The partisans of literal interpretation and authority seem sooner or later to accept two irrational hypotheses instead of one; it is not enough for them that there have been certain revelations from on high, they insist that the very terms in which the divine thought is incorporated shall be divine, sacred, and immutable, and of an absolute exactitude. They divinize human language. They never think of the difficulties that someone might feel who was not a god but simply a Descartes, a Newton, or a Leibnitz, to express his great thoughts in an unformed and half-savage tongue. Genius is always superior to the language that it makes use of, and the words themselves are responsible for many of the errors in its thoughts; and a “divine inspiration,” brought down to the level of our language, would be perhaps more embarrassed than an even purely human inspiration. Nothing therefore can be stranger, to those who examine the matter calmly, than to see civilized nations seeking for a complete expression of the divine thought in the literatures of ancient peoples and semi-barbarous nations, whose language and intelligence were infinitely inferior to ours; their god, talking and dictating, would nowadays hardly be given a certificate of competency in a primary examination. It is the grossest anthropomorphism to conceive a divinity not in the type of an ideal man but in the type of a barbarous man. Also, it is not simply that a literal faith (the primitive form of all revealed faith) ultimately appears to be entirely irrational; it is that this characteristic becomes constantly more marked, for the reason that faith stands still, or tries to stand still, while humanity marches on. [Sidenote: Dogmatism is intellectual indifference or death.]