ightened;--is to discover that faith
works, and works gloriously. A man's idea of God may be, and cannot but
be, inadequate; but it corresponds not to nothing existent, but to
Someone most alive. That which comes to us through the idea is witness
of the Reality behind it.

Nor are we confined to the witness of our personal discoveries. There is
a social attestation of the workableness of faith. The surest way of
establishing the worth of our religious experience is to share it with
another; the strongest confirmation of the objective existence of Him
with whom we have to do is to lead another to see Him. The most
effective defender of the faith is the missionary. "It requires," as
David Livingstone said, "perpetual propagation to attest its
genuineness." Not they who sit and study and discuss it, however
cleverly and learnedly, discover its truth; but they who spend and are
spent in attempting to bring a whole world to know the redeeming love of
One who is, and who rewards with indubitable sonship with Himself those
who prove wholeheartedly loyal.

For our final assurance we appeal confidently to the future. The glory
of the Lord will only be fully revealed when all flesh see it together.
But with personal certainty, based on our own experience, corroborated
by the testimony of all the saints, we both wait hopefully and work
tirelessly for the day when our God through Christ shall be all in all.

CHAPTER II

THE BIBLE

In terms of the definition of religion given in the last chapter, we may
describe the Bible as the record of the progressive religious experience
of Israel culminating in Jesus Christ, a record selected by the
experience of the Jewish and Christian Church, and approving itself to
Christian experience today as the Self-revelation of the living God.

The Bible is a _literary_ record. It is not so much a book as a library,
containing a great variety of literary forms--legends, laws, maxims,
hymns, sermons, visions, biographies, letters, etc. Judged solely as
literature its writings have never been equalled in their kind, much
less surpassed. Goethe declared, "Let the world progress as much as it
likes, let all branches of human research develop to their utmost,
nothing will take the place of the Bible--that foundation of all culture
and all education." Happily for the English-speaking world the
translation into our tongue, standardized in the King James' Bible, is
a universally acknowledged cl