And in speaking of the authority of the Bible we cannot forget that it is not for Christians the supreme authority.  “One is your Master, even Christ.”  We must be cautious in speaking of the Bible, as we commonly do, as “the word of God.”  That title belongs to Jesus.  The Bible contains the word of God; He is for us the Word of God.  We dare not overlook His untrammelled attitude towards the Scriptures of His people, who let His own spiritual discernment determine whether a Scripture was His Father’s living voice to Him, or only something said to men of old time, and given temporarily for the hardness of hearts that could respond to no higher ideal.  As His followers, we dare not use less freedom ourselves.  We test every Scripture by the Spirit of Christ in us:  whatever is to us unchristlike in Joshua or in Paul, in a psalmist or in the seer on Patmos, is not for us the word of our God:  whatever breathes the Spirit of Jesus from Genesis to Revelation is to us our Father’s Self-revealing speech.

Nor do we think that God ceased speaking when the Canon of the Bible was complete.  How could He, if He be the living God?  “Truth,” said Milton, “is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.”  The fountain of God’s Self-revealing still streams.  Religious truth comes to us from all quarters—­from events of today and contemporaneous prophets, from living epistles at our side and the still small voice within; but as a simple matter of fact, its main flow is still through this book.  When we want God—­want Him for our guidance, our encouragement, our correction, our comfort, our inspiration—­we find Him in the record of these ancient experiences of His Self-unveiling.  When near his death, after years of agony on his bed, when he himself had become a changed man, Heinrich Heine wrote:  “I attribute my enlightenment entirely and simply to the reading of a book.  Of a book?  Yes! and it is an old homely book, modest as nature—­a book which has a look modest as the sun which warms us, as the bread which nourishes us—­a book as full of love and blessing as the old mother who reads in it with her trembling lips, and this book is the Book, the Bible.  With right is it named the Holy Scriptures.  He who has lost his God can find Him again in this book; and he who has never known Him, is here struck by the breath of the Divine Word.”

CHAPTER III

JESUS CHRIST

Three elements enter into every Christian’s conception of his Lord—­history, experience and reflection.  Jesus is to him a figure out of the past, a force in the present, and a fact in his view of the universe.  Whether we be discussing the Christ of Paul, or of the Nicene theologians, or of some thoughtful believer today, we must allow for the memory of the Man of Nazareth handed down from those who knew Him in the flesh, the acquaintance with the Lord of life resulting from personal loyalty to His will, and the explanation of this Lord reached by the mind, as, using the intellectual methods of its age, it tries to set His figure in its mental world.