Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[204] the newer views on the Scriptures to the conservative circles of America and particularly to the members of the Presbyterian Church who occupied so large a place in the educational life of the country. He was the leading authority on the history of the Westminster Assembly which framed the Presbyterian standards. In his treatise Whither (1889) he is at great pains to show that the doctrine of inerrancy of Scripture is a modem development of orthodox opinion, and that it was with careful forethought that the Assembly refrained from committing itself and the Church to any specific doctrine of inspiration or to the statement that the Bible is the Word of God. It had proclaimed indeed that the Bible was the only infallible rule of faith and practice but refused to extend its authority beyond the moral and religious sphere. ‘The Church ought to be in advance of the Confession. But the Confession is in advance of the Church so that the children of the Puritans must first advance to the high mark of their own standards before they can go beyond them into the higher reaches of Christian theology.’¹ His own temper was conservative in a very high degree. He rejoiced that he was essentially at one with historic Christendom. At the end of his life he occupied the chair of Irenics at the Seminary which proved so loyal to him, and as a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church gave much of his energy to the reunion of Christendom. Moreover, the field upon which he chiefly laboured in his six student years in Germany and in the Seminary was the Old Testament. And although he frankly admitted that ‘in every department of Biblical study we come upon errors, ’ it was with questions of Old Testament literature that he was primarily concerned. The application of the canons of criticism to the New Testament was fortunately deferred. The figure of Jesus, indeed, was first brought into the realm of criticism in America by his utterances in regard to the Old Testament books which were under discussion. The Bible was discovered by the American public to be literature by way of the Old Testament. It was, however, no literary interest which impelled the discovery, but rather the deepest loyalty to religious truth. With the same fearless loyalty to fact with which Hodge faced hell, did Briggs and his fellows descry errors in a book which they held to be the repository of eternal truth.