acknowledgment. No official body has made Shakespeare a classic; his
works have won their own place. No company of men of letters officially
organized keeps him in his eminent position; his plays keep themselves.
The books of the Bible have gained their positions because they could
not be barred from them; they possess power to recanonize themselves.
Some are much less valuable than others, and it is, perhaps, a debatable
question whether one or two of the apocryphal books--_First Maccabees_,
or _Ecclesiasticus_, for instance--are not as spiritually useful as the
_Song of Solomon_ or _Esther_; but of the chief books we may
confidentially affirm that, if one of them were dug up for the first
time today, it would gradually win a commanding place in Christian
thought. And it is a similar social experience of the Church--Jewish
and Christian--which has recognized their worth. The modernist Tyrrell
has written: "It cannot be denied that in the life of that formless
Church, which underlies the hierarchic organization, God's Spirit
exercises a silent but sovereign criticism, that His resistlessly
effectual judgment is made known, not in the precise language of
definition and decree, but in the slow manifestation of practical
results; in the survival of what has proved itself life-giving; in the
decay and oblivion of all whose value was but relative and temporary."

In a sense each Protestant Christian is entitled to make up a Bible of
his own out of the books which record the historical discoveries of God.
He is not bound by the opinions of others, however many and venerable;
and unless a book commends itself to his own spiritual judgment, he is
under no obligation to receive it as the word of God to him. As a matter
of fact every Christian does make such a Bible of his own; the
particular passages which "grip" him and reproduce their experiences in
him, they, and they alone, are his Bible. Luther was quickened into
life by the epistles of Paul, but spoke slightingly of _James_; many