The Bible is filled to overflowing
with the Holy Spirit of God; the books of it and the words of it and the
very letters of it."

In 1865 Canon MacNeile declared in Exeter Hall that "we must either
receive the verbal inspiration of the Old Testament or deny the
veracity, the insight, the integrity of our Lord Jesus Christ as a
teacher of divine truth."

As late as 1889 one of the two most eloquent pulpit orators in the
Church of England, Canon Liddon, preaching at St. Paul's Cathedral, used
in his fervour the same dangerous argument: that the authority of Christ
himself, and therefore of Christianity, must rest on the old view of
the Old Testament; that, since the founder of Christianity, in divinely
recorded utterances, alluded to the transformation of Lot's wife into a
pillar of salt, to Noah's ark and the Flood, and to the sojourn of
Jonah in the whale, the biblical account of these must be accepted as
historical, or that Christianity must be given up altogether.

In the light of what was rapidly becoming known regarding the Chaldean
and other sources of the accounts given in Genesis, no argument could be
more fraught with peril to the interest which the gifted preacher sought
to serve.

In France and Germany many similar utterances in opposition to the
newer biblical studies were heard; and from America, especially from the
college at Princeton, came resounding echoes. As an example of many
may be quoted the statement by the eminent Dr. Hodge that the books
of Scripture "are, one and all, in thought and verbal expression, in
substance, and in form, wholly the work of God, conveying with absolute
accuracy and divine authority all that God meant to convey without human
additions and admixtures"; and that "infallibility and authority attach
as much to the verbal expression in which the revelation is made as to
the matter of the revelation itself."

But the newer thought moved steadily on. As already in Protestant
Europe, so now in the Protestant churches of America, it took strong
hold on the foremost minds in many of the churches known as orthodox:
Toy, Briggs, Francis Brown, Evans, Preserved Smith, Moore, Haupt,
Harper, Peters, and Bacon developed it, and, though most of them were
opposed bitterly by synods, councils, and other authorities of
their respective churches, they were manfully supported by the more
intellectual clergy and laity. The greater universities of the country
ranged themselves on the side o