The approaches to an understanding of the Scriptures which we suggested in the first chapter are those which have to do merely with intellectual investigation. Any student with normal intelligence can appreciate the methods and results of the critical scrutiny of the biblical documents, but will require something more for an adequate mastery of the scriptural revelations. There is need of sympathetic realization that the Book itself did not in any large degree come out of the exercise of the merely intellectual faculties. In the scriptural revelation we are dealing with a current of life which flowed for centuries through the minds of masses of people. To be sure of insight into the meanings of this revelation there must be an approach to the Bible as a Book of Life in the sense that its teachings came out of life and that they were perennially used to play back into life. Its hold on life to-day can be explained only by the fact that it was thus born out of life, and has its chief significance for the experiences of actual life. Even the most superficial perusal of the Scriptures shows that they came of practical contact with men and things. There is comparatively little in the entire content of our Sacred Book to suggest the speculations of abstract philosophy. The writers deal with the concrete. They tell of men and of peoples who had to face facts and who achieved comprehensions and convictions through grappling with facts. There is about the Scriptures what some one has called a sort of "out-of-doors-ness." There is very little hint of withdrawal from the push and pressure of daily living. If the prophets ever withdrew to solitude, they did not retire to closets, but rather to deserts or to mountains. We must not allow our modern familiarity with bookmaking as an affair of library research and tranquil meditation in seclusion to mislead us into thinking that the Christian Bible was wrought out in similar fashion. The Book is full of the tingle and even the roar of the life out of which it was born. Jesus gathered up in a single sentence the process by which the scriptural revelation can be apprehended by man when he said, "He that doeth the will shall know of the truth." The entire scriptural unfolding is one vast commentary on this utterance of Jesus.