Page:God and His Book.djvu/13



 All Scripture Inspired—Difficulty of Knowing Divine from Human Writings—Holy Ghost Lacks Literary Talent—Old Testament References to Books Now Lost—Are the Targums Inspired?—The Godhead as an Author.

"All Scripture is God-inspired," πάσα γραΦη θεόπνενστος. This is awkward for such theologians as would like to claim that only their own favourite texts are inspired and the passages that lend support to their little ism, but that texts that are repugnant to them, and passages which conflict with their ism, are not God-inspired. This contention, of course, implies that the Holy Ghost produced some writings and shook them up in a sack with the writings of mere mortals, and set mankind to a desperate effort of eclecticism, the determining which are the writings of God and which are the writings of patristic forgers. Man cannot have been made so much lower than the angels after all, if he can write so alarmingly like God that even the learned have not been able to agree as to how much of the Holy Scriptures have been written by Jehovah of Heaven, and how much by John Smith of Earth. If this half-and-half inspiration theory be not particularly complimentary to El Shaddai, "the Almighty," it is certainly a feather in the cap of John Smith, a poor "worm of the dust."