All inspiration is not on the same level--the higher the spirituality the deeper the source. For example, as one writer has pointed out, when Paul said, “Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil; the Lord reward him according to his works,” he was not inspired in the same sublime degree as was Jesus, when, rising above his own sufferings, he remembered his tormentors in the prayer: “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do.” The belief in verbal inspiration has scotched the wheels of progress at every turn. Four hundred years ago those who taught the rotundity of the earth were denounced as heretics. It was a belief in verbal inspiration that inspired the church to force Galileo, who taught that the earth is not the center of the universe, but that it revolves around the sun, to make the recantation: “I, Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my knees before your eminences * * abjure, detest and curse the error and the heresy of the movement of the earth.” Even Newton’s great discovery of the law of gravitation was denounced as “subversive of natural, and inferentially, of revealed religion.” A hundred years ago the use of anesthetics in childbirth was opposed in Scotland on the ground that it was seeking to remove the curse God had placed upon the daughters of Eve for her transgression. King Charles of Spain declared that the digging of a canal across the isthmus of Panama, thus severing North and South America, would be a sin; for is it not written: “What God hath joined together let no man put asunder”? In America the famous Rev. Cotton Mather wrote a letter to John Higginson informing him that the “general court” had given secret orders to a sea captain to waylay William Penn and the one hundred Quaker colonists--“heretics and malignants”--who were then on their way to Pennsylvania, capture the “ungodly crew” and sell them “to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar,” for in so doing “the lord may be glorified and not mocked on soil of this new country,” closing his pious letter with the felicitous phrase, “Yours in the bowels of Christ.” In 1826 the school board of Lancaster, Ohio, refused to permit the use of the schoolhouse for a debate as to whether railroads were practicable. The letter reads: “You are welcome to the schoolhouse to debate all proper questions in, but such things as railroads and telephones (the possibility of which were talked then) are impossibilities and rank infidelity; there is nothing in the Word of God about them. If God designed that his intelligent creatures should travel at the frightful speed of 15 miles an hour He would have clearly foretold it through his holy prophets. It is a device of Satan to lead immortal souls down to hell.” Is there needed stronger proof than this of the mental slavery to which the belief in verbal inspiration reduces its devotees?