* * * * *

It is no part of my aim to say a final word on any of these great truths, even if I deemed myself capable thereof.

[Sidenote:  Aim and Intent.]

[Sidenote:  Confirmation by Experience.]

[Sidenote:  Effect on the Bible.]

[Sidenote:  The Coming of Revelation.]

But it is my hope to point out the way in which we find our faith strengthened, and to show that the great truths of Christianity will survive the most radical criticism of the Scriptures.  Every one of these truths has increasing confirmation as we accumulate the teachings of science, history, and religious experience.  The Bible will never be superseded, because it contains the struggle of every type of soul Godward, and because its record of what the Lord said and did; of what He was, and of what the apostles thought Him to be, stands as the verification of what we know Him to be.  The Bible and experience are mutually illuminating and corroborative.  It is possible that the Church receiving the deposit of truth orally from the apostles, might have passed that truth down orally, and by her ordinances, illustratively as she did, until the Gospels were written; as she must do now in lands where the people can not read, having no written language.  To avoid, however, the defects of human memory and to accumulate a standard by which teaching and experience should be verified, “God who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in times past unto the fathers, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son;” through His Son to the apostles; and by the apostles and their successors to us; those successors being not those made so by the touch of a human hand; but by God’s transforming grace, giving to every believer power and privilege “to speak the things we do know.”  “We having the same spirit of faith; according as it is written, I believed, and therefore have I spoken, we also believe, and therefore speak; knowing that He which raised up the Lord Jesus, shall raise us up also by Jesus, and shall present us with you.  For all things are for your sakes, that the abundant grace might, through the thanksgiving of many, redound to the glory of God.”