Bible Harmonizes When Rightly Viewed

       We are confident that the careful and minute study of the evangelists, in the light of grammar, of philology, and of history, results in the unassailable conviction of their trustworthiness. The process is one of those profound and unconscious ones which bring us to the goal before we are aware. The conviction that the four Gospels are organically connected, and constitute one living and perfect harmony, cannot be violently and quickly forced upon the mind. At first sight, the objections and difficulties fill the foreground; particularly when protruded and pressed upon the notice by the dexterity of the biased and hostile critic. But as when we look upon a grand painting, in which there are a great variety and complexity and apparent contrariety of elements, it requires some little time for the eye to settle gradually and unconsciously into the point from which the whole shapes itself into harmony and beauty, so it requires wise delay, and the slow penetration of scholarship and meditation, to reach that center from which all the parts of the evangelical biography arrange themselves harmoniously, and all contradiction disappears forever. And when this center is once reached, and the intrinsic, natural, artless harmony is once perceived, there is repose, and there is boldness, and there is authority. He who speaks of Christ out of this intuition, speaks with freedom, with enthusiasm, with love, and with power. Objections which at first sight seem acute, now look puerile. The piecemeal criticism which, like the fly, scans only the edge of a plinth in the great edifice upon which it crawls, disappears under a criticism that is all-comprehending and all-surveying. Shedd.