The writer seems above inquiry, and filled with Hindu ideas which he attributes to Christians. But it is untrue of the Christian, if it is true of the Hindu, that he regards Scripture "as a single, indivisible, and mechanically inspired book, dictated throughout by the Deity, and from which all human elements are jealously excluded."
Now on the face of the Bible, there is the patent fact that it consists, not of "a single hook," but of an immense "division"; the older in Hebrew with a small part for good reason in Aramaic; the later in Greek when the door of faith was to be opened to Gentiles; the one occupied with God's ways en earth, the other with His heavenly counsels based on the manifestation of His Son, the Lord Jesus, and of redemption. But yet more its contrast is apparent with the impostures of the Hindu and Arabian, in the vast variety of its writers in the Old Testament as well as in the New Testament, separated by very many centuries of old, but in a brief space for the more recent; yet with absolute unanimity where the same subject is broached. There is therefore in this and in all other ways the reverse of a "mechanical inspiration" in its many distinct but harmonious books; by a legislator and a general, by judges and prophets, by kings and great ministers of state, by priest and herdman, by known and unknown: again, in the New Testament, by a tax gatherer, and a physician, by fishermen of little learning, and by a tent-maker of great. "Dictated by the Deity" it is not, save in a comparatively small degree in the Pentateuch (chiefly in the latter part of Exodus, and we may say in all Leviticus), and in the later prophets. Nor are "all human elements jealously excluded," but abundantly, considerately, and most touchingly found, as the rule, from Genesis to the Book of Revelation. But it is inspired of God, God-breathed, every part of it—"every scripture," as the Apostle lays down authoritatively. The Lord Himself and the Apostle Paul and Luke often used the Greek translation, not as if it was perfect everywhere but as adequate in its way. No wonder that neither the Veda nor the Koran bear translation, and attain it but slightly for the curiosity of some and of others to refute their vain imagination. The Bible lends itself remarkably to transfusion into all the tongues of men. The grand truth is that God controlled the many writers, notwithstanding their infirmities and allowing each his own style, so as to exclude error and give His Word, who cannot lie and needs not to repent.
W. K.