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 INAUGURATION 
 
 OF 
 
 GEORGE TYBOUT PURVES, D.D., 
 
 PROFESSOR 
 
 NEW TESTAMENT LITERATURE AND EXEGESIS. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH 
 & COMPANY, 
 
 (incorporated) 
 
 182 FIFTH AVENUE. 
 
 1892. 
 
PRFSS OP 
 
 EDWARD O. JENKINS' SON, 
 
 NEW YORK. 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 The Rev. George T. Purves, D.D., was inaugurated Pro- 
 fessor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis in Princeton 
 Theological Seminary, on Friday, September i6, 1892, at 11 
 o'clock, in the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton. The 
 order of exercises on this occasion was as follows : 
 
 Hymn. 
 
 Prayer, by the Rev. Dr. William Irvin, one of the Corresponding- 
 Secretaries of the Board of Home Missions. 
 
 Administration of the Pledge to the New Professor, by the 
 Rev. Dr. A. Gosman, President of the Board of Directors. 
 
 The Charge, by the Rev. George D. Baker, D.D., Pastor of the 
 First Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia. 
 
 The Inaugural Address, by Professor Purves. 
 Benediction, 
 
 The Charge and Inaugural Address are here published by order of 
 the Board of Directors. 
 
THE CHARGE. 
 
 THE REV. GEORGE D. BAKER, D.D. 
 
CHARGE. 
 
 My Dear Brother : 
 
 By appointment of my fellow-Directors it is made my duty 
 and privilege to welcome you on their behalf to the Chair of 
 New Testament Literature and Exegesis in Princeton Theo- 
 logical Seminary, and to charge you to faithfulness in the per- 
 formance of the duties connected with it. We are not unmind- 
 ful of what you have relinquished in order to accept our call. 
 We know well the joy and success you have had in the pastor- 
 ate, and appreciate fully the wrench upon your heart in sur- 
 rendering it. But, on the other hand, we would not have you 
 unmindful of what has been given you of God in exchange. 
 What a choice and fertile field have you here ! What a soil 
 into which to cast the immortal seed of divine truth ! What 
 potential, deep-reaching, wide-spreading influence you must 
 inevitably exert, as young men go forth everywhere preaching 
 the Word with the impress of your life and teaching stamped 
 upon them ! Verily, you have been called higher, even to the 
 position which, at least in my judgment, is the most responsi- 
 ble in the Christian Church. To be the teacher of teachers, 
 the preacher to preachers, is henceforth your vocation, your 
 honor, your tremendous responsibility. Moreover, anent the 
 persistency with which we have pursued you until we have 
 captured you, we justify ourselves on the indisputable ground 
 that in these days of sharp battle, when the very citadel of our 
 faith is being boldly assailed from unusual quarters, Princeton 
 has a right to her sons — a right to call them, from any post in 
 the wide field, for defence and for service. You are largely 
 
8 Charge. 
 
 ^> 
 
 your Alma Mater's debtor. Therefore you ought to be, and you 
 doubtless are, ready, in as much as in you lies, to preach the 
 Gospel at Princeton also. 
 
 In passing, you will permit me to remind you of the men 
 (the word should be written large) whom you succeed — 
 noblesse oblige. As you read their names and review their 
 work, you may well be righteously proud. The consciousness 
 that you sit in the chair in which they sat, cannot fail to inspire 
 you to do your very best. It will put you on your mettle. 
 
 Moreover, I congratulate you on the department of study 
 and instruction which fall to your lot in the chair into which 
 you are to-day inducted. I am not surprised that you 
 " coveted " it and chose it rather than another. "-All Scripture 
 is given by inspiration of God," and woe to him who sets lit- 
 tle store by any portion of it ; but the Scripture that proceeded 
 directly out of the mouth of the Incarnate Word and of those 
 who " companied with Him " and heard with their own ears 
 the wonderful Voice, must ever seem the choicest and the 
 dearest, the most potent and constraining and decisive of all — 
 the very heart of the great revelation. It is into this holy 
 heart that it is given you of God reverently to lead the 
 young men who willingly surrender themselves to your guid- 
 ance. Verily you need to go with unsandalled feet and with 
 prayerful lips. It is told of General Gordon, that during his 
 journey in the Soudan country, each morning for half an hour 
 there lay outside his tent a white handkerchief. The whole 
 camp knew what it meant, and treated the signal with the 
 highest respect. No foot crossed the threshold while the little 
 guard kept watch. The most pressing message waited for 
 delivery until that simple signal was withdrawn. God and 
 Gordon were in communion. You understand me ? Let the 
 ^^sigJial" lie without your class-room door ! Let it be under- 
 stood that you are there not to dissect the Gospel and the 
 Epistle as though they were dead bodies, but to press your 
 way into closest contact and fullest communion with the Liv- 
 ing Word ! The cry is in the air, " back to Christ." Aye, 
 aye, we take it up and we sound it long and loud — " back to 
 
Charge. 9 
 
 Christ." Perhaps the cry, as it issues from our lips, is not pre- 
 cisely the same as that of the originators of it — perhaps our 
 "animus" in it is somewhat different from theirs — but still 
 we join in it, and we make the welkin ring with it. " Back to 
 Christ "; and let us make Him the final judge and interpreter 
 — let us abide by His dicta honestly, fairly, unflinchingly, and 
 " take His word for it," when He tells us that Moses wrote of 
 Him, and that Jonah was three days in the whale's belly. 
 " Back to Christ" — to Him who was and is "the Truth/' and 
 whose testimony must therefore be unerring testimony for all 
 ages, even to the end of the world ; testimony not limited by 
 his own ignorance, and not accommodated to the ignorance of 
 the times and of the people in which and among whom He 
 lived. " Back to Christ " — the Church's one great Teacher, the 
 world's one infallible Scholar ; who stooped indeed, oh ! how 
 low, in taking upon Himself our nature, but never stooped 
 so low as to misrepresent, or misinterpret, or mislead in order 
 to accommodate Himself to human infirmity or to human 
 ignorance. 
 
 Unless I misjudge you altogether you need no charge from me 
 to be fearless of everyone in your searching of the Scriptures, 
 except only of the God of the Scriptures. As one has truly 
 said, " Fear is a thing which a scholar, by his very function, 
 puts behind him." You will not be bound by the " traditions 
 of the fathers," but neither will you ignore and despise them 
 because, forsooth, there pertains to them what is accounted in 
 some quarters a probable disqualification of their veracity, viz.: 
 age. " Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neigh- 
 bor" may properly be sounded in the ears of those who allege 
 that this Seminary is timorous in its handling of the Word of 
 God, because it does not welcome and encourage the hasty 
 iconoclasm of the day. " Prove all things, hold fast that which 
 is good." You will not be unmindful or disregardful of the 
 ancient inscription: "Be bold"; and again, " Be bold "; but 
 again, and finally, " Be not too bold." Boldness and rashness 
 are not interchangeable words. It is, it ever has been, the 
 glory of this Seminary to be bold : it is not, it never has been, 
 
lo Charge. 
 
 God grant it never may be, its dishonor to be rash. There is 
 a tendency in the scholarship of the day to " think more 
 highly of itself than it ought to think," and consequently to 
 rush, in over-confidence of itself, to much too crude conclu- 
 sions. What old Isaac said to the boy who was imposing 
 upon him, " How is it that thou hast found it so quickly, my 
 son ? " may well be asked of certain " re-makers " of the Bible 
 in our time, who are impatient because the Church respectfully 
 declines to accept mere theories for facts, mere guesses for 
 ascertained certainties. Human life is too brief, too brief 
 and too solemn, to be consumed in learning to-day that which 
 is to be unlearned to-morrow. When a prophet comes with a 
 message from God, it must be received and it must be believed, 
 no matter how it upsets even cherished convictions ; but when 
 a prophet (self-styled) comes with only his own unproved 
 opinions and conjectures, it is wise, it is right, nay, it is 
 bounden, sacred duty to shut the door against him as " a dis- 
 turber of the peace." 
 
 Again we say, let these Scriptures be searched, sifted, cast 
 into the furnace of criticism seven times heated, and we must, 
 and we will, abide the result ; only let not mere " possibilities " 
 or even " probabilities " be reckoned beforehand as the result ; 
 and above all, let not the conservatism whose motto is festina 
 lente, which insists upon ascertaining whether the bridge will 
 hold before it enters upon the crossing of it, be denominated 
 either bigotry or cowardice or inferior scholarship. You 
 come to your work at a time when there is an increasing and 
 a much-to-be-rebuked disposition in criticism and in morals to 
 " teach for commandments the doctrines of men "; to lay upon 
 the human conscience and the human understanding burdens 
 which the Word of God has not laid ; and to demand the accept- 
 ance of new-fangled theories with reference to the structure 
 and the contents of the Bible on the ground of the consummate 
 and infallible scholarship to which we have attained. It is the 
 old, old story of bringing these Scriptures to the touchstone 
 of human reason, instead of the human reason to the touch- 
 stone of these Scriptures. It is to be withstood with the vigor 
 
'Char ore. ii 
 
 i3 
 
 with which Paul withstood Barnabas. The absolute supremacy 
 and inerrant infallibility of this Book of God as it came from 
 Him, these are to be maintained ; or we shall have embarked 
 upon a sad and stormy and fatal sea. Well may we call to 
 mind the prayer which Seneca puts into the mouth of his 
 pilot : "■ O Neptune, you may sink me, or you may save me ; 
 but whether you sink me or whether you save me, I will keep 
 my riidder true." Well also may we say of this Book, as the 
 warlike king of his crown : ''God gave it to me, and the whole 
 world shall not take it away." 
 
 But I do not forget that you are to follow me with your 
 inaugural address. It is because I have not forgotten it that 
 I have abstained from any careful or minute description of the 
 work given into your charge — of its character and its scope. 
 This, doubtless, you will yourself outline, and it would be 
 unfair in me to trespass upon the time which is legitimately 
 yours. But this in conclusion : " All Scripture is given by 
 inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for 
 reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: 
 that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished 
 unto all good works." This last, my brother: "that the 
 man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all 
 good works." The end of all your teaching of the New 
 Testament is to make "men of God," perfect men of God, 
 thoroughly furnished unto all good works, but especially unto 
 that one work to which " the Holy Ghost has separated 
 them." " A learned man," it has been said, " is a torch." So 
 he ought to be, but such is he always ? Make the young men 
 who sit at your feet " learned in the Scriptures"; cultivate and 
 insist upon the exegetical spirit in them, which shall impel 
 them to closest, most painstaking, most persistent and perse- 
 vering investigation and comparison of the holy Gospels and 
 Epistles : but din it at them and din it into them, that they 
 study and dig and search solely for a purpose, viz. : that they 
 may be (i) fuller, better men; and (2), that they may "hold 
 forth the word of life " to others. With the cry, " less learn- 
 ing and more practicality in the pulpit," we have no sympathy 
 
1 2 Charge. 
 
 whatever. God mercifully retard, nay, prevent the day when 
 reduced scholarship, abridged literary and classical and theo- 
 logical attainment than our Book now demands shall be 
 required for licensure to preach. We have no sympathy with 
 the "short cut into the ministry" tendency. The students 
 here are to be revealers of things to others — they must first 
 learn the things themselves. But still he must be of slow 
 understanding who does not discern the sharp, the imperative 
 demand in these days for preaching straight into the lives 
 which men are living, setting forth doctrine not as an end in it- 
 self, but as an incentive and a spur to pure, honest, and Christ- 
 like being. The demand is a large one — to preach doctrine 
 into human life, and so save it. But it must be, it can be, it 
 is being met. That you will teach the young men (God grant 
 that the number may run well up into the thousands) who 
 come under your instruction, so to handle Gospel and Epistle 
 that they may be " thoroughly furnished unto all good works," 
 and so be " able ministers of the New Testament," shall be our 
 constant prayer for you, as it is our confident expectation. 
 
 Many eloquent, beautiful, and true tributes have been paid by 
 appreciative minds and loving hearts to Caspar Wistar Hodge 
 of blessed memory ; but the briefest of them all was the best. 
 It was that which was written in flowers and laid gratefully 
 and reverently upon his new-made grave: " He opened unto 
 us the Scriptures." Aye, he did open them so that the Christ, 
 the living Christ in them, stood revealed. This, my brother, 
 you also are to do — this you will do — " open the Scriptures " 
 so that the young men committed to your charge will see the 
 Christ who is in them, their Alpha and their Omega ; and see- 
 ing Him, will say as Saul of Tarsus did after the same sight, 
 "Whose I am and Whom I serve." 
 
 God be with you as you take your honored place with your 
 honored colleagues in this honored Seminary of the Church. 
 
ST. PAUL AND INSPIRATION. 
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE T. PURVES, D.D. 
 
INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 
 
 Gentlemen of the Board of Directors: 
 
 In accepting the chair to which you have elected me 
 in this Seminary, I have been made specially sensible 
 of the greatness of the task which I have undertaken, 
 by reason of several considerations. 
 
 (i). In the first place, it requires no little boldness 
 to attempt to follow in the footsteps of the three dis- 
 tinguished expositors of Scripture who have heretofore 
 graced this department by their learning and exegetical 
 skill. Dr. Charles Hodge laid in the chair of Biblical 
 Literature, which he first occupied, the foundations for 
 his later work as a teacher of Scriptural Theology, as 
 his Commentaries on Romans, Corinthians, and Ephe- 
 sians abundantly show. Dr. J. Addison Alexander 
 acquired during his too brief term of office a reputa- 
 tion for biilliant scholarship which lingers still as one 
 of the brightest traditions of this Seminary. Dr. C. 
 W. Hodge, during thirty-one years, impressed upon the 
 students his own masterly methods of exact and impar- 
 tial exegesis, his loyalty to the Scripture wiiilc thor- 
 oughly conversant with every phase of critical doubt 
 and attack, and his profound insight into the historical 
 life of Him who is the Alpha and Omega of the 
 
1 6 Si. Paul and Inspiration. 
 
 Word. To his instruction and example I am myself 
 indebted more, perhaps, than to any other teacher, and 
 I learned from him to have so high an ideal of the 
 work which this chair requires as to feel the more tim- 
 idity in undertaking it. To follow in the steps of these 
 truly great men seems to me so bold an undertaking 
 that only your unanimous call justifies me in attempt- 
 ing it. 
 
 (2). In the second place, my experience in the min- 
 istry has, year by year, impressed upon me the immense 
 importance for the clergy of training in exegetical 
 methods. That preaching which will not only do the 
 most good, but really be the most interesting to 
 average congregations, is and always will be essentially 
 an exposition of the Bible. But it is exegetical train- 
 ing which secures to the expositor insight into the 
 deeper significance of the Word, richness of thought, 
 freedom from crude and offensive fancies, as well 
 as power of doctrinal demonstration, and these are 
 qualities which can hardly fail to make the preacher an 
 acceptable and attractive spiritual guide of his fellow- 
 men. And, besides this effect upon preaching, it has 
 been my observation that the clerical mind possesses in 
 its exegetical training, so far as that exists, the best 
 corrective of the religious doubts by which it is often 
 itself misled and the means of misleading others. 
 It must be confessed, I think, that many ministers are 
 more occupied with books about the Bible than with 
 patient, scientific examination of the Bible itself. Hence 
 they are led to speculate, rather than to interpret ; to 
 theorize in theology, rather than to grasp in its fulness 
 the contents of revelation. I have frequently noticed 
 that training in precise exegesis of Scripture, strength- 
 
S^. Paul and Inspiration. 1 7 
 
 ening, as this always does, a man's sense of the author- 
 ity of Scripture, will effectively resist the first assault 
 of doubt, and so prevent speculative scepticism from 
 finding an open field. To aid in training our ministry in 
 the habit of exact and fair exegesis of the New Testa- 
 ment appears to me, therefore, a work of the very highest 
 practical value. 
 
 (3). And, thirdly, I turn with the more eagerness to the 
 work of the department of New Testament Literature and 
 Exegesis because of the exceeding interest and supreme 
 importance for the Christian faith of the problems con- 
 nected with it. Here we deal with the origin of Chris- 
 tianity itself. Here we stand face to face with its his- 
 torical Founder, and must vividly realize through His 
 life and word, as with every instrument of careful 
 study we examine them, the most real divinity which 
 breathes on us, as on the first disciples, through His most 
 real humanity. Here we are confronted most plainly 
 with the supernatural in history, and are bound to 
 make manifest the impregnable rock of well-accredited 
 fact on which belief in the supernatural, in both phi- 
 losophy and practical life, must ultimately rest. And 
 here we study directly those shaping forces, whether 
 embodied in men or books, which seem to us most 
 evidently the effluence of God, since out of them all 
 that is heavenly in human life has come. It is true 
 that just now popular attention is fixed with unusual 
 interest on the Old Testament, and I have no wish to 
 exalt one part of Biblical study above another. But the 
 problems of New Testament history and criticism will 
 never cease to command our devotion. As Dr. Sanday, 
 of Oxford, has lately written {Expositor, May, 1892): 
 "There have been great ages, 'spacious times.' up and 
 
1 8 S/. Paid and Inspiration. 
 
 down the world's career — the age of Pericles, the age 
 of Augustus, the years which date from the Hegira of 
 Mahomet or from the fall of Constantinople, the out- 
 burst of genius and national life under our own Queen 
 Elizabeth. But in internal significance, if not in out- 
 ward splendour, there is no age to compare with that 
 which began in the fifteenth year of Tiberius with a set 
 of obscure events in an obscure corner of Jud?ea, and 
 which came to its close with the death of the last 
 apostle, St. John." New Testament students have this 
 advantage, that the long battle between those who as- 
 sert and those who deny the essential trustworthiness of 
 the New Testament as a witness to the origin of Chris- 
 tianity, may be fairly said to have been won. Of 
 course, sceptics remain and critical assaults continue. 
 But it is no longer possible to bring our Gospels into 
 the second century or for reasonable men to deny that 
 apostolic history was at least substantially what we 
 have always claimed it was ; while every new discovery 
 in Christian archaeology, as well as every critical inves- 
 tigation of the witnesses for the New Testament text, 
 drive new nails into the coffins wherein the myth and 
 legend theories of early Christianity have already been 
 laid. But these results only serve to bring the New 
 Testament student into closer contact with men and 
 forces, movements and literature which evoke problems 
 all the more attractive because the subjects of them are 
 assuredly known to be real ; while a multitude of ques- 
 tions, subordinate to that of the essential trustworthi- 
 ness of the story, but none the less vital to a right 
 conception of Christianity, are still issues of the hour. 
 The mutual relations and actual formation of the 
 Synoptic Gospels, the historical value of the Fourth, 
 
S^. Paul and Inspiration. 19 
 
 the genuineness of the Pastoral Epistles involving 
 our idea of the apostolic age, — these are specimens of 
 the questions now mooted and of manifest importance. 
 Not that I would by any means have the student of 
 New Testament literature suppose that these critical 
 problems are to command his chief attention. The 
 study of the New Testament itself should be and is to 
 be our main work. But these critical questions must 
 necessarily be discussed, and the relation of them to 
 our conception of Christianity is often so vital that our 
 very faith in the Gospel of Christ and Paul gives to 
 them unspeakable interest in thoughtful minds. 
 
 It is, therefore, with these deep impressions of the 
 greatness of the work entrusted to me that I shall 
 enter upon its duties, depending entirely on the prom- 
 ised Spirit of our Lord for wisdom to discharge them, 
 and earnestly desiring to aid my younger brethren in 
 the ministry to present effectively to their fellow-men 
 that Christ and that Gospel which the New Testament 
 reveals. 
 
 ST. PAUL AND INSPIRATION. 
 
 It is appropriate for me on this occasion to address 
 you on some topic connected with the particular disci- 
 pline which I am to' teach. The department has a 
 double name, — " New Testament Literature and Exe- 
 gesis." The double name indicates two points of view 
 from which the New Testament is to be studied. The 
 first is historical and literary ; the second is hermeneu- 
 tical. The two, however, naturally go together. Tliev 
 are the two eyes by which the student's mind gains a 
 correct impression of the object. The student of the 
 
20 S/. Paul and hispiratiojt. 
 
 literature must be an exegete, and the exegete must be 
 a student of the literature, if his interpretation of the 
 Testament is to be complete. I propose, therefore, to 
 select an historical centre for my address and use it to 
 exhibit certain exegetical results which in their turn 
 will indicate the spirit, in which, as I apprehend, the 
 study of the New Testament should be pursued. 
 
 Now, when looking at the New Testament collec- 
 tion, we find ourselves confronted by one personality in 
 particular who, next to Christ himself, is impressed 
 most largely and weightily both upon the New Testa- 
 ment and upon historic Christianity. I refer, of course, 
 to the apostle of the Gentiles. Of him the student of 
 the New Testament must take particular account. He 
 is the author of certainly thirteen, and perhaps of four- 
 teen, of the twenty-seven books. His epistles consti- 
 tute that part of the Testament which gives to it 
 articulated theological structure. He was the man 
 who opened the door by which the world entered into 
 the fold of Christ. His mission made the Gospel of 
 Jesus a universal religion. And yet he is one whose 
 right to the place traditionally assigned him has, in vari- 
 ous ways in different ages, been hotly contested. His 
 own epistles show that in his lifetime itself his apostle- 
 ship was denied and his mission violently opposed by 
 many who claimed to be followers of Jesus. In the 
 succeeding age we not only find the extreme section of 
 Jewish Christians continuing to deny hisapostleship, but 
 we find the singular and significant fact that, while the 
 orthodox church acknowledged and honored him, used 
 his epistles as Scripture and reaped the benefit of his 
 mission to the Gentiles, yet it apparently did not grasp 
 his real teaching, and, if its extant literature may be 
 
Sf. Pmil and Inspiration. 21 
 
 trusted as evidence, rejected some of his fundamental 
 theological principles. Later on, his distinctive theo- 
 logical ideas were for centuries rejected by the larger 
 part of Christendom, even after they had been success- 
 fully defended by Augustine and formally acknowl- 
 edged by the Church; while modern "liberalism" is as 
 loud as the ancient Judaizers were in its rejection of 
 Paul's interpretation of the Gospel, and seeks to save 
 itself from utter irreligion by endeavoring to prove that 
 this apostle clothed the ethical teaching of Jesus in the 
 sombre and alien garb of rabbinical theology. Con- 
 sidered, moreover, from the point of view of New 
 Testament Literature, the personality and career of 
 Paul are confessedly singular and demand critical study. 
 He appears on the field, suddenly intruding into the 
 circle of original apostles, and mastering it by the 
 success of his work and the force of his credentials. 
 On any view of the origin of Christianity his influ- 
 ence appears gigantic. Baur called him the creator of 
 historical Christianity. The very language of the 
 Church was molded by his vigorous mind, for, as Reuss 
 (^Hist. of Christ. ThcoL in Apost. Age, vol. ii., p. 9) 
 says, " It was Paul who imprinted on the Hellenistic 
 idiom its peculiarly Christian character, and he was thus 
 in a manner the creator of the theological language of 
 the church." The student of the New Testament may 
 feel Paul's influence in the third Gospel and in the 
 epistles of Peter even as the student of the Christian 
 origins finds in him a potent factor in the history. 
 Altogether, he must be particularly investigated. The 
 question of his authority as an apostle of Jesus Christ 
 is a crucial one. Its reality, its extent, its inspired 
 quality,— these are matters which fundamentally affect 
 
2 2 SL Paul and Inspiration. 
 
 our conception alike of early Christian history, and of 
 present Christian doctrine, and of the Bible itself. It 
 may be truly said that our apprehension of Christianity 
 depends upon our apprehension of Paul. I have, of 
 course, no intention of exalting him above the other 
 apostles or of forgetting their part in the formation 
 of the New Testament, of the Church, or of Chris- 
 tian doctrine. But his exceptional history, his pecu- 
 liar work, his dominating influence, together with the 
 particular distinctness of his teaching and its intimate 
 relation to the fundamental ideas which we are to 
 form of the religion of Christ, make the question of 
 his authority and inspiration worthy of separate dis- 
 cussion. 
 
 I propose, therefore, to consider the testimony 
 which Paul himself gave to his consciousness of 
 apostolic office, his right to the place assigned him in 
 our Testament, and then to indicate the consequences 
 which follow from this as concerns our conception of 
 the New Testament itself 
 
 I. First, then, as students of the New Testament, 
 seeking simply to know what it actually contains, let us 
 interrogate Paul himself with reference to his claims of 
 authority and inspiration. 
 
 Rationalistic critics are, of course, under the necessity 
 of reducing the consciousness of St. Paul to a natural 
 growth. They cannot admit the supernatural, in any real, 
 objective sense, to have entered into his experience. His 
 teaching and his activity must be explained as in some 
 way the product of more or less rational processes. He 
 must, in short, be represented as at once the victim of 
 hallucination about himself and the herald of world- 
 
67. Paul and Inspiratioji. 23 
 
 changing truth. It is a striking fact that, according to 
 the rationalistic explanation of sacred history, the 
 greatest spiritual gains to humanity have always been 
 the outgrowth of illusion and mistake. For the New 
 Testament student is confronted, first of all, by Paul's 
 unequivocal testimony to his infallible authority as a 
 teacher of faith and duty, and to his special inspiration 
 by God. This testimony, moreover, is particularly 
 borne in those great doctrinal epistles, written during 
 the middle part of his missionary activity, the genuine 
 ness of- which even inveterate doubters do not deny, — 
 for the recent denials of their genuineness by a few 
 eccentric scholars, chiefly of the Dutch school, are based 
 on too exclusively a priori reasoning to be worthy of 
 serious consideration. It will, therefore, not be neces- 
 sary for me to discuss the genuineness of his later epis- 
 tles ; since no essential point of his self-testimony is in- 
 volved in them. 
 
 Permit me rapidly to summarize his statements upon 
 this subject. 
 
 (i). We have from him in the first place repeated and 
 positive testimony that the objectively supernatural 
 played a large part and the decisive part in his Christian 
 experience. He explicitly attributes, not only his per- 
 sonal salvation to the mighty power and wondrous 
 grace of God, but his cardinal religious ideas to reve- 
 lations directly made to him. The pivotal fact of his 
 career was, he tells us, the glorious appearance of Christ 
 to him when on the way to Damascus, and there can 
 be no question that he regarded that appearance as ob- 
 jectively real. In connection with that event he claimed 
 to have received explicit directions for his work and 
 apostolic authority in it. He was "an apostle not 
 
24 •^'A Paul and Inspiration. 
 
 from men, neither through man, but through Jesus 
 Christ and God the Father" (Gal. i. i). Hence he de- 
 scribes himself as " called to be an apostle " (Rom. i. 
 I ; I Cor. i. i), " an apostle by the will of God " (i Cor. 
 i. I ; 2 Cor. ii. i ; Eph. i. i ; Col. i. i ; 2 Tim. i. i); an 
 apostle " by the commandment of God " (i Tim. i. i), 
 " separated unto the Gospel of God " (Rom. i. i). But 
 this pivotal fact was by no means the only supernatural 
 experience to which he laid claim. Not to mention 
 the miraculous gifts which he possessed in common with 
 other Christians of the apostolic age (i Cor. xiv. 18), 
 he asserts that his religious doctrines had been immedi- 
 ately revealed to him. " The Gospel which was 
 preached by me is not after man. For neither did I 
 receive it from man, nor was I taught it ; but it came 
 to me through revelation of Jesus Christ" (Gal. i. 11, 
 12. So, cf. I Cor. xi. 23 ; xv. -^^ ; xvi. 25 ; Eph. iii. 3). 
 Visions, he tells us, were granted unto him (2 Cor. xi. 
 16 ; xii. 1-4), and future events had in some particulars 
 been disclosed (i Thess. iv. 15 ; 2 Thess. ii. 3 ; i Cor. 
 XV. 51). All this culminates in the general declaration 
 " that by revelation was made known unto me .... the 
 mystery of Christ : which in other generations was not 
 made known unto the sons of men as it is now made 
 known unto his holy apostles and prophets by the 
 Spirit" (Eph. iii. 3, 5). Thus a special "grace" had 
 been bestowed upon him, the grace of apostleship with 
 all the endowments, spiritual and supernatural, necessary 
 to fit him for the office (Gal. ii. 9 ; Rom. i. 5, xv. 15 ; 
 Eph. iii. 3, 7 ; 2 Cor. iii. 5) ; and on the basis of this 
 immediate divine gift he emphatically declares his inde- 
 pendence, so far as the ground of his right to be obeyed 
 was concerned, of any man, even though it were one of 
 
6'/. Paul and Inspiration. 25 
 
 the original apostles (Gal. i. 6, 11). With them he 
 claimed to stand on terms of entire equality (2 Cor. xi. 
 5; xii. 11), both they and he having been directly 
 inv^ested with authority by the same Lord (i Cor. ix. i). 
 
 It is manifest that Paul was very far from regarding 
 either the change in his personal attitude to Jesus or his 
 new religious ideas as the result of rational processes of 
 his own mind. Not indeed that his intellectual activity 
 was in abeyance. Far from it. On the truth once 
 revealed he keenly and intensely thought, though, as we 
 shall see, believing himself even in that thought not to 
 be unaided from on high. But his testimony to object- 
 ive revelations, actually and frequently received, is 
 unequivocal. It is noteworthy also that these consisted 
 not of visions of the other world, of which he has given 
 no description ; and very little of hitherto unrevealed 
 future events ; but supremely and constantly of those 
 religious truths which men now call theological, but 
 which he called summarily his "Gospel." This, he 
 said, was what had been " entrusted to him " (i Th. ii. 4 ; 
 Gal. ii. 7 ; i Cor. iv. i, ix. 17; 2 Cor. v. 18; Rom. i. 
 14; Col. i. 25 ; I Tim. i. 11 ; 2 Tim. i. 11). To use 
 one of his own expressive phrases, " the word of recon- 
 ciliation had been placed in him" (2 Cor. v. 19). This 
 is not the usual way of mystics or enthusiasts, and it re- 
 mains for those who deny Paul's self-testimony on this 
 point to explain the psychological enigma which their 
 denial creates. 
 
 (2). But, still further, Paul claimed not only object- 
 ive revelation, but a special subjective illumination 
 of his mind by the divine Spirit, so that he was en- 
 abled correctly to teach the word of God. True, he 
 recopfnizes that all Christians are " tauo;ht of God to 
 
.-26 Si. Paul and Lispiration. 
 
 ^love one another" (i Thess. iv. 9), and we find him, 
 with beautiful wisdom and courtesy, seeking rather to 
 urge his readers to a full understanding by themselves 
 of what was involved in the truth they had received, 
 than, as he himself puts it, " to lord it over their faith " 
 (2 Cor. i. 24), for he adds, " by faith ye stand." But he 
 plainly claims for the apostles, and in particular for him- 
 self, as one of them, a special divine illumination, different 
 both from the objective revelations they had received, 
 and from the Spirit's teaching granted to all believers, 
 and on the ground of which the apostle's instruc- 
 tions were to be received as final because divine. He 
 does this most explicitly in his epistles to the Corinth- 
 ians. Speaking of the " hidden mystery," — by which 
 he meant the things of our salvation, — he says emphat- 
 ically, " Unto us God revealed them by his Spirit" (i 
 Cor. ii. 10). The context shows that by "us" he 
 meant himself and other apostles ; and the subsequent 
 verses show that this revelation included more than the 
 objective communication of truth. For he continues, 
 " who among men knoweth the things of a man, save 
 the spirit of the man, which is in him ? Even so the 
 things of God none knoweth save the Spirit of God. 
 But we received not the spirit of the world, but the 
 Spirit which is of God, that we might know the things 
 that are freely given to us of God," — i. e., the apostolic 
 teacher was enabled by the Holy Spirit rightly to appre- 
 hend the revelation given to him. Hence he could say 
 without audacity, " we have the mind of Christ" (i Cor. 
 ii. 16). Hence also in the second epistle, speaking of 
 his apostolic authority and defending himself against 
 detractors, he could write, " we preach Christ Jesus as 
 Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake, — see- 
 
S^. Paul and Inspiration. 27 
 
 ing it is God that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, 
 who shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowl- 
 edge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" 
 (2 Cor. iv. 6). Though these words may be properly 
 applied to all believers, the reader cannot fail to see that 
 Paul applied them in a special sense to himself as a 
 divinely enlightened teacher, as one in whose mind the 
 Almighty Creator of all light had shined for the express 
 purpose of making the knowledge of His glory in the 
 face of Christ known to other men ; and this was to 
 such an extent true that he could also write, " if any 
 man thinketh himself to be a prophet or spiritual, let 
 him take knowledge of the things that I write unto you, 
 that they are the commandments of the Lord" (i Cor. 
 
 xiv. 35)- 
 
 Moreover we find him, in i Cor. vii., where he deals 
 with the subject of marriage, carefully distinguishing 
 between the known command of Christ about divorce ; 
 his own command on the subject, which he makes as 
 obligatory as the Lord's ; and his advice to certain of 
 them in view of "the present distress." Even his 
 advice was inspired, for, after giving it, he adds with a 
 touch of irony, " I think that I also have the Spirit of 
 God." Nevertheless it was advice, not command ; and 
 the ability to thus discriminate between what was obli- 
 gatory and what was advisable indicates a perfectly clear 
 perception of what, apart from specific revelations, he 
 was authorized by God to require of them and what not. 
 
 So far then as his own testimony goes, Paul asserted 
 not only a divine commission and divine revelations, 
 but such an illumination by the Holy Spirit that he could 
 say, " God doth beseech you by us " (2 Cor. v. 20), and 
 " Christ speaketh in me " (2 Cor. xiii. 3). 
 
28 S/. Paul and Inspiration. 
 
 (3). It is little to observe after this that the apostle 
 claimed authority over the faith and conduct of Chris- 
 tians. Thoui^h he associates other brethren with him 
 in his epistles, he always puts himself above them (i 
 Thess. i. I ; 2 Thess. i. i ; 2 Cor. i. i ; Col. i. i). 
 Though both Apollos and he were ministers of Christ, 
 he and not Apollos was a founder of the Church : and 
 his language conveys the idea that not merely because 
 he was in Corinth before Apollos, but because he held 
 a different office, was he the founder of that Church (i 
 Cor. iii. 10-14). He habitually speaks of his " Gospel " 
 in terms applicable to nothing less than the full mani- 
 festation of divine, saving truth (i Thess. i. 5 ; 2 Thess. 
 ii. 14 ; 2 Cor. iv. 3, 4 ; Rom. ii. 16, xv. 25 ; 2 Tim. ii. 8). 
 In fact he identifies it with "the word of the Lord" (i 
 Thess. i. 8, ii. 13 ; 2 Thess. iii. i), declaring in one place 
 (i Thess. ii. 13), " we thank God that when ye received 
 from us the word of the message, even the word of God, 
 ye accepted it, not as the word of men, but as it is in 
 truth the word of God, which also worketh in you that 
 believe." He warns against any who taught contrary to 
 what they had received from him, yea though the teacher 
 were an angel from heaven or the apostle himself (2 
 Thess. ii. 2 ; Gal. i. 8, 9). Alike in matters of faith and 
 conduct does he speak in an unfaltering tone of abso- 
 lute command. 
 
 (4). It is more important to observe that he attached 
 the same authority to his letters as to his oral teaching, 
 and to the verbal form in which his teaching was ex- 
 pressed no less than to the truth itself. Besides direct- 
 ing the reading and circulation of his epistles (i Thess. 
 iv. 27 ; Col. iv. 16, 17), he says expressly (2 Thess. ii. 15), 
 "brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which ye 
 
S/. Paid and Inspiration. 29 
 
 were taught whether by word or by epistle of ours." As 
 to the verbal form of his teaching, his language is like- 
 wise unmistakable (i Cor. ii. 13). " Which things also," 
 — i. e., the knowledge given to the apostles by the 
 Spirit, — "we speak not in words which man's wisdom 
 teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth, — combining 
 spiritual things with spiritual." That this statement is 
 to be interpreted in any such way as to make the apos- 
 tle represent himself as a mechanical, unthinking agent 
 of the Spirit is both disproved by all the phenomena of 
 his writings, and is positively forbidden by the phrase it- 
 self, " words which the Spirit teacheth "; for a machine 
 cannot be taught, it can be only used. But it is equally 
 plain that Paul felt even the verbal forms, in which with 
 the full use of his own intellect and heart, and often in 
 most characteristic and peculiar style, he uttered the 
 message that God had given him, to have been also 
 determined for him by the Spirit. He represented his 
 whole communication to men as "pneumatic," — as the 
 Spirit's work throughout ; and therefore in all its ele- 
 ments the communication to men not of Paul's thouo-ht. 
 — that was only the medium, — but the communication 
 of the mind and will of God. As certainly as the 
 phrase, " words which man's wisdom teacheth," describes 
 the rhetorical dress and mode of argument and literary 
 style which Hellenic culture would have suggested, so 
 certainly does he mean in the corresponding phrase, 
 " words which the Spirit teacheth," to say that the 
 rhetoric and the argument and the style which he did 
 employ were in some way, which he does not explain, 
 suggested, indicated, brought to his mind by the Holy 
 Spirit. 
 
 (5). At the same time, be it noted, there never was a 
 
30 S^. Patcl and Inspiration. 
 
 more living writer than Paul, and his testimony is 
 equally clear that, with all the authority and divine 
 guidance which he claimed, he was always himself. 
 His self-consciousness, in fact, is very marked, since he 
 regarded himself as a typical example of grace, and 
 since he was compelled to defend his character and his 
 claims. His personality was intense. The " I, Paul, say 
 unto you" is very frequent. He testifies to nothing 
 mechanical in the operations of divine power within his 
 mind, but quite to the contrary. His writings them- 
 selves bear sufficient witness to his intellectual activity, 
 his strong and sensitive emotions, his quickness to dis- 
 cern the practical relations of his teaching. His testi- 
 mony to the living reality of his experience under 
 grace, and while the subject of revealing and inspiring 
 power, is as clear as is his testimony to that power itself. 
 And to this should be added the remark that he recog- 
 nized the limitations of his knowledge. The Spirit did 
 not always quicken his memory, for he writes of his life 
 in Corinth : " I baptized also the household of Stepha- 
 nas: besides I know not whether I baptized any other" 
 (i Cor. i. 1 6). Neither did he claim perfect compre- 
 hension of the truth, for he could say, "Now I know 
 in part ; but then shall I know even as also I am 
 known" (i Cor. xiii. ii). But this confession of limits 
 to knowledge only makes the more significant his assei- 
 tions of clear and authoritative knowledge as to what 
 had been given him to affirm and teach. It indicates a 
 calm and sober appreciation of just what God authorized 
 him to say and what he did not, which is at the farthest 
 possible remove from either a machine or an enthusiast. 
 "This treasure," he says, speaking of the divine light 
 which God had made to shine within his mind, " we 
 
S^. Paid and Inspiration. 31 
 
 have in earthen vessels, that the exceeding greatness of the 
 power may be of God and not of us" (2 Cor. iv. 7). By 
 the "earthen vessel" he did not mean, as he has some- 
 times been interpreted, the human element in his writings, 
 their words and arguments. These, as we have seen, he 
 regarded as part of the treasure itself. But, as the con- 
 text shows, he meant by "the earthen vessel," the 
 external trials and the personal misfortunes of his life, — 
 for he was "always," he added, "bearing about in his 
 body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of 
 Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh." To 
 the Jews a renegade, to the Athenians a babbler, 
 "the offscouring of the earth" in the eyes of the busy, 
 fighting, cultured, careless Roman world, — Paul claimed 
 that he possessed a gift from Almighty God which 
 made him a true prophet of Israel, an unerring 
 teacher of the wnse, and an authoritative expounder of 
 the only way of salvation for mankind. 
 
 Such I believe to be a fair statement of Paul's 
 apostolic consciousness as exegesis gives it to us. Thus 
 he appears on the field of New Testament literature. 
 This is the only Paul of which we know. It may be 
 conceivable that he was an utterly mistaken man, but 
 he cannot be treated as pretending to be different from 
 what we have described. 
 
 II. Can, then, these claims be justified to us so that, 
 as students of New Testament literature, we may accept 
 Paul's epistles as a constituent part of the sacred Scrip- 
 tures, and Paul himself as the authorized exponent of 
 genuine Christianity which he claimed to be ? 
 
 We do not hesitate to say that the objections brought 
 by avowed naturalism are to be immediately set aside. 
 
32 S^. Paul and hispiration. 
 
 Wc come to the examination of New Testament liter- 
 ature, believing in the possibility of miracles, and even, 
 under certain circumstances, in their probability. Above 
 all, we come as convinced believers in an historical 
 incarnation and resurrection. Our belief in this may 
 be defended quite independently of Paul's claims to 
 authority and inspiration. He may be regarded as mis- 
 taken in these and yet may constitute one of the many 
 witnesses to the original belief of the primitive church, 
 and, as such, one of many facts which only an actual 
 incarnation and resurrection can explain. Fairness 
 does not require us, therefore, to profess want of con- 
 viction upon these points. For belief in the incarna- 
 tion and resurrection does not necessarily carry with it 
 the admission of Paul's specific claims, while unbelief 
 does carry with it the denial of them. 
 
 In the hands of naturalism, moreover, not only must 
 Paul appear a singularly deluded man and his conver- 
 sion remain an unexplained enigma, but he can scarcely 
 be made to justify the place he has occupied among 
 the leaders of mankind. When Professor Pfleiderer 
 concludes that " the specially Christian and permanent 
 element of Paulinism" was the fact "that it was an 
 influence bringing freedom and inward depth to the 
 religious life, delivering men from all externalities and 
 uniting them directly with God " {Hibbert Lectures, 
 1885, p. 287); when Mr. Arnold, trying to show why 
 Protestantism should still uphold the honor of its 
 favorite apostle, makes Paul's essential merit to have 
 been that he was possessed with a zeal for righteous- 
 ness {St. Paul and Protestantisfu, passim), we in- 
 stinctively ask why, of all the advocates of religious 
 liberty and righteousness, this man should occupy a 
 
S^. Paul and Inspiration. 2)^ 
 
 unique position in history. Manifestly such praise is 
 but the cloak which conceals the hand of the assassin. 
 Not by these qualities alone has Paul actually exerted 
 his decisive influence on mankind. 
 
 The New Testament student, therefore, is not to 
 approach the subject without faith in an historical reve- 
 lation of God through Jesus Christ. He is rather to 
 inquire whether, assuming the fact of a supernatural 
 revelation, the extraordinary and specific claims of this 
 intruder into the original circle of disciples ought to be 
 acknowledged. 
 
 Without attempting to do more than give an outline 
 of the argument, the following reasons appear to us 
 conclusive. 
 
 The particular credentials by which Paul himself 
 appealed to his own converts are either beyond our 
 power of testing or are not sufficiently explicit for our 
 present purpose. They consisted in the miraculous 
 powers with which he was endowed, and, above all, in 
 the Holy Spirit accompanying his ministry and sealing 
 his word to the hearts of God's elect (i Cor. xii. 
 12; I Thess. i. 5 ; I Cor. ii. 4-5). The former we 
 cannot directly verify. The witness of the Spirit to 
 his teaching we must certainly, if Christian men, feel. 
 It has been largely because the experience of Chris- 
 tian life bears so much testimony to the essential truth 
 of his doctrine that the church, even when willing, has 
 not been able, to deny it. Nevertheless, the Spirit's 
 testimony is only explicit with reference to Paul's fun- 
 damental doctrines. On the basis of that we miofht 
 indeed infer the validity of all his claims. But as a 
 matter of fact, the form in which he couched his 
 teaching has been impugned even by those who pro- 
 
34 ^^' P^ul and Inspiration. 
 
 fess to acknowledge the latter, and the dimness of the 
 Christian consciousness is such that it is easy even for 
 Christian men to question the full validity and reality 
 of all that Paul asserts about himself. But the stu- 
 dent of New Testament literature may, we think, con- 
 clusively furnish two other lines of proof ; first, the 
 fact of Paul's recognition as an apostle by the original 
 church ; and secondly, the internal relation which his 
 teaching bears to the rest of Scripture. 
 
 (i). His recognition by the original Church is a fact 
 of first value because it affords conclusive evidence that 
 his claims were admitted by the other apostles and thus 
 that the first founders of the Church confessed the 
 validity of his credentials. 
 
 On this point, as you are aware, the modern critical 
 assault has been directed ; and rightly so, if the super- 
 natural character of Christianity is to be disproved. 
 Baur thrust his knife into the vital part of the system 
 when he undertook to prove the original antagonism of 
 Paul and "the twelve," and to explain Catholic Chris- 
 tianity as the reconciliation, 150 years later, of the 
 originally hostile elements. But this ingenious recon- 
 struction of the history has fallen before the attack of 
 historical investigation itself and the later followers of 
 Tubingen Criticism have been forced to recede from so 
 many essential positions and to minimize the alleged 
 division of the apostolic body in so many particulars 
 that the theory ought to have little weight with students 
 of the New Testament and of post-apostolic literature. 
 For the unity of the apostolic body, and the consequent 
 recognition of Paul, we appeal not only to the New Tes- 
 tament itself, when fairly interpreted, but to the earliest 
 extra-canonical writers, — e.g., to Clement of Rome, 
 
S^. Paul and hispiration. 35 
 
 writing about tlie same time with the apostle John 
 (Ad Cor. 5, 44, 47, 49), who appeals expressly to Peter 
 and Paul not only as examples of righteousness, but as 
 reproving that very spirit of rivalry with which modern 
 criticism charges them, and mingles their words together 
 as the commandments of one mind; to Ignatius, writing 
 perhaps only a decade later, who uses this language : " I 
 do not enjoin you as Peter and Paul ; they were apos- 
 tles. I am but a condemned man " (Rom. iv.) ; to 
 Polycarp, whose imitative pen betrays his reverent use of 
 the writings of all the representative apostles; and, pass- 
 ing by many other witnesses, to the extensive statements 
 of Irenseus of Lyons. To be sure these ancient authors 
 were not writing for the express purpose of refuting 
 beforehand modern naturalistic criticism, and occasional 
 difficulties occur in the evidence which have been made 
 the most of. The most recent contention is that the 
 Epistles of Paul were not considered as technically 
 "Scripture" by the Church until the false position in 
 which Marcion and others placed him required his 
 orthodoxy to be vindicated (see Harnack's Dogmenge- 
 schichtc, i. 304 ; Werner's Dcr Paiclismus des Ire7icc2is). 
 But before Marcion wrote, the Epistles of Paul were 
 used in precisely the same manner as other books of the 
 New Testament and must stand or fall with them ; 
 while the idea that Marcion was the first to announce 
 the fact that God had given to the Christian Church a 
 written rule of faith in addition to the Old Testament, 
 attributes far too much originality to that famous heretic. 
 We admit, indeed, that the Church of the second and 
 third centuries did not appropriate the doctrines of 
 grace which Paul taught with anything like his consist- 
 ency. But that has been no unusual phenomenon in 
 
36 S/. Paul and Inspiratio7i. 
 
 Christian history. None the less is the evidence am- 
 ple that, while Paul derived his authority from no man, 
 and while his course was opposed by many Jewish 
 Christians, yet, after the first suspicions were overcome, 
 as the book of Acts relates, the Church recognized his 
 credentials, and that means that the other apostles 
 recognized them, even as he himself declares. If so, 
 then whatever authority on other grounds we attach to 
 the original apostles becomes a corresponding attesta- 
 tion of Paul. Were they merely trustworthy witnesses ? 
 They witness to the sufficiency of those of his creden- 
 tials which we cannot examine. Were they the ac- 
 knowledged founders of the Church ? They acknowl. 
 edge the apostle of the Gentiles to be a founder too. 
 Were they endowed with the Spirit to be the authori- 
 tative teachers as well as founders of the Church ? 
 Then they admit also Paul's claim to be the same and 
 his epistles to be part of the Church's abiding rule. 
 
 (2). The other argument, drawn from the internal re- 
 lation which Paul's teaching bears to the rest of Scrip- 
 ture, depends on the results of exegesis. 
 
 {a). It may be shown that his teaching is a legiti- 
 mate unfolding of ideas already announced in the 
 teachings of Jesus. In Christ's declaration of the 
 righteousness which must exceed that of the Scribes and 
 Pharisees, of the necessity of his death as a ransom for 
 sin, of the wholly lost condition of mankind, of the ne- 
 cessity of regeneration and of the Father's " drawing," of 
 his peculiarly intimate and vital relation to his people 
 based on the Father's gift of them to him from eternity, 
 of the immediateness and completeness of the reconcili- 
 ation of God and the sinner through him, and of the 
 necessity of the sinner's dependence upon him for sal- 
 
S/. Pa7il and Inspiration. 37 
 
 vation, it is easy to see the elements of Paul's doctrine 
 waiting for some one to arrange them in the light of 
 the full significance of Calvary, and of the person of the 
 risen Lord. 
 
 (b). It may be shown further that his doctrine stands 
 in such relation of that of the other apostolic writers as 
 to be an integral and necessary part of the apostolic 
 teaching as a whole ; forming the required complement 
 to James, one of the presuppositions of Peter and the 
 author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and with these 
 laying the foundation on which John stood, with his 
 personal remembrance also of the Lord's discourses, 
 to set forth the true revelation of God and of life with 
 God which the Divine Word had effected and in the dis- 
 closure of which the written word was to find its goal. 
 The more closely the doctrines of the several apostolic 
 writers are examined, the more manifest becomes the 
 one, identical truth which, with rich diversities of view, 
 all express ; and in this complex organism of living 
 truth the teaching of Paul appears as the vertebrate 
 column on which the structure of the whole depends. 
 
 {c). And then it may be shown, finally, that Pauline 
 doctrine, as the apostle himself claimed, is a legitimate 
 unfolding of the teachings of the Old Testament ; a 
 return to Moses and the prophets as against the Scribes 
 and Pharisees ; that he built, not on rabbinical theology, 
 but on the principles imbedded in the Old Testament, 
 and that, strange as his position seemed to the Jews of 
 his day, he did but bring to complete expression the 
 central truths of Israel 
 
 It is not my purpose to do more than indicate these 
 points of internal relationship. Their full working out 
 belongs to Biblical Theology. But the result will, I 
 
o 
 
 8 S^. Patil and Inspiration. 
 
 believe, be substantially what I have indicated. It is 
 so in its general features to every careful reader of the 
 Bible. If so, Paul's Epistles authenticate themselves as 
 an integral part of that unified and yet diversified col- 
 lection of literature which we call " the Bible." But that 
 in turn authenticates him as one of its intended writers. 
 On these two lines of attestation, the one external, 
 the other internal, must the New Testament student, 
 who admits the fact of a supernatural revelation through 
 Jesus Christ, and who is willing to accept the plain 
 historical statements of the original witnesses as to 
 what Jesus did and taught, admit also Paul's claims to 
 apostleship and his epistles to a place among the author- 
 itative apostolic teaching. Then the particular witness, 
 which, in these epistles, Paul bore to his apostolic con- 
 sciousness, must be our guide in determining what the 
 New Testament, and back of that the whole Bible, 
 really is. 
 
 III. The question then arises, what was Paul's doc- 
 trine about the Scripture ? Did he attach the same 
 conception of authority and inspiration to it that we 
 have found him to attach to his own teaching, whether 
 oral or written 1 
 
 (i). To answer this, we must first examine his de- 
 scriptions and use of the Old Testament. His use 
 of it is abundant. He quotes from it formally. lie 
 introduces its phrases. His language is saturated 
 with its expressions and figures of speech. He assumes 
 it to be well known to his readers and an authority 
 recognized by them. There is no question that he pos- 
 sessed it in the form in which we now have it, in the He- 
 brew and substantially in the Greek. The names, also, 
 
vS"/. Paul aiici Inspiration. 39 
 
 which he applies to it indicate in general his acceptance 
 of it, in unison with the Jewish Church, as the divinely 
 given rule of belief and conduct. It is "the Scripture," 
 called so by pre-eminence, " the Holy Scriptures," " the 
 prophetic Scriptures," "the law and the prophets" 
 (Rom. iii. 21), "the sacred writings" (2 Tim. iii. 15). 
 He called the whole collection also "the law," quoting 
 under that title from Isaiah (i Cor. xiv. 21 ; see Rom. 
 iii. 19); and in another place, "the oracles of God" 
 (r« Ibyta Rom. iii. 2), a phrase which must not be lim- 
 ited to the direct utterances of God, but must be under- 
 stood to describe the Scriptures as a whole. These 
 titles indicate his general attitude toward the Old Tes- 
 tament. Strongly as he revolted from the Judaism of 
 his day, he recognized its Bible as God's gift to the 
 Church of all time, and applied to it the terms of strict- 
 est faith and devoutest reverence used by those who ac- 
 knowledged its authority (Rom. iv. 4). 
 
 But not to dwell on these obvious facts, it is import- 
 ant for our purpose to observe the descriptions which 
 Paul gives of the object of the Old Testament and how 
 it came to fulfil that object. He held that the Script- 
 ure was expressly written for the purpose of teaching the 
 Church, both Jewish and Christian, the gospel of Jesus 
 Christ, and this, of course, involved the assumption that 
 it had been composed under the special direction of God. 
 He affirms this, be it noted, of the Scripture as a book. It 
 was not written in the interest of a legal way of salva- 
 tion, though it contained the law ; but it was written in 
 order that the principles of the gospel might be learned 
 by those who read it rightly. Not only did Moses and 
 the prophets speak from God, but the Sacred Scriptures 
 themselves were in some way composed under divine 
 
40 SL Paul and Inspiration. 
 
 control. He not only affirms with Peter that, "moved 
 by the Holy Ghost men spake for God," but that "the 
 Scriptures themselves are inspired by God." Paul plainly 
 recognizes the human authorship of the books, and 
 quotes Moses and David and Isaiah as speaking therein. 
 But not only through them, but iji these books of theirs 
 did God also speak. Many readers notice the first part 
 of Paul's statement, but not the second. God spake 
 " through the prophets in the Holy Scriptures " (Rom. 
 
 i.2). 
 
 Hence we read statements like these. After speak- 
 ing of the sins and sorrows of Israel in the wilderness, 
 he declares : " Now, these things happened unto them 
 by way of example (typically), and they zvere writte7i 
 for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages 
 are come" (i Cor. x. ii). Here he represents both the 
 facts of Israel's history and the record of them as hav- 
 ing been expressly designed for our spiritual profit. So 
 again, " For whatsoever things were written aforetime 
 were written for our learning, that through patience 
 and through comfort of the Scriptures we might have 
 hope " (Rom. xv. 4). And this pertains, according to 
 Paul, to the use of special phrases ; for (Rom. iv. 23) he 
 declared that the particular statement of Genesis that 
 " Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him 
 for righteousness," was not written for his sake alone, but 
 for our sake also. The record, that is, of the great typ- 
 ical justification, was expressly made and in this precise 
 form, for our enlightenment. Even the directions of the 
 Mosaic law were written for our sakes (i Cor. ix. 10) ; 
 not as if they had had no other immediate reference 
 when originally enacted, but that the recording of them 
 in Scripture was for the purpose of instructing us in the 
 
S^. Paul and Inspiration. 41 
 
 doctrines or duties of a godly life. Therefore the Script- 
 ures are, so to speak, personified by him, — as when he 
 writes that " the Scripture, foreseeing that God would 
 justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel before- 
 hand unto Abraham" (Gal. iii. 8), as well as in the 
 common formula " Scripture saith." Of course, these 
 affirmations could only have been made on the supposi- 
 tion that he who secured the production of such a record 
 and who therefore speaks in its language, was none less 
 than God. So Paul explicitly affirms, " The Gospel of 
 God, which he promised afore by his prophets in the 
 Holy Scriptures" (Rom. i. i, 2). He thus clearly dis- 
 tinguished between the historical revelations made from 
 time to time, which like the law, had a temporary pur- 
 pose, and the composition of the Scriptures. These, in- 
 deed, contained the record of those revelations, but, be- 
 sides that, were so written that they might teach for all 
 time the principles of faith and duty. It was on the 
 basis of this view that he could write to the Corinth- 
 ians (i Cor. iv. 6), that they "must not go beyond the 
 things that are written "; by which remark he meant to 
 remind them that the Scriptures were the rule of practice 
 as well as of faith to every Christian. So, too, he could 
 write to Timothy of the Scriptures (2Tim. ii. 15) : "they 
 are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith 
 which is in Christ Jesus." His declarations then cul- 
 minate in the statement : " Every Scripture," that is, the 
 whole collection to which he had just referred as the 
 "sacred writings," and all their parts, " being inspired by 
 God, is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for cor- 
 rection, for instruction which is in righteousness, that the 
 man of God may be complete, furnished completely unto 
 all good works" (2 Tim. iii. 16, 17). Of this last pas- 
 
42 S/. Paul and Inspiration. 
 
 sage I will speak presently. I desire now only to point 
 out that Paul represents not onl}^ the Hebrew economy 
 as designed by God to serve a temporary purpose in the 
 education of his people, and Moses and the prophets 
 as having spoken from God, but the Hebrew Scriptures 
 themselves also as a divinely made book or collection of 
 books intended to teach the Gospel and an abiding rule 
 of faith and conduct to the Christian. He affirms not 
 only that the authors of the Old Testament were media 
 of revelation, but that the literary product itself, and 
 as such, was in some way divinely made and given to 
 the Church. 
 
 (2). What light then is thrown upon these formal 
 statements by Paul's actual use of Scripture } 
 
 {a). He habitually employs it, in accordance, as I 
 have already remarked, with his idea of its purpose, to 
 show that it taught his " Gospel." He does this not by 
 catching at plausible phrases, or by gleaning here and 
 there from the Old Testament expressions which imply 
 his doctrines ; but by showing that the Gospel was the 
 very substance of the Scripture. Christ, as revealed to 
 the apostles, was the key to the Old Testament. The 
 unbelieving Jews read the Old Covenant with a veil 
 upon their hearts (2 Cor. iii. 14, 15), but he — "the veil 
 having been done away in Christ " — grasped the real 
 meaning of the prophetic writings. The more closely 
 we study Paul's use of Scripture the more should we be 
 filled with admiration at the clearness and penetration 
 with which he apprehended the essential religious teach- 
 ing of the passages he cites. Take the great passages, 
 which I need not quote, in which he uncovers in God's 
 recorded transactions with Abraham the doctrine of 
 gracious justification through faith ; or the way in which 
 
S/. Patil and Inspiration. 43 
 
 (Rom. iii.) he presents the Scriptural indictment of man 
 as a sinner by a series of citations from the Psalms 
 and Isaiah so arranged as to set forth in sacred phrase 
 the fact, the practice, the source of human wickedness ; 
 or the magnificent argument (Rom. ix.-xi.) wherein he 
 justifies on Scriptural grounds the loss by the Jews of 
 their peculiar privileges. I do not see how any one can 
 examine Paul's use of Scripture in these classical in- 
 stances without being convinced that the apostle, so far 
 from juggling with words, penetrated to the very marrow 
 of the law and the prophets. There are instances, I 
 know, where at first sight he seems to deal with words 
 rather than with thoughts, and to be guilty of fanciful 
 interpretation. These instances are few in number, but 
 they have been made the most of. His use (Gal. iv. 
 21-31) of the story of Sarah and tiagar with their sons ; 
 his interpretation (i Cor. ix. 9, 10 ; i Tim. v. 17, 18) of 
 the Mosaic command, " Thou shalt not muzzle the oxen 
 treading out the corn "; his citation of Isaiah xxviii. 11, 
 " By men of strange tongues will I speak unto this peo- 
 ple " (i Cor. xiv. 21), as bearing on the use by the 
 Church of the miraculous gift of tongues, — are ex- 
 amples, to which as many more might be added. (2 Cor. 
 iii. 14, 15, "When it shall turn unto the Lord, the veil is 
 taken away"; 2 Cor. viii. 15, "As it is written, he that 
 gathereth much," etc., Rom. x. 6-9). But certainly it is 
 only fair to judge of these instances by the apostle's 
 prevailing habit, and to ask if further examination will 
 not show that below the apparently verbal interpreta- 
 tion there was the perception by him of a principle in 
 each case of which the Old Testament passage was one 
 expression and his application of it another. I believe 
 that this can be shown in every case, not excepting even 
 
44 •^^- Paiil and Inspiratio7i. 
 
 the miscalled "allegory" of Hagar and Sarah, and the 
 much misunderstood remark about the unmuzzled ox. 
 It should, moreover, not be forgotten that these inter- 
 pretations, which are offensive to some, proceed con- 
 spicuously on the supposition that the Scripture, as a 
 writing, was a divine work. But many more examples 
 might be adduced in which Paul's use of Scripture must 
 have been to his first readers like the breaking of sun- 
 light into darkened chambers. Sometimes by merely 
 a single word he illuminates prophetic language, and 
 again, by a group of passages, he lays bare at one stroke 
 the golden ore which the older revelation contained. 
 
 {b). But further, he treats the Biblical narrative as 
 true. This will be denied by none ; but it is import- 
 ant to observe how vital the truthfulness of the narra- 
 tive was to Paul's theological position. For he con- 
 ceived of the Gospel as the climax in a series of econ- 
 omies which were particularly ordered by God with a 
 view to the announcement and understanding of it. He 
 begins commonly with the period of the promise, and then 
 explains the reason of the later introduction of the law. 
 In his analysis of sin, however, he goes back to the first 
 man and distinctly bases his doctrine of justification on 
 the unity of the race in Adam. It thus appears that 
 the truthfulness of the Old Testament's narrativ^e — so 
 far at least as its leading features are concerned — was 
 fundamental to Paul's view of God's government of the 
 world and of the method of man's salvation. And so, 
 when alluding to facts stated in the narrative, he always 
 treats them as real. This is to be particularly noted for 
 the reason that his view of Scripture, which I have de- 
 scribed, as written for the spiritual instruction of the 
 later Church, might have led him, as it has led others, 
 
S/. Paul a7id Inspiratio7i. 45 
 
 to undervalue the historical nature of the facts. It 
 might have, as it did in less accurate hands, transformed 
 Scripture into an allegory. But even when drawing his 
 spiritual lesson from Hagar and Sarah, he manifestly 
 regards the facts related of them as true. So he 
 speaks of the life of Israel in the desert, " These things 
 happened unto them (typically or) by way of example." 
 He did not look upon the narrative as an allegory, 
 but as a relation of actual facts, some of which were of 
 vital importance for a right conception of God's deal- 
 ings with mankind, and so narrated as to set forth, when 
 properly understood, what God intended us to learn. 
 So organic was the relation in his view between the 
 dispensation of the Gospel and the previous history of 
 Israel as set forth in the Scriptures, that only in the light 
 of the latter could it be said, "when the fulness of 
 time was come, God sent forth his Son " (Gal. iv. 4). 
 
 {b). Still again, he is careful at times to support his 
 argument by an appeal to the precise words used by 
 the Sacred Writers. Did he teach that " Christ has 
 been made a curse for us"? He appeals, in justifica- 
 tion of his language, to the language of Deuteronomy, 
 " Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree " (Gal. iii. 
 10). He confirms his doctrine of the spiritual Israel 
 by the language of the promise to Abraham, " and to 
 thy seed"; "as of one, even Christ" (Gal. iii. 16). So 
 in the Epistle to the Romans, his appeal frequently lies, 
 to the language of Scripture as well as to its real sig- 
 nificance. He points out that the Scripture declares 
 that "the just shall live by faith " (i. 17) ; that "Abra- 
 ham believed God, and it was reckoned to him for 
 righteousness " (iv. 3) ; that circumcision w^as given 
 him "as a sign" (iv. u) ; that he was intended to be 
 
46 Sf. Paul and Inspiration. 
 
 the spiritual ancestor of believing Gentiles because 
 called "the Father of many nations" (iv. 17); that his 
 spiritual seed should not be identified with his fleshly 
 descendants because it was written, " In Isaac shall thy 
 seed be called " (ix. 7) ; that the Scripture itself applies 
 the word "hardening" to God's rejection of the repro- 
 bate (ix. 18). These examples are sufficient to prove 
 that in Paul's mind the very phraseology of the Script- 
 ure was valid for religious argument, and expressed 
 divine thought. 
 
 What then is to be said of certain features of his 
 quotations which appear to many inconsistent with such 
 belief in the value of Scripture language ? It is a fact 
 that he often makes his quotations loosely, and occa- 
 sionally does no more than give their substance. Some- 
 times, also, he evidently changed the phraseology on 
 purpose. In a number of instances he differs from the 
 Septuagint, and sometimes follows the Septuagint 
 where it differs from the Hebrew, and occasionally dif- 
 fers from both. Many regard these facts as wholly in- 
 consistent with any high valuation of the words of 
 Scripture. But, aside from the fact that the latter view 
 would make Paul contradict his own express statements, 
 the following additional facts deserve consideration. 
 
 It is wholly unreasonable to require that even an in- 
 spired man, who believed that the words of Scripture 
 were written under God's direction, should always quote 
 Scripture with textual exactness. This would be to in- 
 sist on his becoming a pedant, as if God could not in- 
 spire a man to write rhetorically, or poetically, as well as, 
 when the occasion required, with simple prosaic ac- 
 curacy. We have only a right to require of Paul, on 
 his own theory of the inspiration both of Scripture and 
 
St. Paul and Inspiration. /^y 
 
 himself, that when he declares Scripture to have said a 
 thing, it shall be true that Scripture did say it, and that, 
 when he does argue from the words of Scripture, the 
 words shall be there and his argument from them be in 
 accordance with Scriptural principles. To insist that 
 Paul's doctrine of Scripture, as we have presented it, 
 ought to have precluded him from ever citing the sense 
 rather than the language of the Old Testament, or from 
 ever combining passages together, or from ever failing 
 to correct any bad translation of the Septuagint when 
 the existing translation did not invalidate the force of 
 his appeal, or from changing the language intentionally, 
 when by so doing he could bring out the meaning more 
 strongly for the purpose in hand, is to insist that his 
 epistles, because inspired, should have none of those 
 rhetorical qualities which were the natural manifesta- 
 tion of the apostle's own mental processes. 
 
 In reality, however, Paul is remarkably exact, in the 
 great majority of instances, when formally quoting 
 from the Old Testament. The wonder is that his 
 memory served him so well ; for of course he could sel- 
 dom have had the means, if he so desired, of verifvino- 
 his citations. When he does quote loosely, his argu- 
 ment never depends on the verbal accuracy of his quo- 
 tation, and he always correctly represents the teaching 
 of Scripture when he professes to do so. His mind, 
 however, was so saturated with Scripture that he seems 
 often to be rather speaking himself in its words than to 
 be citing it, and he continually strives in citing to ex- 
 plain and apply it. Thus in Galatians we find eleven 
 clear quotations. Of these, five (iii. 6, ii, i6; iv. 27; v. 
 14) are verbally exact, and three (iii. 8, 12, 13) practi- 
 cally so, — (z'. e., the differences, chiefly in tense or person 
 
48 S^. Paul and Inspiration. 
 
 or verbal form, are too slight to inv^alidate the accuracy 
 of the quotation), while the variations in the other 
 three (ii. 16; iii. 10; iv. 30) can be accounted for by the 
 apostle's desire to state the Old Testament teaching in 
 phraseology which would make its real significance 
 clearer to his readers. In i Corinthians, out of 27 in- 
 stances of reference to Old Testament language, only 
 II are again formal quotations. Of these, seven are 
 exact or practically so, and three (iii. 19 ; xiv. 21 ; xv. 
 54) indicate either acquaintance with the Hebrew and 
 an intentional correction of the LXX, or else the pos- 
 session by Paul of a better Greek version than we have. 
 The remaining quotation (ii. 9) is very free, so that 
 some suppose it to have been taken from a lost apocry- 
 phal book. But that is a violent hypothesis, opposed 
 to Paul's invariable custom elsewhere ; and since the 
 citation expresses Scriptural teaching in Scriptural fig- 
 ures of speech, and since there is a passage in Isaiah 
 (liv. 4) which obviously forms its starting-point, we can 
 only look upon this case as one in which the apostle 
 modified consciously the prophetic declaration in order 
 to apply its principle more forcibly to the matter of 
 which he was writing. 
 
 In the Romans there are about ']2, quotations and 
 allusions of all kinds. Of these, 27 are exact citations, 
 and 20 practically so. Only 8 could be called loose, 8 
 are mere allusions, 2 are centos of scattered passages 
 grouped for a purpose. In 4 cases we may observe 
 apparently intentional changes of verbiage to make the 
 bearing of the truth more evident. Seven (i. 17; ix. i, 
 7, 32 ; X. 15 ; xi. 4, 34 ; xii. 19) times he differs from the 
 Septuagint, and corresponds more closely to Hebrew. In 
 six (iii. 4, 14; ix. 32; x. 11 ; xii. 19; xv. 12) instances he 
 
S/. Paul arid Inspiration. 49 
 
 follows the Septuagint where it differs from the Hebrew 
 but in none of these cases does the sense of Script- 
 ure suffer. Once (xi. 26) he differs in a single word 
 from both Hebrew and Septuagint, saying, " Out ^/Sion 
 shall come the deliverer," instead of "To or for Sion "; 
 but here he apparently mingled a reminiscence of one 
 of the Psalms with the language of Isaiah. 
 
 It would be tedious for me to give more details. I 
 believe these to be fair specimens of the proportion of 
 exact and inexact quotations in Paul's Epistles as well 
 as of his methods. The key to whatever difficulty 
 remains is found in the fact, which should never be for- 
 gotten, that Paul combined and meant to combine in 
 his use of Scripture the functions of both an appellant 
 and an interpreter. He is ever bent on letting the light 
 of the Gospel on the Scripture, as well as on supporthig 
 the Gospel by the Scripture. He never pretended that 
 he had derived his doctrine from the Scripture. He 
 always claimed that he had derived it by revelation from 
 Jesus Christ. Then, however, he saw the meaning of 
 Scripture, and could both appeal to it and explain it. 
 His exegetical method therefore was determined by 
 his practical purpose. He had no need, as we have, 
 first to state the "grammatico-historical" sense of the 
 passage quoted, and then to elaborately show the prin- 
 ciple on which it could be applied to the case in hand. 
 When quoting, he often is interpreting. Hence some 
 of his striking combinations of passages. Hence his 
 change of its phraseology when occasion required. 
 Hence his attitude now of reverence for its letter, and 
 now of apparent disregard of its letter and attention 
 solely to its essential meaning. When all these facts are 
 duly considered, there appears nothing in Paul's actual 
 
50 SL Paul and Inspiration. 
 
 use of Scripture which can be fairly made to contradict 
 his expressed doctrine. 
 
 And now in the light of this study we may grasp the 
 meaning which he himself must have meant to convey by 
 the word which in his last epistle he applied to Scripture, 
 — dtoTTvtoazo:;. It is his own word. It means " breathed 
 into by God." He affirms it not of the writers, but 
 of the sacred writings. These writings are "God in- 
 breathed." The apostle must be his own interpreter, 
 and by the aid of what I have shown is the idea which 
 he embodied in this now classic word to be obtained. 
 By their inspiration he evidently meant that, as writ- 
 ings, they were so composed under God's particular 
 direction that both in substance and in form they were 
 the special utterance of his mind and will. Their words 
 like the apostle's were "pneumatic." The Divine Spirit 
 dwelt in them and breathed through them. And this in 
 no vague, mystic, intangible sense, but in the same 
 sense in which he had said of himself and his fellow- 
 apostles, " We speak not in words which man's wisdom 
 teacheth, but w^hich the Holy Ghost teacheth," and with 
 the same result that the writings were veritably the word 
 of God. How the Divine Spirit operated in either case 
 Paul does not say. The fact and its consequences he 
 unmistakably affirms. 
 
 I have purposely omitted any appeal to the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews because its authorship is disputed even by 
 evangelical scholars. If, howev^er, it was not written by 
 Paul, it is certainly the utterance of Pauline ideas. 
 When, then, we find in it the Psalmist's words quoted, 
 "To-day if ye will hear his voice," with this formula, 
 "as the Holy Ghost saith," — and when we observe fur- 
 ther that the writer's argument turns in great part on 
 
Sf. Paul and Inspiration. 51 
 
 the use in the psalm of the word " to-day," — we are made 
 doubly sure that our interpretation of Paul's doctrine of 
 Scripture is correct, and that he held it in common with 
 the other Christian teachers of the apostolic age. 
 
 Such is the account which to the exegetical student 
 Paul renders of his own inspiration and of that of the 
 Old Testament. That the same is equally true of the 
 other writings of the New Testament will hardly be 
 denied by any who accept Paul's representations. He 
 recognized the authority of the other apostles as of the 
 same nature with his own, and the books which they 
 wrote or gave to the Church must stand on the same 
 level with his or the whole Pauline doctrine of inspiration 
 be given up. He nowhere affirms, be it noted, that inspi- 
 ration was confined to the apostles, and his recognition of 
 Christian prophets, — as when he declares the Church to 
 be built "on the foundation of apostles and prophets," — 
 would seem to imply the contrary. But he does make 
 the apostles infallible teachers and the authorized found- 
 ers of the Church. Those writings therefore which, 
 though not written by apostles, were accepted by the 
 Church from the beginning as part of Scripture, must be 
 regarded as sealed with their authority and therefore also 
 inspired ; and the fact is that in the following century 
 apostolic authority, — direct or indirect, — was the express 
 ground on which the books of the New Testament were 
 received by the Church. That even in the apostolic age 
 itself the conception of a New Testament Scripture 
 had formed, to which the same qualities were attributed 
 which were held to belong to the Old Testament, ap- 
 pears incidentally when Paul cites (i Tim. v. iS) the 
 saying of our Lord, " The laborer is worthy of his hire " 
 (Luke X. 7) as a saying of Scripture, and when Peter in 
 
52 S^. Paul a7id Inspiration. 
 
 his second epistle refers to Paul's epistles under the same 
 title. Those who, partly because of these expressions, 
 would deny the genuineness of the Pastoral Epistles and 
 of Second Peter must surely fail to realize what Paul's 
 teaching on the subject of inspired Scripture really 
 was. 
 
 IV. Now it is not my place to condense these exe- 
 getical results into a dogmatic formula, though I think 
 it obvious what that formula should be. I desire to state 
 in conclusion what, I apprehend, should be the effect of 
 these claims of the Bible on the mind of the Christian 
 scholar as he approaches its study. I say " Christian 
 scholar " because with such alone w^e are concerned. We 
 are here as confessedly Christian men, and it is not 
 likely that many of us would devote our lives to the 
 study of the Bible, were it not for our settled convictions 
 that its teaching is of supreme value to mankind. But 
 when, in addition to this general conviction, we find it 
 to make such pretensions as I have endeavored to de- 
 scribe, these cannot but impose special requirements upon 
 the student. 
 
 Certainly he must approach it with peculiar reverence. 
 It is not like other books. It is not inspired in the sense 
 in which works of genius or spiritual insight are. In its 
 production God was immediately and peculiarly con- 
 cerned. As our Lord is the Son of God in a sense in 
 which His people are not, though they also in their way 
 are sons of God, so is the Bible His word in a sense 
 which cannot be affirmed even of those other literary 
 products (of which there are many), which contain the 
 J truth and manifest the Divine Spirit. Such is the 
 Bible's own account of itself ; and if we may not accept 
 
S^. Paid and Inspiration. 53 
 
 its account of itself, why should we care to ascertain itSj 
 account of other things ? 
 
 So it is hardly possible for one who realizes this to 
 go to the study of it in the same mental attitude in 
 which he would approach other literature. He is deal- 
 ing with a body which is, he has reason to believe, in 
 all its parts quick with divine thought and life ; and he 
 cannot use his lens and scalpel on it with ordinary 
 emotions. 
 
 He would, however, utterly misapprehend its charac- 
 ter and claims, if his reverence were blind or unintelli- 
 gent. The inspired Word pretends to be in every sense 
 a living thing, and, to enter into its secrets, the student 
 must himself be alive, both intellectually and morally. 
 He is very far from dealing with a mechanical product. 
 In its doctrines and its words, in its substance and its 
 form, in its historical genesis and in its proclamation of 
 eternal truths, the Bible is an organism, — with its roots 
 running down into the history, the language, the social, 
 mental, and religious activity both of the Hebrews and 
 of the greater world about them, — while yet its mould- 
 ing, forming principle is derived from above. As I 
 have said, Paul nowhere describes the method by which 
 the Divine Spirit operated in himself or in the prophets- 
 to produce the Scripture. It is only the fact and the 
 consequences to which he bears his testimony. The 
 method we must judge, so far as may be possible, from 
 the phenomena. These point to a complex process, 
 wherein many subordinate agents were made to co-oper- 
 ate with the immediate exercise of divine power. Out 
 of the matrix of a divinely guided history was this divine 
 — human book born, and our very faith in its complete 
 divine vitality should make us eager to apprehend every 
 
54 '^^- Pcitil arid hispiration. 
 
 human element which entered into its being. Through 
 the form alone can we reach the substance ; through the 
 words the thought ; through the historical the doctrinal ; 
 through the human the divine. Every element of this 
 complex literary product acquires new interest when we 
 believe that through them all we are brought into con- 
 tact with the process in and by which God has revealed 
 himself and his will to men. 
 
 At the same time his reverence for the finished pro- 
 duct will keep the student cautious and humble in his 
 judgments. He will not expect to understand everything 
 about the construction of the Bible. He will not be 
 staggered if he find in it statements which he cannot 
 yet comprehend, or phenomena which he cannot yet ex- 
 plain. He will assuredly trust its statements when they 
 are clearly ascertained. If his reverence be intelligent 
 and his examination be critical, as they certainly ought 
 to be, both his intelligence and his criticism will recog- 
 nize that the character of the subject examined sets ob- 
 vious limitations upon their exercise. 
 
 (i). But to be more specific, the Bible's account of it- 
 self will impress upon the student the great importance of 
 ascertaining by valid processes the original text. We 
 know enough of the history of the New Testament 
 text to perceive that in all that is required for the cor- 
 rect ascertainment of Christian doctrine and duty, God 
 has " by singular care and providence kept it pure 
 through all ages." Nevertheless, the student will want 
 to secure as nearly as possible an absolute reproduction 
 of the original that he may apprehend the precise thought 
 of the inspired penman even in its smallest details. 
 The Bible's account of itself would seem to provide 
 the strongest incentive to the study of textual criticism. 
 
S/. Paul and Inspiration. 5^ 
 
 (2). The same reason also will stimulate to the most 
 exact and painstaking exegesis. To one who accepts 
 the Bible's account of itself no question, even of gram- 
 matical structure, will appear without importance. The 
 usage of words, their origin and their receptiveness of 
 Scriptural thought, the laws governing literary compo- 
 sition of this and of that kind, will be investigated by 
 him with new zeal. Everything will be valued which 
 will enable him to grasp the precise shade of thought in 
 the section before him. It would be an immense mis- 
 take for him to become a careless exegete, or to fancy 
 that, because its verbal forms are inspired, he is not to 
 strive to grasp the very thought which is in them,— or 
 to suppose that, because in all its parts it is inspired, he 
 is not to carefully observe from it the proportion of 
 truth and to grasp its teaching as a whole, — or to allow 
 his spiritual fancy to interpret Scripture as the exigen- 
 cies of the pulpit may seem to require. This was the 
 fault of much of exegesis in the ancient Church ; and 
 though it was based on a correct doctrine of Scripture, 
 and was meant to do honor to the inspired Word, it 
 wrought for ages injury to the truth and hid, while it 
 pretended to unfold, the word of God. We should 
 rather conclude from the inspiration of Scripture, that 
 every statement of it is to be apprehended with precise 
 accuracy, — is to be seen to be just what it exactly is, if 
 the divine thought in it and the relation of its thought 
 to others, and so the complex thought of the whole is 
 to be really learned. They who accept and teach a 
 wholly inspired Bible ought to count no labor too great 
 to ascertain, by the use of every critical instrument as 
 well as by devout sympathy with both the human 
 and the divine authors, the exact meaning of the book. 
 
56 S/. Paul and hispii'aiion. 
 
 (3). And then, building on precise exegesis, inter- 
 preting according to the natural rules of the various 
 kinds of literary composition, the student will move 
 through the Bible from its beginning to its close, — feel- 
 ing his way, as it were, from fibre to fibre, from part to 
 part, of this living organism, — until he approaches to an 
 apprehension of it as a whole, perceives its structural 
 unfolding and its vital principle, and is thus enabled to 
 enter into the fulness of its content. Such a student 
 should not be surprised, if he discover that elements, 
 historical or verbal or doctrinal, which enter into the 
 structure of the Bible, had a previous existence of their 
 own. There is an economy observable in all God's 
 operations whereby he uses existing materials for new 
 purposes rather than creates similar ones, and the entirely 
 unmechanical view of inspiration which we have gleaned 
 from the Bible makes it even probable that in some cases 
 (for example in the Synoptic Gospels) a valid literary 
 criticism may discern pre-existing materials. But the 
 student who accepts the Bible's account of itself must 
 admit that only as incorporated in the Scripture can 
 such materials be affirmed to be inspired ; and while 
 such investigations may interest and instruct him, he 
 will feel it to be his chief duty to apprehend aright the 
 teaching of the Bible itself. He will feel that only by 
 entering into its thought, as that is progressively un- 
 folded in the Bible, will he be able to use the book for 
 the supreme purposes for which it claims to have been 
 given. 
 
 Some one will say, perhaps, that in entering on my 
 professorial work, I ought to have emphasized the 
 human side of Scripture rather than the divine side, 
 — since the examination of the Bible on its human side 
 
S^. Paul and Inspiration, 57 
 
 has in modern times proved so rich a blessing to the 
 Bible-using Church. I have no intention of forgetting 
 this. But there is now no danger, as once there was, of 
 our undervaluing the human side. The danger lies in 
 our failing to perceive the definite claims which the 
 Bible makes for itself ; in our failing to perceive that, 
 even though human, it is also divine, and this, not in a 
 vague, indefinable way, but in the distinct sense that, as a^ 
 literary product, and in all the parts thereof, it is ani- 
 mated by the thought and moulded by the intention of 
 the Divine Spirit. The danger lies in our thinking that 
 the admission of this is to introduce a mechanical con- 
 ception of God's handiwork, and is inconsistent with the 
 rich variety of thought and language by which the Bible 
 is obviously marked ; whereas it is rather the strongest 
 stimulus to devout, critical investigation, while the limits 
 which it puts upon criticism are only those which loyalty 
 to the abundant evidence that the Scriptures do speak 
 from God would naturally dictate. As divine, has the 
 Bible been bequeathed to us by the apostles. As such, it 
 is more worthy of lifelong study than on any other suppo- 
 sition it could possibly be. As such, its humanity, if I 
 may so speak, becomes the priceless treasure that it is. 
 As such, it occupies the place it does alike in theological 
 discipline, in the Church, and in human history. As 
 such, and only as such, does it provide that which noth- 
 ing else provides, — a rock, on which man's feet may stand 
 amid the shifting sands of thought and while the mist 
 of ignorance, — dimly lit by guesses, hopes, and fears, — 
 still hides the sun.