Article June 20, 1903 Issue

Religious Items

with contributions from E. F. Burr, Thomas Arnold, J. Stanley Durkee, Quincy Ewing

The vernacular in which God speaks to man is human experience. The unique value of the Bible is that it is the record of the experience of men who stood in peculiar relations to the unfolding of God's plan which culminated in the human experience of Christ and the building of the Church under the guidance of his Spirit. Cut the humanity out of the Bible and there will be little divinity left. Behind that humanity always remains that sense of the presence of God. The world, too, speaks to us in human tones, but in its greetings, its demands, its grief and laughter, too often the sense of the presence of God is absent or hidden out of sight. We need to read the Bible daily as a corrective for the world's forgetfulness of God, and for the training of our thought in using His presence and His will as a test and measure of proportion for the work and play of life.

That human language which God speaks finds its purest and its clearest utterance in the life and words of Christ. All the Bible is of him. In its pages all the long preparation is depicted and the story of his life on earth is given. The personal relation to him, and through him to the social uses of the world, must always be the central sphere of life for the disciple. The Spirit, we are told, shall take and declare of Christ unto us. But unless we are familiar with the record of his life and works and words, how are we limiting the power of God's Spirit to do this work?

The Congregationalist and Christian World.

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