that the mind of God, and that too conveyed in the best possible expression, is in every sentence of the Bible. Enough to know that, in virtue of His command over all natural and all supernatural agency, the Bible was all made by God-though unable to assign the limit between the two, or unable to trace the footsteps of God in the making of it.

21. There is diversity of operations, but it is God who worketh all in all; and so much is He all in all throughout the Bible, that not only is every thought as He would have it because His thought, but every word as Ile would have it because His word. He is the universal agent; yet the whole history of the church bears testimony to His liking, if we may so express it, for the instrumentality of man. He did not send an angel to convert Cornelius; He sent two angels, one to Cornelius and the other to Peter, to arrange a meeting between them-that the words of salvation might be heard from the lips of a fellow-mortal. Even the Bible, of itself and without the enforcements of a human expounder, is not the great instrument of Christianization. It is the Bible in the hands, whether of parents or ministers, set forth in explanation by a living instrument, and urged on the feelings and consciences of men by the energy of a living voice. And God has made use, we know not how far, of this law of human sympathy in the composition of the Bible. In this view, we are not at all startled by the evident copyings of the prophets from each other, or the copyings of the evangelists as alleged

by those who speculate on the origination of the Gospels, or by the quotations as if memoriter or from the popular translation of the Old Testament into the New. It detracts not from the inspiration of the Bible, that we can reason on the formation and transmission of it, and draw evidence from these just as we do in the ordinary questions of criticism, from the phenomena of human compositions. Whatever the steps were by which each passage or each sentence and word has been introduced into the record, they are there by the appointment of that God, who at the same time. has told us of the infallibility of that record, and that though heaven and earth must pass away, not one jot or one tittle of it shall fail. The fact of its being within the four corners of the Bible, is in itself proof of its being part and parcel of God's communication to the world. We believe in the total inspiration, not from what we know of the process, but from what we have been told of the product. Not one word could be altered, but for the worse; and, whether by instruments or without them, the whole authorship both in substance and expression is God's.

22. The next question which we shall discuss but shortly, is, whether this inspiration extends to the whole Bible, or only to parts of it. We have already expatiated on the state of fearful precariousness in which the faith of Christians would be placed, if, instead of the limit between the inspired and the uninspired being just the whole circumference of scripture, that limit were conceived to meander obscurely within the surface of the records

and we were left without one steadfast or palpable criterion by which to discriminate between the things of God and the things of man. We are aware of a general impression on this subject, that inspiration was less needed for scripture history than for scripture doctrine. This, we have already stated, proceeds on a confusion of sentiment, in virtue of not distinguishing between the office of inspiration as an importer and its office as an exporter of truth. In discharge of the former office, inspiration is more required for the truths of doctrine than for the facts of history-these facts, in many instances, being first made known, not by revelation at all; but by common observation, and in the exercise of the natural faculties. But in the latter office, even that of an exporter, inspiration may be more required for narrative than for doctrine; and that, not merely because the manifold details of it are with more difficulty remembered than the leading articles of a system of truthnot merely because the memory requires to be aided in the business of recalling them; but because the judgment more requires to be aided, in the business of selecting them. It is quite a mistake that the historical parts, either of the Old or the New Testament (we mean the writing or the giving of them forth) required less the guidance of inspiration, than the doctrinal or even the prophetical.

Not to speak of the errors in the selection, we ask our readers to think, in such a mass and multitude of materials, what an interminable record it would have been, had each of the various historians been abandoned to the impulses of his own

taste and his own fancy.

Where would have been

that condensed and expressive brevity which is nowhere else to be met with in the whole compass of literature? How else could the record of such a number of centuries have been given at once so briefly and yet so comprehensively ? What would have been our security, that, in such an infinite diversity of topics, the most pertinent would have been selected; and those which are best adapted to the purposes of a revelation? That there should be such a keeping between the parts of this vast and varied miscellany-that altogether it should be confined within dimensions so moderate, that, instead of swelling out into an unmanageable size, this record of thousands of years should, though not a meagre chronicle of events but a vivid and interesting narrative abounding throughout in touches of graphic delineation, should, nevertheless, have all been comprised within the limits of a pocket volume-there must have been a management here beyond the wisdom of man, and far more beyond it in the historical, than in the didactic parts of the composition. There must have been one presiding intellect that foresaw all, and over-ruled all-for the random concurrence of such a number of authors could never have terminated in such a unique and wondrous combination -insomuch that it holds more emphatically true of the historical than of the doctrinal in the Old Testament, that "whatever things were written aforetime were written for our admonition, on whom the latter ends of the world have come."

23. This consideration is insisted on with great

strength and judgment by Mr. Haldane, in his pamphlet on Inspiration; and at still greater length, in a way too we think exceedingly striking, by Joseph Cottle in the second volume of a miscellaneous work entitled, "Malvern Hills with Minor Poems and Essays." The following are copious extracts from one of those essays, being an "Argument in favour of Christianity deduced from the size of the Bible." The whole argument which is admirably put is well worthy of perusal. "When an uninspired man undertakes to write an important history, entering often into detail, of incident, description, and delineation, the work necessarily becomes extended. But, when mighty events are recorded; the rise and fall of states; the lives of warriors and kings; the principles that regulated their conduct; the aggressions of neighbouring potentates; with all the results and. changes which arose from conquest or subjugation; the boldest reader is appalled at the probable accumulation of pages. If this writer has to describe also his own country and ancestors, under all the impressions of personal and national feeling, the temptation to amplify becomes still more imperative and to what a magnitude might a work be supposed to extend, which was to comprise the labours not only of two or three such writers, but a long succession of them, through many generations? Now the Bible is this extraordinary book, and it is not only totally dissimilar to all others in its nature and execution, but is equally contradistinguished by the rarely-combined qualities of comprehension and succinctness. The