selection, but before the final decision there must have been the
practice of the congregations which amounted in the end to the choice or
rejection of sacred books. Very likely the New Testament Scriptures were
collected by a process of trying out the reading of Epistles and Gospels
and exhortations before the congregations. As passages met or failed to
meet the human needs, there was call for the repeated reading of some
works and no call for the rereading of others. In use some documents
proved their sacredness and other documents fell aside into disuse.
Before the concluding deliberate choice was this selection in use by the
believers themselves; and the selection turned round the question as to
whether or not the documents helped people. If each member of the body
of believers is entitled to interpret biblical literature,
interpretation becomes a composite and diversified activity. There is
little warrant in the Scriptures for the notion that the biblical
revelation is to level men to any sort of sameness. There are
diversities of endowments and varieties of expression; but the united
judgment of the body of believers is the supreme authority in
interpreting the scriptural revelation. This is what we mean by saying
that the church is to interpret the Scriptures. We mean that no matter
how brilliant or interesting the utterances of any individual may be,
they are not of great value until they have received in some fashion the
sanction of the main mass of believers. It is the function of the
spokesmen of the church to gather up into distinct expression what may
have been vaguely, but nevertheless really, in the thought or half-
thought of the people. Gladstone once said that it is the business of
the orator to send back upon his audience in showers what comes up to
him from the audience in mist or clouds; so it is with the voice of a
biblical truth through any medium of interpretation. The spokesman
compresses or condenses into speech what has been dimly in the
consciousness of the people. Even in days less democratic than ours this