Oxford Judaziers'") idolatries, the doctrine of the person of Christ; not His Church, not His sacraments, not His teaching, not even the truths about Him, nor the virtues he most enforces, but Himself; that only object which bars fanaticism and idolatry on the one hand, and gives life and power to all morality on the other."1

ARTICLE II.

LEE ON INSPIRATION.2

BY PROF. POND, BANGOR, ME.

We welcome the appearance of the work before us, and are glad to see so beautiful a reprint of it from the press of the Messrs. Carter of New York. Not that it is everything we could desire, in a work for general circulation. There is too much parade of learning about it; too many learned mottoes, appendixes, and notes. Then it discusses a variety of topics, more or less connected with the subject in hand, though not directly upon it. From both these causes, the work is too large, commending itself rather to Biblical scholars, than to the generality of Christian readers.

Still, we are glad to see it, and that for more reasons than one. It treats of a vitally important subject," the Inspiration of the Holy Scripture;" and amidst all the laxity on the one hand, and extravagance on the other, the denials and avowals, the doubts and the dogmatism, which prevail at this day, it takes substantially the right ground, and

1 Life and Correspondence, p. 282.

2 The Inspiration of Holy Scripture, its Nature and Proof. Eight Discourses preached before the University of Dublin. By William Lee, M. A., Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College. 1857.

maintains it; the ground which has been held by evangelical teachers in this country for a long course of years.

Mr. Lee approaches the Bible just as the well-instructed philosopher approaches nature, to learn the truth, the facts, respecting it, and to draw such conclusions as facts justify.

Coming to the Bible in this way, we learn, first of all, that it was the work both of God and of men. That it was the work of men,- setting aside altogether the historic testimony, of men, too, in the exercise of their own faculties and powers, - is evident from its entire contents. It bears the impress of human wit and wisdom, of human thought, emotion, feeling, and is throughout a human production.

Yet it could not have been the work of unaided man, of man alone. This is evident from many considerations. Man, in the unassisted exercise of his own faculties, could no more have made the Bible, than he could have made the world. We most commonly found the argument à posteriori, for the existence of God, upon the world's existence; but it is no less conclusive, when founded on the existence of the Bible. Here is the world; and here is the Bible. Both are in existence, and are to be accounted for. And we can no more account for the one, than the other, without bringing in the wisdom and the power of God.

And as the Bible is the work both of God and man, as to the substance, the subject-matter of it, so also it is as to its dress, its style, its language, its utterance. That the Scriptures were written by men, and in the style of men, each writer having his own peculiar style, is too obvious to require proof. Nothing in point of rhetorical utterance can be more unlike, than the styles of Isaiah and Amos, of John and Paul. And yet there is something in the very style and manner of the Sacred writers, as we shall show hereafter, which tells of a power and a wisdom more than human. Besides, it might be inferred, à priori, if God was to be at the expense of making a supernatural revelation to men, and causing it to be written in a book, he would take care that the writing should be worthy of the subject; should be as free from mistake and error as the revelation itself.

The conclusions to which we thus come fulfil, as Mr. Lee would say, the first conditions of the Bible. They are conclusions to which the serious, earnest student of the Bible, judging from its phenomena, could not fail to come.

And it is important that both these conclusions should be consistently adhered to. Nearly all the errors which have been broached on the subject of inspiration, have originated precisely here. Inspiration has a Divine side, and a human side. It is a work which concerns both God and men. If now we take the Divine side of this work and push it out to an extreme, as some have done, we run into what has been called the mechanical theory of inspiration; a theory which supposes God to do all, and man little or nothing; which supposes the natural exercise of the human faculties. to have been suspended under the theopneustia, and the very words, phrases, figures, grammatical construction, everything, to have been directly suggested and dictated by God. On this theory, there would be little or nothing human about the Bible. The style would all be much the same, and none of it the style of man. In short, it would not be written (except mechanically) by men, or for men, and would be scarcely intelligible to the human understanding. Now every one sees that such a theory does not meet the conditions, the facts of the case. Such is not the Bible which God has given us; and, of course, such is not the kind of inspiration under which it was written.

Suppose then we take what may be called the human side of this work of inspiration, and push it out to an extreme, as many have done, and are doing now. We at once arrive at those lax theories of inspiration which are floating around us, which either make nothing of the special work of God, or reduce it to the very minimum of its existence and operation. We come to say, that the sacred writers were inspired only as all good men are inspired; or that their inspiration extended only to some particular subjects, and in these, not at all to the style or the language. There is a revelation in the Bible, of which every one must judge for

himself; and the record of it, being entirely human, is subjected like other human works, to imperfection and error.

case.

The theory of inspiration presented by Mr. Lee, and which he calls the dynamical theory, avoids both these extremes and errors, and meets as we have seen all the conditions of the It supposes the Bible to be the work both of men and God; and that in producing it, the Divine Spirit wrought in and by the human faculties, so as not to cause any suspension or interruption of their regular exercise. Men thought and wrote, each in his own natural way, while their pens were so supervised or directed, that each wrote according to the mind and the will of God.

It shows the possibility of this view of inspiration, and is at the same time a recommendation of it, that it conforms to God's method of operating in other things. It is in God that "we live, and move, and have our being;" yet in giving us life, and breath, and being, God interrupts not the regular exercise of our faculties, but rather sustains them. The conversion and sanctification of the soul, too, is the work of God; yet in this work, there is no interference with the normal activities of him who is the subject of it. God worketh in us to will and to do of his own good pleasure, while we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. And just so in the matter of inspiration. God supervises, guides, restrains, suggests, and does all that is necessary that the utterance or the record may be complete; and yet the subject of it thinks his own thoughts, exercises his own faculties, and speaks or writes much after his own natural method.

We come now to consider another fact or distinction, which strikes us in looking into the Bible. A very considerable portion of it, if true at all, must have been directly revealed from heaven. It could have been known in no other way. Such are the numerous predictions in the Bible. Such are the disclosures of God's mind and will respecting the coming destiny of our race. Such are the descriptions of scenes and events in the future world. What could men

know respecting subjects such as these, except by a direct revelation?

There is also much in the Bible which is not revelation, certainly not in the high sense of which we have just spoken. It came to the knowledge of the writers, for it could not have been otherwise, in the ordinary exercise of their own powers. Such was the knowledge which Moses had of events which took place under his own eyes in Egypt, and in the wilderness. Such was the knowledge which the four evangelists had of most of the events recorded in the gospels. Two of these evangelists wrote what they had “ seen and heard, and handled of the Word of Life." The other two "had a perfect understanding" of much that they wrote, through intercourse and conversation with the apos

tles.

Some parts of the Bible, therefore, are necessarily revelation, and some are not. But those parts which are not revelation, are not to be regarded on that account as unimportant. They are of scarcely less importance to us than the other parts. What portions of holy writ can have a higher importance than the personal histories of Moses, and of Christ? We might infer, therefore, à priori, that God would take care that we should have a faithful record, not only of his direct revelations, but of all the other parts of Scripture. We might infer that all Scripture, whether revelation or not, would be written under such a Divine guidance and direction as would effectually secure its human authors from mistake, and enable them to write just what God would have them write, and in just the manner in which he would have it written. And this is what we mean, specifically, by the inspiration of the Scriptures: that degree of assistance afforded to the writers, which was necessary to preserve them from imperfection and error, in making the record of God's truth and will.

And here we have the distinction, so much insisted on by Mr. Lee, between revelation and inspiration; a distinction of which he is not the original discoverer, but which is of great importance in the discussion before us. Revelation is