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A. The Bible is the work of one mind.

(a) In spite of its variety of authorship and the vast separation of its writers from one another in point of time, there is a unity of subject, spirit, and aim throughout the whole.

We here begin a new department of Christian evidences. We have thus far only adduced external evidence. We now turn our attention to internal evidence. The relation of external to internal evidence seems to be suggested in Christ's two questions in Mark 8:27, 29—“Who do men say that I am? … who say ye that I am?” The unity in variety displayed in Scripture is one of the chief internal evidences. This unity is indicated in our word “Bible,” in the singular number. Yet the original word was “Biblia,” a plural number. The world has come to see a unity in what were once scattered fragments: the many “Biblia” have become one “Bible.” In one sense R. W. Emerson's contention is true: “The Bible is not a book—it is a literature.” But we may also say, and with equal truth: “The Bible is not simply a collection of books—it is a book.”The Bible is made up of sixty-six books, by forty writers, of all ranks—shepherds, fishermen, priests, warriors, statesmen, kings—composing their works at intervals through a period of seventeen centuries. Evidently no collusion between them is possible. Scepticism tends ever to ascribe to the Scriptures greater variety of authorship and date, but all this only increases the wonder of the Bible's unity. If unity in a half dozen writers is remarkable, in forty it is astounding. “The many diverse instruments of this orchestra play one perfect tune: hence we feel that they are led by one master and composer.” Yet it takes the same Spirit who inspired the Bible to teach its unity. The union is not an external or superficial one, but one that is internal and spiritual.

(b) Not one moral or religious utterance of all these writers has been contradicted or superseded by the utterances of those who have come later, but all together constitute a consistent system.

Here we must distinguish between the external form and the moral and religious substance. Jesus declares in Mat. 5:21, 22, 27, 28, 33, 34, 38, 39, 43, 44, “Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time … but I say unto you,” and then he seems at first sight to abrogate certain original commands. But he also declares in this connection, Mat. 5:17, 18—“Think not I am come to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished.”Christ's new commandments only bring out the inner meaning of the old. He fulfils them not in their literal form but in their essential spirit. So the New Testament completes the revelation of the Old Testament and makes the Bible a perfect unity. In this unity the Bible stands alone. Hindu, Persian, and Chinese religious books contain no consistent system of faith. There is progress in revelation from the earlier to the later books of the Bible, but this is not progress through successive steps of falsehood; it is rather progress from a less to a more clear and full unfolding of the truth. The whole truth lay germinally in the protevangelium uttered to our first parents (Gen. 3:15—the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent's head).

(c) Each of these writings, whether early or late, has represented moral and religious ideas greatly in advance of the age in which it has appeared, and these ideas still lead the world.

All our ideas of progress, with all the forward-looking spirit of modern Christendom, are due to Scripture. The classic nations had no such ideas and no such spirit, except as they caught them from the Hebrews. Virgil's prophecy, in his fourth Eclogue, of a coming virgin and of the reign of Saturn and of the return of the golden age, was only the echo of the Sibylline books and of the hope of a Redeemer with which the Jews had leavened the whole Roman world; see A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 94–96.

(d) It is impossible to account for this unity without supposing such a supernatural suggestion and control that the Bible, while in its various parts written by human agents, is yet equally the work of a superhuman intelligence.

We may contrast with the harmony between the different Scripture writers the contradictions and refutations which follow merely human philosophies—e.g., the Hegelian idealism and the Spencerian materialism. Hegel is “a name to swear at, as well as to swear by.” Dr. Stirling, in his Secret of Hegel, “kept all the secret to himself, if he ever knew it.” A certain Frenchman once asked Hegel if he could not gather up and express his philosophy in one sentence for him. “No,” Hegel replied, “at least not in French.” If Talleyrand's maxim be true that whatever is not intelligible is not French, Hegel's answer was a correct one. Hegel said of his disciples: “There is only one man living who understands me, and he does not.”

Goeschel, Gabler, Daub, Marheinecke, Erdmann, are Hegel's right wing, or orthodox representatives and followers in theology; see Sterrett, Hegel's Philosophy of Religion. Hegel is followed by Alexander and Bradley in England, but is opposed by Seth and Schiller. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 279–300, gives a valuable estimate of his position and influence: Hegel is all thought and no will. Prayer has no effect on God—it is a purely psychological phenomenon. There is no free-will, and man's sin as much as man's holiness is a manifestation of the Eternal. Evolution is a fact, but it is only fatalistic evolution. Hegel notwithstanding did great service by substituting knowledge of reality for the oppressive Kantian relativity, and by banishing the old notion of matter as a mysterious substance wholly unlike and incompatible with the properties of mind. He did great service also by showing that the interactions of matter and mind are explicable only by the presence of the Absolute Whole in every part, though he erred greatly by carrying that idea of the unity of God and man beyond its proper limits, and by denying that God has given to the will of man any power to put itself into antagonism to His Will. Hegel did great service by showing that we cannot know even the part without knowing the whole, but he erred in teaching, as T. H. Green did, that the relations constitute the reality of the thing. He deprives both physical and psychical existences of that degree of selfhood or independent reality which is essential to both science and religion. We want real force, and not the mere idea of force; real will, and not mere thought.

B. This one mind that made the Bible is the same mind that made the soul, for the Bible is divinely adapted to the soul,

(a) It shows complete acquaintance with the soul.

The Bible addresses all parts of man's nature. There are Law and Epistles for man's reason; Psalms and Gospels for his affections; Prophets and Revelations for his imagination. Hence the popularity of the Scriptures. Their variety holds men. The Bible has become interwoven into modern life. Law, literature, art, all show its moulding influence.

(b) It judges the soul—contradicting its passions, revealing its guilt, and humbling its pride.

No product of mere human nature could thus look down upon human nature and condemn it. The Bible speaks to us from a higher level. The Samaritan woman's words apply to the whole compass of divine revelation; it tells us all things that ever we did (John 4:29). The Brahmin declared that Romans 1, with its description of heathen vices, must have been forged after the missionaries came to India.

(c) It meets the deepest needs of the soul—by solutions of its problems, disclosures of God's character, presentations of the way of pardon, consolations and promises for life and death.

Neither Socrates nor Seneca sets forth the nature, origin and consequences of sin as committed against the holiness of God, nor do they point out the way of pardon and renewal. The Bible teaches us what nature cannot, viz.: God's creatorship, the origin of evil, the method of restoration, the certainty of a future state, and the principle of rewards and punishments there.

(d) Yet it is silent upon many questions for which writings of merely human origin seek first to provide solutions.

Compare the account of Christ's infancy in the gospels with the fables of the Apocryphal New Testament; compare the scant utterances of Scripture with regard to the future state with Mohammed's and Swedenborg's revelations of Paradise. See Alexander McLaren's sermon on The Silence of Scripture, in his book entitled: Christ in the Heart, 131–141.

(e) There are infinite depths and inexhaustible reaches of meaning in Scripture, which difference it from all other books, and which compel us to believe that its author must be divine.

Sir Walter Scott, on his death bed: “Bring me the Book!” “What book?” said Lockhart, his son-in-law. “There is but one book!” said the dying man. Réville concludes an Essay in the Revue des deux Mondes (1864): “One day the question was started, in an assembly, what book a man condemned to lifelong imprisonment, and to whom but one book would be permitted, had better take into his cell with him. The company consisted of Catholics, Protestants, philosophers and even materialists, but all agreed that their choice would fall only on the Bible.”

On the whole subject, see Garbett, God's Word Written, 3–56; Luthardt, Saving Truths, 210; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of Bible, 155–181; W. L. Alexander, Connection and Harmony of O. T. and N. T.; Stanley Leathes, Structure of the O. T.; Bernard, Progress of Doctrine in the N. T.; Rainy, Delivery and Development of Doctrine; Titcomb, in Strivings for the Faith; Immer, Hermeneutics, 91; Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 23; 5: no. 28; 6: no. 31; Lee on Inspiration, 26–32.