other literature, or whose divine origin was somehow miraculously guaranteed. There is an old Church fable that at the time of the Council of ' Nice all the books were placed near the altar with a prayer that God would decide between them, and that immediately the true canonical books of Scripture jumped up on the altar and the others remained quietly on the floor!

Some such process might fit in with popular notions about Scripture. But the divine method was very different and here I call careful attention to this method. Not suddenly, by some startling miracle-not officially, by some decision of a council, but slowly, gradually, half-unconsciously, by the quiet influence of the Holy Spirit on the minds of men in the Church, was the canon of Scripture settled. "The Bible was formed even as the Church itself was formed by that Holy Spirit which was the life of both." The Bible and the Church were correlative to each other. Neither was the Church without the Bible nor the Bible without the Church. The Holy Spirit, who touched the highest consciences in the community to utter noble teaching, touched also the general conscience of that community to discriminate between higher and lower-to appreciate and love and treasure especially what was highest and most valuable to its religious life.

The formation of this collection of documents was gradual. It was decided unconsciously by usage rather than by criticism or deliberate choice. It was no verdict of any one gathering of men that formed the Bible. It was the slow, accumulating verdict of the ages.

§ 5. Does it seem derogatory to Holy Scripture to say that it was the judgment of men that made certain books into a Bible? At any rate it was so. There is a mysterious upward look in poor fallen humanity made in God's image, touched by God's spirit. "We needs must love the highest when we see it," even though we may refuse to follow it. It was this response to the highest, specially quickened in a community under God's peculiar guidance, which made the Church recognize and appreciate and reverence and preserve certain books which seemed instinct with the Spirit of God.

The making of the Bible was the act of men. But surely it was none the less for that the act of God the Holy Spirit. It was really His divine working that separated certain books for the perpetual instruction of the Church. But the mode of His working was by the quickening and guiding of human souls, that they should instinctively

love what was most divine, what was most stimulating and helpful to their religious life; that by a divine impulse men should gradually arrive at a general recognition of a certain set of writings as authoritative and inspired Scripture. Thus the Bible formed itself by a power inherent in it. It won its own way. It built its own throne. All that was best in human consciousness recognized its right to rule over men. Its position, we repeat, rests on no external authority, on no sentence of council or synod or prophet or saint, but on a gradual choice by a Church guided by the Spirit of God.

§ 6. It is quite true, as we shall see later, that the representatives of the Jewish Church officially pronounced their verdict as to what books should be in the Old Testament canon of Scripture. Yes, but when? Somewhere about the time of our Lord, after the accepted books had been for centuries recognized as of God. It is quite true that the Christian Church collected certain New Testament writings to form their Bible. But when? After they had been for three hundred years accepted as the God-given guide of the Church.

Surely no one would say that the Books owe their position to the fact that the Church thus

formally recognized and collected them into a Bible, any more than one would say that the works of Shakespeare, or Browning, or Tennyson owe their position to the fact that we have placed them in our collections of standard English literature. The books of Scripture asserted their own position. It was not the Church's collecting them into a Bible that made them of authority but rather the fact of their possessing authority made them be collected into a Bible.

What gave them this authority?

CHAPTER II

THE APPEAL OF THE BIBLE

I

WHAT gave them this authority? The Appeal Why should any set of old documents have been for thousands of

of the Prophets.

years accepted as of divine origin and yielded to by men as an authority to guide their conduct and impose on them commands often disagreeable to themselves? Remember that they were isolated utterances often with centuries intervening between them, coming from various authors of various characters to various sets of people under various circumstances that they originated in small beginnings centuries behind our present Bible-that in many cases we do not know their origin, or their authors, or by what processes they assumed their present form-that they were marked off by no miracle, nor guaranteed by any formal decision of any external authority. And yet somehow we can never reach

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