As to the objection against the plenary inspiration of the original Scriptures, which has been drawn from the fact that the translations which are made from them are not inspired, Professor Gaussen rightly considers it as unworthy of the name of an objection. Yet he shows most conclusively how important it is that the Scriptures in the Hebrew and Greek originals should be inspired, and consequently free from error, even though almost the entire Christian world must of necessity use translations made by uninspired men.

From the remarks of our author on the objection which is made against the complete inspiration of the Scriptures, from the manner in which the writers of the New Testament have quoted from the Septuagint, we give one paragraph, which annihilates this objection, in the most summary and conclusive manner possible.

If some modern prophet were sent from God to the churches which speak our language, how do you think that such a man would quote the Scriptures? In French, without doubt; but according to what version? Those of Ostervald and Martin being the most extensively used, it is probable that he would make his citations in the terms of one or the other, as often as their translations might seem to him to be sufficiently exact. But also, notwithstanding our practice and his, he would take great care to leave both of these versions, and translate after his own way, as often as it might appear to him that the meaning of the original was not sufficiently well rendered in them. Sometimes, even, he would do more. To make us better comprehend in what sense he might have the intention to apply such or such a scripture, he would paraphrase the alleged passage, and then he would follow, in citing it, neither the letter of the original text, nor that of the translations. It is precisely thus that the writers of the New Testament have done in relation to the Septuagint. p. 60.

In the 4th section of this chapter, the author treats the question of the variations which are found in the original text of the Scriptures; and although it does not touch the question of the plenary and verbal inspiration of the original text to allege that there are variations in early manuscripts and versions, yet Professor Gaussen devotes nearly forty pages to this subject, and gives a summary of the remarkable results to which long-continued and most extensive and faithful investigations on the part of Mill, Griesbach, Rossi, Kennicott, Bengel, Scholz and others have led.

In the 5th section he treats the objection against the inspiration of the Scriptures, which some have founded on the appa

rent instances of bad reasoning, inapplicable quotations, popular superstitions, prejudices, and other weaknesses which they allege to be found in the Scriptures. The answer which our author makes to all this is of a very general nature, and is perhaps as good as could be given to such vague accusations, without going into a minute examination of all such instances,which would require a volume.

Under section 6th of this chapter, the author devotes thirty pages to the consideration of the alleged Errors in the Narratives, and Contradictions in the Facts of the sacred Scriptures. Not only did Socinus, Castellion, and others of the same school, in the XVIth century, maintain the existence of such errors and contradictions, but, what is more astonishing, some very distinguished men of our own times-such as Dr. John Pye Smith, Daniel Wilson (now Bishop of Calcutta), and Twesten of Berlin—have admitted the same thing. Professor Gaussen replies with great ability to the positions taken by these authors, and maintains that no such errors or contradictions exist in the Scriptures, when rightly translated. He goes into a minute. examination of a large number of the most important instances of errors and contradictions which have been alleged, and certainly maintains with success the ground which he holds on this point. Our limits will not suffer us to follow him in the examination which he makes of these cases. They are such as the apparent contradictions which exist in the different accounts given by the evangelists respecting the resurrection of the Saviour; the blind men of Jericho ; the death of Judas Iscariot; various dates mentioned in the historical books of the Old Testament; the genealogies of Jesus Christ; the enrolment of the people mentioned in Luke 2: 1, 2; the contradictions which are found in 1 Cor. 15: 44, and Job 19: 26; the temptation of the Saviour as recorded by Matthew and Luke, &c. &c. All these alleged difficulties are treated in a most satisfactory manner, and it is conclusively demonstrated that they constitute no valid ground of objection to the doctrine of the plenary inspiration of the sacred volume.

In the same section, the author discusses the Errors in the Sacred Scriptures, which, it is alleged, contradict the Laws of Nature. This he does at length, and with much ability. Indeed this section is the most masterly view of this subject which we have ever seen. We have only one objection to make to it, and that relates to what the author says

respecting the miracle of the sun and the moon standing still at the command of Joshua. It was scarcely worth while to undertake to demonstrate mathematically how the earth might be made to cease revolving on its axis without causing "the belligerent armies," as the neological Professor Chenevière asserts," and every thing which is on the surface of the soil, to be swept away like chaff by the tempest." The objection is too silly to merit a moment's notice, For, could not the same Almighty hand which caused the earth and the moon instantaneously to stop, also hold every thing, animate and inanimate, in its proper place on their surface, and that in so perfect a manner that not the slightest derangement should occur?

After having shown that, from the nature of the case, the language of the Scriptures in relation to the phenomena of Nature, must be accommodated to that which mankind in all ages have commonly used; and after having shown how inconvenient and incomprehensible sometimes, even to the genius of a Newton, the Bible must have been if it had always spoken of the operations of Nature, not as science has even yet ascertained them, but as they really are, the author proceeds to lay down his first position in relation to this subject, which is, that there is not one physical error in the Word of God. This point he discusses with singular felicity. From this part of his work we are tempted to give an extract of considerable length, which will well reward the reader for a careful perusal. After having, in the course of several pages, indicated the errors of both ancient and modern philosophers, on several points in Physics and Astronomy, as well as some of the ridiculous decisions of some of the Roman Pontiffs, such as Pope Zachariah, and the Holy Office (by which Galileo was condemned), he proceeds:

But now open the Bible; study its fifty sacred authors, from that admirable Moses who held the pen in the wilderness, four hundred years before the war of Troy, to that fisherman, son of Zebedee, who wrote fifteen hundred years later at Ephesus and in Patmos, under the reign of Domitian;-open the Bible, and see if you will find there any thing like this. No; none of those mistakes which the science of each succeeding age discovers in the books of the preceding; above all, none of those absurdities which modern astronomy indicates, in such great numbers, in the writings of the ancients,-in their sacred codes, in their philosophies, and even in the finest pages of the Fathers of the Church,not one of these errors is to be found in any of our sacred books. Nothing there will ever contradict that which, after so many ages, the

investigations of the learned world have been able to reveal to us on the state of our globe, or on that of the heavens. Peruse, with care, our Scriptures from one end to the other, to find there such spots. And whilst you apply yourselves to this examination, remember that it is a book which speaks of every thing, which describes nature, which recounts its grandeur, which relates the story of its creation, which tells us of the formation of the heavens, of the light, of the water, of the atmosphere, of the mountains, of the animals and of the plants. It is a book which teaches us the first revolutions of the world, and which also foretells its last; it recounts them in the circumstantial language of history, it extols them in the sublimest strains of poetry, and it chants them in the charms of glowing song. It is a book which is full of oriental rapture, elevation, variety and boldness. It is a book which speaks of the heavenly and invisible world; whilst it also speaks of the earth and things visible. It is a book which nearly fifty writers, of every degree of cultivation, of every state, of every condition, and living through the course of fifteen hundred years, have concurred to make. It is a book which was written in the centre of Asia, in the sands of Arabia, and the deserts of Judah, in the courts of the temple of the Jews, in the rustic schools of the prophets of Bethel and of Jericho, in the sumptuous palaces of Babylon, and on the idolatrous banks of Chebar; and finally, in the centre of the western civilization, in the midst of the Jews and of their ignorance, in the midst of polytheism and its idols, as also in the bosom of pantheism and of its sad philosophy. It is a book whose first writer had been forty years a pupil of the magicians of Egypt, in whose opinion the sun, the stars and the elements were endowed with intelligence, reacted on the elements, and governed the world by a perpetual effluvium. It is a book whose first writer preceded, by more than nine hundred years, the most ancient philosophers of ancient Greece and Asia, the Thaleses and the Pythagorases, the Zaleucuses, the Xenophons and the Confuciuses. It is a book which carries its narrations even to the plains of the invisible world, even to the hierarchies of angels, even to the most distant epochs of the future, and the glorious scenes of the last day. Well; search among its 50 authors, search among its 66 books, its 1,189 chapters and its 31,173 verses, search for only one of those thousand errors which the ancients and the moderns commit when they speak of the heavens or of the earth; of their revolutions or of their elements; search, but you will find none. Its language is without constraint and without reserve. It speaks of every thing and in all tones. It is the prototype,—it has been the unrivalled model, and the inspirer of all that is most elevated in poetry. Ask Milton, ask the Racines, ask Young, ask Klopstock. They will tell you, that this divine poetry is, of all, the most lyrical, the boldest and the most sublime. It mounts on the wings of a seraph, it expatiates on those of the wind. And yet this book never does violence either to the facts or to the principles of a sound philosophy of nature. You never find it in opposition, even in one sentence, to the just notions which science has conveyed to us on the form of our globe, on its size and its geology; on the void and on space; on the inert and passive materiality of all the stars; on the planets, on their masses, on their courses, on their dimensions, or on their influences; on the stars which

inhabit the profundities of space, on their number, on their nature, on their immensity. In like manner, when speaking of the invisible world, and of the subject—so new, so unknown, so delicate—of the angels, this book will not present you one of its writers, in the course of the 1560 years, which were employed in writing it, who has differed from the others in the character which he gives of the love, of the humility, of the fervor, and of the purity, which belongs to those mysterious beings. In like manner, in speaking of the relations of the heavenly world to God, never has one of these fifty writers, either in the Old Testament or in the New, uttered a single word favorable to the perpetual pantheism of the heathen philosophy. Neither do you find one of the authors of the Bible who, in speaking of the visible world, has suffered to escape from his pen one of those sentences which in other books contradict the reality of facts; not one which makes of the heavens a firmament, as do the Septuagint, St. Jerome and all the Fathers of the Church;* no one who makes the world to be an intelligent animal, as Plato does; no one who reduces all things here below, to the four physical elements of the ancients; no one who thinks with the Jews, with the Greeks and the Romans, with the best geniuses of antiquity,—with the great Tacitus among the ancients, and the great De Thout among the moderns,—with the skeptical Montaigne, that the stars have rule and power, not only over our lives, and the conditions of our fortune, but even over our inclinations, our discourse, our wills; that they rule them, impel and agitate them at the mercy of their influences; and that (as far as our reason teaches and discovers) the entire of this lower world is moved at the least shaking of the least of the heavenly movements. Facta etenim et vitas hominum suspendit ab astris." No one who speaks of the mountains as Mohammed does; of the cosmogony as Buffon; of the antipodes as Lucretius, as Plutarch, as Pliny, as Lactantius, as St. Augustine, as Pope Zachariah. Certainly, if only one of these errors which abound in the writings of philosophers, both ancient and modern, could be found in the Bible, cur faith in the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures would be more than compromised; it would be necessary to acknowledge that there are errors in the Word of God, and that these false sentences belong to a fallible writer and not to the Holy Spirit; for God is not man that he should lie; in him there is no variableness, nor shadow of falsehood; and He to whom "lying lips are an abomination," cannot contradict himself, nor dictate that which is false.

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There is, then, no physical error in the Scriptures, and this great fact, which becomes the more wonderful in proportion as it is viewed from a position near at hand, is a striking proof of the inspiration which dictated them, even in the choice of their least expressions.

But still more;-here is a second fact. Not only does the Bible not contain a false sentence, or a false expression, but it often allows to escape words which make us recognize, in a manner not to be misunderstood, the science of the Almighty. Its great object, without doubt, was to reveal to us the eternal grandeurs of the invisible world, and not

* As the authors of our authorized English version have also done. † De Thou, or Tuanus, a distinguished French writer. Montaigne's Essays, Book II. ch. 12.