THE KING'S BUSINESS
51
Sure Word of Prophecy By Rev. Dr. G. F. Pentecost.
J UST now we are face to face with a question, or rather a series of questions, which give us no anxiety and awaken in our breasts no fear, and yet they are questions which are crucial regarding the place the Bible is to hold in our faith. Briefly, the question is whether we have a book at all which is worth circulating. It is at home more than abroad—I mean in England and in Germany and in America (that larger England)—that the Bible has its chiefest and most deadly enemies. It is here at home that the conviction is that it is God's book, and the book of God is sought to be weakened by all the arts and artifices o f. unbelieving skepticism. So confident have we been that the Bible needed no defense, and that it was its own best argument, that we have been some- what careless in repelling the assaults which have been and are still being made upon it. We are told that in the face of the culture and scientific attainments of the last decade of the nineteenth century, an era of culture and scientific achievement, of which we are all more or less proud, that traditional faith in the Bible as the infallible Word of God is not so well founded as our fathers thought, and that before the science of literary, criticism much that we have accepted as God's inspired Word is nothing more than religious tradition and the literary relic of a people with extra- ordinary religious aspirations. r?This seems an easy and cavalier way of' disposing of the Bible, which may be satisfactory to some people of literary tendencies. But we are not for ourselves ready to give up the traditional faith of the centuries upon so insufficient a criticism. We would not hinder the utmost efforts of the critics, (friendly ( ?) or hostile; nor do we fear to face any investigation into the foundations of our faith; only, we decline to accept hypothesis for fact, and an assumed minor premise for demon- stration. We believe upon the whole that the Bible is its own best witness, and until that witness is impeached beyond question we shall "cling to the Bible." ' • ' • • • • ' . ' " ' That the Bible is the most wonderful book in the world, I think even the critics will allow. That it came into existence in some way .we must accept, since it is here. That it claims to have been written by holy men of old Who were moved by the Holy Spirit or the Spirit of Christ, which was in them, is asserted. "That many of the individual writers testified that the word's which they spoke and wrote were received directly from God is also cl°ar. Tohn Wesley had a short method with certain infidels of his day. His proposition was simply as follows: The Bible must have been written by men or angels. Leaving angelic authorship out of the question, it remains that it was either written by good men or bad men. Well, let us suppose it was written by bad men. The answer to that proposition is that bad men neither would nor could have written so good a book. Then let us try the other proposition—that it was written by good men. Well, then, if the Bible is not true, it is impossible to conceive that good men would or could have written so bad a book. For-if the Bible is not. true, it is the most stupendous fraud ever perpetrated upon the human race. Good men
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