The truth of the religious experiences recorded in the Bible is self-evidencing to him who shares these experiences, and to no one else.  The Bible has, in a sense, to create or evoke the capacities by which it is appreciated and verified.  It is inspired only to those who are themselves willing to be controlled by similar inspirations; it is the word of God only to those who have ears for God’s voice.  There is a difference between the phrases:  “It is certain,” and “I am certain.”  In other matters we appeal to the collective opinion of sane people; but such knowledge does not suffice in religion.  Our fellowship with God must be our own response to our highest inspirations.  The Bible is authoritative for us only in so far as we can say:  “I have entered into the friendship of the God, whose earlier friendship with men it records, and know Him, who speaks as personally to my conscience through its pages, as He spake to its writers.  The Spirit that ruled them, the Spirit of trust and service, controls me.”  This is John Calvin’s position.  “It is acting a preposterous part,” he writes in his Institutes, “to endeavor to produce sound faith in the Scriptures by disputations.  Religion appearing to profane men to consist wholly in opinion, in order that they may not believe anything on foolish or slight grounds, they wish and expect it to be proved that Moses and the prophets spake by divine inspiration; but as God alone is a sufficient witness of Himself in His own word, so also the word will never gain credit in the hearts of men, till it is confirmed by the testimony of the Spirit.”

If, then, the authority of the Bible depends upon the witness of the Spirit within our own souls, its authority has definite limits.  We can verify spiritually the truth of a religious experience by repeating that experience; but we cannot verify spiritually the correctness of the report of some alleged event, or the accuracy of some opinion.  We can bear witness to the truthfulness of the record of the consciousness of shame and separation from God in the story of the fall of Adam and Eve; we must leave the question of the historicity of the narrative and the scientific view of the origin of the race in a single pair to the investigations of scholars.  Our own knowledge of Jesus Christ as a living Factor in our careers confirms the experience His disciples had of His continued intercourse with them subsequent to His crucifixion; but the manner of His resurrection and the mode in which post mortem He communicated with them must be left to the untrammelled study of historical students.  The religious message of a miraculous happening, like the story of Jonah or of the raising of Lazarus, we can test and prove:  disobedience brings disaster, repentance leads to restoration; faith in Christ gives Him the chance to be to us the resurrection and the life.  The reported events must be tested by the judgments of historic probability which are applied to all similar narratives, past