This comprehensive expression is very helpful {180} to our faith. When critics are assailing the books of the Old Testament in detail, the Holy Spirit authenticates them for us in their entirety. As Abigail prayed for a soul "bound in the bundle of life" with the Lord, so here an apostle gives us the books of the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms bound together in one bundle of inspired authority. Stephen, in like manner, speaks of his nation as "those who received the _lively oracles_ (of God) to give unto us" (Acts 7: 38); and Peter says, "If any man speak let him speak as _the oracles of God_" (1 Peter 4: 11). And not only this; the same apostles who submitted to the authority of the Old Testament as the oracles of God, themselves claimed to write as the oracles of God in the New Testament. "If any man," says Paul, "think himself to be a prophet or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the _commandments of the Lord_" (1 Cor. 14: 37). "We are of God," writes John. "He that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us" (1 John 4: 16). These claims are too great to be put forth concerning fallible writings. Admitting their premises, the Jews were right in charging Jesus with blasphemy, in that being a man {181} he made himself God. If Christ is not God, he is not even a good man. And if the Scriptures are not inerrant, they are worse than errant; since, being literature, they make themselves the word of God. And what if it be said that there are irreconcilable contradictions in this book which calls itself the oracles of God? Two things may be said: First, it should be expected that under "the scientific method" such contradictions should appear and constantly multiply. The Bible is a sensitive plant, which shuts itself up at the touch of mere critical investigation. In the same paragraph in which it claims that its very words are the words of the Holy Spirit, it repudiates the scientific method as futile for the understanding of those words: "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,"--and insists on the spiritual method as alone adequate,--"but God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit" (1 Cor. 2: 9, 10). Not only does the Bible not yield roses to the critic, it yields the thorns and briars of hopeless contradiction. "_Intellige ut credos verbum meum_," said Augustine to the rationalists of his day, "_sed crede ut intelligas verbum Dei_." "Understand my word, that you may believe it; believe God's word, that you may understand it." Faith holds not only the keys of all the creeds, but of all the contradictions. He who starts out and proceeds under the conviction that the Bible is the {182} infallible word of God, will find discrepancies constantly turning into unisons under his study. And this remark leads to the second observation: that the contradictions of man may really be the harmonies of God. An uncultivated listener,