The Fundamentals - 1917: Vol.2

50 The Fundamentals its Author, and truth without error as its matter. The man­ ner in which the Old Testament is quoted in the New is crowning demonstration of its verbal inspiration. That sub­ jectless verb, “saith” (rendered, “It saith”), that nominative, the “Scripture saith”, that personal subject, “He” ( “He saith”), that identification of God with the “Scripture,” ( “the Scripture foreseeing,” giving to it eyes, mouth and fore­ knowledge, as a living organism equal with God), that recog­ nition of the human writer, as “Hoses saith,” “David saith,” “Isaiah saith,” is a divinely governed authorship; therefore it is all one to say, “Moses saith,” “It saith,” “the Scripture saith”, “He saith”, since in all it is “God saith’’ —all this proves the “high place,” the estimate and conception which Christ, His Apostles, and the whole Jewish and Christian Church, had of the“Scriptures”, and that they are a God-breathed,: oracular Book, created by the Breath of God—a verbally in­ spired Book, whose “words” were the “Words of God’’, in­ fallible* authoritative, final, the court of last appeal, the very “Utterance” and “Voice”s “of God,” who spoke in time past in the Prophets, and who has spoken to us in these last days in His SonM“words” commanded to he written in the days of Moses and commanded to be written in the Apostles’ days —the Spirit promised “to guide,” to permit no lapse of “re­ membrance,’’ and to “reveal” the future. Such form of citation, quotation, reference, and allusion to the Old Testament came from the conception of the Scrip­ tures as the verbally inspired Book of God. It was by means of this specific and customary formula of quotation, Christ and His Apostles made known to the Church their exalted estimate of the “Volume of the Book.” On this ground alone arose all the high attributes ascribed to it—its Divine origin, sanctity, sublimity, infallibility, authority and sufficiency for mankind. This uniform emphasis of the Scriptures as the product of th e“Breath of God,” not mere “human literature,” as the critics would have it, nor a “human element” uncon-

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