The e.:ploration of ancient cities is being rap idly reduced to a science, thanks in a large degree to the unwearied enthusiasm and patient skill of Prof. Flinders Petrie, Prof. Saycc, Prof. Hil precht and others. They have shown that what geological strata are to the pre-human period, eighty layers of pottery are to the historical hu man eye, and to read their message rightly is as much a branch of science in its true, wide sense as is the interpretation of the fossil remains be neath our feet.
(5) A Living Book. As the scientific student sees a great deal more in nature than the casual observer, so does the student of archeology find increasingly that the Bible is a living book. Its vivid historical and local coloring makes it what no other collection of sacred books even professes to be.
There are also phenomena in the Bible, such as its way of putting things, its selection of topics and its systematic tracing of everything back to the First Cause, which are replete with inter est and philosophy.
Its statements concerning natural phenomena need to be interpreted with extreme accuracy, both on their positive and negative side, whilst the series of marvels it records are to be read along side of its theology and its central teaching, and not as a collection of isolated curiosities or fa bles. They are signs, and the thing signified by them takes us to the very heart of the Creator. (Sec De Quinccy's Essays on Miracles.) If na ture must be studied as a whole, so must the Bible.
It is a collection of books by writers who un wittingly contributed to a scheme the key to which is to be found in one historical Personage. To discuss the books without reference to the Per. soilage is like anatomizing a body without ref. erence to its head. We can hardly expect the scientific man in the ordinary sense of the term to study the Bible scientifically unless the theolo gian does so.
(8) The First Cause. The greatest desideratum of all is that theism should lie approached with steady steps from two sides, the Biblical and the sci entific. Every thoughtful person must understand that the instruments of science cannot discover God. Evidences of his handiwork appear in nature, hut he has better means of revealing himself to malt.
The forces and processes of the material uni verse do not affect His nature or touch His be ing, Space and time, which are very warp and woof of our existence, are not to Him what they are to us. It is to human nature—its most spirit ual part—that we must turn if we desire to catch even a whisper of His real nature.
"Show me thyself," said a bishop of Antioch more than seventeen centuries ago, "show me thyself, and I will show thee God." Here, then, is a call to the man of science. If the existence of a planet can be inferred from the movements of other bodies, may not the existence of the Great Spirit be gathered from certain perturba tions of the human spirit? At times we stand abashed and silenced as we realize that there are vast regions of existence of which we know next to nothing. I do not speak of the stellar but of the spiritual heavens.
The Bible possesses a uniform system of psychology, of morals, and of metaphysics. Its writers are convinced that we live on the borders of two worlds whose laws are analogous—that the material world is a nursery for the spiritual. We should have a more careful inductive survey of the special phenomena of the universe as detected in human nature and revealed in cer tain phases of human consciousness, and espe cially in the will. May not scientific men look into this spiritual world? Do they not recog nize psychology as science? May they not in vestigate on scientific principles its immaterial side, where three empires meet—the psychologi cal, the ethical, and the spiritual? Both parties now recognize the impassable gulf in nature be tween body and soul, and both agree that these two are marvelously blended into one in human life. (See Scientific Research and Biblical Study, by the Rev. Canon R. B. Girdlestone, M. A.; Jour, of thc Transactions of the Victoria Institute, vol. xxix, p. 25, sq.).
8. The Bible and Modern Scholarship.
Modern scholarship is active in every field of letters, and text-books of only five years ago are already considered antiquated. Whole systems of thought succeed each other with wonderful rapidity.
The researches of later science are demon strating the unity of the physical universe in its widest extent, and also the identity of the laws which govern it ; and the unity of the Di vine method in the realm that we know is strong presumption of the same method in the region which lies beyond our knowledge. The Bible is not exempt from the universal spirit of investi gation; the book is still under fire to even a greater extent than during the centuries that are gone, but it comes out triumphant from every fair inquiry, however searching it may be.