The Bible is our greatest heritage from historical Christianity. Nothing out of all that wonderful past has come down to us so valuable as the Bible. The Bible, not the church, is our most valuable asset. We have the seed of the church in the Holy Scriptures. The Word did not issue from the church, but the church from the Word. Destroy the church to-day and a new one would come into existence to-morrow.

      The citadel of our religion is the Bible. It is the only authoritative voice of Him who is not only the foundation, but the Head of the church. It is not surprising, therefore, that the most powerful philippics of the enemies of our Lord have from the beginning been directed against the oracles of God. In the garden our first parents were tempted to doubt by the enemy's suggestion, "Yea, hath God said," and "Yea, hath God said," is still the bold, unbelieving and scornful challenge of the enemies of truth.

      Looking back from the summit of this first century of our history, we observe there has been no cessation of this attack on the Scriptures. The nineteenth century was ushered in amid a lurid flashing and the strident shrieking of a storm of infidelity. In France the Reign of Terror swept away all sanctions of the moral law. It was solemnly resolved in the Corpe De Legislatif that there is no God. God was disposed of by resolutions. The Lord's. Day was erased from the statute-books. The friends of [553] the encyclopedia were chanting requiems at the tomb of Christianity.

      Voltaire, the witty French skeptic, said: "It took twelve men to establish Christianity. I will show the world how one man [presumably himself] can pull it to pieces. In one hundred years from this time the Bible will be an obsolete book, and men will search for it on the dusty shelves of the antiquarian." The thinkers of Europe aped the thinkers of France. In our own country religion reached its lowest ebb. It is said that in the year 1800 there were only three professing Christians in Yale College. Darkness covered the land and gross darkness the people. This tidal wave of infidelity swept the country and it seemed as though the foundations of God were about to be overthrown.

      Then came the fathers--the cry, "To the law and to the testimony." "If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles

G. W. SPEER.

of God." They magnified the Word above all God's law. They took their stand on the more sure Word. Only one book in a thousand lives five years, and only one in twenty thousand one hundred years. Here is a book of which certain portions were in existence before the siege of Troy and centuries before the foundations of Rome were laid. The same unchanged and unchangeably great Book. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." "Where the Scriptures speak, we speak, and where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent."

      Our century opened with a storm of rationalism. There is great difference in the methods of attack between a century ago and to-day. In our day the assault is wholly from within. The great leaders of open and avowed infidelity are gone--Bradlaugh, in England, and R. G. Ingersoll, in America. These men were the last of the old guard. Open warfare has been displaced by strategy.

      Within the gates of Zion a body of militant critics, many of them wearing the sacred garb of theological professors and ministers of the gospel, have attempted to draw the bolts of the citadel gates. Is it not a significant fact that there is not a fundamental which has not been called in question by these men in holy orders? The virgin birth, vicarious death, physical resurrection, have all gone overboard.

      The crying need of our time is for instruction in religious things. The drift of the age has been toward superficiality in religious knowledge. Emotion has held undue sway. Tradition has been accepted without examination. Recently bold and sometimes irreverent investigation in Biblical science has shaken the faith that has been resting on unquestioned tradition. Never was it more necessary for the people of God to search beneath the rubbish for the unmovable stones of the divine temple.

      Our faith must be reinforced by knowledge. Facts must be grasped in their solidity. The sword of the Spirit must be seized firmly and wielded skillfully. The Bible is not a plaster to be applied externally, but a remedy to be taken internally.

      The training-class movement is not only as timely as the Reformation of Luther or the Restoration of the fathers, but as certainly of God. This is the age of the people, and through this movement they are being called back to a study of the Word. Our people were becoming as ignorant of the Bible as the man who posed as a disciple of culture and mathematical education. He was asked if he went through algebra, and replied, "Yes, but it was a very dark night when I went through, and I did not get to see much of the place."

      The other day, in a round-table discussion in our city, conducted by Dr. McElfresh, some earnest man asked: "Mr. McElfresh, can a man understand the Bible by studying the International lessons?" "What do you mean?" said the leader. "Well," he said, "I have been going to Sunday-school and studying the International lessons for thirty years, and we have a person in our church who has been studying 'Training for Service' one year, and that person understands the Bible better than I do." This is valuable testimony for the work of teacher-training. [554]

[CCR 553-554]