"It has been laid on me to say a few words on the devotional study of the Holy Scriptures, taking some one Book of Scripture, and in some sort exemplifying such study from it. I accept the theme, with a deep sense both of its opportuneness in our busy period, so full of temptations to the Christian Minister to postpone his Bible-study to other things, and of its sacred, paramount, vital importance. May our divine and sovereign Master be pleased to use my simple suggestions to call once more the attention especially of His ordained servants to the urgency of our need to be personal Bible-students before Him, and to the strength and joy that lies in such study, really pursued. He, in the days of His flesh, was the supreme Believer in the Bible, the supreme Lover, Student, Expositor, and Employer of the Bible. With the letter of the Bible He sustained Himself and quelled the Enemy in the Temptation, and the quotations He then selected suggest the minuteness of His study. Upon the written Word He spent the whole Easter afternoon. Accepted Sacrifice for Sin, Conqueror of Death, Lord and Head of Life, He had come that morning from the grave; and He came as it were holding the Scriptures in His hands.
"He found around Him in those earthly days a mass of religious popular opinions, and He spoke His holy mind freely against the false among them. But there was one opinion which He noticed only to sanction, to sanctify, to glorify. It was the opinion that the Scriptures were divine, were charged with the authority of God.
"I pray to Him, and trust Him, my Master and Lord, to hold me now humbly firm to the end, after many a struggle, in His opinion of the Holy Scriptures. I would enter into, as He abode in, their rest; therefore I accept, as He accepted, their yoke. I would feel what He felt, that living incitement to their study which is indissolubly bound up, if I mistake not, with the firm persuasion of their supernatural character and authority. I would read them, as He read them, above all things to act upon them in the life which we, His followers, have in Him; that life whose exercise and outcome means our whole walk here as well as hereafter. I would regard them, as it is apparent that He regarded them, as being (in a sacred sense) self-sufficient; not, indeed, to the self-sufficient reader, but to the reader who prays in reverent simplicity that the Holy Spirit may dispel every moral mist, every hindrance of heart and will, from between him and the meaning of the written Word; and who intends in truthful sincerity to consent to, to obey, the discovered meaning; and who is taking pains over the Book.
"It is a great joy to know how entirely this was the view of the matter held, and loved, and taught in the ancient Church. Is there anything about which there is a larger consent of the Fathers? St Athanasius loves to dilate on the [Greek: autarkeia], the self-sufficingness, of 'the divine Scriptures.' St Cyril of Jerusalem entreats his hearers to guide and fix their belief by the reading of the Canonical books. St Chrysostom boldly accounts for all mischiefs by the lack of personal acquaintance with the Scriptures.
"We are in the nineteenth century, almost in the twentieth, and perhaps we therefore need, even more than our elder brethren of the fourth, to renew our energies in Scripture-study by prayerful, painstaking recollection of what the Book is. We need an ever fresh realization of what it is immortally, unalterably; the divinely trustworthy, and therefore authoritative, account of God's mind, and specially and above all of God's mind concerning Jesus Christ and our relations to Him, our life by Him, our peace, and power, and hope, in Him. And it is a few words about this aspect of Scripture, and the search of Scripture, that I now lay before you, with humility and simplicity of purpose, in the way of a description and example of a sort of study that has been a great blessing to myself.