INSPIRATION AND INTERPRETATION. "EVEN if it were found," says a modern writer,* "that a denial of the Plenary Inspiration of Scripture had the effect of leaving us without any fixed standard of belief, I apprehend that this difficulty would not prove that that denial must necessarily be wrong." "I know of no work," says Mr. Swainson,† the subject (of the Plenary Inspiration of the Scriptures) that I dare place in the hands of a student of theology. I know of none which, even to a young man of ordinary acuteness, does not suggest greater difficulties than it removes." 66 on We are not surprised, therefore, to find this eminently candid and Christian writer addressing the University as follows: * A Brief Examination of Prevalent Opinions on the Inspiration of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. By a Lay Member of the Church of England. With an Introduction by Henry Bristow Wilson, B.D., Vicar of Great Staughton, Bampton Lecturer for 1851; p. 204. + The Authority of the New Testament; The Conviction of Righteousness, etc. Three series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge. By C. A. Swainson, M.A., Principal of the Theological College, and Prebendary of Chichester, formerly Fellow and Tutor of Christ's College, Cambridge, and Hulsean Lecturer; p. 130. Hulsean Lectures, p. 107. "Thus it may be granted to some, even in the present day, to discover and to exhibit more of the secrets of the Christian dispensation. The emergencies of the times are driving our earnest students to examine closely the books of God's Revelation, to enquire narrowly into the truth of principles which have been held for the last hundred years without controversy, and to seek for the true mode of meeting difficulties on which the Church universal, acting under the free and unrestrained Spirit of God, has not yet come to a formal or unanimous decision; on which the explanations of our fathers. do not satisfy the more thoughtful men of this generation. may be that some who will soon assemble around these hallowed walls, may be led by the Holy Spirit to such a point on the road of truth that they may see how the country lies, and then be permitted to describe it to us. I cannot but think that God has a good and loving object in view in permitting us to be tried, as tried we are, by the enquirers of the present day. I cannot but think that these things, as all things else, will work together for good to those that love God.'" It It is certainly remarkable, that, while in the one University the alternative should be set before students, of Plenary Inspiration or of positive scepticism,* we should be told in the other University that no satisfactory work upon Plenary Inspiration had as yet appeared. Why not? Because it could not have appeared without coming into collision with much of modern Theology. It is a fact, as we shall have occasion to see, that various systems of Theology have prevailed irreconcilable with any doctrine of the Plenary Inspiration of by far the larger portion of Scripture; nay, further, irreconcilable with its * See Mr. Burgon's Sermons. |