of Bagdat; granting that the Jewish Masoretic points (whenever invented) kept all the traditional sense handed down from Moses; granting that the earliest Jewish records (the best parts of the Mishna or the Targums) give the scholar ground for supporting a true text, till we reach Josephus and Philo, and the Septuagint; and granting that some parts of the Targums may, though unwritten, have been as old as Ezra; yet, if the reproduction of the whole ancient Scriptures, in a new character, interpreted then by an unwritten 'Masora,' be what we come to in Ezra's time, and the documents of the thousand years before all vanish before investigation, it is on the gigantic gifts and inspiration of the transcribers in Ezra's day that we are really depending—gifts and inspiration which yet are a mere hypothesis, of which the possessors tell us no single word! And before Ezra's day, we are thus owning, unmistakeably, that the literary history of the Old Testament is lost! Let all those who would identify this with God's entire revelation, see to what they have brought us."[1]
He that hath ears to hear let him hear. Yet, such is the mystery of godliness. Dr. Irons did not consider the foregoing expression of opinion in regard to God's Book inconsistent with his being God's servant and Prebendary of St. Paul's. So much has this baleful flagitiousness of teaching for many centuries that Faith is superior to and independent of Reason done to dwarf and distort the mental and moral perceptions of the noblest and ablest among us! Theology has made us such adepts with the loaded dice of quibble and paradox that able and honest men like Colenso, Irons, and Giles experience no difficulty in reconciling their appalling heresies with the retention of their "livings." It is natural enough for a student who has been trained in the atmosphere of mental thimble-rigging, which a theological training implies, to work his cerebration so that it arrives inevitably at the result that he is still morally justified in taking the Lord's wages for the planting of weeds in the Lord's vineyard. Now, all except the contemptible residuum of the Lord's own empty pates—little creatures of the Spurgeon, Parker,
- ↑ "The Bible and its Interpreters," pp. 38-40.
