen and flourished and passed away; and men witnessing this humiliating spectacle have been tempted to deny all certainty, to doubt every proposition, and to question the capacity of the human mind to know at all. Among every thinking people, from the time of Pyrrho, philosophy has occasionally assumed a sceptical aspect, and schools have appeared, which, like that ancient philosopher, have esteemed it the highest wisdom to doubt, and have held all knowledge to be useless.

It is then clear that to settle the question between positive knowledge and general scepticism, some standard of truth must be found, some criterion, some ultimate test, to which our judgments, our supposed knowledges, may be all brought. Without a standard of truth the controversy with error can never be settled; no basis to erect a system of belief upon can be found. Hence there comes to be at last, among the sciences to which the human mind gives rise, a science of sciences, a philosophy of philosophies, whose aim is to discover the grounds upon which all other philosophies rest; a science lying back of our physics and our psychology, the great principles of which are all pre-supposed and assumed in

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