let us attend to our own. And to this extent it is evident at a
glance that Bibliolatrists _must_ be wrong, viz., because, as a
pun vanishes on being translated into another language, even so
would, and must melt away, like ice in a hot-house, a large majority
of those conceits which every Christian nation is apt to ground upon
the verbal text of the Scriptures in its own separate vernacular
version. But once aware that much of their Bibliolatry depends upon
ignorance of Hebrew and Greek, and often upon peculiarity of idiom
or structures in their mother dialect, cautious people begin to
suspect the whole. Here arises a very interesting, startling, and
perplexing situation for all who venerate the Bible; one which must
always have existed for prying, inquisitive people, but which has
been incalculably sharpened for the apprehension of these days by
the extraordinary advances made and making in Oriental and Greek
philology. It is a situation of public scandal even to the deep
reverencers of the Bible; but a situation of much more than scandal,
of real grief, to the profound and sincere amongst religious people.
On the one hand, viewing the Bible as the word of God, and not
merely so in the sense of its containing most salutary counsels,
but, in the highest sense, of its containing a revelation of the
most awful secrets, they cannot for a moment listen to the pretence
that the Bible has benefited by God's inspiration only as other good
books may be said to have done. They are confident that, in a much
higher sense, and in a sense incommunicable to other books, it is
inspired. Yet, on the other hand, as they will not tell lies, or
countenance lies, even in what seems the service of religion, they
cannot hide from themselves that the materials of this imperishable
book are perishable, frail, liable to crumble, and actually _have_
crumbled to some extent, in various instances. There is, therefore,
lying broadly before us, something like what Kant called an