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bright with the sparkle of rally and repartee, and watches the powerful eternal play of human love and hate. All Dr. Johnston's books are as healthy as they are vivacious and interesting. At the bottom of The House that Jack Built is the Master's great parable of the rock-foundation. A brave, splendid story it is. Jack is a glorious fellow, and the reader follows his fortunes with keen pleasure and exults in his well-won victories. It is a book to make noble men and women out of boys and girls, and would be read with interest and profit by three or four generations living together in the same house. A fine book for putting into a summer's reading!

The Prairie and the Sea. By W. A. QUAYLE. Small quarto. pp. 344. Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham. New York: Eaton & Mains. Price, cloth, ornamental, $2.00 net.

This sumptuous quarto is illustrated with about two hundred and fifty pictures mostly photographed from nature, and from the ivy pillars in front to the anchor on the last page every one is worth taking a good long look at. It will have some such large sale as Dr. Quayle's previous book, In God's Out-of-Doors, of which it seems like the second volume. When that first nature book came from his pen we said, "This is something that a busy man, if he has the right gifts for it, may do once in a lifetime, but he is not likely to do it twice." But now here is that same rich wood-note piping up again in this new volume; and hearing it we say, "That's the wise thrush. He sings his songs twice over lest you should think he never could recapture that first fine careless rapture." Here is the same fine careless rapture of the reveling soul, the blithe merry heart of a true nature-lover. Dr. Quayle writes nature books with the fluency, fullness and spontaneity of John Burroughs, and as if he studied nothing else but nature. And yet this rapturous poet, this painter of the beauties of God's Out-of-Doors, is the busy pastor of a large and exacting city parish, and his fascinating nature books are a mere aside spoken to the world in brief and infrequent intervals of leisure interrupting long and crowded periods of intense ministerial labor. A tropical richness of color and fragrance is poured out upon their pages in an efflorescent style which, in the author's books as in his sermons and lectures, is entirely native, unique and inimitable. The illustrators and the publishers have done their best upon this new volume in such a way that one charmed possessor of it cries out "O that beautiful book!" One odd surprise in the picture illustrations is to find the landscape, or the stream, or the surf refusing to stay within the picture-frame, and overflowing all down the page, sometimes to the very bottom, so that it looks as if the grasses and ferns were growing, and the brook and the sea were flowing, all about among the type-God's Out-of-Doors actually spilling itself over the printed page. The spirit of the book might be epitomized in the words, "Thy world is very lovely, O my God! I thank thee that I live."

METHODIST REVIEW

JULY, 1906

ART. I.-THE PASTOR AND HIS BIBLE1

THE founders of the Garrett Biblical Institute, as its name indicates, intended that here the Bible should be the central subject of study and the norm of all instruction. They wished that every teacher and every scholar should be, in the broad sense in which Mr. Wesley used the phrase, "a man of one book." It may be presumed therefore that you leave this school of the prophets for the pulpit and the cure of souls enriched with much biblical learning, and enriched yet more with purpose and aptitude for a lifelong study of the inexhaustible volume. If, then, this final hour of your undergraduate life be given to thoughts concerning the Pastor and his Bible it may fitly link your years of preparation with your coming ministry of the Holy Word; a ministry which we trust may be prolonged, faithful, rich in usefulness, and crowned at last with the "Well done" of the Master.

Our discussion will touch only incidentally on the great subjects now in debate among biblical scholars, such as the Canon and its validity; Inspiration, its nature and degrees; the Prophetic Element in Israel; the Literary Character of the several books of the "Divine Library" as indicating age, authorship and historic value; the Authority over faith and conduct both of the Bible as a whole and of its several parts. Such topics are too vast for our limited time, too difficult of treatment by any but a master in sacred science. Our task is a humbler one; namely, 1 Address to the Graduating Class at Garrett Biblical Institute, May 9, 1906.

to note the present condition of biblical opinion and study among us, to ask for the genesis of this condition, and to offer some practical suggestions related to it. Even here difficulties await us, some inherent in the subject itself, some arising from the divided opinions of our scholars. But such difficulties do not excuse us from study. They rather call us to increased diligence, to greater candor and openness of soul, to a more implicit dependence on the Spirit of Truth, and to an inviolable fidelity to the truth as it shall be given us to see it.

I. The Present Condition of Biblical Study among Us. It is matter of common knowledge that within the half century past a new view of the Bible and a new method of Bible study have found place within the Methodist Church, as within other churches. The ministerial life of the present speaker covers the whole period of this change. He was admitted to the itiner ant ministry in the year 1848. In that year our New York book house issued The Patriarchal Age, one of three octavo volumes which, under the title, Sacred Annals, were at once placed in the Course of Reading for young ministers. They were reprints from England, the author being a scholarly Wesleyan layman, George Smith of Camborne. The preface gives definitely the standpoint of this historian. "The volume of inspiration," he says, "is the only source of information which we know to be unalloyed by error and unadulterated by fiction." "It has been our constant aim to admit, maintain and illustrate the truth of the sacred oracles." Accordingly he admits no question concerning any item of the Scripture narrative. The chronology of Genesis (but according to the Septuagint version), the longevity of the early patriarchs, the universality of the Deluge, the standing still of the sun and moon at the command of Joshua, the historic accuracy of the first and the last chapters of the book of Job are all stoutly argued. These items exemplify the book. In the same year, 1848, and for many years before and after, our text-book in theology was Watson's Institutes, a work lucid, comprehensive, cogent in argument, and occasionally touched with a noble eloquence. It admirably set forth the cardinal truths of revelation, but it also taught us that "the worlds," to use its

own words, were produced, in their form as well as substance, instantly, out of nothing; that the creative days of Genesis were natural days of twenty-four hours each; that the best explanation of the work of the fourth day is that on that day the annual revolution of the earth around the sun began; and that to the Noachian Deluge is due, in part the deposit, and in part the disclosure of the fossiliferous rocks. Probably if Mr. Watson were now living (the Institutes were published in 1823) he would not think that the sacred text enforced all these conclusions. The books thus cited represent the general trend of opinion among us fifty years ago. It was held that an equal inspiration obtained throughout the Bible and gave an equal authority to all its books and chapters. All its statements were parts of the inerrant word of God. The various topics differed, as all consented, in relative importance, the incarnation and work of Christ being doubtless the center and crown. But all details, preceding and preparatory, in the patriarchal history, in the wars of Israel, in the lives of David, Solomon, Mordecai and Jonah, were of some importance and were given to us with absolute accuracy. Together with a vivifying assurance as to central things, there also came in those days to the young theologue much perplexity as to things less important. He must, if possible, reconcile Genesis with geology (Darwin had not then published The Origin of Species); must show that the apparent discrepancies in Scripture were not real discrepancies; must harmonize the sacred narrative with secular history and the monuments; must vindicate the unchangeable holiness and impartial goodness of God in the permission of slavery and polygamy among the patriarchs, in the law of the blood-avenger, in the command to exterminate the Canaanites, and in the imprecatory psalms. How well he succeeded need not here be said.

Since that time some of our brethren have journeyed far. How far their books will show. One holds that the early chapters of Genesis contain both historic and unhistoric matter. Another holds that at 4500 B. C. there existed in Babylonia a civilization which presupposes, to use his own words, "millenniums of unrecorded time." Alas, for the Usherian Chronology! One,

whose book burns with a passionate loyalty to Christ and his redemptive work, tells us that "the Bible is not a final authority upon any scientific question;" that "even in matters not scientific absolute inerrancy in the Bible is not required;" that "the rib, the tree, the apple, the serpent of Genesis 2 and 3 are a picturesque way of talking concerning "historic facts;" and that Christian scholars, emphasizing strongly the word "Christian," "have four regions of liberty in biblical discussion": (1) the Canon, (2) the Text, (3) the Literature, including date, authorship (single or composite), style, quotation, and (4) the Interpretation. If the liberty thus conceded is a real liberty, both as to opinion and speech, no one should ask more. Many hold that the Pentateuch was not completed till after the Exile, that Isaiah had two or more authors, and that the book of Daniel is of late date and of doubtful authority. And an eminent professor in one of our oldest universities writes: "There are historical inaccuracies in the Bible as unquestionably as scientific errors. In multitudes of cases various parts of the Bible contradict each other. The Bible is not inerrant, nor is there any reason why it should be." It would gratify many if such opinions could be treated as eccentric and of rare occurrence, but this the facts forbid. At this present time the masters in Theology, those whose books are most widely read by our thoughtful men, are by a vast preponderance the friends and advocates of this freer treatment of the Bible. Even the conservative Dr. Orr claims only "a substantially Mosaic origin of Pentateuchal law" with "minor modifications and adjustments" thereafter. And, further, it is believed that the heads of our chief universities and colleges, though selected for their present positions without reference to this question, are, with few exceptions, of the same tendency. No one is authorized to speak for them as to particular questions raised in this great debate, but the drift among them to a less rigorous view of the Bible is unmistakable. These facts indicate that the number of our ministers and laymen who sympathize with the new views is large, and not likely soon to decrease.

As our statement of the earlier view of the Bible closed with a reference to the perplexities to which it subjected the young

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