Obviously we must interpret, and at times correct, the less developed by the more perfect consciousness of God.  The Scriptures, like the land in which their scenes are laid, are a land of hills and valleys, of lofty peaks of spiritual elevation and of dark ravines of human passion and doubt and cruelty; and to view it as a level plain of religious equality is to make serious mistakes. Ecclesiastes is by no means on the same level with Isaiah, nor Proverbs with the Sermon on the Mount.  Doctrines and principles that are drawn from texts chosen at random from all parts of the Bible are sure to be unworthy statements of the highest fellowship with God.

Nor does mere chronological rearrangement of the material do justice to the progress; there was loss as well as gain.  All mountain roads on their way to the summit go down as well as up; and their advance must be judged not from their elevation at any particular point, but from their successful approach towards their destination.  The experiences of Israel reach their apex in the faith of Jesus and of His immediate followers; and they find their explanation and unity in Him.  In form the Jewish Bible, unlike the Christian, has no climax; it stops, ours ends.  Christians judge the progress in the religious experience of Israel by its approximation to the faith and purpose of Jesus.

The Bible is a selected record of religious experience.  Old Testament historians often refer to other books which have not been preserved; and there were letters of St. Paul which were allowed to perish, and gospels, other than our four, which failed to gain a place in the Canon.  A discriminating instinct was at work, judging between writings and writings.  We know little of the details of the process by which it compiled the Old Testament.  The Jewish Church spoke of its Scriptures as “the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings”; and it is probable that in this order it made collections of those books which it found expressed and reproduced its faith.  In the time of Jesus the Old Testament, as we know it, was practically complete, although there still lingered some discussion whether Esther, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs were sacred books.  We should like to know far more than students have yet discovered of the reasons which Jewish scholars gave for admitting some and rejecting other writings; but, whatever their alleged reasons, the books underwent a struggle for recognition, and the fittest, according to the judgment of the corporate religious experience of the devout, survived.