The following was compiled from a sermon preached by John William Burgon at Christ-Church Cathedral in 1860, where all the Divines of the land had gathered for a season. Among them were also the student body. In the following words, you will see that Burgon cares not for the praise of men as he rebukes clergy and secular alike, for the majority of Christianity had already succumbed to modernism with respect to the Bible and all it contains. The following is composed of excerpts with very minor editing for clarity.
I must be content today with repudiating, in the most unqualified way, the notion that a mistake of any kind whatever is consistent with the texture of a narrative inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. I appeal to your sense of fairness, whether it be not reasonable to assume, that until those blessed writers have been convicted of one single inaccuracy of statement, their narratives ought to be accounted faultless, like Him whose Life they record – like Him by whose Spirit they are inspired. I would to Heaven that men would have the decency to suspect themselves, and one another, rather than the Evangelists, of mistake; or at least, before they venture publicly to impugn the Authors of the Everlasting Gospel, that they would be at the pains to weigh the evidence with the care that that evidence deserves, but which I am sure that sermon-writers and essayists do not bestow. Let them spend the long summer days of many a long vacation – from early morning until twilight – dissecting every syllable of the blessed pages; and then they will learn to adore instead of to cavil. They will deem the Evangelists absolutely faultless, instead of daring to charge all their own pitiful misconceptions, and weak misapprehensions, and miserable blunders, upon them.
They will be inclined, rather, to challenge the world to establish one blot in what they love so well; and would gladly stake all upon the issue of a conflict before a fair tribunal, if submission might follow upon defeat.
I hear some one say – It seems to trouble you very much that inspired writers should be thought capable of making mistakes; but it does not trouble me.
Very likely not. It does not trouble you, perhaps, to see stone after stone, buttress after buttress, foundation after foundation, removed from the walls of Zion, until the whole structure trembles and totters, and is pronounced insecure. Your boasted unconcern is very little to purpose, however, unless we may also know how dear to you the safety of Zion is. But if you make indignant answer – as would to Heaven you may – that you care for God’s honour, your jealousy for God’s oracles, is every whit as great as our own – then we tell you that, on your wretched premises, men more logical than yourself will make shipwreck of their faith, and endanger their very souls.
There is no stopping – no knowing where to stop – in this downward course. Once admit the principle of fallibility into the inspired Word, and the whole becomes a bruised and rotten reed. If St. Paul a little, why not St. Paul much? If Moses in some places, why not in many? You will doubt our Lord’s infallibility next!
Do you mean to say then, (I shall be asked), that you maintain the theory of Verbal Inspiration? – I answer, I refuse to accept any theory whatsoever. “Theories of Inspiration,” as they are called, are the growth of an unbelieving age: and it is enough to disgust any one with the term, to find how it has been understood in some quarters.
But if, instead of the “Theory of Verbal Inspiration,” I am asked whether I believe the words of the Bible to be inspired – I answer, To be sure I do – every one of them: and every syllable likewise. Do not you?
Where - (if it be a fair question) – Where do you, in your wisdom, stop? The book, you allow, is inspired. How about the chapters? How about the verses? Do you stop at the verses, and not go on to the words? Or perhaps you enjoy a special tradition on this subject, and hold that Inspiration is a general, vague kind of thing – here more, there less: strong (to speak plainly), where you make no objection to what is stated – weak, when it runs counter to some fancy of your own.
O Sir, but this “general vague kind of thing” will not suffice to anchor the fainting soul in the day of trouble, and in the hour of death! “Here more, there less,” will not satisfy a parched and weary spirit, athirst for the water of Life, and craving the shadow of the great Rock.
Do you not feel that this “will o’ the wisp” phantom of your brain can prove no guide to either of us in the pilgrimage of life? Perceive you not that the unworthy spirit in which you approach the Book of God’s Law must effectually prevent you from getting any wisdom from it? Why, the pages which you look so coldly and carnally at, are written within and without, and burn from end to end with unutterable meaning!
No, Sirs! The Bible (be persuaded) is the very utterance of the Eternal – as much God’s Word as if high Heaven were open, and we heard God speaking to us with human voice. Every book of it is inspired alike; and is inspired entirely. Inspiration is not a difference of degree, but of kind. The Apocryphal books are not one atom more inspired than Bacon’s Essays. But the Bible, from the Alpha to the Omega of it, is filled to overflowing with the Holy Spirit of God: the Books of it, and the sentences of it, and the words of it, and the syllables of it – aye, and the very letters of it.
“I opened my mouth,” saith Ezekiel, “and God reached me a scroll, saying, Son of Man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this I give thee. I ate it, and it was sweet in my mouth as honey.”
Yea, sweeter, I am persuaded, than either honey or the honeycomb. For herein, the authors of scripture were not like harps or lutes, but they felt, they felt the power and strength of their own words. When they spake of our peace, every corner of their hearts was filled with joy. When they prophesied of mourning, lamentations, and woes, to fall upon us, they wept in the bitterness and indignation of spirit, the Arm of the Lord being mighty and strong upon them.
The first time I enjoyed this privilege of preaching here, I urged the younger men to a diligent and painful daily study of the Bible, and I took my stand on the first chapter of Genesis, because the enemies of God’s Truth have made that chapter their favourite point of attack. We altogether repudiated, then, the contrast which is often implied between Theology and Science, as if Theology were not a Science, but some other thing. Theological Science we declared to be the noblest of the Sciences – the very Queen and Mistress of them all. Her function therefore is to bear willing witness to the Goodness, the Wisdom, the Justice of the Eternal: and her place – the loftiest which can be imagined for a creature.
But when today, instead of the submissive manners of a well-ordered court, symptoms of insolence and insubordination are witnessed on every side – then, the least and humblest takes leave – time, and place, and occasion serving – to speak out fearlessly on behalf of that which he loves with an unworthy, but a most undivided heart.
When “language” impugns those Oracles which she was hired to decipher – and pretends to doubt the Inspiration of that Book of which, confessedly, she barely understands the grammar; when History and Chronology cry out that the annals of Theology are false, and her record of Time a fable; that the Deluge, for instance, is an old wives’ story, and the economy of times and seasons a human fabrication – when Astronomical and Mechanical Science struts up to the Throne whereon sits the Ancient of Days, and prates to Him – the first Author of Law – about the “supremacy of Law,” and tells Him to His face that His miracles are things impossible; when Physiology insinuates that Mankind cannot be descended from one primeval pair, and that the lives of the Patriarchs cannot be such as they are recorded to have been, when the pretender to Natural Philosophy gravely assures us that we ought not to pray for fair weather, because the weather depends not upon “arbitrary changes in the will of God,” but upon laws as fixed and certain “as the laws of gravitation,” – which, mark you, Sirs, is no longer a dry verbal speculation, but is nothing less than an invasion of that inner chamber where you or I have retired to pour out the fullness of an aching heart, in prayer that God would prolong, if it may be, the life of the dearest thing we have on earth; and yet they rudely bid us rise from our knees and be silent, for, they say, the health of Man depends not on the will of God, but on fixed physiological laws; lastly, when the pretender to Geological skill denies the authenticity of the First Chapter of Genesis – which is to deny the Inspiration of all the rest, and therefore of the whole Bible – and thus to rob Life’s weary pilgrim of that rod and that staff concerning which he has many a time exclaimed – “They comfort me!” – whenever, as now, such things are spoken and printed – not in a corner, or by insignificant persons, or in ambiguous language – but in plain English, by clergymen and scholars in authority, openly in the face of God’s sun – then it is high time, even for the humblest and least among you – if no man of mark will speak up, and speak out, for God’s Truth – then it is high time to deliver a plain message with that freedom which Englishmen hold to be a part of their birthright.
It should breed no offence, I say, if the most unworthy of God’s servants, here, before you all – before these younger men especially, who have been drawn hither by the fame of your piety and your learning, and who have been entrusted to your guardianship through the precious years of early manhood, with a well-grounded confidence that you would give them to eat not only of the Tree of Knowledge, but also largely of the fruit of the Tree of Life – in this Holy House, too, where he received his commission, and vowed before God and Man, that he would “be ready,” the Lord being his helper, “with all faithful diligence to drive away all erroneous and strange doctrines contrary to God’s Word,” – before such an audience, and in such a place, it must and shall be lawful for me solemnly to denounce as false and deadly – full of nothing but pernicious consequence – that system of practical Infidelity which enjoys such unhappy popularity at this hour, and which, under the mask of Science, and under the specious name of Progress, is spreading like a fatal contagion through the length and breadth of the land, and which, if suffered to go unchastised and unchecked, will end by shaking both the Altar and the Throne!
Look well to it, Sirs, if you care for the safety of the Ark of God.
For my part – like one of old time whose words I
am not worthy to take upon my lips – “I cannot hold my peace, because
thou hast heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war!”
Nay, Sirs – suffer one of yourselves to ask you,
whether these disgraceful developments are not the lawful result of your own
incredible system, of sending forth, year by year, men to be teachers and
professors of Divinity – to whom you have yet never imparted any
Theological training whatever.
It will be the fact, I fear, before the end of all
things; for it seems to be implied – (a more heart-sickening sentence in all
Scripture, I know not!) – that when the Son of Man cometh, He will not find
the Faith on the Earth. (St. Luke xviii. 8). And if not the Faith –
what then? The Moral Sense? Hardly! for where was the Moral Sense when
she let go the Faith? It was in fact – if I read the record rightly – eighteen centuries ago:
for children had then forgotten their duty to their Parents; and the sanctity of
Marriage was unknown; and (O prime note of a darkened conscience!) men not only
did things worthy of Death, but “had
pleasure in them that did them.”
Read the first chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, and say what was then the condition of the Moral Sense in man. Tell me, while your cheek is
yet burning, whether you think Moral Science was then competent to sit in
judgment on a Revelation sent from the God of Purity, until God’s own Son had
repudiated the sanctions of the Moral Law, and informed Man’s conscience
afresh!
Ever since the Gospel came into the world, general
opinion has ceased to be the
standard of Truth: for the Bible has simply superseded it; and put forth a
standard to which general opinion itself must bow. “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”
So spake the Eternal Son while yet on Earth. And He foresaw that there would
come a day when the world would still ask, with Pilate, “What is Truth?”
Accordingly, we heard his solemn reply in this Morning’s Second Lesson –
“Thy Word” – “Thy Word is Truth” … “God made two great lights,”
I grant you: but what I maintain is, that He made the
greater Light to rule the Day.
And therefore are we very bold to assert that it is
all too late now
to vaunt the authority of the Moral Sense, as a thing to be set up against the
fixed and immutable Revelation of God’s mind and will. The echoes of the voice
of God are now so distinct, only because God hath suffered His awful voice to be
heard on earth again: and if among ourselves those echoes are the loudest and
the clearest, is it not because among ourselves the Bible is read the most?
I say, therefore, that it is all too late to vaunt the supremacy of Conscience as opposed to Revelation - Moral as opposed to Theological Science. Moral Science owes all its renewed strength and vigour to Theology. And so, were Moral Science to dare call in question (as she sometimes has done, and may dare to do again!), the Morality of the Bible - we should find her monstrous image nowhere so fitly as in that of the man whose withered hand Christ healed in the Synagogue - if the same man had proved such a wretch, as straightway to lift up his arm with intention to smite his Benefactor and his God.
Physical Science, therefore, (for the last time!) - all the other Sciences - Moral Science not excepted - are the handmaids of Theological Science: and Morality, to which we omitted before to assign an office, we have stationed somewhere beneath the footstool, which is before the Throne of the Most High.
But this day's sermon has had for its object to remind you that the Bible is none other than the voice of Him that sitteth upon the Throne! Every Book of it - every Chapter of it - every Verse of it - every Word of it - every Syllable of it (where are we to stop?) - every Letter of it - is the direct utterance of the Most High! Pasa grafh qeopneustoV. (2 Timothy 3:16). "Well spake the Holy Ghost by the mouth of" the many blessed Men who wrote it.
The Bible is none other than the
Word of God: not some part of it, more, some part of it, less; but all
alike, the utterance of Him Who sitteth upon the Throne; absolute - faultless -
unerring - supreme!