they have God for their Author. Hence we cannot say that, because the Holy Ghost employed men as His instruments, it was these inspired instruments who, perchance, have fallen into error, and not the primary Author. By supernatural power He so moved and impelled them to write--He was so present to them--that all the things which He ordered, and those things only, they first rightly conceived, then willed faithfully to write down, and finally expressed in adequate words and with infallible truth. Otherwise, it could not be said that He was the Author of the whole of the Sacred Scripture. Such has always been the persuasion of the Fathers. "Therefore," says St. Augustine, "since they wrote the things which He showed and said to them, it cannot be said that He did not write them. His members executed that which their Head dictated." St. Gregory the Great maintains: "Most superfluous it is to inquire who wrote these things;--we loyally believe the Holy Ghost to be the Author of the Book. He wrote it who dictated it to be written. He wrote it who inspired its execution." It follows that those men who maintain that an error is possible in any genuine passage of the sacred writings, either pervert the Catholic notion of inspiration, or make God Himself to be the Author of error. So emphatically were all the Fathers and Doctors agreed that the divine writings, as left by the hagiographers, are entirely free from all error, that they labored earnestly, with no less skill than reverence, to reconcile one with the other those numerous passages which seem to be at variance--the very passages which in great measure have been taken up by the "higher criticism." The Fathers were unanimous in laying it down that those writings, in their entirety and in all their parts, were equally from the divine _afflatus_, and that God Himself, speaking through the sacred writers, could not set down anything that was not true. The words of St. Augustine to St. Jerome may sum up what they taught: "On my own part, I confess to your charity that it is only to those Books of Scripture which are now called canonical that I have learned to pay such honor and reverence as to believe most firmly that no one of their writers has fallen into any error. If in these Books I meet with anything which seems contrary to truth, I shall not hesitate to conclude either that the text is faulty, or that the translator has not expressed the meaning of the passage, or that I myself have not understood it."