Christianity would repudiate it. The argument would be narrowed to that
plain and single issue, and the elaborate treatises upon external
evidence would cease to bring discredit upon the cause by their
feebleness. Unfortunately--and this is the true secret of our present
distractions--it seems certain that in some way or other this belief in
inspiration itself requires to be revised. We are compelled to examine
more precisely what we mean by the word. The account of the creation of
man and the world which is given in Genesis, and which is made by St.
Paul the basis of his theology, has not yet been reconciled with facts
which science knows to be true. Death was in the world before Adam's
sin, and unless Adam's age be thrust back to a distance which no
ingenuity can torture the letter of Scripture into recognising, men and
women lived and died upon the earth whole millenniums before the Eve of
Sacred History listened to the temptation of the snake. Neither has any
such deluge as that from which, according to the received
interpretation, the ark saved Noah, swept over the globe within the
human period. We are told that it was not God's purpose to anticipate
the natural course of discovery: as the story of the creation was
written in human language, so the details of it may have been adapted to
the existing state of human knowledge. The Bible, it is said, was not
intended to teach men science, but to teach them what was necessary for
the moral training of their souls. It may be that this is true.
Spiritual grace affects the moral character of men, but leaves their
intellect unimproved. The most religious men are as liable as atheists
to ignorance of ordinary facts, and inspiration may be only infallible
when it touches on truths necessary to salvation. But if it be so, there
are many things in the Bible which must become as uncertain as its
geology or its astronomy. There is the long secular history of the
Jewish people. Let it be once established that there is room for error
anywhere, and we have no security for the accuracy of this history. The
inspiration of the Bible is the foundation of our whole belief; and it
is a grave matter if we are uncertain to what extent it reaches, or how
much and what it guarantees to us as true. We cannot live on
probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace
must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it
is nothing. It may be that all intel