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The Fundamentals In the Bible God speaks, and speaks not only by proxy. Leviticus is a signal example of this. Chapter after chapter of Leviticus begins: “And the Lord spake, saying;” and so it runs on through the chapter. Moses is simply a listener, a scribe. The self-announced Speaker is God. In the Bible God Himself comes down and speaks, not in the Old Testament alone, and not alone by proxy. “The New Testament presents us,” says Dean Burgon, “with the august spectacle of the Ancient of Days holding the entire volume of the Old Testament Scriptures in His hands, and interpreting it of Himself. He, the Incarnate Word, who was in the begin- ning with God, and who was God—t hat same Almighty One is set forth in the Gospels as holding the ‘volume of the Book’ in His hands,, as opening and unfolding it, and explaining it everywhere of Himself.” Christ everywhere receives the Scripture, and speaks of the Scriptures, in their entirety—the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms, the whole Old Testament canon—as the living Oracle of God. He accepts and He endorses everything written, and even makes most prominent those miracles which infidelity regards as most incredible. And He does all this upon the ground of the authority of God. He passes over the writer— leaves him out of account. In all His quotations from the Old Testament, He mentions but four of the writers by name. The question with Him is not a question of the reporter, but of the Dictator. And this position of our Saviour which exalted Scripture as the mouthpiece of the living God was steadily maintained by the Apostles and the apostolic Church. Again and over again, in the Book of the Acts, in all the Epistles, do we find such expressions as “He saith,” “God saith,” “The oracles of God,” “The Holy Ghost saith,” “Well spake the Holy Ghost by Esaias the prophet.” The Epistle to the Hebrews furnishes a splendid illustra- tion of this, where, setting forth the whole economy of the
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