κεραίας καὶ γραμμῆς τοῦ Πνεύματος τὴν ἀκρίβειαν ἕλκοντες) do not and dare not grant that even the smallest things are asserted by the writers without a meaning” (Greg. Naz., Orat., ii., n. 105). And the following passage of St. Augustine is especially worthy of notice: “I acknowledge to your charity that I have learnt to pay only to those books of Scripture which are already called canonical, this reverence and honour, viz. to believe most firmly that no author of them made any mistake, and if I should meet with anything in them which seems to be opposed to the truth, not to doubt but that either the codex is incorrect, or that the translator has not caught what was said, or that my understanding is at fault” (Ep. ad Hieron., lxxxii. [al. 19.] n. 3).
II. The Catholic Church expressly teaches that God is the author of the Holy Scriptures in a physical sense. That God may be the author of Scripture in a physical sense, and that Scripture may be the Word of God as issuing from Him, it is not enough that the Sacred Books should have been written under the merely negative influence and the merely external assistance of God, preventing error from creeping in; the Divine authorship implies a positive and interior influence upon the writer, which is expressed by the dogmatic term Inspiration. Although a negative assistance, preserving from error, such as is granted to the Teaching Apostolate, is not enough for the physical authorship of Holy Scripture, yet, on the other hand, a positive dictation by word of mouth is not required. The sacred writers themselves make no mention of it; nay, they expressly state that they have made use of their own industry; and the diversity of style of the different writers is distinctly opposed to it. Of course, when something previously unknown to the writer has to be written down by him, God must in some way speak to him; nevertheless, Inspiration in itself is “the action of God upon a human writer, whereby God moves and enables the writer to serve as an instrument for communicating, in writing, the Divine thoughts.” Inspiration arises in the first instance from God’s intention to express in writing certain truths through the instrumentality of human agents. To carry out this intention God moves the writer’s will to
