Men may have insisted, may still insist, on seeing all sorts of fanciful references to some special acts of his in certain words of the Bible. But I must again insist that men’s fancies about the Bible and Christ are not the question, but what the Bible itself says, what Christ is. The whole book is full of Him, there is no need to read Him into any part of it as to which there can be any possible doubt. Holding this faith as to the Scriptures, I am not anxious to defend them. I rejoice that they should be minutely examined and criticised. They will defend themselves, one and all, I believe. Men may satisfy themselves—perhaps, if I have time to give to the study, they may satisfy me—that the Pentateuch was the work of twenty men; that Baruch wrote a part of Isaiah; that David did not write the Psalms, or the Evangelists the Gospels; that there are interpolations here and there in the originals; that there are numerous and serious errors in our translation. What is all this to me? What do I care who wrote them, what is the date of them, what this or that passage ought to be? They have told me what I wanted to know. Burn every copy in the world to-morrow, you don’t and can’t take that knowledge from me, or any man. I find them _all_ good for me; so, as long as a copy is left, and I can get it, I mean to go on reading them all, and believing them all to be inspired. CXVII. Our Lord came proclaiming a kingdom of God, a kingdom ordained by God on this earth, the order and beauty of which the unruly and sinful wills of men had deformed, so that disease, and death, and all miseries and disorder, had grown up and destroyed the order of it, and thwarting the perfectly loving will of God. In asserting this kingdom and this order, our Lord claimed (as he must have claimed if indeed he were the Son of God) dominion over disease and death. This dominion was lower than that over the human heart and will, but he claimed it as positively. He proved his claim to be good in other ways, but specially for our present purpose by healing the sick, and raising the dead. Were these works orderly or disorderly? Every one of them seems to me to be the restoring of an order which had been disturbed. They were witnesses for the law of life, faithful and true manifestations of the will of a loving Father to his children. Yes, you may say, but he did other miracles besides those of healing. He turned water into wine, stilled the waves, multiplied loaves and fishes. These at any rate were capricious suspensions of natural laws. You say you believe in natural laws which have their ground in God’s will. Such laws he suspended or set aside in these cases. Now were these suspensions orderly?