De inspiratione sacrae Scripturae: theologica disquisitio

« But God is true ».

Rom. III-4.

That the absolute inerrancy of Sacred Scripture is a most firm dogma of the Catholic religion, no prudent person would deny. For although in this matter no solemn and explicit definition of any council or pontiff can be adduced, precisely because in past times the necessity of such a definition did not arise, the universal and perpetual preaching of the Church is sufficiently clear, and the innate sense of all the faithful corresponds to it in all things. For what Christian, hearing the testimonies of the Fathers on this matter, will not immediately recognize in them one of the principles that are, as it were, foundations in our faith? Augustine says, epist. 82, n. 3: « To those books alone of the Scriptures which are already called canonical I have learned to show this fear and honor, so as to believe most firmly that no author of them erred in writing anything... But I read others in such a way that, however much they may excel in holiness and doctrine, I do not on that account think a thing true because they themselves thought so, but because they were able to persuade me, either through those canonical authors or by a probable reason, that it does not depart from the truth. Nor do I think, my brother, that you feel otherwise. Absolutely, I say, I do not think that you wish your books to be read as those of the Prophets or Apostles are read, concerning whose writings it is impious to doubt that they are free from all error ». Jerome says, epist. 105, n. 5: « If perverse men find in the Gospels and the Prophets something they may strive to censure, do you wonder if in your books... certain things appear to deviate from the straight line? ». Gregory of Nazianzus says, Orat. 2, n. 105¹: « For let us not imagine that these things were committed rashly to the records of (sacred) letters, and that it is some empty mass of things and words composed to delight the minds of the hearers... Let fables and the gentiles, indeed, play with these things—men little concerned for the truth, who by the allurement of words pour, as it were, certain illusions into ears and minds. But we, who extend the Spirit's care even to the slightest stroke and line, will never concede—for it is not lawful—that even the least actions were rashly written down and elaborated by those who handed them down to memory, and preserved in memory up to these times ». St. Thomas says, Quodl. 12, a. 26 ad 1um: « Nevertheless this must be held, that whatever is contained in Sacred Scripture is true. Otherwise, whoever should think contrary to this would be a heretic ». And in 1a Part. Q. 68, a. 1, where he begins to treat of the work of the six days, he first lays down two cautions to be observed: « First, indeed, that the truth of Scripture be held unshaken. Second, since divine Scripture can be expounded in many ways, that no one adhere so precisely to any one exposition that, if by some sure reasoning it is established that what someone believed to be the sense of Scripture is false, he should nonetheless presume to assert it, lest Scripture be derided by unbelievers on this account, and lest the way of believing be closed to them ». Hence Melchior Cano most rightly observes at the beginning of his work On the Theological Loci: « We call sacred and canonical books those which the sacred authors set down, with the Holy Spirit dictating. Those, therefore, which are established to be such, we shall believe without doubt to be most certain and most true. For unless you have faithfully laid this foundation, that city of God will fall, whose foundations are in the holy mountains, and in the Scriptures of the princes who were in her. Of these Scriptures the author is not man, but God ».

Wherefore all who have admitted errors in the Scriptures have been branded as heretics. In this heresy were formerly the Anomoeans, as Epiphanius testifies, Haeres. 76 at the end: « And when they begin to be pressed by the force of arguments and to be hard put to it, they flee and leap out: “And these things,” they say, “the apostle said as a man” ». Likewise the Manichaeans, if you believe Augustine, book 2 against the adversary of the law and the prophets, c. 2: « He contrived all this so that, if at any time something should be brought forward from an apostolic epistle, where the law and the prophets bear witness to the gospel, he might say that the apostle said this, not to the wise and perfect, but to the Jews, having spoken as a Jew, etc. ». Likewise Erasmus, of whom Bellarmine, book 1 On the Word of God, c. 6: « In our age, he says, Erasmus has renewed the same heresy², since in his annotations on the 2nd and 27th chapters of Matthew he wrote not obscurely that we need not fear that the authority of all Scripture will collapse if some slight error is detected in it, especially since Augustine concedes that the evangelists slipped in memory, and it seems that this cannot be denied in any way ». But this ancient heresy was connected in the minds of its authors, at least by an intimate link, with the denial of a divine dictation extending itself to each and every part of Scripture. For they had not hitherto dreamed that any error, of whatever order it might be, could proceed from the revelation of God. To our own age alone was reserved that new advance of its own kind: I mean the incredible opinion of certain biblical scholars, who have held that scientific or historical errors are admissible in the Scriptures, even in conjunction with divine inspiration. For they imagine an inspiration which they call economic, contrasting the doctrine that God intends to teach us with the modes under which He teaches and proposes it. And as for the doctrine that is the object of the inspiring God's intention, they readily confess that it is not and cannot be anything but truth, although that truth is always contained within the order of faith and morals, in that undoubtedly most restricted sense of which mention was made in the preceding chapter.

But in their view nothing prevents the form under which the dogmatic truth dictated by God was to be consigned to the sacred writings from having been filled with those errors, scientific or historical, with which men's minds were preoccupied in keeping with the diversity of times and places—the minds, that is, of the men through whom those writings were composed and to whom, as to their proximate and immediate readers, the sacred Scriptures were directed. Moreover they add that no harm is to be feared on this account, because Scripture is coordinated to the Church, which has been established as its infallible interpreter³.

These things being so, then, we must first consider for what causes our biblical scholars have come to this opinion, which so openly conflicts with the Christian sense—not to say the common sense. Second, by what arguments they endeavor to support it as best they can. Third, how this untenable opinion was expressly condemned by the Encyclical Providentissimus Deus.

And indeed, one would have thought it more certain, even a priori, that men still glorying in the Catholic name had subscribed to the theory just stated not without the gravest reasons—indeed, only when compelled by ineluctable evidence. For although many are now found to whom applies exactly what is written of the Athenians, Act. XVII-21: Now all the Athenians and the strangers sojourning among them had leisure for nothing else but either to tell or to hear something new, yet novelty itself can by no means have an unlimited power of attracting minds, especially when one reaches those limits where the poet's saying has its place: Whatever you show me thus, incredulous, I loathe. Here, then, the mere allurement of novelty could not have intervened; weightier reasons must undoubtedly have been in play, which we must consider before we proceed further.

First, then, they note that Scripture openly errs in the astronomical matter, as regards the system of the world. For it presents to us the sun as moving around the earth, and the earth as immovable. It says that the stars are luminaries made for man's use, of which the two greatest of all are the sun and the moon. It teaches also that God founded the earth upon the waters, and stretched out the heavens above like a tent. But all these things, as is now known to all, contradict flatly the truth of science¹. — But if you reply timidly that Scripture speaks in the very way in which all modern astronomers still speak, whenever they are not obliged to use technical circumlocutions²; that the earth is said by Ecclesiastes to stand forever, not absolutely, but in opposition to the perpetual succession of generations following one another in turn³; that the sun and the moon are most truly called by Moses the greater luminary and the lesser luminary in relation to us; finally, that the sacred writers used in hymns and canticles and psalms the same expressions that poets everywhere use to this day, without ever affording from themselves the least suspicion of error or ignorance in physical matters: if, I say, you timidly oppose the simple and obvious answers that we all learned from childhood, you must know that those answers no longer hold. It remains, therefore, that you hold without scruple that there are in the Bible many statements that stand in contradictory opposition to scientific truth, although the errors just mentioned are not yet found except in what are obiter dicta. But here is something more serious.

Second, then, they proclaim the necessity of adhering to the conclusions that modern science has made definitive. Now the conclusions are of such a kind that most of the narratives consigned in the books of the Old Testament must altogether be held as historically false⁴. You will perhaps object that those definitive conclusions of science are definitive only in the imagination of those who assert them, or in the benevolent credulity of their disciples. You will also adduce certain examples in confirmation. For instance, the example of those definitive conclusions of the eighteenth-century encyclopedists as to the fabulous character of the accounts of Abraham and of Joseph with the kings of Egypt, which at the very beginning of the nineteenth century the discovery and interpretation of the hieroglyphs showed to be anything but definitive. Likewise the example of the conclusion, equally definitive, and immediately antiquated after the discovery of the tablets at El-Amarna, by which, scarcely twenty years ago, they decreed that the art of writing among the Israelite people had been invented only three or four centuries after Moses and Joshua⁵. You will observe further that it happens daily that even thoroughgoing rationalists explode their own definitive conclusions against biblical facts, and destroy them with the most solid arguments⁶. No, sir! For the science of the rationalists is valid when it fights against the Bible, but when it confirms the Bible it is no longer valid, because then it by no means supplies a sufficient pledge of independence and, as it were, surety.

Third, the learned exegetes do not doubt that a prodigious antiquity must be attributed to the world and to the human race. And since, according to Scripture, the appearance of man upon earth is relatively recent, it remains for us to concede that biblical history, as history, is false, and by no means consistent with the facts⁷. — You reply again that there are perhaps many things that would seem more than enough to enervate the force of this argument. The codices do not agree among themselves as to the reckoning of the years, so that in this part the errors of copyists or transcribers can and must legitimately be presumed. Nothing forces us to take the series of the patriarchs, whether before or after the flood, as a series of men succeeding one another immediately, with no intermediate links suppressed. Above all, the principle from which they proceed is false, since they suppose that man raised himself from a shapeless and wholly savage state to the state of civilization by a very slow and continuous progress, whereas the Scriptures expressly testify—and indeed in a matter pertaining to faith and morals, according to the biblical scholars themselves—that man came forth perfect from the hands of his Creator: so that, clearly, civilization is not to be thought of as terminating a movement of emergence from barbarism, but rather barbarism, wherever it is found, as placed at the term of an inverse movement, namely of corruption and degeneration. Finally, no more trust is to be placed in the calculations of learned masters in estimating the antiquity of humanity than was to be placed, for example, in the judgments of experts concerning the authenticity of the tiara of King Saitaphernes. For if experts sometimes err so shamefully as to take things fabricated by contemporary artisans for monuments of the most remote times, how far will palaeontologists wander in a matter that lies much more open to arbitrary estimations, and is involved in far greater obscurities, and contains, for modern man, causes of error multiplied almost to infinity!⁸. — Notwithstanding all this, you will still have firmly to believe that such is the biblical chronology that it contradicts historical truth in all things, and that from this head also the absolute inerrancy of Scripture is not sustained.

Fourth, they observe certain notable concordances of the scriptural narratives with the fables of the nations. And these concordances the study of the Semitic languages, the discovery of cuneiform inscriptions, and the continuous investigations of Orientalists make more evident every day. Although the matter was not of such weight, since classical letters, both Greek and Latin, had long since abundantly sufficed for the same observation. For who, for example, would not notice in Aeschylus' tragedy Prometheus vinctus a shadowing forth of all that is related by Moses concerning the temptation and fall of man in the earthly paradise, and also of the promised seed of the woman that shall crush the serpent's head? especially since of this future savior Mercury says at the end: Do not expect an end of such misery, O Prometheus, before another of the gods shall appear as the successor of your labors, and shall will to descend to the gloomy Orcus and to the murky depth of Tartarus⁹. Who would not recognize the biblical giants, and the later building of the tower of Babel, in the following verses of Ovid: They say the giants aspired to the heavenly kingdom, and piled up mountains heaped to the stars. Then the almighty Father, hurling his thunderbolt, shattered Olympus and cast down Pelion upon subject Ossa? Who also, reading in the first book of the Metamorphoses of the same Ovid how chaos was unfolded, and how in the beginning the elements were each arranged in their own places; how the heaven was adorned with stars, the earth with living things, and man, last of all, was created; how finally the golden age was first sown, to which then succeeded the silver age, then the bronze, then the iron, until, war having been declared against the gods by the giants, Jupiter resolved to destroy the world by a flood, with Deucalion alone saved and received on mount Parnassus, where carried with the companion of his bed in a small raft, he clung there: who, I say, has not noted an evident parallelism with the first eleven chapters of Genesis? Who will not think Adam expressed in Saturn devouring his children, or Noah in Janus having a double face, the one aged, with which he looks back upon the old world destroyed by the waters of the flood, the other youthful, with which he casts joyful eyes upon the new world about to be born from him? The same narratives, then, are found both in Moses and in the ancient poets of the nations. But if these are false inventions in the Greek or Egyptian or Babylonian mythologies, will they at last be truth in the Bible? It remains, therefore, to say that God, in inspiring the sacred writers, accommodated Himself to the common mentality of ancient men, inasmuch as, in view of the end He intended, namely the teaching of divine and moral truths, He indeed employed false legends that were everywhere admitted, but purified them from every dogmatic stain; nay rather, He made them the vehicle of a most sublime and most lofty religious doctrine¹⁰. — You will perhaps wonder at such a conclusion, because you are still held by the outworn prejudices of the old apologetics. For you thought that the very fables of the nations, in that in which they agree, undoubtedly show a certain substratum of historical truth, albeit adulterated with many fantastic and absurd chimeras. For in any order of things whatsoever, a cause proportioned to the effect is to be sought. But if the imagination of peoples is rightly assigned to explain the dissimilar varieties, it would be only irrationally posited as the principle of common and universal traditions, of the kind that those are concerning a certain original age of innocence and felicity, concerning the tempting serpent, concerning the fall of the human race into the present state of misery and tribulation, concerning the promised restorer, concerning the impiety of the giants, concerning the catastrophe of the flood, and so on. Hence, then, you deduced that if any narrative of these things should chance to be found, shining above all the rest as the sun above the darkness, a narrative pure, simple, limpid, sublime, and consonant with right reason, it would undoubtedly have to be regarded as receiving from the others testimony of absolute truth, so far from being dragged into the partnership of a common falsification. You deduced especially that even the mere suspicion of a derivation of so sublime a book from the corrupt fountains of fables would have to be removed, since the pure scarcely arises from the impure, and even in natural things clear water is not wont to flow from a muddy spring, whereas on the contrary it happens most frequently that from a most pure spring the stream flowing first, afterwards in its course, is defiled or corrupted by the admixture of many heterogeneous elements; wherefore, if one had necessarily to acknowledge that the one was derived from the other, the derivation of the fable from Scripture would seem far, far more probable than that of Scripture from the fable. This, I say, you deduced according to the rules of the ancient wisdom. But since in those rules some defect of logic or other has been discovered, we must now really conclude that Scripture is indeed immune from every stain as regards the dogma of religion, but is in the same condition as the pagan mythologies as regards the rest.

Fifth, they enumerate the antilogies found in the Scriptures. Of Antiochus, for example, it is related in 2. Mach. I-13 that he was killed by the priests in the temple of Nana; and further on, IX-28, it is said that, fleeing from Persepolis while he was meditating to destroy the Jews utterly, struck by God with the greatest pains of the bowels, with worms swarming from his body amid an intolerable stench, he died a natural death. Likewise, Genes. XI-12, Sale is called the son of Arphaxad, and Luc. III-36, the son of Cainan, of whom, if you except the version of the Seventy, no trace is found. Again, 1 Reg. XVII-55¹¹, Saul asks Abner of what stock David, who was going out against Goliath, was sprung, although David could not then have been unknown to Saul, since he had already before that become Saul's own armor-bearer and table-companion, 1 Reg. XVI-21. Further, in the census of the people that David had ordered to be made toward the end of his reign, there are numbered 2 Reg. XXIV-9 eight hundred thousand valiant men of Israel, and of Judah five hundred thousand; but 1 Par. XXI-5 there are numbered a thousand thousand and a hundred thousand of Israel, and of Judah four hundred and seventy thousand. Likewise in the Gospels very many discrepancies are noted, both as regards the infancy of the Savior, and as regards the deeds of His public life, and finally as regards the circumstances of the passion, and especially of the appearances after the resurrection. But to these and other difficulties of the same kind, on the supposition of the absolute inerrancy of the Bible, satisfactory answers have nowhere been given¹². — To these things, however, it might perhaps be replied that this assertion about the insufficiency of the answers seems to have been brought forward rather rashly; that it has not hitherto been so judged among Catholics, and that whatever is newly affirmed without any proof against the common estimation of prudent men is rightly and deservedly regarded as a purely subjective appraisal. That man shows himself too harsh who still finds the evangelical antilogies irreducible after the manifold and highly reasonable solutions given by our commentators, and to whom that radical solution, by which errors would have to be admitted in divinely inspired books, would now appear preferable to conciliation procedures so probable as those proposed up to now¹³. With regard to the Old Testament, account must first be taken of the present state of the codices in names and numbers, lest you transfer to the original Scriptures difficulties that take their origin from the versions or copies alone¹⁴. With regard to Antiochus also, there is no great need to be solicitous, both because it is highly uncertain whether the same Antiochus is spoken of in each place¹⁵, and because, granted that it is Antiochus Epiphanes who is meant in the letter found reported at the beginning of the book, solid explanations are still not lacking¹⁶. In short, there is so much subjectivity in estimating matters of this kind that a writer of no small repute from the rationalist school finds a positive document of historical truth in that very questioning of Saul, 1 Reg. XVII-55¹⁷, which the encyclopedists adduced in demonstration of an open contradiction¹⁸. — These and other similar things you would reply to the argument that our exegetes draw from the biblical antilogies. But again, the case is closed, because such is the critical evidence in this part that it admits of no other demonstration of a matter already judged¹⁹.

It remains, however, that the critics show this position of theirs, concerning the manifold errors of the Bible in matters as much scientific as historical, to be reconcilable with the dogma of inspiration. And here is the work, here the toil. Are there, then, certain weighty considerations by which the possibility of a reconciliation may be—I do not say now persuaded, but even from afar insinuated?

And how could they be, if every saying of Scripture is a saying of God, if God is the first Truth, if it is altogether impossible and contradictory that something false be said by the first Truth? Certainly St. Thomas, asking whether the faith which is taught by the divine Scripture handed down by the Holy Spirit can be subject to falsity, answers: « Nothing can fall under faith except insofar as it stands under the first Truth, under which no falsity can stand, just as neither non-being under being, nor evil under goodness » ¹. In which indeed, I think, he enunciates a mere principle of pure reason as well, which can never be eluded by any subterfuge, as long as there stands in men's minds the concept of subsistent and absolute Truth, which is God most great and most good. Hence, when among certain theologians of a more decadent age there occurs the question agitated far and wide, whether God, either by Himself or through another, either by ordinary or by absolute power, can deceive or lie, against so vain a disputation the intimate sense protests, and each one judges in his own mind that it is to be ascribed to a notable progress that such idle problems no longer have a place in the schools of today. But God is true, says the Apostle, Rom. III-4. And Christ the Lord, John XVII-17: Thy word is truth. And above: The Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive... the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father... But when that Spirit of truth shall have come. Finally 1 John II-21: Every lie is not of the truth.

Nor is any escape to be found in what they feign as economic inspiration, distinguishing between what God intended to teach men and what He employed as a means to propose the doctrine of religion. For a conception of this kind, if it tends to the point that a possible fallacy in the means to the aforesaid end is asserted, destroys first the holiness, and then the wisdom, of God. — It destroys holiness, because to say what is false in order to teach what is true is the same as to do evil in order to procure good. But this is most certainly intrinsically evil. Otherwise, says the Apostle in Rom. III-8, why am I also still judged as a sinner? And not, as we are blasphemed, and as some say that we say, let us do evil that good may come; whose damnation is just. And the reason is too well known to need explanation, namely because a legitimate end does not make the means legitimate, and therefore the intention of teaching the truth has nowhere taken away from false testimony the deformity of a lie. One of two things, therefore: Either Scripture is not inspired in all its parts, but as regards the uninspired parts God conducted Himself merely permissively. Or, if—as the present state of the question has it—all things were written with God dictating, the distinction between what God dictated and that for which, or for the sake of which, He dictated is altogether irrelevant to the proposed aim of placing in safety the supreme truthfulness and infinite holiness of God. — But if holiness is destroyed, will wisdom be saved, whose part it is to order just and proportionate means to the end? But how, I ask, will those books obtain my faith concerning heavenly and supramundane things, if as regards the things that lie under my knowledge they are found to be lying? Bede rightly somewhere reproves those Pharisees who, tempting Christ, sought from Him a sign from heaven: « But you, he says, who calumniate the things you see with your eyes, hold in your hand, and perceive by their use, what will you do with the things that have come from heaven? You will surely answer that the magicians in Egypt also worked many signs from heaven ». Why, then, should there not be someone similarly reproving Scripture in this manner: But you, who are found not even in the things placed under me to agree with the truth, why do you command faith concerning the things that are above me? Are you deceitful in the least things, and truthful in the greatest? Deceiving me where I am able to detect the error, and teaching me infallibly where I am no longer able? I know indeed that the new biblical scholars will say to these things that the detection of errors in the Bible was reserved only for later ages of scientific progress, and that the Bible is neither more nor less than what it had to be in order to be understood by its first readers². But since, as is their custom, they bring absolutely no proof of this assertion of theirs, the opinion of Augustine will perhaps seem to you preferable: « Once there has been admitted, in so great a height of authority, any officious lie, no particle of those books will remain which, as it shall seem to each one either difficult for morals or incredible for faith, may not by that same most pernicious rule be referred to the design and office of a lying author »³.

Hence you now see in what place that parity is to be put which they repeatedly insinuate between the Church and Scripture—as if, namely, from the fact that the Church is not infallible except in matters of faith and morals, the same were also to be concluded about Scripture. — In which indeed it must first of all be observed that Scripture is compared with the Church only most ineptly. For it is as if, instead of comparing the Aeneid with the Iliad and Virgil with Homer, you compared Homer with the Aeneid and Virgil with the Iliad. Therefore, while the comparison is instituted in the present matter, one must compare Scripture with the definitions of the Church, and the Church herself with God, the author of the Scriptures. But when the terms of comparison are arranged in this way, to whom will that parity not seem absurd? I mean a parity between the infallibility of the Church and the infallibility of God? For the latter is absolute and by essence. But the former is only participated through the gratuitous charism of assistance, and for this very reason it does not have an unlimited sphere, but is altogether determined to those limits which the will and wisdom of the assisting God have fixed beforehand. — What if you now observe, secondly, that the infallibility of Scripture, restricted to matters of faith and morals alone, would place Scripture itself far below the definitions of the Church? For if you judge rightly about the infallibility of the Church, you must confess that this infallibility always and necessarily accompanies the exercise of the supreme magisterium, in such a way, namely, that no inquiry is needed about whether certain conditions have been observed or not, but from this alone that something is proposed by that supreme magisterium to be believed, it must by that very fact be accepted as conformable to truth and marked with the character of inerrancy. Nor does the limitation of infallibility to a certain determinate order of things stand in the way at all, because no small part of it consists precisely in this, that the magisterium endowed with such and so great a charism can never, in the very act of defining, run beyond the field of its own proper object. And hence at last it is brought about that in ecclesiastical definitions one need not separate the precious from the vile, and the true from the false, but there is in them a most pure and most sincere truth. But Scripture in fact runs beyond the order of things that are called matters of faith and morals. Hence if its inerrancy were restricted to those matters, it would contain falsity mixed with truth, and indeed such falsity as would be born, as has been shown above, to destroy its entire authority from the foundations.

Nor finally is any account to be taken of the consideration which they are accustomed to bring forward in order to persuade us that the inconveniences that would otherwise arise from biblical errors are avoided and corrected by the fact that the Church, the teacher of truth and infallible interpreter, has been provided for us. For this is the deus ex machina which they reserve and hold in readiness for every desperate case. They destroy one after another all the demonstrations of dogmas that are deduced from a source both scriptural and traditional, and when you ask where at last the foundation of dogmatic truth is to be sought, behold for you the infallibility of the Church. They go off into any recklessness whatever, tearing up the very first bases of faith to the ruin and scandal of many, and when it is asked of them that they give an account of such great license, they answer that the progress of science demands it, that nothing can be obtained unless something is put at risk, and that besides there is present the infallible Church which is able, if errors occur, to repress them all. Just as if boys should bring fire to the four corners of a house, and when asked with what intention they did it, should answer: because there are watchmen appointed in the city to extinguish fires⁴. The same, then, will now also be the final answer as regards the Bible: that biblical errors which were accommodated to the childish mentality of ancient men are no longer in the same condition as regards us; yet nothing troublesome follows from them, because there is present the infallible Church which will separate the precious from the vile, and will go before us as a pillar of light to every discovery of purified truth ⁵.

But lest this disputation go on too long, it will now be enough to note two things. — It must be noted first that the infallible Church is not to be thought of as one to whom the Holy Spirit assists through new revelations. « For neither, says the Vatican Council, was the Holy Spirit promised to the successors of Peter in order that, by His revealing, they might make known a new doctrine, but in order that, by His assisting, they might holily guard and faithfully expound the revelation handed down through the apostles, or the deposit of faith ». Wherefore, since in the apostolic deposit there is by no means found contained the principle of a mixture of truth with error in the canonical books, and much less the criterion by which in those same books the pure may be discerned from the impure, it immediately appears how, with new revelation excluded, no place remains for an infallible judgment in relation to the selection which the new exegetes dream of. — It must be noted especially, secondly, that it is highly accidental in the present matter whether or not the inconveniences that will follow from biblical errors could be avoided, because the supreme and indeclinable question always returns: Can the inspiration of Him who is the supreme, absolute, and subsistent Truth extend itself even to error ⁶.

Hence Leo XIII in the encyclical Providentissimus Deus: « It is to be lamented that there are many who search out and bring forward the monuments of antiquity, the customs and institutions of nations, and the testimonies of similar matters, with great labors indeed, but more often with this design, that they may detect the stain of error in the sacred books, and thereby weaken and make totter their authority on every side. And some do this with too hostile a mind, and not with judgment sufficiently fair. For they trust profane books and records of ancient memory as if no suspicion¹ even of error could attach to them, while to the books of Sacred Scripture, on the mere supposed appearance of error, and that not well examined, they refuse even equal credit. It can indeed happen that certain things have fallen out less correctly through copyists in transcribing the codices; but this is to be judged considerately, and not easily admitted, unless it has been duly demonstrated in particular places. It can also happen that the genuine sense of some passage remains uncertain, for the unraveling of which the best rules of interpretation will contribute much.

But it would be altogether impious either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Sacred Scripture, or to concede that the sacred author himself has erred. Nor indeed is their reasoning to be tolerated, who extricate themselves from these difficulties by not doubting to grant this: that divine inspiration pertains to matters of faith and morals, and to nothing beyond, because they falsely think that, when the truth of sentences is at issue, it is not so much to be inquired what God has said, as rather to be weighed for what cause He said it. For all and entire books... have been written with the Holy Spirit dictating. So far indeed is any error from being able to underlie divine inspiration, that it of itself not only excludes all error, but excludes and rejects it as necessarily as it is necessary that God, the supreme Truth, be the author of no error at all. « This is the ancient and constant faith of the Church ».

Convinced therefore by these arguments and authorities, most biblical scholars, at least in words, have withdrawn from the inconsiderate concession of errors in the Scriptures. But now they have devised new ways of speaking which, as far as the matter is concerned, fall back into the same thing. Of these it now comes to be said in the chapter that follows.