so
defined his position on the science of Scriptural exegesis, that we
needed no new information to be convinced of his antagonism to
evangelical interpretation. The present essay, which is the most
formidable and destructive in the volume, commences with a lamentation
over the prevailing differences in the exposition of the Bible. The
Germans have been far more successful in this respect than the English
people, the former having arrived at a tolerable degree of concurrence.

The word "inspiration" is a _crux theologorum_, the most of its
explanations being widely divergent, and at variance with the original
signification of the term. We make it embrace far too much, for there is
no foundation for any high or supernatural views of inspiration in
either the Gospels or Epistles. There is no appearance in those writings
that their authors had any extraordinary gift, or that they were free
from error or infirmity; St. Paul hesitated in difficult cases, and more
than once corrected himself; one of the gospel historians does not
profess to have been an eye-witness of the events described by him; the
evangelists do not agree as to the dwelling-place of Christ's parents,
nor concerning the circumstances of the crucifixion; they differ about
the woman who anointed our Lord's feet; and the fulfillment of the Old
Testament prophecy is not discernible in the New Testament history. To
the question, What is inspiration? there are two answers: _first_, That
idea of Scripture which we gather from the knowledge of it; and,
_second_, that any true doctrine of inspiration must conform to all the
ascertained facts of history or of science. The meaning of Scripture has
nothing to do with the question of inspiration, for if the word
"inspiration" were to become obsolete nothing vital would be lost, since
it is but a term of yesterday. The solution of the various difficulties
in the gospels is, that the tradition on which the first three are based
was preserved orally, and, having been slowly put together, was written
in three forms. The writers of the first three gospels were, therefore,
not independent witnesses of the history itself. To interpret the Bible
properly it must be treated as any other book, "in the same careful and
impartial way that we ascertain the meaning of Sophocles or Plato....
Scripture, like other books, has one meaning, which is to be gathered
from itself, without reference to the adaptations of fathers or divines,
a