I have sometimes thought how, if I were an advocate stating the case for the inspiration of the Bible, I should be inclined to put it. I should start with Bishop Temple's definition of the First Cause, a personal God, with faculties like ours, but so transcendentally greater that he had no occasion to be perpetually patching and mending his work, but did everything by an original impress, which included all subsequent evolution, as the nucleolus in the primitive ovum includes the whole evolution and subsequent life of the chicken, mammal, or man. I should go on to say that the Bible has clearly been an important factor in this evolution of the human race; that it consists of two portions--one of moral and religious import, the other of scientific statements and theories, relating to such matters of purely human reason as astronomy, geology, literary criticism, and ancient history; and that these two parts are essentially different. It is quite conceivable that, on the hypothesis of a Divine Creator, one step in the majestic evolution from the original impress should have been that men of genius and devout nature should write books containing juster notions of man's relations to his Maker than prevailed in the polytheisms of early civilizations, and thus gradually educating a peculiar people who accepted these writings as sacred, and preparing the ground for a still higher and purer religion. But it is not conceivable that this, which may be called inspiration, of the religious and moral teaching, should have been extended to closing the record of all human discovery and progress, by teaching, as it were by rote, all that subsequent generations have, after long and painful effort, found out for themselves.