manner of the French school of the eighteenth century.  My familiarity with the German studies placed me in a very false position; for upon the one hand it proved to me the impossibility of an exegesis which did not make any concessions, while upon the other hand I quite saw that the masters of St. Sulpice were quite right in refusing to make these concessions, inasmuch as a single confession of error ruins the whole edifice of absolute truth, and reduces it to the level of human authorities in which each person makes his selections according to his individual fancy.

For in a divine book everything must be true, and as two contradictories cannot both be true, it must not contain any contradiction.  But the careful study of the Bible which I had undertaken, while revealing to me many historical and esthetic treasures, proved to me also that it was not more exempt than any other ancient book from contradictions, inadvertencies, and errors.  It contains fables, legends, and other traces of purely human composition.  It is no longer possible for any one to assert that the second part of the book of Isaiah was written by Isaiah.  The book of Daniel, which, according to all orthodox tenets, relates to the period of the captivity, is an apocryphal work composed in the year 169 or 170 B.C.  The book of Judith is an historical impossibility.  The attribution of the Pentateuch to Moses does not bear investigation, and to deny that several parts of Genesis are mystical in their meaning is equivalent to admitting as actual realities descriptions such as that of the Garden of Eden, the apple, and Noah’s Ark.  He is not a true Catholic who departs in the smallest iota from the traditional theses.  What becomes of the miracle which Bossuet so admired:  “Cyrus referred to two hundred years before his birth”?  What becomes of the seventy weeks of years, the basis of the calculations of universal history, if that part of Isaiah in which Cyrus is referred to was composed during the lifetime of that warrior, and if the pseudo-Daniel is a contemporary of Antiochus Epiphanes?

Orthodoxy calls upon us to believe that the biblical books are the work of those to whom their titles assign them.  The mildest Catholic doctrine as to inspiration will not allow one to admit that there is any marked error in the sacred text, or any contradiction in matters which do not relate either to faith or morality.  Well, let us allow that out of the thousand disputes between critique and orthodox apologetics as to the details of the so-called sacred text there are some in which by accident and contrary to appearances the latter are in the right.  It is impossible that it can be right in all the thousand cases and it has only to be wrong once for all the theory as to its inspiration to be reduced to nothing.  This theory of inspiration, implying a supernatural fact, becomes impossible to uphold in the presence of the decided ideas of our modern common sense.  An inspired book is a miracle.  It should present itself to us under conditions totally different from any other book.  It may be said:  “You are not so exacting in respect to Herodotus and the poems of Homer.”  This is quite true, but then Herodotus and the Homeric poems do not profess to be inspired books.