By the Editor.,
W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.

The Expositor's Bible has been published in a period of exceptionally active work in Biblical criticism. A survey of recent study in the Old Testament and in the New by very competent scholars is supplied in this volume. I confine myself to general considerations. Whatever criticism has accomplished or has not accomplished, we may be sure that the supremacy and the finality of the Bible are as they were, and will continue secure and unassailable. The ultimate testimony that the Bible is the Word of God cannot be derived from external witness or from a process of reasoning. It is in the heart of the believer to whom the voice of God is personal, and it is given by the Holy Spirit that still bears witness in and with the Word. It is and has always been to the Church not a matter of probable evidence, but one of Divine certainty. If we could see the living Church! It would be much to see the Church Triumphant, and in a sense that privilege is ours. For we are come to Mount Zion where God has set His King, to the festal host and Church of the firstborn which are written in Heaven. Yet a hush hangs over the everlasting hills, and the light that falls on them now for us is but starlight to the glory that clothes them. But what if we could see the living in Christ, if the sheath of the Church Visible should suddenly fall away and the flower of the Church Invisible should unfold itself before our eyes. Those who have heard in His written Word the true voice of God are the Church Invisible, and it is to them and to them only that the conviction of its Divine riches is assured. But even for them—and in these days this is specially true—there are difficulties about the content, the meaning, and the form of Scripture. Upon these there are great differences, but there is ground on which we may all meet. There are arguments which appeal to every Christian heart for the finality of the Word of God.

We are in the first place, confronted by the fact of the permanent and inextinguishable life of the Bible. No engrossment of the general mind with secularities, no change in the methods of thought, no discovery of science, and no achievement of literature puts the Bible out of court. It and it alone ministers to the permanent and universal cravings of our being. Sir Thomas Browne puts it well: "Men's works have an age like themselves, and though they outlive their authors, yet have they a stint and period to their duration. This only is a work too hard for the teeth of time, and cannot perish but in the general flames when all things will confess their ashes." The words are as true as when they were written, and they will be as true at any future period, however long this frame of things may last. We will not even quarrel with the thought that the Bible itself will come to be no longer needed, for we shall in the end be content to have no Scripture but the Living Word Himself. Now it is this which sharply distinguishes the Bible from every other book. There are, said one, three classes of books. There is the book you read once, the book you read twice, and the book you read every year. There is besides the Book which you read constantly, which morning by morning, evening by evening, brings its message of help. Other books, even the greatest, exhaust their message. Take, for example, the sermons of Frederick Robertson. What startling freshness there was in them on a first reading! Go back to them now, and you find that very much of their message has passed into the substance of contemporary thought. The Bible has been and ever is yielding messages, and yet returning to it you ever find, and the generations ever find, that it has more to say. We may, indeed, read it heedlessly and find it old. But who that reads it with a wistful heart will ever have this experience? "I sometimes look back," said one, "to those simple days when my spiritual life was commencing, when I used to go forth to my labours with the New Testament in my pocket, that I might glance over its pages at the next leisure moment. I read it with fresh, unworn, unspeakable interest. It was like Adam's first walk in Paradise." It has been told of some saints whose minds had in their day roamed over the field of knowledge, that as life drew up to the end they read almost nothing except the Bible, feeling every time that they were only beginning to understand it.

The significance of this is not that the Bible is a great achievement of literature, not that it is the noblest and sublimest of all books, but that it is the final revelation of God. There is a dangerous form of apologetics which aims at establishing that the Bible is the most remarkable book in the world. That parts of the Bible are of the noblest literary beauty is certain. That some at least of the human authors were transcendently gifted is equally certain. For example, this is eminently true of the unknown author of the Book of Job, a book which, as Froude says, will be found at the last to tower above all the poetry of the world. It is so with the unknown author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who has been truly if quaintly, described as "a man of the first intellectual mark." It is true of St. Paul, whose intellect was very receptive, that even when most receptive, most powerful, an instrument, an organon, not a mere speaking trumpet. For St. Paul the glory of the Cross flooded the world, smote with death its principles and creeds, created new scenery, new horizons, new faiths, new understandings. But we cannot affirm all this about every author of the Bible or every part of it, and we need not do so. What we say is that this book and this book only contains all we know of God, all we shall know till the veil is rent. Let me emphasize this assertion. An American poet has said:

This is a statement that we meet with a blank denial. No text has been added to the Bible. No revelation of God has been given or will be given in addition to that within its covers. You say God has revealed Himself by His skill and power in nature. He has revealed Himself by His providence in history. He has revealed Himself in the individual life of believers. He has revealed Himself by His Spirit to His Church. He has in a sense inspired the books of devotion that are the treasures of the world. The Holy Spirit has promised to take of the things of Christ and show them to every believer. Yes, it is all true. But what has God said in nature, in Providence, in Christian experience, in Christian literature that He has not said first in the Bible? Take the most beautiful thought ever suggested by the profoundest Christian mind, and you will find it quietly folded in some word of Jesus, in some argument of an Apostle. This was the argument for the inspiration of the Gospel on which my old teacher, Dr. Robertson Smith, was specially wont to dwell. "We mean," he said, "that the Bible contains within itself a perfect picture of God's gracious relations to man, and that we have no need to go outside of the Bible history to know anything of God and His saving will toward us, that the whole growth of the true religion up to its perfect fulness is set before us in the record of God's dealings with Israel, culminating in the manifestation of Jesus Christ. History has not taught us that there is anything in true religion to add to the New Testament. We still stand in the nineteenth century where Christ stood in the first, or rather Christ stands as high above us as He did above His disciples, the perfect Master, the supreme Head of the fellowship of all true religion." Even so, as Christ stands, and forever will stand, infinitely above us, so does the Bible stand, and ever will stand, infinitely above all other books. Consider what this claim of finality means in an age when everything is changing, when our books of history, science, and philosophy last only a few years. Think what it is to say this in the face of the lights that are now streaming in on all sides upon the human soul. Think also that this statement cannot be challenged by any Christian. No Christian knows anything about God but what has been already written in the Word of God. The experience of the saints runs with these words: "I had little thought of its intellectual grandeur or literary beauty. Christ was there. I went to Him for life and found it. I was baptized and absorbed in His dying love."

But the question may be raised, has been raised, Is it right to describe the Bible as the Word of God? Is it possible to vindicate such a name for the whole Bible in the face of criticism and its results? Is it not better to say that the Bible contains the Word of God? I think it is possible to use the phrase "Word of God" in a sense that is not justified. But the phrase, "the Bible is the Word of God," expresses a truth which is denied in the other phrase, "the Bible contains the Word of God." I appeal again to Dr. Robertson Smith, whose place among Biblical scholars will not lightly be contested. He says: "People now say that the Scripture contains God's Word, when they mean that part of the Bible is the Word of God and another part is the word of man. That is not the doctrine of our churches, which hold that the substance of all Scripture is God's Word. What is not part of the record of God's Word is no part of Scripture. Only we must distinguish between the record and the Divine communications of God's heart and will which the record conveys." Defining his position still further, the same illustrious scholar said: "We may say that silver is contained in the mould into which it is run. If the silver is only in the leaden ore, the man who has no means of smelting is no richer by having it in his possession. If the Bible only contains the Word of God mixed with man's word, like silver in the leaden ore, then no one could use Scripture for his own religious life who did not possess the requisite scholarship, as in the other case the man could not get silver without having a smelting to separate it from the leaden ore. Therefore that view is untenable. But there is another way in which Scripture may contain the Word of God, the pure Word of God—as the mould contains the silver seven times tried. The pure silver takes the shape of the mould—it may be an imperfect shape—but it is pure silver, and the man is enriched thereby at once without any further act."

Once more, when Biblical criticism has done its utmost, when every one of its established results is acknowledged to the full, there is still a problem. Grant the furthest claim of the critical analysis. Divide the Bible as you have it into innumerable shreds, painted differently. What then? You have not explained the living combination. How were these innumerable scraps brought together and endowed with this indomitable vitality? It is the same problem as is presented in Christianity. The parts, as an apologist has said, may be taken to pieces, and people may persuade themselves that without Divine interposition they can account for all the facts. "Here is something from the Jews, something from the Greeks, an element contributed by this party, another by that, a general coloring by people who held partly of both. You may take down Christianity in this way, and spread it over the centuries. But when the operation is done the living whole draws itself together again, looks you in the face, reclaims its scattered parts from every century back to the first, and reasserts itself to be a great burst of coherent life and light centring in Christ. Just as though you might take a piece of living tissue and say, here is only so much nitrogen, carbon, lime, and so forth, but the energetic peculiarities of life going on before your eyes would refute you by the palpable presence of a mystery unaccounted for." So it is with the Bible. How were these elements put together? Who breathed into the whole the breath of life so that it became a living creature, as Luther says, with eyes and hands and feet? Take the problem of the Gospels. One may say lazily that it is an insoluble problem, and one may say it wisely. In any case, how was it that these writers succeeded in drawing the picture of the Stainless? How was it that the stream was never allowed to become turbid at any moment? One act, one word, one attitude might have been condemned by all generations of the faithful. How were they kept from misunderstandings, these men who were always misunderstanding, when the story came to be written? An artist and poet of great note died some twenty years ago, and quite a number of his friends have put on record their impressions. The most intimate of these friends has refrained. He has contented himself with saying that they have all missed the true man, the heroic, the noble man. Are we not in the presence of the supernatural in dealing with a fact like this, that the sinful should understand the Sinless so perfectly as to record no thought, no deed, no word which bears upon it the mark of their human frailty? Shelley said once: "There are two Italys, one of the green earth, the transparent seas, old ruins, the warm, radiant atmosphere; the other is of the Italians, with their works and ways." There are two Bibles, the Bible cut in pieces by analysis, the Bible as we have it. The time will come when one will pass into the other, but it will not come till the finality and Divinity of the Bible are confessed, just as the moment will come when the spell of Italy will pass into the soul of her people, and the contrast will fade away. What we say about the Bible, when admitting everything that criticism has secured, is that criticism has only made it clearer than ever that it is a house not made with hands.

Once more, and especially of the Old Testament, we have the witness of Christ. This is a witness which has been misunderstood and overdriven. But in its essence it is a witness which is admitted by believing critics themselves to be absolute. To us it is not enough to say that Jesus Christ is an inspired soul, obedient to the laws of His own nature. It is not enough even to say that He holds a regal rank among souls and an exceptional relation to God. It is not enough to say that He is the Saint of saints. He is more than that, even very God of very God. But take the lower position. Admit everything that can be urged in the circumstances of His humanity, and still it remains true, as Dr. Robertson Smith has said that "there can be no question that Jesus Himself believed that God dealt with Israel in the way of special revelation, that the Old Testament contains within itself a perfect picture of His gracious relations to His people, and sets forth the whole growth of the true religion up to its perfect fulness." Dr. Robertson Smith added: "We cannot depart from this view without making Jesus an imperfect teacher and an imperfect Saviour." Did He who said, "No man knoweth the Father but the Son and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him," did He mistake His Father for another in the pages of the Old Testament? It is incredible, incredible upon any theory of the person of Christ that can be held by Christians.

"The Spirit of God maketh the reading, and especially the preaching, of the Word an effectual means of convincing and converting sinners," says the Shorter Catechism. Is it so certain that the preaching comes before the reading? Human words, when they are best, give the forms of what truth the speakers see, but the brightest forms have neither the lustre nor the grace of the forms of the Spirit. They are at best poor, dull, inharmonious echoes of the heavenly music, and it is through the Word of the Lord pre-eminently that the power of the Lord must spread from heart to heart.

W. ROBERTSON NICOLL