opinion--that the founders of the doctrine borrowed their notions and
phrases respecting the Bible throughout. Remove the metaphorical
drapery from the doctrine of the Cabbalists, and it will be found to
contain the only intelligible and consistent idea of that plenary
inspiration, which later divines extend to all the canonical books;
as thus:- "The Pentateuch is but ONE WORD, even the Word of God; and
the letters and articulate sounds, by which this Word is communicated
to our human apprehensions, are likewise divinely communicated."

Now, for 'Pentateuch' substitute 'Old and New Testament,' and then I
say that this is the doctrine which I reject as superstitious and
unscriptural. And yet as long as the conceptions of the revealing
Word and the inspiring Spirit are identified and confounded, I assert
that whatever says less than this, says little more than nothing.
For how can absolute infallibility be blended with fallibility?
Where is the infallible criterion? How can infallible truth be
infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible expressions? The
Jewish teachers confined this miraculous character to the Pentateuch.
Between the Mosaic and the Prophetic inspiration they asserted such a
difference as amounts to a diversity; and between both the one and
the other, and the remaining books comprised under the tithe of
Hagiographa, the interval was still wider, and the inferiority in
kind, and not only in degree, was unequivocally expressed. If we
take into account the habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of
referring all excellent or extraordinary things to the great First
Cause, without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes--a
striking illustration of which may be obtained by comparing the
narratives of the same event in the Psalms and in the historical
books; and if we further reflect that the distinction of the
providential and the miraculous did not enter into their forms of