Is, then, the seat of authority for religion in the claims of Holy Scripture? This has been the appeal of the Reformed churches. At the Reformation, when the assertion was again made of the rights of the human spirit to come directly into fellowship with Christ, Scripture of necessity took a place of new importance. It was the road of direct access to God. One can understand how, after being bound in the chains of the Roman Catholic Church, men and women found in Scripture the glorious liberty of the children of God. Is it any wonder that they brooded over it until even the translations themselves seemed to be the very breath of the Almighty? But the earliest and greatest of the reformers had no such cast-iron view of verbal inspiration as afterward came to prevail, in its turn to become a tyranny just as exacting as the old. Both Luther and Calvin knew far too much of religious history and of the Bible to be led into any such unbending position. Luther, for instance, had his pronounced views upon the Epistle of James, which he would have excluded from the Canon. He was well aware of the doubt which had prevailed as to the canonicity of the splendid Epistle to the Hebrews. The preacher of to-day is not wise who neglects Calvin on the Psalms and Calvin on Isaiah; but Calvin saw clearly that there were Aramaic elements in the 139th Psalm, and that the ascription of it to David was impossible. Gradually, however, what was really the record of a revelation came to be regarded as the revelation itself. It is not the New Testament which reveals God. It is Christ who reveals God, and it is the New Testament which gives the story of the incarnation of the Most High. In the post-Reformation days, however, when the Reformation, as a mighty revival of personal religion, was giving place to the time when men were trying to state in logical and philosophical form those wonderful experiences which they had lived through of the power of the Holy Spirit, the Bible came to be used as though it were a collection of proof-texts. A creed is obviously the product of the time when the first overwhelming flood of enthusiasm has passed, and men have begun to reason about the experiences through which they have lived. Thus, in the seventeenth century the doctrinaire view of Scripture stiffened. There was no attempt to understand the history underlying this great library of sacred writings. So truculent a book as Esther was believed to be, every word of it, the breathing of the Almighty, because it found itself within the sacred boards, while so glorious a record as First Maccabees was ranked with any other piece of secular history because its date precluded its inclusion within the Canon. There was no knowledge of the fact that the early narratives of Genesis had a relationship to the Babylonian cosmogony; that, the Septuagint being witness, there had been widely varying texts of the Book of Jeremiah; that the Hebrew text of Hosea was in places in such confusion that anything more than a conjectural translation was impossible. The general and well-founded belief that Scripture was the Word of God was stretched until it became a new legalism, until it covered every word of the Authorized Version, and, in the minds of many, every comma of the splendid translation. That was an inflexible, an uncritical, an unscholarly position that was perilous. In the minds of multitudes it linked the truth in Jesus with some conundrum about Cain's wife. It put the great causes of religion at the mercy of the negative and unbelieving critic. Many of us remember still the shock it was to our faith when we found that Scripture was being examined by the ordinary methods of critical and linguistic analysis; and yet we now realize that it is through this liberty that our faith has been re-established and set foursquare to all the winds that blow.