If in reading John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy you come upon this theory, cautiously broached, you are constrained to treat it with the consideration due an acknowledged master in this science.  If again in the first elaborate work of a new author, Progress and Poverty, you meet this same theory, boldly laid down as the central theme of the book, and contended for as the real solution of the persistent problem of pauperism, you are disposed to pass it by unheeded.  The author’s name carries to your mind no prestige of tradition.  He speaks from no time-honored university chair.  No array of imposing titles hang upon the plain ‘Henry George,’ of the title page.  But you become interested in these brilliant pages of genius and follow the author, with growing sympathy, to the end.

You lay the book down, feeling as though a spell had been upon you, in which you could form no sound judgment.  You lay it by accordingly, to take it up after some weeks, work over its positions, and find your first impressions confirmed; to realize that here is a work of real, rare power; an epoch-making book, which, if it does not carry your conviction, commands your careful consideration.

Precisely so we are to be affected by the Biblical authors.  There are writings in the Bible by utterly unknown writers.  A letter of an obscure author cannot come with the weight of a letter from St. Paul.  There are writings of widely different mental force.  Biblical authors varied in personal power as much as other authors.  Inspiration cannot do away with the limitations of the human individuality.  It must be modified by its instrumentality.  The saints are of various orders.  Even the diamond books which reflect the light of God so brilliantly may not be all of first water.  We must allow for the hues in the less perfect prisms.  Were the greatest musical genius in the world to sit before the key-boards he could not draw from a harmonium the notes of a Lucerne organ.  The impact of a writing on our souls must be proportionate to the spiritual and ethical force with which it is charged.  Everyone recognizes this practically.  None of us, however orthodox, professes to be as much inspired by Esther as by Job; by Chronicles as by Kings; by Daniel as by Isaiah; by Jude as by Paul.  That simply means that there is not as much inspiration in some Biblical authors as in others.  No author is always at his best.  His work differs.  The second epistle to the Thessalonians is not level with the epistle to the Romans.  The third epistle of John, if it be of John, is surely not as highly inspired as the first epistle of John.  Inspiration is plainly a matter of degrees.