Moses, either as author or as editor, is not quite so clearly demonstrable as it might be; highly placed Divines tell us that the pre-Abrahamic Scripture narratives may be ignored; that the book of Daniel may be regarded as a patriotic romance of the second century B.C.; that the words of the writer of the fourth Gospel are not always to be distinguished from those which he puts into the mouth of Jesus.  Conservative, but conscientious, revisers decide that whole passages, some of dogmatic and some of ethical importance, are interpolations.  An uneasy sense of the weakness of the dogma of Biblical infallibility seems to be at the bottom of a prevailing tendency once more to substitute the authority of the “Church” for that of the Bible.  In my old age, it has happened to me to be taken to task for regarding Christianity as a “religion of a book” as gravely as, in my youth, I should have been reprehended for doubting that proposition.  It is a no less interesting symptom that the State Church seems more and more anxious to repudiate all complicity with the principles of the Protestant Reformation and to call itself “Anglo-Catholic.”  Inspiration, deprived of its old intelligible sense, is watered down into a mystification.  The Scriptures are, indeed, inspired; but they contain a wholly undefined and indefinable “human element”; and this unfortunate intruder is converted into a sort of biblical whipping boy.  Whatsoever scientific investigation, historical or physical, proves to be erroneous, the “human element” bears the blame; while the divine inspiration of such statements, as by their nature are out of reach of proof or disproof, is still asserted with all the vigour inspired by conscious safety from attack.  Though the proposal to treat the Bible “like any other book” which caused so much scandal, forty years ago, may not yet be generally accepted, and though Bishop Colenso’s criticisms may still lie, formally, under ecclesiastical ban, yet the Church has not wholly turned a deaf ear to the voice of the scientific tempter; and many a coy divine, while “crying I will ne’er consent,” has consented to the proposals of that scientific criticism which the memorialists renounce and denounce.

A humble layman, to whom it would seem the height of presumption to assume even the unconsidered dignity of a “steward of science,” may well find this conflict of apparently equal ecclesiastical authorities perplexing—­suggestive, indeed, of the wisdom of postponing attention to either, until the question of precedence between them is settled.  And this course will probably appear the more advisable, the more closely the fundamental position of the memorialists is examined.

“No opinion of the fact or form of Divine Revelation, founded on literary criticism [and I suppose I may add historical, or physical, criticism] of the Scriptures themselves, can be admitted to interfere with the traditionary testimony of the Church, when that has been once ascertained and verified by appeal to antiquity."[10]