L. Gaussen.
(Extracted from Scripture Truth Vol 3, 1911, page 243-4.)
There is no physical error in the Word of God … Examine all the false theologies of the ancients and moderns; read in Homer, or in Hesiod, the religious codes of the Greeks; study those of the Buddhists, those of the Brahmans, those of the Mohammedans; you will not only find in them repulsive systems on the subject of the Godhead, but you will meet with the grossest errors in the material world. You will be revolted with their theology, no doubt; but their natural philosophy and their astronomy also, ever allied to their religion, will be found to rest on the most absurd notions. Read, further, the philosophers of Greek and Roman antiquity - Aristotle, Seneca, Pliny, Plutarch, Cicero. How many expressions of opinion will you not find there, any single one of which would be enough to compromise all our doctrines of inspiration if it could be met with in any book of Holy Scripture. Read Mohammed's Koran, making mountains to be created "to prevent the earth from moving, and to hold it fast as if with anchors and cables." Read even the cosmogony of Buffon, or some of Voltaire's sneers on the doctrine of a deluge, or on the fossils of a primitive world. What might we not have been entitled to say of the Scriptures had they expressed themselves on the phenomena of nature as these have been spoken of by all the ancient sages? Had they referred all to four elements, as people did for so long a period? Had they said the stars were of crystal, as did Philolaus of Crotona? And had they, like Empedocles, lighted up the two hemispheres of our world with two suns? Had they taught, like Leucippus, that the fixed stars, set ablaze by the swiftness of their diurnal movement round the earth, feed the sun with their fires? Had they thought, like Philolaus, that the sun has only a borrowed light, and is only a mirror, which receives and sends down to us the light of the celestial spheres? Had they, like Anaxagoras, conceived it to be a mass of iron, and the earth to be a mountain whose roots stretch infinitely downward? Had they imagined the heaven to be a solid sphere to which the fixed stars are attached, as was done by Aristotle and almost all the ancients?
Open now the Bible. Study its fifty sacred authors, from that wonderful Moses, who held the pen in the wilderness four hundred years before the war of Troy, down to the fisherman son of Zebedee, who wrote fifteen hundred years afterwards in Ephesus and in Patmos. Open the Bible and try if you can to find anything of this sort.
No! None of those blunders which the science of every successive age discovers in the books of those that preceded it. None of those absurdities, above all, which modern astronomy points out, in such numbers, in the writing of the ancients, in their sacred codes, in their systems of philosophy, and in the finest pages even of the Fathers of the church. No such errors can be found in any of our sacred books. Nothing there will ever contradict what, after so many ages, the investigations of the learned world have been able to reveal to us of what is certain in regard to the state of our globe or of that of the heavens.
Carefully peruse our Scriptures from one end to the other in search of such blemishes there; and, while engaged in this research, remember that it is a book which speaks of everything, which describes nature, which proclaims its grandeur, which tells the story of its creation, which informs us of the structure of the heavens, of the creation of light, of the waters, of the atmosphere, of the mountains, of animals and of plants. It is a book that tells us of the first revolutions of the world, and foretells us also of the last; a book that relates them in circumstantial narrative, exalts them in sublime poesy and chants them in strains of fervent psalmody. It is a book replete with the glow of oriental rapture, elevation, variety, and boldness. It is a book which speaks of the earth and things visible, at the same time that it speaks of the celestial world and of things invisible. It is a book to which nearly fifty writers of every degree of mental cultivation, of every rank, of every condition, and separated by fifteen hundred years from each other, have successively put their hands. … Well, then, search through these fifty authors, search through these sixty-six books, search through these 1189 chapters and these 31,173 verses. Search for one single of these thousands of errors with which ancient and modern books abound when they speak either of the heavens or of the earth, or of their revolutions, or of their elements; search, but you will search in vain.
(L. Gaussen.)
[The above extract from a volume entitled "Theopneustia. The Plenary Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures." By L. Gaussen may well lead every reader to purchase the book for himself. He will find in it rare treasure in a day when the inspiration of every scripture is so flippantly denied. (J. Wilson Smith.)]