Inventive genius has multiplied the power of a human arm and supplied the masses with comforts of which the rich did not dare to dream a few centuries ago.  Science is ferreting out the hidden causes of disease and teaching us how to prolong life.  In every line, except in the line of character-building, the world seems to have been made over, but these marvellous changes only emphasize the fact that man, too, must be born again, while they show how impotent are material things to touch the soul of man and transform him into a spiritual being.  Wherever the moral standard is being lifted up—­wherever life is becoming larger in the vision that directs it and richer in its fruitage, the improvement is traceable to the Bible and to the influence of the God and Christ of whom the Bible tells.

The atheist and the materialist must confess that man should be able to produce a better book to-day than man, unaided, could have produced in any previous age.  The fact that they have tried, time and time again, only to fail each time more hopelessly, explains why they will not—­why they cannot—­accept the challenge thrown down by the Christian world to produce a book worthy to take the Bible’s place.

They have begged to their God to answer with fire—­appealed to inanimate matter with an earnestness that is pathetic; they have employed in the worship of blind force a faith greater than religion requires, but their God is asleep.  How long will they allow the search for strata of stone and fragments of fossil and decaying skeletons that are strewn around the house to absorb their thoughts to the exclusion of the architect who planned it all?  How long will the agnostic, closing his eyes to the plainest truths, cry, “Night, night,” when the sun in his meridian splendour announces that noon is here?

Those who reject the Bible ignore its claim to inspiration.  This in itself makes them enemies of the Book of books, because the Bible characters profess to speak by inspiration, and what they say bears the stamp of the supernatural.  “Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21).

Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.  But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God:  for they are foolishness unto him:  neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned (1 Cor. 2:13-14).

Those who reject the Bible ignore the spirit that pervades it, the atmosphere that envelopes it, the harmony of its testimonies and the unity of its structure, despite the fact that it is the product of many writers during many centuries.  Its parts were not arranged by man, but prearranged by the Almighty.

Those who reject the Bible also ignore the prophecies and their fulfillment—­“History written in advance”—­proof that appeals irresistibly to the open mind.