nounced by miracles and heralded with fire. Take the Old Testament-Mt. Sinai; take the New TestamentPentecost. Would God himself stretch out His hand and write on tables in the giving, and send down tongues of fire for the proclamation of a Revelation, every particle and shred of which was not His own? In other words, would He work miracles and send down tongues of fire to signalize a work merely human, or even partly human and partly Divine? How unworthy of God, how impious, how utterly impossible the supposition!

3. The Bible comes clothed with authority in the highhanded and exalted terms of its address. God in the Bible speaks out of a whirlwind and with the voice of Elias. What grander proof of literal inspiration can be than in the high-handed method and imperative tone of prophets and apostles which enabled them-poor men, obscure, and without an influence; fishermen, artisans, publicans, day-laborers-to brave and boldly teach the world from Pharaoh and from Nero down? Was this due to anything less than God speaking in them-to the overpowering impulse and seizure of God? Who can believe it? Who is not struck with the power and the wisdom of God? "His words were in my bones," cries one. "I could not stay. The lion hath roared, who will not fear; the Lord hath spoken, who can but prophesy?"

4. The Bible is the optime of authority, because it is from first to last a glorious projection on the widest scale of the decrees of God. The sweep of the Bible is from the Creation of Angels to a new heaven and new earth, across a lake of fire. What a field for events! what an expanse beyond the sweep or even reach of human forethought, criticism, or co-operation! what a labyrinth upon whose least and minutest turning hangs entire redemption, since a chain is never stronger than its smallest link! Who, then, will dare to speak till God

has spoken? "I will declare the decree!" That pushes everything aside-that makes the declaration an extension, so to say, of the Declarer.

"I will declare the decree!" When we consider that the Bible is an exact projection of the decrees of God into the future, this argument is seen to lift, indeed, to a climax; and, in fact, it does reach to the very Crux of controversy; for the hardest thing for us to believe about God is to believe that He exactly absolutely knows, because He has ordained, the future. Every attribute of God is easier to grasp than that of an infallible Omniscience. "I will declare the decree," therefore, calls for direct inspiration.

5. The Bible is the optime of authority, because the Hooks at the end of the chain prove the dictated Inspi ration of its every link. Compare the Fall in Genesis(one link), with the Resurrection in the Apocalypse-the other. Compare the Old Creation in the first chapters of the Old Testament with the New Creation in the last chapters of the New. "We open the first pages of the Bible," says Vallotton, "and we find there the recital of the creation of the world by the word of God-of the fall of man, of his exile far from God-far from Paradise, and far from the tree of life. We open the last pages of the last of the 66 books dating 4,000 years later. God is still speaking. He is still creating. He creates a new heaven and a new earth. Man is found there recovered. He is restored to communion with God. He dwells again in Paradise, beneath the shadow of the tree of life. Who is not struck by the strange correspondence of this end with that beginning? Is not the one the prologue, the other the epilogue of a drama as vast as unique?"

6. The Bible is the optime of authority, because, over this vast range of supernatural, confessedly Divine thought, purpose, and action, there are no lights, and no explanations,

save those furnished by the Book itself. That Book must be supreme, whose only parallel, comparison, and confirmation is itself. Here is an argumentum ad hominem. Why do we not possess concordances for other volumes— for their very words? Because in human writings there is no such nicety-no such Divine significance as makes the sense and all the argument turn on the single words, and their exact consistency and correspondence everywhere throughout the book.

Your concordance, my brother, every time you take it up, speaks loudly to you of the inspiration and authority. of Holy Writ. It says to you: "Not the Bible only, but this word, that word-all these single words, are Godbreathed-Divine!"

7. Another argument for the supreme authority of Scripture, is the character of the investigation challenged for the Word of God. The Bible courts the closest scrutiny. Its open pages blaze the legend: "Search the Scriptures!" Ereunao-"Search." It is a sportsman's term, and borrowed from the chase. "Trace out"-"track out"-follow the word in all its usages and windings. Scent it out to its remotest meanings, as a dog the hare.

"They searched," again says St. Luke, in the Acts, of the Bereans There it is another word, anakrino, "they divided up," analyzed, sifted, pulverized, as in a mortarto the last thought.

What a solemn challenge is this! What book but a Divine Book would dare speak such a challenge? If a book has been written by man, it is at the mercy of men. Men can go through it, riddle it, sift it, and leave it behind them, worn out. But the Bible, a Book dropped from heaven, is "God-breathed." It swells, it dilates, with the bodying fullness of God. God has written it, and none can exhaust it. Apply your microscopes, apply your telescopes to the material of Scripture. They

separate, but do not fray, its threads. They broaden out its nebulæ, but find them clustered stars. They do not reach the hint of poverty in Scripture. They nowhere touch on coarseness in the fabric, nor on limitations in horizon, as always is the case when tests of such a character are brought to bear on any work of man's. You put a drop of water, or a fly's wing, under a microscope. The stronger the lens, the more that drop of water will expand, till it becomes an ocean filled with sporting animalcules. The higher the power, the more exquisite, the more silken become the tissues of the fly's wing, until it attenuates almost to the golden and gossamer threads of a seraph's. So is it with the Word of God. The more scrutiny, the more divinity; the more dissection, the more perfection. We cannot bring to it a test too penetrating, nor a light too lancinating, nor a touchstone too exacting. The Bible is beyond all attempts at exhaustion, not only, but comprehension. No human mind can, by searching, find out the fullness of God. "For what man knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man save the Spirit of God.”

III. That leads up to the third point. The Scriptures testify to their Divine Original by their transcendent doctrine, their outshining light, their native radiance, the glow of the Divine, the witness of the Spirit.

We should expect to find a Book, that came from God, pencilled with points of jasper and of sardine stone

-enhaloed with a brightness from the everlasting hills. We should look for that about the book which, flashing conviction at once, should carry overwhelmingly and everywhere, by its bare, naked witness-by what it simply is. That, just as God, by stretching out a hand to write upon the "plaister" of a Babylonian palace, stamped,

through mysterious and disjointed words, conviction of Divinity upon Belshazzar, and each one of his one thousand "lords," so, after that same analogue,-why not?— God should stretch out His hand along the unrolling palimpsests of all the ages, and write upon them larger words, which, to the secret recognition of each human soul should say, not only, "This is Truth," but " This is Truth, God-spoken!"

The Bible is the Word of God, because it is the Book of Infinites-the Revelation of what nature, without it, never could have attained, and, coming short of the knowledge of which, nature were lost.

The greatest need of the soul is salvation. It is such a knowledge of God as shall assure us of "comfort" here and hereafter. Such a knowledge, nature, outside of the Bible, does not contain. Everywhere groping in his darkness, man is confronted by two changeless facts. One, his guilt, which, as he looks down, sinks deeper and deeper. The other, the Justice of God, which, as he looks up, lifts higher and higher. Infinite against Infinite-Infinite here; Infinite there-no bridge between them! Nature helps to no bridge. It nowhere speaks of Atonement.

Standing with Uriel in the sun, we launch the proposition that the Scriptures are Divine in their very message because they deal with three Infinites :-Infinite Guilt; Infinite Holiness; Infinite Atonement.

A Book must itself be infinite which deals with Infinites; and a Book must be Divine which divinely reconciles Infinites.

Infinite Guilt! Has my guilt any bottom? Is Hell any deeper? Is there, in introspection, a possible lower, more bottomless nadir? Infinite Guilt! That is what opens, caves away under my feet, the longer, the more carefully I plumb my own heart-my nature, my record. Infinitely guilty! That is what I am and where-far, far