In one man, indeed, it was otherwise; but He was both God and man.  To Him the Spirit was given without measure; and as his life was without sin, so his words were without error.  But to all others the Spirit has been given by measure; in almost infinitely different measure it is true:  the difference between the inspiration of the common and perhaps unworthy Christian who merely said that “Jesus was the Lord,” and that of Moses, or St. Paul, and St. John, is almost to our eyes beyond measuring.  Still the position remains, that the highest degree of inspiration given to man has still suffered to exist along with it a portion of human fallibility and corruption.

Now, then, consider the epistles of the blessed Apostle St. Paul, who had the Spirit of God so abundantly, that never we may suppose did any merely human being enjoy a larger share of it.  Endowed with the Spirit as a Christian, and daily receiving grace more largely, as he became more and more ripe for glory; endowed with the Spirit’s extraordinary gifts most eminently; favoured also with an abundance of revelations, disclosing to him things ineffable and inconceivable,—­are not his writings to be most truly called inspired?  Can we doubt that, in what he has told us of things not seen, or not seen as yet,—­of Him who pre-existed in the form of God before he was manifested in the form of man,—­of that great day, when we shall arise incorruptible, and meet our Lord in the air, and be joined to him for ever,—­can any reasonable mind doubt, that in speaking of these things he spoke what he had heard from God; that to refuse to believe his testimony is really to disbelieve God?

Yet this great Apostle expected that the world would come to an end in the generation then existing.  When he wrote to the Thessalonians some years before his first imprisonment at Rome, he warned them, no doubt, against expecting the end immediately:  but he appears still to have supposed that it would come in the lifetime of men then living.  At a later period, when writing to the Corinthians, his dissuasion of marriage seems to rest mainly upon this impression; it is good not to marry, “on account of the distress which is close at hand;” ([Greek:  dia taen enestosan anankaen]; compare 2 Thess. ii. 2, [Greek:  hos hoti enestaeken hae haemera tou Kyriou].) “The time is short,” he adds; “the fashion of this world is passing away.”  And again, when speaking of the resurrection, he says emphatically, “the dead shall rise incorruptible, and we shall be changed;” where the pronoun being expressed in the original, [Greek:  chai haemeis allagaesometha], shows that by the term “we,” he does not mean the dead, but those who were to be alive at Christ’s coming.  So again, still later, when writing from Rome to the Philippians, he tells them “the Lord is at hand;” and later still, even in his first epistle to Timothy, he charges Timothy “to keep his commandment without spot, unrebukable, until the appearing of our