fast
to this anchor. The Bible is divine revelation, say they, therefore it is
infallible and unassailable, and that settles everything.

Now we must, above all things, come to an understanding as to what is
meant by revelation before we attribute revelation to the Bible. There are
not many now who really believe that an angel in bodily form descended
from heaven and whispered into the ear of the apostles, in rather bad
Greek, every verse, every word, even every letter of our Gospels. When
Peter in his second Epistle (i. 18) assures us that he heard a voice from
heaven, that is a fact that can only be confirmed, or invalidated, by
witnesses. But when he immediately after says (i. 21) that "holy men of
God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit," he presents to us a view
of inspiration that is easily intelligible, the possibility or truth of
which must yet be first determined by psychologists. If it be conceded,
however, that holy men may partake of such an inspiration, even then it is
plain that it requires a much higher inspiration to declare others to be
divinely inspired than to make such a claim for oneself alone. This
theory, that the Gospels are inspired by God, and therefore are infallible
and unassailable, has gained more and more currency since the time of the
Reformation. The Bible was to be the only authority in future for the
Christian faith. Pope and ecclesiastical tradition were cast aside, and a
greater stress was consequently laid on the _litera scripta_ of the New
Testament. This naturally led to a very laborious and detailed criticism
of these records, which year by year assumed a wider scope, and was
finally absorbed in so many special investigations that its original
purpose of establishing the authority of the Scriptures of the New
Testament seems to have quite passed out of sight. These critical
investigations concerning the manuscripts of the New Testament, Codex
Sinaiticus, Alexandrimus, and Vaticanus, down to Number 269, Bentley's Q,
are probably of less interest to the Horseherd; they are known to those
who make a special study of this subject, and are of no interest outside.

If, as might have happened, without any miracle, the original autograph of
the Gospels, as they were written by the apostles or some one else with
their own hands, had been carefully preserved in the archives of the first
popes, our professors would have been spared much labour. But we nowhere
read that these success