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calling. In no other way, indeed, could we deal rationally or reverently with a Progressive Revelation. For to consider a series of educational processes as in all its terms of precisely the same value—to give every part of a large system, historically developed, an equal absolute worth—to ascribe the same reverence to the Acts of Joshua and the Acts of the Apostles, or to the Sayings of a Solomon and of a John—would be to produce a confusion among all our thoughts and feelings which must assuredly negative or neutralize some of the very finest lessons which Revelation was designed to furnish. And surely as we do not expect the full-grown man to revert to the lessons of his childhood for expositions or limitations of communications made to his maturer age, so neither ought we to expect the disciple of jesus to be referred from His teachings to the lessons of Moses, nor the inheritor of thirty centuries and more of specially Divine culture to be ruled by the instructions of even the most spiritual of the Patriarchs.
vi
Such modifications of the absolute character of Revelation are introduced by a consideration of the imperfection of the Recipients of it: there are others as considerable which are the consequence of the imperfection of the Agents and the Instruments of it. The employment of the human mind as the agent, and of human language and writing as the instruments, this necessarily involves a measure of Fallibility in the Record of the Revelation. It ought indeed to be distinctly borne in mind that there is no necessary, or even reasonable, connexion between a man's being the subject of a special Divine communication and his subsequent Universal Infallibility: nor can we have the assurance of such infallibility unless we could insure not only the presence of the Divine Spirit in the man, but also the absence of everything else. Indeed carry as high as we can the conception of Divine Influence acting on the human mind, short of the conversion of Mind into Mechanism, yet we cannot get rid of the possibility of Imperfection. In
