Oats, peas, beans, and barley grows,
  Where you, nor I, nor nobody knows.

We have not only to collate the manuscripts we possess and try to reconstruct the likeliest text, but when we know what the authors probably wrote, we must press back of their language and ideas to the religious experience they attempt to express.

As writers the Biblical authors do not claim a special divine assistance.  Luke, in his preface to his gospel, merely asserts that he has taken the pains of a careful historian, and Paul and his various amanuenses did their best with a language in which they were not literary experts.  The Bible reader often has the impression that its authors’ religious experience, like Milton’s sculptured lion, half appears “pawing to get free his hinder parts.”  Or, to change the metaphor, now one portion of their communion with God is brought to view and now another, as one might stand before a sea that was illuminated from moment to moment by flashes of lightning.

The Bible is the record of an historic religious experience—­that of Israel which led up to the consciousness of God in Jesus and His followers.  The investigation of the sources of Hebrew religion has shown that many of its beliefs came from the common heritage of the Semitic peoples; and there are numerous points of similarity between Israel’s faith and that of other races.  This ought not to surprise us, since its God is the God of all men.  But the more resemblances we detect, the greater the difference appears.  The same legend in Babylonia and in Israel has such unlike spiritual content; the identical rite among the Hebrews and among their neighbors developed such different religious meaning.  This particular stream of religious life has a unity and a character of its own.  Its record brings into the succeeding centuries, and still produces in our world, a distinctive relationship with God.

The Bible is a record of progressive religious experience.  As every poet with a new message has to create his own public, so it would seem that God had slowly to evolve men who would respond to His ever higher inspirations.  When scholars arrange for us the Biblical material in its historical order, the advance becomes much more apparent.  Its God grows from a tribal deity to the God of the whole world; from a localized divinity dwelling on Sinai or at Jerusalem, as the Greeks placed their gods on Olympus, into the Spirit who fills heaven and earth; from “a man of war” and a tribal lawgiver into the God whose nature is love.  “By experience,” said Roger Ascham, “we find out a short way by a long wandering,” and it took at least ten centuries to pass from the God of Moses to the Father of Jesus Christ.