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(a) This charge may be shown, in each single case, to rest upon a misapprehension of the aim and method of the book, and its connection with the remainder of the Bible, together with a narrowness of nature or of doctrinal view, which prevents the critic from appreciating the wants of the peculiar class of men to which the book is especially serviceable.

Luther called James “a right strawy epistle.” His constant pondering of the doctrine of justification by faith alone made it difficult for him to grasp the complementary truth that we are justified only by such faith as brings forth good works, or to perceive the essential agreement of James and Paul. Prof. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 3,1898:803, 804—“Luther refused canonical authority to books not actually written by apostles or composed (as Mark and Luke) under their direction. So he rejected from the rank of canonical authority Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter, Revelation. Even Calvin doubted the Petrine authorship of 2 Peter, excluded the book of Revelation from the Scripture on which he wrote Commentaries, and also thus ignored 2 and 3 John.” G. P. Fisher in S. S. Times, Aug. 29, 1891—“Luther, in his preface to the N. T. (Edition of 1522), gives a list of what he considers as the principal books of the N. T. These are John's Gospel and First Epistle, Paul's Epistles, especially Romans and Galatians, and Peter's First Epistle. Then he adds that ‘St. James' Epistle is a right strawy Epistle compared with them’—‘ein recht strohern Epistel gegen sie,’ thus characterizing it not absolutely but only relatively.” Zwingle even said of the Apocalypse: “It is not a Biblical book.” So Thomas Arnold, with his exaggerated love for historical accuracy and definite outline, found the Oriental imagery and sweeping visions of the book of Revelation so bizarre and distasteful that he doubted their divine authority.

(b) The testimony of church history and general Christian experience to the profitableness and divinity of the disputed books is of greater weight than the personal impressions of the few who criticize them.

Instance the testimonies of the ages of persecution to the worth of the prophecies, which assure God's people that his cause shall surely triumph. Denney, Studies in Theology, 226—“It is at least as likely that the individual should be insensible to the divine message in a book, as that the church should have judged it to contain such a message if it did not do so.” Milton, Areopagitica: “The Bible brings in holiest men passionately murmuring against Providence through all the arguments of Epicurus.” Bruce, Apologetics, 329—“O. T. religion was querulous, vindictive, philolevitical, hostile toward foreigners, morbidly self-conscious, and tending to self-righteousness. Ecclesiastes shows us how we ought not to feel. To go about crying Vanitas! is to miss the lesson it was meant to teach, namely, that the Old Covenant was vanity—proved to be vanity by allowing a son of the Covenant to get into so despairing a mood.” Chadwick says that Ecclesiastes got into the Canon only after it had received an orthodox postscript.

Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:193—“Slavish fear and self-righteous reckoning with God are the unlovely features of this Jewish religion of law to which the ethical idealism of the prophets had degenerated, and these traits strike us most visibly in Pharsiaism. … It was this side of the O. T. religion to which Christianity took a critical and destroying attitude, while it revealed a new and higher knowledge of God. For, says Paul, ‘ye received not the spirit of bondage again unto fear; but ye received the spirit of adoption’ (Rom. 8:15). In unity with God man does not lose his soul but preserves it. God not only commands but gives.” Ian Maclaren (John Watson), Cure of Souls, 144—“When the book of Ecclesiastes is referred to the days of the third century BC, then its note is caught, and any man who has been wronged and embittered by political tyranny and social corruption has his bitter cry included in the book of God.”

(c) Such testimony can be adduced in favor of the value of each one of the books to which exception is taken, such as Esther, Job, Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Jonah, James, Revelation.

Esther is the book, next to the Pentateuch, held in highest reverence by the Jews. “Job was the discoverer of infinity, and the first to see the bearing of infinity on righteousness. It was the return of religion to nature. Job heard the voice beyond the Sinai-voice” (Shadow-Cross, 89). Inge, Christian Mysticism, 43—“As to the Song of Solomon, its influence upon Christian Mysticism has been simply deplorable. A graceful romance in honor of true love has been distorted into a precedent and sanction for giving way to hysterical emotions in which sexual imagery has been freely used to symbolize the relation between the soul and its Lord.” Chadwick says that the Song of Solomon got into the Canon only after it had received an allegorical interpretation. Gladden, Seven Puzzling Bible Books, 165, thinks it impossible that “the addition of one more inmate to the harem of that royal rake, King Solomon, should have been made the type of the spiritual affection between Christ and his church. Instead of this, the book is a glorification of pure love. The Shulamite, transported to the court of Solomon, remains faithful to her shepherd lover, and is restored to him.”

Bruce, Apologetics, 321—“The Song of Solomon, literally interpreted as a story of true love, proof against the blandishments of the royal harem, is rightfully in the Canon as a buttress to the true religion; for whatever made for purity in the relations of the sexes made for the worship of Jehovah—Baal worship and impurity being closely associated.” Rutherford, McCheyne, and Spurgeon have taken more texts from the Song of Solomon than from any other portion of Scripture of like extent. Charles G. Finney, Autobiography, 378—“At this time it seemed as if my soul was wedded to Christ in a sense which I never had any thought or conception of before. The language of the Song of Solomon was as natural to me as my breath. I thought I could understand well the state he was in when he wrote that Song, and concluded then, as I have ever thought since, that that Song was written by him after he had been reclaimed from his great backsliding. I not only had all the fulness of my first love, but a vast accession to it. Indeed, the Lord lifted me up so much above anything that I had experienced before, and taught me so much of the meaning of the Bible, of Christ's relations and power and willingness, that I found myself saying to him: I had not known or conceived that any such thing was true.” On Jonah, see R. W. Dale, in Expositor, July, 1892, advocating the non-historical and allegorical character of the book. Bib. Sac., 10:737–764—“Jonah represents the nation of Israel as emerging through a miracle from the exile, in order to carry out its mission to the world at large. It teaches that God is the God of the whole earth; that the Ninevites as well as the Israelites are dear to him; that his threatenings of penalty are conditional.”