assic; and scarcely a man of letters has
failed to bear witness to its charm and power. While most translations
lose something of the beauty and meaning of the original, there are some
parts of the English Bible which, as literature and as religion, excel
the Hebrew or Greek they attempt to render.

The Bible is a record of _religious experience_. It has but one central
figure from _Genesis_ to _Revelation_--God. But God is primarily in the
experience, only secondarily in the record. All thought succeeds in
grasping but a fraction of consciousness; thought is well symbolized in
Rodin's statue, where out of a huge block of rough stone a small finely
chiselled head emerges. With all their skill we cannot credit the men of
faith who are behind the Bible pages with making clear to themselves but
a small part of God's Self-disclosure to them. And when they came to
wreak thought upon expression, so clear and well-trained a mind as
Paul's cannot adequately utter what he feels and thinks. His sentences
strain and sometimes break; he ends with such expressions as "the love
of Christ which passeth knowledge," and God's "unspeakable gift."

The divine revelation which is in the experience has been at times
identified with the thought that interprets it, or even with the words
which attempt to describe it. "Faith in the thing grows faith in the
report"; and fantastic doctrines of the verbal inerrancy of the Bible
have been held by numbers of earnest Christians. Certain recent
scholars, acknowledging that no version of the Bible now existing is
free from error, have put forward the theory that the original
manuscripts of these books, as they came from their authors' hands, were
so completely controlled by God as to be without mistake. Since no man
can ever hope to have access to these autographs, and would not be sure
that he had them in his hands if he actually found them, this theory
amounts to saying with the nursery rhyme:

Oats, peas, beans, and barley grows,
Where you, nor I, nor nobody knows.

We have not only to collate the manuscripts we possess and try to
reconstruct the likeliest text, but when we know what the authors
probably wrote, we must press back of their language and ideas to the
religious experience they attempt to express.

As writers the Biblical authors do not claim a special divine
assistance. Luke, in his preface to his gospel, merely asserts that he
has taken the pains of a careful historian, and P