The grand blunder of Schleiermacher, and the source of the worst infidelity now, is that he has taken the Holy Ghost's work in us—very likely in himself for intuition, or specially collective Christian consciousness. He made divine teaching, in which case it is real, to be a title of human judgment on what the Holy Ghost gave. This is, I suspect, the key to the whole system, itself probably the fruit of Kantian philosophy and its offsets. The whole hangs on the Church's not believing in the positive operation of the Holy Ghost. For all that Scherer and Bunsen, &c., pretend on their best side is simply Schleiermacher. Thus the Bible is Christian consciousness there: we judge it by Christian consciousness now. Hence it is, as Schérer says, the mere history of partial apprehension of truth; and of course, as every philosopher trusts himself, we judge scripture. That is, there is no revelation; for revelation must have authority or is false
Be it that the Church was before the new testament and the latter written for believers; yet the question is not thereby touched, whether it was not written by the power and direct inspiration of the Holy Ghost to give certainty and a divine record of those things in which they had been instructed. If the consciousness of believers was there, it was not to reproduce this but something else. It was to confirm and correct theirs by a divine statement of it, and give a sure record of that divinely-taught truth. Thus its being given to believers is, as far as it goes, a proof that it was not merely the expression of religious consciousness as then developed.