d
some of ethical importance, are interpolations. An uneasy sense of the
weakness of the dogma of Biblical infallibility seems to be at the
bottom of a prevailing tendency once more to substitute the authority of
the "Church" for that of the Bible. In my old age, it has happened to me
to be taken to task for regarding Christianity as a "religion of a book"
as gravely as, in my youth, I should have been reprehended for doubting
that proposition. It is a no less interesting symptom that the State
Church seems more and more anxious to repudiate all complicity with the
principles of the Protestant Reformation and to call itself
"Anglo-Catholic." Inspiration, deprived of its old intelligible sense,
is watered down into a mystification. The Scriptures are, indeed,
inspired; but they contain a wholly undefined and indefinable "human
element"; and this unfortunate intruder is converted into a sort of
biblical whipping-boy. Whatsoever scientific investigation, historical
or physical, proves to be erroneous, the "human element" bears the
blame: while the divine inspiration of such statements, as by their
nature are out of reach of proof or disproof, is still asserted with all
the vigour inspired by conscious safety from attack. Though the proposal
to treat the Bible "like any other book" which caused so much scandal,
forty years ago, may not yet be generally accepted, and though Bishop
Colenso's criticisms may still lie, formally, under ecclesiastical ban,
yet the Church has not wholly turned a deaf ear to the voice of the
scientific tempter; and many a coy divine, while "crying I will ne'er
consent," has consented to the proposals of that scientific criticism
which the memorialists renounce and denounce.

A humble layman, to whom it would seem the height of presumption to
assume even the unconsidered dignity of a "steward of science," may well
find this conflict of apparently equal ecclesiastical authorities
perplexing--suggestive, indeed, of the wisdom of postponing attention to
either, until the question of precedence between them is settled. And
this course will probably appear the more advisable, the more closely
the fundamental position of the memorialists is examined.

"No opinion of the fact or form of Divine Revelation, founded on
literary criticism [and I suppose I may add historical, or physical,
criticism] of the Scriptures themselves, can be admitted to interfere
with the traditionary testimony of the Church, when t