(a) It shows complete acquaintance with the soul.
The Bible addresses all parts of man's nature. There are Law and Epistles for man's reason; Psalms and Gospels for his affections; Prophets and Revelations for his imagination. Hence the popularity of the Scriptures. Their variety holds men. The Bible has become interwoven into modern life. Law, literature, art, all show its moulding influence.
(b) It judges the soul—contradicting its passions, revealing its guilt, and humbling its pride.
No product of mere human nature could thus look down upon human nature and condemn it. The Bible speaks to us from a higher level. The Samaritan woman's words apply to the whole compass of divine revelation; it tells us all things that ever we did (John 4:29). The Brahmin declared that Romans 1, with its description of heathen vices, must have been forged after the missionaries came to India.
(c) It meets the deepest needs of the soul—by solutions of its problems, disclosures of God's character, presentations of the way of pardon, consolations and promises for life and death.
Neither Socrates nor Seneca sets forth the nature, origin and consequences of sin as committed against the holiness of God, nor do they point out the way of pardon and renewal. The Bible teaches us what nature cannot, viz.: God's creatorship, the origin of evil, the method of restoration, the certainty of a future state, and the principle of rewards and punishments there.
(d) Yet it is silent upon many questions for which writings of merely human origin seek first to provide solutions.
Compare the account of Christ's infancy in the gospels with the fables of the Apocryphal New Testament; compare the scant utterances of Scripture with regard to the future state with Mohammed's and Swedenborg's revelations of Paradise. See Alexander McLaren's sermon on The Silence of Scripture, in his book entitled: Christ in the Heart, 131-141.
(e) There are infinite depths and inexhaustible reaches of meaning in Scripture, which difference it from all other books, and which compel us to believe that its author must be divine.
Sir Walter Scott, on his death bed: “Bring me the Book!” “What book?” said Lockhart, his son-in-law. “There is but one book!” said the dying man. Réville concludes an Essay in the Revue des deux Mondes (1864): “One day the question was started, in an assembly, what book a man condemned to lifelong imprisonment, and to whom but one book would be permitted, had better take into his cell with him. The company consisted of Catholics, Protestants, philosophers and even materialists, but all agreed that their choice would fall only on the Bible.”