ow ministers to our highest development? What
is spurious but the absurd and the hollow, which brings no fruit--at
least, no good fruit.

Goethe: "Conversations," March 11,1832.

No article of faith is injured by allowing that there is no such
positive proof, when or by whom these and some other books of holy
Scripture were written, as to exclude all possibility of doubt and
cavil.

Watson's "Apology for the Bible," Letter IV.

VI.

The Right Historical Use of the Bible.

The principle of development involves also the existence of a latent
germ of being--a capacity or potentiality striving to realize
itself.... What Spirit really strives for is the realization of its
Ideal being.....

The profoundest thought is connected with the personality of
Christ--with the historical and external; and it is the very grandeur
of the Christian religion that, with all this profundity, it is easy of
comprehension by our consciousness in its outward aspect, while, at the
same time, it summons us to penetrate deeper.

Hegel: "Philosophy of History," pp. 57, 344. [Bohn.]

Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences go on
gaining in depth and breadth, and the human mind expand as it may, it
will never go beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity as
it glistens and shines forth in the gospel!

Goethe: "Conversations," March, 11,1832.

VI.

The Right Historical Use of the Bible.

"When the fulness of the time was come God sent forth His
Son."--Galatians, iv. 4.

St. Paul condensed the philosophy of Hebrew history into a metaphor.
Israel travailed in birth with Christianity. In the mind of the nation was
begotten, of the Most High, a conception of ethical religion, whose
gestation was a process of centuries. The period of parturition came, and
a universal religion was born into the world; bodied, as religion needs
must be, in a man, Jesus, the Christ.

"When the fulness of the time was come God sent forth His Son."

The sacred literature of Israel is the record and embodiment of this
organic growth of her religion, through its various moods and tenses,
toward its ideal in the Christ. The sacred literature of the Christian
Church is the picture of this flower of the soul of Israel, and of the new
growth springing up from its seeding down of humanity. The whole Bible
presents us with th