The respect for anything in books, the dogma of journalistic inerrancy which still numbers its devotees by millions, the common acceptance of even scientific conceptions upon the dicta of a small group of investigators, these are but a few of the signs of the persistence of what is surely not a medieval but a universal trait.
We know instances in which men have abandoned belief in full inerrancy but have remained substantially orthodox in the rest of their theology.
Charles Augustus Briggs, tried for heresy for his inaugural address in 1891 as professor of biblical theology at Union Seminary (in which he attacked the inerrancy of the Bible, held the composite character of the Hexateuch and of the Book of Isaiah and taught that sanctification is not complete at death), was acquitted by the presbytery of New York, but was declared guilty and was suspended from its ministry by the General Assembly of 1893.
Henry Preserved Smith, professor of Hebrew and Old Testament exegesis in Lane Seminary, for a pamphlet published in 1891 denying the inerrancy but affirming the inspiration of the Scriptures, was suspended in 1892 by the presbytery of Cincinnati, and was unsuccessful in his appeal to the synod and to the General Assembly.
But although the conservative party was successful in inducing successive general assemblies to lay repeatedly stronger stress on the verbal inerrancy of Holy Scripture and to make belief in such inerrancy a requisite of teachers in theological seminaries and of candidates for the ministry, there was in other matters an increasing liberal tendency.