The author of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, Frederick Denison Maurice, sometime Professor of Casuistry and Modern Philosophy in the University of Cambridge, in discussing the philosophers of the last half of the seventeenth century, has an excellent passage on the views of Spinoza respecting the Hebrew prophets, and in what manner they and their work are to be regarded. The passage is so apropos the matter here discussed that I quote the essential parts of it:
"What do the sacred books impart when they affirm the Spirit of God to have been infused into the prophets—that the prophets spoke by the Spirit of God?" (Spinoza.)
The result at which our author arrives upon a long examination into the different uses of the word "Spirit" is, that these expressions respecting the infusion of the Spirit "signify nothing more than that the prophets had a singular and extraordinary virtue and cultivated piety, with very great constancy of mind, and thereby they had a perception of the mind or judgment of God; for we shall find that the Spirit of God denotes in Hebrew as well the mind as the judgment or sentence of God, and therefore that the law of God, because it unfolded the mind of God, is called the mind or Spirit of God; therefore the imagination of the prophets might, with equal justice, be said to be the mind of God, and the prophets be said to have had the mind of God, inasmuch as through their imagination the decrees of God were revealed. * * * The question how the prophets acquired a sense of certainty respecting their revelations gives rise to a long discussion. Their imagination being the main instrument of their discoveries, they cannot have the same security as we have for those truths which are discovered by scientific insight or "natural light." "It is," says Spinoza, very characteristically, "a moral, not a mathematical security. It is derived (1) from the great strength of their phantasy, which brings objects before them as clearly as we see them when we are awake. (2) From some divine sign. (3) From their minds being disposed to the right and just," Spinoza affirms the last to be the principal secret of their certainty. * * * Nevertheless, he affirms that the revelations to the prophet depended upon his temperament and upon his own opinions. These he brought with him—these varied not only his style of writing, but his understanding of any communication that was made to him. His joy, his sorrow, all the different moods of his mind and body, were continually affecting his judgments and his teachings. * * * Every thoughtful reader will perceive that in these statements Spinoza has an evident advantage over those who treat the personal feelings, experiences, struggles of the prophets, as if they were nothing—who forget that they were human beings—who look upon them merely as utterers of certain divine dogmas, or as foretelling certain future events. He has a right to say that such persons overlook the letter of the books, while they profess to honor the letter; that they change their substance, while they think that they are taking them just as they are. But no real devout reader of the prophets ever forgets that they are men. Their human feelings, sufferings, rejoicings, are parts to him of the divine revelation. The struggles of the prophet with his own evil—the consciousness and confession that the vile is mixed with the precious—help more than all formal teaching to show him and us how the higher mind is distinct from the lower, as well as how the one is related to the other. We see how the prophet arrived at a certainty about the divine will and purpose through the very doubts and contradictions in himself.[[15]]
Also the Reverend Joseph Armitage Robinson, D. D., dean of Westminster and chaplain of King Edward VII of England, respecting the manner in which the message of the Old Testament was received and communicated to man, as late as 1905, said:
The message of the Old Testament was not written by the divine hand, nor dictated by an outward compulsion; it was planted in the hearts of men, and made to grow in a fruitful soil. And then they were required to express it in their own language, after their natural methods, and in accordance with the stage of knowledge which their time had reached. Their human faculties were purified and quickened by the divine Spirit; but they spoke to their time in the language of their time, they spoke a spiritual message, accommodated to the experience of their age, a message of faith in God, and of righteousness as demanded by a righteous God.[[16]]
I take occasion at this point to observe that because a writer or speaker claims to be under the inspiration of God it does not follow that in giving expression to what the Lord puts into his heart he will always do so in grammatical terms, any more than the orthography of an inspired writer will always be accurate. We have many illustrations of this fact among the inspired men that we have known in the Church of Jesus Christ in these last days. Those of us who have listened to the utterances of prophets and apostles cannot doubt of their inspiration, and at the same time some of those who have been most inspired have been inaccurate in the use of our English language. The same seems true of the ancient apostles, also. The writer of the Acts, at the conclusion of a synopsis of a discourse which he ascribes to Peter, says, "Now, when they [the Jews] saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled."[[17]] The commentators upon this passage say that the listening Jews perceived that Peter and John were uninstructed in the learning of the Jewish schools, and were of the common sort of men, untrained in teaching.[[18]] And again, "Their language and arguments prove that they were untaught in the Rabbinical learning of the Jewish schools."[[19]] But in what way could the Jews have discerned the ignorance and absence of learning in Peter and John except through the imperfections of their language? And yet those imperfections in language may not be urged in evidence of the absence of inspiration in the two apostles. Surely with God it must be that the matter is of more consequence than the form in which it is expressed; the thought of more moment than the word; it is the Spirit that giveth life, not the letter. "He that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord."[[20]]
The view of the manner of translating the Book of Mormon here set forth furnishes the basis of justification for those verbal changes and grammatical corrections which have been made since the first edition issued from the press; and would furnish justification for making many more verbal and grammatical corrections in the book; for if, as here set forth, the meaning of the Nephite characters was given to Joseph Smith in such faulty English as he, an uneducated man, could command, while every detail and shade of thought should be strictly preserved, there can be no reasonable ground for objection to the correction of mere verbal errors and grammatical construction. There can be no reasonable doubt that had Joseph Smith been a finished English scholar and the facts and ideas represented by the Nephite characters upon the plates had been given him by the inspiration of God through the Urim and Thummim, those ideas would have been expressed in correct English; but as he was not a finished English scholar, he had to give expression to those facts and ideas in such language as he could command, and that was faulty English, which the Prophet himself and those who have succeeded him as custodians of the word of God have had, and now have, a perfect right to correct.[[21]]
Footnotes
[1]. Wentworth letter, Millennial Star, vol. 19, p. 118.
[2]. Wentworth letter, History of the Church, vol. IV, ch. 31.
[3]. Book of Mosiah 8:13.