for consideration of the matter from the commencement—the committee made their report, which is addressed to the General Assembly of the church. They state that “after carefully examining the article 'Bible,’ and considering with attention the explanations which Professor Smith has been good enough to furnish,” they have not found in the article sufficient ground “to support a process for heresy”—a conclusion from which one member of the committee, Dr. Smeaton, dissents, as will appear, with good reason. It is true, the committee go on to say, that Professor Smith’s statements relating to “the date, authorship, and literary history” of certain books and portions of books in the Bible not only “differ from the opinions which have been most usually maintained in our churches,” but are “such as have been maintained by writers who treat the Scriptures as merely human compositions.” But the committee magnanimously decline to “assume that this circumstance is of itself a ground either of suspicion or complaint,” inasmuch as “much liberty of judgment should be maintained.” They confess, again, that they “have observed with regret that the article does not adequately indicate that the professor holds the divine inspiration” of the Bible, and that he does not “adequately state the view of the Bible taken by the Christian church as a whole.” “A clear note on this point” was much needed, but the professor would not give it, and “the committee are compelled to regard this feature of the case with disapprobation,” since it would have been so easy for the professor, by “a single sentence or clause of a sentence, at successive stages of his argument,” to have “prevented the injurious effect which the committee deprecate.” The professor gave “decided opinions in favor of some of the critical positions maintained by theologians of the destructive school,” and he consistently refrained from blowing hot and cold, as the committee wished him to do, “by showing decisively that he did not agree with their destructive inferences.” But since, in his communication to the committee, Professor Smith “admits direct prediction of the Messias in the Old Testament,” and receives three of the four gospels as “authentic and inspired,” the committee—Professor Smeaton again dissenting—did not think it wise to prosecute him for heresy on these points. They stumbled sadly, however, in their attempts to explain why they resolved to acquit him of flagrant heresy in the expressions of his views “with respect to portions of the Pentateuch, and more particularly to the Book of Deuteronomy.” It would be bad enough, they say, had Professor Smith contented himself with maintaining that the Book of Deuteronomy in its present form could not have been written, for philological reasons, until eight hundred years after the death of Moses. But this would not necessarily prove that the author of the book was not inspired and did not faithfully record the history as it occurred.