standard is being lifted up--wherever life is becoming larger in the
vision that directs it and richer in its fruitage, the improvement is
traceable to the Bible and to the influence of the God and Christ of
whom the Bible tells.

The atheist and the materialist must confess that man should be able to
produce a better book to-day than man, unaided, could have produced in
any previous age. The fact that they have tried, time and time again,
only to fail each time more hopelessly, explains why they will not--why
they cannot--accept the challenge thrown down by the Christian world to
produce a book worthy to take the Bible's place.

They have begged to their God to answer with fire--appealed to inanimate
matter with an earnestness that is pathetic; they have employed in the
worship of blind force a faith greater than religion requires, but their
God is asleep. How long will they allow the search for strata of stone
and fragments of fossil and decaying skeletons that are strewn around
the house to absorb their thoughts to the exclusion of the architect
who planned it all? How long will the agnostic, closing his eyes to
the plainest truths, cry, "Night, night," when the sun in his meridian
splendour announces that noon is here?

Those who reject the Bible ignore its claim to inspiration. This in
itself makes them enemies of the Book of books, because the Bible
characters profess to speak by inspiration, and what they say bears the
stamp of the supernatural. "Holy men of God spake as they were moved by
the Holy Ghost" (2 Peter 1:21).

Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom
teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual