aul and his various
amanuenses did their best with a language in which they were not
literary experts. The Bible reader often has the impression that its
authors' religious experience, like Milton's sculptured lion, half
appears "pawing to get free his hinder parts." Or, to change the
metaphor, now one portion of their communion with God is brought to view
and now another, as one might stand before a sea that was illuminated
from moment to moment by flashes of lightning.

The Bible is the record of an _historic_ religious experience--that of
Israel which led up to the consciousness of God in Jesus and His
followers. The investigation of the sources of Hebrew religion has shown
that many of its beliefs came from the common heritage of the Semitic
peoples; and there are numerous points of similarity between Israel's
faith and that of other races. This ought not to surprise us, since its
God is the God of all men. But the more resemblances we detect, the
greater the difference appears. The same legend in Babylonia and in
Israel has such unlike spiritual content; the identical rite among the
Hebrews and among their neighbors developed such different religious
meaning. This particular stream of religious life has a unity and a
character of its own. Its record brings into the succeeding centuries,
and still produces in our world, a distinctive relationship with God.

The Bible is a record of _progressive_ religious experience. As every
poet with a new message has to create his own public, so it would seem
that God had slowly to evolve men who would respond to His ever higher
inspirations. When scholars arrange for us the Biblical material in its
historical order, the advance becomes much more apparent. Its God grows
from a tribal deity to the God of the whole world; from a localized
divinity dwelling on Sinai or at Jerusalem, as the Greeks placed their
gods on Olympus, into the Spirit who fills heaven and earth; from "a
man of war" and a tribal lawgiver into the God whose nature is love. "By
experience," said Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long
wandering," and it took at least ten centuries to pass from the God of
Moses to the Father of Jesus Christ.

Obviously we must interpret, and at times correct, the less developed by
the more perfect consciousness of God. The Scriptures, like the land in
which their scenes are laid, are a land of hills and valleys, of lofty
peaks of spiritual elevation and of dark ravines