Faith & Spirit Quote by Albert Barnes

Barnes is trying to shrink the Bible back down to the size of a compass, not an encyclopedia. The line is a preemptive strike against a familiar modern demand: that Scripture should answer everything, settle every doubt, and function like a total information system. He grants the hunger for certainty ("all the information we might desire") and the reality of inner turmoil ("the human soul is perplexed"), then calmly refuses the premise that revelation exists to satisfy curiosity. The move is pastoral and tactical: lower the expectations, protect the text from being judged by the standards of science, history, or philosophy, and protect the believer from the crash that comes when a sacred book is forced to perform as a universal troubleshooting manual.

The subtext is also an argument about authority. Barnes doesn't diminish the Bible; he repositions it. "Not designed" implies intention and limitation are features, not bugs. That framing sidesteps the trap of treating unanswered questions as failures of God, and it disciplines the reader's posture: you don't interrogate a guidebook the way you audit a dataset. You follow it.

Contextually, this is the kind of Protestant, common-sense hermeneutic that plays well in a world rattled by modernity's expanding knowledge. When geology, textual criticism, and new social questions press in, Barnes offers a defensive clarity: Scripture's job is soteriological, not encyclopedic. The nautical metaphor ("safe guide", "haven") seals the intent. Faith here is navigation under imperfect visibility, not possession of total maps.