o believe
what is contained in it, no man knows what that is.... But let every
man think of it as his spirit prompts him."[13]

Luther wrote of the Epistle of James,

"In comparison with the best books of the New Testament, it is a
downright strawy epistle."[14]

The ebbing tide again left the second generation critical and not
creative. After the sages and prophets of Protestantism came the scribes
and doctors, and they were concerned not so much with the manly religion
of free learning which Erasmus cherished, or the ethical and spiritual
religion which Luther roused, as with establishing Protestant_ism_ and
waging its doctrinal controversies. They wanted an authority for faith and
morals to set over against the authority of Rome. The age knew of no other
authority than external, extra-natural official authority, the king by
divine right in the realm of thought. In the place of the authority of the
Church rose the authority of the Bible; an oracular, infallible,
miraculous Book, instead of an oracular, infallible, miraculous Church.
Men could only sustain the elaborate speculative system they had spun out
of the New Testament letters, by insisting upon the authority of the
apostles in metaphysics as strongly as upon their authority in ethical
and spiritual principles. When dogma became divine, the books whence it
was drawn were deified.[15]

We simply enter into the heritage of the men who spent two and a half
years in elaborating the Westminster Confession, the first chapter of
which petrified this superstitious theory of the Bible. Profoundly as we
reverence these truly sacred books, for the real revelation they record as
coming in the spirits of holy men who spake as they were moved of the Holy
Ghost, and supremely in the person of the Son of Man; and rightly as we
recognize a Providential purpose in the preparation of these books for the
guidance of human life; the history of these same thoughts and feelings in
the past should warn us from renewing ancient exaggerations, injurious to
the best influence of the Bible.

V.

_This theory is incapable of a statement which is not self-stultifying._

To be an infallible authority upon all the matters upon which it treats, a
book must not only be guaranteed in its thought. Thought changes more or
less in finding an expression. No two statements of an idea or of a fact
can be exactly alike. There are no real synonyms. Interchangeable words
hav