Faith & Spirit Quote by Dwight L. Moody

A salesman of faith is still a salesman, and Moody knew what closes the deal: make the product demonstrate itself. "There's no better book with which to defend the Bible than the Bible itself" is less a bibliographic tip than a rhetorical strategy. It refuses the premise that Scripture needs outside credentialing - philosophy, archaeology, higher criticism - to be legitimate. In Moody's hands, that refusal becomes an assertion of jurisdiction: the Bible is not just the evidence, it's the courtroom.

The intent is defensive, but not timid. Moody was a 19th-century evangelist working in an era when Darwin, industrial modernity, and German textual criticism were unsettling inherited certainties. His revivals competed with a rising class of experts and institutions claiming authority over truth. So the line quietly demotes them. If the Bible is best defended by itself, then the believer doesn't need a scholar to arbitrate meaning; the text, read with faith, is portrayed as self-authenticating.

The subtext is pastoral and populist. It flatters ordinary readers: you already have what you need. It also shifts the burden of proof. Critics can argue all day, but Moody implies that the decisive encounter isn't debate; it's exposure. Read it, and it will "defend" itself by producing conviction, comfort, or conversion. That move is emotionally savvy: it turns apologetics into testimony.

Of course, it's circular - and Moody knows it. The circularity is the point, a closed loop designed to keep authority inside the community of belief, where the Bible functions not merely as a book but as a living instrument.