mediately perceives that the Sacred Scriptures consist of two separate series of writings, wholly distinct in their character, chronology, and language-the one containing the sacred books of the Jews, the other those of the Christians. We will commence with the former.

Most of our readers who share the popular belief in the divine origin and authority of the Jewish Scriptures, would pro bably be much perplexed when called upon to assign grounds to justify the conviction which they entertain from habit. All that they could discover may be classed under the following heads:

I. That these books were received as sacred, authoritative, and inspired Writings by the Jews themselves.

II. That they repeatedly and habitually represent themselves as dictated by God, and containing His ipsissima verba.

III. That their contents proclaim their origin and parentage, as displaying a purer morality, a loftier religion, and altogether a holier tone, than the unassisted, uninspired human faculties could, at that period, have attained.

IV. That the authority of the Writers, as directly commis sioned from on High, was in many cases attested by miraculous powers, either of act or prophecy.

V. That Christ and his Apostles decided their sacred character, by referring to them, quoting them, and assuming, or affirming them to be inspired.

Let us examine each of these grounds separately.

I. It is unquestionably true that the Jews received the Hebrew Canon, or what we call the Old Testament, as a collection of divinely-inspired writings, and that Christians, on their authority, have generally adopted the same belief.-Now, even if the Jews had held the same views of inspiration that now prevail, and attached the modern meaning to the word; even if they had known accurately who were the Authors of the sacred books, and on what authority such and such writings were admitted into the Canon, and such others rejected ;-we

do not see why their opinion should be regarded as a sufficient guide and basis for ours; especially when we remember that they rejected as an Impostor the very Prophet whom we conceive to have been inspired beyond all others. What rational or consistent ground can we assign for disregarding the decision of the Jews in the case of Jesus, and accepting it submissively in the case of Moses, David, and Isaiah?

But, on a closer examination, it is discovered that the Jews cannot tell us when, nor by whom, nor on what principle of selection, this collection of books was formed. All these questions are matters of pure conjecture; and the ablest critics agree only in the opinion that no safe opinion can be pronounced. One ancient Jewish legend attributes the formation of the Canon to the Great Synagogue, an imagined" company of Scribes," uvаywyn reaμμaтEwv, presided over by Ezra.Another legend, equally destitute of authority, relates that the collection already existed, but had become much corrupted, and that Ezra was inspired for the purpose of correcting and purifying it; that is, was inspired for the purpose of ascertaining, eliciting, and affirming the inspiration of his Predecessors. A third legend mentions Nehemiah as the Author of the Canon. The opinion of De Wette-probably the first authority on these subjects—an opinion founded on minute historical and critical investigations, is, that the different portions of the Old Testament were collected or brought into their present form, at various periods, and that the whole body of it came gradually into existence, and, as it were, of itself and by force of custom and public use, acquired a sort of sanction." He conceives the Pentateuch to have been completed about the time of Josiah, the collection of Prophets soon after Nehemiah, and the devotional writings not till the age of the Maccabees'. His view of the grounds which led to the reception of the various books into the sacred Canon, is as follows:-" The writings attributed to Moses, David, and the Prophets, were

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1 Introduction to the Critical Study of the Old Testament, (by Parker,) i. 26-35.

considered inspired on account of the personal character of their authors. But the other writings, which are in part anonymous, derive their title to inspiration sometimes from their contents, and sometimes from the cloud of antiquity which rests on them. Some of the writings which were composed after the exile-such, for example, as the Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, and Daniel-were put on this list on account of the ancient authors to whom they were ascribed ;others-for example, Chronicles and Esther-on account of their contents; and others again, as Ezra and Nehemiah, on account of the distinguished merit of their authors in restoring the Law and worship of God."1

Again the books of the Hebrew Canon were customarily classed among the Jews into three several divisions-the Books of the Law, the Prophets, and the other sacred writings, or Hagiographa, as they are termed and it is especially worthy of remark that Philo, Josephus, and all the Jewish authorities ascribed different degrees of inspiration to each class, and moreover did not conceive such inspiration to be exclusively confined to the Canonical writers, but to be shared, though in a scantier degree, by others;-Philo extending it even to the Greek translators of the Old Testament; Josephus hinting that he was not wholly destitute of it himself; and both maintaining that even in their day the gifts of prophecy and inspiration were not extinct, though limited to few". The Talmudists held the same opinion; and went so far as to say that a man might derive a certain kind or degree of inspiration from the study of the Law and the Prophets. In the Gospel of John, xi. 51, we have an intimation that the High Priest had a kind of ex officio inspiration or prophetic power.-It seems clear, therefore, that the Jews, on whose authority we accept the Old Testament as

De Wette, i. 40.

2 De Wette, i. 39-43. A marked confirmation of the idea of graduated inspira tion is to be found in Numbers xii. 6-8. Maimonides (De Wette, ii. 361) distinguishes eleven degrees of inspiration, besides that which was granted to Moses. Abarbanel (De Wette, i. 14) makes a similar distinction.

inspired, attached a very different meaning to the word from that in which our Theologians employ it;-in their conception it approaches (except in the case of Moses) much more nearly to the divine afflatus which the Greeks attributed to their Poets." Between the Mosaic and the Prophetic Inspiration, the Jewish Church asserted such a difference as amounts to a diversity. . . To Moses and to Moses alone-to Moses, in the recording, no less than in the receiving of the law-and to every part of the five books called the books of Moses, the Jewish Doctors of the generation before and coeval with the Apostles, assigned that unmodified and absolute EOTVEVOTIA, which our divines, in words at least, attribute to the Canon collectively." The Samaritans, we know, carried this distinction so far that they received the Pentateuch alone as of divine authority, and did not believe the other books to be inspired at all.

It will then be readily conceded that the divine authority, or proper inspiration (using the word in our modern, plain, ordinary, theological sense), of a series of writings of which we know neither the date, nor the authors, nor the collectors, nor the principle of selection-cannot derive much support or probability from the mere opinion of the Jews;—especially when the same Jews did not confine the quality of inspiration to these writings exclusively;-when a large section of them ascribed this attribute to five books only out of thirty-nine ;and when they assigned to different portions of the collection different degrees of inspiration-an idea quite inconsistent with the modern one of infallibility.-" In infallibility there can be no degrees."

2

II. The second ground alleged for the popular belief in the Inspiration of the Jewish Scriptures, appears to involve both a

Coleridge. Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit, p. 19. As I shall have to refer to this eminent writer more than once, I wish it to be borne in mind, that though not always speculatively orthodox, he was a dogmatic Christian, and an intolerant Trinitarian; at least he always held the language of one.

2 Coleridge, p. 18.

These

confusion of reasoning, and a misconception of fact. writings, I believe I am correct in stating, nowhere affirm their own inspiration, divine origin, or infallible authority. They frequently, indeed, use the expressions, "Thus saith Jehovah," and "The Word of the Lord came to Moses," &c., which seem to imply that in these instances they consider themselves as recording the very words of the Most High; but they do not declare that they are as a whole dictated by God, nor even that in these instances they are enabled to record His words with infallible accuracy. But even if these writings did contain the most solemn and explicit assertion of their own inspiration, that assertion ought not to have, and in the eye of reason could not have, any weight whatever, till that inspiration is proved from independent sources-after which it becomes superfluous. It is simply the testimony of a witness to himself',-a testimony which the falsest witness can bear as well as the truest. Το take for granted the attributes of a writer from his own declaration of those attributes, is, one would imagine, too coarse and too obvious a logical blunder not to be abandoned as soon as it is stated in plain language. Yet, in the singular work which I have already quoted-singular and sadly remarkable, as displaying the strange inconsistencies into which a craven. terror of heresy (or the imputation of it) can betray even the acutest thinkers-Coleridge says first, "that he cannot find any such claim (to supernatural inspiration) made by the writers in question, explicitly or by implication" (p. 16);— secondly, that where the passages asserting such a claim are supposed to be found, "the conclusion drawn from them involves. obviously a petitio principii, namely, the supernatural dictation, word by word, of the book in which the assertion is found; for until this is established, the utmost such a text can prove is the current belief of the Writer's age and country" (p. 17);and, thirdly, that "whatever is referred by the sacred penman

"If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true" (i. e. is not to be regarded), John v. 31.