23-CHAPTHER XVIII INSPIRATION IN ANALOGY WITH GOD’S REVELATION IN NATURE

CHAPTHER XVIII INSPIRATION IN ANALOGY WITH GOD’S REVELATION IN NATURE

We believe in a full inspiration as worthy of God in view of the fact that in the Creation,which is the Divine revelation in Nature, the minutest objects are ordered with the greatestcare and exactness. From its greatest representatives in the starry world down to the minutest creatures and plants, indeed to the molecules, atoms, and electrons of which it is composed, Nature is built up with inconceivable exactness according to most refined and powerful laws. Therefore we ask, shall the Most High, seeing that He has so wonderfully ordered in the lower form of His self-revelation, that is, in Nature, have employed less care in the infinitely higher and nobler revelation, that is, His testimony in the written Word?

Every butterfly wing, with its hundred thousand pellicles; the eye of every fly, with its six to seven thousand lenses; every spider thread, with its three hundred single threads, is a witness to this exactness. And the 306 armor plates of a beetle, the pairs (!) of muscles of a silkworm, the 700 strokes per second of the wings of a gnat, the sperms of the 300,000 species of mush­room which are so minute that one of each sort would not even fill one thimble—are they not all a direct, irrefutable proof that not only is it not unworthy of God, the Greatest of all, to control the tiniest of all things, but that, on the contrary, it most fully and in the highest degree displays His greatness? Or we may think of the marvellous structure of the bee; 31,000 sensitive hairs are on the feelers of the drone, 5,000 facets (lenses) are set together on each eye of the bee, all exacdy hexagonal. The 440 strokes of the wing per second enable it to attain a speed of forty miles per hour, almost the average speed of a fast train. And finally what shall we say of the Infusoria, some of which are so small that of one variety in Bohemia not less than 225 million armour plates are found in one single cubic centimetre? to say nothing of the marvellous power of that ten thousandth gramme of animated matter which we call the brain of the ant, or of the wholly incon­ceivable atomic planetary systems which are the basis of matter, or of the other millions upon millions of wonders of the tiny world of the most minute things. And lastly, seeing that, as the Lord said, the very hairs of our heads are all numbered (Matthew 10:30), will God be less concerned as to the details of His Word by which He wishes to guide millions of human beings with un­ending existence to salvation, blessedness and glory in all the ages of eternity?