with the standards of their Church. The decisions of the Vatican Council (1869-70), no less than those of Trent, assume that valid traditions must have their ultimate basis in utterances which have come from the mouth of Christ, or from the apostles by the dictation of the Holy Spirit, and "have been transmitted, as it were, from hand to hand." (Chap. II.)

It should be stated that Newman in his doctrine of development has gone farther than is agreeable to many expositors of Roman Catholic doctrine. In opposition to his picture of change and growth, there are those who prefer, in the spirit of Bossuet, to represent the Church as always teaching the same things, and not merely as containing some obscure substratum of their future production. Such, for example, is the import of Dr. Wiseman's statement: "We believe that no new doctrine can be introduced into the Church, but that every doctrine which we hold has existed and been taught in it, ever since the time of the apostles." (See other quotations in J. B. Mozley's criticism of Newman's Essay on Development.) Newman's theory, however, is suited to render good service to Romish apologetics. It meets the case of those who have not the hardihood to overlook or to deny the appearance of a vast change in the teachings of the Church since the first centuries. It ought to appear especially useful to Romanists since the promulgation of the dogma of the immaculate conception of the Virgin and the infallibility of the Pope.

A movement on Protestant soil, which, however, cannot be characterized as a Protestant movement, has made a close approach to the Romish doctrine of tradition. In the scheme of the English Ritualists, tradition is assigned the rank of an authoritative interpreter of Scripture. In one of his earlier works Pusey remarks: "We would take not our own private and individual judgments, but that of the Universal Church, as attested by the Catholic fathers

and ancient bishops." (Letter to the Bishop of Oxford.) In a later work he writes to Newman: "I meant to maintain that the Church of England does hold a divine authority in the Church, to be exercised a certain way, deriving the truth from Holy Scripture, following apostolical tradition, under the guidance of God the Holy Ghost. I fully believe that there is no difference between us in this. The quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus, which our own divines have so often inculcated, contains, I believe, the selfsame doctrine as laid down in the council of Trent upon tradition." (Eirenicon.)

2. THEORIES OF INSPIRATION. We consider under this topic only the views of those who acknowledge in general the authority of the Bible, leaving the more negative theories for a subsequent discussion.

The theory of strict verbal inspiration which was dominant in the seventeenth century has had its advocates throughout the present period. This theory implies that the Bible is inspired in its every word and infallible in its every statement, except possibly in some instances in which the text has been corrupted by copyists. Substantially

this view still appears in the Lutheran dogmatics of S. J. Baumgarten, with a token, however, of departure from the same, since he maintained that, while it is not necessary to concede that there are in fact any mistakes, it would not materially affect the authority of the Bible if it were found to contain some errors in chronological, geographical, or historical minutiæ. (Glaubenslehre, 1764, Vol. III. pp. 32-38.) Strict verbal inspiration was asserted by the learned Baptist theologian of the eighteenth century, John Gill. The New England divine, Nathanael Emmons, taught it in these unmistakable terms: "Every sentence and every word in such a book as this was of too much importance to be written by an unassisted pen. Hence it is natural to conclude the Holy Ghost suggested every thought and word to the sacred penmen, all the while they were writ

ing the Holy Scriptures." Difference of style he explains as resulting from a divine accommodation to the peculiar genius and education of the sacred penmen, such as a parent might employ in dictating a letter for a child. (Systematic Theology, Serm. VII.) The teaching of Leonard Woods, if not so distinctly committed to the same theory, bears in its direction. (Theological Lectures, XIII.) Among recent advocates of plenary verbal inspiration, the Genevan divine, L. Gaussen, has written with most force and vivacity. He says of the Bible, that it contains no error, that all its parts are equally inspired, that its words are in every case what they ought to be. "It is not, as some will have it, a book which God employed men, whom He had previously enlightened, to write under His auspices. No, it is a book which He dictated to them; it is the Word of God; the Spirit of the Lord spake by its authors, and his words were upon their tongues." (Theopneustia, translation by D. D. Scott.) Statements nearly as sweeping are employed by Charles Hodge, who likewise maintains that all the books of Scripture are equally inspired, that inspiration extends to all the contents of these books, and to the words as well as to the general subject matter. (Systematic Theology, Introd., Chap. VI. Compare Prof. Atwater in Bib. Sac., Jan., 1864; Enoch Pond, Lectures on Christian. Theology, X.)

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The Swedenborgian view also comes under the category of strict verbal inspiration, at least so far as those books are concerned which are properly the Word of the Lord, or contain the spiritual sense. "These," says Edwin Gould, we believe to be plenarily inspired, every word and syllable contained in them, in the original tongues, having been dictated viva voce to the different penmen by whom they were committed to writing, from the mouth of God Himself." (Swedenborg and Modern Biblical Criticism.) The other books (including in the Old Testament Ruth, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Proverbs, Ecclesi

astes, the Song of Solomon, and Job, and in the New Testament the Book of Acts and the Epistles) were written "by a lower and mediate inspiration, or a divine direction and superintendence." (Ibid.)

A second theory, which has had much currency through the period, while claiming that the Bible as originally given was free from error, affirms that inspiration was not equal in all parts, that at least in case of the historical books it did not determine the exact language. This may be regarded as the standard Roman Catholic theory of more recent times. It is advocated by Perrone among others. While rejecting the theory of Hamel and Less, he is also averse to the view that all of the Scriptures were dictated to the sacred penmen. Biblical inspiration, as he teaches, included the following elements: "(1.) Incitement or impulse to writing; (2.) illumination of the mind and movement of the will, so that not only does no error proceed from the sacred writer; but (3.) moreover, there is found in him such a choice of the things to be written that he omits nothing, adds nothing to that which God wished to be written by him; (4.) constant and singular assistance in accomplishing the work." (Prælect. Theol., De Sacra Script., Cap. II. Compare Klee, Dogmatik, 1844, Vol. I. pp. 261, 262.) The same theory has been held by various Protestant writers, such as Philip Doddridge, Daniel Wilson, and E. Henderson.

A third theory differs from the foregoing in allowing a somewhat wider scope to human agency. While maintaining that the Bible, taken in its entirety, is a complete ethical and religious standard, it admits that it may contain errors in subsidiary and unimportant matters. This theory has commanded a growing patronage since the middle of the last century, and is now largely prevalent among Protestant theologians. It has been very commonly held by the supernaturalist school of Germany, since the latter part of the eighteenth century, being more than once

implied, where not definitely advocated, by the addition to the assertion of Biblical infallibility of the qualifying clause, in matters of doctrine, or in what concerns religious faith. It has been favored by Tholuck, Lange, Martensen, Hofmann, and Van Oosterzee; by Warburton and Lowth; by Coleridge, Thomas Arnold, and Alford. It is not to be understood that all included under this specification have held the same total view of the Scriptures. In fact, the elements of this theory have been associated with somewhat diverse conceptions of the co-working of divine and human agency in preparing the sacred oracles. A relatively larger place has been assigned to human agency by some of these writers than by others. Some, as Van Oosterzee, have taught that inspiration extends to the language of Scripture. This, however, by no means identifies their theory with the first in our list. Their idea was, that whatever affects thought must affect more or less the language in which it is clothed. At the same time, they made the person of the writer a co-agent both in the thought and the language, and to such an extent as to condition the result, and blend with it some traces of human fallibility. "Errors and inaccuracies,” says Van Oosterzee," in matters of subordinate importance, are undoubtedly to be found in the Bible." (Christian Dogmatics, Vol. I. sect. 39.) Naturally, a large proportion of those holding the general theory described in this paragraph lay much stress upon the idea that inspiration is dynamical as opposed to mechanical, — that, instead of taking the place of the human faculties, it imparts an extraordinary activity to both mind and heart.

The attitude of the earlier Unitarians of New England toward the Bible, as also of the more conservative of their successors, may be included within the limits of the theory under consideration. They conceded to the Biblical writers, at least those of the New Testament, quite a positive in spiration, and a full doctrinal authority. "We regard tl.