those traditional tales, which each successive reporter enlarges and
fashions to his own fancy and purpose, and every different edition of
which more or less contradicts the other? Allow me to create chasms
ad libitum, and ad libitum to fill them up with imagined facts and
incidents, and I would almost undertake to harmonise Falstaff's
account of the rogues in buckram into a coherent and consistent
narrative. What, I say, could have tempted grave and pious men thus
to disturb the foundation of the Temple, in order to repair a petty
breach or rat-hole in the wall, or fasten a loose stone or two in the
outer court, if not an assumed necessity arising out of the peculiar
character of Bible history?

The substance of the syllogism, by which their procedure was
justified to their own minds, can be no other than this. That,
without which two assertions--both of which MUST be alike true and
correct--would contradict each other, and consequently be, one or
both, false or incorrect, must itself be true. But every word and
syllable existing in the original text of the Canonical Books, from
the Cherethi and Phelethi of David to the name in the copy of a
family register, the site of a town, or the course of a river, were
dictated to the sacred amanuensis by an infallible intelligence.
Here there can be neither more nor less. Important or unimportant
gives no ground of difference; and the number of the writers as
little. The secretaries may have been many--the historian was one
and the same, and he infallible. This is the MINOR of the syllogism,
and if it could be proved, the conclusion would be at least
plausible; and there would be but one objection to the procedure,
namely, its uselessness. For if it had been proved already, what
need of proving it over again, and by means--the removal, namely, of
apparent contradictions--which the infallible Author did not think