CHAPTER I

THE TIMELESS BOOK

The Bible, like every other book, was the product of a certain period of time. It is a growth of heaven, but it is rooted in the soil of earth, and in its outward expression is redolent of the characteristic qualities of its habitat. This it had to be, if it was to reach, appeal to, and affect the men and women of its race and time and clime, to whom it first came in the sixteen hundred years of its production.

That race and clime are markedly distinct from those of the rest of the world, that time had very different characteristics from our own; and we are separated from it by almost nineteen centuries, centuries which have seen the most tremendous changes in human knowledge, human civilization, the details of human life.

And yet today, and everywhere, that book, breathing out in well-nigh every page the atmosphere of its Semitic authorship, and bearing the marks of the particular sixteen centuries of its birth, is the most contemporaneous book in the world; it is not only a citizen of every country, but also a contemporary of every class, of every date. It has always been so, from the day when Christianity began to give it currency and approach to the whole world of men, the one strictly up-to-date book, the latest word and news for humanity, everywhere and always timeless, in its appeal, its application, and its effect. Spite of its

Semitic tone and archaic time, it is fresh, new, powerful, wherever it can fairly get in touch with the mind.

Bible Never Grows Old

What is the secret of this universal and ubiquitous contemporaneousness?

It has more than the timelessness of great literature, though it has that. Some literature leaps the national boundaries, and endures down the ages, by virtue of something magnificent in its thought, or universal in its appeal, or masterly in its construction, or charming or beautiful in its form, line, music. Very much of the Bible has all those claims. Many of its books are unsurpassed in every one of those qualities. But it is hyperbole to say that the best of other literature is timeless in any such sense as the Bible is. What other book among all the world's classics ever finds itself universally at home, accepted and eagerly devoured as the latest despatch from the central court of things, as this book does? We put them on our list of “The Hundred Best" and on our "Five-foot Shelves." Our scholars, some few, read them con amore, our "highbrows" read them for display, the aspiring read them with sweat of brow, and the mass of humanity leaves them on the shelves with mute and admiring, because expected, respect. Too many, it is true, do that with the Bible, but to some everywhere, to very many in the aggregate, to representative souls in every class in fact, it comes with a fresh appeal and power that has no flavor of the antique and the outgrown; it grips and grapples them at once, the most modern thing they get; the one real "Everyman's Library.”

Nor is the reason of this timelessness simply that the Bible is the production, through a great and wonderful period, marked by great and wonderful experiences, of a great and wonderful people, the undoubted religious geniuses of all humanity, the Jewish race. Other great peoples have put forth virile and powerful religious literatures, but they could not save them from oblivion. They were great, but they are gone, and gone forever, or kept only in a museum. Great single religious utterances, how many have passed into forgetfulness. The Jews themselves, as the people, in any living sense, of that book, have passed. In so far as they have retained its outward body, having missed its soul, they are not contemporary; they are belated Pharisees. So far as they have missed both its outward form and its inner soul, they are belated Sadducees. One class has no power; the other has no approach.

The Bible has perennial approach and appeal because it possesses certain qualities of permanence in greater degree than any other literature does, and certain others of which no other literature really has any.

God is the Theme

It is the timeless book, evermore "up-to-date" and down-to-the-minute," because it grapples with the theme which is not only the greatest of all themes, but which is also in itself timeless, an eternal subject, with eternal interest-God. Other books too deal with God, his existence, the problems of his character and action, but what other can be named which is so centered upon