tions that may be raised. The utmost that can be done is to follow a single thread as it runs from the first page of the Scriptures to the last. Even so this present volume can do no more than trace this thread, leaving the reader to work out details for himself. Suggestion rather than explanation will be the intention. In the effort to steer between the many conflicting opinions which center round the Bible, the purpose will be to keep close to the fundamentals as to which all Christians are agreed. It is probable that even in doing this some objection will be met with, but objection, it is hoped, in which there will be no offense. To see the Bible as the mirror of man's spiritual progress will become our only aim.

I

For man did not consciously set out to discover God. He set out to live his life, to do his work, to conquer his enemies, to beget his children, to commit his sins. While obeying these impulses he has, so to speak, discovered God by the way. In the industrial idiom of our time God might be called a by-product of man's endeavors, only, as so often happens commercially, a by-product of more value than the object of direct pursuit. This does not mean that the same questions as

to the aim and end of things have not always been as much in the minds of men as they are today. We shall see presently that these inquiries start with the very beginning of man's awareness of himself as the Reason and Voice of Creation, but obvious tasks and material needs have remained in the forefront of his mind. Searchings as to the Why and Whence have urged themselves and been set aside; they have been set aside and have urged themselves again. Always active, in the subconsciousness at least, they have ended by attaining their objective.

II

But no more than man sets out to discover God does the Bible set out to tell us of this achievement. It betrays it while telling us about other things. It betrays it, in fact, while telling us about man. Man is the Bible's theme. Man's origin, man's growth, man's strength, man's weakness, man's endowment with a spirit that cannot cease from striving till the ramparts of heaven have been scaled-these topics form the subject of the books we conventionally know as the Holy Scriptures, as they form the subject of literature everywhere.

What the Bible tells us about God is incidental. It might be compared to what Walter

Scott, in a story of passion and adventure, tells us about Scotland, or Victor Hugo about France. God is the Hebrew writer's background. During much of the time He is taken for granted. He intervenes, or appeal is made to Him, when man's doings call for it, but not often otherwise. He is never described; He is never accounted for; no definition is ever made of Him. However primitive the conception of Him-and in the beginning the conception is very primitive indeed-He is treated as beyond the power of the pen. He is treated as beyond the power of the mind, except to the degree that the mind can become more and more clearly aware of His attributes.

This method of dealing with the prime factor of the universe is, in my judgment, a triumph of the indirect and allusive. There is almost never-never as far as I can recollect a forcing of the note to an undue knowledge of the Supreme Mystery. Appeal is made to His justice, His mercy, His goodness, His almighty power, to each and any of the qualities which we learn by a process of induction to be His, but as to Him there is always reverent reserve. Man's doings are shown to us in the light of God's light, but that is all. In his discovery of God

man goes up from lower stage to higher stage, and from higher stage to higher stages still, but God remains forever unchangeable, forever dynamic, forever the source of all energy, being, and activity, eternally waiting till man develops the spiritual mind, the spiritual eyes, with which to behold Him as pure Spirit, which He is. The Bible records this development as the test and proof of man's progress.

III

It will be evident, then, that this is not evolution. Evolution implies modification, adaptation, and a process by which that which was suited to one element changes in such a way as to become suited to another. The thing which could swim in the water becomes able to creep on the land; the thing which could creep on the land becomes able to fly in the air. New powers are put forth; new physical forms are developed. The creature we see today is, as a rule, as far from its ancestor of the Old Stone Age as the words in our language are remote from their Aryan roots.

In the discovery of God there is nothing that resembles this. There is change on the part of man, but not so much in modification as in growth. He becomes less a child, as the scroll

of the Scriptures unrolls, and more of an adult; and though it will probably be many ages yet before he attains to what St. Paul calls "mature manhood and the stature of full-grown men in Christ," we see him in the Bible much as he is in the twentieth century. He has the same mental and physical equipment, the same passions, ambitions, and tendencies. In other words the Bible does not take us back to the days of the Piltdown or Neanderthal man, but only to man as he emerges into history. He emerges into history trailing clouds of myth, legend, tradition, from the ages of which there never could have been a written record, but he comes, as modern investigation shows us, in height, in form, in intelligence, potentially as he is now. The evolution which made him as he stands took place eons before his arrival on the scene of Genesis. After all, written history covers no more than perhaps five thousand years; and in the processes by which we come to be what we are, five thousand years are but as a tale that is told, and a watch in the night.

Nor does the fact that man has discovered God conflict with the tradition which many people love, of God's revelation of Himself. As a matter of fact, revelation and discovery are parts