15
such case the spirit infused cannot but be conceived as mingling with the spirit existing in him who shall utter its Divine dictates under the forms of Human expression. The Divine cannot be separated altogether from the Human where the essentials of both are so much akin, and the nature of the one is, in some sense, the image of the other. The only case in which we can conceive of Truth being uttered purely is in the case of Him who was The Truth—its author and its essence: but confessedly He spake as man never spake; and we now are not the auditors, but the mere Readers of His words. And this is a difference which is so important as to reduce the difference between this case (a case otherwise without a parallel) and the other cases very considerably. For we find the words of our Lord on the same occasions often repeated by the different evangelists with circumstantial variations: and this fact cannot but suggest to us that to whatever extent Divine influence may have been exerted on the minds of the reporters of His words, it did not extend to the minutely verbal accuracy of their records. And surely this being so, we may justly suppose that if such accuracy was not deemed necessary in the case of the record of the sayings of Him who has given us the highest of all Revelations of the mind of god, it could scarcely be deemed so in any more partial communications.
Indeed if we consider that the persons who were the most under Divine Influence of any who have ever been used to convey god's will to man, have variously reflected the mind of Him who equally taught them all, we cannot but see that our Lord did not use His Apostles as mere mechanical conveyances of Truth. It would seem indisputable that what their Master infused into their minds mingled with what it met there, and was reproduced with some of their peculiarities of thought and feeling, though not so tinged with earthly elements as that its essential celestial qualities were materially impaired. Nothing can be more obvious than that each of those who have had a share in the composition of the New Testament has a strongly marked individuality in his methods of present-
