THE HUMAN AND DIVINE by Bishop Magee

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 4, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 49.

THE HUMAN AND DIVINE.

By Bishop Magee

WHENEVER we have to consider any joint action of God and man, we are in danger either of thinking of God to the exclusion of man or of man to the exclusion of God. If we think of the Bible as a divine book, as given by the Spirit of God, we dwell upon the divine element in it, until we almost forget that all the writers of these books were human beings like ourselves, until all the reality of the human side of the book fades away; and we forget that the love of John, and the logic of Paul, and the fervor of Peter, and the rapt, visionary mind of Isaiah, and the tender and sorrowing heart of Jeremiah—that every one of these was just as real, and is just as real, in this book, as the mind and the heart of the author are in the last book that was published and advertised yesterday. We forget the reality of the human element in the Bible while we dwell upon the divine.

And so, on the other hand, there is the danger that in attempting to make this book a real, and living, and human book to us, dwelling upon the human element, men forget the divine, and they think and speak of these books and writings as the work of Paul, and Peter, and John, and Jeremiah, and Isaiah, and Moses, and forget that in and through all these the living and Eternal God is speaking words of eternal truth to men.—Bishop Magee.