THE ONE BOOK | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 26, 1898

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 24, No. 21.

THE ONE BOOK.

THERE are many books in the world, but there is only one Book. The Bible is unique. It is in a class by itself. It seeks to control everything, but it co-ordinates itself with nothing. It sets forth imitable examples of character, but it is not itself imitable. No one ever has written or ever will write a second Bible. The very phrase which every one uses, “The Bible,” signifies the uniqueness of this Book. It is a whole library in itself, and yet it is more than a simple collection of books. There is a homogeneity and consistency to the whole which lead us to speak of Scripture as being a single story, not many revelations. The Bible is the exhaustless Book. It may sometimes prove exhausting to its light-minded readers, but it never exhausts itself. “It is the wonder of the Bible,” observes Dr. Joseph Parker, who has preached more than twenty-five volumes of sermons upon scriptural subjects, “that you never get through it. You get through all other books, but you never get through the Bible.” On the basis of a rationalistic criticism, this quality of exhaustlessness is really inexplicable. But when we come to realize that, after all has been said as to scrolls and tablets and styluses and human factors and copyists, God wrote the Bible, we understand why it is that Scripture is so rich in treasures of wisdom. We see that we can not exhaust the Bible because we can not exhaust God.—N. Y. Observer.