lish themselves, or are strenuously resisting the efforts which are making to dislodge them. The following extract from the Preface of Professor Gaussen's work will at once explain the title which he has chosen, and the importance, in his view, of the subject.

At the first glance at this book and its title, two prejudices, equally erroneous, may arise in some minds, which I desire to dissipate.

The Greek term, Theopneustia, although borrowed from St. Paul, and long employed on the other side of the Rhine, being but little employed in our language, more than one reader, without doubt, will say of the subject herein treated, that it is too scientific to be popular, and too little popular to be important. I fear not, however, to declare that if any thing could have given me both the desire and the courage to undertake it, it is the double persuasion of its vital importance and its simplicity.

I do not think that, next to the divine nature of Christianity, any question can be presented to us more essential to the life of our faith than this: "The Bible, is it from God? Is it wholly from God? Or is it true, (as some have pretended,) that it contains sentences which are purely human, narratives which are not exact, instances of vulgar ignorance, and reasonings which are inconclusive; in a word, some books, or some portions of a book, foreign to the interests of faith, subject to the natural carelessness of the writer, and tainted by error?" Question decisive, fundamental, vital!. It is the first which you have to make when you open the Scriptures; and it is with it that your religion ought to commence.

If it be true, in your opinion, that every thing in the Bible is not important, does not concern the faith, and has no reference to Jesus Christ, and if it be true, in your opinion, on the other hand, that there is nothing inspired in this book but that which, in your opinion, is important to the interests of faith, and has reference to Jesus Christ, then your Bible is a book wholly different from that of the Fathers, of the Reformers, and of the saints of all ages. It is fallible; theirs was perfect. It has chapters, or portions of chapters, it has sentences or expressions, which are to be retrenched from the number of the chapters, sentences or expressions which are from God. Theirs was "all inspired of God;" "all profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works." The same passage, therefore, may, when contemplated by you, be as widely different from what it was, as contemplated then, as the earth is distant from the

heavens.

We may have opened, for example, at the 45th Psalm, or at the Song of Songs. Whilst you have seen there nothing but what is in the greatest degree human in its character,-a long nuptial song, or the love-conversations of a daughter of Sharon and a young husband, they have read there the glories of the church, the bonds of the love of God, the deep things of Jesus Christ; in a word, that which is most divine in the things of heaven; and if they could not read them there, they knew that they were there, and they searched for them there.

We may have taken up an epistle of St. Paul. Whilst one of us will attribute such and such a saying which he has not comprehended, or which has shocked his carnal sense, to the Jewish prejudices of the writer, to sentiments wholly appertaining to the vulgar, to circumstances altogether human, the other will there explore, filled with veneration, the thoughts of the Spirit; he will believe them to be perfect, even before having comprehended them; and he will attribute to his own want of apprehension, and his own ignorance, their apparent insignificance, or their obscurity.

Thus whilst in the Bible of the one every thing has its end, its place, its beauty, its use, as in a tree there are branches and leaves, vessels and fibres, epidermis and bark; the Bible of the other is a tree which has leaves and branches, fibres and bark which God has not made.

But still further: not only, according to your answer, we shall have two Bibles, but it will not be possible to know what yours is. It is only human and fallible, you say, in a certain measure. But that measure,-who shall define it? If it be true that man, in having placed in it his sad impress, has left there his spots, who will determine the depth of that impress, or the number of those spots? It has a part which is human, you say; but that part-what are its limits, and who will fix them for me? No one. Each one must define them for himself, according to his own judgment; that is, the portion of the Scriptures which is fallible will be greater in our estimation, in proportion as we are less under the influence of a divine illumination; that is to say, again, that man will deprive himself of the words that are divine in proportion as he has need of them, as we see idolaters make to themselves deities so much the more impure as they themselves are further removed from the living and holy God! So then, each one will reduce the inspired Scriptures to different dimensions, and making for himself, from the Bible thus expurgated, an infallible rule or guide, he will say to it "Guide me henceforth, for thou art my guide!" as the makers of graven images, of whom Isaiah speaks, "who make to themselves a god, and say to it: Save me henceforth, for thou art my God!" Is. 44, 17.

But this is not all; there is something more grave still. According to your answer, it is not only the Bible that is changed; it is you yourself! Yes, even in the presence of the passages which you have most admired, you will have neither the attitude nor the heart of a believer! How can that be, after you have made them appear, as you have the rest of the Scriptures, before the tribunal of your judgment, to be there declared, by you, divine or not divine, or half-divine? What can be, for your soul, the authority of a word which is not infallible for you but in virtue of you? Must it not have presented itself at your bar by the side of other words of the same book which you have convicted of being human in whole or in part? Will your mind, then, sincerely take before it the humble and submissive attitude of a disciple, after having held that of a judge? That is impossible. The obedience which you will render it may be that of acquiescence, never that of faith of approbation, never that of adoration! You will believe in the divinity of the passage, you will say; but it is not in God that you will believe; it is in yourself! That word pleases you, but it does not govern you; its authority over

you is admitted, but it does not reign over you; it is before you as a lamp, but it is not in you as an unction from on high, a principle of light, a fountain of life! I do not believe that any Pope, even the most enamored with his priesthood, could with confidence utter his prayers before a dead person whom he himself, from the abundance of his plenary authority, had placed in the rank of demi-gods, by canonizing him. How then can a reader of the Bible, who has himself just canonized a sentence of the Scriptures, (however much he may be enamored with his own wisdom) be in respect to such a passage, in the disposition of a believer? Will his understanding descend from its pontifical chair, to abase itself before that word, which, were it not for it,would remain human, or at least doubtful? We do not study to the bottom the sense of a passage, when we have pronounced it legitimate, only in virtue of a sense already discovered. We but half submit to any authority which we can reject, and which we have placed in doubt. We adore but imperfectly that which we have degraded.

Moreover,-and let us beware of it,-the entire divinity of such or such a word of the Scriptures being dependent, in your eyes, not from the fact that it is found in the oracles of God, but from its presenting to your wisdom and your spirituality, certain characters of spirituality and of wisdom, the opinion which you form cannot always be so exempt from hesitation that you should retain in relation to it none of the doubts with which you commenced. Your faith will, therefore, necessarily partake of your doubts, and it will be itself imperfect, undecided and conditional! Like opinion, like faith; and like faith, like life! But faith is not there; the life of God's elect is not there!

But that which will better demonstrate the importance of the question which is about to occupy us is the fact, that, if one of the two systems to which it may give existence has, as we have said, all its roots steeped in doubt, it brings forth inevitably as fruit, a new incredulity. Why is it that we see so many thousands of men open the Bible, morning and evening, without ever perceiving the doctrines which it teaches with the greatest clearness? Whence comes it that they can thus walk in error, for so many years, with the sun as it were in their hands? Yes; but preoccupied by false notions on the subject of inspiration, and believing that there exists still in the Sacred Scriptures some admixture of error, but desirous, however, to be able to find some sentences which are in their opinion reasonable, in order to be able to believe them divine, they study, even without being conscious of it, to give to them a meaning which agrees with their own wisdom. And thus it is, that they only put themselves in a state of incapacity for recognizing what is God's meaning, but what they represent to themselves as despicable. They strive, for example, when reading the epistles of St. Paul, to find in them the doctrine of man's justification by the law, his native innocency, his inclination to what is good, the moral omnipotence of his will, the merit of his works. But then, what happens? Alas! After they have attributed, by violence, some such thoughts to the sacred writer, they find a language so badly conceived for the supposed end, terms so badly chosen for that which they wish to say, and reasonings so inconclusive, that they lose, in despite of themselves, whatever of respect they may still have preserved for the letter of the Sacred Scrip

tures, and bury themselves in Rationalism. It is thus that having commenced in incredulity, they have gained, as the fruit, another incredulity; darkness in recompense for darkness; and they have fulfilled that dreadful word of Christ: "From him who has not shall be taken away even that which he thinketh that he has."

Such is then the fundamental importance of the great question which is about to occupy our attention. According to the answer which you have made to it, has the arm of the word of the Lord been weakened for you; the sword of the Spirit has been blunted; it has lost its temper and its incisive power. How could it from thenceforth penetrate even to the "joints and the marrow?" How could it be powerful against your lusts, your doubts, the world and Satan? How could it give you light, strength, victory, peace? No! It might indeed be that through the pure grace of God, and notwithstanding the unhappy state of the soul, one divine word might suddenly arrest it; then Zaccheus descends from the sycamore; Matthew quits the custom-house; the paralytic takes up his bed and walks; the dead arises. That may happen without doubt. But it remains not the less true, that the disposition of mind which judges the Scriptures, and doubts, in advance, of their universal inspiration, is one of the greatest obstacles which we can oppose to their action. "The word preached," says Paul (Heb. 4: 2), "did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it ;" whilst the most abundant benedictions of the same Scritpures have always been the inheritance of those souls which have received it, "not as the word of man, but (as it is in truth) as the word of God, which effectually worketh in those who believe." 1 Thess. 2: 13.

We see, then, that this question is one of immense gravity for the life of our faith; and we are right in saying that between the two answers which may be made to it, there is the same abyss which separated the two Israelites who had seen Jesus Christ in the flesh, and who had equally recognized him as a prophet. But whilst one of them, considering his carpenter's dress, his mean food, his hands rendered hard by labor, and his rustic suite, believed him to be still liable to error and to sin, as an ordinary prophet; the other recognized in him the Emmanuel, the Lamb of God, the Lord our Righteousness, the Holy One of Israel, the King of kings, the Lord of lords." Preface, pp. 1—7.

This extract, though long, will be received with interest by our readers. It gives a very clear and just idea of the importance of the subject, and the necessity of having correct and well established views of it.

In the first chapter of the work, Professor Gaussen gives us some account of the word θεοπνευστία :

It is, the name of that mysterious power which the Holy Spirit exercised upon the writers of the Old and New Testaments, to cause them to compose them such as the Church of God has received them from their hands. "All Scripture," says an apostle, "is EnvEVOTOS,"

-inspired of God.

He then proceeds to tell us in what this Theopneustia—this Inspiration of God-consists:

Theopneustia is not a system, it is a fact. Like all the other events in the history of Redemption, this fact, attested by the Holy Scriptures, is one of the dogmas of our faith. Nevertheless it is necessary to say, and it is necessary to understand, that this miraculous operation of the Holy Spirit had not the sacred writers for its object, who were but instruments, and who must soon pass away. But it had for its object the Sacred Books themselves, which were destined to reveal, from age to age, to the church the counsels of God, and which must endure for

ever.

The power which was exercised over these men of God, and which they did not themselves feel but in very different measures, has not been defined to us. Nothing authorizes us to explain it. The Scripture never presents to us the mode or the measure of it as an object of study. It only speaks incidentally of these things, and which do not concern our piety. That which it (the Scripture) proposes to our faith, is solely the inspiration of its words, the divine nature of the books which the writers have written. It has established, in this respect, no difference between them. Their words, it tells us, are Theopneustic-inspired of God; their books are of God, whether they recite the mysteries of a past more ancient than the creation, or those of a future more distant than the return of the Son of Man, or the eternal councils of the Most High, or the secrets of the human heart, or the deep things of God: whether they recount their own emotions, or relate their recollections, or repeat contemporaneous narratives, or copy genealogies, or make extracts from uninspired documents,-their writings are inspired; their recitals are directed from on high: it is always God who speaks, who recites, commands or reveals by their mouth, and who, to do this, employs, in different measures, their personality. For "the Spirit of the Lord was upon them," it is written, "and this word was upon their tongue." And if it is always the word of man, because it is always men who utter it, it is also the word of God, because it is God who watches over them, who employs them, who guides them. They give us their narrations, their doctrines, or their commandments, " not with the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but with the words which the Holy Ghost teacheth;" and thus it is that God himself is not only the guaranty of all these facts, but he is also the author of all these commandments, and the revealer of these truths. Still more; he has caused them to be given to his church in the order, and in the measure, and in the terms which he has judged to be most suitable for his heavenly design.

If then we should be asked how this work of inspiration was accomplished in the men of God, we would reply that we do not know, that we need not know; and that it is in the same ignorance, and with altogether a similar faith, we receive the doctrine of regeneration, or that of sanctification of a soul by the Holy Spirit. We believe that the Spirit enlightens the soul, purifies it, elevates it, fills it with consolation, melts it; we recognize all these effects; we know and adore their Cause; but we must be content to be forever ignorant of the means by which they are accomplished. Let it also be so with the doctrine of Theopneustia.