“The Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy word.”

The true Biblical theology is—­Christ himself.  His thought of God, and not even Paul’s thoughts about Christ, are to mould our thinking.  The Supreme Son of Man must have had the truest thought of God.  Two words formulate his theology as bodied not in a creed, but in a prayer—­“Our Father.”  The earliest, simplest, deepest cry of the human after God, now by Him who lived its spirit perfectly, the trusting, loving, holy Child of the Father, made no longer a sigh, a dream, a vision, but a life.  “The life was the light of men.”

That light is the sufficient clue to the dark labyrinth in which we wander wearily.

I cannot always make out the face of a Father on the stern, harsh Power in whom we live and move and have our being.  Then I turn to my Divine Brother, who, of all the children of men, saw deepest into the mystery, and in his far-mirroring eyes I read the vision which satisfies me.

With poor dying Joe, I whisper to myself: 

   “‘Our Father:’  yes, that’s werry good.”

V.

The Right Critical Use of the Bible.

“I am convinced that the Bible becomes even more beautiful the more one understands it; that is, the more one gets insight to see that every word, which we take generally and make special application of to our own wants, has had, in connection with certain circumstances, with certain relations of time and place, a particular, directly individual reference of its own.”

   Goethe:  quoted by M. Arnold in “The Great Prophecy of Israel’s
   Restoration.”

V.

The Right Critical Use of the Bible.

   “God, who at many times and in many manners spake in time past to the
   fathers, by the prophets.”—­Hebrews, i. 1.

The right use of the Bible grows out of the true view of the Bible.

The Old Testament is the literature of the people of religion, in whom ethical and spiritual religion grew, through all moods and tenses, toward perfection.  The New Testament is the literature of the movement which grew out of Israel, the literature of the Universal Church bodying around the Son of Man, in whom religion came to perfect flower and fruit.  The real Bible is the record of this real revelation coming through real ethical and spiritual inspirations; a revelation advancing with men’s deepening inspirations toward the Light which rose in the Life of Jesus Christ our Lord.

   God, who at many times and in many manners spake in time past to the
   fathers by the prophets, hath at the last of these days spoken unto us
   by a Son.