de best man I ebber see'd to tak' de Bible apart, but he dunno how to put it togedder agin." Principal Cairns, I think it was, who heard this story, said it was the best illustration of the distinction between the constructive and destructive criticism to which he had ever listened. The synthetic study of the Bible, it may be said in a word, is an attempt to put it together rather than to take it apart.

[Sidenote: Illustrations of the Method]

To illustrate, I have always felt a sort of injury in the way I was taught geography; capes and bays, and lakes and rivers were sought to be crowded on my understanding before I ever saw a globe. Should not the globe come first, then the hemispheres, continents, nations, capitals and the rest? Does not a view of the whole materially assist in the comprehension of the parts? Is it not vital to it, indeed? And history—what is the true method of its study? Is it not first the outline history of the world, then its great divisions, ancient, mediaeval, modern, then the separate peoples or kingdoms in each, and so on? How could you hope to interest a child in botany who had never seen a flower? How would you study a picture of a landscape? Would you cover the canvas with a cloth and study one feature of it at a time? What idea of it would you obtain under such circumstances? Would you not rather say, "Hang it in the proper light, let me get the right position with regard to it, and take it all in at a single glance, fasten the whole of it at once on the camera of my consciousness, and then I shall be able and interested afterward to study it in detail, and to go into the questions of proportion, and perspective, and shading, and colouring and all that"? Is it not the failure to adopt the corresponding plan in Bible study which accounts in large measure for the lack of enthusiastic interest in its prosecution on the part of the people?

[Sidenote: The American Bible League]

It is assuring to discover that the American Bible League, which promises to do much to quicken Bible study among the people along lines of faith in its integrity as the revealed Word of God, has reached almost precisely the same conclusion as to method. The esteemed secretary of that league, Rev. D. S. Gregory, D.D., LL.D., a man of wide experience in educational and literary lines other than those of the promulgation of Bible truth, charges the present ignorance of the Bible, "everywhere in evidence," to the failure of the old methods of its study. To quote his words in the Bible Student and Teacher:

"The fragmentary method was tried for a generation or two. We were kept studying the comments upon verse after verse, on the tacit assumption that no verse had any connection with any other verse, until we wearied of that, and would have no more of it.

"So the lesson systems came in, and we have had series upon series of such systems, showing that men deeply felt that there was need of system in the study of the Bible. But these systems have been artificial, all of them; the latest of all the most so of all. The men who have been engaged in preparing them deserve our gratitude. They have done the best they could, doubtless; and we will look for more light and improvement for the time to come. But you hear everywhere that the people are weary of lesson systems. They are so because the systems are artificial, and because they do not take you directly to the Bible as the Word of God, but rather by means of most useful lesson leaves and other devices take you away from it.

"And it is impossible to grasp the system, however valuable it may be. You study in seven years your three hundred and fifty lessons in a so-called system; and at the end of the seven years the best memory in Christendom has been found unable to hold that system so as to tell what has been taught in that time. When you have passed on from each lesson you have lost its connection with the Bible, and lost the lesson, too."

[Sidenote: Rationalism in the Sunday School]

It is the judgment of this same observer that these "fragmentary methods" account, in part, for the assault of the rationalistic critics upon the work of the Sunday school. "There was a call for something better, a 'vacuum' in the minds of teachers and professors in charge of instruction in the Bible, and just at the psychological moment there came all this German material—interesting, ingenious, imaginative, ready to fill that vacuum. The two needs met, and so we have had our recent development of the critical system of studying and presenting the Bible, which they are seeking now to introduce into all the schools and colleges and Sunday schools.

"That critical method has taken the Bible apart into bits and scraps and scattered it to the ends of the earth, as we have heard and have reason to know. When one comes upon its results he feels that he does not know exactly where he is."

Men hate bits and scraps, as this writer says, and as Bible teachers we should bring our methods into harmony with their natural constructive sense. Like the expert mountain climber, let us take them to the highest peak first, that they may see the whole range, and then they can intelligently and enthusiastically study the features of the lower levels in their relation to the whole. The opposite plan is confusing and a weariness to the flesh. Give people to see for themselves what the Bible is in the large, and then they will have a desire to see it in detail. Put a telescope in their hands first, and a microscope afterwards. [Sidenote: Luther and the Apple Tree] Martin Luther used to say that he studied the Bible as he gathered apples. He shook the tree first, then the limbs, then the branches, and after that he reached out under the leaves for the remaining fruit. The reverse order is monotonous in either case— studying the Bible or gathering apples.

THE PLAN AT WORK

PART III

THE PLAN AT WORK

[Sidenote: Begin at the Beginning]

There are certain simple rules to be observed in the synthetic study of the Bible if we want to master it, and the first is to begin to study it where God began to write it, i.e. at the book of Genesis. The newer criticism would dispute this statement about the primary authorship of Genesis, but the best answer to the objection is to try the plan. As Dr. Smith says in his The Integrity of Scripture: "Inherent in revelation there is a self-witness. The latest portion points to the beginning, and the beginning, with all that may be limited and provisional, contains the germ of the end. God's discovery of Himself is not an episode, but rooted in a vast breadth of the world's life, intertwined with human history, and growing from less to more, as in this divine education and discipline man became capable of receiving the full self-unveiling of God."

Dr. Ashmore, for fifty years an honoured missionary of the American Baptist Missionary Union at Shanghai, relates the following, which furnishes a practical illustration of this thought. At one time he and his brother missionaries started a Bible school for their young converts, and began to teach them the Epistle to the Hebrews. Now the Chinese are remarkable for an inquiring disposition, and questions began to descend upon the teachers to such a degree that they were compelled to forego their purpose to teach Hebrews and go back to Leviticus as explanatory of or introductory to it. But the teaching of Leviticus produced the same result, and they went back to Exodus. And from Exodus they were driven to Genesis, when the questions materially abated. The Bible is wondrously self-interpretive if we will give it an opportunity, and that opportunity