"
Now, for 'Pentateuch' substitute 'Old and New Testament,' and then I
say that this is the doctrine which I reject as superstitious and
unscriptural. And yet as long as the conceptions of the revealing
Word and the inspiring Spirit are identified and confounded, I assert
that whatever says less than this, says little more than nothing.
For how can absolute infallibility be blended with fallibility?
Where is the infallible criterion? How can infallible truth be
infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible expressions? The
Jewish teachers confined this miraculous character to the Pentateuch.
Between the Mosaic and the Prophetic inspiration they asserted such a
difference as amounts to a diversity; and between both the one and
the other, and the remaining books comprised under the tithe of
Hagiographa, the interval was still wider, and the inferiority in
kind, and not only in degree, was unequivocally expressed. If we
take into account the habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of
referring all excellent or extraordinary things to the great First
Cause, without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes--a
striking illustration of which may be obtained by comparing the
narratives of the same event in the Psalms and in the historical
books; and if we further reflect that the distinction of the
providential and the miraculous did not enter into their forms of
thinking--at all events not into their mode of conveying their
thoughts--the language of the Jews respecting the Hagiographa will be
found to differ little, if at all, from that of religious persons
among ourselves, when speaking of an author abounding in gifts,
stirred up by the Holy Spirit, writing under the influence of special
grace, and the like.
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