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them male and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh. What, therefore, God hath joined together let not man put asunder." Now here are a number of things said directly and implicitly. First, Jesus says Moses wrote the precept of divorce. Again, He says God made them male and female from the beginning of the creation, which implicitly declares that He made the first pair, indorsing thus the Mosaic story of the creation of Adam and Eve. He implies also that they were the "beginning" of His creation of men. His method of intrepretation is also indicated, that specified creation is also legislation, that what God does, interprets what He says. Now, Jesus has not said that the first and the second chapters of Genesis are inspired, but He both refers to and quotes them as indicative of the divine will on one of the most momentous of ethical questions. If He used them as an embodiment of the divine will, we may. If He calls that story the beginning of creation, it is safe to deny that there were pre-Adamites. If He quoted Genesis as the divine reason for monogamy, we may. If that story of the institution of the marriage relation is not true, if it had no existence before the days of Ezra's scribes, there is no divine authority for monogamy; Jesus gave no other ground for that authority than the account which Moses writes.

In Mark we have a quotation from Exodus xx. 12 and xxi. 16, introduced by the word Moses. Moses said: "Honor thy father and thy mother, and whosoever curseth father or mother let him die the death." But Matthew (xv. 3), in reporting this same occurrence, represents Jesus as saying: "For God commanded, saying, Honor thy father," etc. What one ascribes to Moses, the other ascribes to God. No doubt Jesus used both introductions to the quotation, of which Matthew selects one and Mark

the other. But this need not be pressed. If we had Matthew alone, it would be equally apparent that Jesus gave divine authority to Moses' words.

What a marvelous story is that of the destruction of the cities of the plain. And to what else does Jesus refer when He says: "It shall be more tolerable for Sodom in the day of judgment than for thee" (Capernaum)? To what else does He allude when He warns believers, "Remember Lot's wife"? He who could speak confidently of the future, the judgment, was probably textual critic sufficient to assure us that this story did not arise as Kuenen suggests.

They came to Him with a perplexing question about the resurrection. A woman had outlived seven successive husbands. In the resurrection whose wife should she be? And what is His answer? "Now that the dead are raised, even Moses showed at the bush when he called the Lord the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." Here Moses is quoted as an authority on the question. Mark's account reads: "And as touching the dead that they rise, have ye not read in the book of Moses how in the bush God spake unto him, saying: I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob?" Here, again, what is credited to Moses in one place is ascribed to God in another. Several other points are noteworthy-one approaching, incidentally of course, textual criticism. First, he indorses the curious story of the theophany in the bush. Secondly, he confirms the chronological order of these characters in the Pentateuch -Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses. Thirdly, he ascribes the Pentateuch to the Lawgiver, "Have ye not read in the book of Moses?"

It is needless to enlarge on other quotations. No one can fail to remember how He Himself, "beginning at Moses and all the prophets, expounded to them in all the

Scriptures the things concerning Himself"; how He declared, "As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the Son of man" (if the higher criticism is correct, candor must have compelled Him to say here, “As it is reputed to have been in the alleged days of Noah "); how He said, "One jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled"; how in His dying agony He confessed His thirst, that these same Scriptures on this point might be fulfilled. He may have paid no attention to criticism, but with all these allusions of His from the beginning of the divine story on through, touching so many chapters, indorsing Moses not only in general, but in numerous particulars, it is safe to use His own words against His critics: The Scriptures cannot be broken. "Hengstenberg," says Alfred Cave,* "made a collection of incidental declarations in which his opponents betrayed or confessed that their piece de resistance was an initial disaffection toward the supernatural. It was a bold stroke, and one requiring some courage, to charge their unbelief with their opposition. Christian faith does not circumscribe the activity of God by the operations of natural law. A spiritual realm moves and molds, and sometimes breaks through the natural. Let men believe first in the present, living God. Those who have felt the quickening thrill of His nearness, who have been humbled in heart and intellect under the hourly sense of His gracious forgiveness of their sins, will not find the difficulties in His Word discovered by cold study, animated only by "Zeitgeist" rather than by the Holy Ghost. He will not stumble at the supernatural who has thus experienced it in his own soul, in whose consciousness it is a daily reality.

*Princeton Review, May, 1879, page 593.

THE TESTIMONY OF THE SCRIPTURE TO

ITSELF.

GEORGE S. BISHOP, D.D.

THE Bible is the very handwriting of God! Suppose I believe that. Suppose, instead of Luke and John and Paul and Peter, I behold in overawed imagination "God grasping the pen" and setting down the sentences, the words, the jots and tittles-every stroke of it; does not that fix me? does not that arrest me? does not that determine, shape, and mould me, as no conviction other, lesser, can?

That is the Anchor to which, by twisting a few honest strands, I would help, if I may, to rebind our cables. When we were resting quietly inside of Sandy Hook, our own ship and others swung round with the tide, but none changed its place, for all were well anchored. The ships of sentiment are swinging loose to-day, and with the counter tide. That has been, and it will be, again and again, so long as human opinion is the vacillating and uncertain thing it is. But we need not fear, for the old anchor holds as firm, as steady, as inflexible as ever. That anchor-back of all departures, heresies, and fluctuations is the literal, direct, Divine inspiration, on the original parchments, of the Word of God.

We cannot consent to see in the Bible the pens nor the penmen; but, undistractedly, the Master Intellect, which everywhere directs each thought. We must maintain with Justin Martyr, with Chrysostom, and with Theophilus of Antioch, the illustration of that "harp" on which

the Spirit breathes, "the strings of which He touches to evoke each vital tone." We must "adore" with Athe-. nagoras "the Being who has harmonized the strains, who leads the melody, and not the instrument on which He plays. What umpire at the Games," he cries, "omits the Minstrel while he crowns the lyre?"

The mistake of moderns, and especially of recent moderns, has been "crowning the lyre." The whole question of Inspiration has, within the last half century, been made to turn upon the writers. It has been unhinged from those stanchions on which St. Paul makes it turn— the Writings themselves.

This misdirection of thought would seem to be much like that of the boy who stands at the end of the telegraph line and gets a message from his father ("I have written to him the great things of My Law"), and who, instead of taking the message as direct, authoritative, final, goes to work to discuss the posts, the wires, elec tricity, the key-board, the touch of the finger, the process. His business is simply to heed and obey.

The doctrine of direct, dictated, verbal Inspirationthat everything in the Bible was set down by the finger of God has these five things in its favor:

1. It is the first, original, and oldest doctrine.

2. It is the simplest doctrine.

3. It is the undeviating doctrine which has proved the bulwark of the Church of God. Defended in the earliest centuries by men like Athenagoras and St. Augustine -defended still by men like Wickliffe, Huss, and Luther in the struggles which led in the Reformation—and, in post-Reformation times, defended, by men like the Buxtorfs, John Owen, John Gill, and Gaussen-it has been the one, consistent, inexpugnable, permanent doctrine from the beginning. Scripture-sunlight to the sun-is the

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