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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 27

The Bible the Word of Man

page 19

The Bible the Word of Man.

But, for good or evil, the Bible is the word of man and not of God; it contains, not the oracles of Heaven, but the aspirations of earth. It grew from the old familiar soil of human longings and affections, hopes, and fears. It tells how men sought and suffered in days gone by, and by what strange paths humanity has gone in seeking after God. It is not the tomb of inspiration nor the sepulchre of the Eternal; it is a witness, not to a voice that can be heard no more, but to a voice that waits now to speak in the living soul,—to One who will be to us all that He was to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and David and Jesus and Paul. It has its glooms as well as its glories, its shadows as well as its sunbeams, its deformities as well as its beauties, but nothing need be wished away, for nothing is there but what belongs to the history of our kind. It is the world's most precious witness-bearer to God, and it will fulfill its highest mission when it leads you to Him for yourself.

God, then, we say, has not changed either in His disposition, His intentions, or His relations to man; and we are to Him all that men have ever been. From age to age we are borne on by the steady flow of His Providence. In science, in politics, in all the arts and aids of civilization, we are being slowly led on by His beneficent hand, and instructed by His enlightening spirit. The measure of our receiving is the measure of our capacity to receive. Revelation is really discovery, dependent, not upon God's willingness to reveal, but upon man's power to see; nothing is finished, nothing exhausted, in any field of knowledge or inquiry, the law of all things necessitating progress, but never allowing finality; the ages explain one another, and in the thoughts, the hopes, the aspirations, the activities, and the experiences of wise and holy souls in every age, God is perpetually becoming incarnated and revealed; the struggle after the perfection of what is human being simply the struggle after the discovery or development of that which is divine.

We bless God, then, for the Bible, and for all great souls and books; for they have all come from the same Eternal Master-Mind. The wells of salvation were not closed when the New Testament was written, and the voice of God was not hushed when it spoke to the last Evangelist.