Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Dictum of Orthodoxy 65 the consonants, and the vowel points, or at least their force." ' The dictum of orthodoxy, however, has long since been modified by varying and confusing qualifications. It still insists upon the infallible inspiration of the Bible, relegating simply the manner or method of inspiration to the investigation of the student. This chapter is written to challenge and disprove this interpretation of the doctrine. I shall seek to prove, out of the mouth of Scripture itself, and of other competent authority, that the prevailing and accepted dogma is unwarranted either by history, the sacred writings, or philosophy. First, then, WHAT IS THE MEANING OF INSPIRATION ? There has been a vast deal of word-clashing and hair-splitting over this problem. Dogmaticians have elaborated innumerable differences without distinctions. They have piled up Ossas of qualification on Pelions of explanation till the vision is obscured and knowledge confounded. Out of this confusing mass perhaps the clearest orthodox exposition may be found in the following quotation from an article in Kitto's Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature (in loco). " No part of that Holy Book was written without miraculous influences; all parts were equally inspired ; in regard to the whole volume the great end was infallibly attained, namely, the commitment to writing of precisely such matters as God designed for the religious instruction of mankind, [By what mysterious pathway did this author thusconfidingly creep into the mind of God to know His thoughts ?]; the sacred penman wrote what had for its object not merely the immediate benefit of individuals or churches but what would be useful to Christians in all future ages; in regard to the most minute and inconsiderable things which the Scriptur...