II. Your refusal to settle with us the meaning of Scripture till the plenary inspiration is acknowledged, is in plain contradiction to your own principles. You fix the imputation of _deception_ on our statement, that “the process of interpretation may go on undisturbed by any reference to the theory of verbal inspiration.” Yet is this only a repetition of what Mr. Byrth himself says, “In whatever light the Christian Scriptures are regarded, whether as the result of plenary inspiration, as we Trinitarians believe, or as the uninspired productions of the first teachers of Christianity, or even as the forgeries of imposture, _the meaning_ of their contents is a _question apart from all others_.”[11] Dr. Tattershall, in common with all sound divines, makes it the _first step_ of scriptural inquiry to “examine the contents” of the books under the guidance of the following principle: that “any message coming from God must be consistent with the character of the same holy being, as exhibited in his works,” and must have “consistency with itself:”[12] and he justly states, that whether we ought to take the _last step_, of admitting the divine authority of the doctrines, must still be contingent on those doctrines, “being themselves wise and holy,”—“lessons worthy of God.”[13] These principles are violated, unless our investigation into your doctrines is taken in the following order:— I. Are your doctrines _true to the sense of Scripture_? If _not_, the controversy ends here; if they _are_, then, II. Are they _self-consistent; reconcilable with the teachings of God’s works, pure and holy_? If _not_, the controversy ends _here_; if they _are_, then, III. Do they come to us clothed with divine authority, and conveyed in the language of plenary inspiration? Your system, then, must establish its _existence in the Bible_ (which is a matter of interpretation), and its _credibility in itself_ (which we presume there must be _some criterion_ to determine), _before_ the question of inspiration is capable of being discussed. We deny both these preliminaries; protesting that we cannot find your system in the Scriptures; and that if we could, it appears to us so far from “self-consistent,” “wise and holy,” and “worthy of God,” as exceedingly to embarrass the claims to divine authority, of any writings which contain it. It was then in implicit obedience to your own rules that we proposed to let the question of interpretation take the lead; and no less so, that we presume to form a judgment respecting the internal character of doctrines professing to be scriptural. Permit us to ask how, but by some “light in ourselves,” we are to determine whether doctrines are “wise and holy,” “self-consistent,” and “worthy of God?”