circumstantial exactness.  Two historians, though with equal gifts and equal opportunities, never describe events in exactly the same way.  Two witnesses in a court of law, while they agree in the main, invariably differ in some particulars.  It appears as if men could not relate facts precisely as they saw or as they heard them.  The different parts of a story strike different imaginations unequally; and the mind, as the circumstances pass through it, alters their proportions unconsciously, or shifts the perspective.  The credit which we give to the most authentic work of a man has no resemblance to that universal acceptance which is demanded for the Bible.  It is not a difference of degree:  it is a difference in kind; and we desire to know on what ground this infallibility, which we do not question, but which is not proved, demands our belief.  Very likely the Bible is thus infallible.  Unless it is, there can be no moral obligation to accept the facts which it records:  and though there may be intellectual error in denying them, there can be no moral sin.  Facts may be better or worse authenticated; but all the proofs in the world of the genuineness and authenticity of the human handiwork cannot establish a claim upon the conscience.  It might be foolish to question Thucydides’ account of Pericles, but no one would call it sinful.  Men part with all sobriety of judgment when they come on ground of this kind.  When Sir Henry Rawlinson read the name of Sennacherib on the Assyrian marbles, and found allusions there to the Israelites in Palestine, we were told that a triumphant answer had been found to the cavils of sceptics, and a convincing proof of the inspired truth of the Divine Oracles.  Bad arguments in a good cause are a sure way to bring distrust upon it.  The Divine Oracles may be true, and may be inspired; but the discoveries at Nineveh certainly do not prove them so.  No one supposes that the Books of Kings or the prophesies of Isaiah and Ezekiel were the work of men who had no knowledge of Assyria or the Assyrian Princes.  It is possible that in the excavations at Carthage some Punic inscription may be found confirming Livy’s account of the battle of Cannae; but we shall not be obliged to believe therefore in the inspiration of Livy, or rather (for the argument comes to that) in the inspiration of the whole Latin literature.

We are not questioning the fact that the Bible is infallible; we desire only to be told on what evidence that great and awful fact concerning it properly rests.  It would seem, indeed, as if instinct had been wiser than argument—­as if it had been felt that nothing short of this literal and close inspiration could preserve the facts on which Christianity depends.  The history of the early world is a history everywhere of marvels.  The legendary literature of every nation upon earth tells the same stories of prodigies and wonders, of the appearances of the gods upon earth, and of their intercourse with men.  The lives