FIVE REASONS FOR VERBAL INSPIRATION.
By George S. Bishop
THE Bible is the very handwriting of God! Suppose I believe that. Suppose, instead of Luke and John and Paul and Peter, I behold in overawed imagination "God grasping the pen" and setting down the sentences, the words, the jots and tittles—every stroke of it; does not that fix me? does not that arrest me? does not that determine, shape, and mould me, as no conviction other, lesser, can? That is the anchor to which, by twisting a few honest strands, I would help, if I may, to rebind our cables. When we were resting quietly inside of Sandy Hook, our own ship and others swung round with the tide, but none changed its place, for all were well anchored. The ships of sentiment are swinging loose to-day, and with the counter tide. That has been, and it will be, again and again, so long as human opinion is the vacillating and uncertain thing it is. But we need not fear, for the old anchor holds as firm, as steady, as inflexible as ever. That anchor—back of all departures, heresies, and fluctuations—is the literal, direct, divine inspiration, on the original parchments, of the word of God. We cannot consent to see in the Bible the pens nor the penmen; but, undistractedly, the Master Intellect, which every where directs each thought. . . . The whole question of inspiration has, within the last half century, been made to turn upon the writers. It has been unhinged from those stanchions on which St. Paul makes it turn—the writings themselves. This misdirection of thought would seem to be much like that of the boy who stands at the end of the telegraph line, and gets a message from his father ("I have written to him the great things of my law"), and who, instead of taking the message as direct, authoritative, final, goes to work to discuss the posts, the wires, electricity, the key-board, the touch of the finger, the process. His business is simply to heed and obey. The doctrine of direct, dictated, verbal inspiration—that everything in the Bible was set down by the finger of God—has these five things in its favor:— 1. It is the first, original, and oldest doctrine. 2. It is the simplest doctrine. 3. It is the undeviating doctrine which has proved the bulwark of the church of God. Defended in the earliest centuries by men like Athenagoras and St. Augustine—defended still by men like Wickliffe, Huss, and Luther, in the struggles which led in the Reformation—and, in post-Reformation times, defended by men like the Buxtorfs, John Owen, John Gill, and Gaussen—it has been the one, consistent, inexpungable, permanent doctrine from the beginning. Scripture—sunlight to the sun—is the untarnished radiance of God. What it says, God says. 4. A fourth fact is the logical impossibility of any other counter position. "If we do not take direct inspiration," says Waller, "what we are to take is not so clear." If we begin to admit inequalities in revelation, where shall we stop? If we turn our attention away from the writing to occupy ourselves with the writer—his genius, his knowledge, the amount of assistance required—who does not see that453this descent from heaven to earth, from the high Himalaya of the Divine to the low, marshy ground of the creatural human, must tend to gravitate, to minimize, and more and more, until your Bible is reduced to Shakespeare or (who knows?) to Bret Harte. The fabricators of degrees in inspiration—the men who so self-confidently set forth to us their four classes,—the inspirations of "elevation," of "superintendence," of "suggestion," of "direct dictation,"—tell us themselves that the last is the highest. Ah well! we will choose—we will cling to that highest. Why not? If dictation anywhere—in any one instance, then dictation all the way through. If not, why not? Where are the limits? Where shall we stop? Suppose certain words in the Scripture—only a few—to be put there by God. Suppose this admitted, and it is admitted—who shall define the number of those words? Who shall assume to stand up and tell us where God the Holy Ghost expresses himself in the very form of the word, and where he retires from the word and leaves it a shell merely human? The difficulties attaching to any other view of inspiration than the verbal are simply overwhelming. Suppose that something, no matter how little—whatever you please—be left to the writers themselves, and who shall satisfy us that nothing essential has been omitted, nothing irrelevant or trifling has been emphasized, nothing inaccurate has been set down? Who does not see that, so, inspiration is utterly lost? 5. And that leads, logically, up to the climacteric position, that we must hold to verbal inspiration, or if not, at last—give up the Bible. What other result can there be? Is not this just what it comes back to—"I receive what appeals to my likings, I repudiate what I dislike"? In other words, I make my consciousness my arbiter—my prejudice, my Book,—and my self-will, my God.—Geo. S. Bishop, D. D., in the "Inspired Word."