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ing the earth. Erelong it will be to him like a rifled and abandoned mine. Whatever prophecy therefore he has within himself of a better state, points upward into the deep, eternal heavens. When he has exhausted the terrestrial geology, the celestial astronomy offers him for a while an observatory and a home.

ARTICLE IV.

ESSAY ON INSPIRATION.

BY PROFESSOR JOSEPH TORREY, D. D., BURLINGTON, VT.

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It is noticed by a late writer in the North British Review, as a prominent and remarkable feature "in the controversy respecting Inspiration, that "in the vocabulary of recent discussions the terms revelation and inspiration have so entirely changed their significance as to mean the very opposite, well nigh, of what they meant before;" and he adds that "under the shelter of this ambiguity, a considerable portion of the argument or declamation of recent opponents of Scripture infallibility, amounts to not much more than an attempt, oftentimes a dexterous, though it may be an unconscious one, to shift the conditions of the problem and misstate the status quæstionis." How far this representation may be true as to fact, we are not concerned at present to inquire; but of the evil which must unavoidably result, in discussing the question of inspiration, from looseness or ambiguity in the use of the most important terms relating to the subject, we do not entertain a doubt. At the same time, the laying down of definitions for which the way has not been prepared by some previous opening of the subject in hand, showing their necessity, seems to us a rather unsatisfactory mode of proceeding, except within the domain of pure science. We shall not, therefore, at the beginning of this essay,

undertake to give a precise definition either of the term revelation or inspiration, but, taking them both for the present in the somewhat vague, but for our immediate purpose sufficiently distinct, sense in which they have ever been used by believers and unbelievers in common, when affirming or denying a source of divine knowledge higher than any furnished by the light of nature, we shall first speak of revelation as an historical fact which has been recognized in all ages of the world, and attempt to show the necessity of admitting the truth of this fact, in order to a satisfactory explanation of the grand course of events shadowed forth by history from the beginning.

The general fact of the recognition of a revelation, and the necessity in this particular case of supposing the reality of that which has always been recognized, having been clearly established on historical grounds, it will then be time to inquire more minutely into the nature of inspiration, and in so doing to lay down all the distinctions which may be found necessary for the purpose of showing how it differs from revelation and from everything else with which it ever has been, or is likely to be, confounded.

Our fundamental position then is this: that revelation, or if you please inspiration, in the sense of a direct communication of religious truth from God to man, is a fact which has been recognized in all ages of the world; and then, that it is a fact the truth of which must be allowed in order to account, in any satisfactory manner, for the actual course of events in the history of our race. It shall be our endeavor to be as brief on both parts of this preliminary proposition as may be consistent with a clear statement of the argument. To establish the first part of it, no further evidence need be required than that which is furnished by the Scriptures themselves. Of course, we shall not be understood as speaking here of the testimony of Scripture to its own inspiration, but of its testimony to the point that an express revelation from God, as opposed to nature, religion, and mythology, has ever been recognized and believed to exist, by some portion of mankind. Let the truth be as it may with

regard to the reality of the fact, the belief of the fact through all time, as far back as history reaches, surely will not be called in question by any one who admits the authority of Scripture as a trustworthy historical record. That God, at sundry times and in divers manners from the beginning, spake unto the fathers by the prophets; that this is a statement of Scripture which expresses the common conviction of the devout men of both the Old and New Testament; that each sacred writer, in referring to the other Scriptures, speaks of them in a style evincing the sincerity and firmness of his own belief, to say the least, that the Scriptures to which he appeals are the infallible Word of God, - are posi tions which no person that we ever heard of has pretended to dispute. All admit, we suppose, that, as the Scriptures stand, they plainly purport to be nothing less nor other than an unbroken series of the oracles of God, from the revelation to the first man to the appearance of the second, who is the Lord from heaven.

The testamentary Scriptures, moreover, give themselves out, not merely as being one species of direct revelation from God, but as being the only revelation of the kind which has ever been given to the world. The Scriptures recognize no other positive and authoritative declaration of the divine will and purposes to man, save their own. While they admit and teach that the human mind, left to itself, is not so utterly without light as not to be able to discern, if it would, the invisible things of God, even His eternal power and Godhead, manifested in the works of creation; while they admit and teach that those who have not the law as revealed by themselves, still show the work of the law written on their hearts and borne witness to by their consciences; and while they acknowledge the sufficiency of these lights, so far as is necessary to vindicate to natural conscience the divine justice in punishing all ungodliness and all unrighteousness of men, they yet distinctly set themselves over against this light of nature, as being themselves another, altogether different, altogether higher, more direct and more explicit, revelation of divine truth to man, at the same

time affirming their own exclusive title to be considered as such a revelation. Thus much the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament indisputably claim for themselves; and that these claims have been admitted by some part of mankind in every age of the world, is as certain as that they have been put forth. It is a fact, therefore, standing prominently out in the history of our race, that there has been a series of communications, beginning from the earliest times, professing to come, and believed to have come, directly from God, which has ever been as a light that shineth in a dark place, and with a brightness gradually increasing until the dawn of that day which its first and feeblest glimmering foretold, and to whose influence alone it can be ascribed that the knowledge of the true and living God has at no time been utterly lost out of the world.1

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Second point in the proposition: there is no rational way of accounting for what we know from history respecting the religious conditions of makind from the beginning, except by admitting these claims to be true and valid. Among the great facts of history, the most striking, as it must be confessed, on the whole, is this, that through all the ages may be traced a strongly marked line of distinction, separating mankind, as to their religious notions, into two grand but very unequal divisions. All that belong to these divisions on both sides, however they may differ in other respects, wholly agree in the prevailing form, spirit, and tendency of their religions. In one, notions of the Divine Being, imperfect indeed, but, so far as they went, correct, and with time becoming ever more fully developed, clearly defined and powerfully influential on human character, have prevailed from the first; while the mythological and polytheistic or pantheistic, all tending alike to deterioration and to issue in that total extinction of the religious sense, which seems to have been the actual result in some cases, have

Other religions, it is true, claim also to be founded on direct revelation. But it is not simply the claim, it is the perpetuity, and perpetual recognition of the claim, that constitutes the peculiarity of Scripture revelation. In the words of Pascal, who felt the force of this fact: "Nulle autre religion n'a la perpetuité."

been uniformly the characteristic features of the other. As nations follow the fate of their religions, all the dead nations of the earth belonged to the latter division. The only sur viving people of the past, surviving in spite of their dispersion, belong to the former. The nations that now virtually govern the world, confessedly owe all that distinguishes their condition from that of the other, feebler portions, to the influences, direct or indirect, of that Word which claims to be a revelation from God and from nothing else.

Now for the question. If that Word is not in fact what it claims to be; if that Word is itself but one form of development of natural reason and of the natural sense of relig ion belonging to the human creature, a very difficult problem presents itself,- a problem far more difficult to explain than any miraculous interposition of God to bring back an apostate race, created originally in His own image, to the knowledge of Himself. If man might be left to develop his religion simply out of such notions as he had already implicitly within him; if in fact Judaism and Christianity are but such a development in the natural order of things, what is to be said of the other and by far greater portion of mankind, whose religious history, by the confession of all, is neither more nor less than a history of man left to himself and to form his religion out of himself? Why should the constant law of the development of religious truth to consciousness, be in the one case progression, and the no less constant law in the other, be deterioration? Why should the clearing up of the human mind, to better and more satisfying views of God and of His truth, be confined to one particular portion of mankind and forbidden to the other? Why should it be confined precisely to that portion which has always claimed to possess a revelation from the one and only true God, and be found wanting among that portion which have never, in the same sense, claimed any such thing? These questions cannot be fairly answered by deniers of revelation in the old, legitimate sense. Neither can the great facts upon the ground of which these questions are

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