socially active Christians in our day live in the prophets and the first
three gospels, and almost ignore the rest of the Bible. But individual
taste, while it has preferred authors and favorite works, does not think
of denying to Milton, or Wordsworth, or Shelley, their place among
English classics; a social judgment has assigned them that. A man who is
not hopelessly conceited will regret his inability to appreciate a
single one of the great authors, and will try to enlarge his sympathies.
The Christian will, with entire naturalness, be loyal to so much of the
Bible as "finds him," and humbly hope and endeavor to be led into ampler
ranges of spiritual life, that he may "apprehend with all saints" the
breadth, length, depth and height of the historic Self-revelation of
God.

The Bible is thus _a standard of religious experience_. If there is any
question as to what man's life with God ought to be, it can be referred
to the life recorded in these books. But men have often made the Bible
much more; confusing experience with its interpretation in some
particular epoch, they used the Bible as a treasury of proof texts for
doctrines, or of laws for conduct, or of specific provisos for Church
government and worship. They forgot that the writers of the early
chapters of _Genesis_, in describing their faith in God's relationship
to His world and to man and to history, had to express that faith in
terms of the existing traditions concerning the creation, the fall, the
deluge, the patriarchs. Their faith in God is one thing; the scientific
and historic accuracy of the stories in which they utter it is quite
another thing. They did not distinguish between Paul's life with God in
Christ, and the philosophy he had learned in Gamaliel's classroom, or
picked up in the thought of the Roman world of his day. Paul's religious
life is one thing, his theology in which he tries to explain and state
it is another thing. They read the plans that were made for the