How we came by the Bible.—­It will help us to understand and apply these principles if we remember how we came by the Bible.  First of all is the fact that the Bible grew out of religion and the life of the church, and not religion and the church out of the Bible.  The Bible is not one book, as many think of it, but a collection of sixty-six books, which happen to be bound together.  In fact, all sixty-six of these books are now printed and bound separately by the American Bible Society, and sold at a penny each.  These sixty-six books were centuries in the making, and they came from widely separated regions.  Different ones of them were originally written in different tongues—­Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic.

The earlier Christians had, of course, only the scriptures of the Old Testament.  It was nearly four hundred years after Christ had lived on earth before we had a list of the New Testament books such as our Bible now contains.  In the middle of the second century only about half of the present New Testament was in use as a part of the Scriptures.  Some of the books which we now include were at one time or another omitted by the Christian scholars, and several books were at one time accorded a place which are not now accepted as a part of the Bible.  The authorship of a considerable number of the books of the Bible is unknown, and even the exact period to which they belong is uncertain.

The different writers wrote with different purposes—­one was a historian; another a poet; another, as Paul, a theologian; another a preacher; another a teller of stories and myths, or a user of parables.  Paul wrote his letters to local churches or to individuals, to answer immediate questions or meet definite conditions and needs.  Jesus left no written word, so far as we know, and the first written accounts we have of his life and work were begun forty or fifty years after his death.

The problem of selecting Bible material adapted to children.—­The Bible was therefore a slow growth.  It did not take its form in accordance with any particular or definite plan.  It never was meant as a connected, organized textbook, to be studied in the same serial and continuous order as other books.  It was not written originally for children, but for adults to read.

Its enduring quality proves that the writers of the Bible lived close to the heart and thought of God, and were therefore inspired of him.  But we can grant this and still feel free to select from its lessons and truths the ones that are most directly fitted to meet the needs of our children as we train them in religion.  We can love and prize the Bible for all that it means and has meant to the world, and yet treat it as a means and not an end in itself.  We can believe in its truth and inspiration, and still leave out of the lessons we give our children the sections which contain little of interest or significance for the child’s life, or matter which is beyond his grasp and understanding.