le were certainly untrue.

Nor would it be necessary to say any more upon the
subject. Those who believed Christianity would admit
the assumption; those who disbelieved Christianity
would repudiate it. The argument would be narrowed
to that plain and single issue, and the elaborate
treatises upon external evidence would cease to bring
discredit upon the cause by their feebleness. Unfortunately--
and this is the true secret of our present distractions--it
seems certain that in some way or other
this belief in inspiration itself requires to be revised.
We are compelled to examine more precisely what we
mean by the word. The account of the creation of
man and the world which is given in Genesis, and
which is made by St. Paul the basis of his theology,
has not yet been reconciled with facts which science
knows to be true. Death was in the world before
Adam's sin, and unless Adam's age be thrust back to a
distance which no ingenuity can torture the letter of
Scripture into recognizing, men and women lived and
died upon the earth whole millenniums before the Eve
of Sacred History listened to the temptation of the
snake. Neither has any such deluge as that from which,
according to the received interpretation, the ark saved
Noah, swept over the globe within the human period.
We are told that it was not God's purpose to anticipate
the natural course of discovery: as the story of the
creation was written in human language, so the details
of it may have been adapted to the existing state of
human knowledge. The Bible it is said was not intended
to teach men science, but to teach them what
was necessary for the moral training of their souls. It
may be that this is true. Spiritual grace affects the
moral character of men, but leaves their intellect
unimproved. The most religious men are as liable as atheists
to ignorance of ordinary facts, and inspiration may be
only infallible when it touches on truths necessary to
salvation. But if it be so, there are many things in
the Bible which must become as uncertain as its geology
or its astronomy. There is the long secular history of
the Jewish people. Let it be once established that there
is room for error anywhere, and we have no security for
secular history. The inspiration of the Bible is the
foundation of our whole belief; and it is a grave matter
if we are uncertain to what extent it reaches, or how
much and what it guarantees to us as true. We cannot
live on probabilities.