rd of God, acknowledge it to be the greatest
among the books of men.

Yet the New Testament was all produced--if we are forbidden to say
"given"--in one age, not fifteen centuries. Neither was this one of the
great ages of history, when genius seems to be almost contagious. Even
Greece had at this time no original thinkers. Its two centuries of
intellectual supremacy had passed away. It was the age of literary
imitations and counterfeits. Yet it is in this age that the book which
has most profoundly influenced the thought of all subsequent times made
its appearance. How shall we account for the fact? The explanation is
not that its writers were great men. However insignificant the writers,
the mysterious greatness of the book pervades it all, and their lips are
touched as with a live coal from the altar. Nothing will account for the
New Testament but the other fact that Jesus of Nazareth had appeared
among men, and that He was so great, so universal, so human, so Divine,
that He contained in His own person all the truth that will ever be
discovered in the book. Deny the incarnation of the Son of God, and you
make the New Testament an insoluble enigma. Admit that Jesus is the
Word, and that the Word is God, and the book becomes nothing more,
nothing less, than the natural and befitting outcome of what He said and
did and suffered. The mystery of the book is lost in the greater mystery
of His person.

Here the second verse comes in, to tell us of this great Person, and how
He unites in Himself the whole of God's revelation. He is appointed Heir
of all things, and through Him God made the ages. He is the Alpha and
the Omega, the first and the last, He which is, and which was, and which
is to come,--the spring from which all the streams of time have risen
and the sea into which they flow. But these are the two sides of all
real knowledge; and revelation is nothing else than knowledge given by
God. All the infinite variety of questions with which men interrogate
nature may be reduced to two: Whence? and whither? As to the latter
question, the investigation has not been in vain. We do know that,
whatever the end will be, the whole universe rises from lower to higher
forms. If one life perishes, it reappears in a higher life. It is the
ultimate purpose of all which still remains unknown. But the Apostles
declare that this interrogation is answered in Jesus Christ. Only that
they speak, not of "ultimate purpose," but of "the a