Article January 2, 1902 Issue

The Bible in Literature

FOLLOWING is an extract from a sermon on "The Bible in Literature," by Rev. Camden M. Coburn, pastor of the St. James Methodist Episcopal Church of Chicago:—

The Bible is not only a book, but, as modern research has emphasized, it is a library of many books—sixty-six or more. It is a national literature, the production of many authors widely divergent from each other, not only in point of time but in culture, knowledge, taste, and literary style. Some of these chapters contain history and allegory so ancient that no other record in the world made mention of it until, in our times, the inscriptions on the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates have placed by its side contemporaneous corroborations of its truthfulness, while other chapters contain notices or biographies of men who are mentioned again and again in the Greek and Roman classics, and were written of by contemporaries of Virgil and Horace and Tacitus.

Each one of these Bible authors has marked peculiarites of style, favorite words and phrases and figures of speech. The Bible does not show the literary style of Jehovah, but of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and the Psalmists; of Luke and John and Paul, and each one of these writes in a style that is all his own.

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