All of this is familiar in theory; if it become familiar in practice we shall have a new generation of Christian workers; and in this tremendous new day we must have just that.

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS

1. What is the Bible's first mission?

2. Why?

3. Why does it so often fail of its mission?

4. How does Bible study nourish the "taproot of the soul"?

5. How does the "soul's main trunk" grow?

6. Why do some Christians have such keen spiritual perception?

7. What is the Bible's one supreme service?

8. How may this be obtained?

9. How translate theory into practice?

CHAPTER VIII

THE BIBLE BACKBONE

Some subjects need only to be stated; they are selfevidencing and self-expository. This is one of them. The Bible is the spinal column of all our Christian work, the backbone without which everything would be weak and disjointed, lacking coherency and strength; the spinal cord, without which there would be neither religious intelligence, feeling, or power. Any part through which its branching nerves do not run is cold, paralyzed, lifeless; there is no part which does not imperatively need its substance, its flavor, its impulse, and its power. We are all agreed.

Keep in Sight First Principle

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But nothing is easier than to get so deep into the woods that you cannot see the forest for the trees," and in a maze of beautiful plans and a multitude of interesting and helpful details lose sight of first principles. Nothing is more necessary than every now and then, with what strength we may, to reaffirm these first principles. The multiplication-table and the alphabet have this advantage over the Bible: one cannot do a single problem of any length or read a sentence without them; but, alas, one can do an immense amount of church and Sunday school work with only the shadiest reference to the Bible, if not a complete ignoring of it; using it as a convenient "point

of departure," or a string around which to crystallize the rock-candy of our own or other people's thoughts. Of course the final result of such work will no more pass muster than would our arithmetic without the multiplication-table, or our rhetoric without our alphabet, but in our delighted absorption we fail to see the elements which are lacking. The religious life of those we teach and train, however, will reveal them all too soon under the crack and strain of life's daily pressures and stresses.

The Bible is absolutely fundamental. The Bible it was that made the worker himself a Christian, that made him a worker, that gave him the religious experience which lies back of his impulse to be a worker, that gave him the basis of great fundamental truths on which he must stand to work, and it now gives him the heart and life and substance of all his teaching and work.

He can get nowhere else these complete, full, definite, thrilling truths about God and his being and character, truths about man's state and need, truths about God's and man's way of salvation, truths about human duty and destiny, and about the possibilities and pathways of the Christian life. And from nowhere else do these truths come out with such strength, such emphasis, such force, such authoritativeness. It is the one primary source of religious knowledge. Whatever else our work contains is just so much clothing, apparatus, flavoring, dilution of this.

Imagine a Sunday school teaching and working without this running all through it to stiffen, strengthen, vitalize, and spiritualize it; without a clear reference to the Bible's authoritativeness, without a strong infusion, a dominating infusion, of the Bible's teaching, however thoughtful,

imaginative, scientific, poetical, tactful, beautiful, it might be!

Some Lesson Dangers

The Uniform Sunday School Lessons of the past had two great defects recognized by all. What they did give of the Bible was "bones" rather than "backbone." They lacked the central coordinating vertebral column of a systematic view of Bible teaching; and they secured reference to a more or less voluminous "literature" about the Bible rather than to the Bible itself. How eloquently and indignantly our reformers used to fulminate about "Nothing but Leaves," and frantically beckon teacher and pupil "back to the Bible"!

Is there a possibility that Improved Uniform Lessons and Graded Lessons of all sorts have not completely done away with the danger? May pupils' and teachers' minds still be filled with a choice supply of excerpts from the best modern authors about the Bible and Bible times, with pretty thoughts in prose and verse about the fatherhood of God, the beauties of nature, the glories of character, the principles of ethics, and a thousand and one things delightful as flavoring and trimming, but not the main substance of religious truth, the main road to God? No system is immune from the danger. That the Sunday school worker should know fundamentally whom he is to teach, may be conceded, for the Bible itself is only an instrument; it is not an end in itself; the end is the glory of God in the making and molding of character into the image of Jesus Christ. But that he needs fully as much to know what he is to teach, and to teach with-the word of God-must be insisted on,

As has before been said, there are all sorts of cooling drinks, of various flavors; but the one thing in any of them that really quenches thirst is the water it contains, for that alone supplies the waste of tissue whose painful expression thirst is. There may be many shapes, colors, polishes to the handle of the glazier's tool, but the one thing that severs the ties between the molecules of glass is the diamond point. Many may be the sizes and shapes of the hydraulic miner's hose, but what dissolves the hill ahead of him and frees the imprisoned gold is the mighty force of the water that drives down from its reservoir in the hills. It is the amount of Bible that gets into contact with the life of the Sunday school, and through that the amount of the life and power of Jesus Christ, that means our work's efficiency. Pedagogy, machinery, methods, are all of use for distribution and application; but the Bible is, under God, the power, the substance.

Get the Thing Itself

There is nothing superstitious or platitudinously pious about all this. The Bible has been God's chosen medium for bringing his truth and life into contact with men. He has used the choicest religious geniuses of the race in its production. He has packed it full of the deepest and most thrilling religious thought, expressed with a pith, a power, a pungency, a pregnancy, unsurpassed anywhere. He has blessed its use again and again and again in the great religious uplifts of the race, and in the upbuilding of individual souls. It comes to us with the momentum of the religious use and power of thirty centuries. Fairly presented to the mind and heart of young or old, it awakens responsive echoes in the profoundest depths of