Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 42

4.—A Nice Confusion

4.—A Nice Confusion.

"There is confusion worse than death."

The subject was divided into three parts, and these parts were again systematically divided under sub-heads, and discussed seriatim, giving a show of careful preparation, but woeful failure—there is a serious want of connection and of sequence in the succeeding parts. "How the communication was made" is the first grand head. It is curtly dismissed, but not before it is shown that "the communication" means a "revelation," and that it was made by means of a mental impression. "The necessity for it" is the second head, that is, the necessity for "the communication made," which was a revelation. But in the first sentence the terms are changed. "Communication" is supplanted by "inspiration," which is said not to mean "revelation." So that the idea is altered to "the necessity for inspiration," and of course inspiration had been already defined as "the utterances of holy men impelled to write concerning things of which they were ignorant." A very different thought from the necessity of a Divine communication to man. Then the third important division is "How can we verify it?" and in dealing with this part, the terms inspiration and revelation are made interchangeable. Now, surely this is an inextricable confusion. If I were going to define a "revelation," I certainly could not say it was a mental impression; nor could I dare to treat a mental impression as equivalent to a revelation. Besides, Mr Stout says it "must be in the language of the persons to whom it is addressed." Surely mental impressions are not yet in any particular language. The learned lecturer, though a tolerably smart metaphysician, has lost himself, or worse; if not, he misleads his "trusting hearers," who are too confiding to question the seeming correctness of the reasoning, and they are cruelly deceived. There is an apparent want of honesty in such tactics of discourse. Yet the lecturer is an inquirer after truth. He suggests to me the anecdote of Nelson putting the glass to his blind eye.