A book given by inspiration is not a book made perfect by miracle, but a book, the writer of which was in a state open to influences from a higher sphere. All books which the human race has accepted as inspired—Vedas, Koran, Zendavesta—are sacred scriptures; all that _lasts_ is inspired. Perpetuity, not infallibility, is the sign of inspiration. “The word unto the prophet spoken Was writ on tables yet unbroken; The word by seers or sibyls told In groves of oak or fanes of gold Still floats upon the morning wind, Still whispers to the willing mind. One accent of the Holy Ghost The heedless world has never lost.” The famous proof-text on this subject is that in the Second Epistle of Paul to Timothy: “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness.” To what Scripture did Paul refer? Some say to the Jewish Scripture. Some say to the Jewish and Christian writings. But the Christian writings were not then all written, and were not collected into what we call the New Testament. The apostle does not limit himself to these. He says, “_All_ Scripture is inspired”—not merely Jewish or Christian Scripture, but all sacred writing. All the writings of every age which are looked upon as Scripture, which men from age to age reverence and honor as such, were _not_ of man’s invention, not of man’s device, but came from some irrepressible influence acting on the soul from within. The poet before quoted says truly,— “Out from the heart of nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old. The litanies of nations came, Like the volcano’s tongue of flame, Up from the burning cone below, The canticles of love and woe. The hand that rounded Peter’s dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity. Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew; The conscious stone to beauty grew.” There is a truth in this—a profound truth. The Bible is not an exceptional book in this, that it has no parallels in nature to its method of production. It is true that Phidias was inspired to make his statue and to build the Parthenon. “Such and so grew those holy piles, While love and terror laid the tiles. Earth proudly wears the Parthenon As the best gem upon her zone, And morning opes in haste her lids To gaze upon the Pyramids; O’er England’s abbeys bends the sky As on its friends with kindred eye; For out of thought’s interior sphere These wonders rose to upper air.”