Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

THE CLOSIxN'G STRUGGLE.
by no human composition." In 1861 Dean Burgon preached
in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, as follows :
" No, sirs,
the Bible is the very utterance of the Eternal : as much
God's own word as if high heaven were open and we heard
God speaking to us with human voice. Every book is in-
spired alike, and is inspired entirely. Inspiration is not a
difference of degree, but of kind. The Bible is filled to
overflowing with the Holy Spirit of God the ; books of it
and the words of it and the very letters of it."
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In 1865 Canon MacNeile declared in Exeter Hall that
" we must either receive the verbal inspiration of the Old
Testament or deny the veracity, the insight, the integrity of
|Our Lord Jesus Christ as a teacher of divine truth."
As late as 1889 one of the two most eloquent pulpit ora-
tors in the Church of England, Canon Liddon, preaching at
St. Paul's Cathedral, used in his fervour the same dangerous
argument : that the authority of Christ himself, and therefore
of Christianity, must rest on the old view of the Old
Testament ; that, since the founder of Christianity, in divine-
ly recorded utterances, alluded to the transformation of
Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, to Noah's ark and the Flood,
and to the sojourn of Jonah in the whale, the biblical account
of these must be accepted as historical, or that Christianity
must be given up altogether.
In the light of what was rapidly becoming known regarding
the Chaldean and other sources of the accounts given in
Genesis, no argument could be more fraught with peril to
the interest which the gifted preacher sought to serve.
In France and Germany many similar utterances in op-
to the newer biblical studies were heard and from
position ;
America, especially from the college at Princeton, came re-
sounding echoes. As an example of many may be quoted the
statement by the eminent Dr. Hodge that the books of Scripture
" are, one and all, in thought and verbal expression, in
substance, and in form, wholly the work of God, conveying
with absolute accuracy and divine authority all that God
meant to convey without human additions and admixtures "
;
and that " infallibility and authority attach as much to the
verbal expression in which the revelation is made as to the
matter of the revelation itself."
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