A few words are also needed in this place as to inspiration, which Mr. N. introduces here in passing. He says, "But in what position was I now towards the apostles? Could I admit their inspiration, when I no longer thought them infallible? Undoubtedly.... The moderns have erringly introduced into the idea of inspiration that of infallibility, to which either omniscience or dictation is essential." (Phases, p. 120.) Mr. N. is so exceedingly loose in his way of stating things, that one is forced sometimes to be tedious to bring out clearly what has really to be answered. But as popular notions are often the same, such a process in answering may have a certain general utility. In reasoning on the reality of a divine revelation, however, such looseness is unpardonable. In popular language it is comparatively immaterial. Thus when men speak of the infallible word of God, they mean that they may rely upon it as having all the infallible certainty of what God says; and they are quite right. But no person speaking carefully would say the apostles were infallible. We have one of them rebuking another to his face, so that he did not think so. Thousands of devoted Christians have canvassed St. Paul's vows and purifyings at Jerusalem. No true and sound-minded one has questioned the divine authority and truth of the scripture that speaks of it. What I look for in a revelation, as I have said, is a perfect representation of the divine mind, as to all the ways in which God is pleased to make Himself known in dealing with man. In order to have this, I must have a full display-an exposure of man as he really is; and this, being historically and dogmatically given, affords the ground of human conscience and divine light. Now this is the greatest boon, save the power to use it, that God can give to man (not now speaking of the salvation itself which it is the means of making known to him); he gets the knowledge of himself and of God, and of what God is towards himself, such as he really is; and he is brought into the perfect light, and that in grace.
But for this purpose, how many things very different from God's will and thoughts, contrary to what God would have inspired, and of a mixed character when He has acted on the affections, shall we find! If God shows us the truth, we must have things as they really are. We must have an apostle's failures as well as all else-man's path, under the highest power of the Holy Ghost bestowed upon him. For this end he must often express himself. Only with this we need the positive revelation of God's own mind in an unquestionable way to be able to judge, supposing we are spiritual, of all this; and that the scriptures afford us. This human character is, in the New Testament, especially drawn out and unfolded. In the Old, we have the history of man divinely given, and certain oracles imparted with "thus saith the Lord," with comparatively little, save in the Psalms, of the effect of the working of the Holy Ghost in man, so as to produce affections and thoughts in which the divine spring is seen, but the forms of human thoughts, because it was the Holy Ghost working in man. In this latter case, there may be various degrees of spiritual clearness of thought according to the state of the person in whom the Holy Ghost works. It may be such as spiritual men have now, only of course the thoughts conformed to the state of the dispensation. Thus it was, as we have seen, in the case of Deborah's song; and if I am to know man and God's dealings, and man under them, I must have this. Α person may be filled with the Holy Ghost, and so express his mind, that though it be his feelings, and so given, yet what nature would have produced is absent; and it is only what the Holy Ghost has produced, though in his heart. Thus his heart is a proper vessel of the Holy Ghost; and his utterance may be recorded as being really of God, and proper inspiration, though in a human heart. Thus the song of Hannah has, I doubt not, this character, though not given as inspired, and expressive of her own feelings and apprehension of God's ways, as such must be to be real. So Elizabeth's song in Luke 1-Zachariah's in the same chapter-Simeon.'s in chapter 2. In these cases, such outgoings of heart, being directly from the Spirit, will be prophecies, properly speaking. Such we have in the Psalms, though they be expressions often of feelings in the writer's heart at the time, and, I doubt not, prepared for the remnant of Israel in the latter day, as giving them divine comfort in their tried feelings and exercised hearts then.
Of David's psalms we are expressly informed by himself, the sweet psalmist of Israel, "The Spirit of the Lord spake by me, and his word was in my tongue."
This kind of working of the Holy Ghost even in our hearts, and that in cases where our minds are not sufficiently taught of God to know what to look for, is spoken of in Rom. 8, where he says, "He who searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered." It is merely saying, that the Holy Ghost can work in the affections where the intelligence may not be sufficiently formed to express itself on particular subjects, or point out the positive answer to these affections. If before-hand God communicates the answer to a heart so exercised, it becomes real prophecy or inspired truth, as well as divinely given feelings. If even the Spirit gives such expression to the sorrow of the heart that it should be according to God, this may be more than personal, though it be such, and rise to the full revelation of that personal or sympathetic sorrow, which was in the heart of Jesus, from the same causes more fully developed, and without counteracting or modifying evil. And this might be without the knowledge, in him who uttered it, of what it applied to. Such a principle is clearly recognized in the New Testament; for Peter speaks of the prophets who, by the Spirit of Christ which was in them, testified beforehand of the sufferings of Christ, and the glory which should follow, and they searched what and what manner of time it referred to, and found it was not for themselves but for us. The Jews had the same notion, and as an opinion it was well founded, though they joined unsound notions as to inspiration with it. They taught that there was the gradus Mosaicus, or "Moses' degree;" the gradus propheticus; and the Bath-kol, or "Daughter of a voice"-the first two founded on Num. 12:6-86And he said, Hear now my words: If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream. 7My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all mine house. 8With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches; and the similitude of the Lord shall he behold: wherefore then were ye not afraid to speak against my servant Moses? (Numbers 12:6‑8), and the third characterizing the chetubim or hagiographer. This did not touch the authority but the character of the writings, but it is often of deep interest to know the manner of God's speaking to us; though, in whatever way He may speak, His word has always the same authority. Not one jot or one tittle can pass from the law, and all that is written in Moses, and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms concerning Christ, must be fulfilled. Yet when the apostle says, "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spake in time past, hath in these last days spoken to us by the Son [in the Son, in the person of the Son ἐν υἱῷ]," is it not of the deepest possible interest to see the testimony of God brought to us in the person of the Son Himself?-God Himself speaking there? For He whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God, "for God giveth not the Spirit [to Him] in measure." Everything there was the expression of God Himself. It was not "Thus saith the Lord," for some precious sentences, and then a man's relapsing into his ordinary though perhaps sanctified existence. All that came forth breathed God-God in human kindness, philanthropy; as the apostle speaks, "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself." If He took up a child; if He spoke to a sinner; if He sat at the well wearied, with a yet more weary and desolate heart beside Him, a woman who came alone at that strange time to draw water, one justly in one sense ill seen by men, and yet however dark, perhaps with secret wants beyond them, a sign to His eye that the fields were white for harvest; if He touched an outcast leper with a gracious and sovereign "I will"-all told that God was there, amongst men-with men, because of men; and gracious words proceeded out of His mouth. Surely they made men wonder; for how long had they been away from God. And if a prophet's words were just as sure because the Spirit of Christ really spoke to them, yet surely I need not speak of the bright and blessed interest which accompanied the existence of such a testimony as His who spake as never man spake. A Savior's words came, if indeed heard, with divine grace itself to the ear. It was the mercy that it spoke of. "If thou knewest the gift [free-giving δωνεὰν] of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink [who has come so low as to be dependent on you for a drink of water]; thou wouldst have asked of him [entire confidence of heart in God-such a God!-would have been produced, nor would it have been disappointed in grace or in power to answer], and he would have given thee living water."
This was indeed revealing God. Here we have not a long and dreary because a true picture of man cultivated in vain by the great Husbandman, and the testimonies and warnings of God sent to him, or prophecies of brighter days to come through grace. We have perfect gracious man walking before God, for our eyes to rest on and learn, and God walking before men in all the near grace they needed, come to them just as they were, that they might learn what He was, and by it be drawn out of what they were. It was presented to them in all their distance from God, and in all their misery where grace could be best felt, that they might be drawn out of that misery, and know with joy the God who had done so. It is this that Mr. N. despises- treats as an imposture. Man shall by searching find out God, and boast of his capacity-with such a history as he has; but God neither has nor shall reveal Himself to him. That is an evil, and forbidden by spiritual men! As for unspiritual they may shift for themselves; that is not a philosopher's affair: misery is necessary for general development, as hanging is good for society. It is a mere "morbid notion" to object to it!
"More permanent disturbance of mind is caused to good men who have no extensive view of human nature, nor habit of mental analysis, from the prevailing wickedness of mankind. It avails not here to say that human goodness is only a relative idea, and that however much better men were, we should still think them bad, since our standard would have risen. In a mere moral view, indeed, such a reply suffices; for all tribes of men have some morality. Those who are ferocious towards foreigners are often tender-hearted towards their own peοple; and the difference of savage from civilized virtue is one of degree. But religiously the case is otherwise; for there is a chasm between loving God and not loving Him, serving Him and not serving Him. We cm easily suppose such an improvement in human nature, that though all would of course be still imperfect, yet none should be irreligious: and men will ask, Why does a good God leave so large a part of mankind in irreligion? To many this is an exceeding severe trial of faith, because irreligíon has been invested with eternal consequences, which binds the understanding in a net absolutely inextricable. But let the Gordian knot be cut; let it be discerned that the infinite cannot be the reed of the finite; then, while we lament the actual state of the world, we shall not find it hard to understand that it has necessarily resulted from the independence of the human will, which must be left free and capable of resisting the divine will, otherwise we should not be men, but brutes or machines. Assuming then that evil is finite, transitory, and only an essential condition towards the attainment of a higher and permanent good, we find nothing in human wickedness, however intense, and whatever misery it causes, to inspire rational doubt of the divine goodness.
That there is abroad among us an unsound view of supreme goodness (or benevolence, as it is called), cannot, I think, be denied. It is akin to that spurious humanity, which so shudders at putting a criminal to death, as to prefer keeping him alive even where there is no human hope of his being recovered to virtue, but every probability of his incurring more and more desperate hardness. The benevolent man is supposed to shrink from inflicting bodily pain on any one, whether for his own good, or as a necessary process for defending others; and where this morbid notion prevails, we must expect people to be much shocked at the broad facts of the natural history of animals, to say nothing of man himself.... Pain and suffering are undoubtedly among God's most efficacious means for perfecting all His creatures, and, not least, man; but they must needs be with Him means not ends, if we are to attribute to Him in any sense that which we are able to recognize as goodness; and consequently they must be His plans, either partial and subordinate, or finite and transitory. All theology which contradicts this, darkens and distorts the face of God to us." (Soul, p. 43-46.))
But to return. The inspiration of the New Testament is interesting in another way. The Holy Ghost Himself is come down to dwell in the saints, and to take the things of Christ and show them to us; and He dwells in us as a seal that we are children of God, heirs of all, and joint-heirs with Christ. He at the same time brings all the love of God into the sorrows of the way, enables us to apprehend according to God the present state of things, while it marks out a road suited to those who are one with Christ in heaven, for His members by the way. Hence the New Testament is not, in the general tenor of its revelations, a mere testimony of "Thus saith the Lord." It has this prophetic character sometimes; but in general it is the expression of the mind and the sympathies of God in all that concerns the saints on earth. It is the Holy Ghost in a man, who is a member of the body, communicating all the privileges of the body to it, and entering into all its sorrows, while it reveals the love and wisdom of the Father and the Son, leading into all truth, and casting the perfect light of God on all that went before, and sheaving things to come; in this last having more the character assumed before in prophecy, as we read, "The Spirit speaketh expressly;" "Let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches," &c. Hence there ís-while often rising to the most glorious testimonies of blessing in the revelation of God, and of His designs for the glory of Christ and the Church with Him-a familiarity, an entering into detail as to all that concerns the body, and what becomes its heavenly path down here-an expression of the feelings of the instrument who addresses it, which gives the most touching picture of the effect of the presence of the Holy Ghost, and brings down the love of God into the detail and circumstances of man's christian life. It is not, indeed, after we pass the gospels, Christ Himself; but it is His Spirit lifting His members up to Him by the revelation of Him, and coming down to them in all their trials and conflicts, in all through which they pass, to be the spring of feeling there, through His assured sympathy. Such God would show Himself; and surely all that He says there has the tenderest claim and the perfect authority of Him who speaks thus in love. It is the word of God; the Holy Ghost on earth, in the apostle or prophet, speaking generally in the Church; but not an inferior, separate Spirit; but as He hears so He speaks, in union with the Father and the Son-the wisdom of God amongst men.
The scriptures of the New Testament are the perfect expression of the divine mind as communicated to, or working in, the Church of God; suited to the relationship in which God has thus placed them with Himself.
I turn to the nature of inspiration. As to the apostles being infallible, no one dreams of such a thing. A truth communicated, as I have already said, cannot be infallible: it can only be absolute truth; and truth is truth. It is nonsense to speak of its failing or not failing. A person only can be infallible The apostles may have been divinely kept while communicating truth, and thus not suffered to fail while thus used of God. In this secondary sense alone can they be, in any proper use of the word, infallible at that moment; but this is not the real meaning of the word. I do not doubt that God took care that all they have left to us in the scriptures should perfectly present His mind; but this did not make the apostles infallible. God alone is infallible (that is, incapable of failing).
Mr. N. says, omniscience or dictation is necessary to infallibility. Neither has anything to say to it. Omniscience and inspiration are a contradiction in terms: for inspiration is the communication of truth or facts; omniscience supposes, or rather means, that all is known already. Nor is dictation necessary either. Suppose, as to historical scripture, if God acted on my mind or memory so as to call up facts He chose to have related, in the way, the connection, the order in which He chose them to be in my mind, and associated with the feelings which He thought proper to be produced in my soul by it, and the utterance of my memory and the expressions of my feelings to which they naturally gave rise when thus produced, to the exclusion of all distracting or modifying thoughts of any kind, to deteriorate what the Holy Ghost produced in my mind and soul-and that I write this down as thus formed and producing itself in my mind, being full of the Holy Ghost, so that no other idea whatever intruded itself, but such as the Holy Ghost had produced, and that He approved the necessary expression of it, acting on the mind, not on the lips-should not I have and give the perfect mind of God, only through the mind of a man?
Again, if Christ had spoken, and the Holy Ghost recalled to my memory His words, or a particular pan of His words, and I write down these words; so of facts. This would not be dictation. Supposing He formed in my soul the substance of what passed, and I wrote it down from the perfect spiritual apprehension of it, as He put it in my mind, to the exclusion of all else, I should have the perfect mind of God; yet the Holy Ghost acting in my mind would use it as an instrument, and the communication have the form of the mind it passed through. Why, if God has expressly formed the instrument, can He not then use it for the purpose for which He has formed it, according to what He has made it? Now that is style. To deny it, and declare dictation necessary, is merely to suppose that the Holy Ghost cannot use a man's mind, such as it is, and govern his words, without annihilating him mentally, and making use of his lips as of the dumb ass's to rebuke the prophet.
The apostle does not speak of the mere use of the organ without the intelligence as the highest kind of inspiration, but as the lowest, and that it was of a higher order when the man was mentally made partaker of what he communicated, and communicated therefore with his own thoughts and feelings engaged (which produces style), though the Holy Ghost produced those thoughts and feelings. The spout which gives a form to the current that flows from it may transmit the water as pure as it flows in. I do not say the Holy Ghost did not give the words; but that it was not necessarily dictation of them merely. Nay, if He did dictate them, He could do it in the form of mind and thought of the person He deigned to use, so that it should be his style. So that every part of the statement of Mr. N. is unfounded. The Holy Ghost gave the thoughts; and they were not left to the uncertainty of man's account of them. He caused them to be communicated in words He taught; but why should not He work in a mind according to the mind He had designedly given it? See 1 Cor. 2:12-1412Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. 13Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. 14But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. (1 Corinthians 2:12‑14).
Human minds were left to the instruments, but they were acted on and used by the Holy Ghost to the absolute exclusion of all other influence from within or without. If I played every note of a piece of music exactly, not allowing a discordant sound to come in, note for note being settled long before, yet the tone of the instrument on which I played would remain the same. Had I not played, it would have been silent; nor while I play, can another note, but what I please, sound at all. God had framed the instrument with that tone, as well as used it. It is merely want of apprehension that the Holy Ghost could act in the mind, and take possession of it for its own purposes, and so govern the words. That leads to the statement I am discussing. Mr. N. says, "Their knowledge [of God's message], however perfect, must, yet in a human mind, have co-existed with ignorance, and nothing but a perpetual miracle could have prevented ignorance from now and then exhibiting itself in error of fact or argument." (Phases, p. 121.) Why co-existed? Ignorance does not exist, it is a mere negative. Supposing they were ignorant of every other possible idea, they would have given just the inspired message, and it would have been God's sent message, being produced in their minds exactly in that form. It would have been mingled with nothing else, for there would be nothing else to mingle with. Now that was the practical effect of the Holy Ghost, because He •so filled their minds, and with that, that it excluded all else from their minds as much as if it did not exist for them. Every real teacher is inspired in the sense of having thoughts and feelings communicated by the Holy Ghost, but He does not so fill him and control his natural actings as that his own thoughts or will may not mix themselves up at all; so that he cannot be trusted as giving absolute truth as an authority, though all he teaches may be the truth, and he may spiritually profit his hearers. Besides, I doubt not that all his materials are already revealed in the scriptures. The Holy Ghost uses them by His ministration of them; but they are revealed, even if not generally known.
I do not know what Mr. N. means by a "perpetual miracle" (Phases, p. 121), to which he objects. The apostles were not perpetually writing epistles, nor evangelists histories. If God was communicating truth, He did whatever was needed to secure its being His, whenever He did so. That is a self-evident, necessary, and simple proposition. Mr. N. speaks of "revering" the apostles' "moral and spiritual wisdom." (Ib. p. 121.) That has nothing to do with God's word. The apostle himself distinguishes them. Mr. N. speaks of not obtruding miracles on the scripture narratives. What he seems to mean is this, that when the scriptural history gives a plain narrative of fact, he is not to make a miracle of it to explain a physiological difficulty.
This has really no force in it. The historians relate a fact: if the fact is out of the order of nature, they relate it as it is. If they are credible, I am to receive it as what it is-something out of the order of nature. If it is not, I consider it natural.
Mr. N. speaks of their not "sheaving any consciousness that it [the fact he narrates] involves physiological difficulties." Α man that presents himself as giving by the Holy Ghost a narrative of what really happened does not occupy himself with questions, but communicates what is revealed. Did he do otherwise, it would make his "consciousness" of being inspired doubtful. Mr. N.'s remark supposes the thing in question, namely, that it is their doing. I do not invent a miracle, I believe a fact not in the general order of nature. It is one of the perfection of scripture, that it states the fact without any bombastic, or indeed any comment on what was done. There is the fact needed for one's knowing the truth. It is to produce its impression. The impression produced on the writer's mind is not the subject of revelation. You will find it in human Thaumaturge's lives, but not in a divine narrative. It is to produce (not, in general to record) impressions, unless these impressions form part of the divine history of man. What is it to my soul what the writer feels about the matter, provided he gives me the fact? Mr. Ν. does not seem to know what the true character and purpose of a revelation is.