Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/223

Inspiration 205 To claim beforehand that inspiration or any such divine process must be this or that, that it must have certain characteristics, is to venture beyond our limits. In all humility, instead of dictating what God should do, let us inquire reverently what God has done,— in what form concretely the revelation of His will has come to men. All a priori definition of inspiration is not only unscientific but irreverent, presumptuous, lacking in the humility with which we should approach a divine, supernatural fact. So speaks another who later was the object of heresy proceedings in the Presbyterian Church, Professor Llewelyn J. Evans of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. ' Now although the discovery of errors in Scripture, of pseudepigraphs in the Old Testament, of unfulfillable pro- phecies, — the asseveration of which occupied so prominent a place in the trial of Briggs, — of authors separated by centuries within the confines of the Pentateuch alone, of false ascriptions of late laws to the holy but dimming figure of Moses, have undoubtedly helped us to regard the Bible as primarily a pro- duct of human literary and religious genius, they have also gradually changed both the conception of the place of the Bible in our religion and of our religion itself. We find these changes emerging even in the pages of Briggs. If a man use it [the Bible] as a means of grace, it is of small importance what he may think of its inspiration. If it bring him to the presence of the living God and give him a personal acquaint- ance with Jesus Christ, that is its main purpose. . . . They [the Scriptural errors] intimate that the authority of God and His gracious discipline transcend the highest possibilities of human speech or human writing, and that the religion of Jesus Christ is not only the religion of the Bible, but the religion of personal com- munion with the living God.^ The beginning at least of the profound change in a man's religion which comes about through the change in his religious authority is delicately portrayed by Professor William N. Clarke (1841-1912) of Colgate College. Professor Clarke's theological books have been the most popular attempt of our period to pre- ' See his Biblical Scholarship and Inspiration, 1891, pp. 12, 13, 20. " The Bible, Church and Reason, 1892, pp. 82, 117.