nterpret the Bible, for He alone knows what He meant by what He
wrote. And even the Holy Spirit is able to interpret the Bible to =no one=
but the =believer=. For the rationalist, the unbeliever, rejects faith, and
thereby completely closes "the eyes of the heart" to the illumination of
the Spirit; while the faith of the believer is the very thing that opens
the heart to an understanding of the Word. Spiritual apprehension begins
only at the point where faith begins.

This is why it is that when the rationalist tries his hand at
interpretation he is sure, sooner or later, to bring perfectly harmonious
facts into confusion and contradiction.

Take, for example, the facts regarding the development of the human embryo.
The rationalist notes that as it develops it bears a striking resemblance,
successively, to the more mature forms of some of the lower animals, in an
imagined orderly progress from lower to higher. That this resemblance is a
fact no one disputes. There is no controversy over the fact. But when the
rationalist attempts to explain this fact, he interprets it to mean that
man is the product of evolution, rather than a special creation, as the
Bible says he is, and thus he thrusts such confusion and contradiction
before us that we are compelled to make a choice between his interpretation
and the statements of the Bible. The controversy that results is caused
altogether by the rationalist thrusting himself into that place that
belongs to the Holy Spirit alone. "=He= shall lead you into all the truth,"
said Christ, and it is presumptuous in the extreme to seek to do the Holy
Spirit's work for Him.

We are forewarned of the methods of the modern rationalist in his approach
to the Bible by what Christ said to the Jews who were finding fault with
what He taught:

"For had ye believed Moses," He said, "ye would have believed
Me; for he wrote of Me. But if ye believe not his writings,
how shall ye believe My words?"

This is precisely the pathway modern rationalism has followed. It began by
discrediting what Moses wrote, and it has now gone to the length of denying
final authority to what Christ said.

Rationalism is both irreverent and destructive when it seeks to do anything
with the Word of God. For that Book is to be handled as =no= other book is.
Behind the historical, and the literary, and the textual, and the
philosophical criticism must be a spiritual discernment, born of faith
alone, which bo