3. Evidence of Hxperience.—No conclusion of scholarship on so difficult and delicate a problem as the date, authorship, historical accuracy, and theological authority of these writings can compel faith. Scholarship, as honest and as competent as that which is found in the Christian Churches, has not felt this compulsion, and has been able to maintain an opposite conclusion. For this con- clusion depends not only on the outward data, but on the inward attitude with which the data are approached. If, through the Person and Teaching and Work of Christ, God does not here and now draw near to a man, make Himself known to him, meet his greatest need, and bring him his highest good, neither the OT nor the NT can be proved to him the record and the interpretation of a Divine revelation. He might assent intellectually to the whole process of argument, but a mere assent to the claims of the Holy Scriptures has no religious value or significance. The evidence of revelation is a present experience, the impression the Holy Scriptures make, and the influence they wield, in reproducing in men the same relation to God as was perfectly realized by Christ, and is being pro- gressively realized in men by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. The intellectual pro- cess cannot be ignored, and the spiritual experience alone recognized. If it were proved to a man’s reason that the NT is not a true book, he might find an esthetic gratification, but he could not get a spiritual satisfaction in the life and work of Christ. It will enlarge and strengthen a man’s faith, if he not only yields himself to the impres- sion Christ makes on him, and the influence He gains over him, when the NT is read and studied on the assumption that it is true, but if he also sees what evidence there is to justify that assump- tion. The evidence may at first not go beyond the more probable, or the less improbable, but that is itself enough to justify a man, under the pressure of his practical necessities, in putting Christ to the proof, with all honesty and sincerity, whether He is indeed able to save to the uttermost all who come unto God through Him. The results in personal experience and character will in most cases raise the probability to a certainty, and the man will be able to say that he knows whom he has believed, and is persuaded that He is able to be to all who trust Him all that the NT represents Him as being.
4. Keception of the Divine Revelation.—It is with this proving of Christ’s grace that the present evidence of Divine Revelation must begin. But the acceptance of Christ as from God will so change the mental attitude, the moral disposition, the spiritual capacity, that a personal apprehen- sion, appreciation, and appropriation of the entire revelation of God in the Holy Scriptures will be- come increasingly possible. There may remain incidents incredible and doctrines unintelligible, and no Christian man is required to do violence either to conscience or to reason by forcing him- self to believe anything which does not evidence itself to him as from God. On the one hand, a large liberty of reserve should be claimed, and, on the other, a wide tolerance of difference should be shown. But no man who has found God in Christ can treat with indifference any element in the Christian revelation. He must feel that his in-
sensibility to impression from or influence by any art of the Holy Scriptures is his own spiritual oss, the narrowing and the impoverishing of his experience ; and he should so strive to widen his intelligence and deepen his sympathy by fuller submission to the Spirit of truth and love in Christ, that he will be able at last to secure and rejoice in the whole counsel of God, all the truth as it is in Jesus. Only by this receptive and re- sponsive attitude can a man become the possessor of the Divine revelation as his personal treasure. As in olden times God revealed Himself in outward signs and sounds, so in the Holy Scriptures, read with intelligence, reverence, aspiration, does He still reveal Hiniself. Not a distant but a present, not an indifferent but an interested, not an in- dolent but an active Father meets us in Christ by the Spirit, and deals with us here and now. The significance and value of the old revelation is that it is the medium of an ever new revela- tion. God Himself proves that He spake and wrought of old by speaking and working in us now His own good will and pleasure, even our salvation. Every Christian man should be an inspired man, because the Spirit is in Christ given to all men according to their faith; and, in this experience of the Spirit, God is really revealing Himself. But inasmuch as this revelation comes from this inspiration, and this inspiration is con- ditioned by faith in Christ’s grace, and that faith is not found apart from a knowledge of the Gospel as contained in the Holy Scriptures, this continuous revelation and universal inspiration in Christ is not a rival to or substitute for the revelation and in- spiration of the Holy Scriptures, as the former is dependent on and controlled by the latter. We know that God reveals Himself in us only as we know the revelation of the Father in the Son; but to the testimony of the writers of the Scriptures to their own authority and the witness of the Church to the worth of these Scriptures for its faith and life there must be added, to produce that perfect con- fidence in God’s revelation which it demands and deserves, the experience in the individual soul of God’s presence and power in His Son and by His Spirit.