THE MAKING I 
 li OF THE •tBLE 
 
 S AM U E I%«fc^S#Sg,*< 
 
 
 .^^s^^^ 
 
Sr< tinr ' V l^i'^ 
 
THE MAKING 
 
 OF 
 
 THE BIBLE 
 
 SAMUEL M. VERNON 
 
 
 MAY 24 INI 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 NEW YORK CINCINNATI 
 
Copyright, 1916, by 
 SAMUEL M. VERNON 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGB 
 
 I. The World Without a Bible . . 5 
 11. A Bible Becomes Necessary. . 21 
 
 III. Necessary Limitations to a 
 
 Revelation 33 
 
 IV. The Making of the Canon. ... 49 
 
 The Old Testament 
 
 V. The Making of the Canon 
 
 (Continued) 61 
 
 The New Testament 
 
 VI. The New Testament Becoming 
 
 Holy Scripture 73 
 
 VII. The Apocrypha 97 
 
 VIII. The Present Standing of the 
 
 Bible Ill 
 
 IX. The Bible the Creature of 
 
 Experience 124 
 
 X. The Bible Tested by Experi- 
 ence 139 
 
 XI. The Bible Amenable to Criti- 
 cism 154 
 
 XII. The Limitations of Criticism. 162 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE WORLD WITHOUT A BIBLE 
 
 The Bible was not given to man at the 
 beginning of his career. Only after the 
 lapse of many centuries did it appear, as 
 product and instrument of the growing life 
 of the race. When it did come, it was not 
 one sudden burst of light, but it crept in 
 softly, little by little, as the mind of man 
 slowly readjusted itseK to its changing con- 
 ditions and new method of receiving divine 
 revelations. It was one of the later meth- 
 ods chosen by God for manifesting himself 
 to men. That religion of the highest order 
 and ethical conduct of the finest quality 
 were possible without the Bible was proven 
 by the unanswerable argument that they 
 existed and flourished through long periods 
 and among different nations before there 
 was a Bible. That a Bible was not given 
 is suflScient evidence that it was not neces- 
 sary to the well-being and religious devel- 
 opment of the race in the beginning; God 
 had other and adequate methods. 
 
 5 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 If it had been best for man, God could 
 have given him a written revelation at the 
 first, a perfect guidebook for his conduct 
 which he could not misunderstand. That 
 he did not do it is proof that he considered 
 another form of revelation more effective 
 and better for man's religious development. 
 The appeal must be more direct, and the 
 personal contact closer and more manifest 
 than would have been possible in a written 
 revelation. Man's nature was untrained 
 and undeveloped, and a powerful direct 
 appeal was necessary to awaken a desire 
 for the knowledge of God and for com- 
 munion with him. 
 
 If it is objected that writing was not in 
 use at first, and, therefore, a written reve- 
 lation was impossible, it may be answered 
 that this is pure assumption. We do not 
 know but that mth the gift or develop- 
 ment of language there was included a 
 knowledge or development of the art of 
 reading and writing. If that gift was not 
 included in man's outfit for life, it could 
 have been, and certainly would have been, 
 if it had been necessary to his proper in- 
 struction in religious knowledge and duties. 
 
 6 
 
THE WORLD WITHOUT A BIBLE 
 
 Such a gift would have been no more 
 miraculous than were the special direct 
 revelations that were necessary from time 
 to time because of the absence of a written 
 code. It is the unchallenged fact of history 
 that the Creator and Governor of all 
 things, who had power to do whatsoever he 
 saw to be needful to the well-being of man 
 "for whom all creation stood," stopped 
 short in his work without giving him a 
 book of revelation. This must have been 
 because he saw it would be better to use 
 those methods of revelation which history 
 has so fully justified and which our reason 
 can see were better for the race in the 
 early stages of its development than a 
 written book could have been. How long 
 that period was before the beginning of a 
 written revelation is unknown. It was cer- 
 tainly much longer than the traditional 
 view, founded on the unscholarly chronol- 
 ogy for which Archbishop Usher is largely 
 responsible, makes it. Recent discoveries 
 in archaeology, in the uncovering of the 
 cities and monuments of antiquity, make 
 it certain that that period must have been 
 from four to eight thousand years, possibly 
 
 7 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 longer, a period of suflScient length to jus- 
 tify the statement that the Bible is com- 
 paratively a modern development. 
 
 During that long prebiblical period the 
 word of the Lord was not wanting; it 
 filled the earth, but in other forms than 
 that in which we have it. Through all 
 that time, as in every other period of 
 human history, according to Saint PauFs 
 argument on the subject, "God left not 
 himself without witness," nor ever could 
 leave hi.nself without a sufficient declara- 
 tion of himself and of his will for the 
 guidance ji men in religious knowledge and 
 duty. It is one of the illustrations of our 
 ■)erverse tendency to narrowness of thought 
 in such matters that we are disposed to 
 think that because the written revelation 
 seems essential to us, it must have been so 
 in that early age before the entanglements 
 of history and our more complex life had 
 arisen. But the conclusive evidence that 
 such a revelation was not necessary is the 
 fact that it was not given. It would cer- 
 tainly be a defective administration of the 
 world that would withhold at the be- 
 ginning of history, when the race was 
 
 8 
 
THE WORLD ^VITHOUT A BIBLE 
 
 forming character and determining its 
 course, the ministries and agencies that 
 would be most helpful to it in getting 
 upon the right course. To suggest that 
 he withheld anything that would have con- 
 tributed increased knowledge or moral 
 strength in that formative period of human 
 life in the earth is to charge God with 
 responsibility for those evils against which 
 he inveighs so earnestly and to which he 
 attributes the sufferings of this life. To 
 that early period he gave such revelations 
 as the conditions required, and such as 
 would make the strongest appeal to man's 
 nature and be most likely to receive a 
 favorable response from him. 
 
 The historical records give us but brief 
 account of that early period, but what we 
 have is very suggestive on the subject we 
 are considering. There is an account of a 
 man whose knowledge of God and whose 
 love for him was so great that he was per- 
 mitted to walk with God for three hundred 
 years, if we accept the biblical account of 
 patriarchal long life, and finally to go to 
 live with him without passing through the 
 shaded gateway of death. He lived before 
 
 9 
 
THE IVIAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 the time and without the aid of the Bible. 
 There was another of whom it was said 
 that he "walked with God," whose char- 
 acter was so good that he was selected out 
 of the whole race as the one most worthy 
 to be saved from the world-destroying flood 
 and to be the new progenitor of the race. 
 Noah lived and died without knowing even 
 that there ever was to be a Bible. Methu- 
 selah made his long pilgrimage without any 
 written records to guide him, and yet seems 
 to have been well-pleasing to God. The 
 great father of the faithful who was called 
 "the friend of God," who stands at the 
 head of the line of believing souls, and 
 whose spiritual children all true believers 
 are, than whom no better character has 
 appeared in all the annals of history, even 
 Abraham, who by simple goodness towers 
 above and sheds a beneficent moral in- 
 fluence over the ages, came from what we 
 would call a pagan land, where there was 
 neither Bible nor church. There was a 
 way then of nourishing a soul in such 
 beauty and richness of moral excellence 
 that all Bible-taught and church-sheltered 
 souls must still look to him as "the father 
 
 10 
 
THE WORLD WITHOUT A BIBLE 
 
 of the faithful." In the outlook to the 
 future which God gave Abraham nothing is 
 said of a coming book or a rising church, 
 but only of a "seed," in which all the 
 earth should be blessed, and in which book 
 and church lay implicit as parts of that 
 blessing which all the world was to receive 
 through the "seed," which was Christ. 
 The revelation he then had was adequate 
 to the needs of such an exalted character, 
 and it gave him a satisfying outlook to the 
 future. 
 
 Out of that great prehistoric period 
 another remarkable specimen of its high 
 religious characters dips for a moment into 
 our atmosphere to give us a decided mental 
 shock and to suggest that we have but 
 little conception of the glories of that early 
 period of splendid living when man walked 
 and talked with God. All after times have 
 been stirred with curiosity about the per- 
 son, high religious offices, and priestly 
 character of Melchisedec. The only con- 
 tact he has with our modern life is through 
 the single incident recorded in the four- 
 teenth chapter of Genesis. He is here re- 
 ported to have met Abraham on his return 
 
 11 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 from the slaughter of the kings and to have 
 accepted tithes from Abraham. The au- 
 thor of the Epistle to the Hebrews takes 
 up the incident and argues from it that 
 Melchisedec must have been a greater reli- 
 gious character than Abraham, for the 
 payment of tithes to him by Abraham was 
 an acknowledgment of his superiority. In 
 developing his argument about the high- 
 priesthood of Jesus Christ he says it was 
 "after the order of Melchisedec." That 
 seems to give him a religious and official 
 standing above that of any of the great 
 characters in the history of Israel. This 
 suggests to us the possible riches in reli- 
 gious character of that unreported, prehis- 
 toric age that found ample religious 
 instruction and guidance without a written 
 revelation. Another pagan who does not 
 rise quite so high in character, yet who 
 gives evidence of being a real prophet of 
 the Lord, is Baalam. While his religious 
 character and career were not the best, 
 they do show how widespread was the 
 prophetic office and the religious teaching 
 which it furnished. 
 
 The structure of Bible teaching is such 
 
 n 
 
THE WORLD WITHOUT A BIBLE 
 
 as to imply the existence of the conditions 
 here outhned. Everywhere it is assumed 
 that men know of the being of God and 
 are accustomed to the exercises of religion. 
 Nowhere is the being of God asserted or 
 argued. There is no attempt to prove that 
 or the other great truths of religion. The 
 first verse of the Bible assumes the whole 
 case by simply saying, *Tn the beginning 
 God created," without stopping to an- 
 nounce, define, or prove the being of God. 
 That was a well-known and generally ac- 
 cepted fact. It had passed the need of 
 any formal statement or proof. The same 
 was true concerning the being and ac- 
 tivity in human affairs of angels; they 
 move out on the theater of action in human 
 affairs as though they had long been known 
 and their mission understood and needed 
 no introduction at the late period when 
 biblical writings began. 
 
 If we consider the circumstances of man's 
 early life on the planet, we can see that 
 a highly religious life might be maintained 
 without a written revelation. He was 
 created with such intellectual and spiritual 
 powers as would naturally awaken aspira- 
 
 13 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 tions and soul-hunger that would lead him 
 to seek after God. Placed in the midst of 
 the mechanism and active forces of the 
 material universe, with the arching heavens 
 above him and the smiling earth about him, 
 his inquisitive mind would begin at once 
 to ask how all this came to be and how it 
 was maintained, and he never would rest 
 till he had an answer to these questions. 
 His spiritual aspirations, soul-longings, and 
 consciousness of the powers and possibili- 
 ties of his being would lead him out toward 
 God. The human mind was constructed 
 with reference to this environment, with 
 powers and appetencies that when properly 
 used would lead to the apprehension and 
 knowledge of the truth. 
 
 The watchmaker carefully studies the 
 mechanism, the force needed to drive the 
 machinery, the method of its application, 
 the possibilities of repair and readjustment, 
 and finally brings forth a creation that 
 works out a given result with remarkable 
 precision and continuity; it was made to 
 attain that result. It may need much care, 
 frequent windings, and occasional repairs, 
 but all that is provided for and adapted to 
 
 14 
 
THE WORLD WITHOUT A BIBLE 
 
 the intelligence that is supposed to use it. 
 It was constructed with reference to its 
 own powers and the capabilities of those 
 who were to have the care of it. We cannot 
 think that God was less thoughtful for man 
 when forming him with his complex nature 
 of body, soul, and spirit to run a course of 
 development and broadening activities 
 through the centuries. He must have 
 carefully computed the force of animal 
 appetites and propensities, of such mental 
 endowments as reason, imagination, and 
 will, and of the equipment of the soul with 
 the gift of conscience, spiritual aspirations, 
 and hunger for God, intending to keep 
 himself in close, helpful, and directing re- 
 lations to him. Had not some evil influence 
 come in from without, like a grain of sand 
 thrown into the mechanism of a watch, no 
 doubt man would have run his course as 
 faithfully as any timepiece ever made by 
 man's less skillful art. Notwithstanding 
 the perverting and corrupting influence of 
 the evil that entered the race by sin, we 
 must believe that through all those pre- 
 biblical ages the phenomena of the natural 
 universe, and the activities, aspirations, 
 
 15 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 and impulses of the mind of man, aided 
 and guided by the revelations given to 
 him, were suflBcient to lead him to the 
 knowledge of all necessary truth. 
 
 The visitations of angels seems to have 
 served the race, as written revelations have 
 served it in the later centuries, for impart- 
 ing truth and spiritual inspiration. The 
 very first step from Eden out into the 
 thorn-producing world was under the di- 
 rection of one of the seraphim with a drawn 
 sword to give suggestion of a punitive ad- 
 ministration of government henceforth, 
 with what verbal instruction we are not 
 informed. Angels appeared to Hagar in 
 the wilderness, to Abraham under the 
 Oaks of Mamre, where they revealed the 
 doom of Sodom and lifted the veil of the 
 future from the coming glories of his fam- 
 ily. They appeared to Lot in Sodom, they 
 came to carry Elijah home, and they stood 
 guard about Elisha when menaced by a 
 great army. In all the great events of 
 Bible history prior to the completion of the 
 written revelation angels had an impor- 
 tant part in revealing, counseling, and 
 directing. As a method of revelation it 
 
 16 
 
THE WORLD WITHOUT A BIBLE 
 
 was most impressive and had immediate 
 effect. 
 
 In many cases God himself seems to 
 have spoken directly to men, concealing 
 himself, but declaring his purpose and his 
 person. Thus he spoke to Noah concern- 
 ing the Flood, giving him directions for 
 building the ark, for collecting within it 
 the living creatures, and his purpose of 
 cleansing the earth by means of the Deluge. 
 He spoke directly to Moses out of the 
 burning bush, giving directions for his 
 visits to Pharaoh, at various times in the 
 journey toward Canaan, and in the closing 
 scenes of his life. How frequent, and in 
 how many different parts of the earth, these 
 personal revelations may have been in that 
 prebiblical period we have no means of 
 knowing. They reached Abraham in Meso- 
 potamia before there was any chosen fam- 
 ily or redemptive race, while he belonged 
 to what we would now call a pagan people. 
 Such revelations reached Melchisedec, 
 Baalam, and others. If they were made at 
 all, that is proof that they were possible 
 and expedient, and that thej^ would be 
 made as often as the needs of the race 
 
 17 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 required. One such direct communication 
 from God would be repeated by men over 
 wide districts and would have a permanent 
 and potent influence. 
 
 In addition to these methods of convey- 
 ing truth to men, tradition must have been 
 a very important means of disseminating 
 and preserving the knowledge of God. The 
 long life of the antediluvians, free from the 
 excitements and business activity of mod- 
 ern life, was favorable to the correct 
 transmission of truth by tradition. Methu- 
 selah was the contemporary of Adam and 
 Noah, if we accept the Bible account of 
 his long life, so that Noah might hear from 
 the lips of Methuselah what was told him 
 by Adam, so that the stories of creation 
 and of the garden of Eden passed through 
 but one person to reach Noah. The won- 
 derful character of the events, and of the 
 divine manifestations in connection with 
 them, would insure a deep and lasting im- 
 pression on the minds of those participating 
 in them and great care in reporting them. 
 
 After the beginning of Hebrew history 
 God appealed to and seems to have de- 
 pended upon this method of disseminating 
 
 18 
 
THE WORLD WITHOUT A BIBLE 
 
 and perpetuating the truth. He com- 
 manded parents to diligently teach the 
 facts of their miraculous history to their 
 children: "And thou shalt teach them dili- 
 gently to thy children, and shalt talk of 
 them when thou sittest in thine house, and 
 when thou walkest by the way, and when 
 thou liest down, and when thou risest up." 
 The accuracy and reliability of the human 
 memory when it is fully trusted and 
 charged with the responsibility of pre- 
 serving important truth cannot be 
 doubted. Before we had spoiled our 
 memories by distrusting them and making 
 written records of facts that once would 
 have been committed to their safekeeping 
 great feats of memory were very common. 
 Conspicuous among these, to mention but 
 one case, was the fact that blind Homer 
 went from city to city in Greece reciting 
 to wondering crowds the matchless periods 
 of his immortal epic. 
 
 With all these different methods em- 
 ployed for the instruction of men there 
 must have come to them very clear and 
 convincing declarations of truth on all 
 important subjects. Our knowledge of the 
 
 19 
 
THE IVIAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 character and purposes of God, as well as 
 the few glimpses given us of the wonderful 
 religious characters of prebiblical times, 
 seem to warrant the conclusion that there 
 were ample revelations of truth in forms 
 more effective than written documents 
 would have been. 
 
 20 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 A BIBLE BECOMES NECESSARY 
 
 The changing conditions of the world 
 made a change of method in dealing with 
 it necessary. When the race had grown 
 out of its primitive state, its larger intel- 
 ligence and broadening fields of action and 
 its more complex life made necessary a 
 fuller revelation with better ordered and 
 more enduring institutions to conserve its 
 religious life. Nations were multiplying, 
 complicated conditions were arising, racial 
 forces were moving more vigorously, a 
 keener mental analysis and a more search- 
 ing philosophy were dealing with the ques- 
 tions of life and being that were forever 
 pressing for solution, and a clearer, fuller 
 revelation of truth was required to meet 
 the growing needs of the race. Historical 
 facts were liable to become distorted and 
 corrupted by being carried too long in the 
 rather loose form of tradition. Moral and 
 doctrinal teachings would be more uniform 
 and less liable to perversion if they were 
 
 21 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 committed to a changeless form in written 
 documents. 
 
 There was, however, a yet greater and 
 more pressing need for a written form of 
 revelation. There was to be introduced a 
 complex and supernatural redemptive sys- 
 tem that would require careful and ela'b- 
 orate statement with luminous expositions 
 easily accessible. The great moral duties 
 and the essential elements of religion might 
 be sufficiently made known by the voice of 
 conscience, the light of nature, and the 
 special revelations that God gave to men; 
 but the entrance of Deity into a human 
 body and life, the sacrijficial and atoning 
 death of that divine-human Person, the 
 possible entrance of the divine into every 
 human life with regenerating and sancti- 
 fying power, and the cooperation in this of 
 three divine Persons in the unity of the 
 Godhead, of whom hitherto there had been 
 no clear revelation — all this would seem to 
 require a definite and full written state- 
 ment, that there might be a proper appre- 
 hension and clear understanding of these 
 great truths. 
 
 Great preparations were made to give 
 22 
 
A BIBLE BECOMES NECESSARY 
 
 this revelation a proper setting and a po- 
 sition of strength for its appeal to the 
 human mind. A special family was set 
 apart to project a new nation of people 
 into the stream of history, consecrated to 
 a high and peculiar mission, to embody and 
 express in its own history and national de- 
 velopment the great idea of redemption in 
 a succession of educating events and insti- 
 tutions leading up to the manifestation 
 from its own national line of the great 
 Redeemer, the God-man. Such was to be 
 the dignity of his person and the glory of 
 his work that there should be centuries 
 of heraldry going before — incidents, cove- 
 nants, institutions, and prophetic declara- 
 tions, which when he should appear would 
 be found to have been a declaration of the 
 fact and character of his Messiahship. 
 That long line of history was to clear a 
 highway for the coming of the Son of God, 
 into the very structure of which would be 
 wrought evidences and proofs of his Mes- 
 siahship, of its character and purpose, to 
 which he would perfectly answer in his 
 career of teaching, suffering, and death, 
 giving proof of him that could not be re- 
 
 23 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 sisted by the unprejudiced mind. This 
 race of people was segregated from the 
 rest of the world, shut up to the culture 
 and guardianship of its great idea which 
 was the center of its life and the reason 
 for its being, and to hold the deposit of 
 truth given to it which it was uncon- 
 sciously to expound and confirm in its 
 history. There was to be little commerce 
 or commingling with other nations, lest 
 the purity and sacredness of this deposit 
 should be corrupted. This is the teaching 
 of Saint Paul, when he asks, "What ad- 
 vantage then hath the Jew? or what 
 profit is there of circumcision?" He an- 
 swers his own question by saying, "Much 
 every way : chiefly, because that unto them 
 were committed the oracles of God," that 
 is, the spoken and written revelation, the 
 institutions and the ceremonies of religion, 
 prefiguring and announcing the coming 
 Messiah. This is the fact of history, that 
 while the revelation was being made, and 
 until it reached its culmination in the 
 manifested person of Him who was its life 
 and soul, and for the declaration of whom 
 it was given — while this process was going 
 
 24 
 
A BIBLE BECOMES NECESSARY 
 
 on, the people within whom it was coming 
 to manifestation were sheltered by the 
 divine covenant and guardianship in a 
 separate and sacred position where no 
 enemy could destroy them nor thwart the 
 purpose of God till it came to glorious 
 realization. 
 
 This throws a flood of light on God's 
 constancy in caring for fickle, backsliding 
 Israel. How he could have borne with 
 them in their lapses, rebellions, and apos- 
 tasies, holding to them as his peculiar 
 people, bringing them back from their cap- 
 tivities, and reestablishing them in Jerusa- 
 lem, appears only when we remember that 
 he had selected them as the organ and 
 instrument for manifesting his Son to the 
 world. He could not change in the midst 
 of the process from one people to another 
 when the line of evidences and of revela- 
 tion was half finished, but must continue 
 to use a poor instrument till the work for 
 which it was taken in hand was finished, 
 especially as the identity of the instrument 
 was the voucher for the integrity of the 
 work. When the work was done and 
 Messiah had been manifested to the 
 
 25 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 world, Israel had completed its divinely 
 appointed mission of preparing the way 
 for the coming of Messiah. There have 
 been no divine interpositions to bring 
 them back to Jerusalem since Messiah was 
 revealed. 
 
 This fundamental purpose in the calling 
 of Israel is made clear in the terms of the 
 instituting covenant with Abraham. God 
 promised Abraham that he should have a 
 numerous progeny, "as the stars of heaven 
 for multitude," and that in his "seed all 
 nations should be blessed." Saint Paul 
 calls attention to the fact that the singular 
 number is here used, and that the term 
 "seed" refers to Christ, "He saith not, 
 And to seeds, as of many; but as of one. 
 And to thy seed, which is Christ." The 
 whole redemptive scheme, therefore, lay 
 implicit in that covenant with Abraham. 
 That was the root idea, the formative 
 germ of the whole Hebrew history and 
 polity, their only reason for being, their 
 justification and explanation. 
 
 This new epoch in world development and 
 race culture in religious knowledge and life 
 made new agencies and methods necessary. 
 
 26 
 
A BIBLE BECOMES NECESSARY 
 
 The proposition that God should actually 
 come down among men and become in- 
 corporated into the life of the race by 
 taking on himself a human body, being born 
 of a woman that he might redeem and sanc- 
 tify the whole body of humanity, was a 
 scheme so vast that it would justify two 
 thousand years of educational preparation 
 and notification, and the introduction of a 
 more permanent and adequate method for 
 announcing and expounding the facts of 
 this great redemptive movement in written 
 records, such as we have in the Bible. The 
 Holy Scriptures were one element in the 
 development of the holy "seed" that was 
 to be a blessing to "all nations." If not 
 the greatest, these writings are one of the 
 richest blessings that have come to the 
 nations out of that covenant with Abra- 
 ham. As soon as the great redemptive 
 idea kindled the intelligence of man with 
 larger and brighter thoughts about God 
 and concerning his own being and destiny, 
 the impulse to record, expound, and 
 prophesy must have come into the soul 
 of man as an impelling inspiration. This 
 lifted the ethical and spiritual nature of 
 
 27 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 man above the domain of nature and 
 natural suggestion could no longer minister 
 adequately to these higher reaches of life; 
 the divine life coming into fellowship and 
 alliance with the life of man made necessary 
 the incoming of divine truth in larger 
 measure than nature could give. Special 
 divine revelations would no longer be ade- 
 quate, for the broader fields of knowledge 
 now opening to the minds of men and the 
 larger development of the nations would 
 invite and insure careful scrutiny and 
 earnest discussion that could not be suc- 
 cessfully conducted without written docu- 
 ments that could be compared with each 
 other and with known facts. This won- 
 derful system of redemption, that burst 
 forth like a new dawn on the world's 
 growing intelligence, would require ample 
 statement and exposition in forms that 
 could be pondered and studied. Nature is 
 quite silent here. She has no voice pitched 
 to the key of redemption; her register does 
 not include the high notes of redeeming 
 love. Even an angel's jubilant song is not 
 sufficient unless it can be recorded, so that 
 the mind of man may turn to it often when 
 
 28 
 
A BIBLE BECOMES NECESSARY 
 
 nature seems dry and empty. The high 
 and transcendental are so woven in with 
 the low and natural that we should be 
 whelmed in endless confusion and per- 
 plexity if we had not "a more sure word 
 of prophecy, whereunto we do well that 
 we take heed," that is ever accessible for 
 our enlightenment and instruction. The 
 work of redemption makes a personal ap- 
 peal and contemplates a personal life unto 
 holiness that makes necessary a daily coun- 
 selor in righteousness and truth such as 
 the Bible is. The noble living, the world- 
 girdling service, and the missionary efforts 
 of the Christian men of this age would 
 not be possible but for the instruction 
 and inspiration that come out of the 
 book. 
 
 Yet it is a most delicate thing to give 
 such a revelation as is here supposed, for 
 rules of safety themselves create great 
 danger by leading to overmuch confidence 
 in them when conditions arise to which 
 they do not apply, and by disarming that 
 watchfulness and care which are the best 
 guarantees of safety. If the Bible had 
 been intended to be a guidebook in the 
 
 29 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 sense that it would tell us just what to do 
 —how often to pray, how often to fast, 
 how^ much to give, with all the other de- 
 tails of a good life — it could all have been 
 done plainly, so that there could have 
 been no mistake, in a document not 
 larger than one of Saint Paul's epistles, 
 but it would have been a false leading, a 
 betrayal of humanity in its most sacred 
 interests. Humanity would have ro! ted in 
 moral decay and spiritual death under 
 such a system. The revelation must be 
 In such a form as respects and preserves 
 man's freedom, and develops his sense of 
 responsibility for seeking, finding, and in- 
 terpreting the truth, and for applying 
 general principles tc individual acts. It 
 is necessary for man's spiritual and intel- 
 lectual development to place the truth, as 
 God has placed the gold, the grains, and 
 the fruits of the earth, where we must 
 search and dig to get it. Hence revelation 
 comes to us, like the narrow veins of gold 
 that run high up over the crest of the 
 mountains and can be reached only by 
 hard climbing and keen-eyed vision, tucked 
 away in scraps of history, bits of poetry, 
 
 30 
 
A BIBLE BECOMES NECESSARY 
 
 sparkling proverbs, thrilling dramas, deep- 
 toned, far-sounding prophecies, fascinating 
 love stories, charming epistolary letters to 
 friends, and world-embracing apocalyptic 
 visions. 
 
 That written revelation synchronizes 
 with the history of redemption, that it 
 was part of its machinery and equipment, 
 and that its great necessity rose out of it, 
 appears not only in the fact that it began 
 under Moses, who first gave the redemp- 
 tive movement organized form, that its 
 writers were limited to the redemptive peo- 
 ple, and that redemption both of Israel 
 and of the world was its distinguishing and 
 predominant theme, but also by the fact 
 that the volume of written revelation closed 
 with the recording and exposition of the 
 events connected with the culmination of 
 that history of redemption in the life, 
 death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ. When redemption was completed, 
 written revelation was finished. 
 
 The maledictions pronounced upon any- 
 one who should presume to add anything 
 to what had been written in the time of 
 the apostles seems also to confirm this 
 
 31 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 view of the interdependence of written 
 revelation and developing redemption. 
 The book is the herald and the witness of 
 the Son, the God-man. 
 
 32 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 NECESSARY LIMITATIONS TO A 
 REVELATION 
 
 So long as it was possible for man to 
 dig out the truth as it lay buried in the 
 facts of nature and of his own being, or 
 to find it by lifting up his soul to God, it 
 was better for him that he should be left 
 without a written revelation. Nothing 
 contributes more to man's development 
 than searching for the truth, keeping him- 
 seK in the love of the truth that he may 
 find it, and holding himself en rapport 
 with his environment and with God, that 
 he may discover and know the truth. The 
 search for it in an educational and dis- 
 ciplinary way is almost of equal value to 
 its possession. The fact that God did not 
 give man a written revelation till so many 
 centuries after his appearance on the earth 
 is the most conclusive evidence that it 
 was not best for him to have it. We 
 cannot sound the depths of the divine 
 plans, yet there are apparent many rea- 
 
 33 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 sons why it was better for man to be led 
 into the temple of truth by the diligence 
 of his own effort and the fidelity of his 
 spirit in the search for it. 
 
 Help that is not necessary is a hindrance. 
 We make people paupers, destroy their 
 si'lf-respect, and deny them the develop- 
 ment that is attained only by effort by 
 giving them help when they could and 
 should help themselves. Many teachers 
 dwarf instead of developing the minds 
 of their pupils by solving the hard prob- 
 lems for them and lifting them over 
 heights where they should develop their 
 muscles by climbing. Many parents keep 
 their children babies forever by satisfying 
 all their needs and shielding them from the 
 toil and struggle that makes strong men. 
 That toiling boy whom you pity for the 
 hardness of his lot will some day live in a 
 palace which he has earned, while your pam- 
 pered son will be spending on a worthless 
 life money that he did not earn. The race 
 would never have grown out of its infancy 
 if God had given to man a full revelation of 
 the truth at the first. He left man to find 
 out the boundaries of the continents and 
 
 34 
 
LIMITATIONS TO A REVELATION 
 
 the seas, and to discover the spherical form 
 of the earth and the forces of nature by 
 exploration and scientific study. He waited 
 for man to discover steam power and elec- 
 tricit/ because it ministered to human de- 
 velopment to wrestle with the problems of 
 creation, to track the forces of nature to 
 their hiding places and devise a method 
 for bringing them forth and harnessing 
 them to the machinery of life for manu- 
 facture and transportation. It is an af- 
 fecting spectacle to see man footsore and 
 weary trudging over the mountains, bearing 
 his heavy burdens on his shoulders, while 
 in his own home puffing steam was trying 
 to make itself articulate in its crude lan- 
 guage to tell him that it was there to do 
 his work and to run his errands for him. 
 But still he preferred to work his muscle 
 and let his brain lie dormant in a stupor 
 that to us seems incredible. God would 
 not tell him the truth he ought to discern 
 for himself. Electricity kindled its bon- 
 fires in the sky at night to notify him it 
 was there; it ran about the heavens in 
 zigzag fire to show its speed of movement; 
 it shook the earth with its thunder peals 
 
 35 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 to suggest its power; it smote men dead 
 and threw their charred corpses across the 
 path of industry in its appeal to them to 
 awake and call it into their service; and 
 still they only cringed with fear and whined 
 about the hardness of their lot. God would 
 not tell them if they were so stupid as not 
 to read these indications. He waited that 
 man might have the benefit of thinking, 
 the growing confidence of conquest, and 
 the enlarging self-respect of achievement. 
 Discovery was better than revelation. It 
 holds true in the moral and spiritual realm 
 also. It is better for men to seek the truth, 
 to inquire and pray for it, to long for it; 
 then when they find it they have already 
 risen to a state of mind to make a wise 
 use of it. 
 
 It is quite impossible for men to under- 
 stand and appreciate the truth unless they 
 have this spirit of inquiry and the disposi- 
 tion to search for it. This principle was 
 clearly announced to Isaiah when he re- 
 ceived his commission as a prophet, and it 
 is quoted by Jesus as an explanation of 
 the dullness of the Jews in understanding 
 his parables. When Isaiah had his won- 
 
 36 
 
LIMITATIONS TO A REVELATION 
 
 derfiil temple vision, it was said to him, 
 after he had offered himself for a messenger 
 of the Lord, "Go and tell this people, 
 Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and 
 see ye indeed, but perceive not." Jesus 
 teaches that he used parables for this very 
 purpose of concealing the truth from those 
 who did not love it and long for it, lest 
 they would insult it and trample it under 
 their feet. The same principle was illus- 
 trated in our Lord's refusal to gratify the 
 curiosity of the Pharisees by working a 
 miracle to be seen of them, as they would 
 look on any trick of legerdemain. It is a 
 profanation of the truth to handle it 
 lightly, to treat it irreverently; therefore 
 it is placed where it can be reached only 
 by sincerity, effort, and honesty of pur- 
 pose. It is not flung out heedlessly like 
 pearls before swine, lest they trample it 
 under their feet, not knowing or caring 
 what it is, and then turn about to destroy' 
 the very agencies that gave it to them. 
 Like all of God's gifts, truth is so placed that 
 we must seek it if we would find it, and 
 we must love it if we would understand it. 
 We must dig in the soil to get God's gift 
 
 37 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 of bread, blast the quartz to get his gift of 
 gold, and so must we break off the shell 
 that enfolds the kernel of the truth if we 
 would possess it. There is this hiding of 
 the truth in the very form of its revela- 
 tion to protect it from too familiar hand- 
 ling by irreverent and unsympathetic 
 minds. "Clouds and darkness are round 
 about him," and he hideth even his truth 
 wondrously from the eyes of the curious 
 and the proud. This limitation is put 
 upon the whole system of revelation, even 
 upon the grandest expression of it in the 
 person of our Lord, "God manifested in 
 the flesh." The truth was so hidden under 
 forms of flesh and common life that 
 carnal men could not see it, nor could they 
 discern the fineness of his spirit nor under- 
 stand the meaning of his simple words. 
 They misjudged him because they hated 
 him, while the Simeons and the Annas 
 recognized and hailed him with joy as the 
 Messiah. It was the divine wisdom ex- 
 pressing itself according to this uniform 
 principle, to put the truth in its highest 
 expression in a form to be recognized only 
 by the lovers of truth. Others said, "He 
 
 oa 
 
LI]\nTATIONS TO A REVELATION 
 
 hath a devil, why hear ye him?" This 
 they said because the spirit of the devil 
 was in them, and, according to our prin- 
 ciple, they could see only what was in 
 themselves. We often complain that reve- 
 lation is not more clear, that God does not 
 disclose himself more positively in the 
 moral conflicts of life, that truth is not 
 put beyond the possibility of cavil, but 
 the interests of truth itself and of the souls 
 of men are served by thus placing it so 
 that we come to know it only as we rise 
 to the spirit that would make a proper 
 use of it, and not turn its possession to 
 evil account. 
 
 It is well to reflect also that there are 
 many things that we cannot know fully 
 in our present state without spoiling the 
 beauty and symmetry of our earthly lives. 
 We could not know all the glories of the 
 heavenly life without unhinging our work- 
 ing force here, and destroying our appre- 
 ciation and interest in things of the 
 present life. It is much better for our 
 earthly lives that "we know in part," that 
 we should have but a dim outline of the 
 future world, till our work in this world 
 
 39 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 is done. It is also better for our moral 
 development, for it is hardly possible that 
 purely moral considerations could have a 
 fair field if there were revelations of future 
 conditions that would practically coerce 
 the mind. The mind must be kept free 
 from overpowering constraints, or from 
 revelations that would practically leave 
 us no option; the highest moral action 
 requires absolute freedom. We never 
 get a fair test of a child's obedience 
 while we stand over it with a rod in 
 our hands. 
 
 Thus also the sanctity and dignity of 
 the truth are maintained by putting it 
 beyond the reach of profane and captious 
 minds. It is placed in such relations to us 
 as to give us intimations of its existence, 
 of its character, and of the method of ap- 
 proach to it, but we can really possess it 
 only by loving it, working for it, and exer- 
 cising sincerity and honesty of purpose 
 toward it. It is plainly declared by Saint 
 Paul that the higher truths cannot be 
 known by the carnal mind. He says, "But 
 the natural man receiveth not the things of 
 the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness 
 
 40 
 
LIMITATIONS TO A REVELATION 
 
 unto him: neither can he know them, for 
 they are spiritually discerned." We must 
 rise to their level before we can know 
 them, and have hearts worthy of them 
 before they will take up their abode 
 within us. The truth seeks its level as 
 water does, and is sure to find it. It is 
 therefore natural that as men rise in moral 
 elevation and spirituality their knowledge 
 of truth broadens and becomes more satis- 
 fying. There are inner chambers of truth 
 to be entered only by those who have 
 proven themselves worthy of it by their 
 fidelity to the more primary revelations. 
 The truth is of value only to those who will 
 use it properly, therefore it is revealed in 
 such forms as to become accessible only to 
 those who have the spirit to make such 
 use of it. We often wonder why revelation 
 is not plainer, why we must read so much 
 history, biography, poetry, parables, and 
 epistles to get at it; and even then much of 
 it is vague, involved, and hard to be under- 
 stood. This is the honey in the rock which 
 no man can get without climbing for il; 
 and he will not climb for it unless he really 
 desires it. There is a sacred trinity of 
 
 41 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 revelation, holding the truth in triple form 
 before the mind of man — in nature, in 
 man's mysterious being and life, and in 
 the Word. The Word made flesh and the 
 Word made fact, or expressing fact, were 
 both from the same source and are closely 
 related in nature and oflSce. A veil of 
 flesh and of form in the putting is thrown 
 over both, that their sanctity may appear 
 only to those who are prepared in spirit 
 to do them reverence. The audience cham- 
 ber of the King is thus protected from 
 rude and irreverent intrusion. Such jealous 
 regard for the sanctity of the truth on the 
 part of its Author only enhances its value 
 in the eyes of men and intensifies their 
 desire and search for it. 
 
 This is one of the glories of revelation, 
 one of the proofs of its genuineness, that 
 it is thus limited and held in reserve. Just 
 enough is given to show man his duty in 
 plain speech that cannot be misunderstood 
 and to excite his interest to learn more if 
 he is sincerely desiring to know the truth; 
 then the vast fields of truth lie open for 
 his exploration and discovery. God must 
 conceal himself behind his works, and veil 
 
 4d 
 
LIMITATIONS TO A REVELATION 
 
 his truth in forms that require study. We 
 often wonder in the thick of the fight, 
 especially when the battle goes against us, 
 why God does not come forth and show 
 himself and thus give victory to the cause 
 of righteousness. We hear the buffeted 
 and bafl3ed patriarch of Uz saying in his 
 distress: "Oh that I knew where I might 
 find him! . . . Behold, I go forward, but 
 he is not there; and backward, but I can- 
 not perceive him: on the left hand, where 
 he doth work, but I cannot behold him: 
 he hideth himself on the right hand, that 
 I cannot see him." God himself has de- 
 clared that no man can see his face and 
 live, and certainl}^ his presence would so 
 awe and overpower us that there could 
 be no freedom or naturalness of action, 
 and hence no proper development of char- 
 acter. He must withhold such a manifes- 
 tation of himself as would be disturbing to 
 the natural forces with which he has en- 
 dowed man, his appetites, aspirations, rea- 
 son, imagination, and will. Many truths 
 too baldly stated would be disturbing and 
 hurtful rather than helpful. Thus Saint 
 Paul, in his First Epistle to the Thessa- 
 
 43 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 lonians, said some very plain and strong 
 things about the second coming of Christ. 
 Many of the Thessalonians were greatly 
 excited and disturbed by what he said 
 and ran to extremes in their preparation 
 for the event, even giving up all business, 
 ceasing to work, and going about as "busy- 
 bodies" because they expected the imme- 
 diate coming of the Lord. So that in his 
 second epistle he had to warn them not 
 to be "shaken in mind, or be troubled," 
 as "by letter from us, as that the day of 
 Christ is at hand." The light was too 
 strong for the eye and had to be shaded 
 by throwing over the truth an indefinite- 
 ness as to time and circumstances of the 
 great event, that the mind might resume 
 its normal working. 
 
 The possibility of failure to arrive at 
 the exact truth because of this obscurity in 
 some of its presentations cannot endanger 
 the salvation of the soul, for judgment is 
 to be in proportion to the light we have. 
 If no man was to be saved but he who had 
 full knowledge of the truth, none would be 
 saved, for no one ever yet had such knowl- 
 edge. Our judgment will be "according to 
 
 44 
 
LIMITATIONS TO A REVELATION 
 
 that a man hath, and not according to that 
 he hath not." 
 
 The revelation was given by an om- 
 niscient Being, who must have foreseen 
 how it would be misunderstood, and he 
 could have stated it in tabular form, like 
 the Decalogue, so as to have avoided these 
 misunderstandings. Our creed-makers had 
 that much ability. When our Lord prayed 
 that his disciples might be "one," he must 
 have foreseen the divisions and misunder- 
 standings that were so soon to arise. In 
 no more words than are required to utter 
 that prayer he could forever have rendered 
 impossible the Arian controversy, the 
 heresy of Pelagius, the controversy about 
 the primacy of Saint Peter, the right of 
 the pope of Rome to rule Christendom; 
 and many other questions that have dis- 
 turbed the peace of the church could have 
 been settled or their very consideration 
 rendered impossible. But he saw clearly 
 that it was better for man's intellectual 
 and spiritual development to leave the 
 truth in the form in which we have it, 
 rather than to remand man to an infantile 
 state by doing his thinking for him and 
 
 45 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 taking from him the necessity to struggle 
 and contend for the truth. It is a great 
 moral sieve, sifting out the unworthy, the 
 captious, the insincere, the designing, and 
 the false, as Saint Paul teaches when he 
 says, "There must be also heresies among 
 you, that they which are approved may 
 be made manifest among you." The here- 
 sies taught in Corinth, that seemed to 
 give so much trouble, performed that use- 
 ful office of sifting the wheat from the 
 chaff. 
 
 It was evidently the design in giving a 
 revelation that a close and vital relation 
 should be maintained between every soul 
 of man and the Holy Ghost for spiritual 
 power, illumination, and guidance "into all 
 truth." This was the clear teaching of the 
 Master in his address to the disciples on 
 the personality and offices of the Holy 
 Spirit, as recorded by Saint John. He 
 teaches that it would be better for him to 
 go away, that spiritual teaching and illu- 
 mination might take the place of the formal 
 words he was uttering, and that inde- 
 pendent thinking under the guidance of the 
 Holy Ghost would be far better for them 
 
 46 
 
LIMITATIONS TO A REVELATION 
 
 and the church for all time than to have a 
 visible leader to whom they could go with 
 questions when any difficult matter arose. 
 Inward illumination is better than peda- 
 gogy- 
 
 The Bible is the norm and formal state- 
 ment of the truth, but its interpretation 
 and application to the individual life must 
 be by the conscience and judgment il- 
 luminated and guided by the Holy Spirit. 
 The Word was inspired by the Spirit, and 
 it should be read with a consciousness of 
 that fact and with the prayer that the 
 inspiring Spirit should become the inter- 
 preter of the Word. He knows what was 
 mtended in the writing and he can make 
 its meaning plain. Therefore prayer for 
 the illumination and guidance of the Holy 
 Spirit has always been considered an essen- 
 tial to proper Bible-reading. The casual, 
 the critical, or the careless reader may get 
 very little and see very little significance 
 in this revelation if it is read without this 
 spiritual light upon it, for revelation is not 
 in the book alone, but upon the book and 
 upon the mind of man that it may reach 
 the understanding aright. Revelation is a 
 
 47 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 perpetual, ever-active movement of the 
 Spirit of God, never finished and never 
 suspended, if not in giving new truth, 
 then in throwing new hght on the old 
 according to the needs of men. We 
 greatly dishonor the Holy Spirit and his 
 offices among men if we supposfe him less 
 active now than at any former period. 
 The interests involved are greater, the 
 conditions of human life are more com- 
 plex, the population of the world is larger, 
 the progress of the kingdom of God is 
 more rapid, and unless he has given up 
 the field entirely the activities of the 
 Spirit must be greater than at any former 
 time. The flow of truth from the divine 
 to the human mind must be as constant as 
 that of sunlight from the sun, or of the air 
 which we breathe, if man is to have the 
 freshness and vigor of divine truth for his 
 spiritual life. 
 
 48 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE ^L\KIXG OF THE CAXOX 
 
 The Old Testament 
 
 The Bible was an unconscious growth. 
 Probably no one book was written with any 
 thought that it would become a part of a 
 sacred canon. The wTiters generally wrote 
 under some immediate spur or impulse, on 
 some local issues, or to meet some pressing 
 contemporaneous need. If they had known 
 the prominence and influence their writings 
 were to have in the coming ages, they 
 would have been self-conscious and inca- 
 pable of responding perfectly to the move- 
 ments of the Divine Spirit. It would not 
 be possible for any human mind to have 
 such an expectation with respect to its 
 productions without being powerfully af- 
 fected by it, and probably without being 
 incapable of the simplicity and singleness 
 of aim necessary in the adequate state- 
 ment of the truth. 
 
 The first books of the Bible were prob- 
 49 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 ably written from the historical standpoint, 
 to record and preserve the knowledge of 
 important events. Then dramatic repre- 
 sentations of the truth appear, after which 
 come devotional books of praise and 
 prayer. Next in order are the Wisdom 
 books, containing proverbs, maxims, and 
 wise sayings for practical life, and, finally, 
 the prophets give us earnest appeals in 
 behalf of righteousness and predictions of 
 future events. In none of these writings 
 is there any intimation that future ages 
 were in the thought of the authors, and 
 there is no manifest consciousness that 
 what was written was to go into the 
 formation of a sacred book to become the 
 guide of God's people for all time. There 
 was no statement or intimation that they 
 were written with such an object in view, 
 or that it was at the time the intention of 
 the Divine Spirit that what was written 
 should finally be used for such a purpose, 
 or that it was intended ever to give such a 
 book as the Bible to men. These separate 
 writings each accomplished the purpose for 
 which it was written, living and holding its 
 place in the literature of the world among 
 
 .50 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CANON 
 
 many similar productions, till at last the 
 discerning minds among believers came to 
 see the permanent and universal quality 
 in the special message and the evidences 
 of divine inspiration which it contained, 
 and so gave it a place in the collection of 
 books that finally made up the sacred 
 canon. Some of them were several cen- 
 turies in winning the recognition which 
 gave them their present position. Some 
 of them were very unpopular at the time 
 of their appearance; some were greeted 
 with a divided sentiment and heated con- 
 troversy. Some of the prophets were ac- 
 cused of disloyalty to their reigning 
 sovereigns and of consorting with the 
 enemies of the state; some were accepted 
 as useful for instruction, but not as au- 
 thority in matters of rehgion. Not till 
 contemporaneous asperities had died away, 
 and the essential truth emerged from the 
 local and temporary conditions, were these 
 productions fully appreciated and their 
 high and universal quality recognized. 
 
 The literary instinct, as well as the 
 practical needs of a literature, grew as 
 the centuries advanced, and in the later 
 
 51 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 years of Israel's history many manuscripts 
 appeared. They were historical, poetical, 
 devotional, and dramatic, with the Israel- 
 itish people as the center and boundary 
 of thought. This fecundity of thought 
 became embarrassing and naturally forced 
 the question of the relative standing and 
 value of these various productions. From 
 those that were certainly divinely inspired 
 they shaded off by gradations of quality 
 to those that were certainly not divinely 
 inspired, but it was exceedingly difficult 
 to draw the line of just separation. It 
 would not do to take the assumption or 
 claim of the author, for some that were 
 certainly inspired were written by men too 
 modest to make any claim, while then, as 
 in all subsequent history, some were very 
 bold in claiming divine inspiration whose 
 productions belied their claim. It would 
 be unwise in a time of national conflict to 
 ask a verdict concerning the inspiration of 
 a passionately patriotic production that 
 fitted in well with the circumstances and 
 temper of the times, for a dispassionate 
 and reliable judgment under such circum- 
 stances would be improbable. Passion, 
 
 52 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CANON 
 
 prejudice, or party feeling must not enter 
 here; the feeHngs awakened at the ap- 
 pearance of such a production must be 
 allowed to cool and the publication must 
 be tried and proven in the stress of life's 
 great needs by more than one generation 
 before it can be recognized as worthy of a 
 place in the sacred canon. Even then it 
 was never possible to arrive at unanimity 
 of judgment. To this day these differences 
 persist, and the Roman Catholics accept as 
 canonical various books which Protestants 
 denominate apocryphal. 
 
 A great number of manuscripts were be- 
 fore the public and were in use in their 
 schools, in public worship, and for in- 
 struction in national history. The time 
 came when the most discreet and learned 
 saw that there must be a classification of 
 their literature and a definite setting apart 
 of such books as they considered authori- 
 tative and worthy of being accepted as a 
 revelation from God. The writings once 
 issued were no longer in the power of 
 their authors, but were wholly subject to 
 the decision of those to whom they came 
 as to w^iat position they should occupy 
 
 53 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 for instruction or authority over the minds 
 of men; and even their claim to divine 
 inspiration must be passed upon and ap- 
 proved by men before they could have a 
 place in the sacred canon. If the writers 
 were inspired, they who composed the 
 sacred canon by shifting out Hebrew litera- 
 ture musi have had some measun of the 
 same inspiration to enable them to do 
 their work wiselv' and well, which agrees 
 with our general proposition that inspira- 
 tion is a permanent gift to the church, 
 expressing itself at different times accord- 
 ing to conditions, circumstances, and char- 
 acters. In exercising this office of 
 classification the Hebrews divided their 
 Scriptures into three departments: I. The 
 Tora. II. The Prophets. III. The writ- 
 ings of the Hagiographa. 
 
 I. The Tora was composed of the five 
 books of Moses. In early Israel the regu- 
 lation of worship, and the disposition of 
 public affairs as well, fell largely to the 
 priests. They made decisions and com- 
 municated the divine will by means of the 
 lot, the ephod, and the Urim and Thumim. 
 The sanctuary became the seat of gov- 
 
 54 
 
THE ^L\KIXG OF THE CAXOX 
 
 ernment, where judgments were rendered 
 by those appointed to act for the people. 
 These proceedings were called "inquiring 
 of the Lord," and the decisions rendered 
 were "the statutes of the Lord." In all 
 these proceedings and judgments they nat- 
 urally went back to the law of Moses and 
 based their decisions on his teachings, 
 which impHed that they were accepted as 
 divine authority. Thus, naturally, the 
 books of Moses came to be recognized as 
 the highest authority to which appeal 
 could be made, as the verv Word of the 
 Lord to Israel. It is impossible to fix 
 the time when these five books were 
 thrown together as the recognized embodi- 
 ment of Hebrew law. From the beginning 
 of the organic life of Israel they must have 
 held such a position in the pubhc mind, 
 but in the economy of the Hebrews the 
 more formal declaration and setting apart 
 did not occur till the existence of other 
 WTitings claiming such recognition made 
 the formal act necessary. Naturally, the 
 rather vague reverence in which the writ- 
 ings were held from the first came to 
 definite form and clearer classification and 
 
 55 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 interpretation under the attrition of 
 thought and the practical results of cen- 
 turies of conflict and agitation in de- 
 veloping national life and ecclesiastical 
 polity. As all the great world forces were 
 thrown into this seething vat with these 
 writings, there could come out but one 
 result: the law of Moses proved itself and 
 won its position in the thought of the 
 world as "the law of the Lord," just what 
 it was declared to be from the first. 
 
 II. The Prophets. Long after the 
 *'Tora," or law, had come to its recogni- 
 tion another class of writings claimed rec- 
 ognition as worthy of a place in the sacred 
 canon — the Prophets. In this classifica- 
 tion the Hebrews included Joshua, First 
 and Second Samuel, First and Second 
 Kings, and the writings of the later 
 prophets. Of what we recognize as pro- 
 phetic writings, Amos was the first in 
 order of time, though spoken prophecy 
 had been a great power in Israel for many 
 centuries before the time of Amos. 
 Whether these prophets wrote their mes- 
 sages to the people, or delivered them in 
 oral form and had them taken down at 
 
 56 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CANON 
 
 the time or afterward by some scribe, we 
 do not know% but it is certain that some 
 parts of them at least were written by 
 divine direction. Isaiah in tw^o places com- 
 mands that his words be written down for 
 the instruction of future ages. A hundred 
 years after this Jeremiah is particular to 
 have Baruch take down for preservation 
 the words that fell from his lips, that this 
 record might take the place of one that 
 had been burned in the fire by Jehoakim, 
 king of Israel. These prophetical books, in 
 contrast with the books of the law, repre- 
 sent the conscience, the faith, the spiritual 
 life, the worship, and the ethical righteous- 
 ness of the people of Israel. Here we find 
 the enthusiasm and the heroism of faith, 
 and the passionate love of righteousness 
 that characterized the best life of the 
 Hebrews. 
 
 III. The writings of Hagiography. This 
 third division is composed of literature later 
 in origin than the law, and later than much 
 of what is classed by the Hebrews as 
 prophetical. These writings include First 
 and Second Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, 
 Ruth, Job, Psahns, Proverbs, Canticles, 
 
 57 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 Ecclesiastes, and Lamentations. They con- 
 tain practical precepts, proverbs, rules for 
 holy living, dramatic treatment of life, 
 facts of history, poetic utterances of joy, 
 love, faith, hope, and the feelings and 
 aspirations of a true religious life. This 
 classification was not made by any one 
 age, but it grew as the literature grew, 
 and, of course, could not be completed till 
 the last book, Malachi, was written. 
 
 It is quite possible that some books in- 
 cluded at one age were thrown out or lost 
 in another age, as we find in the book of 
 Numbers a book alluded to that is lost to 
 us. Also in Joshua, in the account of the 
 sun standing still, an appeal is made for 
 confirmation to the lost book of Jasher, 
 that then seemed to be an authority. 
 What the selective conscience and judg- 
 ment of the Hebrew people chose out of 
 their literature as the Word of the Lord 
 to them and to the world the ages have 
 so accepted and held sacred. These three 
 divisions are recognized in the New Testa- 
 ament as they were held by the Jewish 
 people generally. 
 
 There was no determining conclave or 
 58 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CANON 
 
 conference that decided what books should 
 go into the Old Testament canon. The 
 religious consciousness of the Hebrew peo- 
 ple, instructed and guided by the Holy 
 Spirit, after a fair testing of the books in 
 the school of experience, made the de- 
 cision in a most formal way by accepting 
 and using such as were approved. The 
 religious consciousness of the race has 
 changed about as little as has the con- 
 sciousness of pleasure and pain, or of food 
 and drink, and its decisions in Hebrew his- 
 tory were practically what they would be 
 now if acting under similar conditions and 
 on the same class of facts. To what extent 
 the counsel of the learned may have in- 
 fluenced the common mind we have no 
 means of knowing, and while we may 
 suppose it to have been considerable, we 
 have no reason to think that it would be 
 out of harmony with that religious con- 
 sciousness which was practically the same 
 in the learned and the unlearned. Many 
 books were bidding high for recognition, 
 and there had to be careful discrimination 
 and thorough sifting to get at the bottom 
 truth concerning each one. If a book held 
 
 59 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 its place in the faith of God's people 
 through the varying experiences of one, 
 three, or five hundred years, its standing 
 was fixed. There never was any other 
 authority, human or divine, that decided 
 in a formal way what books should go into 
 the formation of the Old Testament; yet 
 there could be no higher authority than 
 the concurrent testimony of thousands of 
 people of best character who had tested 
 the books in their own experiences. Es- 
 pecially does this appear when we remem- 
 ber that these experiences, as well as the 
 books themselves-, '^ere 'mder thr Ci/Ulroj 
 of the Holy vSpirit. 
 
 60 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE ]\L\KING OF THE CANON 
 
 (Continued) 
 
 The New Testament 
 
 A new literature sprang into being under 
 the powerful appeal made to the human 
 intellect by the incidents in the life of the 
 Prophet of Nazareth, and much more by 
 the wonderful circumstances of his death 
 and resurrection. No life in history com- 
 pared with his in thought-producing 
 energy, in soul-arousing power, and the 
 demand for full and formal statement was 
 universal and insistent. Many books were 
 written, some of them prejudiced, one- 
 sided, incomplete, unsatisfactory. The 
 evangelist Luke makes this the reason for 
 venturing into the field of literature. He 
 admits that many other accounts had been 
 written, and seems to imply that they are 
 not satisfactory to his mind, so he writes his 
 own account to the honorable gentleman 
 to whom his production is addressed, that 
 
 61 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 he "may know the certainty of the things" 
 wherein he had been instructed. Even the 
 Gospels of Mark and Matthew were not 
 entirely satisfactory to Luk^, for they left 
 out certain important teachings of the 
 Master that he thought ought to be 
 recorded. 
 
 It must be observed that the literary 
 movement was a little slow in starting, the 
 first books of the New Testament not 
 appearing till twenty years after the Lord's 
 ascension. We must also remember that 
 the Christians had a Bible which they 
 highly venerated, and which seemed suffi- 
 cient for their needs. Saint Paul preached 
 in the synagogues, using the Hebrew Scrip- 
 tures and making them the source of his 
 material in expounding the kingdom of 
 God as set up by Jesus Christ. In Rome 
 he brought together a great company in 
 his own house, "To whom he expounded 
 and testified the kingdom of God, per- 
 suading them concerning Jesus, both out 
 of the law of Moses, and out of the proph- 
 ets." These early Christians were so ab- 
 sorbed and occupied preaching and building 
 the Church of Christ that they had neither 
 
 62 
 
THE INIAKING OF THE CANON 
 
 time nor strength for writing. We never 
 should have had Saint Paul's great epis- 
 tles had not God wisely ordered that he 
 should be held in prison those .long years 
 when he seemed to be so much needed in 
 the field, that he might have quiet and 
 time for that greatest service of his lif.; 
 in writing those wonderful productions that 
 for two thousand years have been giving 
 light in all the earth. 
 
 The early Christian writings were mostly 
 produced under the spur of some imme- 
 diate and pressing necessity. They were 
 addressed to a particular locality, to single 
 individuals, or in response to appeals for 
 counsel. There is no indication or intima- 
 tion that any one of the writers had the 
 faintest idea that his production would 
 finally find a place in the sacred canon and 
 be held in the same reverence as that 
 which had attached to the Hebrew Scrip- 
 tures. Greatly as they were appreciated 
 by the Christians of the time, they could 
 not be held in full sanctity till touched by 
 age and with the veneration that finally 
 invested the names of those who had seen 
 the Lord, after they had passed into the 
 
 63 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 fellowship of the church triumphant. There 
 was no intimation while the apostles lived 
 of a purpose to gather together the writ- 
 ings of their age into one volume, to be a 
 part of the sacred canon. That thought 
 was a later development, for while the 
 apostles lived, their public recital of the 
 events worthy of mention in the life of 
 our Lord, and their expositions of his 
 teachings would have precedence over any- 
 thing they might write, and in the public 
 mind would seem to render unnecessary a 
 written account. Not till their testimony 
 was completed and they were removed 
 would the church awake to the apprehen- 
 sion of the great and enduring value of 
 what they had written. 
 
 The simplicity and naturalness of that 
 literature, one of its greatest charms, is 
 evidence that it came from the heart with 
 a single purpose and a single aim, with no 
 apprehension of the position to be assigned 
 to it in the future. Only thus could the 
 human mind be absolutely responsive to 
 the motions of the Holy Spirit, when it 
 was wholly absorbed with the one purpose 
 of conveying the truth to a case of need. 
 
 64 
 
THE :making of the canon 
 
 These writers make no demand that their 
 productions shall be placed in the same 
 category with the Hebrew Scriptures, nor, 
 indeed, do they intimate any concern about 
 the future disposition of them. They left 
 their ministry of writing as their ministry 
 of speech to the providence of God, not 
 knowing which should thrive, "the early or 
 the late sown," the written or the spoken 
 word. They wrote under an inspiration to 
 meet a present need, and it remained for 
 the inspiring Spirit at a later period to in- 
 dicate to Spirit-filled men the real char- 
 acter and enduring worth of these pro- 
 ductions. The apostolical church accepted 
 them as authority for instruction in the 
 facts of Christian history and in the doc- 
 trines of Christian faith, but they could 
 not class them with the writings of Moses 
 or the prophets till there was a sufficient 
 lapse of time to invest them with the air 
 of sacredness that naturally falls over the 
 things of the past when we are removed 
 at a sufficient distance from them. From 
 considering them as books of instruction in 
 the facts of history, the principles of faith, 
 and the practical duties of religion, it was 
 
 65 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 easy to rise to the higher conception that 
 they were divinely inspired and that they 
 were to be incorporated with the Hebrew 
 Scriptures as the culmination and comple- 
 tion of their revelation for the permanent 
 instruction of mankind. 
 
 The Spirit's oflSce as inspirer and teacher 
 of the church did not cease when the apos- 
 tolical writings were finished. He was the 
 life of the church from the first, the source 
 of its best thought and noblest achieve- 
 ments, and he forever remains the inspira- 
 tion of its real life and progress; he is the 
 conservator of its aggressive spiritual power 
 and of its right thinking. The promise was 
 that he should abide "forever" with the 
 church, and without him the church would 
 be a dry, withered, and lifeless thing. We 
 do him no greater dishonor and the church 
 no greater wrong than to teach that the 
 Holy Ghost is active only in great epochs 
 and on special occasions. Inspiration is 
 the abiding privilege, the great need, and 
 the only adequate equipment of the church; 
 the whole church is "the body of Christ," 
 instinct, actuated, and alive by the in- 
 dwelling Divine Spirit. It may be mani- 
 
 66 
 
THE IVIAKING OF THE CANON 
 
 fested in different forms and degrees, but 
 he is always present in the church that is 
 faithful to the divine covenant of grace 
 in Christ Jesus. God did not lodge the 
 glory and responsibility of revelation and 
 redemption with any age or nation, but 
 the whole race of every age is held to its 
 part in the great work of inbreathing and 
 communicating life and truth to humanity 
 through Jesus Christ. The apostles wrote, 
 and their writings threw such a glory over 
 their age that we sometimes think inspira- 
 tion ended with them, but their writings 
 would have been no more than so much 
 wastepaper had not the Divine Spirit 
 moved upon the minds of a later period to 
 discover that they were inspired of God 
 and worthy of a place in the sacred canon. 
 That there should be delay and differ- 
 ences of opinion in coming to an agreement 
 as to what books should be admitted to a 
 place in the sacred canon was perfectly 
 natural. The feeling of reverence that nat- 
 urally arises toward a writing that has 
 come down from a preceding generation, 
 the practical experience and observed facts 
 concerning the effects of a teaching, and the 
 
 67 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 opportunity for gathering up all the facts 
 concerning the production of a document, 
 as well as the opportunity for considering 
 and testing the claims for divine inspira- 
 tion, were essential in the formation of the 
 canon. If a very popular, influential, or 
 learned minister in any city, or a great 
 bishop or far-wandering missionary should 
 write a treatise, history, or doctrinal epis- 
 tle, there would be local or party interests 
 that would clamor for giving it a place in 
 the canon, and it would not be wise to pass 
 upon it till a second and more impartial 
 generation had arisen. Saint Paul's writ- 
 ings would be very enthusiastically received 
 in Gentile cities like Corinth, Ephesus, and 
 Rome, but they would meet with great 
 opposition and disfavor in Jerusalem and 
 other Jewish cities. The epistle of Saint 
 James, on the other hand, would be hailed 
 with delight in Jerusalem and among "The 
 twelve tribes scattered abroad,'' but among 
 the peoples instructed in Saint Paul's great 
 Chris tology and in his doctrine of justifi- 
 cation by faith it would not be acceptable, 
 and among them it would be declared un- 
 worthy a place in the sacred canon. The 
 
 68 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CANON 
 
 personal and local feeling in these and 
 other cases must die out before the time is 
 ripe for deciding what writings shall make 
 up the Bible. 
 
 This treatment of the case brings into 
 decided prominence the human element in 
 Bible-making. But we are to remember 
 that in not one of these ^Ti tings is there 
 any intimation that they were written with 
 a view to their having a place in the Bible, 
 or that they would be read by, or have any 
 influence upon, future generations, or that 
 the WTiters had any anticipation that a 
 Bible would be formed out of the writings 
 of that age. The whole history and method 
 of redemption and revelation may be 
 summed up in the one term, "God-man." 
 If the divine element is transcendent, the 
 human element is essential; to deny either 
 its true place is to devitalize and destroy 
 the truth. To fail to recognize the human 
 is hardly less fatal to the truth than to fail 
 to recognize the divine agency in revela- 
 tion. The two work as a composite union 
 for a result that could not be reached if 
 either were lacking. 
 
 Jesus Christ went away from the infant 
 69 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 church without giving any direction about 
 writing or preparing an addition or supple- 
 ment to the Hebrew Scriptures, nor did he 
 give any directions about the organization 
 or pohty of his church so soon to be formed. 
 Two great institutions were to be raised up 
 for the evangehzation of the world: a 
 divine-human book to furnish material for 
 preaching, and a divine-human organiza- 
 tion called the church. The inspiration of 
 the Holy Ghost was to be the formative 
 force of both, but that force was to be 
 manifested through the human intelligence, 
 in terms and forms to be apprehended by 
 the human understanding, and in response 
 to human need. Both developed gradually 
 and unconsciously, as the best life always 
 does. The unfolding was slow, and it was 
 not a forecasting of the future, but an 
 effort to meet the need of the present. 
 Men cared very little for written docu- 
 ments or formal institutions, so long as the 
 living witnesses of the glory of the Lord on 
 fire with a holy enthusiasm kindled by 
 personal contact with him were traveling 
 everywhere reciting the thrilling facts of 
 their own observations and experiences 
 
 70 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CANON 
 
 with him. There was little appreciation 
 of or demand for a literature so long as 
 the living preacher who had seen the 
 Lord was available. The church had need 
 of but few institutions or forms so long as 
 its services were conducted in private 
 houses or in the open air, and prior to the 
 rise of a hymnology and liturgy. It was 
 the office of the Holy Spirit to furnish the 
 truth, the organization, and the means for 
 disseminating and preserving it in re- 
 sponse to human need and through the 
 organ of the human intelligence. 
 
 These two lines of the movement of the 
 Spirit of God developed slowly, but when 
 fairly developed they became the norm and 
 suggestion of truth for all after times. It 
 has been the habit of all theological 
 teachers and ecclesiastical builders to go 
 back to this early age of inspiration for 
 authority in their teaching. But one only 
 needs to study the origin of the diaconate 
 in the sixth chapter of the Acts of the 
 Apostles, or the subjectivity of the writ- 
 ings of Saint Paul, to see how large the 
 human element is in both lines of the 
 developing kingdom of God. There could 
 
 71 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 have been in all this process of develop- 
 ment no thought of producing and project- 
 ing into the future a literature to rule the 
 thought of coming ages, for that early 
 church was thoroughly obsessed with the 
 idea that Christ would return during the 
 lifetime of that generation and take into 
 his own hands the reins of government. 
 
 n 
 
CHAPTER YL 
 
 THE NEW TESTAMENT BECOMING 
 HOLY SCRIPTURE 
 
 The early New Testament was a flame 
 of religious enthusiasm. Four events like 
 the crucifixion, the resurrection, the ascen- 
 sion, and Pentecost occurring in a period 
 of fifty days, and the marvelous initial suc- 
 cesses of the church, are suflScient explana- 
 tion and justification of it. That this 
 enthusiasm ran into excesses of fanaticism 
 along some lines was indicated by the 
 disastrous attempt at community of goods, 
 the folly of which soon became apparent. 
 In this great movement that permeated all 
 classes the living preacher who could re- 
 port upon these great events as an eye- 
 witness or participator in them was the 
 chief agent and the greatest force. The 
 incidents of the Lord's life, death, resur- 
 rection, and ascension, with such explana- 
 tions as might be given, would be repeated 
 over and over to entranced audiences that 
 would never tire of hearing the wonderful 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 story, and to whom the facts would seem to 
 justify the most extravagant expectations 
 for the future. There was, then, no need 
 for written documents, nor was the temper 
 of mind such as to awaken any desire for 
 them. The oral teacher who could recite 
 and expound the events that had just 
 occurred with thrilling effect was all the 
 church then wanted. 
 
 There was no apprehension of need for 
 written documents in the future, for in this 
 great enthusiasm of the new life the church 
 had become thoroughly obsessed with the 
 idea that the Lord would soon return, over- 
 throw his enemies, take possession of the 
 kingdom, and carry his believing children 
 home to heaven. There would, therefore, 
 be no need even for the Hebrew Bible very 
 long, and certainly no need for any addi- 
 tion to it. They had not carefully studied 
 the sayings of the Master about his second 
 coming, and in their eager enthusiasm had 
 jumbled them all together in one mass, as 
 referring to one event. They did not dis- 
 cern that some of his utterances referred to 
 his resurrection, which was a real "coming 
 again" after having gone away, some to 
 
 74 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 the day of Pentecost, which gave a fulfill- 
 ment to his saying that, "There be some 
 of them that stand here, which shall not 
 taste of death, till they see the. kingdom of 
 God come with power," but they seemed 
 to confound all his sayings on the subject 
 with the last great event, "When the Son 
 of man shall come in his glory, and all the 
 holy angels with him," to judge the world. 
 They fully expected him to come during 
 their lifetime and that they would be per- 
 mitted to share in the glory of his triumph 
 over the world. 
 
 With such an expectation of the con- 
 summation of all things so soon, there 
 could be no thought of forming a new 
 Bible, or an enlargement of the old by the 
 addition of Christian writings. 
 
 This enthusiasm that was burning bright 
 with an aggressive flame was constantly 
 fed with new fuel in the form of wonderful 
 miracles, interpositions, and deliverances 
 hardly less astonishing and assuring than 
 the great redemptive events themselves. 
 The witnesses who were testifying for their 
 Lord, and the apostles who were preaching 
 his gospel, with the great body of believers, 
 
 75 
 
THE IVIAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 accepted these miraculous incidents as a 
 divine attestation of the correctness of 
 their teachings, and this added inconceiv- 
 ably to their influence with the people. 
 The gift of tongues and other miraculous 
 gifts of the Holy Spirit continued in the 
 church for many years, feeding the flame 
 of its enthusiasm. This was true as late 
 as the writing of Saint Paul's First Epistle 
 to the Corinthians, as anyone may see by 
 reading the fourteenth chapter, a work that 
 was not written till about thirty years 
 after Pentecost. Those years constituted 
 the period of dynamics in the church, 
 when the miraculous powers of the Spirit 
 of God were employed to propel the new 
 church in its victorious march among the 
 nations. 
 
 Not until twenty years had passed after 
 the resurrection of the Lord did anyone 
 think it worth while to put anything down 
 in writing. By that time the mind of the 
 church had cooled a little, its thinking had 
 been clarified by experience and broaden- 
 ing knowledge, and the disappointment in 
 the expected immediate reappearance of 
 the Lord aided the coming in of a broader 
 
 76 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 outlook upon the needs and possibilities 
 of the church. Then as the early witnesses 
 were passing away by death, their number 
 becoming fewer and the number of con- 
 gregations becoming greater, it became in- 
 creasingly difficult to secure a living teacher 
 who had personal knowledge of the events 
 of which they wished to hear. Many of 
 the most distinguished ministers had gone 
 into foreign parts on missionary tours, or 
 were locked up in prisons. Then a written 
 communication from these absent leaders 
 of the church, many of whom had endured 
 untold sufferings and hardships that awak- 
 ened great sympathy for them among the 
 people, would be hailed with great joy, 
 and reading them to the congregations 
 would produce a profound religious sensa- 
 tion. At first there could have been no 
 thought with the writers or with those to 
 whom these productions were sent that 
 they would ever take their place by the 
 side of the Hebrew Scriptures, and be 
 held sacred and authoritative, as they were. 
 But when the living witnesses had all 
 passed away, the written testimonies which 
 they had left took on a new importance, 
 
 77 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 and then arose the task of discriminating 
 and deciding which were to be regarded as 
 divinely inspired and authoritative. We 
 can no more beHeve that this selection was 
 left to human caprice and fallible judg- 
 ment than that the writing itself, or the 
 forming of the infant church polity was the 
 product of the unaided human mind. It 
 was the office and work of the Holy Spirit 
 to instruct and guide the church, and he 
 could best do this by giving it a divinely 
 inspired literature that should feed its in- 
 telligence and inspire its faith. 
 
 Fortunately, we have more light on the 
 formation of the Christian Bible than we 
 have upon the early stages of the Hebrew 
 Scriptures. The literary impulse had been 
 greatly intensified and developed, with a 
 much broader outlook and keener interest 
 in all world questions. The new faith had 
 its roots in and received contributions from 
 all the great world centers, and it left 
 tracks on the sands everywhere by which 
 its movements can now be traced and 
 verified. The growth of the New Testa- 
 ment is under our eyes, and we can see 
 the process as it slowly develops. 
 
 78 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 Let us take our stand in one of the 
 Christian congregations of Rome, the first 
 Sabbath after Saint Paul was beheaded 
 there, and watch the feeHng of reader and 
 congregation as the Epistle to the Romans 
 is read. There would be an interest, en- 
 thusiasm, and recognition of its divine 
 quality such as had never been before, and 
 every one would be ready to acclaim it as 
 the very word of God through the blessed 
 Paul. Or, if we should visit one of the 
 colonies of Jews settled up on the banks 
 of the Nile, where the gospel of Christ had 
 been accepted, and chance to be in one of 
 their congregations just after they had re- 
 ceived news of the death of Saint James, 
 bishop of Jerusalem, and they should bring 
 out and read his epistle addressed to "the 
 twelve tribes scattered abroad," we would 
 hear them exclaiming in their spiritual rap- 
 ture: "It is nothing less than the voice of 
 God! There is nothing in the writings of 
 Moses superior to it." And so if we would 
 follow every book of the New Testament 
 through its early experiences, we should 
 find some clear and decided recognition of 
 its quality that gradually won its way by 
 
 79 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 inherent merit, till it was crowned and 
 throned as Holy Scripture. 
 
 The records are wonderfully satisfying to 
 the most critical mind. The period of the 
 oral gospel was drawing to its close. The 
 story of eyewitnesses had been told in all 
 the great world centers, with about such 
 variations of details as we find in the writ- 
 ten Gospels. No doubt the differences be- 
 tween Saint Paul, Saint James, Saint Peter, 
 and Saint John had been noted and dis- 
 cussed, much as they have by Christian 
 scholars of all the ages. Every city would 
 have its favorite apostle. Gospel, or Epistle, 
 and one would say, *T am for Paul, or I am 
 for Cephas, or I for Apollos, or I for 
 Christ." Some of these apostles preached 
 at one place what they had not at another 
 as the result of growing knowledge. As in 
 the case of the eloquent Apollos, he had 
 been preaching with great power in a num- 
 ber of cities, "knowing only the baptism of 
 John," but when more fully instructed he 
 added the great distinctively Christian 
 truths to his preaching, and such changes 
 in the preachers themselves must have 
 produced no little unrest and discussion 
 
 80 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 among the people. All things were in a 
 state of flux, tending slowly toward a 
 settled and fixed condition when the un- 
 changing written productions of the apos- 
 tles should be accepted as inspired of God 
 for final authority. 
 
 We must not overlook the fact that there 
 were great numbers of what have been 
 called "logia," or written scraps of informa- 
 tion about the Christ. They were incom- 
 plete, mixed with legends, or trivial and 
 personal matters that would render them 
 unsuitable for public reading or for a place 
 in the Bible. A gentleman in Jerusalem on 
 business could not fail to WTite home some 
 account of a strange prophet that had 
 visited the city, and he would give a report 
 of his sayings and doings. A gentleman 
 from Alexandria traveling through Pales- 
 tine would happen at Nain the day the 
 widow's son was raised to life. He would 
 write home an account of this and of other 
 wonderful things he had seen and heard. 
 Some poor man rescued from a life of pain 
 and weakness by the touch of Jesus would 
 spend part of his new strength in writing 
 to his distant mother an account of this, 
 
 81 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 and of many other blessed things done by 
 the wonderful Prophet of Nazareth. Any- 
 one can see that there must have been a 
 great flood of these "logia" distributed 
 everywhere, but such an admixture of the 
 impossible, the absurd, the legendary, the 
 fanciful, the fanatical, and the deliberately 
 false that they had to be used with great 
 care. Many scholars suppose that they 
 were the storehouse of material on which 
 the writers of the New Testament drew 
 largely for their material. But no man 
 knows anything about that. Some think 
 they can see marks of it in New Testament 
 writings; others think they are imaginary. 
 It certainly would derogate nothing from 
 the inspiration of a production to show 
 that the author derived his information 
 from the oral or written communication of 
 another, for the inspiration of the author 
 would seem to verify the correctness of the 
 information. It is a matter where there is 
 no room and no need for dogmatism; a 
 man may conjecture what he pleases about 
 the sources of information so long as he 
 allows the imprimatui of inspiration. Out 
 of ctii this melange of literature it was im- 
 
 82 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 peratlve that the church for its peace and 
 purity of doctrine and teaching should 
 select what would be an authoritative stan- 
 dard of faith and practice. To this we now 
 come. 
 
 Passing by some others, the first w^itness 
 we care to bring forward is Papias, bishop 
 of Hierapolis, in Phrygia. He was born 
 twenty years before the death of Saint 
 John, lived in Hierapolis, where he met 
 the daughters of Philip the evangelist, who 
 w^ere prophetesses in the days of Saint 
 Paul when he was entertained for a long 
 time at their father's house. He numbered 
 among his friends the great Poly carp, and 
 others who had been associated with the 
 twelve. He was a very earnest student of 
 all the records upon which he could lay 
 his hands that gave any information about 
 the sayings or doings of Jesus Christ. He 
 speaks of two Johns, calling one, evidently 
 the Saint John of the Gospels, "the elder." 
 He says, "John the elder told Papias that 
 Matthew wrote the Logia," that is, the 
 sayings of Jesus in Hebrew. "And this 
 too, the elder said, Mark, the interpreter 
 of Peter, wrote down accurately, yet not 
 
 83 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 in order, all that he (Peter) told as said or 
 done by Christ. For he (Mark) himself 
 did not hear the Lord nor was a disciple of 
 his, but — of Peter, who used to give 
 teachings to suit the immediate wants, but 
 not as a connected narrative, so that Mark 
 made no mistake. For he took care of one 
 thing, not to leave out anything he heard 
 nor give anything in a wrong way." 
 
 The first Gospel written was this by 
 Saint Mark, the material for which was 
 derived from the public addresses of Saint 
 Peter and from private interviews with 
 him. Soon after followed the Gospel by 
 Matthew, then that by Luke, and about 
 twenty -five years after came the Gospel of 
 John. But all these came after the death 
 of Saint Paul, so that in none of his Epistles 
 is there mention of any of these Gospels, or 
 of any other Christian writings recognized 
 as scripture. We are just now at that 
 period when this recognition began slowly 
 to appear. It was not by any miracle, 
 prophet's dictum, or decree of council or 
 conference, but by the constant growing 
 use of these Christian writings in public 
 worship and for private instruction in the 
 
 84 
 
THE NEW TESTAIVIENT 
 
 things of God. A book that was found 
 worthy to be read in public service with 
 increasing appreciation grew constantly to- 
 ward a place in the sacred volume. The 
 Holy r^piril in the church recognized the 
 Iloh- Spirit in the Word, and that was the 
 determining and guiding force. 
 
 The postapostolic age begins about A. D. 
 100 with a letter written from the Church 
 of Christ in Rome to the church in Corinth, 
 that marks another stage in the rising tide 
 of Christian literature. It is believed by 
 scholars to have been written by Clement 
 of Rome, and while it does not quote 
 formally from the Gospels as recognized 
 scripture, it does use much of the language 
 of the Gospels in references that show he 
 was familiar with them and held them in 
 high regard as sources of Christian truth. 
 Irenseus says of him, ''Clement had seen 
 the blessed apostles and conversed with 
 them, and had the preaching of the blessed 
 apostles still sounding in his ears." 
 
 Another most distinguished witness 
 comes onto the stand from the sacred city 
 of Antioch, the most important city in 
 early Christian history after Jerusalem. 
 
 85^ 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 Ignatius was the bishop there at the end 
 of the first century. He was put to death 
 for his faith early in the second century, 
 and on his way to martyrdom at Rome he 
 wrote seven letters, to the Ephesians, the 
 Magnesians, the Trallians, the Romans, 
 the Philadelphians, the Smyrnseans, and to 
 Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna. In all 
 these letters he shows great familiarity 
 with our New Testament. He does not 
 refer to its teachings as equal in authority 
 with the Hebrew Scriptures, but treats it 
 with a respect verging toward such a 
 recognition. In the city of Antioch he 
 stood in the very places made sacred by 
 Paul, Barnabas, Peter, and all the great 
 Christian leaders, and was thoroughly fa- 
 miliar with their works and writings. He 
 is therefore an important witness for the 
 existence and growing reverence for the 
 writings of the New Testament as we now 
 have it. 
 
 A great character now comes before us 
 to give his testimony in the person of 
 Pol^xarp. There is no more fragrant name 
 in Christian history, no one more revered 
 for his services while living and for his 
 
 86 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 steadfast faith when dying as a martyr. 
 The readers of church history will remem- 
 ber his noble answer to the governor when 
 he stood at the stake ready for them to 
 kindle the jflames. The governor tried to 
 evade executing him, and he cried at the 
 last: "Swear, and I release you. Revile 
 Christ." Polycarp replied: "Eighty and 
 six years do I serve him, and he has never 
 done me wrong. And how can I blaspheme 
 my King that saved me.^" He wrote a 
 letter to the Philippians, the people to 
 whom one of Paul's Epistles was written. 
 That letter is full of the New Testament, 
 used as though he thought it most au- 
 thoritative and useful to them, at least 
 most persuasive and influential in leading 
 them to that which was for their greatest 
 good. He does not speak of the New Tes- 
 tament as Bible, but he uses it with a 
 respect that shows that it had come near 
 to that in his own thought. 
 
 Only a few years ago "The Teaching of 
 the Apostles" was discovered and given to 
 the Christian world. It dates from about 
 120, though parts of it are much older. 
 It corroborates the witnesses already heard 
 
 87 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 in these pages in support of the position 
 that the New Testament as we now have it 
 was in general use, with a degree of respect 
 and reverence, not equal to but approach- 
 ing the prevailing feeling toward the He- 
 brew Scriptures. All through it there is a 
 free use of the Gospels, of all the Epistles 
 of Paul and of other writers. It is, of 
 course, not so circumstantial and satisfac- 
 tory to us as it would have been if the 
 author had written with an eye to the fact 
 that his w^ork would pass under the critical 
 eye of the twentieth century. He wrote for 
 the good of those whom he was addressing, 
 without technical care, in an easy, flowing 
 style, with great simplicity and sincerity. 
 
 We might add much more testimony of 
 the same kind as that already given, from 
 the letter of Barnabas, from Valentinus, 
 Hermas, and many others, but those who 
 desire to follow the subject further will 
 know where to find the literature for it. 
 We now come to a later period and higher 
 development of New Testament influence. 
 Moving forward fifty years, we come to the 
 great Roman churchman, Justin Martyr. 
 We pause with him only long enough to say 
 
 88 
 
THE NEW TESTAINIENT 
 
 that he reports that about forty years 
 after Saint John's death the Gospels are 
 being regularly read along with the Old 
 Testament, sometimes preceding it as of 
 greater importance. This marks a de- 
 cided advance in the use of the New 
 Testament. 
 
 A little later we have a conclusive proof 
 of the prominence the New Testament had 
 secured in the life of the church by the 
 publication of Tation's Diatessaron, or the 
 Book of the Four. This is proof that the 
 four Gospels were in use, and in such 
 general use as to justify the labor and 
 expense of such a publication. 
 
 We have a mutilated fragment of a most 
 important old document discovered a few 
 years ago in the Ambrosian Library of 
 Milan. It is called the Muratorian Frag- 
 ment. It dates from about 170, and con- 
 tains the oldest known list of the books of 
 the New Testament. It begins with the 
 Gospel of Saint Luke, all above that being 
 torn off; the lost part almost certainly 
 contained the names of Matthew and 
 Mark. Following Saint Luke is the Gos- 
 pel by John, then the Acts of the Apostles, 
 
 89 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 after that the thirteen epistles of Saint 
 Paul. The Epistle of Jude, two epistles of 
 John, the Revelation of John, and the 
 Revelation of Peter, are also named. The 
 Epistle of James, First and Second Peter, 
 and the Epistle to the Hebrews were 
 omitted, as these probably were not gen- 
 erally known in the west till a later period. 
 We now turn to another very important 
 witness in the person of Irenaeus, bishop of 
 Lyons in Gaul. He was a native of Asia 
 Minor, and thus became one of the living 
 bonds between the east and the west, 
 having been in Rome, and finally bishop 
 of Lyons. He saw Polyoarp in his boy- 
 hood and had unusual opportunities for 
 knowing the inner life of the church, its 
 recognized literature, and the respect in 
 which its various writings were held. He 
 speaks of the four Gospels, and says, "The 
 Holy Spirit said by Matthew," showing 
 that the church then held the inspiration 
 of the Gospels. He also mentions as 
 "scripture" the Acts of the Apostles, 
 twelve epistles of Saint Paul (omitting 
 Philemon), the Revelation of Saint John, 
 also First John, First Peter, and Hebrews. 
 
 90 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 In reciting how he used to see the blessed 
 Polycarp when an old man sit and repeat 
 what he had heard John and other eye- 
 witnesses say about the works and words 
 of the Lord, he uses this significant lan- 
 guage, "And all that he said was in strict 
 agreement with the Scriptures." This 
 shows that the New Testament books were 
 then regarded as scripture. 
 
 From Irenaeus we return east again to 
 hear from Clement of Alexandria, one of 
 the great churchmen of that age. In 
 speaking of one of the sayings of Jesus, 
 he says, "We have not this saying in the 
 four Gospels which have been handed down 
 to us; it is to be found in the Gospel to the 
 Egyptians." He quotes from the Acts of 
 the Apostles, twelve epistles of Saint Paul 
 (omitting Philemon), the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews (which he says is by Saint Paul), 
 First John, First Peter, Jude, and the 
 Revelation of Saint John. He shows that 
 the line of separation was not yet sharply 
 drawn, as do some of these other witnesses 
 I have quoted, by referring to other writ- 
 ings as inspired that were later rejected, 
 as the epistles of Clement and Barnabas, 
 
 91 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 the Revelation of Peter and the Shep- 
 herd. 
 
 From Alexandria we pass west on the 
 continent of Africa to historic old Carthage 
 to hear from one of the greatest minds of 
 that age, Tertullian. He was a sturdy, 
 stirring man of wonderful power and in- 
 fluence. He complains of a clumsy trans- 
 lation of the New Testament into Latin, 
 now in use in his churches, that he does 
 not like. This Latin Testament, as his 
 quotations show, contained all the books 
 of our present New Testament except the 
 Epistle of James, Second Peter, and He- 
 brews. 
 
 This brief outline of the testimony of 
 the postapostolic church brings us down 
 to the year 200. We have not found, nor 
 can there be found, any decree or formal 
 action setting apart a certain number of 
 books to be accepted as inspired and au- 
 thoritative in the church. But we have 
 found a growing use in the churches, and 
 an increasing reverence for certain books 
 held to be inspired of God, with slight 
 variations in the books included in the 
 lists in various cities. In a few of the 
 
 92 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 churches some of the books now in the 
 canon were not received, such as the 
 Epistles of James, Second Peter, Second 
 and Third John, Jude, Hebrews, and Rev- 
 ehxtion. In some of the churches certain 
 books now considered apocryphal were 
 accepted, as the epistles of Clement, Bar- 
 nabas, Hermas, and the Revelation of 
 Peter and the Shepherd. It is slow yet 
 substantial progress for one hundred and 
 forty years of Christian development. 
 
 We now pass over a hundred years and 
 come to the period of persecution under 
 the Emperor Diocletian. The lives of 
 Christians were sacrificed, their Scriptures 
 burned, and their assemblies broken up. 
 The eagerness of the persecutors to destroy 
 the Scriptures is one of the best evidences 
 of the esteem in which they were held by 
 the church. The great church historian, 
 Eusebius, who had seen the Scriptures 
 burned in the market place by the perse- 
 cutors, is our first witness. In 331 Con- 
 stantine, the Christian emperor, is on the 
 throne, and he sends to Eusebius in Jeru- 
 salem an order for "Fifty copies of the Di- 
 vine Scriptures on prepared skins, by skilled 
 
 93 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 scribes." In fulfilling this order for "the 
 Divine Scriptures" Eusebius divided the 
 writings which were claimed to be scrip- 
 ture into three classes, as follows: 
 
 I. The accepted books, which include the 
 New Testament as we have it with the 
 exception of these seven books, the Epistles 
 of James, Jude, Hebrews, Second Peter, 
 Second and Third John, and Revelation. 
 
 II. The controverted books, that is, 
 books received in some places and not in 
 others. This list is composed of the seven 
 books omitted in the first list. 
 
 f'^ III. The spurious books, in which he 
 names the Epistle of Barnabas, and the 
 Shepherd of Her mas. 
 
 This testimony substantiates two points : 
 that the term "Divine Scriptures" was used 
 by Constantine and accepted by Eusebius 
 as applying to the New Testament, and 
 that the books of the New Testament in 
 the opinion of Eusebius were substantially 
 as we have them. It was the opinion of 
 Tischendorf — and many scholars agree 
 with him — that the manuscript which he 
 discovered in the Convent of Saint Cath- 
 arine on Mount Sinai, and the manuscript 
 
 94 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 in the Vatican Library in Rome, were of 
 this number of fifty prepared by Eusebius. 
 
 Thirty years after this the great Athana- 
 sius in Alexandria, who has the credit of 
 having saved the church from heresy, pre- 
 pares his annual letter to the clergy to be 
 read by them in the churches. In that 
 letter he gives a list of the accepted books 
 of the Bible, and after completing the Old 
 Testament he comes to the New Testa- 
 ment, and gives as his list exactly the 
 books which we now have in the New 
 Testament. 
 
 We now go back to the church at Rome 
 for our last word of testimony on this sub- 
 ject. In the year 383, at the request of 
 Pope Damascus, the great scholar Jerome 
 began the revision of the old Latin Testa- 
 ment. This was the beginning of his great 
 work, the Vulgate Bible, which for one 
 thousand years was the Bible of all Europe. 
 In this revision the books he gives are 
 exactly the books we have now in the 
 New Testament. 
 
 This practically completes the discussion 
 of this subject in the present treatment of 
 it. Much fuller and very convincing evi- 
 
 95 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 dence might have been given if we had not 
 feared overtaxing of the reader's patience. 
 It will be observed that there is here no 
 mention about a determination of the books 
 that should belong to the New Testament 
 by any council, conference, or other eccle- 
 siastical assembly of the church. This is 
 for the simple and sufficient reason that 
 there never was any such action. The 
 common spiritual consciousness of the 
 church settled that question through three 
 hundred years of development, and from 
 that decision there is no appeal. In the 
 sense in which the word used to be em- 
 ployed, there is not, and there never was, 
 a canon of the New Testament. We use 
 the word only in an accommodated sense. 
 
 96 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE APOCRYPHA 
 
 There can be no fair and thorough dis- 
 cussion of the making of the Bible that 
 does not take account of the Apocrypha, 
 which has been held, and is still held by 
 many, as a true and legitimate part of 
 Holy Scripture. The Bible is not the 
 clear-cut product of a recognized authority, 
 the exact boundaries of which may be de- 
 termined with mathematical accuracy; but 
 it is, rather, a clear stream flowing through 
 muddy waters, the margins of which are 
 bordered with a mixed condition that shade 
 off into that with which it has nothing in 
 common. The literary impulse that grew 
 stronger as the life of the race deepened 
 and broadened, under the stimulating in- 
 fluence of the great truths of revelation, 
 was very active in the stirring period be- 
 tween Malachi and the coming of our 
 Lord. Some of the productions of that 
 period seem quite up to the plane of 
 inspiration in moral and spiritual elevation, 
 while others are trivial and worthless. In 
 
 97 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 drawing the line between inspired and un- 
 inspired, both in the Old and in the New 
 Testament, some books were very near the 
 line on both sides, some barely winning, and 
 others as narrowly failing of recognition. 
 
 The books of the Apocrj^pha have held 
 a semisacred position through all history. 
 They have been held by many as equal in 
 inspiration and authority to the other 
 books of the Old Testament, but a still 
 larger number have refused to concede this 
 much to them, while holding them of great 
 value for instruction in the history of 
 Israel and for edification. They are per- 
 meated with the devotional spirit that 
 characterizes all Hebrew literature, they 
 maintain the high ethical standard set up 
 in the Old Testament, and have the same 
 insistence upon supreme loyalty to Jehovah, 
 They seem to be the prg^lur^ "f spirit aally 
 minded rather than of Spirit-guided men; 
 at least this was the judgment of those 
 who determined the Hebrew canon. 
 
 In order to accuracy and clearness of 
 thought it is well here to state that the 
 literature of that period between Malachi 
 and Christ was divided into two parts: 
 
 98 
 
THE APOCRYPHA 
 
 first, the books that we include in the 
 .\pocrypha; and, second, the books known 
 as (jx^r'ihj^ijo. The first were historical 
 and praotii i! Ife second prophetical in 
 form without prophetic inspiration, and 
 more given to the portrayal of disasters 
 than to the unfolding of the glories of the 
 coming kingdom of God. Saint Jude rec- 
 ognizes the truthfulness of one passage at 
 least in the book of Enoch, which is one 
 of the apocalyptic books, but no strong 
 claim has ever been made for the recog- 
 nition of these books as inspired. 
 
 The books of the Apocrypha, which ap- 
 proach so near to inspiration as to have a 
 kind of halo about them in our minds, are. 
 First and Second Esdras, Tobit, Judith, 
 the Remainder of Esther, the Wisdom of 
 Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, Song of 
 the Three Children, Story of Susanna, Bel 
 and the Dragon, Prayer of Manasses, and 
 First and Second Maccabees. The first 
 point to fix in our minds concerning these 
 books is that they never were admitted 
 into the Hebrew Bible; that volume 
 closed with Malachi. 
 
 But to understand that period and the 
 99 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 religious influence acquired by these books 
 we must look beyond the established He- 
 brew communion. There was at that time 
 a large, thrifty, enterprising Hebrew popu- 
 lation in all the trading centers of the 
 world. Two influences were responsible for 
 this: first, the captives carried away to 
 Babylon and into Persia never all returned 
 to Palestine. Many of them grew strong 
 and influential in the lands to which they 
 were carried, and found it to their interests 
 and agreeable to their tastes to remain; 
 second, the opportunities of traffic and 
 business in such enterprising cities as 
 Antioch, Corinth, and Alexandria drew 
 many of the most enterprising Hebrews 
 away from their native land for the better 
 conditions offered. In all these commer- 
 cial centers the Greek language was in 
 general use, and where the Greek language 
 went, Greek arts, ideas, and methods of 
 life naturally followed. The Hebrew ele- 
 ment in these communities was touched 
 and modified by these influences. Saul of 
 Tarsus was brought up in such a com- 
 munity, and, strict Jew as he was, his 
 whole life shows the influence of this en- 
 
 100 
 
THE APOCRYPHA 
 
 vironment upon the intellectual develop- 
 ment of his young life. Naturally, the old 
 Hebrew exclusiveness and strictness would 
 give way to more liberal thoughts and feel- 
 ings, and there grew up a broader-minded, 
 a more open-minded generation of Jews 
 than had ever before appeared. While this 
 may seem to have been a loss in one way, 
 it was a great gain in another way, for this 
 element in the life of the nations was a 
 people prepared and made ready for the 
 approach of Christianity. It was among 
 these people that Christianity had its first 
 great triumphs. It came to them on the 
 plane of the Hebrew Scriptures to which 
 they were still devoted, but it made cer- 
 tain additions to them, a method for which 
 their liberal tendencies had prepared them. 
 If we follow Saint Paul in his missionary 
 tours, we find him everywhere going into 
 the synagogue of the Jews, opening the He- 
 brew Bible and arguing from it that "this 
 Jesus whom I preach unto you is Christ." 
 This vast Grseco-Hebrew population had 
 its most learned and influential center at 
 Alexandria in Egypt. To that entire popu- 
 lation the Apocrypha appealed more power- 
 
 101 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 fully than to the more strict Hebrews. It 
 fell in with their liberal tendencies to give 
 it larger consideration than was customary 
 among the regular Jews, and from this 
 center in Alexandria especially went forth 
 influences that affected its relation to the 
 Bible for all time. The king of Egypt, 
 Ptolemy Philadelphus, who took a great 
 interest in the Jews and in their literature, 
 conceived the happy thought of giving 
 them their Bible in the Greek language, 
 the language with which they were most 
 familiar. So, about B. C. 250, he secured 
 the translation of the Hebrew Bible into 
 the Greek language by Seventy, or, to 
 speak more accurately, seventy-two of the 
 best scholars of the age, from which nu- 
 merical fact it derived the name by which 
 it has generally been known, the Septua- 
 gint. Hardly any other literary event has 
 played so large a part in the growing 
 thought of the world as this translation 
 has, not only in Egypt and Palestine, but 
 throughout the world. To gratify these 
 Jews of "the dispersion," who naturally 
 came to have laxer views about inspiration 
 than was common among strict Hebrews, 
 
 102 
 
THE APOCRYPHA 
 
 the Apocrypha was bound up with the 
 other books of the Bible. The books of 
 the Apocrypha came in by degrees in suc- 
 cessive additions without formal action or 
 declaration, and so came into common use 
 as a kind of subordinate scripture without 
 any clearly defined or well understood 
 standing or authority. Thus they became 
 linked to the Septuagint version in a rela- 
 tion that has proven wonderfully persistent 
 and embarrassing. So at that early date 
 there were practically two Bibles, the He- 
 brew canon and the Septuagint version 
 with its apocryphal addenda. 
 
 A very important question now arises: 
 What was the attitude of the early Chris- 
 tian Church toward these two versions.^ 
 One of the first things that strike us is 
 that our Lord and the apostles made 
 nearly all their quotations from the Septua- 
 gint version. This we must believe was 
 not because of a preference for that ver- 
 sion, or for its relation to the Apocrypha, 
 but because it was the only Bible three 
 was in the language of the people. The 
 people did not understand the Hebrew lan- 
 guage; they used the Greek, hence the 
 
 103 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 Greek Bible was used in conveying to 
 them a message from the Scriptures. The 
 question as to which was the true Bible, 
 the Palestinian or the Alexandrian, cannot 
 have been considered a very important one, 
 for there is no allusion to it in all the 
 apostolical writings. 
 
 The testimony of the early fathers of 
 the Christian Church with practical una- 
 nimity supports the Hebrew canon as the 
 true Bible, but without rejecting the 
 Apocrypha in every case, as worthy of a 
 place with the other sacred writings. There 
 is often a vagueness of statement, an ap- 
 parent effort to gloss over a difficulty that 
 leaves us in doubt of the author's real 
 position. Melito, bishop of Sardis (loO- 
 170), gives a list of the books of the Bible 
 containing only the twenty-two of the He- 
 brew canon, but he gives the titles and the 
 order of the LXX, leaving us in doubt 
 whether he may not have combined tw^o 
 or more books under one title. The 
 learned Origen (185-254), in dealing with 
 this question has a similar vagueness and 
 want of definite statement that leaves us 
 in doubt as to his exact meaning. Irenseus, 
 
 104 
 
THE APOCRYPHA 
 
 bishop of Lyons in Gaul; Clement of Alex- 
 andria, the city where the Apocrypha had 
 its recognition; and Tertullian, of North 
 Africa, all commanding personalities in the 
 early church, quote from the Apocrypha and 
 have it bound up with their Bibles. The 
 "Old Latin" version of North Africa was 
 made directly from the Alexandrian Bible 
 of the LXX and contained the Apocrypha. 
 Coming down to the great church his- 
 torian Eusebius, a leading authority on 
 questions of the canon, we find in his 
 writings three separate lists of the books 
 in the canon of the Scriptures, and in every 
 case he omits the Apocrypha. Cyril, bishop 
 of Jerusalem, a little later is very decided 
 against the use of the Apocrypha as scrip- 
 ture. Among other things he says: "Learn 
 from the church what are the books of the 
 Old and New Testament, and I pray you 
 read nothing of the apocryphal books. For 
 the translation of the Divine Scriptures 
 which were spoken by the Holy Spirit was 
 accomplished through the Holy Spirit. 
 Read the twenty-two books which these 
 rendered, but have nothing to do with 
 apocryphal writings." Equally explicit is 
 
 105 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 the testimony of the great Christian leader 
 of the fourth century, Athanasius, bishop of 
 Alexandria. He says, "All the books of the 
 Old Testament are in number 22." Then 
 he proceeds to give the names of the books, 
 just as we have them to-day. The synod of 
 Laodicea (360) gives the same list in enumer- 
 ating the books of the Bible. Some other 
 authorities of that period were more favor- 
 able to the use of the Apocrypha as scripture. 
 We now turn to the Church of Rome, 
 which represents nearly one haK of the 
 nominal Christianity of the world. We 
 here find the vagueness and indefiniteness 
 that had so long prevailed coming to a 
 definite and clear statement in the decree 
 of the Council of Trent, adopted on April 
 8, 1546. The Vulgate Bible prepared by 
 and under the direction of that great 
 scholar of the fourth century Jerome, for 
 a thousand years the Bible of Europe, at 
 first excluded all but two books of the 
 Apocrypha, but gradually they crept in till 
 at the time of the meeting of the Council 
 of Trent they were all bound up with the 
 canonical books. Martin Luther strongly 
 denounced the use of the Apocrypha, in- 
 
 106 
 
THE APOCRYPHA 
 
 sisting that only the Hebrew canon of the 
 Old Testament and the acknowledged 
 books of the New Testament should be 
 admitted as of authority. This was as a 
 red flag to the Council, which was burning 
 with fury against everything Lutheran. 
 Though opposed by all the best scholars 
 and ablest thinkers of the church, the 
 proposed action was rushed through the 
 Council, in which occurs the following: 
 "The holy Ecumenical and General Coun- 
 cil of Trent, following the example of the 
 orthodox fathers, venerates all the books 
 of the Old and New Testaments, with an 
 equal feeling of devotion and reverence." 
 Then follows a list of the books, including 
 all of the Apocrjqjha, with an anathema 
 on all who in the future shall not receive 
 all the books as equally inspired scripture. 
 Bishop Westcott says: "This fatal decree, 
 in which the Council, harassed by the fear 
 of lay critics and grammarians, gave a new 
 aspect to the whole question of the canon, 
 was ratified by fifty -three prelates, amongst 
 whom ther<^ was not one German, not one 
 scholar distinguished for historic^^ learn- 
 ing, not one who was fittod by special study 
 
 107 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 of the subject in which the truth could only 
 be determined by the voice of antiquity." 
 A General Council of the Roman Church 
 having made such a declaration, there is 
 no way of recalling or going round it, but 
 it must stand for all time as the position of 
 that church. 
 
 The attitude of the Greek Church has 
 been wavering, inconstant, if not self- 
 contradictory. The synods of Constanti- 
 nople, Jaffa, and Jerusalem seem to approve 
 the Apocrypha, while many of the leading 
 scholars refuse to accept it, and the Longer 
 Catechism of Philaret, which has official 
 sanction, gives to all books outside of the 
 twenty-two an inferior place, as meant for 
 the reading of those just entering the 
 church. The theory of the church seems 
 to be expressed in this rule of the cate- 
 chism, but its practice has been about as 
 free and varied as though there had been 
 no rule on the subject. 
 
 The position of the Anglican Church has 
 not been decidedly for or against the use of 
 the Apocrypha, though it has consistently 
 held that full inspiration belongs only to 
 the canonical books. The Apocrypha is 
 
 108 
 
THE APOCRYPHA 
 
 sanctioned for ecclesiastical use, but it is 
 not accepted as authority for doctrinal 
 purposes. On certain daj^s portions of it 
 are read in the church lessons, but for edi- 
 fication rather than for establishing doc- 
 trine. In all her versions of the Scriptures, 
 from Tyndale to the Authorized Version, 
 the Apocrypha is printed by itself as an 
 appendix to the Old Testament. 
 
 All the Protestant churches stand on the 
 ground held by the best scholars of all the 
 ages of Christian history, that the books of 
 the Apocrypha hold a subordinate position 
 to the books of the sacred canon, are no part 
 of it, and are to be read for edification and 
 instruction and not for doctrine. 
 
 Thus we find the Christian world divided 
 into two camps, one opposed to the other 
 on this question of what constitutes the 
 Bible. Thus we are brought back to our 
 fundamental position that inspiration is a 
 perpetual thing in the Church of God, and 
 that men do not come to the knowledge of 
 God and of his will concerning them but 
 by the Light of the Holy Spirit, whether 
 they have or have not the Bible. The 
 process of spiritual discrimination, applica- 
 
 109 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 tion, and appropriation is still going on, 
 and men must for themselves decide this 
 fundamental question of the ages by choos- 
 ing between the one canon and the other. 
 Happily, the question is reduced to a form 
 where great practical error is not possible, 
 and the great message of God to men re- 
 mains intact in either choice. The addition 
 of the Apocrypha to the Bible brings in no 
 new truth, nor does it take away any old 
 truth. God's real Word remains unaffected 
 by it. If with our Protestant Bible we 
 should bind up Abraham Lincoln's Gettys- 
 burg Speech, Epictetus on How a Man 
 on Every Occasion Can Maintain His 
 Proper Character, and Demosthenes's Ora- 
 tion on the Crown, we would take nothing 
 from and add nothing to God's great reve- 
 lation to men. Some would find in these 
 productions a real inspiration, as truly di- 
 vine to them as anything in Esther or in 
 the Song of Solomon, and in no way 
 conflict with anything in the sacred canon. 
 Practically, the exclusion or the inclusion 
 of the Apocrypha is of little importance, 
 for the great message of God to man is 
 unaffected by it. 
 
 110 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE PRESENT STANDING OF 
 THE BIBLE 
 
 The Bible is now everywhere accepted 
 by Christian believers as a revelation from 
 God, teaching the truths of religion and 
 the duties of life as no other book does. 
 But it has not been so accepted because 
 of the claims of the authors, nor yet be- 
 cause of the faith of the people to whom 
 the various books were written, but be- 
 cause a living spiritual energy has gone 
 forth from it, producing fruits that reveal 
 the character of the tree. The ages have 
 been full of pretended revelations, sanc- 
 tioned by assumed miracles and visits of 
 angels. Even in this most enlightened 
 period of the world's history impostors 
 boldly strut before the public, claiming to 
 be sent of God to teach mankind the way 
 of life. One of the latest of these has 
 stolen and misappropriated to itself two of 
 the most influential words in our modern 
 life, for Christian Science is neither Chris- 
 tian nor scientific; that is, it does not make 
 Jesus Christ supreme as the Saviour of 
 
 111 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 men, nor does it proceed according to the 
 facts of human experience as testified to 
 in all the course of history. Striking cases 
 of the kind that have had large success 
 through longer periods are Mohammedan- 
 ism and Mormonisra, but other equally 
 fraudulent but less successful claims have 
 been innumerable. A skillful artist can de- 
 ceive "the very elect" in pretended mir- 
 acles. The magicians of Egypt were able 
 to match the miracles wrought by Moses 
 up to a certain point. 
 
 The acceptance of a revelation by an 
 individual to whom it is made may be 
 sufficiently warranted by attending cir- 
 cumstances, but to prepare a book for 
 general acceptance through long periods of 
 time requires corroborating evidences that 
 appeal to the cool judgment of mankind 
 with convincing force. The Christian 
 Scriptures were subjected to the learned 
 criticism of the best scholars of the age 
 when they were written. They were put 
 on trial and tested in the practical ex- 
 periences of life by thousands of people 
 in all positions of life. All the thinkers, 
 scholars, and preachers of the faith were 
 
 112 
 
STANDING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 set to work comparing them with the ac- 
 cepted standards of religious beUef and 
 with their own rehgious consciousness, and 
 no production found its way into the canon 
 that had not successfully passed all of 
 these tests of its genuineness and truth. 
 In all these processes we assume what was 
 promised by our Lord, that the Holy 
 Ghost directed the course of thought in 
 the church and led to such conclusions as 
 were according to truth. 
 
 The Bible is cordially accepted by the 
 believers of this age as the Word of God, 
 but it is conceded that the human element 
 in it is large. It appears in the style of 
 WTiting, in the expression of taste, temper, 
 passion, national bias, and other peculiari- 
 ties of the writers. Saint Paul looks at 
 Christianity from the standpoint of the 
 law, as a system of righteousness and sal- 
 vation above law and yet not without law; 
 Saint Peter views Christianity from the 
 standpoint of fulfilled prophecy; and Saint 
 James looks at it as a perfected system of 
 ethics and practical precepts. The human 
 element is everywhere in evidence, its 
 weakness as well as its strength. 
 
 113 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 The Word that was made flesh also 
 presents this double aspect, "very God" 
 and "very man.'* The human element 
 was so pronounced that many could see 
 only that, while his closest friends of most 
 spiritual type fully recognized it and 
 thought it no derogation from his deity 
 that he ate fish and bread like other 
 hungry men. His favorite title for des- 
 ignating himseK was "Son of man." As 
 with the Word made flesh, so with the Word 
 made literature, the human elemeAL, with 
 common human hmitations, is the visible, 
 the outstanding feature that adapts it to 
 human intelligence and makes the strong- 
 est appeal to the human heart, yet is '^ 
 the Word of God. It has many limitations 
 that speak lor themselves. 
 
 Among these is incompleteness. It is in 
 fragments, as though men became weary, 
 or knew but a part, or had not time and 
 other resources for writing fully. No 
 writer completes his task. Saint Matthew 
 omits very important utterances of the 
 Lord reported by Saint Luke, and both 
 fail to give some of the best things spoken 
 by the Master, as reported by Saint John, 
 
 114 
 
STANDING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 and he declares in the closing verses of his 
 Gospel that if he should record all the 
 works and words of the Lord, "even the 
 world itself could not contain the books 
 that would be written." 
 
 It was limited also by man's knowledge 
 and capacity for understanding. This ac- 
 counts for differing styles of writing, sweep 
 of thought, depth of reasoning, and height 
 of poetical genius in the different books of 
 divine revelation. The revelation must be 
 according to the capacity for understand- 
 ing and expression of the person receiving 
 it. The ablest teacher could not give in- 
 struction in algebra to one who did not 
 know the alphabet. The messages of God 
 to men had to be adapted to their intelli- 
 gence, the range of their vocabulary, their 
 experience and capacity for spiritual un- 
 derstanding. Therefore the Master said, "I 
 have yet many things to say unto you, but J 
 ye cannot bear them now." They mustj 
 learn more, experience more, and rise to a[' 
 higher plane of life before they could be fit- \ 
 ted to receive the revelation he had to make. 
 
 A good illustration of this principle is in 
 the use of the word "holy," or "holiness." 
 
 115 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 It was a thousand years before Israel came 
 to understand that word, and only then 
 by a careful education by sprinklings, wash- 
 ings, and ceremonials emphasizing the idea 
 of cleanness and purity. There was abso- 
 lutely no conception or knowledge of such 
 a character as that word was intended to 
 represent outside of Hebrew literature; 
 there were no examples, no standards, and 
 no etymology to guide the understanding. 
 The early Hebrew idea of the word seems 
 to have been that of unapproachableness. 
 The same appears in the kindred word of 
 "righteousness" as used in Hebrew litera- 
 ture. The high ethical meaning of that 
 word did not appear till the later prophets 
 of Israel turned their searchlights upon it. 
 Revelation must, therefore, be given with 
 reference to man's vocabulary and range of 
 spiritual understanding, unless it is in- 
 tended, as in the case of the words just cited, 
 to follow the revelation with a long process 
 of education to make its meaning clear. 
 
 It was limited also by its mechanical 
 equipment. It was given before the age of 
 printing and paper-making, and after the 
 revelation was made its existence was very 
 
 116 
 
STANDING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 precarious and its preservation in accurate 
 form very doubtful. It was written for 
 the most part on papyrus, a frail and un- 
 reliable substance made of layers of the 
 pith out of the stock of a growing plant, 
 pressed together, polished, and cut into 
 sheets from six to eighteen inches wide 
 and of any length required. Parchment 
 was too costly for as poor a people as most 
 of the early Christians were. If the sheets 
 of papyrus became damp, they contracted 
 mildew and the writing became illegible; 
 and if they were thoroughly dry, they be- 
 came brittle and were easily broken and 
 crumbled. It is easy to see that being 
 often unrolled, loaned from one individual 
 to another, and carried from one church to 
 another to be read in the services and 
 examined by many curious people or ad- 
 mirers of the author, there would be great 
 danger of deterioration and loss. We have 
 but to think out the circumstances attend- 
 ing any one of these manuscripts to see the 
 danger to which they were exposed. Take 
 the case of Saint Paul's Epistle to the 
 Romans. If it was carried to Rome by 
 Phoebe, as it probably was, her arrival in 
 
 117 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 Rome with such a document would be one 
 of the most sensational events of the age. 
 The next Sabbath there would not be 
 standing room in the church where the 
 epistle would be read, and many eager 
 eyes must be permitted to look upon it. 
 Every congregation and group of wor- 
 shipers must have it, or some part of it 
 read, and that oftentimes. Then there 
 would be requests to loan it to nearby cities 
 to be read in many assemblies. A frail 
 fabric handled thus, often by unskilled 
 hands, must soon sufiFer in the process. 
 One striking illustration of this liability to 
 breakage and the loss of fragments appears 
 in the Gospel of Mark. Scholars are quite 
 agreed that such a break occurred at the 
 eighth verse of the sixteenth chapter. Any- 
 one reading that chapter will note the sud- 
 den stoppage of the continuous account of 
 the resurrection, and the place of the frag- 
 ment broken away is filled in by discon- 
 nected passages from some other source, 
 possibly from memory on the same subject. 
 The copying of these manuscripts was 
 very unreliable. Anyone who has ever 
 carried a manuscript through our more 
 
 118 
 
STANDING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 improved methods to publication knows 
 how difficult it is to avoid mistakes. After 
 the greatest care by typesetter, proof 
 reader, and author going over it again 
 and again, most unaccountable errors creep 
 in. A man employed to copy one of these 
 Gospel manuscripts would do his work 
 alone, in a hot climate, and it would 
 hardly be possible for him to execute his 
 task without omitting or inserting, or sub- 
 stituting a wrong word. Few people can 
 copy even a list of names of any con- 
 siderable length without making mistakes. 
 
 Another Hmitation is in the break of 
 continuity. Not one of the original manu- 
 scripts of that early apostoHc age has come 
 down to us. We have only copies and 
 translations. But there is a great mass of 
 evidence to show that if they are not 
 technically exact copies they are vitally and 
 practically the same as the originals. 
 
 Some minds are disturbed by discovering 
 little inaccuracies and errors in our received 
 versions in matters that do not affect the 
 vital theme or essential contents of the 
 revelation. Some minds are naturally tech- 
 nical and given to quibbling, while others 
 
 119 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 hold unwarranted theories of divine in- 
 spiration that are disturbed by discovering 
 these errors. It would be foreign to the 
 purpose of this writing to give a list of 
 these errors; they are so many and so 
 palpable that no careful reader can pass 
 over them without observing them. The 
 various translations differ widely in ver- 
 biage, and they cannot all be the exact 
 words in which the revelation was given 
 at the first. And if we admit any depar- 
 tures from the exact original, we have no 
 means of determining how far they may 
 have gone. But these lingual errors do 
 not affect the great substance of the mes- 
 sage; the way of salvation and the will of 
 God concerning human conduct shine out 
 clearly through all the encumbering limita- 
 tions of the human element of style and 
 stumbling utterance. If our Revised Ver- 
 sion is without error as the very Word of 
 God in phraseology as well as in substance, 
 then our fathers had a Bible in which were 
 many errors, as anyone may see by com- 
 paring the fifth of First John and the third 
 of Saint James, as well as other scriptures 
 in the Authorized and Revised Versions. 
 
 120 
 
STANDING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 This condition of the revelation har- 
 monizes with what was said earher in 
 this discussion to the effect that nothing 
 could be more fatal to human development, 
 spiritual as well as intellectual, than an 
 exact methodical revelation, in which every 
 word was just as God uttered it and in 
 which every duty of life was clearly stated, 
 so that a man would never have anything 
 more to do than to pull out his schedule 
 to determine just what he ought to do. 
 This would paralyze the intellect and dwarf 
 the soul by removing the necessity for 
 effort. The mind needs the spur of rea- 
 sonable doubt, and the necessity for la- 
 borious and prolonged investigation for dis- 
 entangling complex and obscure conditions. 
 For man*s good the truth must be placed 
 w^here sincerity of purpose, honesty of 
 method, earnestness of effort, and prayer 
 for divine help are necessary to attain it. 
 This becomes an educating, developing 
 process that may be of more value to the 
 soul than the truth itself. He is not a wise 
 father who hands out to his children as 
 their needs require without exacting pro- 
 ductive and creative energy and skill on 
 
 121 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 their part, for he thus holds them forever 
 in an infantile state. The mother eagle 
 chooses between nurslings and eagles, and 
 because she prefers eagles she flings her 
 young out of the nest and compels them to 
 beat the air wildly to save their lives till 
 they learn to mount and soar skyward. 
 
 God has placed all his gifts along the 
 pathway of heroic effort. Man must learn 
 by strenuous toil how to build a handful 
 of dust into growing and ripening grain, 
 how to transform that into a baked loaf, 
 and how with that to build living tissues 
 and brain cells out of which, by heroic 
 effort, he can project his Iliad, his Divina 
 Commedia, or his Paradise Lost. He 
 thanks God for the gift of gold, but he 
 does not find gold dollars rolling down his 
 streets, but he must penetrate the frozen 
 Klondike, search long and climb till he 
 grows dizzy to find above the timber line, 
 carefully disguised and locked up in the 
 flinty quartz, God's great gift to man, 
 which he must dig, explode, crush, and 
 mint before he can use. God's best 
 gifts are in some such form. The great 
 vital thing in truth-getting is the hunger 
 
 122 
 
STANDING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 of soul that longs for it, the heroic effort 
 that moves toward it, the kindling vision 
 that discloses it, and the lifting up of the 
 soul to God that finds him and in him 
 finds the truth and so is satisfied. If God 
 were to give us a revelation that would 
 save us this effort and its resulting discip- 
 line and development, it would be a posi- 
 tive injury to men. Jacob wrestling in 
 doubt and fear all night at the brook 
 Jabbok was a far better method for his 
 highest good than it would have been 
 to send a convoy of angels the day 
 before to assure him of safety. There is 
 no better method of proving and develop- 
 ing sincerity, honesty, and devotion in 
 men, and of driving them to God in prayer 
 for the promised teaching and guidance of 
 the Holy Spirit, than the necessity of 
 grappling with all these questions raised 
 by modern criticism, for which the way 
 seems to have been left open. In this 
 search for the truth the souls of men 
 must be held in a prayerful mood and in 
 vital relation to the Divine Spirit whose 
 oflSce is to guide us *'into all truth," the 
 truth that * 'shall make us free indeed." 
 
 123 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE BIBLE THE CREATURE OF 
 EXPERIENCE 
 
 The divine method of revelation was to 
 lift one man into a new atmosphere, per- 
 meate and enswathe him with truth and 
 spiritual influence, and to quicken his soul 
 till he had the power of vision and a 
 kindled enthusiasm for declaring the truth 
 as he saw it. Truth was not dropped into 
 the mind as an abstract proposition, but it 
 came in by the way of experience as a 
 concrete fact, demonstrated as to its reality 
 by experience. A man must first become 
 the truth, see and feel the truth; then 
 may he prophesy, and not till then. It 
 means something more than intellectual 
 cognition, something deeper, more satisfy- 
 ing, and more assuring. The word of the 
 Lord must always come out of "the burn- 
 ing bush," the supernatural equipment, 
 illumination, and empowering of a man 
 given over to the service of God. Espe- 
 cially must this be so for the written reve- 
 
 124 
 
THE CREATURE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 lation, intended for the instruction of all 
 ages, that there may be no error, no lack, 
 and no extravagance. It is the office of 
 the Divine Spirit to charge the human 
 mind with his thoughts and affections, and 
 to assist it in their adequate expression. 
 
 This element of experience in divine 
 things as the necessary channel of di- 
 vine revelation is clearly manifested in the 
 first writer of our sacred books. When 
 the time came for beginning the formal 
 development of God's purposes to Israel, 
 a special person was selected as instrument, 
 teacher, and leader. The childhood of 
 Moses was sufficiently marked by special 
 providences and striking events to raise 
 among his people the highest expectations 
 for his after life. He must have known 
 these facts and been stimulated by them 
 in his education in the universities of 
 Egypt. 
 
 When at the age of forty he came to a 
 consciousness of his divine vocation as de- 
 liverer and leader of Israel, a little pre- 
 cipitation and lack of prudence threw him 
 back on a long course of discipline that 
 would have crushed a less resolute man. 
 
 125 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 With the charge of murder and treason 
 hanging over him, he must hide himseK 
 in the far-away soHtudes of Midian. A 
 university man of splendid abihties, tend- 
 ing sheep in mountain wilds for forty 
 years, would be a humiliation and dwarf- 
 ing experience that would have broken or 
 shriveled up a nature of less inherent 
 greatness. His life seemed a failure, his 
 career ended, his conscious vocation a de- 
 lusion when, at the age of eighty, came 
 the stirring call to heroic action, a call so 
 illumined and vitalized by attending divine 
 manifestations that it could not be set 
 aside. Then followed the ten plagues, the 
 pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night 
 on the outward march, the dividing sea 
 and the falling manna, Sinai and its reve- 
 lations, angel leadership and the vision of 
 God's glory. Then out of all this investi- 
 ture of divine manifestation and wonderful 
 experiences came the voice of a man, a 
 man charged and packed full of these great 
 events which were translated into thought 
 and speech in him. They became his very 
 life, and he spoke what he was, what he 
 saw and felt under their molding influence. 
 
 126 
 
THE CREATURE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 All that he wrote was but the record of his 
 experience, and of all that came to him 
 and out of him through these experiences. 
 He was that "burning bush" held aloft in 
 all his leadership of the people, giving forth 
 light and speech from the flame that did 
 not consume but glorified that upon which 
 it fed. 
 
 If we come to the patriarch of Uz, the 
 central figure in that drama of truth that 
 has instructed and comforted so many, we 
 find experience the substance, the ruling 
 idea of the book, turned over and worked 
 out in all the details of a wonderful teach- 
 ing drama. A man stricken with loss of 
 children, property, health, and sorely per- 
 plexed in mind about these experiences and 
 their cause is visited by his friends, who 
 assume to be his comforters. They at- 
 tempt to apply to him the untrue but 
 prevalent theory of the times that physical 
 well-being was proof of divine favor and 
 the loss of it evidence of divine anger be- 
 cause of some sin. They pressed him to 
 make confession, to declare his sin and thus 
 seek the favor of God, that he might be 
 restored to prosperity. Daily disputing 
 
 1£7 
 
THE IVIAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 with these misguided friends, worn out by 
 loss, suffering, and broken health. Job is 
 down where the flame of life barely flickers 
 in its socket. When there are no deeper 
 depths of distress to which he may descend. 
 Job is commanded to "pray for his friends," 
 who had vexed and tormented him by false 
 insinuations in the time of his great suf- 
 fering. Rising to the moral height of this 
 requirement, forgetting his own griefs, in a 
 vicarious supplication like that on Calvary, 
 he stretched out his hands of skin and bone 
 toward heaven, and while he poured out 
 his soul to God in prayer for his misguided 
 friends, thus reaching perfection's height, 
 the light fell over him and the account is, 
 "The Lord turned the captivity of Job, 
 when he prayed for his friends." It is a 
 drama of wonderful experiences, luminous 
 with truth and instructive to all ages by 
 his experiences and through them. It is 
 the experience that infolds and gives out 
 the light that is in the book, and from the 
 first it speaks of and to experience. 
 
 If we move forward along the track of 
 history to the great source of the psalmody 
 and spiritual literature of the Hebrews, we 
 
 128 
 
THE CREATURE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 find everywhere the "Hving waters" flow- 
 ing from the smitten rock of experience. 
 The poet king who gave the Hebrew peo- 
 pk^ their first great spiritual inspiration and 
 uphft was thoroughly disciplined and de- 
 veloped in the school of experience, and his 
 highest poetical flights were the declaration 
 of his own states of mind or experience. 
 His boyhood training as a shepherd de- 
 veloped in him what became the ruling idea 
 of his life, the duty and necessity of caring 
 for others; and in a country where there 
 were no universities it was one of the best 
 possible trainings for kingship. 
 
 While yet a lad he heard the living God 
 and the armies of Israel defied by the 
 braggart Philistine giant and felt his na- 
 ture stirred to its profoundest depths and 
 his faith put to its utmost test. Then first 
 there came into his nature a thrilling con- 
 sciousness of power, as it has come to many 
 another lad on occasion, and he felt that 
 all Israel was in some way represented in 
 him and that he stood in defense of the 
 glory and honor of Jehovah. In that con- 
 sciousness the hero emerges and the shep- 
 herd boy drops out of sight. After that he 
 
 129 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 came into the experience of a great love 
 and a bitter hate. Jonathan loved him, as 
 hardly any other man has loved another, 
 and Saul hated him with a wild, cruel, irra- 
 tional hate that would be appeased by 
 nothing less than the death of its object. 
 But standing there over the sleeping form 
 of his enemy, with his drawn sword in his 
 hand, he cut away only the skirt of the 
 king's robe which he afterward displayed 
 as proof of a magnanimity like that of the 
 prayer of Calvary by the Master for his 
 crucifiers. Afterward, with a sad break in 
 his own moral integrity, followed by bitter 
 penitence and spiritual restoration, he 
 learned in himself the frailty of human 
 nature. 
 
 To these educating and developing ex- 
 periences that fitted him so admirably for 
 speaking out the truth most needful to 
 men was to be added in his old age the 
 heartbreaking anguish of rebellion in his 
 own family. He was driven out of Jeru- 
 salem and across the Kidron, derided by 
 some of his own subjects, and found retreat 
 in the wilderness across the Jordan. The 
 ambitious Absalom pursued him with an 
 
 130 
 
THE CREATURE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 army, and when the battle was joined, the 
 king sat in the gate waiting for tidings. 
 When one came saying, "All the king's 
 enemies be as that young man Absalom 
 is," then the king turned away and went 
 up to his chamber lamenting as he went, 
 "O my son Absalom, my son, my son 
 Absalom ! Would God I had died for thee, 
 O Absalom, my son, my son!" 
 
 All these thrilling experiences were 
 breathed forth by this tuneful and poetic 
 nature in the psalms that have been the 
 voice of the Lord to the souls of men 
 through all these centuries because they fit 
 human experiences so perfectly, so evi- 
 dently the word of God to some soul in its 
 deepest experiences reproduced and ex- 
 pressed for the instruction and comfort of 
 all souls. The things that he had ex- 
 perienced developed, clarified, and spirit- 
 ualized his thought, and became the 
 repertory on which to draw, under divine 
 guidance, for the instruction of others. We 
 read what he says with our eyes on his 
 experiences, and interpret the one by the 
 other. 
 
 It is equally true of the great "evan- 
 131 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 gelical prophet of Israel" that he came to 
 his visions of the truth by the way of 
 experience. Isaiah sa^^s, "In the year that 
 King Uzziah died I saw also the Lord 
 sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up." 
 In that vision there came to him an over- 
 whelming sense of his sinfulness, and he 
 poured out confessions and self-reproaches 
 till an angel came with a coal of fire from 
 the altar and laid it upon his lips and de- 
 clared that his inquity was purged away. 
 Then, with a new light and a new life, he 
 began those wonderful utterances, made 
 possible by fire-tipped and fire-purified lips, 
 that have been for the comfort and instruc- 
 tion of the church to this day. The ex- 
 perience antedated and was the channel of 
 the revelations, of the high sense of right- 
 eousness, of the fine ethical sense, and of 
 the vision of the coming Christ that ap- 
 pear on all his pages. The light of that 
 first vision illuminated the whole universe 
 of truth and flung its light far out along 
 the pathway on which men are traveling. 
 But for that experience the voice of Isaiah 
 would probably not have been heard be- 
 yond his own age, and his message will 
 
 132 
 
THE CREATURE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 hardly be understood but bj^ the way of a 
 similar experience. Truth lies in strata, 
 moves in levels, and to understand it one 
 must rise to it, strike its vein, and follow 
 its bent. 
 
 The prophet Ezekiel was not less depend- 
 ent upon the vehicle of experience in the 
 revelations that came to him and through 
 him to the world than were the other Old 
 Testament writers. His first educating ex- 
 perience was the deep pain and humiliation 
 of a captive in a strange land. This no 
 doubt drove him to earnest prayerfulness 
 and searching inquiry into the ways of the 
 Lord with his people. Then rose before 
 him that wonderful spectacle of the four 
 living creatures — the wheels and wheels 
 within wheels, full of eyes, the infolding 
 fii*e, and the moving power that proceeded 
 in straight lines. This burning fire, the 
 seeing eyes, rolling wheels, and straight 
 movements come to expression and exposi- 
 tion in the subsequent words of the 
 prophet. This experience, and all else fol- 
 lows naturally. 
 
 If we come to the New Testament, we 
 find there also experience going before 
 
 133 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 teaching and furnishing the material for it. 
 The apostle Paul had one great experience 
 that changed, illuminated, and empowered 
 his whole life and gave character and sub- 
 stance to all his thinking. He rose into a 
 new realm of truth by experience, and he 
 lived, worked, wrote, and fought on the 
 facts of that experience. For forty years 
 of wonderful ministry that was his constant 
 appeal; whether before the mob in Jerusa- 
 lem or before King Agrippa, everywhere 
 and always he recounted that experience 
 as his defense and as the explanation of 
 his life. The Christology of Saint Paul, 
 the most pronounced and glowing doctrinal 
 feature of the New Testament, was de- 
 veloped out of that experience. We read 
 those wonderful passages in Romans, Ephe- 
 sians, and Colossians, in which the Lord- 
 ship and redeeming glory of Jesus Christ 
 are stated with such ability and beauty of 
 phrase, looking all the time at that Damas- 
 cus experience as the germinal source of it 
 all. Out of this Christology of Saint Paul 
 rose his doctrine of sin and grace, and out 
 of that his doctrine of law and faith. Not 
 only do his doctrines come out of that 
 
 134 
 
THE CREATURE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 experience, but the moral and spiritual 
 forces of his life have the same origin. 
 With such a vision of the power and glory 
 of Jesus Christ as came to him, there never 
 could be lack of courage, faith, abounding 
 cheerfulness, or overflowing love. That 
 experience contained the germ of all doc- 
 trine, personal devotion, ministerial fidel- 
 ity, missionary impulse, and hopeful out- 
 look to the future. How could he fear 
 shipwreck, prisons, scourgings, persecu- 
 tions, or any possible ills after such an 
 experience? And was it not perfectly logi- 
 cal for him to send down the ages the 
 ringing challenge, "Rejoice in the Lord al- 
 way: and again I say. Rejoice".^ 
 
 Saint Peter's writing and preaching, so 
 far as reported, is a reproduction of what he 
 saw, heard, and experienced. When insist- 
 ing that the faith he held was not "cun- 
 ningly devised fables," he supports the as- 
 sertion by declaring that he and his fellow 
 disciples "were eyewitnesses of his majesty. 
 For he received from God the Father honor 
 and glory, when there came such a voice 
 to him from the excellent glory. This is my 
 beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. 
 
 135 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 And this voice which came from heaven we 
 heard, when we were with him in the holy 
 mount." This is the substance of all apos- 
 tolical teaching — the report and exposition 
 of the various experiences through which 
 they passed in association with Christ or 
 in the prosecution of his work after his 
 ascension. The Acts of the Apostles is but 
 a record of miracles, of the works connected 
 with them, and of the truths illustrated 
 and confirmed by them. Instead of the 
 Acts of the Apostles, it would be nearer 
 the actual facts to call it "The Dynamics 
 of the Holy Spirit." It is a book of ex- 
 periences with their doctrinal implications. 
 
 This is a close adherence to the strict 
 scientific method: first the fact, then the 
 theory or doctrine derived from it. But 
 always the fact is the basal, the determin- 
 ing thing, and the doctrine the necessary 
 logical conclusion from the fact. In con- 
 nection with the experience revelations 
 were made that reached out into the future 
 or into realms of truth beyond the range 
 of experience, but in natural line with it, 
 deducible from it, and confirmed by it. 
 
 As revelation came to us by the way of 
 136 
 
THE CREATURE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 experience, and moves on that plane, so is 
 it understood only in the light of ex- 
 perience. We must rise to its level if we 
 would catch its spirit and deepest mean- 
 ing. One must have musical taste and 
 culture to appreciate the best music; only 
 artistic taste — that is, a mind conscious of 
 the beauties of art — can appreciate a mas- 
 terpiece; literary taste and culture are 
 necessary for the understanding and ap- 
 preciation of the best literature; so is a 
 spiritual nature, developed by spiritual ex- 
 periences, necessary to the understanding 
 of revelation. This manifest fact in our 
 intellectual life is clearly stated by Saint 
 Paul when he says: "But the natural man 
 receiveth not the things of the Spirit of 
 God: for they are foolishness unto him: 
 neither can he know them, because they 
 are spiritually discerned." Therefore to re- 
 ceive the revelation properly requires the 
 same spiritual elevation that is necessary 
 in making it, which brings us again to the 
 proposition stated before in this discussion, 
 that inspiration by the Holy Ghost is the 
 perpetual need and privilege of believers, 
 as it is the promised office and work of the 
 
 137 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 Divine Spirit. As in wireless telegraphy 
 the receiving station must be constructed 
 and equipped as the transmitting station is, 
 so they that receive must be in the same 
 spiritual condition as they who transmit 
 the revelation. 
 
 138 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE BIBLE TESTED BY 
 EXPERIENCE 
 
 This is a fair test, just to the book, re- 
 liable and scientific in character, and satis- 
 fying to the thinking mind. If it was sent 
 forth by God, the embodiment of infinite 
 wisdom, adapted to the human race by 
 the maker of it, and designed for a certain 
 purpose by Him who rules all things, then 
 we have a right to expect two things of it: 
 first, that there will be in it a working 
 energy that will persist and hold to its 
 purpose till its work is done; and, second, 
 that it will be found to fit into existing con- 
 ditions and to work toward a general 
 betterment. 
 
 If it came forth from God and has in it 
 the life and thought of God, its system of 
 truth should be reasonably satisfying to the 
 most learned minds, its standard of ethics 
 should be the best known, its curative and 
 corrective methods for human frailties and 
 weaknesses should be the most effective, 
 
 139 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 its motives to worthy conduct the most 
 moving, its rewards to virtue the most 
 engaging, its supports under trial the great- 
 est, its outlook for hope the brightest, its 
 grounds for confidence the strongest, its 
 aids to love the most creative and helpful, 
 its regenerating power by the Holy Spirit 
 the most effective, and in all ways it 
 should prove itself an adequate corrective 
 of human perversity and an abundant 
 supply for human need. If God sent it into 
 the world, putting his personality into it 
 and back of it, so that he could say of his 
 Word, "It shall not return unto me void, 
 but it shall accomplish that which I please, 
 and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I 
 send it," then we shall be justified in look- 
 ing for results corresponding to this high 
 deal. Does it accomplish what it pro- 
 f>oses? Is it effective in the thing it under- 
 rakes.^ Does it live up to contract? These 
 questions naturally suggest themselves, we 
 have a right to ask them, and the author 
 of the revelation invites us to consider 
 them. 
 
 This is the scientific method, settling 
 questions by facts. The final, the unan- 
 
 140 
 
TESTED BY EXPERIENCE 
 
 swerable appeal is to facts; they must 
 stand; they will stand, inveigh against 
 them as we may. When the question of 
 propelling cars by steam was under dis- 
 cussion it was said in the British Parlia- 
 ment that it would be impossible, for a 
 speed of twenty miles an hour would take 
 ,\way one's breath. But this seemingly 
 conclusive argument lost all its force when 
 the great trains between London and Edin- 
 burgh began running more than forty miles 
 an hour. Men sneered at the proposition 
 of an Atlantic cable, but when Queen Vic- 
 toria and the President of the United States 
 exchanged congratulations under the ocean 
 the argument was closed. Facts crash 
 through theories, overturn and remake 
 them. Facts of experience are the final, 
 the unanswerable arguments, and by them 
 the Bible must stand or fall. Life is more 
 than logic, experience more than philos- 
 ophy, and fact more than theory. 
 
 The Bible came into the world to teach, 
 regenerate by the Holy Spirit, and de- 
 velop human beings. It was thrown into a 
 swirling mass of contending forces to mas- 
 ter, guide, and unify them for the uplifting 
 
 141 
 
THE IVIAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 of men. In this work it encountered great 
 opposition from the very first. Its message 
 was uncompromising, insistent upon new 
 and unwelcome ideals, condemnatory of 
 much that was highly prized, and hostile 
 to the prevailing order of things. If not 
 revolutionary, it was so radical and uncom- 
 promising in its teaching that it tended 
 toward a world-wide overturning and re- 
 adjustment. The ambitions, passions, and 
 lusts of men everywhere combined against 
 it; rulers were afraid of it, and the common 
 people hated it because it interfered with 
 their pleasures. The burning of^ the roll of 
 Jeremiah's message by the king of Judah 
 was but a type of that spirit of opposition 
 that has antagonized every stage ot the 
 unfolding revelation. 
 
 This, then, is its first practical test, the 
 opposition of its enemies. This proved its 
 quality, its power of endurance and of 
 recuperation, and the reality of a divine 
 superintendence ove^- it^ course. It is the 
 kind of proof the battleship is subject to 
 when the forts pour their rain of shells upon 
 it; if it comes unharmed out of that trial, 
 we need no other proof of its quality. 
 
 142 
 
TESTED BY EXPERIENCE 
 
 The Bible has survived the opposition of 
 many of the keenest intellects and best 
 scholars of the various ages of its history. 
 Evil-minded men have employed all the 
 resources of their great learning and in- 
 genuity to discredit its claims and to dis- 
 pute its authority. The first appearance 
 of the sacred books, the Word in literature, 
 was greeted with as much skepticism and 
 opposition as were manifested against the 
 *'Word made flesh," and they were sup- 
 ported by much more learning and intel- 
 lectual ability than were employed in the 
 effort to discredit Jesus Christ. No keener 
 intellect ever entered the field of contro- 
 versy than was employed by Celsus in the 
 second century in his efforts to discredit 
 the Scriptures, and many of his colaborers 
 in this undertaking were men of great 
 ability and varied learning. Hardly any- 
 thing new has been said against the Scrip- 
 tures since that first and fierce assault. 
 Many of the propositions of "modern 
 doubt," "advanced thought," "new theol- 
 ogy," or "latest scientific thought" are 
 simply unexploded shells picked up from 
 that old battlefield. That early period, on 
 
 143 
 
THE IVIAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 to the fifth century, remains unsurpassed 
 for the brilHant scholarship and the keen 
 intellects employed both in the attack and 
 in the defense of the Holy Scriptures. The 
 Bible came forth from this trial by fire of 
 the intellect clearer and stronger in its 
 grip upon the minds of men than it had 
 ever been before. 
 
 Then followed the trial by rude force. 
 If men could not overcome the Bible by 
 reason, they could at least strike it down 
 with the bludgeon of rude force. The 
 whole force of the Roman army, then su- 
 preme throughout the world, was em- 
 ployed to put the Bible out of existence. 
 During the period of the great ten perse- 
 cutions (64-303) three objects were con- 
 stantly aimed at — the suppression of public 
 worship, the destruction of the individual 
 believer, and the wiping out of the Holy 
 Scriptures. Diligent search was made for 
 copies of the hated book, a world-wide 
 campaign was set on foot for its utter 
 extirpation, and no means of torture were 
 left untried to force confession of where it 
 was being concealed. Many brave men 
 laid down their lives rather than surrender 
 
 144 
 
^ TESTED BY EXPERIENCE 
 
 the Holy Scriptures to the destroyers, 
 others resorted to various devices to con- 
 ceal and preserve the book of their faith. 
 The great church historian Eusebius says 
 of this period of persecution, "I saw with 
 my own eyes the houses of prayer thrown 
 down and razed to their foundations and 
 the inspired and Sacred Scriptures con- 
 signed to the fire in the open market 
 place." But He who had declared that 
 "the word of God liveth and abideth for- 
 ever" kept "watch and ward over his 
 own," and in proof of its divine origin and 
 protection the Bible came forth from this 
 fierce storm of wrath to regain all it had 
 lost and to spread to the uttermost parts 
 of the earth. 
 
 We now pass over a long period of time 
 in which were various forms of opposition 
 to the Bible^to mention the most formal 
 and formidable attack of atheism. A short 
 method in logic would be to prove that 
 there was no personal God, then, of course, 
 there could be no divine revelation. This 
 form of opposition rose to its highest de- 
 velopment among the French Encyclo- 
 paedists during the eighteenth century. 
 
 145 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 Among the great scholars and writers who 
 united in this movement were Voltaire, 
 Diderot, Rousseau, and others who brought 
 greai literary skill to the support of their 
 undertaking. The Bible was ridiculed, 
 sneered at, buffeted, and sent to the cross, 
 only to come forth again in a glorious 
 resurrection as the kindling rays of the 
 English Reformation lighted up the dawn 
 of a new day, giving further proof of the 
 divine life that forever abides in it. 
 
 Another form of attack upon the Word 
 of God was in the negations and destruc- 
 tive criticism of the English deists, who 
 flourished about the time of the French 
 Encyclopaedists, and whom they rivaled in 
 learning and intellectual ability. Among 
 these may be named such brilliant writers 
 as Gibbon, Bolingbrook, Hume, and others 
 who have brought honor to English letters 
 and glory to the Word of God by leaving 
 it unharmed after their able attacks upon 
 it. About this time, and apparently as the 
 divine answer to these attacks, a young 
 Oxford student reading his Greek Testa- 
 ment received such an impulse and uplift 
 from it that he went out and shook the 
 
 146 
 
TESTED BY EXPERIENCE 
 
 nations with the power of his word, till 
 men everywhere were roused to a new 
 faith in the Bible and to a new application 
 of its teach ings to the regulation of their 
 conduct. All forms of attack upon the 
 book have recoiled upon their authors, leav- 
 ing it stronger in its hold upon the human 
 mind than before. All this looks very 
 nnich as though it was given by One 
 who knew perfectly its power of endurance 
 and recuperation and the spiritual forces 
 that were to come into it and attend it, as 
 well as the limitations of all forms of attack 
 that could possibly be made, and who fore- 
 saw that it was to go on increasing in power 
 and influence till the whole world was filled 
 with its light and truth. After all the 
 attacks upon it this old book is the young- 
 est and freshest thing of our literature if 
 we are to judge by that fairly good rule, 
 *'the best seller." In all the markets of 
 the world men are asking for what has 
 proved itself to be "the bread of life" with 
 increasing eagerness. 
 
 In this test of experience we must also 
 consider the verdict of those who having 
 accepted the Bible in good faith as the 
 
 147 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 Word of God have been proving it in the 
 experiences of hfe. It is a fair question to 
 ask whether it has proven itself workable, 
 adequate, reliable, and suitable to human 
 needs. The proof of a medicine is in the 
 cures it effects, of a machine in the work 
 it does, and of a religion in the character 
 it creates and maintains. This book, when 
 its teachings are accepted and embodied in 
 experience, shows the thief made honest, 
 the drunkard made sober, the licentious 
 made clean, savage tribes raised to civilized 
 nations, civilized nations becoming mis- 
 sionary, and all virtues stimulated and 
 strengthened. This is proof that it fits 
 human conditions, that it was given by 
 One who perfectly understood these con- 
 ditions and how to deal with them, and 
 who was good enough to provide the best 
 things for men. If for a machine that runs 
 badly or tends toward self-destruction 
 when driven to action, an adjustment is 
 provided that corrects its fault, it will 
 be acknowledged to be the work of the 
 maker of the machine, or of some one 
 equal to him in understanding. This is 
 the conclusion we arrive at concerning the 
 
 148 
 
TESTED BY EXPERIENCE 
 
 Bible: that because it has proven adequate 
 for all man's needs, in every land and age, 
 and in every grade of culture and wealth, 
 therefore it must have been given by his 
 Maker who perfectly understood the pos- 
 sibilities of his life. The Magdalenes fol- 
 lowed it, and it led them to pure and 
 beautiful womanhood. The prodigals fol- 
 lowed it, and it turned their steps to their 
 Father's house, to the fatted calf and the 
 new robe. The poor man accepted it, and 
 he became conscious of his worth and 
 dignity as the child of a King with a great 
 inheritance waiting for him. The venerable 
 pilgrim, nearing the end of his journey, 
 walked in its light and saw, to his great 
 joy, that he was just at the beginning of 
 an endless life. It came to the man vexed 
 with doubt and fear and gave him peace, 
 to the sorrowing and gave comfort, to the 
 dying and took from death its sting, and 
 over the whole of life it spread the pro- 
 tecting canopy of God'.« ^^^-^^^asting mercy. 
 The Bible proves iis?]f r\v enduriniT the 
 t€|vst of growing knowledge and culture. At 
 t'le end of three thousand years of mar- 
 velous development we still find the Bible 
 
 149 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 leading the van as the most trusted teacher 
 and guide of the race. It has not yet been 
 superseded, nor has its Hght grown dim 
 amid the splendors of the day in which we 
 live. This could not have been the case 
 had it been the product of the human 
 mind only. It is proof of divine origin, 
 that coming into the world in a dark age 
 and among a people not remarkable for 
 intellectual culture, its teachings still tran- 
 scend all that the brightest intellects have 
 been able to produce in a long period of 
 wonderful growth in knowledge. 
 
 In the portrayal of the divine character 
 it takes a position so far above and apart 
 from all other human hterature as to pre- 
 clude the idea of invention. The Greek 
 Zeus, the Roman Jupiter, or all the gods of 
 the nations with the best qualities in each 
 combined into one conception of Deity 
 fall so far below the Hebrew Jehovah or 
 the Christian Jesus Christ as to force the 
 conviction that the Bible conception was a 
 gift of inspiration. In all the advanced 
 culture of which our age may justly boast 
 not one line has been added to or taken 
 from that conception, nor has anything 
 
 150 
 
TESTED BY EXPERIENCE 
 
 larger or better or equally good entered 
 into the thought of men. Far above all 
 our thinking rises strong, clear, pure, and 
 unapproachable the biblical ideal of the 
 Divine Being, as a vision that came down 
 from heaven and broods over the earth 
 as a lifegiving and sanctifying revelation. 
 Not only in the ideal of divinity, but 
 also in the ideal morality for men the 
 biblical conception rises far above every 
 other. The best modern thinking, unless 
 formed after its models, does not approach 
 it in excellence of quality. In the field of 
 ethics Plato, with whom Socrates and Aris- 
 totle practically agree, named four elements 
 as comprehending his thought on the sub- 
 ject. They were: (1) Wisdom, (2) Cour- 
 age, or fortitude, (3) Temperance, or order- 
 liness, (4) Justice, or uprightness. There 
 was no recognition of benevolence or of 
 good will toward men in that early philos- 
 ophy, nor did it occur to them to arrive at 
 good morals by the way of a clean heart 
 or a right spirit. The inward state, the 
 source of all character, did not come within 
 the scope of their thinking. The ethics of 
 the Bible so far surpass all man's thinking, 
 
 151 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 both ancient and modern, that it is evident 
 man did not formulate its teaching. 
 
 The Bible has been tested in the spiritual 
 realm with similar results. The keenest 
 intellects have found nothing to be added 
 and nothing to be taken from the funda- 
 mental, all-inclusive law, "Thou shalt love 
 the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with 
 all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and 
 with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as 
 thyself." The very announcement of it 
 staggers the brain and dazzles the eyes; 
 it is too high for human thought to climb 
 to it; the mind of man never could have 
 produced it without so marring it in the 
 process as to render it other than what it 
 is. Let a man sit down and try to think 
 of something higher than this, to write out 
 something that will equal or surpass it, and 
 he will feel the truth of what we are saying 
 about it. So far as we can see, it is not 
 possible for any intelligence to conceive or 
 express anything higher or better than that 
 law. 
 
 In its practical teaching the same supe- 
 riority to all human systems for regulating 
 and ordering human conduct appears. In 
 
 152 
 
TESTED BY EXPERIENCE 
 
 all the ways of testing to which the Bible 
 has been subjected in human experience it 
 proves itself more than human, that it is 
 manifestly of divine origin. 
 
 153 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE BIBLE AMENABLE TO 
 CRITICISM 
 
 Criticism is the natural impulse, right, 
 and duty of the intelligent mind, and no 
 considerations of prudence, authority, or 
 mock reverence can work the forfeiture of 
 that right. No one can look upon the 
 Parthenon or the temple of Theseus in 
 Athensi without at once raising the ques- 
 tions, "When was this building erected, by 
 whom, and for what purpose?" The an- 
 swer that his questions would evoke would 
 at once be subjected to the keenest scru- 
 tiny of his best intelligence, unless he was 
 ready to admit that his open-eyed wonder 
 was too primitive and dull to generate 
 thinking energy. Anything that claims 
 antiquity or special authorship starts and 
 justifies the question of the correctness of 
 the claim, and must furnish proofs. A 
 document that claims a certain date and 
 authorship thereby eliminates every other, 
 and so opens the door and invites to dis- 
 
 154 
 
AMENABLE TO CRITICISM 
 
 cussion. There is no question whether a 
 man ought to use his intelHgence in criti- 
 cizing, since he is so made that he must 
 do it, or decapitate his own intelHgence. 
 
 All thoughtful readers of the Bible may 
 be classed as higher critics, for higher 
 criticism is simply the consideration of 
 these questions of date and authorship. 
 The readers who find no occasion to de- 
 part from the traditional view are as truly 
 higher critics as those who reject that 
 view. Higher criticism is not a certain 
 result, but a process that may and does 
 lead to very different, and sometimes to 
 directly opposite, results. In some cases 
 the best scholarship finds for the traditional 
 view; in other cases the findings are against 
 that view; and this illustrates the peculiar 
 difficulties of the field in which these dis- 
 cussions lie. 
 
 We cannot seriously consider the books 
 of the Bible at all - till we have come to 
 some conclusions about these fundamental 
 questions of their origin and authority. 
 The five books of Moses give no hint of 
 who was their author or when they were 
 written, therefore the door is left open for 
 
 155 
 
THE IVIAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 these questions to march in, and they will 
 come in with or without our choice. The 
 book of Joshua and the book of Judges 
 name no one as author, nor do they claim 
 any date as the time of their appearing — 
 these are open questions. First and Sec- 
 ond Samuel, First and Second Kings, First 
 and Second Chronicles, Ruth, Job, and 
 many other books lay no claims to any 
 particular authorship or time of produc- 
 tion. If there are any unwritten traditions 
 about these things, we naturally wish to 
 know what they are and on what grounds 
 they make their appeal to our confidence. 
 The degree of interest we feel in the con- 
 tents of these books will measure the 
 degree of the interest we feel in these 
 questions. 
 
 This impulse of the mind toward criti- 
 cism is not specially manifested toward the 
 books of the Bible or the institutions of 
 religion, though because of their import- 
 ance it may attract nioie attention here 
 than in other fields of its operation. It 
 applies to all the products of human energy 
 and skill, to secular as well as to sacred 
 literature, to art, to music, to architecture, 
 
 156 
 
AMENABLE TO CRITICISM 
 
 to war — in fact, it is as wide as the creative 
 activities of the race. Those who imagine 
 that it is something invented and em- 
 ployed especially to discredit religion and 
 its institutions have a very insufficient view 
 of the facts. The real critic, like the real 
 scientist, is concerned only to know the 
 facts without regard to what theories they 
 will support or discredit. Whether it con- 
 cerns the authorship of Homer's Iliad, the 
 Odyssey, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, 
 the sacred books of India, or of the writ- 
 ings of Shakespeare, the object is every- 
 where the same and the methods largely 
 the same. 
 
 The history of biblical criticism is a 
 little vague in detail, but it has been 
 sufficiently pronounced in all the ages to 
 enable us to trace it in its various move- 
 ments. Moses apprehended the presence 
 and work of critics when to Jehovah, who 
 had commissioned him to lead Israel out 
 of Egypt, he made a plea for instruction as 
 to how he should answer these questions 
 that he well knew they would and must 
 ask: "Who sent you? What is his name.^ 
 What is your authority?" All the ages 
 
 157 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 since similar questions have greeted every 
 religious teacher, document, and institu- 
 tion, and a satisfactory accounting is de- 
 manded. This restless age has been asking 
 them with renewed energy, not from a 
 captious spirit, but to gain full and satisfy- 
 ing information. When men ask for bread 
 of instruction they will not be put off with 
 a stone of dogmatism or assumed ecclesias- 
 tical authority. The last centuries of He- 
 brew history and every age of Christian 
 history have furnished a certain amount of 
 critical output, but the nineteenth century 
 has witnessed a revival of interest, thor- 
 oughness, scientific method, and careful col- 
 lection and consideration of facts that make 
 it seem like a new science. It has indeed 
 taken on a new intensity of life, breadth 
 of purpose, and fullness of equipment. 
 
 Modern scholarship is very exacting in 
 demanding adequate credentials on which 
 to rest its faith. If a document, sacred or 
 secular, claims a certain authorship; if in- 
 stitutions, religious or civil, claim antiquity 
 of origin, modern scholarship will carefully 
 examine the facts, test the witnesses as to 
 their competency, sincerity, and disinter- 
 
 158 
 
AMENABLE TO CRITICISM 
 
 estedness, and will come to its conclusions 
 only after patient and careful consideration 
 of all the facts. Light and frivolous minds 
 with poor equipment rv..Nii to joiiclusions 
 and proclaim from the housetops immature 
 deductions that have never been tested and 
 proven by the deeper religious conscious- 
 ness of the great body of believers. The 
 best scholarship is reverent and hesitant to 
 move into new field;^ and will advance only 
 as compelled by the facts. Only the half- 
 instructed or the overtrained specialist is 
 willing to rush before the public with 
 propositions that have not passed the sol- 
 emn test of the Christian consciousness of 
 the age. The best minds are cautious and 
 considerate of the dangers involved in dis- 
 turbing common beliefs in the field of 
 religion, and they proceed with great care 
 and deference to established beliefs. 
 
 Yet modern scholarship must be first 
 and always loyal to fact, and it must be 
 perfectly free in that loyalty, or its investi- 
 gations will have no value. Whether the 
 facts are for or against our cherished be- 
 liefs, they must stand, and the loyal in- 
 vestigator must stand with them and for 
 
 159 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 them. An investigation undertaken with 
 the result at which it must arrive deter- 
 mined beforehand is worthless, for the con- 
 clusion was reached before the evidence 
 was heard. Hostility to a document or in- 
 stitution can easily find arguments against 
 it; the moral magnet has great power to 
 sway the needle of the mind. An investi- 
 gation undertaken with a mental bias is 
 pretty sure to find for the bias. If one 
 starts out with a fixed disbelief in the 
 supernatural, if he rules that out as un- 
 scientific and unthinkable, he is utterly 
 disqualified as a critic of the Holy Scrip- 
 tures, for he has already decided the 
 fundamental point on which the whole dis- 
 cussion turns. He must exclude miracles, 
 predictive prophecy, virgin birth, resurrec- 
 tion, inspiration, and everything essential 
 to the life and being of Christianity. We 
 do not say that he must believe these 
 things, but that he must admit and feel 
 that they are possible, else his conclusion 
 is reached before he begins his investiga- 
 tion, and therefore it is worthless. This 
 narrows the field of competent critics, but 
 it is necessary for the integrity of the in- 
 
 160 
 
AMENABLE TO CRITICISM 
 
 tellectual process. The specialist, doctrin- 
 naire, or special pleader cannot be admitted 
 here. The mind must be open as the day 
 for the light to stream in from the east, 
 from the zenith, or from the west. 
 
 161 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 
 
 It is important to bear in mind that 
 while criticism is a legitimate exercise of 
 the intelligence to which the natural forces 
 of the mind impel us, it is surrounded with 
 certain limitations that bound the field of 
 its action and affect the value of its deduc- 
 tions. It is not an exact science, and its 
 achievements must be sifted and carefully 
 weighed to ascertain their true value. 
 
 Much of the literary criticism of the Old 
 Testament is vague, indeterminate, and un- 
 satisfying. The canons of literary criticism 
 are suflSciently accurate and reliable in 
 themselves, for they are the product of care- 
 ful, scholarly thinking. But their applica- 
 tion to an individual case, as to the Bible, is 
 subject to the infelicities of a possible faulty 
 diagnosis. The remedy is good where the 
 conditions for which it is appropriate exist; 
 where such conditions do not exist it may 
 prove deadly poison. When one comes to 
 sit in judgment he may be influenced by 
 
 162 
 
THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 
 
 prepossessions, prejudice, partial knowl- 
 edge, eagerness for some worthy intellectual 
 achievement, or want of a broad outlook, 
 and so produce work that will be of little 
 value. 
 
 The critical theorv about the names of 
 Deity in use in the Pentateuch by which 
 the books, chapters, and even verses are 
 split up and divided among a number of 
 supposed authors has been rather roughlj^ 
 handled in the court of reason and has not 
 stood the test of the best modern thinking. 
 The finest classical writers in Greek and 
 Roman literature use a great variety of 
 names and qualifying terms in speaking of 
 their deities, of Zeus, Jupiter, Venus, and 
 others, yet no one ever thought of splitting 
 up their literature into shreds and parceling 
 it out among a great number of authors 
 according to their mythological terminol- 
 ogy. In the New Testament and early 
 Christian writings, for variety of expres- 
 sion, literary enrichment, to express par- 
 ticular shades of thought, the writers used 
 a great variety of names, qualifying terms, 
 and combinations of w^ords to express their 
 thought of Deity, as ''Jehovah," "God," 
 
 163 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 "Lord," "God and Father," "Lord God 
 Almighty," and many other terms. In 
 speaking of Christ the same freedom and 
 variety in the use of terms appears. He is 
 called "Jesus," "Jesus Christ," "The Lord 
 Jesus Christ," "Son of God," "Son of 
 man," "Son of the Father," "Lamb of 
 God," "Alpha and Omega," "The Bright 
 and Morning Star"; and a great number 
 of other titles indicate the variety of 
 thought with which the sacred writers ex- 
 pressed themselves concerning the Divine 
 Being. It would be just as scientific and 
 reasonable to divide up the writings of 
 Saint Paul or Saint John among a number 
 of supposed unknown authors as to take 
 such liberties with the Pentateuch as some 
 critics have. 
 
 It is pedantic and wholly without suflS- 
 cient reason to attach so much importance 
 to the use of particular names of the 
 Divine Being in early Hebrew literature, 
 especially as we know so little about the 
 meaning, derivation, and use of the names 
 employed. The name El is the most 
 primitive and the most widely distributed 
 of all the names of Deity and it appears 
 
 164 
 
THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 
 
 in manj^ combinations, as well as singly, 
 in all the Hebrew writings. It was used in 
 Babylonian, Aramaean, Phoenician, Hebrew, 
 and Arabic; it belongs to primitive Semitic 
 speech before it became modified into dia- 
 lects, but of its origin, derivation, and 
 meaning nothing is known. Following this 
 apparently in the order of time and of 
 development wao the name "Elohim." It 
 is also a general name among the nations 
 for Deity, applied in Hebrew literature to 
 the true God, but without any definite 
 meaning that is known to us. Then came 
 the name * 'Jehovah," which also seems to 
 have been a very ancient name for Deity, 
 to which special meaning and preference 
 were given in the interview with Moses at 
 the burning bush. We do not know its 
 derivation or meaning, nor do we know 
 its true pronunciation, for the vowel point- 
 ings that determine the pronunciation were 
 not employed till the sixteenth century of 
 our era. Knowing so little about these 
 names, as we do, all of which seem to have 
 been used promiscuously among the na- 
 tions, it seems an absurd and unscholarly 
 thing to attempt to break up the Penta- 
 
 165 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 teuch into fragments and trace them to 
 their original sources by the particular 
 name of Deity which they use. 
 
 Neither is there any warrant in reason 
 or in the known habits of writers for the 
 arbitrary breaking up of a single book into 
 a number of parts and distributing them 
 among different authors on the ground of 
 apparent differences in l tyle. It is not 
 according to the known facts of literary 
 composition that an author always main- 
 tains the same, or even a similar style. In 
 all literatures the best writers are like the 
 birds in their flight, sometimes high and 
 sometimes low, sometimes slow and some- 
 times swift, sometimes straightforward and 
 sometimes circular in their movements, 
 sometimes long upon the same course and 
 again often doubling upon their track, but 
 always the same bird. A writer of real 
 ability will use different styles according to 
 the subject he is treating, whether it be 
 grave or gay, scientific or historical, philo- 
 sophical or poetical, devotional or doc- 
 trinal. The style must be suited to the 
 subject and may be largely affected by the 
 mood the author is in at the time of writ- 
 
 166 
 
THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 
 
 ing. An author may write at one time in 
 a style very different from what he has 
 used at another time when there is no 
 apparent reason for it. A writer may hold 
 a production long under consideration and 
 after years of thought introduce new mat- 
 ter in a style quite unlike some other parts 
 of the same writing. Goethe was forty 
 years finishing Faust, and a recent Ger- 
 man scholar says he can analyze that great 
 production and distribute its parts among 
 different authors on the ground of differ- 
 ence in style after the manner of the higher 
 critics. Every competent thinker who is 
 acquainted with the det-ails of literary 
 composition must see the fatal narrowness, 
 insufficiency, and unreliability of much of 
 this literary criticism of the Bible. 
 
 Even the uneducated must see that the 
 presumptuous critic is outclassed, left be- 
 hind, and hopelessly befogged by his own 
 incompetency for his task when he comes 
 to taking such liberties with the greatest 
 literature. A writer may be moved by a 
 great sense of moral responsibility, he may 
 be fully persuaded that God is putting 
 thoughts into his mind to be expressed by 
 
 167 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 him, he may fall into a judicial mood for 
 historic accuracy and fairness; again his 
 mind may burn and flash with poetic fires, 
 then fountains of emotion may fling their 
 spray into the air, or deep resentment and 
 fierce passion may break forth in lightning 
 flashes and thunder peals that will shake 
 the earth, or he may breathe out a spirit of 
 love that would cement into one great 
 brotherhood all the families of the earth. 
 The critic approaches a piece of work like 
 this, the output of a great mind led through 
 a variety of moods and experiences in the 
 course of its preparation. He sits down to 
 his work cool and impassive as becomes a 
 critic. He finds a strange medley before 
 him, thoughts and forms of expression that 
 do not harmonize, that jar one upon the 
 other, that are clearly the product of dif- 
 ferent mental states, and as he concludes, 
 therefore, of different minds. Things are 
 viewed from different standpoints, with 
 feelings, moods, and tempers very unlike, 
 therefore he concludes there must have 
 been different persons engaged in the com- 
 position. He takes up his thin blade of 
 literary criticism — it is sometimes very thin 
 
 168 
 
THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 
 
 — and he easily inserts it between the 
 various parts, and lo! the structure falls 
 at once into as many parts as the operator 
 listeth. 
 
 This kind of literary criticism is not 
 limited to the Bible. The great poem of 
 the incomparable Greek bard, the father of 
 poetry, blind Homer, has been the prey of 
 these rash critics that are now trying to 
 tear the Bible into fragments. The im- 
 mortal Iliad has been broken into a hun- 
 dred fragments and the pieces handed 
 around to different authors in all the cities 
 of Greece who are supposed to have fur- 
 nished them to some master mind who 
 welded them into one great masterpiece 
 of poetic beauty. For two thousand years 
 the critics have been fighting again the 
 old Homeric battles, flinging their clouds 
 of dust and smoke into the air till one can 
 only guess where the real facts are, with 
 this difference, however, that there is a 
 copious shedding of cold ink instead of hbt 
 blood. The world still holds to its faith in 
 the unity of the authorship of the Iliad in 
 the brain of the grand old bard whose 
 name it bears. 
 
 169 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 We are all familiar with the efiPorts of 
 the literary critics to deny the great mas- 
 ter of English literature, William Shake- 
 speare, the authorship of the works at- 
 tributed to him. The ease with which a 
 skillful critic can use any literature, as the 
 critics have used biblical literature, is illus- 
 trated in this attempt to show that Lord 
 Bacon was the real author of the works of 
 William Shakespeare. The plausible na- 
 ture of the argument in this case should 
 be a sufficient indication of the danger of 
 error in attempting to decide such grave 
 matters by such an insufficient method. A 
 strong argument has been made to show 
 that Thomas Paine, and not Thomas Jef- 
 ferson, was the real author of the declara- 
 tion of American independence. And now 
 Professor Mueller, of Germany, in a recent 
 book declares that he can do with Goethe's 
 Faust just what the Old Testament critics 
 have been attempting with its writings. 
 There is no literature that may not be 
 treated in the same way, and this fact is 
 sufficient to discredit and eliminate the 
 method as a conclusive authority. It may 
 be highly suggestive and stimulating to 
 
 170 
 
THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 
 
 thought, but as a guide and teacher it is 
 untrustworthy. The method is inadequate 
 to the task it undertakes, and therefore its 
 issue is unreliable. Insufficiency of method 
 is, therefore, a serious limitation on the 
 literary criticism of the Bible. 
 
 A second limitation on criticism in gen- 
 eral is that its results are inconclusive. 
 This is for the sufficient reason that we 
 are never sure that the facts are all in, and 
 the facts that seem well assured to-day 
 may be overturned to-morrow by some 
 new discovery. The spade is in the ground 
 and the mind waits on the spade; facts 
 spring out of the earth, as plants do, and 
 bear fruit for the feeding of the nations. 
 The field of discovery has only been 
 touched by the enterprise of modern 
 scholars, and vast treasures lie buried in 
 the ruins of ancient cities to be brought 
 forth at some future time for our instruc- 
 tion. Anyone who has wandered over the 
 sands of Gizeh and Sakkara, along the 
 Nile, or over the earth-covered ruins in 
 Palestine, will be convinced that we are 
 not yet ready for a final judgment on 
 many of these questions of criticism. Sir 
 
 171 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 William M. Ramsay recently said: "Tell 
 them to have no fears for the future of the 
 Bible. The spade is at work, and as it 
 digs, it reveals, more and more, records 
 that confirm the biblical narratives." 
 
 The critics of to-day are laughing at 
 those of ten years ago, and those of the 
 next generation will probably look back 
 with much sympathy for their poor, de- 
 luded brethren of the present. Within the 
 memory of this generation learned men 
 were teaching that Moses could not have 
 wi'itten the books ascribed to him, for the 
 sufficient reason that the art of writing 
 was then unknown. The argument seemed 
 conclusive till the tablets of Tel-el-Amarna 
 in Egypt were discovered; then there was 
 much hurrying to and fro among the 
 learned faculties to get into line with 
 established facts and to save as much of 
 the old baggage as possible. Poor Bel- 
 shazzar was beaten and cuffed by these 
 merciless critics till it was a real comfort to 
 believe that, after all, he never had any 
 real existence; but suddenly he rises out of 
 obscurity, marches into the field and deals 
 these critics a blow that satisfies all his 
 
 172 
 
THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 
 
 claims against them. As for the mythical 
 Sargon, nothing but laughter and ridicule 
 was a sufficient expression of learned ab- 
 horrence of such ignorance and credulity as 
 dared to name him — just who is laughing 
 now everybody knows. And these doughty 
 old Hittites, so hard to subdue while living, 
 but relegated to the realms of myth by 
 the critics, have come marching back onto 
 the field with flying banners and have put 
 to flight the last man that dared to ques- 
 tion the records concerning them. In so 
 many things the conclusions of the higher 
 critics have been proven worthless that the 
 wisest of them are becoming quite modest 
 in their assumptions, and one must look to 
 the half-educated and the immature for 
 dogmatism on the subject. This is saying 
 nothing against the validity or value of 
 the study or of the method, but it does 
 suggest a necessary limit that commends 
 the wisdom of holding conclusions in a 
 tentative way. To-morrow's shovelful of 
 earth or pickax stroke may shatter the 
 conclusions held for a thousand years. 
 
 Another limitation is upon the use to be 
 made of the results of criticism. A due 
 
 173 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 sense of the uncertainty of the conclusions 
 arrived at ought to make one modest about 
 proclaiming them, and the possible injury 
 to others who cannot accept these con- 
 clusions without injury to their faith should 
 lead to great caution in announcing them. 
 Poisons may be so administered by a wise 
 physician as to be curative, but he is liable 
 to arrest as a murderer who distributes 
 them indiscriminately without proper label. 
 The supreme end in teaching is health of 
 soul, spiritual growth and development, 
 and everything must be subordinated to 
 that end. In the great school of learned 
 Hebrew critics that flourished from the 
 eighth century before Christ, this duty of 
 reticence about the results of their study 
 before the common people was a cardinal 
 principle, according to Professor Duff's re- 
 cent history of Old Testament criticism. 
 
 It is of the nature of malfeasance in 
 office for one to accept the teaching func- 
 tion in pulpit, press, or school and use the 
 position to teach doctrines contrary to 
 those of the church employing him. It is 
 fallacious to plead the rights of scholarship 
 and free speech. These rights were in full 
 
 174 
 
THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 
 
 force and recognition when the engagement 
 was entered into and when the agreement 
 was made to serve the church and teach 
 its doctrines; that agreement voluntarily 
 Hmits and sets bounds to these rights. To 
 depart from such an engagement and con- 
 tinue receiving the salary paid for main- 
 taining it is ethically unthinkable in a 
 man laying claim to intellectual and moral 
 integrity. It is sophistical, if not worse, 
 to plead the rights of free speech in de- 
 fense of unfaithfulness to the function or 
 engagement of a teacher. To make such 
 use of one's knowledge as to confuse, dis- 
 turb, or injure the ignorant or the young 
 and immature is such an abuse of the 
 sacred office of teacher as to justify sum- 
 mary expulsion from it. One of the first 
 considerations with a sincere teacher in 
 pulpit, press, or school must always be 
 how to impart knowledge so that it will 
 be correctly understood, and so that it will 
 minister to growth of faith and strength of 
 character. 
 
 The Pauline principle is the only sane 
 and safe one for teachers, and it does not 
 require divine inspiration or apostolic moral 
 
 175 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 elevation to see its justness. In writing to 
 the Corinthians the great apostle said: *T 
 have fed you with milk, and not with meat; 
 for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, 
 neither yet now are ye able to bear it." 
 This is the true principle of adaptation of 
 teaching to the mental and moral condi- 
 tion of those to be taught, involving the 
 holding back on the part of the teacher of 
 much that he knew but which those under 
 his instruction were not yet prepared to 
 receive. A teacher of mathematics who 
 should attempt to teach the Calculus to 
 children in the grammar school would be 
 thought to be mentally unbalanced, or so 
 deficient in ideas of method as to unfit 
 him for his work. It is hardly possible to 
 conceive of a more reprehensible character 
 than that of a religious teacher who vaunts 
 himself, and feeds his vanity with the ap- 
 plause he receives from the ignorant masses 
 for great learning, while destroying the very 
 principle of faith by injecting doubts about 
 things that had been accepted as matters 
 of divine revelation. 
 
 Insistence upon this caution in teaching 
 as a necessary limitation upon the student 
 
 176 
 
THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 
 
 of criticism docs not place any restraint on 
 the prosecution of such studies, but, rather, 
 upon their abuse. In the pulpits, press, 
 and schools of the church immense damage 
 has been done by the reckless and indis- 
 criminate use made of the tentative results 
 of critical studies, and none see more clearly 
 the unwisdom of such a course than the 
 great masters of these studies. 
 
 If limited to their proper field, these 
 studies do not touch the vital and essential 
 contents of a book; they deal only with the 
 question of authorship, date, and circum- 
 stances of origin. If men have changed or 
 shifted the names and dates in God's book, 
 that cannot change its eternal truth; its 
 spiritual light will shine on just the same, 
 for the foundation of God's truth stands 
 forever sure. Inspiration is a living, per- 
 petual thing, and the most criticism can 
 do is to shift the scenes of the great drama 
 that is forever bringing light and truth 
 to the minds of men. It remains true 
 now as when first spoken, "My sheep 
 know my voice." The devout soul quickly 
 detects the notes of divine inspiration by 
 a spiritual sense that distinguishes the 
 
 177 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 quality of the tones that fall upon the 
 ear. 
 
 Critical studies are often objected to be- 
 cause of their supposed findings, but a 
 more valid objection is their comparative 
 inutility and the habit of doubting and 
 questioning which they cultivate. The 
 habit of rationalizing on all things is un- 
 favorable to, if not positively disabling for 
 constructive or creative effort. It proposes 
 the study of what has been done, rather 
 than creative or constructive doing; and it 
 is even concerned more with the machin- 
 ery of what has been done than with the 
 substance of the doing. It is objectionable 
 as a mental attitude and form of effort. 
 
 In the development of normal intel- 
 lectual life there are three distinct stages 
 or forms of activity. First, the ideal, in 
 which the mind is reaching after truth, 
 convictions, principles, and visions for its 
 own interior well-being and to fit it for 
 worthy action. Second, the productive 
 stage, when the mind pours forth speech, 
 song, artistic creations, poetry, philosophy, 
 patriotism, religion, or any form of seK- 
 expression to which taste or talent may 
 
 178 
 
THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 
 
 lead. Then follows the administrative form 
 of effort, when the mind seeks to organize 
 and operate the truths and principles ac- 
 cepted; governments are formed, policies 
 adopted, agencies and instruments em- 
 ployed, and great causes are pushed for- 
 ward with a strong hand. Thus far the 
 action of the mind has been normal and 
 healthy, working toward the achievement 
 of worthy ends. But another form of in- 
 tellectual activity may arise, not in logical 
 sequence or further development, but as 
 an unproductive return upon these pro- 
 cesses of development for the critical study 
 of the exterior formal facts concerning 
 them. The constructive' and productive 
 gives place to the critical, and no one can 
 doubt the effects of that change of mental 
 attitude. This form of activity is logically 
 subsequent to the others and structurally 
 incompatible with them. I do not say it 
 is hostile to them, but by the limitations 
 of the human mind, its inability to carry 
 on many lines of effort at the same time, 
 the one naturally excludes the other. As 
 matter of fact, few minds are broad enough 
 to be productive and critical at the same 
 
 179 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 time. The dramatic critic is never the 
 great actor. The mihtary critic is never 
 the winner of battles. The art critic is 
 never the master painter or sculptor. The 
 literary critic is never the poet or literary 
 artist. The biblical critic is seldom the 
 great preacher or evangelist. The pro- 
 ductive and the critical attitude are so 
 different that both 'do not exist in the 
 same mind without mutual loss and dis- 
 ablement unless you have a mind of 
 unusual endowments. This question of 
 mental attitude is fundamental in this, as 
 in other realms of thought and action. 
 WTiat will you do? Will you carry the 
 building up story by story, filling the 
 rooms with things usefid and ornamental 
 till it stands a completed palace of utility 
 and beauty.'^ Or will you occupy yourself 
 in digging down to inspect the founda- 
 tions, inquiring who the first architect and 
 builder were, and whether there may not 
 be some confusion about their names and 
 the date of their beginnings.'^ You may 
 do one or the other; you will not do both. 
 This is the limitation of critical studies 
 which I am pointing out, a limitation on 
 
 180 
 
THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 
 
 intellectual productivity and efficiency; not 
 upon intellectual ability, but upon that 
 employment of it that renders greatest 
 credit to the student and largest benefits 
 to others. It is practically impossible for 
 the mind to be intent upon productive 
 work for the moral and spiritual regenera- 
 tion of men, or for the administrative ad- 
 vancement of the kingdom of Christ in 
 the earth, and at the same time do thorough 
 and reliable work in criticism; the two 
 mental states do not exist at the same 
 time in the ordinary human mind. One 
 may keep himself thoroughly informed 
 about the progress of critical thought with- 
 out taking the critical attitude or becom- 
 ing dogmatic about it. 
 
 If one looks at the world from the 
 humanitarian standpoint only, how little 
 time or disposition will he find left for 
 critical studies! How can he sit down to 
 study an old foundation with a hungry 
 child tugging at his sleeve, asking for some- 
 thing to eat.^ With the world's vast, 
 blistering, killing curse of intemperance 
 spreading ever wider its "valley of dry 
 bones," '^ith its illiteracy forever jabbering 
 
 181 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 in his ears, with childhood and womanhood, 
 wronged and corrupted in all the earth, 
 still lifting up their wail, and with the 
 poor old world reeling on like a drunken 
 man it knows not whither, how can any 
 normal man devote himself to critical stud- 
 ies or feel an absorbing interest in them, 
 unless he is set apart to such scholastic 
 pursuits? The man who in a railway 
 wreck would turn aside to study the 
 mechanical structure of the steam engine, 
 a very useful study, while wounded men 
 and women were calling for help, would be 
 considered a monster of callous feeling, de- 
 ficient in all the nobler and better qualities 
 of human nature. The work of saving and 
 reconstructing humanity has not yet ad- 
 vanced far enough to justify calling off 
 any considerable contingent of our forces 
 to study critically the men and measures 
 employed at its inception. The humani- 
 tarian appeal continues to be bewildering 
 in its vastness and force, and there is only 
 one thinkable response for men of the 
 better nature to make, and that is in the 
 direction of immediate and continuous re- 
 hef. Think of Martin Luther, John Wes- 
 
 182 
 
THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 
 
 ley, John Howard, Lord Shaftesbury, or 
 Florence Nightingale turning a deaf ear to 
 the cry of the world to devote themselves 
 to critical studies! That would have been 
 another fall of angels almost as mysterious 
 and disconcerting as the first, though it is 
 granted that they did do some creditable 
 critical work. It is one of the criticisms 
 made upon the highly educated and intel- 
 lectual Germans, that they neglected the 
 vital and saving elements of Bible-teaching, 
 and employed their great abilities in criti- 
 cal studies instead of pressing home upon 
 the people those spiritual truths of the 
 Word of God that would have made them 
 the most spiritual as well as the best edu- 
 cated people in the world. It is a question 
 of which shall predominate, which shall 
 occupy our strength, moral and spiritual 
 ends or critical studies? Any competent 
 thinker can see that the moral and spiritual 
 presents an infinitely better field for the 
 development and display of real intellectual 
 power, while the practical results are in- 
 comparably greater. While the call of the 
 world remains what it now is, the most 
 gifted and noble natures will continue to 
 
 183 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 respond as they have in the past. Absolute 
 abandonment to the work of setting the 
 world right may admit of a sideplay of 
 the intellect in the pursuit of critical 
 studies, but they never can acquire great 
 prominence in the thought or life of such 
 a man. We thus find a moral limitation, 
 not a prohibition of the studies we are 
 considering. 
 
 If we look at the subject from the stand- 
 point of theology, a correlated subject, we 
 discover another limitation to critical stud- 
 ies. We do not say a prohibition, but a 
 limitation, a natural barrier. Theology, 
 because of the dignity of the subject, the 
 greatness of the themes, and the intel- 
 lectual ability required in dealing with 
 them, is "the queen of the sciences," the 
 greatest of them all. The creation and 
 production of theological thought is the 
 highest exercise of the human intellect, the 
 most taxing, absorbing, and capable of 
 raising the mind to the highest enthusiasm 
 and concentration of creative energy. The 
 theological thinker is the embodiment of 
 creative and constructive energy — a state 
 of mind directly opposite to that occupied 
 
 184 
 
THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 
 
 by the critic, who reviews, estimates, and 
 construes what others have produced. 
 
 It is important here to observe the dis- 
 tinction between the theological thinker 
 and the theological scholar. The theologi- 
 cal scholar is supposed to have a com- 
 prehensive knowledge of what other men 
 have thought and taught in the realm of 
 theology, and of the material which they 
 brought to their support, while he may 
 not in any true sense be a producer of 
 theological thought. Such a mind, occu- 
 pied with reviewing and estimating the 
 productions of other minds, may find 
 nothing in critical studies incongruous with 
 its ordinary studies or habits of thought. 
 They do not lie in the same field, but they 
 face the same way tow^ard religious life and 
 literature, and their movement in the field 
 of discussion is similar. The theological 
 thinker glows, flames, and soars through 
 vast fields of thought with an exhilaration 
 and uplift of soul that renders him im- 
 patient with the dry details of critical 
 studies, and ill disposed toward them. The 
 theologian has not a very high opinion of 
 the critic's w^ork, nor is the critic over- 
 
 185 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 burdened with admiration for theological 
 thinking. They feel with reference to each 
 other's achievements about as mathema- 
 ticians and poets do toward each other: 
 their realms are so unlike one cannot ap- 
 preciate the other. The mind will not be 
 theological and critical at the same time. 
 Theology opens the greatest of all fields to 
 the mind of man, and whatever impinges 
 upon it must give way. 
 
 Another limitation to the work of the 
 critic appears when we come to consider 
 the great practical features of religious 
 truth. The exercise and development of 
 faith requires as much thought and care, 
 and intellectual activity of as high an 
 order, as critical studies require, though of 
 a different kind, and it has been known to 
 produce much more beneficent and lasting 
 fruit. The faith life is not the blind, ir- 
 rational thing, the creature of impulse, 
 emotion, and reckless thinking, which many 
 seem to think it to be. It is closely logical 
 and methodical in its procedure, and truly 
 courageous in its action, for when it has 
 posited an omnipotent Helper it is thor- 
 oughly rational to trust for anything, and 
 
 186 
 
THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 
 
 there is warrant for undaunted courage in 
 any situation. It is not walking by feel- 
 ing, impulse, or vision, but on the beaten 
 highway of irrefutable logic. It rears 
 structures, projects campaigns, wins vic- 
 tories, and claims kingdoms, giving little 
 thought to origins and dates when once 
 convinced that "the foundation of God 
 standeth sure." It has been the con- 
 quering and creative force of Christian 
 history, not questioning how or why, but 
 going on with confidence and courage to 
 do the Lord's will as led by him. It does 
 not rest in technicalities, but in the living 
 verities of God's manifestation to men. 
 
 Love is also one of those qualities of the 
 Spirit that mounts, and soars, and sings, 
 and serves, and overcomes out of the vital 
 energies of its own nature drawn from the 
 hidden sources of life, forever renewing and 
 pluming itself with a sublime indifference 
 to all the questions that occupy the critics. 
 The great fountain of life lies open and is 
 forever flowing, and true souls receive di- 
 rectly from it the satisfying elements of 
 the better life; and if it must sometimes 
 flow through artificially constructed pipes 
 
 187 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 of divine-human revelation, the water is so 
 refreshing and satisfying that there is Httle 
 disposition to quibble about the piping. 
 What concord can a love-filled soul, sing- 
 ing its glad song of praise to the great God 
 whom it knows, have with a carping, pes- 
 simistic critic who has lost his way groping 
 through realms of darkness where there is 
 no well assured path? It does not need to 
 have origins accounted for; it derives life 
 directly from God, with whom it is in a 
 holy alliance forever, and its one business 
 is to glorify the Maker of all and to lift up 
 and save men by the forces of truth and 
 grace that are now coming into the world. 
 This is a realm of life above and beyond 
 the reach of the critic, on which his shadow 
 never falls; and if he sometimes sneers at 
 it, he knows that it looks down on him 
 with pity. The eagle, as it soars away to- 
 ward the sun, is perfectly willing for the 
 hop-toad to boast itself in its power of 
 leaping if it can find comfort in that. 
 This I say in all seriousness, for the hop- 
 toad is as legitimate as the eagle, and his 
 pride of leaping is as rational in the pres- 
 ence of the eagle as the self-vaunting of 
 
 188 
 
THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 
 
 the critic over his achievements in the 
 presence of that great, shining company of 
 conquering souls who are making the king- 
 dom of God come bv their heroic toil and 
 overcoming faith. \Vlio can define or ex- 
 pound that soul -hunger that went abroad 
 seeking to save men in the great revival 
 periods of the church's history? It was 
 w^holly apart from and inconsistent with 
 the critical spirit that seems more anxious 
 to interpret than to repeat the conquering 
 epochs of Christian history. The critical 
 spirit never did, nor can it do, these 
 "mighty works" of the kingdom of God, 
 by which men are regenerated and savage 
 tribes transformed into civilized nations. 
 The fervors of worship, the evangelizing 
 impulse, and the missionary spirit naturally 
 flow from love and occupy' all the energies. 
 The greatness of the subjective benefits of 
 such a life in growth of intellect and per- 
 sonal power justifies the concentration of 
 all the powers on it, and the beneficent 
 effects of it upon others demand it of us 
 as an imperative duty. The love-life and 
 service will require more effort, inde- 
 pendent thinking, heroism, and strength 
 
 189 
 
THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 
 
 of character, but for this reason and 
 others its returns in the higher reahns of 
 life are richer than all that critical studies 
 can give. It is an easy life to sit down and 
 criticize the works of others; it is a heroic 
 life to fight battles, effect changes, and 
 found institutions that will affect com- 
 ing generations. Criticism presupposes 
 achievements, lives by those that are not 
 its own, and requires not the active but 
 the reflective attitude. 
 
 The thought I have endeavored to ex- 
 press in this chapter is that the professional 
 scholar is bound by his calling to pursue 
 critical studies to their limit, and that the 
 intelligent pastor and Christian worker 
 must keep himself informed as to the 
 results of the best scholarly investigation, 
 but the preacher or the productive or con- 
 structive thinker who turns aside to do the 
 scholar's work, or who gives voice to hasty 
 conclusions or undemonstrated prop- 
 ositions of critics, is disabling himself and 
 putting his best work in peril. If these 
 "limitations" seem like the prohibition of 
 criticism itself, they are not so in fact. 
 The full circle of truth on any subject will 
 
 190 
 
THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 
 
 have two segments looking in opposite di- 
 rections, the one seeming to contradict tlie 
 other, as is the case with "free will" in man 
 and "divine sovereignty" in God, each of 
 which at first thought seems to exclude 
 the other. Think far enough to complete 
 the circle of truth, and the different parts 
 will be found consistent with each other. 
 
 191 
 

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