I maintain that God has supernaturally revealed His character and His will in the Bible, but I know not where the hard and fast line is which separates the human from the superhuman in our versions of these sacred documents, the general characteristic of which is that they are inspired productions; that therein "holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost."[25] "Not the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth."[26] [25] 2 Pet. i. 21. [26] 1 Cor. ii. 13. "God at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers," and having subsequently spoken by His Son, authenticates His message, which, we cannot doubt, the Holy Spirit inspired the apostles to record, by a special inspiration, as He did in pre-Christian times. It is human nature for man to pervert even his best of blessings. Jews and Christians alike have done so. When we think of the translators of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek altering the prophetical dates, to mislead as to the coming of Messiah, as was done in the Septuagint Version; of the genealogy of Joseph being fitted into three periods of fourteen generations each, to square with Jewish notions of numerical precision and completeness; of the verse in John's first epistle (v. 7) inserted in the text to add strength to the theological phraseology of a creed; and of the first verses of the eighth chapter of the Fourth Gospel being left out in several of the most ancient MSS., evidently owing to some great authority, such as Eusebius (who was ordered by Constantine to prepare copies of the Scriptures), having suppressed them; we cannot but be suspicious that human infirmity and meddlesomeness have, to some extent, interfered with the transmission of the Divine oracles. The fountain is undoubtedly pure, but has not the channel been polluted through which the Divine truths have been transmitted? We have next a reference to the "Epistle of Barnabas" and the "Pastor of Hermas," both of which are attached to that ancient copy of the Scriptures known as the Codex Sinaiticus, recently found by Tischendorf, in a monastery in the desert of Sinai, and now preserved at St. Petersburg. It is the most ancient MS. of the Scriptures we can refer to, and is supposed to have been written in the fourth century.