were done of old must be possible to-day. If they are possible they must be possible according to a law, and if there is such a law it must be our part to discover it. It is this discovery, this re-discovery which, it seems to me, the modern Christian world is making through the knowledge of God as Dynamic Energy and Practical Working Force. There is much talk to-day of the need of a new spiritual awakening that will save our world. This, I suppose, is what the talk means first of all-the finding of the Universal Father, who will adjust injustices, reconcile enmities, make the crooked straight, and bring to pass what now seems impossible. To find Him we have many agencies. History helps; science helps; education helps; our own thinking helps; the churches help. But the Bible, read without exaggerations, and by the light of what I may call our sanctified common sense, probably helps most of all. I CHAPTER II THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE I F the Bible is the record of man's prog ress in the knowledge of God, it is essen tial to understand some at least of the processes by which it has reached its position of authority. Where so much is claimed, the credentials become the more important; and though it is impossible to deal exhaustively with so large a subject in so limited a space, some lines of suggestion may be sketched. There were years during which the subject of the inspiration of the Bible was to me personally a puzzle. In what I had been taught as to God's taking possession of the minds and pens of certain individuals to produce work which would guide the world into absolute truth I could see little or no reason. The process seemed so woefully roundabout. If He was doing this at all, why should He not have made the result more lucid? Why should He have strewn His course with traps and snares and stumbling-blocks? The Holy Ghost which had indued Moses or David or Paul with an authority different in essence from that of all but their colleagues in producing Holy Writ could as easily as not have made the issue so clear that there would have been no wrangling. A series of divinely dictated books which perplexed the world almost as much as they helped it struck me as perhaps the strangest of all the strange phenomena which religion placed before us. And yet I held fast to the inspiration. The more I read of the Bible the more sure of it I |