His Gospel in a book. The Spirit of Truth was to be the main factor in the Faith of the Church. He was to interpret and call to remembrance the deposit of oral teaching enshrined in the Gospels, but also to develop it in a manner which would have been unintelligible to the first disciples. The Christian view of inspiration, so long as it is true to the intentions of Christ, is dynamic; and this involves a continuous moral and intellectual activity on the part of those who receive the revelation.

Revelation and inspiration are the same thing viewed from different standpoints.1 Revelation is the word we use when we view the matter from the side of God, inspiration when we view it from the side of man.2 And both must be regarded as living, active processes. It is not possible to receive revelation passively, whether it comes through a book or in any other manner. And in order to receive it actively, in such a way as to make it our own and respond to it, we must bring to it the best of ourselves, the reasonable service of all our faculties. The more certain we are that the revelation is divine, the more convinced we ought to be that it makes an exacting demand upon us to understand and profit by it. God does not throw His best gifts at our heads, nor does He give us anything to save us the trouble of finding it. At the same time, we are not given conundrums to guess in matters of vital importance. We may accept Chrysostom's maxim (Comm. in 2 Thess.) that all necessary things are clear' (Táνта тà ảνaykaîa dîλa), though certainly not the preceding word that 'everything in Scripture is clear and straightforward.' And we shall miss much if we are satisfied with the 'plain, necessary things.' Erasmus's

1 Gwatkin, The Knowledge of God, vol. i. p. 168.

Dr. Fairbairn, Christ in Modern Theology, p. 496 seq., reverses this. 'God inspires, man reveals. Inspiration is the process by which God gives; revelation is the mode or form in which man embodies what he has received.' This is to use 'revelation' in a forced and unusual sense, which even the authority of Martineau can hardly justify.

advice for the study of the Bible is good. Adsit pia curiositas et curiosa pietas.'

The desire for an infallible guide is so strong in the human heart that it often causes distress and disappointment to show that the inspired records were drawn up by fallible human beings; that the selection of the Canonical Books was made by fallible men, who, in certain cases in the Old Testament, and in at least one case (that of 2 Peter) in the New Testament, appear to have been deceived by documents which claimed a greater antiquity and authority than they possess; and lastly that unless the reader of the Bible is also infallible and miraculously protected against human infirmity, there is no guarantee that he may not entirely misunderstand what he reads. But those who feel distress cannot have understood the nature of Faith. An infallible oracle would destroy the possibility of Faith, or at least would finally arrest its growth at the point where the revelation was made. The Bible of the race '1 is not yet fully written; and our powers of understanding all that is already written are limited. And we must not forget that an exaggerated view of the infallibility of Holy Writ depresses and deprives of authority all the other channels through which we are justified in believing that the divine will is made known to us. I do not refer only to the writings of great and good men outside the Canon, and even outside the Christian Church, to whom a minor degree of inspiration may be attributed without any disrespect to the Bible, but to divine revelation through science, through art, through the beauties of nature, through the course of history, and so forth. Make any one of these infallible and exclusive, and the rest lose their value.

Our conclusion then is, that, as in the case of the infallible Church, so in the case of the infallible Book, the attempt to make authority a primary ground of Faith has failed. 1 Lowell: 'Slowly the Bible of the race is writ.'

Revelation and inspiration, being really two aspects of the same process, can never be separated from each other. Revelation, like inspiration, is a process, not a static condition. There are adequate reasons for putting the Bible in a class by itself, above all other books; but not for regarding it as the primary ground of Faith. The only word that our Lord ever wrote, so far as we know, was traced with His finger on the unrecording ground. It was not His will that His religion should be, like Islam, the religion of a book. He wrote His message on the hearts of a few faithful men, where it was not to be imprisoned in Hebrew or Greek characters, but was to germinate like a seed in fruitful soil. The words which I have spoken to you,' says the Johannine Christ, they are spirit and they are life.'

The office of authority in religion is essentially educational. Like every good teacher, it should labour to make itself superfluous. The instructor should not rest content till his pupil says, 'Now I believe, not on thy saying, but because I see and know for myself.'

Theology is the most conservative of the sciences, and among other tendencies of bygone days it has retained a timid and superstitious reverence for the written word, whether it be text or commentary. Too many theologians persist in looking back, though the people are looking forward. They look back, and they pay the penalty for doing so, like Lot's wife. The deserts of theological literature are strewn with these dreary pillars of salt. Commentaries on the Old and New Testaments, full of palpably absurd explanations borrowed from the Fathers; books on dogmatic theology constructed on the same principles; anxious researches into the liturgies and ritual of the Middle Ages with a view to careful imitation—all alike show how potent the dead hand is in matters of religion. The scribe who is instructed to the Kingdom of Heaven, said our Lord, is like a householder who brings out of his

treasure things new and old. The wise scribe does not, however, bring forth some things that are new and other things that are old, but he gives a new life to things that are old (for indeed we cannot truly believe in our authority unless we believe with it-the truth must be born anew in the heart of every believer), and he discerns the ancient, eternal truth of what seems to be new. In part, our objection to orthodox dogmatism is that it does not go back far enough. Res ipsa, quae nunc Christiana religio nuncupatur, erat apud antiquos, nec defuit ab initio generis humani, quousque ipse Christus veniret in carne, unde vera religio, quae iam erat, coepit appellari Christiana.' 1

The ultimate authority, which alone is infallible, is the eternal and living Truth.

1 Augustine, Retract. i. 13, 8.

CHAPTER VIII

AUTHORITY BASED ON JESUS CHRIST

We have discussed two great historic attempts to make Faith rest on external authority. We have investigated the claims of the infallible Church and of the infallible Book, and have found them both defective. At the same time we have found that each contains a true principle. The authority of the Church, rightly understood, is the authority of the redeemed race, the elect the stored spiritual experience of humanity. The authority of the Book, rightly understood, is the authority of the records of revelation, the testimony of those who have been inspired, to whom truth has been revealed. Neither authority is, or can be, absolute or infallible; for there is no way of escape from the objection that an infallible authority requires infallibility in the recipient as well as in the author of the revelation. If such infallibility were in the possession of any man or any institution, there would be no room for Faith.

My subject in these lectures is Faith, not the Christian Faith. But I have naturally taken my examples from our own religion, and as my aim in choosing this subject is not purely speculative, but also practical, I have felt no scruple in approaching each department of it mainly from the side which is familiar to thoughtful persons in our own age and country. And having said so much about the Catholic Church and the Bible, as the alleged seats of authority in matters of Faith, I feel that I cannot