IN ADDITION, we live in an age of hard choices. Many, for example, are implacably opposed to abortion, calling it murder of the unborn. Others feel just as strongly that women have authority over their own bodies and should decide such a matter for themselves. Many view homosexuality, adultery, and premarital sex as rank immorality. Others believe these practices are a matter of personal choice. Who is to say who is right and who is wrong?

The Bible offers guidance in matters of morality, and it describes effective solutions to the problems of crime, hunger, and pollution. The trouble is, most people no longer view the Bible as an authority in such matters. At one time, it waslistened to with respect​—at least in the West. Although the Bible was written down by humans, in the past the majority in Christendom accepted it as the Word of God and believed that God himself had inspired its contents.

To begin with, it is a best-seller, the most widely circulated book in all history. According to the 1988 edition of theGuinness Book of World Records,an estimated 2,500,000,000 copies were printed between 1815 and 1975. That is an enormous figure. No other book in history has come even close to the Bible in circulation figures.

The New Encyclopædia Britannicacalls the Bible “probably the most influential collection of books in human history.”​2The 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine confessed: “I owe my enlightenment quite simply to the reading of a book . . . the Bible. It is quite rightly called Holy Scriptures. He who has lost his God can rediscover Him in this book.”​3During that same century, antislavery activist William H. Seward proclaimed: “The whole hope of human progress is suspended on the ever-growing influence of the Bible.”​