Suppose even that a verbal inspiration could have been secured--secured, observe, against _gradual_ changes in language and against the reactionary corruption of concurrent versions, which it would be impossible to guarantee as also enjoying such an inspiration (since, in that case, _what_ barrier would divide mine or anybody's wilfully false translations from that pretending to authority? I repeat _what_? None is conceivable, since what could you have beyond the assurance of the translator, even which could only guarantee his intentions)--here is a cause of misinterpretation amounting to ruin, viz., after being read for centuries as if practically meant for our guidance, such and such a chapter (_e.g._, Jael and Sisera), long proscribed by the noble as a record of abominable perfidy, has at length been justified on the ground that it was never meant for anything else. Thus we might get rid of David, etc., were it not that for his flexible obedience to the _clerus_ he has been pronounced the man after God's own heart.
Is it not dreadful that at the very vestibule of any attempt to execute the pretended law of God and its sentences to hell we are interrupted by one case in every three as exceptional? Of the deaths, one in three are of children under five. Add to these surely _very_ many up to twelve or thirteen, and _many_ up to eighteen or twenty, then you have a law which suspends itself for one case in every two.
_Note in the argument drawn from perishableness of language._ Not only (which I have noted) is any language, _ergo_ the original, Chaldæan, Greek, etc., perishable even for those who use it, but also the vast openings to error which all languages open to translators form a separate source of error in translators, viz.:
1. The old one on my list that for them the guidance of inspiration has ceased, else, if not, you must set up an inspiration separately to translators, since, if you say--No, not at all, why, which then?
2. The uncertainty of a foreign language even in a day contemporary with the original writer, and therefore over and above what arises from lapse of time and gradual alterations.
_On Human Progress._--Oftentimes it strikes us all that this is so insensible as to elude observation the very nicest. Five years add nothing, we fancy. Now invert your glass. In 1642 Englishmen are fighting for great abstract principles. In 1460-83 (_i.e._, 100 + 17 + 42 years before, or 159 years) they are fighting for persons, for rival candidates. In 1460 they could not have conceived more than an Esquimaux can entertain a question about the constitution of lyric poetry, or the differential principles of English and Greek tragedy, the barest approximation to questions that in 1642 are grounds of furious quarrel, of bloody quarrel, of extermination. Now then, looking forward, you would see from year to year little if any growth; but inverting your glass, looking back from the station of 1642 to 1460, you see a progress that if subdivided amongst all the 159 years would give to each _x_/0 as its quota, _i.e._ infinity. In fact, it is like the progression from nothing to something. It is--creation.