“I conceive a man as always spoken to from behind, and unable to turn his head and see the speaker.  In all the millions who have heard the voice, none ever saw the face.  That well-known voice speaks in all languages, governs all men; and none ever caught a glimpse of its form.  If the man will exactly obey it, it will adopt him, so that he shall not any longer separate it from himself in his thought; he shall seem to be it, he shall be it.  If he listen with insatiable ears, richer and greater wisdom is taught him, the sound swells to a ravishing music, he is borne away as with a flood, he is the fool of ideas, and leads a heavenly life.  But if his eye is set on the things to be done, and not on the truth that is still-taught, and for the sake of which the things are to be done, then the voice grows faint, and at last is but a humming in his ears."[24]

We have thus seen in the Bible an ancient and noble literature, the literature of a noble race, the literature supremely influencing and enriching Christian civilization; demanding, therefore, our rational reverence, as constituting a truly Sacred Book.

We have seen in the Old Testament the literature of the people of religion, commissioned with its normal evolution; writings charged with deep religiousness; the records of the various moods and tenses through which religion grew continuously and insistently toward perfection, in an organic process watched and directed by a Higher Power than man.  We have seen in the New Testament the record of the realization of this long-sought aim of the people of religion; the story of the Divine Man, who breathed religion out into perfection, and the writings that depict the bodying around Him of the Universal Church, the Church in whose truth and life is growing the religion of the future, “the Christ that is to be.”

The fuller knowledge of our age, in evanishing the unreal Bible restores the real Bible.  It is the record of the visioning and embodiment of the Human Ideal, the Divine Image—­The Christ.  It is the Providentially prepared Hand Book of religion in whose rich and varied phases of ethical and spiritual thought all men may find the nourishment they need.  It is the spiritual reality our fathers rightly felt, but wrongly expressed, when they called it as a whole The Word of God.  It holds the words proceeding from out of the mouth of God on which man liveth.  It bodies in “letters” The Word of God, embodied in the flesh in Jesus Christ the Lord.  It records a real revelation.  This revelation, however, denies no other revelation.  It affirms the fact of the withdrawal of a veil in each new knowledge won; the fact that man has felt in calling the new knowledge a discovery; and it interprets this unveiling as Tennyson has learned of it to do: 

    “And out of darkness come the hands
    That reach through nature, moulding man.”

These books are the products of a real inspiration.  This inspiration, however, denies no other inspiration.  It interprets the sense of a higher than human influence in the noblest searchers after truth, throughout the world, in every action of the intellect.  It affirms the validity of that consciousness.[25]