Parenting & Family Quote by Philip Schaff

Schaff is selling the Bible as a literary technology: a text whose power lies in its range, not its refinement. The pitch is clever because it dodges a common 19th-century anxiety. Higher criticism, new philology, and the prestige of “culture” were re-sorting which books counted as serious. Schaff answers by reframing accessibility as proof of greatness. If a child can drink from it and a scholar can’t drain it, the Bible isn’t merely edifying; it’s structurally superior.

The phrase “every class and grade of culture” does a lot of work. On the surface it’s democratic, almost pastoral. Underneath, it’s a unifying claim aimed at a fractured modern audience: the Bible can be the shared language that industrial society, mass literacy, and denominational competition are rapidly eroding. “Simple nourishment” flatters ordinary believers without conceding intellectual ground, while “inexhaustible matter of study” reassures the educated reader that devotion need not be anti-modern or anti-intellectual.

Schaff’s real intent is institutional as much as spiritual. As a church historian and mediator between European scholarship and American Protestant life, he’s arguing for a Bible robust enough to survive both the nursery and the seminar room. The subtext is defensive but confident: you can bring your doubts, your methods, your learning; the text will outlast them. The genius of the line is that it turns the Bible’s many registers into a single argument for authority, making breadth itself feel like evidence of divine design.