of what we read, and we learn what ought to be pressed and what not. Now this is really the very foundation of any sane criticism.
We can hardly urge this topic too much, of so great a practical importance is it, and above all at the present time. To be able to control what one reads by means of the discriminative tact coming, in a clear and fair mind, from a wide experience, was never perhaps so necessary as in the England of our own day, and in theology, and in what concerns the Bible itself.
And to our popular religion it is especially difficult; because we have been trained to regard the Bible, not as a book whose parts have varying degrees of value, but as the Jews came to regard their Scriptures, as a sort of talisman given down to us out of Heaven, with all its parts equipollent. And yet there was a time when Jews knew well the vast difference there is between books like Esther, Chronicles, or Daniel, and books like Genesis or Isaiah. There was a time when Christians knew well the vast difference between the First Epistle of Peter and his so-called Second Epistle, or between the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Epistles to the Romans and to the Corinthians. This, indeed, is what makes the religious watchword of the British and Foreign School Society: The Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible! so ingeniously (one must say) absurd; it is treating the Bible as Mahometans treat the Koran, as if it were a talisman all of one piece, and with all its sentences equipollent.
Yet the very expressions, Canon of Scripture, Canonical
