se a story is not necessarily false,
therefore it is necessarily true. We have no intention of
vindicating Dr. Colenso. His theological training makes
his arguments very like those of his opponents, and he and
Dr. M'Call may settle their differences between themselves.
The question is at once wider and simpler than
any which has been raised in that controversy. Were it
proved beyond possibility of error that the Pentateuch was
written by Moses, that those and all the books of the 01d
and New Testaments were really the work of the writers
whose names they bear; were the Mosaic cosmogony in
harmony with physical discoveries; and were the supposed
inconsistencies and contradictions shown to have no
existence except in Dr. Colenso's imagination--we should
not have advanced a single step towards making good the
claim put forward for the Bible, that it is absolutely and
unexceptionably true in all its parts. The "genuineness
and authenticity" argument is irrelevant and needless.
The clearest demonstration of the human authorship of
the Pentateuch proves nothing about its immunity from
errors. If there are no mistakes in it, it was not the
workmanship of man; and if it was inspired by the
Holy Spirit, there is no occasion to show that the hand
of Moses was the instrument made use of. To the
most excellent of contemporary histories, to histories
written by eye-witnesses of the facts which they describe,
we accord but a limited confidence. The highest
intellectual competence, the most admitted truthfulness,
immunity from prejudice, and the absence of temptation
to mis-state the truth; these things may secure general
credibility, but they are no guarantee for minute and
circumstantial exactness. Two historians, though with
equal gifts and equal opportunities, never describe events
in exactly the same way. Two witnesses in a court of
law, while they agree in the main, invariably differ in
some particulars. It appears as if men could not relate
facts precisely as they saw or as they heard them. The
different parts of a story strike different imaginations
unequally; and the mind, as the circumstances pass
through it, alters their proportions unconsciously, or
shifts the perspective. The credit which we give to
the most authentic work of a man has no resemblance
to that universal acceptance which is demanded for
the Bible. It is not a difference of degree: it is a
difference in kind; and we desire to know on what
ground this