CALIFORNIA

CHAPTER I

WHY MEN STUDY THE BIBLE

I-World-wide Popularity

THE Bible is to-day the most popular and the most widely read book in existence. Its extensive use is as wide as the world and those who study it are as diverse as the nations. In eighteen different countries last college year, 80,000 college men were studying in voluntary Bible classes in institutions of higher learning. The Baraca Movement, the object of which is the interesting of young men in organized Bible classes in the church, reported last season a Bible-class membership of 350,000 young men. The Young Men's Christian Association enrolled last year in Bible study in their various branches 97,232 men. These men represented our cities, country districts, railroads, colleges, high schools, industries, and the army and navy.

The volume of voluntary student Bible study in North America (28,562 students attending classes for two months or more last year in 490 institutions) would be much increased should we add the hundreds of men who are attending Bible-study classes in connection with the curriculum of these institutions, and the 8,977 theological students in 167 institutions of the United States and Canada who are studying the Bible in preparation for the Christian ministry.

It is, moreover, one of the facts for thoughtful consideration that there was last year a total army of 28,011,194 persons, representing fifty-one nationalities, who were studying the Bible in Sunday-schools of various lands.

Twenty-seven Bible Societies are printing this book; one in the United States, three in Great Britain and twenty-three on the European continent. These 27 societies reported an aggregate output in 1910 of 12,843,196 Bibles.

It is conservatively stated that more copies of the Bible were sold last year than

of any other hundred books of the world combined. The Oxford Press turns out 20,000 Bibles a week. The British and Foreign Bible Society prints the Bible in 400 languages. The head of one of the great publishing-houses of London stated recently that it had been impossible for several years for the house with which he was connected to print Bibles rapidly enough to supply the demand. It was stated that the Boxer War in China would drive Bible religion from that empire, yet the issue of Bibles for China last year was 428,000 copies. The American Bible Society published and distributed in 1910, 2,153,028 copies of the Bible. The total annual issues of Scriptures are over nineteen million volumes.

The thousands of men who are being attracted at present to the study of the Bible in connection with missionary organizations, and with young people's societies, together with an unrecordable multitude who, in addition to those meeting in regular classes, are discovering day by day the great educational

and inspirational values of the Christian Scriptures, add materially to this vast, unexampled crusade which seems intended at no distant date to make the Bible the universal book of all peoples.

Why has this company of men of widely diversified races and religions given time and thought to the Bible? I wish to deal with some of the causes and results of this revival in Biblical study.

II-What is Christianity?

The Bible presents the facts of the Christian religion. Plato said: "He shall be as a God to me who can rightly divide and define." The president of one of our large North American universities in his convocation sermon recently said that comparatively few people know what Christianity is. We think of a noted scientist who, when he was asked what he thought about the failure of Christianity, exclaimed: "The failure of Christianity! I have never yet seen Chris

tianity tried." One of the reasons why men are not able to really represent Christianity to the world is that they have never studied with thoroughness its records and its history. They have never really discovered its underlying principles. A student on the Pacific Coast asked me: "What is the difference between those things which you and I can disagree upon and still be Christians, and the things we must agree upon if we are Christians?"

It is astonishing how much of our religious knowledge is taken in a second-hand fashion from books or from friends. Many men of the church have not really studied with deep seriousness the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament. A genuine knowledge of the great religion of the Western world is not acquired by snap-shot attention to books or sermons about Christianity.

In North China I found a prominent Chinese educator planning to give a good part of his time for the next few years to the study of the principles of Christianity,