[206] in systematic form the essentials of historic Christianity without inhospitality to modern science and criticism. In his Sixty years with the Bible (1909) he writes:
I have described the change by saying that I passed on from using the Bible in the light of its statements to using it in the light of its principles. At first I said, The Scriptures limit me to this; later I said, The Scriptures open my way to this. As for the Bible, I am not bound to work all its statements into my system; nay, I am bound not to work them all in; for some of them are not congenial to the spirit of Jesus and some express truths in forms which cannot be of permanent validity.Popular interest in the authority of the Bible was prepared for by the appearance of the Revised Version of the Bible just a decade before the dramatic trial of Charles A. Briggs. Thirty-four of the leading Hebrew and Greek scholars of America united with sixty-seven Englishmen in this great undertaking, which Philip Schaff, the chairman of the American revisers, declared to be ‘the noblest monument of Christian union and co-operation in this nineteenth century.’ After a laborious toil of eight years, during which ‘no sectarian question was ever raised,’ the New Testament was given to the public. ‘The rapidity and extent of its sale surpassed all expectations and are without a parallel in the history of the book-trade.’ The New Testament appeared in 1881 and the Old Testament in 1885. Although one of the Old Testament revisers took pains to say in his Companion to the revised Old Testament that ‘they have no fellowship with that disposition which of late years has appeared among some who profess and call themselves Christians to speak lightly of the Scriptures as a partial and imperfect record of revelation,’ and although the Old Testament Committee was presided over by Professor Wm. H. Green of Princeton Seminary and the New Testament Committee by ex-President Theodore D. Woolsey of Yale College, both eminently conservative scholars, the mere publication of a new translation of the Scriptures, founded upon a revised Hebrew and Greek text, prepared the public mind for some modification of the concept of infallibility which had possessed it hitherto. The printing of the Bible in paragraphs like other books—instead of in the oracular verses—and the appearance
