OBJECTIONS FROM INSIGNIFICANT DETAILS,

Did the Holy Spirit dictate such details, it is asked, as the minute instructions for the Tabernacle and the Temple, the genealogies of private families and petty tribes, in the Old Testament; or such as the salutations to friends at the close of several epistles, Paul's medical counsel to Timothy as to taking remedies for his stomach and infirmities, or the communications with which he charges him as to his parchments and the cloak he had left at Troas?

1. This objection, it appears to us, wholly misconceives the doctrine which we advocate, ignoring the fact that we affirm and vindicate the thoroughly human quality of the books. This feature we claim for them as earnestly as their divine authority. The objection might be of force against a mechanical theory of inspiration, which admits no real human authorship, but it has no validity against our doctrine.

2. The objection also ignores the obviously beneficial and valuable design of some of these alleged “insignificant details”; e. g. the typical object of the Mosaic ritual, and of the temple ser vices, and the indispensable importance of the genealogies as evidence in tracing the descent of the Messiah.

3. Further, the objection fails to do justice to those historical passages which it charges with insignificance. It fails to appreciate those details which it calls trivial. It is just in these slight circumstances of the history that character speaks out, oftentimes, in the most affecting and instructive way. But for these affectionate greetings to beloved friends, we should have lacked evidence of the genuine tenderness of the Apostle's soul, and we might have been told that Christianity left no room for the virtue of friendship. The practical common-sense advice to Timothy is no encouragement to intemperance, but, on the other hand, a strong evidence that Timothy was abstemious in principle and practice, since it needed Apostolic suggestion and urgency to induce him to use even “a little wine,” and that when it was medicinally necessary.

Again, Paul's concern about his parchments and other books, and his cloak, is to our minds as interesting a circumstance as that other petty but instructive incident of the little old man, practical, helpful, considerate for others, after the shipwreck on the island of Malta, bustling around to gather up fragments of sticks to make a fire for the chilled and dripping company that had been rescued from the waves. We would not be willing to spare or lose either, on any consideration. They reveal to us the man, Paul; they bring us nearer to him in actual, real life.

Consider the case about this much complained of cloak. Here is a man who, some thirty years ago, renounced ease, fortune, popularity, brilliant prospects, — all for Christ, in order to do good to the souls of men. He has had his reward all along, from the world and from his nation, in stripes, in rod-beatings, in stonings, in imprisonments, in treachery and deadly conspiracy, in unblushing falsehoods, in unassuaged malice. And now his end is near. He is advanced in years, in his last prison, his usefulness accomplished, his course finished. He is just awaiting the sentence of death. Bravely, cheerfully, triumphantly, he writes his last letter to his dearest friend, his son in the Gospel. Not a note quivers, not a word hints of gloom or regret.

But he is shivering with cold. Winter is commencing. He is in want of clothes. And in that prison he is lonely. He cannot solace himself by talking, as of old, to the guard to whom he was chained; nor can he, as formerly, have interviews with the hostile Jews, and strive to convert them, or with the loving Christians, and endeavor to com fort them. He is shut off from such intercourse. Some of the Christians themselves are afraid or ashamed now to stand with him; and others are debarred from doing what they would for him. Only Luke is with him, sharing apparently his imprisonment for the sake of alleviating his sufferings, – Luke, who had been with him in his imprisonment at Cæsarea, and again in his first imprisonment at Rome. He is used to it: he has come to stand by him to the last. But the good man wants his books, especially certain beloved precious parchments. They would cheer his lonely hours. He needs his cloak, he wants his manuscripts. Is there nothing touching, nothing affect ing in this?

We read with emotion about Jerome of Prague, “shut up for three hundred and forty days in the prisons of Constance, in the bottom of a dark and fetid tower, and never allowed to leave it except to appear before his murderers "; and our hearts go out in sympathy with the martyr. We read of the venerable Bishop Hooper in old England, “dragged from his disgusting cellar, covered with wretched clothes and a borrowed cloak, tottering on his staff, and bent double with rheumatism on his way to the stake,” for the testimony of Jesus; and our hearts kindle anew with admiration and devotion. We read of Judson at Oung-pen-la, in extremest peril and destitution, ministered to by that godly wife, his life only saved at the risk of her own; and we feel afresh the impulse to rise to similar hero ism. And shall not these venerable martyrs, these noble missionaries, remind us also of our brother Paul, shut up in prison, suffering from loneliness and from cold, and asking for his cloak? And shall his example fail to stir our hearts, or excite our sympathy? — “We behold him," says Haldane, “standing upon the confines of the two worlds, — in this world about to be beheaded as guilty, by the Emperor of Rome, in the other world to be crowned as righteous, by the King of Kings; here deserted by men, there to be welcomed by angels; here in want of a cloak to cover him, there to be clothed upon with his house from heaven."

We put a high value upon that cloak, and the little passage that alludes to it.

In like manner we might take up, as Gaussen has done very instructively (Origin and Inspiration of the Bible, pp. 317–322), the greetings at the close of the Epistle to the Romans, and show the manifold and precious instructions which come to us from them. Mere lists of names, we are told; personal reminiscences of his friendships; dry nomenclature of eighteen people, all in oblivion otherwise: to give these needed no inspiration.

On the contrary, we are specially thankful for these very sixteen verses, giving us a living picture of a primitive Church, and casting a flood of light on the reorganization of heathen society under the influence of Christianity. And we do not see why inspiration might not suggest, as well as affection prompt, these kindly fraternal allusions.

But we almost shrink from pursuing this line of argument, for it seems as if, in such defences of what is contained in the Word of God, we are in danger of exalting ourselves to the position of judges of what should and what should not be contained in a revelation from God. A man who is fully competent for such judgment is competent to make a revelation.

As Gaussen has said, “It strikes us that there is no arrogance to be compared with that of a man who, owning the Bible to be from God, then makes bold to sift with his hand the pure in it from what is impure, the inspired from what is uninspired, God from man. This is to overturn all the foundation of the faith; it amounts to placing it no more in believing God, but in believing ourselves. " (p. 313.)

“There are those to-day,” says Mr. McConaughy, (in the Sunday School Times, 1880, p. 551,) “who know just what God ought to do, and their judgment, rather than what he pleases, is their criterion. They measure their God with a yardstick. They sound him with a plumb-line. They calculate him by mathematics. They bring him to the test of science. They regulate him according to right reason, – that is, their own. They prescribe the exact limits within which he may work; and then, having made him altogether such a one as themselves, having robbed him of his Godhead, they fall down and worship the God of their own hands."