retained by the Jews, was adopted from the beginning by the Christian church, which indeed began as a Jewish sect. The New Testament canon, which in the course of two centuries was made up for Christian uses, supplements the former by adding the fulfillment and completion to which the old looks forward. Like the older canon, it puts its historical part, consisting of the four gospels and the Acts, first; but the second part, consisting of epistolary works from St. Paul and others, was written earlier than the completed gospels. In our study of Biblical literature the two canons are treated as harmonious with each other and in a way continuous; for our purposes indeed the two are one library, making the whole Bible a unitary cycle of literature. Two important results of this development from a miscellaneous literature to a coördinated library or canon are to be noted and borne in mind as we study. Results of this Library I. Much of the literature we have in a revised Selection form, adapted to conditions later than those of the first composition. The revisions were indeed made conscientiously and with remarkable skill and sympathy; but sometimes differing versions of the same event may be interwoven, or introduced side by side without attempt to reduce discrepancies. Customs and ideas which have grown obsolete may be interpreted by standards of the later time when the final account was given. Primitive elements may exist among the more matured and refined. In other words, the Bible literature, owing to the conditions in which it was developed, is very largely a composite literature, containing elements of varying age and mintage. This fact increases the difficulty of historic verification; but it does not impair, it enhances rather, the spiritual and literary value of the whole, because the editorial work has softened the crudities of style and presented the truth of the theme in a more finished and uniform edition. 2. The various books and their component parts were written in one order, an order following in the large the historical experience of the nation. As an arranged library, however, they are to be read and estimated in another order, an order rather of dependence than of chronology. The books of earliest theme, like Genesis, were not the earliest written; and they contain evidences of a more advanced and matured thinking than do some other books, like for instance Judges. Leviticus contains a later development of law than Deuteronomy. The prophets, which in the canon come after the historical books, have to be fitted into the history by internal evidence; and generally they come before the Mosaic law is completed, though the latter is in Hebrew estimation the first division of the Bible, both in time and importance. The noting of such historical connections as these has in the last half century revolutionized and greatly illuminated Biblical research; it is in fact the main business of what is called the Higher Criticism. It is to be valued not blindly nor exclusively, but for what it is worth. The study of the Bible in its canonical order has its advantages too; and the present and eternal values do not depend on our knowledge of ancient history. III The Bible as a Book. The editorial and selective movement by which a race's literature was winnowed and reduced to a classified library was but a stage in a movement greater still, whose full significance could not well come to light until the culminating stage was reached, to complete and round out the whole. This culminating stage of the Biblical literature is comprised in the New Testament. With this body of writings to draw the meanings of things into unity and coördination, it is seen that the Bible resolves itself into a single book. It has the authentic traits of an organic and homogeneous individual work of literature. Like any well-planned book it has one inclusive plot or theme; it has a single purpose, [21] a correlation of parts, a consistently developed movement, a fitting dénouement; it has a unitary ideal, to which its whole scheme of character, object, and event is related. Thus it has earned its unique title: The Book. What all this book movement is, in outline, will appear as we trace the story of a literature some thirteen hundred years in the making. Its beginnings emerge from dim prehistoric times whose conditions can be traced only by spiritual insight. It is closely interwoven with the progress of a nation's history; and yet its truth is larger than historical events can compass or explain. It is enmeshed with the thoughts and motives of human nature from manhood's primitive elements; and yet by a steady prophetic pulsation it sweeps onward beyond the natural course of human tendency until the human blends with the divine. By reason of this spiritual movement and high culmination it is that this book, so many ages in the making, bears emphatic marks of one superintending Mind, one organic purpose. It is impossible to account for all that the Book is without holding it to be as truly the word of God as the composition of man. Movement Without attempting to measure the divine factor in this movement, however, we may here note two cardinal eleRationale of ments, reciprocally related to each other, which the Biblical work together to make the Bible a unitary book. The first is, that throughout the Old Testament range of utterance its authors had, in varying degrees as occasion called, a prophetic intuition and conviction of their people's duty and destiny, and shaped their literary work accordingly. The Old Testament is a forward-looking book. It is imbued with the idea that the unique history it records is history working to an end. Of the racial traits that come to light in it, none is more constant than what has been called "the habitual expectancy of the Semitic mind";1 1 G. A. Smith, "Book of the Twelve Prophets," Vol. I, p. 15. and of all the strains of literary utterance represented the most vital and potent is the prophetic. The second element is, that as the Personage whose words and ministry are the soul of the New Testament was imbued with the dynamic spirit of this prophetic literature, he set himself consciously and determinately to translate its ideals into terms of human life. He made it his vocation to interpret, to correct, and to fulfill what the men of truest intuition in the ages before had dimly foreseen ought to be. The life of Jesus and the literature that gathered round and derived from it are as truly expressed in terms of completion and fulfillment as the Old Testament is in terms of promise and expectation. Thus, with these two factors prophecy and fulfillment answering in their order to each other, the Bible may be regarded as essentially the story (may we not call it the epic?) of the spiritual development of manhood, as this is revealed through the experiences of a nation specially endowed to this end, and as it culminates in a supreme Personality in whom is revealed the Son of Man, which is to say the complete adult manhood. If we seek for the supreme interpreter of Biblical history and thought, the one without whom it would be a plot without a consummation, this is he. This is how the later Biblical writers read the course of the vast action, as its end and purpose lay unrolled before them. To this end all who wrought at the sublime literary structure prophets, historians, evangelists, apostles builded better than they knew, for an unseen Wisdom and Spirit wrought with them. And so as their work began with the vision of the primal spirit of man issuing raw and untried from the Creator's hand, it ended, after the dim and perilous way" of his spiritual education and growth had been traversed, with the vision, still going on to realization, of the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ," which is St. Paul's definition of "a full-grown |