cripture as it would treat any
unreligious or heathen literature, and with no relation to its divine
authorship. It sees in Scripture only a promiscuous collection of
disjointed documents, with no living tie to bind them together, and no
significance beyond that of the time in which they were written. It
would treat the Bible as a man-made book, or rather, as a man-made
series of books, regardless of the fact that the plural "biblia," which
once represented the thought of the church, has, under the influence of
the divine Spirit, become "biblion" or Bible, a singular, and a proof
that Christian consciousness has not been satisfied with rationalistic
explanations, but has followed its natural impulses by attributing unity
to the word of Christ its Saviour. The separate "words" have been felt
to constitute the one "word of God," an organic whole, which fitly
represents the eternal "Word," of whom it is the voice and expression.
Scripture is not a congeries of earth-born fragments, but an organism,
pulsating with divine life. The "historical method" of which I speak can
never find that life, because it works only on the physical and
horizontal plane, ignoring the light which comes deductively from above,
and also the darkening and blinding influences which often operate
unconsciously from below.

XVI

SCRIPTURE AND MISSIONS

The "historical method" of Scripture interpretation, as it is often
employed, ends without Christ, because it begins without him. One of its
fundamental principles is that each passage of Scripture is to be
interpreted solely in the light of the knowledge and intent of the
person who wrote it. The One Hundred and Tenth Psalm, for example, can
have no reference to Christ, because the writer knew no other than the
Jewish king whose accession and whose power he anticipates. The Psalm
reads, "Jehovah said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, until I
make thine enemies thy footstool." The so-called historical critics
would make any interpretation of this passage as a designed prophecy of
Christ to be an unwarranted accommodation of it to a meaning which it
did not originally bear, and the conclusion is that we are wrong in
citing these words as an Old Testament assertion of Christ's deity. But,
unfortunately for this method of interpretation, we have, in the Gospels
of Matthew and of Mark, our Lord's own reference of this passage, not
simply to some Jewish ruler of olden time, but to the comi