Such a test would not indeed go very
far, because the human race is by no means agreed on all moral
questions; nor does it always find it easy to say what is, and what is
not, directly or indirectly connected with morals. But, in fact, the
scope of religion cannot be so confined: and then the difficulty
returns; for a revelation that tells us anything of the nature of God
and His method of government, of the nature of our own being and of a
future state, must necessarily go beyond our own ethical knowledge and
powers of judging, or it would not be a revelation. Supposing that the
revelation regarding such vital subjects is occasionally conveyed
through the medium of erroneous statements, where in any given case
would be the certainty as to what was Divine truth, and what not so?
This argument applies equally to another school of thinkers, who do not
care to tell us what the narrative in itself means: who believe that God
did not do what He is said to have done in Genesis, and yet who hold
that the narrative is in a sense inspired, and that we may learn from it
the great facts that God (and none other) originated all things--that
man has a spiritual element in his nature, and that woman is equal in
nature, but subordinate in position, to man, and so forth. Not only is
enlightened judgment, even, inadequate to pronounce with certainty on
how much is true; but the strange feeling still remains, if God designed
to teach us these truths only, why was it not possible to enable the
writer[1] to state them without the (purely gratuitous) error? The
sufferance of such a strange and unnecessary mixture of error seems
rather like that "putting to confusion" of the human mind, which we feel
sure the Great Teacher would never willingly perpetrate.
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