A large class of the objections to the doctrine of inspiration, which for many minds are the most effective, arise from the rejec- tion of one or other of the presumptions specified on a preceding page. If a man denies the existence of a personal, extramundane God, he must deny the doctrine of inspiration, but it is not neces- sary in order to prove that doctrine that we should first prove the being of God. If he denies that God exerts any direct efficiency in the government of the world, and holds that everything is the product of fixed laws, he cannot believe what the Scriptures teach of inspiration. If the supernatural be impossible, inspiration is impossible. It will be found that most of the objections, especially those of recent date, are founded on unscriptural views of the re- lation of God to the world, or on the peculiar philosophical views of the objectors as to the nature of man or of his free agency,
A still larger class of objections is founded on misconceptions of the doctrine. Such objections are answered by the correct state- ment of what the Church believes on the subject. Even a man so distinguished for knowledge and ability as Coleridge, speaks with contempt of what he regards as the common theory of inspiration, when he utterly misunderstands the real doctrine which he opposes. He says : " All the miracles which the legends of monk or rabbi contain, can scarcely be put in competition, on the score of compli- cation, inexplicableness, the absence of all intelligible use or pur- pose, and of circuitous self-frustration, with those that must be assumed by the maintainers of this doctrine, in order to give effect to the series of miracles by which all the nominal composers of the Hebrew nation before the time of Ezra, of whom there are any re^ mains, were successively transformed mto automaton compositors,"^ etc. But if the Church doctrine of inspiration no more assumes that the sacred writers " were transformed into automaton com- positors," than that every believer is thus transformed in whom God "works to will and to do," then all such objections amount Ic
1 " CoDfessions of an Inquiring Spirit," Works, Harpers, N. T., 1853, vol. v. p. 612.