In view of the proved inspirational power of these writings, we must take care that they be read still by the generations to come. The collapse of the old pretensions concerning the Bible has turned many a man away from it in impatience or contempt. Others, who have not heard the call to the higher life, are bored with its solemnity and prefer to do their reading in the lighter and gayer literature of the hour. But if the people ever cease to read the Bible for its spiritual dynamic, our young men will, we may fear, cease to see visions, and lose their belief in the things of the spirit.

(2) Even from a purely cultural point of view the loss would be great. The splendid Elizabethan English of the King James Version has done more than any other force to preserve the beauty and rhythm of our speech; conversance with it has been the source of the literary power of many a master. And an acquaintance with this winnowed literature of a great people is an education in itself. All the great human emotions find expression between the covers of this book with the deepest sincerity and in inimitable language. Here are chronicles unsurpassed in vivid terseness and dramatic power; here are ancient legal codes, folk-tales, sermons, letters, biographies, love-poems, hymns, an epic, charming tales of rustic life, of Oriental courts, of war and passion; conjugal fidelity is dwelt upon, ambition, filial devotion, patriotism, and mother-love; fascinating stories, exquisite lyrics, earnest exhortations, memorable aphorisms, aptest of parables, combine to form an anthology of the deepest interest to all lovers of what is abiding and excellent in human life. "Wholly apart from its religious or from its ethical value, the Bible is the one book that no intelligent person who wishes to come into contact with the world of thought and to share the ideas of the great minds of the Christian era can afford to be ignorant of. All modern literature and all art are permeated with it. There is scarcely a

great work in the language that can be fully understood and enjoyed without this knowledge, so full is it of allusions and illustrations from the Bible. It is not at all a question of religion, or theology, or dogma; it is a question of general intelligence." 1

(3) From the historian's point of view, also, we must acknowledge the importance of these records of the development of the greatest of religions. They are not always accurate or trustworthy in their conception of the facts; but they are priceless sources, landmarks of religious history, monuments of some of the most important events that have happened on earth. From them we can understand the movement that culminated in the great sermons of the prophets, and later led to the supreme event in religious history, perhaps in all history, the Christian conquest of the Western world. The memorabilia of Jesus picture the purest of men teaching the highest way of life that man has conceived. The Bible is the greatest source-book of the religious life, its supreme and classic expression. As the Greek statues are in the realm of sculpture, as Homer and Dante are in the realm of poetry, as Shakespeare is in the realm of drama, so is the Bible in the realm of religion.

(4) And finally, however antiquated or unintelligible to us its ancient conceptions may sometimes appear, and however we may be drawn to other, more recent and more sophisticated books, we must never forget what the Bible has meant in the life of our Church and of our race. Tattered and worn as it is, only the fragments of a great literature, its text often corrupted through the errors of a thousand loving but humanly fallible copyings by hand, discredited in many of its statements by the onward march of historical and cosmological knowledge, obsolete in many of its ideas and obsolescent even in some of its most cherished ideals, it

1 Charles Dudley Warner, quoted by Selleck, p. 5.

is yet our Book of books, the banner about which Christendom has so long rallied, and the ultimate source of very much that is best in our lives. Like a flag that is battle-scarred and torn, it has inspired so many men to heroic endeavor and sacrifice, consecrated for them the long effort of so many dragging days, soothed the sting of sorrow of so many breaking hearts, that the man who is capable of any deep and natural sentiment can hardly see or handle it without emotion. As the flag is the symbol of our nation and a summons to her service, so the Bible is a perpetual summons to the spiritual life and the immortal symbol of man's unquenchable faith in God.

J. Warschauer, What is the Bible? J. T. Sunderland, Origin and Character of the Bible. W. C. Selleck, New Appreciation of the Bible. Driver and Kirkpatrick, Higher Criticism. F. W. Farrar, History of Interpretation; The Bible, its Meaning and Supremacy. J. E. Carpenter, The Bible in the Nineteenth Century. Foundations, chap. II. W. Gladden, Who Wrote the Bible? B. P. Bowne, Studies in Christianity, chap. 1. G. T. Ladd, What is the Bible? L. Wallis, Sociological Study of the Bible. J. P. Peters, The Old Testament and the New Scholarship. E. von Dobschütz, Influence of the Bible upon Civilization. A. Sabatier, Religions of Authority, bk. 11; Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, bk. 1, chap. 11. R. M. Wenley, Modern Thought and the Crisis in Belief, III-v. G. H. Gilbert, Interpretation of the Bible. W. G. Jordan, Biblical Criticism and Modern Thought. New World, vol. 3, pp. 23, 250. Methodist Review, vol. 93, p. 899. Biblical World, vol. 44, p. 3.

CHAPTER XVIII

MIRACLES

WITH the passing of the credulous acceptance of Bible legends and the blind trust in Bible texts, the miraculous element in Christian belief has tended steadily to diminish. Many of the leaders of Christian thought now reject miracles in toto; and others who are not ready to abandon them altogether have ceased to use them as supports for their faith. We will first note the reasons for this waning of belief in miracles, and then consider how far, if at all, they can serve as foundations or aids for our theology.

What considerations have weakened the belief in miracles? Judging by its etymology, the word "miracle" means simply a marvelous event, one which excites our wonder.1 In this broadest sense we speak of the sunrise or the coming of spring as a miracle, and may, indeed, find the whole pageant of nature miraculous. "This green, flowery, rockbuilt earth . . . that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead. . . . What is it? Ay what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at all. It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at it. . . . This world after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it."2 More particularly, a miracle is a wonderful event in which God is revealed, or which works for man's salvation; the

...

1 So the Latin miraculum, the Greek @avuάolov, and the German Wunder.

2 Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship, chap. I.

greatest of miracles is the conversion that takes place in a sinner's heart, the power of the indwelling God to regenerate a life. In this sense there can be no objection to the use of the term; it in so far implies no violation of natural law, no break in the regular sequence of cause and effect. And since the very idea of natural law is a recent one, the conception of miracles can hardly be said to have generally implied such a break in a fixed natural order. But the conception has usually implied something abnormal, an intrusion into the ordinary and expected course of events; and the modern technical sense of the word, as a break in the natural chain of cause and effect due to supernatural intervention, scarcely more than makes explicit and precise what was vaguely meant. Taking the term in this sense, then, what grounds have we for mistrusting the existence of miracles?

(1) In the first place, there has been in the past century or two a rapid accumulation of evidence pointing to the invariable regularity of natural processes-what is called the reign of natural law. The more closely we analyze events in any field of study, the more clearly we see that their apparent confusion is the result of an extremely complex tissue of underlying uniformities. Things do happen in exactly the same way if exactly the same circumstances are repeated; the enormous development of science has been possible only because of that fact. Whenever an experiment has been properly made, it holds good for all time; for the way things behaved yesterday is the way they will behave to-morrow. There are indeed many groups of phenomena too intricate for us as yet to unravel; particularly is this true of mental phenomena. But the field of observed uniformity is constantly being extended. Even mental and social facts are suggesting underlying laws to investigators; and if concrete mental and social events are too complex and include too many disturbing factors for these underlying laws to be any