regret his inability to appreciate a
single one of the great authors, and will try to enlarge his sympathies.
The Christian will, with entire naturalness, be loyal to so much of the
Bible as "finds him," and humbly hope and endeavor to be led into ampler
ranges of spiritual life, that he may "apprehend with all saints" the
breadth, length, depth and height of the historic Self-revelation of
God.

The Bible is thus _a standard of religious experience_. If there is any
question as to what man's life with God ought to be, it can be referred
to the life recorded in these books. But men have often made the Bible
much more; confusing experience with its interpretation in some
particular epoch, they used the Bible as a treasury of proof texts for
doctrines, or of laws for conduct, or of specific provisos for Church
government and worship. They forgot that the writers of the early
chapters of _Genesis_, in describing their faith in God's relationship
to His world and to man and to history, had to express that faith in
terms of the existing traditions concerning the creation, the fall, the
deluge, the patriarchs. Their faith in God is one thing; the scientific
and historic accuracy of the stories in which they utter it is quite
another thing. They did not distinguish between Paul's life with God in
Christ, and the philosophy he had learned in Gamaliel's classroom, or
picked up in the thought of the Roman world of his day. Paul's religious
life is one thing, his theology in which he tries to explain and state
it is another thing. They read the plans that were made for the
organization of the first churches, and hastily concluded that these
were intended to govern churches in all ages. The chief divisions of the
Church claim for their form of government--papal, episcopal,
presbyterian, congregational--a Biblical authority. The religious life
of the early churches is one thing; their faith and hope and love ought
to abide in the Church throughout all generations; the method of their
organization may have been admirable for their circumstances, but there
is no reason we should consider it binding upon us in the totally
different circumstances of our day. Latterly social reformers have been
attempting to show that the Bible teaches some form of economic theory,
like socialism or communism. It lays down fundamental principles of
brotherhood, of justice, of peaceableness, but the economic or political
systems in which these shall be e