ations.

I.--FOUNDATIONS

1.--If the fear should ever come upon you, my reader, of the
possibility of the Scriptures being discredited by present-day
controversies after having been accepted as God-given for three
thousand years, first pause for a moment, and let the full weight of
these thoughts press upon you of all that is implied in the fact (1)
that any set of old documents, always open to scrutiny and question,
should for thousands of years have been accepted as of Divine origin;
(2) that they should have been yielded to by men as an authority to
guide their conduct by commands often disagreeable to themselves; (3)
that this acceptance and obedience has been chiefly amongst the most
thoughtful and highly-cultured nations of the world; (4) that it has
gone on age after age, steadily increasing, and never in any age has
made more progress than in this cultured, enlightened, all-questioning
century in which we live.

2.--What has given these Scriptures such authority? Remember they were
only separate documents, often with hundreds of years intervening
between them, written by different writers of different characters to
different people, and under different circumstances. Remember that in
many cases we do not know their origin, or how they assumed their
present form. And yet somehow we never can reach back in their history
to a time when they were not treasured and reverenced among men as in
some way at least above human productions. There they stand, a long
chain of records with one end reaching away into the far back past, and
the other gathering around the feet of Christ.

And remember especially this, that they were selected out by no
miracle, that they rest on no formal decision or sentence of Church or
Council, or pope or saint, nay, not even of the Blessed Lord Himself;
for long before He came, for centuries and centuries there they stood,
testifying of Him, cherished and reverenced as a message that had come
from above "at sundry times and in divers manners". All study of their
history shows that their acceptance rested on no decision of any
external authority. They were accepted as of Divine origin for many
generations before they were gathered into any fixed collection. "The
Church", said Luther, "cannot give more force or authority to a book
than it has in itself. A Council cannot make that to be Scripture
which in its own nature is not Scripture".

It is true that the great Synagogue, or t