to the cottage of the plain man and the palace of the king. It is
woven into the literature of the scholar and colors the talk of the
street." That is the voice of the liberalism which includes rather
than excludes.

These were men not of the band of evangelical Christian preachers, who
are roughly classed as a set of persons unable to tell the truth about
the Bible, for fear they may lose their means of subsistence; these
are men who know the true mission of the Bible. It is not to furnish
a picture of life in the time of Moses such as life ought to be, a
portrait of a David for the imitation of men, a statue of a warrior
in a time of barbarism who shall command my obedience to his commands
now, an idea of God wrought out in ignorance and darkness, which has
no self-development within it. The mission of the Bible is to furnish
a humanly written account of a people, just as human as we, in whom,
by divine inspiration, the soul of truth so lived and worked as to
develop, in gradual course, by laws, by hopes, by loves, by life, a
living, and, at last, perfectly authoritative ideal of righteousness,
but more than all a gradual growth of such moral power as would be
commanding in the redeeming self-sacrifice and love of Jesus Christ.
Every page of the Old Testament was only preparatory, as the thorny
bush is preparatory for the rose. Christ is the end of the long, weary
human history that leads to Him. If the laws of Sinai had been enough,
there never would have been a Calvary. No one for a moment dreams that
the God of nature could have brought forth such a fruit as the life
and ideas of Jesus without a tree of such a history, a tree rooted in
the ground, storm-twisted, gnarled, and valuable only for its fruit.
We are not asked to eat the roots and bark and branches; only the
fruit has an appeal to us. Its appeal is to our hunger, its authority
lies in the fact that it satisfies our hunger.

It has satisfied the hunger of men whose liberalism came from their
being made liberally. Large and capacious souls of mighty yearnings
are they. They stand in contrast with the puny critics who assert
that the Bible fails to feed them, because they have never tasted its
nourishment.

Liberal Christianity, separating itself from the dogmatism which would
make Christianity a book religion, worshiping a literary idol rather
than loving a human revelation of the divine, knows it is not an
ignorant lot of men and women who have receiv