Page:Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (Volume One).djvu/62



S I pass in this record from my childhood and early youth to the responsibilities of life, I am led to some reflections upon the changes in opinions and the changes in the condition of the people in the more than half-century from 1835 to 1899. At the first period there was not a clergyman of any of the Protestant denominations who questioned the plenary and verbal inspiration of the Scriptures, including the Old and New Testaments. The suggestion could not have been safely made in any New England pulpit that there were errors of translation, and yet the Christian world, outside the Catholic Church, now accepts a revision that changes the meaning of some passages and excludes others as interpolations. The account given in the first chapter of Genesis of the creation of the world and of man was accepted according to the meaning of the language used. At the present moment there is not a well-educated clergyman of any denomination who would not either treat the account as a legend, or else explain the days as periods of indefinite duration.

The claim of the verbal and plenary inspiration of the Old Testament is denied by many and doubted by others, and the volume is seen and treated by them as a compilation of works or books in which are recorded the thoughts and doings of men and tribes and nations that existed at different periods and flourished or suffered as is the fortune of mankind.

The early chapters of Genesis were then a faithful history; they are now a legend. The Book of Job was then an in-