Lux Mundi

VIII The Holy Spirit and Inspiration

Charles Gore

I. The appeal to ‘experience’ in religion, whether personal or general, brings before the mind so many associations of ungoverned enthusiasm and untrustworthy fanaticism, that it does not easily commend itself to those of us who are most concerned to be reasonable. And yet, in one form, or another, it is an essential part of the appeal which Christianity makes on its own behalf since the day when Jesus Christ met the question ‘Art thou He that should come, or do we look for another?’ by pointing to the transforming effect of His work; ‘The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.’

The fact is that in current appeals to experience the fault, where there is a fault, lies not in the appeal but in the nature of the experience appealed to. What is meant by the term is often an excited state of feeling, rather than a permanent transformation of the whole moral, intellectual, and physical being of man. Or it is something which seems individual and eccentric, or something confined to a particular class of persons under special conditions of education or of ignorance, or something which other religions besides Christianity have been conspicuous for producing. When a meaning broad and full, and at the same time exact enough, has been given to experience the appeal is essential to Christianity, because Christianity professes to be not a mere record of the past, but a present life, and there is no life where there is no experience.

It will be worth while, then, to bear in mind how freely the original defenders of the Christian Church appealed, like their Master, to facts of experience. Thus we find an individual, like S. Cyprian, recalling the time of his baptism, and the personal experience of illumination and power which it brought with it:—

‘Such were my frequent musings: for whereas I was encumbered with the many sins of my past life, which it seemed impossible to be rid of, so I had used myself to give way to my clinging infirmities, and, from despair of better things, to humour the evils of my heart, as slaves born in my house, and my proper offspring. But after that life-giving water succoured me, washing away the stain of former years, and pouring into my cleansed and hallowed breast the light which comes from heaven, after that I drank in the Heavenly Spirit, and was created into a new man by a second birth,—then marvellously what before was doubtful became plain to me, what was hidden was revealed, what was dark began to shine, what was before difficult, now had a way and a means, what had seemed impossible, now could be achieved, what was in me of the guilty flesh, now confessed that it was earthy, what was quickened in me by the Holy Ghost, now had a growth according to God248.

Again, we find an apologist like S. Athanasius, resting the stress of his argument on behalf of Christ upon what He has done in the world, and specially on the spiritual force He exercises on masses of men, ‘drawing them to religion, persuading them to virtue, teaching them immortality, leading them to the desire of heavenly things, revealing the knowledge of the Father, inspiring power over death, shewing each man to himself, abolishing the godlessness of idolatry249.’

The Fathers of the Christian Church appealed in this way to experience, because Christianity, as they knew, is essentially not a past event, but a present life, a life first manifested in Christ and then perpetuated in His Church. Christianity is a manifested life,—a thing, therefore, like all other forms of life, known not in itself but in its effects, its fruits, its results. Christianity is a manifested life, and it is this because it is the sphere in which the Spirit, the Life-giver, finds His freest and most unhindered activity. The Christian Church is the scene of the intensest, the most vigorous, the richest, the most ‘abundant’ life that the universe knows, because in a preeminent sense it is the ‘Spirit-bearing body.’ The Spirit is life; that is His chief characteristic. We may indeed elucidate the idea of spirit by negations; by negation of materiality, of circumscription, of limitation; but the positive conception we are to attach to spirit is the conception of life; and where life is most penetrating, profound, invincible, rational, conscious of God, there in fullest freedom of operation is the Holy Spirit250.

Thus, obviously enough, the doctrine of the Spirit is no remote or esoteric thing; it is no mere ultimate object of the rapt contemplation of the mystic; it is the doctrine of that wherein God touches man most nearly, most familiarly, in common life. Last in the eternal order of the Divine Being, ‘proceeding from the Father and the Son,’ the Holy Spirit is the first point of contact with God in the order of human experience251.

‘I believe in the Holy Ghost, the giver of life.’ All life is His operation. ‘Wherever the Holy Spirit is, there is also life; and wherever life is, there is also the Holy Spirit252.’ Thus if creation takes its rise in the will of the Father, if it finds its law in the being of the Word or Son, yet the effective instrument of creation, the ‘finger of God,’ the moving principle of vitalization is the Holy Spirit, ‘the divider and distributor of the gifts of life253.’

Nature is one great body, and there is breath in the body; but this breath is not self-originated life, it is the influence of the Divine Spirit. ‘By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.’ The Spirit, the breath of God, was brooding upon the face of the waters of chaos ere life and order were. It is the sending forth of the breath of God, which is the giving to things of the gift of life; it is the withdrawal of that breath which is their annihilation254. So keenly indeed were the Christians of the early period conscious of the one life of nature as the universal evidence of the one Spirit, that it was a point of the charge against Origen that his language seemed to involve an exclusion of the Holy Spirit from nature, and a limitation of His activity to the Church255. The whole of life is certainly His. And yet, because His special attribute is holiness, it is in rational natures, which alone are capable of holiness, that He exerts His special influence. A special in-breathing of the Divine Spirit gave to man his proper being256. In humanity, made after the Divine Image, it was the original intention of God that the Spirit should find His chiefest joy, building the edifice of a social life in which nature was to find its crown and justification: a life of conscious and free sonship, in which the gifts of God should be not only received, but recognised as His, and consciously used in willing and glad homage to the Divine Giver, in reverent execution of the law of development impressed by the Divine Reason, in the realized fellowship of the Blessed Spirit of knowledge and love. The history of humanity has in fact been a development, but a development the continuity of which is most apparent in that department in which man appears simply as the child of nature, the most perfect and interesting of her products, consciously adapting himself to his environment and moulded by it. This indeed has been so much the case that the facts of the history of civilization have been used, at least plausibly, as an argument against our race really possessing moral freedom at all. Such a use of the facts is, we recognise, not justifiable. It leaves out of consideration some of the most striking elements in human history, and some of the most certain facts of human consciousness. But the very plausibleness of the argument is suggestive. It means that comparatively very few men have been at pains to realize their true freedom; that men in masses have been dominated by the mere forces of nature; or, in other words, that human history presents broadly the record of a one-sided, a distorted development. For man was not meant for merely natural evolution, mere self-adaptation to the ‘things that are seen.’ The consciousness that he was meant for something higher has tinged his most brilliant physical successes, his greatest triumphs of civilization and art, with the bitterness of remorse, the misery of conscious lawlessness.

Our race was created for conscious fellowship with God, for sonship, for the life of spirit. And it is just in this department that its failure has been most conspicuous. It is here that the Divine Spirit has found His chiefest disappointment. Everywhere He has found rebellion—not everywhere without exception, for ‘in every age entering into holy souls, He has made them sons of God and prophets’: but everywhere in such a general sense that sin in fact and in its consequences covers the whole region of humanity. In the highest department of created life, where alone lawlessness was possible, because what was asked for was the co-operation of free service to carry out a freely accepted ideal257,—there alone is the record of lawlessness, the record of the Spirit striving with man, but resisted, rejected, ignored, quenched. Thus the word, which in fact most forcibly characterizes man’s spiritual history, so far as it has been according to the mind of God, is not progress, but recovery, or redemption. It is not natural but supernatural—supernatural, that is, in view of the false nature which man made for himself by excluding God. Otherwise the work of redemption is only the reconstitution of the nature which God designed. It is the recovery within the limits of a chosen race and by a deliberate process of limitation, of a state of things which had been intended to be universal258. The ‘elect’ represent not the special purpose of God for a few, but the universal purpose which under the circumstances can only be realized through a few. The hedging in of the few, the drawing of the lines so close, the method of exclusion again and again renewed all down the history of redemption, represents the love of the Divine Spirit ever baffled in the mass, preserving the truth of God in a ‘remnant,’ an elect body; who themselves escaping the corruption which is in the world, become in their turn a fresh centre from which the restorative influence can flow out upon mankind. Rejected in the world, He secures for Himself a sphere of operations in the Jews, isolating Abraham, giving the law for a hedge, keeping alive in the nation the sense of its vocation by the inspiration of prophets. Again and again baffled in the body of the Jewish nation, He falls back upon the faithful remnant, and keeps alive in them that prospective sonship which was meant to be the vocation of the whole nation: sometimes in narrower, sometimes in broader channels, the purpose of love moves on till the Spirit finds in the Son of Man, the Anointed One, the perfect realization of the destiny of man, the manhood in which He can freely and fully work: ‘He came down upon the Son of God, made son of man, accustoming Himself in His case to dwell in the human race, and to repose in man, and to dwell in God’s creatures, working out in them the will of the Father, and recovering them from their old nature into the newness of Christ259.’ In Christ humanity is perfect, because in Him it retains no part of that false independence which, in all its manifold forms, is the secret of sin. In Christ humanity is perfect and complete, in ungrudging and unimpaired obedience to the movement of the Divine Spirit, Whose creation it was, Whose organ it gave itself to be. The Spirit anoints Him; the Spirit drives Him into the wilderness; the Spirit gives Him the law of His mission; in the power of the Spirit He works His miracles; in the Holy Spirit He lifts up the voice of human thankfulness to the Divine Father; in the Spirit He offers Himself without spot to God; in the power of the Spirit He is raised from the dead260. All that perfect human life had been a life of obedience, of progressive obedience, a gradual learning in each stage of experience what obedience meant261; it had been a life of obedience which became propitiatory as it bore loyally, submissively, lovingly, all the heritage of pain and misery in which sin in its long history had involved our manhood, all the agony of that insult and rejection in which sin revealed itself by antagonism to Him—bore it, and by bearing it turned it into the material of His accepted sacrifice. He was obedient unto death. And because He thus made our human nature the organ of a life of perfect obedience, therefore He can go on to make that same humanity, freed from all the limitations of this lower world and glorified in the Spirit at the right hand of God, at once the organ of Divine supremacy over the universe of created things, and (itself become quickening Spirit262) the fount to all the sons of obedience and faith of its own life. Christ is the second Adam, who having ‘recapitulated the long development of humanity into Himself263,’ taken it up into Himself, that is, and healed its wounds and fructified its barrenness, gives it a fresh start by a new birth from Him. The Spirit coming forth at Pentecost out of His uplifted manhood, as from a glorious fountain of new life264, perpetuates all its richness, its power, its fulness in the organized society which He prepared and built for the Spirit’s habitation. The Church, His Spirit-bearing body, comes forth into the world, not as the exclusive sphere of the Spirit’s operations, for ‘that breath bloweth where it listeth265;’ but as the special and covenanted sphere of His regular and uniform operation, the place where He is pledged to dwell and to work; the centre marked out and hedged in, whence ever and again proceeds forth anew the work of human recovery; the home where, in spite of sin and imperfection, is ever kept alive the picture of what the Christian life is, that is, of what common human life is meant to be and can become.

Of the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church we may note four characteristics.

1. It is social. It treats man as a ‘social being,’ who cannot realize himself in isolation. For no other reason than because grace is the restoration of nature266, the true, the redeemed humanity, is presented to us as a society or Church. This is apparent with reference to either of the gifts which summarize the essence of the Church’s life, grace, or truth. Sacraments are the ordained instruments of grace, and sacraments are in one of their aspects social ceremonies—of incorporation, or restoration, or bestowal of authority, or fraternal sharing of the bread of life. They presuppose a social organization. Those who have attempted to explain why there should be in the Church an apostolic succession of ministers, have seen the grounds of such appointment in the necessity for preserving in a catholic society, which lacks the natural links of race or language or common habitation, a visible and obligatory bond of association267.

The same fact appears in reference to the truth, the knowledge of God and of the true nature and needs of man, which constitutes one main part of the Christian life. That too is no mere individual illumination. It is ‘a rule of faith,’ an ‘apostolic tradition,’ ‘a pattern of sound words,’ embodied in Holy Scripture and perpetuated in a teaching Church, within the scope of which each individual is to be brought to have his mind and conscience fashioned by it, normally from earliest years. It would be going beyond the province of this essay to stop to prove that from the beginnings of the Christian life, a man was understood to become a Christian and receive the benefits of redemption, by no other means than incorporation into the Christian society.

2. But none the less on account of this social method the Spirit nourishes individuality. The very idea of the Spirit’s gift is that of an intenser life. Intenser life is more individualized life, for our life becomes richer and fuller only by the intensification of personality and character. Thus Christianity has always trusted to strongly marked character as the means by which religion is propagated. It does not advance as an abstract doctrine, but by the subtle, penetrating influences of personality. It is the illuminated man who becomes a centre of illumination. ‘As clear transparent bodies if a ray of light fall on them become radiant themselves and diffuse their splendour all around, so souls illuminated by the indwelling Spirit are rendered spiritual themselves and impart their grace to others268.’ Thus, from the first, Christianity has tended to intensify individual life in a thousand ways, and has gloried in the varieties of disposition and character which the full life of the Spirit develops. The Church expects to see the same variety of life in herself as she witnesses in Nature.

‘One and the same rain,’ says S. Cyril of Jerusalem to his catechumens, ‘comes down upon all the world, yet it becomes white in the lily, and red in the rose, and purple in the violets and pansies, and different and various in all the several kinds; it is one thing in the palm tree and another in the vine, and all in all things. In itself, indeed, it is uniform and changes not, but by adapting itself to the nature of each thing that receives it, it becomes what is appropriate to each. Thus also the Holy Ghost, one and uniform and undivided in Himself, distributes His grace to every man as He wills. He employs the tongue of one man for wisdom; the soul of another He enlightens by prophecy; to another He gives power to drive away devils; to another He gives to interpret the Divine Scriptures; He invigorates one man’s self-command; He teaches another the way to give alms: another He teaches to fast and train himself; another He trains for martyrdom; diverse to different men, yet not diverse from Himself269.’

Nor was this belief in the differences of the Spirit’s work a mere abstract theory. In fact the Church life of the early centuries did present an aspect of great variety: not only in the dispositions of individuals, for that will always be observable where human nature is allowed to subsist, but in the types of life and thought cultivated in different parts of the Church. Early in the life of Christianity did something like the Roman type of Catholicism shew itself, but it shewed itself as one among several types of ecclesiasticism, easily distinguishable from what Alexandria or Africa or Antioch nourished and produced.

And what is true in the life of religion as a whole is true in the department of the intellect. Here again the authority of the collective society, the ‘rule of faith,’ is meant to nourish and quicken, not to crush, individuality. Each individual Christian owes the profoundest deference to the common tradition. Thus to ‘keep the traditions’ is at all times, and not least in Scripture, a common Christian exhortation. But this common tradition is not meant to be a merely external law. It is meant to pass by the ordinary processes of education into the individual consciousness, and there, because it represents truth, to impart freedom. Thus S. Paul speaks of the developed Christian, ‘the man who is spiritual,’ as ‘judging all things and himself judged of none.’ And S. John makes the ground of Christian certainty to lie not in an external authority, but in a personal gift: ‘ye have an unction from the Holy One and ye know all things;’ ‘ye need not that any one teach you270.’ There is then an individual ‘inspiration271,’ as well as an inspiration of the whole body, only this inspiration is not barely individual or separatist. As it proceeds out of the society, so it ends in it. It ends by making each person more individualized, more developed in personal characteristics, but for that very reason more conscious of his own incompleteness, more ready to recognise himself as only one member of the perfect Manhood.

The idea of authority is in fact a perfectly simple one. It never received better expression than by Plato when he describes it as the function of the society by a carefully regulated education to implant right instincts, right affections and antipathies, in the growing mind of the child, at a time when he cannot know the reason of things: in order that as the mind develops it may recognise the right reason of things by a certain inner kinship, and welcome truth as a friend272. Authority, according to such a view of it, is a necessary schooling of the individual temperament. Thus, we are told that in the judgment of the philosopher Hegel, ‘The basis of sound education was... the submission of the mind to an external lesson, which must be learnt by every one, and even learnt by rote, with utter disregard of individual tastes and desires; only out of this self-abnegation, and submission to be guided and taught, could any originality spring which was worth preserving273.’ In fact, we all recognise the necessity for such external discipline in all departments. Few people like good art, for instance, at first. Probably they are attracted by what is weak but arrests attention by obvious and superficial merits. The standards which artistic authority has erected, the accepted canons of good taste and judgment, do not commend themselves at first as right or natural. But modest and well-disposed people take it for granted at starting that the orthodox judgment will turn out to be right; and they set themselves to school to learn why the artists and poets of great name are great, till their own judgment becomes enlightened, and they understand what at first they took on trust. It was the instinctive perception of this function of authority which made the Church insist so much on the principle ‘credo ut intelligam.’ The Creed represents the catholic judgment, the highest knowledge of God and the spiritual life granted to man by the Divine Revelation. Let a man put himself to school in the Church with reverence and godly fear, and his own judgment will become enlightened. He will come to say with S. Anselm, ‘I give thee thanks, good Lord; because what first I believed by Thy gift, I now understand by Thy illumination274.’

Such an idea of authority leaves much for the individual to do. It is the reaction of the individual on the society which is to keep the common tradition pure and unnarrowed. The Church has in Holy Scripture the highest expression of the mind of Christ. The familiarity of all its members with this flawless and catholic image is to ward off in each generation that tendency to deteriorate and to become materialised which belongs to all ‘traditions.’ The individual illumination is thus to react as a purifying force upon the common mind of the Christian society. The individual Christian is to pay the debt of his education, by himself ‘testing all things and holding fast that which is good.’ Specially gifted individuals from time to time will be needed to effect more or less sudden ‘reversions to type,’ to the undying type of apostolic teaching275. But such a true reformer is quite distinct in idea from the heretic. He reforms; he does not innovate. His note is to restore; not to reject. And the absence of necessity for fundamental rejection comes from this simple fact, that the Christian Creed is rational and true. If any man comes to us and says that he has studied and assimilated the Christian Creed with all the care and reverence in his ability, and has rejected it because he finds it irrational and false, we cannot complain of him276. We cannot ask him to accept it though he thinks it false. We do not at all complain of his having inquired and thought freely—only we venture to assure him, with a confidence which can hardly fail to be irritating, because it is confident, that he is mistaken, that he has thought not only freely, but erroneously. When Christianity adopts, as in the modern Romanist system, a different tone, proscribing free inquiry as ‘rationalistic,’ and making the appeal to antiquity, in order to test the present teaching of the Church, a ‘treason and a heresy277,’ it is abjuring its own rational heritage, and adopting a method which Charles Kingsley had good reason to call Manichaean. It is the test of the Church’s legitimate tenure that she can encourage free inquiry into her title-deeds.

3. Thirdly, the Spirit claims for His own, and consecrates the whole of nature. One Spirit was the original author of all that is; and all that exists is in its essence very good. It is only sin which has produced the appearance of antagonism between the Divine operation and human freedom, or between the spiritual and the material. Thus the humanity of Christ, which is the Spirit’s perfect work, exhibits in its perfection how every faculty of human nature, spiritual and physical, is enriched and vitalized, not annihilated, by the closest conceivable interaction of the Divine Energy. This principle, as carried out in the Church, occupies a prominent place in the earliest theology; in part because Montanism, with its pagan idea of inspiration, as an ecstasy which deprived its subject of reason, gave the Church an opportunity of emphasizing that the fullest action of the Spirit, in the case of her inspired men, intensified and did not supersede their own thought, judgment, and individuality; still more because Gnostic dualism, turning every antithesis of nature and grace, of spirit and flesh, of natural and supernatural, into an antagonism, forced upon the Church the assertion of her own true and comprehensive Creed. That everything in Christianity is realized ‘in flesh as in spirit’ is the constantly reiterated cry of S. Ignatius, who of all men was most ‘spiritual.’ That the spiritual is not the immaterial, that we become spiritual not by any change or curtailment of nature, not by any depreciation or ignoring of the body, is the constantly asserted principle of S. Irenaeus278. And the earliest writers in general emphasize the visible organization of the Church, and the institution of external sacraments, as negations of the false principle which would sunder nature from God, and repudiate the unity of the material and the spiritual which the Word had been made Flesh in order to reveal and to perpetuate.

4. But the unity of the spirit and the flesh, of faith and experience, of God and the world, is certainly not an accomplished fact. On the contrary, dualism is always making appeals which strike home to our present experience. Thus if the Church was to maintain the unity of all things, it could only be by laying great stress upon the ravages which sin had wrought, and upon the gradualness of the Spirit’s method in recovery. The Old Testament, for example, presented a most unspiritual appearance. Its material sacrifices, its low standard of morals, its worldliness, were constantly being objected to by the Gnostic and Manichaean sects, who could not tolerate the Old Testament canon. ‘But you are ignoring,’ the Church replied, ‘the gradualness of the Spirit’s method.’ He lifts man by little and little, He condescends to man’s infirmity: He puts up with him as he is, if only He can at the last bring him back to God.

It is of the essence of the New Testament, as the religion of the Incarnation, to be final and catholic: on the other hand, it is of the essence of the Old Testament to be imperfect because it represents a gradual process of education by which man was lifted out of depths of sin and ignorance. That this is the case, and that in consequence the justification of the Old Testament method lies not in itself at any particular stage, but in its result taken as a whole, is a thought very familiar to modern Christians279. But it is important to make plain that it was a thought equally familiar to the Fathers of the Christian Church. Thus S. Gregory of Nazianzus, speaking of God’s dealings with the Jews of old, describes how, in order to gain the co-operation of man’s good will in working for his recovery, He dealt ‘after the manner of a schoolmaster or a physician, and while curtailing part of their ancestral customs, tolerated the rest, making some concession to their tastes, just as physicians make their medicines palatable that they may be taken by their patients. For men do not easily abandon what long custom has consecrated. Thus the first law, while it abolished their idols, tolerated their sacrifices; the second, while it abolished their sacrifices, allowed them to be circumcised: then when once they had accepted the removal of what was taken from them, they went further and gave up what had been conceded to them—in the first case their sacrifices, in the second their practice of circumcision—and they became instead of heathens, Jews, instead of Jews, Christians, being betrayed as it were by gradual changes into acceptance of the Gospel280.’ Again, S. Chrysostom explains how it is the very merit of the Old Testament that it has taught us to think things intolerable, which under it were tolerated. ‘Do not ask,’ he says, ‘how these (Old Testament precepts) can be good, now when the need for them is past: ask how they were good when the period required them. Or rather, if you wish, do inquire into their merit even now. It is still conspicuous, and lies in nothing so much as what now enables us to find fault with them. Their highest praise is that we now see them to be defective. If they had not trained us well, so that we became susceptible of higher things, we should not have now seen their deficiency.’ Then he shews how under the old law swearing by the true God was allowed to avoid swearing by idols, the worse ill. ‘But is not swearing at all of the evil one?’ he asks. ‘Undoubtedly, now, after this long course of training, but then not. And how can the same thing be good at one time and bad at another? I ask rather, how should it not be so, when we have regard to the plain teaching of the fact of growth in all things, fruits of the earth or acquirements of man? Look at man’s own nature; the food, the occupations which suit his infancy, are repulsive to his manhood. Or consider facts of history. All agree that murder is an invention of Satan, yet this very act at a suitable time made Phineas to be honoured with the high priesthood. Phineas’ murder “was reckoned to him for righteousness.” Just in the same way Abraham obtained an even higher honour for being not a murderer only but what was much worse, a child-murderer. We must not then look at the facts in themselves only, but investigate with attention the period also, the cause, the motive, the difference of persons, and all the attendant circumstances: so only can one get at the truth281.’

Once more S. Basil: ‘Surely it is absolutely infantile and worthy of a child who must be really fed on milk, to be ignorant of the great mystery of our salvation—that just as we received our earliest instruction, so, in exercising unto godliness and going on unto perfection, we were first trained by lessons easy to apprehend and suited to our intelligence. He Who regulates our lives deals with us as those who have been reared in darkness, and gradually accustoms our eyes to the light of truth. For He spares our weakness, and in the depth of the riches of His wisdom and the unsearchable judgments of His understanding adopts this gentle treatment, so well adapted to our needs, accustoming us first to see the shadow of objects, and to look at the sun’s reflection in water, so that we may not be suddenly blinded by the exposure to the pure light. By parity of reasoning, the law being a shadow of things to come, and the typical teaching of the prophets, which is the truth darkly, have been devised as exercises for the eyes of the heart, inasmuch as it will be easy for us to pass from these to wisdom hidden in mystery282.’

In the same spirit was the Church’s answer to the difficulties which facts of personal experience were constantly putting in the way of her claims. Churchmen were frequently seen to be vulgar, ignorant, imperfect, sinful. If, in spite of manifold evils existing within her, the Church could still appeal to her fruits, it must be by comparison with what was to be found elsewhere, or by taking in a large area for comparison, or by appealing to her special grounds of hope. In fact, what she represented was a hope, not a realization; a tendency, not a result; a life in process, not a ripened fruit. But then she claimed that this was God’s way. ‘He loves us not as we are, but as we are becoming283.’ Let but a man once lay hold of the life-giving principle of faith, and God sets a value on him, life has a promise for him, altogether out of proportion to present attainments. For God estimates him, in view of all the forces of a new life which are set loose to work upon him, and he can assure himself that the movement of recovery which he has begun to feel stirring within him will carry him on through eternal ages, beyond what he can ask or think.

It is because of this gradualness of the Spirit’s method that it lays so great a strain on human patience. The spiritually-minded of all ages have tended to find the visible Church a very troubled and imperfect home. Most startling disclosures of the actual state of ecclesiastical disorder and moral collapse, may be gathered out of the Christian Fathers. Thus to found a ‘pure Church’ has been the instinct of impatient zeal since Tertullian’s day. But the instinct has to be restrained, the visible Church has to be borne with, because it is the Spirit’s purpose to provide a home for the training and improvement of the imperfect. ‘Let both grow together unto the harvest.’ ‘A bruised reed will He not break, and smoking flax will He not quench.’ The Church must have her terms of communion, moral and intellectual: this is essential to keep her fundamental principles intact, and to prevent her betraying her secret springs of strength and recovery. But short of this necessity she is tolerant. It is her note to be tolerant, morally and theologically. She is the mother, not the magistrate. No doubt her balanced duty is one difficult to fulfil. At times she has been puritanical, at others morally lax; at times doctrinally lax, at others rigid. But however well or ill she has fulfilled the obligations laid on her, this is her ideal. She is the guardian, the depository of a great gift, a mighty presence, which in its essence is unchanging and perfect, but is realized very imperfectly in her experience and manifested life. This is what S. Thomas Aquinas means when he says ‘that to believe in the Church is only possible if we mean by it to believe in the Spirit vivifying the Church284.’ The true self of the Church is the Holy Spirit, but a great deal in the Church at any date does not belong to her true self, and is obscuring the Spirit’s mind. Thus the treasure is in earthen vessels, it is sometimes a light hid under a bushel; and the Church is the probation of faith, as well as its encouragement.

It will not be out of place to conclude this review of the Spirit’s method in the Church by calling attention to the emphasis which, from the first, Christians laid upon the fact that the animating principle both of their individual lives and of their society as a whole, was nothing less than the Holy Spirit Himself. To know Him was (as against all the philosophical schools, and in a sense in which the same could not be said even of the Divine Word) their peculiar privilege, to possess Him their summary characteristic. Under the old covenant, and in all the various avenues of approach to the Church, men could be the subjects of the Spirit’s guidance and could be receiving gifts from Him; but the ‘initiated’ Christian, baptized and confirmed, possessed not merely His gifts but Himself. He is in the Church, as the ‘Vicar of Christ,’ in Whose presence Christ Himself is with them. He is the consecrator of every sacrament, and the substance of His own sacramental gifts. The services of ordained men indeed are required for the administration of sacraments, but as ministers simply of a Power higher than themselves, of a Personal Spirit Who indeed is invoked by their ministry, and pledges Himself to respond to their invocations, but never subjects Himself to their power. Therefore the unworthiness of the minister diminishes in no way the efficacy of the sacrament, or the reality of the gift given, because the ministry of men neither creates the gift nor adds to or diminishes its force. He is the giver of the gift, and the gift He gives is the same to all. Only the meagreness of human faith and love restrains the largeness of His bounty and conditions the Thing received by the narrowness and variability of the faculty which receives it. According to our faith is it done to us, and where there is no faith and no love there the grace is equally, in S. Augustine’s phrase, present and profitless285.

II. In something of this way the early Christian writers—and it has seemed better to let them speak for us—teach the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. What they teach is grounded in part on actual experience, in part on the revelation of the being and action of God made once for all in the Person of Jesus Christ and recorded in the New Testament. On this mingled basis of experience and Holy Scripture they passed back from the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as He is operative in the world, to the Theology of His Person. They passed back but slowly, with great hesitation, even unwillingness. Nothing, we may say, was further removed from the Fathers than the easy-going assumption that because we are the subjects of a revelation, therefore we are able to speculate with tolerably complete information about the mysteries which lie beyond experience. The truth that ‘we know in part,’ we see ‘in a glass darkly,’ was profoundly impressed upon their minds. God manifested Himself, S. Gregory of Nazianzus tells, in such a way as to escape the nets of our syllogisms, and to shew Himself superior to our logical distinctions. If we expect to find our logic equal to express Him, we shew only our mad presumption, ‘we who are not able even to know what lies at our feet, or to count the waves of the sea, or the drops of rain, or the days of the world, much less to fathom the depths of God, and give account of His nature which transcends alike our reason and our power of expression286.’ Besides this, the early theologians realized the obligation of keeping to Holy Scripture—of not being wise ‘above that which is written’—and they were conscious of the danger of building on isolated texts of Scripture or of treating its ‘simple and untechnical’ language as if it was the language of a formal treatise287.

For these reasons they were cautious in theological speculation. Yet the facts and relationships introduced into the world of experience by the revelation of the Son represent eternal realities, if under great limitations yet still truly, and thus make possible a real security up to a certain point on what lies beyond the unassisted human knowledge. Thus, first, when the Arian movement passed from the denial of the true Godhead of Christ to a similar position with reference to the Holy Spirit, the Christian Church felt itself fully justified alike by its past traditions288, and by its Scriptures, in emphasizing the personal distinctness and the true Godhead of the Holy Spirit. Unless all Christ’s language was an illusion, the Holy Spirit was really personal and really distinct from Himself and the Father; nor could One who was associated with the Father and the Son in all the essentially Divine operations of nature and grace, be less than truly and really God, an essential element in the Eternal Being. The Arian controversy in its earlier stages had disposed of the notion that Christian theology could at any cost admit the conception of a created personality, clothed with Divine attributes and exercising Divine functions.

Secondly, the consideration that the relations manifested in the Incarnation in terms of our experience between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, express transcendent and eternal relations, led the Church to speak of the Holy Ghost as proceeding from the Father, as the unique fount of Godhead, through the Son: or in somewhat less nicely discriminated language ‘from the Father and the Son289.’ In the fifth century there is a tendency to use in the East the former, in the West the latter mode of expression, but without any essential difference. Nor can it be said that the causes which were at work later to divide the Eastern and the Western Churches on the subject of the procession of the Holy Ghost, were so much really theological as ecclesiastical and political.

Thirdly, the accurate consideration of the language in which is expressed the relation of Christ to the Holy Spirit, helped the Church to guard the doctrine of the Trinity from the associations of Tritheism. For the coming of the Holy Spirit is clearly spoken of in Holy Scripture as coincident with and involving the coming of Christ. ‘While we are illuminated by the Holy Spirit, it is Christ who illuminates us: when we drink in the Spirit, it is Christ we drink.’ The Spirit is distinct from Christ—‘another Paraclete’—yet in His coming, Christ comes: in His indwelling is the indwelling of the Father and the Son290. How can this be? Because the ‘Persons’ of the Holy Trinity are not to be thought of as distinct individuals, as three Gods. No doubt in our ordinary language, persons are understood to be separate, and mutually exclusive beings. Even in regard to ourselves deeper reflection shews us that our personalities are very far from being as separate as they appear to be on the surface: and with regard to God, it was only with an expressed apology for the imperfection of human language that the Church spoke of the Divine Three, as Three Persons at all. But ‘we have no celestial language,’ and the word is the only one which will express what Christ’s language implies about Himself, the Father, and the Spirit. Only while we use it, it must be understood to express mutual inclusion, not mutual exclusion.

Wherever the Father works, He works essentially and inevitably through the Son and the Spirit; whenever the Son acts, He acts from the Father by the Holy Spirit; whenever the Holy Spirit comes, He brings with Him in His coming the Son and the Father. Thus when an image was necessary to interpret in part the Divine relationships, the Fathers sought it nowhere so much as in the three distinct yet inseparable elements of man’s spiritual nature; the triune character of which Plato had already brought into notice, and which is in fact an earthly image, however inadequate, of the Triune God291.

III. Hitherto nothing has been said about that part of the Holy Spirit’s work which is called the inspiration of Scripture. It has been kept to the last because of the great importance of putting it in context with less familiar truths. The Scriptures have, it is a commonplace to say, suffered greatly from being isolated. This is as true whether we are considering them as a source of evidence or as the sphere of inspiration.

As a source of evidence they contain the record of historical facts with some of which at any rate the Creed of Christendom is inseparably interwoven. Thus it is impossible for Christians who know what they are about, to depreciate the importance of the historical evidence for those facts at least of which the Creed contains a summary. But the tendency with books of historical evidence has been, at least till recently, to exaggerate the extent to which the mere evidence of remote facts can compel belief. What we should make of the New Testament record, what estimate we should be able to form of the Person of Jesus Christ and the meaning of His life and work, if it was contained simply in some old manuscripts, or unearthed in some way by antiquaries out of the Syrian sand, it is impossible to say. In order to have grounds for believing the facts, in order to be susceptible of their evidence, we require an antecedent state of conception and expectation. A whole set of presuppositions about God, about the slavery of sin, about the reasonableness of redemption, must be present with us. So only can the facts presented to us in the Gospel come to us as credible things, or as parts of an intelligible universe, correlated elements in a rational whole. Now the work of the Spirit in the Church has been to keep alive and real these presuppositions, this frame of mind. He convinces of sin, of righteousness, of judgment. He does this not merely in isolated individuals however numerous, but in an organized continuous society. The spiritual life of the Church assures me that in desiring union with God, in feeling the burden of sin, in hungering for redemption, I am not doing an eccentric, abnormal thing. I am doing only what belongs to the best and richest movement of humanity. More than this, it assures me that assent to the claims and promises of Jesus Christ satisfies these spiritual needs in such a way as to produce the strongest, the most lasting, the most catholic sort of human character. The historical life of the Church thus in every age ‘setting to its seal’ that God’s offer in Christ is true, reproduces the original ‘witness,’ commends it to conscience and reason, spans the gulf of the ages, and brings down remote and alien incidents into close and intelligible familiarity. Lotze speaks of revelation as ‘either contained in some divine act of historic occurrence, or continually repeated in men’s hearts292.’ But in fact the antithesis is not an alternative. The strength of the Christian Creed is that it is both. It is a revelation continuously renewed in men’s hearts by an organized and systematic operation of the Spirit in the Church, while at the same time it finds its guarantee and security in certain Divine acts of historic occurrence.

Once more, the belief in the Holy Scriptures as inspired requires to be held in context by the belief in the general action of the Holy Spirit upon the Christian society and the individual soul. It is, we may perhaps say, becoming more and more difficult to believe in the Bible without believing in the Church. The Apostles, indeed,—and the New Testament canon consists largely of the words of Apostles—have an authority which, reasonably considered, is unique, and stands by itself as that of the accredited witnesses of Christ; but when we find them appealing to members of the Church, they appeal not as the possessors of an absolute authority or of a Spirit in which others do not share. They are the ministers of a ‘tradition’ to which they themselves are subject, a tradition ‘once for all delivered293:’ they appeal to those who hear them as men ‘who have an unction from the Holy One and know all things.’ The tone in fact of the apostolic writers forces us to regard the spirit in which the Church lives, as co-operating with, and in a real sense limiting, the spirit in which they themselves speak and write. Thus in fact the apostolic writings were written as occasion required, within the Church, and for the Church. They presuppose membership in it and familiarity with its tradition. They are secondary, not primary, instructors; for edification, not for initiation. Nor, in fact, can a hard and fast line be drawn between what lies within and what lies without the canon. For example, Protestantism of an unecclesiastical sort has built upon the Epistle to the Hebrews as much as upon any book of the New Testament. This book is of unknown authorship. If ‘Pauline’ it is pretty certainty not S. Paul’s. In large part it is the judgment of the Church which enables us to draw a line between it and S. Clement’s ‘scripture.’ The line indeed our own judgment approves. The Epistle to the Hebrews and S. Clement’s letter are closely linked together, but the latter depends on the former: it is secondary and the other is primary. Yet how narrow is the historical interval between them. How impossible to tear the one from the other. How seemingly irrational to attribute absolute authority to the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews which represents apostolic teaching at second hand294, and then to interpret it in a sense hostile to the Epistle of Clement, which represents exactly the same stream of apostolic teaching only one short stage lower down. For Clement interprets the high priesthood of Christ in a sense which, instead of excluding, makes it the basis of, the ministerial hierarchy of the Church. Or to put the matter more broadly, how irrational it is, considering the intimate links by which the New Testament canon is bound up with the historic Church, not to accept the mind of the Church, especially when we have its consent down independent lines of tradition, as interpreting the mind of the apostolic writers. Most rational surely is the attitude of the early Church towards Scripture. The Scripture was regarded as the highest utterance of the Spirit, the unique and constant test of the Church’s life and teaching. But the Spirit in the Church interpreted the meaning of Scripture. Thus the Church taught and the Scripture tested and verified or corrected her teaching: and this because all was of one piece, the life of the Church including the Scriptures, the inspired writers themselves appealing to the Spirit in the Churches295.

And now, what is to be said about this, at present, much controverted subject of the inspiration of Holy Scripture? What does the doctrine imply, and what attitude does belief in it involve towards the modern critical treatment of the inspired literature?

1. Let us bear carefully in mind the place which the doctrine holds in the building up of a Christian faith. It is in fact an important part of the superstructure, but it is not among the bases of the Christian belief. The Christian creed asserts the reality of certain historical facts. To these facts, in the Church’s name, we claim assent: but we do so on grounds which, so far, are quite independent of the inspiration of the evangelic records. All that we claim to shew at this stage is that they are historical: not historical so as to be absolutely without error, but historical in the general sense, so as to be trustworthy. All that is necessary for faith in Christ is to be found in the moral dispositions which predispose to belief, and make intelligible and credible the thing to be believed: coupled with such acceptance of the generally historical character of the Gospels, and of the trustworthiness of the other apostolic documents, as justifies belief that our Lord was actually born of the Virgin Mary, manifested as the Son of God ‘with power according to a spirit of holiness,’ crucified, raised again the third day from the dead, exalted to the right hand of the Father, the founder of the Church and the source to it of the informing Spirit.

In all this no claim is made for any special belief as to the method of the Spirit’s work in the Scripture or in the Church. Logically such belief follows, does not precede, belief in Christ. Indeed, in the past, Christian apologists have made a great mistake in allowing opponents to advance as objections against the historical character of the Gospel narrative, what are really objections not against its historical character—not such as could tell against the substantially historical character of secular documents—but against a certain view of the meaning of inspiration. Let it be laid down then that Christianity brings with it indeed a doctrine of the inspiration of Holy Scriptures, but is not based upon it296.

2. But such a doctrine it does bring with it. Our Lord and His Apostles are clearly found to believe and to teach that the Scriptures of the Old Testament were given by inspiration of God; and the Christian Church from the earliest days postulated the same belief about the Scriptures of the New Testament. To disbelieve that ‘the Scriptures were spoken by the Holy Ghost,’ was equivalent to being ’an unbeliever297.’

Thus, when once a man finds himself a believer in Christ, he will find himself in a position where alike the authority of his Master and the ‘communis sensus’ of the society he belongs to, give into his hand certain documents and declare them inspired.

3. What in its general idea does this mean?

S. Athanasius expresses the function of the Jews in the world in a luminous phrase, when he describes them as having been the ‘sacred school for all the world of the knowledge of God and of the spiritual life298.’ Every race has its special vocation, and we recognise in the great writers of each race the interpreters of that vocation. They are specially gifted individuals, but not merely individuals. The race speaks in them: Rome is interpreted by Virgil, and Greece by Aeschylus or Plato. Now every believer in God must see in these special missions of races, a Divine inspiration. If we can once get down to the bottom of human life, below its pride, its wilfulness, its pretentiousness, down to its essence, we get to God and to a movement of His Spirit299. Thus every race has its inspiration and its prophets.

But the inspiration of the Jews was supernatural. What does this mean? That the Jews were selected—not to be the school for humanity in any of the arts and sciences which involve the thought of God only indirectly, and can therefore be carried on without a fundamental restoration of man into that relation to God which sin had clouded or broken,—but to be the school of that fundamental restoration itself. Therefore, in the case of the Jews the inspiration is both in itself more direct and more intense, and also involves a direct consciousness on the part of its subjects. In the race, indeed, the consciousness might be dim; but the consciousness, as the prophets all assure us, did belong to the race, and not merely to its individual interpreters. They speak as recalling the people to something which they know, or ought to know, not as preachers of a new religion. They were ‘the conscience of the state300.’ But special men, prophets, psalmists, moralists, historians, were thus the inspired interpreters of the Divine message to and in the race: and their inspiration lies in this, that they were the subjects of a movement of the Holy Ghost, so shaping, controlling, quickening their minds and thoughts and aspirations, as to make them the instruments through which was imparted ‘the knowledge of God and of the spiritual life.’

Various are the degrees of this inspiration: the inspiration of the prophet is direct, continuous, absorbing. The inspiration of the writer of Ecclesiastes, on the other hand, is such as to lead him to ponder on all the phases of a worldly experience, passing through many a false conclusion, and cynical denial, till at the last his thought is led to unite itself to the great stream of Divine movement by finding the only possible solution of the problems of life in the recognition of God, and in obedience to Him.

Various also are the sorts of literature inspired: for the supernatural fertilizes and does not annihilate the natural. The Church repudiated the Montanist conception of inspiration, according to which the inspired man speaks in ecstasy, as the passive unconscious instrument of the Spirit; and the metaphors which would describe the Holy Spirit as acting upon a man ‘like a flute player breathing into his flute,’ or ‘a plectrum striking a lyre,’ have always a suspicion of heresy attaching to their use301. As the humanity of Christ is none the less a true humanity for being conditioned by absolute oneness with God, so the human activity is none the less free, conscious, rational, because the Spirit inspires it. The poet is a poet, the philosopher a philosopher, the historian an historian, each with his own idiosyncrasies, ways, and methods, to be interpreted each by the laws of his own literature. And just as truly as physiology, in telling us more and more about the human body, is telling us about the body which the Son of God assumed, so with the growth of our knowledge about the kinds and sequences of human literature, shall we know more and more about the literature of the Jews which the Holy Spirit inspired.

What then is meant by the inspiration of Holy Scripture? If we begin our inquiry with the account of creation with which the Bible opens, we may take note of its affinities in general substance with the Babylonian and Phoenician cosmogonies; but we are much more struck with its differences, and it is in these we shall look for its inspiration. We observe that it has for its motive and impulse not the satisfaction of a fantastic curiosity, or the later interest of scientific discovery, but to reveal certain fundamental religious principles: that everything as we see it was made by God: that it has no being in itself but at God’s will: on the other hand, that everything is in its essence good, as the product of the good God: that man, besides sharing the physical nature of all creation, has a special relation to God, as made in God’s image, to be God’s vice-gerent: that sin, and all that sin brings with it of misery and death, came not of man’s nature but of his disobedience to God and rejection of the limitations under which He put him: that in spite of all that sin brought about, God has not left man to himself, that there is a hope and a promise. These are the fundamental principles of true religion and progressive morality, and in these lies the supernatural inspiration of the Bible account of creation302.

As we pass on down the record of Genesis, we do not find ourselves in any doubt as to the primary and certain meaning of its inspiration. The first traditions of the race are all given there from a special point of view. In that point of view lies the inspiration. It is that everything is presented to us as illustrating God’s dealings with man—God’s judgment on sin: His call of a single man to work out a universal mission: His gradual delimitation of a chosen race: His care for the race: His over-ruling of evil to work out His purpose. The narrative of Genesis has all the fullest wealth of human interest, but it is in the unveiling of the hand of God that its special characteristic lies. As we go on into the history, we find the recorders acting like the recorders of other nations, collecting, sorting, adapting, combining their materials, but in this inspired—that the animating motive of their work is not to bring out the national glory or to flatter the national vanity, nor, like the motive of a modern historian, the mere interest in fact, but to keep before the chosen people the record of how God has dealt with them. This, as we perceive, gives them a special sense of the value of fact303. They record what God has done, how God did in such and such ways take action on behalf of His peculiar people, delivering them, punishing them, teaching them, keeping them, disciplining them for higher ends. And none who have eyes to see God’s spiritual purposes can doubt that those historians read aright the chronicles of the kings of Israel. The spiritual significance which they see is the true significance. God’s special purpose was on Israel.

It is not necessary to emphasize in what consists the special inspiration of psalmists or of prophets. The psalmists take some of the highest places among the poets of all nations, but the poetic faculty is directed to one great end, to reveal the soul in its relation to God, in its exultations and in its self-abasements. ‘Where... did they come from, those piercing lightning-like gleams of strange spiritual truth, those magnificent out-looks upon the kingdom of God, those raptures at His presence and His glory, those wonderful disclosures of self-knowledge, those pure out-pourings of the love of God? Surely here is something more than the mere working of the mind of man. Surely... they repeat the whispers of the Spirit of God, they reflect the very light of the Eternal Wisdom304.’

In the case of prophets once more we get the most obvious and typical instances of inspiration305. The prophets make a direct claim to be the instruments of the Divine Spirit. Not that the Divine Spirit supersedes their human faculties, but He intensifies them. They see deeper under the surface of life what God is doing, and therefore further into the future what He will do. No doubt their predictive knowledge is general, it is of the issue to which things tend. It is not at least usually a knowledge ‘of times and of seasons which the Father hath put in His own power.’ Thus at times they foreshorten the distance, and place the great deliverance and the ‘day of Jehovah’ in the too immediate foreground306. The prophetic inspiration is thus consistent with erroneous anticipations as to the circumstances and the opportunity of God’s self-revelation, just as the apostolic inspiration admitted of S. Paul expecting the second coming of Christ within his own life-time. But the prophets claim to be directly and really inspired to teach and interpret what God is doing and commanding in their own age, and to forecast what in judgment and redemptive mercy God means to do and must do in the Divine event. The figure of the king Messiah dawns upon their horizon with increasing definiteness of outline and characteristic, and we, with the experience of history between us and them, are sure that the correspondence of prophecy and fulfilment can be due to no other cause than that they spoke in fact the ‘word of the Lord.’

Thus there is built up for us in the literature of a nation, marked by an unparalleled unity of purpose and character, a spiritual fabric, which in its result we cannot but recognise as the action of the Divine Spirit. A knowledge of God and of the spiritual life gradually appears, not as the product of human ingenuity, but as the result of Divine communication: and the outcome of this communication is to produce an organic whole which postulates a climax not yet reached, a redemption not yet given, a hope not yet satisfied. In this general sense at least no Christian ought to feel a difficulty in believing, and believing with joy, in the inspiration of the Old Testament: nor can he feel that he is left without a standard by which to judge what it means. Christ, the goal of Old Testament development, stands forth as the test and measure of its inspiration.

The New Testament consists of writings of Apostles or of men of sub-apostolic rank, like S. Luke and probably the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. There is not, except perhaps in the case of the Apocalypse, any sign of an inspiration to write, other than the inspiration which gave power to teach. What then is, whether for writing or for teaching, the inspiration of an Apostle?

If Jesus Christ both was, and knew Himself to be, the Revealer of the Father, it almost stands to reason that He must have secured that His revelation should be, without material alloy, communicated to the Church which was to enshrine and perpetuate it. Thus, in fact, we find that He spent His chief pains on the training of His apostolic witnesses. And all the training which He gave them while He was present among them was only to prepare them to receive the Holy Ghost Who, after He was gone, was to be poured out upon them to qualify them to bear His witness among men.

‘Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and ye shall be My witnesses:’ ‘These things have I spoken unto you while yet abiding with you. And the Comforter, even the Holy Ghost, Whom the Father will send in My name, He shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you.’ ‘I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all the truth307.’

Thus the Church sees in the Apostles men specially and deliberately qualified to interpret Christ to the world. It understands by their inspiration an endowment which enables men of all ages to take their teaching as representing, and not misrepresenting, His teaching and Himself. In S. John’s Gospel, for example, we have an account of our Lord which has obviously passed through the medium of a most remarkable personality. We have the outcome of the meditation, as well as the recollection, of the Apostle. But, as the evidence assures us that the Gospel is really S. John’s, so the Church unhesitatingly accepts S. John’s strong and repeated asseveration that he is interpreting and not distorting the record, the personality, the claims of Jesus Christ. ‘He bears record, and his record is true308.’

This assurance is indeed not without verification: it is verified by the unity of testimony which, under all differences of character and circumstance, we find among the apostolic witnesses. The accepted doctrine of the Church when S. Paul wrote his ‘undoubted Epistles,’—the points of agreement amidst all differences between him and the Judaizers—gives us substantially the same conception of the Person of the Incarnate Son of God as we find in S. John309. The same conception of what He was, is required to interpret the record of what He did and said in the Synoptic Gospels. Further, the witness of the Apostles, though it receives its final guarantee through the belief in their inspiration, has its natural basis in the prolonged training by which—‘companying with them all the time that He went in and out among them, beginning from the baptism of John, until the day that He was received up,’—they were prepared to be His witnesses. Thus if an act of faith is asked of us in the apostolic inspiration, it is a reasonable act of faith.

If we pass from the writings properly apostolic to those like S. Luke’s records, which represent apostolic teaching at second hand, we do not find that the inspiration of their writers was of such sort as enabled them to dispense with the ordinary means or guarantees of accuracy. The simple claim of S. Luke’s preface to have had the best means of information and to have taken the greatest care in the use of them, is on this score most instructive. We should suppose that their inspiration was part of the whole spiritual endowment of their life which made them the trusted friends of the Apostles, and qualified them to be the chosen instruments to record their teaching, in the midst of a Church whose quick and eager memory of ‘the tradition’ would have acted as a check to prevent any material error creeping into the record.

4. It will be remembered that when inspiration is spoken of by S. Paul, he mentions it as a positive endowment which qualifies the writings of those who were its subjects, to be permanent sources of spiritual instruction. ‘Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness310.’ Following out this idea of Holy Scripture then, we are led to think of the belief in inspiration as having this primary practical result: that we submit ourselves to the teaching of every book which is given to us as inspired. We are to put ourselves to school with each in turn of the inspired writers; with S. James, for example, in the New Testament, as well as with S. John and S. Paul; with S. Luke as well as with S. Matthew; with the Pastoral Epistles as well as with the Epistle to the Galatians311. At starting each of us, according to his predisposition, is conscious of liking some books of Scripture better than others. This, however, should lead us to recognise that in some way we specially need the teaching which is less attractive to us. We should set ourselves to study what we like less, till that too has had its proper effect in moulding our conscience and character. It is hardly possible to estimate how much division would have been avoided in the Church if those, for example, who were most ecclesiastically disposed had been at pains to assimilate the teaching of the Epistle to the Romans, and those who most valued ‘the freedom of the Gospel’ had recognised a special obligation to deepen their hold on the Epistles to the Corinthians and the Pastoral Epistles and the Epistle of S. James.

To believe in the inspiration of Holy Scripture is to put ourselves to school with every part of the Old Testament, as of the New. True, the Old Testament is imperfect, but for that very reason has a special value. ‘The real use of the earlier record is not to add something to the things revealed in Christ, but to give us that clear and all-sided insight into the meaning and practical worth of the perfect scheme of Divine grace which can only be attained by tracing its growth312.’ We see in the Old Testament the elements, each in separation, which went to make up the perfect whole, and which must still lie at the basis of all rightly formed life of individuals and societies.

Thus to believe, for instance, in the inspiration of the Old Testament forces us to recognise a real element of the Divine education in the imprecatory Psalms. They are not the utterances of selfish spite313: they are the claim which righteous Israel makes upon God that He should vindicate Himself, and let their eyes see how ‘righteousness turns again unto judgment.’ The claim is made in a form which belongs to an early stage of spiritual education; to a time when this life was regarded as the scene in which God must finally vindicate Himself, and when the large powers and possibilities of the Divine compassion were very imperfectly recognised. But behind these limitations, which characterize the greater part of the Old Testament, the claim of these Psalms still remains a necessary part of the claim of the Christian soul. We must not only recognise the reality of Divine judgments in time and eternity, bodily and spiritual; we must not only acquiesce in them because they are God’s; we must go on to claim of God the manifestation of His just judgment, so that holiness and joy, sin and failure, shall be seen to coincide.

To recognise then the inspiration of the Bible is to put ourselves to school in every part of it, and everywhere to bear in mind the admonition of the De Imitatione ‘that every Scripture must be read in the same spirit in which it was written.’ So far it will not be a point in dispute among Christians what inspiration means, or what its purpose is. ‘The Councils of Trent and the Vatican,’ writes Cardinal Newman, ‘tell us distinctly the object and the promise of Scriptural inspiration. They specify “faith and moral conduct” as the drift of that teaching which has the guarantee of inspiration314.’ Nor can it be denied that the more Holy Scripture is read from this point of view, the more confidently it is treated as the inspired guide of faith and conduct, no less in the types of character which it sets before us than in its direct instruction, the more the experience and appreciation of its inspiration grows upon us, so that to deny or to doubt it comes to mean to deny or to doubt a matter plain to the senses. Indeed what has been said under this head will probably appear to those practised in the spiritual use of Holy Scripture as an understatement, perhaps not easy to justify, of the sense in which the Scripture is the Word of God, and the spiritual food of the soul315.

5. But here certain important questions arise. (a) The revelation of God was made in a historical process. Its record is in large part the record of a national life: it is historical. Now the inspiration of the recorder lies, as we have seen, primarily in this, that he sees the hand of God in the history and interprets His purpose. Further, we must add, his sense of the working of God in history, increases his realization of the importance of historical fact. Thus there is a profound air of historical truthfulness pervading the Old Testament record from Abraham downward. The weaknesses, the sins, of Israel’s heroes are not spared. Their sin and its punishment is always before us. There is no flattering of national pride, no giving the reins to boastfulness. In all this the Old Testament appears to be in marked contrast, as to contemporary Assyrian monuments, so also to a good deal of much later ecclesiastical history. But does the inspiration of the recorder guarantee the exact historical truth of what he records? And in matter of fact can the record, with due regard to legitimate historical criticism, be pronounced true? Now, to the latter of these two questions (and they are quite distinct questions), we may reply that there is nothing to prevent our believing, as our faith certainly strongly disposes us to believe, that the record from Abraham downward is in substance in the strict sense historical. Of course the battle of historical truth cannot be fought on the field of the Old Testament, as it can on that of the New, because it is so vast and indecisive, and because (however certainly ancient is such a narrative as that contained in Genesis xiv.) very little of the early record can be securely traced to a period near the events. Thus the Church cannot insist upon the historical character of the earliest records of the ancient Church in detail, as she can on the historical character of the Gospels or the Acts of the Apostles. On the other hand, as it seems the more probable opinion that the Hebrews must have been acquainted with the art of writing in some form long before the Exodus, there is no reason to doubt the existence of some written records among them from very early days316. Internal evidence again certainly commends to our acceptance the history of the patriarchs, of the Egyptian bondage, of the great redemption, of the wanderings, as well as of the later period as to which there would be less dispute. In a word we are, we believe, not wrong in anticipating that the Church will continue to believe and to teach that the Old Testament from Abraham downwards is really historical, and that there will be nothing to make such belief and teaching unreasonable or wilful. But within the limits of what is substantially historical, there is still room for an admixture of what, though marked by spiritual purpose, is yet not strictly historical—for instance, for a feature which characterizes all early history, the attribution to first founders of what is really the remoter result of their institutions. Now historical criticism317 assures us that this process has been largely at work in the Pentateuch. By an analysis, for instance, the force of which is very great, it distinguishes distinct stages in the growth of the law of worship: at least an early stage such as is represented in ‘the Book of the Covenant318,’ a second stage in the Book of Deuteronomy, a last stage in ‘the Priestly Code.’ What we may suppose to have happened is that Moses himself established a certain germ of ceremonial enactment in connection with the ark and its sacred tent, and with the ‘ten words’; and that this developed always as ‘the law of Moses,’ the whole result being constantly attributed, probably unconsciously and certainly not from any intention to deceive, to the original founder. This view would certainly imply that the recorders of Israel’s history were subject to the ordinary laws in the estimate of evidence, that their inspiration did not consist in a miraculous communication to them of facts as they originally happened: but if we believe that the law, as it grew, really did represent the Divine intention for the Jews, gradually worked out upon the basis of a Mosaic institution, there is nothing materially untruthful, though there is something uncritical, in attributing the whole legislation to Moses acting under the Divine command. It would be only of a piece with the attribution of the collection of Psalms to David and of Proverbs to Solomon. Nor does the supposition that the law was of gradual growth interfere in any way with the symbolical and typical value of its various ordinances.

Once again, the same school of criticism would assure us that the Books of Chronicles represent a later and less historical version of Israel’s history than that given in Samuel and Kings319: they represent, according to this view, the version of that history which had become current in the priestly schools. What we are asked to admit is not conscious perversion, but unconscious idealizing of history, the reading back into past records of a ritual development which was really later. Now inspiration excludes conscious deception or pious fraud, but it appears to be quite consistent with this sort of idealizing; always supposing that the result read back into the earlier history does represent the real purpose of God and only anticipates its realization.

Here then is one great question. Inspiration certainly means the illumination of the judgment of the recorder. ‘By the contact of the Holy Spirit,’ says Origen, ‘they became clearer in their mental perceptions, and their souls were filled with a brighter light320.’ But have we any reason to believe that it means, over and above this, the miraculous communication of facts not otherwise to be known, a miraculous communication such as would make the recorder independent of the ordinary processes of historical tradition? Certainly neither S. Luke’s preface to his Gospel, nor the evidence of any inspired record, justifies us in this assumption. Nor would it appear that spiritual illumination, even in the highest degree, has any tendency to lift men out of the natural conditions of knowledge which belong to their time. Certainly in the similar case of exegesis, it would appear that S. Paul is left to the method of his time, though he uses it with inspired insight into the function and meaning of law and of prophecy as a whole. Thus, without pronouncing an opinion, where we have no right to do so, on the critical questions at present under discussion, we may maintain with considerable assurance that there is nothing in the doctrine of inspiration to prevent our recognising a considerable idealizing element in the Old Testament history. The reason is of course obvious enough why what can be admitted in the Old Testament, could not without results disastrous to the Christian Creed, be admitted in the New. It is because the Old Testament is the record of how God produced a need, or anticipation, or ideal, while the New Testament records how in fact He satisfied it. The absolute coincidence of idea and fact is vital in the realization, not in the preparation for it. It is equally obvious, too, that where fact is of supreme importance, as in the New Testament, the evidence has none of the ambiguity or remoteness which belongs to much of the record of the preparation.

(b) But once again; we find all sorts of literature in the inspired volume: men can be inspired to think and to write for God under all the forms of natural genius. Now one form of genius is the dramatic: its essence is to make characters, real or imaginary, the vehicles for an ideal presentation. It presents embodied ideas. Now the Song of Solomon is of the nature of a drama. The Book of Job, although it works on an historical basis, is, it can hardly be denied, mainly dramatic. The Book of Wisdom, which with us is among the books of the Bible, though in the second rank outside the canon, and which is inside the canon of the Roman Church, professes to be written by Solomon321, but is certainly written not by him, but in his person by another author. We may then conceive the same to be true of Ecclesiastes, and of Deuteronomy; i.e. we may suppose Deuteronomy to be a republication of the law ‘in the spirit and power’ of Moses put dramatically into his mouth. Criticism goes further, and asks us to regard Jonah and Daniel, among the prophetic books, as dramatic compositions worked up on a basis of history. The discussion of these books has often been approached from a point of view from which the miraculous is necessarily unhistorical. With such a point of view we are not concerned. The possibility and reality of miracles has to be vindicated first of all in the field of the New Testament; and one who admits them there, cannot reasonably exclude their possibility in the earlier history. The question must be treated simply on literary and evidential grounds322. But we would contend that if criticism should shew these books to be probably dramatic, that would be no hindrance to their performing ’an important canonical function,’ or to their being inspired. Dramatic composition has played an immense part in training the human mind. It is as far removed as possible from a violation of truth, though in an uncritical age its results may very soon pass for history. It admits of being inspired as much as poetry, or history, and indeed there are few who could feel a difficulty in recognising as inspired the teaching of the books of Jonah and Daniel323. It is maintained then that the Church leaves open to literary criticism the question whether several of the writings of the Old Testament are or are not dramatic. Certainly the fact that they have not commonly been taken to be so in the past will be no evidence to the contrary, unless it can be denied that a literary criticism is being developed, which is as really new an intellectual product as the scientific development, and as such, certain to reverse a good many of the literary judgments of previous ages. We are being asked to make considerable changes in our literary conception of the Scriptures, but not greater changes than were involved in the acceptance of the heliocentric astronomy.

(c) Once again: an enlarged study of comparative history has led to our perceiving that the various sorts of mental or literary activity develop in their different lines out of an earlier condition in which they lie fused and undifferentiated. This we can vaguely call the mythical stage of mental evolution. A myth is not a falsehood; it is a product of mental activity, as instructive and rich as any later product, but its characteristic is that it is not yet distinguished into history, and poetry, and philosophy. It is all of these in the germ, as dream and imagination, and thought and experience, are fused in the mental furniture of a child’s mind. ‘These myths or current stories,’ says Grote writing of Greek history, ‘the spontaneous and earliest growth of the Greek mind, constituted at the same time the entire intellectual stock of the age to which they belonged. They are the common root of all those different ramifications into which the mental activity of the Greeks subsequently diverged; containing as it were the preface and germ of the positive history and philosophy, the dogmatic theology and the professed romance, which we shall hereafter trace, each in its separate development.’ Now has the Jewish history such earlier stage: does it pass back out of history into myth? In particular, are not its earlier narratives, before the call of Abraham, of the nature of myth, in which we cannot distinguish the historical germ, though we do not at all deny that it exists? The inspiration of these narratives is as conspicuous as that of any part of Scripture, but is there anything to prevent our regarding these great inspirations about the origin of all things,—the nature of sin, the judgment of God on sin, and the alienation among men which follows their alienation from God,—as conveyed to us in that form of myth or allegorical picture, which is the earliest mode in which the mind of man apprehended truth?

6. In spite of the arbitrariness and the irreligion which have often been associated with the modern development of historical criticism in its application to the Old Testament, the present writer believes that it represents none the less a real advance in literary analysis, and is reaching results as sure, where it is fairly used, as scientific inquiry, though the results in the one case as in the other are often hard to disentangle from their less permanent accompaniments. Believing this, and feeling in consequence that the warning which the name of Galileo must ever bring before the memory of churchmen, is not unneeded now, he believes also that the Church is in no way restrained from admitting the modifications just hinted at, in what has latterly been the current idea of inspiration.

The Church is not restrained, in the first place, by having committed herself to any dogmatic definitions of the meaning of inspiration324. It is remarkable indeed that Origen’s almost reckless mysticism, and his accompanying repudiation of the historical character of large parts of the narrative of the Old Testament, and of some parts of the New325, though it did not gain acceptance, and indeed had no right to it (for it had no sound basis), on the other hand never roused the Church to contrary definitions. Nor is it only Origen who disputed the historical character of parts of the narrative of Holy Scripture. Clement before him in Alexandria, and the mediaeval Anselm in the West, treat the seven days’ creation as allegory and not history. Athanasius speaks of paradise as a ‘figure.’ A mediaeval Greek writer, who had more of Irenaeus than remains to us, declared that ‘he did not know how those who kept to the letter and took the account of the temptation historically rather than allegorically, could meet the arguments of Irenaeus against them.’ Further than this, it cannot be denied that the mystical method, as a whole, tended to the depreciation of the historical sense, in comparison with the spiritual teaching which it conveyed326. In a different line, Chrysostom, of the literal school of interpreters, explains quite in the tone of a modern apologist, how the discrepancies in detail between the different Gospels, assure us of the independence of the witnesses, and do not touch the facts of importance, in which all agree.

The Church is not tied then by any existing definitions. We cannot make any exact claim upon any one’s belief in regard to inspiration, simply because we have no authoritative definition to bring to bear upon him. Those of us who believe most in the inspiration of the Church, will see a Divine Providence in this absence of dogma, because we shall perceive that only now is the state of knowledge such as admits of the question being legitimately raised.

Nor does it seem that the use which our Lord made of the Old Testament is an argument against the proposed concessions. Our Lord, in His use of the Old Testament, does indeed endorse with the utmost emphasis the Jewish view of their own history. He does thus imply, on the one hand, the real inspiration of their canon in its completeness, and, on the other hand, that He Himself was the goal of that inspired leading and the standard of that inspiration. ‘Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day:’ ‘I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.’ This, and it is the important matter for all that concerns our spiritual education, is not in dispute. What is questioned is that our Lord’s words foreclose certain critical positions as to the character of Old Testament literature. For example, does His use of Jonah’s resurrection, as a type of His own, depend in any real degree upon whether it is historical fact or allegory327? It is of the essence of a type to suggest an idea, as of the antitype to realize it. The narrative of Jonah suggested certainly the idea of resurrection after three days, of triumph over death, and by suggesting this gave our Lord what His discourse required. Once more, our Lord uses the time before the flood328 to illustrate the carelessness of men before His own coming. He is using the flood here as a typical judgment, as elsewhere He uses other contemporary visitations for a like purpose. In referring to the flood He certainly suggests that He is treating it as typical, for He introduces circumstances—‘eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage’—which have no counterpart in the original narrative. Nothing in His use of it depends on its being more than a typical instance. Once more, He argues with the Pharisees on the assumption of the Davidic authorship of Psalm cx329. But it must be noticed that He is asking a question rather than making a statement—a question, moreover, which does not admit of being turned into a statement without suggesting the conclusion, of which rationalistic critics have not hesitated to avail themselves, that David’s Lord could not be David’s son. There are, we notice, other occasions when our Lord asked questions which cannot be made the basis of positive propositions330. It was in fact part of His method to lead men to examine their own principles without at the time suggesting any positive conclusion at all.

It may also fairly be represented, on a review of our Lord’s teaching as a whole, that if He had intended to convey instruction to us on critical and literary questions, He would have made His purpose plainer. It is contrary to His whole method to reveal His Godhead by any anticipations of natural knowledge. The Incarnation was a self-emptying of God to reveal Himself under conditions of human nature and from the human point of view. We are able to draw a distinction between what He revealed and what He used. He revealed God, His mind, His character, His claim, within certain limits His Threefold Being: He revealed man, his sinfulness, his need, his capacity: He revealed His purpose of redemption, and founded His Church as a home in which man was to be through all the ages reconciled to God in knowledge and love. All this He revealed, but through, and under conditions of, a true human nature. Thus He used human nature, its relation to God, its conditions of experience, its growth in knowledge, its limitation of knowledge331. He feels as we men ought to feel: he sees as we ought to see. We can thus distinguish more or less between the Divine truth which He reveals, and the human nature which He uses. Now when He speaks of the ‘sun rising’ He is using ordinary human knowledge. He willed so to restrain the beams of Deity as to observe the limits of the science of His age, and He puts Himself in the same relation to its historical knowledge. Thus He does not reveal His eternity by statements as to what had happened in the past, or was to happen in the future, outside the ken of existing history332. He made His Godhead gradually manifest by His attitude towards men and things about Him, by His moral and spiritual claims, by His expressed relation to His Father, not by any miraculous exemptions of Himself from the conditions of natural knowledge in its own proper province. Thus the utterances of Christ about the Old Testament do not seem to be nearly definite or clear enough to allow of our supposing that in this case He is departing from the general method of the Incarnation, by bringing to bear the unveiled omniscience of the Godhead, to anticipate or foreclose a development of natural knowledge.

But if we thus plead that theology may leave the field open for free discussion of these questions which Biblical criticism has recently been raising, we shall probably be bidden to ‘remember Tübingen,’ and not be over-trustful of a criticism which at least exhibits in some of its most prominent representatives a great deal of arbitrariness, of love of ‘new views’ for their own sake, and a great lack of that reverence and spiritual insight which is at least as much needed for understanding the books of the Bible, as accurate knowledge and fair investigation. To this the present writer would be disposed to reply that, if the Christian Church has been enabled to defeat the critical attack, so far as it threatened destruction to the historical basis of the New Testament, it has not been by foreclosing the question with an appeal to dogma, but by facing in fair and frank discussion the problems raised. A similar treatment of Old Testament problems will enable us to distinguish between what is reasonable and reverent, and what is high-handed and irreligious in contemporary criticism whether German, French, or English. Even in regard to what makes prima facie a reasonable claim, we do not prejudice the decision by declaring the field open: in all probability there will always remain more than one school of legitimate opinion on the subject: indeed the purpose of the latter part of this essay has not been to inquire how much we can without irrationality believe inspiration to involve; but rather, how much may legitimately and without real loss be conceded. For, without doubt, if consistently with entire loyalty to our Lord and His Church, we can regard as open the questions specified above, we are removing great obstacles from the path to belief of many who certainly wish to believe, and do not exhibit any undue scepticism. Nor does there appear to be any real danger that the criticism of the Old Testament will ultimately diminish our reverence for it. In the case of the New Testament certainly we are justified in feeling that modern investigation has resulted in immensely augmenting our understanding of the different books, and has distinctly fortified and enriched our sense of their inspiration. Why then should we hesitate to believe that the similar investigation of the Old Testament will in its result similarly enrich our sense that ‘God in divers portions and divers manners spake of old times unto the fathers,’ and that the Inspiration of Holy Scriptures will always be recognised as the most conspicuous of the modes in which the Holy Spirit has mercifully wrought for the illumination and encouragement of our race?

‘For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.’

Notes

248 Cyprian, ad Donatum 3. Trans. in Library of the Fathers, iii. p. 3.

249 Athanasius, de Incarnatione, 31, 48-52.

250 See S. Basil’s fine definition of the term in his treatise on the Holy Spirit, ix. 22. This treatise has been translated by the Rev. G. Lewis for the ‘Religious Tract Society.’

251 See Basil, as above, xvi. 37: ‘We must not suppose because the Apostle (1 Cor. xii. 4) mentions the Spirit first, and the Son second, and God the Father third, that the order at the present day has been quite reversed. For he made his beginning from our end of the relation: for it is by receiving the gifts, that we come in contact with the Distributor; then we come to consider the Sender; then we carry back our thought to the Fount and Cause of the good things.’ Cf. xviii. 47: ‘The way of the knowledge of God is from one Spirit, by the one Son, to the one Father: and reversely, the natural goodness of God, His holiness of nature, His royal rank taking their rise from the Father, reach the Spirit though the Only-begotten.’

252 Ambrose, de Spiritu Sancto, i. 15, 172.

253 So Irenaeus, Cyril of Jerusalem, Athanasius, Basil, Didymus, Victorinus, express the relation of the Divine Persons in Creation.

254 Ps. xxxiii. 6; Gen. i. 2; Ps. civ. 29, 30.

255 Huet. Origeniana, L. ii. Qu. 2. c. xxvii. Cf. Athan. Epp. ad Serapion. i. 23-31; iv. 9-12.

256 Gen. ii. 7.

257 Athan. de Incarn. xliii. 3.

258 Athan. l.c. xii. 5, xliii. 4.

259 Iren. c. Haer. iii. 17, 1.

260 S. Mark i. 10, 12. S. Luke iv. 1, 18; x. 21. S. Matt. xii. 28. Heb. ix. 14. Rom. viii. 11. (These two last passages at least imply the action of the Holy Spirit in the Sacrifice and Resurrection of Christ.)

261 Heb. v. 7-10. Phil. ii. 8.

262 1 Cor. xv. 45, ‘The last Adam became a life-giving Spirit.’ S. John vi. 63, ‘Spirit and Life.’

263 Iren. iii. 18, 1, and frequently elsewhere.

264 Iren. iii. 24, 1. Cf. H. C. G. Moule’s Veni Creator, pp. 39-40.

265 S. John iii. 4. The intention of this passage is to express not that the Spirit is lawless in His operations, but that He is beyond our control.

266 Aug. de Spiritu et Littera, xxvii. 47, ‘Grace is not the negation of nature, but its restoration.’

267 Raymund of Sabunde, Theol. Nat. tit. 303.

268 Basil, de Spiritu Sancto ix. 23 (Lewis’ translation). Cf. Newman’s Univ. Sermons, ‘Personal Influence the means of propagating the truth.’

269 Cyril, Catech. xvi. 12. The attention to the differences of individual character is very noticeable in S. Basil’s monastic rule: see the Regulae fusius tractatae, resp. 19, and the Constit. Monast. 4. Also in the writings of Gregory of Nazianzus, Chrysostom, and Gregory the Great on the Pastoral Office.

270 1 Cor. ii. 15. 1 S. John ii. 20-27.

271 Clement Alex. Strom. v. 13. 88.

272 Republic, 401 D, 402 A.

273 Caird’s Hegel (Blackwood’s Philosophical Classics), p. 72.

274 Anselm, Proslog. 4; he adds, ‘So that even if I were unwilling to believe that Thou art, I could not cease to understand it.’ But the whole relation of authority and reason is most completely grasped and stated by S. Augustine: see Cunningham, S. Austin (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1886), pp. 9, 157 ff.

275 Dr. Salmon, Infallibility, p. 115, has a clever comparison of the authority of the Church to that of the town clock. The value we assign to having such an authoritative standard of the right time does not prevent our recognising the importance of having it regulated. ‘And if we desired to remove an error which had accumulated during a long season of neglect, it would be very unfair to represent us as wishing to silence the clock, or else as wishing to allow every townsman to get up and push the hands backwards and forwards as he pleased.’

276 But cf. pp. 196-8, 229-232, 258-260.

277 Manning, Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost, third edit. pp. 9, 29, 238-240.

278 See, for instance, c. Haer. v. 10, 2. ‘The wild olive does not change its substance [when it is grafted in, see Rom. xi. 17], but only the quality of its fruit, and takes a new name, no longer being called an oleaster but an olive; so also man when he is by faith grafted in, and receives the Spirit of God, does not lose his fleshly substance, but changes the quality of the works which are his fruits, and takes another name indicating his improved condition, and is no longer described as flesh and blood, but as a spiritual man.’ So also v. 6, 1, ‘whom the apostle calls “spiritual” because they have the Spirit, not because they have been robbed of the flesh and become bare spirit.’ It is the recognition of this principle that makes most of the language of the Fathers on fasting so healthy and sensible. The end of fasting is not to destroy the flesh, but to free the spirit.

279 See especially Mozley’s Lectures on the Old Testament, x.: ‘The end the test of progressive revelation.’

280 Greg. Naz. Orat. xxxi. 25. Many of the greatest of the ancient Christian writers depreciate the sacrificial law as a mere concession, made to avoid worse things, when the incident of the calf shewed that the first legislation of the Ten Commandments was too spiritual: so Jerome in Isai. 1, 12, In Jer. vii. 21. Cf. Justin, Trypho 19. Chrys. adv. Jud. iv. 6. Epiphan. Haer. lxvi. 71. Constt. ap. i. 6; vi. 20. This method of interpretation is perhaps derived from the Epistle of Barnabas, 2-4.

281 Chrys. in Matth. Homil. xvii. 5-6 (slightly abbreviated). Cf. Libell. Faustin. et Marcellin. in Bibl. Vet. Patrum. tom. v. 657 d.

282 On the Holy Spirit, xiv. 33 (Lewis’ trans.).

283 Aug. de Trin. i. 10, 21. This principle alone gives a basis for the doctrine of ‘imputation’ so far as it is true. God deals with us, e.g. in absolution, by anticipation of what is to come about in us, in Christ.

284 Thom. Aq. Summa Theol. pars sec. sec. Qu. 1. Art. ix.

285 The above paragraph is a summary of expressions constantly met with in the Fathers. It is S. Ambrose who protests against the idea that the priest can be spoken of as having power over the Divine Things which he ministers, see De Spiritu Sancto, praef. 18, lib. i. 11, 118: ‘nostra sunt servitia sed tua sacramenta. Neque enim humanae opis est divina conferre.’ S. Augustine, among others, draws the distinction between gifts from the Spirit and the gift of Himself. Ep. cxciv.: ‘aliter adiuvat nondum inhabitans, aliter inhabitans: nam nondum inhabitans adiuvat ut sint fideles, inhabitans adiuvat iam fideles.’ Didymus, de Spiritu Sancto 15, calls attention to the distinction in the New Testament between πνεῦμα (without the article) i.e. ‘a spiritual gift,’ and τὸ πνεῦμα, i.e. the Spirit Himself: cf. Westcott on S. John vii. 39.

286 Greg. Naz. Orat. xxxi. 8.

287 See Athan. Epp. ad Serapion. i. 17. Cyril Hieros. Cat. xvi. 24. Iren. v. 13, 2. Basil, de Spiritu Sancto, iii. 5.

288 The Dict. of Chr. Biog., Art. Holy Ghost (by Dr. Swete), has an admirable summary of the theology of the subject.

289 See Godet on S. John xv. 26, 27.

290 Athan. Epp. ad Serap. i. 19. S. John xiv. 16, 18, 23.

291 Plato’s human trinity is made up of reason, spirit [θυμός], and desire: S. Augustine’s of memory (i.e. personal identity), reason, and will; or mind, knowledge, and love. Nothing has been said in the text of Patristic and more recent attempts to express the function of the Holy Spirit in the inner relations of the Trinity. Some of the Fathers speak of the Holy Spirit as completing the circle of the Divine Life, or as ‘the return of God upon Himself,’ ‘the bond of the Father and the Son.’ This eternal function would interpret His temporal mission to bring all creatures back into union with God. Not very differently S. Augustine speaks of Him as the Love of the Father and the Son: ‘Vides Trinitatem si caritatem vides. Ecce tria sunt; amans et quod amatur et amor.’ And this Love is itself personal and coordinate: ‘commune aliquid est Patris et Filii; at ipsa communio consubstantialis et coaeterna.’ But in such speculation they allow themselves with much reserve and expression of unwillingness.
In fact it is easy to see that an eternally living God, knowing and loving, must be a God Whose Being involves eternal relationships. Knowledge involves a relation of subject and object: to make love possible there must be a lover and a loved. It is more difficult to see how a perfect relationship must be threefold; but there are true lines of thought which lead up to this, such, for instance, as make us see first in the family, the type of complete life. Love which is only a relation of two, is selfish or unsatisfied: it demands an object and a product of mutual love. See especially Richard of S. Victor, de Trin. Pars i. lib. iii. cc. 14, 15: ‘Communio amoris non potest esse omnino minus quam in tribus personis. Nihil autem (ut dictum est) gloriosius, nihil magnificentius, quam quicquid habes utile et dulce in commune deducere:... hujusmodi dulcedinis delicias solus non possidet qui in exhibita sibi dilectione socium et condilectum non habet; quamdiu condilectum non habet, praecipui gaudii communione caret.’ See also Sartorius, Doctrine of Divine Love (Clark’s Foreign Theol. Libr.), p. 16.

292 Microcosmus, B. ix. C. iv. (E. T. vol. ii. p. 660.)

293 See especially Gal. i. 8, 9.

294 Heb. ii. 3.

295 See further on the fatal results of separating the Spirit’s work in Scripture, from His work in the Church, Coleridge, Remains iii. 93, iv. 118; or quoted by Hare, Mission of the Comforter, Note H. vol. ii. pp. 468, 474.

296 This distinction was drawn by Bishop Clifford, Fortnightly Review, Jan. 1887, p. 145.

297 Cf. the quotation in Eusebius, H. E. v. 28.

298 Athan. de Incarn. 12. Cf. Ewald’s preface to his History of Israel.

299 See Gratry, Henri Perreyve, pp. 162, 163.

300 Delitzsch, O.T. History of Redemption, p. 106. Cf. Prof. Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, p. 108.

301 See Epiphan. Haer. xlviii. 4. Westcott, Introd. to the Study of the Gospels, App. B, sect. ii. 4, sect. iv. 4. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, p. 255.

302 See Professor Driver’s admirable article on ‘the cosmogony of Genesis.’ Expositor, Jan. 1886.

303 Professor Cheyne, speaking of such narratives of Scriptures as the record of Elijah, protests against the supposition that they are ‘true to fact.’ ‘True to fact! Who goes to the artist for hard dry facts? Why even the historians of antiquity thought it no part of their duty to give the mere prose of life. How much less can the unconscious artists of the imaginative East have described their heroes with relentless photographic accuracy!’ (The Hallowing of Criticism, p. 5.) But it seems to me that such a passage, by treating the recorders of the Old Testament as ‘artists,’ ignores their obvious intention to lay stress on what God has actually done, the deliverances He has actually wrought. They, at least, like the Greek historical ‘artist’ of the defeat of Persia, would have laid great stress on the facts having happened.

304 Church, Discipline of the Christian Character, p. 57. This work seems to me the best existing answer to the question, in what does the inspiration of the Old Testament consist.

305 Cf. pp. 161-167. In view of criticisms it may be explained that in the account of the prophet given above only that view of his inspiration is taken into consideration which appeals first to the enquirer (cf. the words in the next paragraph ‘in this general sense at least’). When once this primary assurance of inspiration is gained the evidence of detailed prophecies will be found cogent. As we compare the anticipations of the Messiah or of the ‘Righteous Servant’ in such passages as Ps. xxii., Is. liii., vii. 14, or ix. 6, 7, with their fulfilment in Jesus Christ, we recognise a special action of the Holy Ghost, marking even in details the continuity of His method. Cf. p. 167 referred to above.

306 See for instance Micah v. 2-6. On the subject of the limitations of prophetic foresight, as on the whole subject of prophecy, let me refer to Dr. Ed. Riehm, Messianic Prophecy (Clark’s trans.) pp. 79, 86 ff., 114, 157-162.

307 Acts i. 8. S. John xiv. 25, 26; xvi. 12, 13.

308 S. John xix. 35; xxi. 24. 1 S. John i. 1-3.

309 See Prof. Sanday’s What the first Christians thought about Christ. (Oxford House Papers: Rivington.)

310 2 Tim. iii. 16.

311 Mr. Horton’s book on Inspiration and the Bible is almost naively lacking in this quality of impartial regard to inspired books.

312 Prof. Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, p. 6.

313 Cf. Prof. Robertson Smith, The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, Lect. vii. p. 207: ‘Another point in which criticism removes a serious difficulty is the interpretation of the imprecatory psalms.’

314 See Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1884, p. 189.

315 ‘When from time to time,’ says S. Bernard to his monks, ‘anything that was hidden or obscure in the Scriptures has come out into the light to any one of you, at once the voice of exultation and thankfulness for the nourishment of spiritual food that has been received, must rise as from a banquet to delight the ears of God.’

316 See the Annual Address (1889) delivered at the Victoria Institute by Prof. Sayce, on the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-amarna, pp. 4, 14 f.: ‘We learn that in the fifteenth century before our era—a century before the Exodus—active literary intercourse was going on throughout the civilized world of Western Asia, between Babylonia and Egypt and the smaller states of Palestine.... This intercourse was carried on by means of the Babylonian language and the complicated Babylonian script. How educated the old world was, we are but just beginning to learn. But we have already learnt enough to discover how important a bearing it has on the criticism of the Old Testament.’

317 See Driver, Crit. notes on Sunday-School lessons (Scribner: New York).

318 Ex. xx. xxii-xxiii. xxxiii.

319 The Books of Kings seem to be compiled from the point of view of the Deuteronomist.

320 Origen, c. Cels. vii. 4.

321 E.g. chs. vii. ix. The Roman Church admits that it is, to use Newman’s phrase, ‘a prosopopeia’; ‘our Bibles say, “it is written in the person of Solomon” and “it is uncertain who was the writer,”’ l.c. p. 197. It is important to bear in mind that the Western Church in general has, since S. Augustine’s day, admitted into the canon a book the literary method of which is thus confessedly dramatic. Newman makes this the ground for saying that the same may be true of Ecclesiastes.

322 On the evidence of O.T. miracles I may refer to Mr. Samuel Cox’s Essay: Miracles, an Argument and a Challenge. (Kegan Paul, 1884.)

323 Of course the distinction must be maintained in the case of the book of Daniel between a ‘pious fraud’ which cannot be inspired, and an idealizing personification which, as a normal type of literature, can. Further study will probably solve the special difficulty which on the critical hypothesis attaches to the book of Daniel from this point of view: see Stanton, Jewish and Christian Messiah, p. 109, note 1.

324 This is certainly true of the Church as a whole. For the most that can be said in the same sense of the Roman Church, see Newman in the article above cited.

325 De Principiis, iv. 15, 16, 17. His point is that incidents which could not have occurred in fact, or at least did not occur, are inserted in the narrative of the Old and New Testaments, that their very historical impossibility or improbability may drive us to the consideration of their spiritual significance. ‘The attentive reader may notice... innumerable other passages, like these, so that he will be convinced that in the histories that are literally recorded, circumstances are inserted that did not occur.’ Cf. Bigg, Christian Platonists, pp. 137-8.

326 Cf. Jerome, ad Nepotian. ep. lii. 2.

327 S. Matt. xii. 40.

328 S. Matt. xxiv. 37-39.

329 S. Matt. xxii. 41-46.

330 See especially S. Mark x. 17-18 (and parallel passages), where our Lord’s question, if converted into a positive proposition, suggests a repudiation of personal goodness. Cf. also the question in S. John x. 34-36 where, though the argument is a fortiori, still the true character of our Lord’s sonship is hardly suggested.

331 This limitation of knowledge must not be confused with fallibility or liability to human delusion, because it was doubtless guarded by the Divine purpose which led Jesus Christ to take it upon Himself.

332 Of course He gave prophetic indications of the coming judgment, but on the analogy of inspired prophecy. He did not reveal ‘times and seasons,’ and declared that it was not within the scope of His mission to do so. See esp. S. Mark xiii. 32. He exhibits supernatural insight into men’s characters and lives. But He never exhibits the omniscience of bare Godhead in the realm of natural knowledge; such as would be required to anticipate the results of modern science or criticism. This ‘self-emptying’ of God in the Incarnation is, we must always remember, no failure of power, but a continuous act of Self-sacrifice: cf. 2 Cor. viii. 9 and Phil. ii. 7. Indeed God ‘declares His almighty power most chiefly’ in this condescension, whereby He ‘beggared Himself’ of Divine prerogatives, to put Himself in our place.