168 The Fundamentals “The Bible is none other but the Word of God, not some part of it more and some part of it less so, but all alike the utterance of Him that sitteth upon the throne, absolute, fault less, unerring, supreme—‘The witness of God which He hath testified of His Son.’ ” The time is at hand when the haughtiness of man shall be brought low, and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day. Then the Word of God shall judge the critics. Meanwhile, the living Word shall continue to be the dis cerning companion of all who resort to it for the help which is not to be had elsewhere in this*world of the dying. In go ing to the Bible we never think of ourselves as going back to a book of the distant past, to a thing of antiquity; but we go to it as to a book of the present —a living book. And so in deed it is, living in the power of an endless life, and able to build us up and to give us an inheritance among all them that are sanctified. (Acts 20:32.) VIII. THE TRANSLATABILITY OF SCRIPTURE The Word of God manifests itself as. a living Word in the very unique property it has of adapting itself and its message to all peoples, and of speaking in all languages, tongues and dialects. The extreme mobility and adaptability of Scripture, as manifested in this way, is comparable only to the power which a living being has of making himself at home in dif ferent countries from that in which he was born. We have here again a characteristic which distinguishes the Bible from all other books, as any one may, with a little attention, clearly perceive. It is a universal rule that a book does not thrive except in the language in which it was writ ten. Men’s books will not always bear translation; and the greater the literary value of a book the more it is likely to suffer loss in being translated from one language into another. Change of locality is, to the great majority of books, abso lutely destructive.
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