THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
prophet was denied. This led to the other extreme; it placed the revelation of the Old Testament on the same level with that of the New, and so finallyresulted in the not indeed mantic, but mechanical, doctrine of inspiration held by the older Protestant theologians. The attempts at a truer theory found in Irenseus' distinction between prophetic and apostolic inspiration (III., xi. 4), and his notion of a development in the history of God's redeeming work (IV., ix. 3), bore no fruit. The doctrine of the Fathers recognized both the unrestricted operation of the Holy Ghost upon the minds and wills of Scriptural authors and at the same time their own independent activity, to which more than mere form and style was attributed; but they seem to have made no attempt to frame a theory as to the manner in which these two were combined. Thus, e.g., Augustine, who says in one place that the Evangelists wrote " as each remembered, in accordance with his native powers, either briefly or at greater length " (De consensu evangelistarum, ii. 12), in another compares the apostles to hands that wrote down what the head, Christ, dictated (ib., i. 35). Among the Fathers Origen went most deeply into the question. What he says about it agrees closely with his theory that inspiration is an elevation of the mind and an opening of the inner ear to the truth — a higher degree of the illumination bestowed upon all pious believers. That so little use was made of Origen's suggestions was not a consequence of their connection with other parts of his system, or of the suspicion which was cast upon his orthodoxy, but rather of the fact that (when the epoch of the apologists was past and Montanism was conquered) there was little practical interest in these questions. In the controversies which distracted the Church the authority and the divine origin of the Scriptures were not called in question. With the issue of these conflicts and the strengthening of the Church's organization, the Church took its place by the side of the Scriptures as a coordinate authority, and even at times more than that, so that Augustine could say (Adv. Manichceos, v.), " I would not believe the Gospel against the authority of the Catholic Church." The acceptance of a continuous inspiration, expressed especially in the decisions of councils, gave rise to the theory of a twofold source of knowledge, as to which only a standard of judgment in matters of fact was required, not a decision as to the manner of inspiration. The emphasis laid by the school of Antioch on the human side of the Scriptures was not important enough, in view of the simultaneous recognition of their authority, to call forth much discussion as to inspiration itself. Even the bold assertions of Theodore of Mopsuestia that the Book of Job was a poem originating on heathen soil, that Canticles contained a tedious epithalamium, that Solomon (in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes) had the logos gnoseos, " the gift of wisdom," but not the logos sophias, " the prophetic gift," did not touch the general theory of inspiration, but only raised the question whether all parts of the Scriptures had the same measure of (prophetic) . inspiration ; and the only result was the condemnation of these propositions by the Council of Constantinople.
By a natural process, the operation of the Holy Ghost occupied an increasingly prominent place, and the independent personality of the writers was less and less considered. When Agobard of Lyons dwelt upon the external signs of this independence, and remarked that the sacred writers had not always observed the strict rules of grammar, the Abbot Fridugis of Tours (q.v.) went so far as to assert that the Holy Spirit had formed " even the very verbal expressions in the mouth of the Apostles." And Agobard did not think of limiting the operation of the Spirit; he preferred to explain the phenomenon by a condescension on the part of the Holy Spirit to human weakness.
No deeper interest in the question was displayed
by scholasticism, which discussed it, indeed, with
its accustomed minuteness in connec-
3. The tion with the rest of the system, but
Scholastic showed no sense of its importance in
Period, relation to revelation. Here and there, as from Anselm and Thomas Aquinas, it received more serious consideration. The latter treats the subject under the head of gratiae gratis datae, or charismata, distinguishing between the gift of knowledge and the gift of the word, without which the gift of knowledge would be useless to others. To express the right word, the Holy Ghost makes use of the tongue of men "as of an instrument, but he himself perfects the inner working." The blessing is sometimes diminished by the fault of the hearer, sometimes by that of the speaker. The operation of the Holy Ghost thus does no violence to the independence of the agent. The authority of the Scriptures was not questioned, but the impulse to use and to investigate them was not yet awakened. Mysticism had a deep feeling for the divine power of the Word and a clear understanding of the operation of the Holy Ghost. A belief in the continuance of the gift left the Scriptural inspiration not so radically different, in spite of its admitted precedence, from experiences which were possible to others; and so, even while its authority was firmly maintained, there was a certain indifference to its unique character. The assertion of Abelard, based upon Gal. ii. 11 sqq., that the prophets and apostles were not infallible, was employed with some hesitation by him; but when Renaissance scholarship pointed to defects in detail as results of the human limitations of the Scriptural writers, neither the Church nor scholars thought of the authority of the Bible as any less assured.
Never since the apostolic age had so admirable
a use been made of its pages, and never had its
authority been so decidedly upheld as
4. The in the Reformation period; but for this Reforma- very reason there was little speculation tion. on the way in which it had come to be. No one disputed its authority; the only question was as to the manner of its use. This explains the fact that among the Reformers and their immediate successors the old conception of inspiration is still found without any further discussion of the mutual relations of the two factors in the formation of the Scriptures, and without any attempt to define the limits within which inspira-