Testimony of the Scriptures to Themselves 53 In the line with the fact, again it is said that the word came to the writers without any study—“ suddenly”—as to Amos where he is taken from following the flock. Again; when the word thus came to the prophets they had not the power to conceal it. I t was “like a fire in their bones” which must speak or write, as Jeremiah says, or consume its human receptacle. And to make this more clear, it is said that holy men were pheromenoi, “moved,” or rather carried along in a super- natural ecstatic current—a delectatio scribendi. They were not left one instant to their wit, wisdom, fancies, memories, or judgments either to order, or arrange, or dispose, or write out. They were only reporters, intelligent, conscious, passive, plastic, docile, exact, and accurate reporters. They were like men who wrote with different kinds of ink. They colored their work with tints of their own personality, or rather God colored it, having made the writer as the writing, and the writer for that special writing; and because the work ran through them just as the same water, running through glass tubes, yellow, green, red, violet, will be yellow, violet and green, and red. God wrote the Bible, the whole Bible, and the Bible as a whole. He wrote each word of it as truly as He wrote the Decalogue on the tables of stone. Higher criticism tells us—the “New Departure” tells us— that Moses was inspired, but the Decalogue not. But Exodus and Deuteronomy seven times over declare that God stretched down the tip of His finger from heaven and left the marks, the gravements, the cut characters, the scratches on the stones. (Ex. 24:12.) “I will give thee tables of stone, command- ments, which I have written” (Ex. 31:18). “And He gave unto Moses, upon Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone written with the finger of God” (Ex. 32:16). The tables were the work of God and the writing was the writing o f God, graven upon the tables. (Deut. 4:12). “The Lord
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