THEOLOGY IN OUTLINE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 285, 2 December 1933, Page 2 (Supplement)

THEOLOGY IN OUTLINE.

HOW THE BIBLE INTERPRETS. (II.) (By S.) "How do you know the Bible is true?" some one asked an aged saint. "What proofs have you of its truth?" "My own experience," was the reply. "The cxpericnco of my heart." "Oh," said questioner contemptuously, "Your experience! That is nothing to me. "That may be," she quietly returned, "but it is everything to me." in the library at Abbotsford one day during his last illness, Sir Walter Scott, Lockliart tells us, expressed a wish to have something read to him. On being asked what book he would like, he replied, "Need you ask? There is but one." There were nearly 20,000 volumes in the cases round the walls, but, for him these closing days, there was but one, and it was from that one he derived the strength and consolation he craved, the freedom from distracting cares, and the ability tq, meet calmly and hopefully the great change that was before him. Here is one answer to the question, "Why do we believe in the Bible'." Alike to a simple woman and a great genius, the Bible was the book of books, no collection of fables, no mere record of how men worked their way from primitive religious ideas and primitive moral ideas to the highest to which the human race has attained, but the oracles of God, and that simple woman, and that great genius are representative of untold multitudes. Heine tells us that it was his reading of the Bible that saved him from the atheism to which, for a time, he had given way, and he of it in glowing terms. "What a book it is? It strikes its roots into the very depths of creation, and towers aloft into the mysterious blue of Heaven. The whole drama of humanity is to be found in it, and Christ sheds "the warm rays of His lovo over the whole earth." How many other men of genius have written in similar terms of this remarkable book. We know the Bible has come to us through human beings like ourselves, and, that passing through many hands in the writing, transcribing, and translating of it, it is not without flaw. But that is natural, and no more affects the vital truths we find in it than the spots on the sun affect its light and heat. Where do we find purity and morality so high as in the men and women who know it and accept it as inspired by God? There are difficulties in it. There are also' difficulties in Nature and in Providence. In the main, it is as simple as it is deep. There are bits of it that are dull and uninspiring. But what book was ever written of which that was not true? It would be strange if, in a volume of such magnitude, and range, and diversity it were otherwise. What light it throws on questions which our human knowledge and human philosophies leave in uncertainty. »How wonderfully and uniquely it interprets and responds to what is deepest in us, and satisfies the cry of our soul. What a soothing balm for the wounds of life it supplies. With what greatness it invests life and human nature. How real it makes God to us, and Jesus. To read it is to get iron into our blood, and, when we have allowed ourselves to get lost, to be restored to God and the universe. One could multiply answers to the question why we believe in the Bible, but these are enough.