reaching to that of Christ, perhaps due to their
sharing in the prejudices of their contemporaries? An orator is most
persuasive, when he is lifted above his hearers on those points
only on which he is to reform their notions. The apostles were not
omniscient: granted: but it cannot hence be inferred that they did not
know the message given them by God. Their knowledge however perfect,
must yet in a human mind have coexisted with ignorance; and nothing
(argued I) but a perpetual miracle could prevent ignorance from now
and then exhibiting itself in some error. But hence to infer that
they are not inspired, and are not messengers from God, is quite
gratuitous. Who indeed imagines that John or Paul understood astronomy
so well as Sir William Herschel? Those who believe that the apostles
might err in human science, need not the less revere their moral and
spiritual wisdom.

At the same time it became a matter of duty to me, if possible,
to discriminate the authoritative from the unauthoritative in the
Scripture, or at any rate avoid to accept and propagate as true
that which is false, even if it be false only as science and not as
religion. I unawares,--more perhaps from old habit than from distinct
conviction,--started from the assumption that my fixed point of
knowledge was to be found in the sensible or scientific, not in the
moral. I still retained from my old Calvinistic doctrine a way of
proceeding, as if purely moral judgment were my weak side, at least
in criticizing the Scripture: so that I preferred never to appeal
to direct moral and spiritual considerations, except in the most
glaringly necessary cases. Thus, while I could not accept the
panegyric on Jael, and on Abraham's intended sacrifice of his son,
I did not venture unceremoniously to censure the extirpation of
the Canaanites by Joshua: of which I barely said to myself, that it
"certainly needed very strong proof" of the divine command to justify
it. I still went so far in timidity as to hesitate to reject on
internal evidence the account of heroes or giants begotten by
angels, who, enticed by the love of women, left heaven for earth. The
narrative in Gen. vi. had long appeared to me undoubtedly to bear this
sense; and to have been so understood by Jude and Peter (2 Pet. ii.),
as, I believe, it also was by the Jews and early Fathers. I did at
length set it aside as incredible; not however from moral repugnance
to it, (for I feared to trust the soundness o