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INSPIRATION
INSPIRATION
A Study of Divine Influence and
Authority in the Holy Scriptures
By
NOLAN R. BEST
Editor of The Continent
New York Chicago
Fleming H. Revell Company
London and Edinburgh
Copyright, 1923,^''
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street
Dedicated
With Devoted Filial Affection
to
MRS. CYRUS H. McCORMICK, Senior.
Preface
DISCUSSION between conservative and
progressive theologians reveals one dif-
ference in viewpoint which accounts for
all their other differences. Briefly it may be said
that the inspiration of the Bible is the single central
issue on which they are at odds. But even that
statement of it would exaggerate the breadth of
their actual dissension. That the Bible is inspired
by divine wisdom for the religious edification of
mankind both would instantly consent. What the
effect is of that inspiration on the quality of the
Bible is the much narrower question on which
alone evangelical opinion differs radically. If at
this point some measure of common understanding
could be had in Protestant churches, unseemly con-
tention would almost cease to mar their peace.
The heat of feeling excited by controversy over
the inspiration of the Scriptures is, however, not
difficult to explain. To understand it one needs
but to bear in mind how fundamentally Protestant
Christianity has reposed its reliance on the written
word of God. To multitudes of the devout it is
literally terrifying to hear respecting the Bible the
least suggestion of shifting interpretation. If the
Bible is not a  constant in the problem of life,
what can be rested on?
The question is a natural one and naturally most
7
8
PREFACE
poignant where the scholarly studies that produce
so many new theories concerning the Scriptures
are least understood. Criticism which in the
schools seems commonplace and incidental is likely
to appear in the eyes of the average man who lives
by the Bible a direct assault on his spiritual se-
curity. Almost invariably he attributes to it a
destructive influence which those with whom it
originated would think ludicrous. None the less
it is unchristianly cruel to scorn the alarms which
such persons feel; rather a brotherly consideration
should be alert to assure them of a loyalty as
earnest as their own toward Jesus the Christ.
In the last analysis it is only men committed
mind and soul to the paramount fact that  the Son
of Man hath authority on earth to forgive sins,
who are competent or entitled to interpret the gos-
pel revelation on either old presumptions or new.
On the other hand, the gospel revelation can never
be in peril of being distorted by true and passionate
lovers of a saving Christ, whether their premises of
interpretation are new or old. On this spiritual
certainty may all Bible-lovers rest. There is
naught to fear even from those who deal in
novelties of Bible exegesis as long as in their lives
may be discerned the  fruits of the Spirit. It
is the highest Name which underwrites the uni-
versal law of religion: "A good tree cannot bring
forth evil fruit.
N. R. B.
New York.,
II
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2 7
35
42
50
59
68
8i
96
113
130
145
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Contents
The Voice of God .
The Agency of the Spirit
The Materials of Revelation
The Providence of the Canon
The Compilation of the Book
The Truth of the Message
The Bible's Human Element .
The Mirage of Inerrancy
Education and Symbolism
The Multiplexity of Doctrine
The Employment of Reason
Miracles in the Bible
Liberalism Within Orthodoxy
Appendix
9
I
THE VOICE OF GOD
AN inquiry into the nature of Biblical in-
spiration can be of interest only to those
whose philosophy of things human and
divine does not exclude the conception of God
communicating His thoughts to the mind of man.
A thinker who has convinced himself that no hu-
man intellect could receive or transmit the direct
impressions of a divine Intelligence, can scarcely
be engaged by a study of how the Bible expresses
the mind of God. His only answer can be that a
book humanly produced expresses human minds
and nothing more.
With as many, however, as have not tied up
the possibilities of the universe into so small a
parcel of their own opinion, the mere supposition
of a volume conveying to mankind a message of
supernatural origin should suffice to rouse a con-
cern to know its credentials and appraise the ex-
tent of divine influence exercised through it. And
the more profoundly any reader is persuaded of
the reality of such claims for the Scriptures of the
Old and New Testament, the more earnestly eager
should he be to value precisely the worths imparted
to these writings by the impress of divinity upon
them. Assuredly a man who has come to rever-
ii
12
THE YOICE OF GOD
ence the Bible as a—or let us rather say, the—
book of God, will be equally anxious neither by
fanatic superstition to load it with significances
that God never intended, nor by critical skepticism
to rob it of any meaning with which the infinite
Wisdom purposed to invest it.
The effort here begun to outline such an ap-
praisement of the qualities of Holy Scripture pro-
ceeds then on the frank assumption that a revela-
tion of the will of the universal Creator to His
human creatures is not only a possibility through
the medium of a book penned wholly by human
hands, but in the volume of the Bible has become
an actuality. The assumption is of course a pre-
mise of faith rather than a conclusion of logic.
Even if occasion permitted the matter to be
argued, argument would never demonstrate it.
The ways of God like the being of God transcend
syllogisms.
Nevertheless logic need take no offense at the
premise of divine revelation. Many considerations
commend the idea to a reasonable philosophy—
considerations drawn from the common experi-
ence of the race and especially from the historic ex-
perience of Christians. Most patent of the facts
that sustain it is the Bible itself. Saying this is not
begging the question. A Bible  of the earth
earthy  would indeed be, no matter what its o wn
claims in its own behalf, poor testimony to the
reality of truth's communication from heaven.
But the Bible that we have has long since im-
pressed the world with a character to which it is
THE VOICE OF GOD
13
far from absurd to attach the thesis of a heavenly
derivation.
To be sure, for those whose inclinations turn
that way it is easy to single out from the Scrip-
tures—especially from their primitive portions—
illustrations of crudities unmistakably human, for
the origin of which no half-way candid reader
would look higher than a this-world plane. But
whoever is willing to do the Bible the justice of
judging it in whole and not in part, must confess
that in its loftier portions it soars to elevations of
sublimity well worthy of an ultimate authorship
in the mind of God. As the Westminster Con-
fession of Faith says so finely, it is  the heavenli-
ness of the matter  which the Bible contains that
justifies regarding it as a heavenly product.
There is, of course, no compulsion on any man's
judgment to admit this divine authorship if he
chooses to deny it. It is open to him to maintain
that the noblest of Bible passages reflect nothing
but the genius of men. In that case, however, he
will be constrained to speak of amazing Bible men
whose feet have  climbed the steep ascent of
heaven  to a more convincing apprehension of
who God is and how He loves than the greatest
of sages elsev/here have attained. But one who
says God helped them to the truth, has no need to
speak of a remarkable God. If God indeed had
a hand in the making of the Bible, its most glit-
tering peaks are not loftier than a rational expecta-
tion of Omniscience, looking upward, may sur-
vey without surprise.
14
THE VOICE OF GOD
The awesome drama of Job, where God Him-
self appears as an actor; the glorious hymns of
faith and praise which the psalmists sang; the
thrilling oratory of impassioned prophets denounc-
ing evil with voices of thunder and illuminating
righteousness with the lure of unquenchable light;
above all the  meek and lowly  voice of Jesus
Christ, unfolding, with ineffable gentleness but a
strangely commanding power, the way of that
mystic life which eschews self and inherits eternal
joy—these things, if from man and only from
man, are wonders for which history and criticism
have yet to account. But if one says they are from
God, all is accounted for the instant the word is
spoken.
But the greater—yes, the greatest—argument
for the authentic revealment of the Creator
among and to His creatures is afforded not by a
book but by a Life—a Life recorded indeed in a
book but so vitally distinct from all that is written
of it that still after twice a thousand years it con-
tinues to dominate the mind of the world with the
independent force of embodied fact. Nothing was
more distinctively characteristic of the Son of
Man than His consciousness that the Father who
sent Him was always with Him and through Him
was manifest to the men who were His own daily
companions. Of those companions it was later
said that those who watched them  took knowl-
edge of them that they had been with Jesus.
Even so mankind, watching the figure of their
great Friend and heeding His words, has taken
THE VOICE OF GOD
15
knowledge that He had been—has been—is—with
God.
Without reference to theological conceptions of
His Personality, it is impressively obvious that
Jesus Christ's mighty and constant sense of God
stands, for the modern man as for the original
disciples, as the best of all pledges that the Soul
of the Infinite does seek converse with the finite
souls of this small planet, otherwise isolate in the
ocean of space. In so far as Jesus was God, He
was the demonstration that God craves fellowship
with man. In so far as He was man, He was the
demonstration that God can have fellowship with
man and man with God. In either aspect the
literal feasibility of divine revelation, guiding hu-
man thought, directing human action, is sustained
by one wholly congruous example. And plainly
what has been lived and felt may also be told and
written. After Jesus a Bible is no longer a
miracle. God manifest in the flesh renders God
manifest in a volume of writing a simple and
minor sequence.
With full confidence therefore in the rationality
of the idea of  Scripture inspired of God, these
studies base themselves on the single broad belief
that the Lord of heaven and earth has "of old
time spoken unto the fathers by the prophets in
divers portions and in divers manners, and of
those messages, as well as from that still nobler
message  spoken unto us in His Son, has pro-
vided an authoritative and permanent record be-
queathed to later generations that  through com-
16
THE VOICE OF GOD
fort of the Scriptures we might have hope. This,
as already said, is a frankly confessed assumption
—an unproved (but fitly believed) postulate from
which inquiry sets out; for no inquiry makes
progress except it has first determined what things
it will leave behind unquestioned. Whoever there-
fore cannot consent that so much shall be held to
be fixed and free of doubt, had best not go on by
this road. Let him turn back and have out his
own wrestle with first principles.
But grant that we are satisfied to accept the
presumption of an actual revelation from God in
a book certified by His providence and divinely
adapted to instruct mankind in the changeless
things of His purpose and will. Then we are
ready to advance to the practical examination of
that book, asking what are the seals and tokens
of this august authorship which it has pleased the
Lord to stamp upon it. By  divers manners,
says the apostle, God has accomplished this trans-
mission of His thoughts to the minds of men.
What more fascinating pursuit can a studious
brain propose to itself than the investigation of
the particular manners which God has chosen to
employ in making the Bible—discerning, if pos-
sible, by what standards of discrimination He has
preferred one "manner for one passage and
some other  manner  for another of its  divers
portions  ?
Before entering, however, upon the highway of
this attractive study it is necessary to post at the
outset one warning sign. We have made one as-
THE YOICE OP GOD
17
Sumption; let that in this direction be our end of
both assuming and presuming. Not a philosophic
riddle to be solved by hypotheses and presupposi-
tions lies before us, but a tangible phenomenon of
literature, as challenging to scientific determina-
tion of fact as the firmament of sun and stars
overhead. Not what the Bible might be, nor even
what (in our opinion) it ought to be, is the object
of our just interest; we desire to know simply
and only what the Bible is. Too long, by both
those who would magnify and those who would
disparage the significance of inspiration, has te-
dious theorizing been indulged over what God
must do or could not do if He undertook to in-
spire a book of permanent religious authority for
His children on earth. For such vain disputation
there is but one terminus, and that is the common
willingness of all concerned to quiet their own,
clamour and look in the Bible to see what in fact
God has done..
II
THE AGENCY OF THE SPIRIT
AN inspired Bible must depend on the reality;
of personal spiritual contact between men
and God. But so, too, according to
evangelical faith, does the daily Christian life of
the simplest of private disciples. Each means ac-
tual divine-human intercommunication. If God
does not in very truth impart energy, illumination,
guidance, to individual human souls in this world,
then indeed we have no book of divine authority,
but by the same token there are no lives directed
by heavenly impulse to the service of Christ. And
it can only be by the same Holy Spirit that the
divine impacts are transmitted which accomplish
both these purposes. It is not one Spirit who
speaks messages for prophets to repeat to vast
national multitudes and another Spirit who speaks
counsel for the private Christian to apply to his
own personal perplexities. It is in each case the
same Voice. But is it the same sort of speech?
 There are, says Paul,  diversities of work-
ings, but the same God who worketh all things in
all. How wide is the diversity here? When God
in a now far antiquity inspired twoscore men (or
thereabouts) to write what He has since collected
into the canon of Holy Scripture, did He exert
z8
THE AGENCY OF THE SPIRIT
19
over them some mystic influence brought into play
upon humanity neither before nor since? Or did
He but enter those minds by the same silent chan-
nels through which He still daily responds to sup-
pliants for the wisdom which, James declares, He
gives with limitless liberality to all men who care
to request it? Was it by some forcible seizure of
their mental powers that these authors of the Bible
writings were compelled to pen what God desired ?
Or were the promptings which guided them the
same character of unspoken urge within the soul
by which devout men still in this prosaic day are
sure that the heavenly Father affords leading in
religious duty? What, in a word, is the essential
quality of Bible inspiration? And how distinctive
is it, as compared with other guiding influences
by which the heavenly Father in every age teaches
each child of His the path of His pleasure?
On this problem, which seems so central to the
question which these studies have undertaken to
pursue, it is surprising to find how little help the
Bible itself affords. One finds that the writers of
Scripture were not at all disposed to analyze their
own psychology. Perhaps it is fair to say that the
Hebrew race, to which they belonged, never did
develop that form of self-consciousness. At all
events, not one Bible writer furnishes the least clue
to let us know how it felt to be writing under
God's inspiration works sacred to later ages.
A few are rather explicit about the visions and
theophanies whereby matter for their messages
was made known to them—John in the Revelation
20 THE AGENCY OF THE SPIRIT
is especially notable for this—but not even these
suggest anything other than the normal action of
the human mind in the memory which retained
these communications for record or even in the
habits of verbal composition which gave to them
literary form. The prophets who begin nearly
every paragraph with  Thus saith Jehovah  but
seldom relate by what means—sound for the outer
ear or impression on the inward thought—they
heard Jehovah's sayings. And for much the
greater part of the contents of the Bible it may be
taken as certain that the authors came by the facts
and thoughts of their writings in a manner not
consciously different from the production of any
other literature of similar sincerity. Scripture
historians questioned eye-witnesses or consulted
documents; poets and psalmists wrote as the surge
of life experience within them drove them to
write; the apostles sent letters to the churches for
just the same reason that men write letters to-
day—they had something urgent to say to their
friends.
It appears accurate to add that no author rep-
resented in the Biblical canon had any conception,
as he wrote, that he was contributing to a book of
permanent divine revelation for all mankind. To
that thought the nearest approach must have been
realized by Moses and those who worked with
him or after him on the  book of the law  for
the Israelitish nation. They, of course, had no
idea of reaching beyond the circle of their own
people, but as patriots they no doubt anticipated
THE AGENCY OF THE SPIRIT
21
an endless national force for the statutes they were
recording. Is it cynical to observe the historic
irony of the fact that the only portion of the Bible
which the twentieth century finds obsolete is the
Levitical code, which to these ancient Hebrews
seemed perpetual?
For the rest of the Scriptures it seems true with-
out qualification that its various books were com-
mitted to writing under as immediate an urgency
as a modern preacher preaches a sermon or a
modern compiler might undertake to preserve the
records of the late war. Each such writing was in
its own way a tract for the times. And the
Biblical authors were preeminently men of con-
temporary minds intent on serving their own re-
spective generations.
To that end they wrote, as the case might de-
mand of each according to his special talent,
memoirs of a heroic or a shameful national past
to inspire or restrain the people's current tempers;
burning exhortations to waken conscience for liv-
ing sins and responsibility for living duties ; songs
of hope in dark or light to cheer the hearts of
spiritual pilgrims; dawn-bright foretellings of sal-
vation and refreshment destined in God's mes-
sianic plans yet to reward the discouraged and
weary; loving transcripts of those words which
were spoken as man never spake, so that those
who never saw Jesus none the less might remem-
ber Him; and simplest of all, friendly letters hur-
riedly penned to carry to one and another group
of beloved fellow Christians such quick warning
,22
THE AGENCY OF THE SPIRIT
and instant instruction as they were thought to be
at the moment in need of. There are the ma-
terials—each serving the passing day but each in-
stinct with a seed of perpetuity that their original
penmen never guessed—which remain to consti-
tute the invaluable treasure of the Holy Bible.
If in qualification of these remarks any saying
of Scripture could be cited, it would no doubt be
out of the first chapter of Peter's first epistle,
where, having voiced the early Christian's pas-
sionate love of the recently ascended Lord, the
apostle harks back to the messianic prophecies
which foretold a Saviour's coming:
 Concerning which salvation the prophets sought
and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace
that should come to you, searching what time or what
manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in
them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the
sufferings of Christ and the glories that should fol-
low them. To whom it was revealed that not unto
themselves but unto you did they minister these
things.
It must appear plain, however, on study that
these words do not contradict but confirm the
generalization that Bible writers wrote for their
times and not with the object or hope of helping
to create a perpetual religious literature. The al-
lusion of Peter does not, of course, extend beyond
those passages in the Old Testament that foretell
the appearance of a Messiah among the Jews—
passages of the highest significance yet small in
extent as compared with the whole bulk of that
THE AGENCY OF THE SPIRIT
23
Testament. Not even these prophecies, however,
are by Peter's affirmation classed as conscious con-
tributions to a permanent Bible.
Indeed, the implication is quite the opposite.
Peter rather signifies that the Spirit of God
prompted the prophets to speak and write, for the
encouragement of their own contemporaries, the
blessed message which promised the world a
Saviour, but to their disappointment forbade them
to anticipate an early fulfillment of the promise.
They had thus to leave to the future what they
would have been joyful to welcome in their own
day, and the predictions which they recorded for
their own neighbours stood to be the comfort also
of other long generations intervening before the
fullness of time had arrived. The prophets, there-
fore, may have dreamed of their prophecies sur-
viving till the divine One did appear, but that does
not say that they had knowledge or even intima-
tion of a destiny that was to make their writings
imperishable till the end of time.
Yet, if totally unaware of any afflatus that
lifted them to the plane of timeless oracles, these
Scriptural authors were intensely conscious, as al-
most every page of their manuscript shows, of
that other fellowship with the Spirit of God which
is the covenant privilege of every devout soul.
The long destiny of their writings they had no
way of foreseeing, but they fully appreciated the
imminent importance of making a mighty mark
for God in the generation alive at the hour when
each man wrote. And well they knew that such
24
THE AGENCY OP THE SPIRIT
a service is to be accomplished by no merely hu-
man cleverness or adroit literary device. They
hoped to speak and write for God not by might
nor by power but only by the aid and guidance of
His Spirit. Just as a true minister of the word
of God in this day makes first preparation for his
sermon by prayer and meditative invitation of
divine influences, so the prophets of old com-
muned with God long and with even agonizing
desire before they dared utter in His name their
 Thus saith.
Of course, it must not be assumed that the
modes of experience by which Bible writers were
admitted to participate in the mind of God were
never different from the modes of experience
which are common to men of to-day. No one with
any due conception of what omnipotence signifies
would dare the effrontery of setting limits to the
means by which God may work out His purposes.
In a time when the instrumentalities through
which God could reveal His will were fewer, and
perhaps the spiritual apprehension of the race cul-
tivated to a far less degree of sensitiveness than
now, it may well have been that means of com-
munication more objective than He uses to-day,
were necessary. And if necessary the infinite God
would not be hampered in His resources.
There are many references to visions and
dreams, in the older Testament especially, to which
current religious experience affords no parallel.
But lack of that kind of verification for divine
messages now is no disproof of the reality of it
THE AGENCY OF THE SPIKIT
25
then. Nevertheless, even in the prophetic books
the impression is strong that the men who spoke
for God of old time heard the word of their proc-
lamation oftenest in the prayerful silence of their
own souls—just where the evangelical church to-
day expects its preachers to receive the Spirit's
sanction for the substance of their preaching.
It is noticeable that Paul frankly declared that
what he heard when caught up to the third heaven
was not usable for any earthly ministry. What
method of revelation brought him (succeeding his
conversion vision) the gospel he did preach—
which he always insisted was transmitted to him
without human intermediation—he nowhere has
hinted. But those delightfully naive passages in
the seventh chapter of First Corinthians (where
the apostle acknowledges that he has  no com-
mandment of the Lord  and so must  give my
judgment, in which, he adds,  I think I also
have the Spirit of God") carry the very ring of
voice which would seem natural to a present-day
evangelist—absolute assurance on the great things
of God, but on matters of minor importance a
hope rather than a surety of keeping in line with
God's mind. Is it presumptuous then to imagine
that Paul's certainties developed from experiences
altogether similar to those through which many
a lesser Christian has won his way to great tri-
umphs of faith? What did that long stay in
Arabia signify? Battles no doubt, such as hosts
of souls have had to fight, struggling through
.floods of questionings to the solid rock of mighty
26
THE AGENCY OP THE SPIEIT
affirmations, of which his epistles have become SSL
undying witness to edify a living Church.
There seems then to be discoverable no defined
line of difference by which to distinguish the oper-
ation of the Spirit in the mind and soul of a Bible-
writer from the same Spirit's guidance and gov-
erning of an average Christian's life along lines
of average duty. The most positive conclusion to
record on the subject is a negative one—there is
absolutely no faintest shadow in Scripture of the
widespread pagan notion that God could speak
only through a mind robbed of normal faculties.
The Bible sets utterly no store on the mantie rav-
ings out of which the Greeks thought they could
gather divine oracles.
The true God got His Bible written, as He gets
all His other works in the world done, by men
using for Him all the gifts and capacities with
which He endowed them. The Holy Spirit has
no preference for low-grade mental tools. It is a
far greater thing to know that He is capable of
using the keenest of tools appropriately for His
several intents. If by no external test is it possible
to say how the inspiration of a book differs from
the inspiration of a life, yet the fact that for dif-
ferent purposes the Spirit inspires both is sufficient
assurance that in each case the purpose is ade-
quately accomplished. Each case is the deed of a
perfect Wisdom. The matter rests in the satisfy-
ing deduction that the Bible which God has made
is every whit the Bible man needs.
Ill
THE MATERIALS OF REVELATION
NO exact distinction, it has just been said,
can be defined by the human observer
between the movements of the Holy
Spirit anciently in the minds of Bible authors and
the movements of the same Spirit to-day in the
souls of common Christians. Yet a vast differ-
ence in effect is apparent. No Bible is developing
in the twentieth century. Hosts of men, the
Church believes, continue to this day to speak and
write in the power of the Spirit. But neither from
their speech nor from their writing does there any-
where arise an authority comparable for a mo-
ment to the sway—the universal sway, we may
well say—of those ancient Scriptures which after
the lapse of millenniums remain dominant over the
moral world. What accounts for such singular
and unfading supremacy? If it is indeed true
that no external phenomenon of authorship dis-
tinguishes the Bible from other books, how does it
come nevertheless to be so potently different?
A process of selection tacitly attesting the
Bible's contents is evident on the face of things.
The works included (unless exactness requires
that an exception be made for the two books by
Luke, the Greek physician) are wholly the product
27
28 THE MATERIALS OF REVELATION
of a single race, but by no means the whole litera-
ture of that race. The earliest Biblical records
mention other Hebraic writings seemingly in their
day more famous and, it would appear, quite as
devoutly religious, which despite that missed the
immortality of a place in the Scriptures. The re-
pudiation of the Old Testament apocrypha by the
best scholars of primitive Christianity excluded
from the Bible sphere another large body of He-
brew thought by no means devoid of historical,
intellectual and spiritual merits. As for psalms
it cannot be supposed that a people so ready in the
praises of God sang no more than a hundred and
fifty of these hymns of the soul in all the centuries
of their national life. Solomon alone is recorded
to have written more songs and spoken more prov-
erbs than the whole Bible contains.
The books of Kings and Chronicles confess
themselves abridgments of more copious histories
extant in their epoch. Numerous prophets who
appear dimly in the background of the Old Testa-
ment scene must in many cases have written down
for their contemporaries the truth from God as
they heard it, but failed to win the preservation
of their words to later generations. On the other
hand, much apocalyptic literature, such as in a
later period of Jewish history became the favourite
vehicle of  popular preaching, was cherished
and handed down along lines of pious descent for
a great while before the canon of our existing
Bible was closed, yet found neither part nor lot in
that sublime monument of the Hebrew mind.
THE MATERIALS OF REVELATION 29
The same sort of selective sifting is further
manifest through the New Testament within the
scope of purely Christian literature. The intro-
duction to Luke's Gospel in particular illuminates
this fact. The  beloved physician  who came to
Jerusalem with Paul and chose to remain in Judea
as long as his great friend was imprisoned there,
was impressed not with the scarcity but with the
multiplicity of written memoirs of Jesus, then be-
ing handed about in manuscript among Jewish
Christians. Not a few but  many  had  taken
in hand  to tell that wonderful story of the Son
of God who became Son of Man. And there is no
trace of conscious superiority over that multitude
in the quiet phrase,  It seemed good to me also,
by which Luke explained his resolve to include
himself in the loyal and reverent group of such
biographers.
Could the evangelist have had—as he certainly
did not have—a miraculous prevision of the New
Testament now possessed by the Christian Church,
he would doubtless have been amazed to behold
but four gospels surviving to subsequent ages of
religion. And perhaps he would have been still
more surprised to see his own story of Jesus sup-
planting all but two—more likely, all but one—
of the numerous manuscripts in circulation when
he sat down to write. For surely in Luke's modest
commendation of his work to Theophilus there is
no suggestion of a conceit proposing to do better
a task bungled before, but only of a humble joy in
being permitted to try his skill also at a task rich in
30 THE MATERIALS OP REVELATION
privilege to any disciple who loved the memory
of the gentle Nazarene.
Much the same that is thus said of Luke might
be said of his still more gifted mentor, instructor
and example, the mighty Apostle Paul. For Paul
too was a humble man and must have had, if pos-
sible, less imagination than Luke of bequeathing
anything of his writing to be a standard of doc-
trine for all succeeding Christendom. As has been
already observed, he used his pen not for obtain-
ing to himself the dateless fame which has become
his meed from history, but for the intensely prac-
tical and right-at-hand necessity of setting his fel-
low believers right where they had missed some
of the meaning of Christianity.
The apostle, of course, was aware that the pleas-
ure of God had long contemplated a supreme book
bestowed on men for their religious guidance. He
well knew that book as it existed in his day and
revered it as containing  sacred writings  able
to make men  wise unto salvation. He was
happy that his spiritual son Timothy had known
those writings from infancy; doubtless his own
knowledge of the same book went back also to
young childhood, and he would have no child grow
up without its divine counsel. And quite possibly
Paul realized that for all God's purposes the Holy
Scriptures would still require a supplement—
something to explain better how the salvation fore-
cast in the law and the prophets of the old Jewish
Bible was now to be realized  through faith which
is in Christ Jesus.
THE MATERIALS OF REVELATION 31
But that thirteen of his own letters would go
into that new supplement on  salvation,"—this,
it is surely safe to say, absorbed and self-forgetful
Paul never dreamed of. More to the point here,
however—since this unanticipated immortalization
for writers of Scripture has already been dwelt
upon—is the probably greater puzzle in the mind
of the apostle if he had attempted to account for
the fact that only thirteen were used. Why these
and no more ? Without doubt these thirteen con-
stituted but a portion—very likely a minor portion
—of the correspondence he had penned through
all his long missionary career, with  anxiety for
all the churches pressing on him daily.
Paul was a born letter-writer and he could not
long have worried over any of these far-away
circles of disciples without reaching for pen and
parchment or stylus and tablet No doubt he dis-
patched to distant friends many an epistle which
the recipients carelessly failed to preserve. In
fact, from his own allusions (1 Corinthians 5:9;
2 Corinthians 2:4) we know the apostle sent one,
and very likely two, letters to the church of Cor-
inth which that church appears not to have prized
enough to keep. By these lost epistles may be il-
lustrated one of the crucial questions involved in
this inquiry.
Considering that all this correspondence with
the Corinthians ran in a single connected series,
dealing with various ramifications of one problem,
is it conceivable that Paul could have written the
surviving and the lost epistles under a differing
32 THE MATERIALS OF REVELATION
spell of divine impulse? If Dr. David Smith's in-
terpretation is correct, it is the second and the
fourth of these letters which stand now as integral
parts of God's authoritative Bible, acknowledged
as inspired by all evangelical scholars. The first
and the third are those which have disappeared.
But who in such a case would be willing to say
that the Spirit who watches over all the churches
descended to the apostle with a divine inspiration
only after his first (now lost) epistle to the Co-
rinthians was penned and temporarily withdrew
once more after the second (called in the New
Testament the First) had been finished.
An apostle with the problem of the unruly Co-
rinthian congregation on his hands was in no situa-
tion to be content with intermittent flashes of di-
vine illumination. He continually needed all the
godly wisdom—all the protection against error in
judgment or instruction—which the divine Spirit
could in any case impart to an earthly servant of
God's truth. It certainly could not have been more
important to insure right regulation and true or-
thodoxy for an American church in the twentieth
century through the medium of an inspired book
than it was to get a straight start for an infant
congregation in the initial age of Christianity
through the oversight and agency of a living
apostle. Can it be too bold then to say that the
Lord did not give the Spirit in stinted measure to
Paul at any time, whether he was writing to the
Corinthians his first, second, third or fourth letter
of counsel—that the lost writing was just as fully
THE MATERIALS OF REVELATION 33
inspired as that which we read in this day when
we open the Bible to First and Second Corin-
thians ?
If we affirm, however, that the inspiration of
God may (or even must) have been as  plenary 
for much of His word that never got within the
covers of Holy Scriptures as it is for the historic-
ally accepted contents of that volume, let us make
sure that we are grading up the oral and transient
utterances of God's messengers and not grading
down the values of the permanent record. Not
otherwise will we be in harmony with the experi-
ence of prophets, psalmists, evangelists and
apostles. For to none of these great heralds of
God was it ever a commonplace and incidental
matter to have the Spirit with them for any of the
ministries which they rendered in God's name.
All the wonder that they could possibly have given
to the thought of heavenly Wisdom permeating a
book of revelation for mankind they daily felt in
themselves as they realized the equal miracle of
God cooperating with them in their work—em-
ploying them in His work.
This exalted estimation of a divine immanence
in common life which we modern Christians are
apt to dismiss as unimportant—if not wholly
mystical and theoretic—is accounted for in these
ancients by the much higher value than our usual
insight supports which they put on the daily busi-
ness of serving God. That was to them colossal
business, and required all the power possibly to be
obtained for it from the reservoir of Omnipo-
34 THE MATERIALS OF REVELATION
fence. So men still should think. If a preacher
really understands what a divine duty it is to
preach a weekly gospel sermon and make it count
for men's salvation, he will scarcely believe it a
greater—though it may very well be a different—
power which one would need to write a Bible.
He who gives over therefore the attempt to
describe and distinguish the exact potential of di-
vine dynamic requisite to inspire a competent book
of revelation, is in no wise consenting to evaporate
the book's authority. He may be refusing to
measure how much of God is in the book, for he
may have learned by exploration of the greatness
of God how futile (if not foolish) it is for the
human philosopher to mark bounds for the com-
ing and going of the Eternal Spirit. But as long
as one says,  God is in the book, he has said
what is all sufficient, for he has said that enough
of God is there.
Enough of God is there to insure that the di-
verse contents assembled from many sources to
constitute the holy volume have been drawn to-
gether by the magnetism of an infallible Intelli-
gence. It is not an aimless or formless conglomer-
ate. Out of materials vaster than could possibly
have been incorporated into any single Bible for
human use, God in His own time by His own se-
lection of appropriate elements has made a Bible
as it has pleased Him. Its power unimpaired
through the rolling centuries is the adequate dem-
onstration of the rightness of His choice and the
perfection of His work.
IV
THE PROVIDENCE OF THE CANON
IF it is appreciated that in the very times when
the Holy Scriptures were taking form, the
inspiration of God pervaded utterances and
documents far more numerous than a volume of
the usable size of the Bible could preserve, there
is introduced into the study of inspiration a factor
not commonly considered. Superabundance of
materials at hand for any kind of construction al-
ways compels selection. This is as true in the mak-
ing of a book as in the building of a house. When
therefore God was compiling a book for men, His
first necessity (to speak after a human manner)
was to choose, from the plentiful mass of what
He had taught His trusted servants to think, speak
and write, such portions as were in their nature
most suitable to the purposes which that book was
to fulfill.
Contemplating this process of selection, the
reader of the Bible which resulted from it can
scarcely fail to feel the double sanction of divine
authority conveyed thereby. On this view the
contents found within the volume are not only
what God originally wrought out through human
minds governed by His Spirit but what by His
35
36 THE PROVIDENCE OF THE CANON
own specific choice He later marked as ageless in
value and fit therefore to constitute the permanent
guide-book of mankind. This makes the Bible
like a great deed of trust, which on its face con-
veys a property of inestimable worth and after-
ward is indorsed with a sworn and bonded guar-
antee of title from the grantor Himself.
A distinct change of emphasis, however, must
ensue where this thought of a Bible compiled out
of a much larger inspired literature supplants the
perhaps more prevalent thought of a Bible planned
and composed as a unique religious unity under
influences that have affected no other writing of
men. By the latter conception the matter to be
mainly insisted on as establishing the authority
of the Scriptures is the Lord's direct appointment
of each Biblical author to pen the particular por-
tion of the Bible which it became his lot to com-
pose. With this goes of course the belief that in
a way altogether unparallelled by any human ex-
perience elsewhere the Holy Spirit presided over
the mind of each writer until he had finished the
stint of authorship assigned him.
From so exclusive a stress, however, on sixty-
six separate miracles of supernatural control
wrought for the production of the Bible's sixty-
six documents, there often results a strange indif-
ference to the means by which those sixty-six
documents were at length assembled in the single
book which to-day standardizes the faith and the-
ology of Christendom. Men who are vehement
champions of the plenary inspiration of each in-
THE PROVIDENCE OF THE CANON 37
dividual segment of Scripture, not infrequently
indulge in slighting remarks about the ecclesi-
astical powers that shaped and finally closed the
Biblical canon. Sometimes there are heard al-
most sneering references to the few votes, one way
or the other, by which it is supposed in the councils
of the ancient Church this or that book was put
into or shut out of the Bible. The impression sug-
gested is that the Spirit took the divinest pains to
procure the writing of the various fractions of the
Bible but left to chance their preservation and the
canonical collection of them—that the parts of
Scripture are inspired but their association in a
single volume came to pass by some guideless ac-
cident.
All this appears to be a complete inversion of
the logical values of the case. It is the Bible as a
whole, as an intact book unified by its one ever
controlling interest in the relations of God and
man, which bulks on the sight of the world as the
most potent phenomenon of universal literature.
It is the mass impact of the volume which makes
humanity bow to the moral authority of its teach-
ings. It is not by its fragments but in its integral
wholeness that it sways the mind of Christendom.
The concentration of the Bible's sections and por-
tions into a single harmonized unit of power is
therefore a greater work than the first production
of the various materials thus combined. Is it pos-
sible then that the Spirit of God would give an
omniscient attention to what was less and leave to
neglect what was more?
38 THE PROVIDENCE OP THE CANON
It has been already insisted in these studies that
the Spirit's agency in the original composition of
the Scriptural writings was actual and valid. But
there is no inconsistency with that faith in adding
now that the Spirit's agency in forming the canon
—in binding up the completed book into one
volume—was a still more unqualified intervention
of the governing purposes of God. Moreover, it
was an act of much more immediate consequence
in attesting to mankind the supernatural reality of
Biblical revelation.
That God's book should be commended to the
trust and faith of humanity by His ratifying
choice of the matter to be incorporated therein, is
an idea much easier to make real to the twentieth-
century mind than any thought of a Bible writer's
intellect being preempted by a temporary divine
Occupant. This is, of course, but little reason for
maintaining that the former idea is truer than the
latter. But it is good reason for setting the former
fact to the forefront when one is inviting the
modern man to put confidence in the Scriptures.
And it also affords excellent ground for thinking
that the Father in heaven, with His infallible
foreknowledge of the minds He had given to men,
would Himself exercise His most anxious care
over His written revelation at the point where that
care would be most evident and most convincing
in the light of common earthly experience.
What God did in and through the intellects of
the Bible authors—what illumination He shed on
divine secrets, what certainties He sent to replace
THE PROVIDENCE OF THE CANON 39
uncertainties—is a speculation for which the or-
dinary Christian's consciousness of God may give
but little suggestion. But that God knows how
through the quiet workings of years on years to
accomplish in the end the  bright designs  which
Cowper says He  treasures up  for the good of
His children, is an observation commonplace to
Christian faith throughout the world. God is to-
day doing just that, as He has been from the dawn
of history; thousands of those who love and trust
Him dare even now to testify that they have seen
Him working so. Wickednesses accumulate;
tumults turn the world upside down; the treacher-
ous and evil man has his short triumph and the
righteous suffers unspeakable affliction; but yet
through clouds and darkness God moves on to His
foreseen goal, and at length the thing He meant
comes to pass and the world learns that its Creator
is not defeated nor His good intent confounded.
Let us say then that the making of a Bible for
the spiritual guidance of man is just another such
 bright design  treasured patiently through cen-
turies by the  God of patience "—as the Bible it-
self calls Him. How instantly—and how appro-
priately—the whole process in this light takes its
place in that framework of providence wherein are
comprehended the hopes of the devout for all good
things present and to come. God watching and
waiting through the centuries to accumulate just
the words of direction by which His followers
might best be guided to peace and security in a
troublous world—what in all that is more mysteri-
40 THE PROVIDENCE OF THE CANON
ous or less credible than God planning through
centuries to establish liberty, disseminate intelli-
gence, suppress wrong and diffuse human good
will? And where thousands and thousands from
among even the agnostic and materialistic will ac-
knowledge in the world the evidence of providen-
tial progress toward these latter aims, how shall a
Christian doubt the hand of God in the giving of
the Bible to the race of mankind? Is His hand
too weak or His patience too hasty for the long
enterprise ?
Suppose it is indeed true that the decision which
included one writing within the canon or excluded
another has once and again seemed to turn on the
whim of prejudiced scholars or the accident of a
scant majority in some convocation of ecclesiastics.
Do these things negative God? Is it not through
the midst of far more precarious human con-
tingencies that the heavenly Father pursues the
path of His secular purposes? And does He not
have His way in the end even when all the hosts
of evil are in league to frustrate His intent? In
the face of such abundant history to prove how
even the wrath of man is overruled to the praise
of divine power in other things, why should it be
hard to believe that in this matter the voice of
councils and the judgment of church fathers have
been controlled to register at last a consensus on
the contents of Scripture wholly agreeable to su-
preme Wisdom—accomplishing thus the comple-
tion of what in all remaining time was to be the
 book of books  for every land and all people?
THE PROVIDENCE OF THE CANON 41
Providential selection of its component parts be-
comes then the great final seal by which the
Church has warrant for its reliance on the Bible.
By a method by which they know that their Guide
is still working in the affairs of this world the
people of God find themselves supplied with a
mighty and satisfying manual of divine counsel.
Its broad adequacy, its comprehensive worth,
tested in the crucible of daily life to which it is
subjected when men try to live by its precepts,
justify the omnipotent toil of preparing it.
And this from every practical standpoint dem-
onstrates the Bible's sufficient perfection. It
meets the need it was made for. Should any man
complain of peculiarities in the book's pages which
he may think inconsistent with its asserted divin-
ity, the perhaps crass but perfectly direct answer
is that anything good enough for God should be"'
good enough for him. The universe is full of
proof that its Creator rejoices in things that work.
The infinite mechanisms by which the stars are
moved, the seasons made to roll round in due sue-
cession, and life and death brought into the har-
mony of an endless rhythm, get their ultimate
approbation all from this—they do what they are
meant to do. The Bible as a work of God is vin-
dicated by the same law. It is a divine book be-
cause it is perfectly effective for what God in-
tended. And this in the orbit of cosmic efficiency
comes back to the axiomatic converse of that state-
ment—what the Bible suffices for is just what God
intended.
V
THE COMPILATION OF THE BOOK
GOD chose the materials that make up the
Bible. By what standards of judgment
did He prefer the contents thus preserved
above the mass of now unknown manuscript which
in the age-long process of compilation He must
have discarded? No just human rating of the
book in its entirety or in its several parts is pos-
sible without some appreciation at least of the
viewpoint from which God, as we may say, edited
it. Definite reasons must have led to the use of
each particular document accepted; it is impossi-
ble to suppose that for such a result ancient writ-
ings were poured at random into a collection of
unstudied miscellany. Is it possible then to infer
from the pages of Scripture why God took for
His perpetual library of sacred things just the sub-
ject matter which to-day is found in it?
This at all events may be stated with assur-
ance—that God's reasons in these premises must
all refer to the objects for which by His provi-
dence the book was intended. Among these ob-
jects, however, one minor factor may be supposed
to have reacted negatively on many a possible
choice. A Bible which was to serve as a religious
handbook for the general host of men, must be
42
THE COMPILATION OF THE BOOK 43
saved from too great bulk. Encyclopaedic tomes
are studied in libraries by professional scholars; a
book for everybody to read at home must be a
small and condensed volume. What the Bible
might have been in size is suggested by the later
Jewish Talmuds. Produced in a garrulous age of
dogmatism when Hebrew rabbis talked lifetimes
away in vain debate over paltry casuistries, the
Talmuds grew to ponderous proportions, over
which none but a few plodding specialists in any
generation have ever achieved even a half-under-
standing mastery.
For illumination to the .common people all this
mammoth Talmudic literature has therefore
amounted to nothing from its beginning until now.
An unrestricted Bible would have come to the
same useless fate. A Hand to prune it, to cut
away thickets of words that would have darkened
its rich fruits from the sight of ordinary men,
was necessary in order to bestow on the modern
world a book which a child may handle unbur-
dened and which every believer can carry whole
to his secret place of meditation and prayer.
Many instances of economical restraint may be
traced in the order of the universe; the compara-
tive brevity of the Bible is one instance more.
However, the Bible is what it is by God's in-
elusions, not by His exclusions. The vital de-
cisions were the affirmative choices, of course.
And naturally the first question to be settled about
a Bible writing—or a writing appearing available
for the Bible—must be whether it conspires with
4A THE COMPILATION OF THE BOOK
the book's first purpose. What is that purpose?
Venturing to think God's thoughts after Him, the
Bible is intended above all else to persuade men
that they can have and ought to have fellowship
with God. No composition of any human pen
therefore could be suitable to form a part of the
divine Scriptures if it did not tend to this funda-
mental conviction. Whatever author gains the
honour of appearing among the producers of the
Bible must, like all others who please God,  be-
lieve that he is and that he is a re warder of them
that seek after him. It must moreover be a be-
lief on experience—experience of a man's own,
keen enough and clear enough to make him eager
to help others to realize the same practical faith.
Such were in fact the building stones out of which
inspiration erected the imposing and time-defying
structure of God's supreme book.
To be sure, the God-consciousness of some of
the authors whose work is preserved in our Bible
does not seem as clear and spiritually pure as this
definition would appear to require. The writer of
Esther, for example, was a person so little accus-
tomed to a pious expression of his thoughts that
he wrote his whole story without even the mention
of God—a circumstance which has led certain
strict conservative scholars to question whether the
production ever possessed any inspiration at all.
Yet a study of its atmosphere rather than its text
exposes qualities in the rehearsal of Queen Es-
ther's heroism which leave but small difficulty in
understanding why this brief history was chosen
THE COMPILATION OF THE BOOK 45
by the Spirit of inspiration to be bound up in the
Bible volume. Possibly, indeed, such a section as
this was brought into the compass of Scripture
with a sympathetic thought for men who find it
hard to get deeper in their talk than a few oblique
hints at the religious faith which they carry hidden
in their hearts. However that may be, though, it
is at least evident that in his heart of hearts the
author of Esther was one worshipping the God
who, as Lowell says, stands  within the shadows
keeping watch above His own. He was a real,
even if unconfessed, man of faith.
It was, then, with the diffident restraint that
usually characterizes men of his temperament, but
with a faith that would not let him be wholly
silent, that this now nameless historian used his
pen on a record by which he hoped he could nerve
men and women to depend on the sureness of God
even in the darkest of adversities—and live up to
their best sense of duty no matter what dangers
threatened. He had too a clairvoyant persuasion
that  every man's life is a plan of God "—that
nobody is born into the world  whose work is not
born with him "—and he put that consecrating
idea into words that youth at least will not forget:
 Who knoweth whether thou art not come to the
kingdom for such a time as this?  Should not
then the everyday modern Christian, to whom such
clear confidence in the providential ordering of
man's life is vastly rich in both comfort and stim-
ulus, give thanks that the Spirit of God never es-
tablished any arbitrary rule requiring God's name
46 THE COMPILATION OF THE BOOK
to appear in each separate contribution to Scrip-
ture. That would have left out Esther entirely.
What is requisite everywhere is a message that
points and leads to God. And that Esther surely
has despite its secular-sounding text.
More dubious under this criterion is the right
of the Song of Solomon to be reckoned among the
sacred writings of true religion. It does contain
once the divine Name. But there is in it far less
consciousness of living and moving beneath the
eye of God than in the heroic romance of the
Persian queen. Besides, the  song (which is
really a drama) has suffered in repute from the
meddling of doctrinaires who have foolishly tried
to save it as canonical by pretending that it is
something which it never was or could be. Not
content to let its literary character stand as the
Holy Spirit left it, these meddlers have tried to
veneer the drama with a fictitious interpretation
expected to make it look religious. By fantastic
allegorizing they would exhibit it as a picture of
the love of Christ and His Church—a violent
manipulation without a shred of reason in the
poem itself but alleged to be necessary in order to
make its tone sanctimonious enough to accord with
an inspired Bible. As if men better than the Spirit
know what does accord with an inspired Bible!
From such means of commending it to the re-
spect of the Bible's friends, the Song of Solomon
has in truth suffered ten times more than it
profited. Many readers have instinctively as-
sumed that a piece of literature which, as it
THE COMPILATION OF THE BOOK 47
seemed, could not be vindicated for religious use
except by distortions obnoxious to common sense,
must be of small consequence, if not quite out of
place, in a book drawing its credentials from God.
But their verdict might have been very different
if reason for its appearing within the canon had
been sought in its own inherent character rather
than in an artificial halo invented to sanctify it.
Really responsible scholarship reports instead
that the Song of Solomon is in fact a delicately
wrought idyll glorifying stainless fidelity in ro-
mantic love between woman and man. Under an
oriental exuberance of imagery obscure to western
.understanding, patient study traces the story of a
country maiden stolen from her shepherd swain
and carried away to the king's harem, where in
the simplicity of a pure and steadfast heart she
repulses royal blandishments until in sheer honour
to her loyalty the king restores her to her, rustic
lover, from whom the allegiance of her heart had
never a moment wavered. If only the people of
God had kept a just sense of the sacredness with
which the Creator invested the sex facts of life
when  male and female created he them, it is
scarcely possible that surprise would greet the sug-
gestion that a love drama—a drama of true love
—held a central place in the written word of God.
It is humanity's jesting or sensual degradations
of love which make such a theme seem strange in
such a book. In an elder age and an eastern life,
where the sense of the story would be more in-
telligible to the common mind, the poem may
48 THE COMPILATION OF THE BOOK
doubtless have helped many a soul to know the
holiness in God's sight of love and marriage. And
that assuredly would be leading a man closer to
the divine. Let us not then disavow even this
strangely mystic  song as unworthy of the
Bible. Possibly the day may come when its re-
covered meaning will again shed a hallowed light
on the unity of those  whom God hath joined to-
gether.
It is impossible, however, to prolong in detail
the inquiry how each particular element in this
composite Bible helps on the single coordinate aim
of pointing men to God. The fact which the il-
lustrations just discussed tend to show might be
fortified by consecutive citations from every one
of the Bible's sixty-six divisions—there is but one
aim in the book but that aim is fulfilled in a variety
of modes too manifold to count. The Bible has
consistency without sameness.
Men are best won to confidence in God by
knowledge of what He has been to generations
past who served Him. The Bible meets that with
its abundant histories, culminating in the history
of Him in whom  dwelleth all the fullness of the
Godhead bodily. Men learn to praise God by
examples of praise; how rich the Bible is in that
incentive. They are taught to think right about
God as they share the thoughts of the right think-
ers of the past; the Bible is the ultimate school for
that crowning art of the human mind. And there
are portions besides to glorify simple common
sense.
THE COMPILATION OF THE BOOK 49
So it becomes apparent that another of God's
guiding principles for selection of the Scriptures
is the need of wide variety. Variety is demanded
by men's different moods and circumstances ; there
must be much for the man in joy, but that neces-
sity cannot be permitted to skimp the comfort pro-
vided for the man in grief. A provision for the
satisfaction of a man's reason as he questions the
ways of God is indispensable. But it would be a
sadly inadequate Bible which spoke only to reason
and had no voice of appeal to a man's emotions
and no challenge for his will. Optimism and ap-
prehension, daring and caution, conservatism and
progressiveness—all these must be balanced
against one another if the moral movement of
mankind is kept in equilibrium. And true to every
need the Bible supplies all these elements in an
absolute wealth of variousness. May God be
praised again for His  divers manners.
VI
THE TRUTH OF THE MESSAGE
SURER than all else in the Christian's con-
viction concerning the Bible is his faith
that the Bible is true. An undeniable spir-
itual instinct would demand that, even if the in-
ferences of reason did not. It is the same instinct
which breaks to the surface so emphatically in
Paul's abrupt exclamation: "Yea, let God be
found true and every man a liar. Whoever or
whatever else is false in the universe, God must
not be; the universe dissolves at the very imagina-
tion of a truthless Creator. And by necessity if
the God of truth prepares for mankind a book re-
vealing His ways and will, that too must be a
book of truth.
The very soundness of this confidence in Scrip-
ture truth may, however, betray the unconsidering
and superficial to unwarranted conclusions. So-
called plain thinking on supposedly obvious topics
often speeds too fast to fixed opinions. Truth
seems an idea of such clarity that few perhaps
think of its requiring analysis in order to discrim-
inate between characters and forms of truth. In
the story of world events offered by the daily pa-
per there is commonly no question involved but
5®
THE TRUTH OF THE MESSAGE
51
the simple test: Did what is told here happen as
it is here related or did it not? Even in the cur-
rent press, however, when editor or correspondent
assumes to estimate the motives and delineate the
influence of a statesman, a party or a movement,
the fidelity of the report depends on something
deeper than the literal precision of the facts as-
serted. The facts may all be actual and yet the
interpretation of them totally astray; either be-
cause all the elements of the case have not been
brought into view or because the commentator is
deficient in understanding of what he does see.
In a still deeper stratum of thought, where men
deal with the philosophy of life, mere accuracy of
statement is less sufficient to convey truth. False
teachers in economics, sociology or religion are but
seldom liars; in the average case they tell facts
quite indisputably. But they tell the facts in
wrong relations, and expose their inherent falsity
when facts which do not suit their theories they
willfully pass by. In all the greater interests of
human life it takes something better than a correct
reporter to speak the truth; only a man having
(according to Bible language)  truth in the in-
ward parts "—a man saturated with love of truth-
fulness—is capable of marshalling into his view
and into the view of other men that wholeness of
reality which alone is worthy to be called in any
large sense the truth.
If thus difficult and unusual is the comprehen-
sion of the whole truth in the graver of humanity's
own concerns, how much more difficult must it be
52 THE TRUTH OF THE MESSAGE
to attain a truthful grasp of the far profounder
things that have to do with the mutual concerns
of man and God. Whether it is man's responsi-
bility as a self-willing moral creature or his di-
vinely surprising opportunity to help God realize
the immortal ideals to which creation is dedicated
—whatever the message, warning or summoning,
which the word from heaven is designed to convey
—this at least is sure in any case, that expression
of the thought will overtax the capacity of the
brain and soul chosen to be the channel of it.
Nevertheless it is such supernal ideas as these that
the Bible does express. From this viewpoint the
making of a Bible ranks with the most marvellous
achievements of omniscient ingenuity. As in na-
ture, so in the realm of grace, the very simplicity
of God's solved problems often disguises from us
the impossibilities that He has conquered. Did
we but look more closely, we should wonder vastly
more.
With singular aptness just this may be said of
the Bible. God has made it a book of truth—the
book of the greatest, sublimest, deepest and broad-
est truth that the world knows—in spite of the
human disqualifications which everywhere must
Hog the project of revealing infinite realities to
"'finite understanding. His methods have taken ac-
count of the obstacles and have overcome them
with the same practical directness which the
world's best engineers learn from the tutelage of
nature. When the resistance of a transmission
wire hinders the producer of electric power from
THE TRTJTH OP THE MESSAGE 53
sending a greater current through that one medium,
he does not despair of distributing the energy
which his dynamos are generating; he parallels
the loaded cable with another of equal capacity.
And the new wire, with all later fellows strung on
the same circuit of distribution, not only carries its
own load of power but by induction intensifies the
service of every comrade in the task.
It is by means very like this that God sends
down to men the vital power of the Spirit which
His Bible is effectually devised to carry. Had He
used but the one lone wire of any single mind to
diffuse to the world His truth, the whole truth
could never have been communicated in any re-
ligious sufficiency. Not the most capacious hu-
man brain escapes restrictions that narrow the re-
ceptive faculties of the soul; were God to bestow
all spiritual knowledge on some one favoured serv-
ant of His, the treasure would inevitably overflow
the vessel and run to waste. Still more, the in-
evitable bent of peculiarity which makes every
man his special and individual self, forbids the
hope that God's messages could traverse any hu-
man intellect without being subject to some per-
sonal diffraction in the passage. To use more than
one medium is the necessary means of cancelling
this factor of human idiosyncrasy.
In revealing His salvation to the world, there-
fore, God must plan multiple transmission. Not
one prophet but many; not a sole and lonely
apostle hut a varied group; not a single psalmist
but a guild of singers; not an outstanding unique
54 THE TRUTH OF THE MESSAGE
historian but a multitude of chroniclers—by these
He made sure of imparting to men the rich full-
ness of a manifolded Gospel. It is not only
ampler in content than any single voice could have
conveyed, but it is richer in colour, taking bril-
liance from every faithful personality who has
been divinely used to contribute to it. The many
prisms that pass along the light impart to the Bible
an alluring variety of hue and tint like to the
iridescence by which in nature the dewdrop and
rainbow are bejewelled.
Saying all this, we must not forget that in the
noonday of this Bible revelation there came One
who spake like never man spake or could speak.
In this  crystal Christ there was found and in
His voice there was heard, as Lanier said, no  if
or yet. And the reverence of the world from
that day till now continues to bear witness that
His words measured a wholeness of truth such as
humanity has seen no other of its teachers able
to compass. Age succeeds age, since He lived on
earth and left it, and still there is nothing to sub-
tract from His sayings nor anything to add save
what echoes their wisdom. Were there no other
argument for the supernaturally supreme character
which the New Testament ascribes to the Central
Person of its story, the circumferential complete-
ness of His preaching—fragmentally reported
though it was—would remain in glowing contrast
to the fractional emphasis of every other religious
leader throughout all time, and would refute every
explanation of the difference except the explana-
THE TRUTH OF THE MESSAGE 55
tion which sets Him higher than all others of
earth.
Even in connection with His incomparable life
and words, however, the point of argument in this
study comes again into convincing view. If Jesus
comprehended the complete circled unity of truth
as no man might, the four Gospels are yet a
graphic demonstration that even among His dis-
ciples none obtained from Him anything like an
equal catholicity of mind. Those nearest to Him,
like ourselves to this day, were tied to personal
points of view, from which each took the opinion
and estimate of the Master most in accord with
his own singularity of temperament or interest.
If but the Synoptic Gospels remained to us we
should in this remote day of the Christian epoch
be dwelling far too exclusively on the human traits
of our Lord and the human elements in His per-
sonality. If on the other hand all our knowledge
of Jesus were supplied to us by the story which
John wrote, the Saviour by this time would have
become an almost mystic wraith, of whose fleshly
brotherhood with ourselves we should perhaps be
in despairing doubt. It is the possession of all
four of these differing pictures of the Lord—for
happily even the portraits of the synoptists are not
absolute duplicates—which, like the duplex vision of
a man's two eyes, lifts the figure of Jesus into the
roundness of distinct and embodied vitality. Who
among us can fail of gratitude that the  provi-
dence of the canon  did not leave us depending
on but a single biography of our Master? How
56 THE TRUTH OF THE MESSAGE
poorly we should know Him without the fourfold
fullness of the evangel by which the Holy Spirit
has bequeathed to us our historic knowledge of
Jesus.
From all that has thus been said, it follows that
the truth of Bible revelation is reserved for him
who searches for it not in a part of the Scriptures
but through their whole range. If indeed one per-
sists in confining himself within given portions
which seem to chime with some characteristic note
of his thinking or experience, it cannot be said
that he is deceived. An observer who has viewed
some mighty mountain mass from but one favourite
outlook has certainly seen the mountain. He may
be taken as a true witness to the fact of the moun-
tain's greatness and solidity. But his individual
description of it would be an ill guide to depend
upon. What could he from his stationary angle
tell of the mountain's aspects of grandeur from
various points of observation, its compass, its en-
vironing features ? So the specialist in one or an-
other Bible doctrine as gleaned from a single au-
thor or a special passage, may not be said to be
lost from truth. But it is not safe to accept him as
an expositor of all that the Bible means or all that
truth embodies. Not a specialist but a generalizer
—one who walks round about Jerusalem to tell
all the towers thereof—alone can approximate true
Biblical theology.
In fact, to interpret the Bible rightly a student
of the Scriptures needs to be a genius in synthesis.
When Paul says that faith saves men, he is right.
THE TEUTH OF THE MESSAGE 57
When James says that men are saved by works,
he is right. But neither apart from the other has
the truth. It is idle to pretend, as some have done
because they misconceive what inspiration implies,
that both apostles are saying the same thing under
different terms. If they were saying the same
thing, there would be no need of having the say-
ings of both in the Bible. They are both in the
Bible because the partial view of each goes to help
make a whole view of the facts in the case, as the
two conceptions are not contrasted but combined.
One mapped one-half of the great mountain peak
of salvation; the other mapped the other half.
Put the two together and you will know the whole
noble country in which both were God-glorifying
explorers.
So Paul's conception of God's stern sovereignty
and John's passionate vision of God's overflowing
love afford but fragmental notions of God when
held apart. United they begin to unfold the true
measure of the divine Greatness. The difference
is not disputatious but complementary and corrob-
orative. Something of the same thing requires
to be said of the Old Testament revelation of a
God concerned to use one special nation for special
purposes in His providence and the New Testa-
ment revelation of a God loving all nations with an
impartial Fatherhood. It is the way of spiritual
poverty to reject one of those thoughts—special
or universal providence—and take the other. Let
us instead be rich by believing both. And the
pessimism of Ecclesiastes—if a man fed on that
58 THE TRUTH OF THE MESSAGE
alone he would never be able to lift his voice in
any sort of praise to God. Yet, when one has
given over his whole reckless soul to gayety and
irresponsibility, then Ecclesiastes is the very salt he
needs to keep his life from putrefaction. A phar-
macopoeia for every spiritual disease is the Bible;
a cyclopaedia of all spiritual wisdom too. Not less
than all of it is sufficient.
Wherefore God had to take care to make the
book not only compact enough, as we have said
before, but also capacious enough.
VII
THE BIBLE'S HUMAN ELEMENT
HOW far is the Bible affected by the hu-
man limitations of its writers? Like-
wise, in what degree has the Bible been
limited by undeveloped capacities, either intellec-
tual or spiritual, in those for whom immediately
it was written, who were the first to be religiously
instructed by it?
We have already taken into account one limita-
tion which the most jealous interpreter of inspired
Scripture will scarcely be at pains to disallow. It
is in fact a restriction which seems involved neces-
sarily in the very thought of divine revelation.
There would be no need of supernatural reveal-
ment if the ideas which are thereby communi-
cated to men were not greater in reach and com-
pass than the native measure of the human mind.
It is well to recall how vividly that was impressed
on the consciousness of the prophet who repeated
God's reminder of it: "For as the heavens are
higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than
your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
It would be incredible to suppose that any form
of inspiration could eliminate this disparity. That
virtually would be eliminating the difference be-
tween the finite and the Infinite. A human being
exalted to see all and think all as God sees and
59
60 THE BIBLE'S HUMAN ELEMENT
thinks could hardly be counted human thereafter.
Certainly no man in the long succession of mes-
sengers by whom our Bible came to us can be
thought to have enjoyed the inspiration of God
in higher form than the Apostle Paul. And he has
let us know very plainly that he had no sense of
having been elevated thereby to any transcendent
level of intelligence. He meekly included himself
along with all the fellow-believers to whom he
wrote when he said not only, "We know in part,
but as well, "We prophesy in part.
Paul in his epistles wrote truth as best he saw
it, but he never for a moment imagined that he was
furnishing to the Church on earth a transcript
complete of the endless counsels of heaven. Only
in an after life and in a far diviner atmosphere,
 when that which is perfect is come, did he hope
to  see face to face  and to  know fully  even
as by the all-seeing and unconditioned knowledge
of God he had always  been fully known. No,
it would not have been the Apostle Paul who would
care to dispute the statement that even the inspired
Scriptures partake in this present world of the
partialness which affects all things done by the
hands and through the agency of man.
There follows from this a consequence which
cannot be blinked. If, as we have said in a pre-
vious study, it has frequently been necessary for
the Divine Oversight to accumulate the testimony
of two or three or four men in order to complete
a round view of truth whereof individually each
saw but a half, a third or a quarter, then there
THE BIBLE'S HUMAN ELEMENT 61
runs with this the inevitable risk that in each com-
ponent section the respective author may have
overemphasized that fractional phase of truth
which he peculiarly felt.
Not appreciating all the qualifying facts, he
would be almost certain to state his special fact too
broadly. Thus in regard to the Old Testament
conception of God as the national protector of His
chosen Israel (which, as has already been noted,
had eventually to be rounded out by the New
Testament revelation of God's impartial compas-
sion for all mankind), it is plain that until this
complemental truth did dawn on the people of
Jehovah they misunderstood very many things
about God's will for other nations and therefore in
some cases at least misjudged what was just and
right in their relations to neighbouring nationali-
ties. Assuredly then it can be considered no mat-
ter of wonder if portions of Scripture written dur-
ing the period when the nation of Israel enter-
tained such circumscribed ideas of God are now
discovered to bear evidence of those restricted
views, resulting in overstressed sympathy with
nationalistic prejudices then current.
Nobody who really believes in God will make
any doubt that God was entirely able, in even so
primitive and illiberal an epoch, to lay hold on
some extraordinary man and illuminate him with
all the world vision that thrilled the souls of Paul
and John in apostolic days. God can do any
miracle that He pleases. But He does even His
miracles according to law—the law of progress by
62 THE BIBLE'S HUMAN ELEMENT
which He steadily presses on from epoch to epoch
to fulfill His cosmic projects. Never yet has God
been found using a miracle to provide for impa-
tience a quick road to eternal results. And surely
He did no such thing in providing for man a Bible.
Let us reverently say, He took His time to it.
When therefore the Holy Scriptures began to
take form, the Divine Power attempted no sudden
 tour de force  which might have created over
night a volume of ultimate perfection up to the
level of what were to be civilized man's peak at-
tainments in thought and idealism. Had it been
such a book into which God put His revelation of
Himself, it would have been a useless mystery to
the patriarchal ages. Perhaps it would be still a
sealed riddle even to our time. A vain human
experimenter might have done so futile a thing
as that if he had had the power. God knew better.
It is not a cabalistic Bible which we have.
The real fact is that our Father in heaven—this
too we have already said—was from the first
working for His children in each age of history
just where they were and as they were. He was
imposing on them no cryptograms which would
have to be left for some rarer race of wiseacres in
unforeseen time ahead to interpret. Like a true Fa-
ther He sent His messages in language which then
and there His sons and daughters might receive un-
derstandingly. He spoke to them, that is to say, by
men of their own time and their own tongue. A
prophet miraculously thrust forward into touch
with the ideas and reasonings, the discoveries and
THE BIBLE'S HUMAN ELEMENT 63
inventions, of some century then veiled in the
cloudland of the future, could have said nothing
comprehensible to his contemporaries. The
prophet had to be a man of his own day. What
he said and what he wrote was primarily for the
inspiriting, the guidance, the reclamation, of men
and women all around him.
Not that any Bible-writer was ever just one in
a crowd. Always God's message-bearer has to be
somebody a little way ahead. Otherwise he would
not know what to call the people forward to. And
the divine word is always a call to be moving on.
Yet the voice which speaks for God must not be
too far in advance if it is to sound loud in the
ears of the called. So always there are tones and
accents in it but a little less rude and crude than
the mass speech of the hour. If the message is
put in writing, there are sure to be finger prints of
the current generation here and there on the manu-
script. An absolutely timeless literary work may
or may not be conceivable. But there is at least no
such thing in the Bible.
It cannot be denied that from material of this
sort, which seems too timely and too popular to
be anything but evanescent, it appears an improb-
able, if not impossible, hope to expect the evolution
of a standard religious book on which later ages
might rely as a permanent guide to the will and
work of God. And so it would be if there were
naught but impersonal evolution behind it. But
because the design of a foreseeing and choosing
heavenly Father is there, the hope is not vain.
64 THE BIBLE'S HUMAN ELEMENT
No doubt, out of all that the Holy Spirit has
prompted men to write in times past for the relig-
ious teaching of humanity, the great overplus has
been too deeply contaminated with the transient
bias of a half-instructed world for any use to be
made of it in a perpetuated Bible. But here and
there the Omniscient Eye has discovered some
mighty document so full of burning vision of
spiritual realities, so vibrant with the actual experi-
ence of souls in touch with the Soul Divine, that
providence could by no means afford to let it dis-
appear from the sacred treasures of religion. What
then if, on the surface of so invaluable a witness
to things unseen but eternal, there should appear
exposed certain blemishes of inadequate or even
distorted understanding? Will God cast away all
the brilliant wealth of its truth because there cling
to it some minor fragments of human imperfec-
tion ?
Perhaps He must have done so if there had been
no other way of setting right the misapprehensions
involved. But He had another way. Down the
vista of coming days God saw a time when His
servants would comprehend more clearly the
subtler spiritual facts of which a former age was
uncertain. So the divine Editor needed not to
discard what was  written aforetime, even
though marked by the lacks and insufficiencies of
the period. Well He knew that later  men after
his own heart would complete this insufficient
truth, and in the perfected Bible its positive testi-
monies would count for sustenance of faith, while
THE BIBLE'S HUMAN ELEMENT 65
all its negative defects would be absorbed in the
adequacy of the book entire.
Such a method of building up a book of reve-
lation might be judged quite inconsistent with the
character of God—whose own perfections invite
confidence in the unqualified perfection of all His
works—if it were not for our constant observa-
tion of the like means by which He trains the race
of humanity in all other concerns of life. Every-
where He educates men from smaller to greater
by processes which leave more for them to find
out than He tells them—more for them to do than
He does for them. Not the instantaneous fiat of
His own will which makes all things perfect at a
stroke, but the patient progress of step by step
which leads men to higher knowing and broader
seeing and deeper feeling, while the guiding God
walks beside them, is His manifest preference for
achieving His objects in this world—whatever
may be His working plan elsewhere in creation.
In that original home of man which the Bible
has taught us to call the Garden of Eden, there
were present all the forces which to-day light the
lamps and move the enginery of civilization, and
God, had He wished, might have begun history
with the steam and electricity of a modern me-
tropolis. But He made known to humanity in the
morning of its annals no more than the secret of
turning the soil and planting the seed; as the Bible
expresses it,  Jehovah took the man and put him
into the garden to dress it and to keep it. And
from that simple start in primitive agriculture
66 THE BIBLE'S HUMAN ELEMENT
God left the man to climb, with strengths divinely
provided but humanly exercised, to the pinnacle
of present science, where physically puny human'
ity controls powers of nature which antiquity
never dreamed that the hierarchies of heaven itself
might wield.
It surely cannot be deemed ungodlike if for
man's spiritual training an analogous progress is
traceable in divine revelation. It may be counted
sure that in the life of the soul as in the life of the
body the Creator would establish man with capital
enough to live by from the beginning. The earli-
est life entitled to be called human had a conscious-
ness of God—turned to God as the earliest flower
turned to the sun—and dimly at least appreciated
that pleasing God was the secret of all well-being.
In primeval time, as always since, God  left not
himself without witness. But it was manifestly
not His will to show all in one blinding dazzle of
illumination. His messages were destined to
 grow from more to more. As He had planted
in the human soul that inextinguishable instinct
which ever prompts mankind to  seek God if
haply they might feel after him and find him,
so He provided for them the reward of something
ever remaining to be learned—which is likewise
his reward who seeks God through nature.
Till  the fullness of the time came  the Fa-
ther even delayed to let shine on men  the light
of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face
of Jesus Christ. And still, after the calendar of
men's redemption had brought round the day when
THE BIBLE'S HUMAN ELEMENT 67
the  very image "of the Father must needs be
seen on earth, there remained much yet to be re-
vealed and be learned—things which, as Jesus
Himself said, His dearest disciples were not yet
prepared to hear. Even with the Bible complete,
knowledge was and is not complete. The Spirit
of truth, as the Lord Himself promised, even yet
leads into truth those who love the truth.
The thought then of progressive revelation need
offend no one who is not offended by progressive
science. Each is of God—each by the wisdom of
Him who knows all is conditioned on and adapted
to His faith in humanity's capacity to know more.
Likewise let us be sure that one process quite as
much as the other is under God's providential
guidance, guaranteeing both against frustration or
incorrigible deflection. The heavenly Overseer
has always taken care that the world had men in
it with the spirit of quest desiring to know earthly
things. So likewise have there never failed men
having the spirit of quest desiring to know
heavenly things. Of these latter, in the ages when
the Bible was building, came forth the authors of
what are now our Scriptures. They sought to
know. God met them and told them. Then they
wrote and what they wrote God preserved for us.
No common men were they; they were great men
attaining an ineffable companionship in high re-
gions beyond the ken of the earth-bound. And
it was the reality of that spiritual greatness which
made them fit to write of God—fit to be the re-
ligious benefactors of the world to this day.
VIII
THE MIRAGE OF INERRANCY
IT may dismay some to realize that what has
just been said about human limitations in the
Bible forestalls the possibility of establishing
for the book a claim to inerrancy—which by many
is considered to be the essential verifying quality
inseparable from divine inspiration. In some sec-
tions of nearly all Protestant bodies it is a prac-
tically unquestioned dogma that if any error of
any sort were demonstrably discovered anywhere
within the covers of the Holy Bible, the whole
book by that fact would be stripped of any ra-
tional title to a status of divine authority. Others,
a little less positive on this point, say simply that
if any portion of the book were found to contain
erroneous statements, that portion would have to
be excluded from the range of inspired Scripture.
And there are many unbelievers who, taking these
friends of the Bible at their word, point out what
they regard as undeniable errors on certain Bible
pages, and by that consideration alone assume that
they have set themselves free from every obliga-
tion to heed or even respect the volume.
Therefore one who has spoken of deficiencies in
the Scriptures which appear to result from the
ignorance or incompetence of the times in which
they were written, has risked the peril of paining
68
THE MIEAGE OF INEEEANCY 69
a host of devout Bible-lovers—or, better said,
Bible-trusters. It behooves such a one, then, to
hasten to make clear that the power of the Bible
—its worth, its right to speak to human souls, its
conveyance of the message from God—do not de-
pend on inerrancy and are not vacated when the
student of the Scriptures abandons the effort to
show that the Bible is a book of no mistakes.
To be sure, it is easy to conceive mistakes which
would invalidate the Scriptures—mistakes about
God, mistakes about the duty of man toward God,
mistakes about the right way of living amid one's
fellow men; such errors, if pervading the Bible as
a whole and standing unmodified by any later and
superseding instruction, would indeed render the
book morally untrustworthy and spiritually mis-
leading. But we have already set forth, in part
at least, the reasons why evangelical Christianity
holds by the faith that in the Bible we have God's
great bequeathed guide-book designed to direct the
feet of men into the paths of divine fellowship
and divine obedience. To that faith it is indeed
an indispensable corollary that the guide-book
must guide to the true path; any other imputation
would  make of none effect the faithfulness of
God.
If the Bible is not to be relied on as an agency
of what we have defined as its supreme purpose
—the consummation of vital intercommunion be-
tween man and God; if it will not lead to that
consummation the man who comes to it with a
hunger for God in his soul—then all too surely
70 THE MIRAGE OF INERRANCY
God is not in the book. But if it does by the
exhortation of its counsels and the example of its
living personalities—especially its chief Person-
ality—show men the way to live for, with and in
their divine Lord and Saviour, then by a far
greater surety God is in the book. That the latter
is the constant and indefeasible fact about the in-
fluence of the Bible among mankind, evangelical
theology has steadfastly believed from the Refor-
mation onward, and the historic expression of that
confidence is the affirmation that with reference
to faith and practice the Holy Scriptures offer—
not an inerrant but—an infallible standard of spir-
itual instruction.
On the dictionary page there may appear but a
figment of difference between these two adjectives
— infallible  and  inerrant"—and from that
viewpoint the attempt to assign them diverse
meanings may seem an artificial play with words.
But the atmosphere which surrounds the two
terms in the field of theological discussion affords
full reason for saying that the Bible by no means
needs to be inerrant in order to be infallible. The
two phrasings do not paint the same picture.
When  infallible  is the word used, there rises
on one's vision a mighty thought of power and
authority radiating from the Bible as a central
luminary in the moral sky just as energy radiates
from the daily sun in the firmament of heaven.
But when one says  inerrant, the suggestion to
the mind is rather a picking and paltering over
trifles, a persistence about the insignificant—as if
THE MIEAGE OF INERRANCY 71
a man perishing with cold should refuse to warm
himself at a fire until he had ascertained that no
stick longer or shorter than twenty-four inches
was burning in the blazing pile. So indeed there
are Bible students who bother endlessly about the
sticks in the fire-heap—just how this text should
be laid on or across that other text—and they
never get a flame started that will warm either
themselves or anybody else. For many such peo-
pie it would be a great relief of soul if from their
small fussiness they could be delivered into the
large knowledge that what signifies for the faith
of a Christian is a Bible to be depended on in the
whole bulk of its truth—to which inerrancy in
mere detail could add not a featherweight of
worth.
That this is not a position perilous to the spirit
or untenable for the mind, all believers may re-
assure themselves by remembering that the claim
to be without errors of human misinformation is
a claim that the Bible never makes for itself. It
is true, indeed, that extensive elements in the early
histories of the Bible and in the prophets—the
major prophets especially—are set down as direct
quotations from the mouth of Jehovah. Notable
in the materials so sanctioned is the Mosaic law,
almost every section of which is introduced by the
standardized phrase,  Jehovah spake unto Moses.
But there is no hint in history or prophecy of any
means other than honest human memory employed
to guarantee the Biblical record of Jehovah's
words. Indeed, it is possible without irreverence
72
THE MIRAGE OF INERRANCY
to affirm that in the case of the most permanently
important of those divinely spoken laws—the ten
commandments—the transcription into Israel's
statute books was not letter-perfect. Memory and
record—even though the record is said to have
existed for centuries in graven stone—have failed
to preserve for us the knowledge of what exactly
God said when He spoke out of the clouds of
Sinai to the awed Hebrew tribes massed in the
plain below.
If this appears startling to any Bible reader,
he needs only to compare the twentieth chapter of
Exodus with the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy
and note the differences between the recital of the
ten commandments in those two passages. It is
quite true that the differences are of no conse-
quence as relates to the moral force of the deca-
logue; the reader gets from one passage just as
well as from the other the will of God for the
conduct of life. But the point here is that the
conveyance of that eternal truth is accomplished
without any changeless crystallization of the words
used.
The main divergencies, as any student may see
for himself, are in the fourth commandment. Ex-
odus tells that God gave as a reason for the sacred-
ness of the Sabbath His own rest after the com-
pletion of creation, and the form of statement in-
dicates that it had already been a hallowed day as
long as the world had stood. Deuteronomy pre-
sents the Sabbath institution as a memorial newly
established to keep the Israelites reminded of their
THE MIRAGE OF INERRANCY
73
'deliverance from Egypt. It may be held that God
named both reasons. But that, if it is considered
to be really probable, would only reemphasize the
point which is here being stressed, for in that event
neither record affords an exact transcript. The
ten commandments are infallible without doubt—
all the consent of moral thinking throughout the
ages testifies to that. But the form in which we
have them cannot possibly be shown to be inerrant.
The dogmatic faith of the Church has always,
and the personal faith of the Christian has nearly
as invariably, attributed to the words of Jesus
Christ a divine authority no less than the formula,
 Thus saith Jehovah, imparts to those passages
to which it is attached in the Old Testament. Yet
here the test of inerrancy fails even more obviously
than in the older writings. There has heretofore
been discussed the ground for saying that the
quadruple story of the Gospels which the Holy
Spirit has provided in our Bible affords the later
world a much more realistic appreciation of the
great soul of Jesus Christ than any single biog-
raphy could have furnished. But it is equally true
(though minutely less important in comparison)
that these four accounts, when set side by side,
compel us to realize that we shall never know the
exact terms in which the Lord put some of His
most graphic sayings nor the precise circumstances
surrounding some of the greatest moments of His
experience in this world.
Take for example His beatitudes. Did He say,
 Blessed are ye poor, or did He say,  Blessed
74 THE MIRAGE OF INERRANCY
are the poor in spirit ? Luke repeats the utter-
ance in the first form; Matthew in the second.
Sometimes with such various readings the student
may say that the difference makes no difference;
the idea conveyed is the same under either form.
But here there is contrast not only of words but of
sense. We should be able to tell very much more
than we do now about the attitude of Jesus to-
ward the economic conditions of life if we could
be sure whether when He spoke of blessed poverty
He was thinking of the lack of worldly goods or
of the absence of religious pride among those
whom He delighted to count as His friends.
So likewise is there considerable spread of dis-
tinction between what was meant by the Master if
He said,  The kingdom of God is among you,
and what He meant if He said,  The kingdom of
God is within you. The first would give the
kingdom a time mark; the second a character
mark. It is the latter meaning which men of our
day would rather cling to. But till the end of
time no man in this world will know surely which
was the sense the Lord had in mind. The un-
certainty here, however, arises not from varying
reports by different witnesses but from the am-
biguity of the language in which the saying has
been kept for us. Probably the Master's meaning
was entirely clear to those who heard Him say
this thing in His native Aramaic. But the trans-
lation into Greek brought obscurity because the
translator blundered into a grammatical usage
capable of two constructions. This confusion of
THE MIRAGE OF INERRANCY
75
sense, however, could alter little the later
Church's apprehension of the character and mis-
sion of Jesus; interesting therefore as it would be
for us to learn just what Christ did say, who
would dare to think that, simply for the satisfac-
tion of our curiosity, the supervising Spirit would
concern Himself to prevent or remedy so tiny a
flaw in so great a story?
Among those who regard inerrancy as indis-
pensable in an inspired Bible, it is customary,
where seeming contradictions appear on the sur-
face of Biblical passages, to try to maintain the
principle by  reconciling these discrepancies.
This process consists in working out some theory
of the circumstances under which it would be pos-
sible for both diverse statements to be literally
true. Much skillful conjecture has been spent on
this means of justifying the accuracy of the Bible,
and it cannot be denied that in numerous instances
plausible explanations have been hit on; some of
them may actually reconstruct from differing ac-
counts the ampler details of what in fact did hap-
pen. But far oftener the adjustment of one ac-
count to another is accomplished by surmises so
far fetched that no one would think of indulging
them if a supposed necessity did not demand the
reconciliation at all costs.
No matter how successfully this interweaving
of varied stories is carried out, however, it does
not improve the case for the advocates of iner-
rancy. If precise exactitude in details were a re-
quired mark of a God-inspired writing, then ob-
76 THE MIEAGE OP INEEEANCY
viously it would be impossible to regard as in-
spired the individual writings in which occur para-
graphs that need to be thus  reconciled  before
they give the right impression. Severally consid-
ered, each unit on this assumption must give a
wrong impression. And it is to be remembered
that most of the sixty-six documents now bound
together in our Bible were first put forth in in-
dependent form, and their original readers could
not have had opportunity to compare them with
the other Bible writings with which they are now
associated. The supposed clarification to-day pur-
sued so diligently was therefore in the beginning
impossible, and readers at that time were certainly
led into opinions of fact which present-day recon-
cilers would consider erroneous, because the data
from parallel accounts, by which it is claimed that
fuller facts are now made apparent, were not then
available.
Thus an early Christian who might have in hand
only Mark's Gospel would suppose that Jesus re-
stored sight to only one blind man when He passed
out of Jericho on His last journey to Jerusalem.
Not till the believer read Matthew would he know
that there were two blind men there, both of whom
were blessed by the healing power of the Christ.
And then after he got hold of the Gospel by Luke,
he would be entirely uncertain whether the one
man or the two men healed had met the Lord
when He passed out of Jericho or when He was
coming into the town. Similarly four persons who
read respectively the four separate accounts of
THE MIRAGE OF INERRANCY
77
Peter's tragic denial of the Lord would have in
mind four quite different groups of incidents.
The best reconciling which the inerrancy dog-
matists can do with this case is to infer that Peter
actually denied the Lord seven times—which dis-
agrees with what the Lord predicted and is con-
trary to the impression which any one of the
evangelists conveys by his individual story.
Plainly, records that in minute matters of cir-
cumstance are brought into accord only by rashly
adventurous guessing—which, to say the least, is
not itself inerrant—cannot depend for their value
on that kind of microscopic precision which iner-
rancy calls for. If God had ever intended to stake
the reputation or the authority of the Bible on a
superhuman accuracy in minor and incidental
facts, He would certainly have taken care to make
that extraordinary exactness an unmistakable phe-
nomenon. There is no evidential value for in-
spiration to be drawn from the sort of inerrancy
which to a cursory reader is so little manifest that
he thinks he sees quite the opposite—the same kind
of harmless inexactitude that he would expect in
all story-telling and history-writing by average
honest men. But there is on the other hand a vast
gain for faith and immense rest for troubled minds
when the simple truth is recognized that in pro-
viding for an inspired book of religion the in-
spiring Spirit saw no need of working the gigantic
miracle which would have made ordinary fallible
men omniscient in minutiae. Who conceivably
could be strengthened in faith toward the Lord
78
THE MIRAGE OF INERRANCY
Christ by knowing surely whether it was at the
east gate or the west gate of Jericho that Bar-
timaeus was roused to hope by the electric word,
"Jesus of Nazareth passeth by"?
Another imagination which has been invoked
by the same dogma is still more futile—the hy-
pothesis that although there are apparently irre-
concilable discrepancies in the Holy Scriptures as
we now possess them, there were no mistakes and
no contradictions in the original manuscripts as
the Bible authors penned them. All errors that
can be traced in to-day's Bible have resulted, ac-
cording to this theory, from the blunders of copy-
ists and translators through whose hands the book
came down to us. It is passing strange that the
architects of this conception cannot see that it is
bound in the very nature of the case to fall and
bury them in its ruins. If the book by which God
conveys His law and Gospel to mankind must be
historically inerrant in order to be religiously in-
fallible, then on the hypothesis here outlined the
revelation of God perished from the earth ages
ago—being destroyed by the incompetence of those
who transcribed it from one manuscript to another
and rendered it out of its original languages into
the tongues of the nations.
The logic of this is that we to-day have no Bible
at all to which any divine authority can be at-
tributed. Who then was this God who could at
the beginning inspire men to write with a miracu-
lous accuracy but could do nothing afterward to
control the errant liabilities of those other disciples
THE MIEAGE OF INERRANCY
79
of His to whom He left the preservation of the
Scriptures? Just on the score of a due respect to
the sufficiency of God's omnipotence, it is far more
reverent, instead of supposing that inspiration was
baffled thus, to believe that God never tried to
abolish honest men's fallibilities but was always
content to reveal His truth through and by their
natural human talents.
There is a great maxim dear to the most just
and most enlightened legal minds—a maxim
drawn from ancient Rome, the mother of the
world's jurisprudence: "The law cares not for
trifles. It is a maxim which theology ought to
adopt in honour of the heavenly Father, whose
infinite mind is the native home of law as well as
of revelation, and whose love desires for mankind
not petty securities within tight-closed corrals but
abundant life along the wide ranges of a free uni-
verse.  God cares not for trifles. Certainly it
is an intellect childishly restricted which is able
to imagine Him who  upholdeth all things by the
word of his power, sitting in the central ruler-
ship of the universe with concern in His thought
about the possibility that Matthew, Mark, Luke
and John would not get it straight whether Peter
denied his Lord to two or only to one of the high
priest's serving maids.
But God had charged Matthew, Mark, Luke and
John to make known to the world the mighty fact
that their Master came into the world to redeem
sinners from the curse of sin—and to take care
that they did that and to provide that their mes-
80 THE MIEAGE OF INERRANCY
sage should never be lost from the hands of God's
children who needed that testimony to His love,
His vastest powers have been none too great for
the eternal God to employ.
In making a Bible God made a book which like
all the rest of His works is to be praised for what
it is and not for what it is not. Paul was a soul
so in touch with God that in this as in countless
other things he caught the divine mood entirely.
Paul, writing to Timothy his second epistle, in-
eluded a definition of inspired Scripture which no
creed since has ever equalled for either brevity,
fullness or clarity. And he dallied with no such
negative and speculative claim as  The Scriptures
contain no mistakes. He struck for something
far more positive and far more vital—something
which experience could testify to with the million-
fold force of a universal Christian response:
 Every Scripture inspired of God is profitable.
Yes,  profitable, effective for the religious ends
it was designed for. There is the  impregnable
rock  for Bible faith. Just as Jesus prescribed
that the life of an individual disciple should be
judged by its fruits, so is the Bible to be judged.
And its fruits are demonstrative.
 No errors "—a man could wrestle with that
proposition for a century and not prove it; every
logician indeed would warn him beforehand that
a universal negative is unprovable. But  profit-
able"—that he could prove at every Christian
hearthstone, at every Christian altar. And there's
the true proof of inspiration.
IX
EDUCATION AND SYMBOLISM
THINKING of the Bible as a course of
education prepared by the Father in
heaven for the instruction of His chil-
dren in the elder days of the race, detracts nothing
from the permanent worth of the book, but does
help to put a right value on certain passages often
considered difficult to interpret. It surprises no
one to find text-books for the primary grades of
school differing, not only in contents but in peda-
gogical method, from text-books designed for
high school. If then the Bible comprises a long
curriculum from primary to high school and be-
yond, it cannot be thought strange that differences
of quality and appeal distinguish portions of the
Scriptures belonging to early stages of the world's
culture from portions originating in and designed
for later days of more enlightenment.
Had this natural and reasonable view of the
Bible prevailed in the Christian mind of recent
generations, the Church would never have been
troubled by the imagination of a conflict between
Genesis and geology. Nor would it now be dis-
turbed by assertions that evolution as one of God's
working means of production cannot be believed
82 EDUCATION AND SYMBOLISM
in without giving the lie to what the Bible says
about creation. These needless antitheses have no
basis whatever except the totally unfounded no-
tion—the impossible notion, indeed—that this
Genesis prologue contains everything that is ever
to be told or learned about the beginnings of the
material universe, this present earth and the race
of mankind. Such a presumption ought to be
contradicted instantly by the very scantness of the
story. Can three pages of duodecimo print be a
compendium of universal origins ? It ought to be
still more emphatically contradicted by any ob-
servation whatever of the divine training of hu-
man intelligence.
When, pray tell us, did God ever make to man a
gratuitous present of information which man
could by any pains search out for himself ? When,
for that matter, did any wise teacher ever inform
a student of what the student could discover by
his own investigation? The pedagogy of earth
has in this but learned the pedagogy which the
Lord God has observed ever since He began to
teach Adam in the kindergarten of time. Revela-
tion He has always reserved for those secrets
which are by their nature beyond the inquiries of
the earthly mind. A blatant skeptic once an-
nounced his find of indisputable proof that Jesus
could not have been divine—Jesus went away
from this world without telling men that they
ought to use knives and forks at their meals. The
proof in good common sense really runs the other
way; if He had not been divine, He might have
EDUCATION AND SYMBOLISM 83
thought it His mission to introduce knives and
forks. Being divine, He was wise enough not to
interfere with the slow processes by which the
race was working out its own civilization. That
was a minor matter in which the world could save
itself without a heavenly intervention. Christ
rendered His service on a plane that men could
never reach without Him.
The same economy and reserve are in Genesis.
Most knowledge could wait till the human mind
grew out of babyhood. All the age-long story in
the rocks and all the cosmic panorama in the stars
would at length come out; men would learn to
read and to discern and in good time would know
the marvellous truth of science, both geologic and
astronomic. Indeed, in the primitive epoch of the
Pentateuch how futile it would have been to de-
velop the complete facts of creation for a tribe of
just liberated slaves to read and use. What could
the hordes gathered before Sinai have made out
of a treatise on the flora of the carboniferous age
or a discussion of the history of spiral nebulae?
Were the earliest portions of the Bible of a na-
ture like that, it would scarcely be effrontery to
say that God could never have had anything to do
with such ridiculously displaced literature. Moth-
ers know enough to tell their small children child
stories; God, with an untutored child race to in-
struct, would surely be as wise.
And so indeed He was. He put into Genesis a
child story of creation—a story told in pictures
and symbols such as children love. But it was a
84 EDUCATION AND SYMBOLISM
true story—so true that to this day, when science
has fashioned around it a sumptuous setting of
golden knowledge, rich, varied, vast, this same
brief story shines still like a jewel in the midst of
all later discovery, glowingly lovelier than the staid
prosings of the investigators, brilliant with the
simple poetry of God's pleasure in His own well
wrought handiwork. And it tells of the universe
all that man needed morally to know before he
had learned enough to be his own explorer into
the Creator's mysteries.
It tells the answer to the great first question of
the opening mind of humanity: Who made all
this? It tells too the guarantee of the Infinite to
the first terrifying skepticism that comes to plague
that opening mind; no matter what the cynical
look of things may be,  God saw everything that
he had made and, behold, it was very good.
Out of Genesis its peasant readers even learned
something of that divine combination of power
and patience which is yet the wonder of those who
seek to know the ways of the Lord—able with His
power to accomplish all at a word, yet willing to
build up His creation by the patient addition of
one to one, even as a schoolboy adds up a tedious
sum.
The Genesis manuscript alone was therefore
enough to let a man know that he was in God's
world and that he himself bore marks of relation-
ship to God that set him apart from all living
creatures by whom he found himself surrounded.
That was not sufficient to make him a scientist
EDUCATION AND SYMBOLISM 85
but it amply sufficed to make him a worshipper—
which in this Bible introduction was certainly the
guiding object of inspiration. And the wonder of
Genesis—the sheer, open fact which a denier of
inspiration may struggle long to account for in
any way consistent with his denial—is that these
primeval chapters, innocent of even a suspicion of
modern science, to-day commingle freely with all
which that science has taught about the constitu-
tion of man and the universe and lose no dignity
nor suffer any stultification in the contact.
A cosmology now holds sway over men's
thought totally different from that which pre-
vailed when Genesis was put into the Bible; a new
survey of creation has substituted uncounted mil-
lions of years for this story's naive six days; all
things have been reclassified and realigned in the
natural world; and yet in the simplicity of a great
insight the Mosaic account of creation stands up to
command the assent of mankind to its two pin-
nacle affirmations:  In the beginning God created
the heavens and the earth, and at the end of the
work for the crown of the labour He  created
man in his own image  and  breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life and man became a liv-
ing soul. Some science may indeed doubt that,
but the world believes it. And naught but divine
inspiration could triumph over the changes of cen-
turies like that. God taught His earliest children
truth, and truth it still abides.
The vindication of the third chapter of Genesis
•—the story of man's fall—is equally triumphant.
86 EDUCATION AND SYMBOLISM
The only pity is that some of the Bible's stanchest
champions are unaware of the victory and con-
sider that there was a great defeat suffered when
the ancient account of the fall of man met the
latter-day conception of social as well as organic
evolution. To admit this, however, is naturalizing
in the Church an ignorance of moral philosophy
which may possibly be excusable among scientists
but is certainly not befitting to theologians. It is
said that evolution makes it foolishness to talk of
the fall of man. On the contrary evolution may
be fairly said to confirm the fall of man. The
only thing that may have been invalidated by the
impact of evolution on the Bible at this point is
the name which the Church has given to the
tragedy of Adam's sin—the  fall. And that's
no loss, for the Bible never uses any such term
about the transgression in Eden, and the Church
would better forget it.
Wherever the two creation chapters of Genesis
made any man realize his obligation to God as
Creator and Preserver, the next question inevi-
table must have been why it was so hard to live
up to that obligation. Why was a man always
sinning? There arose another problem that man
could never work out for himself. So the inspir-
ing Spirit prepared the third chapter to give an-
swer—a primary answer indeed but an everlasting
one—to that question. By a tale so real to the
experience of humanity that its incidents might
have been duplicated a thousand times in the sub-
stance of the situation, it was shown that God
EDUCATION AND SYMBOLISM 87
leaves it to man to make his own decision whether
in this world he will obey or rebel. Until man
realizes, however, that this is a choice for him to
make, he is not a moral creature; in the graphic
language of this record, he knows neither good
nor evil.
Evolution agrees thoroughly that from such in-
fantile innocency—the irresponsibility of the
morally neutral animal—man somewhere passed
into the morally responsible realm where con-
science distinguishes the right from the wrong and
affirms the duty to do right. It cannot guess,
though, where that momentous change occurred
or how. Genesis tells. God laid on humanity a
test to see if humanity would take life or death
—obedience necessarily being life when the com-
mands to be obeyed were the laws of the Ruler
of the universe. But the tragedy was that hu-
manity chose death—to wit, disobedience. That
was the  fall. Yet even then man was at the
door of a greater life—beginning an evolution to
better things. God said so then and there. That
 serpent of sin that had wrought all the evil
of this terrible drama was yet to be crushed by the
struggling descendants of erring Eve—especially
by One destined to be stronger at the last than the
 strong man  of wickedness.
The ancient sinner who read that chapter un-
doubtedly learned from it what sin was. He
learned why its hold on his heart gripped so un-
shakably. But far better, he understood that it
was worth his while to fight for freedom because
88 EDUCATION AND SYMBOLISM
God had foretold the destruction of the power of
sin. Could human genius without a divine
prompting have written so divinely adequate a
word for just that page of immortal counsel at
just that crisis in the spiritual education of man-
kind? No; it would be little risk to stake the
whole case for the reality of Bible inspiration on
that Eden story—provided always, however, that
the spiritual light shining from it is what is
thought of, and that contentious dispute whether
the story is to be called history or allegory is rec-
ognized as unbecoming among those who alike at-
tribute its conception to God. The narrative may
in reality be either the one or the other without
the need of deciding which—the important thing
is that it is certainly the truth.
The difficulty felt by so many modern Christians
in accepting allegory as an inspired vehicle of
God's truth is strictly an occidental difficulty. No
oriental would feel it. It is a hindrance imposed
on faith by the unimaginative matter-of-factness
that is more or less a characteristic of the Anglo-
Saxon mind everywhere and especially of that
strain in Anglo-Saxondom which draws inherit-
ance from the rigid and literal Puritans. To them
the exercise of mental invention to create a tale
of what never happened on sea or land was a will-
ful excursion into the realm of that evil one who
was a liar from the beginning. Of course, they
could not dream of such piece of wicked imperti-
nence existing within the covers of the Bible.
But happily in regard to secular literature even
EDUCATION AND SYMBOLISM 89
the strictest of Puritans in our day appreciate the
possibility that fiction, produced by an artist capa-
ble of broadly depicting living human types in
the actors of his plot, may draw a picture really
more true to life than any isolated  fact story 
of a few real individuals. Fiction can mass its
characters under the author's generalship for a far
more telling effect. And as for the realism of the
result, there are the soundest reasons for saying
that a student will learn more of the actual life of
England in the time of Richard the Lion-Heart
from the imaginative story of  Ivanhoe than
from any extant history of that period.
Moreover, it is by no means unusual for fictional
stories to bring about irresistible moral arouse-
ment among a people who have woefully long
dallied with public evils. Did not Dickens's
 Oliver Twist count powerfully to ameliorate
the horrors of English workhouses; his  Nicho-
las Nickleby  to improve the treatment of Eng-
lish schoolboys? And would anybody deny that
Harriet Beecher Stowe's  Uncle Tom's Cabin 
was a mighty agency toward the emancipation of
American slaves? Is it possible then for the
Christian, who must believe that the good works
of the world are never wrought in the absence of
God, to reject the art of fiction as an unworthy
instrument for God to employ in the hands of an
author who has  let his soul for truth's sake go
abroad  ? And from that standpoint what hin-
drance can forbid him to step over to the scarcely
more venturesome thought that God might (did
90 EDUCATION AND SYMBOLISM
He but choose) inspire works of fiction for His
great standard volume of world religion?
The suggestion that the books named for Daniel
and Jonah are not perhaps historical has awakened
embittered commotion at various times in the
Church of Christ because the considerations just
proposed have not been common to the thought of
contemporary Christians. The dry and flat for-
mula,  The Bible is truth; anything else than literal
history is a lie; therefore there can be nothing but
literal history in the Bible, has been too hastily
clamped down on the discussion. There is more
than that to say. The alternative to strict history
is not a  pack of lies  but honest historical fiction
—a form of the highest literary honour to-day
and a type of writing esteemed in nearly all ages
for the lofty genius required to lift it to success.
If a prophet of Israel, at some time later than
the epoch at which Jonah or Daniel flourished,
was persuaded that he could write for his people
a message associated with the famous name of one
or the other of these men, which by reason of that
association would attract a larger reading, is there
anybody who will maintain that it was a wicked
and deceitful intent? None certainly of that time
who read the message would be deceived by it; its
fictional character would be understood as readily
as Americans understand that  Hugh Wynne,
Free Quaker, for example, is not a historical
memoir of George Washington. But the great
name of a remembered hero would give an appeal
to the book and more would read, heed and medi-
EDUCATION AND SYMBOLISM 91
tate. And the vividness of romance then as to-
day would intensify the impression conveyed.
Then  who hath known the mind of the Lord
that he should instruct him  that historical novels,
no matter how full of the great and abiding ideas
of religion, must never be admitted to the canon of
Scriptures? Who presents himself so to inform
the Bible's infinite Compiler? There are crystal-
clear spiritual elements in both Jonah and Daniel
which, as well as human judgment may guess, a
book of divine things could not omit without loss.
There is Jonah's moving exposition of God's uni-
versal love—remarkable precursor of the supreme
note of the Christian Gospel. Daniel too has ideals
of fidelity to conscience which expand the con-
scientiou^1 soul with the most heroic motives,
whether those ideals are drawn from the great
mind that penned the book or from great charac-
ters there commemorated who suffered heroically
in the flesh. God needed both those writings.
Should a question of mere literary form rule them
out?
To say these things is not to make argument
either for or against the historicity of the two
productions thus named. It is an argument that
if they were fictional, they would still have just as
good title to the rating of inspired documents.
And it may be added that not their miracles but
their failure to fit into any known historical situ-
ation is the obstacle which prevents so many Bible
students from classifying them with history. The
highest living authority who holds to Daniel as a
92 EDUCATION AND SYMBOLISM
historical record seems to admit that such a posi-
tion can be preserved for it only by supposing
that the Darius who cast Daniel into the lions' den
was a local proconsul ruling temporarily in behalf
of the conquering Cyrus over the city and district
of Babylon alone. Yet the lordly manner in which
Darius at the end of the chapter wrote to  all the
peoples, nations and languages that dwell in all the
earth  sounds very little as if he were aware of
having the mighty Cyrus or any other potentate
as overlord.
Happily, however, there is one point where oc-
cidental and oriental believers are able to join in
equal recognition of the use of symbolic fiction in
the Bible. That luminous meeting ground is the
parables of Jesus. There may have been a time
when certain Bible-readers concerned themselves
to speculate where and when the prodigal son and
his father lived and to what far country the former
wandered away. But that is long past now. It
satisfies all of us, conservatives and liberals, that
these forever memorable figures lived in the pic-
turesque mind of Jesus Christ, and from thence
they issued into an undying reality—more actual
to-day in the immortality of their story setting
than all the princes and emperors who ever reigned
on the thrones of all the world. There may or
there may not have been a man in history who sold
all that he had in order to buy a pearl of great
price. But there is such a man now; he has lived
from the day that Jesus Christ named him. If
any man says that a piece of imagination can never
EDUCATION AND SYMBOLISM 93
be inspired enough for a place in the Bible, the
mere mention of the parables of Jesus is all the
answer needful.
Then there is another realm of symbolism in the
Scriptures which all schools of Bible students
would be equally loath to deny. Surely there are
none to maintain that the Bible's descriptions of
the architecture and occupations of heaven are
literal forecasts of the joys which await the re-
deemed in the immortal life. How poor would be
a heavenly city which could be described in guide-
book fashion within the compass of an earth-born
and earth-bound language. All our tongues are
weighted down with leaden words that have all
been necessarily cast in physical moulds. For
things that exist in spiritual actuality independent
of the familiar forms of matter we have slight
imagination and no vocabulary. God's book can-
not tell us more than our pens and tongues can
say. He speaks perforce of golden streets and
jewelled walls and rivers of the water of life.
There are no exacter words. But we shall none
of us feel cheated if we find none of these things
when God brings us to that  place of his abode.
If the gold and precious stones are not there, it
will be plain to us that they served on earth well
and truthfully as symbols of glories far beyond
our fleshly ken. And we shall be thankful to God
that He did put symbols into His book.
Meanwhile, here in the present life, let us try
to do the Bible the constant justice of remember-
ing the picturesqueness of the oriental mind, and
94 EDUCATION AND SYMBOLISM
determinedly resist our tendency to interpret the
book—wholly of oriental origin—as if it had been
produced by Americans in our own pragmatic and
factual age. Were it not so solemn a folly per-
petrated in premises of such profound seriousness,
it would be grotesque to see the -Yankee all-busi-
ness intellect analyzing the delicate dream-fabrics
of eastern imagery with the same literalness that it
handles a column of market reports. No doubt
there have at times risen even in the west poetizers
who, if allowed to go on unhindered, would have
dissipated the meat of the Lord Christ's teachings
into an ethereal ambrosia quite useless for  human
nature's daily food. And, of course, we cannot
endure to have Christ vapourized into misty fancy.
But far oftener the mischief has been done in quite
the opposite way when ideals that were meant to
lift souls into the pure air of high heaven have
been chained down to pace the earth by a profitless
and deceiving road of unimaginative ritual.
This is what in the worship of a large part of
the Church has totally ruined the great spiritual
significance of those two wonderful metaphors,
 This is my body  and  This is my blood, and
in the practical Christian life has reduced to an
idle, prating folly the Lord's canny and pungent
proverb:  Give to every one who asketh thee.
It is a sorry blunder, of course, to turn a literal
word of Scripture into a figure of speech. But it
is a blunder equally ill and much more frequent to
take a proverb, an epigram, a symbol, a picture
phrase, a sparkling adventure in poetic fancy, and
EDUCATION AND SYMBOLISM 95
treat it like a formula in geometry or a paragraph
of directions from a mail order catalogue. Before
an occidental reads this oriental book, he ought to
offer a specially humble and fervent prayer for the
resurrection and sanctifying of all the poetic im-
agination latent in him. And especially should he
beware, if he does not find the petition
abundantly answered as he traverses prior parts
of Scripture, of invading the book of the Revela-
tion. Only a poet is fit to read the Bible's final
writing.
X
THE MULTIPLEXITY OF DOCTRINE
THE demand for an inerrant Bible, as we
have said, is an artificial stipulation which
men would impose on the Spirit who has
inspired the Scriptures but which gets no recogni-
tion whatever within the Scriptures themselves.
The Bible is nowhere a self-conscious book, and
only once does there come to the surface anything
which can be deemed an inspired definition of in-
spiration—the verses 2 Timothy 3: 16, 17, which
on an earlier page have already been referred to:
 Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable
for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for in-
struction which is in righteousness, that the man
of God may be complete, furnished completely
unto every good work.
It is indeed sometimes alleged that this wording
of this passage—the translation of the American
revisers—has been weakened from the strong sense
of the King James version; some have even said
that it was purposely weakened. The accusation
is idle, because the language of the revision is just
as inclusive and emphatic as the terms of the old
version. Nevertheless, in order that the full force
of the earlier rendering may be before the eyes of
96
THE MULTIPLEXITY OF DOCTRINE 97
those who prefer it, let that also be repeated:  All
Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is
profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction,
for instruction in righteousness, that the man of
God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all
good works.
Here then is the Bible's standard description of
its own qualities, and here surely, if from the
Bible viewpoint a preternatural exactness was es-
sential to inspired literature, there would have
been some tangible hint of that characteristic. In-
stead the outlook of the apostle—himself an un-
doubted agent of divine inspiration—was entirely
in another direction. Paul had his eyes on the
moral dynamic of the book—its spiritual vitality.
That dynamic he had himself felt in the deepest
impulses of his own ministry. He had seen its
efficiency demonstrated by the consecration and
holiness of many fellow Christians who loved the
book and lived by it. On both accounts he was so
convinced of the divine power flowing out from
the Holy Scriptures that he felt no need to seek
other grounds for commending it to the confidence
of men. Had some one suggested to him that the
written word of God might be further attested by
asserting that, even in its secular allusions, it was
clear from the ordinary misunderstandings and
blunders of humanity, he would have been scarcely
interested even if he had believed the claim to be
correct. He knew so many other things about the
Bible infinitely more significant.
How then does it come that Protestantism at
98 THE MULTIPLEXITY OP DOCTRINE
large has laid so tremendous a weight on merely
verbal and factual inerrancy in the Bible? Why
does a dogma that is invisible in the Bible itself
bulk so large in the orthodox defense of the Bible ?
The explanation is to be found in religious anxi-
eties which the Protestant mind shares with the
Roman Catholic mind but which it seeks to in-
trench in a much different refuge. The instinct
of each—probably it would not be too much to
say, the universal instinct of men—is for certainty
in religion. On so measureless and so profound
an interest people feel they cannot afford to en-
dure the least doubtful hazard; they must know.
The proverb which bids men be sure they are right
before they go ahead, is not sufficient for this case;
in living life, a man has to go ahead whether he is
ready or not; he cannot wait until he has reasoned
through the case. Therefore if religion has any
help for him at all, he expects it to speak at once
and decisively. He will be content with nothing
misty and fluctuating; he wants positive and un-
disputed surety.
The Roman believer is persuaded that he has
just this certainty to answer all his questions.
What the priest says, repeating what the pope says,
is his reliance; pope and priest claim to know the
exact truth about religion, and whatever they may
tell him he receives as the end of all controversy—
the supreme decision which forbids further query.
It is an easy disposal of doubt's inveterate uneasi-
ness. Yet the Protestant Christian rightly feels
all this an incredible supposition—that perfect
THE MULTIPLEXITY OF DOCTRINE 99
knowledge of every Christian doctrine should be
given solely to one old man shut away in the palace
prison of the Vatican, and that the reading and
thinking and praying of all other good men in all
the world should count for nothing at all in com-
parison or contrast with the pope's ipse dixit. It
is quite too much for a free soul to accept. Still
the Protestant too wants that same kind of cer-
tainty. Where shall he find it? Away from the
pope and from all other seers and preachers and
saints as well—from every and any voice of man
—he turns to the unchanging record and testi-
mony of the Bible.  Here is God's word, he
says;  I rest here.
It is the best of all resting places undoubtedly.
We have already borne witness to the faith that
no living soul who truly relies on Holy Scripture
as his  man of counsel will fail to please God
or miss meeting the Saviour. But it is another
question entirely whether the desire of the
heavenly Father is, by means of either pope or
Bible, to eliminate diversities of faith from among
His disciples—to bring them all into one uniform
line of thinking, one single consensus of theology.
To say as much as this will, of course, seem to
many like denying an axiom of mathematics. It
is quite as likely to be a Protestant as a Catholic
who will argue:  It stands to reason that there
is only one truth about any subject. Whatever
opinion men may have on that subject which does
not coincide with that one truth must necessarily
be a wrong opinion. And on such an important
100 THE MULTIPLEXITY OF DOCTRINE
matter as the truth about himself and the human
soul it is certain that God would not leave any-
body to error. We simply must believe that some-
where He has made it possible for us to find and
know the absolute unmistaken facts of religion.
All this may be heard said as emphatically in
evangelical as in papal circles, with only a final
difference about where that indubitable truth is to
be found—in the book or in the Church.
But again it must be observed that the adequate
conclusion of the whole matter is not quite so sim-
pie as everyday home-made logic would induce us
to believe. An open-and-shut antithesis between
right opinion and wrong opinion may cover the
ground for a question of scientific fact (though
not always even there), but a question of the
eternal things which fill earth and sky and all the
life of man may not be so easily measured. It
would be a bold proposition indeed to maintain
that any thought which comes within the yea-and-
nay of one human brain is the whole unabridged
truth about any act of God or any responsibility
of man. The character and being of God and the
salvation of humankind are still vaster themes;
on these a fully balanced understanding is even
less likely to be achieved inside any single mind
in this world.
In another chapter we have studied how the di-
vine Editor in the Bible secured a comprehensive
presentation of various elements of Christian faith
by collating a variety of views from different au-
thors, and so in a doctrinal symposium, as it were,
THE MTJLTIPLEXITY OP DOCTRINE 101
drawing a large circle to include each wide and
expansive principle of life. By the same token it
often requires numerous minds vibrating in a long
gamut of opinions to sound out to the world the
full chords of God's entire truth. The loftiest
note and the lowest in such an instance may seem
distressingly out of harmony; dogmatists may
proclaim them in hopeless contradiction—and yet
in the swelling symphony of God's messages each
may be equally needful for the divinest music.
Truth is less often this or that than this and that.
If one will but consider the basic obligation of
the loyal Christian disciple to take the Bible as it
is for what it is, he will certainly be constrained
to yield assent to this proposition of a multifarious
theology which God purposes to convey through
a multifarious Bible. The opposite conception of
one single-strand line of doctrine, drawn unde-
fleeted and unduplicated from the beginning of the
Old Testament to the end of the New, from which
only willfulness or blindness can occasion depar-
ture—from which any departure whatsoever is
necessarily a crazy plunge into mental confusion
and moral rebellion—will simply not stand up in
the presence of any honest study of the book that
God actually made.
In fact, the dogmatist who says that the Bible
was intended to teach just the creedal system
which his predilections have derived from it and
extinguish every other mode of thought, is verging
dangerously close to a sacrilege—for he is in ef-
feet saying that the Lord attempted something
102 THE MULTIPLEXITY OF DOCTRINE
which He obviously did not succeed in accomplish-
ing. Is not that an impiety? Certainly other
modes of thought are not extinguished. They
multiply among the Bible's most devoted readers.
If an all-prevailing uniformity of belief in the
Church were the object in view when the Scrip-
tures were brought into being, it surely could not
have been beyond the divine capacity to produce
a book immensely better suited to that end. For
that result the Bible should have been much less
various, much more systematic, much more logical,
much more rigid. To multiply a single pattern
anywhere, one must see to having an inflexible
mould.
Is not then the reverential attitude that which
says that since God did not by the Scriptures sup-
press differences in the religious beliefs of Bible
students, He must be supposed to favour rather
than deprecate those diversities? If He wanted
an unvarying creed and an undiversified polity
throughout His Church, there is certainly enough
loyalty abroad among His people to secure what
the Master wants. Inasmuch then as a perfect
sameness is not secured, even where men heartily
agree to take the Bible in its unsophisticated sim-
plicity as the only criterion for either creed or
polity, it can only be inferred as a practical judg-
ment on the situation that the Lord of the Church
is not interested in sameness. Plenty of proof is
evident that the Creator loves variety in nature;
why not in faith and love and worship and spir-
itual experience?
THE MULTIPLEXITY OF DOCTRINE 103
There are those who are very sure that the Fa-
ther above is not satisfied to have His household
on earth ruled over by any arrangement which
does not include a hierarchy of bishops. On the
other hand, there are a multitude of no doubt
equally good and faithful souls who are fully per-
suaded that bishops are an abomination to the
Lord and it is a defeat of some eternal good pur-
pose in the universe if anybody rises higher in
authority within the Church than the presbyters.
And both these parties in all sincerity appeal to the
same Scriptures to sustain their mutually exclusive
claims. Each side is amazed that the other should
think the Bible can be interpreted to such incredi-
ble conclusions. In the doctrinal field, similarly,
Baptists and Disciples insist that nothing is plainer
than that the New Testament prescribes immersion
as the only form by which baptism can be baptism.
Practically all others of the greater Protestant de-
nominations hold that nothing can be plainer in
the records than the fact that no form was pre-
scribed for the rite and several different forms
were used in apostolic times as circumstances
might happen to make most convenient.
These disputations look tragic except in the light
which makes their ponderous earnestness absurd
—the realization that the God who planned and
brought together the contents of the Bible cannot
possibly have cared much about either of these
fiercely debated issues or He would have taken
effective pains to settle them long ago before they
began. Does any Episcopalian really believe that
104 THE MULTIPLEXITY OF DOCTRINE
the Infinite One, if in fact He considered it re-
quisite for His Church on earth to be forever and
only under the governance of lord bishops, would
not have been able to say so in terms that not even
obstinate Presbyterians could dare to gainsay?
Or if in truth no disciple of the Master might be
considered to be baptized unless he had been cov-
ered head and foot with water, and every disciple
must needs be so baptized, would not Jesus have
spoken the few words required to make the matter
plain even to men who do not possess Greek lexi-
cons and are unable to consult the alleged  schol-
arship of the world  ?
The most outstanding wonder of modern Chris-
tianity is the amazing spiritual reaction which per-
mits theologians and ecclesiastics to read a book
of such broad and swinging freedom, such un-
staled and exuberant variety, as the Bible exhibits,
and come away gloating over a handful of short,
tough tethers twisted out of a verse here and a
verse there, by which they propose to tie up men
to a few stubby peculiarities claimed to be essential
to religion, if not the sum of it. Why don't they
take the road to the open heights instead of back
to the hitching posts? Was Jesus ever tethered to
a hitching post ?
Of course, the greatest enrichments of theology
have always been attained by the final consent of
men to solve such disputes as we have spoken of
by merging the truths of both contentions. The
patristic Church achieved such a victory when it
resolutely refused to accept the dilemma thrust
THE MULTIPLEXITY OF DOCTRINE 105
upon it by those who would pronounce the Master
all divine and those who persisted that He should
be called only human. The Church took from
both pleas and affirmed the great composite faith
that He was both human and divine, and so set its
seal to the only never-failing doctrine of salvation
by  a great High Priest who hath passed through
the heavens and yet  hath been in all points
tempted like as we are. By that act of joining
what the less understanding would have disjoined,
the fathers saved to the Church of Christ the mes-
sage out of which has gone forth all the evangel-
ical power which it has wielded in any age. Quite
similarly in very recent days comprehensive Chris-
tian preachers have put an end to centuries of
rivalry between Arminianism and Calvinism by
proclaiming them in unison as conjoint halves of
a single truth. And presently the now current
controversy between liberals and conservatives
over progressive or static theology will be set at
rest by the discovery that the Bible harmoniously
includes both.
As fast as there comes a general recognition of
the hospitality with which the Bible entertains
together many varied ideas that the creeds put in
opposition, there must follow a revision of what
is understood by designating the Scriptures as a
 standard of doctrine. The idea which now pre-
vails would set up the sacred book as a sort of
defining dictionary from which the only allowable
sense for each doctrine in a Christian's creed
might be drawn with an authority strong enough
106 THE MULTIPLEXITY OF DOCTRINE
to settle and end all discussion. As we have seen,
the book is in reality ill adapted for that kind of
thing, and the only rational conclusion is that it
was never intended for it.
Yet the Bible is none the less a  standard of
doctrine "—but rather in the way of a touchstone
than as a measuring stick. It can't be pretended
that the Bible contains all the truth in the universe,
even about religious matters. But it does contain
a great copious sample of the truth out of God's
deepest and most eternal vein, and it serves and
will always serve to judge the genuineness of
whatever else in man's philosophizing and in man's
experience may turn up in the guise of claimed-to-
be wisdom. Let it all be brought in and compared;
if it agrees with the fiber, texture, structure, of
the Bible's highest and final teachings, let it be
called honest goods. But if it disagrees, then out
with the stuff; it is but shoddy after all.
Moreover, the Bible stands impregnable as re-
minder and indeed as demonstration that truth
has an existence, an objective existence, all its own.
Constantly through the ages the temptation has re-
turned on men to speculate with the suspicion that
the only reason for calling anything true is the cir-
cumstance that people have somehow come to im-
agine it true. The natural sequence is the sugges-
tion that morals and justice likewise derive from
the same kind of human tradition and consent.
But men who read the Bible have the best defense
against that temptation. Through the clear eyes
of Scripture writers the Christian sees the Throne
THE MTJLTIPLEXITY OF DOCTKINE 107
Set eternally in the midst of the universe and
knows that truth and right issue forth from the
ultimate source of all reality—the pledge of every
basic fact—the infinite being of God.
With this assurance the journey becomes safe
which so many private believers and so many ac-
credited theologians as well fear to venture on.
The greatest practical defect of the theologies
which seminaries and pulpits promulgate is the
fear manifest in all of them to put the weight on
Christian experience which the Bible puts on it.
The invariable answer to every appeal for more
stress on the manner in which the Scriptures are
validated by the spiritual response of those that
read them, is a warning that any such emphasis
on the reactions of individual believers will thrust
the Church into a chaos of as many different the-
ologies as it has Bible-reading members. But the
response betrays a fear that the Bible confounds
openly. Do the objectors imagine that the Bible
itself is to be dissolved into an airy phantom com-
pounded of the impressions that form and reform
as its students turn its pages? Let them dismiss
their apprehension. The Bible is a solid not so
easily dissolved. The Bible remains as immovable
as its God, and ten thousand years hence, if the
world endures so long, it will mark the unshaken
foundations of righteousness as clearly as to-day.
And men will lay out their lives from the base-line
of its unchanged data on how to serve their Maker
and their fellow men.
But all this should not obscure the one means
108 THE MULTIPLEXITY OF DOCTRINE
by which the Bible is able to assert any governing
power over any man's actual living conduct—the
one and only means also by which any man is
convinced that it brings him a trustworthy mes-
sage from his Maker. It is the same secret of the
sway of the Holy Scriptures over men in Church
and in world which will still explain the book's
vitality when that ten thousand years to come have
been absorbed in history. This secret is the mystic
fact, which numberless generations and all sorts
and conditions of Christians have found realistic
beyond all telling, that when one with earnest mind
reads the Bible, something within begins soon to
say,  That's true, and that means me. And that
fact is matched and clinched by the other certainty
to which can be brought the testimony of multi-
tudes whom no man can number—the testimony
that when a man with good faith takes up these
promises and commands which so surely mean
him, and seeks to live by them, he soon returns
saying,  I have tried these things out, and they
come true; in experience they prove themselves
completely.
Men obey the Bible because it imperiously calls
to what is deepest in the consciousness—even in
the sub-consciousness—of their souls. A man
reads,  The Lord is my shepherd, and he knows
he needs a shepherd, and he trusts the Lord as a
shepherd, and soon his neighbours hear him sing-
ing,  I shall not want. And all this is because
in very deed the Spirit of God dwells in the book.
It is not only that the Spirit once inspired the
THE MTJLTIPLEXITY OF DOCTRINE 109
Bible. To-day as ever He—in the present tense—
inspires it. And it is He who, as Christians read
it, allots to each man his portion. No man has
quite a whole Bible for his own. He is richest
who has most of it, but no one is poor who has
any. The Spirit gives each Christian his part, and
as the man's soul grows, he is let into a larger and
richer holding. So each gets his own Bible not
because a council decreed it authoritative nor be-
cause a Church has demanded that men call it in-
fallible, but because he can tell what it has done
for him and what it has made him do for God.
This interpretation of the Scriptures by and
through the life tests applied by the individual
Christian soul is the more appropriate to their
character and contents because they are themselves
in so very large part the records of individual ex-
perience in loving God, trusting God, doing His
will and enjoying the fullness of His providence
and redemption. Extensive portions of the Bible
are of course occupied with the enunciation and
discussion of general principles in religion. But an
even greater portion consists of the petitions, the
praises and the pious reflections of men who are
telling from their hearts what life has meant to
them personally—what cries for help its trials have
extorted from them, what responses God has
granted them in the midst of hard duty and strong
struggles, and what calm of faith they have come
to as they fared forward in the midst of opposi-
tion and perils.
It is true indeed that these recitals of fears and
110 THE MULTIPLEXITY OP DOCTRINE
triumphs are sometimes wrenched from their real
significance and made into blind puzzles for the
devout by an unadvised exegesis which treats as a
universal generalization what is only the testimony
of this or that saint to his own experience of the
world. The late Dr. A. Woodruff Halsey used to
tell how, as he read from the Bible to his saintly
mother in his boyhood, she intervened when he
came to that verse in the thirty-seventh Psalm
which says:  I have been young and now am old;
yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken nor his
seed begging bread.  Stop there, Woody, she
cried;  I have. And the good Christian lady
was not disputing inspiration, either; she was sim-
ply with admirably unconventional candour rec-
ognizing the utterance for exactly what inspira-
tion presented it—one certain psalmist's own ob-
servation of God's care over His people. Mrs.
Halsey's observation happened to be different, and
it was neither irreverent nor skeptical for her to
say so.
One reads likewise in the ninety-first Psalm an-
other psalmist's assurance in the midst of some
great plague that the pestilence would not be per-
mitted to smite his life to destroy it. No doubt
his confidence in the special providence of such
protection was fulfilled for him—the psalm would
scarcely have been preserved otherwise. Yet its
appearance in the Bible is no guarantee that all
other God-fearing men will be delivered from
death in any and every peril that may happen to
overtake them. Every man's times are in the
THE MULTIPLEXITY OP DOCTRINE 111
hand of a loving Lord, and there are no guaran-
tees to any man except that if he does his best for:
God, God will do what is best for him.
None the less these tributes of trust and praise
which holy men of old have been prompted out of
their own private experience of God's goodness to
render to Him for all His mercies, have their
rightful and honoured place in the book by which
God is pleased to reveal His ways and purposes to
mankind. They testify, not to any mechanical
contrivance by which God grinds out good things
to men from the wheels and cogs of an irrespective
fate, but to the everlasting kindliness with which
He watches over each of His children and appor-
tions to each what shall best reward his deserv-
ings, best discipline his shortcomings and bring
him most securely to the particular rounding out
of life that best fulfills the particular fitness of his
particular soul.
Especially do these and a hundred other pas-
sages testify to the great and comprehensive fact
that God's allotments to the righteous are allot-
ments of prosperity and gladness many times
oftener than He apportions the allotments of woe
and sorrow, to which bear witness other Biblical
transcripts of Christian experience equally inspired
because equally real. Not from one sort of Scrip-
ture nor from the other taken alone—neither from
the triumphantly joyful nor from the dolefully
sorrowful—would a modern Bible student derive a
full and fair account of God's dealings with His
children whom He loves. But with the light of
112 THE MULTIPLEXITY OP DOCTEINE
the one kind of Bible testimony mingling amid the
shading and the shadows of the darker sort, the
Christian who attends to the Scriptures in whole
and not in part sees a picture vivid with all the
mercies, both dark and bright, of an ever living
and ever loving Father.
Vain then are the arguments which the schools
bring to demonstrate the authority of the Scrip-
tures—impotent the resolutions that assemblies
adopt rebuking those who acknowledge doubts.
The Bible's ascendancy over the minds of men can
be confirmed by no such external measures. All
is done when personally for each Bible-reader that
happens which Cowper describes so simply—the
truest, finest thing ever written about the Bible
outside itself:
 The Spirit breathes upon the word
And brings the truth to light.
XI
THE EMPLOYMENT OF REASON
IS it impertinent to exercise the human reason
on a book of divine inspiration? Over this
question many Christians conceive that a pro-
foundly divisive difference exists in the contem-
porary Church. On the part of a host of conser-
vatives it is received as an axiom that what God
has published to the world as His word of author-
ity must in the nature of the case be read with un-
questioning acceptance. From this standpoint it is
no wonder that men who write books of Biblical
criticism appear impious persons.
The matter here at stake is not, however, en-
tirely axiomatic. A deeper issue than either con-
servatives or liberals realize underlies the question.
The thing to be first decided is whether God has
given men a book on which it is suitable for them
to bring reason to bear—or whether it is a book in
essence forbidding to reason. If God meant His
volume of Scripture never to be reasoned about,
then of course it is impertinence to offer a man's
opinion concerning it. But if God intended His
book to awaken and summon forth the gift of rea-
soning with which He has endowed man, then re-
fusing to apply reason to the Bible is irreverent.
"3
114 THE EMPLOYMENT OP REASON
Can we know how in this particular it is God's
pleasure to have the Scriptures dealt with?
In the familiar forms of secular writing it is
never difficult to determine which are intended to
encourage and which to discourage independent
exercise of the mind. One type of expression
conspicuously not calculated to induce thought
readily suggests itself; it is the highly specialized
style in which the civic laws of modern states are
written. Any one who has so much as looked
inside a statute book knows the reiteration of
terms, the multiplication of synonyms, the enumer-
ation of every conceivable contingency, whereby it
is hoped to put the letter of the law beyond the
possibility of two constructions at any point what-
ever. The man therefore who reads a legislative
act is supposed to have but one business laid upon
him; that is to comprehend what the law says.
Reasoning, pro or con, on these premises, is super-
fluous.
It is true, indeed, that this theory of the matter
fails to work out. An endless succession of
judicial decisions learnedly interpreting disputed
legislation constitutes an ever present proof that
people do not understand the laws identically, how-
soever painstakingly legislators may draw them.
But always this effort to be unmistakable results
in a quite distinctive kind of product, which on
the most casual reading exposes the purpose to
regimentalize all ideas based upon it. Something
of the same kind may be observed in school text-
books—especially text-books in the sciences—
THE EMPLOYMENT OF EEASON 115
where language is put through its best disciplined
paces with the sole idea of forbidding it to mean
or even to suggest anything more than the one
exact conception which standard science is ready
to ratify. Theology also, writing its creeds with a
like concern to mean just what it means and no
more nor less, has to adopt much the same kind of
strait-laced pronunciamento diction.
What is to be thought of here, however, is not
the success or the ill success of such efforts to say
something that can neither be debated nor vari-
ously interpreted. The more important observa-
tion just now is that no writing which even aims
at that effect—legal, scientific, creedal or in any
form dogmatic—ever impressed anybody as liter-
ature. Literature in all tongues and in all times
has exactly the opposite influence. Instead of cir-
cumscribing and confining thought, standardizing
opinion and repressing imagination, literature fires
and stirs minds that read, until thought leaps up
to seize ideals belonging in loftier altitudes and
imagination takes wings to distances that the mere
words as written would never measure.
Who would read a poem that tied down the soul
to the baldly literal sense of each noun and adjec-
tive and verb used to fill out the beat of the meter ?
A poem is no poem unless it releases fancies and
aspirations and bids them soar where the only
chart is the sunny joy of living in the love of God.
Chains and walls can be made of words, and walls,
if not chains, have their uses. But such are not
the winged words of literature. They do not con-
116 THE EMPLOYMENT OF REASON
fine but set free. They do not forbid men to
think; they compel thinking. They do not dull
and stifle reason; they arouse the reason with
scores of questions and set it searching earth and
heaven for answers fit to be named rational.
What really good book, out of all that are found
written by men in all the libraries of the world,
can a man read without stirring his reasoning pow-
ers into vivid activity—accumulating confirma-
tions, extending deductions, applying principles to
added instances?
From this digression then the inquiry returns to
ask once more which kind of book God has pre-
pared for men in His Bible. Is it a manual of
statutes restricting human life within a framework
of unyielding rules? Or is it a volume of en-
franchising literature challenging men to adventure
the greatening of their spiritual knowledge by ex-
ploration of the ways of God? Manifestly, in-
deed, a part of the Bible is formed on the pattern
of all legalism—a structure of minute external re-
quirements wrought into an inflexible system of
corporate conformity. Such is the character of
the Mosaic law, which constitutes so large a frac-
tion of the second, third, fourth and fifth books of
the Old Testament. Certain later parts of the
same Testament likewise, though they do not par-
take of the form, are characterized in general by
the same governing outlook.
But of the larger mass of the Bible there need
be no hesitance in naming a different classification.
The contributions made to its contents by its poets
THE EMPLOYMENT OF REASON 117
'(both dramatic and lyric), its sages of the old He-
brew  wisdom, its story-tellers, its prophets, its
evangelists, its apostles, and above all, by its im-
mortal Messiah—all these are literature of a qual-
ity shiningly beyond all categories of  the letter,
which Paul complained of as "killing the spir-
ituality of believers. They all instead are instinct
with the spirit which (quoting Paul again)  giv-
eth life. Indeed, the richest treasures of Bible
literature are those very words which He who
spoke them declared to be in and of themselves
 spirit and life.
Utterly vain then is it to talk of not employing
human reason on the Bible. With a non-literary
Bible that might be feasible, but not with this
Bible. In the presence of a book crammed with
ideas that awaken the human mind as spring sun-
shine awakens sleeping flowers, by what unnat-
ural and repressive magic is it proposed to prevent
reason from sharing in the response of the soul?
Or who imagines that when God calls humanity
to participate in His glowing and kindling
thoughts, He invites the tribute of every faculty in
human nature save that which is best able to ap-
preciate purpose, plan, cause, effect, continuity and
consistency? When did the Creator ever brand
man's reason as unholy—unfit to handle the sacred
things of either His deeds or of His words?
Equally impermissible is it to suppose that man's
reason is bidden to engage itself only with those
things in the Scriptures that are plain to see and
understand; the very nature of reason, as God has
118 THE EMPLOYMENT OF REASON
embedded it in the intelligence of men, gives it a
houndlike scent for what is not plain, for what is
apparently altogether non-understandable. It
would be therefore mere mockery for the Giver of
the Bible to set a boundary in it between the ob-
vious and the obscure, and prohibit the reader
from taking his reasonableness with him across
that line. To be sure, the keenest of reason will
never penetrate to the center of religion's mys-
teries. But let us be also sure that God hinders
it not from going as far as it is able. It is pre-
posterous to put all this artificial enmity between
reason and revelation. God gave both, and He
prepared the one that it might receive the other.
He has fitted each to each. Every page of the
Bible might be justly inscribed with the invitation
which stands in living letters on the first page of
the Prophet Isaiah:  Come now and let us reason
together, saith Jehovah. Reason is God's joy—
not His  black beast.
It is by no means beside the mark here to ob-
serve how ironical a paradox dogs the footsteps
of those who maintain that every Bible utterance
is to be taken in its simplest literal sense and must
not be subjected in any particular to rationalizing
interpretation. This they cling to, oblivious of the
pragmatic contradiction which their very ortho-
doxy compels. For their theory also obliges them
to hold that every Bible verse in its simple literal
sense is an explicitly exact statement of fact.
When therefore two such verses appear on their
face to present quite different views of matters to
THE EMPLOYMENT OF REASON 119
which both allude—and any Bible reader knows
how often that happens—there comes a serious
strain on consistency. No other resort is open
than to proceed to  reconcile  them by whatever
supposition appears least violent. It often seems,
when one picks up a typical Bible commentary of
the literalist school, that the larger portion of the
volume is occupied with the anxious labour of such
reconciliations.
By what means then is this reconciling accom-
plished? Why, by means of human reason ap-
plied to interpret concordantly the text of the
Scriptures. There is no other means by which it
can be done. No matter how strenuously a man
may contend that such and such a single passage
must be taken to signify just what it says, when
he brings two passages together (especially if their
harmony is to his mind predetermined), he finds
himself in spite of himself reasoning out unity be-
tween them according to his own intelligence. An
inference from one statement applied to amplify
a scanter allusion in the other; an explanation,
transferred perhaps in the opposite direction,
carrying a new shade of colour into a narrative
that standing alone would bear a quite different
implication; the composite revision of an entire
story in order to weave in all the incidents found
in two independent accounts—these are familiar
expedients to which conservative scholars en-
gaged in the exegesis of the Bible are constrained
to devote prodigious ingenuity.
Such devices are of course employed in all sin-
120 THE EMPLOYMENT OF REASON
cerity of devotion to the truth of God; they are
honest efforts to make that truth more lucid. But
certainly the reflective and the scrupulous among
students using these methods of exposition cannot
pretend to abide by the dictum that men have no
right to invade the realm of divine revelation with
reason's readjustments. It is that very thing that
they are doing all the while. Their experience
and example are rather a practical demonstration
that the Bible cannot be appropriated in all its
values by anybody who does not look at it in the
light of the best human faculties that can be
brought to bear upon it.
It may seem a jesting  tu quoque  to say of
the literally orthodox in Bible studies that they
are more inveterate rationalists than the higher
critics whom they so unanimously condemn. But
it is not a jest; it is the easily observable fact.
Confronting a so-called  difficulty as between
two seemingly disagreeing portions of Scripture,
the liberal scholar is usually content to let the text
stand undisturbed and even unexplained just as it
is. The conservative, on the contrary, weaves a
great net of cross references by which he drags
the questioned paragraph or chapter into a de-
cidedly different orientation. Sometimes the new
angle of vision opened up by this process puts the
truth in clearer light, and the scholarship which
accomplishes it would elicit the gratitude of all
Bible-lovers except for one flaw in its picture of
reality—the pious pretense that the result reached
in this fashion is itself dogmatically infallible and
THE EMPLOYMENT OF REASON 121
not the product of a purely human exercise in the
art of rationalizing the varied materials of the
Bible.
An instance of the tireless zeal with which these
rationalistic efforts are carried on by those who
imagine that nothing else will put an unshakable
foundation under the Bible, is the labour that has
been spent to explain how it happened that King
Saul did not recognize the youth who fought
Goliath if that youth, according to the letter of the
history, had already been Saul's favourite harper
in his own court. The higher critic says:  Two
traditions "—and lets it go at that. The man who
believes that he is no kind of a critic at all, who
boasts that he takes everything in the Bible in
exactly the way it is stated and asks no question,
says:  Now we have got to figure this thing out
—and puckers his brows for hours at a time at-
tempting to range all the data of the story in one
consistent chain. He has a perfect right to. But
it's reason he's using; he's an undeniable ration-
alist—trying by reason to establish something not
said in the Bible.
A case still more egregious of the same charac-
ter is the premillennial program which a strong
party of uncompromising dogmatists have worked
out, professing to show the exact course of events
which must intervene between the present hour
and the reappearance of Jesus Christ on the earth
—including the surreptitious removal from the
world of all true Christians and an ensuing erup-
tion of general horror outdoing the worst previous
122 THE EMPLOYMENT OF BEASON
experiences of the race. Every item of this pre*
diction is supported by an authentic Bible citation.
Nevertheless it is precisely true to say that nothing
like this foreseen history can be read in any part
of the Bible. As a connected prophecy it is wholly
a piece of man's device. For in spite of these
quotations all being in Scripture, there is not even
the ground plan there for the scheme of association
by which they are brought together.
Many of the passages thus used were never sup-
posed either by their writers or by their earlier
readers to have anything to do with the end of the
world. Of others it can only be said that the
exegesis to which premillenarians submit them
leaves lingering in free minds a large measure of
doubt. But putting these things aside, the matter
evident beyond controversy is that, however in-
fallible may be the individual proof-texts of this
cult, the pattern of the mosaic into which they
are forcibly fitted bears not the faintest glint of
infallibility. They could be laid together quite as
readily in a totally different design; in fact, that
has been often done by postmillennialists who felt
just as sure of themselves as the premillennialists
could ever be. It ought to be the candid admis-
sion of the latter that their picture of great and
terrible events speedily to come is not what the
Scripture says, but what their own very human
reason has somewhat plausibly managed to make
Scripture appear to say. It is rationalism pure and
simple—though certainly not to be branded un-
true on that sole account.
THE EMPLOYMENT OP REASON 123
It is then not simply allowable to bring the in-
spired Scriptures under the survey of human rea-
son; it is by the very character of the book ren-
dered imperative. And this necessity has bearings
far wider than the comparatively insignificant
matters that have served us for passing illustra-
tion. There is involved in it the primary vindica-
tion of that often scorned discipline of the church
—systematic theology. There is no systematic the-
ology in the Bible, but the Bible none the less con-
ducts the actively thoughtful student to a point
where some kind of theology, more or less sys-
tematic, becomes the indispensable apparel of his
pilgrimage. He gets it by weaving Bible woof
into the warp of his own inquisitive soul, and the
fabric often outlasts the long journey.
More popularly significant, however, is the pro-
priety which by this view of reason and the Bible
is conceded to Biblical criticism as a reverential
employment for competent Christian men. In
great sections of the Church there still prevails
the inquisitorial prejudice which would put criti-
cism of the Scriptures in the calendar of supreme
atrocities. But when it is once shown that the
conservative is as little able as the radical to avoid
judging the Bible with whatever intellectual light
he has—that virtually God Himself has compelled
such judgment—there must certainly ensue a saner
attitude toward the critics and a better discrimina-
tion between the good and the bad among them—
or as is perhaps safer to say, between the better
and the worse.
124 THE EMPLOYMENT OF EEASON
Much misunderstanding and even more hatred,
as useless as it is unjustifiable, inhere in the
chronic misreading of the very term  criticism.
Even persons of education and extensive knowl-
edge suffer themselves subconsciously to entertain
the vernacular sense of the verb  criticise  and of
its derivatives, assuming that criticism is simply
an inveterate faultfinding, elevated in the univer-
sities to the dignity of a learned profession. But
of course this phraseology as applied to the Bible
and all Bible subjects rises to the plane of the
technical conception cherished in literature and the
arts—the thought that criticism is, first of all, ap-
plause of excellencies, and only by negative con-
sequence comes round to the marking of faults.
To the Bible critic then the Church should come
not expecting a discount on the Scriptures, en-
forced by a catalogue of defects and deficiencies,
but frankly anticipating from him some fresh
tribute to the greatness and grandeur of the book
of God.
Were that anticipation prevalent among every-
day Christians, pastors and laymen, its magnetism
would no doubt draw forth from scholarship an
expanding eloquence on the power and nobility of
the massive Bible entire, in lieu of penny-counting
rivalries to see who can collect from odd corners
of the book the largest symposium of insignificant
guesses at possible mistakes. Already there is a
great change observable from the negative effect
of earlier movements of criticism, and the morn-
ing of appreciation following a too lengthy night
THE EMPLOYMENT OF REASON 125
of depreciation is surely dawning over the Scrip-
tural studies of this generation. When that morn-
ing is fully come all men will be able to see how
fruitful is the result of sowing human intelligence
in an inspired soil.
There are those who consider it a useful dis-
crimination to divide between constructive critics
and destructive critics, applauding the former,
anathematizing the latter. But that test is rather
too tedious in confirmation to serve for present
guidance; not for a generation or two will it be
possible to tell whether our contemporary critics
are constructing what will stand or destroying
what ought to stand. But there is a distinction
which should always be easy for the just-minded
to apply. There are some critics who despise the
Bible and are bent on ridiculing it into oblivion;
there are other critics who love it and are passion-
ately anxious to set it forth in so clear and ap-
pealing a light that it will win constantly—and
most of all among the young—more faith, more
trust, more usage, more vital vogue in private lives
and popular affairs. The first, no matter how
erudite they are or even how meticulously correct,
are not of our company; let them range themselves
with the foe. But the other sort—the true Bible-
lovers—are allies in the militant kingdom of God
with all good disciples of Jesus Christ, and in their
fellowship we shall go forward to a brighter and
larger appropriation of the revelation of God as
contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New
Testaments.
126 THE EMPLOYMENT OF REASON
And yet—and yet—let us remind ourselves, ere
we pass from this theme, that none of the Bible
writers were either critics or theologians in any
such sense as these terms convey in present-day
schools and churches. This is true even of Paul
and John, who are now regarded as prototypes
and patron saints of all the race and lineage of
theological professors. John at Ephesus preached
Jesus as the eternally preexistent Word by whom
all things were made, and Paul with passionate
earnestness wrote to the Romans of God's ability
to justify sinners because of the propitiation
wrought on the cross in the blood of Christ. In
what they said of these matters there were in-
eluded all the elements out of which have been
later constructed the theological doctrines of the
Trinity and the atonement. But neither Paul nor
John nor any other Bible writer ever developed
either of these fundamental articles of the Chris-
tian faith into a philosophic dogma.
Afterward came those who, when they had said
that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are
equally divine, found themselves constrained in
their own minds to try to define how these three
personalities could consist together in one God-
head—to say how men might believe in the God-
head of all three without believing in three Gods.
Likewise they deemed it needful to describe in
terms of philosophy just how it was that the death
of Christ on the cross enabled the Holy God to blot
out the sins of the unholy and receive them to
Himself. They who felt this urge were not,
TEE EMPLOYMENT OF REASON 127
however, the apostles or their contemporaries;
they were a later rank of Christian leaders—the
generation of Nicsea and thereabouts. Their
work, therefore, while worthy of immense honour,
bears no such peculiar seal of divinity as the in-
spiring Spirit has used to certify the New Testa-
ment. The formulation of theology was strictly a
post-Biblical development.
Whoever then with sincerity regards the Bible
as the paramount standard by which faith is to be
tested, must needs recognize as orthodox any faith
accepting and building upon the Bible facts,
whether the philosophy now derived from those
facts agrees or does not agree with explanations
of the same that were favoured by the Nicene and
later theologians. The modern disciple who like
Paul looks upon Jesus as  existing in the form of
God, by that consideration alone comes well
within the range of the historic trinitarianism of
Christianity. And he is not to be excluded if in
place of the Nicene distinction of three persons in
one God he distinguishes rather three manifesta-
tions of one God. From anything that Paul or
John wrote on the subject it is impossible to tell
which was the view of either of them. Perhaps,
in the midst of engrossing missionary and pastoral
service, neither ever penetrated far enough into the
psychic problem to work out a definite thought of
how the Son was metaphysically related to the
Father.
So too these great apostolic teachers probably
never weighed and balanced theories of the atone-
128 THE EMPLOYMENT OP REASON
ment as Christian philosophers have done in the
centuries since. So far as their writings tell, the
apostles simply took the fact and ended there.
They said:  Christ died for our sins according to
the Scriptures. And inasmuch as that message ef-
fectually saved men, it fully contented the preach-
ers of it. Whoever then can truly echo that word,
is an orthodox follower of the apostles. He be-
lieves and teaches the atonement. And it is all
one whether he considers that Jesus thus died for
the sinner as a substituted sacrifice or in a great
dramatic demonstration of an everlasting divine
love stronger than death and supreme in unselfish-
ness. Taking the atonement either way, the
Christian is honestly accepting all that the Bible
says. Explanations one way or the other are
purely human addenda, in which no doubt it is
pleasing to God for the speculations of men to range
broadly, since the sum of them all, woven into the
chain of reverent Christian thought, still consti-
tutes a measure far too short to encompass the
whole significance of Christ's self-devotion in life
and in death for the sinner's sake.
Let us then by no means discard our theologies.
Used aright, they can cast great illumination on
the pathway of the Church's progress to the fuller
meanings of religion. But let us ever remember
that not our theologies, but the Gospel about, of
and in our Lord Jesus Christ, is the power that is
to save the world. And it is not theology but Gos-
pel that the Bible furnishes. So may we accustom
ourselves often to return from the cloistered re-
THE EMPLOYMENT OF KEASON 129
treats in which the philosophers of the Church
work out their elaborate reconstructions of Bible
data, and seek company instead with the first di-
rect and urgent preachers of the evangel, who, in-
nocent of the dogmatizing which less eager ages
have loitered to indulge,  knew nothing save Jesus
Christ and him crucified. We shall be closer to
the real heart of our Lord the oftener we set aside
all later sophistications and refresh our souls anew
with the spontaneous simplicities amid which Jesus
and His twelve companions walked in the early
days of our religion.
XII
miracles in the bible
THE fear prompting resistance to the use
of men's reason in Bible exegesis is more
than all else a dread of what will happen
to the miracle stories in the book. The modern
mind, everybody realizes, is not predisposed to ac-
cept miracle stories from any source, being of
course in this respect quite opposite to the general
mind of the times in which the Bible was pro-
duced. Will not then twentieth-century reason, if
given free sweep, expel from the Bible every ex-
ample of supernatural intervention? It is this
peril which, as many conceive, can only be met by
saying to men:  Whatever is told in this book
you must believe just because it is found here.
You are not permitted to inquire about the ac-
curacy of any of it.
It would perhaps make for quietude in many
quarters if the matter could be so clamped down
and left undisturbed. But if we have been at all
right in arguing that the Bible is not only lawfully
open to the investigations of human reason but is
divinely calculated to invoke (even provoke) such
investigation, then it is clear that the miracles re-
lated therein cannot be excluded from the scope
130
MIEACLES IN THE BIBLE 131
of this questioning. Nor can a predetermined au-
thentication of them be guaranteed before the in-
quiry begins. Predetermination of the outcome
takes the honesty out of any inquiry. Neverthe-
less the case for the miraculous is not to be
thought forfeited by granting such freedom. In-
dependent external corroboration that the marvels
told of in the Bible actually happened has of course
long since become impossible. But the moral pre-
sumptions in favour of that supernatural setting in
which the major miracles of Bible history appear
—and in which their spiritual significance makes
them rationally plausible—grow stronger as views
of Bible revelation grow more comprehensive.
It will increase, however, for the believer both
the clarity of his own thinking on this subject
and his sympathy for those who are unable to
partake of his credence, if he considers why the
mind of these times has a difficulty with miracles
which earlier generations did not experience.
There is in part involved no doubt a certain un-
moral resistance to religious obligation, but that
is nothing new. There has always been in use
among irreligious men some such  protective
mechanism for shielding uncomfortable con-
sciences; an impersonal discussion of theology is
much more agreeable to sustain than pointed refer-
ence to the need for correcting one's own attitude
toward God. In all generations whatever matters
might at the time be topics of current controversy
in religion, have been impartially availed of by
persons whose only really anxious care was to
132 MIRACLES IN THE BIBLE
save themselves from being driven to close quar-
ters on the subject of their own spiritual duty.
Such people to-day find that nothing else serves so
well for defensive diversion as the loud announce-
ment:  I don't believe in the miracles that we read
about in the Bible.
Yet this in no way accounts for the specific
trouble which nowadays men have in adjusting
their intelligence to the conception of a miracle.
Thousands of the devoutest spirits who live in
these times feel that their confession of faith in
Jesus Christ and His Gospel would be perfectly
easy—and supremely joyous—if only it was not
necessary to accept narratives that relate things
outside the course of nature which He did or were
done in Him. Here without question has come
the great reversal that affects religion more than
any other one item in the mental progress of the
Christian era. When Jesus was on earth it would
have been hard for typical men of the age to be-
lieve in any religion which was not evidenced by
marvels manifesting the direct intervention of Al-
mighty God. Now we live in an age when very
many would find themselves much more able to
put confidence in the reality of religion if there
were no miraculous factors—at least, physically
miraculous—in any way attached to it.
This is a tremendous shift of viewpoint which
certainly the men of the time of Jesus—either His
disciples or His enemies—never so much as
dreamed of. If He Himself foresaw it, that of it-
self would afford a strong ratification for the
MIRACLES m THE BIBLE 133
claim that as a truly divine Teacher He brought to
earth a message superior to the contingencies of
human change and valid until the  consummation
of the age. And did He not foresee? Why else
was He so impatient with  an evil and adulterous
generation  that  seeketh after a sign  ? Again
and again He refused to do miracles which people
around Him—though perhaps insincerely—prom-
ised to accept as tokens of His Messiahship. To
be sure, the Master could not wholly omit  mighty
works in an epoch of life when for any mes-
senger of God miracles were regarded as indis-
pensable credentials. Doing them not for show
but for service, He did perform miracles of which
all who were concerned might take knowledge.
He knew that there were many who would believe
Him only  for the very works' sake. Those,
therefore, He gave their fair chance—the  wit-
ness  which their stage of spiritual perception re-
quired.
But even while He accorded to' certain disciples
this testimony of the  works, He voiced a deeper
satisfaction in the faith of those who did not need
such an outward show of proof—who just from
the forthright spiritual convincingness of the mes-
sage were able to believe on His word alone that,
as He expressed it,  I am in the Father and the
Father in me. Surely in His prospective hope
there was even then the vision of a more deeply
religious future when men would not be asking
for material marvels to assure them of the presence
of God in the world, but with a keener awareness
134 MIRACLES IN THE BIBLE
of spiritual things, would see in the very
character of Christ Himself the surer evi-
dence of eternal Fatherhood yearning for the
good of humanity. If indeed such was the
vision before His eyes then, how happy He must
be with this present age of ours, when it is very
certain that the Personality revealed by His own
incarnation has become an argument for faith ten
thousand times more powerful than all the mir-
acles that He ever wrought.
If the Lord did thus forecast a time when men
would care little for outward miracles and much
for the inward miracles of grace, He certainly did
not look forward to it as an age of doubt—as so
many dolefully insist that the present age is—but
as an age of faith. There is, as we have just
acknowledged, something of infidelity in current
discounting of miracles, but on the whole there is
in it a good deal more of sincere and trustful
religious principle. For the modern Christian
stumbles in this matter over no doubt of God's
power. He stumbles over no factitious dogmatism
asserting that there are laws of nature which na-
ture's God is incapable of transcending. He pre-
sumes on no fiction of invariable nature or human
nature. He has indeed but a single puzzle to
disturb him in all these premises. It is best
pictured in the words of the apostle who wrote to
the Hebrews: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday
and to-day, yea and forever. That is what every
reverent thought of Jesus Christ would say of
Him; and if of Him, how much more of the Father
MIRACLES IN THE BIBLE 135
in heaven whom He so constantly and lovingly pro-
claimed! Flux and mutation on earth; new ideas
and new ways constantly developing among man-
kind; but with God as supreme governor of an
ordered universe, with Jesus as supreme revealer
of the divine character, surely no novelty or
amendment or revised policy.
Here then is where the great hazard comes in
the path of a simple faith approaching the mir-
acles: There are no miracles now; why were there
miracles in Bible times ? Has God changed ? Or
is His arm shortened so that in our day He cannot
do what once He did? If miraculous demonstra^
tions of His power were once a part of the dis-
cipline of the law and of the preaching of the
Gospel, why is there no such evidence in our day ?
A miracle is not simply an unexplained wonder;
wonders in nature and science are innumerable
and few of them explained. A miracle is a won-
der which does not recur. And the whole hard-
ship about believing it lies in the fact that it does
not happen again.
For this perplexity there is but one possible
manner of solution within the range of a rational
faith. Of course God cannot change, nor is Jesus
different to-day from what He was yesterday.
But the world changes, and the Immutable and
Infinite One is neither so poor in resource nor so
vagrant in adaptability that He can fit no new
means to the training of an advancing race. A
glimpse of progressive educational method in the
Bible, by which simpler ideas were commended to
136 MIRACLES IN THE BIBLE
the simpler people of a simpler time, and a higher
range of thinking and fact opened to the under-
standing of a more developed age, has already
interested us. And it may very well have been
in the same divine curriculum simply another
aspect which proved God's reality in earlier days
by supernatural acts in the physical creation, but in
later times has preferred to rely on the super-
natural spiritual experiences of men whom Christ
has saved from sin.
Analogies that may be drawn from the pedagogy
which instructs our children in modern schools lie
parallel to such a thought. What is the teach-
ing method of the kindergarten? Blocks, balls,
games, sand-boxes, crayons—everything concrete
for object lessons. What the method of the uni-
versity professor? Lectures, assignments of
themes, discussions, references to the written au-
thorities—everything in the abstract for reason to
take hold of and for reflection to elaborate. Allow
that God kept a kindergarten equipped with object
lessons in the elder time, and in this day is getting
His pupils on toward the university stage—is there
not sufficient suggestion there of reasons why
there should once have been objective miracles
which this generation no longer sees? God has
simply substituted for His former appeal to the
eyes of men a new and higher appeal to the con-
sciousness of the human soul. And if we have in-
terpreted Jesus rightly, all this is a graduation into
higher things for which He was exceedingly eager
when He was in the world.
MIRACLES IN THE BIBLE 137
If is also to be mentioned that extraordinary
conditions always require exceptional measures.
Furthermore, unique conjunctions of powers and
forces must produce unprecedented results. This
observation applies to God's moral universe to-day
exactly the same as ever. In this sense the age of
miracles is not past and can never pass while the
universe endures. If God had some purpose to
accomplish to-day which natural means would not
suffice to carry through, He would assuredly not
let the purpose fail for lack of miraculous inter-
position. Indeed, the story of mankind abounds,
as much outside the Bible as inside it, with in-
stances of those  lucky chances  or  providential
developments  which have again and again given
victory to righteous causes against apparently
hopeless odds. As acts of immediate divine control
over the otherwise uncertain contingencies of life,
such events have to the senses of faith all the
characteristics of miracle, except the deflection of
nature's accustomed cause and effect. They are
distinctly supernatural interventions. And the
keener the crisis between good and bad, the less
strange is the intervention. The path made for
Israel across the Red Sea would have been incredi-
ble in any ordinary case; on the day when the fate
of a nation destined for the service of God hangs
in the balance, anything which saves a people is
credible.
But, as of course all Christians know, the pin-
nacle heights of miracle in the Bible are reached in
the life of Jesus Christ, Himself as God manifest
138 MIRACLES IN THE BIBLE
in the flesh the Miracle of the ages. Here once it
may have been the miracles that proved the Man,
but to-day it is the Man who proves the miracles.
Considering how different He is from other men,
as the conviction of accumulating centuries more
and more attests—as the twentieth century better
than all its predecessors appreciates—we can hold
it nothing unbelievable that His earthly life began,
proceeded and ended with circumstances such as
have attached to no other life known to humanity.
A Person elevated in quality of character and in
dynamic of influence so far above the best attain-
ments of the race elsewhere, indexes the presence
of vitalities and potencies more transcendently
divine than ever centered in any other single life in
this world. How reasonable then are the memoirs
of His career, which show forth those unmatched,
forces in unmatched victory over enmity and hate,
in unmatched ministration to evil, misery and sor-
row—which reflect the shine of heavenly lights
along all the path by which the Master walked His
way through the midst of men—which reveal Him
dispensing the gracious mercies of God the Father
to the poorest and most hopeless of all that He
met. That radiant story no man could wish to
replace with a picture less beautiful. Is it possible
that any man could be happier for replacing it with
a record poorer in beneficent power ?
The one supremely appropriate miracle in all
this gracious life, persuasively crowning all else
that is told us concerning Jesus Christ, is His
resurrection. That mighty event is commended to
MIKACLES IN THE BIBLE 139
the belief of the world not only by the historical
circumstances surrounding it—by the admitted
truth that the Lord's rising from the dead explains,
and nothing else does explain, the astonishing re-
turn of faith and hope to the disciples whom His
crucifixion plunged into despair. It is also and
even more profoundly made real to the spiritually
sensitive soul by a consciousness of the fitting
culmination to which it brought the earthly stay of
the incarnate  Word of God. The power of that
life was a power which in its eternal preeminence
of strength and beauty was justly destined to con-
quer the grave; by moral instinct the believer feels
what the great preacher of Pentecost proclaimed to
the Jerusalem multitude:  It was not possible that
he should be holden of death. More still, the
rising of Jesus offers a pledge of immortality to
the human hunger for immortality such as emerges
nowhere else to satisfy the anxious heart of man.
In all these ways the crown of the miracles relates
itself to the spiritual experience of the race and
obtains a verification which, though it counts for
nothing in demonstrative logic, counts for every-
thing in the trust of mankind.
If it were possible to make the same kind of
affirmation about the miracle which accomplished
the incarnation of the Divine Word one of the
most entangled problems of current religion would
be greatly simplified. Was Christ miraculously
born of a virgin? The narrative which tells us so
is quite as plain and explicit as the narrative which
reports the empty tomb and the reappearance of
140 MIRACLES IN THE BIBLE
the crucified Master among His followers. And
there would be no more doubt of the former than
of the latter in reverent minds if the miraculous
conception stood now in any such relation to
Christian experience as the resurrection does.
Until a recent day in the history of the Church the
virgin birth of Christ has expressed a concrete
value to both individual faith and corporate the-
ology. It was the sign and seal of the  fullness
of the Godhead  dwelling bodily in Jesus that He
should have been born without other father than
His Father in heaven. And that same sense of a
miracle birth as necessary for the incarnate God
would have still been persisting in full power
within the evangelical Church if there had not come
over the world, with the dawn of an intensely
scientific age, that universal change in point of
view which has been already alluded to.
This change replaced with a very different basic
thought the old assumption that God can be seen
and known to work only in some totally unprec-
edented act which cannot be referred to natural
law. The new opinion that God is just as divinely
present in any of the common operations of nature
as He could be in the most remarkable special mir-
acle, is beyond all question an immense gain for
faith—the extension of religious sacredness over
a measureless area of routine circumstance and
ordinary life. But it has had in this respect an
unforeseen and, to a degree, disturbing conse-
quence. It has occurred to certain men of faith—
not of un faith—to ask why it should be supposed
MIRACLES IN THE BIBLE 141
to be necessary to work a miracle in order to house
the Eternal Reality within the tabernacle of a hu-
man body ? A spiritual miracle—that it was, un-
deniably. But why a physical miracle?
A generation that believes in God as the worker
of every work, from the upthrust of a grass-blade
to the unfolding of immortal personality, has no
philosophical answer for that question. It might
be said that men could not believe in a divine in-
carnation without a superhuman birth, but that
assertion falls to the ground at once in face of the
fact that many men do so believe. They count on
every human conception and every human birth as
the work of God, and they are unprepared to say
that He who by this means supplies human bodies
with human souls would be impotent by the like
means to supply one human body with a Divine
Soul.
The upreach of men's hearts for a Saviour with
the power of God in his hands and the love of
God in his breast, which under other circumstances
would clinch the doctrine of the virgin birth in
the unbreakable grip of spiritual necessity, is in
these conditions not so imperative. And many
doubts wander through the Church, asking why it
is that Jesus staked no divine claims on His mirac-
ulous coming into the world; why His motherj
and His brethren were apparently so indifferent to
His supernatural origin; why the apostles never
incorporated the virgin birth into their evangel;
why especially John, who so powerfully teaches
the eternal preexistence of Mary's Son, sets no
142 MIRACLES IN THE BIBLE
store on the proof of a physical origin different
from that of other men ?
All these questions, painful as they are to the
sensibilities of old-time disciples, must be faced,
dealt with, responded to; it would be a fatal con-
fession of intellectual cowardice for the Church
anywhere to forbid the discussion of the problem
or anathematize those who raise the question.
The Church must always be for opening every
question wide; it is only so that all the truth can
come out. And in this case all occasion for panic
or for dread of consequences to ensue disappears
in the presence of one superlative thought-mark
of this present time—the constantly increasing
modern appreciation of Jesus—His character, His
words, His work.
Whether men do or do not esteem Him to have
been brought into the world by a miracle, they do
esteem Him the superlative Teacher of mankind
in the truths of the spiritual life—the one supreme
Mentor of the consciences of men. Such is the
consensus which now approximates unanimity
throughout the thoughtful world. And men do
not rate Him simply as a man either; without the
refinements of theological definition which the
creeds attempt, the world calls Him its one actual
superman and at the least a neighbour to the
divine.
Even those who doubt the virgin birth are not
thinking to dishonour Jesus. The unclean slur
about an illegitimate parentage has been, so far as
modern discussion goes, no suggestion of these
MIRACLES IN THE BIBLE 143
doubters; it was a boomerang foolishly thrown by
certain orthodox defenders of Christ and the
Bible. The other parties to the question have
constantly said that if the birth story of Jesus as
told in Luke is not literal fact, it is sacred legend
developing from a great loyalty to Him which
thus sought to account for the vast contrasts
visible between Jesus and the rest of hu-
manity. And in the end it may decisively
serve to vindicate the literalness of the na-
tivity narrative that its critics have elected to
stand on just this alternative to its historicity.
We have already observed that a miracle birth is
hard to believe in our environment because natural
birth itself seems to us a divine wonder. There
was in the orient in ancient times one nation only
which felt just that way—the Hebrew nation,
which always said:  Lo, children are a heritage of
Jehovah. The Jewish people, therefore, never
had the mental background that would suggest a
poetic imagination of miraculous paternity as a
tribute of honour to any man. The Greeks made
myths on that supposition; there is not a sign of
any such strain in Hebrew thought. Yet the
stories of Christ's birth are Hebrew—purely He-
brew. On the strictest critical grounds it is easier
to accept their actuality than to presume them
fanciful. Hebrews would have been little more
likely to invent such a story than Americans.
Yet all this is but a secondary matter where the
consciousness of Christians has responded to the
supreme and sublime New Testament revelation of
144 MIRACLES IK THE BIBLE
Jesus of Nazareth as the only begotten Son of
Cod, who  being found in fashion as a man
humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death,
yea, the death of the cross—wherefore God highly
exalted him and gave unto him the name which is
above every name. It is He, Jesus Christ, who
is the all comprehending Miracle of the Bible, and
•so long as the ascending star of His incarnate di-
vinity is rising higher on the firmament of human
idealism—as it surely is to-day—there need be
none to fear in His case  the elimination of the
supernatural element from the Scriptures. Per-
chance there might here or there be some one rash
enough to think he could accomplish that feat.
But what can he do while of the whole book Jesus
Himself remains the  chief corner-stone "?.
XIII
LIBERALISM WITHIN ORTHODOXY
THE opinions touching the Bible which
have been set down in the foregoing
studies have consulted no authority ex-
cept the Scriptures themselves. There is, however,
a deep satisfaction in finding, when the subject
has been so far traversed, that the conclusions ar-
rived at are in large accord with what was said
about the Scriptures by the Puritan theologians
who gathered at Westminster in 1645 to erect a
Reformation structure of doctrine and polity for
the Protestantism of England.
The stalwart Confession of Faith which they
elaborated is sufficient certificate for the intellec-
tual power of the members of that famous as-
sembly, and a present-day pilgrim may fairly feel
that he has not wandered into any domain of folly
when he reaches a resting-place within sight of
their celebrated heights. But more important is
the reassurance which must be afforded to many
by discovering how remote from  modernism,
judged by this comparison, are some of the views
of Scripture which are often nowadays branded
as dangerous. The Westminster Confession in de-
fining Bible inspiration is decisively broader in out-
145
146 LIBERALISM WITHIN ORTHODOXY
look and far less mechanical in its conception of
Scripture authority than many latter-day inter-
pretations professing to be based upon it. Timidi-
ties which the Westminster divines did not feel
have induced more recent defenders of the faith
to block up with too hasty dogmatisms windows
which they left open for light and air.
For example, the inerrancy of the Scriptures as
to facts of nature and records of history has come
to be with a host of contemporary Christians the
supreme test of authenticity for the book. But
the eloquent and expansive chapter which the
Westminster assembly produced on the topic of the
Bible contains not the barest suggestion of any
such idea. Probably the authors of the confession
would not have agreed among themselves whether
in this sense the Bible is inerrant. But they did
agree in regarding it as needless to establish such
a character for the book in order to command for
it the honour and reverence and obedience to which
it is entitled by the divine supremacy which for
far more significant reasons they attributed to it.
The qualities which these men did think req-
uisite in the Bible were such and such only as had
evidently to do with the object for which God
gave it to humanity. And they had no difficulty
in defining to their own satisfaction what that
object was. It is surprising but gratifying to find
that these learned and philosophic gentlemen,
whose flow of language was singularly copious on
other aspects of their subject, were terse, simple
and sententious when they undertook to say what
LIBERALISM WITHIN ORTHODOXY 147
God intended the Scriptures for. Two lines suf-
fice. When the books of the Old and New Testa-
ments had been rehearsed in order, they added:
 All which were given by inspiration of God to
be the rule of faith and life.
Faith and life! To these ends, vital for every
immortal spirit on whom the image of God confers
potential partnership in things divine, the teachers
and preachers of the Gospel in assembly at West-
minster beheld the Holy Bible dedicated by  the
determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.
Seeing the book in this exalted vision, they were
delivered from the pettishness of matching jots
and tittles between this verse here and another
verse there, and were enabled to dwell with a broad
admiration, critical in the highest and best sense,
on the lofty merits that have invested the Bible
with a universal reputation of divinity. In all the
literature of classic English there is no finer para-
graph of prose than that in which the Westminster
creed-makers undertook to enumerate the fine gold
and jewels of God's wealth displayed in His one
royal book:
 The heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of
the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent
of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is to
give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of
the only way of man's salvation, the many other in-
comparable excellencies, and the entire perfection
thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly
evidence itself to be the word of God.
148 LIBERALISM WITHIN ORTHODOXY
 Doth abundantly evidence itself "—of a truth
indeed! What more need be said to make mani-
fest the Bible's supreme value for  faith and
life  ? Would the Westminster clergy have added
aught to their argument in behalf of its  incom-
parable excellencies  if this recital of theirs had
been climaxed with the claim that the book con-
tains a mathematically exact record of the great
ages reached by antediluvian patriarchs? They
could no doubt have made that statement unqual-
ifiedly; in their time any Christian would have
quoted the figures of Genesis for the longevity of
Adam, Methuselah and Noah without a quaver of
question. As their own fourth chapter shows,
these great ecclesiastics took the creation of world,
sun, moon and man to have been accomplished in
the six days of a single mundane week. It was then
no inroad of agnosticism which prompted them to
omit inerrancy from their tribute to the perfection
of Holy Scripture. They omitted it rather because
it lay so far below the plane of their nobler out-
look on the grandeur of God's revelation. They
omitted it for the same reason that men desert low
and shifty seasands for the surety and solidity of
the lifting rock; they knew a higher and safer
place to stand.
Had therefore these men lived until humanity
learned that the earth was not created before the
sun, moon and stars which enlighten it; that the
making of the universe was the process of an aeon
rather than of a week; that the antiquity of man-
kind cannot be calculated by adding up the  gene-
LIBERALISM WITHIN ORTHODOXY 149
rations  of Genesis, they would have been in no
wise shaken in their esteem of the Bible, for they
would have perceived that in these extensions of
scientific knowledge nothing had developed to alter
in the slightest the worth of the book as  the rule
of faith and life.
What had changed was the understanding of
men concerning the material surroundings in
which they dwelt, of which things the Creator had
never engaged to make greater or more hasty reve-
lation than their own diligence of inquiry might
lead them to. Revelation in its Biblical quality,
pertaining to the spiritual duties and spiritual
hopes of the sons of God, stood high above all
scientific fluctuations and not within touch of the
tides of Ptolemaic or Copernican opinion, whether
they ebbed or flowed. It affected neither saving
grace nor saved life for a man to suppose that the
sun revolved about the earth or to know that the
earth revolves around the sun.
In the light of this excellent common sense—
and just as excellent religious apprehension—the
members of the assembly at Westminster stood
clear of all fears of conflict between science and
religion. It was only a later and more timorous
school of Protestants who, thinking the Bible to
need more defense than its Author had thrown
around it, invented the superfluous requirement
that a book inspired for  faith and life  must be
also miraculously authoritative on causes, circum-
stances and consequences in nature. Such teach-
ers had the sad reward of their undue industry
150 LIBERALISM WITHIN ORTHODOXY
when their theory—not anything that God had said
in the Bible—compelled them in the middle of the
nineteenth century to tell the youth of that time
that they must reject the evidences of the then
rising science of geology in respect to the age of
the earth, or else cease to be Christian believers.
Only God knows how many souls that folly ruined.
And only He can tell what damage was done to
the spirituality of America when in the end of the
century church leaders well-nigh abandoned the
evangelistic ministry of the Gospel to battle for
the defense of a dogma respecting  original auto-
graphs  which was equally worthless to nurture
faith upon or guide life by.
We have not yet, however, indicated the most
admirable height to which the Westminster as-
sembly attained in its view of Holy Scripture. It
was on its way to that height when it recognized
the fact, which these studies have already sought
to make clear, that the truth of Scripture is heard
not in the single voice of any isolated passage but
in the harmony and balance secured by the com-
position of many voices into one revelation. The
writers of the Confession took special pains to
stress this. Their paragraph on this point is lucid
and unmistakable:
 The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture
is the Scripture itself; and therefore, when there is
a question about the full and true sense of any Scrip-
ture (which is not manifold but one), it may be
searched and known by other places that speak more
clearly.
LIBERALISM WITHIN ORTHODOXY 151
One might wish to stop a moment to study the
authors' use of the word  infallible  in this con-
nection, where it occurs apart from that technical
association which customarily attaches it to the
thought of inspiration. Here it is plain that the
makers of the Confession do not intend to say
that the comparison of Scripture with Scripture
always results in a conclusion free from the liabili-
ties of human misunderstanding. But they do
mean to say that when any Scriptural matter is
obscure and perplexing, this is the right road by,
which to proceed to its clearing up. Not every
inquirer who takes this path, indeed, may reach
the goal of the perfect truth, but infallibly each
step in this direction brings him nearer. It is the
always unmistaken method. And that justifies the
adjective  infallible.
This, however, is but incidental. The outstand-
ing impression of the paragraph is its clear appre-
ciation that the Bible is not to be judged or to be
used piecemeal. The Bible derives its authority
from, and accomplishes its service to mankind
through, the  consent of all the parts  into which
its elements have been worked by the divine Hand.
The volume entire is the inspired unit, authenti-
cated with the divine signature underwriting a
completed divine design.
The culminating peak of the chapter follows—
its last paragraph:
 The Supreme Judge, by which all controversies
of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of
152 LIBERALISM WITHIN ORTHODOXY
councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of
men and private spirits, are to be examined, and in
whose sentence we can rest, can be no other but
the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.
Of these potent words the significance is still
more manifest when—adapting to their own utter-
ances the procedure which these famous theolo-
gians recommend for the Bible—we bring into
comparison the concluding sentence of their fifth
paragraph:
 Our full persuasion and assurance of the in-
fallible truth and divine authority [of the word of
God] is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit
bearing witness by and with the word in our hearts.
Here we find these early Puritan thinkers boldly
adventuring what most of their successors since
have been too timid to risk—staking the potency
of inspired Scripture on the response of Christian
experience. Against the hazard of this many a
nervous champion of religion has protested pas-
sionately.  What a catastrophe would befall the
world, such a one will cry,  if the experience of
men should turn against the Bible—if men should
suddenly say the book does not impress them as
having anything heavenly about it and cast it out
as worthless! Popular opinion on any subject
is fickle, we are reminded, and who knows what
day the Bible might be found stripped bare of the
favour with which it is now a common fashion to
speak of it? And indeed, if there were nothing to
take account of but a handful of pages of black-
LIBERALISM WITHIN ORTHODOXY 153
and-white reading matter on the one hand and a
protean crowd psychology on the other, it would
be a precarious business to leave the treasures of
divine revelation to be certified by the appreciation
of an inconstant world. But the men who wrote
this now venerable creed were not limited in their
calculations to such fluctuating factors. They put
faith in certain vast fixities.
They believed in God, who made the book; in
the human soul, for which the book was made; in
the Holy Spirit, to whose directing use the book
was committed; in Jesus Christ, the all-command-
ing Figure on whom the illumination of the book
is focused. Here are changeless quantities which
the drift of time cannot remove nor currents and
counter currents of popular whimsy wash away.
A century since, a century hence and to-day the
need of human nature for forgiveness and the urge
of human conscience toward a life more fit in
righteousness remain as through immemorial time.
And God, who  himself knows what is in man,
has presciently calculated the Holy Scripture to
meet that continuing need, that abiding urge.
Moreover, the Bible does not do its work alone;
by the Spirit who lives in and labours through its
messages it is applied not in general to the mass
of mankind but in selective measure, as individual
susceptibility allows or individual guidance may
require, to one man and another according to the
appropriate portion of each. This is bold faith
indeed, but no evangelical orthodoxy ever said less.
How, indeed, could a spiritually minded teacher
154 LIBERALISM WITHIN ORTHODOXY
affirm anything effective of Bible inspiration if
he hesitated to affirm that the Spirit who imparted
inspiring wisdom to the writers of it imparts en-
lightened understanding to the readers of it ? Cer-
tainly there was no such hesitation in the West-
minster assembly.
Why then should any one who accepts at all the
postulates of revelation think it a tottering foun-
dation to put beneath the permanent influence of
Scripture when it is said to rest on the obedient
belief it secures from successive generations of
humanity ? Has that belief or that obedience ever
failed in any age since the Bible came to be? It
has not. Nor will it until there comes a genera-
tion of men who have none of the spiritual long-
ings which the God of the Bible put in them and
which He gave them the Bible to satisfy; who
have none of the sins from which Jesus Christ
came to redeem them; who have totally shut out
the infinite Spirit from access to their intelligence,
their emotion and their will. Till then the certif-
icate going before every other credential of Scrip-
ture will be the testimony which Coleridge voiced
for millions:
 In the Bible there is more that finds me than I
have experienced in all other books put together; the
words of the Bible find me at greater depths of my
being; and whatever finds me brings with it an ir-
resistible evidence of its having proceeded from the
Holy Spirit.
Yes,  the Spirit speaking in the Scripture  is
LIBERALISM WITHIN ORTHODOXY 155
 the supreme judge  of the actuality of inspired
revelation. And His verdicts are rendered not
through  decrees of councils, opinions of ancient
writers, or  doctrines of men, but through the
Spirit's  inward work, bearing witness with and
by the word in our own hearts. In the inward
life of private Christians—their daily audience in
the secret place with their Lord—is the decision
on the issues of life which constitutes the answer
of the living Church to every problem of faith.
The conjoint judgments of the brethren registered
in assemblies and councils and conferences stand
in all proper dignity on the records of a fraternal
Christendom. But every such corporate deliver-
ance must go for naught unless it is ratified in the
consciousness of private disciples who read the
Bible and pray over it at their own hearthstones.
The great convocations of the Church may pro-
claim what they will to be the truth of God, but
none will believe it in the end because it is so pro-
claimed. It will be believed, if at all, because the
Spirit says it is true when each individual man
opens the Scriptures and reverently asks for light.
Thus is fulfilled what the Saviour spoke just
before He went to His cross;  When he, the
Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into all
the truth; for he shall not speak of himself, but
what things soever he shall hear, these shall he
speak, and he shall declare unto you the things that
are to come. This final phrase has been gravely
misconstrued by those who have thought it to
promise for the Church a power to foresee and
156 LIBERALISM WITHIN ORTHODOXY
foretell happenings buried in the contingencies of
the future. It, of course, means not that at all—as
the context shows. But it is a very precious re-
assurance that no Christian who prays for it un-
selfishly shall ever be left in want of that divine
counsel which is ever waiting to apply anew to the
problems of each new age the lasting principles
made known in the written Scriptures. And it is
not another Spirit, but the same Spirit of truth
who inspired the Bible who is now with us to in-
terpret it freshly for every freshly given day of
opportunity and obligation.
It will, of course, be objected that this way of
claiming the present aid of the one Spirit of in-
spiration amounts to asserting that additions to
the Bible or new utterances as valuable as the
Bible might still be produced to-day. And so no
doubt there could be, did God so design it. But
the  providence of the canon  was a providence
of specific intent accomplished in specific time.
Being accomplished according to God's plan for
creating a perpetual book of standard reference
on religion, the making of Scripture is done and
ended.
The Bible, in an earlier stage of these studies,
has been compared to a course of education for
mankind. No course of education aims to teach
the student all that he can learn in the world; it
only aims to afford him a conspectus of truth with
which all that he discovers of truth in later life
shall be accordant. The graduate of any school
goes out to learn other things than his teachers
LIBERALISM WITHIN ORTHODOXY 157
told him. But if he has been well taught, he will
learn nothing contradictory of what they told him.
So the Spirit of truth instructs the Church of to-
day and of all days in many new ways of think-
ing, serving and giving glory to God. But let no
man dread the appearance of "another Gospel.
The new unfolding will but confirm the old re-
vealing. There is no contradiction in truth—only
ratification by fresh application. The Bible will
not be supplemented—still less superseded. It
will simply grow in glory as clearer apprehensions
reflect its divine knowledge along an ever widen-
ing arc of the interests of mankind. And ever it
will be the abundant text-book of the Spirit's
school for souls.
Evangelical churches all require of those who
are set in official responsibility for teaching and
government in religion some form expressing their
confessed acceptance of the Bible. The Presby-
terian formula is typical—a question propounded
as follows:  Do you believe the Scriptures of the
Old and New Testaments to be the word of God,
the only infallible rule of faith and practice?
Will any Christian refuse to say  Yes hap-
pily and boldly whose soul has been  found  deep
down by the great things of the book ?
A  rule of faith and practice "—that indubi-
tably he needs along the winding, briar-hedged
pathways by which he is bound to journey through
this perplexing world; a rule to tell how to go and
what to hope for and Whom to trust. And the
"only rule"—surely that also; for there is no
158 LIBERALISM WITHIN ORTHODOXY
other to compare with this. An experienced
traveller would as soon trade a compass for a
wooden stick as this book for any other guide that
men have ever tried to follow. More than that,
 the only infallible rule "—what's to deny there ?
Did any man ever miss light or wreck life who
humbly took the Bible determined to follow it
wherever it directed him ? Has it ever been to any
man a cheating book, a wrong-leading book? No,
 infallible  is a strong word, but not too strong
for this book that has stood all tests through all
the Christian centuries and is relied on to-day by
greater throngs than in any prior day of time who
have found it sincere, verifiable, alight with truth.
And the  word of God "—to that the living
Spirit ever bears the witness of power that goes
forth from it to the redeemed in all climes and
nations.
With joy, out of experience in which he humbly
trusts himself to have been instructed by the Spirit,
the present writer subscribes anew this time-hon-
oured formula:
 I believe the Scriptures of the Old and New
Testament to be the word of God, the only in-
fallible rule of faith and practice.
Appendix
WESTMINSTER CONFESSION OF FAITH
Chapter I—"Of the Holy Scripture
I. Although the light of nature, and the works of creation
and providence, do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power
of God, as to leave men inexcusable; yet they are not sufficient to
give that knowledge of God and of His will, which is necessary unto
salvation; therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in
divers manners, to reveal Himself, and to declare that His will unto
His Church; and afterwards, for the better preserving and propagaf-
ing of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of
the Church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of
Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing;
which maketh the Holy Scripture to be most necessary; those for-
mer ways of God's revealing His will unto His people being now
ceased.
II. Under the name of Holy Scripture, or the Word of God
written, are now contained all the books of the Old and New Testa-
ment, which are these:
(Here follow the names of the books of the Bible as contained
in the King James Version.)
All which are given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith
and life.
III. The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine
inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture; and there-
fore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any other-
wise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.
IV. The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to
be believed and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any
man or church, but wholly upon God (who is truth itself), the
author thereof; and therefore it is to be received, because it is the
Word of God.
V. We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the
Church to an high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scripture; and
the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the
majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the
whole (which is to give all glory to God), the full discovery it
makes of the only way of man's salvation, the many other incom-
parable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments
whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God;
yet, notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the in-
159
160
APPENDIX
fallible truth, and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work
of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our
hearts.
VI. The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary
for His own glory, man's salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly
set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may
be deduced from Scripture; unto which nothing at any time is to be
added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit or traditions of
men. Nevertheless we acknowledge the inward illumination of the
Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such
things as are revealed in the Word; and there are some circum-
stances concerning the worship of God and government of the Church,
common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by
the light of nature and Christian prudence, according to the gen-
eral rules of the Word, which are always to be observed.
VII. All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor
alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be
known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly pro-
pounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not
only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary
means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.
VIII. The Old Testament in Hebrew (which was the native
language of the people of God of old), and the New Testament in
Greek (which at the time of the writing of it was most generally
known to the nations), being immediately inspired by God, and by
His singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore
authentical; so as in all controversies of religion the Church is
finally to appeal unto them. But because these original tongues are
not known to all the people of God who have right unto and interest
in the Scriptures, and are commanded, in the fear of God, to read
and search them, therefore they are to be translated into the vulgar
language of every nation unto which they come, that the Word of
God dwelling plentifully in all, they may worship Him in an ac-
ceptable manner, and, through patience and comfort of the Scrip-
tures, may have hope.
IX. The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the
Scripture itself; and therefore, when there is a question about the
true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one),
it may be searched and known by other places that speak more
clearly.
X. The Supreme Judge, by whom all controversies of religion
are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient
writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and
in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy
Spirit speaking in the Scripture.
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