are at the mercy of every wind of doctrine that blows. "The Bible, and the Bible only the religion of Protestants" was never true, and it has lost what semblance of truth it might have had when Chillingworth said it.

Next to this, people should be taught that the authority of the Bible does not depend on men's theories and doctrines about the Bible. The inspiration of the Bible is a fact, not a dogma. A hundred generations have been finding in it something unique in spiritual quality. Nowhere else have they been able to discover such light and life, such comfort and strength and peace. For centuries men have resorted to it for sorely needed help in their struggle to escape from sin and attain goodness, and have had their spiritual energies renewed and their wills braced for further contest. The authority of the Bible does not depend on what ecclesiastical Powers have decreed, or on what theologians may have taught about it, but on what it is. It authenticates itself as God's word to the soul that is reaching out after the Most High, as a father's call in the dark authenticates itself to a frightened child. In the Bible we hear and recognize our Heavenly Father's voice and our spirits joyfully respond. This is the fact of inspiration-a personal experience of the highest validity, which is totally unaffected by this theory or that about the Bible. What matters it to us who wrote the various books, or how, or when, or why, if we thus recognize in them the voice of our God?

People should be taught the facts about the historical origin of the Bible. They should learn that the Bible is not one book, but two separate collections of booksnot one book, but a library. The very name embodies this historic fact; it was originally τὰ βιβλία, the books, or, as we so often say, the Scriptures. These two collections are the best of the surviving writings of an extraordinary race during more than a thousand years. They contain, as we might expect, many different types

of literature: history, drama, lyric poetry, orations, essays, apothegms. Books whose composition extends over a thousand years, and that touch men's lives at so many points, could hardly fail to be of different degrees of value, according to the intelligence and spiritual insight of their authors. Ten centuries must show progress in religious ideas—or else retrogression; in any event, change. That apparently innocent mutation of name from bibles to Bible, has done much to encourage the unhistorical notion of One Book, entirely homogeneous in character and contents, coming perfect from the mind of the Holy Spirit, without admixture of error, every part necessarily the equal of every other part, and teaching the same ideas of God and man from earliest composition to latest. This notion about the Bible, which may be called the popular theory, is such a perversion of facts lying on the very surface of the writings, that any person of intelligence and education ought to be heartily ashamed of being its advocate or defender.

People should be taught that the making of these two collections was a slow process, and that the result was long in doubt. The Jews in the time of Christ, and for long after, were not agreed as to what books should be admitted to and what excluded from their sacred writings. Ten generations of Christians lived and died before our New Testament assumed its present form. What was the determining principle in the formation of the two canons? Study of the facts discloses a common principle in the making of both: a winnowing process gradually separated the present books of the Bible from a much larger collection of similar books, because these were found, in the religious experience of successive generations, to have a superior spiritual quality. After virtual unanimity had been thus arrived at, ecclesiastical authority formally decreed that these books and no others should thenceforth be regarded as Holy Scripture. The

Bible is thus one of the most striking illustrations in history of the law of survival of the fittest. The experience that made the Bible a whole has kept it such to this day.

People should be taught that, while infallibility of the Bible is a doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church,* it has never been the official Protestant doctrine. Infallibility of the Bible has been so strenuously advocated by some Protestant theologians, however, and accepted by so considerable a part of clergy and laity, that it may be called unofficial Protestant doctrine, but it has never been declared in any Protestant creed or confession of faith. What has been the result of this attempt to make this doctrine Protestant orthodoxy? For several generations the clergy have been influenced by every bribe this world can offer-hope, honors, wealth, social consideration—and by every threat this world can devise-disgrace, persecntion, stripes, chains, death-to maintain the infallible correctness of every word contained in the Bible; and as a net result faith in the Bible has been steadily weakening. Is it not about time to try another policy?

V

It is an extraordinary fact, yet fact indubitable, that the very persons who make loudest professions of belief in the inspiration and infallibility of the Bible, and insist most strenuously on the reverent treatment of the book, are the very persons who treat the Bible with least reverence. They show their faith by their works less than

*"For all the books that the Church receives as sacred and canonical are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost; and so far is it from being possible that any error can coexist with inspiration, that inspiration not only is incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily, as it is impossible that God himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true." Encyclical Providentissimus Deus, of Pope Leo XIII, November 18, 1893.

any other Christians. The men now posing before the public as the special champions of the Bible and almost the sole defenders of its authority, are nearly all Premillennarians. But the doctrine of the speedy coming of the Son of Man to reign with his saints a thousand years can be made to appear a doctrine derived from the Bible only by the most careless, not to say dishonest, exegesis. Under pretext of extreme devotion to the Bible, Premillennarians distort and falsify the Bible in the most barefaced manner. Therefore, people should be taught the truth, namely, that there is no teaching in the Bible about a millennium in connection with the second coming of Christ. There is not so much as a hint of such doctrine. Premillennial doctrine is a manufacture "out of whole cloth" of a doctrine that has not the slightest support in the Bible.

There is but a single passage, a very brief one, in the whole Bible that speaks of a reign of Christ for a thousand years. That passage is in the Revelation, a book of impassioned poetry, of profuse symbolism, the interpretation of which has caused more difference of opinion among Christian scholars for centuries than any other part of the Bible. Here are the words:

And I saw thrones, and they sat on them,

And authority to judge was given them.

And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of the testimony of Jesus and the word of God, And whosoever did not pay homage to the Beast nor his image,

And received not the mark upon their foreheads and
upon their hand;

And they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.
The rest of the dead did not live till the thousand years

were completed.

Several things are distinctly stated in this vision: it is before the general resurrection, and the reign of Christ

is with a strictly limited portion of his saints: such as had lost their lives in a great persecution, and such others as had refused to do homage to the Beast. However the vision may be interpreted, these limitations cannot be disregarded. The persecution in the writer's mind may have been that under Nero, or that under Domitian, or some other. This is a question of little importance, because in any persecution in the Roman Empire a great part, probably the greater part, of the Christians were not molested at all. Many who were arrested, and openly avowed their faith, and steadfastly refused to sacrifice to the gods or the Emperor, were subsequently released when the fervor of persecution declined; others were put to death. Only these two classes, the martyrs and the confessors, are seen by John as sharing with the Lord this millennial reign. And this is absolutely the only reference in the whole Bible to a reign of Christ of a thousand years. Hence, the statement above that the Bible does not contain a doctrine of the reign of Christ with all his saints for a thousand years-which is the "millennial" doctrine-is not only warranted but compelled by the facts.

How then do the Premillennarians, with their loudly proclaimed devotion to the Bible, contrive to make their self-invented doctrine appear to be the teaching of Scripture? Why, very simply. They first read the doctrine into the Bible and then read it out again. They quietly assume, to begin with, that this passage in the Revelation teaches a reign of Christ with all his saints, instead of with some-a meaning that, as we have seen, the text I will not bear. Then they combine with this perverted passage all that Jesus and his apostles have said about the second coming of Christ; and all that Hebrew prophets have said about Messiah's kingdom; and anything else anywhere in the Bible that their ingenuity can bend to their use. And out of this hodge-podge of unrelated texts,