have said, Ye are gods, and all of you are children of the most high:  but ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.”  In other words:—­“though we are apt to think of rulers as if they were superhuman, yet they shall meet the lot of common men.”  Well:  how is this applied in John?—­Jesus has been accused of blasphemy, for saying that “He and his Father are one;” and in reply, he quotes the verse, “I have said, Ye are gods,” as his sufficient justification for calling himself Son of God; for “the Scripture cannot be broken.”  I dreaded to precipitate myself into shocking unbelief, if I followed out the thoughts that this suggested; and (I know not how) for a long time yet put it off.

The quotations from the Old Testament in St. Paul had always been a mystery to me.  The more I now examined them, the clearer it appeared that they were based on untenable Rabbinical principles.  Nor are those in the Acts and in the Gospels any better.  If we take free leave to canvass them, it may appear that not one quotation in ten is sensible and appropriate.  And shall we then accept the decision of the New Testament writers as final, concerning the value and credibility of the Old Testament, when it is so manifest that they most imperfectly understood that book?

In fact the appeal to them proved too much.  For Jude quotes the book of Enoch as an inspired prophecy, and yet, since Archbishop Laurence has translated it from the Ethiopian, we know that book to be a fable undeserving of regard, and undoubtedly not written by “Enoch, the seventh from Adam.”  Besides, it does not appear that any peculiar divine revelation taught them that the Old Testament is perfect truth.  In point of fact, they only reproduce the ideas on that subject current in their age.  So far as Paul deviates from the common Jewish view, it is in the direction of disparaging the Law as essentially imperfect.  May it not seem that his remaining attachment to it was still exaggerated by old sentiment and patriotism?

I farther found that not only do the Evangelists give us no hint that they thought themselves divinely inspired, or that they had any other than human sources of knowledge, but Luke most explicitly shows the contrary.  He opens by stating to Theophilus, that since many persons have committed to writing the things handed down from eye-witnesses, it seemed good to him also to do the same, since he had “accurately attended to every thing from its sources ([Greek:  anothen]).”  He could not possibly have written thus, if he had been conscious of superhuman aids.  How absurd then of us, to pretend that we know more than Luke knew of his own inspiration!

In truth, the arguments of theologians to prove the inspiration (i.e. infallibility) of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are sometimes almost ludicrous.  My lamented friend, John Sterling, has thus summed up Dr. Henderson’s arguments about Mark.  “Mark was probably inspired, because he was an acquaintance of Peter; and because Dr. Henderson would be reviled by other Dissenters, if he doubted it.”