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ENTERED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1858, by

ELEAZAR LORD,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New-York.

JOHN A. GRAY, Printer and Stereotyper,

16 & 18 Jacob St., Fire-Proof Buildings.

PREFACE.

THE present fulfills an intimatión expressed at the close of the former Volume under the same title.

The most striking feature of the very numerous, learned, philosophical, and theological treatises of modern times, on the subject of Inspiration, is that of their various and inconsistent definitions, theories, and speculations. It is remarkable that, at a period characterized as preeminently the age of Bibles, when the Protestant world, aware of the Divine purposes to be fulfilled by the universal diffusion of the Sacred Oracles, is engaged in the publication of them in the languages of all the nations of the earth, their inspiration, the basis of their claim to infallibility and Divine authority, should, by one class of writers, be asserted on erroneous and fallacious principles; and by other classes, be openly assailed, impugned, or denied, upon various contradictory and hostile theories and assumptions; that learned and orthodox men of the one class, who hold the Scriptures to be the infallible word of God, should assume that infallible guidance of the sacred writers, instead of a conveyance to their minds of the infallible thoughts and words which they were to record, was the object and end of Inspiration; and that men of the other class should treat the subject as involving no specific element of infallibility whatever. On the one hand, a state of things, in all respects unprecedented, exists in regard to the means and facilities of diffusing the Oracles of God among all nations; on the other, the plenary inspiration and Divine authority of those Oracles is called in question in new and imposing forms of theory and speculation.