‘In my view,’ says your correspondent above referred to, ‘the Mosaic writers were divinely taught, and knew what they wrote about with a most perfect knowledge.’ In one sense, no doubt, they _did_ know what they were writing about--they knew that it was religion, and, therefore, they never pretended to ‘enunciate’ science, whether false or true; but in any other sense to say that they knew what they wrote about with a most perfect knowledge, is to assert what is highly improbable, and cannot be proved. Either it makes every writer a kind of god, so far as the attribute of infallibility is concerned, or it destroys all independence of testimony. To claim for them a perfect knowledge of which they made no use, except to mislead the world for thousands of years, is surely to commit the capital offence of ‘inciting to hatred and contempt’ of their writings. How alien, moreover, is it to the spirit of the writers themselves--men who are constantly confessing their own errors, doubts, and perplexities; men whose path in moral, let alone intellectual excellence, was not always direct and straightforward, and who knew and owned their infirmity of nature. How contrary, too, to every analogy of life is this notion of a Book, written in perfect language by men of perfect knowledge in every subject that may be even incidentally referred to in its pages. For not only is man an imperfect being, but his language is an imperfect instrument of his imperfect thoughts. His conscience is fallible; his understanding is fallible; let the Book which guides him be as infallible as you please, he will still bring it back to the inherent imperfection of things human by misreading and misconceiving it. That the law of God is perfect, follows from the very thought of God; that any particular exposition of that law to finite minds either is or can be perfect, is almost, or altogether, a contradiction in terms. Far from knowing all about modern systems of Botany, Moses did not even know all about religion as the later prophets knew; nor did _they_ know as we know. Their mission would probably have been hidden rather than forwarded, had they been able to ‘enunciate’ scientific truths in advance of their age. Their new views in religion were often roundly abused; their new views in science would hardly have escaped denouncing.