These writings became rightly sacred as the mementoes of the Divine Man, and the counsels of the great apostles; a shrine in which men drew near to the supreme manifestation of God upon earth.  But they became wrongly sacred also, as the lengthening lapse of time isolated these precious heirlooms of the Christian household into relics it was blasphemy to criticise; as the falling waters of the river of life stranded high above men’s reach the thoughts and experiences of the inspired fisher-folk of Galilee.  In the Dark Ages, when to read was a sign of distinction, and to write a schoolboy history like “Eginhard’s Charlemagne” was a prodigy; when to lead clean lives, and to labor as hosts are doing now for their fellows made a man a saint; the literary and spiritual power of the apostles was nothing less than preternatural.

In the Reformation the old story repeated itself.

In the days of fresh inspiration men surely did not fail to prize the blessed books whence had come their new life.  But the sense of the divine life in their own spirits enabled them to judge of the inspiration of the Apostles at once reverently and rationally.  They did not hesitate to criticise freely the sacred books.  Erasmus wrote of the Revelation: 

“I certainly can find no reason for believing that it was set forth by the Holy Spirit....  Moreover, even were it a blessed thing to believe what is contained in it, no man knows what that is....  But let every man think of it as his spirit prompts him."[13]

Luther wrote of the Epistle of James,

   “In comparison with the best books of the New Testament, it is a
   downright strawy epistle."[14]

The ebbing tide again left the second generation critical and not creative.  After the sages and prophets of Protestantism came the scribes and doctors, and they were concerned not so much with the manly religion of free learning which Erasmus cherished, or the ethical and spiritual religion which Luther roused, as with establishing Protestant_ism_ and waging its doctrinal controversies.  They wanted an authority for faith and morals to set over against the authority of Rome.  The age knew of no other authority than external, extra-natural official authority, the king by divine right in the realm of thought.  In the place of the authority of the Church rose the authority of the Bible; an oracular, infallible, miraculous Book, instead of an oracular, infallible, miraculous Church.  Men could only sustain the elaborate speculative system they had spun out of the New Testament letters, by insisting upon the authority of the apostles in metaphysics as strongly as upon their authority in ethical and spiritual principles.  When dogma became divine, the books whence it was drawn were deified.[15]