The "Orthodox" View.

The prevailing view—or the view that is believed to prevail—is that the Bible is the word of God; i.e., that God inspired men to write it, from beginning to end, as a perfect and final revelation of Himself and of His will to mankind; that upon belief in its absolute truth our hope of eternal salvation depends; and that to deny its infallibility and authority is dangerous heresy or even damnable infidelity. Now it stands to reason that, while such a view of the Bible prevails, anything like free inquiry respecting it is impossible. On the one hand, laymen have, of course, been taught to repress their doubts, and to even treat doubt as a temptation of the devil and a sin; while, on the other hand, any departure from the accepted view by a minister involved persecution and the possible loss of the labours of a life. So that the plain truth about the Bible has not been easily obtainable; and we are now in this curious and dangerous position,—that while it is still held to be orthodox to maintain the inspiration and infallibility of the Bible, and while the vast majority of ministers are pledged to that opinion, a mass of evidence, positively overwhelming, exists, to demonstrate that the page 4 Bible, amid much that is supremely good, contains every variety of historical mistake, scientific error, moral blemish, and spiritual stain. To say this is held to be the greatest heresy of the age, but I hold that to hush it up is both dangerous and immoral; and I warn those who denounce us for saying these things, that they are running terrible risks in staking everything upon the divine perfection of a book the serious and fatal defects of which no one, in twenty years, will be able to deny.