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CHRISTIAN FAITH AND 
 DOCTRINE SERIES 
 
 EDITED BY REV. F. B. MEYER, B.A. 
 
 The Inspiration and Authority of Holy 
 Scripture. By Rev, J. Monro Gibson, M.A., 
 LL.D. 
 
 The Doctrine of the Last Things. By Rev. 
 J. G. Greenhough, M,A. 
 
 Conversion; or, The New Birth. By Rev. 
 Newton II. Marshall, M.A., Ph.D. 
 
 The Christian Conception of God. By 
 
 Principal W. F. Adeney, M.A., D.D. 
 
 The Resurrection and the Life. By Rev. G. 
 Hanson, M.A., D.D. 
 
 IN PREPARATION. 
 
 The Person of Christ. By Rev. R. F. Horton, 
 M.A., D.D. 
 
 The Personality and Worlc of the Holy 
 Spirit. By Rev. Charles Brown, D.D. 
 
 Man and Sin. By Prof. Peake, M.A., D.D. 
 
 Missions (Home and Foreign) and the 
 Church. By Dr. Chas. Wenyon. 
 
 The Church and the Kingdom. By Rev. J. 
 
 iJCOTT LlDGETT, M.A., D.D. 
 
Cbrlstian f aitb anD 
 Doctrine Scries 
 
 I 
 
 THE 
 
 INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 
 
 OF HOLY SCRIPTURE 
 
THE INSPIRATION 
 AND AUTHORITY OF 
 HOLY SCRIPTURE 
 
 JOHN MONRO GIBSON, M.A., LL.D. 
 
 AUTHOR OF *' THE DEVOTIONAL USE OF HOLY SCKirTURB,"-' 
 
 " THE UNITY AND SYMMETRY OF THE BIBLE," 
 
 "ST. MATTHEW IN THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE," ETC; 
 
 ^.c» ^'^''i^'%; 
 
 \ •''■ 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 PRINCIPAL FORSYTH, M.A., D.D. 
 
 ^^C -0 1913 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 
 Fleming H, Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
FLEMING H. KEVLLL OUMFANV^ 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago : 80 Wabash Avenue 
 Toronto: 25 Richmond St., W. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh : 100 Princes Street 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Introduction by Principal Forsyth, M.A., D.D. 
 Personal Foreword by Author .... 
 
 PART I 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. The Inspiration with which we have 
 
 TO do 
 
 II. The Field to be Explored . 
 III. The Method of Exploration 
 
 PART II 
 
 INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 
 OF THE REVELATION 
 
 Vll 
 
 3 
 
 IV. A Prophet Nation . 
 God-consciousness . 
 The Passion for Righteousness 
 Lofty Spirituality 
 The Nation's Pulpit 
 V. Divine Discipline through 
 
 History 
 VI. The Object Lesson . 
 
 VII. The Substance of Revelation 
 The Name of God 
 The Salvation of God . 
 
 Long 
 
 13 
 23 
 32 
 
 41 
 46 
 52 
 57 
 63 
 
 68 
 80 
 
 89 
 
 93 
 96 
 
VI 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 
 
 PAGB 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Verification : Authority 
 
 AND Vision 
 
 103 
 
 
 Authority — External and 
 
 Internal . 
 
 . 106 
 
 
 Authority in Life and in 
 
 Religion 
 
 113 
 
 
 Authority — Ultimate and 
 
 Proximate 
 
 1x8 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Way of Certainty 
 
 • < 
 
 126 
 
 PART III 
 
 INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 
 OF THE RECORD 
 
 X. Introductory 143 
 
 XI. Necessary Limitations — " Earthen 
 Vessels" .... 
 Human Agency 
 Human Language . 
 Literary Form 
 XII. The Excellency of the Power 
 Power of the Gospel 
 Incidental Excellencies . 
 
 XIII. The Place of Criticism . 
 
 As Regards the Treasure 
 As Regards the Vessels . 
 
 XIV. Gains from Reverent Criticism 
 
 An Unassailable Foundation . 
 A Great Cloud of Witnesses . 
 A Fresh Human Interest 
 All Scripture Profitable . 
 After- word 
 
 146 
 150 
 153 
 
 155 
 
 160 
 162 
 169 
 
 174 
 176 
 184 
 191 
 194 
 202 
 219 
 
 239 
 245 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 By Principal Forsyth, M.A., D.D. 
 
 ONCE there was a dragon almost as 
 large as the world, and he was sur- 
 rounded by a mighty brood. And they lay 
 heavy on the hearts and thoughts of men. 
 But slowly the heroes of the world mastered 
 and slew them. And as they slew them, to 
 make sure of their end they burnt them, 
 and the prodigious dust and ashes were cast 
 upon the sea. There they settled down to 
 the bottom in a dense mass, which covered 
 the whole ocean floor. And there, in course, 
 it condensed and set ; so that when the 
 ocean retired, in the great convulsions of 
 the world, there was left a thick layer of 
 flinty rock in the lowest parts of the earth. 
 And it cost the inhabitants almost as much 
 labour and danger to blast these rocks as 
 
 vii 
 
viii INTRODUCTION 
 
 it cost their forefathers to destroy the 
 dragon-brood. But destroyed they had to 
 be, to give room for the growing life and 
 teeming energy of the new race. 
 
 Now this is a parable. The dragon-brood 
 is the family of prodigious old error which 
 threatened to swallow up the children of 
 light and truth. And the heroes are the 
 men of the Spirit, called and equipped by 
 God to encounter the error, and slay it with 
 the arrows of light. And so they break it 
 to pieces, and bring it to dust, and scatter 
 it to wind and water. But from being 
 dangerous in one form, it goes on to be 
 deadly in another. And it settles down 
 on the lower levels to be the densest and 
 most impenetrable stratum of all. It no 
 longer rages with tooth and claw, but it 
 presents the tough inertia of compacted 
 ignorance, prejudice, use, and wont ; and it 
 offers to progress that dense passive resist- 
 ance which is so much harder to deal with 
 than keen active revolt. 
 
 It is one of the depressing things in social 
 growth — the persistence and recurrence in 
 lower strata of old fallacies that had long 
 been disposed of in the region of the higher 
 
INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 knowledge. Just as there are said to be in 
 England (or were till recently) spots where 
 the conditions, social and mental, reproduced 
 those of the fifteenth century ; so that we 
 h.^.d the middle aofes survivinof in the base- 
 ment of the nineteenth century ; and as 
 there are certainly, in the extreme south 
 of Italy, regions where, under the thinnest 
 veneer of Catholicism, there still subsists 
 the paganism of two thousand years ago 
 both in its charm and its superstition — so it 
 is also in the history of opinion. We have 
 mental strata where there still flourish per- 
 tinaciously and securely views and habits 
 of mind which have long gone to limbo 
 in quarters where wisdom is spoken among 
 the full grown. Think of the Greek Church 
 and its level of intelligence. Think of the 
 Roman Church in Spain. 
 
 Now these references have been mainly 
 stirred, as I have indicated, by the obscur- 
 antisms of the unreformed churches. The 
 Reformation brought in a new spirit. But 
 the various parts of Protestantism move at 
 different paces. And while one cannot but 
 respect the hesitation and caution of many 
 who still cling to impossible and even harm- 
 ful views of Scripture, one has still more 
 
X INTRODUCTION 
 
 sympathy with those who try to mediate — 
 not between views but between the learned 
 and the public. 
 
 II 
 
 There is no more difficult position to-day, 
 nor one which evokes less sympathy, than 
 that of the minister who has to stand between 
 the world of modern knowledge on the one 
 hand and the world of traditional religion on 
 the other, and mediate between them. It is 
 not a case of adjusting his own faith to the 
 new knowledge. He has done that and can 
 go on doing it. It is a case of adjusting 
 the new knowledge to the untaught faith of 
 others, and doing it in the way of reverence 
 for truth, love for men, and regard for the 
 growth of living faith. Any vulgarian can 
 destroy and offend. But the task of the 
 veracious, alert, and paternal-minded man 
 who has to rear faith amid a world of com- 
 motion, to establish the soul in a public war 
 of elements, and to secure the Eternal in 
 a tempest of change, is very delicate and 
 very severe. The more so as its difficulty 
 is of a kind that does not readily come home 
 to most people, even of those in his charge. 
 The plain man, whose demand for a plain 
 
INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 Yes or No Christ was always baffling, has 
 no idea what it costs to make a traditional 
 creed a moral reality, and to turn, as our 
 Lord Jesus had to do, a conventional Messiah 
 to a spiritual Christ. 
 
 And what the Church seems to require 
 most, at the moment, is less an army of 
 scholars engaged on ** research work " upon 
 its origins, than a growing body of men at 
 once disciplined to scientific sympathies by 
 a proper education in its schools, secured 
 there also in a theology of experimental faith, 
 and at the same time provided with the art of 
 public teaching, and endowed with the sym- 
 pathy and tact which win the trust of the 
 evangelical public. The army of research is 
 sufficiently well recruited ; also its van has been 
 going faster than the main body can follow, 
 and becoming detached from its evangelical 
 base both in sympathy and in results. What 
 we need is a supply of capable middle-men 
 (if the term may be allowed) or adjusters, 
 who know the new truth, the old faith, and 
 the believing people, and who can mediate 
 the inevitable transition without fatal acci- 
 dent. The premises are being rebuilt, but 
 the business must be carried on ; and the 
 builders must be competent to manage both 
 
xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 without loss in the process, and with great 
 gain in the end. The education of our 
 ministers must keep this increasingly in 
 view. The unsettlement among them pro- 
 duced by contact with the crudest of " ad- 
 vanced" views, is a severe nemesis upon 
 the neglect by the Churches of the colleges, 
 or the neglect by the colleges to provide 
 a theology which (like the study of medicine) 
 makes its pupils its enthusiasts. The circum- 
 stances of the time make this a requirement 
 quite as essential as pulpit fervour or pastoral 
 skill. But the Church public is unconvinced. 
 The colleges are starved both of funds, 
 and, still more, of sympathy. Students are 
 tempted to regard the colleges as the Churches 
 do, and not take them seriously compared with 
 pulpit iclat or philanthropic activity. Which 
 can only prepare the future for an eclipse of 
 faith, just as it has much to do, from the past, 
 with faith's occupation at present. The worst 
 heresy is incompetency, degenerating into 
 quackery. It cannot be too clearly under- 
 stood that no amount of well-doing, and no 
 amount of zeal, and no amount of ethereal 
 mysticism will save the situation which is 
 being forced upon us. If men do not know 
 what to believe they will soon not know 
 
INTRODUCTION ^ xiii 
 
 what to do. We need men of experimental 
 
 historic faith, who are also exercised in the 
 
 knowledge which is creating the present 
 
 crisis. Knowledge will not do it, but it 
 
 canno^ be done without knowledge. And 
 
 multitudes of our teachers and preachers, 
 
 truly religious men, are crying out, " Would 
 
 God I had a definite creed for my mind, 
 
 and a positive gospel to preach." We are 
 
 in a social position growingly complex, to 
 
 which naive religion though indispensable 
 
 is inadequate, and an intelligent, not to say 
 
 scientific, religion is required. The mere 
 
 hierophants only gather groups, and strike 
 
 flashes ; they vary between pathos and 
 
 bathos ; they are not equal to the needs 
 
 of a great Church and the public it faces. 
 
 And only two courses are possible — either 
 
 to stand on every statement of an infallible 
 
 book, or to treat extreme rationalism with 
 
 a higher reasonableness, meet the critics on 
 
 their own ground, accept results tested by 
 
 their own methods in sounder hands, watch 
 
 the mere philologist, edit the reports brought 
 
 by the Uhlans of research, distrust all 
 
 criticism inspired by a negative dogma 
 
 rather than by historic science, and proceed 
 
 amidst all in the experienced liberty with 
 
xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 which Christ crucified has set our conscience 
 free to be sure and bold in Him. 
 
 Ill 
 
 This little book of Dr. Gibson's appears 
 to me to be an admirable example of his 
 arduous work in this kind. The autobio- 
 graphical interest stirred by its foreword is 
 great. We have here a man of the ripest 
 pastoral experience, gathered from a long 
 life which yet has not been wholly immersed 
 in pastoral and ecclesiastical cares. He 
 began in the old theory of inspiration, in 
 which he would have remained had his been 
 a metallic, inert, or mechanical mind. But 
 his warm and capacious personality, his 
 mental interest in the merits of the case, 
 his reading kept up, and his experience in 
 dealing with perplexed souls, have combined 
 to urge him out into another conception of 
 things, in which he finds the Bible's true 
 life, power, and promise for the future. He 
 says he does not profess to be an original 
 scientific mediator. He is a ductor dubitan- 
 Hum and not a dux certaminis. He is a 
 servant of the Church rather than of the 
 schools. His book is a flower of ministry 
 rather than militancy. It is calculated (if 
 
INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 I may presume to say all this) to be of the 
 greatest use to multitudes, especially of 
 young people, in our Churches, who are not 
 only bewildered in their faith, but in great 
 risk of losing it. It will do very much to 
 bring home to such the saving distinction 
 of the Bible and the Gospel, even while it 
 insists on their inseparability. It is true, 
 lucid, genial, and vivacious. It is very 
 honest and very relevant to those he has 
 in view — a really educative and sympathetic 
 book for all such. His method is sound, 
 and his principle is therefore historic. There 
 is a flow and a lift in the book. It is the 
 work of a man who knows his Bible both 
 from without and within — as the scholarly 
 minister should — one who writes with his 
 eye on the object, his heart in his theme, 
 and his mind alive to what is going on round 
 him. He sees (as he himself desiderates) 
 not only the track but the landscape. He is 
 really facing the situation, and not butting 
 at it. And his prime object is not to be 
 modern, but to have modern sympathies — to 
 have the modern mind, not so much in the 
 way of starting from it, but of duly allowing 
 for it. He makes a valuable protest against 
 the vice of apriorism, which comes down on 
 
xvi INTRODUCTION 
 
 the Bible with a theory of inspiration really 
 drawn from rationalist expectations, instead 
 of rising out of the Bible from its inductive 
 treatment as faith and science alike must do. 
 He shows how the rationalism of orthodoxy 
 has its congenial nemesis in the rationalism of 
 heresy. He begins with the facts. Let the 
 Bible speak. That is the essential principle 
 of criticism. What does the Bible really say ? 
 What does it say about itself ? Very little 
 about its own indubitable inspiration, as 
 Christ had little to say about His own sin- 
 lessness. Let us get at the facts, and then 
 treat each fact according to its nature. In 
 a fact like the crucifixion we need only 
 beheve ; but a fact like Christ crucified we 
 trust for ever and ever, and trust it with 
 ourselves and our destiny. 
 
 I venture to regard Dr. Gibson's book 
 as a real service to the Churches he has 
 served so long. It is a ripe fruit of that long 
 service. And it is a worthy help to the 
 Church's confidence in that progressive 
 theology which revolutionaries are throwing 
 back for a generation, but which is itself a 
 part and effect of the vast Redemption in 
 the Saviour who gives His Church its 
 charter and its life. Criticism exercised by 
 
INTRODUCTION xvii 
 
 faith is one thing ; criticism inflicted on faith 
 is another. The one is an essential part 
 of the Church's reformation by the Spirit; 
 the other is a part of its regulation by the 
 world. The one belongs to the nature of 
 the Free Churches ; the other is a subtle 
 piece of Erastianism. 
 
 IV 
 
 I should like to add a word of sympathy, 
 so far as I may, with the whole enterprise 
 of the Free Church Council, wherein Dr. 
 Gibson's book leads the way. The question 
 of belief is becoming a much more serious 
 matter for the Free Churches than the 
 question of their public work or social 
 sympathies. For these concern their rela- 
 tion to the public, while their faith concerns 
 their existence. And it is unfortunate that 
 our rank and file should be left to pick up 
 stray notions about the great subjects from 
 casual sermons, or still more often from brief 
 abstracts of sermons, in which the piquant 
 phrases are culled and tied up in small 
 bunches, while the essential points are 
 missed, and the argument vanishes. The 
 more the cheap press touches such things, 
 the more needful it is that fresh effort 
 
xviii INTRODUCTION 
 
 should be made by those responsible for 
 our religious stability to guide serious and 
 intelligent minds in a duly serious way. 
 There were never so many in all the history 
 of the Church crying out, *' Where am I ? " 
 as there are to-day. I do not of course refer 
 to aggressives and destructives. I refer to 
 those to whom it is a pain to feel their feet 
 slipping from them, or a concern to think 
 their ground is undermined ; who have a 
 real though bewildered faith, and who desire 
 above all things to believe if they could see 
 their way. To many such this enterprising 
 series of books should be of great use. 
 They are written by men who know how 
 the land lies, and who have the secret of 
 reaching the public with their own settled 
 faith. They are able men and trusted. The 
 little books can be carried where larger 
 works will not go, and they can be read for 
 their excellent style by those to whom a 
 scientific terminology would be jargon. After 
 a certain point, of course, there must be 
 scientific terminology, but for the public this 
 series has in view it is not only useless but 
 irritant. The writers may be trusted to see 
 to it that neither the science nor the religion 
 of the situation suffer in their hands. 
 
 P. T. Forsyth. 
 
INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 
 
 OF 
 
 HOLY SCRIPTURE 
 
PERSONAL FOREWORD 
 
 THE task of contributing to the discussion 
 of so difficult and pressing a subject 
 as "The Inspiration and Authority of Holy 
 Scripture " is one which I should not have 
 ventured to undertake, had it not been laid 
 upon me with great urgency, not only by 
 the editor of this series, but by many other 
 friends well entitled to be heard. I am 
 only too keenly conscious of my inability to 
 deal adequately with a subject so momentous, 
 with the limited reading on it which has been 
 possible to one so full of engagements as I 
 have been and still am. This disqualification 
 would have been, to my mind, a complete 
 bar, had it not been represented to me that 
 a simple presentation of the subject as it 
 appeared to my own mind might be of value 
 to many who would not be likely to read 
 or profit by a profound and exhaustive 
 treatise. I confess that there is no subject 
 to which I have given so much earnest 
 
 3 B 2 
 
4 PERSONAL FOREWORD 
 
 thought from my college days and through- 
 out the whole course of my ministry. I was 
 brought up to believe that the whole fabric 
 of our faith rested ultimately on the founda- 
 tion of a book which, though written by many 
 different authors, was yet from beginning to 
 end not their work at all, but that of God. 
 They were simply God's penmen, and what 
 they wrote was at His dictation. As I grew 
 out of childhood I was sorely perplexed by 
 many things in the Bible which seemed 
 wholly at variance with this view, and I 
 read with avidity everything I could find 
 to reinforce my faith. I found great comfort 
 in Kitto's books ; but though I would feel 
 satisfied after each particular explanation, 
 there would remain, as the net result of the 
 inquiry, an uncomfortable feeling that too 
 much ingenuity had been needed, that simple 
 truth should scarcely require so very much 
 special pleading. Still, the positive evidence 
 for the inspiration and authority of the Bible 
 was so strong that I was content to leave 
 these diflficulties in abeyance ; and in this 
 state of mind I began my ministerial work 
 forty-four years ago. 
 
 It will show how thoroughly I was imbued 
 with the old view of the Bible, if I make 
 
PERSONAL FOREWORD 5 
 
 the confession that in my early ministry I 
 wasted many precious hours in trying to make 
 sermons out of quite impossible texts. If 
 the Bible was all equally the Word of God, 
 why should I not be able to use even the 
 least promising parts of it ? It was only by 
 sad experience that I was compelled practi- 
 cally to admit that it was not all on the same 
 level. Meanwhile, in spite of me, the feeling 
 was growing that surely there must be some- 
 thing wrong with the idea of inspiration in 
 which I had been brought up. It was only 
 very gradually that relief came ; but I can 
 well remember several distinct stages, which 
 it may be useful to specify. 
 
 The first I clearly remember came from 
 the use of Alford's Greek Testament, espe- 
 cially from the position he put so strongly 
 that not the words but the men were inspired. 
 In that case they were not merely scribes, 
 they were men, and the introduction of the 
 human element, as real and not merely formal, 
 suggested many things. 
 
 Another great relief later on came from a 
 book of Mr. Miall, the name of which I 
 now forget, but the thought insisted on was 
 that the Bible was not itself the divine 
 revelation, but the record of it. This thought 
 
6 PERSONAL FOREWORD 
 
 gave me immense help, and sensibly reduced 
 the effect of the difficulties and perplexities 
 which still disturbed me. 
 
 Some time after, I became acquainted 
 with Lessing's tractate on " The Education 
 of the Human Race," which for the first time 
 brought me in sight of the progressive nature 
 of divine revelation ; and about the same 
 time I found help in Mozley's " Ruling Ideas 
 in Early Ages." I had been wrestling hard 
 with some of the toughest parts of the Book 
 of Judges, and can remember still what an 
 immense relief it was to realize that the 
 lesson to be learned there was not the 
 vengeance of God, but His patience with a 
 dark and cruel age. 
 
 About this time I was revelling in Browning. 
 It was not then the fashion to admire him ; 
 but, hearing that there were some few who 
 had discovered hid treasure of great price 
 in his poems, I began to look into them, 
 and presently came across the Epistle of 
 Kharshish, which I found so marvellously 
 suggestive on the story of Lazarus that I 
 tried next the story of Saul. In reading 
 this wonderful poem, I had my first glimpse 
 of the modern view of inspiration. It was 
 to me then an entirely fresh unfolding of the 
 
PERSONAL FOREWORD 7 
 
 human side of the experience — the natural 
 powers of David's soul in fullest exercise, 
 and a great unselfish love arising within him 
 till it completely filled his heart, and then, 
 and only then, the great message coming to 
 him — a message which came not apart from, 
 but in and through the working of his own 
 mind and heart, leading in the most natural 
 way to the startling climax, " See the Christ 
 stand ! " Yet the supernatural is by no 
 means eliminated, but comes in what may 
 be called the most natural way, as so beauti- 
 fully shown in the opening of Stanza XIV. — 
 
 " And behold while I sang . . . but O Thou who didst grant 
 
 me, that day, 
 And, before it, not seldom hast granted thy help to essay, 
 Carry on and complete an adventure,— my shield and my 
 
 sword 
 In that act where my soul was thy servant, thy word was my 
 
 word, — 
 Still help me, who then at the summit of human endeavour 
 And scaling the highest man's thought could, gazed hopeless 
 
 as ever 
 On the new stretch of heaven above me — till, mighty to save, 
 Just one lift of thy hand cleared that distance." 
 
 For me, the reading of that poem put an 
 end to the old mechanical, unnatural view 
 of inspiration which reduces the sacred 
 writers to mere amanuenses. 
 
8 PERSONAL FOREWORD 
 
 Another epoch in my mental history was 
 the reading of Bruce 's *' Chief End of Revela- 
 tion." This crystallized for me the view of 
 the Bible which had been for many years 
 growing in my mind, making it clear that 
 the perfection to be looked for in Scripture 
 is not absolute perfection, but perfection for 
 the purpose for which it is given, its un- 
 paralleled adaptation to the fulfilment of its 
 " chief end." By this time the critical views 
 of the Old Testament had been gaining 
 ground. When they were first broached, I 
 had been among the strongest in opposition. 
 I well remember with what prejudice I read 
 Macdonald on the Pentateuch, especially as 
 what he brought forward promised to spoil 
 a great many of my sermons ; but I felt 
 bound to read it, if not to accept, then to 
 refute, his position. And in the same way 
 I have felt it my duty ever since, so far as 
 time would allow, to make myself acquainted 
 with the work of the more spiritual critics, 
 and have found thus a very great help in 
 the clearing away of old difficulties, and in 
 reaching a conviction of the inspiration and 
 authority of the sacred Scriptures far stronger 
 and more satisfactory than I ever had in 
 the old days, when the difficulties, though 
 
PERSONAL FOREWORD 9 
 
 explained away, were never cleared away, 
 but remained as a counter-weight to the 
 accumulated evidence for the faith. 
 
 It was in this way that I came out of the 
 comparative darkness into better light ; and 
 it is in the hope that I may help some others 
 into the same clear and unclouded conviction 
 of the inspiration and authority of the Sacred 
 Scriptures, that I try in this book to show 
 the immense gains which have come from 
 the frank recognition of all the facts before us, 
 and from basing on these our theory of in- 
 spiration, instead of first settling our theory 
 and then trying to force the facts to fit into it. 
 
 In this series, as in all the others issued 
 by the National Free Church Council, each 
 writer bears the sole responsibility for the 
 views set forth in his pages. For myself, I 
 can only say that I do not regard this re- 
 sponsibility lightly ; but I am helped to bear 
 the weight of it by the knowledge, which 
 I am not ashamed to avow, that the work 
 has been begun, continued, and ended with 
 the desire, and in the hope and prayer, that 
 God may use it to lead some doubting souls 
 into clearer light, and to settle believers in 
 a firmer and more steadfast faith. 
 
PART I 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
CHAPTER I 
 The Inspiration with which we have to do 
 
 WE must begin by trying to get a clear 
 view of the main subject with which 
 we have to deal. This may be best done 
 by an examination of the word " inspiration," 
 which is used in so many senses that it may 
 mean anything or nothing, so far as our 
 subject is concerned. There is first a very 
 broad sense in which all of us are inspired : 
 ** There is a spirit in man, and the inspira- 
 tion of the Almighty hath given him under- 
 standing." That is what may be called 
 inspiration in its widest sense. 
 
 More familiar is the narrower sense of the 
 word as limited to a select few — men of 
 genius, to wit : the poet, the artist, the 
 musician. Equally with the last, this may 
 be called natural inspiration, for ''the poet 
 is born, not made " ; genius is the dowry of 
 nature. To the same category we may 
 
 13 
 
14 VARIOUS MEANINGS 
 
 perhaps assign the inspiration of Bezaleel 
 and Aholiab, and of Samson and Gideon. 
 In all these cases the term is correctly enough 
 used, inasmuch as it is the divine Spirit 
 from whom come those powers which make 
 up ordinary human intelligence, and also 
 those special gifts with which nature's elite 
 are endowed. Let us then call all this 
 natural inspiration^ and set it aside as irrele- 
 vant to our subject, except in so far as it 
 lies at the base of the higher inspiration, 
 which acts often through a quickening and 
 enlightening of natural genius. 
 
 Quite distinct from both of these is the 
 inspiration which comes not by nature but 
 by grace, mediated by Christ (even retrospec- 
 tively in the Old Testament), and bestowed 
 in answer to prayer. There is here direct 
 personal contact of the Spirit of God with 
 the spirit of man. Let us then call it, for 
 the sake of distinction, spiritual inspiratioji. 
 But this again admits of degrees. As before, 
 there is a broad sense in which all Christians 
 are inspired. The Spirit is given to all who 
 ask ; and, on the other hand, "If any man 
 have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of 
 His." But while all true Christians are in 
 a measure inspired, it is in very different 
 
OF INSPIRATION 15 
 
 degrees, varying from the first breath of the 
 new life up to the measure of the soul's 
 capacity as indicated by the apostolic phrase, 
 '' filled with the Spirit." No one can deny 
 to this inbreathing of the Spirit the name 
 of inspiration ; but it carries with it no 
 authority. Not that it is limited to the 
 recipient only, for those who have received 
 the Spirit are called to impart to others, and 
 when the measure in which the Spirit is 
 received is abundant, the outflow is abundant 
 also — " rivers of living water," as the Saviour 
 puts it, flowing out from the soul. We have 
 all known or heard of notable examples of 
 this. But while there is influence — often 
 great and blessed influence — in such cases we 
 recognize no authority. Even a Spurgeon 
 cannot claim the right to determine matters 
 of faith and duty. All this further content 
 of the word " inspiration," therefore, must be 
 set aside as irrelevant to our subject. 
 
 Let it be observed, however, that all this 
 range of inspiration of the kind we have 
 spoken of as spiritual, presupposes much. 
 We have said that it means direct personal 
 contact of the Spirit of God with the spirit of 
 man, that it is mediated by Christ, and that 
 it is not of nature, but of grace. But who is 
 
i6 VARIOUS MEANINGS 
 
 God ? Who is Christ ? What is grace ? 
 It is evident that the inspiration which is 
 spiritual does not spring out of the ground, 
 nor does it come down from heaven ready- 
 made. It is clearly the result of something 
 that has g^one before. It is throuo^hout 
 based on a prior revelation. The inspira- 
 tion of the Christian has to do with the 
 application of that which has been given and 
 is now complete. But how was it given ? 
 How has it come into our possession ? 
 
 The answer to this question throws us 
 back on another kind of inspiration — the 
 inspiration of those who were chosen of God 
 to be the vehicles of that redemptive reve- 
 lation which was to be the basis of fellow- 
 ship with God through all succeeding ages. 
 Just as in natural inspiration there are the 
 select geniuses who are often pioneers and 
 mark out a track for other men to follow, 
 so in the spiritual inspiration there must be 
 pioneers, geniuses of inspiration as it were, 
 through whom the revelation originally 
 comes. 
 
 Now that is just where we find ourselves 
 in our present inquiry. We of these later 
 days have fallen heirs to a great revelation 
 beginning in the earliest times, waxing ever 
 
OF INSPIRATION 17 
 
 clearer and fuller till it culminates in the 
 pure white light of the revelation of God 
 in Christ. It is with this period of the 
 giving of revelation our inquiry has to do, 
 and we shall find that during its course, 
 in the accomplishment of its gracious pur- 
 pose, there was called for and there came 
 forth an inspiration sui generis, which had 
 as its special characteristic the quality of 
 originality and the note of authority : origi- 
 nality, for it was a matter of revelation, the 
 unveiling of that which had been hidden 
 from the ages and the generations ; and 
 authority, for a revelation on which the ages 
 to come were to be nourished must bear 
 unequivocal marks of having come from 
 God, to Whom they owed themselves. Let 
 us call this, then, in distinction from all 
 other kinds of inspiration of which we have 
 been speaking, revelational (or especially 
 redemptive) inspiration. It is with this, and 
 this alone, that we have to do. 
 
 Let it be noted in passing that this way 
 of approaching the subject does away with 
 a difficulty which has often been raised, 
 namely, the ceasing of what we may, in 
 view of our present subject, call inspiration 
 proper. If the line of demarcation between 
 
 c 
 
1 8 VARIOUS MEANINGS 
 
 the authoritative and non-authoritative had 
 been a date arbitrarily selected, then it 
 would be hard to show the reasonableness 
 of that high inspiration coming to an end. 
 Why should there be a difference between 
 the inspiration of Paul and the inspiration 
 of Wesley ? But when we consider that 
 redemptive revelation was a gradual process, 
 and that it culminated in what is known as 
 ** the fulness of the times " when all that 
 was needed as the foundation of the new 
 life had been given in full, we can readily 
 see that the particular kind of inspiration 
 should cease with the call for it. Connected 
 as it was with the giving of a revelation, it 
 would naturally come to an end when the 
 revelation was fully given, and nothing 
 remained but the acceptance and eluci- 
 dation and application of that which had 
 been revealed. 
 
 This natural distinction is often missed by 
 excellent men who wish to emphasize the 
 fact that God has not ceased to dwell with 
 man and to speak with him, and to send 
 into the world men of light and leading and 
 genuine inspiration. All this is, of course, 
 perfectly true, but it does not set aside 
 the fact that the revelation of divine grace 
 
OF INSPIRATION 19 
 
 found Its culmination in Christ, so that we 
 do not "look for another" such as He was ; 
 and whatever advances are made In the 
 apprehension of God in Christ, are advances 
 In apprehension and appreciation, not new 
 revelations. We have no quarrel with the 
 great truth which was In the poet Lowell's 
 mind when he wrote : 
 
 " Slowly the Bible of the race is writ, 
 
 And not on paper leaves nor leaves of stone ; 
 Each age, each kindred adds to it 
 
 Texts of despair or hope, of joy or moan. 
 While springs the sea, while mists the mountain shroud. 
 While thunder's surges burst on clefts of cloud, 
 Still at the prophets' feet the nations sit." 
 
 But It Is evident that the words ** Bible " 
 at the beginning and " prophets " at the 
 end of our quotation are employed in a 
 wide and general sense, justified by usage, 
 as, in speaking of Carlyle and Ruskin as 
 prophets we mean by it that they had 
 a message from God, but do not suggest 
 thereby that they occupied precisely the 
 same position as that of the inspired men 
 who took part In the revelation of God 
 which found Its completion and perfection In 
 Christ. 
 
 We have been gradually limiting the 
 reference of the word " inspiration " till we 
 
20 VARIOUS MEANINGS 
 
 have reached that specific kind which is 
 the subject of our inquiry, namely, the 
 inspiration which, having to do with the 
 giving of the revelation of God culminating 
 in Christ, had in it notes of originality and 
 authority wanting in later authors, who may 
 nevertheless be regarded as inspired in a 
 wider sense. But we have attempted no 
 definition. To attempt a definition at this 
 stage would be a begging of the question, 
 a settling beforehand what ought to be the 
 result of our inquiry. Besides, it would be 
 precluded by the fact that even in this 
 narrowed definition of our term there are 
 still degrees of inspiration to be considered. 
 
 Here we touch a point of controversy on 
 which we shall not at present enlarge ; let 
 it suf^ce to mark out one difference of 
 degree concerning which there will be agree- 
 ment. I refer to that indicated in the com- 
 prehensive utterance with which the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews opens, an utterance which 
 covers the whole period of the giving of 
 revelation : " God, who at sundry times and 
 in divers manners spake in time past unto 
 the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last 
 days spoken unto us by His Son." Then 
 follows a great passage which marks out 
 
OF INSPIRATION 21 
 
 the preeminence of Him in whom the reve- 
 lation culminates, showing Him as the fount 
 rather than the channel of inspiration. And 
 even when He is regarded as the subject of 
 inspiration, the distinction is still maintained, 
 as when St. John says the Spirit was given 
 without measure to Him, implying that it 
 was only in measure to others. God spoke 
 in Him with a fulness, completeness, supre- 
 macy of authority for which there is no 
 parallel. It is a similar kind of inspiration 
 certainly, but by no means of the same 
 superlative degree, in which God spoke 
 through the prophets. And in the same 
 way as God spoke through the prophets, 
 Christ spoke through the apostles. Their 
 inspiration then was on another plane than 
 the manifestation of God in Christ, in which 
 His inspiration consisted. And it is the 
 nature and extent of their inspiration with 
 which we have to do when we speak of 
 the inspiration of the Scriptures ; for while 
 Christ and His Cross is the subject of the 
 Bible as a whole, He is not the author of a 
 single book or a single line in it. His 
 writing was on lives, not on parchment 
 leaves. The great question for us then is, 
 What are we to understand by God speaking 
 
22 INSPIRATION 
 
 through the Prophets and Christ speaking 
 through the Apostles ? It is not, therefore, 
 the very highest degree of inspiration with 
 which we have to deal ; but that which ap- 
 proaches most nearly to it — the inspiration, 
 specially of the Prophets and Apostles and 
 generally of all the writers of the books 
 w^hich are known as the Holy Scriptures. 
 
 In following out our inquiry we shall find, 
 first (in Part II.) an elect nation called of 
 God to receive and convey to the world 
 His message of salvation, and next (in 
 Part III.) individual men selected and 
 empowered by the agency of His Spirit to 
 make the message articulate — the witness of 
 all converging on Him who is the Word 
 of God, and by whose sacrifice alone the 
 world can be redeemed. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 The Field to be Explored 
 
 OUR title says " the Inspiration and 
 Authority of the Bible." " The Bible" 
 then is the field to be explored. We have 
 been accustomed from our childhood to 
 understand by the Bible a single well-known 
 book which we believe to have been pro- 
 duced by that special inspiration which has 
 to do with the giving of revelation. But 
 when we examine our Bible, we find that 
 it is not one book but sixty-six ; and in fact 
 the word Bible is not a correct translation 
 of the title first given to the Scriptures by 
 Chrysostom, for the name he gave was Ta 
 BtjSXta, not the book, but the books. 
 
 On what principle have these sixty-six 
 books been chosen as of special inspiration ? 
 If we have to defend the claims of every 
 one of them, and to form our theory of the 
 nature of inspiration from what we find in 
 
 23 
 
24 THE FIELD 
 
 them all, we ought to know the authority for 
 including all these, and these only, in ** the 
 Bible." They certainly do not all claim for 
 themselves to be given by inspiration of 
 God. Very few of them do. Many of them, 
 especially the Prophets in the Old Testa- 
 ment and the Apostle Paul in the New, 
 make the claim, not indeed for the books, 
 but for the message which the books contain. 
 But the claim is made for them all — by 
 whom ? 
 
 (i) First as to the Old Testament. Our 
 Lord evidently deals with the Old Testament 
 Scriptures of His day as given by inspira- 
 tion of God, and the famous passage in the 
 Epistle of Paul to Timothy gives a similar 
 testimony. But how many books are thus 
 certified ? There were two collections of 
 sacred Scripture then in existence, both in 
 current use, the Hebrew original and the 
 Septuagint translation. The latter was much 
 the more familiar, for the original Hebrew 
 was by that time a dead language, and, 
 indeed, it was through targums, translations 
 and paraphrases into the vulgar tongue, that 
 the Hebrew collection was best known. 
 Moreover, it is from the Septuagint that the 
 quotations of our Lord Himself and His 
 
TO BE EXPLORED 25 
 
 Apostles are most frequently taken. But 
 the Septuagint included many more than the 
 thirty-nine books we now have in the Old 
 Testament ; it included the whole of the 
 Apocrypha, not separated from the rest as 
 is customary in English Bibles which contain 
 it, but mixed in with the other books. Are 
 we to understand then that our Lord certifies 
 the whole of the Apocrypha as of equal 
 authority with the other books ? This 
 would broaden the field of inquiry very 
 considerably, and largely increase our diffi- 
 culties. If, on the other hand, we assume 
 that He only meant to certify the Hebrew 
 collection, as might be argued from His 
 reference to "the Law of Moses, and the 
 Prophets, and the Psalms," in Luke xxiv. 
 44, we have still the fact to deal with that 
 He left no warning against treating the whole 
 of the Septuagint as authoritative. From 
 which we gather that for some reason or 
 other He did not consider the subject of 
 vital importance. This may seem strange 
 to some good people, but it is a fact ; and it 
 is our duty as loyal disciples of our blessed 
 Lord, to accept the position He takes in 
 the matter without venturing to criticize it. 
 We shall, I believe, afterwards find that 
 
26 THE FIELD 
 
 there is excellent reason for His not being 
 precise in His teaching in this particular. 
 
 But even if we had good reason for re- 
 stricting our Lord's certification to the sacred 
 Scriptures according to the Hebrew collec- 
 tion, we still are in difficulty, inasmuch as 
 we cannot tell how many books it contained 
 at the time of our Lord ; for the Hebrew 
 canon, including the books we now have, 
 was not made up till more than half a 
 century after our Lord's death. There 
 were doubts and disputes going on among 
 the Hebrew authorities as to Esther, Pro- 
 verbs, Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, and 
 Ezekiel. It was not till a.d. 90 that the 
 canon of the Hebrew Old Testament was 
 made up as we have it now, and even then 
 the authorities were not unanimous. The 
 decision was by majority. And though 
 there was this indeterminateness as to the 
 Hebrew canon in our Lord's time. He 
 does not consider the matter of sufficient 
 importance to give authoritative pronounce- 
 ment as to the number of books to be 
 included. This again is a fact which is 
 not to be set aside, but reverently accepted 
 in the spirit of loyal trust. 
 
 (2) As to the New Testament we have 
 
TO BE EXPLORED 27 
 
 no guidance whatever from our Lord or 
 His Apostles, except indeed our Lords 
 special promise to His Apostles to guide 
 them into all truth and bring all things to 
 their remembrance, which would give a 
 sanction to such books of the New Testa- 
 ment as were of apostolic authorship. There 
 are those, indeed, who have appealed to the 
 solemn warning at the close of the Book of 
 Revelation against adding to or taking away 
 from '* the words of the book of this pro- 
 phecy," contending that it is an apostolic 
 certificate of the twenty-seven books of the 
 New Testament, or even of the sixty-six 
 books of the Bible, as containing all, and 
 alone containing, God's authoritative revela- 
 tion ; but no intelligent person can take this 
 ground now. " The book of this prophecy " 
 is the book in which the passage occurs, 
 namely, the Apocalypse ; and, as a matter of 
 fact, several of the books of the New Testa- 
 ment were not then in existence, and most 
 certainly there was no volume of the New 
 Testament, or of the Bible as a whole, till 
 long after this sentence was written. We 
 must then have in view the fact that we 
 have no means of knowing the mind of 
 Christ or of His Apostles as to the exact 
 
28 THE FIELD 
 
 number of the books to be included in the 
 Bible. 
 
 How then was our present Bible made up ? 
 The answer to this is long and difficult. If 
 the matter had been of supreme importance, 
 we may be sure that we should have had a 
 voice from heaven or some quite decided 
 intimation of the divine mind. But instead 
 of this there are long discussions as to some 
 of the books, both of the Old Testament and 
 the New, leading gradually to a general 
 acquiescence in regard to the thirty - nine 
 books of the Old Testament and the twenty- 
 seven of the New which we now have, but 
 with a mark of question left against a few 
 which are spoken of as " deutero-canonical " 
 (z.e. canonical in a secondary and somewhat 
 doubtful sense), to distinguish them from 
 those which are acknowledged by all to be 
 canonical. But there still remains a dis- 
 tinct cleavage as to the books known as 
 the Apocrypha; for these are all accepted 
 by the Roman Catholic Church as equally 
 canonical with the rest, while the Reformers 
 rejected them. In this connection it is worth 
 noting that there had been so much vague- 
 ness as to the canon of Scripture for some 
 fifteen centuries, that the Council of Trent, 
 
TO BE EXPLORED 29 
 
 meeting in 1546, found it necessary to make 
 an authoritative declaration as to the canon 
 of Scripture ; which shows that there was no 
 previous pronouncement decided enough to 
 suit their purpose. On the other hand, there 
 were similar pronouncements from the side 
 of the Reformation, such as the list of books 
 in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican 
 Church, distinguishing the sixty-six books 
 which it recognized as canonical from the 
 books of the Apocrypha which may be read 
 " for example of life and instruction of man- 
 ners," but " not to establish any doctrine " ; 
 and the list of books in the Westminster Con- 
 fession of Faith which coincides exactly with 
 what we understand now by "The Bible." 
 
 While then we have no distinct and 
 definite divine authority for including all 
 our sixty-six books and none besides, we 
 have a general consensus of Christian opinion, 
 including all the Churches of the Reformation 
 as well as the Church of Rome, as to the 
 canonicity of these books. We may there- 
 fore take as the field to be explored : 
 
 (a) The books which come to us on pro- 
 phetic or apostolic authority ; 
 
 (d) Those which, though not bearing the 
 names of apostles or prophets, have yet been 
 
30 THE FIELD 
 
 recognized as canonical by what may be 
 called universal consent ; and 
 
 {c) Those which have not been universally 
 acknowledged, yet have established such a 
 claim as to have found a place in the col- 
 lection of sacred Scriptures, which has sur- 
 vived the controversies of fifteen centuries, 
 and is now generally accepted. 
 
 The importance of keeping these distinc- 
 tions in mind will be recognized when we 
 consider that while we have to deal with 
 facts gathered from the whole field, we do 
 not feel exactly the same responsibility for 
 what we find in much disputed books, such 
 as Esther in the Old Testament or the 
 second Epistle of Peter in the New, as 
 we have in the writings of clearly authenti- 
 cated Apostles and Prophets. And those 
 who are acquainted with the Apocrypha will 
 recognize what a relief it is to be free from 
 the necessity of claiming special inspiration 
 for all the books which it contains. 
 
 Let it be noticed, before passing from the 
 subject of the canon, that our faith does not 
 depend at all on the canonicity of those 
 books concerning which the evidence is not 
 quite complete. If we were restricted to 
 those portions of the Bible which have all 
 
TO BE EXPLORED 31 
 
 the marks of canonicity — those books which 
 can be proved to have been clearly in the 
 mind of Christ when He used the Old 
 Testament Scriptures, and those parts of 
 the New Testament which are clearly of 
 apostolic authority, — we should still have a 
 sufficient basis to establish not only faith in 
 God and in His Son Jesus Christ, but also 
 all the truths which are of vital importance 
 to our salvation and eternal life. We need 
 not then vex our souls in the slightest degree 
 that we have no supernatural certification of 
 all the books of the Bible. We ought rather 
 to acknowledge with adoring gratitude that, 
 while there is some doubt as to outlying 
 parts of Scripture, there is abundance in 
 those parts which are fully certified to lead 
 the soul from darkness into light, to guide 
 any earnest inquirer to the Saviour of man- 
 kind. We need not find fault with the 
 penumbra, if the central luminary shines 
 clear and glorious. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 The Method of Exploration 
 
 NOW that we see clearly what it is we 
 have to study, the next question is as 
 to the method we should follow. Shall we 
 first settle in our own minds the precise 
 nature and extent of inspiration according to 
 our ideas of what God ought to do, or is 
 likely to do ; then diligently seek out all that 
 can be found in the Scriptures themselves 
 which seem to confirm our view, and when 
 anything is observed that seems to conflict 
 with it, either leave it out of account or 
 ingeniously explain it away ? This is the 
 method which has till quite recently been 
 most popular with the defenders of the 
 authoritative inspiration of the Scriptures. 
 They have postulated as a necessity of the 
 case the emancipation of all the writers of 
 Scripture from the effects of human weakness 
 and limitation. They have said that if we 
 
 33 
 
METHOD OF EXPLORATION 33 
 
 cannot have the guarantee that every word 
 these holy men of old have written expresses 
 accurately and only the mind of God, the 
 whole thing is useless, because if these people 
 who are the vehicles of revelation cannot be 
 trusted in everything, they can be trusted in 
 nothing. This is what may be called the 
 rationalistic method of proceeding, for it 
 starts with a theory framed in accordance 
 with what the theorist regards as reasonable, 
 and deals with all the facts of the case in 
 the light of that theory. It is a vice of 
 method precisely analogous to that of those 
 who begin their study of the Bible with a 
 theory of the universe which seems to them 
 the only reasonable one, and insist on making 
 everything they find square with their theory. 
 This has been the basis of a great deal of 
 the destructive criticism which has done so 
 much mischief in the last generation. A 
 Bible critic would start with a naturalistic 
 theory of evolution which ruled out all divine 
 action as inadmissible. Hence every state- 
 ment which implies divine action must either 
 be discredited and denied, or else explained 
 in such a way as to resolve the case into 
 one of natural causation. Thus the Incarna- 
 tion, the Resurrection, and all the mighty 
 
 D 
 
34 METHOD OF EXPLORATION 
 
 works of Christ must either be denied or 
 explained away. Surely it is clear that such 
 Bible study is wholly vitiated by the false 
 method of first making your theory, and then 
 forcing the facts to fit it. 
 
 There is this great difference between 
 the two cases, that the one uses the faulty 
 method for the destruction of the authority 
 of the Bible, the other for its defence. But 
 surely the end does not justify the means ; 
 surely there is mischief, if not disaster, to 
 be expected from the use of a method which 
 is wholly discredited since the time of Bacon. 
 Indeed, all the progress of modern science 
 has been attained by the discarding of this 
 method and the adoption in its place of 
 humbly sitting at the feet of nature, accept- 
 ing all the facts, making room for every one 
 of them, and only after all have been looked 
 at and duly weighed, venturing to construct 
 a theory v/hich will include every one of 
 them. 
 
 An astronomer of the olden time settled 
 in his mind first that the universe might 
 be divided into two parts, superlunary and 
 sublunary, the former the abode of perfec- 
 tion, the latter of imperfection, and next that 
 the circle was the only perfect figure ; then 
 
METHOD OF EXPLORATION 35 
 
 he would teach that the orbit of all the 
 planets beyond the moon must be circular. 
 To suppose them other than circular would 
 be to ascribe imperfection to that which God 
 must have made perfect. Thus the matter 
 was settled beyond all contradiction. The 
 modern astronomer settles nothing in his 
 mind beforehand. He begins by studying 
 the facts of the case. He examines with 
 care the orbits of Venus, Mars, Jupiter, 
 Saturn, and finds that not one of them is 
 circular, and therefore that the theory of the 
 circle as the only perfect figure must be 
 given up. Which of these is the correct 
 method of inquiry ? Surely the latter. 
 
 It is this latter and humbler method on 
 which most reverent students of the Bible 
 now proceed. Instead of determining before- 
 hand that God must reveal Himself in a 
 manner which shall preclude all possibility 
 of the smallest mistake or the slightest 
 imperfection on the part of the agents whom 
 He will employ for the accomplishment of 
 His purpose, they set themselves to find 
 out what God actually has done ; they look 
 at the whole field of Scripture, try to take 
 in all the facts, and then, after having studied 
 them carefully and allowed each its due 
 
36 METHOD OF EXPLORATION 
 
 place, they form their conclusions as to 
 the nature and extent of the inspiration 
 which God has been graciously pleased to 
 employ. Their theory of inspiration is 
 formed, not at the beginning, but at the end 
 of the inquiry. It is formed, not on the 
 rationalistic principle of deciding it in one's 
 own mind, and then drilling all the products 
 of inspiration in accordance with it, but on 
 the modest principle of sitting at the feet 
 of the inspired writers, and especially at 
 the feet of Christ Himself, the great Master, 
 and accepting what they find there as in 
 accordance with the mind and will of God. 
 The theory of inspiration so reached may 
 not seem so satisfactory as the one made 
 in advance, just as the ellipse did not seem 
 so satisfactory as the circle ; but it will, at 
 all events, be reached by a method which 
 is honest and straightforward, free from all 
 taint of rationalism, ready to accept as best 
 what God gives, though it be not exactly 
 what we think best. 
 
 As it is the inspiration connected with 
 revelation with which we have to do, it will 
 be well first to investigate the facts discovered 
 in our field which show God's method of 
 revelation. This will give us a general view 
 
METHOD OF EXPLORATION 37 
 
 over the whole field, after which we shall be 
 in a better position to discover God's method 
 of inspiration. This general survey will show 
 us (i) that God chose a particular nation to 
 be the channel through which the revelation 
 should come ; (2) that it was given by a 
 gradual process of teaching and training ; 
 (3) that it culminated in a complete and final 
 revelation of God in a human life. 
 
PART II 
 
 INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY OF 
 THE REVELATION 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 A Prophet Nation 
 
 THE first thing we notice when we look 
 at the Bible is that it is primarily a 
 history of Redemption, and secondarily a 
 history of the Hebrew nation. The call 
 of Abraham comes early in the first book, 
 and the destruction of Jerusalem occurred 
 towards the end of the apostolic period. 
 We further find that it is to the Hebrew 
 race we owe the entire collection of books ; 
 even the Apostle of the Gentiles was a 
 Hebrew of the Hebrews. The first fact 
 we have to deal with, then, is that of an 
 elect and inspired people — a nation singled 
 out from other nations to receive God's 
 special redemptive revelation and to give 
 it to the world. 
 
 This is not a mere inference from the 
 general fact we have just referred to. It 
 is a claim distinctly made and continually 
 
 41 
 
42 A PROPHET NATION 
 
 repeated throughout the Bible. We read 
 that when God called Abraham out of 
 Chaldea to be the founder of the nation, 
 it was in order that in him and in his 
 seed all the nations of the earth should be 
 blessed. When the nation was constituted 
 at Mount Sinai, the same high calling of 
 Israel was set forth in a still more distinct 
 and definite manner: **Ye have seen what 
 I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare 
 you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto 
 Myself. Now therefore, if ye will obey 
 My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, 
 then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto 
 Me from among all peoples : for all the 
 earth is Mine : and ye shall be unto Me 
 a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation " 
 (Exodus xix. 4-6). And though they were 
 very far from actually being a kingdom of 
 priests and a holy nation, yet the high 
 calling was never quite lost sight of. 
 Though the nation as a whole was faith- 
 less, there were always some faithful ones 
 who kept up the tradition. We find the 
 Psalmists, for example, expressing them- 
 selves in strains like this : " God be merciful 
 unto us, and bless us, and cause His face 
 to shine upon us; that Thy way may be 
 
A PROPHET NATION 43 
 
 known upon earth, Thy saving health among 
 all nations. Let the peoples praise Thee, 
 O God ; let all the peoples praise Thee " ; 
 and again : " Blessed be the Lord God, 
 the God of Israel, who only doeth wondrous 
 things : and blessed be His glorious Name 
 for ever; and let the whole earth be filled 
 with His glory," which latter quotation is 
 specially to be noted as being the doxology 
 with which the second book of the Psalter 
 is concluded. The prophets, moreover, kept 
 up the same strain, sounding a clearer and 
 ever clearer note as the centuries passed ; 
 and when things grew darker and darker 
 with the nation, they did not give up the 
 hope, but centred it in One coming who 
 should Himself fulfil Israel's calling, and 
 thus show Himself to be **the Holy One 
 of Israel." And even when the oracles 
 seemed dumb in the centuries following 
 the captivity, the dispersion was preparing 
 the way for the fulfilment of all when the 
 Holy One of Israel at last came. 
 
 This special calling of Israel is also fully 
 recognized in the New Testament. Our 
 Lord restricted His ministry to "the lost 
 sheep of the house of Israel," and when 
 they rejected Him, He trusted His cause 
 
44 A PROPHET NATION 
 
 to a few chosen men of this same race. In 
 speaking to the woman of Samaria, He said, 
 " Salvation is of the Jews " ; in the same 
 way the Apostle Paul, Apostle of the 
 Gentiles though he was, asserted the special 
 privilege and prerogative of Israel (see 
 especially Romans ix.-xi.) ; and in the seal- 
 ing recorded in the Book of Revelation the 
 twelve tribes come first, and only after them 
 a great multitude out of every nation and 
 kindred. 
 
 Now, it is a very remarkable fact that 
 such a claim should be made for a particular 
 nation, especially when we know it to have 
 been in no other way distinguished. We 
 should never have supposed, from a study 
 of the national characteristics and of the 
 great facts of its history, that Israel was 
 at all likely to be a prophet nation. But 
 has it not been so? Is it not evident that 
 it has been specially selected and specially 
 trained for the purpose of being the channel 
 of divine truth to the world.-* We by no 
 means assert that they had a monopoly of 
 truth, or of divine guidance. We believe 
 that God has been in all history, and has 
 guided and controlled the destinies of all 
 the nations, and that each one of the great 
 
A PROPHET NATION 45 
 
 nations in particular has contributed its 
 share to the world's progress. We are 
 debtors to the Egyptian, the Greek, and 
 the Roman, aye, and to the great Asiatic 
 races. There have been Lights of Asia 
 besides those which issued from Mount 
 Zion. But when all this is acknowledged, 
 still the Jewish race stands alone, not only 
 in the great world, but even among the 
 Semitic races, which are believed to have 
 been specially predisposed to religion. There 
 is no such line of light in the history of any 
 other nation in all the world. And there is 
 no collection of sacred books to be compared 
 for a moment with those which make up 
 our Bible. This statement does not deny 
 that passages may be culled from other 
 sacred books which might stand side by 
 side with corresponding passages in the 
 Bible ; but when we take it as a whole, 
 there is nothing to compare with it. 
 
 It would take a whole treatise fitly to 
 develop this ; but we shall refer only to 
 three things which specially constituted 
 Israel the prophet nation — (i) their abiding 
 consciousness of the immanence and trans- 
 cendence of God, (2) their quenchless passion 
 for righteousness, and (3) the growth through 
 
46 A PROPHET NATION 
 
 all their chequered and even disastrous 
 history of a lofty spirituality. 
 
 I. God-consciousness. 
 
 This is the supreme interest throughout. 
 The Hebrew is the only literature in all 
 the world in which God is in all, through 
 all, and over all. We are so familiar with 
 this characteristic of the Bible that it seldom 
 occurs to us to think how unique it is. The 
 only way in which we can catch the wonder 
 of it is by comparison with other parallel 
 literature. As an illustration of this, we may 
 compare the Song of Moses (Exodus xv.) 
 with the almost contemporary hymn of the 
 poet Pentaur, who is sometimes spoken of 
 as the Homer of Egypt. There is a certain 
 similarity in style, as is, of course, to be 
 expected in productions which belong to 
 the same period ; but they are as different 
 as possible in substance. The one is full 
 of man and his praises, while the other 
 makes nothing of man (the name of Moses 
 is not even once mentioned in it) and 
 everything of God. The first three verses 
 sufficiently indicate the tenour of the whole : 
 '• I will sing unto the Lord, for He hath 
 triumphed gloriously : the horse and his 
 
GOD-CONSCIOUSNESS 47 
 
 rider hath He thrown into the sea. The 
 Lord is my strength and song, and He is 
 become my salvation. This is my God, 
 and I will praise Him; my father's God, 
 and I will exalt Him. The Lord is a man 
 of war : the Lord is His name." 
 
 Such is the strain of the Hebrew epic ; 
 whereas in the Egyptian one the praises 
 of Pharaoh are sung throughout, and when 
 any god of Egypt is referred to, it is in some 
 such fashion as this : " I (Pharaoh) have 
 built for thee Propylaea, wonderful works 
 of stone, I have raised to thee masts for 
 all times, I have conveyed the obelisks for 
 thee from the island of Elephantine. It 
 was I who had brought for thee the ever- 
 lasting stone, who caused the ships to go 
 for thee on the sea, to bring thee the pro- 
 ducts of foreign nations. Where has it 
 been told that such a thing was done at 
 any other time ? " Comment is needless 
 on the contrast. 
 
 This feature is quite as obvious in Israel's 
 history. The writers are not historians, 
 they are divines. The victories are the 
 victories of God, not of Israel ; their defeats 
 are the chastisements of God, and all 
 through their varied experiences they are 
 
48 A PROPHET NATION 
 
 under the guidance of God. It is God 
 first, God last, God midmost, God in every- 
 thing. This comes out most impressively 
 in the Psalms. There is one Name sounded 
 out in every Psalm, in every stanza — we 
 might almost say in every line. It is the 
 Name of God. It is true that this is the 
 most intensely human book of the Bible, 
 emphatically the word of man. But if we 
 think, not of the speakers, but of what they 
 say, it is in the highest sense the word of 
 God. Man blots himself out, and writes 
 over the space the great Name, Jehovah. 
 It is the nation's song-book; but it is not 
 the nation's doings that are celebrated. 
 Their sinful doings are confessed, but the 
 great things, the "mighty deeds," are always 
 and only the doings of God for them. The 
 great names in the nation's history are con- 
 spicuously absent. There is no panegyric 
 of Abraham, or Moses, or Joshua, or Samson, 
 or Elijah. If any one is mentioned, as 
 David is several times, it is never to signalize 
 the man, but always to glorify God. There 
 had been great wars and glorious victories, 
 but we find not a word about any Hebrew 
 commander ; there is no WelHngton, or 
 Napoleon, or Frederick the Great ; no 
 
GOD-CONSCIOUSNESS 49 
 
 Csesar, or Alexander, or Pharaoh ; it is the 
 God of battles whose praise fills all the 
 page. "Who is the King of glory? The 
 Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord, mighty 
 in battle." " The Lord of Hosts, He is the 
 King of glory." 
 
 It is the same in the quieter and more 
 meditative Psalms. The nature songs, for 
 example, are among the finest ever written ; 
 but the beauties of nature are all trans- 
 parencies through which are seen the glory 
 of God. And it is the same in the 
 songs of life. God is all and in all. 
 For the immanence of God is a doctrine 
 as old as the Psalter. From beyond the 
 borders of the land there comes the 
 wail, " Oh, that I knew where I might 
 find Him, that I might come even to His 
 seat." "I go forward, but He is not there; 
 and backward, but I cannot perceive Him." 
 There is transcendence, but no immanence. 
 Now listen to the harp of Judah : " Whither 
 shall I go from Thy Spirit ? Or whither 
 shall I flee from Thy presence ? If I ascend 
 up into heaven. Thou art there ; if I make 
 my bed in Sheol, behold. Thou art there. 
 If I take the wings of the morning, and 
 dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea ; 
 
50 A PROPHET NATION 
 
 even there shall Thy hand lead me, and 
 Thy right hand shall hold me." The 
 thunder is His voice, the lightning is His 
 glance, the winds are His angels, the clouds 
 are His chariot ; fire, hail, snow, stormy wind 
 are His servants, the shadow of a great rock 
 is His shadow, the flowing stream is the 
 river of God. Immanence everywhere. Yet 
 transcendence also : The rock is " higher 
 than I " ; " Thou hast set Thy glory above 
 the heavens " ; " Thou rulest the raging of 
 the sea " ; " Unto Thee, O Lord, do I lift 
 up my soul." 
 
 There are daring anthropomorphisms in- 
 deed; but they are never belittling, they 
 are only such as pertain to the necessary 
 limitations of thought and language ; and 
 there is often a majesty in them such as 
 belongs only to the highest order of poetry. 
 There are indeed dull prosaic souls who find 
 in such representations only vulgar super- 
 stition : and one wonders whether they read 
 Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth in the 
 same wooden way. Recall, for example, the 
 two great thunder-storm passages in the 
 Psalter, the storm on land in Psalm xxix., 
 and the storm at sea, perhaps more magnifi- 
 cent still, in Psalm xviii., both in the highest 
 
GOD-CONSCIOUSNESS 51 
 
 degree anthropomorphic : the thunder the 
 voice of God, the lightning His arrows, the 
 tempest "the blast of the breath of His 
 nostrils " — all a highly poetic rendering of 
 the immanence of God in the storm most 
 vividly realized. Yet His transcendence far 
 above is never forgotten. When the sea- 
 storm is at its height, and shipwreck seems 
 inevitable : "He sent from above, He took 
 me ; He drew me out of many waters." 
 And when the land-storm is over, there is 
 the beautiful reflection that God was not 
 only in the storm but over it : " The Lord 
 sat as king at the flood ; yea, the Lord 
 sitteth as king for ever." And then, when 
 the rain has ceased, and the winds are 
 hushed, and the sun is shining out again, 
 what an exquisite note of faith in view both 
 of the might of God in the storm and the 
 peace of God in the tranquillity which follows 
 it: "The Lord will give strength unto His 
 people ; the Lord will bless His people with 
 peace." 
 
 " Well roars the storm to him who hears 
 A deeper voice across the storm " ; 
 
 or to put the same thought in the still nobler 
 language of Psalm xciii. : " The floods have 
 
52 A PROPHET NATION 
 
 lifted up, O Lord, the floods have lifted up 
 their voice ; the floods lift up their waves. 
 But the Lord above is mightier than the 
 noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty 
 waves of the sea." 
 
 This God-consciousness is quite as cha- 
 racteristic of the New Testament, the only 
 difference being that it is now God in Christ, 
 or "the Lord the Spirit," so that the God- 
 consciousness passes into the Christ-con- 
 sciousness, which is so all-pervading in the 
 writings of the Apostles that we have no 
 sense of extravagance when the chief of 
 them says, "To me to live is Christ," and 
 again, " Christ is all and in all." 
 
 Verily, this Bible is the word — of God. 
 
 II. The Passion for Righteousness. 
 
 It may be said indeed that every one 
 recognizes this feature as a unique character- 
 istic of the Bible, especially since the time 
 when the thought was so eloquently set forth 
 by Matthew Arnold more than twenty years 
 ago. I cannot therefore do better than quote 
 a passage from his chapter on "the greatness 
 of the Old Testament " : " The whole history 
 of the world to this day is in truth one con- 
 tinual establishing of the Old Testament 
 
PASSION FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS 53 
 
 revelation : * O ye that love the Eternal, 
 see that ye hate the thing that is evil ! to 
 him that ordereth his conversation aright, 
 shall be shown the salvation of God.' And 
 whether we consider this revelation in 
 respect to human affairs at large, or in 
 respect to individual happiness, in either 
 case its importance is so immense, that the 
 people to whom it was given, and whose 
 record is in the Bible, deserve fully to be 
 singled out as the Bible singles them. 
 'Behold darkness doth cover the earth, and 
 gross darkness the nations ; but the Eternal 
 shall rise upon thee, and His glory shall be 
 seen upon thee ! * For, while other nations 
 had the misleading idea that this or that, 
 other than righteousness, is saving, and it is 
 not ; that this or that, other than conduct, 
 brings happiness, and it does not ; Israel 
 had the true idea that righteousness is 
 saving, that to conduct belongs happiness. 
 
 " Nor let it be said that other nations, too, 
 had at least something of this idea. They 
 had, but they were xioX. possessed v^\\h it ; and 
 to feel it enough to make the whole world 
 feel it, it was necessary to be possessed with 
 it. It is not sufficient to have been visited 
 by such an idea at times, to have had it 
 
54 A PROPHET NATION 
 
 forced occasionally on one's mind by the 
 teaching of experience. No ; * He that hath 
 the bride is the bridegroom ; the idea 
 belongs to him who has most loved it. . . . 
 Thy testimonies have I claimed as mine 
 heritage for ever, and why? they are the 
 very joy of my heart ! ' This is why the 
 testimonies of righteousness are Israel's 
 heritage for ever, because they were the 
 very joy of his heart. Herein Israel stood 
 alone, the friend and elect of the Eternal. 
 ' He showeth His word unto Jacob, His 
 statutes and ordinances unto Israel. He 
 hath not dealt so with any nation, neither 
 have the heathen knowledge of His laws.' " 
 
 In the heart of the passion for righteous- 
 ness is the great ethical conception of the 
 divine holiness, which again is specially 
 characteristic of the prophet nation, called 
 first to discover, and then to proclaim, that 
 *' Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God of 
 Hosts." The absolute holiness of God is 
 so familiar a thought to us now that we 
 do not often realize its greatness. We take 
 it as a matter of course that the God whom 
 we worship should be absolutely holy, for- 
 getting that we owe to the prophet nation 
 our realization of this truth. Compare with 
 
PASSION FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS 55 
 
 Israel ancient Greece and Rome. See in 
 Greece the finest art, the noblest literature, 
 the sublimest philosophy, the rnost heroic 
 patriotism — in a word, the highest and 
 most perfect culture. And of all this Rome 
 served herself heir, and added great national 
 qualities which made her in course of time 
 the mistress of the world and its metropolis 
 for more than a thousand years, laying broad 
 and deep the foundations of the great science 
 and system of law, which comes nearest of 
 all subjects of human thought to the science 
 of religion itself. What might we not 
 expect then of a religion nurtured in Greece, 
 and fully developed in Rome .-* Yet despite 
 the art and literature and philosophy of 
 Greece, and the civic and national, political 
 and legislative greatness of Rome, the re- 
 ligion which was nurtured and developed 
 under these influences is " of the earth 
 earthy," sadly stained all through by the 
 evil imaginations of the heart of man. 
 Philosophy and letters did their best for 
 it, but could not hide its shame. As for 
 holiness, the conception is not to be found. 
 Their gods and goddesses were just as 
 ready to patronize the vices as the virtues. 
 They had their god of wine, in whose 
 
56 A PROPHET NATION 
 
 honour degrading revels might with pro- 
 priety be indulged. They had their goddess 
 of lust, who presided over sins that cannot be 
 described. They had their god of thieves. 
 And Jupiter himself, ** Optinms Maximus,'* 
 their greatest and their best, was believed 
 by the majority of his worshippers to be 
 guilty of the most horrid crimes. 
 
 What a contrast we find to all this in 
 the Bible ! There we have the history 
 of a people that grew up side by side 
 with the great nations of the ancient 
 world — Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, 
 Rome, a poor despised people, without art, 
 without science, without philosophy, with 
 little culture, with much weakness and cor- 
 ruption in the state and in society — a nation 
 of slaves to begin with, and not much better 
 in the end — made to pass under the yoke 
 of Babylon, made to pass under the yoke 
 of Syria, made to pass under the yoke of 
 Rome, and finally scattered abroad, a by- 
 word among the nations — and yet there and 
 thence, out of that so unpromising history, 
 there springs up a conception of God which 
 is to that of Greece and Rome as light is to 
 darkness. The religion is not like the people 
 at all. It is infinitely above them. And the 
 
LOFTY SPIRITUALITY 57 
 
 superiority appears especially in this, that in 
 their lowest declension — moral, intellectual, 
 national — remained like adamant this great 
 truth : " The Lord our God is holy." There 
 is only one explanation. In the great 
 nations the religions came from the people 
 and were like them. In the little nation the 
 religion came from God and was like Him. 
 The nation was a prophet nation. 
 
 This prepares the way for the third 
 characteristic to be noticed. 
 
 III. Lofty Spirituality. 
 
 This we certainly do not claim for them 
 in the early stages of their history. As one 
 of their own prophets put it : " Thy birth 
 and thy nativity is of the Land of Canaan ; 
 thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother 
 a Hittite" (Ezekiel xvi. 3). And as their 
 origin, so their early history. It would be 
 difficult to find in the history of any other 
 nation a period of more hopeless savagery 
 than that so faithfully described in the Book 
 of Judges. If it be maintained that the 
 Hebrews had a natural genius for religion, 
 it will scarcely be claimed for them that 
 spirituality was an original characteristic 
 of the nation. But this makes it all the 
 
58 A PROPHET NATION 
 
 more remarkable that their literature should 
 gradually become more and more spiritual, 
 till at last it reached heights which have 
 never been surpassed. 
 
 The greatness of Israel is of the spirit 
 only. In all that is outward and material 
 it is hopelessly out of rank with the other 
 nations of the ancient world. This is most 
 impressive to the traveller who passes 
 through Egypt on his way to Palestine. 
 
 ** Those temples, palaces, and piles stupendous, 
 Of which the very ruins are tremendous," 
 
 speak eloquently of Egypt's greatness in 
 the brave days of old. How changed the 
 scene when he passes into Palestine ! There 
 indeed he sees the relics of a bygone age ; 
 but what a contrast ! Little or nothing to 
 impress the thought of Israel's greatness. 
 There are some great remains, such as the 
 Tower of Herod in Jerusalem, the ruins 
 of Sebaste, the broken columns of fallen 
 Tyre ; but these are all foreign — they are 
 Roman and Phoenician, not Hebrew. Even 
 Solomon's temple itself was built by Phoeni- 
 cian workmen, and the great stones in the 
 old wall of Jerusalem have less to tell than 
 at first might be supposed of the might of 
 
LOFTY SPIRITUALITY 59 
 
 Israel. At most they tell of a very short 
 period during which alone it might fairly 
 be said that Israel was great among the 
 nations of the earth. And the country 
 itself — how disappointing to many ! No 
 great river like the majestic Nile ; no great 
 mountains like the mighty Alps ; not even 
 matchless scenery like the Western High- 
 lands of Scotland, or the sylvan beauty of 
 many an English shire. Small and poor, and 
 unimpressive ; and, therefore, necessarily 
 disappointing to those who will forget that 
 it is " the Holy Land," and not '* the great 
 and mighty land " they go to see. A goodly 
 land and large it was for a little time, and 
 might have been always ; but follow the 
 course of its actual history, and it cannot 
 be denied that it is in the main the history 
 of a small and poor country, and of an in- 
 considerable and by no means great people. 
 But what does all this mean ? It means 
 that Israel's greatness is of the spirit only. 
 *' Not by might nor by power, but by My 
 Spirit, saith the Lord." 
 
 One thinks in this connection of the 
 remarkable passage in Psalm Ixviii., in which 
 there is the suggestion of the lofty hills of 
 Bashan looking askance at the little hill of 
 
6o A PROPHET NATION 
 
 Zion. As the traveller proceeds northward 
 from Jerusalem, the hills get larger and 
 higher, until, as he reaches the Plain of 
 Esdraelon and looks eastward, he sees the 
 giant ridge of Bashan looking proudly down 
 on little Tabor beside him, and even more 
 proudly, one may well suppose, on the still 
 smaller mount in the south, of which all the 
 world speaks and hears. ** Why look ye 
 askance (R.V.), ye high hills ? " " The hill 
 of God is as the hill of Bashan ; an high 
 hill as the hill of Bashan." Zion as high 
 as Bashan ! Take a foot-line and measure, 
 says the pedantic literalist. Another gross 
 Bible error. But, friend, is the linear 
 measure the only measure you know ? Read 
 on : " This is the hill which God desireth 
 to dwell in." It is spiritual altitude of which 
 the Psalmist is thinking. And here even 
 the Alps are small in comparison. The 
 matter-of-fact tourist, fresh from the glories 
 of the Bernese Oberland and the wild 
 grandeur of Chamounix and Zermatt, may 
 say, ** How paltry are these little hills of 
 Palestine, and how foolish to make so much 
 of them ! Here we are in front of the most 
 famous mountain in all the world, and it is 
 not half so high as Snowdon." Why look 
 
LOFTY SPIRITUALITY 61 
 
 ye askance ? " This is the hill which God 
 desireth to dwell in." It is not its height 
 above the sea-level ; it is not its beauty or 
 grandeur; it is not anything that earth can 
 do, or has done for it, that makes it so 
 much worth looking at — it is that here God 
 revealed Himself to men, and this exalts 
 it, exalts it to the height of Alps or Andes 
 or Himalayas. "The hill of God is as the 
 hill of Bashan ; an high hill as the hill of 
 Bashan!" 
 
 " Can any good thing come out of 
 Nazareth ? " No question could be mo-re 
 pertinent or sensible on the standing ground 
 of mere earthly evolution ; and it is still 
 appropriate as applied to the whole of 
 Palestine. Those who visit Palestine in 
 the expectation of finding in the land itself, 
 its soil, scenery, people, and surroundings, 
 a sufficient explanation, on principles of 
 mere natural development, of the wonders 
 that have come out of it, are, of course, 
 grievously disappointed — " disillusioned," as 
 it is the fashion to say. But ought those 
 to be disappointed who have no expectation 
 of finding the wonders of divine truth and 
 love so easily explained ? The man of 
 spiritual discernment knows that the good 
 
62 A PROPHET NATION 
 
 thing in all the world's history, the un- 
 speakable gift of God to men, did not come 
 out of Nazareth ; and when he visits the 
 Holy Land, and finds it no better than othe. 
 lands, and in many important respects far 
 inferior to the more favoured lands of the 
 West, he is only confirmed in his belief that 
 the heritage of truth, which has come down 
 to us from ancient Israel, did not come from 
 the land, or from the people, but that in 
 very deed it has come to us out of heaven 
 from God. 
 
 In all this, be it remembered, there is no 
 question of detail. It is not whether this, 
 that, or the other verse or book of the Bible 
 is inspired ; it is not even whether this or 
 that particular prophet or psalmist can ex- 
 hibit his divine commission. It is the whole 
 course and progress of the history, and the 
 literature which springs up like trees by the 
 watercourses of divine love and grace. On 
 the one hand we find a poor, comparatively 
 ignorant, and very fickle and feeble people, 
 with a history which does them very little 
 credit, which rises into greatness only for a 
 very brief period, and for the most part is a 
 record of sin and disgrace and disaster ; and 
 yet, notwithstanding all this, it is a nation 
 
ITS PULPIT 63 
 
 whose sons have reached heights of vision 
 which no others have attained — even Greece 
 itself, so immeasurably above them in all 
 that earth can do to raise men, not to be 
 compared — heights of spiritual vision as 
 high above even their Platos and Zenos, 
 as their snow-clad Parnassus towers above 
 Israel's little Hill of Zion. And it was no 
 mere burst of development in a golden age 
 like that of Pericles ; it was a steady light, 
 shining on and on and on, through darkest 
 days and stormiest weather, even getting 
 brighter and clearer in the days of national 
 decline, and shining out in its fullest bril- 
 liancy in the age of the nation's utter fall 
 and ruin, when out of the ashes of the holy 
 nation's death there rises the Sun of Right- 
 eousness, the Holy One of Israel, to illumine 
 all the world. The prophet nation passes, 
 the Prophet of humanity abides. 
 
 IV. The Nation's Pulpit. 
 
 Consider, In concluding this most important 
 branch of our subject, that though the Holy 
 Land was so very small, it provided a very 
 good pulpit for the prophet nation. It has 
 often been objected that it is not reasonable 
 to suppose that if God were to reveal 
 
64 A PROPHET NATION 
 
 Himself at all, He would do it in so small and 
 out-of-the-way a corner of the earth as little 
 Palestine. But is the Bible only a Palestine 
 book ? And was Palestine a corner of the 
 earth ? Not so. The Bible bears in it the 
 burden of all the world. There is no great 
 nation of antiquity that has not its place 
 there. And though Palestine itself was 
 small, it was in no corner ; on the contrary 
 it was right in the centre of the world 
 which then was — south of it was Egypt ; 
 east, Babylon ; north-east, Assyria ; north, 
 Tyre, Sidon, Syria ; and west, Greece and 
 Rome. Take Jerusalem as your centre, 
 and with a radius of twelve degrees lati- 
 tude describe a circle, and you will include 
 the capitals of all the kingdoms which 
 figured in the main current of the world's 
 history up to the time of Alexander the 
 Great ; and there is no other capital of 
 which this can be said ; and when after- 
 wards, first the conquests of Alexander, 
 and later those of Rome, quite altered 
 the ancient balance of power, though both 
 the capitals of the West were beyond the 
 twelve degrees of distance, yet even these 
 western empires might be regarded as 
 neighbouring powers, for it was a mere 
 
ITS PULPIT 6s 
 
 stretch of sea that lay between : in sailing 
 westward to the coasts of Europe, the first 
 land reached was Greece and the next was 
 Italy. 
 
 The world, of course, was not nearly so 
 large In ancient times as It is now; but 
 such as it was, the Holy Land was in the 
 centre of it. If we think of it we shall 
 see that it would have been impossible to 
 have chosen a more central position. That 
 rocky ridge lifted up above the great river- 
 plains around, where grew and flourished 
 the mighty empires of antiquity, was a 
 magnificent rostrum from which to reach 
 them all with the word of God ; and well 
 might the Hebrew prophets lift up their 
 voices to the nations far and near with 
 such a cry as this : ** O earth, earth, earth, 
 hear the word of the Lord," or this : ** Hear 
 ye people, all of you, hearken, O earth, and 
 all that therein is ; and let the Lord God 
 be witness against you, the Lord from His 
 holy temple." All the great nations had 
 their great witnesses, and all at the time 
 of the zenith of their power: there was 
 Abraham in old Chaldea; Joseph, Moses, 
 in Egypt ; Jonah in Nineveh ; Ezekiel, 
 Daniel, in Babylon ; and of the great empire 
 
 F 
 
66 A PROPHET NATION 
 
 of Persia, the last of the great eastern 
 powers, the founder himself was the chosen 
 of the Lord to set His people free. Was 
 not that most true which God gave by the 
 mouth of His prophet : " I have not spoken 
 in secret, in a dark place of the earth " ; and 
 that grand utterance of the Psalmist : " The 
 mighty God, even the Lord, hath spoken, 
 and called the earth, from the rising of the 
 sun to the going down thereof. Out of 
 Zion, the perfection of beauty, God hath 
 shined " ? Yes, Jerusalem was indeed a city 
 set on a hill that could not be hid. It was 
 the best place in all the world from which 
 to send out light and truth that they might 
 be guides to men and bring them to God's 
 holy hill, where His dwelling was ; and, as 
 the slow course of history has proved, that 
 was no Utopia which was in the Psalmist's 
 outlook when he prayed, ** God be merciful 
 to us and bless us, and cause His face to 
 shine upon us, that Thy way may be known 
 upon earth, Thy saving health among all 
 nations." 
 
 To sum up, Israel was a prophet nation 
 called of God to proclaim His message of 
 salvation to the whole world ; and in this 
 
A PROPHET NATION 67 
 
 unquestionable fact we have a broad and 
 deep foundation for our faith in the inspira- 
 tion and authority of the Hbrary of sacred 
 literature in which the story of the nation is 
 enshrined and their oracles are preserved. 
 
 Note. — If we are reminded that there are two books of 
 the Old Testament (Esther and Song of Solomon) in which the 
 name of God is not once mentioned, we might speak of the 
 exception proving the rule ; but it is more to the purpose to 
 remind ourselves that both these are among the "deutero- 
 canonical " books, for which, therefore, there is no necessity 
 of holding ourselves specially responsible. Moreover, such 
 is the influence of all the other Scriptures which surround 
 them, that though the divine name is not mentioned in 
 cither, it has been the habit of people always to read the 
 providence of God into the one and the love of God into the 
 other. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 Divine Discipline through a Long History 
 
 IT is a great mistake to suppose that the 
 giving of divine revelation was a very- 
 simple thing. Many seem to think that 
 nothing more was necessary than putting 
 into words what was needful for man to 
 know. Place in his hands a book telling 
 all that needs to be told, with the assurance 
 that every word of it is straight from God, 
 and the thing is done. These people forget 
 or fail to realize that — 
 
 "... It is by no breath, 
 Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with 
 death." 
 
 Words certainly were needed, but deeds 
 much more ; teaching was needed, but train- 
 ing much more. A nation cannot be a 
 prophet nation without divine discipline. 
 
 The need of discipline is apparent even 
 in intellectual equipment. You cannot put 
 
 68 
 
DIVINE DISCIPLINE 69 
 
 a book on the higher mathematics into the 
 hand of a tyro; and he who would master 
 any difficult subject must not only read and 
 listen, but must toil and strive, pass through 
 a course of discipline — at the hands of a 
 master in childhood and at his own hands in 
 later life. And while discipline is necessary 
 for proficiency in any curriculum, it is espe- 
 cially necessary where not only the mind 
 but the heart must be developed, where 
 character is the supreme achievement. It 
 was not enough, therefore, that God should 
 speak to the fathers by the prophets, it was 
 necessary that He should do great things for 
 them, while passing them through a course 
 of discipline by which they should be pre- 
 pared to be the prophet nation of the world. 
 It is for this reason that the sacred Scriptures 
 are in the main historical, setting forth what 
 the Lord did for His people, and how He 
 led them and guided them, tried and proved 
 them, suffered them to fall and raised them 
 up again. The Scriptures are full of this, 
 but perhaps it is nowhere more tenderly 
 expressed than in that beautiful passage in 
 Deuteronomy : " As an eagle stirreth up her 
 nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth 
 abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them 
 
70 DIVINE DISCIPLINE 
 
 on her wings : so the Lord alone did lead 
 them, and there was no strange god with 
 Him." 
 
 In the work of creation it was only neces- 
 sary for God to say, " Let there be light," 
 and there was light. But with God a word 
 is a deed. In the work of creation there 
 was but one will to act, so a fiat was all. 
 But in the far greater work of redemption 
 there was the will of man to reckon with, 
 as well as the will of God. There were two 
 parties to the transaction ; and though One 
 was omnipotent, and the other feeble and 
 helpless, yet the will of the feeble and help- 
 less one must not be crushed and overborne. 
 He must not be coerced into a mechanical 
 holiness, such as Huxley in one of his weaker 
 moments craved ; he must be led into a will- 
 ing obedience and service. This required 
 time — long time ; and patience — very much 
 patience — on the part of God. Hence the 
 long discipline of the prophet nation. 
 
 It is because there were two parties in 
 the whole process of revelation that we hear 
 so much of "the Covenant" — the Covenant 
 with Abraham and his seed, the Covenant 
 with Moses and the children of Israel. What 
 did this mean but that God could not act 
 
DIVINE DISCIPLINE 71 
 
 alone, He must do everything in co-opera- 
 tion with the people ? The difficulties which 
 caused so much delay were never with Him, 
 always with them ; and the reason why the 
 light came only by degrees was not because 
 God grudged any more of it, but because it 
 was all they could bear at the time. When 
 the Lord Jesus said to His disciples on the 
 eve of His crucifixion, " I have many things 
 to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them 
 now," He disclosed the whole method of the 
 divine procedure in the giving of revelation. 
 Not only is it true that the people had 
 to be prepared by a divine discipline for 
 receiving the revelation of God, but the 
 revelation itself was far less in word than in 
 deed. Character is far more fully and im- 
 pressively revealed by action than by speech. 
 Suppose that from the starry sky to which 
 Abraham looked up there had come a voice, 
 " God is love," or that on it the words had 
 been written in letters of light, could he 
 have understood it .'* Could the three words 
 possibly have meant to him what they meant 
 centuries later to St. John, when, after the 
 long discipline of Israel the record of which 
 he had so often read, after three years* com- 
 panionship with the Christ of God, and many 
 
72 DIVINE DISCIPLINE 
 
 years thereafter of meditating upon all that 
 he had learned from God's doings to Israel 
 and in His Son, the great truth grew into 
 a sun lightening all his firmament ? 
 
 This great fact that God revealed Himself 
 in deeds is written large through the whole 
 of the Scriptures. God spoke to Abraham, 
 Isaac, and Jacob ; but if we gather together 
 all the spoken words, sublime though they 
 be, they are very few in number. But 
 His greatest utterances were always deeds. 
 Think what He did for Abraham, Isaac, and 
 Jacob. Think what He did for Joseph and 
 through Joseph. Think what He did for 
 Moses and through Moses. Think what He 
 did through Joshua and the Judges, and the 
 Kings. Read the historical psalms, and see 
 the psalmists rejoicing in the mighty deeds 
 of old ; hear the prophets continually remind- 
 ing the people of them ; and, in the perfect 
 revelation which came at last through the 
 Holy One of Israel, mark how the deeds 
 were the main substance of it : " Go your 
 way, and tell John what things ye have seen 
 and heard ; how that the blind see, the lame 
 walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, 
 the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel 
 is preached " ; the preaching of the gospel 
 
DIVINE DISCIPLINE 73 
 
 coming last, not because it is least important, 
 but because it is the deeds which make it 
 plain that there is a gospel to preach. 
 
 Thus it was that the children of Israel 
 grew into the knowledge of God, getting 
 ever clearer and fuller revelations of His 
 unity and personality, His might, His holi- 
 ness, His justice, His tenderness. His mercy, 
 His forgiveness, His love. The revelation 
 was both in word and in deed, but the revela- 
 tion in deed was the more important and the 
 more influential. In fact, many of the words 
 were to call attention to the deeds, and to 
 teach the lessons to be learned from them. 
 The revelation, then, was progressive through 
 a long process of divine discipline, by which 
 the prophetic function of the nation was 
 developed. 
 
 Here again the revelation is unique. We 
 would not forget, indeed, that all the nations 
 were under divine discipline, and that in 
 this point of view the history of Israel is a 
 key to the history of the world, which is 
 just another way of saying that Israel was 
 a prophet nation, not only as proclaiming 
 the salvation of God, but also as showing the 
 hand of God in history. But the uniqueness 
 of Israel's position was this, that of no other 
 
74 DIVINE DISCIPLINE 
 
 nation can it be said that it was especially 
 trained to receive and convey to others the 
 revelation of God. 
 
 Let it be noticed also that in this historical 
 process of revelation we have not only relief 
 from the most serious difficulties attaching 
 to the view of verbal inspiration equally dis- 
 tributed through all the books, but also a 
 strong and most striking confirmation of our 
 faith in the divine inspiration of the Bible as 
 a whole. Think how the revelation of God 
 through the discipline of the prophet nation 
 has been inextricably interwoven with the 
 world's history. Our faith is not a system 
 of doctrines or dogmas, speculations of men's 
 minds. All the principal teachings of the 
 Bible are bound up with great facts in history ; 
 they are not, like the philosophy of the best 
 of the Greeks, or the ethics of Confucius, or 
 the original parts of the Koran, the mere 
 product of some superior or peculiar mind, 
 exercising its powers as best it may on the 
 problems of life and destiny ; nor like the 
 mythology of the heathen, founded entirely on 
 prehistoric fable ; but are so connected with 
 great outstanding facts in the world's history 
 which no one can possibly deny, that a firm 
 basis is afforded for an intelligent faith. 
 
DIVINE DISCIPLINE 75 
 
 We saw in our last chapter how the history 
 of Israel in comparison with, or rather in 
 contrast to, that of the great nations all round 
 about it, brought out the force of the pro- 
 phetic word : " Not by might, nor by power, 
 but by My Spirit, saith the Lord." Consider 
 now how the contact of Israel with other 
 nations throughout the whole of its history 
 gives opportunity for those confirmations 
 which come in ever-increasing numbers from 
 ancient monuments, inscriptions, and histori- 
 cal records. Even as far back a^ Abraham 
 we have illustrations and confirmations of 
 the Bible story — as, for example, in the war 
 of the four kings with five recorded in the 
 fourteenth chapter of Genesis. As we come 
 down, the points of contact and confirmations 
 are more and more numerous and impressive. 
 The history of Egypt affords many of these, 
 from the time of Joseph onwards. As 
 perhaps the best illustration of this, we may 
 refer to the Exodus in connection with the 
 contemporary history of Egypt as gathered 
 from the monuments and the records of 
 that mighty nation. From these it has 
 been determined that the time of Rameses 
 the Great was the very culmination of the 
 Egyptian power and glory. Of all the 
 
76 DIVINE DISCIPLINE 
 
 mighty monarchs he was the mightiest ; 
 and yet it was in his time that Moses was 
 called out from among the Hebrew slaves 
 and trained for his great mission ; and it 
 was when the unparalleled achievements 
 of this mightiest monarch of all had been 
 finished, and the fruits of his victories 
 gathered, when the land had been filled 
 with monuments of his mighty deeds, and 
 the prestige of the great empire was at its 
 height — it was then, that to his haughty 
 and stubborn son and successor, from the 
 mouth of one of his slaves there came the 
 peremptory word : " Let My people go." 
 
 When all this is set vividly before the mind, 
 what majesty does one see in that magnificent 
 opening of the Sinai revelation : " I am the 
 Lord thy God, which have brought thee out 
 of the land of Egypt, out of the house of 
 bondage " ! And how thoroughly we enter 
 into the conviction of the people themselves 
 when they say : " The Lord brought us forth 
 out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand 
 and with an outstretched arm." Verily He 
 did. Who that thinks can doubt it ? To 
 say that these poor slaves were rescued from 
 such bondage and transformed into a free 
 nation by any powers of their own, or any 
 
DIVINE DISCIPLINE 77 
 
 conceivable process of the development of 
 free institutions, is to speak nonsense. It was 
 not evolution ; it was salvation. Remember, 
 it is no question of details — of flies, or lice, 
 or frogs. Even in matters of detail there is 
 confirmation, as, for example, in the remark- 
 able discoveries from the excavations at 
 Pithom and Raamses, so that we have no 
 reason to be afraid of details ; but then they 
 are distracting, and often turn away attention 
 from the great outstanding fact which is of 
 prime importance — that by a mighty hand 
 and an outstretched arm God did bring His 
 people out of Egypt. Thus does God stand 
 revealed on the very threshold of authentic 
 and continuous history, old Egj'pt and its 
 mighty monuments being witnesses to Him 
 as the God of Salvation. Here is the 
 way that Moses put it, in words far more 
 enduring than the pyramids, for they are as 
 fresh and living to-day as ever, as appro- 
 priate now as then : *' The Lord is my 
 strength and my song, and He is become 
 my salvation ; this is my God, and I will 
 praise Him, my father's God, and I will 
 exalt Him." This one great fact of ancient 
 history is a broad and deep foundation, not 
 indeed for any human theory of inspiration, 
 
78 DIVINE DISCIPLINE 
 
 but for our faith in God as mighty to 
 save. 
 
 It would take far too long to develop 
 the thought through the subsequent history. 
 Suffice it to say that the divine disciphne 
 of Israel through fourteen centuries is so 
 linked with the history of the world as 
 known from other sources — with the histories 
 of Nineveh, and Babylon, and Persia, and 
 Greece, and Rome — that the Hebrew Scrip- 
 tures, notably the prophecies, are continually 
 illumined and confirmed by what we know 
 of other nations ; so that, without descend- 
 ing to matters of detail, we have the main 
 lines of that history of divine discipline 
 through which the revelation of God and 
 of His salvation has come to us, standing 
 out clear and sure beyond all reach of ques- 
 tion or cavil.*' 
 
 * It immediately raises not only cavil, but serious ques- 
 tions, when arguments such as these, which are abundantly 
 sufficient to prove the general trustworthiness of Scripture, 
 are treated as if they were equally valid for establishing 
 the theory of minute verbal inspiration. A very common 
 practice of those who are determined at all hazards to 
 maintain their theory is to assume that all who differ from 
 them are trying to prove the Scriptures a tissue of false- 
 hood, in which case all the witness of the monuments and 
 of the historical records would be relevant and valid ; but 
 what they fail to recognize is that all these happily abundant 
 confirmations of the general truth of the sacred records 
 
DIVINE DISCIPLINE 79 
 
 have no relevancy as bearing on the question between the 
 mechanical and the spiritual theories of inspiration. And 
 the sad result often is that, arguments which are perfectly 
 sound and sufficient for proving the trustworthiness of the 
 sacred writers having been brought forward as if they proved 
 their infallibility, the vice of the wrong application of the 
 arguments reacts on the arguments themselves ; and people, 
 clearly seeing that they certainly do not prove the conclusion 
 for which they are advanced, infer that they prove nothing 
 at all. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 The Object Lesson 
 
 " "NT OW all these things happened unto 
 IN them for ensamples; and they are 
 written for our admonition, upon whom the 
 ends of the world are come." The divine 
 discipline was for Israel in the first place, 
 but not for Israel alone — it was for all ; 
 hence, the discipline of Israel, with the 
 revelation which came through it, has been 
 enshrined in the sacred Scriptures, and 
 handed over to all nations that they may 
 learn Israel's lessons and share with her 
 the great revelation. 
 
 We must at this point make clear in our 
 minds the distinction between the revelation 
 and the record of it. The one is quite apart 
 from the other. The revelation of God 
 through Israel and in Christ would have 
 been a revelation even if there had been 
 no record of it. And both in the one and 
 
 80 
 
THE OBJECT LESSON 8i 
 
 in the other — that is, both in the Old Testa- 
 ment and in the New — the revelation always 
 comes in advance of the record. God 
 revealed Himself to Abraham, Isaac, and 
 Jacob long before the story of the patriarchs 
 was written ; He revealed Himself through 
 the prophets before any of the prophecies 
 were put on record; He revealed Himself 
 in Christ before the first of the Epistles 
 was written, and long before Mark, the first 
 of our Evangelists, sat down to write the 
 wondrous story. It is mere confusion of 
 thought, then, to make no distinction be- 
 tween God's revelation of Himself — to Israel, 
 through the prophets, and in Christ — and the 
 record of it which we have in the sacred 
 Scriptures. 
 
 This raises the question as to the means 
 taken to secure a trustworthy record. Such 
 a record we have, but we cannot discover 
 any sign of special arrangements having 
 been made to secure it. It seems, as a 
 rule at least, to have been left to what we 
 may call ordinary providence. God was in 
 it, of course, as He is in everything; and 
 most thankful should we be that, in His 
 adorable providence, He put it into the 
 hearts of a sufficient number of competent 
 
 G 
 
82 THE OBJECT LESSON 
 
 persons to write the history of His dealings 
 with Israel, and to put on record a number 
 of the special messages which were sent to 
 the fathers by the prophets, as well as to set 
 before us the earthly life of our Lord, and 
 to give us some account of what He con- 
 tinued to do and to teach by His Spirit; but 
 there is no sign of men being specially called 
 and commissioned to undertake the work. 
 
 We read of the call of Abraham to come 
 out and be separate, and become the founder 
 of a nation ; of the call of Moses to declare 
 His Name to the people and bring them out 
 of Egypt ; of the call of Gideon and others, 
 in the time of the Judges, to fight the Lord's 
 battles ; of the call of Samuel and many 
 others, his successors, to be His prophets to 
 the people ; of the call of Saul, and after- 
 wards of David and his successors, to be 
 kings, and of their anointing for their special 
 work : but we have no sign of any one being 
 specially called and commissioned to write 
 the history of the chosen people. If any 
 one supposes, for example, that Samuel was 
 called, not only to be a prophet and judge in 
 Israel, but to write the books which bear 
 his name, they have only to observe that his 
 death is recorded in the first book (i Samuel 
 
THE OBJECT LESSON 83 
 
 XXV. i), and that the rest of that book, and 
 the whole of the second volume, tell what 
 happened after his death ; moreover, the 
 two Books of Samuel and the two Books of 
 Kings are bound in one volume in the 
 Septuagint (which, be it remembered, was 
 the Bible chiefly used in the time of our 
 Lord and His Apostles), with no indication 
 whatever as to who was the author of any 
 part of it. Nor have we any means of 
 knowing who was the author of the two 
 Books of Chronicles, or of the earlier Books 
 of Joshua, Judges, and Ruth. 
 
 Thus, we find that the entire history, 
 from the entrance into Canaan down to the 
 Captivity, a space of seven hundred years at 
 least, comes to us, not only without any sign 
 of a call or commission to perform this 
 important service, but without any means 
 of finding out who the author was. This is 
 a fact which is surely not without signi- 
 ficance, and which ought not to be entirely 
 disregarded, as it so often is, by inquirers 
 who wish to be humble and reverent. We 
 may think it unfortunate ; but why should 
 we ? At all events, there it is ; and we 
 ought humbly to accept it, and to adapt to 
 it our theory of the relative importance of 
 
84 THE OBJECT LESSON 
 
 the revelation itself, and the record which 
 enshrines it. Ezra is the first name known 
 after the time of Moses, as a recorder of the 
 Lord's dealings with His people. It is pro- 
 bable that he not only recorded the events 
 of his own time, but that he collected and 
 edited the histories which had come into 
 his hands from the past. Hence we know 
 him as " Ezra the Scribe "; yet he was called 
 first and mainly, to do his work as a re- 
 former in Israel, and there is no mention of 
 any commission to take in hand either the 
 recording or the editing. The same applies 
 to Nehemiah. The prophets had sometimes 
 special directions to write, as when Jeremiah 
 prepared the roll which Jehoiakim destroyed, 
 and again, by divine direction, prepared a 
 second roll ; but we have no evidence of any 
 special call or commission to record the 
 prophecies for the sake of the ages to come. 
 So, in the New Testament, we have the 
 call of Matthew to be a disciple, and a 
 further call to be an apostle ; but we have no 
 record of any call or commission to write his 
 gospel. The Evangelist Luke tells us how 
 he came to write his, and not only is there no 
 reference to any special call or commission, 
 but it is put just as if it had occurred to 
 
THE OBJECT LESSON 85 
 
 himself to do it : " Forasmuch as many have 
 taken in hand to set forth in order a de- 
 claration of those things which are most 
 surely believed among us, even as they 
 delivered them unto us, which from the be- 
 ginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of 
 the word ; it seemed good to me also, ..." 
 And the Acts of the Apostles comes to us 
 in the same apparently incidental way. The 
 Epistles, too, were written just as occasion 
 offered, for the use of the Churches to which 
 they were addressed, and without any in- 
 dication that the author felt himself called 
 to write authoritatively for the Church uni- 
 versal and for the world at large. Not till 
 we come to the last book is there anything 
 which looks like a distinct call and commis- 
 sion to write : " What thou seest, write in 
 a book." 
 
 All this surely shows that, important as 
 the writing of the record was, it was not 
 at all on the same level with the work of 
 those who were called to take part in the 
 revelation itself, or were sent with special 
 messages direct from God, as was true of 
 the prophets. Most certainly God was in 
 it all, guiding, prompting, inspiring; and we 
 should, with adoring thankfulness, recognize 
 
86 THE OBJECT LESSON 
 
 His wonderful providence ; but we must not 
 shut our eyes to the certain fact that there is 
 no evidence whatever that God chose men 
 so set apart from their fellows as to be above 
 all human weakness and imperfections, and 
 supernaturally endowed with a power to 
 write books as absolutely free from imper- 
 fection and error as if God had written them 
 with His own finger. 
 
 There may be those who think it would 
 have been a great deal better if men had 
 been specially called and commissioned to 
 write the books of sacred Scripture, and if 
 each of them had been given a distinct 
 promise that they would be kept absolutely 
 free from error ; but would it not be more 
 reverent and humble for those who cannot 
 help thinking such thoughts if, instead of 
 criticising what God has done, they would 
 rather magnify and bless His holy Name 
 that in His marvellous providence He has 
 not allowed His revelation to Israel to 
 remain unrecorded, but has given this great 
 Object Lesson to us and all the nations of 
 mankind in a manner which, though we may 
 not exactly see it as the best, is yet adequate 
 to teach us the great lessons which were 
 taught to Israel of the divine holiness, 
 
THE OBJECT LESSON 87 
 
 justice, tenderness, patience, forgiveness, 
 and loving-kindness ? 
 
 Before we leave the subject of this chapter 
 it may be well to interpose a caution against 
 two extremes in estimating the value of the 
 Hebrew history as given us in the Bible. 
 There are those who think we ought to be 
 done with the Old Testament, now that we 
 have the complete and perfect revelation in 
 the New. The ancient Hebrews may have 
 needed all that discipline and those slow 
 revealings of truth, but surely we are far 
 beyond that now ! Is it not enough to keep 
 to the New Testament with its full, clear 
 light ? If we have the result, why trouble 
 any more with the process ? The answer 
 is, not only that there is immense interest 
 and valuable instruction to be had from 
 following the successive stages of revelation, 
 but also that God deals with us as individuals 
 on the same principles as He dealt with the 
 chosen nation. There is not a stage in the 
 education of the Children of Israel which 
 has not its parallel in the education of the 
 children of God; hence it is that, though 
 in Christ we have all we need, we have 
 most valuable illustrations of "the truth in 
 
88 THE OBJECT LESSON 
 
 Jesus " In these Old Testament records, and 
 we have therefore reason to be devoutly 
 thankful that, these things having happened 
 to them as ensamples, we "upon whom the 
 ends of the world have come " — i.e. who live 
 in the age of the completed revelation — may 
 learn our much-needed lessons of faith, hope, 
 love, obedience, courage, and constancy. 
 
 On the other hand we ought to be on our 
 guard against the opposite error of putting 
 all the Scriptures on the same level. While 
 we ought diligently to search and study the 
 Old Testament Scriptures, we should always 
 do so in the light of the full and perfect 
 revelation in Christ our Lord, on the prin- 
 ciple which He Himself distinctly taught 
 us when He said, " Ye have heard that it 
 hath been said . . . but I say unto you." 
 Let us read always in the light of the Spirit 
 of Christ, who, happily, is with us all the 
 days even to the end of the world. So shall 
 we have our Object Lesson in all its variety 
 and value lying full and clear in the light of 
 the Sun of Righteousness risen on us with 
 healing in His wings. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 The Substance of Revelation 
 
 THE fact that there is a distinction 
 between revelation and the record of 
 it leads to the inquiry, What is the substance 
 of revelation ? Revelation is enshrined, as 
 we have said, in the sacred Scriptures. We 
 have discovered (Chapter H.) with a certain 
 degree of accuracy what is the field to be 
 explored. We have now to inquire what 
 is the treasure in the field, to use our Lord's 
 own illustration. Can we discover, from 
 looking at the way in which God guided 
 Israel, the messages He sent her, and the 
 completed revelation in the Holy One of 
 Israel, what it is God's desire and purpose 
 to make known, first to His chosen people 
 and then to the world through them ? 
 
 Much of the reasoning in past times on 
 the subject of insptration has proceeded 
 on the supposition that the revelation God 
 
 89 
 
90 THE SUBSTANCE OF REVELATION 
 
 intended to give thereby was quite enc5'clo- 
 psedic, covering all things in heaven and on 
 earth, and settling for ever all doubtful 
 disputations. This idea was due to that 
 preconceived theory of inspiration already 
 referred to (Chapter III.), according to which 
 it was supposed that men inspired of God 
 must be so completely unmanned, as it were, 
 so thoroughly deified, that they could speak, 
 like supermen, with absolute scientific pre- 
 cision on every subject they touched. It 
 was pure theory, without a shred of evidence 
 for it. There is no claim made on behalf 
 of the greatest of the prophets or the chief 
 of the apostles that he was called to set the 
 world right on all matters within the range of 
 man's investigation, physical or metaphysical. 
 The emphasis is laid throughout on the 
 things of the spirit, on the things of God. 
 And while the subject is spiritual, the object 
 is practical. " Every scripture inspired of 
 God is also profitable for teaching, for 
 reproof, for correction, for instruction which 
 is in righteousness, that the man of God 
 may be complete, furnished completely unto 
 every good work." That is perhaps the 
 locus classicus on the subject of inspiration ; 
 yet how completely it has been discarded by 
 
THE SUBSTANCE OF REVELATION 91 
 
 many good people in favour of the theory 
 that Scripture was given to acquaint people 
 with astronomy, geology, history, and every- 
 thing else under the sun, and above it too. 
 This view, however, is now practically given 
 up. Almost every one in our day is willing 
 to have the scope of Scripture teaching 
 limited to the spiritual and the practical. 
 
 Even within this still wide range, however, 
 there are certain great things standing out 
 in such prominence as to make it quite clear 
 that the Inspirer of the sacred Scriptures 
 intended us to give special attention to them. 
 We are warned again and again against 
 making too much of the letter and too little 
 of the spirit. The Apostle Paul says : " The 
 letter killeth, the spirit giveth life " ; and 
 our Lord, in reproof of the narrow-minded 
 Jews who insisted on taking literally what 
 He had said about eating His flesh and 
 drinking His blood, made this important 
 declaration : " It is the spirit that quickeneth ; 
 the flesh profiteth nothing : the words that 
 I speak unto you, they are spirit and they 
 are life." And in this connection it is not 
 only instructive, but most pathetic, to refer 
 to the chief thing He has to say about search- 
 ing the Scriptures, which is this : " In them 
 
92 THE SUBSTANCE OF REVELATION 
 
 ye think ye have eternal life, and they are 
 they which testify of Me, but ye will not 
 come unto Me that ye might have life." 
 Consider the position of the Saviour of the 
 world, for whose coming the long discipline 
 of the prophet nation had been a continual 
 preparation, face to face with men in whose 
 hands was the record of it, and whose 
 function it was to explain it to the people, 
 but whose minds were so occupied with 
 petty details that they missed the substance 
 and spirit of it all. They paid tithes of 
 mint and anise and cummin, but neglected 
 the weighty matters of the law. They read 
 their Bibles diligently, but had no vision 
 of the truth therein enshrined. It was not 
 merely that they did not see the wood for 
 the trees, for they did not even see the trees. 
 The outside bark they did cherish, but the 
 inner life was missed entirely. Hence it 
 came to pass that, for all their searching of 
 the Scriptures, they rejected Him to whom 
 all the Scriptures bore witness, and in whom 
 alone they could find the life they sought. 
 
 Let us beware of making the same mis- 
 take. The revelation God has given us 
 is very wide and very varied. But clearly 
 there are in it greater things and lesser 
 
THE SUBSTANCE OF REVELATION 93 
 
 things. The Bible is not a level plain; it 
 is like the land from which it came — full 
 of great mountain masses. It will help us 
 to right ideas of God's purpose, if we try first 
 to single out those great masses, the lessons 
 which are written large throughout the in- 
 spired history of Israel, and find their centre 
 in Christ, to whom they all bear witness. 
 
 First of all, there is the Name of God. 
 The great object of the divine discipline 
 of Israel was to enable them to spell out 
 that Name. To tell the Name of God was 
 not the easy thing unthinking people are 
 apt to suppose. When Jacob, brought face 
 to face with God at Peniel, made the re- 
 quest, " Tell me Thy Name," he no doubt 
 expected a simple answer, perhaps in a 
 single word. But no such answer came. 
 What came was an answer in deed, not in 
 word : " He blessed him there." Is not 
 this an indication of the only way in which 
 God could reveal His Name effectually ? 
 
 Accordingly, it was not in word, but in 
 deed, in the long course of gracious but 
 faithful dealing with Israel, that God re- 
 vealed His Name. The revelation was not 
 complete till He came in flesh who was 
 
94 THE SUBSTANCE OF REVELATION 
 
 the brightness of the Father's glory and 
 the express image of His person — not quite 
 complete, indeed, until the crowning revela- 
 tion of the Cross and the Resurrection, for 
 at the very close of His earthly life we 
 hear Him saying to His Father : " I have 
 declared unto them Thy Name, and will 
 declare it: that the love wherewith Thou 
 hast loved Me may be in them, and I in 
 them." This, then, is the main substance of 
 revelation : the unveiling of God, gradually 
 through the sacred history, and finally in 
 the life and death and resurrection of Christ 
 our Lord. It is in this above all that we 
 see clearly the Bible to be the Word of 
 God. In the highest sense, indeed, Christ 
 Himself is the Word of God; but in a 
 subordinate sense, as testifying to God and 
 His Christ, these Scriptures are entitled to 
 this unique designation. 
 
 But there needed not only a revelation 
 of God to man, but of man to himself. 
 That, too, we have throughout. We have 
 not only a line of light revealing the Name 
 of God, but a line of darkness marking 
 the sin of man. Side by side with the 
 wonderful story of the creation of man in 
 the image of God, we have the fact of sin 
 
THE SUBSTANCE OF REVELATION 95 
 
 set forth, not in philosophic phrase, but in 
 a living picture, which in its simple way 
 conveys the deepest truths as to sin's in- 
 sidious approaches, its virulence, and its 
 fatal issues — most marvellous combination 
 of the simplicity of form which was abso- 
 lutely necessary for the world's childhood, 
 and the profound suggestiveness which is 
 the mark of its high inspiration. And, as 
 the revelation begins, so it proceeds, unveil- 
 ing the Name of God on the one hand, and 
 the shame of man on the other — the black 
 lines of human sin set in the revealing light 
 of the Sun of Righteousness. There is no 
 respect of persons in the sacred records. 
 The sins of Abraham and of David are 
 painted in all their native hideousness ; the 
 sins of the holy nation are as unsparingly 
 exposed as those of the nations who knew 
 not God ; and in the New Testament, the 
 sins of erring apostles and disciples are as 
 faithfully recorded as those of the chief 
 priests and scribes. But ever over against 
 the sin of man there is set the righteous- 
 ness of God, reflected in His law, marked in 
 His judgments, and finally radiant in His Son. 
 This makes a terrible antithesis, discloses 
 a mighty gulf between God and man, and 
 
96 THE SUBSTANCE OF REVELATION 
 
 raises the great question : How shall man 
 be just with God ? The answer to this ques- 
 tion is the very core of revelation, namely, 
 The Salvation of God, foreshadowed in 
 the earlier history, pictured in the great 
 deliverance from Egypt, and signalized in 
 the Song of Moses, which is echoed and 
 re-echoed by prophet, psalmist, and saint 
 till it becomes in the Apocalypse the Song 
 of Moses and the Lamb : " Behold, God is 
 my salvation ; I will trust, and not be 
 afraid ; for the Lord Jehovah is my strength 
 and my song; He also is become my sal- 
 vation " (see especially Exodus xv. 2, Isaiah 
 xii. 2, and Revelation xv. 3). We see, more- 
 over, as we follow the course of revelation, 
 that the salvation must be by Sacrifice. 
 This is foreshadowed in the Paschal lamb 
 and throughout the Jewish ritual, set forth 
 in the suffering Christ of Psalm xxii., Isaiah 
 liii., and other kindred passages, and finds its 
 culmination in the story of the Cross : a line 
 of thought which justifies the great Apostle 
 in giving as the sum and substance of his 
 message, "Jesus Christ, and Him crucified." 
 We get thus a very definite subject for 
 the Bible as a whole. The man in the 
 street would say it was a book on religion. 
 
THE SUBSTANCE OF REVELATION 97 
 
 Yet, as a matter of fact, religion is not once 
 mentioned in the Old Testament and scarcely 
 ever in the New. We might indeed say 
 not at all, for while the word occurs in two 
 places (Acts xxvi. 5 and James i. 26, 27), 
 it is not in the wide sense in which we use 
 it, but corresponds rather to our idea of 
 worship or "divine service," while the ex- 
 pression "the Jews' religion" in Galatians 
 i. 13, 14 is in the original simply " Judaism." 
 If then, as so many suppose, the Bible is 
 a book of religion, how comes it to pass 
 that practically the word is never used ? 
 What takes its place ? The great word 
 "Salvation," which rings through the Bible 
 like a joy-bell from the beginning to the end. 
 As the result of our inquiry, then, we 
 find that the great themes of the Bible are 
 God, Man, Sin, Righteousness, Salvation, 
 and Sacrifice, and accordingly the main 
 substance of the Bible may be helpfully 
 suggested by the following device which 
 the author of this little book has frequently 
 used in Bible-class work : — 
 
 GOD 
 SIN —^ sp« RIGHTEOUSNESS 
 
 MAN ._ 
 
98 THE SUBSTANCE OF REVELATION 
 
 which, being interpreted, means the Salva- 
 tion of God, for Man, from Sin, to Righteous- ~ 
 ness, through Christ and Him crucified. All 
 this is summarized in the word ** Gospel," 
 which may therefore be given as the great 
 outstanding subject of revelation. For, be 
 it remembered, though the great subjects 
 of God and Man and Sin and Righteous- 
 ness are all included, these are all dealt with 
 only in relation to the central theme of 
 Salvation. There is no attempt, for example, 
 to give a philosophy of sin or an explanation 
 of its mystery, but only such an exhibition 
 of its hatefulness and horror and ruinous 
 results as to prompt the question. What 
 shall we do to be saved ? Nor can we 
 find in Scripture a complete anthropology. 
 There is much indeed to be learned from 
 it on what the Greek philosopher called 
 " The proper study of mankind," namely, 
 Man ; but here again we are only to expect 
 those points which stand related to the great 
 Salvation. Even on the doctrine of God, 
 though, as we have seen, the unfolding of 
 the Name of God is one chief object of 
 revelation, yet are we not to expect a com- 
 plete theology. Rather are we discouraged 
 from the attempt by a question like this : 
 
THE SUBSTANCE OF REVELATION 99 
 
 " Who can by searching find out God ? " 
 We often think of the doctrine of the 
 Trinity as among the essentials of the faith ; 
 and there are good grounds for seeing in 
 it the only thoroughly rational basis for an 
 intelligent Theism. But even the doctrine 
 of the Trinity is nowhere dogmatically 
 taught in Scripture. It comes in exclu- 
 sively in its practical bearing, as connected 
 with the great Salvation which is summed 
 up in the benediction : " The grace of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and 
 the fellowship of the Holy Ghost " ; so it 
 is only in relation to the Gospel that even 
 the doctrine of the Trinity is unfolded in 
 Scripture. Thus, from every point of view, 
 the Gospel of Salvation is the central theme. 
 No candid reader can fail to recognize 
 the palmary position given to the Gospel of 
 Salvation throughout the New Testament. 
 For once that you hear of the Bible or the 
 Scriptures, you hear of Salvation and the 
 Gospel a hundred times. So, too, it is not 
 Preach the Bible, but Preach the Gospel, 
 or Preach the Word, which evidently means 
 the same thing, as in the passage, " To you 
 is the Word of this Salvation sent." Nor 
 is it Believe the Bible, but Believe the 
 
loo THE SUBSTANCE OF REVELATION 
 
 Gospel. It follows that those who lay all 
 the stress on what are really side-issues, 
 however interesting they may be, are not 
 treating God's revelation according to the 
 purpose for which He gave it. The range 
 is very wide, but the centre should always 
 be, " God in Christ reconciling the world 
 to Himself." 
 
 This central theme of revelation cannot be 
 missed with any honest dealing with the 
 Scripture. There are those who make an 
 extended use of the Bible and yet fail to 
 apprehend the Gospel ; but it is by wilfully 
 neglecting that which stands out clear and 
 prominent. Let a man survey the Bible 
 as a whole with any sense of perspective, 
 and the central theme will appear full and 
 clear and unmistakable. The wayfaring 
 man, though a fool, will not err therein. 
 We do not guarantee, however, that the 
 ** wise " man will not err, the man we mean 
 who makes up his mind beforehand what 
 there ought to be in the Bible and what 
 there ought not to be, who therefore will 
 take liberties with it, rule out all that is 
 not easily reconciled with his preconceived 
 ideas, and instead of the Gospel submit 
 some scheme of his own philosophy or 
 
THE SUBSTANCE OF REVELATION loi 
 
 ethics or " religion." One often wonders 
 why our friends who insist on every part 
 of the Bible being equally inspired do not 
 see how they undermine their own position 
 in regard to a matter on which happily they 
 are as a rule equally insistent, namely, the 
 duty of giving the Gospel its due place of 
 prominence. On the principle of all parts 
 of Scripture being equally inspired, one 
 might preach on the Bible for fifty years 
 and never once bring the Gospel in. One 
 sees no logical way of countering this un- 
 faithfulness to the sacred Scriptures except 
 by acknowledging in theory as well as in 
 practice the supreme importance of the 
 central theme of the Bible. 
 
 It ought surely to be a subject of devout 
 thankfulness that, whatever difficulties may 
 attend outlying and comparatively unim- 
 portant subjects, the main substance of 
 revelation stands out so full and clear, 
 quite untouched by the many difficulties 
 raised by modern criticism. One can be 
 quite indifferent as to the question of the 
 canon, or as to the vowel points, or the 
 hundred and fifty thousand errors in tran- 
 scription which some have reckoned up, or 
 
102 THE SUBSTANCE OF REVELATION 
 
 any number of blunders in translation, or 
 uncertainties of any kind. You might take 
 away book after book, every book concern- 
 ing which there ha^ ever been suggested 
 a reasonable doubt ; and enough would 
 remain. Think what a revelation there 
 often is in a single verse, such as John iii. 
 1 6. A single Gospel would be a great 
 abundance. How, then, should our hearts 
 swell with gratitude to Him who has 
 given such a large and abundant and satis- 
 fying revelation of the Gospel of His grace, 
 dimly foreshadowed, perhaps, in the story 
 of the Fall, but getting clearer and clearer 
 as we come down the ages till it blazes 
 out in Christ, especially in the Cross, as 
 interpreted by the Incarnation on the one 
 side and the Resurrection on the other. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Verification : Authority and Vision 
 
 SOME one may interpose here and say, 
 it may be a fine thing to have a 
 Gospel, or the Gospel if you choose, written 
 large in the Scriptures, and made so plain 
 that none can miss it, but how can I be 
 sure of it ? Where is my authority ? If 
 I have not an assurance that all these 
 Scriptures are so inspired that I can trust 
 every word of them, how can I be sure of 
 the Gospel that is in them ? 
 
 Here again let us proceed according to 
 our method, which is not to settle in our 
 minds beforehand how the Gospel ought 
 to be verified, but what God has actually 
 done in the way of verification. Now we 
 find when we follow the course of God's 
 dealings with His people that it is not 
 His usual plan to appeal to a written 
 
 103 
 
I04 VERIFICATION 
 
 document for verification of His Gospel. 
 As a rule it is a much more direct appeal 
 to the conscience and heart of man. So 
 was the Gospel preached to Abraham, so 
 was the law given to Moses, and through 
 him to the people. When the prophets 
 were charged with messages from God, 
 there was the same direct appeal to the 
 heart and conscience of the people. So 
 with the preaching of the Gospel in the New 
 Testament. Christ spoke with authority, 
 not as the Scribes, the difference being 
 that He appealed directly to heart and 
 conscience, while their appeal was to the 
 letter of the law. When Pilate asks Him, 
 *' What is truth ? " He does not refer him 
 to the Old Testament Scriptures, but says, 
 " Every one that is of the truth heareth My 
 voice." He recognized indeed that though 
 the truth shone by its own light, the hearts 
 of men were dark, often so very dark that 
 they could not see it. In such cases even 
 He could do nothing. His only recourse 
 was to speak in parables, which He knew 
 could not possibly be understood by the 
 people in their present state of mind, but 
 being easily remembered, might recur in a 
 more favoirable time and shine with their 
 
AUTHORITY AND VISION 105 
 
 own light. See also His answer to the 
 question " Who is this Son of Man " in 
 John xii. 35, 36; His going abruptly away 
 to hide Himself from them ; and the remarks 
 made upon it in the passage immediately 
 following. When people were not ready 
 to receive the truth He made no attempt to 
 coerce by external authority. He recog- 
 nized that the Gospel, even when presented 
 with the greatest clearness and on the 
 highest authority, is of no use without the 
 inward witness : " No man can come to 
 Me, except the Father which hath sent Me 
 draw him." When the inward witness is 
 there, it is enough, no other authority is 
 needed : " Every man that hath heard, and 
 hath learned of the Father, cometh unto Me " 
 (John vi. 45). This does not mean that He 
 made nothing of external authority, but that 
 its place was quite subordinate, as shown for 
 example in such an appeal as this : " Believe 
 Me that I am in the Father, and the Father 
 in Me; or else believe Me for the very 
 works' sake." There was verification in 
 the works, a verification not at all to be 
 despised ; but the other was far better, the 
 verification from inner vision rather than 
 from authority. 
 
io6 VERIFICATION 
 
 The Apostles proceeded on the same prin- 
 ciple. As St. Paul put it : " We preach not 
 ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, ... by- 
 manifestation of the truth commending our- 
 selves to every man's conscience in the sight 
 of God." He appeals, indeed, to the Scrip- 
 tures in dealing with the Jews, who denied 
 that Jesus was the Christ, and in controversy 
 with Judaizing Christians he appealed to his 
 calling, and apostleship, and inspiration ; but 
 in the preaching of the Gospel to the heathen 
 he evidently expected the truth to come with 
 its own authority. 
 
 Authority — External and Internal. 
 
 We find, then, that there are two kinds of 
 authority, external and internal; that, while 
 both are useful, the latter is much the more 
 important, and is the only one which is 
 absolutely essential for verification. The 
 former helps towards the truth, but veri- 
 fication is not complete till the truth shines 
 by its own light. Many a one is convinced 
 and saved by the simple appeal of the truth 
 itself. The outward authority may bring 
 within sight of the truth, but it is the inner 
 vision which sees it. That inner vision is 
 faith. And the essence of faith is not a 
 
AUTHORITY EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL 107 
 
 blind, easy-going assent to the statement of 
 some person or persons regarded as an autho- 
 rity external to our own minds and hearts ; 
 it is an energy of mind, and heart, and soul 
 going out to the truth, especially to Him 
 who is the Truth, and accepting it as 
 bringing its own credentials direct from the 
 Father of Lights. 
 
 It is of the greatest importance in dealing 
 with this whole subject to remember that 
 God never interferes with human freedom. 
 He never overbears a man's personality. 
 This applies, not only to the subjects of 
 divine inspiration, but to those to whom 
 their message comes. People are never 
 coerced into faith ; they must be won to it, 
 by something which appeals to that which is 
 within them. There is never the least sug- 
 gestion of an infallible authority standing in 
 front of a human soul, and saying, "There 
 are certain things you must believe, whether 
 they appeal to you or not, whether you wel- 
 come them or not, whether they awaken any 
 response of conviction or not." There is no 
 such thing as the demand of blind submis- 
 sion ; the faith must not be of the nature of 
 soul slumber or enforced mental inactivity; 
 it is not faith at all if it be not free. As 
 
io8 VERIFICATION 
 
 Schopenhauer said : " Faith is like love ; it 
 cannot be forced." 
 
 Our Lord Himself insisted very much on 
 the necessary connection of faith and free- 
 dom : *' Ye shall know the truth," He says, 
 "and the truth shall make you free." And, 
 again, "Ye seek to kill Me, because My 
 word hath not free course in you." *' Free 
 course " observe, and that was said to those 
 who believed in the most thorough way in 
 the verbal and literal inspiration of the 
 Scriptures. Their belief was not genuine 
 faith. They were slaves of the letter, and 
 knew nothing of the freedom of the spirit. 
 And so it often is in our own times. If a 
 person is not in sympathy with the truth, he 
 will not find the Gospel in the Scriptures, 
 though he be a believer in the literal inspira- 
 tion of every word of the Bible. On the 
 other hand, a person who is in sympathy 
 with the truth will surely find it, even though 
 he may have no theory of inspiration, and 
 not even a thought of it. Because he is of 
 the truth, he will hear the Voice Divine, 
 which is the true authority. He will be 
 like the Samaritans, who, encouraged by 
 the testimony of the woman (the external 
 authority), came and saw for themselves (the 
 
AUTHORITY EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL 109 
 
 inner vision), and said, " Now we believe, 
 not because of thy saying : for we have 
 heard for ourselves, and know that this is 
 indeed the Saviour of the world." In this 
 instance we see the true relation between the 
 external and the internal authority. The 
 one, the external authority, awakens interest 
 and leads to inquiry ; but it is the latter (the 
 inner vision) which is the final verification, 
 the true ground of certainty. 
 
 It may be well, before proceeding further, 
 to notice a very common error in regard to 
 the relation of the Protestant Reformation 
 to the question of authority in matters 
 of religion. The supposition is that the 
 reformers simply exchanged one external 
 authority for another, turning from an in- 
 fallible Church to an infallible Bible as the 
 supreme arbiter. It is an entire mistake. 
 The early reformers certainly gave up the 
 idea of an infallible Church, but what they 
 put in its place was the perpetual presence 
 of Christ Himself with His people, the 
 witness of the Spirit with the word responded 
 to by the Spirit-guided soul. There are 
 those who think that Luther was quite 
 peculiar in the freedom with which he dealt 
 with sacred Scripture. Every one knows 
 
no VERIFICATION 
 
 that he condemned the Epistle of James as 
 " an epistle of straw." But every one does 
 not know that Calvin, who may be supposed 
 to represent the more rigid school of the 
 reformers, though less rash in his language, 
 was as far as Luther himself from accepting 
 the rigid theory of inspiration afterwards 
 introduced. He deals with the whole subject 
 in his " Institutes," where he makes it clear 
 that what he sets over against the idea of 
 an infallible Church is the reality of an ever- 
 present Spirit in contact with the minds of 
 the truly devout. " Profane men," he says, 
 " desire and insist to have it proved by 
 reason that Moses and the prophets were 
 divinely inspired. But I answer that the 
 testimony of the Spirit is superior to reason. 
 For as God alone can properly bear witness 
 to His own words, so these words will not 
 obtain full credit in the hearts of men until 
 they are sealed by the inward testimony of 
 the Spirit. The same Spirit, therefore, who 
 spoke by the mouth of the prophets, must 
 penetrate our hearts, in order to convince 
 us that they faithfully delivered the message 
 with which they were divinely entrusted. 
 This connection is most aptly expressed by 
 Isaiah in these words, * My spirit that is 
 
AUTHORITY EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL iii 
 
 Upon thee, and My words which I have put 
 in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy 
 mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor 
 out of the mouth of thy seed's seed, saith the 
 Lord, from henceforth and for ever.' " And 
 again (Calvin says), " Scripture, carrying its 
 own evidence along with it, deigns not to 
 submit to proofs and arguments, but owes 
 the full conviction with which we ought to 
 receive it to the testimony of the Spirit." 
 
 In the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church 
 of England there is no theory of inspiration. 
 What is specially declared there is "The 
 sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for salva- 
 tion." So, too, the fifth article of the West- 
 minster Confession of Faith, after referring 
 to the value of the testimony of the Church 
 to the Scriptures, and to the evidence of their 
 divine authority to be found in the heaven- 
 liness of the matter, the efficacy of the 
 doctrine, the majesty of the style, etc. (all 
 appealing to the human power of apprecia- 
 tion), proceeds, " Notwithstanding, our full 
 persuasion and assurance of the infallible 
 truth, and divine authority thereof, is from 
 the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing 
 witness by and with the word in our hearts." 
 Perhaps most distinct of all is the answer 
 
112 VERIFICATION 
 
 in the larger Catechism to the question, 
 " How doth it appear that the Scriptures 
 are the word of God ? " which is : " The 
 Scriptures manifest themselves to be the 
 word of God by their majesty and purity; 
 by the consent of all the parts, which is to 
 give all glory to God ; by their light and 
 power to convince and convert sinners, to 
 comfort and build up believers unto salva- 
 tion : but the Spirit of God bearing witness 
 by and with the Scriptures in the heart of 
 man is alone able fully to persuade it that 
 they are the very word of God." It is also 
 very significant that the Heidelberg Cate- 
 chism, extending to as many as a hundred 
 and twenty-nine questions, makes no refer- 
 ence whatever to the Scriptures. 
 
 From such authoritative documents of the 
 Reformation as these it is abundantly evident 
 that there was no shifting from the external 
 authority of an infallible Church to the 
 equally external authority of an infallible 
 Book, but an appeal first to what the 
 Scriptures manifest themselves to be to the 
 devout soul, and next, as the supreme autho- 
 rity, to the Spirit of God bearing witness 
 by and with the Scriptures in the heart of 
 man. 
 
AUTHORITY IN LIFE 113 
 
 Authority in Life and in Religion, 
 The subject of authority in religion is a 
 very large one. To understand it thoroughly 
 we would need to consider what a large place 
 authority has in our whole life. We come 
 into the world under the influence of heredity, 
 an influence which does not spring from our 
 own souls, and therefore is of the nature of 
 authority. We grow up under the influence 
 of our environment, which again has potent 
 effect in the making and moulding of us. 
 We are under parental authority during our 
 childhood and early youth, and our whole 
 education is conducted under the authority 
 of our teachers, including the books from 
 which we study as well as the persons from 
 whom we learn our lessons. When we enter 
 on our work in the world, we have a heritage 
 of the past from which it would be as vain 
 as it would be foolish to try to escape. Not 
 a day passes in which we do not take action 
 on the ground of convictions which are not 
 the product of our own minds, but have come 
 to us out of the experience of those who 
 have gone before us. But while we are thus 
 beset before and behind with authority of 
 various kinds and degrees, it is evidently 
 
 I 
 
114 VERIFICATION 
 
 God's purpose concerning us that we should 
 maintain our freedom, and develop an indi- 
 viduality not crushed by authority but evolved 
 out of it. So it is in the matter of our 
 religious development. The same sets of 
 influences affect us in this department of our 
 life. We come under the influence of external 
 authority of parent, teacher, friend, spiritual 
 adviser ; but as we grow up we are more 
 and more called to exercise our freedom. 
 
 There are many who think it dangerous 
 in matters of religion to leave anything to 
 the freedom of the individual soul. How 
 can we trust it? they say. The heart is 
 deceitful above all things ; what room is 
 there for the assertion of its freedom ? 
 What we want is an authority quite in- 
 dependent of the human soul, which does 
 not ask its assent, but compels it; which 
 settles everything for it, and does not expose 
 it to the danger of settling anything for 
 itself. 
 
 But a very little consideration will show 
 how utterly futile is this position. There are 
 always competing claims for our allegiance, 
 and how are these to be settled ? Take 
 three typical cases as illustrations. 
 
 (i) The Romanist finds rest in his faith 
 
AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 115 
 
 in an infallible Church, but before finding 
 it he must accept his Church as infallible. 
 Surely that is an exercise of freedom, if it 
 is anything. Is there not some danger 
 of his being wrong in that acceptance ? Is 
 not the ultimate authority in his case the 
 validity of the act of his soul by which he 
 accepts the Church of Rome as an infallible 
 guide ? 
 
 (2) The same principle is applicable to 
 those who find rest in the conviction that 
 they have in their possession a book, every 
 line and word of which is beyond the reach 
 of error. But how has the man reached 
 that conviction ? Is it by his own investiga- 
 tion ? Then how can he be sure that he 
 has not made some mistake ? Or is it 
 because he has been so taught from his 
 youth ? Then is his ultimate authority not 
 a whit better than that of the Romanist who 
 believes in the infallibility of his Church. 
 And it is evident that whatever reason he 
 gives for accepting the infallibility of the 
 Bible, the ultimate appeal is to his own 
 judgment in so accepting it, which is surely 
 anything but an infallible authority. We 
 cannot by any jugglery of logic get away 
 from the difficulty of personal responsibility 
 
ii6 VERIFICATION 
 
 in accepting or rejecting the truth. If our 
 acceptance is blind, it is of course worth- 
 less. If it is founded on reason, then it 
 shares the uncertainty attaching to all human 
 reasoning. Seeing then that it is quite 
 impossible to escape the exercise of personal 
 judgment in the acceptance of the truth, 
 why should it be thought a thing incredible 
 that God should lay upon us the responsi- 
 bility of recognizing His Gospel as it shines 
 forth in the pages of the Bible ? 
 
 (3) Take the case of a person who has 
 not been able to find sufficient evidence that 
 any Church is infallible, and moreover has 
 not been able to find sufficient evidence that 
 every line of the Bible is inspired. He 
 finds, however, a claim of inspiration on the 
 part of certain prophets and apostles, and 
 especially on the part of Him to whom all 
 the prophets and apostles bear witness. He 
 reads their utterances humbly, reverently, 
 and expectantly, and as he reads, a light 
 above the brightness of the sun flashes in 
 upon him, a voice which he cannot but 
 recognize as truly divine speaks to his soul, 
 searches his heart, elevates his affections, 
 exercises a purifying effect on his life ; as 
 he continues to read there rises before the 
 
AUTHORITY IN RELIGION T17 
 
 faith of his soul a living Friend, with whom 
 he comes into conscious touch, with whom 
 he grows into the acquaintance of trust and 
 love, until he can say, " I know whom I have 
 believed, and am persuaded that He is able 
 to keep that which I have committed unto 
 Him." Is that man leaning more on his 
 own understanding, and trusting less to 
 divine guidance than if he had previously 
 reasoned himself into the belief in an in- 
 fallible Church or an infallible Bible ? If 
 you ask him what is his ultimate and 
 supreme authority, he will point you not 
 to a Church, nor to a Book, but to the 
 living Christ whose Spirit guides him into 
 the truth. It is true that his ultimate 
 authority does not reach him through the 
 eye as in the case of the man who finds 
 it in the Book, nor through the ear as in 
 the case of the man who finds it in the 
 priest speaking in the name of the Church ; 
 but is the witness of the invisible Spirit 
 of God in direct contact with his spirit to 
 be treated as a thing of nought, because 
 there is in his case no external authority 
 on which to lean ? 
 
 There is no verification possible, apart 
 from the acceptance by the human spirit of 
 
ii8 VERIFICATION 
 
 the divine message, the response of the soul 
 to the claim made on its allegiance. And 
 though there is, from the nature of the case, 
 a measure of uncertainty in the conviction 
 which arises out of the response of the spirit 
 to the voice of God in the utterances of 
 prophets, apostles, and Christ Himself, it 
 can surely be no greater than in that which 
 arises from the surrender of the mind to the 
 claim made upon it by an infallible Church 
 or an infallible Book. 
 
 Authority — Ultimate and Proximate. 
 
 If we think the matter out with any care, 
 we shall find that God's method is the only 
 one which conserves human freedom. The 
 truth, whatever it be, whether it be identified 
 with the Church, or the Bible, or the Gospel 
 of Christ Himself, must in the last resort 
 appeal to the conscience and heart of man. 
 External authority — of which there is abun- 
 dance, as we have already seen, running 
 alonof the whole course of divine revelation 
 — may bring a man face to face with the 
 truth, but only the vision of the mind and the 
 embrace of the heart can make it his own. 
 
 This may seem very unsatisfactory to 
 those who have been accustomed to call 
 
AUTHORITY ULTIMATE AND PROXIMATE 119 
 
 for some outward authority as the last 
 resort ; but surely it is more humble and 
 reverent and loyal to accept the fundamental 
 position of our Lord Himself, when He 
 said, on the subject of verification, " Every 
 one that is of the truth heareth My voice." 
 
 It is only fair to acknowledge that the 
 great majority of those who seem to found 
 their faith on the theory of verbal inspiration 
 have in reality a far better and stronger 
 foundation on which to rest. They, too, 
 have an experience as rich and satisfactory 
 as any. Being of the truth, they hear the 
 divine voice in the Scriptures ; they see 
 visions of God, and have the happy con- 
 sciousness of the presence with them of 
 the unseen Friend, and the witness of His 
 Spirit in their hearts. It is this unquestion- 
 able experience which makes their faith so 
 clear and strong and constant; and it is 
 their sense of the preciousness and the 
 certain validity of this experience which 
 makes them so sensitive to any suggestions 
 of doubt as to what they suppose to be 
 the foundation of their faith. But if they 
 would only consider carefully what is the 
 real ground of their confidence, they would 
 find it was not the external authority, but 
 
I20 VERIFICATION 
 
 the appeal of the voice of Christ and the 
 truth of God to all that is noblest and best 
 in their renewed natures. If they realized 
 this, they would cease to be troubled with 
 questions v/hich touch only the external 
 authority, and are completely irrelevant to 
 that which affects the living issue. 
 
 The case of these brethren, among whom 
 are found many of earth's noblest, and of the 
 devoutest and most self-denying of Chris- 
 tians, has been once for all set forth in 
 the illustration given by the late Dr. Dale, 
 where he tells of the sore troubles in Carr's 
 Lane Church by the discovery that two 
 large pillars had to be removed in order 
 to afford space for an organ. There were 
 elaborate calculations as to how the lost 
 support could be made up in other ways, 
 and at last a way was found by which it 
 was thought they could be safely removed. 
 And when the work began, and the pillars 
 were dealt with, it was found that they did 
 not go to the bottom, and therefore only 
 seemed to be pillars, and that instead of 
 supporting the beam they were hung from 
 it. This is an exact parallel to the case 
 of those who have really an immovable 
 foundation for their faith, while they trust 
 
AUTHORITY ULTIMATE AND PROXIMATE 121 
 
 to the seeming pillars of a human theory 
 of inspiration and authority. Their theory 
 of inspiration, instead of supporting their 
 faith in Christ, as they suppose, is really 
 supported by it. There is one difference, 
 however, that in Carr's Lane the pillars did 
 not weaken the structure. In this case they 
 do, for there are tens of thousands of people 
 who have been so brought up in the belief 
 that everything turns on the absolute in- 
 errancy of every word of Scripture, that- 
 when any question arises, not in regard to 
 the substance or the spirit, the object or 
 effect of the whole, but as to some matter 
 of small detail, they at once suppose that 
 everything is lost ; and not having seen the 
 vision or heard the voice as the others have, 
 they reject the Bible as if it were waste 
 paper, and give up the Church of God as 
 a discredited relic of the past. They would 
 have had no excuse for this had they not 
 been led to build on the sand of theory 
 instead of on the rock of Truth. 
 
 Let it be remembered, however, that 
 while the one supreme authority is Christ 
 Himself, speaking by His Spirit not only 
 through ** holy men of old who spake as they 
 were moved by the Holy Ghost," but also 
 
122 VERIFICATION 
 
 directly to the souls of those who truly seek 
 Him, we are not at all justified in discard- 
 ing other authorities because they are not 
 supreme. It would be the very height of 
 pride and self-sufficiency for any man to say 
 to himself, Christ is my only teacher, there- 
 fore I will not listen to any one else, but 
 build up my spiritual life on direct visions of 
 Him and voices from Him to my own soul. 
 
 It is the disposition to look at things 
 too much in this way that vitiates the great 
 argument of Martineau on " The Seat of 
 Authority." Finding as he does the ulti- 
 mate seat of authority in the voice of God 
 as responded to by the human heart and 
 conscience, he assumes a position which 
 practically sets aside as worthless the wit- 
 ness of prophets and apostles, and the 
 accumulated experience and witness of the 
 Church. As we have seen, it would be 
 madness in ordinary life to cut ourselves 
 off from the past, and it is equally foolish 
 to attempt it in the life of faith. Though 
 we do not find our supreme authority even 
 in the holiest men of old, or in any body 
 of men claiming to be the Church, we by no 
 means discard the authority which properly 
 belongs to them. We have already seen 
 
AUTHORITY ULTIMATE AND PROXIMATE 123 
 
 abundant evidence, and shall see more before 
 we have done, that God did indeed speak to 
 the fathers by the prophets, and has in these 
 last days spoken to us in His Son ; and to 
 discard the authority of these utterances 
 because we have not the guarantee that every 
 line of the books in which they come to us 
 is guarded against the possibility of error, is 
 wilfully to reject the revelation which God 
 has given us, and on which alone our fellow- 
 ship with Him is based ; and to pay no 
 regard whatever to what the Spirit has said 
 to the Churches in time past would be to 
 cut ourselves off from all the guidance and 
 inspiration which has come through an in- 
 numerable cloud of witnesses. There is no 
 infallible Church ; but that does not mean 
 that we deny the presence of the Spirit with 
 His people all through the chequered his- 
 tory of the Church ; and though we see no 
 grounds for believing that God has wrought 
 a continual miracle for the purpose of pre- 
 serving from all possible error every line and 
 word of the Bible, that is no reason for calling 
 in question the unique authority with which 
 the utterances of Prophets and Apostles and 
 the records of the Evangelists have come to us. 
 There will, no doubt, be those who cannot 
 
124 VERIFICATION 
 
 help thinking it a serious loss to give up the 
 idea of a document so carefully drawn up 
 as to be in itself a complete and sufficient 
 authority, like an Act of Parliament in 
 which the effect of every word and comma 
 has been minutely considered beforehand, 
 so as to leave nothing to doubtful dispu- 
 tation. What a comfort it would be ! We 
 should need no interpreter, no light from 
 above, there would be an end of all con- 
 troversy, for liter a scrip ta manet^ while 
 visions and voices and inspiration — are they 
 not all fugitive and unreal ? But have 
 Acts of Parliament proved so very satis- 
 factory ? Have we never heard of the 
 proverbial coach-and-six ? And if it is 
 proved by experience to be impossible with 
 the aid of the most accomplished parlia- 
 mentary draughtsmen and lawyers, to con- 
 struct in such a way as to leave no loophole 
 for evasion, an Act of, say, twenty pages, 
 dealing with a subject of quite Hmited scope 
 and application, can it be supposed possible 
 to have a heavenly Act of Parliament ex- 
 tending to a thousand pages and dealing 
 with a thousand and one difficult questions, 
 constructed in such a way as to be sufficient 
 in itself for all purposes ? 
 
ULTIMATE AUTHORITY 125 
 
 Verily we cannot do without something 
 above the written word, without the presence 
 and guidance of the Spirit of Him who spake 
 to the fathers by the prophets. There must 
 be present inspiration to verify for us, and to 
 enable us to make use of the inspiration that 
 is past. Do we not believe in the Holy 
 Ghost? Do we wish to do without Him? 
 Let us then, instead of finding fault with the 
 divine method as unsatisfactory, gratefully 
 accept it, and let us with adoring gratitude 
 rejoice that " God who commanded the light 
 to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our 
 hearts, to give the light of the knowledge 
 of the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
 Christ." There is the final verification. 
 There is the ultimate authority — the Holy 
 Spirit of God and of His Son Jesus Christ 
 speaking, in the sacred Scriptures especially, 
 to the consciences and hearts of those who 
 are of the truth. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 The Way of Certainty 
 
 AT the close of the last chapter we 
 referred to the dissatisfaction often 
 expressed with the view there presented, on 
 the ground that it seems to give up the hope 
 of certainty promised both by an infallible 
 Church and an infallible Bible. T*- c. ulc 
 admitted that there may '-^ ^^nd if it is 
 tainty, personal assu'-i^^ be impossible with 
 the gospel, but -bst accomplished parlia- 
 the rerj^- -•:xciughtsmen and lawyers, to con- 
 struct in such a way as to leave no loophole 
 for evasion, an Act of, say, twenty pages, 
 dealing with a subject of quite limited scope 
 and application, can it be supposed possible 
 to have a heavenly Act of Parliament ex- 
 tending to a thousand pages and dealing 
 with a thousand and one difficult questions, 
 constructed in such a way as to be sufficient 
 in itself for all purposes ? 
 
WAY OF CERTAINTY 127 
 
 what He has actually done. This will take 
 us in part over the ground we have traversed, 
 but the matter is so important that we need 
 not hesitate to deal with it in another con- 
 nection, which will present it in a more 
 concrete and illustrative way. 
 
 Let it be observed, in the first place, that 
 there is no encouragement given in Scripture 
 to expect any such revelation of truth as 
 will dispense with earnest inquiry. We are 
 continually reminded throughout the Old 
 Testament that we must seek the Lord, 
 seek Him with the whole heart, must search 
 for wisdom as for hid treasure ; our Lord 
 Qi^ trie V.^s^"^^ duty with still greater force, 
 Christ." Theiv}'*'^ must ask, seek, knock. 
 There is the ultimaOto the strait gate, must 
 Spirit of God and of Hlgdureth unto ever- 
 speaking, in the sacred Scriptures 'L^^rf^sure 
 to the consciences and hearts of those who 
 are of the truth. 
 
128 WAY OF CERTAINTY 
 
 certainty is in itself quite natural and proper, 
 yet when it takes the form of a demand 
 for some external authority to settle every- 
 thing for us without any thought or effort 
 of our own, it becomes morbid and utterly 
 misleading. This appears continually in the 
 case of those who in recent times have left 
 the Anglican for the Roman Church. It is 
 seen with startling distinctness in the letters 
 of Cardinal Manning, and it is no less marked 
 in the " Apologia " of John Henry Newman. 
 Both of them assume all through that cer- 
 tainty is impossible unless there be an in- 
 fallible authority to settle all questions as 
 they arise by word of mouth or stroke of 
 pen. The Scriptures were sufficient for their 
 time, but what are the people of this late 
 age of the world to do without an infallible 
 authority to answer their questions ? The 
 Holy Spirit indeed still lives, but where is 
 He, and how is His voice to be uttered ? 
 It is not enough that He is infallible Himself, 
 He must have an infallible mouthpiece, and 
 what can that be but the Church of Rome, 
 and the Pope who speaks in its name ? How 
 simple and clear it all is now ! an infallible 
 Church speaking through an infallible Pope — 
 no more doubts or fears, no more difficulties, 
 
WAY OF CERTAINTY 129 
 
 no more need to search and see for ourselves ; 
 it is all done for us, and we need have no 
 more trouble ; all the faithful may now, as 
 the Cardinal expresses it in one of his letters, 
 " lay down their weary reason by the still 
 waters of refreshment." Now the question 
 is, Is it indeed the divine will that in order 
 to attain certainty in regard to the truth as 
 it is in Jesus, we are to lay down our weary 
 reason beside the still waters of submission 
 to a fellow-mortal supposed to be infallible ? 
 Or is there a more excellent way ? 
 
 We have spoken of the general drift and 
 tenour of the Scriptures ; but there happens 
 to be one particular passage in which we are 
 permitted to see the true method of reaching 
 the desired certainty. It is the introduction 
 to St. Luke's Gospel, where the Evangelist 
 states, as his object in writing to Theophilus, 
 "that thou mightest know the certainty of 
 those things wherein thou hast been in- 
 structed." Let us then inquire what means 
 he employed for the purpose. 
 
 Notice, at the outset, that the inspired 
 Evangelist had no expectation that Christian 
 disciples would have certainty to start with. 
 Theophilus had already been under instruc- 
 tion which evidently covered the wide range 
 
 K 
 
I30 WAY OF CERTAINTY 
 
 of the life and teaching of Christ in the days 
 of His earthly ministry; yet he still needed 
 to be led on to certainty. 
 
 This does not imply any uncertainty in 
 his experience. As soon as his heart was 
 opened to the Lord Jesus, he would become 
 acquainted with Him, and would have the 
 experience of the light of the new life. But 
 it would be only a point of light to start 
 with, only the beginning of a course of 
 instruction in divine things. As the circle 
 enlarged, new questions would arise; new 
 difficulties ; doubts, possibly, in regard to 
 some things ; dim conceptions needing to be 
 cleared ; and, in this way, it would come to 
 pass that, even after years of instruction, he 
 would still feel the need of such help as the 
 Evangelist Luke undertook to give him. 
 
 Let it be observed that this point has 
 its application to many at the very opposite 
 pole from our Roman Catholic friends. Ex- 
 tremes meet; and so there are those who 
 excuse their neglect of religion altogether on 
 the ground that they cannot have perfect 
 certainty to begin with, in regard to the 
 whole round of Christian doctrine. They 
 have their difficulties about miracles, about 
 the future life, about the course of nature, 
 
WAY OF CERTAINTY 131 
 
 and the providence of God ; and, because 
 their Christian friends cannot clear these all 
 up to them, in the space of ten minutes or 
 half an hour, they will not listen to anything 
 our Lord and Master has to say. Now, no 
 one denies, no thoughtful person can deny, 
 that, in the doctrines of Christianity, touch- 
 ing, as they do, on every side the hardest 
 subjects on which the mind of man can 
 exercise itself, there are many and great 
 difficulties. What then ? Is it reasonable 
 to insist that the whole round of Christian 
 truth should lie in the clear light of know- 
 ledge and certainty to the mere beginner? 
 What should we think of a person who 
 refused to begin the study of elementary 
 geometry and algebra, because he could not 
 see through the intricacies of the integral 
 and differential calculus ? Yet there are 
 thousands who decline to enter the school 
 of Christ, for reasons of precisely the same 
 kind. All that is asked is, to turn from all 
 that conscience tells them is sin, and open 
 their hearts to God that He may let His 
 light shine in upon them as they read the 
 Scriptures or hear the gospel, and keep them 
 open to Him that more and more light may 
 shine day by day ; and when, in the course of 
 
132 WAY OF CERTAINTY 
 
 their training, they come to places where 
 they meet with serious difficulty, they will, 
 no doubt, find some such help as that which 
 was ready for Theophilus when he needed 
 it — making clear what formerly was dark, and 
 helping onwards towards that certainty, in 
 regard to the full-orbed truth of God, which 
 is to be the goal, not the starting point, of 
 our race. What is asked of them is, not that 
 they give their assent to any ready-made 
 creed, but that they humble themselves 
 before God, take their place in the school of 
 Christ, as beginners, and be content to learn 
 by degrees, as He will teach them. 
 
 So much for the negative part of our sub- 
 ject : certainty is not waiting for us ready 
 made at the start ; it must be attained, and 
 the question is. How } By what means ? Is 
 there any hint given to Theophilus of the 
 suppression of his faculties being needed, 
 or their coercion by sheer authority? The 
 writer has not the smallest doubt that the 
 Evangelist Luke wrote this gospel as he 
 was moved by the Holy Ghost, and that, 
 therefore, it is an authoritative presentation 
 of the truth in Jesus; but mark well that 
 St. Luke does not say one word about this, 
 or even give the slightest hint of it. He 
 
WAY OF CERTAINTY 133 
 
 does not say, These other teachers to whom 
 you have been listening are not infallible, but 
 I am; so you must believe what I say on 
 peril of your salvation. Not a trace of this. 
 He refers to many others who have taken 
 in hand to tell the Gospel story. There 
 must have have been some of these attempts, 
 which, however well meant and well done, 
 never found their way into the canon of 
 Scripture. Our Fourth Gospel could not 
 have been among them, for it was consider- 
 ably later ; and if Matthew and Mark were, 
 they could only have been two of the 
 "many" to whom he refers. Yet, observe, 
 he does not distinguish among those who 
 have taken the work in hand, nor does he 
 discredit any of the rest in his own favour ; 
 and when he speaks of the qualifications he 
 has for the task, what does he specify ? Is 
 there anything about his being specially 
 appointed to give an ex cathedra utterance ? 
 Not a word of it. Here are the claims he 
 makes on his own behalf: that he has given 
 much attention to the subject, that he has 
 been careful to be accurate in verifying his 
 facts, and that he makes a special effort to 
 to be orderly in the presentation of them. 
 Not only so, but he even avoids any such 
 
134 WAY OF CERTAINTY 
 
 phrase as is common enough among good 
 people of our day who have no claim to 
 special inspiration. He does not say, ** The 
 Spirit moved me to write this to you " ; or, 
 " I have been led to write this Gospel " ; he 
 does not even go to the length of saying, 
 "It has been borne in upon me that I should 
 write this to you ; " he simply says, "It 
 seemed good to me also." 
 
 Does all this lessen reasonable faith in his 
 inspiration? On the contrary, it increases 
 it. It is your uninspired men and Churches 
 who wish to compel faith by mere authority. 
 Instead of taking the claim of infallibility 
 as the note of the true Church, as Newman 
 and Manning did, and their followers do, we 
 recognize in it a mark of its departure from 
 the simplicity and purity of the early days. 
 If only these good men had given less atten- 
 tion to the mediaeval fathers and more to 
 the Holy Scriptures, they would have seen 
 that the absence of such claims was much 
 more in accord with real inspiration. 
 
 But it may be suggested that the absence 
 of the claim to infallibility on the part of the 
 Evangelist was simply due to his modesty. 
 Well, no doubt St. Luke was an exceedingly 
 modest man, and that is the reason why he 
 
WAY OF CERTAINTY 135 
 
 never mentions his own name, either here 
 or in the Acts of the Apostles, but always 
 hides himself behind his subject. Is not that 
 a modesty well worthy of imitation ? If only 
 the Roman Church would cease to hide Christ 
 behind itself, and begin to hide itself behind 
 Christ, as all the Evangelists did, what a 
 glorious Reformation there would be ! 
 
 But there was more than modesty in 
 Luke's suppression of all claim to speak 
 with the authority of divine inspiration. 
 It was part of his inspiration, guarding him 
 against deviating from the divine method 
 of dealing with human souls. Education, 
 not dictation, is the divine method. Every 
 intelligent reader of the Scriptures now 
 recognizes the truth of what Lessing first 
 distinctly taught — that the Old Testament 
 is the record of the divine education of 
 Israel. And to come closer home, look at 
 Christ's training of the Twelve. Is there 
 any sign of the imposing on their minds by 
 mere authority of a fully developed creed ? 
 He lays down duties with authority, as in 
 the Sermon on the Mount ; but not doctrines. 
 Take, as a palmary illustration, the doctrine 
 of His divinity. Can we discover any 
 attempt to impose it on them by authority ? 
 
136 WAY OF CERTAINTY 
 
 On the contrary, He deliberately withholds 
 it till they discover it for themselves. " Come 
 and see" is one of His earliest utterances to 
 His disciples. So He waits until they see it 
 for themselves. He hears them say to one 
 another, *' What manner of man is this ! " 
 and we do not find Him answering, "You 
 are mistaken in thinking; of Me as a man 
 merely ; I am the Son of God, and you 
 must believe it." Nothing of the sort. He 
 waits until they see it. And not until He 
 has some reason to believe that they have 
 caught sight of the great truth for them- 
 selves — though it took them nearly three 
 years to get that length — not till then does 
 He begin to draw them out by asking, as 
 He did at Ceesarea Philippi, " Whom do ye 
 say that I am ? " And if we will think at 
 all carefully on the subject, we shall see that 
 truth imposed by mere authority is of no 
 use ; it must be welcomed by the spiritual 
 nature, taken into its substance, assimilated 
 by thought and feeling, before it can do its 
 proper work. 
 
 The work of the Spirit was to be con- 
 ducted in the same way. " He shall guide 
 you into all truth " — a process of education 
 still, in which the faculties are to be fully 
 
WAY OF CERTAINTY 137 
 
 employed about the truth till it becomes 
 luminous and full-orbed, shining with its own 
 light, and so giving that certainty for which 
 we rightly crave, and which is a great and 
 blessed attainment when reached in the 
 proper way, so clearly marked out for us 
 in the Scriptures of truth. 
 
 " There is no royal road to learning." 
 There is no short cut to certainty. " Then 
 shall we know, if we follow on to know the 
 Lord." ** I follow after, if that I may appre- 
 hend that for which I also am apprehended 
 of Christ Jesus." We cannot dispense with 
 the use of the faculties with which our 
 Creator has endowed us. We must search 
 the Scriptures, according to the word of 
 Christ. We must prove all things, and hold 
 fast that which is good, according to the 
 word of St. Paul. We must not believe every 
 spirit, as the Apostle John puts it, but prove 
 the spirits whether they are of God. We 
 must return from all wanderings to Christ, 
 whom the Apostle Peter calls ** the Shepherd 
 and Bishop of our souls." 
 
 Yes, we have an infallible Guide, but He 
 is no poor, frail, erring creature like you or 
 me, or the Pope of Rome. We have Christ 
 Himself, "the Shepherd and Bishop of our 
 
138 WAY OF CERTAINTY 
 
 souls," who has promised never to fail us 
 nor forsake us. We have the Holy Spirit, 
 to come and take possession of our hearts, 
 to quicken, not to deaden, all our faculties, to 
 give us the light of the knowledge of the 
 glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 
 And, as the Apostle John puts it, "The 
 anointing which we received of Him abideth 
 in you, and ye need not that any one teach 
 you ; but as His anointing teacheth you all 
 things and is true, and is no lie, and even 
 as it taught you, abide in Him." What a 
 distinct warning against those who seek in- 
 fallibility in man ! Assurance, i.e. certainty, 
 is the keynote of the Epistle, and here the 
 Apostle of Certainty distinctly points us to 
 the Spirit of God as the only and all- 
 sufficient Guide. ** Ye need not that any 
 one teach you." What does that mean } 
 It cannot mean that all teaching is to stop, 
 that churches are to be closed, Sunday 
 Schools shut, books burned, even Bibles 
 destroyed, and nothing left but the voice 
 of the Holy Spirit in the heart. It means 
 that there is no authoritative teacher except 
 the Holy Spirit; it means that if we want 
 infallibility we must not seek it in man, but 
 in God alone ; and if we ask how it is to 
 
WAY OF CERTAINTY 139 
 
 be conveyed to us, it is by that anointing, 
 as he calls it, which abides in the recesses 
 of the soul. 
 
 We must certainly use all the means of 
 grace, especially the reading of the sacred 
 Scriptures ; for that was the means on which 
 the Evangelist Luke relied. Theophilus 
 would need the guidance and instruction of 
 the Holy Spirit, but that did not dispense 
 with the necessity of carefully reading this 
 Gospel. We see, then, how clear and dis- 
 tinct is the answer of the Scripture to the 
 question with which we started. We cannot 
 expect certainty in regard to every word of 
 the Bible and the whole circle of divine 
 truth to start with ; but we may expect in 
 due time to attain to the full-orbed truth of 
 God in Christ through the reading of the 
 sacred Scriptures under the light and guidance 
 of the Holy Spirit. 
 
PART III 
 
 INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY OF 
 THE RECORD 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 Introductory 
 
 WE have, in a certain sense, reached our 
 goal. We have had an inspired 
 people, a prophet nation, called of God to 
 receive from Him and to transmit to us a 
 revelation of Himself and of the Gospel of 
 salvation which shines out in their literature, 
 and culminates in the wonderful story of the 
 Redeemer of the world ; and we have all 
 this coming to us, not as a mere story of the 
 past, but as an authentic revelation of God, 
 valid here and now — His voice heard, His 
 presence felt, the power of His salvation 
 known to those who open mind and heart 
 to the great unveiling. Already we have had 
 good reason to be assured, to use the words 
 of the sixth of the Thirty- Nine Articles, 
 " of the sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures 
 for salvation." 
 
 But it may be said, the gospel is only 
 143 
 
144 INSPIRATION 
 
 a line of light running through the Scrip- 
 tures. Are we to restrict their inspiration 
 and authority to that one line ? Are not 
 the Scriptures, as a whole, inspired by God, 
 and invested with divine authority ? If so, 
 must we not claim that complete exemption 
 from human frailty and liability to error 
 which seems involved in the idea of divine 
 authority ? It is to this part of the subject 
 we must now address ourselves, namely, the 
 inspiration and authority of the record of 
 divine revelation in the Scriptures of the 
 Old and New Testament. 
 
 Here again we believe that if we faithfully 
 follow our method of not settling in our 
 mind what ought to be, but finding out 
 what is, we shall have reason to wonder 
 and adore, as we see how our Father in 
 heaven has secured for us all the blessings 
 of inspired guidance under conditions which 
 seemed almost to preclude the possibility of 
 it. We shall find that He has made the 
 very most of the materials with which alone 
 it was possible for Him to work, with the 
 result that though the treasure is in earthen 
 vessels, which serve as a foil to set off its 
 incomparable value, the very vessels them- 
 selves, earthen as they are, and must of 
 
OF THE RECORD 145 
 
 necessity be, are such that there too we 
 cannot but recognize the divine workman- 
 ship. We shall see further that, though 
 we cannot claim perfection for any of the 
 organs or vehicles of inspiration, save for 
 Him to whom they all bear converging 
 witness, the result of the whole, as seen in 
 our completed Bible, may be said to be 
 perfect — not as literature, nor as art, nor as 
 history, nor (least of all) as science — but as 
 adapted to the accomplishment of its end, 
 perfect in the sense suggested by the 
 Psalmist when he says : " The law of the 
 Lord is perfect, converting the soul ; the 
 testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise 
 the simple." To see the marvel of all this 
 it will be necessary first to take into some- 
 what careful consideration the necessary 
 limitations of inspiration under the con- 
 ditions of its exercise. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 Necessary Limitations — ** Earthen Vessels** 
 
 IT is important at the outset to remember 
 that the most consummate artist is 
 limited by the nature of his material. He 
 may have thoughts and inspirations far 
 above and beyond what he can express in 
 black-and-white or in colours, in marble 
 or in bronze, in speech or in song; but 
 however perfect his idea may be, it must, 
 in finding expression, share the imper- 
 fections of the forms in which he works. 
 If this very obvious fact had only been 
 kept in mind, most of the difficulties which 
 beset the subject of inspiration need never 
 have arisen. 
 
 There are some people who find it diffi- 
 cult, or as it would seem almost impossible, 
 to realize that God, the omnipotent, all-per- 
 fect One, should have been under similar 
 limitations in the giving of His revelation 
 146 
 
 sii 
 
NECESSARY LIMITATIONS 147 
 
 to the human race. They suppose that 
 with His limitless resources He would 
 surely have found it easy to give a perfect 
 revelation to the most imperfect people. 
 But have these friends ever in seriousness 
 raised the question how it could have been 
 done ? Let us take some of the common 
 suppositions. 
 
 Let us suppose it possible that a document 
 could be constructed in heaven v/hich would 
 have been a perfect revelation of the truth, 
 the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, 
 desirable for man to know on all the subjects 
 which concern him here and hereafter. 
 What mortal could have read it ? For it 
 must have been in a perfect language ; and 
 there never has been any such language 
 upon earth, so it must have been in an 
 unknown tongue. And even if that diffi- 
 culty had been overcome, which of the 
 sons of men would have been capable of 
 seeing and understanding and appreciating 
 the authentic product of heaven's high 
 literature ? There would need to have been 
 not only a miraculously constructed book, 
 but a miraculously reconstructed humanity 
 to take it in ; and wherein would that have 
 been different from the annihilation of the 
 
148 NECESSARY LIMITATIONS 
 
 human race as it is, and the creating of 
 another ? It would not have been the 
 salvation of man ; it would have been the 
 sweeping of him out of existence, and 
 the bringing into being of a new race 
 entirely different from the old. 
 
 Again, let us suppose it possible that He 
 could have sent an angel from heaven, or 
 a whole army of angels, fully inspired with 
 heavenly truth, to go forth as missionaries 
 and make known the heavenly revelation to 
 all sorts and conditions of men. But, once 
 again, what language would they use ? As 
 soon as they employed any language under 
 the sun, that moment would their message 
 be involved in the imperfections — crudities, 
 barbarisms, inconsistencies, obscurities, and 
 what not — inseparable from the very best 
 of earth's languages. And, if it be supposed 
 that it might be possible for them to supple- 
 ment the words they spoke by the lives they 
 lived, would they not be out of touch with 
 us, and would it not be quite impossible for 
 us to enter into lives so wholly diverse in 
 nature and in circumstance from ours ? 
 And, if they came upon us with the impact 
 of superhuman power, would not human 
 freedom be abolished ? 
 
EARTHEN VESSELS 149 
 
 It has been a not uncommon rhetorical 
 device, in speaking of the gospel as coming 
 to us through human agency, to say that 
 God might have spoken to us with a voice 
 from heaven, or He might have written 
 His gospel in letters of light on the sky, or 
 He might have sent a legion of angels to 
 tell it all abroad ; but He has, in His 
 condescending goodness, set these other 
 methods aside and employed the agency of 
 man. But will such flights of rhetoric bear 
 any examination ? Try to think the alter- 
 natives out. Imagine the writing on the 
 sky ; imagine the voice or succession of 
 voices from an open heaven ; imagine the 
 legion of angels setting to work — is there 
 one of the inherent difficulties of the case 
 really met ? What really stands in the way 
 of salvation is sin. And it is not so very 
 easy a matter to take away the sin of the 
 world, to give eternal life to dying men ! 
 
 The more we apply our minds to think 
 out the mighty problem of the divine reve- 
 lation to a sinful race, the more clearly shall 
 we see that God's method is, if not the only 
 one, most certainly the best ; always on the 
 supposition that human freedom is not to 
 be interfered with. 
 
ISO NECESSARY LIMITATIONS 
 
 Setting aside, then, other suggested alter- 
 natives, let us look at the method which God 
 actually followed, and consider some of the 
 limitations from which there could be no 
 escape. 
 
 (i) If man's free agency is to be respected, 
 he must be reached, not by an intrusive 
 force from without, but by the usual methods 
 of influence and persuasion by which the will 
 is reached without coercion. Hence the 
 need of human agency. And the agency 
 must not only be human, but must remain 
 human. To take an ordinary man and by 
 divine fiat to transform him into an angel 
 or some perfect creature quite unlike what 
 he was, would be practically to surrender 
 human ministration, and fall back on what 
 would be, to all intents and purposes, pre- 
 ternatural agency. There is an influence of 
 the divine Spirit upon the human spirit, 
 which lies within the range of what is 
 natural, and whenever we have the oppor- 
 tunity of following the training which made 
 a prophet or an apostle of the originally 
 ordinary man, we can see by what gradual 
 and sometimes painful processes the result 
 was reached. We think of Moses and all 
 
HUMAN AGENCY 151 
 
 that he went through before he could become 
 the leader of the people ; of Elijah and his 
 trials and temptations ; of Hosea and the sad 
 story of his domestic life ; of Jeremiah and 
 the sore suffering, and still sorer soul- 
 conflicts by which he became the most 
 Christ-like of all the prophets. So too the 
 Apostles — think of the long course of train- 
 ing they had ; compare Peter and John of 
 the early days with the men they had become 
 when they wrote their epistles : they are new 
 men, but not by a divine fiat, not by a 
 sudden miracle of transformation, simply by 
 the training of Christ and His Spirit in ways 
 which never interfered with the freedom of 
 their will, or the natural evolution of their 
 manhood, under the gracious influence of 
 which they were the subjects. It might, 
 perhaps, be thought that the case of the 
 Apostle Paul was an exception. Was not 
 he miraculously changed from one being to 
 another in that flash of light from heaven, 
 and may that not be taken as an illustration 
 of how God not only could, but did, in a 
 moment and simply by the exercise of divine 
 power, undo one man, the old Saul, and 
 create a new one, the new Paul ? Is not 
 that what Paul himself felt when he wrote 
 
152 NECESSARY LIMITATIONS 
 
 of being in Christ, as a "new creation"? 
 But when we look more closely into his case, 
 we find that it was no real exception to the 
 rule. There was, indeed, a sudden change 
 from darkness to light, but we must not 
 forget his presence some time before at the 
 martyrdom of Stephen, and the impression 
 which would be made upon him by what he 
 there saw and heard ; nor must we forget 
 the opportunity he would have on the long 
 journey North to review his past, and to raise 
 the great question of his life ; and, moreover, 
 while there was, as so often happens, a quite 
 sudden conversion, there was no suddenness 
 in his appointment to the position of apostle. 
 He had not only to put himself under the 
 guidance of Ananias, and in communication 
 with the brethren at Jerusalem, but to spend 
 three years in the desert. Even in his case, 
 therefore, there is no evidence of such a 
 miraculous influence upon him as would lift 
 him above the possibility of error. That he 
 was an inspired man thereafter there can be 
 no manner of doubt, and that his inspiration 
 was far more than what we call the ordinary 
 guidance of the Spirit ; but even in his 
 case it was not such as to interfere with 
 the natural working of mind and heart, and 
 
HUMAN LANGUAGE 153 
 
 SO reduce him to a mere organ of another's 
 inspiration. We conclude, therefore, that 
 while there was special guidance of the 
 Spirit for the prophets of the Old Testament 
 and the apostles of the New, its action was 
 not in superseding their own powers, but 
 rather in directing and quickening them ; it 
 was never such as to change them suddenly 
 from imperfection to perfection. This would 
 have been to exceed the necessary limita- 
 tions in two ways, first by coercing the 
 will, and next by changing the man into a 
 superman — a virtual abandonment of genuine 
 human agency. 
 
 (2) Another necessary limitation was the 
 use of human language, and of such lan- 
 guage, however undeveloped, as there was 
 to be had at the time. The Hebrew tongue 
 was probably quite as good as any of the 
 earlier languages of the world. There is 
 a simplicity, directness, and impressiveness 
 about it which made it in some degree 
 suitable as a vehicle of revelation in its 
 earlier stages ; but it was certainly crude, 
 and very limited in its scope. The Greek 
 language was the most perfect vehicle of 
 thought in existence at the time the New 
 
154 NECESSARY LIMITATIONS 
 
 Testament was produced ; but even the best 
 of Greek was quite inadequate for giving 
 perfect expression to the things of God. 
 New words had to be introduced, old ones 
 transfigured, and some lifted out of the mud 
 in which they had long lain to be minted 
 and coined anew. The inadequacy of 
 vocabulary is only a small part of the case. 
 All who have studied the science of lan- 
 guage know that it is a great mistake to 
 suppose that there can be any real pre- 
 cision in expressing even the most familiar 
 thoughts in the region of the intellect, and 
 that it is only by way of suggestion that 
 the unseen and eternal can be presented 
 at all. We use, for example, such simple 
 and common words as "faith" and "love" 
 as if they had a definite and precise mean- 
 ing; whereas if we could analyze the ideas 
 awakened in the minds of different people, 
 we should find scarcely two of them in 
 which they completely corresponded. 
 
 One thinks here of the classic passage 
 in " The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," 
 showing that there are at least six distinct 
 personalities to be recognized as taking part 
 in the dialogue between John and Thomas : 
 ** The real John, known only to his Maker ; 
 
LITERARY FORM 155 
 
 John's Ideal John, never the real John, and 
 often very unlike him ; Thomas' ideal John, 
 never the real John, nor John's John, and 
 often very unlike either " ; and the three 
 Thomases in like manner. In the same 
 way, it would be very interesting, and most 
 instructive too, if we could follow some 
 controversy, say on "faith," or on "the 
 Atonement," and discover in how many 
 senses the same word was used by different 
 persons. We should probably find nearer 
 thirty ** faiths" than three, and as many as 
 fifty different "atonements." The human 
 mind being what it is, there is endless room 
 for misunderstanding; and language, being 
 one of its products, cannot rise above its 
 source. It follows, therefore, that there is 
 a necessary limitation with respect to the 
 giving of revelation in the impossibility, 
 from the nature of the case, of finding a 
 better vehicle for it than any of the lan- 
 guages of man. And while all this applies 
 to spoken language, it is still more marked 
 as applied to written language, which is 
 destitute of the tones and inflections that 
 help us so much in our ordinary speech. 
 
 (3) The limitations of literary form. Here 
 
iS6 NECESSARY LIMITATIONS 
 
 again it is quite possible to conceive of God 
 so lifting men out of the environment of 
 their time as to enable them to make use 
 of the very best and most accurate forms 
 of literature, even such as in the natural 
 course were not developed till thousands of 
 years later. Even these would have had 
 their own imperfections ; besides, in order to 
 reach that higher stage of literary form, it 
 is plain that such a miracle would have been 
 required as to unman a man, to deprive him 
 of his human nature and make him a super- 
 human automaton. No free will could have 
 been left to him after such treatment. 
 
 But apart from this, is it not evident that 
 there has been no imposing of a special literary 
 form on the inspired writers .-* Each takes 
 his own, and of course it is a form current 
 in his own times. It was "at sundry times 
 and in divers manners" that the different 
 portions of the Bible came into existence ; 
 and it is one of the most interesting things 
 about the Bible that there is scarcely any 
 form of literary production which does not 
 find its place there. The literary forms of 
 the world in use at the different times are 
 taken just as they are ; only they are lifted, 
 as it were, above themselves, and, without 
 
LITERARY FORM 157 
 
 any violation of their proper nature, made 
 vehicles of the most marvellous inspiration. 
 
 The first form which is found in the history 
 of the world's literature is that of myth and 
 legend. Now, there are those in our day 
 who think that God must have found it quite 
 impossible to make any use of that kind of 
 literature. But why ? From this unworthy 
 and unwarrantable limitation of the grace and 
 power of God have sprung many of the most 
 serious difficulties as to the inspiration of the 
 Scriptures — difficulties which are all swept 
 away as soon as we recognize that just as 
 God will graciously use the most imperfect 
 languages — languages which have not even 
 a word that will stand for God in them, lan- 
 guages like those of Patagonia and Northern 
 Australia, reflecting the condition of people 
 who have scarcely a thought above the daily 
 wants of the body and the most elementary 
 passions of the soul — for conveying whatever 
 is possible of the truth ; so he would use 
 forms of literature, however inadequate, rather 
 than let the people go without any enlighten- 
 ment at all. If we would only think our- 
 selves back to the conditions of the olden 
 time, so far from finding fault or suggesting 
 difficulty, we should recognize the marvellous 
 
158 NECESSARY LIMITATIONS 
 
 grace of God in so lifting up the best legendary 
 literature of the world as to make it a vehicle 
 of high and pure revelation. How impressive 
 it is, for example, to compare the story of 
 the garden of Eden or of the Fall with the 
 uninspired legends of other nations, which 
 are tissues for the most part of meaningless 
 absurdities, sometimes of abominations, while 
 the Bible stories are filled full, as full as such 
 forms of literature could be imagined to be, 
 of the noblest spiritual teaching ! What an 
 exhilarating change to those of us who once 
 were harassed by the old difficulties, and 
 worried with the fruitless and foolish con- 
 troversies about them, to get a view of the 
 glorious heaven which, unclouded by any of 
 them, overarches all ! That which on the old 
 view told so heavily against the inspiration 
 of the Bible, tells powerfully in its favour 
 now. It is a fresh witness to the reality and 
 efficacy of that touch upon the spirits of holy 
 men of old which, without interfering with 
 their freedom or overbearing their human 
 nature, enabled them to give us light in the 
 darkness, the rainbow in the cloud — all of 
 the truth which was communicable through 
 the only vehicle then available for use. 
 
 At the best the treasure must be in earthen 
 
LITERARY FORM 159 
 
 vessels, and the farther back we go, the more 
 earthen may we expect the vessel to be ; 
 and this will, of course, apply in a very special 
 manner to the time when myth and legend 
 held the field ; but surely, instead of making 
 this a ground of complaint, or of unworthy 
 criticism, we should rather adore the wisdom 
 and grace of God that He could and did put 
 the treasure into any vessel, however earthen, 
 which was available ; and do we not in this 
 see further evidence that the excellency of 
 the power was not of man, but of God ? But 
 this is of such commanding importance that 
 we must give it a chapter to itself. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 The Excellency of the Power 
 
 IT is encouraging to the writer, on referring 
 to the quotation just made (2 Corin- 
 thians iv. 7), to find that he has been uncon- 
 sciously following the order of the Apostle's 
 thought in the passage which leads up to that 
 quotation. If we turn to the chapter we 
 shall find that he begins by speaking of the 
 truth, which he is called, as a minister of 
 Christ, to commend to every man's con- 
 science in the sight of God (vers, i, 2). This 
 truth he identifies with the Gospel (ver. 3) ; 
 and in view of its being hid from those who 
 believe not, he cites as the explanation of 
 this, not any uncertainty due to the lack of 
 external authority, but blindness of mind 
 (ver. 4), and appeals for the verification of 
 his Gospel, not to external supports, refusing 
 even to press upon them his own personal 
 
 or official authority (ver. 5), but to the 
 160 
 
POWER OF THE WORD i6i 
 
 self-evidencing power of the truth — the 
 shining of the light of the Gospel as verified 
 in Christian experience (ver. 6). Then follows 
 the acknowledgment that this " treasure " 
 ("the word of God," "the truth," "our 
 Gospel," "the glorious Gospel of Christ," 
 "the light of the knowledge of the glory 
 of God in the face of Jesus Christ " — all 
 equivalent expressions already used) is 
 in " earthen vessels " ; but instead of this 
 being in his view any disparagement or 
 disappointment, the only effect it has on 
 his mind is to give assurance that the 
 excellency of the power must be of God. 
 
 It is a mere commonplace now that this 
 excellency of power has been found, is always 
 to be found, in these sacred Scriptures. It 
 is now more than two millenniums since that 
 Psalm was written in which the sacred 
 oracles of the Hebrews, then scanty and 
 incomplete, were represented as " converting 
 the soul," " making wise the simple," " re- 
 joicing the heart," ** enlightening the eyes." 
 And has not the claim been abundantly 
 justified through all the centuries and to 
 the ends of the earth ? In other sacred 
 books and in the writings of ancient sages 
 we find passages that would not be disgraced 
 
 M 
 
i62 POWER OF THE WORD 
 
 by comparison with what is here — passages 
 of rarest beauty, of loftiest tone, of spiritual 
 discernment even ; but everywhere else we 
 miss the excellency of the power. 
 
 There is a' dynamic here which we dis- 
 cover nowhere else, and that dynamic lies 
 in the Gospel of God, the treasure hid 
 in these earthen vessels. The Chinese 
 preacher, familiar with the writings of Con- 
 fucius and the faith of Buddha, well caught 
 this special characteristic of the Gospel. 
 He represented a sinner lying in a deep 
 pit, unable to extricate himself from its 
 mire. Confucius came to the edge of the 
 pit, and said, " Poor fellow, I am very sorry 
 for you. Why were you such a fool as to 
 get in there ? Let me give you a piece of 
 advice ; if you get out, don't get in again." 
 A Buddhist priest next came by, and said, 
 " Poor fellow ! I am very much pained to 
 see you there. I think if you could scramble 
 up two-thirds of the way, or even half, I 
 could reach you and lift you up the rest." 
 But the man in the pit could not get out 
 of the mire. Then the Saviour came by, 
 and took him from the horrible pit and 
 from the miry clay and set his feet upon 
 a rock, and put a new song in his mouth. 
 
SPIRIT AND LIFE 163 
 
 This is the power which makes the Bible 
 unique. It is to this that prophets, apostles, 
 and Christ Himself make special appeal. 
 Jeremiah writes : " Is not My word like as 
 fire, saith the Lord ; and like a hammer 
 that breaketh the rock in pieces ? " So the 
 Apostle Peter speaks of " The word of God 
 which liveth and abideth for ever " ; and in 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews we read : " The 
 word of God is living and active, and sharper 
 than any two-edged sword, and piercing 
 even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of 
 both joints and marrow, and quick to discern 
 the thoughts and intents of the heart." In 
 the same way our Lord, finding fault with* 
 the pedantic literalism of the Jews, said : 
 ** It is the spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh 
 profiteth nothing: the words that I have 
 spoken unto you are spirit and are life." 
 
 The ethical and religious productions of 
 those who made their researches and re- 
 corded the results of them apart from the 
 Scriptures — where are they ? Where, for 
 example, are the moralists and philosophers 
 of Greece and Rome ? Their works, indeed, 
 are on the shelves of every scholar in Chris- 
 tendom ; but in what capacity ? As autho- 
 rities ? Not at all ; simply as monuments 
 
i64 POWER OF THE WORD 
 
 of genius and chapters of intellectual 
 history. Who would ever think, when con- 
 sidering the question, ** Wherewithal shall 
 a young man cleanse his way ? " of answer- 
 ing it by saying, " By taking heed thereto 
 according to Aristotle's * Nicomachian 
 Ethics ' ! " Yet Aristotle's " Nicomachian 
 Ethics " is perhaps the very best book ever 
 produced on the subject without aid from 
 revelation. Who would ever think of 
 expecting a soul-satisfying solution to the 
 problem, "If a man die, shall he live 
 again ? " in the " Phsdo " of Plato, unrivalled 
 as it is among the literature of antiquity 
 on the subject of the soul's immortality ? 
 Is there a single Greek or Roman classic 
 on the subject of man's condition and 
 prospects that would be of the slightest 
 use to a soul burdened with sin, or pressed 
 with the weight of this most solemn of 
 all questions : " How shall a man be just 
 with God ? " They are all out of date — 
 cold monuments of genius, dead relics of 
 antiquity, almost forgotten attempts to 
 sound the mysteries of life and death. 
 
 Or again, where is the sceptical writer of 
 two thousand years ago, or one thousand, or 
 one hundred, or fifty — one is almost tempted 
 
PERENNIAL VITALITY 165 
 
 to come down like Abraham, to ten, and 
 to ask. Where is one of them that our 
 sceptical friends will stand by, as we 
 stand by Moses and David, by Matthew 
 and Paul ? They are all out of date, and 
 their works are to be found, if found 
 at all, amidst the dusty, moth-eaten relics 
 of the past, in the British Museum, or 
 on the antiquary's book-shelf. But who 
 will venture to predict the time when 
 you will have to ransack the antiquary's 
 library to find a copy of the writings 
 of Moses, David, Solomon, Isaiah, Hosea, 
 Matthew, Paul, or John ? These authors 
 are all old, but they are always new. 
 Old as they are, their words are as 
 weighty, as powerful, as ever, and they are 
 far more widely read to-day than at any 
 previous time. In some old Bible of your 
 grandfather, between the leaves which 
 enclose some cherished passage that had 
 often cheered the old man's heart, there is, 
 perhaps, a little relic of the past — a rose 
 leaf, a sprig of heliotrope, a forget-me-not. 
 The colour is gone, the scent has evaporated, 
 even the grace of form is crushed out of 
 all recognition. You must touch it very 
 tenderly, or it will crumble into dust, and 
 
1 66 POWER OF THE WORD 
 
 be all gone. It abides after a fashion, as 
 human things abide; it does not live and 
 abide as divine things live and abide. But 
 the promise, over against which the little 
 flower is lying, not only abides, but lives. 
 It lives in ten thousand hearts as well as 
 in yours, as rich in colour, as fresh in 
 fragrance, as delightful to the soul as ever 
 it was. " All flesh is grass, and all the 
 goodliness thereof is as the flower of the 
 field. The grass withereth, and the flower 
 thereof falleth away ; but the word of the 
 Lord endureth for ever." The word of God 
 is not like that of Demosthenes or of Cicero, 
 whose speeches may still move to admiration 
 but can no longer lead men on to action as 
 in the days when they were fresh and strong. 
 The word of God lives and breathes ; lives 
 with the life and breathes with the breath 
 of the Spirit of the living God. This is the 
 secret of its perennial freshness ; this is 
 the secret of its immortal youth : " It is the 
 Spirit that quickeneth." Of Homer, and 
 Virgil, and Dante, and Milton ; of Aris- 
 totle and Seneca, and Descartes and Bacon ; 
 of Demosthenes, and Cicero, and Burke — 
 it may be said : " He being dead yet 
 speaketh"; but of the Inspirer of the 
 
IN ALL LITERARY FORMS 167 
 
 Bible, and of Him alone, it can be said : 
 " He, being alive, yet speaketh." The 
 Spirit of God may use, often does use, 
 other books ; but He identifies Himself 
 with the Bible. He makes it vocal with 
 His loving voice, and vital with His living 
 power. 
 
 We find this power running through all 
 the different forms of literature which have 
 been employed. It is not equally distributed, 
 but it so pervades the Bible as a whole that 
 it is no exaggeration to say that ** All Scripture 
 is given by inspiration of God, and is profit- 
 able for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, 
 for instruction in riofhteousness : that the man 
 of God may be perfect, throughly furnished 
 unto all good works." There maybe a ques- 
 tion whether there is any of the excellence 
 of this power in the Book of Esther, for 
 example ; but that does not affect the general 
 statement, it only suggests the reasonableness 
 of the doubt which has all along been enter- 
 tained as to the place of that book in the 
 canon. 
 
 In view of this all-pervasiveness of the 
 power, we can see how the whole of the 
 Scriptures, and not only those parts where 
 the Gospel is specially prominent, may be 
 
i68 POWER OF THE WORD 
 
 truly inspired of God. We must not over- 
 press the metaphor of the earthen vessels and 
 the treasure therein contained, as indicating 
 that we can separate the one from the other 
 and show what parts of the Bible are earthen, 
 and what pure treasure. We may illustrate 
 the intermingling of the divine and the 
 human in the Scriptures by the intermingling 
 of flesh and spirit in the human body. This 
 illustration is fully justified because, as we 
 have seen in the introductory chapter, it is 
 covered by the large sense of the word 
 " inspiration " : " There is a spirit in man, 
 and the inspiration of the Almighty hath 
 given him understanding." But who can 
 tell the place of the spirit ? It shines out 
 in some places more than in others — most of 
 all, no doubt, in the eyes. But are not the 
 eyes flesh? It diminishes as we go down 
 and out to the extremities, almost disappear- 
 ing, as we may say, in hair and finger-nails, 
 which are not even sensitive to the knife. 
 But the life, in some mysterious manner, 
 extends even there, for does not the power of 
 growth prove its presence ? So in Scripture 
 there are parts where the power is at the 
 minimum, and there are glowing centres where 
 it is at the maximum ; but just as there is life 
 
INCIDENTAL EXCELLENCY 169 
 
 power in every part of the body, so there is 
 spirit power diffused throughout the Bible. 
 
 While the power may be said to be not 
 only excellent, but even perfect when viewed 
 in relation to the great object for which 
 the revelation was given, there are other 
 marvellous excellencies of the Scriptures 
 which are quite incidental. So long as these 
 are looked upon as merely incidental, they 
 add in a delightful manner to the evidence 
 of divine inspiration. Take, as an example 
 of this, the utterances which trench on the 
 domain of science. Make this a primary 
 consideration, make it an essential that there 
 should be in all such places an accurate 
 anticipation of scientific discovery, make the 
 whole credibility of the Bible turn on this 
 complete correspondence, and you raise a 
 host of difficulties which no ingenuity can 
 completely remove, and men like Tyndall 
 and Huxley are forced into scepticism. But 
 bear in mind that the great object is to 
 reveal God and make known His salvation, 
 and that therefore we ought not to look for 
 anticipations of scientific discovery ; then, 
 when we find how far above their contem- 
 poraries the inspired writers were, even in 
 
170 POWER OF THE WORD 
 
 this point of view ; when we find them using 
 language which, though not anticipating 
 modern discovery, is yet by its elevation 
 of thought not unworthy of it, we see how 
 the inspiration which runs specially along 
 the line of the moral and spiritual has, 
 at the same time, an enlarging and refining 
 effect on the action of the mind in regard 
 to subjects only incidentally touched. In 
 all this there are new and striking tokens 
 of divine inspiration. As illustration, let us 
 glance at the epic of Creation in the begin- 
 ning of the Bible. What a contrast to other 
 cosmogonies ! Read it as an astronomical 
 and geological treatise, and you have endless 
 difficulties ; read it as a revelation of the one 
 God in nature, and you have not only the 
 perfect accomplishment of the main object, 
 but you have incidentally a most marvellous 
 correspondence with what science has re- 
 vealed — a correspondence so marvellous that 
 some distinguished astronomers and geolo- 
 gists have actually believed it to be a 
 minutely accurate record. Make the de- 
 mand that it must be a scientific revelation, 
 and you put innumerable weapons into the 
 hand of the enemy ; take it as it obviously is 
 given, and you not only get rid of all the 
 
INCIDENTAL EXCELLENCY 171 
 
 difficulties, but you have such excellency — 
 excellency above all that uninspired men 
 have ever accomplished in the same direc- 
 tion — that one recognizes even here the 
 manifest tokens of the divine Inspiration. 
 
 To take another illustration of the same 
 kind. We have no reason to believe that 
 when the great Prophet of the Captivity 
 looked up to the starry heavens, he was 
 miraculously endowed with the knowledge 
 of the Astronomer Royal of the twentieth 
 century. We cannot suppose that on the 
 basis of science miraculously made known 
 to him in advance, he would have the same 
 impression of the vastness of the universe 
 and the minuteness of man as we have. 
 How comes it, then, that when he has 
 occasion to touch on the theme, he does 
 it in a way that scarcely betrays the limi- 
 tation of his knowledge, he does it in a 
 way that would make it possible to read 
 what he says about it at a meeting of the 
 British Association, and no one would feel 
 that it fell short of the requirements of the 
 theme ? Read Isaiah xl. from the twelfth 
 verse to the end, and say if there is any 
 utterance of modern times, I say not to 
 excel it, but even to equal it. How did 
 
172 POWER OF THE WORD 
 
 this come to pass ? Because he was in- 
 spired so as to see the great results of 
 modern astronomy ? Certainly not ; but 
 because he had a vision of God, and God 
 is greater than all His worlds. It was the 
 inspiration of the Almighty that so enlarged 
 his mind that not only did he speak truly 
 of God, but his language about the works 
 of God was such that it has not staled in 
 twenty-five centuries. What intelligent man 
 can fail to see the excellency of the power 
 even there ? 
 
 Illustrations of this kind might be multi- 
 plied, bringing out other incidental excel- 
 lencies : the wonderful literary charm of an 
 idyll like Ruth, for example; the exquisite 
 poetry of many of the Psalms; the eagle 
 flights of a quondam fisherman like John ; 
 the elevation, not only of thought but even 
 of language in a book like the Apocalypse, 
 where the occasional badness of the Greek 
 is surely sufficient evidence that there was 
 no miraculous superseding of the author's 
 limitations ; and all would go to make it 
 clear that while, on the supposition that 
 the men were lifted miraculously out of their 
 natural limitations, there are endless diffi- 
 culties, it is only necessary to remember 
 
INCIDENTAL EXCELLENCY 173 
 
 that they were all " earthen vessels," in 
 order not only to surmount all the diffi- 
 culties, but to see in the unquestionable 
 excellence of thought and style and even 
 of language, new tokens of the inspiration 
 of the Almighty. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 The Place of Criticism 
 
 HAS criticism any place in dealing with 
 the sacred Scriptures ? And if so, 
 what ? 
 
 We must settle first what we mean by 
 criticism. It is perhaps due to the depravity 
 of human nature that the word almost in- 
 variably suggests fault-finding. When a 
 book is handed over to a critic, must he 
 find fault with it ? The fault-finding function 
 is needed, if there are serious faults to find. 
 But what if the book be superlatively good ? 
 Then his function is to recognize and call 
 attention to its excellencies. And if it be 
 only fairly good, he will have both functions 
 to discharge. 
 
 There are then two kinds of criticism, that 
 
 of appreciation, and that of depreciation. In 
 
 proportion as the work is good and the critic 
 
 competent, will his criticism be appreciative. 
 
 174 
 
THE CRITICS MAGNA CHART A 175 
 
 And surely it would be a great mistake 
 to refuse him the opportunity. If he has 
 the power of discovering merits which are 
 apt to be hid from the average reader, why 
 should he not be allowed to point these 
 out? 
 
 This is clearly the Apostle Paul's idea, as 
 shown in the striking passage i Corinthians 
 ii. 1 1- 1 5, where he calls for this critical appre- 
 ciation. He expects and wishes the criticism 
 to be thorough and searching. The word 
 he uses is avaKpivoi^ which is just our word 
 "criticize," with a strengthening prefix 
 specially calling for earnest, careful scrutiny. 
 Only he insists that the critic must be com- 
 petent. As the things he is dealing with 
 are spiritual things, he must have the 
 spiritual faculty : ** The natural man," he 
 says, *' 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. But (and here is the 
 critic's Magna Charta) he that is spiritual 
 judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged 
 of no man" (vers. 14, 15). That is liberty, 
 is it not ? Why is the Apostle not afraid 
 to give the critic so loose a rein ? Because 
 the man who is truly spiritual is sure to 
 
176 THE PLACE OF CRITICISM 
 
 appreciate, not depreciate, the things of 
 God. 
 
 So far, the question seems exceedingly- 
 simple. But a complication comes in, so 
 far as the Scriptures are concerned, when 
 we remember that there are two elements 
 to be considered : the revelation which is 
 of God, and the record of it which is through 
 the agency of man, used by God, indeed, 
 in His adorable providence, but not so as 
 to obliterate the human personality. This 
 view of the subject is put strikingly before 
 us by the same Apostle in the passage we 
 have used in another connection, " We have 
 this treasure (" the light of the knowledge 
 of the glory of God " referred to in the 
 preceding verse) in earthen vessels, that the 
 excellency of the power may be of God and 
 not of us." There are two things therefore 
 to be considered : first the treasure of divine 
 revelation, and next the earthen vessels 
 which contain it. Let us examine what is 
 the place, and what ought to be the attitude 
 of criticism in the one case and in the other. 
 
 ' (i) In regard to the divine revelation, there 
 surely can be no place for the fault-finding 
 critic. Shall any one find fault with "the 
 
AS REGARDS THE TREASURE 177 
 
 light of the knowledge of the glory of God " ? 
 Nor can there be any place for the superior 
 critic. Some might be disposed to think the 
 Apostle wrong in giving criticism, even the 
 most appreciative criticism, any place here. 
 Is it not presumption to express any opinion, 
 however laudatory ? It would certainly be, 
 if it were done with a sense of superiority. 
 Here, again, it is apt to be assumed that 
 a critic is necessarily a superior person — 
 another token of the depravity of human 
 nature, for surely it is not a fair assumption. 
 Shakespeare has had many critics. Do they 
 all assume superiority? Does any one of 
 them, worth listening to, assume superiority ? 
 And if the ordinary critic of Shakespeare 
 naturally takes a place far beneath the works 
 he is appreciating, how much more shall we 
 expect that he whose duty it is to call 
 attention to the things of God will not only 
 not assume superiority — surely an unthink- 
 able audacity ! — but will bow low in adora- 
 tion at His feet. 
 
 When we consider this, we shall see how 
 completely out of court are a whole class of 
 self-styled critics. They take up the sacred 
 Scriptures, and subject them to a scrutiny 
 which may be careful enough, but which 
 
 N 
 
178 THE PLACE OF CRITICISM 
 
 deliberately sets aside things of God as 
 an impossibility. They start with the dogma 
 of the denial of the supernatural. What 
 possible chance is there of appreciation 
 there ? The things of God are necessarily 
 " foolishness " to such people, neither can 
 they know them ; because the things of 
 God are spiritually discerned, and they are 
 at the opposite pole. 
 
 Such persons are absolutely incompetent 
 critics, no matter how learned and even wise 
 they may be in the things of the world. 
 This seems self-evident, but it is far too 
 little realized in Bible criticism. There are 
 many who seem to think that if a man is a 
 great linguist, an accomplished historian, 
 and an acute literary critic, he is just the 
 man to deal thoroughly and satisfactorily 
 with divine revelation ; and yet he may 
 be absolutely incompetent. This is what 
 the Apostle so strongly urges in his letter 
 to the Corinthians. Corinth was not far 
 from Athens geographically, and it was not 
 very far behind it in culture. There were 
 many competent critics there of the literary, 
 the historical, the linguistic, and the artistic. 
 And these faculties all had their value in 
 literature, in history, in language, in art ; 
 
AS REGARDS THE TREASURE 179 
 
 but the possession of any or all of these did 
 not constitute a man a qualified critic of 
 divine revelation. 
 
 Can any one really dispute the justice of 
 the Apostle's position ? Who would think 
 of submitting a scheme of colour to the most 
 learned and accomplished man in all the 
 world, if he were blind ? Who would submit 
 a Sonata of Beethoven to a deaf man, or 
 even to the greatest scholar in the land, if 
 he had no ear for music ? The fatal objec- 
 tion in every such case would be that he was 
 destitute of the only faculty to which the 
 final appeal can rightly be made. 
 
 Suppose the passage we are reading to 
 be the healing of the paralytic, and that we 
 have come to the place where Jesus, answer- 
 ing His critics, says, ** That ye may know 
 that the Son of Man hath power on earth 
 to forgive sins, (then saith He to the sick of 
 the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go 
 unto thy house." We see the light in Jesus' 
 face, recognize the grandeur of His mission, 
 and the appropriateness alike of the deed 
 of mercy and the word of grace. It is the 
 opening of heaven and the pouring of light 
 on earth's darkness. Our hearts are full 
 of thanksgiving and praise. But here are 
 
i8o THE PLACE OF CRITICISM 
 
 two men approaching from opposite direc- 
 tions. One of them says, " Suppose I could 
 change the pen with which I write this into 
 a pen-wiper, I should not thus make what 
 I write any the truer or more convincing." 
 The other makes a similar remark about a 
 centaur trotting down Regent Street. Surely 
 these men must have been very vulgar 
 people ! No ; on the contrary, one is an 
 apostle of sweetness and light, and the other 
 is a master of scientific exposition ; the name 
 of the one being Matthew Arnold, and of 
 the other Thomas H. Huxley. But are such 
 men as these at all capable of judging our 
 Lord's deeds of mercy .-* On the other 
 hand, to the humblest man, who has had 
 the experience of sins forgiven and of grace 
 to walk in the paths of righteousness after 
 powers atrophied by neglect or palsied by 
 sin, the deed of Christ is no breach of 
 nature's laws, rather a healing of some old 
 breach, the most natural thing in all the 
 world to be done by the Saviour of the 
 world, the great Healer, " der Heiland," as 
 the Germans beautifully call Him. " In Thy 
 light shall we see light " ; in the light of the 
 knowledge of the glory of God (and salvation 
 is His glory) we see wondrous light in the 
 
AS REGARDS THE TREASURE i8i 
 
 story on the printed page. Think of the 
 imbecility, to say nothing of the unspirituality, 
 of putting the change of a pen into a pen- 
 wiper, or the trotting of a centaur down 
 Regent Street, in the same category as that 
 great and blessed revelation of the fulfilment 
 of man's greatest need ! 
 
 Let it be set down then as absolutely 
 necessary to competence for the position 
 of Bible critic, that a man have the spiritual 
 faculty, that he not only does not deny God, 
 but that he has an eye to see the light of 
 His glory, an ear attuned to hear His voice, 
 his whole nature open to welcome His Holy 
 Spirit. 
 
 On the other hand, such a man is 
 competent to recognize the things of God 
 even though he be destitute of all other 
 capabilities. He would be better with them, 
 no doubt, but he can do without them. " He 
 that is spiritual judgeth all things." He 
 cannot help it, in fact. All spiritual men 
 not only may but must use the critical faculty 
 if they are to make anything of their Bibles. 
 The devout reader of Holy Scripture is using 
 the critical faculty continually. Even those 
 who hold, or think they hold (for it is only 
 theory with them), that every sentence in 
 
i82 THE PLACE OF CRITICISM 
 
 all the Bible is equally inspired of God, 
 never have the courage of their opinions 
 right through. They open their Bible about 
 the middle, and find this strong and very 
 definite declaration : " A man hath no pre- 
 eminence over a beast" (Ecclesiastes iii. 19). 
 They turn to a more famihar place and read : 
 " Fear not ; ye are of more value than many 
 sparrows." Are they troubled ? Not at all. 
 How do they settle it ? By the exercise 
 of higher criticism. It is not lower criticism. 
 It has not to do with the lexicon or the 
 grammar. They are not equipped for that. 
 But they have the higher critical faculty, and 
 they use it without hesitation. There is not 
 a word in either Ecclesiastes or Luke to 
 indicate that in the one case they are not 
 to believe all they read, and in the other 
 they are. There is no preface in either case 
 to indicate that the literary form of the one 
 book is quite different from that of the other. 
 And probably our simple Bible reader could 
 not tell why it is he treats the two passages 
 in the same Bible so very differently. He 
 is probably not consciously exercising the 
 faculty of higher criticism, but he is most 
 certainly doing it, however unconsciously. 
 " He that is spiritual judgeth all things." 
 
AS REGARDS THE TREASURE 183 
 
 How is it that the Bible of the simplest 
 saints will be well worn and thumbed, 
 perhaps actually torn, at the Psalms and in 
 Gospels, and the page quite clean in Leviticus 
 and in Esther ? It is because they are higher 
 critics. And their criticism is perfectly just. 
 They might not acknowledge in words that 
 there are degrees of inspiration in the Bible ; 
 but the markings in their Bibles make it per- 
 fectly plain that in effect they do. It is quite 
 possible, indeed, for one who has nothing 
 of the critical faculty to read over the whole 
 Bible mechanically, a chapter a day perhaps, 
 and get as much good out of the toughest 
 morsels as out of the sweetest, that is, pro- 
 bably, no good at all. Such an one can 
 dispense altogether with criticism of all 
 kinds ; but if he is to make real use of his 
 Bible, if he is to discern the things of God 
 which are there, he must read it in the light 
 of such critical faculty as he has. "He that 
 is spiritual judgeth all things." 
 
 " Yet he himself is judged of no man." A 
 whole university of learned professors giving 
 their verdict on matters linguistic, historical, 
 literary, philosophical, metaphysical, might 
 rule out the supernatural. It would not 
 affect him in the least. He has an ear to 
 
i84 THE PLACE OF CRITICISM 
 
 hear what the Spirit saith. He hears the 
 music of the spheres. " The rest may reason 
 and welcome ; 'tis we musicians know." Or, 
 to put it in apostoHc phrase : ** He has an 
 unction from the Holy One, and knows." 
 
 (2) But is not the treasure in earthen 
 vessels ? And is there not room here for 
 a different kind of criticism ? And may 
 not the qualities which were inadequate for 
 appreciating the things of God be sufficient 
 for dealing with the earthen vessels ? 
 
 There is some truth in this way of putting 
 it. The revelation of God comes to us in 
 the ordinary vehicles of speech and story, 
 poetry and prose, biography, history, and 
 literature generally. In order, therefore, to 
 deal with this side of the things of God, it 
 is necessary that there should be a critical 
 apparatus ; hence scholarship of all kinds, — 
 linguistic, historical, literary, — is useful, and 
 for thorouo^h work needful. We have seen 
 that the man who^ is spiritual is in the main 
 thing independent of all these : he can find 
 the things of God, however little he knows 
 of these other things ; and he can hold to the 
 things of God, however much learned critics 
 in the lower sphere may say against them. 
 
AS REGARDS THE VESSELS 185 
 
 But if he is a wise and humble man, he will 
 keep to his own sphere. He will not feel 
 called upon stoutly to deny what some gram- 
 marian has to say about grammar, or some 
 linguist about language, or some literary 
 man about style, or some historic critic about 
 particular events. If what is said on these 
 things trouble him at all, it will be enough 
 for him to think : *' Whether these things be 
 so or not, I know not ; one thing I know, that 
 whereas I was blind, now I see." The reve- 
 lation of God lies clear before him, for he 
 has the spiritual eye ; the divine voice is dis- 
 tinctly heard, for he has the spiritual ear ; the 
 treasure in the vessel is grandly appreciated, 
 for he has the spiritual mind ; but he is not the 
 man to settle dogmatically difficult questions 
 which belong to another sphere, such as the 
 nature and degrees of inspiration. The fact 
 of inspiration he sees and knows ; he cannot 
 help seeing it, for the light of the knowledge 
 of the glory of God is shining in his heart ; 
 but the nature and degree of it he is 
 not capable of discussing. Such a difficult 
 (though comparatively unimportant question) 
 requires other faculties than his. 
 
 Still, on the other hand, it is important to 
 remember that while scholarship is necessary 
 
i86 THE PLACE OF CRITICISM 
 
 in order to competence for dealing with 
 the earthen-vessel side of things, even here 
 the spiritual mind is indispensable for com- 
 plete competence. We do not say that the 
 work of unspiritual men is never of any use. 
 It may be, especially in the way of gathering 
 materials ; but for any thorough dealing 
 even with the human side of revelation, it 
 is quite necessary that there should be the 
 spiritual faculty. 
 
 The reason of this lies in the fact that 
 the divine and human in revelation are not 
 practically separable. Here is where the 
 Apostle's admirable illustration falls short 
 of the whole truth, as all illustrations must. 
 If we could hand over the treasure to the 
 spiritual man, and the earthen vessel to the 
 intellectual and scholarly man, and let each 
 deal with his own and leave the other 
 untouched, it might work. But you cannot 
 do this. The inspiration of the Scriptures 
 is like the inspiration of the man. It is all 
 through. God breathed into man's nostrils 
 the breath of life. The in-breathed life is 
 all through the body — in greater degree in 
 some parts, in lesser degree in others — 
 but it pervades the whole, so that you 
 cannot take a man, and hand the spiritual 
 
AS REGARDS THE VESSELS 187 
 
 part of him apart from the material, to one 
 investigator, and the bodily part of him with- 
 out the spirit to another. Hence it comes 
 that even in the investigation of the body the 
 spirit must not be left out of view, just as 
 in the study of the spirit in any thorough 
 way the body also must be taken into 
 account. Let it be understood then that 
 while the divine and the human in the 
 Scriptures are separable in thought, they 
 are not so in fact. Therefore it is impos- 
 sible to judge rightly even of the earthen 
 vessel if we have no appreciation of the 
 treasure which is in it. 
 
 This will appear still more clearly if we 
 remember that we cannot appreciate the 
 earthen vessel apart from its relation to the 
 treasure. Here is where many excellent 
 Christians make a great mistake. They 
 start with the idea that God cannot use 
 anything earthen at all, unless He miracu- 
 lously takes away its earthenness, and makes 
 it pure heavenly. And whenever the pro- 
 cess of searching discloses the earthenness 
 of any of the vessels, they think all is lost. 
 Or if they do not go this length, they think 
 it is a depreciation of the Bible to point it 
 out. Anything earthen in the Bible ! Perish 
 
i88 THE PLACE OF CRITICISM 
 
 the thought ! But if they look at the matter 
 with the Apostle's eye, they will see that the 
 criticism which discloses the earthen vessel 
 is really appreciation, not of the vessel but 
 of Him who can use it, earthen as it is 
 and must be, for conveying His heavenly 
 treasure. Clearly that is the way the Apostle 
 views it : *' We have this treasure in earthen 
 vessels, that the excellency of the power 
 may be of God, and not of us." 
 
 Even in this case, therefore, mere fault- 
 finding and error-picking is quite incom- 
 petent criticism. Fault-finding is the easiest 
 thing in the world. Any dullard can excel 
 in it. But appreciation, specially spiritual 
 appreciation, and most of all, perhaps, the 
 appreciation of the divine in the human, 
 requires the spiritual faculty. A man who 
 can only chip away at the earthen vessel 
 and has no eye for the treasure in it, is 
 quite useless. The spiritual man can judge 
 the spiritual side of things even if he have no 
 faculty for scrutinizing the earthen vessel ; 
 but the unspiritual man cannot even appraise 
 the earthen vessel, for it can be rightly 
 appraised only in relation to that which it 
 contains and conveys. A man might judge 
 a picture even if he could not see its frame ; 
 
AS REGARDS THE VESSELS 189 
 
 but how can any man judge the frame of the 
 picture if he cannot see the picture ? For it 
 is not only that spiritual things are foolish- 
 ness to him, but even the natural things are 
 often foolish to him if he cannot see the 
 spiritual shining in them and through them. 
 
 Take a very homely example. Suppose a 
 being scientifically and philosophically gifted 
 in the highest degree, but completely igno- 
 rant of love, as much a stranger to it as many 
 a man is to God, setting himself to study 
 the actions of a mother fondling her infant, 
 with a view to a thorough interpretation 
 of them all. He follows all the motions, 
 describes the curves, counts the number of 
 the kisses (all the time wondering what 
 they can possibly mean), listens to the 
 varied sounds, registers and tabulates them 
 all, makes the most careful and critical 
 examination of every phenomenon — and 
 then gives out as his sage verdict, ** The 
 woman is a fool." For are not all these 
 things foolishness to him ? But if now 
 there could come suddenly into his soul a 
 great influx of love, the love which fills 
 the heart of the father of the child as he 
 watches the same process, would they 
 be foolishness any longer ? You cannot 
 
iQO THE PLACE OF CRITICISM 
 
 understand even the outward and fleshly 
 if you have no idea of the inward and 
 spiritual. 
 
 With the love of God in the heart, a man 
 will see it all. The light of the knowledge 
 of the glory of God will shine in the face of 
 Jesus Christ, and rays of divine light and 
 love will flash out from every page of the 
 sacred Scriptures. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 The Gains from Reverent Criticism 
 
 ARE we to have no chapter on the losses ? 
 Certainly not. There are no losses 
 from reverent criticism. We admit that if 
 irreverent criticism is allowed to hold the 
 field, nothing but loss will be the result. 
 If those to whom the word of revelation 
 is " spirit and life " leave the searching of 
 the Scriptures to those destitute of the 
 spiritual faculty, the result will be disastrous. 
 It will be like a report of human life reached 
 through the anatomy of the dead body. 
 The criticism of depreciation must be met 
 by the criticism of appreciation ; and when 
 Christian people put the most appreciative 
 critics in the same class with the most 
 destructive, and condemn them all alike, 
 they certainly do their best to play into 
 the hands of the foes of inspiration. 
 
 We admit that there are results of 
 191 
 
192 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 investigation which look Hke loss. If a man 
 starts with a rigid theory of his own as the 
 foundation of his faith, it is no wonder that 
 he is appalled when his theory is set aside. 
 It seems a terrible loss. But what if he 
 get a far better foundation in its place ? 
 Will not the disturbance be a blessing in 
 disguise ? Among the great and precious 
 promises of the word of God is this : "God 
 hath promised to shake not the earth only, 
 but also heaven " (Hebrews xii. 26), and 
 the reason why this is a promise and not 
 a threat is given thus : *' That those things 
 which cannot be shaken may remain." That 
 great promise God has often fulfilled, and 
 He has been fulfilling it in our times. 
 Therefore, whatever apparent losses are 
 the result of spiritual and spirit-guided 
 criticism will be found to be really gains. 
 Whatever does not stand in times like these 
 is better gone. 
 
 We have no word of scorn or even of 
 disparagement for the temple of faith as it 
 stood in the days of our fathers and grand- 
 fathers. Its foundation was in the holy 
 mountains, and its main structure was of the 
 order of ''gold, silver, and precious stones," 
 which remain and ever shall abide. There 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE WORK 193 
 
 was indeed, as alas ! there always is in all that 
 is "of this building," some "wood and hay 
 and stubble " ; but with all that was imper- 
 fect in it, it was a sanctuary of noble souls, 
 the anthems sung in it did not roll to wintry 
 skies, and the worshippers and workers who 
 were trained in it did great things for the 
 kingdom of God, and have made us heirs 
 of institutions and enterprises on which God 
 has poured blessings so abundant that now 
 the whole round world is open to the glad 
 tidings of His Gospel. The fires which 
 have been taking away the wood and hay 
 and stubble may have seemed at times to 
 threaten the structure itself, but God is 
 mindful of His own ; He can make, and has 
 made, the wrath of the destroyer to praise 
 Him, and restrained the remainder thereof. 
 And now that the destroyer has done his 
 worst, now that shakable things have been 
 shaken, the work of reconstruction is going 
 on apace, and we have good reason to 
 believe that the temple of faith in the 
 twentieth century will be nobler and grander 
 than ever, will have in it a still richer 
 and fuller anthem of praise, will be the 
 nursing mother of equally devoted sons and 
 daughters, who will accomplish even more 
 
 o 
 
194 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 for the in-bringing of the kingdom of 
 God than did the great souls who lived the 
 life and did the work of the century that is 
 gone. 
 
 Let us, then, address ourselves hopefully 
 to the subject now before us : The gains 
 from reverent criticism. We shall mention 
 only some of the most outstanding. 
 
 I. An Unassailable Foundation. 
 
 It is very difficult for those believers in 
 verbal inspiration, whose faith is, as a matter 
 of fact, firmly founded on the Rock Christ, 
 and who therefore can say with the Apostle, 
 " I know whom I have believed," to realize 
 how very weak is the theory of Scripture on 
 which they have erroneously supposed their 
 faith to rest. Here is a line of thought 
 which has been only too familiar in the past : 
 Why do you believe in Christ ? Because I 
 read about Him in the Bible. — Why do you 
 believe the Bible? Because it is an inspired 
 book. — What is an inspired book ? A book 
 which is all the same as if it had been written 
 by the finger of God, so that every line and 
 word of it must be taken as if it came 
 straight out of heaven. Now, these people's 
 faith may be of the strongest and noblest 
 
AN UNASSAILABLE FOUNDATION 195 
 
 quality. It may be as genuine faith in 
 Christ as that of the very best of those who 
 hold the other views. The mistake is in 
 the underpinning of it. They rest Christ 
 on the Bible ; and so far there is no practical 
 harm done, for the Bible, treated fairly, is 
 quite strong enough to bear the weight ; but 
 then they rest the Bible on a theory of in- 
 spiration which will not bear any weight. 
 It would not bear the weight of a single 
 believer, as is often found to be tragically 
 true. Here is a man who has been brought 
 up with the most definite views of the 
 mechanical theory of inspiration, and who 
 on that basis has attended Church and 
 taught in the Sunday School for many years. 
 He is suddenly confronted with an array 
 of Bible difficulties to which he cannot find 
 any satisfactory answer. If only now his 
 faith rested on Christ Himself, these difficul- 
 ties, though they might disturb him, would 
 not shake him in the least ; but resting as he 
 does on a theory of inspiration and finding 
 that it does not stand the test, he thinks he 
 must give up everything. Because there are 
 some things in the Bible he cannot be quite 
 sure of, he gives it all up. And his faith in 
 Christ having been wholly dependent upon 
 
196 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 the belief of a discredited theory, he feels him- 
 self constrained to give up Christ also, and 
 becomes a theist, or an agnostic, or an atheist. 
 It may seem to many good people of 
 very little consequence whether a man says 
 he believes in Christ because He is in the 
 Bible, or believes in the Bible because Christ 
 is in it ; but there is all the difference in 
 the world between the stability of the one 
 position and of the other. Christ, as set 
 before us not only in the Gospel pages, and 
 in the testimony of His witnesses throughout 
 the Scriptures, but in His personal presence 
 here and now, is a fact which can as little 
 be set aside by those who have eyes to see 
 as can the sun in the heaven.3. The theory 
 of verbal inspiration makes no such appeal. 
 You cannot say that a man is spiritually 
 blind who has difficulty as to the high praise- 
 worthiness of Jael, the wife of Heber the 
 Kenite. He may be wrong, of course ; but 
 you cannot say that he is not of the truth if 
 he hesitate as to whether that is of the truth. 
 The light of the knowledge of the glory of 
 God is not in the face of Jael, as it is in the 
 face of Jesus Christ. I do not say there is 
 absolutely none of it in her face, but it does 
 not shine out there so as to condemn a 
 
AN UNASSAILABLE FOUNDATION 197 
 
 man to be of a reprobate mind who does 
 not discern it. 
 
 One of the most illuminating and con- 
 vincing books of our time is Carnegie 
 Simpson's " Fact of Christ." Every link 
 in that masterly argument is entirely in- 
 dependent of any theory of inspiration, or 
 even of the fact of inspiration. It would 
 stand good if we knew nothing whatever 
 about the origin or composition of any of 
 the books of the Bible. It simply takes 
 them as we find them, just as we might 
 pick up a collection of Greek literature and 
 read it in an appreciative spirit. It is a 
 fine example of the spirit of the appreciative 
 critic, with the result that to those in 
 sympathy with whatsoever things are true, 
 honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report, 
 the fact of Christ stands out as the crowning 
 fact of all human history. Clearly this is 
 a position which is unaffected by any number 
 of Bible difficulties. These may affect the 
 view we take of certain questions more or 
 less remotely connected with the central 
 truth, but none of them, nor all of them 
 together can alter the great luminous fact 
 of Christ, which shines in the Bible as 
 the sun shines in the heavens. This is the 
 
igS GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 only unassailable foundation. It is so accord- 
 ing to the word of Christ Himself, as when 
 He said : ** I am the Way and the Truth 
 and the Life." It is so according to the 
 apostolic testimony : " Other foundation can 
 no man lay than that which is laid, which 
 is Jesus Christ " ; and again : " To whom 
 coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed 
 indeed of men, but chosen of God, and 
 precious, ye also, as lively stones, are built 
 up a spiritual house " — a passage, by the 
 way, which shows how completely St. Peter 
 understood our Saviour when He said : 
 " Upon this rock I will build My Church.' 
 And this is the position taken practically 
 by all good Christians, both collectively and 
 individually, for the great congregation 
 sings — 
 
 " The Church's one foundation 
 Is Jesus Christ her Lord " ; 
 
 and the individual believer exults — 
 
 " On Christ the solid rock I stand, 
 All other ground is sinking sand." 
 
 It is almost impossible to exaggerate the 
 mischief which has been done, and is now 
 done, by making the shifting sand of human 
 theory the foundation on which the Christian 
 
AN UNASSAILABLE FOUNDATION 199 
 
 faith is built. All the most popular anti- 
 Christian literature of the present day as- 
 sumes that Christianity stands or falls with 
 what is supposed to be the orthodox theory 
 of inspiration. Take the works of Samuel 
 Laing, for example, which are circulated by 
 tens of thousands, and which, being written 
 by a business man of considerable culture, 
 fair acquaintance with science, and a real 
 appreciation of poetry and art, appeals not 
 only to the proverbial man on the street, but 
 to the intelligence of fairly educated men. 
 There is often a sweet reasonableness in his 
 way of putting things, which captivates the 
 reader, and inclines him to accept his sug- 
 gestions. But it will be found that not a 
 line of his writings is valid against the fact 
 of Christ, and its vast moment. Here, for 
 example, is his method of attack : " What is 
 the meaning of inspiration ? It means that 
 a certain book was not written, as all other 
 books in the world have been written, by 
 writers who were fallible, and whose state- 
 ments and opinions, however admirable in 
 the main and made in perfect good faith, 
 inevitably reflected the views of the age in 
 which they lived, and contained matters 
 subsequent ages found to be obsolete or 
 
200 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 erroneous, but that this particular book was 
 miraculously dictated by an infallible God, 
 and, therefore, absolutely and for all time 
 true. But, as a chain cannot be stronger 
 than its weakest link, if any one of these 
 statements were proved not to be true, the 
 theory of inspiration failed." This is con- 
 clusive against the theory, but how does it 
 affect the fact of Christ ? Is the sun less a 
 sun since the sun-spots were discovered ? 
 They probably do not help its shining. Do 
 they hinder it ? Much ? 
 
 There lies before me, as I write, a list 
 of twenty-six cheap reprints issued by the 
 Rationalist Press Association. Of these the 
 majority are what may be called scientific 
 treatises, such as Huxley's lectures and 
 addresses, and Darwin's " Origin of Species," 
 not one of which is antagonistic to the 
 modern view of the divine inspiration of 
 the Scriptures ; and all the rest, with the 
 possible exception of Renan's and Clodd's 
 books on the Life of Jesus, are equally harm- 
 less to those who have any faculty of spiritual 
 appreciation. The sale of these books, we 
 are told, has already reached close on a mil- 
 lion. Think what havoc is thus made on the 
 faith which rests all on the theory of verbal 
 
AN UNASSAILABLE FOUNDATION 201 
 
 inspiration, whereas to those who remember 
 the distinction between the earthen vessels 
 and the treasure contained in them, there is 
 scarcely one of them that would not make 
 our position clearer and more unassailable 
 than ever, on the principle set forth in Chapter 
 XII. There are, no doubt, those now, as 
 always, who love darkness rather than light, 
 because their deeds are evil ; but there are 
 multitudes of good, earnest souls who do 
 love the light, but have been forced into 
 unbelief by the cruel demand that they must 
 accept every word of the Bible as coming 
 direct from God, or reject the whole. They 
 are too conscientious to say they can accept 
 every word ; so the only alternative left to 
 them is to be done with it altogether. 
 
 A theory of inspiration is perhaps the 
 very poorest foundation which has ever been 
 imagined for Christian faith. It may come 
 in very well in the superstructure. After 
 we have accepted Christ, we may learn from 
 Him what to think of the inspiration of the 
 Scriptures. That is what we have been 
 trying to do throughout this little volume. 
 And though a tortoise, or even an elephant, 
 is a poor foundation for the earth to stand 
 on, we may find that even the tortoise will 
 
202 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 stand as securely as any other creature on 
 the earth — always provided it can stand on 
 its own feet. In any case, we may rest 
 assured that if a man truly believes in Christ, 
 he will not fail to rise to a worthy faith in 
 the inspiration of the Scriptures. 
 
 11. A Great Cloud of Witnesses. 
 
 So far in this chapter we have been 
 dealing with what is called internal evidence 
 — the appeal of Christ and His word to the 
 soul. This is the only sure foundation for 
 a stable faith. It is time now to look at the 
 external evidence, which may appeal even 
 to those in whom the spiritual faculty is not 
 yet awakened. As we have already seen 
 (Chapter VIII.), mere external evidence 
 cannot of itself produce faith, but may arrest 
 attention so as to lead men to lift up their 
 souls to God, and give heed to His message 
 of salvation. We may, in this connection, 
 recall again that saying of our Lord : 
 " Believe Me that I am in the Father, and 
 the Father in Me : or else believe Me for 
 the very works' sake." The first of the 
 two appeals is to those who have the 
 spiritual faculty in full exercise, the second 
 is to those in whom it is deficient. 
 
ARRAY OF WITNESSES 203 
 
 The great bulk of the external evidence 
 is in the library of books which have been 
 bound up together under the general title 
 of "the Bible." Now, there is in these 
 books a marvellous unity which justifies 
 their being bound up in this way ; and in 
 fact this unity is one of the notable marks 
 of divine inspiration. But it is a very great 
 mistake in dealing with the external evi- 
 dence, to treat the Bible as if it were 
 only one book, every part standing or falling 
 with every other part ; for thus not only is 
 the weakening of one part the weakening 
 of all, but the witness of all is reduced to 
 the witness of one. 
 
 This has been set forth by the author 
 in a previous volume, entitled " Rock 
 vers7is Sand," three paragraphs of which 
 he takes the liberty of reproducing in sub- 
 stance. 
 
 We have to deal here with the extra- 
 ordinary perversity and unfairness, so 
 common in our day, of treating the Scrip- 
 tures as if the whole collection were only 
 one book. Of all the unfair devices for 
 weakening the evidences of Christianity 
 this is perhaps the very worst. And it is 
 surprising that so many good Christians 
 
204 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 allow it and even encourage it — some- 
 times demand it. So great is the mischief 
 arising from this, that it would almost seem 
 a pity that, even for convenience, the sixty- 
 six or more books which form our Bible are 
 so constantly bound together in one volume. 
 For not only is there the unhappy result 
 of reducing the many witnesses to one, in 
 the minds of unthinking people, but also of 
 silencing and putting out of court that one. 
 For such unreasoning suspicion is abroad 
 about the Bible, that there are multitudes of 
 people who would attach a great deal more 
 importance to the testimony of almost any 
 writing outside the Bible, than of any num- 
 ber of writings within It. Show them a fact 
 attested by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, 
 Paul and Peter, and they will say : ** All 
 that is in the Bible ; give us something out- 
 side of the Bible and we will believe it." 
 The Bible, in the first place, is regarded by 
 them as the work of a single author ; and 
 in the second, as that of a prejudiced author 
 — one who has his own cause to bolster 
 up ; and accordingly a hundred confirmations 
 within its covers are not so good as one from 
 the outside would be. 
 
 Is this not unreasonable in the extreme ? 
 
ARRAY OF WITNESSES 205 
 
 Let me suppose a case, in order to put 
 the monstrous injustice in a clear light. 
 Suppose that, very soon after the invention 
 of printing, some enterprising editor had 
 collected all the original materials of any 
 value in regard to the history of the Roman 
 Republic into one volume, which he issued 
 to the world under the title of " The History 
 of the Roman Republic " ; and suppose 
 further that it became so popular that it 
 was circulated first by hundreds, then by 
 thousands, then by hundreds of thousands, 
 and finally by the million, so that it came 
 into almost everybody's hands. But in 
 course of time, after all the world had be- 
 come accustomed to it in its form of a 
 single volume, there sprang up a fashion of 
 scepticism on the whole subject, and every- 
 thing in the volume was regarded with 
 suspicion ; and accordingly the whole his- 
 tory of the Roman Republic was called in 
 question. Those who believed it called 
 attention to the many different authorities 
 who corroborated each other. " Here is 
 Livy, who writes about it in Latin. Here 
 is Dion Cassius, who writes about the same 
 thing in Greek. Here are speeches of 
 Cicero that relate to the same events. And 
 
2o6 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 here are poems of Horace that could not 
 have been written unless these facts were 
 so." But the opposite party immediately 
 silenced them by triumphantly pointing out 
 that all these different authorities were no 
 authorities at all. Why not ? Because " it 
 is only one book after all." That, of course, 
 settled the question. In the first place it 
 disposed of all the separate witnesses, of 
 Livy, and Dion, and Cicero, and all the 
 rest ; for were they not all one ? And in 
 the second place it disposed even of the 
 single witness of the collective book, because 
 it was the credibility of the book itself which 
 was in question, and therefore, all that was 
 in the book must be ruled out as the testi- 
 mony of an interested party. And so it came 
 to pass that, from the single unfortunate 
 circumstance of the scattered materials having 
 been gathered together as bearing on the 
 one great subject, the evidence for the his- 
 tory of the Roman Republic was utterly 
 destroyed ! 
 
 Let us then by all means remember, when 
 we are dealing with the subject of the 
 Scriptures, that we are dealing not with 
 one book, but with at least sixty-six ; not 
 with a single volume, but with a library. 
 
ARRAY OF WITNESSES 207 
 
 Remember, further, that these sixty-six books 
 are not h"nks, but strands of evidence. 
 There is, indeed, a golden chain of sacred 
 history from Genesis to Revelation, so that, 
 in a historical point of view, many of the 
 books of the Bible are links. But, so far 
 as the evidences of Christianity are con- 
 cerned, they are not links, but strands. 
 This can be very easily shown. The 
 strength of a chain is the strength of its 
 weakest link ; and if a single link gives 
 way, the whole is useless. Now, will any 
 one pretend to say that, if it were proved 
 that the Book of Esther had no divine 
 authority, we should have to give up the 
 Gospel of Matthew .-* Would there be no 
 evidence for the divine authority of Christ if 
 the Lamentations of Jeremiah had happened 
 to have been lost ? Why, there would be 
 enough to establish the divine authority of 
 Christ, if we had nothing more than the four 
 evangelists ; and whatever of confirmation 
 or elucidation comes from the many other 
 books, is just so much in addition. The 
 Bible is not a chain of sixty-six links, it is 
 a cable of sixty-six strands. 
 
 This is such an important matter that it 
 
2o8 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 may be well to put it in another way. So 
 long as the inspiration of the Bible is treated 
 as the foundation of faith, the Bible occupies 
 the position of a book whose claims are to 
 be tried in the court of reason. On this 
 account it is not allowed to speak for itself. 
 It occupies the position of the panel at the 
 bar. Where, then, are the witnesses ? 
 
 One is reminded here of the course of 
 procedure at a Presbyterian synod. If a 
 complaint is made against a presbytery on 
 which the synod must adjudicate, the pres- 
 bytery is for the time disfranchised ; not 
 one member of it, however much he knows 
 about the case, is allowed to vote, because 
 he is an interested party. In the same way, 
 Moses and Samuel and David and Isaiah, 
 and Matthew and John and Paul are all put 
 out of court ; for is it not the claims of the 
 Bible that are being tried, and why should 
 any of these people who belong to the Bible 
 have any voice in it ? It would be quite 
 different if an individual minister were being 
 tried. In that case, the members of his 
 presbytery would each and every one have 
 a voice, and, being those who knew him 
 best, would be the most valuable witnesses 
 of all. 
 
ARRAY OF WITNESSES 209 
 
 This will show the position into which 
 those put the Bible who make its inspiration 
 the fundamental question. But now, make 
 the fundamental question, What think ye of 
 Christ ? What divine Face looks out of 
 the canvas of the book and fascinates you ? 
 Immediately there spring up a whole array 
 of witnesses, the very best, the most com- 
 petent, the very witnesses who can decide 
 the case. 
 
 But there is a still greater weakness in 
 the position taken by the advocates of what 
 is called "Scripture infallibility." Not only 
 do they allow the best witnesses to be dis- 
 credited in advance by belonging to the 
 party which is on trial, but they accept the 
 burden of proving them to be not only 
 honest and capable, which is right enough, 
 but infallible, which amounts to a weak and 
 foolish surrender to a most unjust demand. 
 Did ever any one hear of such a demand 
 in any court of justice in all the world ? and 
 was ever a defendant so weak as to yield 
 to it ? to say nothing of being so foolish as 
 to insist on it. Here is a man who has 
 his witness to bear in a case with which he 
 has the best opportunity of being acquainted. 
 
210 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 He is of good character, of sound judgment, 
 and has no motive for bearing false witness. 
 But he is not acquainted with geology ; he has 
 actually made a mistake in history. " Put him 
 down. You must get somebody who never 
 made a mistake, otherwise we cannot believe a 
 word." It does seem as if our Lord Christ had 
 as little justice with His accusers now as He 
 had before the Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate. 
 Only lay aside this most unreasonable 
 demand of infallibility on the part of wit- 
 nesses, and we are in a position to see that 
 the testimony to Christ as the Saviour of 
 mankind is simply overwhelming. There 
 has been nothing like it in the whole history 
 of the world. We all believe in what we 
 read of Alexander the Great and Julius 
 Csesar, of Socrates and Seneca, and of many 
 other less noteworthy personages in ancient 
 history. How many witnesses do we require ? 
 In many cases a single trustworthy witness is 
 all that is demanded. Think how much we 
 depend on the solitary testimony of Plutarch ; 
 yet no one thinks it necessary to prove that 
 Plutarch was infallible. We think ourselves 
 happy when we have a twofold witness, as 
 in the case of the life and teaching of 
 Socrates. Is there a single person in all 
 
ARRAY OF WITNESSES 211 
 
 ancient history of whom we have four bio- 
 graphies by men of the character and 
 trustworthiness of Matthew, Mark, Luke, 
 and John ? Even if that were all, it would 
 be incomparable; but think of the number of 
 letters devoted to setting the same august 
 personage before the eyes of men. And 
 such biographies ! And such letters ! It is 
 only familiarity with them that makes it 
 possible for any intelligent person to miss 
 the wonder and the glory of it. 
 
 And there are not only the contemporaries 
 of Christ, but the marvellous array of wit- 
 nesses long in advance, whose testimony is 
 enshrined in the Old Testament Scriptures. 
 It would greatly help to keep us in the right 
 track in this matter if we would remember 
 the reason our Saviour gives for searching 
 these Scriptures, namely, "They are they 
 that testify of Me." Consider how inde- 
 pendent this makes us of the innumerable 
 difficulties which have been raised by 
 criticism in regard to the Old Testament. 
 ** They are they that testify of Me," says 
 Christ. Cannot Moses testify of Christ 
 without being as learned in the learning 
 of the " Encyclopaedia Britannica " as he 
 was in that of the Egyptians ? Cannot 
 
212 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 David testify of Christ, though, instead 
 of doing it alone in the Book of Psalms, 
 as he was once supposed to do, he 
 be surrounded with a whole company of 
 witnesses to share with him the honour, 
 and change the solo into the grandest chorus 
 the world has ever heard? Cannot Isaiah 
 testify of Christ, though the same man may 
 not have written the whole book which now 
 bears his name ? If his witness is not 
 single and solitary, as we used to think, 
 but the witness of two, both of them 
 men marvellously gifted, and bearing their 
 testimony with such wonderful harmony that 
 people generally believed, till lately, it was 
 the voice of one ; if the solo be changed 
 into a duet, or even into a quartette, what 
 are we the worse ? 
 
 Furthermore, there is this extraordinary 
 phenomenon, that not only are there 
 witnesses contemporary, and witnesses in 
 advance, but a great cloud of witnesses ever 
 since. This is such an extraordinary cor- 
 roboration and withal made so commonplace 
 by familiarity, that it may be well to make 
 a fresh statement of it. 
 
 It will make the point clearer if I recall 
 a question put to me by an anxious inquirer 
 
ARRAY OF WITNESSES 213 
 
 who spoke of Christianity — " Christianity," 
 observe, that is the way so many think of 
 our faith, as behef in something ending in 
 ity or ism, some system of doctrines com- 
 pleted long ago and handed down the ages. 
 Well, this young friend, speaking of Chris- 
 tianity, said, "It seems so long ago, how can 
 I know that it has any more truth in it than 
 other religions ? " 
 
 One sees the force of the question, and can 
 sympathize with the difficulty. If it were a 
 question of the rivalry of so many religions 
 — systems of thought which have been elabo- 
 rated at different periods — then the longer 
 the time since the religion was promulgated 
 the greater the difficulty in accepting it 
 as the only true one ; for is not the world 
 always learning, and why not on this subject 
 as well as every other ; and if the people of 
 that early time were wrong as they certainly 
 were on so many other subjects, why should 
 they happen to be right in this ? We can 
 sympathize with the difficulty thoroughly, so 
 long as it is a mere question of a religion or 
 a system of doctrine on the most difficult of 
 all subjects. But that is not the point at all. 
 It is not a question of a religion, it is the 
 presence with us of a heavenly Friend, who 
 
214 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 lived a long time ago, it is true, but who 
 claimed that He would be with us to the end 
 of the ages, and as to whose real presence 
 appeal can be made to multitudes in all 
 generations since for the verification of His 
 claim. 
 
 Think what this cloud of witnesses means, 
 and how the evidence instead of weaken- 
 ing as the centuries pass, keeps growing 
 continually. To realize this, let us go back 
 for a moment to the time when the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews was written. It was the first 
 of the ages of the Christian era, and the 
 number who had believed in Christ was 
 very small indeed. The writer could 
 appeal to some who finished their course : 
 " Remember them which have the rule 
 over you, who have spoken unto you the 
 word of God ; whose faith follow, considering 
 the end of their conversation : Jesus Christ, 
 the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever." 
 But when he wanted a " cloud of witnesses," 
 he had to go to the men of faith under the 
 Old Covenant, none of whom, from the 
 nature of the case, could be witnesses to the 
 living Christ. For that he could appeal to 
 yesterday, and assure them it was the same 
 to-day; but as for the ages to come — they 
 
ARRAY OF WITNESSES 215 
 
 lay before him and it was easy enough (the 
 doubter might suggest) for him to assume 
 that it would be the same throughout these 
 ages ; but how does he know ? It is quite 
 safe to prophesy a thousand years in advance. 
 Nobody can prove you wrong. 
 
 But now many of these ages which were 
 to come lie behind us, and there is not one 
 of them that does not bear its testimony 
 to the living and reigning and saving 
 Christ. The history of the Church has 
 been a very chequered one, but there is 
 no time in all its past when there have 
 not been new witnesses. Think again how 
 poor the early Church was in this respect, 
 right on to the end of the apostolic period. 
 Think of John there in lonely Patmos, the 
 cruel Domitian on the world's throne, the 
 Church of Christ everywhere scattered and 
 peeled, — for aught that appeared, ended, — 
 and he, the last of the Twelve, banished to a 
 lonely rock in the sea to die ; if there ever 
 was an excuse for abandoning all hope it was 
 then ; yet see v/ith what magnificent faith 
 he looks forward to the future, and speaks 
 of ten thousand times ten thousand and 
 thousands of thousands, saying with a loud 
 voice, " Worthy is the Lamb that was slain 
 
2i6 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 to receive power and riches and wisdom and 
 strength and honour and glory and blessing." 
 But what the lone seer descried in the dim 
 future, we can all see plainly in the historic 
 past ; only for thousands and ten thousands 
 we can put millions now, millions of wit- 
 nesses to the living Christ, who have testi- 
 fied through life and in death that Christ 
 Jesus the Saviour of the world was with 
 them, faithful and true, loving and tender, 
 an ** ever present help in time of trouble " ; 
 the same yesterday and to-day, and age after 
 age continually. 
 
 It may be here objected that we have 
 taken no notice of what to many is the 
 chief difficulty, namely, that, while wit- 
 nesses such as Plutarch and Livy are 
 readily accepted when they testify to ordin- 
 ary facts, we at once question them when 
 they relate prodigies ; whereas the witnesses 
 we cite are not testifying to an ordinary 
 man doing ordinary things, but to a very 
 extraordinary man doing most extraordinary 
 things. 
 
 To deal with this fully would require a 
 separate treatise ; but it may be pointed 
 out that the modern view of the " miracles " 
 
ARRAY OF WITNESSES 217 
 
 which has come in with the advance of 
 criticism puts us in a very strong position 
 here also. So long as the miracles were 
 supposed to be something appended to the 
 revelation to certify its truth, their position 
 was precarious ; but when we realize that 
 they are not so much evidences, as parts, 
 of the revelation, that they are signs of 
 the kingdom of heaven, that they are not 
 portents or prodigies, but bound up naturally 
 and not incongruously with the character of 
 Christ, who accepted a reputation for them ; 
 when we realize that they are not separable 
 excrescences as they are in the pages of 
 uncritical historians and biographers, but are 
 of the very substance of the testimony of 
 all the witnesses ; when we think that these 
 testimonies to a mighty Saviour, originating 
 in the dimness of remote antiquity, grew 
 clearer and clearer as the centuries advanced 
 till the full light blazed out in the acclaim 
 of those who saw His glory ; and when we 
 think that the nature of the witness of the 
 innumerable multitude since is such as to 
 confirm, not the ordinary facts of the life 
 on earth, but the divine power of the 
 ever-living Saviour — when we think of all 
 this, we see that not only the amount, but 
 
2i8 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 the quality of the testimony, points unequi- 
 vocally to One who is not a transitory 
 mortal, but still lives and reigns and 
 saves. 
 
 It is easy, of course, for a wholly unspiritual 
 mind to set all this aside at the dictation of 
 a preconceived theory which rules out the 
 supernatural ; but wherever the spiritual 
 faculty is not starved out by disuse or per- 
 verted by sin, the accumulated evidence is, 
 as we have said, simply overwhelming. Line 
 up the procession once more, and say if there 
 ever has been anything approaching it in the 
 wide world. See there, first, the long line of 
 prophets, every one of them with a light in 
 his eye and a fire in his soul, as, with a for- 
 ward-pointing finger, he says, " The Christ 
 is coming, the Christ of God is coming " ; 
 see next the glorious company of the apostles 
 and early Christians, every one of them with 
 still more abundant tokens of heavenly in- 
 spiration, all uniting in the witness : " The 
 Christ is come, the Christ of God is come " ; 
 and, following them, an innumerable multi- 
 tude swelling on and on, till it embraces 
 every kindred and tongue and people and 
 nation, and with one accord they all say, 
 " The Christ of God is come, He is with us, 
 
FRESH HUMAN INTEREST 219 
 
 a living Saviour, the same yesterday, and 
 to-day, and for ever." 
 
 How completely out of court now is the 
 old question whether the Bible rests on the 
 Church or the Church on the Bible ! What 
 is the Bible but ancient Church history up to 
 the fulness of the times when the revelation 
 was completed in Christ ? And what is the 
 Church but the continued succession of wit- 
 nesses to the once crucified and now exalted 
 Redeemer of mankind ? Neither Church 
 nor Bible is the foundation. It is Christ 
 Himself. "Other foundation can no man 
 lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus 
 Christ." 
 
 " The Church's one foundation 
 Is Jesus Christ her Lord." 
 
 III. A Fresh Human Interest. 
 
 "The Bible is a new book to me now." 
 How often have we heard this testimony 
 in the last quarter of a century ! We have 
 always been familiar with it on the part of 
 those who have passed from darkness into 
 light, who have learned for the first time 
 that it w^as in very deed the word of God, 
 with messages of forgiveness and eternal 
 life. But the testimony we refer to is not 
 
220 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 from newly converted people, but from those 
 whose eyes have been opened to the human 
 interest in the Bible ; not from those who 
 for the first time discover that it is the voice 
 of God, but from those who, long accustomed 
 to that mighty fact, have just learned that it 
 is also the word of man, God's message 
 reaching us through the thoughts and emo- 
 tions of men of like passions with ourselves. 
 The old painters depicted the saints of 
 the Bible with golden aureoles round their 
 heads. These aureoles have stayed on till 
 quite lately, and have not helped us into 
 mutual acquaintance. How should we like 
 a man so decorated to be a guest in our 
 home ? How uncomfortable for us, how un- 
 happy for him ! There is that, we are glad 
 to admit, in many a face which fairly an- 
 swers to the golden aureole of the painters ; 
 there is such a thing as the shining of a 
 human countenance with a heavenly light. 
 But though heavenly, it is not unearthly — 
 that is the point. Heaven and earth are not 
 contrasts, were never intended to be. An 
 aureole must not be an appendage to a man : 
 if it be something wrought into his genuine 
 humanity, it is quite another thing. So with 
 the inspiration of the apostles and prophets. 
 
FRESH HUMAN INTEREST 221 
 
 They are Spirit-guided, but they are none 
 the less men ; and all they write is of human 
 as well as divine interest. 
 
 But is not the humanity of the Bible so 
 obvious that it needs no stating or empha- 
 sizing ? Not so. That it is not at all 
 obvious to many might be inferred, indeed, 
 from the very tone in which it has been 
 the almost universal habit to read the 
 Scriptures, so unnatural, so sepulchral some- 
 times. And apart from this, it is only too 
 evident from the attitude many short-sighted 
 Christians take as to those investigations 
 which tend to put us in touch with the life 
 and times of these holy men of old. They 
 think the time would be much better 
 employed in devout meditation on the text 
 of Scripture, catching the divine meaning 
 where it is obvious, and spiritualizing where 
 it is not. But in this way the human interest 
 is obscured or lost. It is, perhaps, not too 
 much to say that to very many good Christian 
 people in the last generation, the personality 
 of the prophets of the Old Testament, and 
 even of the apostles of the New, was 
 as completely lost as was the humanity of 
 Jesus to the poet Dante, who took all his 
 illustrations of the virtues and graces from 
 
222 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 the very scanty materials of the life of the 
 Virgin Mary, and not one from the life of 
 our Lord. A "text" from one book was 
 exactly the same as a " text " from another. 
 It could be cut out from its context, and set 
 alongside of a number of others cut out in 
 the same way, to be used as " proofs " of some 
 controverted doctrine. For all the use the 
 men's names were, they might have been 
 blotted out and the word ** God " put in 
 instead. There were those even (are there 
 not some survivors yet ?) who thought it a 
 merit to ignore the man altogether, as if the 
 one fault of the Bible was its unfortunate 
 habit of telling what this man or that man 
 said, when it would have been so much 
 simpler and more satisfactory if the matter 
 had been cut short by putting the whole from 
 beginning to end in the name of God. 
 
 But happily there have been those who 
 have shown more reverence for the Scrip- 
 tures as they are, who have thought that 
 it was not in vain that our attention was 
 called to the holy men of old who spake 
 to their fellows the word of God. Such 
 students of Scripture have shown us how 
 well worth while it is to study these men, 
 to make ourselves acquainted with the 
 
FRESH HUMAN INTEREST 223 
 
 circumstances which formed the occasion of 
 their utterances, to try to enter into their 
 thoughts and feehngs, and so to bring out 
 that human side of the divine word which 
 links it to our human lives. 
 
 Just as in the life of Christ realized as the 
 life of a man upon the earth, we have God 
 brought near to us, brought down into the 
 atmosphere of our thought, so that we see 
 His face, and feel His touch, and hear the 
 beating of His heart ; so in the writings of 
 these holy men of old, prophets and apostles, 
 the word of God comes to us — not as a 
 succession of unearthly voices out of a far- 
 away heaven, but as warm words of life 
 from the throbbing, sometimes sobbing, 
 hearts of "men of like passions with our- 
 selves." We get them with the warmth 
 and glow of earth's atmosphere around 
 them. In all this not only have we the 
 Bible made more human, while none the 
 less divine, but we get rid of a host of 
 difficulties which needlessly troubled our 
 fathers, and which unhappily, and still more 
 needlessly, trouble some of their children ; 
 for we now see that they are difficulties 
 which are inseparable from the human 
 medium, and do not at all affect the divine 
 
22 4 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 source from which the word of truth has 
 come. 
 
 It is difficult to realize how far we have 
 advanced already from the old days of 
 mediaeval darkness, when it was supposed 
 to be quite disrespectful to take the Bible 
 in its literal sense, especially those passages 
 which deal with details of ordinary life, as 
 for example, in the exquisite story of the 
 courtship and marriage of Isaac and Re- 
 bekah. Hence the invention of the four 
 different senses of Scripture. There was 
 the literal sense, which was not supposed 
 to be worth anything in comparison with 
 the three others, which were the allegorical, 
 the figurative, and the anagogic. The effect 
 of all this complication was first that only 
 experts could interpret Scripture at all, and 
 next, and more particularly, that these ex- 
 perts could make it mean anything they 
 pleased. Thus the word of God was made 
 null and void by human tradition. 
 
 The Reformation was the great correc- 
 tive to this system of tampering with the 
 sincere milk of the word ; and though there 
 is among good people still some tendency 
 to over-spiritualize, yet the literal interpre- 
 tation is no longer set aside as valueless. 
 
FRESH HUMAN INTEREST 225 
 
 But we have not yet quite emerged from 
 the period of selected texts and marked 
 Bibles. We have not a word to say in 
 condemnation of this. We all select texts, 
 and should we not mark those passages in 
 our Bibles through which the voice of God 
 has in a special manner reached our souls ? 
 But this is not enough. One might be very 
 familiar with the Bible in that fashion, yet 
 enter very little into the human interest 
 of it. Take the prophecy of Hosea as 
 an illustration. Every Christian is familiar 
 with such texts as, *' I will allure her and 
 bring her into the wilderness, and speak 
 comfortably unto her " ; and again, " I will 
 heal her back-slidings ; I will love her 
 freely " ; but how few comparatively have 
 entered into the pathos of the prophet's life 
 and the passion of his human heart ; yet 
 when we do so, what added pathos there is 
 in his word, and what freshness and power 
 on the reader's heart ! 
 
 There is a new vein of riches here 
 opened up to us all through the Scriptures 
 by those new studies which make it possible 
 for us as never before, not only to realize 
 that these were men of like passions with 
 ourselves, but to lay our lives alongside of 
 
 Q 
 
226 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 theirs and feel the very beating of their 
 human hearts. Even the most exquisite 
 gems of sacred Scripture will have an added 
 beauty when seen in their setting. An old 
 reminiscence comes in here to illustrate this, 
 a remembrance of the impression made by 
 the reading of Dean Stanley's introduction 
 to his exposition on i Corinthians xiii. : "On 
 each side of this chapter the tumult of 
 argument and remonstrance still rages : but 
 within it all is calm : the sentences move in 
 almost rhythmical melody : the imagery un- 
 folds itself in an almost dramatic propriety : 
 the language arranges itself with almost 
 rhetorical accuracy. We can imagine how 
 the Apostle's amanuensis must have paused 
 to look up in his master's face at the sudden 
 change of his style of dictation, and seen 
 his countenance lighted up as it had been 
 the face of an angel, as the sublime vision 
 of divine perfection passed before him." 
 And many of us remember what fresh human 
 interest was given to the life and writings 
 of St. Paul by the monumental work of 
 Conybeare and Howson, and know how this 
 interest has been deepened by the closer 
 study of his inner life which later writers 
 have made. These references remind us 
 
FRESH HUMAN INTEREST 227 
 
 that it is a long time since this rich vein 
 was first opened up for us in regard to the 
 New Testament writers; but it is in com- 
 paratively recent times that the same work 
 has become accessible for the Old Testa- 
 ment, with the result that it has been rescued 
 from the neglect into which it was in danger 
 of falling, and invested with an interest which 
 is to many almost like life from the dead. 
 
 We have spoken of apostles and prophets ; 
 may we not also refer to the new light 
 which is shed on the life of our blessed Lord 
 by the realization of His true humanity ? 
 There are those who think it perilous to 
 draw special attention to anything in our 
 Lord's life which suggests the limitations 
 inseparable from human nature ; but it must 
 not be forgotten that there is corresponding 
 peril in the opposite direction. There, 
 frowning on our left, encircled with mists 
 and beaten with tempests is the Scylla of 
 rationalism which denies the divine ; but 
 is there not on the other side, less con- 
 spicuous and therefore more deceitful, the 
 Charybdis of irrationalism which denies the 
 human, a whirlpool which is ready to enclose 
 in its treacherous currents those who, terri- 
 fied by the frowning rock, are turned from 
 
3 28 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 the onward course. What was the heresy 
 against which the Apostle John uttered his 
 most solemn warning ? " Hereby," he says, 
 " know ye the Spirit of God : every spirit 
 that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in 
 the flesh is of God ; every spirit that con- 
 fesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the 
 flesh is not of God; and this is that spirit 
 of antichrist." The formidable heresy of 
 the time was that of those who represented 
 Jesus Christ not as a real man "compassed 
 about with infirmity," " tempted in all points 
 like as we are," but as God walking through 
 life in the outward semblance of a man. 
 And was it not this heresy that led to many 
 of the corruptions of the Roman Church, 
 notably the worship of the Virgin Mary, 
 who was introduced to supply the tender- 
 ness of a truly human mediator, to make 
 up for the supposed want of it in Him who 
 was no longer realized as " the Man Christ 
 Jesus" .-* It is true that the opposite heresy 
 is by far the more dangerous now ; still, the 
 experience of the past ought surely to show 
 us that it is not right or even safe to ignore 
 or under-value the genuine humanity of our 
 blessed Lord. 
 
 To illustrate the importance of this, we 
 
FRESH HUMAN INTEREST 229 
 
 may refer to the argument which is mainly- 
 relied on by those who would set aside the 
 Cross of Christ from its central position in 
 our faith. It cannot be denied that all the 
 four Evangelists give it a space out of all 
 proportion to anything else in their records, 
 and that the Apostles make it correspond- 
 ingly prominent in their writings. But it is 
 said, Christ Himself does not agree with them. 
 He said very little about it, and in fact laid 
 the emphasis on quite other things, specially 
 on purity of heart and righteousness of life. 
 
 Now, the bare fact referred to is indeed 
 a fact; but its significance is quite missed 
 by those who do not enter into the true 
 humanity of the Lord Jesus. Let it be 
 remembered, to begin with, that it is cha- 
 racteristic of human nature at its best to be 
 reticent as to that which is deepest in the 
 soul ; and if there is anything which cuts to 
 the quick, which shakes the very foundations 
 of our being, it is only under very special 
 circumstances that we can be induced to 
 speak of it at all. Now it is quite evident 
 to the sympathetic reader of the life of our 
 Lord as recorded by the four Evangelists, 
 that the Cross was a subject which cut to 
 the quick our Lord's sensitive soul, and 
 
230 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 accordingly, though ever in His thoughts, 
 was rarely on His lips. To look forward to 
 it even was agony, and to turn from it 
 was the great temptation of His life — begun 
 in the wilderness and not finally overcome 
 until the crowning victory of Gethsemane. 
 
 Nothing is more clearly indicated than the 
 reason why He was so late in making it 
 the subject of instruction to His disciples. 
 It would have been quite impossible for 
 them even to beo^in to understand it until 
 they had recognized His Divine Sonship. 
 We have seen already how our Lord would 
 not teach them this dogmatically, but waited 
 till they thought it out for themselves. But 
 as soon as they gave evidence of seeing it, 
 He lost not a single day. " From that time 
 forth began Jesus to show unto His disciples 
 how that He mtist go unto Jerusalem, and 
 suffer many things of the elders and chief 
 priests and scribes, and be killed, and be 
 raised again the third day." Even before 
 that, there had been hints of it, showing that 
 it was only by resolute self-suppression that 
 He refrained from plainly speaking of it, such 
 hints as we have in His answer to the question 
 about fasting (Matthew ix. 15), the reference 
 to the serpent in the wilderness (John iii. 14), 
 
FRESH HUMAN INTEREST 231 
 
 and the then enigmatical saying : " Destroy 
 this temple, and in three days I will raise it 
 up." And though even in the latter part of 
 His ministry His reported words are few, 
 the smallness of the number is more than 
 made up for by their extraordinary weight, 
 and by the deep emotion with which they 
 were uttered. Think of the impact of that 
 little word m^ist in His first plain utterance 
 on the subject, the implication of the word 
 " ransom " in the phrase ** And give His 
 life a ransom for many," and of the word 
 "crisis" when the coming of the Greeks 
 brought Him face to face with the fact, 
 more vividly realized than ever before, that 
 only by being " lifted up " could all men be 
 drawn unto Him : "Now is the judgment 
 {literally crisis) of this world." The whole 
 passage (John xii. 20-32) is most significant 
 in this connection, especially as showing 
 the overpowering emotion which the vivid 
 realization of the approaching sacrifice stirred 
 in the Redeemer's soul. It was an earlier 
 Gethsemane ; and indeed to those who can 
 read between the lines, the signs of such 
 profound emotion are apparent all through 
 the story, especially of the last year of the 
 Saviour's life. As we read, we realize that 
 
232 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 in the depths of His soul there is a volcanic 
 fire, there continually, though it only appears 
 when some rent is made which lets it show 
 itself on the surface. When Peter tried to 
 turn Him from the Cross, what means that 
 terrible agitation of soul which prompted 
 Him to cry, " Get thee behind Me, Satan" ? 
 That too was an earlier Gethsemane. Aided 
 by the beloved Peter, the tempter seemed 
 irresistible. " Is this an angel of light with 
 a suggestion to which My human nature 
 prompts Me to respond ? No, it is Satan 
 speaking through an angel of light, it is the 
 old temptation of the wilderness coming in 
 insidious disguise. Get thee behind Me, 
 Satan." As we read on, these jets of emotion 
 become more frequent, as when He cries, 
 " 1 have a baptism to be baptized with, and 
 how am I straitened till it be accomplished ! " 
 Sometimes it is seen only in His face and 
 mien, as when it is recorded that " He 
 steadfastly set His face to go up to Jeru- 
 salem," and again, " They were in the way, 
 going up to Jerusalem ; and Jesus was going 
 before them ; and they were amazed, and they 
 that followed were afraid." Again we hear 
 Him say with a very human touch of bitter- 
 ness, " I must walk to-day and to-morrow, 
 
FRESH HUMAN INTEREST 233 
 
 and the day following : for it cannot be that 
 a prophet perish out of Jerusalem." 
 
 Is it not abundantly evident to any sym- 
 pathetic reader that the Cross was always 
 in His mind, and though His words on it 
 were few, this only shows the depth of 
 His emotion; and when we enter into His 
 human heart, we understand quite well that 
 it was because it meant so very much to 
 Him that He could say so very little, not 
 only because it would have broken His 
 disciples' heart, but because it was breaking 
 His own. And all this impresses us the more 
 when we find that on the one occasion when 
 He was relieved from both restraints He 
 spoke of nothing else ! On the Mount of 
 Transfiguration, when His disciples had 
 fallen asleep, and He Himself was rapt 
 in the heavenly vision and converse, " He 
 spake (to Moses and Elias — there was no 
 need of reticence with them) of the decease 
 which He should accomplish at Jerusalem." 
 
 Let this suffice as an illustration in a large 
 way ; but many examples might be given in 
 detail of how the realization of our Lord's 
 humanity clears away even serious difficulties. 
 Principal Forsyth in his book on ** Religion 
 and Art " says : " Far more than half of the 
 
234 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 religious difficulties which torment people in 
 a day like this are due to the hard, inelastic, 
 and unsympathetic order of mind which they 
 bring to bear upon subjects the most subtle, 
 genial, and flexible of all." I am sure this 
 is true, and perhaps I could not get a better 
 example of it than one of our Lord's words 
 uttered in the Gethsemane of John xii. ; and 
 it may be a useful way of dealing with it 
 to transcribe the answer which I gave to a 
 friend who propounded it to me as a serious 
 difficulty. The question was, " Can it be 
 that the Lord Jesus, who was so rich and 
 tender in all His human sympathies, was 
 after all so much of a misanthrope that He 
 would deliberately condemn the loving of 
 life, and counsel the hating of it ? " I repeat 
 in what follows the substance of the answer 
 I gave my friend. 
 
 The erroneous impression conveyed by 
 the words is due to the old practice, so 
 fruitful in error, of treating the Bible as a 
 mere collection of texts, any one of which 
 may be taken by itself and treated as if 
 it stood alone. It is even made a matter 
 of letters ; and there are those who would 
 say — Is it not plainly written h-a-t-e, and 
 how can it mean anything else than hate ? 
 
FRESH HUMAN INTEREST 235 
 
 How then can one be considered a Christian 
 who takes any pleasure in his life in this 
 world ? Such persons continually forget 
 another set of letters in the same book for 
 which they profess so much respect, which 
 set of letters, being scanned in order, readeth 
 thus : " The letter killeth, but the spirit 
 giveth life." A law document is constructed 
 to be read according to the letter ; but no 
 one who wanted lively reading would choose 
 that particular department of literature. He 
 would prefer something that was not quite 
 so precise and colourless. Some people, 
 indeed, think that it is an end of all con- 
 troversy to say, "There it is in black and 
 white " ; but they forget that there are a 
 great many things that will not go into black 
 and white ; and if nothing else than black 
 and white is possible, as on a printed page, 
 then there must be some soul in the person 
 reading it to put the colour in from the 
 suggestions of it which it is possible to give. 
 Observe, for example, with what v/onderful 
 success a good etcher will give suggestions 
 of colour though he has only black and 
 white to do it with. 
 
 Now the words "love" and "hate," as 
 found here, are what we may call touches of 
 
236 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 colour. And to see the value of them we 
 must look at the surroundings. We must 
 first look at the whole utterance of which 
 they form part ; and then, too, we must put 
 ourselves as much as possible into the 
 position of the speaker, that we may look 
 at it from his point of view. We must, in a 
 word, deal with the text, not as consisting of so 
 many black marks on a piece of paper, but as 
 the warm utterance of a profoundly agitated 
 soul. Thus we shall get above " the letter 
 that killeth," to *' the spirit that giveth life." 
 
 Following this course, then, the first thing 
 we observe is that it is a critical moment in 
 the Saviour's histjry. Perhaps we may best 
 get the idea of the position by thinking of 
 our Saviour as having just turned the last 
 curve of the winding pathway of His life on 
 earth. As He turned it, what does He 
 see? What dark object is that, straight 
 before Him there.-* It is the Cross! The 
 shadow of it has often fallen on His path- 
 way ; but it is no shadow now — there it is, 
 straight before Him in all its dread reality. 
 No wonder that He cries, " Father, save 
 Me from this hour." 
 
 It would appear that our Saviour never 
 contemplated the Cross without an awful 
 
FRESH HUMAN INTEREST 237 
 
 shrinking from it. The strain was more or 
 less upon Him all the while, as we have 
 already seen ; but there were times when 
 from the chronic it passed into the acute. 
 Such a time was this, when the message 
 from the Greeks brought vividly to His 
 mind the innumerable multitude from every 
 kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation, 
 to which these would be the prelude ; and 
 the greatness of the thought constrained 
 Him by a natural reaction to think of the 
 awful cost at which alone that triumph 
 could be gained, realizing more vividly 
 than He had ever done before that for this 
 harvest, as for other harvests, the way must 
 be prepared by death. The experience of 
 this hour then may well be set side by side 
 with that of Gethsemane itself, when three 
 times in bitter agony He cried, " Father, if 
 it be possible, let this cup pass from Me." 
 It is the same agony of soul which is ex- 
 pressed in the passage : ** Now is My soul 
 troubled, and what shall I say ? Father, 
 save Me from this hour. But for this cause 
 came I to this hour." 
 
 We see then that the Saviour was in the 
 midst of one of the sorest conflicts of 
 His life. And these words were spoken in 
 
238 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 the thick of it, when all that was human in 
 Him — His whole life, as it were — rose up 
 in arms, and barred the way to the Cross. 
 The temptation to turn out of the con- 
 secrated path was too strenuous, the moment 
 was too critical, to admit of any half 
 measures. He must not parley with such 
 an antagonist. He must treat him as His 
 bitterest foe, and hew a pathway through 
 him to the Cross. The moment had come 
 when He had to hate His life in order to 
 save it ; for what would it all have amounted 
 to if He had yielded now ? " It was for this 
 cause that I came to this hour ; and hence 
 there is nothing for it but to treat as My 
 bitterest enemy all desires, however natural, 
 to save My life at the expense of My life 
 work." 
 
 And now is it not easy to see the force of 
 the colouring in the words "love" and 
 "hate," especially if we remember the 
 Orientalism of these strong terms ? The 
 Saviour has in His mind's eye times of 
 sharpest crisis, when a man is brought face 
 to face with his life in this world rising 
 against him as an adversary to bar his 
 way, to close against him the path of duty 
 and devotion — what then .-* If he love his 
 
FRESH HUMAN INTEREST 239 
 
 life, he is lost ; the only hope is for him to 
 hate it, to treat it as his bitterest enemy — 
 to run his sword through and through it, and 
 utterly slay and quench it. When we take 
 all this into account, we can see that the way 
 in which our Saviour puts it is not at all too 
 strong. It is quite parallel with that other 
 passage in which the much-loved Peter must 
 be hated in so far as he yields to Satanic 
 suggestion. 
 
 It would be easy, were there space, to 
 give instances in which, in the Prophets 
 especially, passages which were dark and 
 difficult have had a flood of light thrown 
 on them by entering into the emotions of 
 the writer. But I am obliged to omit even 
 those illustrations which had been specially 
 prepared, drawn from the great Immanuel 
 Prophecy (Isaiah vii.-ix. 7) and from the 
 wild and whirling words of Jeremiah in such 
 a passage as Jeremiah xx. 7-18 ; for the 
 limits assigned to this volume are already 
 over-passed. Suffice it to say that there 
 are scores of passages like these which 
 were stumbling-blocks before, and now are 
 among the most precious revealings of the 
 human soul under the patient kindness of 
 the Great Inspirer. 
 
240 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 IV. All Scripture Profitable. 
 
 Though the old theory was that the Bible 
 was all equally inspired ** from cover to 
 cover," as the phrase is, it was only a theo- 
 retical, not a practical, belief. Even the most 
 stalwart defenders of the theory have not 
 acted on it ; or, if the attempt was made, as 
 in the writer's case (see the Personal Fore- 
 word), it was soon given over as imprac- 
 ticable. For, however resolutely one may 
 set himself to go through the whole Bible 
 chapter by chapter, there are considerable 
 portions of it which to the ordinary reader 
 are a hopeless puzzle. Possibly there may 
 not be a single chapter in the whole 
 Bible in which the devout soul will not 
 find some light and leading, it may be 
 sometimes a single verse gleaming out of the 
 surrounding darkness, so that the exercise is 
 never quite in vain ; but how much has been 
 passed over — in a book like the Prophet 
 Jeremiah, for example — with scarcely any 
 attempt to penetrate into the soul of it. 
 
 Even the best of the commentators in the 
 olden time scarcely grappled with the more 
 difficult passages. A saintly genius like 
 Matthew Henry could always find something 
 
ALL SCRIPTURE PROFITABLE 241 
 
 highly spiritual to say on the most unlikely 
 passages, but it would often be in the way of 
 ingenious application, rather than of close 
 exposition. It was homiletical rather than 
 exegetical ; and in many places it was the 
 excellent word of the good Matthew Henry, 
 not the mind of the Spirit. And even 
 after the era of more careful study came in, 
 heralded by such men as Dean Alford in 
 England and the Rev. Dr. John Brown of 
 Edinburgh, there was for a long time such 
 prevalence of the dogmatic point of view, 
 and so little attention paid to studying the 
 inner life of the men, that progress for a 
 time was slow. But now that the historico- 
 critical method has been not only followed 
 by scholars, but popularized by modern ex- 
 positors, there are large tracts, of the Old 
 Testament especially, which have been won 
 from the desert, so that in many cases the 
 wilderness and the solitary place has been 
 made to blossom as the rose, and whole 
 books have been lighted up with a wondrous 
 lustre. 
 
 There is still the same delight in the old 
 familiar passages ; but these come in, even 
 in the most difficult books, not as oases in 
 a comparative waste but as lovely gardens 
 
 R 
 
242 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 in the wide landscape, and we have a joy 
 not only in gazing on the flowers and rang- 
 ing through the gardens, but in the broad 
 views of the varied scenery of God's marvel- 
 lous book of revelation. A journey through 
 the Bible has much the same charm as a 
 journey through the Holy Land, beginning 
 from Mount Hermon in the north and 
 travelling to Mount Zion in the south ; for 
 is not that grand epic of Creation with 
 which the Bible opens like a great snow- 
 clad mountain, rearing its head right up 
 to heaven, not itself within the borders of 
 Israel any more than the epic of Creation 
 is (for it is not till Abraham that we are in 
 the charmed circle), but from its detached 
 height looking down upon all ; and when 
 we reach Mount Zion on the south, are we 
 not come to the sunny mount of God, not 
 bare like Hermon but with a city upon it, 
 type and prophecy of the City of God, the 
 Heavenly Jerusalem? There is not a stage 
 in the journey that is not full of interest; 
 and if we were to single out any one feature 
 as specially arresting, it would be the hills. 
 
 Some people, in going through the Bible, 
 do not notice the hills. They keep their 
 eyes for the most part on the ground, which 
 
ALL SCRIPTURE PROFITABLE 243 
 
 seems to them a smooth and level plain, and 
 they find perhaps many a beautiful flower 
 and many a succulent herb, shade trees, fruit 
 trees, Elims of peace and joy ; but they do 
 not notice the strength of the hills and the 
 sweep of the landscape. They see them 
 indeed, but as in a Chinese painting without 
 perspective. That was characteristic of the 
 era of texts and selected passages. But 
 now we study whole books, and try to get 
 the bearing of everything within the range 
 of vision. And so it comes to pass that 
 those parts of the Bible which do not mean 
 much as separate passages find their place in 
 the great scheme of the whole, and the Bible 
 becomes a glorious panorama of the unveil- 
 ing of the revelation of God culminating 
 in Christ and finding its consummation in the 
 City of God. 
 
 We are now making less of the micro- 
 scopic and more of the telescopic method 
 of study. There are, indeed, passages of 
 Scripture, and even single words, which 
 will repay the most careful use of the micro- 
 scope, but the larger view not only brings 
 in all and everything, but is generally much 
 more inspiring. The great subject of pro- 
 phecy is a good illustration. If, in the 
 
244 GAINS FROM REVERENT CRITICISM 
 
 Study of prophecy, we make less now of 
 mere verbal coincidences and of minute 
 matters of detail, which to some minds give 
 an impression of triviality out of harmony 
 with the greatness of divine revelation, 
 there is a more vivid realization of the 
 grandeur of prophecy as a whole, moving 
 on in its majestic progress to its great fulfil- 
 ment in the Christ of God and His heavenly 
 kingdom. 
 
 In this larger view of God's revelation 
 we are getting back to the noble conception 
 of the author of Psalm xix. (how manifestly 
 inspired he is !), to whom it was no mere 
 book or roll, assemblage of words, or ency- 
 clopaedia of texts, but something infinitely 
 greater, which, scorning all comparison with 
 books, demands for a parallel nothing less 
 than the heavens which declare the glory 
 of God and the firmament which showeth 
 His handiwork ; which challenges comparison 
 not with Socrates or Plato but with Day 
 and Night ; and for the central orb of its 
 firmament of truth finds no image that will 
 suit it but the Sun. 
 
AFTER-WORD 
 
 I HAVE fallen far short of the ideal I set 
 before me when I beg-an this little book. 
 I feel that it far too feebly expresses the 
 strength of the new position and the value 
 of the new light which has been shed upon 
 Holy Scripture. But, indeed, no words can 
 express the relief it is to my mind to find 
 myself in a region where the old Bible 
 difficulties are quite irrelevant, to be able 
 to feel about the Bible as we all feel about 
 the sun. There may be spots on it (or in 
 it, if that is the better way of putting it) ; 
 they tell us there are, but that does not 
 in the least make it less a sun to me. And 
 when I hear of these old difficulties mar- 
 shalled for the thousandth time, with the 
 expectation of destroying our faith in Christ, 
 I think of my little grandchild of eighteen 
 months, who, having been taught by her 
 father to blow out first a match and then 
 
 a candle, made her next attempt on the 
 245 
 
246 AFTER-WORD 
 
 orb of day, on an afternoon with just 
 enough fog to make it possible for her to 
 look straight at its great red ball. The 
 dear child tried it again and again and 
 again. 
 
 And the Sun is shining yet ! 
 
 THE END 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWBS AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BKCCLES. 
 
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