The Bible is a Book which unfolds the harmonious whole of all God's thoughts, of all His ways with regard to man, and of His determinate purpose as to the Christ-and as to man in Him. It also sets forth the revelation of what God is; of man's responsibility, and of what God Himself has done for man, as well as of the new relationships with God into which man enters through Christ. It reveals what God is in His nature morally, and the dispensations in which He glorifies Himself in the sight of the heavens and their inhabitants. It lays bare the secrets and the state of the human heart, and at the same time unveils before it things invisible.
It begins where the past touches eternity, and leads us on (through a developement and a solution of all moral questions) to the final point where the future merges in. eternity, according to God. It fathoms moral questions in the perfect light of God revealed, and makes known to us the groundwork of new relationships with Him, according to what He is, and what He is in infinite love.
How marvelous indeed is this divine parenthesis (which we know as time) in the midst of eternity, in which the febrile activity of the fallen creature displays itself in thoughts which all perish, urged on by him who wields his power as a liar and a murderer; but in which also the nature and the thoughts of God, His moral being and His determinate purpose (until then hidden in Himself) are (while testing man and manifesting what he is revealed and fulfilled through the Son, that they may in their final result appear in an eternity of glory to come, in which God, surrounded by blissful creatures who know and understand Him, will manifest Himself as Light and Love in the full results of His own eternal and imperishable thoughts; but where also all that has been wrought by His grace and wisdom throughout the things that are seen here below, will be displayed in its glorious and eternal fruits; where GOD—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—known of Himself before time was, will be known by innumerable blessed beings—known by them in their own happiness when time shall be no more. And this world is the wonderful sphere where everything is made to work to that end; and the heart of man the scene wherein all takes place and is morally wrought out, if so be that God, in whom and by whom and for whom are all these things, dwell in hint by His Spirit to give him intelligence; and if Christ, who is the Object of all that is done, be his sole Object. The Bible, then, is the revelation which God has given to us of all this wondrous system, and of all the facts which relate to it.