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The Fundamentals months of reading to go but once through their contents. Bagster prints the Four Gospels in 82 pages; the Oxford, in 104; Amer. Rev., 120. In the Bagster, Matthew has but 23; Mark, 13; Luke, 25; and John, 21. Less than one hundred pages of the Four Gospels against more than five thousand four hundred of the four “Lives.” Countless volumes, great and small, in the form of com mentary, exposition, notes, harmony and history are written on these brief records. How happens it that such stores of wisdom and knowledge lie garnered in these short pieces? Who taught the evangelists this superhuman power of ex pansion and contraction, of combination and separation, of revelation in the words and more revelation below the words ? Who taught them so to describe the person and work of the Lord Jesus as that the description satisfies the most illiterate and the most learned, is adapted to minds of the most limited capacity, and to those of the widest grasp? Whence did they derive the infinite skill they display in grouping together events, discourses, and actions in such fashion that vividly before us is the deathless beauty of a perfect Life? There is but one answer to these questions, there can be no other. The Spirit of the living God filled their minds with His unerring wisdom and controlled their human speech. To that creative Spirit who has peopled the world with living organisms so minute that only the microscope can reveal their presence, it is not hard to give us in so brief a compass the sublime portrait of the Son of Man. To men it is impossible. IN SP IRA T ION EXTENDS THROUGHOUT T H E BIBLE Now if it be conceded that the Four Gospels are inspired, we are compelled by every rule of right reason to concede the inspiration of the rest of the New Testament. For all the later communications contained in the Acts,’ the Epistles, and the Revelation, are already in germ form in the Gospels, just as the Pentateuch holds in germ the rest of the Old Testament.
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