THE STORY OF THE CASE

How to master the English Bible! High-sounding title that, but does it mean what it says? It is not how to study it, but how to master it; for there is a sense in which the Bible must be mastered before it can be studied, and it is the failure to see this which accounts for other failures on the part of many earnest would-be Bible students. I suppose it is something like a farm; for although never a farmer myself, I have always imagined a farmer should know his farm before he attempted to work it. How much upland and how much lowland? How much wood and how much pasture? Where should the orchard be laid out? Where plant my corn, oats, and potatoes? What plot is to be seeded down to grass? When he has mastered his farm he begins to get ready for results from it.

Now there are many ways of studying the Bible, any one of which may be good enough in itself, but there is only one way to master it, as we shall see. And it is the Bible itself we are to master, not books about the Bible, nor yet "charts." I once listened to an earnest and cultivated young man delivering a lecture on Bible study, illustrated by a chart so long that when he unrolled and held one end of it above his head, as high as his arms could reach, the other curled up on the floor below the platform. As the auditor gazed upon its labyrinthian lines, circles, crosses and other things intended to illuminate it, and "gathered up the loins of his mind" to listen to the explanation following, it was with an inward sigh of gratitude that God had never put such a yoke upon us, "which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear."

And it is the English Bible we are thinking about, the Bible in the veruacular, the tongue most of us best understand. One is grateful to have studied Hebrew and Greek, just to be able to tell others who have not that they do not require either to hearken to our Heavenly Father's voice. He has an advantage as a scholar who can utilize the original tongues; but the Bible was not given to scholars, but to the people, and "hear we every man in our own tongue wherein we were born" (Acts 2:8). It is not at all inconsistent to add that he who masters the English Bible is possessed of the strongest inducement to study it in Hebrew and Greek.

That which follows grows largely out of the writer's personal experience. For the first eight or ten years of my ministry I did not know my English Bible as I should have known it, a fact to which my own spiritual life and the character of my pulpit ministrations bore depressing witness. Nor was I so fortunate as to meet with more than one or two brethren in the ministry who knew their English Bible very much better than I knew mine. They all declared that the theological seminaries did not profess to teach the English Bible. They taught much about the Bible of great importance for ministers to know, such as the Hebrew and Greek tongues, the principles of exegesis and interpretation, the history of the text, and the proofs and illustrations of Christian doctrine; but, in the words of one of the ministers referred to (which have appeared in print), "while we had some special lessons in one or two of the epistles, several of the psalms, in some of the prophecies, and in a few select portions of the gospels, other and vastly important parts of the Bible were left out altogether. We had nothing on the book of Revelation, no elaborate study of the Mosaic ritual and its profound system of types, and especially were we left uninitiated into the minute and wonderful coordination of parts in the various books of the Old and New Testaments, which disclose a stupendous divine plan running through the whole, linking them all together as an indissoluble unit and carrying with them an amazing power of conviction."

The seminaries have assumed that students were acquainted with the great facts of the English Bible and their relation to one another before matriculation, but so competent an authority as President Harper declares that "to indicate the line of thought and chief ideas of a particular prophet, or the argument of an epistle, or to state even the most important events in the life of our Lord, would be impossible for the average college graduate." It is such an unfortunate state of things which, to a certain extent, accounts for the rise and maintenance of those excellent institutions, the Moody Bible Institute in this country and Spurgeon's College in London, with their almost countless offspring and imitators everywhere, creating as they have a distinct atmosphere of biblical and evangelistic teaching and preaching. It is commonly supposed, it may be said in passing, that these institutions cater to or attract only men or women of very limited educational attainments, but in the case of the first-named, at least, an incidental census taken recently disclosed the fact that one-third of the male students then on the rolls or who had lately left were college-trained; one may safely hazard the opinion that in the woman's department the proportion of college-trained students would have been still larger.

The first practical help I ever received in the mastery of the English Bible was from a layman. We were fellow-attendants at a certain Christian conference or convention and thrown together a good deal for several days, and I saw something in his Christian life to which I was a comparative stranger -- a peace, a rest, a joy, a kind of spiritual poise I knew little about. One day I ventured to ask him how he had become possessed of the experience, when he replied, "By reading the epistle to the Ephesians." I was surprised, for I had read it without such results, and therefore asked him to explain the manner of his reading, when he related the following: He had gone into the country to spend the Sabbath with his family on one occasion, taking with him a pocket copy of Ephesians, and in the afternoon, going out into the woods and lying down under a tree, he began to read it; he read it through at a single reading, and finding his interest aroused, read it through again in the same way, and, his interest increasing, again and again. I think he added that he read it some twelve or fifteen times, "and when I arose to go into the house," said he, "I was in possession of Ephesians, or better yet, it was in possession of me, and I had been 'lifted up to sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus' in an experimental sense in which that had not been true in me before, and will never cease to be true in me again."

I confess that as I listened to this simple recital my heart was going up in thanksgiving to God for answered prayer, the prayer really of months, if not years, that I might come to know how to master His Word. And yet, side by side with the thanksgiving was humiliation that I had not discovered so simple a principle before, which a boy of ten or twelve might have known. And to think that an "ordained" minister must sit at the feet of a layman to learn the most important secret of his trade!

Since that day, however, the writer has found some comfort in the thought that other ministers have had a not unlike experience. In an address before the National Bible Society of Scotland, the Rev. Dr. Stalker speaks of the first time he ever "read a whole book of the Bible straight through at a sitting." It was while as a student he was spending a winter in France, and there being no Protestant church in the town where he was passing a Sunday, he was thrown on his own resources. Leaving the hotel where he was staying, he lay down on a green knoll and began reading here and there as it chanced, till, coming to the epistle to the Romans, he read on and on through to the end. "As I proceeded," he said, "I began to catch the drift of Paul's thought; or rather, I was caught by it and drawn on. The mighty argument opened out and arose like a great work of art above me till at last it enclosed me within its perfect proportions. It was a revolutionary experience. I saw for the first time that a book of Scripture is a complete discussion of a single subject; I felt the force of the book as a whole, and I understood the different parts in the light of the whole as I had never understood them when reading them by themselves. Thus to master book after book is to fill the mind with the great thoughts of God."

Let me now speak of what I, personally, began to do after the suggestion of the layman, for the results which, in the providence of God, have grown out of it seem to warrant dwelling upon it even at the risk of prolixity on the one hand or the suspicion of egotism on the other. At first, supposing it more desirable to read the books in the original than the vernacular, I began to memorize some of the smaller epistles in Greek, but the Lord showed me "a more excellent way" in view of the purpose which the event proved Him to have had in mind in the matter. Accordingly, ignoring the Bible tongues for the time, I read Genesis through in the English at a single reading, and then repeated the process again and again until the book in its great outlines had practically become mine. Then I took up Exodus in the same way, Leviticus, Numbers, and practically all the other books of the Old and New Testaments to Revelation, with the exception of Proverbs, the Psalms and one or two others which do not lend themselves readily to that plan of reading, and indeed do not require it to their understanding and mastery. I am careful to emphasize the fact that I did not read the Bible "in course," as it is commonly understood. One might read it in that way a great many times and not master it in the sense indicated above. The plan was to read and reread each book by itself and in its order, as though there were no other in existence, until it had become a part of the very being.

"Was the task tedious and long? No more than was Jacob's when he served Laban for his daughter Rachel. There were compensations all along the way and ever-increasing delight. No romance ever held sway over the thought and imagination in comparison with this Book of books. A better investment of time were never made by any minister; and, shut me up to-day to a choice between all the ministerial lore I ever learned elsewhere and what was learned in this synthetic reading of the Bible, and it would not take me many minutes to decide in favor of the latter. Nor did I know until lately how closely my feeling in this respect harmonized with that of a great educator and theologian of an earlier day.- Dean Burgon tells of an interview he had in 1846 with the learned president of Magdalen College, Oxford, Dr. Martin Joseph Routh, then aged ninety-one. He had called upon him for advice as to the best way of pursuing his theological studies.

"I think, sir," said Dr. Routh, "were I you, sir -- that I would -- first of all -- read the -- the Gospel according to St. Matthew." Here he paused. "And after I had read the Gospel according to St. Matthew -- I would -- were I you, sir -- go on to read -- the Gospel according to St.-- Mark."

"I looked at him," says Dean Burgon, "anxiously, to see whether he was serious. One glance was enough. He was giving me, but at a very slow rate, the outline of my future course."

"Here was a theologian of ninety-one," says the narrator of this incident, "who, after surveying the entire field of sacred science, had come back to the starting point, and had nothing better to advise me to read than -- the Gospel!" And thus he kept on until he had mentioned all the books of the New Testament. Sad, however, that the story should have been spoiled by his not beginning at Genesis!

Words fail me to express the blessing that reading has been to me -- strengthening my conviction as to the integrity and plenary inspiration of the whole Book, enlarging my mental vision as to the divine plan along the line of dispensational truth, purifying my life and lightening my labors in the ministry until that which before had often been a burden and weariness to the flesh, became a continual joy and delight.

To speak of this last-named matter a little further. The claims on a city pastor in these days are enough to break down the strongest men, especially when their pulpit preparation involves the production of two orations or finished theses each week for which they must "read up in systematic treatises, philosophic disquisitions, works of literature, magazine articles and what not, drawing upon their ingenuity of invention and fertility of imagination all the time in order to be original, striking, elegant and fresh." But when they come to know their Bible, and get imbued with its lore and anointed by the Spirit through whom it speaks, "sermonizing" will give place to preaching -- the preaching that God bids us to preach, the exposition of His own Word, which is not only much easier to do, but correspondingly more fruitful in spiritual results. And, indeed, it is the kind of preaching that people want to hear -- all kinds of people, the converted and the unconverted, the rich and the poor. A wide experience convinces me of this. Here is the minister's field, his specialty, his throne. He may not be a master in other things; he may and should be a master in this. The really great preachers to-day, the MacLarens, the Torreys, the Campbell Morgans, are Bible expounders. George Whitefield, in Boston, had a congregation of two thousand people at six o'clock in the morning to hear him "expound the Bible." The people trod on Jesus to hear the Word of God, and if pastors only knew it, it is the way to get and to hold the people still.

My experience in the premises soon began to be that of others. Some theological students under my care at the time undertook the mastery of the English Bible in the same way and with the same blessing. Then the work began to broaden, and God's further purpose to reveal itself. Such Bible institutes as those already spoken of, organized for the purpose of training Christian young men and women as evangelists, pastors' helpers, missionaries, and gospel workers generally, were in need of some simple, yet practical, method of putting their students in possession of the facts of the Word of God for use among the people with whom they had to deal, and God had been making ready to supply their need. But out of these institutes again have grown those large interdenominational Bible classes which have become a feature of our church life in different parts of the country. Their origin is traceable, like that of so many other good things of the kind, to the suggestion and support of the late D. L. Moody. One summer, while conducting a special course of Bible study in the Chicago Institute, he said to the writer: "If this synthetic method of teaching the Bible is so desirable for and popular with our day classes, why would it not take equally well with the masses of the people on a large scale? If I arrange for a mass meeting in the Chicago Avenue Church, will you speak to the people on 'How to Master the English Bible' and let us see what will come of it?" The suggestion being acted upon, as a result about four hundred persons out of some one thousand present that evening resolved themselves into a union Bible class for the synthetic study of the Bible under the leadership of Mr. William E. Newell, then assistant superintendent of the Institute. This class continued to meet regularly once a week with unabated interest throughout the whole of that fall and winter, and the next year had multiplied into five classes held in different parts of the city, on different evenings of the week, but under the same teacher, and with an aggregate membership of over four thousand. The year following, this had increased to over five thousand, two or three of the classes averaging separately an attendance of twelve hundred to fifteen hundred. Since that time several similar classes have attained a membership approaching two thousand, and one, in Toronto, to nearly four thousand. At the time of this writing, in the heat of the summer, such a class is being held weekly in Chicago. From Chicago the work spread in other cities of the East and Middle West, and under other teachers. Classes for briefer periods have been carried on in Canada and Great Britain. A religious weekly organized a class to be conducted through its columns, enrolling tens of thousands in its membership, and through its influence many pastors, Y. M. C. A. and Y. W. C. A. workers have instituted classes in their own fields which have, in turn, multiplied the interest in the popular study of the English Bible in increasing ratio.