"All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: "That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works." [Footnote 30] [Footnote 30: 2 Timothy iii. 16, 17.] {147} Is it possible to determine in words of greater precision the religious and moral object of the inspiration? Appeal is made to a consideration of a different description. If, it is said, we at the same time admit, on the one side, the inspiration of the sacred books, and on the other, that this inspiration is not universal and absolute, who shall make the selection between these two parts?--who mark the limit of the inspiration?--who say which texts, which passages are inspired, and which are not? So to divide the Holy Scriptures is to strip them of their supernatural character, to destroy their authenticity, by surrendering them to all the incertitudes, all the disputes of men: a complete and uninterrupted inspiration alone is capable of commanding faith. {148} Never-dying pretension of man's weakness! Created intelligent and free, he proposes to use largely his intelligence and his freedom; at the same time, conscious how feeble his means are, how inadequate to his aspirations, he invokes a guide, a support; and from the very moment that his hope fixes upon it, he will have it immutable, infallible. He searches a fixed point to which to attach himself with absolute and permanent assurance. In creating man, God did not leave him without fixed points; the Divine revelation, and the inspiration of the Scriptures, had precisely for object and effect to supply these, but not on all subjects alike and without distinction. I refer here again to what I lately said respecting the separation of the finite and the infinite, of the world created, and of its Creator. At the same time that the limits of the finite world are those of human science, it is to human study and human science that God has surrendered the finite world; it is not there that God has set up his divine torch; He has dictated to Moses the laws which regulate the duties of man towards God, and of man towards man; but He has left to Newton the discovery of the laws which preside over the universe. {149} The Scriptures speak upon all subjects; circumstances connected with the finite world are there incessantly mixed with perspectives of infinity; but it is only to the latter, to that future of which they permit us to snatch a view, and to the laws which they impose upon men, that the divine inspiration addresses itself; God only pours his light in quarters which man's eye and man's labour cannot reach; for all that remains, the sacred books speak the language used and understood by the generations to whom they are addressed. God does not, even when He inspires them, transport into future domains of science the interpreters He uses, or the nations to whom He sends them; He takes them both as