September, 1935
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human. I see all kinds of people reading it, and every man finds it was written for him alone. Show me one phase of life that the Bible has not anticipated and ad dressed. It puts our thoughts into words; it fills our needs; and it teaches us the only prayers that God can answer.” R ic h e s U n end ing The Bible is inexhaustible. I was told once that the greatest authority on Plato in the modern world, a professor in one of our greatest universities, whose name I do not choose to mention, confessed to an intimate friend of his that, after forty years, he could not say that Plato gave him the thrills and the satisfaction that he had found in this philosopher’s pages in middle life. Sir Robertson Nicoll said that he could no longer read the Waverley Novels, because, before he turned a page, he knew exactly what was to be found there. The very author of the Waverley Novels himself once said of the Bible: ■“The most learned, acute, and intelligent student cannot, in the longest life, obtain an entire knowledge of this one volume. The more deeply he works the mine, the richer and more abundant he finds the ore; new light continually beams from this heavenly knowledge, to direct the conduct and illustrate the work of God and the ways of men; and he will at last leave the world confessing that the more he studied the Scriptures, the fuller con viction he had of his own ignorance and of their inestimable value.” The greatest expository preacher of the English world today, Dr. G. Camp bell Morgan, said, some time ago: “If you should live and preach for half a cen-: tury, or a century, you would never be able to exhaust the thing that is yours as a deposit.” The late Professor David Smith, with whose views we dó not, of course, always agree, but who has left us many beautiful chapters on the Gospel records, shortly before he died, made this remarkable confession: “Tor forty years the study of the Holy Scriptures has been my daily employment; and it is wonder ful to me how their glory has shone ever brighter in my eyes. Even as each suc- ■cessive generation since the world began has discovered fresh wonder in the Book of Creation, so has fresh light kept break ing from the pages of the Book of Grace, and there is still, for eyes illumined by the Holy Spirit, even larger light to break through. What other literature could one study for a lifetime, only to realize that he has touched but its fringes? Where else could one find, week after week, for a quarter of a century, messages of com fort and hope and peace for all the diverse need of the human heart ? The Scriptures háve grown more precious to me with every passing year, more truly divine, more surely the living Word of the liv ing God.”
We search the world for truth, we cull The good, the pure, the beautiful, From graven stone and written scroll, From the old flower-fields of the soul, And, weary seekers for the best, We come back laden from our quest, To find that all the sages said Is in the Book our mothers read. — J O H N G REEN LEAF WHITTIER. The first thing the child of God has to do morning by morning is to obtain food for his inner man . . . What is the food for the inner man? Not prayer, but the Word of God; and here again, not the simple reading of the Word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe, but considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts. — G EO RG E MULLER. All that I have taught of art, everything that I have written, every greatness that has been in any thought of mine, what ever I have done in my life, has simply been due to the fact that when I was a child my mother daily read with me a part of the Bible, and daily made me learn a part of it by heart. That I count confidently the most precious and, upon the whole, the one essential part of all my education. — JO H N RUSKIN. e One of the wonders of the Bible is its inexhaustibility. It is like a seed. You can tell how many acorns are on an oak, but vou cannot tell how many oaks are in an acorn . . . . The depth of the Bible in infinite; its height is infinite. Millions of readers and writers, age after age, have dug in this unfathomable mine, and its depths are still unex hausted. Age after age it has generated, with everincreasing creative power, ideas and plans, and schemes, and themes, and books . . . . Another wonder is its nonimprovableness. You cannot gild gold. You cannot paint rubies. You cannot bright en diamonds. And no artist can touch with final touch this finished Word of God. This proud-pinnacled century can add nothing to it. It stands as the sun in the sky . . . . It has the Glory of God. — C A N O N DYSON HAGUE.
A dequate to t h e D eepest N eeds The Word of God alone convicts of sin. The Word of God alone is able to make us wise unto salvation, and bring us into a living 1 knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Word of God alone is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our pathway in the hour when sin has dark ened our life, in the hour when the doubts and criticisms of men have darkened our mind, in the hour when death draws a curtain, and when we long to know some thing of the life to come. It has no rival. No book has ever been published and no book ever will appear that will ever satisfy men as does the Word of God, because it is that which alone can speak with authority to us concerning the deepest problems of life. Men will come back to it, if the Lord tarries. Just as Belshazzar found all of the wise men of his kingdom unable to interpret the awful sentence of doom written upon the wall of his palace the night of his death, and was compelled to call in Daniel, in whom was the Spirit of the living God, so will men today be compelled to listen to the prophets of the Lord if they are ever to find a solution for the mysterious interrogations that con tinually confront contemporary man in a confusion which is deepening and fear- begetting. G uarding A gainst S a ta n ’ s W iles We are living in times.of deception, religious deception, moral deception, the latter days of this Age of Grace. These deceptions are born of Satan himself. They are promoted through his evil agents. They are propagated by men who, though they may not even believe in him, are his subjects and his mouthpieces (cf. 1 Tim. 4:1, 2), There is deliverance, from the deceptions today of false Christs, false prophets, and false teachers, of the denial that Christ has come in the flesh, only in the Word of God. As temptations multi ply and a life of holiness becomes increas ingly difficult, as the world presses more and more severely upon us, we need, against the principalities and powers, and the rulers of the darkness of this world, the very sword of the Spirit, which is nothing else than the Word of.. God (Eph. 6 : 10-17). Surely it must be al ways the foundation of our church. Surely it must be the truth which we alone ex pound. Surely it must be first in our thinking and first in our reading. We must be more than conquerors in this subtle temptation of our modern day to warp our thinking, to starve our own souls, to secularize our viewpoint, to im poverish our people, to expose them to dangers they cannot resist, this temptation to give first attention to the books of men, and a minor place in our daily program to the eternal Word of God. [Continued on page 334]
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