This is a vast subject. What is one to do with it in an essay limited to twenty pages? Keeping in mind the purpose of the editors I have decided to confine myself to one main thought: Reassurance as to the unshakeable position of the Bible amid present-day doubts and disquiet. With all his reverence for the Bible there sometimes come to a thoughtful layman perplexities and tacit questionings. This is partly because we are thinking a little more than our grandfathers did, but still more because God has given in our day fuller knowledge of the truths of history and science, and also of the making of the Bible itself through the keen investigations of what is called Higher Criticism. There is no space to discuss such questions here. But if it be not presumptions after many years of study of these questions I should like to assure the reader that not only is there no peril to the Bible in any of this new knowledge, but that when he has got over any disquiet caused by some shifting of his point of view it should make the Bible for him a more living, appealing presentation of God. At present I can only help him to examine his foundations. I.--FOUNDATIONS 1.--If the fear should ever come upon you, my reader, of the possibility of the Scriptures being discredited by present-day controversies after having been accepted as God-given for three thousand years, first pause for a moment, and let the full weight of these thoughts press upon you of all that is implied in the fact (1) that any set of old documents, always open to scrutiny and question, should for thousands of years have been accepted as of Divine origin; (2) that they should have been yielded to by men as an authority to guide their conduct by commands often disagreeable to themselves; (3) that this acceptance and obedience has been chiefly amongst the most thoughtful and highly-cultured nations of the world; (4) that it has gone on age after age, steadily increasing, and never in any age has made more progress than in this cultured, enlightened, all-questioning century in which we live. 2.--What has given these Scriptures such authority? Remember they were only separate documents, often with hundreds of years intervening between them, written by different writers of different characters to different people, and under different circumstances. Remember that in many cases we do not know their origin, or how they assumed their present form. And yet somehow we never can reach back in their history to a time when they were not treasured and reverenced among men as in some way at least above human productions. There they stand, a long chain of records with one end reaching away into the far back past, and the other gathering around the feet of Christ.