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ject proves a vacuum in the soul of man which nothing can fill save faith in God.” “Now take the positive side. Consider the happiness of religious and chiefly the highest religious, i. e., Christian —belief. It is a matter of fact that besides being most in tense, it is most enduring, growing, and never staled by custom. - - - All this may lead on to an argument from the adaptation of Christianity to human higher needs. All men must feel these needs more or less in proportion as their higher natures, moral and spiritual, are developed. Now Christianity is the only religion which is adapted to meet them, and, according to those who are alone able to testify does so most abundantly.” What this brilliant Cambridge scholar found out after long weary years of life without the redeeming power of the Gospel of Christ, we have found out and burn with a consuming flame to make it known to all men. If you have a lot of philosophical doubts and negatives, better keep silent—the world has doubts enough of its own. But if you have a living experience of a power that saves and brings genuine and abiding satisfaction to the human heart, speak out for the world is waiting for your message! We know that Jesus Christ is able to save, therefore, we speak. May we ever continue to speak with a white flame of con viction. him what it is. Many readers get out of a verse just what they first put in, and that may be all of man’s wisdom and not at all the mind of God. We must go to the Word of God therefore with the humility, simplicity, and receptiv ity of a little child. But the question is, also, what kind of a child; and the answer is, a child of God; and if a child of God, then must the Spirit of God be the Light in which to study the words and works of God. The written Word is like the Word made flesh, divine and human, and it must be studied with the light of the divine Spirit in the human. God alone can show God. This is the axiom in the study of the two books, God is, (Heb. 11:6). But more needful to study truly is it to know not only that God is, but that He is the Father, and the student and reader His child. The “natural man re- ceiveth not the things of the Spirit of God,” whether re vealed in the Bible or in nature, for the flower and the Cross teach the same lesson, trust in God; but scientists rarely read the lessons from the lily and the bird which Jesus, full of the Spirit of God, read (Luke 12:22-28; 1 Cor. 9:10; Ps. 119:18; Amos 4:13; John 1:1-3; 1:14; 1:18; 3:16-18). God’s Word is thus written for His children and must be received humbly and reverently and eagerly, and in the absolute faith in which a child takes the word of his father. Always then take for granted that God is. Never try to prove it. It is Father’s book. He wrote it Himself. He wrote it for us. Believe every word of it, or we shall never get the good of it. Men think prophecy is a dark subject and the only use of it is to prove that God knew something beforehand, and that He has not lied to us. Prophecy is to teach God’s children His purposes. A person may think he knows all about the Bible be cause he has read it through six or seven times. But this may be mere surface work. I may go through a country on an express train several times, and still know nothing of it. To walk through it and get acquainted with its
Prof. George Romanes was one of the most highly re spected scientists and thinkers of recent years. He was recognized as one of the most brilliant evolutionists of his day. He honestly thought that he could not be a thor ough-going scientist and believe in God through Christ. But he lived long enough to discover that this conclusion was not reached because he was a thorough-going and com prehensive thinker but because he arbitrarily persisted in ignoring half the facts of life in reaching his conclusions. It was not thoroughness but the lack of it that closed out Christ and the Bible from his thinking. Among the last things that he wrote before he died are these words— “It Is By God Decreed “Fame shall not satisfy the highest need” ' “It has been my lot to know not a few of the famous men of our generation and I have always observed that this is profoundly true. Like all other ‘moral’ satisfactions, this soon palls by custom, and as soon as our end of dis tinction is reached, another is pined for. There is no finality to rest in, while disease and death are always stand ing in the background. Custom may even blind men to their own misery, so far as not to make them realize what is wanting; yet the want is there. I take it then as un-» questionably true that this whole negative side of the sub Dr. ErdmanS-who was only recently called to his well- earned eternal reward-—had passed the octogenarian mark by several years. He was for several years Secretary of the famous “Niagara Bible Conference,” in its early years, in which were associated such men as Brookes, Needham, Whittle, Gordon, Pierson, Moorehead, Moody, Munhall and others of like char acter. Of this company of worthies, the last named, Rev. L. W. Munhall, himself over eighty years of age, is now the only survivor. H HERE are two books of God—Nature and the Bible. Creation and Redemption are the two works of God, and the works are words, (John 14:10). Both Creation and Redemption lead to faith in God, (John 3:12; 3:31; Luke 12:22-28; Ps. 119: 64; Rom. 10:17-18). Both should be studied in the same way. If it seems surprising to discuss the methods of Bible study at so late a day after it has been in the hands of men for hundreds of years, let us remember the mar vellous discoveries of natural science fall within the last two centuries, and are due to a change of the methods of investigation. Have we studied the Bible as scientists now investigate nature? Science creates no new facts, theology no truths; all is finished for man to search out. How shall he search out the work of Creation and the work of Redemption? I. The Spirit The spirit in which to study is that of a child. Lord Ba con said: “One must enter the kingdom of the natural sci ences as one enters the kingdom of heaven, like a little child.” A child is humble, trustful, docile, without prepos sessions, theories or fixed opinions. The world before it is like to an Adam,—new and fresh. If a botanist finds a strange flower, he lets the flower tell him what it is; he has neither knowledge nor name for it; what it is, becomes, or rather is its name; if a mineralogist meets a strange stone he asks it questions, and puts into a stone only what he first gets out; in lik« manner a Bible student must wait on a verse or text or epistle or any book or part thereof to tell
H o^ to Studÿ the Bible By the late Rev. W. J. Erdman, D. D.
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