amounts to saying with the nursery rhyme:

Oats, peas, beans, and barley grows,
Where you, nor I, nor nobody knows.

We have not only to collate the manuscripts we possess and try to
reconstruct the likeliest text, but when we know what the authors
probably wrote, we must press back of their language and ideas to the
religious experience they attempt to express.

As writers the Biblical authors do not claim a special divine
assistance. Luke, in his preface to his gospel, merely asserts that he
has taken the pains of a careful historian, and Paul and his various
amanuenses did their best with a language in which they were not
literary experts. The Bible reader often has the impression that its
authors' religious experience, like Milton's sculptured lion, half
appears "pawing to get free his hinder parts." Or, to change the
metaphor, now one portion of their communion with God is brought to view
and now another, as one might stand before a sea that was illuminated
from moment to moment by flashes of lightning.

The Bible is the record of an _historic_ religious experience--that of
Israel which led up to the consciousness of God in Jesus and His
followers. The investigation of the sources of Hebrew religion has shown
that many of its beliefs came from the common heritage of the Semitic
peoples; and there are numerous points of similarity between Israel's
faith and that of other races. This ought not to surprise us, since its
God is the God of all men. But the more resemblances we detect, the
greater the difference appears. The same legend in Babylonia and in
Israel has such unlike spiritual content; the identical rite among the