There is, then, no such dogma (or, to speak _Germanice_, no such _macht-spruch_) in behalf of verbal inspiration as has been ascribed to St. Paul, and I pass to my own argument against it. This argument turns upon the self-confounding tendency of the common form ascribed to ξεοπνευστια, or divine inspiration. When translated from its true and lofty sense of an inspiration--brooding, with outstretched wings, over the mighty abyss of _secret_ truth--to the vulgar sense of an inspiration, burrowing, like a rabbit or a worm, in grammatical quillets and syllables, mark how it comes down to nothing at all; mark how a stream, pretending to derive itself from a heavenly fountain, is finally lost and confounded in a morass of human perplexities. First of all, at starting, we have the inspiration (No. 1) to the original composers of the sacred books. _That_ I grant, though distinguishing as to its nature. Next, we want another inspiration (No. 2) for the countless _translators_ of the Bible. Of what use is it to a German, to a Swiss, or to a Scotsman, that, three thousand years before the Reformation, the author of the Pentateuch was kept from erring by a divine restraint over his words, if the authors of this Reformation--Luther, suppose, Zwingle, John Knox--either making translations themselves, or relying upon translations made by others under no such verbal restraint, have been left free to bias his mind, pretty nearly as much as if the original Hebrew writer had been resigned to his own human discretion?