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The Fundamentals Pasa Graphe Theoptieustos! God inspires not men, but language. The phrase, “inspired men,” is not found in the Bible. The Scripture never employs it. The Scripture says ■that “holy men were moved”—pheromenoi—b ut that their writing, their manuscript, what they put down and left on the page, was God-breathed. You breathe upon a pane of glass. Your breath congeals there; freezes there; stays there; fixes an ice-picture there. That is the notion. The writing on the page beneath the hand of Paul was just as much breathed on, breathed. into that page, as was His soul breathed into Adam. The chirograph was God’s incarnate voice, as truly as the flesh of Jesus sleeping on the “pillow” was incarnate God. We take the ground that on the original parchment —the membrane—every sentence, word, line, mark, point, pen-stroke jot, tittle was put there by God. On the original parchment. There is no question of other, anterior parchments. Even were we to indulge the violent extra-Scriptural notion that Moses or Matthew transcribed from memory or from other books the things they have left us; still, in any, in every case, the selection, the expression, the shaping and turn of the phrase on the membrane was the work of an unaided God. But what? Let us have done with extra-Scriptural, pre- sumptous suppositions. The burning Isaiah, the perfervid, wheel-gazing Ezekiel; the ardent, seraphic St. Paul, caught up, up, up, up into that Paradise which he himself calls the “third heaven”—were these men only “copyists,” mere self- moved “redactors” ? I trow not. Their pens urged, swayed, moved hither and thither by the sweep of a heavenly current, stretched their feathered tops, like that of Luke upon St. Peter’s dome, into the far-off Empyrean, winged from the throne of God. We take the ground that on the original parchment—the membrane—eve ry sentence, word, line, mark, point, pen-stroke jot, tittle was put there by God.
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