We have set forth these three main reasons for the unique influence that the Bible exercises over life. Some are fond of saying that the Bible is merely one of many sacred books. Those who have read the bibles of other races will not be misled by the statement. Max Müller writes that the Sacred Books of the East “by the side of much that is fresh, natural, simple, beautiful, and true, contain much that is not only unmeaning, artificial, and silly, but even hideous and repellent.” Of the Brahmanas he affirms that they “deserve to be studied as the physician studies the twaddle of idiots and the ravings of madmen.” The Koran sets forth a very fine morality, but it was written by one man and really presents a legal religion. Moreover it offers no perfect example. The author of the Koran himself claimed to receive revelations that opened a path to immorality. One voice declared the authority of the book, and an obedient people accepted this verdict. The Koran was not written by a wide range of life, expressing God’s dealing with many persons under diverse conditions. It was not tested for its authority by the free conscience of a people. Mohammed wrote and adopted his own canon. The Christian’s Bible, written by life, tested by life, and culminating in Life, has come back to life with transforming power.
The insistence of these chapters is that, when the Holy Scriptures are given a free opportunity to do their work with life, they prove their own inspiration. After all, there can be no other proof. The Bible is what it is, no matter what theory men may adopt as to its formation. It creates its own evidences. The argument for its inspiration is the life that it inspires. If the Book gives power and purity to all departments of life, the Book defends itself against attack and makes its own conquests. Does the Bible rightly exalt man? Does it sanctify the home? Does it promote education? Does it glorify work? Does it save wealth from greed, pleasure from excess, sorrow from despair? These questions reach the center of the problem.
We can go but one step beyond them, and that step is most significant. Do we find in the Bible not only a way to be followed, and a goal of truth to be gained, but a Life that will help lives along the way toward the goal? Does the Book really reveal the way, the truth, and the life? The answer must again be found in life. The evidences of dynamic are in the realms of human experience. More and more the students of the Holy Scriptures, who seek the pages with a religious purpose, will find that all the departments of human living wait on Jesus for their meaning and come to him for their power. He is the Saviour. He lifts men out of their sins, up into a trembling and glorious idealism, and still up into a passion for efficient goodness. The supreme apology for the Bible will ever be found in men who have been so instructed, reproved, and corrected, that they may be named as perfect men of God, thoroughly furnished unto every good work. Given its full right, the Book that was born of life, tried of life, glorified of Life, will find its own best witnesses in redeemed lives.
CHAPTER II
The Bible and Man
The natural outline of a human life which has suggested the method of these lectures represents a man as awaking each morning to the consciousness of himself. Every man lives perforce in his own company. He walks with himself on every road of life. He sits with himself in its resting places. He lies down with himself in its slumbers. He is his own friend, and his own enemy. Omar Khayyám declares that he is his own heaven and his own hell. There is a story of a farmer who said that when he climbed to the roof of his barn and looked about, he always found that he himself was the center of the world. The roof of the sky at all points was equally distant from him; the walls of the world made by the dipping horizon showed the same length of radius from himself! The story has its serious, as well as its amusing side. Every man is the personal center of a world which gets its meaning from his own heart. It is no wonder that the old Greek motto was “Know thyself.”
Yet the knowledge of self is not easy knowledge. The fact that no man has ever seen his own face, save by reflection in some mirror, is a parable. The very eyes that see cannot see themselves. They are so near that they are hidden. The moral literature of the race always emphasizes the difficulty of self-revelation. Its cry is, “Who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults.” It has a yet deeper desire: that it may know more of its own essential nature. Each man longs for a revelation of God; and each man longs for a revelation of himself. The present emphasis is that the Bible is the medium of this human revelation.
We do not go far in the reading of its pages without discovering that the word “thou” looms large in its spiritual grammar. Those curious persons who often bring their arithmetic to the Bible could doubtless tell how many times “thou” and “thee” and “thy” and “thine” are found in its chapters. In the Ten Commandments and in the New Commandment “thou” is the recurring word. Personal address is prominent everywhere. Indeed, the whole Book is a kind of prophet coming into the court of each soul and saying, “Thou art the man.” Sometimes the approach is an accusation, sometimes an approbation; in any case the note is intensely individual. In the New Commandment the “self” is made the standard by which the relation to the neighbor is to be tested. The implication would seem to be that the man who does not love himself lacks the law by which his love for other men may be made efficient. Polonius was not far from the biblical idea when he said: