Wonderful Harmony of The Bible

        Consider what, as a matter of fact, we have in this old book, or collection of books, men call the Bible. We have in its first chapters answers to the universal questions, Whence came the world and man? Then we have memorials of the rise and fall of the proudest empires the earth has seen. We have the story of the development of the mightiest of moral forces, even this Christianity which we profess. We have some predictions such as those of the diffusion of the Gospel and the dispersion of the Jews, whose fulfillments are all around us. And its last book is in large measure devoted to the satisfying of that other universal human craving by which only is man's longing to know the secrets of the past transcended, even our desire to discern somewhat of the hidden future. Thus this Bible possesses rounded completeness. It begins by telling us how order was brought forth from the chaos, and it ends by revealing to us the new heavens and earth to which, in the glory of their redemption, no trace of the curse of sin by which they are marred shall cleave. Whence has come this singular perfectness? The Bible is not the production of one writer; it is no great epic or history conceived and consummated by one mighty human genius. For the harmony that characterizes it, we might then reasonably have looked. But it is the production of many writers, of different nations, of varied tongues. It was commenced by Moses in the deserts of Arabia, and completed by John in the Island of Patmos. Between its commencement and its close entire phases of civilization appeared and disappeared. To its earlier penmen the very speech of its later writers was unknown, and to the authors of its closing half the dialect of Moses and of David had become unintelligible. And yet this book, produced in such far removed times, such distant places, and by such varied instrumentality, is one, and forms a whole! Now, is not this itself a proof of more than human  origin? Was there ever a cathedral constructed by means of the building by one man of a wall, and by another of a window, and by another of an arch, and by a fourth of a doorway, and by a fifth of a spire, and so on through its countless parts, without concert, without a common plan, without an architect to supervise? What would you say to the man who should tell you that thus originated the minster of York, or St. Paul's in London, or that Abbey in which repose the ashes of England's noblest dead, or that mightier pile which is Rome's crowning glory? But shall we believe that this grander cathedral of truth, built through vaster space of time, serving nobler ends, glorious with completer perfectness, had no architect, that its many builders were not guided by any common plan, that its harmony is a mere accident and result of chance?  A. Bertram.