dge of Jesus Christ as a
living Factor in our careers confirms the experience His disciples had
of His continued intercourse with them subsequent to His crucifixion;
but the manner of His resurrection and the mode in which _post mortem_
He communicated with them must be left to the untrammelled study of
historical students. The religious message of a miraculous happening,
like the story of Jonah or of the raising of Lazarus, we can test and
prove: disobedience brings disaster, repentance leads to restoration;
faith in Christ gives Him the chance to be to us the resurrection and
the life. The reported events must be tested by the judgments of
historic probability which are applied to all similar narratives, past
or present. The Bible's authority is strictly _religious_; it has to do
solely with God and man's life with man in Him; and, when read in the
light of its culmination in Christ, it approves itself to the Spirit of
Christ within Christians as a correct record of their experiences of
God, and the mighty inspiration to such experiences. Surely it is no
belittling limitation to say of this unique book that it is an authority
_only on God_. Every fundamental question of life is answered, every
essential need of the soul is met, when God is found, and becomes our
Life, our Home.

And with such _self-evidencing_ authority in the books of the Bible, it
is a question of minor importance who were their authors and when they
were written--the questions which the literary historical criticism
undertakes to answer. Luther put the matter conclusively when he said in
his vigorous fashion: "That which does not teach Christ is not
apostolic, though Peter or Paul should have said it; on the contrary
that which preaches Christ is apostolic, even if it should come from
Judas, Annas, Pilate and Herod." Some persons have been greatly troubled
in the last generation by being told that scholars did not consider the
conventionally received authorships of many of the books of the Bible
correct, but thought that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, or David
the _Psalms_, or Solomon the _Proverbs_ or _Ecclesiastes_, or Isaiah and
Jeremiah more than parts of the books that bear their names, or John and
Peter all the writings ascribed to them. We are not to judge of writings
by their authors, but by their intrinsic value. Suppose Shakespeare did
not write more than a fraction of the plays associated with his name, or
that he wrote none of them