Psalm xcv. he clenches with the application, "Wherefore (as the Holy Ghost saith), To-day if ye will hear His voice." Throughout the entire Epistle, whoever may have been the writer quoted from, the words of the quotation, are referred to God.*

*

2d. But now let us come closer, to the very exact and categorical and unequivocal assertion. If the Scriptures as a Book are Divine, then what they say of themselves is Divine. What do they say?

In this inquiry, let us keep our fingers on two words, and always on two words-the Apostolic keys to the whole Church position—" γραφή,” “ θεόπνευστος.”

"Graphe "-writing, writing, THE WRITING,-not somebody, something back of the Writing. The Writing, "He Graphe," that was inspired.

"Theopneustos,"

And what is meant by inspired? God-breathed. Modern theologians have played at shuttle-cock with various "degrees" of inspiration. It is indeed a wretched play-this bandying of quibbles in the mouths of mortals to whom God vouchsafes to speak, and who themselves are sitting shaking on the crumbling precipice of an Eternal destiny.

Degrees of inspiration! Shades of varying value in the cadences of the Almighty's voice! He whispers, hesitates, speaks low in Esther, in the sixteenth chapter of St. Mark, and in the eighth chapter of St. John's Gospel. He stutters, falters in the Genealogies; is inaccurate in figures. He evidently weakens, halts: Almighty God breaks down!

Degrees of inspiration! The older theologians, thank God, did not know them-nor own them. Why should they? As well discuss degrees in Deity, in Predestina

* Olshausen, Die Echtheit des N. T., cited by Dr. Lee.

tion, in Providence, as talk about degrees in that of which Augustine says: "Whatsoever He willed that we should read either of His doings or sayings that He commissioned His agents to write, as if their hands had been His own hands."

God

"God breathed" sweeps the whole ground. comes down as a blast on the pipes of an organ,in voice like a whirlwind, or in still whispers like Eolian tones, and saying the word, He seizes the hand, and makes that hand in His own the pen of a most ready writer.

Pasa Graphe Theopneustos! "All sacred writing." More exactly, "every sacred writing"-every mark on the parchment is "God-breathed." So says St. Paul.

Pasa Graphe Theopneustos! The sacred assertion is not of the instruments, but of the Author; not of the agents, but of the Product. It is the sole and sovereign vindication of what has been left on the page when Inspiration gets through. "What is written," says Jesus, "how readest thou?" Men can only read what is written.

Pasa Graphe Theopneustos! God inspires not men, but language. The phrase, "inspired men," is not found in the Bible. The Scripture never employs it. The Scripture says that "holy men were moved"—pheromenoi-but that their writing, their manuscript, what they put down and left on the page, was God-breathed. You breathe upon a pane of glass. Your breath congeals there; freezes there; stays there; fixes an ice-picture there. That is the notion. The writing on the page beneath the hand of Paul was just as much breathed on, breathed into that page, as was His soul breathed into Adam.

The Chirograph was God's incarnate voice, as truly as the flesh of Jesus sleeping on the "pillow" was incarnate God.

We take the ground that on the original parchment

the membrane-every sentence, word, line, mark, point, pen-stroke, jot, tittle, was put there by God.

On the original parchment. There is no question of other, anterior parchments. Even were we to indulge the violent extra-Scriptural notion that Moses or Matthew transcribed from memory or from other books the things they have left us; still, in any, in every such case, the selection, the expression, the shaping and turn of the phrase on the membrane was the work of an unaided God.

But what? Let us have done with extra-Scriptural, presumptuous suppositions. The burning Isaiah-the perfervid, wheel-gazing Ezekiel - the ardent, seraphic St. Paul, caught up, up, up into that Paradise which he himself calls the "third heaven"-were these men only 'copyists," mere self-moved "redactors"? I trow not. Their pens urged, swayed, moved hither, thither by the sweep of a heavenly current, stretched their feathered tops, like that of Luke upon St. Peter's dome, into the far-off Empyrean-winged from the throne of God.

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We take the ground that on the original parchment, the membrane, every sentence, word, line, mark, point, pen-stroke, jot, tittle, was put there by God.

On the original parchment. Men may destroy that parchment. Time may destroy it. To say that the membranes have suffered in the hands of men, is but to say that everything Divine must suffer, as the pattern Tabernacle suffered, when committed to our hands. To say, however, that the writing has suffered-the words and letters-is to say that Jehovah has failed.

The writing remains. Like that of a palimpsest, it will survive and reappear, no matter what circumstances -what changes come in to scatter, obscure, disfigure, or blot it away. Not even one lonely THEOS writ large by the Spirit of God on the Great Uncial "C" as, with my own eyes I have seen it-plain, vivid, glittering, out

starting from behind the pale and overlying ink of Ephraem the Syrian-can be buried. Like Banquo's ghost, it will rise; and God himself replace it, and, with a hammer-stroke, beat down deleting hands. The parchments, the membranes decay; the writings, the words are eternal as God. Strip off the plaster from Belshazzar's palace, yet Mene! Mene! Tekel! Upharsin! remain. They remain.

Let us go through them, and from the beginning, and see what the Scriptures say of themselves.

One thing: they say that God sрake, nálaι ev tois роpýtα15, "anciently and all the way down, in the prophets." One may make, if he pleases, the "v" instrumental- —as it is more often instrumental—i. e., “by” the prophets; but in either case, in them, or by them, the Speaker was God.

Again the Scriptures say that the laws the writers promulgated, the doctrines they taught, the stories they recorded—above all, their prophecies of Christ, were not their own; were not originated, nor conceived by them,were not rehearsed, by them, from memory, nor obtained from any outside sources-were not what they had any means, before, of knowing, or of comprehending, but were immediately from God; they themselves being only recipient, only concurrent with God, as God moved upon them.

Some of the speakers of the Bible, as Balaam, the Old Prophet of Bethel, Caiaphas, are seized and made to speak in spite of themselves; and, with the greatest reluctance, to utter what is farthest from their minds and hearts. Others-in fact all--are purblind to the very oracles, instructions, visions, they announce. "Searching what, or what manner of time, the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify!" i. e., the prophets themselves

did not know what they wrote. What picture can be more impressive than that of the prophet himself hanging over and contemplating in surprise, in wonder, in amazement, his own autograph--as if it had been left upon the table there-the relict of some strange and supernatural Hand? How does that picture lift away the Bible from all human hands and place it back, as Iis original Deposit, in the hands of God.

Again: it is said that" the Word of the Lord came" to such and such a writer. It is not said that the SPIRIT came, which is true; but that the Word itself came, the Dabar-Jehovah. And it is said: "Hayo Haya Dabar," that it substantially came-essentially came "essendo fuit"-so say Pagninus, Montanus, Polanus-i. e., it came germ, seed and husk and blossom--in its totality"words which the Holy Ghost teacheth"--the "words." Again: it is denied, and most emphatically, that the words are the words of the man- of the agent. "The Spirit of the Lord," says David, "spake by me, and His word was in my tongue." St. Paul asserts that "Christ spake in him" (2 Cor. xiii. 3). "Who hath made man's mouth? Have not I, the Lord? I will put my words into thy mouth." That looks very much like what has been stigmatized as the "mechanical theory." It surely makes the writer a mere organ, although not an unconscious, or unwilling, unspontaneous organ. Could language more plainly assert or defend a verbal direct inspiration?

Yes, but in only one way-i. e., by denying the agent. And that denial we equally have from the lips of our Saviour. "It is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you. Take no thought how or what ye shall say. The Holy Ghost shall teach you what ye ought to say "--both the "how" and the "what"— both the matter and form.