One Sunday morning, just weeks before we attended for the last time, the conductor asked, "what do we base our beliefs on" as he took hold of the WT to raise it up. The COBOE quickly grabbed the microphone and said, "the Bible" as the conductor put the WT back down on the podium.
In the early beginnings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Watchtower’s first president, Charles Taze Russell, published a series of books called Studies in the Scriptures. In The Watchtower (9-15-1910, Reprints, p.4685) Russell wrote the following about his books, “Not only do we find that people cannot see the divine plan in studying the Bible by itself, but we see, also, that if anyone lays the Scripture Studies aside, even after he has used them, after he has become familiar with them, after he has read them for ten years - if he then lays them aside and ignores them and goes to the Bible alone, though he has understood his Bible for ten years, our experience shows that within two years he goes into darkness. On the other hand, if he had merely read the Scripture Studies with their references, and had not read a page of the Bible, as such, he would be in the light at the end of the two years, because he would have the light of the Scriptures.”