By FRANK E. GAEBELEIN* Stony Brook, Long Island, N. Y. Illustration by Ransom D. Marvin
G eorge D ouglas tells a story of a young man who was packing his trunk for his first long journey away from home. As a friend stood by, the young man packed one article after the other—his suits, shoes, clothes, books, and finally his tennis racket and balls. There remained just a little space about six inches by four inches. All the rest of the trunk was full. “What are you going to pack there?” asked the friend. “I have reserved this corner,” replied the young man, “to pack a guidebook, a lamp, a looking-glass, a volume of poems, a microscope, a telescope, several fine biogra phies, a package of love letters, a book of songs, some histories, a hammer, and a sword. You see, it’s all in the packing. I ’m going to put in that little space the Bible my mother gave me.” Now there is a great truth in this sim ple story. The Bible is all of the things the young man enumerated and much more. As the Psalmist said nearly 3,000 years ago, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” So the Bible re mains for us Christians today. It is the indispensable guide to life. It is our brief and fullest record of the Lord whom we love and serve. It tells us all the facts we know regarding Him. And therefore for any person, whether he be educated or un educated, to try to live without it is utter folly. Yet that is just what many are these days endeavoring to do. Unlike the young man packing his trunk, they take everything for their journey of life except the Bible, the one essential guidebook, the only spirit ual lamp and light. We Protestants have a single great spirit-
ual authority—the Bible, God’s written Word. Roman Catholicism claims the double authority of the Church and the Scriptures. But when the Reformation came, Protestantism threw off the yoke of tradi tion and the Roman Church. It is thus clear that if Protestantism loses the Bible, it has nothing final, no great spiritual author ity left. And the tragedy of the Protes tant church today is that this very thing is happening. Protestant America has lost and is losing its Bible. Thousands and thousands of church members are all too ignorant of the full contents of the marvel ous Book. To be sure, they may occasion ally hear it read in church on Sundays, but as a guide and power in their daily living it retains little place. It is a strange paradox that the most widely circulated book in the world is so little read. On the one hand there are the statistics of the great Bible societies. For instance, the American Bible Society, from 1816 to 1936, printed and circulated 30,- 673,159 copies of complete Bibles and 276,- 371,654 New Testaments and portions of the Bible. No one at all familiar with the facts could deny for a moment that the Bible is far and away the best seller of all books. Yet it remains true that the great majority of literate persons, not only in this country but in the world as well, have lost the Bible as a vital factor in their lives. How can the Protestant church and its individual membership find this Book in a more vital manner? How can Christians, to be more specific, rediscover the Bible? This article will offer three suggestions. They are not original; they have been tried and found effective by Christians through many years. But of them it is certainly true that, if sincerely followed, they are bound to make a difference in one’s per sonal, individual grasp of the divine Book.
"The Bible without the Spirit is a sundial by moonlight." — Coleridge.
R eading in L ogical S ections First of all, the Bible may be redis covered as a vital force in one’s life by the obvious method of reading it correctly. One of the most convincing proofs of the uniquely divine character of the Book is the fact that for centuries it has survived the most brutal mistreatment any book has had. It is safe to say that no other book has been so consistently read and studied w ith .such utter disregard of its literary form and basic content as has the Bible. Could the work of the modern novelist like H. G. Wells or Willa Cather, or the poetic dram atist like Shakespeare, or the lyric poet like Keats, survive being chopped up into small, arbitrary divisions and being read piecemeal as one takes medicine in small, homeopathic doses? Yet that is exactly what a very great many Christians are doing with their Bible. They think that a chapter from the Old Tes tament one day, and a few verses from the New Testament the next day, a short Psalm another day, and a bit of a Pauline Epis tle the following day, is real Bible reading. What is the result? One has but to examine the Bible of the average church member to see what the result is. Such an examination will reveal that the Book, if it bears marks of any considerable reading, indicates that the reading has been cen tered in the Psalms, certain favorite por tions of the Gospels, and possibly the Epistles. Where this method has been fol lowed, great tracts of the inspired Word of God have remained unexplored and thus unknown.
* Headmaster, The Stony Brook School.
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