ommon and perhaps
unworthy Christian who merely said that "Jesus was the Lord," and that
of Moses, or St. Paul, and St. John, is almost to our eyes beyond
measuring. Still the position remains, that the highest degree of
inspiration given to man has still suffered to exist along with it a
portion of human fallibility and corruption.

Now, then, consider the epistles of the blessed Apostle St. Paul, who
had the Spirit of God so abundantly, that never we may suppose did any
merely human being enjoy a larger share of it. Endowed with the Spirit
as a Christian, and daily receiving grace more largely, as he became
more and more ripe for glory; endowed with the Spirit's extraordinary
gifts most eminently; favoured also with an abundance of revelations,
disclosing to him things ineffable and inconceivable,--are not his
writings to be most truly called inspired? Can we doubt that, in what he
has told us of things not seen, or not seen as yet,--of Him who
pre-existed in the form of God before he was manifested in the form of
man,--of that great day, when we shall arise incorruptible, and meet our
Lord in the air, and be joined to him for ever,--can any reasonable mind
doubt, that in speaking of these things he spoke what he had heard from
God; that to refuse to believe his testimony is really to
disbelieve God?

Yet this great Apostle expected that the world would come to an end in
the generation then existing. When he wrote to the Thessalonians some
years before his first imprisonment at Rome, he warned them, no doubt,
against expecting the end immediately: but he appears still to have
supposed that it would come in the lifetime of men then living. At a
later period, when writing to the Corinthians, his dissuasion of
marriage seems to rest mainly upon this impression; it is good not to
marry, "on account of the distress which is close at hand;" ([Greek:
dia taen enestosan anankaen]; compare 2 Thess. ii. 2, [Greek: hos hoti
enestaeken hae haemera tou Kyriou].) "The time is short," he adds; "the
fashion of this world is passing away." And again, when speaking of the
resurrection, he says emphatically, "the dead shall rise incorruptible,
and _we_ shall be changed;" where the pronoun being expressed in the
original, [Greek: chai haemeis allagaesometha], shows that by the term
"_we_," he does not mean the dead, but those who were to be alive at
Christ's coming. So again, still later, when writing from Rome to the
Philippians, he t