It must be this, if it is ever to make effective its spiritual assertions over the increasing intricacy of human affairs. What, let us ask, is that life of faith which historically began with Abraham? It is a friendship, an intimacy, between man and God, between a son and a father. Such an intimacy cannot be idle or stagnant; it cannot arrest its instinctive development. It holds in it infinite possibilities of growth: of increasing familiarity, of multiplied communion. And, thus, such a friendship creates a story of its own; it has its jars, its frictions, its entanglements; alas! on one side, its lapses, its quarrels, its blunders, its misunderstandings: and then, on the other, its corresponding indignations, and withdrawals, and rebukes; and yet again, its reconciliations, its reactions, its pardons, its victories. Ever it moves forward on its chequered path: ever God, the good Friend, spends Himself in recovering the intimacy, in renewing it, in purging it, in raising it. Its conditions expand: its demands intensify: its perils deepen: its glories gather: until it consummates its effort in the perfected communion of God and man--in Him, Who completes and closes the story of this ever-growing intimacy, by that act of supreme condescension which brings down God to inhabit and possess the heart of man: and by that act of supreme exaltation, which uplifts man into absolute union with the God Who made him. This is the story: the Bible is its record. As a body of incidents and facts it must be subject to all the conditions of history and the laws of evidence; as a written record it introduces a swarm of questions, which can be sifted and decided by rational criticism. This entails complications, it must be confessed; but they are inevitable. The intimacy between man and God cannot advance, except through the pressure of connected and recorded experience. A human society which has no record of its past is robbed of its future. It is savage: it cannot go forward, because it cannot look back. So with this divine friendship. Its recorded experiences are the one condition of its growth. Without them it must always be beginning afresh: it must remain imprisoned at the starting-post. The length and complexity of its record is the measure of its progress; even though they must present, at the same time, a larger surface to the handling of criticism, and may involve a deeper degree of obscurity in details.