Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/59

 are next ensuing; and far beyond those times. Our Bibles shall come into the hands of our sons, and of our grandsons, who, reading Hebrew as correctly as the most learned of their sires have read it, shall do so in a season of religious depth, and of religious conscientiousness, and who, in such a season, shall look back with grief, and shame, and amazement, when they see how nugatory were the difficulties which are making so many among us to stumble, and to fall. Human opinion has its fashion, and it shifts its ground with each generation;—a thirty or forty years is the utmost date of any one clearly definable mood or style of religious feeling and opinion: each of such ephemeral fashions being a departure, upon a radius, from the central authority—the Canon of Scripture, accepted as from God.

But the imperishable fixedness of Holy Scripture—first, in a purely literary sense, as an ascertained ancient text, which none may now alter; and next, as the vehicle or depository of the Divine Will toward mankind, does not imply or necessitate, either a superstitious and blind regard to the letter of Scripture, as if it were not human, or an enchainment to the words, as if the Divine element therein contained, and thereby conveyed, might not have been otherwise worded, and diffused among the people in other forms of language than in this one—to which, as a fixed standard, all must in fact return. Not only is the Divine, in Scripture, greater than the human, but it has an intrinsic power and vitality