Nor would it be necessary to say any more upon the subject.  Those who believed Christianity would admit the assumption; those who disbelieved Christianity would repudiate it.  The argument would be narrowed to that plain and single issue, and the elaborate treatises upon external evidence would cease to bring discredit upon the cause by their feebleness.  Unfortunately—­ and this is the true secret of our present distractions—­it seems certain that in some way or other this belief in inspiration itself requires to be revised.  We are compelled to examine more precisely what we mean by the word.  The account of the creation of man and the world which is given in Genesis, and which is made by St. Paul the basis of his theology, has not yet been reconciled with facts which science knows to be true.  Death was in the world before Adam’s sin, and unless Adam’s age be thrust back to a distance which no ingenuity can torture the letter of Scripture into recognizing, men and women lived and died upon the earth whole millenniums before the Eve of Sacred History listened to the temptation of the snake.  Neither has any such deluge as that from which, according to the received interpretation, the ark saved Noah, swept over the globe within the human period.  We are told that it was not God’s purpose to anticipate the natural course of discovery:  as the story of the creation was written in human language, so the details of it may have been adapted to the existing state of human knowledge.  The Bible it is said was not intended to teach men science, but to teach them what was necessary for the moral training of their souls.  It may be that this is true.  Spiritual grace affects the moral character of men, but leaves their intellect unimproved.  The most religious men are as liable as atheists to ignorance of ordinary facts, and inspiration may be only infallible when it touches on truths necessary to salvation.  But if it be so, there are many things in the Bible which must become as uncertain as its geology or its astronomy.  There is the long secular history of the Jewish people.  Let it be once established that there is room for error anywhere, and we have no security for secular history.  The inspiration of the Bible is the foundation of our whole belief; and it is a grave matter if we are uncertain to what extent it reaches, or how much and what it guarantees to us as true.  We cannot live on probabilities.  The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it is nothing.  It may be that all intellectual efforts to arrive at it are in vain; that it is given to those to whom it is given, and withheld from those from whom it is withheld.  It may be that the existing belief is undergoing a silent modification, like those to which the dispensations of religion have been successively subjected; or, again, it may be that to the creed as it is already established there is nothing to be