As we contemplate the great things of God’s word, we look into a fountain that broadens and deepens beneath our gaze. Its breadth and depth pass our knowledge. As we gaze, the vision widens; stretched out before us we behold a boundless, shoreless sea. Such study has vivifying power. The mind and heart acquire new strength, new life. [Sidenote: _Tested by Experience_] This experience is the highest evidence of the divine authorship of the Bible. We receive God’s word as food for the soul, through the same evidence by which we receive bread as food for the body. Bread supplies the need of our nature; we know by experience that it produces blood and bone and brain. Apply the same test to the Bible: when its principles have actually become the elements of character, what has been the result? what changes have been made in the life?—“Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”[277] In its power, men and women have broken the chains of sinful habit. They have renounced selfishness. The profane have become reverent, the drunken sober, the profligate pure. Souls that have borne the likeness of Satan, have been transformed into the image of God. This change is itself the miracle of miracles. A change wrought by the word, it is one of the deepest mysteries of the word. We can not understand it; we can only believe, as declared by the Scriptures, it is “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”[278] A knowledge of this mystery furnishes a key to every other. It opens to the soul the treasures of the universe, the possibilities of infinite development. [Sidenote: _Pledge of Eternal Growth_] And this development is gained through the constant unfolding to us of the character of God,—the glory and the mystery of the written word. If it were possible for us to attain to a full understanding of God and His word, there would be for us no further discovery of truth, no greater knowledge, no further development. God would cease to be supreme, and man would cease to advance. Thank God, it is not so. Since God is infinite, and in Him are all the treasures of wisdom, we may to all eternity be ever searching, ever learning, yet never exhaust the riches of His wisdom, His goodness, or His power. _History and Prophecy_ “WHO HATH DECLARED THIS FROM ANCIENT TIME? HAVE NOT I THE LORD? THERE IS NO GOD ELSE” [Sidenote: _The Earliest of Annals_]