And it is this intense faith in the living God, which can only come
by the inspiration of the Spirit of God, which proves the old
Testament to be truly inspired. This it is which makes it different
from all books in the world. This it is, I hold, which marks the
canon of Scripture. For in the Apocrypha--true, noble, and good as
most of it is--you do not find the same intense faith in the living
God, or anything to be compared therewith; and that for the simple
reason that the Jews, at the time the Apocrypha was written, were
losing that faith very fast. They felt themselves that there was an
immense difference between anything that they could write and what
the old psalmists and prophets had written. They felt that they
could not write Scripture. All they could do was to write
commentaries about it, and to carry out in their own fashion Moses'
command, 'Thou shalt bind my words for a sign upon your hands, and
they shall be as frontlets between your eyes, and thou shalt write
them upon the doorposts of thine house.' They were right in that;
but as they lost faith in the living God, they began to observe the
command in the letter, and neglect it in the spirit.
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