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‘The mystery which … now is made manifest, and, by the scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations, for the obedience of faith.’
Rom_16:25-26
I. It is at once many books and one.—It is the product of many generations, yet immortally adjusted to all times. It is the literature of an Oriental nation, of a provincial Oriental nation, yet it is the Book of universal man; it proves itself to be so, more and yet more. Yes, reflect upon this profound paradox, which yet is solid fact.
II. How did this literature of a thousand years sum itself up at last into a Book?—What magic has made such a Library sublimely one work in moral character and bearing, one in its presentation of God, of man, of sin, of righteousness, of redemption? How did its vastly various types of literary form, its histories, poems, allegories, sermons, biographies, predictions, from one aspect of a hundred minds, so coalesce as to impress nevertheless the reader, the reader touched by a sympathy with the Bible, genuine, however imperfect, as being all the while the work of One Mind? Does not reason answer, as loudly at least as faith, that this is so because here is ‘the finger of God’?
III. The Book is abundantly human.—But it absolutely refuses to be rightly understood as merely human. It casts off from itself, by its own essential phenomena, the poor and shallow naturalism—shallow, however brilliantly presented—shallow, however surrounded with a mass of learning—which denies to it the profound presence of an element properly miraculous. The Book asserts the miraculous in it by its vast and coherent structure. So it prepares us to credit, to embrace, to adore the miraculous, not only in its story and in its prophecy, but also in its results of moral miracle upon the soul of man.
IV. There is no tenet on which the scattered writers of the first Christian ages are more emphatically united, semper, ubique, omnes, than on the Divine character, the supreme authority, the glorious worth for our whole spiritual need, of the Holy Scriptures. St. Chrysostom speaks for all his coevals and all his predecessors when he calls upon all men who can to buy the Scriptures, and to read them. He speaks as a voice of the Church when he says, in his preamble to the Romans, that all the tumults and errors of religious thought, all the epidemic of heresies, all the weary, miserable conflicts within the Church, our disorders of life, ‘our unfruitfulness of toil,’ arise from ignorance of the Scriptures. It is he, if I mistake not, the great expository preacher, never weary of his Bible, who says (or if the treatise is not his, it is from his school) that in the last and most trying days of Christendom all else shall fail; the institutions of the Church shall totter; but the Scriptures shall be the stay of the Church, and her portion for ever, yea, even in that dark hour.
V. To those Scriptures let us return, with the reverential study which understands them because, in the fear of God, it sympathises with them. In company with them let us live, and let us die. And meanwhile let us take our part with thankfulness and with hope in any work which seeks, ‘through the Scriptures of the prophets’ and the apostles, to ‘make known the mystery’ of redeeming love ‘to all the nations, for the obedience of faith,’ and for the hope of glory.
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Bishop H. C. G. Moule.
Illustration‘Within Christendom, and beyond it, are amply, magnificently, visible to-day its promised effects. “The entrance of the Word giveth light”; it “converteth the soul”; it “testifies of Christ”; it “prepares His way.” That “way” the Bible, read altogether apart from the missionary’s teaching, is preparing in innumerable hearts in India, Mahometan and Hindoo. And one mysterious story has reached me, on evidence which I think indubitable, of a community of Jews in Central Arabia, so isolated that they had never heard even a rumour of the name Jesus of Nazareth and who then, when their Rabbi received, from Cairo, sent by loving stealth, a copy of the New Testament in Hebrew, welcomed its witness at once, and owned Jesus as their true Messiah, and worshipped in His Name.’