Thus there is built up for us in the literature of a nation, marked by an unparalleled unity of purpose and character, a spiritual fabric, which in its result we cannot but recognise as the action of the Divine Spirit. A knowledge of God and of the spiritual life gradually appears, not as the product of human ingenuity, but as the result of Divine communication: and the outcome of this communication is to produce an organic whole which postulates a climax not yet reached, a redemption not yet given, a hope not yet satisfied. In this general sense at least no Christian ought to feel a difficulty in believing, and believing with joy, in the inspiration of the Old Testament: nor can he feel that he is left without a standard by which to judge what it means. Christ, the goal of Old Testament development, stands forth as the test and measure of its inspiration.
The New Testament consists of writings of Apostles or of men of sub-apostolic rank, like S. Luke and probably the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. There is not, except perhaps in the case of the Apocalypse, any sign of an inspiration to write, other than the inspiration which gave power to teach. What then is, whether for writing or for teaching, the inspiration of an Apostle?
If Jesus Christ both was, and knew Himself to be, the Revealer of the Father, it almost stands to reason that He must have secured that His revelation should be, without material alloy, communicated to the Church which was to enshrine and perpetuate it. Thus, in fact, we find that He spent His chief pains on the training of His apostolic witnesses. And all the training which He gave them while He was present among them was only to prepare them to receive the Holy Ghost Who, after He was gone, was to be poured out upon them to qualify them to bear His witness among men.
'Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and ye shall be My witnesses:' 'These things have I spoken unto you while yet abiding with you. And the Comforter, even the Holy Ghost, Whom the Father will send in My name, He shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you.' 'I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all the truth[307].'
Thus the Church sees in the Apostles men specially and deliberately qualified to interpret Christ to the world. It understands by their inspiration an endowment which enables men of all ages to take their teaching as representing, and not misrepresenting, His teaching and Himself. In S. John's Gospel, for example, we have an account of our Lord which has obviously passed through the medium of a most remarkable personality. We have the outcome of the meditation, as well as the recollection, of the Apostle. But, as the evidence assures us that the Gospel is really S. John's, so the Church unhesitatingly accepts S. John's strong and repeated asseveration that he is interpreting and not distorting the record, the personality, the claims of Jesus Christ. 'He bears record, and his record is true[308].'
This assurance is indeed not without verification: it is verified by the unity of testimony which, under all differences of character and circumstance, we find among the apostolic witnesses. The accepted doctrine of the Church when S. Paul wrote his 'undoubted Epistles,'—the points of agreement amidst all differences between him and the Judaizers—gives us substantially the same conception of the Person of the Incarnate Son of God as we find in S. John[309]. The same conception of what He was, is required to interpret the record of what He did and said in the Synoptic Gospels. Further, the witness of the Apostles, though it receives its final guarantee through the belief in their inspiration, has its natural basis in the prolonged training by which—'companying with them all the time that He went in and out among them, beginning from the baptism of John, until the day that He was received up,'—they were prepared to be His witnesses. Thus if an act of faith is asked of us in the apostolic inspiration, it is a reasonable act of faith.
If we pass from the writings properly apostolic to those like S. Luke's records, which represent apostolic teaching at second hand, we do not find that the inspiration of their writers was of such sort as enabled them to dispense with the ordinary means or guarantees of accuracy. The simple claim of S. Luke's preface to have had the best means of information and to have taken the greatest care in the use of them, is on this score most instructive. We should suppose that their inspiration was part of the whole spiritual endowment of their life which made them the trusted friends of the Apostles, and qualified them to be the chosen instruments to record their teaching, in the midst of a Church whose quick and eager memory of 'the tradition' would have acted as a check to prevent any material error creeping into the record.
4. It will be remembered that when inspiration is spoken of by S. Paul, he mentions it as a positive endowment which qualifies the writings of those who were its subjects, to be permanent sources of spiritual instruction. 'Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness[310].' Following out this idea of Holy Scripture then, we are led to think of the belief in inspiration as having this primary practical result: that we submit ourselves to the teaching of every book which is given to us as inspired. We are to put ourselves to school with each in turn of the inspired writers; with S. James, for example, in the New Testament, as well as with S. John and S. Paul; with S. Luke as well as with S. Matthew; with the Pastoral Epistles as well as with the Epistle to the Galatians[311]. At starting each of us, according to his predisposition, is conscious of liking some books of Scripture better than others. This, however, should lead us to recognise that in some way we specially need the teaching which is less attractive to us. We should set ourselves to study what we like less, till that too has had its proper effect in moulding our conscience and character. It is hardly possible to estimate how much division would have been avoided in the Church if those, for example, who were most ecclesiastically disposed had been at pains to assimilate the teaching of the Epistle to the Romans, and those who most valued 'the freedom of the Gospel' had recognised a special obligation to deepen their hold on the Epistles to the Corinthians and the Pastoral Epistles and the Epistle of S. James.
To believe in the inspiration of Holy Scripture is to put ourselves to school with every part of the Old Testament, as of the New. True, the Old Testament is imperfect, but for that very reason has a special value. 'The real use of the earlier record is not to add something to the things revealed in Christ, but to give us that clear and all-sided insight into the meaning and practical worth of the perfect scheme of Divine grace which can only be attained by tracing its growth[312].' We see in the Old Testament the elements, each in separation, which went to make up the perfect whole, and which must still lie at the basis of all rightly formed life of individuals and societies.
Thus to believe, for instance, in the inspiration of the Old Testament forces us to recognise a real element of the Divine education in the imprecatory Psalms. They are not the utterances of selfish spite[313]: they are the claim which righteous Israel makes upon God that He should vindicate Himself, and let their eyes see how 'righteousness turns again unto judgment.' The claim is made in a form which belongs to an early stage of spiritual education; to a time when this life was regarded as the scene in which God must finally vindicate Himself, and when the large powers and possibilities of the Divine compassion were very imperfectly recognised. But behind these limitations, which characterize the greater part of the Old Testament, the claim of these Psalms still remains a necessary part of the claim of the Christian soul. We must not only recognise the reality of Divine judgments in time and eternity, bodily and spiritual; we must not only acquiesce in them because they are God's; we must go on to claim of God the manifestation of His just judgment, so that holiness and joy, sin and failure, shall be seen to coincide.