Yet one other instance, and let this be the crucial test of the doctrine. Say that the Book of Job throughout was dictated by an infallible intelligence. Then re-peruse the book, and still, as you proceed, try to apply the tenet; try if you can even attach any sense or semblance of meaning to the speeches which you are reading. What! were the hollow truisms, the unsufficing half-truths, the false assumptions and malignant insinuations of the supercilious bigots, who corruptly defended the truth:- were the impressive facts, the piercing outcries, the pathetic appeals, and the close and powerful reasoning with which the poor sufferer--smarting at once from his wounds, and from the oil of vitriol which the orthodox LIARS FOR GOD were dropping into them--impatiently, but uprightly and holily, controverted this truth, while in will and in spirit he clung to it;--were both dictated by an infallible intelligence?--Alas! if I may judge from the manner in which both indiscriminately are recited, quoted, appealed to, preached upon by the routiniers of desk and pulpit, I cannot doubt that they think so--or rather, without thinking, take for granted that so they are to think;--the more readily, perhaps, because the so thinking supersedes the necessity of all afterthought. Farewell.
LETTER IV.
My dear friend, You reply to the conclusion of my Letter: "What have we to do with routiniers? Quid mihi cum homunculis putata putide reputantibus?
Let nothings count for nothing, and the dead bury the dead! Who but such ever understood the tenet in this sense?"
In what sense then, I rejoin, do others understand it? If, with exception of the passages already excepted, namely, the recorded words of God--concerning which no Christian can have doubt or scruple,--the tenet in this sense be inapplicable to the Scripture, destructive of its noblest purposes, and contradictory to its own express declarations,--again and again I ask:- What am I to substitute? What other sense is conceivable that does not destroy the doctrine which it professes to interpret--that does not convert it into its own negative? As if a geometrician should name a sugar-loaf an ellipse, adding--"By which term I here mean a cone;"--and then justify the misnomer on the pretext that the ellipse is among the conic sections! And yet--notwithstanding the repugnancy of the doctrine, in its unqualified sense, to Scripture, Reason, and Common Sense theoretically, while to all practical uses it is intractable, unmalleable, and altogether unprofitable--notwithstanding its irrationality, and in the face of your expostulation, grounded on the palpableness of its irrationality,--I must still avow my belief that, however fittingly and unsteadily, as through a mist, it IS the doctrine which the generality of our popular divines receive as orthodox, and this the sense which they attach to the words.
For on what other ground can I account for the whimsical subintelligiturs of our numerous harmonists--for the curiously inferred facts, the inventive circumstantial detail, the complemental and supplemental history which, in the utter silence of all historians and absence of all historical documents, they bring to light by mere force of logic? And all to do away some half score apparent discrepancies in the chronicles and memoirs of the Old and New Testaments--discrepancies so analogous to what is found in all other narratives of the same story by several narrators--so analogous to what is found in all other known and trusted histories by contemporary historians, when they are collated with each other (nay, not seldom when either historian is compared with himself), as to form in the eyes of all competent judges a characteristic mark of the genuineness, independency, and (if I may apply the word to a book), the veraciousness of each several document; a mark, the absence of which would warrant a suspicion of collusion, invention, or at best of servile transcription; discrepancies so trifling in circumstance and import, that, although in some instances it is highly probable, and in all instances, perhaps, possible that they are only apparent and reconcilable, no wise man would care a staw whether they were real or apparent, reconciled or left in harmless and friendly variance. What, I ask, could have induced learned and intelligent divines to adopt or sanction subterfuges, which neutralising the ordinary criteria of full or defective evidence in historical documents, would, taken as a general rule, render all collation and cross-examination of written records ineffective, and obliterate the main character by which authentic histories are distinguished from those traditional tales, which each successive reporter enlarges and fashions to his own fancy and purpose, and every different edition of which more or less contradicts the other? Allow me to create chasms ad libitum, and ad libitum to fill them up with imagined facts and incidents, and I would almost undertake to harmonise Falstaff's account of the rogues in buckram into a coherent and consistent narrative. What, I say, could have tempted grave and pious men thus to disturb the foundation of the Temple, in order to repair a petty breach or rat-hole in the wall, or fasten a loose stone or two in the outer court, if not an assumed necessity arising out of the peculiar character of Bible history?
The substance of the syllogism, by which their procedure was justified to their own minds, can be no other than this. That, without which two assertions--both of which MUST be alike true and correct--would contradict each other, and consequently be, one or both, false or incorrect, must itself be true. But every word and syllable existing in the original text of the Canonical Books, from the Cherethi and Phelethi of David to the name in the copy of a family register, the site of a town, or the course of a river, were dictated to the sacred amanuensis by an infallible intelligence.
