*2 V '/V\ . 
 
 THE SEVENTH COUNCIL 
 
 OF I HE 
 
 Reformed Churches Through- 
 out the World. 
 
 Che Bible and the Reformed Churches. 
 
 The Opening sera\on 
 
 Professor JOHN DeWitt, D. D., 
 
 Princeton Theological Seminary. 
 
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THE BIBLE AND THE REFORMED CHURCHES. 
 
 I Peter, 1,23. Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incor 
 ruptiblc, by t lie word of God which livetli and abideth forever. 
 
 I am sure that I express a feeling common to us all 
 when I say, that it is with singular propriety that the Coun- 
 cil of the Reformed Churches throughout the World is 
 met in the Capital of the United States of America. For 
 the constitutive idea of these Churches, operating as a 
 historical force through their membership in America, 
 exerted a powerful influence in securing for these States 
 an independent life, and, when that had been secured, in 
 organizing their Federal Government. Nor will it be 
 denied that throughout the entire period, which began 
 with the beginning of the national life, the Reformed 
 Churches in America have been a factor 'of the first 
 importance among those which have determined the 
 Nation’s political, social, and religious development. 
 
 These striking and acknowledged historical facts 
 almost compel us, on this occasion, to direct our atten- 
 tion to what I have called the constitutive idea of the 
 Reformed Churches. And I shall have you with me in 
 the statement that this idea is to be found in the attitude 
 of these Churches toward the Holy Bible. This attitude 
 is embodied in the well-known phrase of William Chil- 
 lingworth : “The Bible, and the Bible alone, is the 
 religion of Protestants.” It involves the two great pro- 
 positions that the Holy Scriptures are the supreme rule 
 
 By Prof. JOHN DeWITT, D. D., 
 
 Princeton Theological Seminary. 
 
2 
 
 of religious faith and conduct, and that being sufficient 
 and perspicuous, the}’ do not need, for religious purposes, 
 the mediation of the Church as either witness or inter- 
 preter. Of course, this is the attitude of all the Protest- 
 ant Churches. But in the Reformed Churches the con- 
 viction of its importance has been so profound and its 
 influence has been so dominant and continuous that 
 their attitude toward the Bible has been their most dis- 
 tinctive note. While other Churches have emphasized 
 their Catholicity or their Apostolicity, the Reformed 
 Churches have emphasized their loyalty to Holy Scrip- 
 ture. They have believed that they themselves would 
 stand or fall with the Bible; and they have felt that no 
 greater honor could be paid to them than to call them, 
 by eminence, the Churches of the Book. And since 
 their genesis as Reformed was due to their secession from 
 the Latin Church because, as they claimed, that Church 
 had misinterpreted and obscured the Bible ; and since 
 they claimed to have rehabilitated the Bible by making 
 it their distinctive standard and their supreme law, we, 
 at least, who are their successors and believe their claim 
 to have been justified, may well employ, to describe their 
 origin as Reformed, the words of the Apostle Peter, and 
 assert that they were born again, not of corruptible seed, 
 but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which livetli 
 and abideth forever. 
 
 It would be far from the truth to say that the Reformed 
 Churches stand alone in their attachment to and depend- 
 ence on the Holy Scriptures. The Great Roman Church, 
 in which Mediaeval Christianity still survives, asserts 
 not less clearly and strenuously than ourselves their 
 divine inspiration and authority. But it places tradi- 
 tion side by side with Scripture, and of both Scripture 
 and tradition it makes the teaching Church both the 
 authoritative witness and the interpreter. It would 
 require more time than custom allots to this opening 
 sermon adequately to acknowledge the indebtedness of 
 
Christendom to the Anglican Communion for the great 
 literature which its divines of every school have written 
 in the defense and the interpretation of the Bible. Were 
 this contribution to be subtracted from the body of 
 Christian literature, the loss to the world would be 
 incalculable. But such has been the emphasis placed 
 by Anglicanism on its claim to historic orders, and such 
 has been its dalliance with the idea of a priestly clergy, 
 that it is probable that the dominant party of its clergy is 
 prepared, not only to disclaim the name Protestant, but 
 also to attack the distinctively Protestant attitude toward 
 Holy Scripture. 
 
 The attitudes of the Roman and the Anglican 
 Churches, just noticed, serve to bring out clearly the 
 significance of the Reformed Churches’ contention, that 
 the Bible alone is the rule of religious faith. Claiming 
 neither a priestly character for their clergy nor anything 
 like magical virtue for their sacraments, and setting no 
 high value, indeed, no religious value at all, on tactual 
 successions in ordination, the peculiarity of their minis- 
 try has been that, relying on nothing else, they have 
 held up the Bible as the Word of God, the revelation of 
 His will, to be believed and studied and obeyed. For 
 though they co-ordinated with the Bible prayer and the 
 sacraments as means of grace, they found the sole ground 
 of their belief in prayer’s efficacy and the sole warrant 
 for their sacraments in the Written Word. 
 
 The exaltation and exclusive employment of Holy 
 Scripture produced in the Reformed Churches a distinct- 
 ive type of Christian character; which I think we are 
 justified in calling the intellectual type. Of course, in 
 using this term, I am saying nothing about intellectual 
 gifts and attainments. I am endeavoring to describe a 
 religious type. And I am sure, that we may properly 
 call that the intellectual type of Christian character, 
 which is formed and nourished exclusively by Biblical 
 truths ; apprehended by the understanding, made ex- 
 
4 
 
 plicit by exposition, correlated with the fundamental 
 truths of reason, organized into a system, and addressed, 
 through the intellect, to the conscience and the will. As 
 we all know, this is the type which is characteristic 
 to-day, and always has been characteristic of the Re- 
 formed Churches of Europe and America. From their 
 possession and cultivation of this type of religion it fol- 
 lowed inevitably, that these Churches separated sharply 
 the voluntary outgoing of the affections toward God 
 from the necessary feelings which arise in the presence 
 of beauty or sublimity ; and that, recognizing the former 
 only as having a religious character, they refused to 
 employ the material fine arts as means to excite or to 
 express religious devotion. Nor did it less inevitably 
 follow from this intellectual habit, that they severely 
 repressed all tendency to mysticism in themselves, and 
 sometimes unjustly denounced it when it appeared in 
 others. 
 
 It is not my purpose either to eulogize or to criticise 
 the type of Christianity by which the Reformed Churches 
 are thus distinguished. I am only endeavoring to be 
 true to history, in describing the genius of the great 
 family of Churches whose representatives we are. And, 
 above all, I am trying to make clear that, because we 
 have thoroughly abandoned the priestly claims and sac- 
 ramentarianism of Media3val Christianity; and have 
 denied ourselves, believing them delusive allies, the aid 
 of the material fine arts; and have refused to surrender 
 ourselves to the delicious charms of religious mysticism ; 
 in a word, because our type of Christianity is distinct- 
 ively intellectual; we of all the Churches are, perhaps, 
 most vitally interested in the fate of the Holy Bible. 
 For if the Holy Bible were once discredited ; what would 
 be left to the Reformed Churches, but the platitudes of 
 natural ethics, and the “ half-starved and hunger-bitten 
 dogmas” of natural religion ; not seen in the dim aisles 
 of cathedrals or in the shaded groves of mysticism, but 
 scrutinized in the clear light of the open day? 
 
 This, undoubtedly, has been the view of the Reformed 
 Churches themselves. Their profound and abiding con- 
 viction, that the cause of the Bible and the cause of 
 supernatural religion are one, they have asserted in 
 many ways in every period of their history. They have 
 affirmed it in the plainest terms in their Confessions; 
 
they have made the Bible the supreme judge in religious 
 controversies. Turning away from Visible Churches, 
 which they held might apostatize, and from Ecclesiasti- 
 cal Councils, which they asserted might err, to God him- 
 self, speaking in his written Word, they have repaired to 
 the Bible alone as to the sufficient revelation of God’s 
 nature and will, the highest rule, and the one unim- 
 peachable witness in religion. Their system of doctrine, 
 they have defended only as founded on and issuing from 
 Holy Scripture. Beginning with John Calvin, the father 
 of modern Biblical interpretation, their divines have 
 yielded to those of no other Church in their endeavors, by 
 historical and grammatical study, to ascertain the Bible’s 
 exact text and precise significance; for in their belief 
 the phrases, “Scripture saith ” and “God saitli,” are 
 synonymous and interchangeable. The public teachings 
 of their pulpits have been expositions of the Word. 
 Their historic songs of praise have been its inspired 
 lyrics. Though the most of these Churches, at first, 
 employed fixed forms in their public worship, the feeling 
 among them was unanimous, that a stately uniformity, 
 though in itself desirable, would be too dearly bought, if 
 an imposed liturgy were suffered to compete with the 
 Holy Bible for the affections of their people. This Bible, 
 they made the fundamental text book of childhood and 
 youth in the home and the parochial school. The duty 
 of its regular devotional study by the people throughout 
 life, they enforced by their Directories, by the character 
 of their Catechisms, and by the teachings of their pul- 
 pits. Its translation into the tongues of the peoples 
 among whom they labored has been among the chief 
 cares of their missionaries in foreign lands ; and no 
 Churches have been more enthusiastic or more generous 
 in securing for it the widest circulation, without note or 
 comment, as the people’s Book of books. In no way, 
 perhaps, has the devotion of these Churches to the cause 
 of the Bible been shown more clearly, than in the 
 promptness and vigor and spirit of their apologetics in 
 its behalf. Against every assault, they have furnished 
 abundant defenders, equal in ability and learning to the 
 task the assault created and animated by the spirit which 
 nerves men only when they are fighting for what they 
 hold most dear. 
 
6 
 
 We need not be disturbed if we have to confess that 
 not always have those, representing the Reformed 
 Churches, rightly read the Holy Bible, or that sometimes 
 they have made the Word of God responsible for their 
 errors and excesses. It would have been strange, in- 
 deed, if they had not, now and again, misinterpreted or 
 misapplied it. What Church has not at times affirmed 
 moral quality of things indifferent; or reached conclu- 
 sions concerning God’s will after a narrow induction of 
 Scripture; or, in the strain of battle, been pushed by the 
 foe into indefensible positions? But the final judgment 
 of history on a great institution is determined, not by 
 exceptional falls or aberrations, but by its whole career 
 and its total influence on the life of the world. Judged 
 in this large way, the Reformed Churches must be held 
 to have been one of the most potent and beneficent forces 
 in the life of Europe and America, since the Reforma- 
 tion of the sixteenth century. And the greatness and 
 beneficence of their influence must be ascribed, most of 
 all, to the exalted place and the all-important function 
 these Churches lia've assigned to Holy Scripture. 
 
 The great and splendid story of the limitation of class 
 privilege, of the enfranchisement of the people, of the social 
 amelioration of the masses, of the care of the unfortunate, 
 of the diminution of the hon ors of war, of the popular 
 and the higher education, of the deepening indignation 
 throughout the world in the presence of cruelty or of out- 
 raged justice, and of advancing civil liberty and self-gov- 
 ernment prophesying the Commonwealth of man:— this 
 story of the last three centuries will not be fairly told, if a 
 large share of these achievements is not assigned these Re- 
 formed Churches; and if the reason ot their share is not 
 attributed to their attitude toward the written Word ot God. 
 Or, fixing our regard on the sphere of the distinctively 
 religious life ; if we only permit ourselves to judge our 
 policy by its fruits, we need not fear that the Reformed 
 Churches robbed the people, when, giving tip the aids of 
 a priestly clergy and the material tine arts and mysti- 
 cism, they commended to the people the Word of God, 
 to he devoutly studied as their only rule of religious faith 
 and duty. In their adoring worship of the living God 
 alone, in their confident faith in his forgiving mercy, 
 through the merits of his Atoning Son, in their profound 
 
view of sin, in their high ethical and deep spiritual con- 
 ception of the religious life, in their abundant philan- 
 thropic and missionary labors and the large generosity bv 
 which these have been supported in their Catholic concep- ' 
 tion of the visible Church, and in the fraternal attitude 
 toward other Churches by which they have given ex- 
 pression and effect to their conception ; the Reformed 
 Churches are entitled to say that they have made clear 
 in their history, that the Holy Bible by itself begets and 
 supports a type of piety as lofty, as devout, and as ethical 
 and spiritual as any the Church has known. The vision 
 of the Saviour of the world has never been dimmed or 
 obstructed in our Churches or our homes; the graces of 
 the Spirit have beautified the lives of our people ; prayer 
 has hallowed them ; their characters have been made 
 strong by the practice of the ethical virtues as Christian 
 duties; and the whole world has known and recognized 
 and rejoiced in their work of faith, and labor of love, 
 and patience of hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 Noble as it is in itself and great and blessed as has 
 been its mission to the world, the intellectual type of re- 
 ligion characteristic of the Reformed Churches is some- 
 times attended by a serious danger to faith. For, in a 
 naturalistic age, the study of the Bible, by those to whom 
 the right of private judgment has been accorded, may 
 easily be transmuted into destructive criticism; so that 
 the Bible will be interpreted with a view to the elimina- 
 tion of its supernatural history and doctrines, and, in 
 the end, its rule over belief and life be rejected. We all 
 know that this danger has been often insisted on as in- 
 hering in the very essence of Protestantism. We have 
 been told that the words Protestantism and Rationalism, 
 when employed to describe methods of dealing with the 
 Bible, are convertible terms; and that, if we describe 
 Protestantism by its historical influence, we must call it 
 the mother of the modern disbelief of the Bible. 
 
 Now, so far as history is concerned, it is rarely, if it 
 is ever, possible to say of any outbreak of unbelief, what 
 its exact historical causes were. Most often, unbelief 
 appears in the life of a nation or an age, quite suddenly 
 and mysteriously. And it always appears as an assimi- 
 lating force, nourishing itself on all prevailing modes of 
 thought, until, finally, it exhausts itself and dies. The 
 historian, in a succeeding age, is quite apt to mistake for 
 
8 
 
 its historical cause some one of the many modes of 
 thought by which, in its day, it was nourished. No 
 doubt, in the eighteenth century, Deism in Great Britain 
 fed itself on Protestantism. And there is just as little 
 doubt that, in the same century, Deism in France fed 
 itself on Romanism. But it would he inaccurate to say 
 that Romanism was the responsible cause of Deism in 
 France, or to say that Protestantism was its responsible 
 cause in Great Britain. It would, indeed, be easy to 
 construct a plausible argument for each contention. On 
 the one hand it could be urged, that the free exercise of 
 the human reason in the study of Scripture produced 
 unbelief; and, on the other, that skepticism appeared as 
 a reaction from the too large demands made upon faith. 
 There would be a measure of truth in each of these 
 statements. But the historical cause of the Deism of the 
 eighteenth century would in neither case be told. The 
 truth is, that the great problems of historical causation 
 are never easy of solution. And before the action and 
 re-action of the voluntary co-efficients in national life, 
 we may well stand in modest silence, or confess with 
 frankness our inability to proportion causes and effects 
 in human history. 
 
 Nor has anyone a right to call the Protestantism of 
 the Reformation essential Rationalism, because it substi- 
 tuted Scripture for the Church as the ultimate rule of 
 faith, or because it bade the people employ whatever aid 
 they could obtain in exploring the meaning of God’s 
 written Word. For faith in the supernatural was at the 
 centre of the Reformation, just as truly as it was at the 
 centre of Mediaeval Christianity. Nor was this super- 
 natural belief less real or less influential, because its 
 specific object was the indwelling and illumining Divine 
 Spirit giving spiritual efficacy to the written Word, in- 
 stead of God communicating grace through a system of 
 seven sacraments. 
 
 So much, we may rightly. say against the charge that 
 Protestantism legitimates religious unbelief. And yet 
 we must, I think, confess, that when naturalistic modes 
 of thought are prevalent and honored and influential ; 
 when second causes so hold men’s attention that the 
 First Cause is easily “ removed far from them on the 
 field of their contemplation,” there is peculiar danger 
 that we, especially of the Reformed Churches, shall he 
 
9 
 
 powerfully tempted to let the spirit of the time control 
 or strongly influence us in our study of the Bible; until 
 we look askance at or minimize the miraculous in its 
 history, and construe, by the laws-of natural evolution, 
 those great events which, as narrated in Holy Scripture, 
 we had before interpreted as God’s miraculous and gra- 
 cious interruptions of the awful tragedy of a sinful and 
 fallen race. 
 
 I do not presume to say, that a conscious naturalistic 
 habit of mind is the source of what we have agreed to 
 call the new Biblical criticism (of which we now hear so 
 much), so far as its conclusions are defended within the 
 Reformed Churches. We are bound to accept and to 
 defend the sincerity of our own brethren in their dis- 
 avowed of anti-supernaturalism, and in their assurances 
 that, in accepting as ascertained truth the reconstruction 
 of the history of Israel made necessary by their studies 
 of the literary phenomena of the Old Testament, they 
 still receive the Bible as the infallible rule of faith and 
 practice, and are endeavoring, in full faith of the super- 
 natural, to open the Scriptures to the people. 
 
 Nevertheless, we all know that the new criticism pro- 
 poses a revolution in our interpretation of the Old Testa- 
 ment history, and is beginning to propose a like revolu- 
 tion in our interpretation of the New Testament history. 
 In view of the fact that the Bible is not only supreme in 
 our Church, but occupies an exclusive supremacy ; and 
 in view of that intellectual habit of religion, peculiar to 
 us; on which I have already dwelt, it is not too much 
 to say, that this proposal has produced in the Reformed 
 Churches a serious crisis of belief, of which we are bound 
 to take some notice in Councils like this in which we are 
 gathered. 
 
 I say, we are bound to take notice of the present 
 crisis of Biblical belief. It would be unintellectual op- 
 timism or sinful obscurantism to pass it by in silence. 
 And, therefore, since the circumstances in which we are 
 met have led me to speak of the supreme and exclusive 
 place which the Reformed Churches have given to the 
 Bible, I should be evading the very subject of my ser- 
 mon if I did not go on to say a few words about the 
 relation of the new criticism to our historical position ; 
 and to consider the interesting question, whether, if we 
 accept the conclusions of the new criticism, we can still 
 
10 
 
 hold by the Bible as our supreme rule in religious belief 
 and conduct. 
 
 You will agree with me, that this historical attitude 
 of our Churches toward the Bible, involves, at the least, 
 the statements, that the Bible is one; that it is true; 
 that it is inspired ; and that it is self-evidencing. How- 
 ever we may define them, the Bible’s unity, truth, in- 
 spiration and self-evidencing quality cannot be given up 
 by us as Reformed Churches without a complete revolu- 
 tion. To set them aside would be lor us, at least, to set 
 aside the Bible. For there would be no meaning to our 
 acceptance of the Bible, if we did not hold it as, in some 
 sense, a unity, or, if we did not hold it, as in some sense, 
 true ; we could not call it a revelation, if we did not as- 
 sign to God, in some sense, its authorship; and how 
 could it oblige the people to receive it as their supreme 
 rule of faith and duty, if it did not authenticate itself as 
 the very Word of God to man ? 
 
 What then do we mean when we say that we believe 
 in the unity of the Holy Scriptures, or that we accept 
 them as one Book? That we do say this we all know. 
 It is implied in all our treatment of them, as well as in 
 the name by which we most often describe them. Their 
 units were, indeed, written at different times, and are in 
 various literary forms; and a sharp line separates the 
 elder writings from the later. Yet the sayings of St. 
 Augustine, that “the New Testament lies hidden in the 
 Old, the Old lies open in the New,” and that “if we dis- 
 tinguish the times the Scriptures will agree,” have com- 
 mended themselves to the judgment of the Church. As 
 to what this unity is, all the great divisions of the Cath- 
 olic Church are agreed. The ecumenical creeds of the 
 Patristic and the detailed confessions of the Reformation 
 periods alike' witness, that the unity of Scripture is pre- 
 cisely this: that it contains a system of supernatural 
 truth concerning God and man and the relations between 
 them; and that this system of truth, as it lies open in 
 the New Testament, is implicit in the Old. 
 
 Now, how are we to maintain this unity of Scripture, 
 if we accept the new critical view of the Old Testament 
 which posits, as underlying the whole volume as at last 
 compiled, a series of documents of which the several re- 
 ligious tendencies are in conflict? Or how are we to 
 assert the unity of the Old and New Testaments, if we 
 
11 
 
 concede that the Messianic idea, which dominates the 
 New Testament, is derived, not from the prophets of the 
 Old Testament, but from their prophetic utterances as 
 mistakenly interpreted by the extra-canonical apocalyptic 
 writers? Or how, finally, shall we hold to this unity, if 
 we accept the conclusion that the Nicene theology is not 
 yielded by the Bible, but is the product of Greek thought 
 modifying, or rather revolutionizing the primitive Chris- 
 tianity, which was little more than a system of prac- 
 tical ethics joined to the worship of Jesus? 1 do not 
 desire to be polemical. But these questions must be 
 considered by us as organized Churches. We cannot 
 escape them. And what more appropriate occasion 
 could we find to propound them, than the occasion by 
 which we are assembled? 
 
 Then there is the truth of the Bible. Need I say 
 that, since these Reformed Churches have been organized 
 on the basis that Holy Scripture is the supreme and in- 
 fallible rule of faith and duty, we should be denying the 
 fundamental principle by which we exist, if we did not 
 hold to the truthfulness of the Bible ? It must be trust- 
 worthy in our view, or it will be impossible for us to con- 
 ceive of it as the judge in religious controversy. It is 
 impossible, therefore, for us to escape the serious consid- 
 eration of the question, whether the conclusions of the 
 new criticism can be made to consist with the trust- 
 worthiness of the Bible. And that this question may be 
 before us in a concrete way, I will select a striking ex- 
 ample from the reconstructed history of Israel which the 
 modern criticism almost unanimously assures us is made 
 necessary by the literarv study of the Old Testament. 
 
 The tabernacle, which is described at length and 
 with such careful attention to details in the book of 
 Exodus, we are told by the author of that book, was 
 actually constructed by the appointment of Moses dur- 
 ing the wandering in the wilderness, and was intended 
 to be, and really was, the shrine of the sacrifices of the 
 Levitical law, which was given by Moses at the same 
 period. Now, what if I should be compelled to reach 
 the conclusion, that the tabernacle, so described, was not 
 ordered to be built by Moses ; that in point of fact it was 
 never built at all; that it is only an imaginative recon- 
 struction of the temple of Solomon ; and that the story 
 of its construction was fabricated during the exile in the 
 
12 
 
 interest of the priestly programme of that late period ; 
 and was intended to provide imaginatively a shrine of 
 the Mosaic age for theLevitical sacrifices, which are said 
 in the Pentateuch to have been prescribed hv Moses, 
 but with which Moses had no more to do than he had to 
 do with the building of the tabernacle, which was never 
 built at all? What, I say, if I should be compelled to 
 reach this conclusion ? In what sense could I say that 
 I held to the truthfulness of the Old Testament? Could 
 I hold to it in any sense? For the problem, you per- 
 ceive, is not the mere problem of constructing a dogmatic 
 definition of inspiration. Here is the narrative of the 
 organization of the cultus of Israel at the beginning of 
 its national life. It is the very narrative which domi- 
 nates the whole succeeding history of Israel as it lies on 
 the face of the Old Testament. That whole history is 
 thus reconstructed in a way which it is tame to call revo- 
 lutionary. And since the reconstruction has been made 
 and defended with the greatest frankness, how can we 
 help, with equal and reciprocal frankness, asking the 
 question ; but what, in this reconstruction of history, be- 
 comes of the truth, or the truthfulness, or the trust- 
 worthiness of the Old Testament? 
 
 Then, the Divine inspiration of the Bible is affirmed 
 in all our Confessions. That this means, in some sense, 
 the inbreathing of the Divine mind into the texture of 
 Holy Scripture all are agreed. Nor shall we be less 
 unanimous in our consent that the end of the inbreath- 
 ing is not to give us scientific history, but to give to Holy 
 Scripture a religious quality, and to make the Bible 
 infallible in the sphere of faith and duty. And were 
 Christianity a religion unrelated to human history, it 
 were easy to conceive of its Sacred Books as thoroughly 
 infallible in their religious teachings and yet erroneous 
 in their historical narrative. But this is not Christianity 
 as understood by the Reformed Churches, or as embodied 
 in the ecumenical creeds. Is there a doctrine of the 
 faith which is not implicated in and inseparable from 
 events which occurred under the conditions of time and 
 space? The fall of man, the Incarnation, the Atone- 
 ment, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the coming of the 
 Holy Ghost; what are these but historical events, bound, 
 if taught at all, to he taught as history? Or, how are 
 we to unite with our brethren in the Apostle’s Creed, if 
 we do not assent to its statement of the historic events, 
 
that Jesus Christ our Lord was conceived of the Holy 
 Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius 
 Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, and was raised 
 again the third day? I do not see how it is possible, 
 however closely we confine the mission of inspiration to 
 securing the religious infallibility of the Bible, to exclude 
 tbe Biblical history. And if we include Biblical history 
 at all, we may well ask those who exclude a portion of 
 the history as not witnessed to by inspiration, to formu- 
 late tbe law of exclusion. 
 
 And, there is that self-evidencing quality of Holy 
 Scripture, in virtue of which it obliges its acceptance by 
 those to whom it is given. Of course, we shall all say, 
 that what precisely is evidenced, is not immediately the 
 history, but those doctrines, like the love of God and the 
 forgiveness of sin, which can become elements of indi- 
 vidual experience. But to evidence these is mediately 
 to evidence tbe history with which they are necessarily 
 allied. 
 
 Here, then, is the historical attitude of the Reformed 
 Churches toward the Bible, and here, in sharp antithesis, 
 is the new Biblical criticism demanding to be heard and 
 accepted. It is perfectly clear, as I have already said, 
 that we have reached a crisis of belief. Of the necessary 
 result of the wide acceptance of the new critical conclu- 
 sions on our Churches and people, it is unnecessary to 
 speak at any length. We can all see that, in the event 
 of such an acceptance, there will be a revolution in our 
 ecclesiastical and religious life. It will be impossible for 
 the Bible to continue to hold the supreme place it holds 
 to-day; and, this ancient support of our ecclesiastical 
 and religious life, having been withdrawn or weakened, 
 many of us will seek some other support in its place or 
 as its ally; like sacramentarianism with sacerdotal 
 directors; or aestheticism with its gratifications; or 
 mysticism with its vague but powerful emotions. I am 
 inclined to believe, however, that because of the intellect- 
 ual habit bred in our people and our churches by the 
 education of almost four centuries, the first halting place 
 of the most of us will be rationalism. ' We must not 
 conceal from ourselves that exactly this disintegration 
 has once and again befallen Reformed Churches, and 
 there is no earthly guarantee that history will not repeat 
 itself. And in this way we are brought to the profoundly 
 
14 
 
 interesting question : “ What is our duty as Churches 
 and presbyters arid people, in this crisis of belief? ” 
 
 You will agree with me that it would be out of place 
 to say anything, and, indeed, that it would not be pos- 
 sible to make any valuable remarks of a general charac- 
 ter on the relation to the present crisis of the Church’s 
 power of discipline. For the right of discipline does not 
 belong to this Council, but to each separate Church here 
 represented. And since the complex conditions, under 
 which each Church lives and does its work, differ from 
 those of every other Church, each Church can, far more 
 wisely than all of us combined, conclude in what cases 
 to exercise and in what cases not to exercise judicial 
 functions. But there are other duties of which I may 
 appropriately speak ; and I shall, in conclusion, speak 
 briefly of three, which belong, respectively, to the intel- 
 lect, the feelings, and the will : 
 
 Our intellectual duty is obvious. It is to meet the 
 demands of the Biblical critics with rigid scrutiny and 
 with counter criticism. And here I will take the liberty 
 to say that the value of the higher criticism, as an instru- 
 ment of knowledge, is apt to be grossly exaggerated by 
 those who employ it. No one will deny that it is an 
 important adjunct to historical testimony when the latter 
 is aiding us toward conclusions in which the mind will 
 rest content. But in cases where there is no historical 
 testimony, and in cases especially in which it antagonizes 
 historical testimony, the evidence is abundant that be- 
 cause it is purely subjective and individual and, there- 
 fore, under no laws which can be approximately formu- 
 lated, the higher criticism has been changeful in method, 
 capricious in opinion, and temporary in its conclusions. 
 In the nature of the case its processes can end in nothing 
 more solid than a working hypothesis, when there is no 
 testimony beside the literary phenomena which it is 
 scrutinizing. And unless this happens to be the only 
 hypothesis possible in the circumstances (and that can 
 rarely happen), its conclusions can never command per- 
 manent and contented belief. 
 
 Take, for example, the case of the first book of the 
 Bible. Let us grant, if you will, that the higher criticism 
 has made clear, that you can explain all its literary 
 traits, on the supposition that it is a late compilation of 
 several documents, each of which has a religious tend- 
 ency different from the tendencies of the others. In 
 granting this we grant everything that by literary criti- 
 
cism can possibly be proven. But is this particular 
 hypothesis the only one to which its literary phenomena 
 can be made to respond ? I should say that, given twenty 
 acute and speculative minds, it would be possible to con- 
 struct as many different hypotheses of the book’s origin, 
 of each of which you could asjustly say : “It accounts for 
 every literary phenomenon in the book.” And is the 
 Book of Genesis peculiar in its susceptibility to this 
 speculative division into conflicting documents? It is 
 not peculiar at all. This susceptibility is a trait which 
 it has in common with every piece of literature the world 
 contains. If you care to be speculative, you can ravel 
 out the Epistle to the Romans, the parable of the prod- 
 igal son, or of the good Samaritan, any oration of Ed- 
 mund Burke, or any essay of Lord Macauly, into con- 
 stituent documents of conflicting tendencies, and the 
 literary phenomena of the object you are raveling will 
 all be accounte I for. Can conclusions reached in this 
 way ever amount to more than provisional hypotheses? 
 If they shall command general and permanent belief, it 
 will be more than they have done in the past. 
 
 And, certainly, it goes without saying, that they can 
 never serve as the basis of positive religious institutions, 
 organized to evoke devout emotions and to constrain to 
 self-sacrificing lives. I believe, therefore, that the intel- 
 lectual duty which presses most severely on the Re- 
 formed Churches to-day, is not the duty of concessive 
 apologetics, but the cheerful and by no means difficult 
 task of pointing out to the new Biblical critics, the very 
 serious limitations of their method as an instrument of 
 knowledge, and its more serious limitations as a power 
 to compel general or permanent conviction — limitations 
 which they, like the most of their predecessors, appear 
 to have ignored or forgotten. I am well aware, and we 
 are often told, that the new Biblical criticisms derive 
 great force, at present, from the prevailing naturalistic 
 habit of mind. Precisely so. Their greatest power is 
 derived, not from the higher criticism, but from the 
 present mighty naturalistic drift. This is exactly my 
 contention — that but for this present tendency toward 
 naturalism as a theory which will explain all religions, 
 the conclusions of the new criticism could not, in the 
 nature of the case, be widely accepted or strongly held. 
 If this be true, — and I believe it to be true, — then now, 
 as always, naturalism is the foe which confronts us. We 
 
16 
 
 know it well. We have met it often in many guises ; 
 and the recollection of our past battles should forbid 
 fear, on our part, as to the result of another conflict. 
 
 Our great duty in the sphere of the feeling, is the 
 duty of charity, it may well cause us anxiety, that, in 
 a degree not to be affirmed of previous movements of the 
 kind, this movement has taken possession of earnest, able 
 and sincere minds within our Churches. Of course, this 
 should make us more alert and vigilant. At the same 
 time, we should not forget the sincerity and the devout- 
 ness of tliose who are our brethren, and who, inconsist- 
 ent as they appear clearly to us to be, are still praying 
 and laboring and sacrificing, in order to honor Jesus 
 Christ, the Son of God and Saviour of the World. Let 
 us remember, that perhaps no one of us is thoroughly 
 consistent intellectually ; and let us remind ourselves, 
 even in the midst of our conflicts for the faith, that as 
 the greatest of the graces is charity, so it is the most 
 difficult to maintain and exhibit when we are engaged 
 in theological warfare. 
 
 Finally, our great duty in the sphere of the will is to 
 pray. Never does the Christian’s will energize more 
 mightily and to more blessed purpose than when in pro- 
 found faith in Jesus Christ he seeks a spiritual benedic- 
 tion from Almighty God. And surely our Churches can 
 never pray with stronger confidence, than when they 
 appeal to him in behalf of the cause of Iloly Scripture. 
 Let us pray, then, for a deeper faith in the Holy Bible. 
 Let us pray that we may revere Jt more highly, and 
 study it more devoutly, and believe it more implicitly, 
 and obey it more heartily. Let us pray for the illumin- 
 ing Spirit. And let us remember, brethren, the years of 
 the right hand of the Most High. As we remember 
 them, our faith will grow strong. We shall be sure that 
 the present crisis of belief will pass away, and that a 
 new Revival like the Reformation of the sixteenth, or 
 the Evangelical awakening of the eighteenth century, 
 will bless our Reformed Churches. In the blessed at- 
 mosphere of that revival it may be that some one, who 
 shall stand in the place I occupy to-day, will employ, to 
 describe our revived belief and obedience, the words of 
 the Apostle — We are born again, not of corruptible seed, 
 but of incorruptible, by the Word of God, which liveth 
 and abideth forever.