======================================================================== THE FUNDAMENTALS OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH, VOLUMES 1-4 (UNABRIDGED) by R.A. Torrey ======================================================================== A comprehensive examination of core Christian doctrines including substitutionary atonement, exploring scriptural foundations and theological frameworks while defending orthodox Christianity against modernist challenges. Chapters: 96 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TABLE OF CONTENTS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. - What Christ Teaches Concerning Future... 2. - The Atonement 3. - At-One-Ment by Propitiation 4. - The Grace of God 5. - Salvation by Grace 6. - The Nature of Regeneration 7. - Regeneration - Conversion - Reformation 8. - Justification by Faith 9. - The Doctrines That Must Be Emphasized in... 10. - Preach the Word 11. - Pastoral and Personal Evangelism, or Win.... 12. - The Sunday School's True Evangelism 13. - Foreign Missions or World-Wide Evangelism 14. - A Message from Missions to the Modern Mi... 15. - What Missionary Motives Should Prevail? 16. - Consecration 17. - Is Romanism Christianity? 18. - Rome, The Antagonist of the Nation 19. - The True Church 20. - The Testimony of Foreign Missions to... 21. - The Purposes of the Incarnation 22. - Tributes to Christ and the Bible by Inte... 23. - Modern Philosophy 24. - The Knowledge of God 25. - Table of Contents 26. - Introduction from Blueletter Bible 27. - Preface 28. - Dedication 29. - The Wisdom of this World 30. - The Science of Conversion 31. - The Decadence of Darwinism 32. - The Passing of Evolution 33. - Evolutionism in the Pulpit 34. - The Church and Socialism 35. - Millennial Dawn: A Counterfeit... (JW's) 36. - Mormonism: Its Origin, Characteris... 37. - Eddyism, Commonly Called "Christian Sci... 38. - Modern Spiritualism Briefly Tested by... 39. - Satan and His Kingdom 40. - Why Save the Lord's Day? 41. - The Apologetic Value of Paul's Epistles 42. - Divine Efficacy of Prayer 43. - The Proof of the Living God as Found... 44. - Our Lord's Teachings about Money 45. - The Scriptures 46. - The Place of Prayer in Evangelism 47. - What the Bible Contains for the Believer 48. - The Hope of the Church 49. - The Coming of Christ 50. - The Testimony of Christian Experience 51. - A Personal Testimony 52. - A Personal Testimony 53. - The Personal Testimony (of C.T. Studd) 54. - A Personal Testimony 55. - Copyright Information 56. - The History of the Higher Criticism 57. - The Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch 58. - The Fallacies of the Higher Criticism 59. - The Bible and Modern Criticism 60. - Holy Scripture and Modern Negations 61. - Christ and Criticism 62. - OT Criticism and NT Christianity 63. - The Tabernacle in the Wilderness: Did... 64. - The Internal Evidence of the Fourth Gospel 65. - The Testimony of Christ to the OT 66. - The Early Narratives of Genesis 67. - One Isaiah 68. - The Book of Daniel 69. - The Doctrinal Value of the First Chapters... 70. - Three Peculiarities... with the Graf Well... 71. - The Testimony of the Monuments... 72. - The Recent Testimony of Archaeology... 73. - Science and Christian Faith 74. - My Personal Experience with the Higher... 75. - The Inspiration of the Bible - Definition... 76. - Inspiration 77. - The Moral Glory of Jesus Christ a Proof of... 78. - The Testimony of the Scriptures to Themselves 79. - The Testimony of the Organic Unity of... 80. - Fulfilled Prophecy a Potent Argument... 81. - Life in the Word 82. - Is There a God? 83. - God in Christ the Only Revelation of... 84. - The Deity of Christ 85. - The Virgin Birth of Christ 86. - The God-Man 87. - The Person and Work of Jesus Christ 88. - The Certainty and Importance of the Phys... 89. - The Personality and Deity of the Holy Spirit 90. - The Holy Spirit and the Sons of God 91. - Observations on the Conversion and Apos... 92. - Christianity is No Fable 93. - The Biblical Conception of Sin 94. - Paul's Testimony to the Doctrine of Sin 95. - Sin and Judgment to Come 96. - Preface to the e-Sword Edition ======================================================================== CHAPTER 1: - WHAT CHRIST TEACHES CONCERNING FUTURE... ======================================================================== WHAT CHRIST TEACHES CONCERNING FUTURE RETRIBUTION BY WILLIAM C. PROCTER, F. PH., CROYDON, ENGLAND There are four reasons for confining our consideration of the subject of Future Retribution to the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ: (1) It limits the range of our inquiry to what is possible in a brief essay. There will be no occasion to examine the 56 passages in the authorized version of our Bible which contain the word "Hell," (most of which are the translations of the Hebrew "Sheol" and the Greek "Hades," meaning "the grave" and "the unseen state,") and we can concentrate our attention on the ten passages in which our Lord uses the word "Gehenna" (which was the usual appellation in His day for the abode of the lost) together with those other verses which evidently refer to the future state of the wicked. (2) It affords a sufficient answer to the speculation of those who don’t know, to refer to the revelation of the One who does know. Many other passages might be quoted from the New Testament, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who was promised by our Lord to His disciples to "guide them into all truth," and "show them things to come" (John 16:12-13); but, in taking the words of Christ Himself, we shall find the greatest ground of common agreement in these days of loose views of inspiration. Surely, He who is "The Truth" would never misrepresent or exaggerate it on a matter of such vital importance, and would neither encourage popular errors nor excite needless fears. (3) It also affords a sufficient answer to those who represent the doctrine as unreasonable and dishonoring to God, and who regard those who hold it as narrow minded and hard hearted, to remind them that all the very expressions which are most fiercely denounced in the present day fell from the lips of the Saviour who died for us, and came from the heart of the "Lover of souls." Surely we have no right to seek to be broader minded than He was, or to nurture false hopes which have no solid foundation in His teaching; while to assume a greater zeal for God’s honor, and a deeper compassion for the souls of men, is little short of blasphemy. The current objections to the orthodox doctrine of hell are made by those who allow their hearts to run away with their heads, and are founded more on sickly sentimentality than on sound scholarship. (4) In considering the subject as professing Christians. the words of the Master Himself ought surely to put an end to all controversy; and these are clear and unmistakable when taken in their plain and obvious meaning, without subjecting them to any forced interpretation. It is greatly to be regretted that they are not more frequently dealt with in the modern pulpit; but ministers are only human, and there is a strong temptation to preach what is palatable, rather than what is profitable. In this case, surely, history repeats itself; for we read in Isaiah 30:10 of those who said to the prophets of old: "Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits"; and a cowardly yielding to this demand has produced an emasculated Gospel and an enfeebled ministry in the present day. Coming now to consider briefly Christ’s teaching on the subject, let us ask, first of all: 1. WHAT DID OUR LORD TEACH AS TO THE CERTAINTY OF FUTURE RETRIBUTION? The word "retribution" is to he preferred to "punishment" because the Bible teaches us that the fate of the wicked is not an arbitrary (much less a vindictive) infliction, but the necessary consequence of their own sins. Taking the passages in their order, in Matthew 5:22; Christ speaks of causeless anger against, and contemptuous condemnation of, others as placing us "in danger of the hell of fire, while in verses Matthew 5:29-30 He utters a similar warning concerning the sin of lust; and these are in the Sermon on the Mount, which is the most generally accepted part of His teaching! In chapter Matthew 8:12 He speaks of unbelieving "children of the Kingdom" being "cast forth into the outer darkness", and adds, "There shall be the weeping and gnashing of teeth" - expressions which are repeated in chapters Matthew 22:13 and Matthew 25:30. In chapter Matthew 10:28 Jesus said: "Fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" - a wholesome fear which is decidedly lacking in the present day, and which many people regard as a remnant of superstition quite unsuited to this enlightened age! In our Lord’s own explanation of the parable of the tares and wheat, He declared: "The Son of Man shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that cause stumbling, and them that do iniquity, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire; there shall be the weeping and gnashing of teeth. The angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the righteous, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire; there shall be the weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Matthew 13:41-42; Matthew 13:49-50). In Matthew 23:15 He speaks of the hypocritical Pharisees as "children of hell," showing that their conduct had fitted them for it, and that they would "go to their own place", like Judas (whom He describes as "the son of perdition" in John 17:12), while in verse Matthew 23:33 He asks: "How shall ye escape the judgment of hell?" The law of retribution can no more be repealed than that of gravitation; it is fixed and unalterable. That hell has not been prepared for human beings, but that they prepare themselves for it, is clear from the sentence which our Lord says that He will pronounce upon those on His left hand in the last great day: "Depart from Me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels" (Matthew 25:41). Turning to the Gospel according to MARK, we find our Lord saying, in Mark 3:29 : "Whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin." Whatever view may be taken of the character of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, the cause and consequence are here closely linked together, eternal sin bringing eternal retribution. The words in the original undoubtedly indicate an inveterate habit rather than an isolated act, and would probably be better translated, "is held under the power of an eternal sin." This in itself precludes the possibility of forgiveness, because it assumes the impossibility of repentance; besides, each repetition involving a fresh penalty, the punishment is naturally unending. Similarly, in John 8:21; John 8:24, our Lord’s twice repeated declaration to those Jews which believed not on Him, "Ye shall die in your sins", indicates that unforgiven sin must rest upon the soul in condemnation and pollution; for death, so far from changing men’s characters, only fixes them; and hence Christ speaks in chapter John 5:29 of "the resurrection of damnation". Once more, the words of the Ascended and Glorified Saviour recorded in Revelation 21:8 may be quoted: "The fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death." A careful study of the Scriptural uses of the words "life" and "death" will clearly show that the root ideas are respectively "union" and "separation". Physical life is union of the spirit with the body, spiritual life is the union of the spirit with God, and everlasting life is this union perfected and consummated to all eternity. Similarly, physical death is the separation of the spirit from the body, spiritual death is the separation of the spirit from God, and eternal death is the perpetuation of this separation. Hence, for all who have not experienced a second birth, "the second death" becomes inevitable; for he who is only born once dies twice, while he who is "born again" dies only once. As against the doctrine of annihilation, Revelation 20:14 may be quoted: "Death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire". 2. WHAT DID CHRIST TEACH AS TO THE CHARACTER OF FUTURE RETRIBUTION? We have already seen that He spoke of it as full of sorrow and misery in His seven-fold repetition of the striking expression: "There shall be the weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Matthew 8:12; Matthew 13:42; Matthew 13:50; Matthew 22:13; Matthew 24:51; Matthew 25:30; Luke 13:28). In Mark 9:43-48, our Lord twice speaks of "the fire that never shall be quenched", and thrice adds, "where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched". Of course He was using the common Jewish metaphors for Gehenna, taken from the perpetual fires that burned in the valley of Hinnom to destroy the refuse, and the worms that fed upon the unburied corpses that were cast there; but, as we have already seen, He would never have encouraged a popular delusion. Our Lord twice Spoke of fruitless professors being "cast into the fire" (Matthew 7:19; John 15:6); twice of "the furnace of fire" (Matthew 13:42; Matthew 13:50); twice of the "hell of fire" (Matthew 5:22; Matthew 18:9); and twice of "eternal fire" (Matthew 18:8; Matthew 25:41). Granted that "the undying worm and unquenchable fire" are metaphorical, yet these striking figures of speech must stand for startling facts, they must be symbolical of a terrible reality. We need no more regard them materially than we do the golden streets and pearly gates of heaven; but, if the latter are emblematic of the indescribable splendors of heaven, the former must be symbolical of the unutterable sufferings of hell. One can no more presume to dogmatize on the one than the other, but it requires no vivid stretch of the imagination to conceive an accusing conscience acting like the undying worm, and insatiable desires like the unquenchable fire. In our Lord’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the former is represented as being "in torments" and "in anguish" even in "Hades," and, that memory survives the present life and accompanies us beyond the grave, is clear from Abraham’s words to him: "Son, remember" (Luke 16:23-25). Could any material torments be worse than the moral torture of an acutely sharpened conscience, in which memory becomes remorse as it dwells upon misspent time and misused talents, upon omitted duties and committed sins, upon opportunities lost both of doing and of getting good, upon privileges neglected and warning rejected? It is bad enough here, where memory is so defective, and conscience may be so easily drugged; but what must it be hereafter, when no expedients will avail to banish recollection and drown remorse? The poet Starkey stimulates our imagination in the awful lines: "All that hath been that ought not to have been, That might have been so different; that now Cannot but be irrevocably past. Thy gangrened heart, Stripped of its self-worn mask, and spread at last Bare, in its horrible anatomy, Before thine own excruciated gaze;" while Cecil puts the matter in a nutshell when he writes: "Hell is the truth seen too late." Again, what material pain could equal the moral torment of intensified lusts and passions finding no means of gratification, insatiable desires that can have no provision for their indulgence, or if indulged, all the pleasure gone while the power remains? Surely, such expressions as the undying worm and the unquenchable fire represent, not pious fictions, but plain facts; and we may be sure that the reality will exceed, not fall short of, the figures employed, as in the case of the blessedness of the redeemed. The woes thus pronounced are more terrible than the thunders of Sinai, and the doom denounced more awful than that of Sodom; but we should never forget that these terrible expressions fell from the lips of Eternal Love, and came from a heart overflowing with tender compassion for the souls of men. 3. WHAT DID CHRIST TEACH AS TO THE CONTINUITY OF FUTURE RETRIBUTION? Is there any solid basis in His recorded words for the doctrine of eternal hope, or the shadow of a foundation for the idea that all men will be eventually saved? Much has been made of the fact that the Greek word "aionios" (used by our Lord in Matthew 18:8; Matthew 25:41; Matthew 25:46, and translated "everlasting" in the Authorized, and "eternal" in the R.V.) literally means "age-long"; but an examination of the 25 places in which it is used in the New Testament reveals the fact that it is twice used of the Gospel, once of the Gospel covenant, once of the consolation brought to us by the Gospel, twice of God’s own Being, four times of the future of the wicked, and fifteen times of the present and future life of the believer. No one thinks of limiting its duration in the first four cases and in the last, why then do so in the other one? The dilemma becomes acute in considering the words of our Lord recorded in Matthew 25:46, where precisely the same word is used concerning the duration of the reward of the righteous and the retribution of the wicked, for only by violent perversion and distortion can the same word in the same sentence possess a different signification. Again; it is sometimes urged that, as salt has a purifying power, the words, "everyone shall be salted with fire," in Mark 9:49, have this significance in the case of future punishment; but the context clearly shows that its preserving power is alluded to, for the passage speaks of the undying worm and the unquenchable fire. Besides, if the Divine chastisements are ineffectual here in the case of any individual, when there is so much to restrain men and women from wrong-doing, how can they be expected to prove effectual in the next world, with all these restraints removed, and only the society of devils? It is certainly somewhat illogical for those who make so much of the love of God to argue that punishment will prove remedial hereafter in the case of those whom Divine Love has failed to influence here. Not only is there not the slightest hint in the teaching of our Lord that future punishment will prove remedial or corrective, but His words concerning Judas in Matthew 26:24 are inexplicable on that supposition. Surely His existence would still have been a blessing if his punishment was to be followed by ultimate restoration, and Christ would therefore never have uttered the sadly solemn words: "It had been good for that man if he had not been born." Similarly there is a striking and significant contrast between our Lord’s words to the unbelieving Jews recorded in John 8:21 : "Whither I go ye cannot come," and those to Peter in chapter John 13:36 : "Whither I go thou canst not follow Me now, but thou shalt follow Me afterwards." As character tends to permanence, heaven is a place of perfect holiness and hell must be of the opposite; and this throws light upon the words of Revelation 22:11, which were apparently uttered by our ascended, glorified, and returning Lord: "He that is unrighteous, let him do unrighteousness still; and he that is filthy, let him be made filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him do righteousness still; and he that is holy, let him be made holy still." The doctrine of universal restoration springs from a natural desire to wish the history of mankind to have a happy ending, as in most story books; but it ignores the fact that, by granting man free will, God has (as it were) set a boundary to His own omnipotence, for it is a moral impossibility to save a man against his will. Surely eternal sin can only be followed by eternal retribution; for, if a man deliberately chooses to be ruled by sin, he must inevitably be ruined by it. One never hears of the doctrine of final restoration being applied to the devil and his angels, but why not? If the answer is, "Because they cannot and will not repent," the same is surely true of many human beings. Not only is there no vestige of foundation in Our Lord’s words for the doctrine of universalism, there is also no shadow of a suggestion of any restoration of the wicked hereafter. So far from this being the case, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus rings the death knell of any such hope. Abraham is there represented as saying to Dives: "Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, that they which would pass from hence to you may not be able, and that none may Cross over from thence to us" (Luke 16:26). That "fixed gulf" is surely a yawning chasm too deep to be filled up, and too wide to be bridged over; and the awful description of hell by the poet Milton, in "Paradise Lost", remains sadly true: "Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell; hope never comes That comes to all, but torture without end." 4. WHAT DID CHRIST TEACH AS TO THE CAUSES OF FUTURE RETRIBUTION? A careful study of our Lord’s words show that there are two primary causes, namely, deliberate unbelief and wilful rejection of Him; and surely these are but different aspects of the same sin. In Matthew 8:12, it was the contrast between the faith of the Gentile centurion and the unbelief of the Jewish nation which drew from His lips the solemn words: "The children of the Kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness;" while, in Matthew 23:33 the awful denunciation in verse 33 is followed by the sad lamentation: "How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not" (verse Matthew 23:37). Similarly, in Mark 3:29, R. V., the "eternal sin" spoken of can only be that of continued rejection of the offers of mercy; and in John 8:24, our Lord plainly declares: "If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins." Finally, in Mark 16:16, we find the words: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that disbelieveth shall be condemned." A careful consideration of these passages, and especially of the last, will help to remove one great difficulty with regard to the whole subject, namely, the future state of those who have never had the Gospel so plainly presented to them as to enable them to deliberately accept or reject Christ, to willingly believe the good news or wilfully disbelieve it. Another difficulty is removed when we realize that our Lord taught that there would be different degrees in hell as in heaven. Thus, in Matthew 11:20-24 He taught that it would be "more tolerable in the day of judgment" for Tyre and Sidon than for Chorazin and Bethsaida, and for Sodom than for Capernaum; and in Mark 12:40 He speaks of "greater damnation." It is clear that future retribution will be proportioned to the amount of guilt committed and of grace rejected. (See also Luke 12:47-48; John 19:11). We have so far examined, as thoroughly as possible within this limited space, all the recorded words of our Lord which bear on this important subject. It only remains, in conclusion, very briefly to point out that the whole drift of Christ’s teaching confirms what we learn from these isolated passages, and that future retribution is not merely an incidental but a fundamental part of the Gospel message. It is the dark background on which its loving invitations and tender expostulations are presented, and the Gospel message loses much of its force when the doctrine is left out. But, worst of all, the earnest exhortations to immediate repentance and faith lose their urgency if the ultimate result will be the same if those duties are postponed beyond the present life. Is it seriously contended that Judas will eventually be as John, Nero as Paul, Ananias and Sapphira as Priscilla and Aquila? Finally, the doctrines of heaven and hell seem to stand or fall together, for both rest upon the same Divine revelation, both are described metaphorically, and both have the same word "everlasting" applied to their duration. If the threatenings of God’s Word are unreliable, so may the promises be; if the denunciations have no real meaning, what becomes of the invitations? Ruskin well terms the denial of hell "the most dangerous, because the most attractive, form of modern infidelity." But is it so modern? Is it not an echo of the devil’s insinuating doubt: "Yea, hath God said"? followed by his insistent denial, "Ye shall not surely die," which led to the fall of man? Let us, therefore, believe God’s truth, rather than the devil’s lie; let us accept Divine revelation, rather than human speculation; and let us heed what Christ so plainly taught, without mitigating, modifying, or minimizing His solemn warnings. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 2: - THE ATONEMENT ======================================================================== The Atonement By Professor Franklin Johnson, D. D., LL. D., Author of "Old-Testament Quotations In The New Testament," Etc., Chicago, Ill. [Copyrighted by the "Homiletic Review," and published by permission of Funk & Wagnalls Co.] The Christian world as a whole believes in a substitutionary atonement. This has been its belief ever since it began to think. The doctrine was stated by Athanasius as clearly and fully as by any later writer. All the great historic creeds which set forth the atonement at any length set forth a substitutionary atonement, All the great historic systems of theology enshrine it as the very Ark of the Covenant, the central object of the Holy of Holies. While the Christian world in general believes in a substitutionary atonement, it is less inclined than it once was to regard any existing theory of substitution as entirely adequate. It accepts the substitution of Christ as a fact, and it tends to esteem the theories concerning it only as glimpses of a truth larger than all of them. It observes that an early theory found the necessity of the atonement in the veracity of God, that a later one found it in the honor of God, and that a still later one found it in the government of God, and it deems all these speculations helpful, while it yearns for further light. Grounds of Belief in Substitution If we should ask those who hold this doctrine on what grounds they believe that Christ is the substitute for sinners, there would be many answers, but, perhaps, in only two of them would all voices agree. The first of these grounds would be the repeated declarations of Holy Scripture, which are so clear, so precise, so numerous, and so varied that they leave no room to doubt their meaning. The other ground is the testimony of the human heart wherever it mourns its sin or rejoices in an accomplished deliverance. The declaration of the Scriptures that Christ bore our sins on the cross is necessary to satisfy the longings of the soul. The Christian world, in general, would say: "We believe in gravitation, in light, in electricity, in the all-pervading ether, because we must, and not because we can explain them fully. So, we believe that Christ died instead of the sinner because we must, and not because we know all the reasons which led God to appoint and to accept His sacrifice." The Moral-Influence Theory While the Christian world as a whole believes in a substitutionary atonement, the doctrine is rejected by a minority of devout and able men, who present instead of it what has often been called the "moral-influence theory." According to this, the sole mission of Christ was to reveal the love of God in a way so moving as to melt the heart and induce men to forsake sin. The theory is sometimes urged with so great eloquence and tenderness that one would fain find it sufficient as an interpretation at once of the Scriptures and of human want. Now, no one calls in question the profound spiritual influence of Christ where He is preached as the propitiation of God, and those who believe the doctrine of a substitutionary atonement lift up the cross as the sole appointed means of reaching and saving the lost. They object only when "the moral-influence theory" is presented as a sufficient account of the atonement, to the denial that the work of Christ has rendered God propitious toward man. One may appreciate the moon without wishing that it put out the sun and stars. Arguments Against Substitution The advocates of this theory must clear the doctrine of substitution out of the way. They attempt to do this by advancing many arguments, only two of which need detain us here, since, these removed, the others, of lighter moment, will fall of themselves. a. Substitution Impossible. It is said by them that the doctrine of substitution supposes that which is impossible. Guilt can not be transferred from one person to another. Punishment and penalty can not be transferred from a guilty person to an innocent one. An innocent person may be charged with sin, but if so he will be innocent still, and not guilty. An innocent person may suffer, but if so his suffering will not be punishment or penalty. Such is the objection: the Christian world, in believing that a substitutionary atonement has been made by Christ, believes a thing which is contrary to the necessary laws of thought. The reader will observe that this objection has to do wholly with the definitions of the words guilt and punishment and penalty. It is, perhaps, worthy the serious attention of the theologian who wishes to keep his terms free from offense; but it has no force beyond the sphere of verbal criticism. It is true that guilt, in the sense of personal blameworthiness, can not be transferred from the wrongdoer to the welldoer. It is true that punishment, in the sense of penalty inflicted for personal blameworthiness, cannot be transferred from the wrongdoer to the welldoer. This is no discovery, and it is maintained as earnestly by those who believe in a substitutionary atonement as by those who deny it. Let us use other words, if these are not clear, but let us hold fast the truth which they were once used to express. The world is so constituted that it bears the idea of substitution engraved upon its very heart. No man or woman or child escapes from suffering inflicted for the faults of others. In thousands of instances these substitutionary sufferings are assumed voluntarily, and are useful. Husbands suffer in order to deliver wives from sufferings richly deserved. Wives suffer in order to deliver husbands from sufferings richly deserved. Children suffer in order to deliver parents from sufferings richly deserved. Parents suffer in order to deliver children from sufferings richly deserved. Pastors often shield guilty churches in this way, and sometimes at the cost of life. Statesmen often shield guilty nations in this way, and sometimes at the cost of life: If, now, we shall teach that Christ suffered in order to deliver us from sufferings which we richly deserve, we shall avoid a strife about words, and shall maintain that, coming into the world as a member of our race, He suffered to the utmost, as many other heroic souls have suffered in a lesser degree, by subjecting Himself to the common rule of vicarious suffering, instituted by God in the formation of human society bound together by ties of sympathy and love, and existing in daily operation from the dawn of history till this present time. The vicarious sufferings, by means of which the innocent deliver the guilty from sufferings richly deserved, are frequently assumed in the fear that over-much grief will harden the culprit and in a hope that a stay of judgment and the softening lapse of time may lead him to better things. May we not believe that Christ was affected by a similar motive, and has procured that delay of the divine justice at which every thoughtful person wonders? But the vicarious sufferings which we observe in the world are frequently assumed for a stronger reason, in the belief that the culprit already shows signs of relenting, and in the assurance that patient waiting, even at a great cost, will be rewarded with the development of the tender beginnings of a new life which the thunder-storms of untempered equity might destroy, So it was predicted of Christ before His coming that "He should see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied." Thus if Christ suffered in order to deliver us from sufferings which we richly deserved, it was also in order to deliver us from sin by reason of which we deserved them. b. Substitution Immoral. The second argument by means of which the advocates of "the moral influence theory" seek to refute the doctrine of a substitutionary atonement is equally unfortunate with the first, in that, like the first, it criticizes words rather than the thoughts which they are employed to express. The doctrine of a substitutionary atonement, it is said, is immoral. Let us inquire what this immoral doctrine is. The doctrine, it is answered, that our guilt was transferred to Christ and that He was punished for our sins. Here again let us "strive not about words." Let us admit that the theologian might well express himself in other terms, which would create no prejudice against his meaning. But, if he amends his statement, let him retain every part of his meaning. Let him say that Christ suffered in order that guilty man might escape from sufferings richly deserved. Is this teaching immoral? Then the constitution of the human race, ordained by God, is immoral, for, since its ties are those of sympathy and love, human beings are constantly suffering that others may escape sufferings richly deserved. Then sympathy is immoral, for this is what it does. Then love is immoral, for this is what it does. Then the best persons are the most immoral, for they do this oftener than others. The objector does not maintain that the doctrine of a substitutionary atonement has equally produced immorality wherever it has been proclaimed. He does not venture to test this charge by an appeal to history. The appeal would be fatal. For nineteen hundred years the only great moral advances of the human race have been brought about by the preaching of a substitutionary atonement. "A tree is known by its fruits." It is impossible that a doctrine essentially immoral should be the cause of morality among men. Moral Influence Theory Not Adequate Let us turn now to "the moral-influence theory" and consider why it ought not to be accepted. a. Too Circumscribed. As a complete theory of the atonement it is far too narrowly circumscribed, and too near the surface. Were it universally adopted it would be the end of thought on this high theme. The substitutionary atonement promises an eternity of delightful progress in study. It can not be exhausted. All the theories which have been advanced to cast light upon it are valuable, but they leave a whole universe to be explored, and one may hope to extend the field of discovery at any time. To shut us out of this boundless prospect, and limit us to the petty confines of "the moral-influence theory" would be to shrivel the ocean to the dimensions of a pond and bid the admiral sail his navies in it, or to blot out all the worlds save those of the solar system and bid the astronomer enlarge his science. As the adoption of this circumscribed view would be the end of thought, so it would be the end of emotion. The heart has always been kindled by the preaching of a Christ who bore our sins before God on the cross. By this truth the hardened sinner has been subdued and in it the penitent sinner has found a source of rapture. An atonement of infinite cost, flowing from infinite love, and procuring deliverance from infinite loss, melts the coldest heart and inflames the warmest. To preach a lesser sacrifice would be to spread frost instead of fire. But the will is reached through the reason and the emotions. That which would cease to challenge profound thought and would cut out the flames of emotion would fail to reach the will and transform the life. The theory makes the death of Christ predominantly scenic, spectacular, an effort to display the love of God rather than an offering to God in its nature necessary for the salvation of man. It struggles in vain to find a worthy reason for the awful sacrifice. Hence it may be charged with essential immorality. In any case, the work of Christ, if interpreted in this manner, will not prove "the power of God unto salvation." The speculation is called "the moral-influence theory," but when preached as an exclusive theory of the atonement, it is incapable of wielding any profound moral influence. The man who dies to rescue one whom he loves from death is remembered with tears of reverence and gratitude; the man who puts himself to death to show that he loves is remembered with horror. b. Not Scriptural. Still further, the chief failure of those who advance this view is in the sphere of exegesis. The Bible is so full of a substitutionary atonement that the reader comes upon it everywhere. The texts which teach it are not rare and isolated expressions; they assemble in multitudes; they rush in troops; they occupy every hill and every valley. They occasion the greatest embarrassment to those who deny that the relation of God to the world is determined by the cross, and various methods are employed by various writers to reduce their number and their force. They are most abundant in the epistles of the Apostle Paul, and some depreciate his authority as a teacher of Christianity. The doctrine is implied in the words which our Lord uttered at the last supper, and some attack these as not genuine. Christ is repeatedly declared to be a propitiation. "Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, by His blood" (Romans 3:25). "He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole world" (1 John 2:2). "God sent His Son to be a propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10). "Wherefore it behooved Him in all things to be made like unto His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people" (Hebrews 3:17). Many special pleas are entered against the plain meaning of these declarations. It does not seem difficult to understand them. A propitiation must he an influence which renders someone propitious, and the person rendered propitious by it must be the person who was offended. Yet some do not hesitate to affirm that these texts regard man as the only being propitiated by the cross. Special tortures are applied to many other Scriptures to keep them from proclaiming a substitutionary atonement. Christ is "the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). "The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:28; Mark 10:45). "Him that knew no sin He made to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Corinthians 5:2). Such are a few examples of the countless declarations of a substitutionary atonement which the Scriptures make, and with which those who reject the doctrine strive in vain. Any speculation which sets itself against this mighty current flowing through all the Bible is destined to be swept away. Yet further. A theological theory, like a person, should be judged somewhat by the company it keeps. If it shows an inveterate inclination to associate with other theories which lie wholly upon the surface, which sound no depths and solve no problems, and which the profoundest Christian experience rejects, it is evidently the same in kind. The theory which I am here opposing tends to consort with an inadequate view of inspiration, and some of its representatives question the inerrancy of the Scripture, even in the matters pertaining to faith and conduct. It tends to consort with an inadequate view of God, and some of its representatives in praising His love forget His holiness and His awful wrath against incorrigible wrongdoers. It tends to consort with an inadequate view of sin, and some of its representatives make the alienation of man from God consist merely in acts, rather than in an underlying state from which they proceed. It tends, finally, to consort with an inadequate view of responsibility and guilt, and some of its representatives teach that these cease when the sinner turns, so that there is no need of propitiation, but only for repentance. A distinguished representative of this theory has written the following sentences: "All righteous claims are satisfied if sin is done away." "Divine law is directed against sin, and is satisfied when sin is made to cease." "If grace brings an end of sinning, the end sought by law has been attained. It can not be, therefore, that in the sight of God there is any need of satisfying law before grace can save sinners." These words are like the voice of "a very lovely song"; but many a pardoned soul uttered a more troubled strain. A man may cease to sin without reversing the injury he has wrought. In the course of his business, let us suppose, he has defrauded widows and orphans, and they are now dead. Or, in his social life, he has led the young into unbelief and vice, and they now laugh at his efforts to undo the mischief, or have gone into eternity unsaved. In a sense his sinning has come to an end, yet its baneful effects are in full career. His conscience tells him he is responsible not only for the commission of his sins, but for the ruin wrought by his sins. In other words, he is responsible for the entire train of evils which he has put into operation. The depths of his responsibility are far too profound for such light plummets to sound. These are some of the reasons which lead the Christian world as a whole to reject "the moral-influence theory" of the atonement as inadequate. Christ the Sin-Bearer I shall not attempt to set forth any substitutionary theory of the atonement. It is not absolutely necessary that we have a theory. It may be enough for us to hold the doctrine without a theory. The writers of the New Testament did this. The earliest fathers of the Church did it. The world has been profoundly influenced by the preaching of the doctrine before the leaders of the Church began to construct a theory. What was done in the first century may be done in the twentieth. We may proclaim Christ as the Sin-bearer and win multitudes to Him without a theory. Men will welcome the fact, as the famishing welcome water, without asking about its chemical composition. Yet the Christian thinker will never cease to seek for an adequate theory of the atonement, and it may be well for us to consider some of the conditions with which it is necessary for him to comply in order to succeed in casting any new light upon this divine mystery. The Adequacy of Substitutional Atonement 1. Any theory of the atonement, to be adequate, must proceed from a fair and natural interpretation of all the Biblical statements on the subject. It must not pick and choose among them. It must not throttle any into silence. 2. It must make use of the thought which other generations have found helpful. It must not discard these old materials. Though they are not a completed building, they constitute a foundation which we can not afford to destroy. They may be covered over with an accumulation of verbal infelicities from which we must set them free; But whoever would advance our knowledge of the peace made for us by Christ must not disdain to build upon them. 3. It must take account of all the moral attributes of God, for all are concerned in our salvation. It will find the chief motive of the atonement in the love for God, who "so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son" (John 3:16). It will find one necessity of the atonement in the righteousness of God, who "set forth Christ to be a propitiation, through faith in His blood, to show His righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the showing of His righteousness at this present season; that He might Himself be just and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus" (Romans 3:25-26). It will find one effect of the atonement in the aversion from man of the wrath of God, the product of love and righteousness outraged by sin: "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by His blood, shall we be saved from wrath through Him." 4. It must accord with a profound Christian experience. It will not toy with Socinian interpretations of the Godhead, for the doctrine of the Trinity is the product not only of a sound exegesis and a sound philosophy, but also of a sound Christian experience. It will not picture God as a Father in a sense which would deny His kingship, as a weak-minded father who bewails the rebellion of his children but has no courage to wield the rod. It will not cover His face with feeble smiles or inane tears and deny to it the frowns of wrath, for a profound Christian experience pronounces such portraitures untrue. It will not join those excellent Christians who see in sin only a temporary fault, a disease of the surface, the product chiefly of circumstances, and probably a necessary stage of man to higher things, for these roseate hues are known to be deceitful by all who have entered earnestly into battle with the corruption of our nature and have achieved any great moral triumphs. It will not diminish the guilt of the transgressor, for it is the pardoned transgressor who knows best the awful demerit of his deeds and of the state of alienation from God from which they issued. In short, it will take into account the judgment of those wise souls who have learned "the deep things of God" in much spiritual conflict, and will reach conclusions acceptable to them. 5. It must view the sacrifice of Christ as an event planned from eternity, and effectual with God from eternity, He is "the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world" (Revelation 13:8). He "was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but manifested at the end of the times" (1 Peter 1:20). Sin did not take God by surprise. He had foreseen it and had provided a Redeemer before it had led us captive. 6. It must take a broader view of the self-sacrifice of Christ than that once presented to us. His self-sacrifice culminated in His death, and we speak of that very properly as His atonement. But His self-sacrifice had other features. It had two principal moments one in eternity, and the other in time. The first was the laying aside of some of His divine attributes that He might take our nature; the second was the endurance of the evils of human life and death, which He would not remove from His lot by miracle. Both are brought before us in the statement that, "being in the form of God, He counted it not a prize to be on an equality with God, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bondservant, being made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient even as far as unto death, yea, the death of the cross" (Php_2:6-8). And all this pathetic history of self-sacrifice is rendered yet more pathetic when we reflect that He anticipated His sufferings from eternity, and moved in the creation and government of the universe with the vision of His coming sorrows ever before His eyes. We can form no conception of the cost at which He laid aside some of His divine attributes to become incarnate. We can form but little conception of the cost at which He died for the world. No mere man ever laid down His life for others in the sense in which Christ laid down His life for the world. Every man must die at some time; "there is no discharge in that welfare." When a man sacrifices his life he does but sacrifice a few days or years; he does but lay it down earlier instead of later. But Christ did not choose between dying at one time rather than at another; He chose between dying and not dying. Thus, viewed in any light whatever, the voluntary sufferings of Christ surpass our powers of thought and imagination, reaching infinitely beyond all human experience. 7. It must make much of the effect produced upon God by the infinite, voluntary, and unselfish sacrifice of Christ for the world. Here all human language breaks down, and it sounds feeble to say that God, the Father, admires with the utmost enthusiasm this holy and heroic career of suffering for the salvation of man. Yet we must use such words, though they are cold. The Scriptures speak of His attitude toward His incarnate Son as one of unbounded appreciation and approval, and tell us that His voice was heard repeatedly from heaven, saying: "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." When we say that the sacrifice of Christ is meritorious with God, we mean that it calls forth His supreme admiration. Such was His feeling toward it as He foresaw it from eternity; such was His feeling toward it as He looked upon it while being made; and such is His feeling toward it now, as He looks back upon it and glorifies Christ in honor of it. 8. It must find that the work of Christ has made a vast difference in the relations of God to the fallen world. It was infinite in the love which prompted it and in the self-sacrifice which attended it, and hence infinite in its moral value. We can not but deem it fitting that it should procure for the world an administration of grace. Provided for eternity and efficacious with God from eternity, it has procured an administration of grace from the moment when the first sin was committed. No doubt it is for this reason that God has suffered the world to stand through all the ages of its rebellious history. He has looked upon it from the beginning in Christ, and hence has treated it with forbearance, with love, with mercy. It did not first come under grace when Christ was crucified; it has always been under grace, because Christ has always offered His sacrifice in the plan and purpose of God, and thus has always exercised a propitiatory influence. The grace of God toward man was not fully revealed and explained till it was made manifest in the person and work of Christ, but it has always been the reigning principle of the divine government. Men are saved by grace since the death of Christ, and they have always been saved by grace when they have been saved at all. The entire argument of the Apostle Paul in his epistles to the Romans and the Galatians has for its purpose the defense of the proposition, that God has always justified men by grace through faith, and that there has never been any other way of salvation. The entire administration of God in human history is set forth, in the light of "the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world," as one of infinite kindness and leniency, notwithstanding those severities which have expressed His abhorrence of sin. But if the self-sacrifice of Christ has made a difference in the practical attitude of God toward the world, it has also made a difference in His feeling toward the world. God is one. He is not at war with Himself. He is not a hypocrite. He has not one course of action and a different course of feeling. If He has dealt patiently and graciously with our sinning race it is because He has felt patient and gracious, and the work of His Son, by means of which His administration has been rendered patient and gracious, has rendered His feeling patient and gracious. It is to this different administration and to its basis in a different feeling that the Scriptures refer when they present Christ to us as "the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the whole world." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 3: - AT-ONE-MENT BY PROPITIATION ======================================================================== At-One-Ment by Propitiation By Dyson Hague, Vicar of the Church of the Epiphany, Toronto, Canada; Professor of Liturgics, Wycliffe College, Toronto; Canon of St. Paul's Cathedral, London, Ontario, 1908-1912 The importance of the subject is obvious. The Atonement is Christianity in epitome. It is the heart of Christianity as a system; it is the distinguishing mark of the Christian religion. For Christianity is more than a revelation; it is more than an ethic. Christianity is uniquely a religion of redemption. At the outset we take the ground that no one can clearly apprehend this great theme who is not prepared to take Scripture as it stands, and to treat it as the final and authoritative source of Christian knowledge, and the test of every theological theory. Any statement of the atonement, to satisfy completely the truly intelligent Christian, must not antagonize any of the Biblical viewpoints. And further; to approach fairly the subject, one must receive with a certain degree of reservation the somewhat exaggerated representations of what some modern writers conceive to be the views of orthodoxy. We cannot deduce Scriptural views of the atonement from non- Biblical conceptions of the Person of Christ; and the ideas that Christ died because God was insulted and must punish somebody, or that the atonement was the propitiation of an angry Monarch-God who let off the rogue while He tortured the innocent, and such like travesties of the truth, are simply the misrepresentations of that revamped Socinianism, which is so widely leavening the theology of many of the outstanding thoughtleaders of today in German, British, and American theology. The subject will be dealt with from four viewpoints: the Scriptural, the Historical, the Evangelico-Ecclesiastical, the Practical. 1. The Atonement from the Scriptural Viewpoint The Old Testament Witness As we study the Old Testament we are struck with the fact that in the Old Testament system, without an atoning sacrifice there could be no access for sinful men into the presence of the Holy God. The heart and center of the Divinely revealed religious system of God's ancient people was that without a propitiatory sacrifice there could be no acceptable approach to God. There must be acceptance before there is worship; there must be atonement before there is acceptance. This atonement consisted in the shedding of blood. The blood-shedding was the effusion of life; for the life of the flesh is in the blood a dictum which the modem science of physiology abundantly confirms (Leviticus 17:11-14). The blood shed was the blood of a victim which was to be ceremonially blemishless (Exodus 12:5; 1 Peter 1:19); and the victim that was slain was a vicarious or substitutionary representative of the worshipper (Leviticus 1:4; Leviticus 3:2; Leviticus 3:8; Leviticus 3:13; Leviticus 4:4; Leviticus 4:15; Leviticus 4:24; Leviticus 4:29; Leviticus 16:21, etc.). The death of the victim was an acknowledgment of the guilt of sin, and its exponent. In one word: the whole system was designed to teach the holiness and righteousness of God, the sinfulness of men, and the guilt of sin; and, above all, to show that it was God's will that forgiveness should be secured, not on account of any works of the sinner or anything that he could do, any act of repentance or exhibition of penitence, or performance of expiatory or restitutionary works, but solely on account of the undeserved grace of God through the death of a victim guilty of no offence against the Divine law, whose shed blood represented the substitution of an innocent for a guilty life. (See "Lux Mundi," p. 237. The idea, in p. 232, that sacrifice is essentially the expression of unfallen love, is suggestive, but it would perhaps be better to use the word "also" instead of "essentially." See also, the extremely suggestive treatment in Gibson's "Mosaic Era," of the Ritual of the Altar, p. 146). It is obvious that the whole system was transitory and imperfect, as the eighth chapter of Hebrews shows. Not because it was revolting as the modern mind objects, for God intended them thereby to learn how revolting sin was and how deserving of death; but because in its essence it was typical, and prophetical, and intended to familiarize God's people with the great idea of atonement, and at the same time to prepare for the sublime revelation of Him who was to come, the despised and rejected of men Who was to be smitten of God and afflicted, Who was to be wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, Whose soul was to be made an offering for sin (Isaiah 53:5; Isaiah 53:8; Isaiah 53:10; Isaiah 53:12). The New Testament Witness When we come to the New Testament we are struck with three things: First. The unique prominence given to the death of Christ in the four Gospels. This is unparalleled. It is without analogy, not only in Scripture, but in history, the most curious thing about it being that there was no precedent for it in the Old Testament (Dale, "Atonement," p. 51). No particular value or benefit is attached to the death of anybody in the Old Testament; nor is there the remotest trace of anybody's death having an expiatory or humanizing or regenerative effect. There were plenty of martyrs and national heroes in Hebrew history, and many of them were stoned and sawn asunder, were tortured and slain with the sword, but no Jewish writer attributes any ethical or regenerative importance to their death, or to the shedding of their blood. Second. It is evident to the impartial reader of the New Testament that the death of Christ was the object of His incarnation. His crucifixion was the main purport of His coming. While His glorious life was and is the inspiration of humanity, after all, His death was the reason of His life. His mission was mainly to die. Beyond thinking of death as the terminus or the inevitable climax of life, the average man rarely alludes to or thinks of death. In all biography it is accepted as the inevitable. But with Christ, His death was the purpose for which He came down from heaven: "For this cause came I to this hour" (John 12:27). From the outset of His career it was the overshadowing event. It was distinctly foreseen. It was voluntarily undergone, and, in Mark 10:45, He says: "The Son of Man came to give His life a ransom for many." We are not in the habit of paying ransoms, and the metaphor nowadays is unfamiliar. But, to the Jew, ransom was an everyday custom. It was what was given in exchange for the life of the first-born. It was the price which every man paid for his life. It was the underlying thought of the Mosaic and prophetical writings (Leviticus 25:25; Leviticus 25:48; Numbers 18:15; Psalms 49:7; Isaiah 35:10; Isaiah 51:11; Isaiah 43:14; Exodus 13:13; Exodus 30:12; Exodus 30:16; Exodus 34:20; Hosea 13:14; etc., etc.); and so, when Christ made the statement, it was a concept which would be immediately grasped. He came to give His life a ransom, that through the shedding of His blood we might receive redemption, or emancipation, both from the guilt and from the power of son. (The modernists endeavor to evacuate this saying of Christ of all meaning. The text, unfortunately for them, is stubborn, but the German mind is never at a loss for a theory; so it is asserted that they are indications that Peter has been Paulinized, so reluctant is the rationalizer to take Scripture as it stands, and to accept Christ's words in their obvious meaning, when they oppose his theological aversions). Third. The object of the death of Christ was the forgiveness of sins. The final cause of His manifestation was remission. It would be impossible to summarize all the teaching of the New Testament on this subject. (The student is referred to Crawford, who gives 160 pages to the texts in the New Testament, and Dale's "Summary," pp. 443-458). It is clear, though, that, to our Saviour's thought, His cross and passion was not the incidental consequence of His opposition to the degraded religious standards of His day, and that He did not die as a martyr because death was preferable to apostasy. His death was the means whereby men should obtain forgiveness of sins and eternal life (John 3:14; John 3:16; Matthew 26:28). The consentient testimony of the New Testament writers, both in the Acts and in the Epistles, is that Christ died no accidental death, but suffered according to the will of God, His own volition, and the predictions of the prophets, and that His death was substitutionary, sacrificial, atoning, reconciling and redeeming (John 10:18; Acts 2:23; Romans 3:25; Romans 5:6; Romans 5:9; 1 Corinthians 15:3; 2 Corinthians 5:15; 2 Corinthians 5:19; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Hebrews 9:14; Hebrews 9:26, etc., etc.). In proof, it will be sufficient to take the inspired testimony of the three outstanding writers, St. Peter, St. John, and St. Paul. St. Peter's Witness To St. Peter's mind, the death of Jesus was the central fact of revelation and the mystery, as well as the climax, of the Incarnation. The shedding of His blood was sacrificial; it was covenanting; it was sin-covering; it was redeeming; it was ransoming; it was the blood of the Immaculate Lamb, which emancipates from sin (1 Peter 1:2; 1 Peter 1:11; 1 Peter 1:18-19). In all his post- Pentecostal deliverances he magnifies the crucifixion as a revelation of the enormity of human sin, never as a revelation of the infinitude of the Divine love (Dale, p. 115). His death was not merely an example; it was substitutionary. It was the death of the sin-bearer. "Christ also suffered for us," "He bare our sins," meaning that He took their penalty and their consequence (Leviticus 5:17; Leviticus 5:24; Leviticus 5:15; Numbers 9:13; Numbers 14:32; Numbers 14:34; Ezekiel 18:19-20). His death was the substitutionary, the vicarious work of the innocent on behalf of, in the place of, and instead of, the guilty (1 Peter 3:18). (It is surely an evidence of the bias of modernism to interpret this as bearing them in Sympathy merely). St. John's Witness According to St. John, the death of the Lord Jesus Christ was propitiatory, substitutionary, purificatory. It was the Hilasmos; the objective ground for the remission of our sins. The narrow and superficial treatment of modernism, which, if it does not deny the Johannine authorship of the fourth Gospel and the Revelation; at least insinuates that the death of Christ has no parallel place in the writings of St. John to that which it has in the writings of St. Peter and St. Paul, and the other New Testament authors, is entirely contradicted by the plain statements of the Word itself. The glory of the world to come is the sacrificed Lamb. The glory of heaven is not the risen or ascended Lord, but the Lamb that was slaughtered (Revelation 5:6-12; Revelation 7:10; Revelation 21:23, etc.). The foremost figure in the Johannine Gospel is the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world, who lifts the sin-burden by expiating it as the Sin-Bearer. The center of the Johannine evangel is not the teaching Christ, but the uplifted Christ, whose death is to draw as a magnet the hearts of mankind, and whose life as the Good Shepherd is laid down for the sheep. (John 12:32; John 10:11-15). No one who fairly faces the text could deny that the objective ground for the forgiveness of sins, in the mind of St. John, is the death of Christ, and that the most fundamental conception of sacrifice and expiation is found in the writings of him who wrote by the Spirit of God, "He is the propitiation of our sins, and not for ours only" (1 John 2:2). "Hereby perceive we the love of God because He laid down His life for us" (1 John 3:16). "Herein is love," etc. (1 John 4:10). The propitiatory character of the blood, the substitutionary character of the atonement, and, above all, the expiating character of the work of Christ on Calvary, clearly are most in dubitably set forth in the threefoldness of the historic, didactic, and prophetic writings of John. St. Paul's Witness St. Paul became, in the province of God, the constructive genius of Christianity. His place in history, through the Spirit, was that of the elucidator of the salient facts of Christianity, and especially of that one great subject which Christ left in a measure unexplained-His own death (Stalker's "St. Paul," p. 13). That great subject, its cause, its meaning, its result, became the very fundamentum of his Gospel. It was the commencement, center, and consummation of his theology. It was the elemental truth of his creed. He began with it. It pervaded his life. He gloried in it to the last. The sinner is dead, enslaved, guilty, and hopeless, without the atoning death of Jesus Christ. But Christ died for him, in his stead, became a curse for him, became sin for him, gave Himself for him, was an Offering and a Sacrifice to God for him, redeemed him, justified him, saved him from wrath, purchased him by His blood, reconciled him by His death, etc. To talk of Paul using the language he did as an accommodation to Jewish prejudices, or to humor the adherents of a current theology, is not only, as Dale says, an insult to the understanding of the founders of the Jewish faith, it is an insult to the understanding of any man with sense today. Christ's death was a death for sin; Christ died for our sins; that is, on behalf of, instead of, our sins. There was something in sin that made His death a Divine necessity. His death was a propitiatory, substitutionary, sacrificial, vicarious death. Its object was to annul sin; to propitiate Divine justice, to procure for us God's righteousness; to ransom us, and to reconcile us. Christ's death was conciliating, in that by it men are reconciled to God, and sin's curse and the sinner's slavery and liability to death, and incapability of returning to God, are overcome by the death of the Lamb who was slaughtered as a victim and immolated as a sacrifice (1 Corinthians 5:7). To Paul the life of the Christian emerged from the death of Christ. All love, all regeneration, all sanctification, all liberty, all joy, all power, circles around the atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, and did for us objectively something that man could never do, and who wrought that incredible, that impossible thing, salvation by the substitution of His life in the place of the guilty. The Bible Summary To epitomize, then, the presentment of the Bible: The root of the idea of At-one-ment is estrangement. Sin, as iniquity and transgression, had the added element of egoistic rebellion and positive defiance of God (1 John 3:4; Romans 5:15; Romans 5:19). The horror of sin is that it wrenched the race from God. It dashed God from His throne and placed self thereupon. It reversed the relationship of man and God. Its blight and its passion have alienated mankind, enslaved it, condemned it, doomed it to death, exposed it to wrath. The sacrifice of the cross is the explanation of the enormity of sin, and the measure of the love of the redeeming Trinity. Surely it is ignorance that says God loves because Christ died. Christ died because God loves. Propitiation does not awaken love; it is love that provides expiation. To cancel the curse, to lift the ban, to inoculate the antitoxin of grace, to restore life, to purchase pardon, to ransom the enslaved, to defeat Satan's work; in one word, to reconcile and restore a lost race; for this, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and Son of Man, came into this world and offered up His Divine-human Person, body and soul. Christ's death upon the cross, both as a substitute and as the federal representative of humanity, voluntary, altruistic, vicarious, sinless, sacrificial, purposed not accidental, from the standpoint of humanity unconscionably brutal, but from the standpoint of love indescribably glorious, not only satisfied all the demands of the Divine righteousness, but offered the most powerful incentive to repentance, morality, and selfsacrifice. The Scripture in its completeness thus sets forth the substance of the two great theories, the moral and the vicarious, and we find in the rotundity or allness of the Scriptural presentment no mere partial or antagonistic segments of truth, but the completeness of the spiritual, moral, altruistic and atoning aspects of the death of Christ. (Hodge on the "Atonement," pp. 292-320, and Workman, "At-one-ment and Reconciliation with God," may in different ways be taken as representative of a one-sided way of treating a great subject. The Socinian view that Christ's death was mainly, if not exclusively, to produce a reconciling influence upon the heart of mankind, which Workman espouses, is as narrow, if not narrower, and as partial as Hodge's advocacy of the theory that Christ died for the elect only). 2. The Historical We will discuss this aspect of the subject in four brief sections: The Primitive, the Mediaeval, the Reformational, the Modern. The Primitive Church Witness With regard to the writers and writings of the primitive church in the Ante- Nicene and the Post-Nicene era, it may be said, broadly speaking, that the atonement is presented by them as a fact, with its saving and regenerative effects. The consciousness of the primitive church did not seem to be alive to the necessity of the formation of any particular theory of the atonement. It follows the Apostle's Creed, which makes no reference whatever to the miraculous words or marvellous works of Jesus, but significantly passes by them all to focus the confession of the Church upon the great purpose and achievement of the Incarnation; His suffering as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. As regards the writers of the post-apostolic age, Clement of Rome, Origen, and Athanasius, may be referred to as outstanding exponents of the Church's thought in the first four centuries. Of the first and third it may be said that they simply amplified the language of the New Testament. There is no trace of the attitude of the modernist, with its brilliant attempts to explain away the obvious. Their doctrine of the atonement is entirely free, as has been said, from the incrusting difficulties of spurious explanation. There were no attempts at philosophy or sophistry, though, as was to be expected, there was more or less of the embroidery of the oriental imagination, and a plethora of metaphor. (Justin Martyr, Chrysostom, and Augustine, may be mentioned also here). Origen, following possibly Irenaeus, is accredited with the theory that the atonement was a ransom paid to Satan. This was the theory of Gregory of Nyssa, Leo Magnus, and Gregory the Great. It was a weird theory, involving some strange conclusions, and evoked the antagonism of Gregory Nazianzen and John of Damascus. The Mediaeval View As we pass into the mediaeval period (broadly speaking, from 500 to 1500 A. D.), we find that, with one or two exceptions, the ransom paid to the devil hypothesis held sway. It was not a thinking era, and the imprisonment of the Bible meant the reign of ignorance. In the eleventh century, Anselm appeared. He was an Italian by birth, a Norman by training, and Archbishop of Canterbury by office. Anselm's Cur Deus Homo is probably the greatest work on the atonement that has ever been written. The work is great because it contains great conceptions of God, and great conceptions of sin. Sin is not to render to God His due, and the sinner is bound to pay back the honor of which he has robbed God. It is a debt we are obliged to pay, and failing to do it, we must die. As sin is debt, there are only two ways in which man can be righted with God; either by incurring no debt, or by paying the debt. But this, man cannot do, and herein comes the glory of the Gospel of the atonement, securing at once the honor of God and the salvation of the sinners. No one ought to make satisfaction for the sin of man except man, and no one can make satisfaction except God Himself. He who makes the satisfaction for human sin must, therefore, be man and God; and so in wondrous love, the God- Man of His own accord offered to the Father what He could not have been compelled to lose, and paid for our sins what He did not owe for Himself. The Anselmic conceptions of God, of sin, of man, and of the soul are so transcendent that they are altogether too strong and too high for this age. His theory seems fantastic, his reasoning preposterous to the modern mind. Yet, after all, Anselm has never been surpassed. His mind was filled with the august greatness of God, the just penalty of sin, the impossibility of human atonement; and the atoning work of Christ, because of the Person who did the deed, outweighed the sins of all mankind, and bound mankind to the suffering Son of God by bonds of love that eternity will not sever. Anselm swayed his own and has swayed every succeeding age. The counter theories of Abelard and Duns Scotus (Moberly, p. 372; Dale, p. 285), in which the modern mind is much more interested, and with which it is much more sympathetic, may be regarded as the foregleams of modern Unitarianism. The Reformation Era When we pass to the Reformation era, we find that the Pauline- Augustinian presentment of the subject is almost universal. The reformers, Lutheran and Calvinistic, were practically agreed in representing the death of Christ as an atoning death. Both the Lutheran and the Reformed systems of theology alike, the latter, of course, including all the Anglican reformers, held the forensic idea of the death of Christ, which is so obviously manifest in the Pauline, Petrine, and Johannine presentments of the truth. Turretin, the most distinguished writer on the subject of the atonement of the Reformation era; Mastricht, a half century later, and Hugo Grotius, the antagonist of Socinius (whose Defensio fidel Catholicae de satisfactione Christi appeared in 1617); all of them, with various divergences, held the sacrificial, representative, vicarious theory of atonement (Dale, pp. 290- 297; Hodge, Sys, Theol. II., 573-575). The Nineteenth Century As we pass into the modern world of theology, three outstanding names in the nineteenth century may be selected as the representatives of the so called orthodox, and three as representatives of the broader school of theology. The works of Crawford of Edinburgh, of Dale of Birmingham, and of Denney of Glasgow, are probably the finest expositions of the subject from the Scriptural and spiritual standpoint. All of them try to set forth the doctrine of the atonement in the language of the New Testament, and according to the mind of the inspired writers, and take their stand upon the vicarious, substitutionary character of the atonement. Professor A. A. Hodge's work is also most able and most scholarly. It is the strongest thing ever writ. ten on the subject from the Calvinistic standpoint. Bushnell, the American; Jowett, the Anglican; and McLeod Campbell, the Scotchman; may be taken as representatives of the broader school: All of them are inclined to select a number of the texts which unquestionably favor their theory, and to minimize almost to the point of explaining away those statements of the Old Testament, and of the New Testament, which emphasize the gravity of the guilt of sin and the necessity of sacrifice as the objective ground of its forgiveness. They all of them incline to represent the sufferings of Christ as sympathetic, rather than vicarious; and, with the Swedenborgians, make the atonement to consist not in what Christ did or offered by dying in our stead, so much as what He accomplished for us in His reconciling love. The atonement was the Incarnation. That was the revelation of God's love; and the sufferings of Christ were not a substitute for the penalty of sin, but Christ's expiatory-penitential confession of the sins of humanity. McLeod Campbell, who is followed by Moberly, held the theory that the repentance of Christ, or the penitence of Christ, had in it atoning worth, and was the proper expiation of sin (Moberly, 129, 401; "The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought," p. 375; Clow, 160; Stalker, 135). (This theory, by the way, is becoming very popular nowadays). In one word; the object of the death of Christ was the production of a moral impression, the subduement of a revolted world-heart by the exhibition of dying love. This is practically also the Ritschlian view, which, after all, is a re-statement of the old Socinian theory, of the distrustremoving and confidence-re-establishing effect of the cross. Frederick Maurice and Robertson of Brighton (the noblest spirit of them all) may also be referred to as leaders in this the broader school (Crawford, 303, 348). They were followed by such Church writers as Farrar, Moberly, Freemantle, and by Cave, Adeney, Horton, R. J. Campbell, in the Old Country, and in the United States by Lyman Abbott, Washington Gladden, Munger, and a host of others. Modernism When we come to the most daring of the present day theories with regard to the atonement, as set forth, for instance, in Sabatier, or the latest work of American modernism, "The Atonement, by Three Chicago Professors of Theology," we are startled with the advance. A very broad space of rationalism intervenes between the broad school of today and the broad school of half a century ago. The present-day liberal theology may be traced to two streams of influence: First. The influence of German rationalism, pre-eminently the Ritschlian theology, and the critical theories of Wellhausen, Kuenen and their school. Second. The widespread acceptance of the theory of evolution. To the first may be traced the free and easy way of the modernists of dealing with the Scriptures; and to the second, the revolutionized attitude of theologians with regard to sin, its source, its penalty, and its atonement. Albrecht Ritschl, Professor of Theology at Gottingen, whose magnum opus, "Justification and Reconciliation," was published in 1870, is par excellence, the ruling influence of continental theology. What Germany thought yesterday, America and Scotland think today, and England will think tomorrow. It is an epigram that has more than a grain of truth in it. The Germanic way of accepting or rejecting what it pleases of the Bible, and opposing its knowledge to the authority of the apostles, is becoming more and more the custom of the leading theologians of the three ruling nations of today, British, American, and German. If a text is inconvenient, modernism disputes it; if a passage is antagonistic, it dismisses it as Pauline or Petrine, not Christian. Suppose a Christian of the old days was to enter for the first time the class room of one of the extremer modernist professors, addressing a representative body of theologians from Germany, Britain, or the United States. He would be amazed to hear the rankest Socinianism taught: The question the professor would propose would not be the vicarious or the moral theory of the sacrifice of Christ, but did Christ really die, and was there any need of the atoning death? He would state, in the coolest possible manner, that the supposition of God's displeasure or wrath at sin is an archaic concept; that sin is not guilt as traditional theology conceives, nor does it need any propitiation, and that there is no need of salvation, for there never was a fall. (A God who thinks of poor, hard-worked people as miserable sinners, who must account themselves fortunate to be forgiven for Christ's sake, says one of the fore-most British modernists, is no God at all. The theologian may call Him a God of love, but in practice He is spiteful and silly!) The doctrine of evolution has washed out of the Bible the existence of such a man as Adam, and biology has taught that death is not due to sin. He would then probably hear the professor going on to show that nobody nowadays thinks of sin as Paul did, that it is impossible for the man of today, familiarized with the doctrine of evolution and the researches of Biblical scholarship, to think of sin as a debt that is due, to God; that the God of the Bible is, after all, only the God of traditional theology. In one word, he would hear that what this age not only demands, but requires, is a reconstructed Bible, a re-interpreted Biblical theology, and a presentment of apostolic conceptions in accordance with the modern mind. But a theology which begins with accepting or rejecting according to its caprice such sections of the Word of God as it pleases, and substituting its own fancies for the New Testament conceptions of sin, of guilt, of wrath, and death, and the idea of punishment, naturally tends to the climax of repudiating the Deity of our Saviour and the teaching of His inspired apostles! A Pelagian hamartology invariably leads to a Socinian Christology; and a Socinian Christology invariably goes hand in hand with a rationalistic soteriology. If there is no objective Deity, there can be no sin. If man is God, there can be no guilt; and if there was no fall, and if it is the rise, not the fall of man with which the study of history makes us acquainted, there is, of course, no need for redemption; and if there is no need for redemption, there could, of course, be no ransom, or Redeemer, and an atonement is theologically and philosophically absurd. If there is no special creation, and man is a mere evolution from some frog or horse or anthropoid, why, of course, there can be no talk of atonement. If there is no storm and nobody is drowning, why on earth should anyone launch a lifeboat! If the wages of sin is not death, what evangel is there in the death of Christ for sin and sinners? After reading, with every attempt to be sympathetic, the works of the modern theological thought leaders in Great Britain and the United States, we seriously conclude that modernism is in essence the sophism of which Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 1:19-22; Romans 1:22; Colossians 2:8, and 1 Timothy 6:20. 3. The Evangelico-Ecclesiastical The Consensus of All the Churches When we turn to this subject as set forth in the standards of the representatives of the leading Protestant churches, it is refreshing to find what substantial unity there is among them. In all the Creeds and Church Confessions the death of Christ is set forth as the central fact of Christianity; for it ought to be remembered that the Reformed Churches accepted equally with the Roman Church the historic platform of the three great creeds, and that in all these creeds that subject stands pre-eminent. In the Apostles' Creed, for instance, there is not the slightest mention of Christ's glorious example as a man, or of the works and words of His marvelous life. All is passed over, in order that the faith of the Church in all ages may at once be focused upon His sufferings and His death. And as to the various doctrinal standards, a reference to the Articles of the Church of England, or the Westminster Confession of Faith, or the Methodist, or Baptist formularies of belief, at once shows that the atonement is treated as one of the fundamentals of the faith. It may be stated in language that a modern theologian finds difficult to accept and would gladly explain away; but it is unquestionably asserted to be no mere at-one-merit in the Ritschlian sense, but a real vicarious offering; a redemptive death; a reconciling death; a sin-bearing death; a sacrificial death for the guilt and sins of men. His death was the death of the Divine Victim. It was a satisfaction for man's guilt. It propitiated God. It satisfied the justice of the Father. The modern mind sees only one side to reconciliation. It looks at truth from only one standpoint. It fails to take into account the fact of the wrath of God, and that 1 John 2:1, and Romans 3:25 teach that Christ's death does something that can only be expressed as "propitiating." The modern theory ignores one side of the truth, and antagonizes the two complementary sides, and is, therefore, not to be trusted. The Church standards simply set forth, of course, in necessarily imperfect language, the truth as it is in the Scriptures of God. Perhaps no finer summary of their teaching could be found than the language of the Anglican communion service: "Jesus Christ, God's only Son, suffered death upon the cross for our redemption, and made there, by His one oblation of Himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world." 4. The Practical The Power of His Death We finally consider the atonement in its actual power. As we glance through the vistas of history we see it exemplified in innumerable lives. Paul, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Luther, Latimer, with a myriad myriad of the sinful, struggling, weary, despondent, and sin-sick sons of men, laden with the sin-weight, haunted with the guilt-fear, struggling with the sin-force, tormented with the sin-pain, have found in Him who died their peace. "The atonement," said the great scientist, Sir David Brewster, "Oh, it is everything to me! It meets my reason, it satisfies my conscience, it fills my heart." (See also that fine passage in Drummond, the "Ideal Life," p. 187). Or, take our hymns. We want no better theology and no better religion than are set forth in these hymns, says a great theologian (Hodge, Syst. Theol., ii: 591), which voice the triumph, and the confidence, and the gratitude, and the loyalty of the soul, such as: "Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee." "My faith looks up to Thee, Thou Lamb of Calvary." "When I survey the wondrous cross, On which the Prince of glory died." Or take the preacher's power. It must be built upon reality as real as life itself; on what the Son of God has done for him. One of the greatest of the nineteenth century preachers said, "Looking back upon all the chequered way, I have to say that the only preaching that has done me good is the preaching of a Saviour who bore my sins in His own body on the tree, and the only preaching by which God has enabled me to do good to others is the preaching in which I have held up my Saviour, not as a sublime example, but as the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world!" And the work of Christ did not end with His death upon the cross. As the risen and ascended One, He continues it. The Crucified is still drawing souls to Himself. He is still applying His healing blood to the wounded conscience. We do not preach a Christ who was alive and is dead; we preach the Christ who was dead and is alive. It is not the extension of the Incarnation merely; it is the perpetuation of the crucifixion that is the vital nerve of Christianity. But orthodoxy must not be dissevered from orthopraxy. Maclaren, of Manchester, tells us, in one of his charming volumes, that he once heard of a man who was of a very shady character, but was sound on the atonement. But what On earth is the good of being sound on the atonement if the atonement does not make you sound? Anyone who reads his New Testament or understands the essence of apostolic Christianity must understand that a mere theoretic acceptance of the atonement, unaccompanied by a penetration of the life and character of the principles of Jesus Christ, is of no value whatever. The atonement is not a mere formula for assent; it is a life principle for realization. In that we agree with Goldwin Smith. But is it not a fact that, wherever the atonement is truly received, it generates love to God, and love to man; evokes a hatred and horror of sin; and offers not only the highest incentive to self-sacrifice, but the most powerful dynamic for the life of righteousness? To the soul that beholds the Lamb of God, and finds peace through the blood of the cross, there comes a sense of joyous relief, a consciousness of deep satisfaction, that is newness of life. Yes, a Christianity that is merely a system of morals, and the best only of natural religions, is not worth preserving. A Christianity without a Christ Divine, an atonement vicarious, and a Bible inspired, will never carry power. A devitalized Gospel, a diluted Gospel, an attenuated Gospel, will conceive no splendid program, inspire no splendid effort. It never did produce a martyr; it never will. It never inspired a reformer, and it never will. The two religious poverties of the day, a lost sense of sin, and a lost sense of God, are simply, the result of this attenuated Socinianism that is becoming so prevalent. No minister of Christ has any right to smooth off the corners of the cross. At the same time, a Christianity that is merely orthodoxy, or an orthodoxy clasped in the dead hand of a moribund Christianity, is one of the greatest of curses. A Church that is only the custodian of the great tradition of the past, and not the expression of a forceful spiritual life; a Christian who is simply conserving a traditional creed, and not exemplifying the life of the living God, is a cumberer of the ground. A dead Church can never be the exponent of the living God, and a dead Church-man can never be the exponent of a living Church, for the test of every religious, political or educational system, after all, as Amid says, is the man it forms (Amiel, p. 27). (The chief works On the atonement which have been referred to are the following: Hodge, Dale, Denney, Crawford, Stalker, Van Dyke, Moberly, Clow, Simpson, Sabatier, Champion, Armour, Workman, Cunningham, Van Oosterzee, Ritschl, and Anselm). ======================================================================== CHAPTER 4: - THE GRACE OF GOD ======================================================================== The Grace of God By C. I. Scofield, D. D., Editor of the "Scofield Reference Bible" "Grace" is an English word used in the New Testament to translate the Greek word, Charis, which means "favor," without recompense or equivalent. If there is any compensatory act or payment, however slight or inadequate, it is "no more grace"-Charis. When used to denote a certain attitude or act of God toward man it is therefore of the very essence of the matter that human merit or deserving is utterly excluded. In grace God acts out from Himself, toward those who have deserved, not His favor, but His wrath. In the structure of the Epistle to the Romans grace does not enter, could not enter, till a whole race, without one single exception, stands guilty and speechless before God. Condemned by creation, the silent testimony of the universe (Romans 1:18; Romans 1:20); by wilful ignorance, the loss of a knowledge of God once universal (Romans 1:21); by senseless idolatry (Romans 1:22-23); by a manner of life worse than bestial (Romans 1:24; Romans 1:27); by godless pride and cruelty (Romans 1:28; Romans 1:32); by philosophical moralizings which had no fruit in life (Romans 2:1; Romans 2:4); by consciences which can only "accuse" or seek to "excuse" but never justify (Romans 2:5; Romans 2:16); and finally by the very law in which those who have the law boast (Romans 2:17; Romans 3:20), "every mouth" is "stopped, and all the world becomes guilty before God." In an absolute sense, the end of all flesh is come. Everything has been tried. Innocence, as of two unfallen creatures in an Eden of beauty; conscience, that is, the knowledge of good and evil with responsibility to do good and eschew evil; promises, with the help of God available through prayer; law, tried on a great scale, and through centuries of forbearance, supplemented by the mighty ethical ministry of the prophets, without ever once presenting a human being righteous before God (Romans 3:19;Galatians 3:10; Hebrews 7:19; Romans 3:10; Romans 3:18; Romans 8:3-4); this is the Biblical picture. And it is against this dark background that grace shines out. Definition The New Testament definitions of grace are both inclusive and exclusive. They tell us what grace is, but they are careful also to tell us what grace is not. The two great central definitions follow: "That in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us through Christ Jesus" (Ephesians 2:7). This is the inclusive, or affirmative, side; the negative aspect, what grace is not, follows: "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). The Jew, who is under the law when grace comes, is under its curse (Galatians 3:10); and the Gentiles are "without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world" (Ephesians 2:12). And to this race God comes to show "the exceeding riches of His GRACE in His kindness toward US," "through CHRIST JESUS." The other great definition of grace is: "But after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared"-the positive aspect; "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us"-the negative aspect. Grace, then, characterizes the present age, as law characterized the age from Sinai to Calvary. "For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." And this contrast between law as a method and grace as a method runs through the whole Biblical revelation concerning grace. It is not, of course, meant that there was no law before Moses, any more than that there was no grace and truth before Jesus Christ. The forbidding to Adam of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:17) was law, and surely grace was most sweetly manifested in the seeking, by the Lord God, of His sinning creatures, and in His clothing them with coats of skins (Genesis 3:21)-a beautiful type of Christ "made unto us ... righteousness" (1 Corinthians 1:30). Law, in the sense of some revelation of God's will, and grace, in the sense of some revelation of God's goodness, have always existed, and to this Scripture abundantly testifies. But "the law" as an inflexible rule of life was given by Moses, and, from Sinai to Calvary, dominates, characterizes, the time; just as grace dominates, or gives its peculiar character to, the dispensation which begins at Calvary, and has its predicted termination in the rapture of the Church. Law and Grace Diverse It is, however, of the most vital moment to observe that Scripture never, in any dispensation, mingles these two principles. Law always has a place and work distinct and wholly diverse from that of grace. Law is God prohibiting, and requiring (Exodus 20:1; Exodus 20:17); grace is God beseeching, and bestowing (2 Corinthians 5:18; 2 Corinthians 5:21). Law is a ministry of condemnation (Romans 3:19); grace, of forgiveness (Ephesians 1:7). Law curses (Galatians 3:10); grace redeems from that curse (Galatians 3:1). Law kills (Romans 7:9; Romans 7:11); grace makes alive (John 10:10). Law shuts every mouth before God; grace opens every mouth to praise Him. Law puts a great and guilty distance between man and God (Exodus 20:18-19); grace makes guilty man nigh to God (Ephesians 2:13). Law says, "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" (Exodus 21:24); grace says, "Resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also" (Matthew 5:39). Law says, "Hate thine enemy;" grace, "Love your enemies, bless them that despitefully use you." Law says, do and live (Luke 10:26; Luke 10:28); grace, believe and live (John 5:24). Law never had a missionary; grace is to be preached to every creature. Law utterly condemns the best man (Php_3:4; Php_3:9); grace freely justifies the worst (Luke 23:24; Romans 5:5; 1 Timothy 1:15; 1 Corinthians 6:9; 1 Corinthians 6:11). Law is a system of probation; grace, of favor. Law stones an adulteress (Deuteronomy 22:21); grace says, "Neither do I condemn thee" (John 8:1; John 8:11). Under law the sheep dies for the shepherd; under grace the shepherd dies for the sheep (John 10:11). The relation to each other of these diverse principles, law and grace, troubled the apostolic church. The first controversy concerned the ceremonial law. It was the contention of the legalists that converts from among the Gentiles could not be saved unless circumcised "after the manner of Moses" (Acts 15:1). This demand was enlarged when the "apostles and elders" had come together at Jerusalem to settle that controversy (Acts 15:5-6). The demand then made put in issue not circumcision merely, or the ceremonial law, but the whole Mosaic system. "That it was needful to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the law of Moses" (Acts 15:6). The decision of the council, as "it seemed good to the Holy Ghost," negatived both demands, and the new law of love was invoked that Gentile converts should abstain from things especially offensive to Jewish believers (Acts 15:28-29). But the confusion of these two diverse principles did not end with the decision of the council. The controversy continued, and six years later the Holy Spirit, by the Apostle Paul, launched against the legalistic teachers from Jerusalem the crushing thunderbolt of the Epistle to the churches in Galatia. In this great letter every phase of the question of the respective spheres of law and of grace comes up for discussion and final, authoritative decision. The Apostle had called the Galatians into the grace of Christ (Galatians 1:6). Now grace means unmerited, unrecompensed favor. It is essential to get this clear. Add never so slight an admixture of law-works, as circumcision, or law effort, as of obedience to commandments, and "grace is no more grace" (Romans 11:6). So absolutely is this true, that grace cannot even begin with us until the law has reduced us to speechless guilt (Romans 3:19). So long as there is the slightest question of utter guilt, utter helplessness, there is no place for grace. If I am not, indeed, quite so good as I ought to be, but yet quite too good for hell, I am not an object for the grace of God, but for the illuminating and convicting and deathdealing work of His law. The law is "just" (Romans 7:12), and therefore heartily approves goodness, and unsparingly condemns badness; but, save Jesus of Nazareth, the law never saw a man righteous through obedience. Grace, on the contrary, is not looking for good men whom it may approve, for it is not grace, but mere justice, to approve goodness, but it is looking for condemned, guilty, speechless and helpless men whom it may save through faith, sanctify and glorify. Into grace, then, Paul had called the Galatians. What (Galatians 1:6) was his controversy with them? Just this: they were "removed" from the grace of Christ into "another gospel," though he is swift to add, "which is not another" (Galatians 1:7). There could not be another "gospel." Change, modify, the grace of Christ by the smallest degree, and you no longer have a gospel. A gospel is "glad tidings"; and the law is not glad tidings. "What things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law; that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world become guilty before God" (Romans 3:19), and surely that is no good news. The law, then, has but one language; it pronounces "all the world"-"good", bad, and "goody-good"-"guilty". But you say: What is a simple child of God, who knows no theology, to do? Just this: to remember that any so-called gospel which is not pure= unadulterated grace is "another" gospel. If it proposes, under whatever specious guise, to win favor of God by works, or goodness, or "character," or anything else which man can do, it is spurious. That is the unfailing test. But it is more than spurious, it is accursed-or rather the preachers of it are (Galatians 1:8-9). It is not man who says that, but the Spirit of God who says it by His apostle. This is unspeakably solemn. Not the denial of the Gospel even, is so awfully serious as to pervert the Gospel. Oh, that God may give His people in this day power to discriminate, to distinguish things which differ. Alas, it is discernment which seems so painfully wanting. If a preacher is cultured, gentle, earnest, intellectual, and broadly tolerant, the sheep of God run after him. He, of course, speaks beautifully about Christ, and uses the old words redemption, the cross, even sacrifice and atonement-but what is his Gospel? That is the crucial question. Is salvation, perfect, entire, eternal,-justification, sanctification, glory,-the alone work of Christ, and the free gift of God to faith alone? Or does he say: (Dr. Abbott) "Character is salvation," even though he may add that Christ "helps" to form the character? The Three Errors In the Epistle to the Galatians the Holy Spirit through Paul meets and answers the three great errors into which in different degrees, theological systems have fallen. The course of this demonstration is like the resistless march of an armed host. Nothing can stand before it. The reasonings of ancient and modern legalists are scattered like the chaff of the summer threshing floor. We have, most of us, been reared and now live under the influence of Galatianism. Protestant theology, alas, is for the most part, thoroughly Galatianized, in that neither law nor grace are given their distinct and separated places, as in the counsels of God, but are mingled together in one incoherent system. The law is no longer, as in the Divine intent, a ministration of death (2 Corinthians 3:7), of cursing (Galatians 3:10), of conviction (Romans 3:19), because we are taught that we must try to keep it, and that by Divine help we may. Nor, on the other hand, does grace bring us blessed deliverance from the dominion of sin, for we are kept under the law as a rule of life despite the plain declaration, "Sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace" (Romans 6:14). The First Error The Spirit first meets the contention that justification is partly by lawworks and partly by faith through grace (Galatians 2:5 to 3:24). The steps are: 1. Even the Jews, who are not like the Gentiles, hopeless, "and without God in the world" (Ephesians 2:12), but already in covenant relations with God, even they, "knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ" (Galatians 2:15-16), have believed; "for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified." 2. The law has executed its sentence upon the believer (Galatians 2:19); death has freed him. Identified with Christ's death by faith, he, in the reckoning of God, died with Christ (Romans 6:3-10; Romans 7:4). 3. But righteousness is by faith, not by law (Galatians 2:21). 4. The Holy Spirit is given to faith, not law-works (Galatians 3:1-9). 5. "As many as are of the works of the law are under the curse"-and the reason is given: "Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them" (Galatians 3:10). The law, then, cannot "help", but can only do its great and necessary work of condemnation (Romans 3:19-20; 2 Corinthians 3:7; 2 Corinthians 3:9; Galatians 3:19; James 2:10). Elsewhere (Romans 5:1-5) the Spirit, by the same Apostle, sums up the results of justification by faith with every semblance of human merit carefully excluded. Grace, through faith in Jesus Christ, has brought the believer into peace with God, a standing in grace, and assured hope of glory. Tribulation can but serve to develop in him new graces. The very love that saved him through grace now fills his heart; the Holy Spirit is given him, and he joys in God. And all by grace, through faith! The Second Error The Spirit next meets and refutes the second great error concerning the relations of law and grace-the notion that the believer, though assuredly justified by faith through grace wholly without law-works, is, after justification, put under law as a rule of life. This is the current form of the Galatian error. From Luther down, Protestantism has consistently held to justification by faith through grace. Most inconsistently Protestant theology has held to the second form of Galatianism. An entire section of the Epistle to the Romans, and two chapters of Galatians are devoted to the refutation of this error, and to the setting forth of the true rule of the believer's life. Romans 6, 7, 8 and Galatians 4 and 5, set forth the new Gospel of the believer's standing in grace. Romans 6:14 states the new principle: "For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace." The Apostle is not here speaking of the justification of a sinner, but of the deliverance of a saint from the dominion of indwelling sin. In Galatians, after showing that the law had been to the Jew like the pedagogue in a Greek or Roman household, a ruler of children in their nonage (Galatians 3:23-24) the Apostle says explicitly (ver. Galatians 3:25), "But after that faith has come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster" (pedagogue). No evasion is possible here. The pedagogue is the law (Galatians 3:24); faith justifies; but the faith which justifies also ends the rule of the pedagogue. Modern theology says that after justification we are under the pedagogue. Here is a clear issue, an absolute contradiction between the Word of God and theology. Which do you side with? Equally futile is the timorous gloss that this whole profound discussion in Romans and Galatians relates to the ceremonial law. No Gentile could observe the ceremonial law. Even the Jews, since the destruction of the temple, A.D. 70, have not found it possible to keep the ceremonial law except in a few particulars of diet. It is not the ceremonial law which says, "Thou shalt not covet" (comp. Romans 7:7-9). The believer is separated by death and resurrection from Mosaism (Romans 6:3-15; Romans 7:1-6; Galatians 4:19-31). The fact remains immutable that to God he is, as to the law, an executed criminal. Justice has been completely vindicated, an it is no longer possible even to bring an accusation against him (Romans 8:33-34). It is not possible to know Gospel liberty, or Gospel holiness, until this great fundamental truth is clearly, bravely grasped. One may be a Christian and a worthy and useful man, and be still under bondage to the law, but one can never have deliverance from the dominion of sin, nor know the true blessedness and rest of the Gospel and remain under the law. Therefore, once more, note that it is death which has broken the connection between the believer and the law. "The law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth" (Romans 7:1). "But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held" (Romans 7:6). Nothing can be clearer. But I hasten to add that there is a mere carnal and fleshly way of looking at our deliverance from the law, which is most unscriptural, and I am persuaded, most dishonoring to God. It consists in rejoicing in a supposed deliverance from the principle of Divine authority over the life-a deliverance into mere self-will and lawlessness. The true ground of rejoicing is quite other than this. The truth is, a Christian may get on after a sort under law as a rule of life. Not apprehending that the law is anything more than an ideal, he feels a kind of pious complacency in "consenting unto the law that it is good," and more or less languidly hoping that in the future he may succeed better in keeping it than in the past. So treated, the law is wholly robbed of its terror. Like a sword carefully fastened in its scabbard, the law no longer cuts into the conscience. It is forgotten that the law offers absolutely but two alternatives exact obedience, always, in all things, or a curse. There is no third voice. "Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them" (Galatians 3:10; James 2:10). The law has but one voice: "What things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law; that every mouth may be stopped and all the world may become guilty before God" (Romans 3:19). The law, in other words, never says: "Try to do better next time." Of this the antinomian legalist seems entirely unaware. The True Christian Life And now we are ready to turn from the negative to the positive side to the secret of a holy and victorious walk under grace. We shall find the principle and the power of that walk defined in Galatians 5:16-24. The principle of the walk is briefly stated: "Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh" (Galatians 5:16). The Spirit is shown in Galatians in a threefold way. First, He is received by the hearing of faith (Galatians 3:2). When the Galatians believed they received the Spirit. To what end? The legalists make little of the Spirit. Though they talk much of "power" in connection with the Spirit, it is power for service which chiefly occupies them. Of His sovereign rights, of His blessed enabling in the inner life, there is scant apprehension. But it is precisely there that the Biblical emphasis falls. In Romans, for example, the Spirit is not even mentioned until we have a justified sinner trying to keep the law, utterly defeated in that attempt by the flesh, the "law in his members," and crying out, not for help, but for deliverance (Romans 7:15-24). Then the Spirit is brought in with, Oh, what marvelous results! "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death" (Romans 8:2). Not the Apostle's effort under the law, nor even the Spirit's help in that effort, but the might of the indwelling Spirit alone, breaks the power of indwelling sin (Galatians 5:16-18). You ask, and necessarily at this point, what is it to walk in the Spirit? The answer is in Galatians 5:18 : "If ye be led of the Spirit." But how else may we be led of Him save by yieldedness to His sway? There is a wonderful sensitiveness in the blessed Spirit's love. He will not act in and over our lives by way of almightiness, forcing us into conformity. That is why "yield" is the great word of Romans 6, where it is expressly said that we are not under the law, but under grace. The results of walking in the Spirit are twofold, negative and positive. Walking in the Spirit we shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh (Galatians 5:16). The "flesh" here is the exact equivalent of "sin" in Romans 6:14, "Sin shall not have dominion over you." And the reason is immediately given (Galatians 5:17). The Spirit and the flesh are contrary, and the Spirit is greater and mightier than the flesh. Deliverance comes, not by self-effort under the law that is Romans 7 -but by the omnipotent Spirit, who Himself is contrary to the flesh (Galatians 6:7), and who brings the yielded believer into the experience of Romans 8. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 5: - SALVATION BY GRACE ======================================================================== Salvation by Grace By Rev. Thomas Spurgeon, London, England WHAT IS "GRACE"? Once upon a time, I met, on board an Australian liner, an aged man of genial temperament, and of sound and extensive learning. He managed to dwell in well-nigh perpetual sunshine, for he followed the sun round the globe year after year, and he was himself so sunny that the passengers made friends with him, and sought information from him. It fell out that a discussion having arisen as to What "Grace" was, someone said, "Let us ask "The Walking Encyclopcedia"; he will be sure to know." So to him they went with their inquiry as to the meaning of the theological term, "Grace." They returned woefully disappointed, for all he could say was, "I confess that I don't understand it." At the same time he volunteered the following extraordinary statement: "I don't think that they understand it either who so often speak of it." Like the medical man of whom the Rev. T. Phillips told in his Baptist World Congress sermon who said of Grace, "It is utterly meaningless to me," this well-read traveller comprehended it not. Some among us were hardly astonished at this, but it did occur to us that he might have allowed that it was just possible that on this particular theme, at all events, some less learned folk might be more enlightened than himself. Now, it chanced that on that same vessel there was a Christian seaman, who, if he could not have given a concise and adequate definition of "Grace," nevertheless knew perfectly well its significance, and would have said, "Ay, ay, sir; that's it," with bounding heart and beaming face, if one had suggested that "Grace is God's free, unmerited favor, graciously bestowed upon the unworthy and sinful." And if Mr. Phillips himself had been on board, and had preached his Congress sermon there, and had declared that "Grace is something in God which is at the heart of all His redeeming activities, the downward stoop and reach of God, God bending from the heights of His majesty, to touch and grasp our insignificance and poverty," the weather-beaten face would have beamed again, and the converted sailor-man would have said within himself, "Oh, to Grace how great a debtor, daily I'm constrained to be." Verily, the world through its wisdom knows not God. The true meaning of "Grace" is hidden from the wise and prudent, and is revealed to babes. "Cottage dames" are often wiser as to the deep things of God than savants and scientists. Our learned traveller dwelt in perpetual sunshine, but he was not able from experience to say, "God hath shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ." Dr. Dale, long years ago, lamented that the word "Grace" was becoming disused. It has, alas, been used a great deal less since then. His own definition of "Grace" is worth remembering: "Grace is love which passes beyond all claims to love. It is love which after fulfilling the obligations imposed by law, has an unexhausted wealth of kindness." And here is Dr. Maclaren's: "Grace-what is that? The word means, first, love in exercise to those who are below the lover, or who deserve something else; stooping love that condescends, and patient love that forgives. Then it means the gifts which such love bestows; and then it means the effect of these gifts in the beauties of character and conduct developed in the receivers." Dr. Jowett puts the matter strikingly: "Grace is energy. Grace is love-energy. Grace is a redeeming love-energy ministering to the unlovely, and endowing the unlovely with its own loveliness." Shall we hear Dr. Alexander Whyte hereupon? "Grace means favor, mercy, pardon. Grace and love are essentially the same, only Grace is love manifesting itself and operating under certain conditions, and adapting itself to certain circumstances. As, for instance, love has no limit or law such as Grace has. Love may exist between equals, or it may rise to those above us, or flow down to those in any way beneath us. But Grace, from its nature, has only one direction it can take. GRACE ALWAYS FLOWS DOWN. Grace is love indeed, but it is love to creatures humbling itself. A king's love to his equals, or to his own royal house, is love; but his love to his subjects is called grace. And thus it is that God's love to sinners is always called GRACE in the Scriptures. It is love indeed, but it is love to creatures, and to creatures who do not deserve His love. And therefore all He does for us in Christ, and all that is disclosed to us of His goodwill in the Gospel, is called Grace." Is "Grace" Definable? Delightful as these definitions are, we are conscious that the half has not been told. O the exceeding riches of His grace. Whereunto shall we liken the mercy of God, or with what comparison shall we compare it? It defies definition, and beggars description. This is hardly to be wondered at, for it is so Divine. There are some things of earth to which no human pen or brush has done justice-storms, rainbows, cataracts, sunsets, icebergs, snowflakes, dewdrops, the wings that wanton among summer flowers. Because God made them, man fails to describe them. Who, then, shall tell forth fully that which God has and is? The definition we have quoted from Dr. Jowett is worthy of his great reputation, yet he himself confesses that "Grace" is indefinable. Thus choicely he puts it: "Some minister of the Cross, toiling in great loneliness, among a scattered and primitive people, and on the very fringe of dark primeval forests, sent me a little sample of his vast and wealthy environment. It was a bright and gaily colored wing of a native bird. The color and life of trackless leagues sampled within the confines of an envelope! And when we have made a compact little phrase to enshrine the secret of Grace, I feel that however fair and radiant it may be, we have only got a wing of a native bird, and bewildering stretches of wealth are untouched and unrevealed. No, we cannot define it." Desire for Salvation It cannot be pretended that all men desire to be saved. Would to God that it were so! A lack of the sense of sin is still the most perilous omen of today, as Mr. Gladstone declared it was in his time. Were he now alive, he would, we believe, repeat those portentous words with added emphasis, for this lack this fatal lack is approved and fostered by certain of those whose solemn endeavor it should be to prevent and condemn it. A fatal lack it assuredly is, for if a sense of sin be absent, what hope is there of a longing for salvation, of a cry for mercy, or of appreciation of a Saviour? So long as men imagine themselves to be potential Christs, there is little likelihood that they will be sufficiently discontent with self to look away to Jesus, or, indeed, to suppose that they are other than rich and increased in goods and in need of nothing. No, no; all men do not desiderate salvation, though we sometimes think that there has come to all men at some time or other, before the process of hardening was complete, some conscience of sin, some apprehension as to the future, some longings, faint and fitful it may be, to be right with God, and assured of heaven. There is, moreover, a much larger number than we suppose of really anxious souls. Deep desire is often hidden under a cloak of unconcern, and there is sometimes a breaking heart under a brazen breast. In addition to, and partly in consequence of, this lack of a sense of sin, there is much misconception as to the nature of salvation, and the way to secure it. It is even possible to entertain some true conception of sin, and of salvation, without comprehending, or, at all events, without submitting to God's method of salvation. One may realize that to be saved from sin is to overcome its power as well as to escape its penalty, and yet suppose that this is not impossible to fallen men by way of profound penitence, radical reformation, and precise piety. Righteousness Is Essential One thing is evident-righteousness is essential. But what must be the nature and quality of that righteousness, and how and whence is it to be obtained? Shall it be home-made, or shall it be of God and from above? Shall I go about to establish my own, or shall I subject myself to God's? Shall salvation be of works, or by faith? Is Christ to be a Substitute for the sinner, or will the sinner be a substitute for the Saviour? Shall the altar smell of sacrifice, God-appointed and God-provided, or will we prefer to deck it with flowers that wither and with fruits that shrivel, howsoever fair they seem at first? Is personal goodness, or is God's grace, as revealed in Jesus Christ, to bring us to the world where all is well? The one is a ladder that we ourselves set up, and painfully ascend; the other is an elevator which God provides, into which, indeed, we pass by penitential faith, but with which the lifting power is God's alone. Salvation by works is the choice of the Pharisee, salvation by Grace is the hope of the Publican. One or Other Nor can these two principles be combined. They are totally distinct; nay, more, they are at Variance the one with the other. A blend of the two is impossible. "If it is by grace, it is no more of works; otherwise grace is no more grace." One cannot merit mercy. This field must not be sown with mingled seed. The ox of mercy and the ass of merit must not be yoked together; indeed, they cannot be; they are too unequal. No linsey-woolsey garment can we weave of works and grace. As Hart quaintly puts it: "Everything we do we sin in, Chosen Jews Must not use Woollen mixt with linen." So the choice must be made between these two ways to heaven. The great question still is, "How can man be just with God ?" and it appears that he must either himself be essentially and perfectly holy, or he must, by some means, acquire a justness which will bear the scrutiny of Omniscience, and pass muster in the High Court of Heaven. What Says the Book? What has the Word of God to say about this all-important matter? It declares most plainly that all have sinned, that sin is exceeding sinful, that retribution follows iniquity as the Cart-wheel follows the footprints of the ox that draws it, that none can make his hands clean or renew his own heart. It tells us also that God, in His infinite mercy, has devised a way of salvation, and that none but Jesus can do helpless sinners good. Behold the bleeding victims and the smoking altars of the old dispensation! They speak of sin that needed to be put away, and they foreshadowed a sacrifice of nobler name and richer blood than they, the only Sacrifice which can make the comers thereunto perfect. Hearken to David as he cries: "Enter not into judgment with Thy servant, for in Thy sight shall no flesh living be justified." The prophets tell the selfsame tale. "By the knowledge of him shall My righteous Servant justify many, for he shall bear their iniquities" (Isaiah 53:11). Then there is the wonderful word which broke the fetters that were on Luther's soul as he climbed the holy staircase on his knees: "The just shall live by faith." The Apostles bear similar witness. Peter tells of Jesus of Nazareth, and declares, "In none other is there salvation; for neither is there any other name under heaven, that is given among men, wherein we must be saved" (Acts 4:12, R. V.). Paul is insistent on justification by faith alone. "By the deeds of the law there Shall no flesh be justified in His sight" (Romans 3:20). "By grace ye are saved through faith; and that not Of yourselves; it is the gift of God; not of works, lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:8; Ephesians 2:9) "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost, which He shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour; that being justified by His grace, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life" (Titus 3:5-7). (See also Galatians 3:11; Php_3:8; Php_3:9; Acts 13:39, and 2 Timothy 1:9). No Thoroughfare What need have we of further witness? It is evident that the way of Works is closed. Athwart the narrow track have fallen the Tree of Life and the broken tables of the Law, and God has affixed a notice there, large and legible, so that he who reads may run into a better path-NO THOROUGHFARE! It is given "By Order," and the King's red seal is on it; therefore doth it stand fast for ever. Levitical instructions, Davidic confessions, Prophetic and Apostolic declarations are all the voice of the Lord-the voice that breaketh the cedars of Lebanon and strippeth the forests bare-declaring that salvation is by Grace alone. The Verdict of History The history of man is the history of sin. It is one long, lurid record of fall and failure. Adam had the best opportunity of all. The law was fragmentary and rudimental then. There was but one command a solitary test. But it was one too many for our first parents. Later, the flood-swept world was soon defiled again. Later still, there came a law to Israel, holy and just and good. Did they obey? Let the carcasses that strew the wilderness bear witness. Is there a perfect life in all Time's annals? The Pharisees were preeminent as professional religionists, yet Jesus said, "Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." They, as it were, traveled in an express train, and, of course, first-class, but it was the wrong train! Saul of Tarsus was a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and he was no hypocrite, mind you, but he, too, was on the wrong track, till he changed trains at Damascus Junction. There, he relinquished all confidence in the flesh, and thenceforth exclaimed: "What things were gain to me, these have I counted loss for Christ. Yea, verily, and I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung that I may win Christ, and be found in Him, not having mine own righteousness which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith." Grace, Not Graces Personal experience bears similar testimony. Our own graces can never satisfy as does God's Grace. He who is not far from the kingdom, nevertheless inquires, "What lack I yet?" One might as well think to lift himself by hauling at his boots, as expect to win heaven by the deeds of the law. The fact is, that fallen human nature is incapable of perfectly keeping the perfect law of God. It is well when this is understood and humbly acknowledged; it may be the dawn of better things, even as it was with one of whom I have heard, who was brought to Christ by the Spirit's application of the words, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Gulliver tells of a man who had been eight years upon a process of extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers. The sunbeams were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in inclement weather. This was folly indeed, but it is even more ridiculous to think of extracting righteousness from a depraved heart. "They that are in the flesh cannot please God." That was good advice given to a seeker: "You'll never know peace till you give up looking at self, and let all your graces go for nothing." The black devil of unrighteousness has slain its thousands, but the white devil of self-righteousness hath slain its tens of thousands. Salvation is by Grace, not by graces. Sound aloud this truth, for it is glad tidings, for all save Pharisees. They, indeed, prefer another Gospel, which is not another, and a modern one which is as old as Cain's offering. Their watchword is, "Believe in yourself," but for those who have seen themselves as God sees them, for such as can by no means lift up themselves, who are shut up under sin, and condemned already, oh! for these, this is summer news, in truth. If salvation is by Grace, the graceless may be saved, prodigals may venture home, the vilest may be cleansed. Ah! yes, and there is a sense in which the guiltier, the better. Then is there less fear of the intrusion of other trust, and the glory gotten to God's Grace is greater. I do perceive that if salvation be by works, then can none be saved. Equally sure am I that if salvation be by Grace, none need be lost, for it is omnipotent, and greatly rejoiceth to be tested to the full. I read this sentence in a riveter's shop-window the other day: "No article can be broken beyond repair the more it is smashed the better we like it," and I said within myself: "Thus it is with the Grace of God, and long as I live I will tell poor sinners so." As for the proud Pharisee, "God grant him grace to groan." What Saith the Cross? Grace and atonement go hand in hand. Dr. Adolph Saphir has well said: "The world does not know what grace is. Grace is not pity; grace is not indulgence nor leniency; grace is not long-suffering. Grace is as infinite an attribute of God as is His power, and as is His wisdom. Grace manifests itself in righteousness, Grace has a righteousness which is based upon atonement or substitution, and through the whole Scripture there run the golden thread of grace and the scarlet thread of atonement, which together reveal to us, for man, a righteousness that comes down from heaven." The fact that Christ has died, a Sacrifice for sin, surely settles the question as to whether salvation is or is not by Grace. "If righteousness is through the law, then Christ died for nought." Yon great Sacrifice were worse than waste, if man can save himself. They who think to be saved through works of the flesh make void the grace of God. The unspeakable gift had never been donated; the substitutionary sacrifice had never been offered, had any other way been possible. Calvary says, more plainly than anything else, "Salvation is of the Lord." Away, ye merit-mongers from the Cross, where "the sword of Justice is scabbarded in the jeweled sheath of Grace." Penances, and pieties, and performances are less than vanity in view of the "unknown sufferings" of the spotless Lamb of God. It is impossible for self-righteousness to thrive on the slopes of the hill called Calvary. "Oh bring no price; God's grace is free To Paul, to Magdalene, to me!" All of Grace Salvation, then, is necessarily all of Grace. Man's fall is so complete, God's justice is so inexorable, heaven is so holy, that nothing short of Omnipotent love can lift the sinner, magnify the law which he has mutilated, and make him pure enough to dwell in Light. The thought of saving sinners is God's, born in the secret places of His great loving heart. "Grace first contrived the way to save rebellious man." The accomplishment of the wondrous plan reveals God's Grace throughout; He sent His Son to be the Saviour of the World. He freely delivered Him up for us all. He acknowledged Him in His humiliation as His beloved Son, but forsook Him on the tree, because He was made sin for us. Moreover, He brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, and enthroned Him at the right hand of the Majesty on high. There followed the shedding forth of the Spirit to convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment. Here is grace at every turn. "Through Faith" A work of Grace, too, has been effected in each believing heart. We are not saved merely because Christ died. The good news would be to us as rain upon Sahara, did not Grace incline to penitence and prayer and faith. "Grace taught my soul to pray, And made my eyes o'erflow," Salvation by grace is appropriated by faith. Grace is the fountain, but faith is the channel. Grace is the life-line, but faith is the hand that clutches it. And, thoroughly and finally to exclude all boasting, it is declared that the salvation and the faith are both the gift Of God. "And that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God." That salvation is God's gift is evident. "The gift of God is eternal life through Christ." "The free gift," "The gift of grace," "The gift of righteousness"-these phrases determine the fact that salvation is itself a Divine present to man. "Salvation," cried C. H. Spurgeon in the great congregation, "is everything for nothing! Christ free!-Pardon free!-Heaven free!" Thanks be to God for a gratuitous salvation! But is faith, also, the gift of God? Assuredly it is, if only because it is one of the most precious faculties of the human heart. What have we that we have not received? But faith in Christ is, in a very special sense, a Divine gift. "Not that something is given us which is different from absolute trust as exercised in other cases, but that such trust is divinely guided and fixed upon the right object. Gracious manifestations of the soul's need, and of the Lord's glory, prevail upon the will to repose trust upon that object." To trust is natural, but to trust Christ, rather than self, or ceremonies, is supernatural it is the gift of God. Moreover, faith, to be worthy of the name, must not be dry-eyed, and who can melt the heart and turn the flint into a fountain of waters but the God of all Grace? "The Grace that made me feel my sin, It taught me to believe; Then, in believing, peace I found, And now I live, I live." Nor is it to be supposed that Grace has done with us as soon as we have believed. The mighty call of Grace that results in our awakening is but the beginning of good things. Grace keeps us to the end. It will not let us go. It is the morning and the evening star of Christian experience. It puts us in the way, helps us by the way, and takes us all the way! "Lest Any Man Should Boast" It is difficult to imagine by what other process salvation could have been secured, consistently with God's honor. Suppose, for a moment, that salvation by works were a possible alternative. Boasting, so far from being excluded, would be invited. Man would boast in prospect. How proud he would be of his purposes and hopes. On such a task as this, he would embark with bands playing and colors flying. There would be credit and eclat from the first. Alas! vain man; this can only end disastrously. Thou art building on the sand. This is not of God, and must therefore come to naught. The Divine Spirit humbles men to conviction and deep repentance; He never prompts, to self-righteousness and pride; as Hart's simple stanza has it: "He never moves a man to say, 'Thank God, I am so good,' But turns his eye another way- To Jesus and His blood." He would boast in progress. How his meanest achievement would elate him? What crowing there would be over the slightest advance! There would be no need for indebtedness to God. The new birth, the cleansing blood, the converting Spirit-what call for these? The self-made man, they say, worships his creator, and the self-righteous man adores his saviour, that is to say, himself. While the Pharisee is bragging of what he does, the publican mourns over what he is. Because his heart smites him, he smites his heart; he cannot look up, for he has looked within, but because he cries for mercy he is justified. This is as God would have it, for He hath said: "My glory will I not give unto another." He would boast when perfect. If real peace and lasting joy could come to him, he would boast anew. "I have made my heart clean, and washed my hands in innocency," he would cry. There would be no room for God, and for His sovereign claim to the whole praise of our salvation. Instead of the sweet chiming of the bells of St. Saviour's, "I forgave thee-I forgave thee-I forgave thee all that debt," we should be deafened with the hoarse brass of every man's own trumpet blaring about the good-some will even dare to say, the God-that is in all. I know which music I prefer. Since first I hearkened to that pardoning word, like bells at evening pealing, my soul has scorned all other strains. Ring on, ring on, sweet bells! Again, he would boast in Paradise. Think of it! Heaven as it is, is full of perfect praise to God. Its every song is in honor of Father, Son, or Spirit. "Unto Him that loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and hath made Us kings and priests unto God and His Father, to Him be glory and dominion for ever and ever." That is the chorus of the skies, the sweet refrain of the everlasting song. "Worthy is the Lamb," they cry, and again they say, "Hallelujah!" But were salvation by works instead of by Grace, the songs would be in praise of man. Each would laud his fellow or himself, and eternity would be spent in recounting personal virtues and victories. Oh! what a tiresome eternity that would be. Ah, it is better as it is, with the Lamb in the midst of the throne, and the harps all tuned to Jesus? praise. There will be no self-admiration there, and, consequently, no comparisons and no rivalry, unless, indeed, we vie one with the other as to who shall honor Grace the most. The motto of each will be, "He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord." As McCheyne puts it, we shall be "dressed in beauty not our own." That is the beauty of it! So, salvation is of Grace, and of Grace alone. God will have no man boasting, and boast he assuredly would, were he saved, even in part, by the works of his own hands. It is admittedly a humbling doctrine. We wonder not that it is not popular. Truth seldom is. "Truth is unwelcome, however Divine." But is it not well to be humbled? We are not disposed to favor any teaching which be-littles God, or magnifies man. It has been well and truly said that "the man who has been snatched from helplessness and despair by unmerited grace, will never forget to carry himself as a forgiven man." (T. Phillips). He will not fail to look back to the rock whence he was hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence he was digged. Gipsy Smith keeps the hedge row at the foot of his Cambridge garden that he may enjoy uninterrupted view of the Common on which his father's tent was pitched, and whence he used to sally forth as a young timber-merchant. (He sold clothes-pegs, you remember). We love him for this. Lifted to honor and usefulness by Grace, he gives God the praise. Grace Divine makes gracious men. Good works and graces are by no means excluded from believers' lives. They are the product of gratuitous salvation, the evidence of saving faith, the acknowledgment of grateful hearts. The Grace-saved sinner works out the salvation that has been wrought in him. He is his Saviour's willing bondslave. He cannot be content with triumphing in Christ's grace; he must grace His triumph, too. It is with him as it is with the inhabitants of the city of Bath, who record their appreciation of its healing waters on a tablet inscribed as follows: "These healing waters have flowed on from time immemorial, Their virtue unimpaired, their heat undiminished, Their volume unabated; they explain the origin, Account for the progress, and demand the gratitude Of the City of Bath." The analogy is nearly perfect. God's grace may well be likened to flowing waters, to streams hot and health-giving, to streams that never cool nor fail. Moreover, "they account for our origin and progress," that is, we owe our spiritual being and well-being to them. And as for demanding gratitude-well, "Streams of mercy never ceasing call for songs of loudest praise." Oh let us preach up Grace, even if it be not graciously received. "If the people don't like the doctrine of Grace," said C. H. Spurgeon, "give them the more of it." Not what they want, but what they need we must supply. If the age is pleasure-loving, unbelieving, self-satisfied, the more call for faithful testimony as to the nature of sin, God's attitude towards it, and the terms on which He offers salvation. We must aim the more at heart and conscience. We must seek to arouse and even alarm the sinner, while we invite as wooingly as ever to the one Mediator. A full-orbed Gospel treats alike of abounding sin, and of much more abounding Grace. Surely Dr. Watts sang truly when he pictured the ransomed recounting their experiences of Grace: "Then all the chosen seed Shall meet around the throne, Shall bless the conduct of His grace, And make His glories known." To me it has been what the same poet calls "a drop of heaven," to review God's plan for my salvation, and to try to set it forth. Toward the stout ships that have carried me across the seas I have ever cherished a grateful feeling. How much more do I love the good ship of Grace that has borne me thus far on my way to the Fair Havens. An unusual opportunity was once offered me of viewing the vessel on which I was a passenger, before the voyage was quite complete. After nearly three months in a sailing ship, we were greeted by a harbor tug, whose master doubtless hoped for the task of towing us into port. There was, however, a favorable breeze which, though light, promised to hold steady. So the tug's services were declined. Anxious to earn an honest penny, her master ranged alongside the clipper, and transshipped such passengers as cared to get a view from another deck of the good ship that had brought them some fifteen thousand miles. You may be sure that I was one of these. A delightful experience it was to draw away from our floating home, to mark her graceful lines, her towering masts, her tapering yards, her swelling sails the White wave curling at her fore-foot, and the green wake winding astern. From our new view-point items that had grown familiar were invested with fresh interest. There was the wheel to which we had seen six seamen lashed in time of storm, and there the binnacle, whose sheltered compass had been so constantly studied since the start, and there the chart-house with its treasures of wisdom, and yonder the huge-fluked anchors, and over all the network of ropes a tangle to the uninitiated. Even the smoke from the galley fire inspired respect, as we remembered the many meals that appetites, sharpened by the keen air of the Southern Seas, had demolished. And yonder is the port of one's own cabin! What marvelous things had been viewed through that narrow peephole, and what sweet sleep had been enjoyed beneath it, "rocked in the cradle of the deep." Oh! it was a brave sight, that full-rigged ship, so long our ocean home, which, despite contrary winds and cross-currents, and terrifying gales and tantalizing calms, had half compassed the globe, and had brought her numerous passengers and valuable freight across the trackless leagues in safety. Do you wonder that we cheered the staunch vessel, and her skilful commander, and the ship's company again and again? I can hear the echoes of those hurrahs today. Do you wonder that we gave thanks for a prosperous voyage by the will of God, and presently stepped back from the tug-boat to the ship without question that what remained of the journey would be soon and Successfully accomplished? Let me apply this incident. The good ship is FREE GRACE, and I have taken my readers aboard my tug-boat to give them opportunity to view the means by which they have already come so near-(how near we know not)-to the Haven under the hill. We have sailed around about her, and told the towering masts thereof, and marked well her bulwarks. We have seen the breath of God filling her sails brightened by the smile of His love. We have noted the scarlet thread in all her rigging, and the crimson flag flying at the fore. We have seen at the stern the wheel of God's sovereignty by which the great ship is turned whithersoever the Governor listeth, and on the prow the sinner's sheet-anchor: "Him that cometh unto Me, I will in no wise cast out." The chart-house is the Word, and the compass is the Spirit, and there are well-plenished store-rooms, and spacious saloons, and never-to-be-forgotten chambers wherein He has given His beloved precious things in sleep, and outlooks whence they have seen His wonders in the deep. Through stress of storm and through dreary doldrums; through leagues of entangling weed, and past many a chilling and perilous iceberg, with varying speed and zigzag course, and changing clime, FREE GRACE has brought us hitherto. We have, perchance, a few more leagues to cover. We may even stand off and on a while, near the harbor mouth, but, please God, we shall have abundant entrance at the last. We have circled the ship, and I call on every passenger to bless her in the name of the Lord, and to shout the praise of Him who owns and navigates her. All honor and blessing be unto the God of Grace and unto the Grace of God! Ten thousand, thousand thanks to Jesus! And to the blessed Spirit equal praise! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 6: - THE NATURE OF REGENERATION ======================================================================== The Nature of Regeneration By Thomas Boston (1676-1732) I. For the better understanding of the nature of regeneration, take this along with you, in the first place, that as there are false conceptions in nature, so there are also in grace: by these many are deluded, mistaking some partial changes made upon them for this great and thorough change. To remove such mistakes, let these few things be considered: 1. Many call the Church their mother, whom God will not own to be His children. "My mother's children," that is, false brethren, "were angry with me" (Son_1:6). All that are baptized, are not born again. Simon was baptized, yet still "in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity" (Acts 8:13-23). Where Christianity is the religion of the country, many are called by the name of Christ, who have no more of Him than the name: and no wonder, for the devil had his goats among Christ's sheep, in those places where but few professed the Christian religion. "They went out from us, but they were not of us" (1 John 2:19). 2. Good education is not regeneration. Education may chain up men's lusts, but cannot change their hearts. A wolf is still a ravenous beast, though it be in chains. Joash was very devout during the life of his good tutor Jehoiada; but afterwards he quickly showed what spirit he was of, by his sudden apostasy (2 Chronicles 24:2-18). Good example is of mighty influence to change the outward man; but that change often goes off when a man changes his company; of which the world affords many sad instances. 3. A turning from open profanity to civility and sobriety falls short of this saving change. Some are, for a while, very loose, especially in their younger years; but at length they reform, and leave their profane courses. Here is a change, yet only such as may be found in men utterly void of the grace of God, and whose righteousness is so far from exceeding, that it does not come up to the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. 4. One may engage in all the outward duties of religion, and yet not be born again. Though lead be cast into various shapes, it remains still but a base metal. Men may escape the pollutions of the world, and yet be but dogs and swine (2 Peter 2:20-22). All the external acts of religion are within the compass of natural abilities. Yea, hypocrites may have the counterfeit of all the graces of the Spirit: for we read of "true holiness" (Ephesians 4:23); and "faith unfeigned" (1 Timothy 1:15); which shows us that there is a counterfeit holiness, and a reigned faith. 5. Men may advance to a great deal of strictness in their own way of religion, and yet be strangers to the new birth. "After the most straitest sect of our religion I lived a Pharisee" (Acts 26:5). Nature has its own unsanctified strictness in religion. The Pharisees had so much of it that they looked on Christ as little better than a mere libertine. A man whose conscience has been awakened, and who lives under the felt influence of the covenant of works, what will he not do that is within the compass of natural abilities? It is a truth, though it came out of a hellish mouth, that "skin for skin, all that a man hath will he give for his life" (Job 2:4). 6. A person may have, sharp soul-exercises and pangs, and yet die in the birth. Many "have been in pain," that have but, as it were, "brought forth wind." There may be sore pangs and throes of conscience, which turn to nothing at last. Pharaoh and Simon Magus had such convictions as made them desire the prayers of others for them. Judas repented himself; and under terrors of conscience, gave back his ill-gotten pieces of silver. All is not gold that glitters. Trees may blossom fairly in the spring, on which no fruit is to be found in the harvest: and some have sharp soul exercises, which are nothing but foretastes of hell. The new birth, however in appearance hopefully begun, may be marred two ways: First, Some, like Zarah (Genesis 38:28-29), are brought to the birth, but go back again. They have sharp convictions for a while; but these go off, and they become as careless about their salvation, and as profane as ever and usually worse than ever; "their last state is worse than their first" (Matthew 12:45). They get awakening grace, but not converting grace and that goes off by degrees as the light of the declining day, fill it issue in midnight darkness. Secondly, Some, like Ishmael, come forth too soon; they are born before the time of the promise. (Genesis 16:2; compare Galatians 4:22, etc.) They take up with a mere law-work, and stay not till the time of the promise of the Gospel. They snatch at consolation, not waiting till it be given them; and foolishly draw their comfort from the law that wounded them. They apply the healing plaster to themselves, before their wound is sufficiently searched, The law, that rigorous husband, severely beats them, and throws in curses and vengeance upon their souls; then they fall to reforming, praying, mourning, promising, and vowing, till this ghost be laid; which done, they fall asleep again in the arms of the law: but they are never shaken out of themselves and their own righteousness, nor brought forward to Jesus Christ. Lastly, There may be a wonderful moving of the affections, in souls that are not at all touched with regenerating grace. Where there is no grace, there may, notwithstanding, be a flood of tears, as in Esau, "who found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears" (Hebrews 12:17). There may be great flashes of joy; as in the hearers of the Word, represented in the parable by the stony ground, who "anon with joy receive it" (Matthew 13:20). There may also be great desires after good things, and great delight in them too; as in those hypocrites described in Isaiah 58:2 : "Yet they seek Me daily, and delight to know My ways: they take delight in approaching to God." See how high they may sometimes stand, who yet fall away (Hebrews 6:4-6). They may be "enlightened, taste of the heavenly gift," be "partakers of the Holy Ghost, taste the good Word of God, and the powers of the world to come." Common operations of the Divine Spirit, like a land flood, make a strange turning of things upside down: but when they are over, all runs again in the ordinary channel. All these things may be, where the sanctifying Spirit of Christ never rests upon the soul, but the stony heart still remains; and in that case these affections cannot but wither, because they have no root. But regeneration is a real thorough change, whereby the man is made a new creature (2 Corinthians 5:17). The Lord God makes the creature a new creature, as the goldsmith melts down the vessel of dishonor, and makes it a vessel of honor. Man is, in respect of his spiritual state, altogether disjointed by the fall; every faculty of the soul is, as it were, dislocated: in regeneration the Lord loosens every joint, and sets it right again. Now this change made in regeneration, is - 1. A change of qualities or dispositions: it is not a change of the substance, but of the qualities of the soul. Vicious qualities are removed, and the contrary dispositions are brought in, in their room. "The old man is put off" (Ephesians 4:22); "the new man put on" (ver. 24). Man lost none of the rational faculties of his soul by sin: he had an understanding still, but it was darkened; he had still a will, but it was contrary to the will of God. So in regeneration, there is not a new substance created, but new qualities are infused; light instead of darkness, righteousness instead of unrighteousness. 2. It is a supernatural change; he that is born again, is born of the Spirit. (John 3:5). Great changes may be made by the power of nature, especially when assisted by external revelation. Nature may be so elevated by the common influences of the Spirit, that a person may thereby be turned into another man, as Saul was, (1 Samuel 10:6), who yet never becomes a new man. But in regeneration, nature itself is changed, and we become partakers of the Divine nature; and this must needs be a supernatural change. How can we, that are dead in trespasses and sins, renew ourselves, more than a dead man can raise himself out of his grave? Who but the sanctifying Spirit of Christ can form Christ in a soul, changing it into the same image? Who but the Spirit of sanctification can give the new heart? Well may we say, when we see a man thus changed: "This is the finger of God." 3. It is a change into the likeness of God. "We, beholding, as in a glass, the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image" (2 Corinthians 3:18). Everything that generates, generates its like; the child bears the image of the parent; and they that are born of God bear God's image. Man aspiring to be as God, made himself like the devil. In his natural state he resembles the devil, as a child doth his father. "Ye are of your father the devil" (John 8:44). But when this happy change comes, that image of Satan is defaced, and the image of God is restored. Christ Himself, who is the brightness of His Father's glory, is the pattern after which the new creature is made. "For whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate, to be conformed to the image of His Son" (Romans 8:29). Hence He is said to be formed in the regenerate (Galatians 4:19). 4. It is a universal change; "all things become new," (2 Corinthians 5:17). Original sin infects the whole man; and regenerating grace, which is the salve, goes as far as the sore. This fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness; goodness of the mind, goodness of the will, goodness of the affections, goodness of the whole man. He gets not only a new head, to know religion, or a new tongue to talk of it; but a new heart, to love and embrace it in the whole of his conversation. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 7: - REGENERATION - CONVERSION - REFORMATION ======================================================================== Regeneration - Conversion - Reformation By Rev. George W. Lasher, D. D., LL. D., Author of "Theology for Plain People", Cincinnati, Ohio In his "Twice-Born Men," Mr. Harold Begbie gives us a series of instances wherein men of the lowest grade, or the most perverse nature, became suddenly changed in thought, purpose, will and life. Without intentionally ignoring the word "regeneration," or the fact of regeneration, he emphasises the act of conversion in which be includes regeneration which, in our conception, is the origin of conversion and a true reformation as a permanent fact. A weakness in much of the teaching of modern times is in that conversion and reformation are thrust to the front, while regeneration is either ignored, or minimized to nothingness. Jesus Christ did not say much about regeneration, using the equivalent word in the Greek (paliggenesis) only once, and then (Matthew 19:28) having reference to created things, a new order in the physical universe, rather than to a new condition of the individual soul. But He taught the great truth in other words, the needful fact by which He made it evident that a regeneration is what the human soul needs and must have to fit it for the kingdom of God. In the other Gospels, Jesus is represented as teaching things which involve a new birth, without which it is impossible to meet Divine requirements; but in John's Gospel it is distinctly set forth in the very first chapter, and the idea is carried through to the end. When (in John 1:12-13) it is said that those who received the Word of God received also "power," or right, to become God's children, it is expressly declared that this power, or right, is not inherent in human nature, is not found in the natural birth, but involves a new birth-"who are born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." It is this new or second birth which produces children of God. The declaration of John (John 3:3) puts to confusion the very common claim that God is the Father of universal humanity, and makes it absurd to talk of "the Fatherhood of God," "the Heavenly Father," "the Divine Fatherhood," and other such phrases with which we are surfeited in these modern days. Nothing is farther from truth, and nothing is more dangerous and seductive than the claim that the children of Adam are, by nature, God's children. It is the basis of much false reasoning with regard to the future state and the continuity of future punishment. It is said, in words, that, though a father may chastise his son, "for his profit," yet the relation of fatherhood and sonship forbids the thought that the father can thrust his son into the burning and keep him there forever. No matter what the offense, it can be expiated by suffering, the father heart will certainly relent and the prodigal will turn again and will be received with joy and gladness by the yearning father. Of course, the fallacy of the argument is in the assumption that all men are, by nature, the children of God a thing expressly denied by the Lord Jesus (John 8:42) who declared to certain ones that they were of their father the devil. The conversation with Nicodemus gives us the condition upon which once-born men may see the kingdom of God, namely, by being twice-born, once of the flesh, and a second time of the Spirit. "Except a man be born again [anothen, from above] he cannot see the kingdom of God." There must be a birth from heaven before there can be a heavenly inheritance. Nicodemus, though a teacher of Israel, did not understand it. He had read in vain the word through Jeremiah (Jeremiah 33:31) relative to the "new covenant" which involves a new heart. He had failed to discern between the natural man and the spiritual man. He had no conception of a changed condition as the basis of genuine reformation. But Nicodemus was not alone in his misconception. After all these centuries, many students of the New Testament, accepting the Gospel of John as canonical and genuine, stumble over the same great truth and. "pervert the right ways of the Lord." Taking the fifth verse of John 3, they accept the doctrine of regeneration, but couple it with an external act without which, in their view, the regeneration is not and cannot be completed. In their rituals they distinctly declare that water baptism is essential to and is productive of the regeneration which Jesus declares must be from heaven. They stumble over, or pervert the words used, and make "born of water" to be baptism, of which nothing is said in the verse or in the chapter, and which the whole tenor of Scripture denies. The lexicographers, the grammarians and evangelical theologians are all pronounced against the interpretation put upon the words of Jesus when He said: "Except a man (anyone) be born of water kai spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." The lexicographers tell us that the Greek conjunction kai may have an epexegetical meaning and may be (as it frequently is) used to amplify what has gone before; that it may have the sense of "even," or "namely." And thus they justify the reading: "Except a man be born of water, even (or namely) spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." The grammarians tell us the same thing, and innumerable instances of such usage can be cited from both classic and New Testament Greek. The theologians are explicit in their denial that regeneration can be effected by baptism. They hold to a purely spiritual experience, either before baptism, or after it, and deny that the spiritual birth is effected by the water, no matter how applied. And yet some who take this position in discussions of the "new birth" fall away to the ritualistic idea when they come to treat of baptism, its significance and place in the Christian system. (It would be easy to justify all these statements by reference to authors and books, but space forbids the quotations here. So patent are they that we can hardly doubt the acceptance of the assertion by the intelligent reader, without citations in proof). Paul as an Interpreter of Jesus The best interpreter of Jesus who ever undertook to represent Him was the man who was made a "chosen vessel," to bear the Gospel of the kingdom to the pagan nations of his own time, and to transmit his interpretations to us of the twentieth century, He could say: "The Gospel which was preached of me is not after man, neither was I taught it, but by revelation of Jesus Christ." And Paul speaks of this work wrought in the human soul as a "new creation"-something that was not there before. "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature" (creation). "Neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature" (creation). Never once, in all his discussions of the way of salvation, does Paul intimate that the new creation is effected by a ritual observance. It is always and everywhere regarded and treated as a spiritual experience wrought by the Spirit of God, the subject of it knowing only, as the healed man said of himself, "Whereas I, was blind now I see." The Testimony of Experience The prayers of the Bible, especially those of the New Testament, do not indicate that the suppliant asks for a regeneration-a new heart. He may have been taught the need of it, and may be brought face to face with the great and decisive fact; but his thought is not so much of a new heart as it is of his sins and his condemnation. What he wants is deliverance from the fact and the consequences of sin. He finds himself a condemned sinner, under the frown of a God of justice, and he despairs. But he is told of Jesus and the forgiving grace of God, and he asks that the gracious provision be applied to his own soul. "Mercy, and not sacrifice," is the argument, the mercy secured by the work of Him whom God hath appointed to be the propitiation for our sins. But when the supplicating and believing sinner awakes to a consciousness that his prayer has been heard, he finds that he is a new creature. The work has been wrought without his consciousness of it at the moment. All he knows is that something has taken place within him a great "change." He is a new creature. He dares to hope and to believe that he is a son of God; and he cries in the ecstacy of a new life: "Abba, Father" (Dear Father)! "The Spirit Himself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God," and subsequently we learn that we are heirs of a rich Father-"heirs of God and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ," with whom we are to both suffer and reign. CONVERSION (which really means only "change"), we have said, is included in the idea of regeneration; but the words do not mean the same thing. Regeneration implies conversion; but there may be conversion without regeneration. The danger is that the distinction may not be observed and that, because there is a visible conversion, it may be Supposed that there must be a prevenient regeneration. Conversion may be a mere mental process; the understanding convinced, but the heart unchanged. It may be effected as education and refinement are effected. The schools are constantly doing it. It is what they are for. Regeneration involves a change of mind; but conversion may be effected while the moral condition remains unchanged. Regeneration can occur but once in the experience of the same soul; but conversion can occur many times. Regeneration implies a new life, eternal life, Divine life, the life of God in the soul of man, a Divine sonship, the continuous indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Conversion may be like that of King saul, when he took a place among the prophets of Jehovah, or like that of Simon the sorcerer, who said: "Pray ye the Lord for me, that none of these things which ye have spoken come upon me." Conversion may be the result of a conviction that, after all, a change of life may be profitable for the life that is to come, as well as for the life that now is; that in the future world a man gets what he earns in this life. It does not imply a heart in love with God and the things of God. Men of the world are converted many times. They change their minds, and often change their mode of living, for the better; not because they have been regenerated and brought into sacred relations with God in Christ, being renewed by the power of the Holy Spirit. One of the most imminent dangers of the religious life of today is the putting of conversion in the place of regeneration, and counting converted men as Christian men, counting "converts" in revival meetings as regenerated and saved, because they have mentally, and, for the moment, changed. Men are converted, politically, from one party to another; from one set of principles to another. Christians, after regeneration, may change their religious views and pass from one denomination to another. Few Christians pass through many years without a need of conversion. They grow cold of heart, blind to the things of God, and wander from the straight path to which they once committed themselves; and they need conversion. Most revivals of religion begin with the conversion of saints. Rarely are souls, in considerable numbers, regenerated while regenerated men and women are unconscious of their high calling and are in need of conversion, in order to their hearty engagement in efforts for those around them. First, a converted church, then regenerated and converted souls. Reformation implies conversion, but it does not imply regeneration. REGENERATION insures reformation, but reformation does not imply regeneration. Reformers have been abroad in all ages, and are known to paganism as well as to Christianity. The Buddha was a reformer. Confucius was a reformer. Zoroaster was a reformer. Mahomet was a reformer. Kings and priests have been reformers, while knowing nothing of the life of God in the human soul. A Christian man is a reformed man, though his reformation may be far from complete and may need a great many reforming impulses. The most glaring and fatal mistake in the religious world today is the effort to reform men and reform society by making the reformation a substitute for regeneration. The social life of today is full of devices and expedients for bettering the physical condition of individuals, families and communities, while yet the soul-life is untouched. Human devices are taking the place of the Divine ideal, and those who cannot reach the inner life are contenting themselves, if they can reach and better the outer life, the mere incident of being. We have civic organizations without number, each of which has for its highest object the betterment not simply of worldly conditions, but of the character of the brotherhood. An argument for the existence of many of these organizations is that they may make better men by reason of the confidence and fraternity secured by the contact effected, by the oaths and vows taken, and by the cultivation of the social life. A willingness to learn and to receive instruction is a condition of initiation into the order. That reformatory agencies are good and accomplish good is not denied. Each has its good points and helps to elevate the tone of society in the aggregate. But a fatal mistake is in the notion that the elevation of society, the eliminating of its miseries, is conducive to a religious life and promotive of Christianity. Perhaps the greatest hindrances to the conquest sought by Christianity today, in civilized and nominally Christian countries, are the various agencies intended to reform society. They are improving the exterior, veneering and polishing the outside, while the inside is no better than before because the heart remains wicked and sinful. "Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter, but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness." The Pharisees were the best people of their day; and yet they were the greatest failures. Against no others did Jesus hurl so fierce denunciations. Why? Because they put reformation in the place of repentance and faith; because they were employing human means for accomplishing what only the Holy Spirit could accomplish. And so, today, every device for the betterment of society which does not strike at the root of the disease and apply the remedy to the seat of life, the human soul, is Pharisaical and is doing a Pharisee's work. It is polishing the outside, while indifferent to the inside. The road to hell from a church door is as short as is that from a hangman's noose, or an electric chair. More church members than murderers have gone to the hell of the unbeliever. "The good is always the enemy of the best"; and so reformation is always an enemy of the cross of Christ. *Mr. Begbie's "twice-born men" were reformed, and they made proof of it in their subsequent lives because they were regenerated, twice born; but there were beside them, a great multitude of "reformed" men, who were no less heirs of hell than before their "reformation." He tells us of only a few of the great multitude of those reformed-a few of thousands. [*By reference to Mr. Begbie's book, the writer means no criticism, for he is in full accord with the facts and purposes of the book. He uses it only as a striking illustration of the point he wishes to make.] Fundamental to the Christian system is a conviction of sin which compels a cry for mercy, responded to by the Holy Spirit, who regenerates the soul, converts it, reforms it and fits it for the blessedness of heaven. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 8: - JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH ======================================================================== Justification by Faith By H. C. G. Moule, D. D., Bishop of Durham, England. "Justification by Faith"; the phrase is weighty alike with Scripture and with history. In Holy Scripture it is the main theme of two great dogmatic epistles, Romans and Galatians. In Christian history it was the potent watchword of the Reformation movement in its aspect as a vast spiritual upheaval of the church. It is not by any means the only great truth considered in the two epistles; we should woefully misread them if we allowed their message about Justification by Faith to obscure their message about the Holy Ghost, and the strong relation between the two messages. It was not the only great truth which moved and animated the spiritual leaders of the Reformation. Nevertheless, such is the depth and dignity of this truth, and so central in some respects is its reference to other truths of our salvation, that we may fairly say that it was the message of St. Paul, and the truth that lay at the heart of the distinctive messages of the non- Pauline epistles too, and that it was the truth of the great Reformation of the Western church. With reason, seeing things as he was led in a profound experience to see them, did Luther say that Justification by Faith was "the articles of a standing or a falling church." With reason does an illustrious representative of the older school of "higher" Anglicanism, a name to me ever bright and venerable, Edward Harold Browne, say that Justification by Faith is not only this, but also "the article of a standing or a falling soul."* [* "Messiah Foretold and Expected," ad finem.] Import of the Terms Let us apply ourselves first to a study of the meaning of our terms. Here are two great terms before us, Justification and Faith. We shall, of course, consider in its place the word which, in our title, links them, and ask how Justification is "by" Faith. But first, what is Justification, and then, what is Faith? By derivation, no doubt, JUSTIFICATION means to make just, that is to say, to make conformable to a true standard. It would seem thus to mean a process by which wrong is corrected, and bad is made good, and good better, in the way of actual improvement of the thing or person justified. In one curious case, and, so far as I know, in that case only, the word has this meaning in actual use. "Justification" is a term of the printer's art. The compositor "justifies" a piece of typework when he corrects, brings into perfect order, as to spaces between words and letters, and so on, the types which he has set up. But this, as I have said, is a solitary case. In the use of words otherwise, universally, Justification and Justify mean something quite different from improvement of condition. They mean establishment of position as before a judge or jury, literal or figurative. They mean the winning of a favorable verdict in such a presence, or again (what is the same thing from another side) the utterance of that verdict, the sentence of acquittal, or the sentence of vindicated fight, as the case may be. I am thinking of the word not at all exclusively as a religious word. Take it in its common, everyday employment; it is always thus. To justify an opinion, to justify a course of conduct, to justify a statement, to justify a friend, what does it mean? Not to readjust and improve your thoughts; or your actions, or your words; not to educate your friend to be wiser or more able. No, but to win a verdict for thought, or action, or word, or friend, at some bar of judgment, as for example the bar of public opinion, or of common conscience. It is not to improve, but to vindicate. Take a ready illustration to the same effect from Scripture, and from a passage not of doctrine, but of public Israelite law: "If there be a controversy between men, and they come unto judgment, that the judges may judge them, then they shall justify the righteous and condemn the wicked" (Deuteronomy 25:1). Here it is obvious that the question is not one of moral improvement. The judges are not to make the righteous man better. They are to vindicate his position as satisfactory to the law. Non-theological passages, it may be observed, and generally non-theological connections, are of the greatest use in determining the true, native meaning of theological terms. For with rare exceptions, which are for the most part matters of open history, as in the case of the Homousion, theological terms are terms of common thought, adapted to a special use, but in themselves unchanged. That is, they were thus used at first, in the simplicity of original truth. Later ages may have deflected that simplicity. It was so as a fact with our word Justification, as we shall see immediately. But at first the word meant in religion precisely what it meant out of it. It meant the winning, or the consequent announcement, of a favorable verdict. Not the word, but the application was altered when salvation was in question. It was indeed a new and glorious application. The verdict in question was the verdict not of a Hebrew court, nor of public opinion, but of the eternal Judge of all the earth. But that left the meaning of the word the same. Justification a "Forensic" Term It is thus evident that the word Justification, alike in religious and in common parlance, is a word connected with law. It has to do with acquittal, vindication, acceptance before a judgment seat. To use a technical term, it is a forensic word, a word of the law-courts (which in old Rome stood in the forum). In regard of "us men and our salvation" it stands related not so much, not so directly, to our need of spiritual revolution, amendment, purification, holiness, as to our need of getting, somehow-in spite of our guilt, our liability, our debt, our deserved condemnation a sentence of acquittal, a sentence of acceptance, at the judgment seat of a holy God. Not that it has nothing to do with our inward spiritual purification. It has intense and vital relations that way. But they are not direct relations. The direct concern of Justification is with man's need of a divine deliverance, not from the power of his sin, but from its guilt. Mistaken Interpretations Here we must note accordingly two remarkable instances of misuse of the word Justification in the history of Christian thought. The first is found in the theology of the School-men, the great thinkers of the Middle Ages in Western Christendom-Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and others.* To them Justification appears to have meant much the same as regeneration, the great internal change in the state of our nature wrought by grace. The other instance appears in the sixteenth century, in the Decrees of the Council of Trent, a highly authoritative statement of Romanist belief and teaching. There Justification is described (vi. c. 7) as "not the mere remission of sins but also the sanctification and renovation of the inner man." In this remarkable sentence the Romanist theologians seem to combine the true account of the word, though imperfectly stated, with the view of the Schoolmen. It is not too much to say that a careful review of the facts summarized above, as regards the secular use of the word Justification, and the Scriptural use of it in the doctrine of salvation, is enough to negative these explanations. They are curious and memorable examples of misinterpretation of terms; that most fruitful source Of further, wider and deeper error. [* See T. B. Mozley, "Baptismal Controversy," Chap. VII.] Justification Not the Same as Pardon The problem raised then, in religion, by the word Justification, is, How shall man be just before God? To use the words of our Eleventh Article, it is, How shall we be "accounted righteous before God?" In other words, How shall we, having sinned, having broken the holy Law, having violated the will of God, be treated, as to our acceptance before Him, as to our "peace with Him" (Romans 5:1), as if we had not done so? Its question is not, directly, How shall I a sinner become holy, but, How shall I a sinner be received by my God, whom I have grieved, as if I had not grieved Him? Here let us note, what will be clear on reflection, that Justification means properly no less than this, the being received by Him as if we had not grieved Him. It is not only, the being forgiven by Him. We do indeed as sinners most urgently need forgiveness, the remission of our sins, the putting away of the holy vengeance of God upon our rebellion. But we need more. We need the voice which says, not merely, you may go; you are let off your penalty; but, you may come; you are welcomed into My presence and fellowship. We shall see later how important this difference is in the practical problems of our full salvation. But one thing is evident at first sight, namely, that this is implied in the very word Justification. For Justification, in common speech, never means pardon. It means winning, or granting, a position of acceptance. "You are justified in taking this course of action," does not mean, you were wrong, yet you are forgiven. It means, you were right, and in the court of my opinion you have proved it. In religion accordingly our Justification means not merely a grant of pardon, but a verdict in favor of Our standing as satisfactory before the Judge. The Special Problem of Our Justification Here in passing let us notice that of course the word Justification does not of itself imply that the justified person is a sinner. To see this as plainly as possible, recollect that God Himself is said to be justified, in Psalms 51:4, and Christ Himself, in 1 Timothy 3:16. In a human court of law, as we have seen above, it is the supreme duty of the judge to "justify the righteous" (Deuteronomy 25:1), and the righteous only. In all such cases Justification bears its perfectly proper meaning, unperplexed, crossed by no mystery or problem. But then, the moment we come to the concrete, practical question, how shall we be justified, and before God, or, to bring it closer home, how shall I, I the sinner, be welcomed by my offended Lord as if I were satisfactory, then the thought of Justification presents itself to us in a new and most solemn aspect. The word keeps its meaning unshaken. But how about its application. Here am I, guilty. To be justified is to be pronounced not guilty, to be vindicated and accepted by Lawgiver and Law. Is it possible? Is it not impossible? Justification by Faith, in the actual case of our salvation, is thus a "short phrase." It means, in full, the acceptance of guilty sinners, before God, by Faith. Great is the problem so indicated. And great is the wonder and the glory of the solution given us by the grace of God. But to this solution we must advance by some further steps. What Is Faith? We may now fitly approach our second great term, Faith, and ask ourselves, What does it mean? As with Justification, so with Faith, we may best approach the answer by first asking, What does Faith mean in common life and speech? Take such phrases as, to have faith in a policy, faith in a remedy, faith in a political leader, or a military leader, faith in a lawyer, faith in a physician. Here the word Faith is used in a way obviously parallel to that in which, for example, our Lord uses it when He appeals to the Apostles, in the Gospels, to have faith in Him; as He did in the storm on the Lake. The use is parallel also to its habitual use in the epistles, for example, in Romans 4, where Paul makes so much of Abraham's faith, in close connection with the faith which he seeks to develop in us. Now is it not plain that the word means, to all practical intents and purposes, trust, reliance? Is not this obvious without comment when a sick man sends for the physician in whom he has faith, and when the soldier follows, perhaps literally in utter darkness, the general in whom he has faith? Reliance upon thing or person supposed to be trustworthy, this is Faith. Practical Confidence To note a further aspect of the word. Faith, in actual common use, tends to mean a practical confidence. Rarely, if ever, do we use it of a mere opinion, however distinct, lying passive in the mind. To have faith in a commander does not mean merely to entertain a conviction, a belief, however positive, that he is skillful and competent. We may entertain such a belief about the commander of the enemy-with very unpleasant impressions on our minds in consequence. We may be confident that he is a great general in a sense the very opposite to a personal confidence in him. No, to have faith in a commander implies a view of him in which we either actually do, or are quite ready to, trust ourselves and our cause to his command. And just the same is true of faith in a divine Promise, faith in a divine Redeemer. It means a reliance, genuine and practical. It means a putting of ourselves and our needs, in personal reliance, into His hands. Here, in passing, we observe that Faith accordingly always implies an element, more or less, of the dark, of the unknown. Where everything is, so to speak, visible to the heart and mind there scarcely can be Faith. I am on a dangerous piece of water, in a boat, with a skilled and experienced boatman. I cross it, not without tremor perhaps, but with faith. Here faith is exercised on a trustworthy and known object, the boatman. But it is exercised regarding what are more or less, to me, uncertain circumstances, the amount of peril, and the way to handle the boat in it. Were there no uncertain circumstances my opinion of the boatman would not be faith, but mere opinion; estimate, not reliance. Our illustration suggests the remark that Faith, as concerned with our salvation, needs a certain and trustworthy Object, even Jesus Christ. Having Him, we have the right condition for exercising Faith, reliance in the dark, trust in His skill and power on our behalf in unknown or mysterious circumstances. Hebrews 11:1 Is Not a Definition It seems well to remark here on that great sentence, Hebrews 11:1, sometimes quoted as a definition of Faith: "Now faith is certainty of things hoped for, proof of things not seen." If this is a definition, properly speaking, it must negative the simple definition of Faith which we have arrived at above, namely, reliance. For it leads us towards a totally different region of thought, and suggests, what many religious thinkers have held, that Faith is as it were a mysterious spiritual sense, a subtle power of touching and feeling the unseen and eternal, a "vision and a faculty divine," almost a "second-sight" in the soul. We on the contrary maintain that it is always the same thing in itself, whether concerned with common or with spiritual things, namely, reliance, reposed on a trustworthy object, and exercised more or less in the dark. The other view would look on Faith (in things spiritual) rather as a faculty in itself than as an attitude towards an Object. The thought is thus more engaged with Faith's own latent power than with the power and truth of a Promiser. Now on this I remark, first, that the words of Hebrews 11:1 scarcely read like a definition at all. For a definition is a description which fits the thing defined and it alone, so that tile thing is fixed and settled by the description. But the words "certainty of things hoped for, proof of things not Seen," are not exclusively applicable to Faith. They would be equally fit to describe, for example, God's promises in their power. For they are able to make the hoped-for certain and the unseen visible. And this is just what we take the words to mean as a description of Faith. They do not define Faith in itself; they describe it in its power, They are the sort of statement we make when we say, Knowledge is power. That is not a definition of knowledge, by any means. It is a description of it in one of its great effects. The whole chapter, Hebrews 11, illustrates this, and, as it seems to me, confirms our simple definition of Faith. Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses-they all treated the hoped-for and the unseen as solid and certain because they all relied upon the faithful Promiser. Their victories were mysteriously great, their lives were related vitally to the Unseen. But the action to this end was on their part sublimely simple. It was reliance on the Promiser. It was taking God at His Word. I remember a friend of mine, many years ago, complaining of the skeptical irreverence of a then lecturer at Oxford, who asked his class for a definition of Faith. Hebrews 11:1 was quoted as an answer, and he replied, "You could not have given me a worse definition." Now this teacher may have been really flippant. But I still think it possible that he meant no contempt of the Scripture. He may merely have objected, though with needless roughness, to a false rise of the Scripture. He felt, I cannot but surmise, that Hebrews 11:1 was really no definition at all. Definition and Effect It is all-important to remember alike this simplicity of definition and this grandeur of effect in the matter of Faith. It is all-important in the great question of our salvation. Here on the one side is an action of the mind and will, in itself perfectly simple, capable of the very homeliest illustration. We all know what reliance means. Well, Faith is reliance. But then, when the reliance is directed upon an Object infinitely great and good, when it reposes upon God in Christ, upon Him in His promise, His fidelity, His love, upon His very Self, what is not this reliance in its effects? It is the creature laying hold upon the Creator. It is our reception of God Himself in His Word. So, it is the putting ourselves in the way of His own almighty action in the fulfilment of His Word, in the keeping of His promise. "The virtue of Faith lies in the virtue of its Object." That Object, in this matter of Justification, so the Scriptures assure us abundantly and with the utmost clearness, is our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, who died for us and rose again. Here the simplest reliance, so it be sincere, is our point of contact with infinite resources. When lately the Vast dam of the Nile was completed, with all its giant sluices, there needed but the touch of a finger on an electric button to swing majestically open the gates of the barrier and so to let through the Nile in all its mass and might. There was the simplest possible contact. But it was contact with forces and appliances adequate to control or liberate at pleasure the great river. So Faith, in reliance of the soul, the soul perhaps of the child, perhaps of the peasant, perhaps of the outcast, is only a reliant look, a reliant touch. But it sets up contact with JESUS CHRIST, in all His greatness, in His grace, merit, saving power, eternal love. Faith, No Merit One momentous issue from this reflection is as follows: We are here warned off from the temptation to erect Faith into a Saviour, to rest our reliance upon our Faith, if I may put it so. That is a real temptation to many. Hearing, and fully thinking, that to be justified we must have Faith, they, we, are soon occupied with an anxious analysis of our Faith. Do I trust enough? Is my reliance satisfactory in kind and quantity? But if saving Faith is, in its essence, simply a reliant attitude, then the question of its effect and virtue is at once shifted to the question of the adequacy of its Object. The man then is drawn to ask, not, Do I rely enough? but, Is Jesus Christ great enough, and gracious enough, for me to rely upon? The introspective microscope is laid down. The soul's open eyes turn upward to the face of our Lord Jesus Christ; and Faith forgets itself in its own proper action. In other words, the man relies instinctively upon an Object seen to be so magnificently, so supremely, able to sustain him. His feet are on the Rock, and he knows it, not by feeling for his feet, but by feeling the Rock. Here let us note that Faith, thus seen to be reliance, is obviously a thing as different as possible from merit. No one in common life thinks of a wellplaced reliance as meritorious. It is right, but not righteous. It does not make a man deserving of rescue when, being in imminent danger, he implicitly accepts the guidance of his rescuer. And the man who, discovering himself, in the old-fashioned way (the way as old as David before Nathan, Isaiah in the vision, the publican in the temple, the jailor at Philippi, Augustine at Milan), to be a guilty sinner, whose "mouth is shut" before God, relies upon Christ as his all for pardon and peace, certainly does not merit anything for closing with his own salvation. He deserves nothing by the act of accepting all. "God," says Richard Hooker, in that great "Discourse" of his on Justification, "doth justify the believing man, yet not for the worthiness of his belief but for the worthiness of Him which is believed."* So it is not our attitude which we rely on. Our attitude is just our reliance. And reliance means the going out upon Another for repose. [*A Discourse of Justification," Chap. 33.] Once for all let us remember that we may make the falsest use, even under the truest definitions, of both ideas, Justification and Faith. We may think of either of them as the object of our hope, the ultimate cause of our salvation. So thought of, they are phantoms, nay, they are idols. Seen truly, they are but expressions for Jesus Christ our Lord as He is given and taken. Justification is no Saviour, nor is Faith. Justification by Faith-what is it? It is the acceptance of the guilty by reason of a Trusted Christ. "By" Defined So now we may take up the question of that middle and connective word in our title, "by." Justification by Faith, what does it mean? This divine welcome of the guilty as if they were not guilty, by reliance upon Jesus Christ, what have we to think about this? We have seen a moment ago that one meaning most certainly cannot be borne by the word "by." It cannot mean "on account of," as if Faith were a valuable consideration which entitled us to Justification. The surrendering rebel is not amnestied because of the valuable consideration of his surrender, but because of the grace of the sovereign or state which amnesties. On the other hand, his surrender is the necessary means to the amnesty becoming actually his: It is his only proper attitude (in a supposed case of unlawful rebellion) towards the offended power. That power cannot, in the nature of things, make peace with a subject who is in a wrong attitude towards it. It wishes him well, or it would not provide amnesty. But it cannot make peace with him while he declines the provision. Surrender is accordingly not the price paid for peace, but it is nevertheless the open hand necessary to appropriate the gift of it. In a fair measure this illustrates our word "by" in the matter of Justification by Faith. Faith, reliance, is, from one side, just the sinful man's "coming in" to accept the sacred amnesty of God in Christ, taking at His Word his benignant King. It is the rebel's putting himself into right relations with his offended Lord in this great matter of forgiveness and acceptance .... It is not a virtue, not a merit, but a proper means. Union with Christ The word "by," per, lends itself meantime to the expression of another aspect of the subject. One of the great problems attaching to the mighty truth of Christ our Righteousness, our Merit, our Acceptance, is that of the nexus, the bond, which so draws us and Him together that, not in fiction but in fact, our load can pass over to Him and His wealth to us. The New Testament largely teaches, what lies assuredly in the very nature of things, as it puts the facts of salvation before us, that we enter "into" Christ. we come to be "in" Him, we get part and lot in the life eternal, which is in Him alone, by Faith. "He gave power to become the sons of God, to them that believed on His Name." "Believing, we have life in His Name" (John 1:12; John 20:31). Faith is our soul-contact with the Son of God, setting up (upon our side) that union with Him in His life of which Scripture is so full. And thus it is open to us, surely, to say that Justification by Faith means, from one momentous aspect, Justification because of the Christ with whom through Faith we are made mysteriously but truly one. Believing, we are one with Him, one in the common life with which the living members live with the Head, by the power of His Spirit. One with Him in life, we are therefore, by no mere legal fiction but in vital fact, capable of oneness with Him in interest also. The Marriage-Bond "Faith," says Bishop Hopkins of Derry, "is the marriage-bond between Christ and a believer; and therefore all the debts of the believer are chargeable upon Christ, and the righteousness of Christ is instated upon the believer. * * * Indeed this union is a high and inscrutable mystery, yet plain it is that there is such a close, spiritual, and real union between Christ and a believer. * * * So Faith is the way and means of our Justification. By Faith we are united to Christ. By that union we truly have a righteousness. And upon that righteousness the justice as well as mercy of God is engaged to justify and acquit us."* [* E. Hopkins, "The Doctrine of the Covenants."] ======================================================================== CHAPTER 9: - THE DOCTRINES THAT MUST BE EMPHASIZED IN... ======================================================================== The Doctrines That Must Be Emphasized in Successful Evangelism By Evangelist L. W. Munhall, M. A., D. D., Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania First of all, What constitutes Successful Evangelism? Some will answer, "Great audiences, eloquent preaching and soul-stirring music." But I reply, "We may have all these and not have real evangelism; as we may have successful evangelism without them." Others will answer, "Any movement that will add large numbers to the membership of the churches." I reply, "We may have successful evangelism and not many be added to the churches; and, we may have large numbers added to the churches? membership without successful evangelism." Yet others will answer, "A work or effort that will bring into the church people who will be steadfast." I reply, "We may have members added to the church who will hold out, and the work, evangelistically, be unsuccessful; and we may have a highly successful evangelistic work and the accessions to the churches from it not hold out for any great length of time." Let us briefly consider three points: First, No matter how great the multitude, eloquent the preaching and soulstirring the singing, if the God-ordained conditions are not fully met, failure is inevitable. While these things are of value they are dispensable. Great successes have been achieved without them. Second, I have known not a few evangelistic campaigns to be successful, as such, in a marked degree, and one or more churches identified with it, professedly, received but a few members, or none, from the movement. They united in the movement from wrong motives. They were not prepared for the work; were formal, worldly and unspiritual; were without faith. Putting nothing of value into the work, they got nothing out of it. Or the work was not properly followed up. Also, I have known not a few widely advertised and thoroughly organized evangelistic campaigns, in which mere sentiment was far more conspicuous than the Holy Spirit, and the lachrymals more frequently appealed to than the intellect and conscience; and large numbers were added to the membership of the cooperating churches, who knew nothing whatever of the regenerating work of the Holy Ghost. Third, I have known not a few persons who have been faithful members of the church for many years and never been born again-"had a name to live and were dead." There are many churches full of life, and apparently great successes, because of humanitarian, educational and socialistic matters in which they are engaged, and entertainments that they give from time to time; and some of the members who give most time and money to these things, and take most pride in them, are spiritually dead. Also, I have known persons, who were, without doubt, saved and sincere, to unite with the church as a result of an evangelistic campaign, to run well for a season and then fall away; and the falling away was unjustly charged to the campaign. The real cause of it may have been one or more of the following reasons: First, The atmosphere of the church was not congenial, being unspiritual and cold. This is of vital importance to "babes in Christ." Second, In not a few instances the pastors, instead of "feeding the church of God," with "the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby," were like those mentioned in the twenty-third chapter of Jeremiah; or have turned their pulpits into lecture platforms, and the members going for bread received a stone; and in many cases were off after false teachers who promised them what they needed, and what they should have received at home. Third, The positively bad example set by a large majority of the members of most churches, in that they conspicuously fail to meet their solemn obligations to God and the church. And there are yet other reasons for the falling away of the weak and inexperienced. But again it is asked, "What constitutes successful evangelism?" I answer, "Preaching the Gospel according to Divine conditions and directions." In the great commission, as given by Matthew, Jesus said, "Teach all nations." Make disciples, is what the word "teach" here means. Mark puts it in these words, "Preach the Gospel to every creature." Luke states it thus, "Repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations." And in Acts 1:8, Jesus said, "But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto Me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth." The Conditions What are the conditions? First, Discipleship. Jesus commissioned only such. One must know, experimentally, the power and joy of the Gospel before he is competent to tell it out. Second, Power. The disciples were told to "Tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from on high." Since the apostles and disciples of our Lord, who waited personally upon His wonderful ministry and witnessed His marvelous doings, were not qualified for testimony and service without power from on high, we, most surely, must have Divine help. "Without Me ye can do nothing." Third, Faith,-since the Almighty One has said, "For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater: so shall My word be that goeth forth out of My mouth: it shall not return unto Me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it," the proclaimer need have no misgiving as to the result, knowing full well that "He is faithful that promised." The Directions What are the directions? First, "Go into all the world" and tell it "to every creature." The field is the wide world; and the good news is for every soul of man. Second, It is to be "preached." The God-sent preacher is a kerux-a herald. He has no message of his own. It is the King's message he is to proclaim. According to the heraldic law, if the herald substituted so much as a word of his own for the king's, he was beheaded. If this law was enforced in these days a lot of preachers would lose their heads, indeed many have lost their heads, judging by the kind of messages they are delivering. Third, The preacher is to be brave, a witness-martus-martyr. All the apostles, like our Lord, went to martyrdom for faithfully proclaiming the Word of God. The Master said, "If they have persecuted Me, they will also persecute you." And, "Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you, for so did their fathers to the false prophets." Paul said, "If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ." The mind of the natural man is enmity against God; therefore the unsaved demand of the preacher, "Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits;" and a premium is placed upon finesse by many in authority in the church. Because of this, it requires as sublime courage in these days to speak faithfully the Word of God as was shown by Micaiah, when he stood before Ahab, Jehosaphat and the four hundred lying prophets; or Simon Peter when he said to the threatening, wrathful rulers of Israel, "We cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard." There never was so much need of fearlessness on the part of the servant of God as in these days; brave true men, who will not receive honors of men, or seek their own, are absolutely necessary to successful evangelism. The Message Now then, as to the message itself: Timothy was commanded to "Do the work of an evangelist;" and, in doing it, to "Preach the Word * * * with all long-suffering and doctrine." Doctrinal preaching is therefore necessary to evangelistic success. But what doctrines? I answer, First, Sin-its universality, nature and consequences. (a) Universality. "As by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned, * * * by one man's offence death reigned by one, * * * by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation, * * * by one man's disobedience many were made sinners," etc. (Romans 5:12-21. See also Psalms 51:5; Psalms 58:3; Ecclesiastes 7:20; Romans 3:10; 1 John 1:8; 1 John 1:10, etc.) (b) Nature. There are numerous words in the Bible rendered sin; and these words mean iniquity, offence, trespass, failure, error, go astray, to cause to sin, and miss the mark. In 1 John 3:4 we are told that "Sin is the transgression of the law." The word rendered transgression is anomia, and means lawlessness. Failure to conform to the law is as certainly sin as to violate the commandments of God. Unbelief is sin. (John 16:9; John 3:18). In Genesis 6:5 we are told, "God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually," and in Genesis 8:21, "The imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth." The word rendered imagination in these passages signifies also the desires and purposes of the individual. Therefore guilt lies in the desires and purposes as certainly as in the act. The common law requires that one shall have committed an overt act of violation before he can be adjudged guilty. But according to the Divine law one is guilty even though he never committed an overt act, since guilt lies in the desires and purposes of the heart. "Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer" (1 John 3:15). "Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart" (Matthew 5:28). "The Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7). Because of the "lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life," every mouth is stopped and the whole world is guilty before God. (Romans 3:19). The Almighty and Sovereign Creator is infinite in holiness. Therefore His "law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good." Sin is ruinous, heinous and damning: the most awful thing in the universe. (c) Consequences. Sin separates and estranges the sinner from God; and he becomes an enemy of God by wicked works (Romans 8:7), has no peace (Isaiah 57:21), no rest (Isaiah 57:20), is polluted (Ephesians 4:17-19), condemned (John 3:18), and without hope (Ephesians 2:12). Oh, the curse and ruin of sin! If unrepenting and unbelieving, the future has for him, First, inexorable and awful judgment. (See Matthew 25:30-46; Hebrews 9:27; Jude 1:14-15; Revelation 20:11-13; Revelation 22:11-15). Second, the wrath of God. (See Ezra 8:22; Psalms 21:9; John 3:36; Romans 1:18; Romans 2:5; Romans 4:15; Romans 5:9; Romans 12:19; Romans 13:4; Ephesians 2:3; Ephesians 5:6; Colossians 3:6; 1 Thessalonians 1:10; Revelation 6:16-17; Revelation 14:10; Revelation 16:19; Revelation 19:15, etc.). And third, eternal torments. (See Psalms 11:6; Isaiah 33:14; Daniel 12:2; Matthew 3:12; Matthew 22:11-13; Matthew 23:33; Matthew 25:41; Matthew 25:46; Mark 9:43; Mark 9:48; Luke 12:5; Luke 16:22-31; John 5:28-29; 2 Thessalonians 1:7-9; Hebrews 10:28-29; 2 Peter 3:5-12; Revelation 19:20; Revelation 20:14-15; Revelation 21:8, etc.) The preacher who ignores these three awful and inexorable truths preaches an emasculated gospel, be he never so faithful in proclaiming other truth. He who preaches the love of God to the exclusion of God's justice and wrath proclaims but idle sentiment. No one will ever truly desire salvation unless he first realizes that there is something to be saved from. "By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house" (Hebrews 11:7); all of which symbolizes the sinner's condition, need, motive and hope. In no way can the love of God be so clearly, beautifully and convincingly set forth as in the fact that God makes plain to the sinner his condition and peril, and then shows him the way of escape, having, in His great mercy, Himself provided it at infinite cost. Now, at this point the Gospel comes in as indeed good news, showing God's love for the sinner. The supreme motive for the atoning work of our Lord was His infinite love for us. The supreme object had in view was to save us from eternal ruin. "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16). Our Lord, while among men, had far more to say about the doom of the finally impenitent than about love and heaven. Is it not wise and safe to follow His example who said, "The word which ye hear is not Mine, but the Father's which sent Me." How can any minister reasonably expect to have evangelistic success if he fails to imitate the Master in this particular? "When I say unto the wicked, O wicked man, thou shalt surely die; if thou dost not speak to warn the wicked from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thy hand" (Ezekiel 33:8). Second, Redemption through Jesus' blood. "The Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all" (Isaiah 53:6). "The Son of Man came * * * to give His life a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45). "For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit" (1 Peter 3:18). "For He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Corinthians 5:21). "For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth" (Romans 10:4). "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree" (Galatians 3:13). "And ye are not your own. For ye are bought with a price" (1 Corinthians 6:20. See also Leviticus 17:11; Hebrews 9:22; Matthew 20:28; Matthew 26:28; John 3:14; John 3:16; Romans 3:24-26; Romans 5:9; 1 Corinthians 1:30; 1 Corinthians 10:16; 2 Corinthians 5:14-21; Ephesians 1:7; Ephesians 2:13-17; Colossians 1:14; Colossians 1:19-22; 1 Timothy 2:6; Hebrews 9:12-14; Hebrews 9:24-26; Hebrews 10:19; Hebrews 13:12; 1 Peter 1:2; 1 Peter 1:18-19; 1 Peter 2:24; 1 John 1:7; Revelation 1:5; Revelation 5:9; Revelation 12:11). On no other ground than the cross can the sinner be justified and reconciled to God. If the atoning work of our Lord was not vicarious, then the sacrifices, ordinances, types and symbols of the old economy are meaningless and of no value. The moral influence theory of Bushnell is all right for the saint; but the atonement is of no value to the sinner if it is not substitutional. More than thirty years ago, in Denver, Colorado, I met an aged Congregational minister, who was a pastor in Hartford, Connecticut, during Dr. Horace Bushnell's pastorate in the same city. He told me this: "I spent an hour with Dr. Bushnell the day before he died. He then said to me, 'Doctor, I greatly fear some things I have said and written about the atonement may prove to be misleading and do irreparable harm.' He was lying upon his back with his hands clasped over his breast. He lay there with closed eyes, in silence, for some moments, his face indicating great anxiety. Directly, opening his eyes and raising his hands he said, 'O Lord Jesus, Thou knowest that I hope for mercy alone through Thy shed blood.'" Third, Resurrection. "If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain and your faith is also vain. * * * Ye are yet in your sins;" and "they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that are sleeping" (1 Corinthians 15:14-20). Jesus was "declared to be the Son of God with power * * * by the resurrection from the dead" (Romans 1:4). Therefore the apostles and disciples went everywhere preaching "Jesus and the resurrection." (See Acts 2:24-32; Acts 3:15; Acts 4:2; Acts 4:10; Acts 4:33; Acts 5:30; Acts 17:18; Acts 17:32; Acts 23:6; Acts 24:15; Acts 24:21; 1 Corinthians 15:3-8; 1 Peter 1:3-5). "He was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification" (Romans 4:25). "By the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God; angels and authorities, and powers being made subject unto Him" (1 Peter 3:22). "Wherefore He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them" (Hebrews 7:25). Fourth, Justification. "Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; to declare, I say, at this time His righteousness: that He might he just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus" (Romans 3:24-26). "And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath He reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in His sight" (Colossians 1:21-22). "Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth" (Romans 8:33), for "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus; for the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death" (Romans 8:1-2). Believers are "not under the law, but under grace" (Romans 6:14) and can rejoicingly say, judicially, of course, "As He is, so are we in this world" (1 John 4:17). Fifth, Regeneration. The unchristian man is spiritually dead (Romans 5:12), and must be "born again," or "he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John 3:3). Richard Watson defined regeneration as "That mighty change in man wrought by the Holy Spirit, by which the dominion which sin has over him in his natural state, and which he deplores and struggles against in his present state, is broken and abolished; so that with full choice of will and the energy of right affections, he serves God freely, and runs in the way of His commandments." He who receives Jesus as Saviour and Lord, is made a "partaker of the Divine nature" (John 1:12-13; 2 Peter 1:4): "He is a new creature [creation]: old things are passed away, behold, all things are become new" (2 Corinthians 5:17). The Method The following is the method: The words of the Gospel "are spirit, and they are life" (John 6:63). If the repenting sinner receives them into his heart and life to believe and obey them (James 1:21); the Holy Spirit operating through them accomplishes the new birth (James 1:18), and he will be "born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God, which liveth and abideth forever" (1 Peter 1:23). Saved, "By the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost; which He shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour; that being justified by His grace, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life" (Titus 3:4-7. See also John 1:12-13; Galatians 6:15; Ephesians 2:1-3; Colossians 2:13, etc.) Sixth, Repentance. Repentance means a change of mind; and this change of mind is brought about by the Holy Spirit, through the knowledge of the sinner's condition, needs and peril, by which the sinner is convicted "of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment" (John 16:8), and is induced to yield himself wholly, immediately and irrevocably to God. (See Matthew 9:13; Mark 6:12; Luke 13:2-5; Luke 24:47; Acts 2:38; Acts 3:19; Acts 17:30; Acts 26:20; Romans 2:4; 2 Corinthians 7:9-10; 2 Timothy 2:25; 2 Peter 3:9). Seventh, Conversion. Conversion means to turn about or upon. When the unsaved sinner is convinced of sin and resolves to turn from his transgressions and commit his ways unto the Lord, he has repented; and when he acts upon that resolve, and yields himself to God in absolute selfsurrender, he is converted. (See Psalms 19:7; Psalms 51:13; Matthew 18:3; Acts 3:19; James 5:19-20). Eighth, Faith. Until the sinner changes his mind with regard to his relation to God, and resolves with all his heart to do it, his faith is a vain thing, he is yet in his sins; but, when he sincerely repents and turns to God, and believes the record God has given of His Son, his faith is of the heart and unto righteousness. (Romans 10:9-10. See also Hebrews 11:6; Romans 10:17; Galatians 5:22; Ephesians 2:8; Galatians 3:6-12; Galatians 2:16-20; Romans 4:13-16; Romans 3:21-28; Acts 16:30-31; John 6:47). Ninth, Obedience. Faith is a vital principle. "If it hath not works, is dead, being alone" (James 2:17-18). Two things are required of the believer, immediately upon his profession of faith in Jesus as Saviour and Lord, namely, verbal confession and water baptism. "With the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation" (Romans 10:10. See also Psalms 107:2; Matthew 10:32-33; Romans 10:9; 1 John 4:15, etc.) "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved" (Mark 16:16). The believer is not saved because he is baptized; but, baptized because he is saved. We are saved through faith alone, but not the faith that is alone, because "Faith without works is dead, being alone." Water baptism is a divinely ordained ordinance whereby the believer witnesses to the world that he died with Christ, and is risen together with Him," an habitation of God through the Spirit. (See Matthew 28:19-20; Acts 2:38; Acts 2:41; Acts 8:12-13; Acts 8:16; Acts 8:36; Acts 8:38; Acts 9:18; Acts 10:47-48; Acts 16:15; Acts 16:33; Acts 19:5; Acts 22:15-16; Romans 6:3-4; Colossians 2:12; 1 Peter 3:21; 1 John 2:3; 1 John 3:22). Tenth, Assurance. Salvation from spiritual death by the new birth, and from the guilt of sin in justification, immediately follows "repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ." "For by grace have ye been saved through faith" (Ephesians 2:8). "These things have I written unto you, that ye may know that ye have eternal life, even unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God" (1 John 5:13). It is here stated that certain things are in God's Word by which the believer is to know he has eternal life. Here are some of them: "He that heareth My Word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life" (John 5:24). "He that hath the Son hath the life." "Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is begotten of God" (1 John 5:12-13. For confirmation see 1 John 2:3; 1 John 3:14; 1 John 3:24; 1 John 4:20-21; etc.). "And by Him every one that believeth is justified" (Acts 13:39)-an accomplished work. So the Bible uniformly teaches. Believing these words of assurance, one finds peace and joy. It is the business of the preacher to make this matter plain to converts, that they may be surely and safely anchored; and "that their hearts may be comforted, they being knit together in love, and unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding, that they may know the mystery of God, even Christ, in whom are all the treasures of knowledge hidden" (Colossians 2:2-3). There are some other doctrines, of a persuading character, such as Love, Heaven, Hope, Rewards, that may be emphasized to advantage in an evangelistic campaign; but, those I have enumerated will most surely be owned of God in the salvation of souls, if proclaimed as they should be. In going about among the churches as I do, I find three things increasingly true. First, Ministers and people in large numbers are awakening to the fact that the so-called "new theology" and up-to-date methods are utterly barren of spiritual results. Prof. A. H. Sayce once said, "Higher criticism saves no souls." Second, Because of this indisputable fact, very many are turning again to the doctrines of the historic faith, for it is seen that they are still workable and produce results as in former times. Third, Great numbers of ministers are seeing that their ministry is a failure unless it results in the salvation of souls. They really feel as did the late Henry Ward Beecher. While conducting an evangelistic campaign in Brooklyn Tabernacle I one day met Mr. Beecher. As he held my right hand in both of his, he said: "I hear you are having a great blessing in your meetings with Dr. Talmage. I very much wish we could have you for a campaign in Plymouth Church." He trembled as he held my hand. He then said, "But I fear my people would not stand for it." Then, after hesitating for a few minutes he added, "I would like to see an old-time Holy Ghost revival in Plymouth Church before I go hence." He then broke down and cried as if his heart would break .... Three weeks later, to a day, his body was laid in the grave. Life and opportunity are ours. Men are dying, and the whole world lieth in the wicked one, lost in the ruin of sin. Redemption is an accomplished fact, and salvation is possible for all. We have been chosen to tell out the message of life and hope; and are assured of glorious success if faithful; if unfaithful we had better never been born. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 10: - PREACH THE WORD ======================================================================== Preach the Word By the Late Howard Crosby One of the latest injunctions of the aged Paul, just before his martyrdom, was that to Timothy, which constitutes the text of my address, "Preach the Word." Thirty years of Christian experience, fifteen years of apostolic survey, and the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, all spoke in those words. It was a command from heaven itself, not to Timothy only, but to all who fill the office of evangelists or preachers in the New Testament Church. The order, thus succinctly given, is a condensation of all that Paul had said to Timothy or to the Church on the subject of preaching. The sound or healthy doctrine on which he lays so much stress, and the avoidance of fables and the world's wisdom, are both included in this curt command. There has been a tendency from the very beginning to conform the doctrine of Christ to the philosophy of man, to fuse the two together, and to show that all religions have the same Divine element at their roots. This was seen in gnosticism, in the Alexandrian school of Clement and Origen, and in a score of heresies that sprang up within the later Church. The distinctive character of Christianity has displeased the philosophic mind, and men have sought to explain away many of its features from the standpoint of the human consciousness and by an appeal to the teachings of nature. These efforts have certain marks in common. They diminish the heinousness of sin, they exaggerate the powers of man, and they suggest a uniformity of destiny. Sin is a defect, perhaps a disease. The defect can be supplied, the disease can be cured by human applications; the Divine help being valuable as encouragement to the human effort. High civilization and moral reform are what man needs, and these can be obtained by the use of general principles common to our race, of which Christianity is only one of the forms. It is natural and inevitable that, with this teaching, the written Word of God should be neglected, if not ignored. No one can study that Word and then use it for so broad and indiscriminating a purpose. No one can study that Word and then be contented with a superficial polish of society, and a universal brotherhood founded upon such a scheme. Paul saw this tendency in his own day, and he warns the Church earnestly against it. "Beware," is his language-"Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ" (Colossians 2:8). The evil principle is ever at work. Human nature is ever the same. The Church is always subject to the same efforts of human nature within itself to remove the foundations of grace and substitute the inventions of pride. Whether it appears in the form of hierarchical assumption, or in the character of rational inquiry and scientific research, the evil principle hides, mutilates, or contradicts the Holy Scripture. The Scriptures, as they are, with their Divine claim and their uncompromising teachings, it cannot endure, and the appeal to Scripture it counts as a mark of credulity and an exhibition of ignorance. One of the saddest sights in the Church of Christ is the yielding to this spirit of pride on the part of the ordained preachers of the Word. Many modern Timothys use the pulpit for discourses on art and literature; others take the opportunity for the display of rhetoric and oratory; others proclaim an ethics of expediency; while still others seek only to tickle the ears of an audience that desires to be amused. In all this you look in vain for the Gospel. Plato or Aristotle, and in some cases Lucian, could have said it all. Churches are filled by appealing to carnal desires and aesthetic tastes. Brilliant oratory, scientific music, sensational topics and fashionable pewholders, are the baits to lure people into the churches, and a church is called prosperous as these wretched devices succeed. The preacher delights to get himself into the newspaper and he accommodates his preaching to the newspaper level. Such churches will, of course, have worldly-minded officers and a worldly-minded membership, while godly souls either flee from them, or else mourn in secret, if they are not themselves chilled by the lack of Gospel heat. It is directly against all this that the holy apostle utters his clarion cry down through the ages, "Preach the Word." What is the Word? It is not man's philosophy nor man's rhetoric. It is the Divine revelation. It is called the Word of God, because it is not of man. As God's it has both authority and power-authority to demand attention, and power to convert and save the soul. It is not to be pounded in man's mortar, nor run into man's mould. It is not to be twisted and fitted to man's preconceived ideas. It is not to be filtered through man's strainer, nor mixed with man's conceits. It is God's and as God's let no man dare add to it, or take from it, or alter it in any way. The Lord Jesus stands by His cross, where He offered up the sacrifice for sin, and points backward to the Old Testament, and forward to the New, as alike the Word of God. Of the former He cries, "Search the Scriptures"; of the latter He tells His apostles that the Paraclete would come and teach them all things, and they should bear witness. This Old and New Testament is one revelation of God-one Bible-one unerring rule of faith. God has not given us a doubtful and deceitful light for our path. He has not given us a bundle of truth and fable tied up together. He has not left us to our weak and discordant reason, and thus made revelation superfluous. He has given His people a "sure word of prophecy" as the only reasonable guide for our weak reason and our sinful natures; and on this sure Word is His Church built. The doctrines of grace have neither human origin nor human support. They are altogether Divine, and are received only by the soul that becomes partaker of the Divine nature. To go, therefore, to human philosophy or to man's inner consciousness for their confirmation or explanation, is to go to the sentenced criminal to understand the excellences of criminal law. The error of errors is the seeking for the truths of religion from man. It is but the adaptation of religion to the carnal heart. It is the essence of pride and rebellion against God. Thousands of tomes have been written by men who called themselves Christian scholars and Christian philosophers, which are but volumes of confusing metaphysics and specious rationalizing from the basis of natural experience, and which have undermined faith in the Word of God, and utterly perverted the Gospel of Christ. Students of Christian theology waste precious time in studying the works of these conceited thinkers, whose names are lauded as those of giants in the Church, while they are corrupting the pulpit and secularizing the pew. It is a favorite charge of the advocates of this looseness that we are worshipping a Book. "Bibliolatry" is the formidable word that they cast at us; But we worship no book. We do worship God who sent the Book, and it is no true worship of God that slights the Book which He gives. If we honor God, we shall honor the Word He has sent, and we shall be jealous for that Word, that not one jot or one tittle of it be disturbed by the vagaries of dreamers or the impious hands of boasting critics. It is the Word of God, and, as such, we shall not allow, for a moment, the speculations, imaginings, and guesses of men, ever so learned, to weigh a feather's weight against it. They have been convicted over and over again of grossest fallacies in their hot endeavor to detract from the influence of the holy Word, and their criticisms have returned upon themselves to their confusion. What gross absurdities have been promulgated by these learned enemies of Revelation! Myth, romance, the fiction of poetry, a patchwork of traditions, contradictory records, pious fraud, these are some of the labels that the strutting pride of man has affixed to the books of the Bible, while not one of his sneers has been sustained in the light of honest criticism. No scientific truth has been found opposed, and no historic truth misstated, in all the sacred writings, from Moses to John. The most microscopic investigations have been made by the most eager and learned enemies of the truth in order to find some inaccuracy, but not one has been discovered, except those necessarily resulting from the process of transcription, and those imaginary ones which are perfectly resolvable by ordinary common sense. Apply these tests to the Vedas, the Avesta, or the Koran, and the contrast is overwhelming. These fairly bristle with error and falsehood, but the Bible comes out from the crucible without spot, as the pure Word of God. Men just as learned as the inimical critics, and just as thorough in their investigation, men known and revered in the world of letters, have accepted the Bible, the whole Bible, as the inerrant truth of God. If the verdict of the inimical critics can be thus set aside in an equally learned court, the result shows that their learning goes for nothing in the matter. But far above all this testimony to the letter is the witness of millions who have found the joy unutterable and the peace which passeth all understanding in the sacred Volume, and who are drawn to it as a child is drawn to its father, without question regarding his worth and authority. They never suppose (and the position is a right one) that the fountain that refreshes their soul is defective or corrupt, but they value its every drop as a gift of the Divine grace. They go constantly to its blessed waters and always derive strength from the draught. To such the carping critics are as unworthy of regard as those who would argue against the sunshine. The knowledge of the heart is a profounder thing than the knowledge of the head, and, in the Spirit-led disciple, can correct and rebuke the errors of the latter. Now, it is this holy Word, thus spotless and thus powerful for righteousness and comfort, that the Christian preacher is to preach. The preacher is a proclaimer, a herald, not a college professor or an originator of theories. He has the Word given him, and that he is to proclaim. He is not to draw from the wells of human philosophy, but from the stream that flows directly from the throne of God. He is to tell the people what God has said. He is to hide himself behind his message, and to receive it equally with those he addresses. Nor is the preacher the mouthpiece of a Church to issue ecclesiastical decrees and fulminate ecclesiastical censures. This is as far from preaching the Word as the other. As a herald of Christ, while there is nothing before him but human hearts and consciences to appeal to, there is nothing behind him but the revealed Word of God to utter and enforce. All Church commands laid upon him as to his preaching are as nothing except as they are conformed to that Word. He is responsible as a herald to God and not to the Church. He is God's herald and not the Church's. The same reason that forbids him from making the people's approbation the guide to his preaching will forbid him from making Church authority the guide. He will be happy to please both people and authorities, but he cannot make that pleasing a criterion or standard. His duty is above all that. His allegiance is higher. IN THUS LIMITING HIMSELF TO THE PREACHING OF GOD'S WORD, THE PREACHER IS NOT CIRCUMSCRIBING HIS POWER, BUT ENLARGING IT. By the jealous use of that Word alone he will accomplish far more for the kingdom of Christ and the salvation of men than by mixing human expedients with the Word. Human expedients are very specious and attractive, and, alas! many preachers betake themselves to them. They think they will attract the multitude and fill up the pews and produce a larger rental; and so they may, but these are not the objects for which the Lord sent out His heralds. Success is not to be reckoned by full houses and popular applause, but by convicted and converted hearts, and by the strengthening of the faith and piety of God's people. A holier life, a more pronounced separation from the world, a stainless integrity in business pursuits, a Christly devotion to the interests of others, a more thorough knowledge of the Word these are the true signs of success which the preacher may justly seek, even though he wear homespun and his people meet in a barn. These are the glorious results which the consecrated soul will pray for, and in them he will rejoice with a purer, holier joy than that which comes from numbers, wealth, or popular admiration. IF THE PREACHER PREACHES THE WORD ONLY, THEN HE WILL TEACH HIS PEOPLE TO HANDLE THE WORD-to follow him in his reading and expounding-to study over the Scripture lesson at home, and to pray its blessed truths into their souls. A people will, in this way, become mighty in the Scriptures; and he who is mighty in the Scriptures is a mighty power for Christ and salvation, and in his own soul will have a full experience of the power of Divine truth, deriving it directly from its source, and proving how the entrance of God's Word giveth light. STILL AGAIN, IF THE PREACHER PREACHES THE WORD ONLY, HE WILL HIMSELF BE A DILLIGENT STUDENT OF THE WORD. He will bathe in God's revelation and be permeated by it; and so be proof against all the shafts of ignorance and conceit. He will become familiar with every detail of the sacred history, chronology, ethnology, geography, prophecy, precept, and doctrine, and will take nothing at second hand. He will not go to Pope or Council, nor to Calvin or Schleiermacher, to know what to preach, but his delight will be in the law of the Lord, and in His law will he meditate day and night. It is a lamentable fact, that in too many of our seminaries where preachers are prepared for their work, the Word of God is not taught, but in its stead the philosophic schemes of so-called "fathers" and great divines are given as the basis of doctrinal belief. It is true, that these schemes are brought to the Scripture for support, and texts are quoted in their defence, It is true also that some of these schemes are consonant with Scripture more or less. But, with these admissions, the mistake still exists, that the Word of God plays a secondary part in the instruction. It is not taught; that is, it is not made the authoritative text-book. It is even sometimes introduced as a subject for criticism, and men like Reuss and Robertson Smith are brought in as the critical guides or, at least, helpers. As if a school of the prophets was intended to examine the credentials of God's Word, and not to take it humbly and gratefully for personal use and for use before the people. Some theological schools might without exaggeration be called "schools for turning believers into doubters." The excuse, that men who are going to be preachers should know all that is said against the credibility, genuineness, and authenticity of the Scriptures, is a flimsy one. If that were the object, these objections would be considered only by way of parenthesis, and the overwhelming evidence of the Scriptures would be the main current of thought; but this is not the way it is done. On the contrary, the objections are magnified, and their authors are commended to the students for their perusal, and the hint is often thrown out that conservative views of the inspiration of God's Word are antiquated, obsolete, and marks of ignorance. We have thus, in the very places where, most of all, we should expect to see the profoundest reverence for God's Word, and its faithful study for the understanding of the Divine will, the machinery for undermining the doctrine of Scripture inspiration and authority, on which all Christian truth rests, and that, too, in the young minds which are being prepared to become Christ's preachers to a sinful and dying world. It is a most painful thought, and it becomes the Church of Jesus Christ to arise to a sense of the evil, and to correct it before the whole Church is poisoned by this insidious influence. We wish our young Timothy's to go out to their work with the one controlling desire to put God's Word before the people and to avoid questions and strifes of words which do not minister to godly edifying, knowing that the power to convert and edify is not the wisdom of man, but the power of God. In these days when so much is made of science, let them leave science alone. All the knowledge of the material world, which science deals in, has nothing to do with the soul's salvation. That is in a different sphere altogether. While it is in accordance with propriety that a preacher should have a general acquaintance with life and things about him, which would include the main principles of natural science (which is simply to say that he ought to be an educated man), yet it is not through material science that he is to teach heavenly truths, nor is he to waste his time on protoplasm, bathybius, and natural selection, into which and like subjects Satan would gladly draw him, that he may not present the subjects of sin and the cross of Christ. If a preacher illustrate Scripture doctrine from facts in the natural world, it is well. He follows the Master's example. But if he puts the natural world in its scientific aspects forward as the text of his discourse, he is using a Bible of a very weak and uncertain sort, and of which he knows very little, and he is making the Word of God subordinate to his own inferences and guesses from nature. Science and religion are too often spoken of as if they occupied the same plane. Both those who say they are antagonistic, and those who say they are at one, equally talk of the two as on a level. You might as well talk of bread-baking and religion as if they were co-ordinates. Of course there is a connection between science and religion. So there is between bread-baking and religion. The scientific man ought to be religious. So ought the bread-baker. Science can furnish examples of God's wonders in nature. So can bread-baking. But such connections cannot put the subjects on the same level. Science is merely the study of matter, an examination into natural sequences; but what has that to do with man's immortal soul, and the Word of God to that soul? Who dares to bring the latter down to the level of the former? What has the analysis of any body and its division into carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen to do with my eternal relation to God as a responsible and sinful being? Why mingle things so utterly diverse? And yet this babble about science and religion (where science is always ever put first) is heard ad nauseam from those who are commissioned to preach the Word. Is this Paul's way? Is this John's way? Is this Christ's way? Then why should it be the way of our modern Timothys? Science at its utmost reach can never touch the sphere of the soul's pressing wants. All its truths together can make no impression on a guilty conscience needing the Divine pardon. Nature is as dumb as any of its own stones in the matter of the soul's salvation. Then why meddle with it in the pulpit? Why bow to it as a teacher? Why be guilty of the blasphemy of putting it on a level with the Word of God? It is as preachers depart from that Word that their preaching becomes barren and fruitless. The Divine Spirit will only accompany the Divine Word. His mighty power will act only in His own way and by His own means. The Word is supernatural, and woe to the preacher who leaves the supernatural for the natural; who sets aside the sword of the Spirit to use in its stead a blade of his own tempering! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 11: - PASTORAL AND PERSONAL EVANGELISM, OR WIN.... ======================================================================== Pastoral and Personal Evangelism, or Winning Men to Christ One by One By Rev. John Timothy Stone, D. D., Chicago, Illinois, Ex-Moderator General Assembly Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. The story of evangelism is the specific history of the Cross Of Christ. Great movements and revivals have made up much of its general history, but slowly and quietly through the years and centuries the Evangel has won, as men and women have led their fellow human beings to repentance and have by precept and example followed in the footsteps of their Lord. Jesus Christ won most of His followers and chose His Apostles one by one. He called men to Himself, and they heard and heeded His call. The multitudes sought Him and heard Him gladly, but He sought individuals, and those individuals sought others and brought them to Him. John the Baptist said: "Behold the Lamb of God," and Andrew his disciple heard and followed. Andrew found his own brother Simon and brought him to Jesus. Jesus the next day found Philip and bade him follow Him; Philip found Nathaniel and answered his questionings by the Saviour's previous reply, "Come and see." The Master called Matthew from his unworthy work, and so the other Apostles. Saul of Tarsus was arrested by the Divine individual call as he pursued his intense and terrorizing campaign against the early Christians. His "Who art Thou, Lord?" was followed by his complete surrender as he asked, "What wilt Thou have me to do?" All through those first decades of the early Church, and on through the ages, individual work for individuals has progressed and accomplished results. How largely the Gospels, the Acts and the Epistles verify this fact! Even the marvelous work of Philip in Samaria was not the immediate plan of God, but the Spirit sent him past Jerusalem, down into the desert at Gaza, that he might win the Ethiopian eunuch to Christ, and through him no doubt countless hosts of Africa. The missionary journeys and efforts of Paul were filled with personal service. His letters are filled with personal messages. Some of his most important letters, such as Philemon, the Timothys and Titus, are addressed and written to individuals. His winning of Onesimus in Rome, and the letter to Philemon which resulted, is one of the most effective and beautiful experiences recorded in all the Word of God. God has used men mightily in reaching vast multitudes of people, even from the days of His own ministry and the days of Peter and his associates at Pentecost. Even at this time, two hundred years after his unparalleled ministry, we are reminded of George Whitefield, who preached at times to fully thirty thousand people in the open air, and won his thousands and tens of thousands. We recall the vast multitudes who were reached by our own Moody and Sankey; we note the vast audiences who flocked to hear Mr. Spurgeon, week after week, year after year. The strong evangelists of our own generation verify before our very eyes God's honor placed on those to whom He gives such signal power. But our thought goes back to the great universal method our Lord Himself instituted, of reaching the individual by his fellow man. The Almighty could have so arranged His Divine plan that He Himself, without human help, might arrest and enlist followers as He did with Saul of Tarsus, but this was not His plan. By man He would reach men. Human mediums of power must do His wondrous work. Man must go, in the power of His Spirit "into all the world, to preach the Gospel to every creature." And His promise was sure and permanent: "Lo, I am with you alway." God's Holy Spirit The first requisite in winning men to Christ must be the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. "It is expedient that I go away from you, for if I go not away, the Holy Spirit will not come." With His presence "greater works" than the works of Christ "shall ye do." "Ye shall receive power when the Holy Spirit is come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses." To live in the power of God's Holy Spirit, and to know that He is present and will lead, is in itself an assurance of a joyful and successful service. The Spirit will constantly "call to our remembrance the things of Christ," and hence we may not be anxious as to the words we are to speak, for He will direct us and speak for and through us. So many times we are fearful and embarrassed, but this will not be the case if we are under the influence momentarily of God's Spirit. "He will guide us into all truth." "He will not speak of Himself," but will glorify Christ. That which we say in weakness He will use with power, and "His word will not return unto Him void, but will accomplish that whereunto it was sent." We may always take for granted His preparation, for He does not send but calls us. His word is not "Go," but "Come." Thus we will always be on the alert for opportunities to speak the things He would have us, and our words and thoughts will be those which He suggests and honors. We will be nourished constantly by His Word within, and equipped with His sword for sustained protection and aggressive attack. If His Word abides in us, we will never be weak in body, nor unprepared and weaponless. His Spirit will also give us courage and endurance, and the fearless one who has stability and patience need not fear the unexpected nor the aggressive opponent. The Spirit of God also pre- pares the one whom we must approach, and is working in his heart as well as with our words. Prayer is also a real factor in our lives, and we live in His presence by the true conversational method of association. As God speaks to us through His Word, so we talk with Him in prayer, and the place and surroundings are of little relative importance, as we are always with Him and He with us. The word we speak and the act we perform is the expression of Himself, and the impression is bound to be His as well, for our association with Him takes others into His presence as they communicate and associate with us. We may pray before and after and as we speak with others, and do it so naturally and impulsively that we may actually live in the atmosphere of prayer without hypocrisy and without pretense. And prayer will become more and more a power in our work as we approach individuals from the very presence of the unseen but not unknown God. Assurance and confidence result, and we are agreeably surprised with ourselves to find that our happiness does not depend so much upon the evidence of our success as upon the consciousness of our faithfulness. We will also seek to win others to Christ that they too may be used by His Spirit and associated with Him, rather than simply to obtain salvation; not what we can do for them, but what God's Spirit can and will do with them. The Spirit of God will also lead us to gain from others the experiences and methods through which they have gone to learn to do this work for Him; hence conferences and testimony will take on new life and gain keener interest. We will overlook littleness, and the greatness of God is seen in His confidence placed in those who win others to Him. Criticism will give place to appreciation and suggestion to expressions of gratitude. We will see in others what God sees, and fail to see what we have seen before by way of fault and error. We will also learn to take the difficult things to God in prayer instead of taking them to men in controversy, and will be surprised to find how many easily adjust themselves for us. God's Spirit will also prompt us to spend longer seasons alone and seriously think upon life's greatest issues and values. Prayer will be less general and more specific and individual. Souls will mean more, and things less. Lives will become more attractive and fascinating, and books, papers and stories will only control interest when related to lives which can be influenced for and by Him. The last verse of "In the Secret of His Presence" asks the real question: "Would you like to know the secret of the sweetness of the Lord? Go and hide beneath His shadow; this shall then be your reward. And whene'er you leave the silence of that happy resting place, You must feel and bear the image of the Master in your face." This will be the result, and others will be won by you as they see in your very face the reflection of Christ, because His Spirit dwells within you. The Bible A second most necessary element in winning men to the Master is a knowledge and appropriate use of God's Word. We must be workmen who need not to be ashamed, who can rightly divide the Word of Truth. The use of the Bible is the greatest advancing weapon for Christ. The worker who knows his Bible will constantly read it for strength and apply it in dealing with the unconverted. He will not argue with men, nor talk about God's Word, but he will explain with it, and repeatedly refer to it. An open Bible before and with an inquirer almost always means conversion and spiritual growth to follow. When dealing with your subject, ask if he has ever considered what the Bible says on the point under discussion. For instance, a man tells you he does not take much stock in what you have been saying about the necessity of the Cross; it seems somewhat foolish to him. Do not be angry, but reply pleasantly that you do not blame him a bit, in fact, Paul himself writes, in his first letter to the Corinthians, that men will feel exactly that way. Tell him you appreciate his frankness, and meanwhile pull your Testament from your pocket or take it from the table, and turn to the passage in First Corinthians, one, eighteen; or better still, hand him another copy of the Bible open to the place, and read from your own copy: "For the preaching of the Cross is to them that perish foolishness, but unto us which are saved it is the power of God." Then, before he is angered or troubled about that word "perish," ask him to notice in the same connection the twenty-first verse, just below: "For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe." These passages will at least arrest his attention, and unconsciously interest him somewhat in reading the Bible himself. I well remember a somewhat like experience to this suggested, which happened in my parish calling years ago. I was talking in the office of a man who was a confessed unbeliever, when he made some such criticism of a former sermon he had heard. I followed the course outlined, and after reading the verses, he remarked upon their application, and told me he would "look into the Pauline writings." He became later a fairly regular attendant in church, and sometimes came to our Bible class. From such a chapter as that, I would take a man into the second chapter, which attracts one from the very first sentence, "I came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God, for I was determined not to know anything among you but Jesus Christ and Him crucified." Then read the fifth verse: "That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." Then the ninth verse, with its wonderful vision: "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him." This verse will prove a vista to many to scenes beyond. Ask a man who doubts God's love for him if he has ever carefully considered that his salvation does not so much rest upon his confidence in his own belief as in God's confidence in him. Tell him that faith grows by use and action. Ask him to pray, "Lord, I believe; help Thou my unbelief." Turn to Hebrews, eleven one, and read it from the Revised Version, which is far stronger in this verse: "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." Then go on with this great "Faith chapter." Stop and dwell upon some of the references, if it will add to the interest. Remember to have an open Bible before your companion as you read. Reading to a man will not help a listener and reading with you will. Let the eye help the ear, and make it personal by letting him follow you as you read. Perhaps sometimes ask him to read an occasional verse that needs emphasis, and then you comment on it, asking him to read on. If a man does not understand how God can love him, do not discuss it, but turn to First Corinthians, the thirteenth chapter, and read it slowly and thoughtfully. Always begin that chapter with the last verse of the twelfth: "And yet show I unto you a more excellent way." Change the word "charity" to "love." When you get to the fourth verse, intersperse a remark such as this: "Have you ever read anything more wonderful than this: 'Love suffereth long and is kind, love envieth not, love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil.'" Why, each verse of this wonderful chapter will grow more and more impressive as one reads on. Then read through the first verse of chapter fourteen, which gives us the admonition, "Follow after love and desire spiritual gifts." Ask a man if such attainment as this isn't worth while. Turn before he answers to John three, sixteen: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." "For God came not into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved." In other words win a man by the love of God. Before he can question again, ask him to turn, or better, take his Bible and turn for him, to Luke the fifteenth chapter, and beginning with the eleventh verse, read together the parable of the Prodigal Son. Then quickly and easily turn to First John, the third chapter: "Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God. Therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew Him not." Read on a way in that chapter, and then turn over to the fifth chapter and read there. Then turn to Revelation three, twenty, and read: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear My voice and open the door, I will come in to him and he to Me, and he shall go in and out and find pasture." Tell him in connection with this verse the story of Holman Hunt, the great artist who painted, "The Light of the World." Describe the picture till he recalls it, of Christ standing before the latticed door, knocking, holding a lantern in the other hand, the distant love in the Master's eye showing that the interest of His thought was within the cottage. Tell him how Holman Hunt, after the picture had been painted, called in a friendly artist to criticise the picture. His friend, after scrutinizing the picture, said, "But you have no latch on the door." "No," replied the great painter, referring to this verse, "the latch of this door is on the inside. 'Behold I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear My voice and open the door.'" Show how Christ respects the human life by knocking and not forcing His entrance, and how if the individual opens He will come in and abide. If you have one burdened with a sense of his own guilt and sin, turn to Isaiah one, eighteen; "Come now and let us reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." Then turn to Romans seven and eight and read with him from verse fourteen. I have personally known more men reached by these chapters than by any others. They are a sort of photograph or mirror to most men of their own very lives. Just note that fifteenth verse: "For what I do, I allow not; for what I would, that do I not, but what I hate, that do I." Then verse seventeen: "Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me." Read on, verse after verse, until you get to that powerful verse, the eleventh of the eighth chapter. Then you will have to stop. "But if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His Spirit that dwelleth in you." This verse will inspire most men who need it. It lifts a man out. of himself. There is actual life power in its truth. The thrill and longing is liable to come especially after a man has realized what sin is doing in and for him. I have known many a man look UP at that verse and ask if it could be possible for him to attain such a thing. Of course it can. That eleventh verse, led up to aright by that which precedes it, will arouse almost any heart. Then take a man right over to chapter twelve: "I beseech you, therefore, brethren." Tell your man how the first eleven chapters of Romans are the theory of Paul's great theme of "Justification by Faith," and that now in the twelfth we have the practical, hence the "therefore." "I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service, and be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God." Tell a man the glory of sacrifice, and what it means to live that kind of a life, subject to God's will. Turn over then to Ephesians three, the fourteenth verse, and read Paul's great prayer with him, telling him you want him to know how a man who felt those truths of Romans could pray for other men. Then read all that prayer, Ephesians three fourteen, through verse twenty-one. Re-read verses twenty and twenty-one. This verse will lead us to our knees, and that means victory. Let us consider in this connection the subject of: Prayer We do not estimate the place and power prayer has in winning others to Christ, prayer for others in intercession, and prayer with others as we take them individually into the very presence of God. First, prayer for them. No matter what your method or lack of method may be, take those for whom you are working up to God in prayer. Pray for them by name; pray that you may approach them aright and appeal to them with Divine wisdom. Pray that you may be able to put yourself in their place, and be patient as Well as wise with them. Pray that you may turn to the right Scripture, and use the appropriate illustrations, to help them. Pray that you may lead them to Jesus instead of talking with them about Him. Pray that they may be responsive and willing. Pray that their sins may not hinder them from giving their best selves to the consideration of this all-important subject. Pray that they may see in you that vital interest and real sincerity which will actually arouse them. Pray that their companions and surroundings may not prove a barrier or hindrance to them. Pray that you may converse with them on the essentials and not spend the time on unimportant and relative matters. Pray that you may not be timid or careless, but fearless, clear and exact. Pray that human sympathy and love may influence you to show your heart and soul to touch and melt their hearts. Pray that just the favorable opening may come to you, and that you may be ready to use it. Pray most of all for the Holy Spirit's power with you. Then Secondly, pray with the individual. After Scripture has had its chance, and decision should be reached, get your friend on his knees, and ask him to decide after you have poured out your heart to God for and with him. I have known more men who have yielded on their knees than anywhere else. At just the right time, when genuinely prompted by loving impulse and sincere motive, your hand placed upon his shoulder may help him make the decision. To let one know you love him for Christ's sake breaks many a heart. When thus praying, no matter how cold your heart may have been, you will feel three are present rather than two, and the third is the Saviour of men. When you pray with the one for whom you are working, be most specific and plain in your petition. Then ask him to pray for himself. If he cannot, frame his prayer for him, and ask him to repeat. Bring him then and there to a decision if possible, and seal the occasion with prayer again. Pray frequently between questions, if led. Remember the destiny of a human soul is in the balance. Pour out your soul to God and labor with Christ for that soul. When nothing one could say, quote or argue would help or convince, I have seen men yield on their knees and rise to their feet happy and confident in Christ. Sometimes a subtle and unconfessed sin is lurking in the mind or heart, and that keeps from decision. On one's knees in prayer, this is liable to be yielded, and the life freed from the fetters of concealed guilt. Sometimes an unforgiving spirit is the cause of delay. There is no place so sure to overcome bitterness or hatred as the place of prayer. Leading the human life into the place of prayer will bring Divine power into the work, and conquers where you might fail. Another form of prayer for the individual may be used by putting down upon a list or card the names of those for whom you are praying. We have in our own church a small card which is distributed occasionally at the prayer service and at other spiritual gatherings, which is entitled "Prayer List." On it there are spaces for names, and a blank line for the name of the signer and the date. A small footnote states that a copy of the card may be mailed to the pastor, although it is not required or urged. The list is for the individual Christian, a definite prayer for a definite soul. Many of these cards are handed in to me, and we thus unite in prayer for these souls. It is a real method of binding pastor and people in prayer for individuals. A prayer list which includes all your friends is a most inspiring and useful method. One whom you see each day will be next in alphabetical order to a missionary in central India or in Japan. Home problems will come sometimes next to far-distant hopes, and the whole world comes to your very room through the power of prayer. As the years go by, so many whose names are there before you give themselves to God, and so many causes for gratitude come. In days past, I tore up a card When the heart yielded to God, but now we leave the card just the same, for one needs prayer surely after conversion fully as much as before, that growth and grace may abound. Prayer for individuals also makes one alert when opportunities open to speak to them, and directs aright conversation at such times. It also frees us from mind-wandering and perplexity in prayer. We grow specific and very definite, and learn to ask for those things which we really want. Friendship and companionship mean more when we realize that we are meeting each other through Christ at the throne of grace, and individuals are conscious of greater power than human speech when they know that you are praying for them. Recently, when a man yielded to Christ, he replied, when told by his friend he had long prayed for him: "Well, I knew something was influencing me, for I have felt unhappy and dissatisfied until now, and it was not natural for me to be troubled about myself." Prayer is, then, a most effective and powerful agency in winning others. We ought also to pray more in our public utterances for the immediate and direct result of our preaching; that souls may be converted; that hearts may be arrested in sin and turned to God. Dr. Maltbie Babcock used to pray for a verdict then and there, that souls might yield during that very service. When a congregation feels that a preacher actually expects results, they begin to expect and pray for them too. If the soul hungers for souls, then public as well as private prayer will claim them. Method and Means We must now take up the subject of method and means. The method is, after all, secondary, and if it becomes too set and orderly, it will be self-destructive, for as soon as one sees your method, the heart and mind are steeled against it, and there is little or no interest. When God's Spirit leads, we are responsive to all kinds of openings and ways. Instead of studying approach we simply advance as the plan opens before us, and we find ourselves doing in an unexpected way the very work we have always hoped to do. A revival of God's Spirit means the disregard of former ways and means, and an initiation of new and untried channels. We regard and value less the method, and seek only for the result. It is wise and right for us, however, to consider methods and means. Christ Himself began His work with reaching individuals and training them to work for others. When Dr. Bruce wrote "The Training of the Twelve," he gave us the scholarly development of this truth. The Founder of our faith gave Himself largely to twelve men, and one of these was not worthy and another extremely vacillating. With them He walked, to them He revealed Himself in conversation, precept, parable and miracle. They grew like Him and followed His teaching. Five hundred millions of souls today honor Him as His followers, but He did not gain this vast multitude of myriad tongues and tribes by organizing a great band, but by the selection and training of twelve men. True, the multitudes sought Him, as they had followed John the Baptist, but He did not seek the multitudes. Great throngs followed many of those early disciples and preachers, even up through the latter centuries, and many were mightily used in preaching to great throngs of men, but Christ's method still remains He sought individuals. What if He had never talked with that poor Samaritan woman at the well-side; we would never then have had those wondrous words in the fourth chapter of John: "Whoso drinketh of this water shall thirst again; but whoso drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." (John 4:14) What if these words had never occurred in the Gospels?-and they would not if Christ had not passed through Samaria and taken pity on that poor sinful woman and talked with her. What if He had never spent time with Nicodemus when he sought the Master by night? What rich and significant words those He uttered then on regeneration: "Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth; so is every one who is born of the Spirit." Suppose Christ had never overtaken the two disciples as they walked to Emmaus after His crucifixion, and we had never known those words of His and that experience they had as their hearts burned within them. He turned and saw the two disciples of John who had heard John the Baptist say, "Behold the Lamb of God." Andrew went from Christ to find his brother Peter, and brought him to Jesus. The next day Jesus Himself found Philip and told him, "Follow Me." Philip found Nathaniel. All through His work on earth, Christ saw and found individuals. Zacchaeus was called out of a tree, Matthew from a moneychanger's seat, but these men became winners and leaders of other men. Saul of Tarsus was not let alone because he was a persecutor, but was arrested on a highway with a personal word and question. His reply was: "Who art Thou?" and "What wilt Thou have me to do?" Paul, although a great preacher, worked too with individuals, in no more beautiful way ever illustrated than in the touching love he showed for Onesimus, the Phrygian runaway slave, whom he sent back to his master and Paul's friend at Colossae, Philemon. The greatest advantage which the large meeting has is so interesting individuals in the truth that they will inquire from individuals who are ready to help them, as to the application of the truth they hear. A valuable series of meetings is only sure in interest and result as individuals invite, seek and lead others to be present, and then follow them by individual effort. The successful revivals of today must follow this method if permanent and large results are to be attained. God works through men, and individuals must reach other individuals. One of the most efficient means some have used is that of training men and women to call upon those in their neighborhood and personally invite them to services-not a formal invitation, but a call in which they may get acquainted and feel at home with one another; one call followed up with another until a friendliness springs up and there is a response, There are many departments in church life that take this work up, such as the Home Department of our Sunday Schools, pastors' aid and visitation societies, and relative organizations; but there should be a more definite personal responsibility put upon our members as they come into our church, in reaching others, and in extending to them the definite invitation to attend God's house and give their lives to the Master. The Church of Christ universal has an immense force in herself to face the work of winning others to Christ, but we have not used that force. The foreign missionary lands have appreciated this fact in the work they are doing, and in some places the condition of winning others has been imposed upon new members before they are accepted into full communion. For instance, before a new member is received into the Korean Church, the convert must not only confess his faith in Christ, but also lead another to Christ. What if our membership were really working for others individually, and were trained with that in view? What if we called the attention of our new members to this very obligation and expectation? Some of our churches have had no new members for several years, and some have very few. On the other hand, here is a great force of hundreds of thousands who are not working in the very line of activity which it is their privilege and duty to use. Suppose a church with one hundred members so impressed this upon fifty per cent of its membership that each one of those fifty should win one soul to Christ. It would mean that that church added fifty per cent of its membership the next year. If a church of five hundred members were to use twenty per cent of its membership, each winning one soul a year to Christ, that would be a hundred members added to that church. On the other hand, why should we not expect that many of our members should have one or more representatives at every communion? This would mean, if five or six communions were held during the year, that fifty such workers would add from two hundred fifty to three hundred to the membership of that individual church in a year. Now, there is no question that a pastor has his definite work of preaching. He must also realize that, no matter how intense and far-reaching that work may be, his pre-eminent work should be in his pulpit; but it is also his work to shepherd his flock, and a shepherd cannot properly do that work without teaching his flock to follow him. He first must be an inviter and winner of men to Christ, and he must train his people to follow him. The great need of the Church today is a work within herself, in which her members may become individual and definite workers for the Lord Jesus Christ, and the winners of others to Him. In some of our churches, this method and means of reaching others has been carefully and thoroughly organized, so that regular organizations of young people and others go out regularly to do this work in their neighborhood, inviting others to attend the church and afterward winning them individually to Christ. We do not find that all such visitors are able immediately to become personal workers, but we do find that this work tends to lead them to desire to do that work, and in many instances leads them into efficient service. In our own church, hundreds upon hundreds have been won in this way, and we now have from fifty to sixty young people who are doing this work regularly, week after week, the result being that the influence is felt upon all our services, and hundreds are present at our services who would not be there except for this personal invitation and direct association. We would here quote from a recent book upon this subject, which I prepared for the work in our own church here in Chicago: "Some five years ago, in reviewing carefully a ministry of about fifteen years, I was convinced of certain effective and many ineffective results. This practical inventory led me to consider the method, means and value of relative activities. It was very clear to me that much public work had nor yielded results equal to certain private and personal service, although the latter is more easily known and tabulated. It was also evident that the work of the preacher and pastor is not concluded in bringing men to Christ, but in inspiring and training them to become the winners of others. "In talking with colleagues in the ministry and gathering occasional evidence from varied churches, I discovered that a great weakness in the Church exists in a lack of masculine spiritual leadership-the difficulty of finding strong men to fill spiritual offices and to lead in spiritual service Boards of Trustees being more easily filled than Elders' or Deacons' Boards, men more responsive to ushering or even to taking official duty, than to taking a Sunday School superintendency or class, or attending and participating audibly, in the weekly prayer service. I also found men ready to relieve one in distress or assist materially in any emergency, who seemed embarrassed and helpless when asked to assist or direct in things spiritual. "Since this actual condition has been discovered, the effort has been made to remedy it by giving constant and faithful attention to individual Christians, not only pointing out the way of growth through exhortation and inspiration, but through instruction, example and personal direction. "The community in which our church is placed has many thousands who are unreached and unattracted by any church. It has large numbers of youths of both sexes and many young families. Although there are many whose homes are permanent, even a larger number are transient and hence apt to scatter and drift farther from all moorings. "No pastor nor force of professional assistants can hope successfully to reach such a field, but trained membership can, and young men and young women who are interested, instructed and directed can see in such a neighborhood a vast storehouse of raw human material which may be made into finished product for God. Better still, such latent life may become energized and utilized to win and save itself with responsive, joyful life. "Organization has accomplished much, but the work and worker need Divine inspiration and spiritual food as well, and the Word of God, prayer and common sense combine to make the work effective and permanent. This little handbook is thus sent out to assist in meeting that need, that the hundreds of young men and young women already won may become winners of others; and primarily that the half hundred young people now working on these Invitation Committees may have a ready reference in time of immediate need. "We have also felt that our need may be the need of others elsewhere,and cordially extend to you as well, our comradeship." In connection with this same little volume, there are certain practical notes which we would also give to you: "One cannot use God's Word without studying it. "You cannot win others to Christ unless you believe in Him and keep near Him yourself. "He must work through you. 'Apart from Me ye can do nothing.' "Prayer must be a reality and a power to you. 'Ask, and ye shall receive.' "Confidence in Christ's power must attend your effort. 'I can do all things in Him which strengtheneth me.' "Common sense means putting yourself in the other man's place. Do not merely argue. Use the Word of God. "Do not do all the talking; win the confidence of the one for whom you are working, and let him tell his story. "Do not be in haste. Remember 'God's delays are not denials.' Work and wait. Be patient and persistent. "Pray with your man as well as for him. Don't be afraid of falling on your knees in the presence of another. "Get him to pray for himself. "Learn to pray anywhere and in any posture in an office or an automobile, in a quiet spot on the street, standing, sitting or kneeling, but always reverently. "Get your man alone. Do not present the matter when another is present. (Exceptional cases may occur, as at times when talking with husband and wife). "Study your case beforehand (when possible). "Do not approach your case with fear but with prayer and faith. 'It shall be given unto you... . what you shall speak.' "Learn how by doing, and gain confidence through experience. "Remember you are not only Christ's representative but that God's Holy Spirit is working through you. The power is His. "Approach and do your work with a happy heart and with joy. Always show that 'the joy of Jehovah is your strength.' "Beware of the temptation to postpone. The evil one prompts such suggestion. Many a man is never asked to give his heart to Christ because a good impulse was averted by indecision and the false plea of 'a better time to speak.' "If you fail, do not be discouraged, but determine to get nearer to God and to gain more power through your apparent failure. Write a good letter to the one you have failed to reach or failed to find after repeated calling. Many have been won by correspondence. He knows you are interested very definitely if you write. "Win back to service the Christian man who has lost interest, and lost touch with Christ and the Church." Robert Speer has well said, "When we love men for what we know Christ can make them, we shall go after them for Him." We might add, "To persuade one soul to lead a better life is to leave the world better than you found it." God has certainly a very definite work for individuals to do in His Kingdom, and the Christian worker needs to realize that his duty is to set people to work and to train them in this service. Another very effective method is by correspondence: So many times when we do not find people at home, or when we are not able to approach them as we desire, if we would sit down and write a direct and personal letter, it would have its weight and influence. Several years ago I knew a pastor who was very much discouraged with his work, who entered upon this method, and it resulted in a large accession to his church at the next communion. He has always been a different man and valued aright the power of the pen in personal correspondence. It should not be a substitute for a personal interview, but is a wonderful addition to it, and where the one is denied the other can be used. The ways and methods for reaching others are manifold, and thank God they are as diversified as the personalities and training of those who are workers. God has new methods and ways to use constantly, but we must be alert in this great work, and reach out in faith and in earnestness. One of the best means of reaching others is to be able to put one's self directly in the place of another, to feel his temptations, to understand his difficulties, and to be willing to meet him upon his own ground and with his own needs. If we can establish this human sympathy, we have gone a great way toward reaching others. Another most effective way must be through the Sunday School and through the regular channels of active association. Whatever we can do to bring to others the positive need of settling this question for one's self, communicants' classes, catechetical classes, individual pastor's classes, all such methods should be used. A pastor should get into the public and private schools of the boys and girls of his own parish, to know where they live and what their work is and what their problems are, and then he should plan in some way to meet them individually. A pastor should go to the various Sunday School classes in his own Sunday School, not regularly or at stated times, but sometimes informally or by definite arrangement with the teacher, thus getting into touch with the scholars and meeting them upon their own ground. He should also arrange special classes, to meet them and talk over their relationship to Christ. All through the church, he should have those who are so interested in individuals that they will take to him the special cases and refer them to him. But after all, the greatest method in the world, the greatest means of all in winning others to Christ, is that of persistent, patient, faithful prayer. This, followed by action and associated with all the details of service, will be rewarded. Times of revival will spring up. Others will wish for special services and methods and will suggest them, and before we know it our churches will be alive with a newness of material, and we will find that men and women are not only crying out, "What must we do to be saved?" but "How may we win others to the Master?" We will all become "workmen who need not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of Truth," and we will realize that God's Word shall not return to Him void, but "shall accomplish that whereunto it is sent." Surely, "He that winneth souls is wise." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 12: - THE SUNDAY SCHOOL'S TRUE EVANGELISM ======================================================================== The Sunday School's True Evangelism By Charles Gallaudet Trumbull, Editor of "The Sunday School Times," Philadelphia, Pennsylvania There are more than thirty million persons reported in the enrollment of the Sunday Schools of the world. But if all these persons, and all church members as well, knew what the Sunday School is really for, the enrollment would leap upward millions upon millions. The Sunday School is often spoken of as the child of the church, or the church of tomorrow, or a branch or department of the church. It is more than any and all of these. The true Sunday School is the Church of Jesus Christ engaged in systematic study and teaching of the Word of God for three great purposes: to bring into the body of Christ those within the membership of the Sunday School who are not yet members of the church or of Christ; to train up those who are in Christ into a full-grown knowledge and appropriation of the riches which are theirs because they are. Christ's; and to send out into the world fully equipped, victorious soul-winners who shall be Christ's living epistles to those who do not yet know Him. The whole superb work of the Sunday School centers about its text-book, the Word of God. Bible study in the Sunday School is made the means of the three-fold purpose of the Sunday School. The Sunday School is the great organized movement of the Church of God for Bible study which has for its end salvation, character building, and equipment for evangelism. Or to describe the work of the Sunday School partly in theological terms, the purpose of the Sunday School is Bible study for justification, sanctification and service. Whoever needs to know what the Bible has to say about next-world freedom from the penalty of our sins, and this world freedom from the power of our sin, together with the supernatural power of God as the equipment of the full grown man for service, may properly be in the Sunday School. Only those who do not need the fullest possible message of the Bible on these subjects can logically stay outside the Sunday School. And that means that few can logically or safely stay outside the Sunday School. The true Sunday School is the whole Church of God engaged in systematic Bible study to ascertain the whole will of God as revealed in His Word for their lives. With the cradle roll at one end of the age limit for non-attending members and the home department at the other end for nonattending members, there is little reason today for any one to remain outside the membership of the Sunday School. It is not necessary to attend the Sunday services of the Sunday School in order to be a member in full and regular standing. Literally the entire church membership can with great profit be enrolled: babies, invalids, shut-ins, traveling men, mothers tied down by home duties, railroad men, telegraph or telephone operators,—the Sunday School welcomes the representatives of every walk in life. Blessed stories are told of the home department, such as of the engineer miles from his Sunday School, safeguarded in the cab of his locomotive by his nearness to his Lord, and rejoicing in his privilege of studying the same Sunday School lesson that the boys and girls in the home school are poring over. Or about the telegraph operators who, miles apart from each other, compare notes over the wire about their Sunday School lesson. Cradle roll members don't do much reading or studying for themselves; but when the enthusiastic, tactful, loving cradle roll Superintendent hurries around to a home in the neighborhood and asks for the name and enrollment of the baby not yet twenty-four hours old, you may be sure that that household, especially the father and mother, are not offended at this show of interest in the little life which is all the world to them. And stony hearts that may have seemed hopelessly remote from the Gospel have been warmed and won to a wide-open acceptance of the love of Jesus Christ because the littlest member of the family first entered the Sunday School through the cradle roll. Thus it is that, from any way we look at it, the true Sunday School is a mighty evangelistic agency. If the Sunday School isn't evangelistic, it isn't the Sunday School. It may bear the name of the Sunday School, but that does not make it one. The true Sunday School Of the Church of Jesus Christ exists solely to make the whole wonderful reach and splendor of the Good News better known, both to those within and without. A young crockery merchant in New York State who rejoiced in Christ as his Saviour had found that when he flung himself in conscious helplessness on his Lord and asked to be used for the saving of others, his Lord took him at his word. Saving souls became his great joy and interest. He wanted to do more systematic work in that line, and to know the Bible in a more systematic way. The city in which he lived numbered one hundred thousand people; but he found that there was not a men's Bible class connected with any Sunday School there numbering as many as ten members. Yet there were sixteen thousand young men in that city. While his own home church was being decorated, the entire Sunday School just then meeting as one class in a rear room, this man-hunter noticed some young men waiting outside to walk home with their girls after school. He invited them to crawl in under the rafters of the partially finished church, and with him find a place for a Bible class that he then and there asked them to form with him. They liked the novelty of the idea, and the class was formed, the members sitting on the back of a seat while their teacher faced them, standing. Under the scaffolding, amid dirt and plaster, he taught his first men's class, praying and telling the lesson story in simple language. From that beginning the young crockery merchant got more and more interested in bringing together young men for organized Bible study in Sunday School classes. In six months his class of eighteen had grown to one hundred and eight. In the next seventeen years, three hundred and fifty-two men were won to Christ in that one class. He gave up his crockery business to give his whole time to young men's Sunday School Bible classes. After he had brought three hundred thousand men into the Sunday School for organized effort and systematic Bible study, his ideas got large, and he went on until he actually began to talk about wanting a million—not dollars, but men. It is not as easy to get a million men enrolled in an organized Bible class movement as it is to get three hundred thousand, even if you have a whole continent to work in; and perhaps some didn't expect to see "the man who wants a million," as he liked to call himself, succeed during his life-time in his expansive wish. But he got his million; and now he signs his letters, "Yours for a million more." Marshall A. Hudson, Founder and President of the World's Baraca Bible Class Union, has shown what just one department of the true Sunday School can be and do as a mighty evangelistic agency. His work would not stay limited to men, but has reached out to a similar work for women, the Philathea movement. The quiet, persistent, undefeatable evangelistic work of the Sunday School is going on all the time, in ways not as widely known as is the blessed work of the Baraca and Philathea classes, but none the less effective on that account. The writer had once been speaking at the mid-week meeting of a city church on personal soul winning, and had, among other things, urged the duty of being willing to risk mistakes in doing this work, rather than make the greatest mistake of saying nothing for Christ. After the meeting a woman came up and told him of her experience. She was a Sunday School teacher with a class of girls, and she had longed to lead to Christ one of her class. She shrank from having a face-to-face talk upon the subject with the girl, but finally determined to make the effort, and she went to see the girl at her home. She found her in; and although she had ample opportunity alone with her to speak of the purpose of her call, her courage failed her, and, talking about anything and everything but that for which she had come, she finally rose and said goodbye without having once mentioned the subject. Starting home in discouragement, the teacher had not gone far from the house when she wheeled around and went back again. She rang the bell once more. The girl came to the door herself; and this time the teacher, not trusting herself to go inside and sit down again, told her young friend as they stood together in the doorway why she had called to see her, and in a blundering, faltering way said that she wished the girl would give herself to Jesus Christ as her Saviour. Then she left the house for the second time, and went home, but not before the young girl had shown her that she was very angry with her teacher for having dared to speak so directly on that subject to her. At the next communion service of their church the teacher was overjoyed to see that young girl among those who publicly confessed the Lord Jesus Christ as their Saviour. Hurrying over to the girl, at the close of the service, the teacher told her how glad she was that she had taken this step. And then she said to her, "Tell me, what was it that finally influenced you to do this?" "Why, it was what you said to me that day you called," was the reply. And a Sunday School teacher was glad that she had dared to "make a mistake" for her Lord. There are many methods of evangelism of which the Sunday School makes blessed use. "Decision Day" when wisely observed has resulted in great blessing. On this day a direct appeal to accept Jesus Christ as Saviour is made from the platform to the school or the department as a whole, and opportunity is given for formal response in the way of signed cards or otherwise. The observance of such a day is most blessed when there has been earnest, faithful preparation for it in prayer, by teachers and officers. It seems better not to have the day announced in advance to the school, but only to teachers and officers, that they may prepare for it in prayer and in personal work. But the all-the-time evangelism of the faithful teacher is the surest and most effective. Most effective, that is, if accompanied by all-the-time prayer. Prayer meetings of the teachers for the conversion and consecration of the pupils is a secret of the continuously evangelistic Sunday School. What sort of teaching is done in the Sunday School in which true evangelism is conspicuous? It is teaching that assumes that the whole Bible is the inspired Word of God; unique, authoritative, infallible. The acceptance of destructive criticism's theories and conclusions can have no place in this teaching. The evangelistic school knows that all men (and "men" means men, women and children) are lost until saved by the blood of Jesus Christ. The teaching in such a school brings out clearly the lost condition of the entire human race by nature, and recognizes no possibility of salvation by education, character, or any other works of man. It gives full recognition to education as the duty and privilege of the Christian, but it does not substitute education for salvation. The evangelistic Sunday School holds up the Lord Jesus Christ as the only Saviour of men, accepting the Word of the Holy Spirit that "neither is there any other name under heaven, that is given among men, wherein we must be saved." And because no man or created being can save another created being that is spiritually lost, the uncreated deity of Jesus as Saviour is recognized and declared. The new birth, accomplished by the Holy Spirit in the one who believes in Jesus Christ as Saviour, marks the passage from death unto life—that is the Gospel of the evangelistic Sunday School. The workers in such a Sunday School know that no human being can save a soul; they know that no human being, no matter how faithfully and truly he tells the story of salvation and offers the Gospel invitation, can win another soul to Christ or enable that soul to believe on Christ as Saviour. It is recognized that this act of acceptance and belief is not the result of human teaching or telling or persuading or inviting, but is a supernatural work of God. Therefore the evangelistic teacher depends chiefly upon prayer to succeed in the chief mission of the Sunday School. The teacher recognizes that prayer is the great secret, the great essential of effective evangelism. The evangelistic teacher prays souls into salvation before even expecting to be used to that end in teaching or personal conversation. Not all so-called Sunday Schools are evangelistic. Not all are being supernaturally used of God in the miraculous work of bringing lives into the new birth and the new life in Christ Jesus. There are dangers that threaten the Sunday School of today probably more than in any preceding generation. These dangers not only threaten; they are disastrously and effectively at work in many schools. The undermining work of the destructive criticism has crept into Sunday School lesson helps. Not only in so-called "independent" courses of Bible study but in helps on the International Lessons, issued by regular denominational boards, are found lesson comments that assume the error and human authorship of parts of the Bible instead of inerrant, inspired authorship. It has been a distressing thing to many to note this terrible encroachment of the Adversary as he uses the very tools of the Church of Christ to lead teachers and pupils away from the hope of eternal life. For, as has been well pointed out, the Adversary's first move is to discredit parts of the Bible, then the atonement of Jesus Christ, then the deity of Christ. And without a Saviour who is God the "evangelism" of the Sunday School is not the Good News. Not long ago "The Sunday School Times" had occasion to investigate a certain "Completely Graded Series" of Sunday School lessons (not the International Graded Lessons) of which the publisher said: "These lessons are already in use in thousands of up-to-date Sunday Schools. The various courses of study have been prepared under the direction of men who are recognized as authorities in this country in religious education, and they therefore embody the results of the latest scholarship." Upon looking into the lesson courses themselves, such statements as the following were found: "It is easy to see that the age that produced the Gospels would not be anxious for scientific accounts of the deeds of Jesus, but that it would expect of Him exactly the acts that are attributed to Him. It is possible therefore that some events, like the restoration of the centurion's servant, were simple coincidences; that others, like the apparent walking of Jesus on the water, were natural deeds which the darkness and confusion caused to be misunderstood; that others, like the turning, of water into wine, were really parables that became in course of time changed into miracles. As nearly all the miracles not of healing had their prototypes in the Old Testament, many of them at least were attributed to Jesus because men expected such deeds from their Messiah, and finally became convinced that He must have performed them.—EDITOR." The foregoing paragraph was from a help for the Intermediate teacher. In a similar volume for the Junior teacher there appeared the following discussion of the reasonableness of miracles: "There are some scholars who find traces of this tendency to magnify the marvelous even in the Gospels themselves, which, with all their uniqueness, are human documents, written by flesh and blood human beings. For example, in our story of Jairus' daughter, Mark's account, as we have seen, leaves us in doubt whether the little girl was really dead, or only in a swoon, or state of coma. In Matthew's later account, however, we find that Jairus says to Jesus, 'My daughter is even now dead.' When they reach the house, flute players, hired for the funeral, are already on the scene. This increases the marvel of the story, but does not seem to add to its moral significance. It is possible that not a few of the accounts of miraculous deeds, attributed to Jesus, are the product of this same tendency. By this is meant the tendency to magnify the marvelous, as seen in apocryphal legends, arising from a 'vulgar craving for signs and wonders.'" Junior teachers were told, in explanation of the omission of the story of Ananias and Sapphira: "This fear is explained by the story of Ananias and Sapphira, which precedes this sentence in the complete text of Acts. This story is like a number of other ancient narratives, in that the facts are probably recorded with substantial accuracy; but the author's own interpretation of these facts seems to us, in these days, not altogether satisfactory. There is no reason for doubting the account of the deception practised on the apostles by this unscrupulous couple, Ananias and Sapphira; nor the account of Peter's rebuke; nor the statement that they both died shortly after receiving the rebuke. In that period of the world's history people would inevitably conclude that this death was a direct manifestation of the Divine wrath invoked by Peter. This interpretation, however, seems inconsistent with the Christian conception of God as a loving and patient Father. On account of the primitive ideas which it reflects, the story has been omitted from the Junior Bible." As was editorially stated in "The Sunday School Times," which discussed this series of lessons, it is only too true that: "There are those who have not taught the whole Christ of the New Testament and the Old, but have been busy about the presenting of a different and lesser Person. They have followed and taught Jesus of Nazareth as the ideal teacher and leader, acknowledging Him as indeed the most extraordinary development among the noblest sons of God, and the Gospel story of Him as usually reliable, but they have not been presenting Jesus unreservedly as the eternal Christ in all that the Scriptures in their uttermost struggling for full expression claim that He is; as all that He was, very Life itself to the disciplined mind and the revolutionized personality of Paul; as all that He is to those who daily testify in word and deed to liberty from the crushing bondage of sin by His indwelling." The same editorial discussed the peril of teaching a "modified Christ." It went on to say: "It is no uncommon thing to find teachers of the Bible who are thus teaching a modified Christ. The cautionary attitude, to say the least, of a type of influential scholarship, on the trustworthiness of the Scriptures, and the encouraging of suspended opinion as to the claims of Christ, are more confusing and insidious in their results on the mind and the life than a flat denial of cherished truth by confessed unbelievers. The New Testament writers, on the one hand, are not wholly able within the range of human vocabularies to find language that will release the streams of inspired truth concerning the Lord Jesus. In their most rapt ecstasy, as in their apologetic, they cannot exalt the Christ as they would, because not He, but language, is inadequate. They simply cannot say enough of Him. But, on the other hand, there is a type of modern scholarship not without its influence upon the trained and untrained Bible teacher alike, which is careful not to say too much of Jesus. There is a restraint in its deliverances about Him, a cautious and reserved detachment, which would seem to belong as a method rather to the outside observer than to the inner disciple. Ethical and social leadership and supremacy are freely attributed to Jesus, but this type of Biblical scholarship does not seem, in dealing with Jesus, to be dealing with the same eternal Christ who was disclosed to John and Peter and Paul and others of like mind and experience. Indeed, the limitless ascriptions of John, the sweeping declarations of Peter, the passionate abandon of Paul, by no means characterize this kind of scholarship. On the contrary, its Jesus is far less than the New Testament Christ; its New Testament a record quite open to reasonable doubt. Yet the superior advantages of lesson helps embodying the results of this attitude toward Jesus and the record of his life are widely urged upon teachers and pupils in the Sunday School today." Just here those who have the Sunday School at its highest point of evangelistic efficiency should have clearly before them the facts concerning the course of Graded Lessons issued by the American Section of the International Committee. It is a seventeen year course, of which sixteen years of study have been issued, running from the first year "Beginners, for four-year-olds, through the third year Senior, for nineteen-year-olds." The writer had occasion to discuss this course of lessons in the columns of "The Sunday School Times" just before the International Sunday School Convention held in Chicago in June of 1914, and takes the liberty of printing here a portion of what was said at that time: "These lessons are rendering a greatly needed service in awakening the Sunday School world to the claims and rights of the child. They are showing what a supremely delicate and difficult task it is to bring to the child, in the way that child nature is entitled to, the instruction that God intends. It is to be hoped that these lessons have made it impossible for the Sunday School ever to go back to what may have been its former carelessness, indifference, and ignorance on this subject. "There is welcome evidence that the Graded Lessons are resulting in bringing pupils to decision for Christ. Mrs. Bryner, the International Elementary Superintendent, recently published, in the state Sunday School papers the results of her inquiry of state and provincial elementary superintendents concerning the spiritual results that can be reported from the introduction of the Graded Lessons; and the testimony was most encouraging. One school reported that the number of Juniors coming naturally into the church had increased seventy-five percent since the adoption of these lessons in that school. "In the First Year Senior there is excellent topical study offered on 'The Needs of the World,' 'The Standard of Success,' 'The Challenge to the Individual;' and this year offers also two complete book studies, taking up the Book of Ruth in three lessons and the Epistle of James in nine lessons. "The opportunity for complete book study is still further extended in the Third Year Senior, just issued by the Lesson Committee, offering opportunity for brief, rapid surveys of more than twenty of the books of the New Testament. The doctrine of salvation is well taught here also, in a lesson devoted to 'Developing the Theology of Salvation,' from Romans. "In such points as these, and in many other admirable opportunities for thorough-going Bible study, the International Graded Lessons offer the Sunday School a rich field for profitable work. "Yet in spite of all this there are other factors in this series of Graded Lessons that are fairly characterized as regrettable and harmful. If one asks why these words should be used, here is the answer: "Because there are elements here that tend to minimize or ignore the unique and supreme character and authority of the Bible as the inspired Word of God; that tend to blur the line between the natural and the supernatural; that tend to place nature study on the same plane as Bible study in gaining a knowledge of God; and that tend to a lack of emphasis on certain vital doctrinal teaching of the Gospel of Christ. "Extra-Biblical lessons have been inserted throughout this Graded series, that is, lessons the material for which is drawn chiefly from other literature than the Bible. In one instance—in the Second Year Intermediate, a full six months is devoted to the study of 'Later Christian Leaders,' including such characters as Luther, Calvin, John Wesley, the Earl of Shaftesbury, and Florence Nightingale; and three months of the six are devoted to the study of a single modern missionary, Alexander Mackay. A note from the Lesson Committee points out that the material upon which these three months? lessons are based is found in the well-known book 'Uganda's White Man of Work,' the Committee having previously said: 'It is intended that a more careful analysis of a single character shall prepare the pupil for the nine months' study in the life of Christ which will immediately follow in the lessons for the Third Year Intermediate.' Just what effect will it have upon fourteen-year olds to bring in, a book of this sort, as, in a sense, parallel material to the Bible's record of the life of our Lord Jesus Christ' To be sure, Scripture material is suggested for each of these extra- Biblical lessons, but the Scripture material is subordinate, and the extra-Biblical material is the main theme for study. "As is well known, in response to a widespread protest the Lesson Committee in 1911 issued Biblical lessons to run parallel to all the extra-Biblical lessons in the Graded Series, and to make such other, minor modifications as seemed to it desirable. These Biblical lessons do not replace the extra-Biblical lessons; they 'take their place beside the extra-Biblical lessons in the lists already issued.' The International Lesson Committee therefore stands before the Sunday School world committed to offering the Sunday School constituency material from other sources than the Bible as its chief material for study in numerous Sunday School sessions. "And it has been done with deep-seated conviction on the part of those who favor it. At the conference on the International Lessons held in Philadelphia in 1914, a prominent leader in the work of the Graded Lessons said publicly, and with intense earnestness: 'We deny at every point that our course is a BIBLE course; our course is a CHILD-TEACHING course.' "As we speak of 'the Sunday School' today, we refer to the very limited opportunity for Bible study offered in the session of an hour or so on Sunday, where the actual Bible studying, Bible teaching period is about thirty minutes. This is the church's chief and only Bible teaching service, at present, in the vast majority of churches. To give any other form of material than the Bible the right of way in this restricted period is a perilous thing. The church must have a service of Bible study and Bible teaching. Its very life, and the life of the home and the community, depend upon this. Nothing that is extra-Biblical can be permitted to encroach upon that vital part of the church's work. It will be a sad day indeed when this question is considered even debatable by the majority of the members of the Church of Christ on earth. "It is important to recognize also that there is no real dilemma between the Bible and child-teaching. We do not have to. choose between the two. We must have them both, and we can. The Bible is God's best provision for child-teaching. "There is a real danger, also, in using nature as the chief material for Sunday School teaching, even with the youngest beginners. Nature ,study has its valued place as material to illustrate Bible truths. Our Lord used it in that way. But there is no such revelation of God in nature as there is in the Holy Scriptures. Nature is natural; the Bible is supernatural. The two are in no sense equal revelations of the heart of God and of the Gospel of Christ. Indeed, nature is a sin-distorted, sin-cursed thing. God made this very plain when He said in the Garden of Eden, 'Cursed is the ground for thy sake; ... thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee,' as He told Adam and Eve how they had degraded even the earth beneath their feet through their sin. It may not be necessary or wise that the little child should be taught this; but it is very necessary that the teacher should have this in mind in using nature material to illustrate the ways and the love and the protection of the Heavenly Father. It puts sharp limitations upon our use of nature materials, and it suggests that such nature material, in and of itself, should not be the leading material in any lessons for Sunday School study. "Apart from the question of nature studies as such, there is present in the 'International Graded Lessons the modern steadily encroaching atmosphere of the 'natural' as over against the 'supernatural.' The atmosphere in many colleges today is an atmosphere that denies the supernatural. There are evidences, here and there throughout this scheme of lessons, of such a handling of the Bible as one would give to any other book. Such lesson titles, for example, as 'Gideon, the Man Whom Responsibility Made Great' (First Year Intermediate), 'Abraham—The Challenge of an Ideal' (Second Year Senior), 'The Development of Religious Ideas in Early Israel' (Second Year Senior), are hints of this; as is also the note on Lessons 17 to 22 of the First Year Intermediate, 'David, the Man Who Showed Himself Friendly': 'the aim is to show that David's power to make and retain friends explains his career and his character.' This ignoring of God's sovereign grace as the secret of David's career is not sufficiently offset by the close of the note, that David's 'intimate, constant, and childlike fellowship with God was the supreme friendship of his life, exalting and directing his actions.' "And there is a certain inadequacy in some lesson topics, a failure to reveal the stupendous riches of the Scripture truth that is to be taught. An example of this is to be seen in the Third Year Senior topics for the study of the Epistle to the Galatians: 'Paul's Assertion of Independence,' 'The Bondage of Tradition,' 'The Christian Idea of Freedom.' The wording of these topics does not do justice to the great eternal spiritual truths of bondage to sin under the law versus the life of victory-by-freedom in Christ which this Epistle so gloriously brings out. "Many would have been glad to see somewhere in these lessons, among the many statements of aim and purpose of the courses for the different years, a declaration of aim that the pupil shall come to recognize man's lost condition as constituting our need of a Saviour. This is nowhere stated. It is stated that the lessons have the aim of bringing the pupil to the personal acceptance of Jesus as Saviour and Lord; and that is good. But a clear declaration of the universal need of the new birth would have given increased doctrinal strength to the series. This lack is accentuated by such expressions as the following: 'The average age of thirteen calls for a new type of lessons which shall make their appeal to the new sense of selfhood and the new hunger for a satisfying personal ideal.' The emphasis seems to be chiefly 'to deepen the impulse to do right,' rather than to show (not necessarily to the youngest children, but certainly somewhere during the series) the hopelessness of any one's doing right except through the regenerating presence of the Holy Spirit made possible by the acceptance of Christ as Saviour."* [* Representatives of two denominational Sunday School Publishing Boards have stated that the helps published by them are free from the objections noted. I. J. Van Ness, Editorial Secretary of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board (Nashville, Tennessee), writes: "Many denominations have made radical modifications for themselves. The Southern Baptists have issued a complete series of periodicals for these lessons, using only Biblical material, and making material changes in the lessons for the Beginners, Primary and Junior Departments. The Lesson Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention entirely reconstructed the Intermediate Committee, but making changes in the arrangement and in the titles. The series of lessons which we are putting out is essentially different from that which you condemn, and has few, if any, of the points which you point out." Marion Stevenson, of the Christian Board of Publication (St. Louis, Mo.), writes: "It should be noticed that we are following the Biblical lessons so strongly approved by the International Sunday School Association at San Francisco and also at Chicago. As your editorial stands, it is a blanket indictment of the Graded Lessons, to which we would respond that we are not guilty. The characteristics complained of are true of hardly any graded literature except that published by the Syndicate. But the Syndicate is a diminishing association. Since its organization the Presbyterian bodies have withdrawn and are preparing their own literature, thus leaving the Syndicate to the Methodist Church, North and South, and to the Congregationalists. Some smaller denominations are selling agents for the Syndicate material. But from the first the Baptists, North and South, and the Churches of Christ, have chosen their own writers. The indictments against the Syndicate material may not therefore be drawn against all graded lesson literature. They are certainly not true in regard to the graded literature prepared by the Christian Board of Publication." Every movement away from the perils that would injure the Sunday School is to be heartily welcomed; and the writer gladly gives prominence to these letters of denominational leaders." Against all such encroachments upon the Word of God, upon the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and upon a clear vision of men's eternal need of that Gospel, the Sunday School of true evangelism must stand with the firmness of the Rock of Ages. Only the power of Christ can enable us to stand thus firmly in the strength of Christ. He is doing just this, with blessed results, for Sunday Schools that ask Him to do so upon His own terms. The Social Service program, which includes so many things Christian in spirit, but which in many cases so disastrously puts fruit ahead of root, is a danger against which the Sunday School needs to guard, especially in its adult classes. The salvation of society regardless of the salvation of the individual is a hopeless task; and the Sunday School of true evangelism will not enter upon it. But the Sunday School that brings the good news of Jesus Christ to the individuals of any community lifts society as the usual Social Service program can never do. A striking illustration of this principle has been noted in the work of Evangelist "Billy" Sunday. Sunday preaches the individual Gospel of the apostolic church. He says little about social service. But the community-results where Sunday's evangelism has had an opportunity are revolutionizing. There is no social service worker in America today whose work can compare, in the very results for which the social service program aims, with that of Sunday's. And so the Sunday School of true evangelism will do an effective work in social service; but it will do it in the Lord's way. One last word. If the Sunday School is really to do its work as an evangelizing agent, the Sunday School must consist of workers whose personal lives are radiant with victory. The Sunday School of true evangelism declares with convincing power the message of the victorious life. Here is an evangel, a Good News, which is all too new to many a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ who rejoices in the Sunday School as his field of service. But our Lord wants it to be the experienced possession of His every follower. Evangelism that is limited to the Good News that there is freedom from the penalty of our sins is only a half-way evangelism. It is a crippled, halting evangelism. If we would tell "that sweet story of old," let us tell the whole story. And the whole story is that our Lord Jesus Christ came, not only to pay the penalty of our sins, but to break the power of our sin. He laid aside His glory and came from heaven to earth, not only that men might be saved from dying the second death, but also that they might live without sinning in this present life. Here is Good News indeed; so good that to many it sounds too good to be true. But, praise God, it is true! When the Holy Spirit says to us, "Sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under law, but under grace," He means it. When Paul declared in the exultant joy of the Spirit, "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin," he meant it. It was true. And the same Spirit of life in Christ Jesus is making men free today from the law of sin, when they are ready to take Him at His word. When the beloved Apostle wrote, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, "My little children, these things write I unto you that ye may not sin," he meant just that. When our Lord Jesus Himself said, first, "Every one that committeth sin is the bondservant of sin"; and then, instead of leaving us hopelessly there, went on to say: "If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall, be free indeed," He was trying to tell us what His whole salvation is. The victorious life is not a life made sinless, but it is a life kept from sinning. It is not, as has well been said, that the sinner is made perfect here in this life, but that the sinner even in this life has a perfect Saviour. And that Saviour is more than equal, while we are still in this life, to overcoming all the power of our sin. The Keswick Convention in England has for forty years been blessedly used of God in spreading abroad the Good News of the Gospel of victory over sin. The life that is surrendered unconditionally to the mastery of Jesus Christ and that then believes unconditionally in the faithfulness of that Saviour Lord to make His promises true, begins to realize the meaning of the unspeakable riches of God's grace. There are Sunday School teachers who are rejoicing today the privilege of telling their classes the whole message of true evangelism. May God mightily increase the numbers of those who shall bear witness, by their victorious lives and by their eager glad message, to the whole evangelism of the Word: the saving and the keeping power of our wonderful Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Then, "If He shall be manifested, we may have boldness, and not be ashamed before Him at His coming." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 13: - FOREIGN MISSIONS OR WORLD-WIDE EVANGELISM ======================================================================== Foreign Missions Or World-Wide Evangelism By Robert E. Speer, Secretary Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, U. S. A., New York City Argument in behalf of foreign missions is generally either needless or useless. It is needless with believers; with unbelievers it is useless. And yet not wholly so; for often believers and unbelievers alike have taken their opinions at second hand, and an honest first hand study of the facts and principles of. the missionary enterprise leads the one group to believe with deeper conviction and a firmer hope, and shakes the scepticism and opposition of the others who have known neither the aims nor the motives which inspire the movement. Because foreign missions is a religious movement, however, the fundamental argument for it is of necessity a religious argument, and will be conclusive only in proportion as the religious convictions on which it rests are accepted. It rests first of all upon God. If men believe in God they must believe in foreign missions. It is in the very being and character of God that the deepest ground of the missionary enterprise is to be found. We cannot think of God except in terms which necessitate the missionary idea. He is one. There cannot, therefore, be such different tribal or racial gods as are avowed in the ethnic religions of the East, and assumed in the ethnic politics of the West. Whatever God exists for America exists for all the world, and none other exists. And that cannot be true of God in America which is not true of Him also in India. Men are not free to hold contradictory conceptions of the same God. If there be any God at all for me, He must be every other man's God, too. And God is true. To say that He is one is merely to say that He is. To say that He is true is to begin to describe Him, and to describe Him as alone He can be. And if He is true He cannot have taught men falsehood. He will have struggled with their ignorance in His education of mankind, but it cannot have been His will (or be His will now) that some men should have false ideas of Him or false attitudes toward Him. A true God must will to be truly known by all men. And God is holy and pure. Nothing unholy or impure can be of Him. Anything unholy or impure must be abhorrent to Him, if in religion the more abhorrent because the more misrepresentative of Him, the more revolting to His nature. If anywhere in the world religion covers what is unclean or unworthy, there the character of God is being assailed. And God is just and good. No race and no man can have slipped through the fatherly affection of a loving God. Any inequality or unfairness or indifference in an offered god would send us seeking for the real one whom we should know was not yet found. A god who was idols in China, fate in Arabia, fetiches in Africa, and man himself with all his sin in India, would be no god anywhere. If God is one man's father, He is or would be every man's father. We cannot think of God, I say it reverently, without thinking of Him as a missionary God. Unless we are prepared to accept a God whose character carries with it the missionary obligation and idea, we must do without any real God at all. When men believe in God in Christ the argument for missions becomes still more clear. It is by Christ that the character of God is revealed to us. One of His most bold and penetrating words was His declaration, "The day will come when they shall slay you, thinking that they do service unto God, and these things will they do unto you because they have not known the Father or Me." The best people of His day, He declared, were ignorant of the true character of God. Only those truly knew it who discovered or recognized it in Him. "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father. No man cometh unto the Father but by Me. No man knoweth the Son save the Father, and no man knoweth the Father save the Son and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him." These are not arbitrary statutes. They are simple statements of fact. The world's knowledge of the character of God has depended and depends now on its knowledge of God in Christ. A good and worthy, an adequate and satisfying God, i.e., God in truth, is known only where men have been in contact with the message of the historic Christ. This simple fact involves a sufficient missionary responsibility. Men will only know a good and loving Father as their God, i.e., they will know God, only as they are brought into the knowledge of Christ, who is the only perfect revelation of God. For those who have this knowledge to withhold it from the whole world is to do two things: It is to condemn the world to godlessness, and it is to raise the suspicion that those who think they have the knowledge of God are in reality ignorant of what Christ was and what He came to do. "It is the sincere and deep conviction of my soul," said Phillips Brooks, "when I declare that if the Christian faith does not culminate and complete itself in the effort to make Christ known to all the world, that faith appears to me a thoroughly unreal and insignificant thing, destitute of power for the single life and incapable of being convincingly proved to be true." And I recall a remark of Principal Rainy's to the effect that the measure of our sense of missionary duty was simply the measure of our personal valuation of Christ. If He is God to us, all in all to our minds and souls, we shall realize that He alone can be this to every man, and that He must be offered thus to every other man. The Unitarian view has never produced a mission, save under an inherited momentum or the communicated stimulus of evangelicalism, and it has been incapable of sustaining such missions as it has produced. But when men really believe in God in Christ, and know Christ as God, they must, if they are loyal to themselves or to Him, share Him with all mankind. For, child of one race and one time though He was, and that race the most centripetal of all races, Christ thought and wrought in universals. He looked forward over all ages and outward over all nations. The bread which He would give was His flesh, which He would give for the life of the world. He was the light of the whole world. If He should be lifted up He would draw all men unto Himself. His disciples were to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations. His sheep were not of a Jewish fold alone. It was not of a race but of a world that the Father had sent Him to be the Saviour. He did not regard Himself as one of many saviours and His revelation as one of many revealings. He was the only Saviour of men, and His was the only revelation of the Father God. "I have long ago ceased to regard the history of the Hebrew race as unique," writes a well-known Christian leader of our day. "It was well for us in our early days that our studies were directed towards it, and we saw how the Hebrew people found God in every event in their history, but we believe that Assyria and Babylon, Nineveh and Rome, could have similar stories written of God's dealings with them." Now, whether the history of the Hebrew race is unique or not is not a matter of theory. It is a simple question of fact. If it was not unique, then where is its like? What other history produced a vocabulary for a revelation? What other history yielded God to humanity? What other ended in a Saviour? As a simple matter of fact, Christianity, which sprang out of this race and this history, is unlike all other religions in its kind. As such, it never contemplated anything else than a universal claim. If it shrinks into a mere racial cult, it separates itself from its Founder and life, and utterly abandons its essential character. Not only is the missionary duty inherent in the nature of Christianity and in the Christian conception of God, i.e., in the real character of God, but it is imbedded in the very purpose of the Christian Church. There were no missionary organizations in the early Church. No effort was made to promote a missionary propaganda, but the religion spread at once and everywhere. The genius of universal extension was in the Church. "We may take it as an assured fact," says Harnack, "that the mere existence and persistent activity of the individual Christian communities did more than anything else to bring about the extension of the Christian religion." Bishop Montgomery in his little book on "Foreign Missions" recalls Archbishop Benson's definition of four ages of missions, "First, when the whole Church acted as one; next, when missions were due to great saints; thirdly, to the action of governments; lastly, the age of missionary societies." The Church at the outset was a missionary society. The new Christians were drawn together spontaneously by the uniting power of a common life, and they felt as spontaneously the outward pressure of a world mission. The triumphant prosecution of that mission and the moral fruits of this new and uniting life were their apologetics. They did not sit down within the walls of a formalised and stiffened institution to compose reasoned arguments for Christianity. The new religion would have rotted out from heresy and anaemia in two generations if they had done so. As an old writer of the Church of England has put it: "The way in which the Gospel would seem to be intended to be alike preserved and perpetuated on earth is not by its being jealously guarded by a chosen order and cautiously communicated to a precious few, but by being so widely scattered and so thickly sown that it shall be impossible, from the very extent of its spreading, merely to be rooted up. It was designed to be not as a perpetual fire in the temple, to be tended with jealous assiduity and to be fed only with special oil; but rather as a shining and burning light, to be set up on every hill, which should blaze the broader and the brighter in the breeze, and go on so spreading over the surrounding territory as that nothing of this world should ever be able to extinguish or to conceal it." The sound doctrine of the Church was safeguarded by the wholesome hygienic reflex action of service and work and conquest. And its light and life convinced men, because men saw them conquering souls. The Church was established to spread Christianity, and to conserve it in the only way in which living things can ever be conserved, by living action. When in any age or in any land the Church has forgotten this, she has paid for her disobedience. So long as there are any unreached men in the world or any unreached life, the business of the Church is her missionary duty. The fourth deep ground of missionary duty is the need of humanity. The world needs Christ today as much and as truly as it needed Him nineteen centuries ago. If Judaism and the Roman Empire needed what Christ brought then, Hinduism and Asia need it now. If they do not need Him now, no more was He needed then. If they can get along without Him just as well, the whole world can dispense with Him. If there is no missionary duty, the ground falls from under the necessity, and therefore from under the reality of the incarnation. But that world into which He came did need Christ. Men were dead without Him. It was He who gave them life, who cleansed their defilement, who taught them purity and service and equality and faith and gave them hope and fellowship. He alone can do this now. The non-Christian world needs now what Christ and Christ alone can do for it. It needs the physical wholeness, the fitting of life to its conditions, which, as a matter of fact, men get just in proportion as they get Christ. We do not need to go for proof of such needs to any overcolored, distorted accounts of those who see only the good of Christendom and only the evil of heathenism—heathenism is a good word, and it describes facts. Sir John Hewett's account, as Lieutenant-Governor, of the conditions of sanitation in the United Provinces of India, will suffice: "Speaking generally, the death rates recorded in the Provinces in recent years, both in urban and rural tracts, are nearly three times as high as in England and Wales. It is estimated that in India nearly one out of every ten of the population is constantly sick, and a person who has escaped the diseases and dangers of childhood and youth, and entered into manhood or womanhood, has an expectation that his or her life will extend to only 68 per cent of the time that a person similarly situated may be expected to live in England .... Infantile mortality is nearly twice as great as it is in England .... It is lamentable that one out of every four children born should die before he or she has completed a year of life. ... The average number of persons per house (which frequently consists of two rooms, or even of only one) is 5.3 in important cities, and 5.5 in the rest of the country. It is estimated that the average superficial area per head of the population is something like 10 square feet, and the breathing space 150 cubic feet—just half what is required in common lodging-houses in England." Conditions in Christian lands are not what they should be, but they are infinitely superior to the conditions in other lands, and in proportion as they are Christian, famine and disease and want are overcome. Are these blessings to be ours alone? The world needs the social message and redemption of Christianity. Paul tells us that it met and conquered the inequalities of his time, the chasm between citizen and foreigner, master and slave, man and woman. These are the chasms of the non-Christian world still. It has no ideal of human brotherhood save as it has heard of it through Christianity. Not one of the non-Christian religions or civilizations has given either women or children, especially girl children, their rights. There is human affection. The statement of a recent writer regarding China, that "children are spawned and not born," is surely most untrue save on the basest levels of life. But the proverb of the Arab women of Kesrawan too truly suggests the Asiatic point of view: "The threshold weeps forty days when a girl is born." And between man and man the world knows no deep basis of common humanity, or if it knows, it has no adequate sanction and resources for its realization. Its brotherhood is within the faith or within the caste, not as inclusive as humanity. It wants what all the world wanted until it found it through Christ. "In his little churches, where each person bore his neighbor's burden, Paul's spirit," says Harnack, "already saw the dawning of a new humanity, and in the Epistle to the Ephesians he has voiced, this feeling with a thrill of exaltation. Far in the background of these churches, like some unsubstantial semblance, lay the division between Jew and Gentile, Greek and Barbarian, great and small, rich and poor. For a new humanity had now appeared, and the Apostle viewed it as Christ's body, in which every member served the rest, and each was indispensable in his own place." The great social idea of Christianity is still only partially realized by us. But we do not have it at all unless we have it for humanity, and it can be made to prevail anywhere only by being made to prevail everywhere. The world needs, moreover, the moral ideal and the moral power of Christianity. The Christian conceptions of truth and purity and love and holiness and service are original. Every ideal except the Christian ideal is defective. Three other sets of ideals are offered to men. The only other theistic ideals are the Mohammedan and the Jewish. The Mohammedan ideal expressly sanctions polygamy, and the authority of its founder is cited in justification of falsehood. The Jewish ideal is wholly enclosed in and transcended by the Christian. Buddhism and Shintoism and Confucianism offer men atheistic ideals, i.e., ideals which abandon the conception of the absolute and cannot rise above their source in man who made them. Hinduism, with its pantheism, is incapable of the moral distinctions which alone can produce moral ideals, and as a matter of fact owes its worthy moral conceptions today exclusively to the influence of Christianity. But it is not ideals alone it is power for their realization that the world requires. That power can be found only in life, in the life of God communicated to men. Who offers this or pretends to offer it but Christ? How can it be offered by religions which have no God, or whose God has no character? For this is the great need of the world. It needs the knowledge and the life of the good and fatherly God. Its own religions have given it neither of these, and its own religions are disintegrating. Christianity has detached small companies of people from them, but the influence of Christianity has penetrated them to the marrow. Let alone, it would war against their vicious elements and preserve all in man that is capable of redemption. But it will not be let alone. Other influences are at work upon the religious conceptions of the non-Christian world, and under those influences the conceptions and the institutions of the non-Christian religions are doomed. Never did men face a more solemn responsibility than confronts us now. "The ancient beliefs and customs of the non-Christian peoples," said Lord Bryce while in America, "are destined soon to pass away, and it becomes a matter of supreme importance to see that new and better moral and religious principles are given to them promptly to replace what is disappearing; and to endeavor to find methods for preventing the faults or vices of adventurers and others who are trying to exploit the uncivilized races from becoming a fatal hindrance to the spread of Christianity." Christian peoples are standing face to face with judgment here. Throughout the non-Christian world there are multitudes who are conscious of their need. They may not regard Christianity as the answer to their need. It is not surprising if they do not. In what way has Christendom not misrepresented Christianity to them? But they know their need. "You speak as if our country is already a dead thing," says one of the characters in Uchimura's dialogue on "The Future of Japan." "Yes," is the reply, "immoral nation is already dead. With all its shows of stability, a nation without a high ideal is a dead corpse. Japan under the Satsuma Choshu Government is a dead nation." "You speak very determinedly." "Yes," replies Uchimura, "I have to; I cannot bear to see my nation die." And there are many who do not wish to see their nations die in Asia, who turn to Christ. "All over India," wrote Dr. Cuthbert Hall to the missionaries there when he left India, with India's need upon his heart and its poison in his blood, "all over India are men unprepared to identify themselves with any Christian denomination, to whom the popular forms of the ancient faith have become inadequate, if not distasteful, and for whom the name of Jesus Christ and the distinctive truths connected with that name for the redemption of individuals and the reconstruction of the social order, are taking on new attractiveness and value." The fact that the world is awaking to its need, whether it understands Christ or not, adds a pathos to its mute appeal to those who have in custody the Gospel of God in His Son. For it is only that Gospel that can meet the world's need. Commerce and government, philanthropy and education, deal with it superficially, and in the hands of shallow or evil men only accentuate it. A force is needed which will cut down to the roots, which deals with life in the name and by the power of God, which marches straight upon the soul and reconstructs character, which saves men one by one. Here we are flat upon the issue, and not to evade or confuse it, I will put it unmistakably. It is our duty to carry Christianity to the world because the world needs to be saved, and Christ alone can save it. The world needs to be saved from want and disease and injustice and inequality and impurity and lust and hopelessness and fear, because individual men need to be saved from sin and death, and only Christ can save them. His is the only power which will forgive and regenerate, which will reach down deep enough to transform, and will hold till transformation is fixed. And Christianity does this by striking down to the individual and saving him. It saves him by the power of God in Christ, working in and upon him. The missionary duty is this duty. "I hold education," says Uchimura, "as essentially personal and individualistic." And he uses the term education in its broad sense. There is more to education than this. Society is something more than the sum-total of individuals, but it begins and ends with individuals, and the need of the world is primarily the need of its individuals, and the salvation of the world in Christ's way can only be the salvation of its soul through the salvation of its souls. A few years ago we heard a great deal about the need of educating and civilizing the world before we try to change its religion. Dr. George Hamilton advanced this argument in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1796: "To spread abroad the knowledge of the Gospel among barbarous and heathen nations seems to me to be highly preposterous in as far as it anticipates, nay, as it even reverses the order of nature. Men must be polished and refined in their manners before they can be properly enlightened in religious truths. Philosophy and learning must, in the nature of things, take the precedence. Indeed, it should seem hardly less absurd to make revelation precede civilization in the order of time, than to pretend to unfold to a child the 'Principia' of Newton, ere he is made at all acquainted with the letters of the alphabet. These ideas seem to me alike founded in error; and, therefore, I must consider them both as equally romantic and visionary." We do not hear so much of this view now. Civilization has shown what a vain and empty thing it is, and we know that the sin and passion in human hearts, which it cannot destroy, are as real and dreadful in America and in all the neutral nations as they are in the nations at war. God is man's one need. Man cannot save himself or make anything out of himself. He needs what God and God alone can do for him. If that is true of Europe and America it is true of all the rest of the world. Jesus Christ is the one Saviour of men and each man in the World needing that Saviour has a right to look to those who know of Him to tell of Him to all mankind. Even as a purely religious movement, however, there are some who object to foreign missions on the ground that there are other religions in the world which are true for their followers and which meet their needs as truly as Christianity meets ours. They say that a fair comparison of Christianity with other religions destroys the claim of Christianity and makes foreign missions unnecessary. Is this true? What are the conclusions which such a comparison presents? 1. In the first place it is a significant fact that Christianity is the only religion which is trying to make good its claim to universalism. None of the non-Christian religions is making any real effort to do so. Mohammedanism is spreading in Africa and India, but it makes no effort of any significance to convert America or Europe or Japan. The bounds of Confucianism are contracting. Shintoism has withdrawn from the lists as a religion, and claims now only the place of a court ceremonial and a burial rite. Zoroastrianism, one of the worthiest of the ancient religions, has almost vanished in the land of its origin, and numbers comparatively few adherents in India. Hinduism is geographically limited, save as a philosophy, by its principle of caste, and Buddhism is rejected in Japan by the very men who might succeed in propagating it elsewhere. But Christianity is moving out over all the earth with steadily increasing power, with ever multiplying agencies, with ever enlarged devotion, and with open and undiscourageable purpose to prepare for Christ's kingship over the world. And not less significant than the fact of Christianity's missionary purpose, is the method of it. With no trust in secular support, in spite of all slanders which charge otherwise, with purely moral agencies and with fair comparison of its treasures with anything that the world can offer, Christianity goes fearlessly forth to deal with all the life and thought of man and to solve his problems and meet his needs in the name and strength of God, 2. At the root of all things is the idea of God. Here all religions meet to be judged. "The truth and the good inherent in all forms of religion is that, in all, man seeks after God. The finality of Christianity lies in the fact that it reveals the God for whom man seeks." (Jevons, "Introduction to the Study of Comparative Religion," p. 258). The best that can be said of any non-Christian religion is that it is seeking for that which Christianity possesses—the true and perfect God. "The conception of God with which Christianity addresses the world, is the best that man can form or entertain." If it is asked, "What is that excellence in Christianity by virtue of which it is entitled to be a missionary religion and deserves to be received by all men?"—the answer is: "Christianity is entitled to be a missionary religion and to displace all other religions, because of its God. "There are many glories in the religion of Jesus Christ, and it can do many services for men; but its crowning glory, or rather the sum of all its glory, is its God. Christianity has such a conception of God as no other religion has attained; and, what is more, it proclaims and brings to pass such an experience of God as humanity has never elsewhere known. It is in this that we find that superiority which entitles Christianity to offer itself to all mankind. "It is necessary to tell in few words what this God is who is the glory of Christianity and the ground of its boldness in missionary advances—this God so infinitely excellent that all men may well afford to forget all their own religions, if they may but know Him. The God of Christianity is one, the sole source, Lord and end of all. He is holy, having in Himself the character that is the worthy standard for all beings. He is love, reaching out to save the world from sin and fill it with His own goodness. He is wise, knowing how to accomplish His heart's desire. He is Father in heart, looking Upon His creatures as His own, and seeking their welfare. All this truth concerning Himself, He has made known in Jesus Christ the Saviour of the world, in whom His redemptive will has found expression, and His saving love has come forth to mankind." Set over against this conception of God the views which we have seen that the non-Christian religions take of Him, and it does not need to be shown that the religion of the Christian God has supreme rights among men. "A religion that can proclaim such a God, and proclaim Him on the ground of experience, is adapted to all men, and is worthy of all acceptation. Since Christianity is the religion of such a God, Christianity deserves possession of the world. It has the right to offer itself boldly to all men, and to displace all other religions, for no other religion offers what it brings. It is the best that the world contains. Because of its doctrine and experience of the perfect God, it is the best that the world can contain. Its contents can be unfolded and better known, but they cannot be essentially improved upon. At heart, Christianity is simply the revelation of the perfect God, doing the work of perfect love and holiness for His creatures, and transforming them into His own likeness so that they will do the works of love and holiness towards their fellows. Than this nothing can be better. Therefore, Christianity has full right to be a missionary religion, and Christians are called to be a missionary people." 3. From its unique and adequate conception of God, it follows that Christianity has a message to the world which is full of notes which the non-Christian religions do not and cannot possess. Even ideas which some of these religions share with Christianity, such as "belief in an after life, in the difference between right and wrong, and that the latter deserves punishment; in the need of an atonement for sin; in the efficacy of prayer; in the universal presence of spiritual powers of some kind," belief in the sovereignty of God, in the immanence of God, in the transitoriness and vanity of this earthly life on one hand, and in the infinite significance of this life and the sacredness of the human order on the other,—have a relationship and a significance in Christianity, with its perfect. God, which makes them totally different from the conceptions of other religions. And beside these, Christianity has a whole world of conceptions of its own—the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, redemption, the incarnation of a personal God, atonement, character, service, fellowship. 4. In its conception of sin, in its provision for sin's forgiveness and defeat, and in its ideals of salvation and the free offer of its salvation to every man, Christianity is unique and satisfying. Christianity sees sin as the supreme evil in the world, it regards it as a want of conformity to the perfect will of God, or as transgression of His perfect law; it teaches that sin is not a matter of act only, but also of thought and desire and wills taint in the nature; it insists that God is not responsible for it or for any evil; it emphasizes the guilt and horror of it, and the deadly consequences both for time and for eternity, and it opens to man a way of full forgiveness and clean victory. In contrast with this view, Mohammedanism teaches that sin is only the wilful violation of God's law; sins of ignorance it does not recognize; its doctrine of God's sovereignty fixes the responsibility for sin on God and dissolves the sense of guilt, and it denies the evil taint of sin in human nature. In Hinduism sin as opposition to the will of a personal God is inconceivable; it is the inevitable result of the acts of a previous state of being; it is evil, because all existence and all action, good as well as bad, are evil, and it is illusion, as all things are illusion. In pure Buddhism there can be no kin in our sense of the word, because there is no God; sin there means "thirst," "desire," and what Buddhism seeks to escape is not the evil of life only, but life itself; and its conception of the sins that impede, while including much that is immoral, does not include all, and does not include much on the other hand that has no immoral character at all. Confucianism makes no mention of man's relation to God, and totally lacks all conception of sin. In one word, Christianity is the only religion in the world which clearly diagnoses the disease of humanity and discovers what it is that needs to be healed and that attempts permanently and radically to deal with it. And so, also, Christianity alone knows what the salvation is which men require, and makes provision for it. In Christianity salvation is salvation from the power and the presence of sin, as well as from its guilt and shame. Its end is holy character and loving service. It is available for men here and now. In the Mohammedan conception salvation consists in deliverance from punishment, and deliverance not by redemption and the sacrifice of love, but by God's absolute sovereignty. The Hindu idea of salvation is to escape from the sufferings incident to life, to be liberated from personal, conscious existence, and this liberation is to be won by the way of knowledge, knowledge being the recognition of the soul's essential identity with Brahma, the impersonal God, or by the way of devotion, devotion being not faith in a God who works for the soul, but the maintenance by the soul of a saving attitude of mind toward the deity chosen to be worshiped. This is actual Hinduism, not the nobler doctrine of the Vedas. In Buddhism salvation is the extinction of existence. Indeed, there is no soul recognized by pure Buddhism. There is only the Karma, or character, which survives, and every man must work out his own Karma unaided. "By one's self," it is written in the Dhammapada, "the evil is done; by one's self one suffers; by one's self evil is left undone; by one's self one is purified. Lo, no man can purify another." The best Northern Buddhism draws nearest to Christianity in its conception of a salvation by faith in Amitaba Buddha, but even here the salvation is release from the necessity of continued rebirths, not a creation of new character for human service in Divine loyalty. Confucianism has no doctrine of salvation. The Chinese soul has had to turn, in the attempt to satisfy its needs, to other teachers. In its ideal and offer of salvation Christianity stands alone. (Kellogg, "Comparative Religion," chapters IV, V). 5. Christianity is the only religion which is at once historical, progressive and spiritually free. Therefore, it is the only religion which can claim universal dominion. Each. religion of the world has filled a place in history, but Mohammedanism is the only one whose historical facts are essential to it, and, as Bishop Westcott says: "Christianity is historical not simply in the sense in which, for example, Mohammedanism is historical, because the facts connected with the origin and growth of this religion, with the personality and life of the Founder, with the experience and growth of His doctrine, can be traced in documents which are adequate to assure belief; but in a far different sense also. It is historical in its antecedents, in its realization, in itself; it is historical as crowning a long period of religious training which was accomplished under the influence of Divine facts; it is historical as brought out in all its fulness from age to age in an outward society by the action of the Spirit of God; but above all, and most characteristically, it is historical because the revelation which it brings is of life and in life. The history of Christ is the Gospel in its light and in its power. His teaching is Himself, and nothing apart from Himself; what He is and what He does. The earliest creed—the creed of baptism—is the affirmation of facts which include all doctrine. "Dogmatic systems may change, and have changed so far as they reflect transitory phases of speculative thought, but the primitive Gospel is unchangeable as it is inexhaustible. There can be no addition to it. It contains in itself all that will be slowly wrought out in thought and deed until the consummation. "In this sense, Christianity is the only historical religion. The message which it proclaims is wholly unique. Christ said, I am—not I declare, or I lay open, or I point to, but I am—the way, the truth and the life." 6. The ethical uniqueness of Christianity entitles it to absorb and displace all other religions. It alone makes the moral character of God the central and transcendent thing. Judged by its God, no other gods are really good. It alone presents a perfect ethical ideal for the individual and it alone possesses a social ethic adequate for a true national life and for a world society. It is pre-eminently the ethical religion. All its values are moral values. All the best life of Christian lands is an effort to embody the Christian ethics in life, and those ethics shelter absolutely none of the evil of Christian lands. "There is hardly a more trustworthy sign and a safer criterion of the civilization of a people," says the anthropologist Waitz, "than the degree in which the demands of a pure morality are supported by their religion and are interwoven with their religious life." And this is the true test of religions also. Do they supply men with perfect moral ideals? Do they condemn evil and refuse to allow evil to shelter itself under religious sanction? On one or both of these issues every non-Christian religion breaks down. There is much worthy moral teaching in each of the non-Christian religions, but the Koran enjoined the enslavement of the women and children of unbelievers conquered in battle, and authorized unlimited concubinage, and its sanction of polygamy cannot be defended as in the interest of morality. "Polygamy," said Dr. Henry H. Jessup, "has not diminished licentiousness among Mohammedans." Even in the Vedas there are passages which are morally debarred from publication. "I dare not give and you dare not print," wrote the Revelation S. Williams, "the ipsissima verba of an English version of the original Yajar Veda Mantras." ("Indian Evangelical Review," January, 1891). In the Bhagavata Purana the character of the god Krishna is distinguished by licentiousness. And worst of all in the Hindu ethics, even in the Bhagavadgita, it is taught that actions in themselves do not defile one, if only they are performed in the state of mind enjoined in the poem. While Buddha and Confucianist ethics are deficient in active benevolence and human service. "Be ye perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect," is a conception peculiar to Christianity. 7. Christianity is the final and absolute religion, because it contains all the good and truth that can be found in any other religion, and presents it to men in its Divine fulness, while other religions have none but partial good; because it is free from the evils which are found in all other religions, and because it alone can satisfy all the needs of the human heart and of the human race. It is the one true religion. We are glad to find any outreach after truth in other religions which shows that the hearts of those who hold them are made for that truth and capable of receiving it in its perfect form in Christianity. Christianity is final, because there is no good beyond it and no evil in it, and because it cleanses and crowns all the life and thought of man. It is the end of all men's quest. "I maintain," says Tiele, "that the appearance of Christianity inaugurated an entirely new epoch in the development of religion; that all the streams of the religious life of man, once separate, unite in it; and that religious development will henceforth consist in an ever higher realization of the principles of that religion." And Christianity is absolute as well as final; that is, it fills the field. There can, be nothing higher or better. There can be nothing else in the same class. As Bishop Westcott said: "A perfect religion—a religion which offers a complete satisfaction to the religious wants of man—must be able to meet the religious wants of the individual, the society, the race, in complete course of their development and in the manifold intensity of each separate human faculty. "This being so, I contend that the faith in Christ, born, crucified, risen, ascended forms the basis of this perfect religion; that it is able, in virtue of its essential character, to bring peace in view of the problems of life under every variety of circumstance and character—to illuminate, to develop, and to inspire every human faculty. My contention rests upon the recognition of two marks by which Christianity is distinguished from every other religion. It is absolute and it is historical. "On the one side, Christianity is not confined by any limits of place, or time, or faculty, or object. It reaches to the whole sum of being and to the whole of each separate existence. On the other side, it offers its revelation in facts which are an actual part of human experience, so that the peculiar teaching which it brings as to the nature and relations of God and man and the world is simply the interpretation of events in the life of men and in the life of One who was truly Man. It is not a theory, a splendid guess, but a proclamation of facts. "These, I repeat, are its original, its unalterable claims. Christianity is absolute. It claims, as it was set forth by the apostles, though the grandeur of the claim was soon obscured, to reach all men, all time, all creation; it claims to effect the perfection no less than the redemption of finite being; it claims to bring a perfect unity of humanity without destroying the personality of any one man; it claims to deal with all that is external as well as with all that is internal, with matter as well as with spirit, with the physical universe as well as with the moral universe; it claims to realize a recreation coextensive with creation; it claims to present Him who was the Maker of the world, as the Heir of all things; it claims to complete the cycle of existence, and show how all things come from God and go to God." As absolute, it must displace all that is partial or false. It must conquer the world. The people who have it must be a missionary people. This is the solemn duty with which we are charged by our personal experience of the treasure that is in Christ, and this is the solemn duty with which any true comparison of Christianity with the world religions confronts us. Alike from the look within and from the look without we arise with a clear understanding of the missionary character of the religion that bears the name of Christ. The attitude of that religion is "not one of compromise, but one of conflict and of conquest, It proposes to displace the other religions. The claim of Jeremiah is the claim of Christianity: 'The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, they shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens.' The survival of the Creator, joyfully foreseen, is the ground of its confidence and its endeavor. Christianity thus undertakes a long and laborious campaign, in which it must experience various fortunes and learn patience from trials and delays; but the true state of the case must not be forgotten, namely, that Christianity sets out for victory. The intention to conquer is characteristic of the Gospel. This was the aim of its youth when it went forth among the religions that then surrounded it, and with this aim it must enter any field in which old religions are encumbering the religious nature of man. It cannot conquer except in love, but in love it intends to conquer. It means to fill the world." It must do so in order that the nations may have their Desire and the world its Light. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 14: - A MESSAGE FROM MISSIONS TO THE MODERN MI... ======================================================================== A Message from Missions to the Modern Ministry By Rev. Charles A. Bowen, A. M., PH.D., Olympia, Washington It is not my purpose to enter into a defense of, nor champion the cause of, missions. They stand there immovable in the purpose of God. They are the corner-stone as well as the crown in the fabric of the Christian Church. This stone which for so many years was rejected is now become the head of the corner, and whosoever shall fall upon it-whatever church shall ignore its claims shall be broken. It is my purpose rather to seek in the field of missions for some message to the modern ministry, for some inspiration to the home church. I know it is impossible to divorce the Church from missions-they are both one; but if we may do so in our thought for a time, we shall find that missions are not so much in need of the home church as the home church is in need of missions. The home church today is not so much the source of encouragement to missions as missions are the fountain of inspiration to the home church. The question is no longer whether the heathen can be saved without the Gospel, but whether the Gospel can be saved for the home church if it is not given speedily to the heathen. Across the whole Church today is an appalling dearth of aggressive spiritual life. Earnest souls are discouraged, and many almost despairing. They are groping and asking what is the trouble and what can be done. Whatever of encouragement there is comes largely from the mission fields. On the other hand, the fires on mission altars are burning brightly, souls by tens of thousands are being born every year. The faith of the missionary was never stronger, nor his hope brighter. The only cloud that crosses his horizon is the fear lest the church at home may not live up to her privilege. If we in the home churches, with all our machinery and members and wealth and education and favorable conditions, as we think, are largely cumberers of the ground; and if missions against great odds, improperly supported, with very imperfect equipment, humanly speaking-if they are sowing and reaping abundantly, and to a large degree are saving the Church from utter humiliation when the Master comes year by year seeking fruit, then we ought to ask missions the secret of their power. If our lamps in the home churches are burning dimly, if out of our twilight and shadows we see the light in the far away distance shining steadily, it might be well for us to ask what kind of oil fills that lamp. Like Apollos the eloquent, the home church ought to be willing to be instructed by this Aquilla and Priscilla in "the way of God more perfectly." Now if I read aright the story of missions, the secret of their power, the message they bring to the modern ministry and to the whole Church is the emphasis upon this trinity of doctrines: Atonement in Christ, Ministry of the Spirit. and Prayer. 1. The Atonement and Missions In emphasizing the atonement in Christ we believe that missions have good Scriptural grounds for their position. "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of Christ," was Paul's battle cry. No doubt, on going to Athens and Corinth, Paul may have been tempted, because of their education and culture, to preach differently from what he did to the rough people of Galatia. But he did not. This is his testimony as to the kind of preaching: "I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3). And this was done in a most earnest fashion. "I determined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2). So deeply did that first great missionary feel the importance of this truth that he prays a curse upon anyone who preaches a different doctrine. So vital was this to Paul and so large a place has it in Scripture, that we believe the words of a recent writer are true: "The death of Christ has not the place assigned to it, either in preaching or in theology, which it has in the New Testament." And again: "It is not unjust to say that no man will so preach the Gospel as to leave the impression that he has the Word of God behind him if he is inwardly at war with the idea of the atonement" (Denny-"Death of Christ"-Introduction and p. 285). Passing over the intervening ages till we come to the "Father of Modern Missions," we find him saying: "It is absolutely necessary....that we keep to the example of Paul, and make the great subject of our preaching Christ, the crucified" (Carey's Covenant). Look at the Moravian Church; for every fifty-eight communicants in the home church they support one missionary in a foreign land, and for every member in the home church they have two and six-tenths members gathered in congregations among the heathen. What is the inspiration of this church which so inspired Carey that he exclaimed: "See what these Moravians have done!" Their secretary of missions in a recent address tells us that the compulsion of the Moravian Church is not from the great commission, but from this prophecy: "When His soul shall make an offering for sin, He shall see His seed. He shall prolong His days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand. He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied .....Therefore will I divide Him a portion with the great, because He poured out His soul unto death." From this they have their battle cry: "To win for the Lamb that was slain, the reward of His sufferings." The only way they can reward Him is by bringing souls to Him. They are the only compensation for His suffering. (Ecumenical Conference Report, I, 79). To show the place and power of the atonement in missions I have time to give only one illustration from each of several different mission fields. In 1721 Hans Egede left Holland for Greenland. His idea of mission methods is given in his own words: "The first care taken in the conversion of heathens is to remove out of the way all obstacles which hinder their conversion and render them unfit to receive the Christian doctrine, before anything can be successfully undertaken on their behalf" ("Holy Spirit and Missions," p. 122). For fifteen years this heroic soul toiled amid the ice and snow without a single convert. At the end of that time he gives up in despair, preaching the last time from: "I have labored in vain: I have spent my strength for naught: yet my judgment is with the Lord and my work with my God!" But in 1730 Frederick Beck went to the same field. The natives travestied and ridiculed his doctrine. In the meetings they pretended to be asleep and snored. They would ask him to sing, only that they might drown the music with howls and drums. They pelted him with stones, broke into his hut and broke or stole his needed things. They destroyed his boats, and when on the verge of starvation would sell this brave Moravian no food. Awful was their condition; dwarfed in body, they were still more dwarfed in soul. Mothers licked their children as a cat does her kittens, and they wallowed like swine in their filth. After eight years, Beck was translating the Bible, and the natives were curious to see how paper could hear, remember and repeat the Word of God. He read them the story of the cross. The miracle was wrought, and stony hearts were broken. Kayarnak came near and said to Beck with pathetic face and voice: "How is that? Tell it to me once more. I, too, want to be saved." Tears ran down Beck's face to think that after these years there was one inquirer. He told the story again and again. Kayarnak came day after day. Soon twenty came with him. On Easter, 1739, he, his wife, and two children were baptized. He became a preacher and taught the missionary to depend, not upon logic but upon the story of the cross. In 1747, twenty-five years after Egede had landed, the first church was built for the three hundred members. The workers wrote at the time: "A stream of life is now poured upon this people. As we speak or sing of the sufferings of Jesus, . . . tears of love and joy roll down their cheeks" ("New Acts of the Apostles," p. 215). In 1828 in far away Burma Adoniram Judson had been laboring many years with but little success. He hears of the Karens far in the interior. The only Karen man he could find was Kho-Thah-Byu, a slave fifty years of age. As a youth be had been dull, vicious, and brutal. As a man he had murdered thirty men by his own hand. Judson paid his ransom and took him to his own home. His darkened mind was at last lightened by the story of the cross. He was baptized and went immediately to his people to preach. For twelve years he made itinerating tours of from one week to six months among the six hundred thousand Karens. Whole villages were converted, and today there are forty thousand native Karen Christians as the result almost wholly of the preaching of Kho-Thah-Buu. a result second only in mission annals to the work in the South Sea Islands. And this is one testimony of his preaching: "He sought in every sermon to bring into prominence the vicarious death of Christ. And the result was that a larger number of converts understood justification by faith than could be found among an equal number of Christians in a Christian land." Rev. Henry Richards gives this experience at Banza Manteke, in Africa. For four years he labored in vain, teaching the people about God as Creator, that He was good and they were sinners. He went home for a vacation, and while there, was advised to preach the law when he went back. On returning he translated the commandments. They said the ten commandments were very good and that they kept them all. Thoroughly discouraged, he turned to God's Word and was soon deeply impressed with "Go preach the Gospel," not the law or commandments, but the Gospel. If he were to preach Christ crucified they would want to know who Jesus was. So he began translating Luke and reading it to them. He got on very well till he came to chapter 6:30, "Give to every man that asketh." Here he was puzzled, for these men were notorious beggars. In order to have time to think he took them back for a two weeks? review. After struggling over what the commentaries said and what common sense would say was the explanation of this verse, he decided it meant just what it said. He so read it to the natives, saying that this was a high standard of life but that he intended to practice what he preached. Of course, they took him at his word, as well as took nearly everything he had. One day he overheard a conversation. One native said to another: "I got this of the white man." The other replied that he, too, was going to ask for a certain article, whereupon a third said: "No, buy it. This must be God's man, for we never saw anyone like him." At last they came to the story of the cross. He said: "You say you are not sinners? There is Jesus dying for you. He never did anything wrong, but died for your sins and for mine." After seven years the battle was won by the story of the cross, and there are now fifteen hundred Christians in the church at Banza Manteke. ("New Acts of the Apostles," p. 273; Ecumenical Conference Report, II, 93). Thirty years ago, in the city of Mukden, with its 400,000 population, there was a little street chapel. When nothing else would reach those stolid Chinamen, the story of the cross, the sufferings of Jesus, reached them when told by ignorant "Old Wang," the converted confirmed opium smoker. Thirty years ago there were on the roll of the Presbyterian Church in Manchuria three members; four years ago there were in Manchuria, won mostly from Mukden as a center, twenty-seven thousand Presbyterian Christians. Would you know the secret of this remarkable work? "In order to gain the Chinese to Christianity, all other conceivable methods combined cannot compare in efficiency with public preaching.... . But, however the vessel of the preacher may be led in all directions by the flowing or the ebbing tide of his hearers? inclinations, though it move up and down on the waves of a thousand various subjects, and however long its chain, the anchor must ever be fast immovably in what is known as the cross of Christ. The mercy and love of God as revealed in the life and confirmed in the death of His Son, must be the center around which all the preaching revolves, and on which it is based. This is the great central truth on which the church in Manchuria has been founded" (Ross, "Missionary Methods in Manchuria," p. 332). Such is the testimony to the power of the cross from far distant and different witnesses. The conclusion drawn by the Scotch professor and by the missionary in China are one and the same. "There is nothing in the world," says Prof. Denny, "so universally intelligible as the cross" ("Death of Christ," p. 200). And Dr. Ross from China says: "The cross of Christ with its implied doctrines satisfies the soul of the Chinese. it is the intelligent response of love to the cry of their distressed heart" ("Missionary Methods in Manchuria," p. 90). Nothing more impressively, than the preaching of the cross to every creature and its acceptance by them, demonstrates to us so conclusively that our Gospel is an eternal Gospel; that the power and need of Christ's blood to save never goes out of date. This story of the cross wins its way among all peoples because it is the old, old story. It is older than Wesley, older than Calvin, Augustine, Paul, Moses, or Abraham. It is as old as God, this story of "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." Did you ever hear of a Unitarian mission? You may have. Then did you ever hear of a Unitarian mission having a revival in a heathen land? I never did. And the reason is they have no cross, no atonement to preach. When you steal the cross, you take the crown of missions. When you despise the blood of Calvary, you will have strangled missions. Somehow I feel that Peter often went back, at least in thought, to that courtyard where he denied his Lord. And while there he renewed his vows, asking God to help him never again to deny or forsake his Saviour. And somehow I feel that we who have been denying the power of the cross in our preaching ought to go back to the places where we have thus put our Master's sacrifice to an open shame, confess our sin, and promise there to be faithful in lifting up "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world." 2. The Holy Spirit and Missions Every age has its own test of fidelity. In Old Testament times the test was the unity of God. After Christ came, the test was the Son of God as Divine Saviour and King. The test for the Church today is its readiness to accept the Holy Spirit as the Divine administrator of God's kingdom in this world, Dr. Steele is right when he says: "The conservator of orthodoxy in every successive age is the Holy Spirit." And if the Church is apostate today one place more than another, it is in not enthroning the Holy Spirit. It is on mission fields and in mission work that this is most nearly done, and there God is honoring those that honor Him. In the first place, the Holy Spirit must be enthroned as administrator and director. "His time is no less important than His way." The Church never has been able to select the proper time and place for labor. As we read the "Acts of the Apostles" we feel that they are the "Acts of the Holy Spirit." The foretokens of foreign missions were when the Holy Spirit directed Philip to the eunuch and Peter to Cornelius. And the first act in the world drama of Christian conquest was when in the church at Antioch "the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them." And no missionary of modern times has been successful but what has gone out under a like ministration of the Holy Spirit as director. Paul's being turned back from Asia and Bithynia by the Holy Spirit, because hearts in Europe were ready for the Gospel, can be paralleled over and over again in the administration of the Spirit in modern missions. When Judson went to India and landed at Calcutta, the East India Company forbade his landing. Feeling certain he had been called to the mission field, he retired to the Isle of France, and a year later went to Madras, where he was also unable to stay. The only place open was Rangoon, Burma, the last place he wished to go. But he went, led of the Spirit, or rather, compelled of the Spirit, against his wishes and judgment. Burma was ready. Judson knew it not, but the Spirit did, as testified to by the Pentecostal work that followed: I have no doubt that Philip's and Peter's surprise was great when the eunuch and Cornelius were found so wondrously prepared by the Spirit to receive the message. In 1820, when the ship "Thaddeus" furled sail in Oahu harbor with eighteen missionaries on board to begin the fight with cannibalism and paganism in the Hawaiian Islands. what was their surprise when Obookiah, their native-born lad, who had gone ashore in a boat, returned bearing this news, "Oahu's idols are no more." And it was so. Before the missionaries had landed, the Holy Spirit had moved the pagan king and the priests to destroy all the heathen idols. How God moves upon the hearts of whole communities by the Holy Spirit in answer to the prayer of a devoted man! On Nov. 7, 1837, Titus Coan had been laboring two years at Hilo, Hawaiian Islands. Some ten thousand natives had come in from the surrounding tribes to hear the Gospel. Their little booths lined the shore, and some six thousand were crowded into the crude church building at the hour of evening service. Suddenly the sea, moved by an unseen hand, began to roar and the volcanic wave fell upon the people, sweeping hundreds out to sea. An awful night that was! But mighty as was the sea, it was not to be compared with the waves of the Spirit that rolled over that people. All the next day, though the sea was giving up its dead one by one, the meeting continued, and the kingdom of darkness gave up its victims by the hundreds. So mighty was this work of the Spirit that on the first Sunday in July, 1838, Mr. Coan, on that afternoon, baptized 1,705 men, women and children, and some 2,400 communicants sat down at the Lord's table. During the next three years, the Spirit all the while moving upon the people, 7,382 persons were received into the church at Hilo. And during his thirty-five years of work there Mr. Coan baptized with his own hands 11,960 converts. Somehow these "new acts of the apostles" strangely stir our hearts, even when we read about them. The very Spirit seems to breathe through the record, as through the Book of Acts, giving it life. What then must it be to he present in such an atmosphere where such scenes are being enacted! We are not surprised that Bishop Foster says of the first prayer-meeting he attended at a mission station that he never saw such manifest presence of God in a mid-week prayer meeting. And his wonder grew when told that this was not an exception, but they were all like that! And Bishop Foss, after attending a camp-meeting at the foot of the Himalaya Mountains, writes: "Never in my life, in any period of the old-time camp-meeting fervor, have I heard more sermons, and exhortations, and prayers, and experiences on the subject of the gift of the Holy Spirit" ("Cleveland Missionary Convention," p. 209). "My brethren, we have unlearned the Holy Spirit". These words are true. He Who was the inspirer of the first missionaries; who again and again has awakened the Church from her slumber and pointed out the duty still not done; who is today giving proofs of His power to direct and to obtain results this Holy Spirit we have ignored, if not forgotten. We here at home have not realized, as have the missionaries, that the life that was "born from above" must also be directed from above; that the Church with a supernatural beginning must have a supernatural leadership; that as Christ was necessary, by His atonement, to set men's feet in the way of life, so the Holy Spirit, by knowing the will of God, is necessary to keep men singing and triumphing in that way. From many a mission field, yielding bounteous harvests, the Holy Spirit is calling to us here at home to yield to Him the right of way, promising to convict men of sin, of righteousness, of judgment, and to take of the things of Christ and show them unto us and unto many. 3. Prayer and Missions Prayer preceded Pentecost. Prayer preceded God's raising up needed workers. Prayer preceded the sending out of the first missionaries. The reason given for appointing deacons was that the Apostles might give themselves unto prayer. Every man or woman who has been mighty on the mission field has first been mighty on his knees before God. In many "a going apart," in scores of "all night" seasons, again and again, in many a Gethsemane, he has fellowship with, and catches the Spirit of, the Master. The spirit of the true missionary is that of Neesima, of Japan, when he said: "We must advance on our knees." The nine children of Mr. and Mrs. John Scudder of India have all given their lives to missionary service in that land-seven sons and two daughters. This one family has given a total of five hundred and thirty years of continuous missionary service for India. The only explanation is that given by Mr. Scudder: "The children were literally prayed into the kingdom by their mother." She was accustomed to spend the birthday of each child in all-day prayer for him. There is Eliza Agnew, forty-three years a missionary in Oodooville, Ceylon. During all that time she never once returned to England, never once took a vacation. "I have no time," she said. She is called "the mother of a thousand daughters," having taught the daughters and grand-daughters of her first pupils. When she died it was found of the thousand girls who had gone entirely through the school, not one returned to her home a heathen. Like her Saviour, she could say: "Of all those whom thou hast given me, I have lost none." And out of that one school alone, while under Miss Agnew's care, over six hundred girls went to carry the Gospel light to the zenana homes of India. The secret? She spent literally hours every day praying for the girls by name! "I know My sheep by name. They hear My voice and follow Me." In Japan, from April, 1900, to May, 1902, there was continuous, united prayer by Christians throughout the kingdom. In May, 1902, the revival broke out, and during the year to the Church of forty thousand native Christians there were added twenty-seven thousand converts in answer to that prayer. In answer to prayer by the China Inland Mission, Dr. Schofield, after winning seventy-five hundred dollars in prizes for scholarships in English colleges, gave himself to medical work in China. He labored only three years before he was "called up higher;" but during that time his wife tells us she often heard him praying in his study that God would thrust out of the English universities young men to work in China. His early death was lamented and not understood. Christ died at thirty three, after only three years of toil and prayer. One year after Dr. Schofield's death the "Cambridge seven" went forth. Before they went to China they made a tour of English and Scotch colleges, and stirred the student life of all Great Britain for God and missions. Today one is bishop of West China, one is assistant superintendent of the China Inland Mission, one a pioneer missionary to Tibet, and all the others are useful workers. Dr. Gordon's Church, of Boston, was giving five thousand dollars annually to missions. One day Dr. Gordon said in the pulpit: "It is not enough; let us still use all our plans and agencies that have been successful in the past. But in addition, in the Sunday School, in the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavor, in missionary organizations, at the family altar, in secret, in the public service, let us pray that God will enable us to do more generously for this great cause." Result: the next year they gave over ten thousand dollars to missions, the Christian Endeavor alone giving sixteen hundred dollars! Do we stop often to think that one of the mightiest missionary organizations of our day has been prayed into being? Listen to the story: J. Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission, was a child given in answer to a father's prayer for a son to be given him who might evangelize China's millions. This son tells us that when a young man, "God said to me, 'My child, I am going to evangelize Inland China, and if you would like to walk with Me, I will do it through you.'" While still in England he was led to believe in the limitless possibilities of prayer. He tells us he said to himself: "When I get to China my only claim will be on God. ... How important, therefore, to learn before leaving England to move man through God by prayer alone" ("China Inland Mission," p. 66). The decision to open the mission is made. For months Hudson Taylor has been bearing the burden of unevangelized China. But the far greater burden is that he can not trust and pray for God to raise up the workers for China and support them. It seems his life will go out under the fearful strain. He goes to Brighton by the sea for relief. There on the beach, on a bright Sunday morning in June, we see him fully trusting God, and the burden lifts. Then it was that on the margin of his Bible he made a little record, which ought to be forever memorable in the annals of missions: "Prayed for twenty-four willing, skillful laborers at Brighton, June 25, 1865. The conflict was all ended. Peace and gladness filled my soul" ("China Inland Mission," p. 224). This number and more sailed to China. In the autumn of 1881, at Wu Chang, the China Inland missionaries gathered to meet Hudson Taylor. Funds were low. Five years had passed since the Chefu Convention, which opened every province to the missionary, and every province had been entered by this heroic band. They said: "God has opened the doors to once-sealed lands; why are laborers so few?" The answer came: "You have been definite in prayer for doors to open; why not be definite in prayer for workers to enter them?" Conscious of failure, this little company sits down, each one with pencil and paper. They go over the eleven provinces of Inland China, asking what God's work must have. Twenty-eight women and forty-two men, just seventy in all! There they are, a little band, poor, uninfluential, hardly known outside of England, though known, we believe, to God and all His angels on high. Whole working force after fifteen years' work now less than a hundred. How could they ask for seventy? But here was the need. God had taught them, they fully believed, to pray as they ought. They dared not ask for less and still believe in God, the Father Almighty. They prayed for seventy, also "for large re-enforcements for all the evangelical societies." But they could not rightly care for so many in one season, so they asked that they be sent during 1882, 1883, 1884. They were later led to pray that God would lead some of His wealthy stewards to make room for a large blessing for himself and family by giving liberally of his substance for this special object. One said: "Would it not be delightful if three years hence all now here could gather and give thanks when the last of the seventy shall have reached China?" Clearly that could not be. "Why not have the thanksgiving tonight in which we may all unite?" one said; and it was so, they rejoicing over what they had taken of God by faith. Before the close of the time seventy six workers were on the field, and in February, 1882, the Berger family, of England, gave three thousand pounds-fifteen thousand dollars. Five thousand dollars for father, five thousand for mother, one thousand for Mary, one thousand for Rosie, one thousand for Bertie, one thousand for Amy, one thousand for Henry. "Exceeding abundantly above all that ye ask or think." Again, in November, 1887, Mr. Taylor and others met at Nanking to consider the need. They were led to ask for one hundred missionaries and ten thousand pounds additional during 1888. Further led to ask that the money might come in large sums, that their clerical force might not be taxed in acknowledging it! Results, one hundred new missionaries came during 1888, and not $50.000, but $55,000 additional in eleven separate gifts, the smallest being $2,500, and the largest $12,500. This mission stands there today as an example of work begun in prayer, relying on prayer entirely for men and means. We may say what we please about visionary schemes, but here are visible fruits. Think of this story! Not back in apostolic times, but in this busy, crowding, materialistic, twentieth century! Prayer is the mightiest power in our hands today. Is it not a great sin that we do not use this talent of all talents? What blessings we are withholding from ourselves, the Church, and missions by not praying! If, like Pastor Gossner, we could learn to "ring the-prayer bell rather than the beggar's bell," we might have his success-one hundred missionaries put into the field who gathered thirty thousand converts before his death at sixty-three-and be worthy of his epitaph; "He prayed mission stations into being and missionaries into faith; he prayed to open the hearts of the rich, and gold from the most distant lands." But prayer is a costly exercise, and this possibly is why so few people dare pray really in earnest. If you pray earnestly a year for China, you will feel you ought to go. If your Church prays earnestly a year for China, she will double her missionary offering. If at the family altar a father and mother plead earnestly for India or Africa, God will ask a son or daughter of them for far-away service. If we pledge the price we can claim the power. ....The picture of my boyhood was that of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders; but the picture for boy and girl, for man and woman, for minister and missionary today, is Christ bearing the world upon His heart. The world with Atlas' shoulder under it we know is a myth, but the world with Christ's heart under it is the mightiest reality of the ages. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 15: - WHAT MISSIONARY MOTIVES SHOULD PREVAIL? ======================================================================== What Missionary Motives Should Prevail? By Rev. Henry W. Frost, Director for North America of the China Inland Mission, Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania "The love of Christ constraineth us" (2 Corinthians 5:14) Various Kinds of Motives When we contemplate the motives which largely prevail in these days in respect to missionary service, we meet with a surprise. Instead of discovering, as we should anticipate in such a relationship, that these are always upon the high plane of the divine and heavenly, we find often that they are upon the low plane of the human and earthly. And it is to be noted that this condition, as compared with the past, marks a change in the kind of motive which is being presented to men in order to induce them to give themselves to missionary service. There was a time—within the memory of many—when the motives proclaimed were markedly scriptural and spiritual. But more recently there has been in many quarters a positive decline in this respect, the scriptural and spiritual giving place either to the selfish or to the simply humanitarian. And this has resulted in a development of weakness, both in the appeal and in its results. It is certainly true, as men say, that non-Christian nations are in a pitiable state, governmentally, educationally, commercially, socially and physically; and it is equally true that nothing but Christianity will alter the conditions which are existing. But such conditions do not constitute the appeal which God makes to His people when He urges them to Christianize the nations. The conditions above named are all "under the sun," and they have to do with the present temporal life. Besides, though a total transformation might be secured in these respects, the peoples so affected as the present condition of Japan demonstrates—would have been brought no nearer to God than they were before. For, while it is always true that Christianity civilizes, it is never true that civilization Christianizes. It would appear from the above, if souls are to be reached, if men are to be made inwardly right, if the things which make for eternal security and blessedness are to be obtained, that divine motives, leading to divine methods and results, must prevail. This is the reason why God sets such high motives before the Church. He would have Christians look high in order that they may live high; and He would have them live high in order that they may lift others equally high. It is supremely important, therefore, to discover from the Scriptures what the divinely given motives are. Our starting text indicates that Paul felt that these could be expressed in one phrase: "The love of Christ"—that is, Christ's love for us—"constraineth us." But other portions of the Word indicate that the Spirit expands the thought so expressed, the one motive including several others. May we anticipate sufficiently to say that these motives appear to be three in number. It is our purpose to consider these, one by one. A First Motive During the earlier portion of the ministry of Jesus on earth, that is, between His baptism and crucifixion, He spoke very little about missions; but during the later portion, that is, between His resurrection and ascension, He spoke of nothing else. This last is a striking and impressive fact, especially as there were many other matters, in those last days, about which His disciples might have wished to have Him speak and with which He might have desired to occupy Himself. it is evident then, during the forty days of His ascension, that one theme was uppermost in His mind and that one burden lay most heavily upon His heart. His redemptive work having been accomplished, He longed to have His disciples proclaim the glad tidings everywhere; and hence He spoke of this, and of this alone. Moreover, on the several occasions when He discoursed upon the theme of missions, He always spoke as a master would address his disciples, as a captain would address his soldiers, as a king would address his subjects. At other times and in other relationships, He suggested, He exhorted, He urged But here, without exception and without equivocation, He commanded. Not once did He explain how He could demand what He was requiring; not once did He ask if there were any arguments to be expressed in answer to His proposals; in full knowledge of the terrible cost, without allowing any escape from the obligation imposed, He simply said, "Go!" In face of such a burning passion and heavily imposed obligation, there is but one conclusion to reach; the Church of Jesus Christ has no choice as to whether she will or will not do the thing ordered. One who has purchased His people with His own blood, One who owns them in spirit, soul and body, One who is indeed Master, Captain and King has positively commanded that His Gospel shall be preached throughout the world. Of course, the Church, if she chooses, may disobey, as—speaking generally—she is disobeying. But under the conditions prevailing, this on her part is high treason, and it is at her present loss and future peril. The thing which Christ has commanded, in all rightful consideration, is the thing which ought to be fully and immediately undertaken. This then, is the prime motive which God sets before Christians, individually and collectively, namely, that He who has had a right to command has done so, and that the command, because of the Person, calls for unhesitating, uncompromising and continuous obedience, until the task ordered is fully and finally accomplished. A Second Motive There are five several passages in the Gospels which speak of Christ as having, or as being moved with, compassion. One is when Jesus saw two blind men and where He gave them sight; another is where He saw a leper and where He touched and healed him; another is where He saw a widow mourning the loss of her dead son and where He raised that son to life; another is where He saw the hungry multitudes and where He fed them; and the last is where He saw multitudes uncared for and where He asked His disciples to offer prayer in their behalf. Now, all of these passages are interesting, as revealing the heart of Christ, He being the "God of compassion" whose "compassions fail not." But the last passage is particularly interesting, as it gives to us a view of present world-conditions and of the thought of God concerning them. For what was true that day in Galilee is still true the world over; and what Christ was He still is. Let us, for a moment, consider the passage. Jesus had come to His own city of Nazareth, and later He had gone forth from thence throughout the neighboring districts. Both in the city and out of it, He had dispensed His largess of healing, from, apparently, early morning until late evening. As a result of His ministrations, He had gathered at last great crowds about Him, made up of men, women and children, and now these had no place to turn to for the night and had many physical and spiritual needs still unsupplied. That Jesus had had compassion upon the people all through the day, His words and acts attest. But now, seeing the multitudes in such a pitiable condition, it is recorded—for this is the implication—that He had peculiar compassion upon them. He saw that they were hungry and weary, just as sheep are at the close of the day when they are unfed and exhausted; and He saw also that they were like a great harvest field, whose past-ripe grain, for lack of hands to gather it into the garner, was rotting on the stalk. Then it was these physical conditions suggesting the spiritual—that the great heart revealed its longing, and that there came forth the appealing, pathetic cry: "Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that He will send forth laborers into His harvest." We would not imply, for a moment, that there was not sufficient cause in the sight of the multitudes that day to thus mightily move the heart of the Son of God. At the same time, we can but think that not a little part of the emotion which Jesus experienced was occasioned by the fact that the multitudes before Him were a picture of those other, greater multitudes which went to make up a lost world, and also of those other and still greater multitudes which were yet unborn and which would go to make up the lost world which was yet to be. For Christ ever looked on things with a divinely prophetic eye; and there was everything in that present view to suggest the wider vision. And so the heart bled out its grief; and so the voice plaintively asked the help of man. And thus this same Christ is ever looking down from heaven's throne, the same heart is ever feeling its weight of compassionate woe, and the same voice is ever pleading with His disciples to see as lie sees and to feel as He feels. This then is the second motive which God sets before Christians, namely, to enter into Christ's compassion for the lost souls and lives of men, and thus to be moved as He was moved, and to be constrained to do as He did. A Third Motive The Gospels, recording the earthly life of Jesus, are full of promises—mostly from the lips of the Master—concerning a coming which would be for the purpose of establishing a kingdom. The Epistles, representing the testimony of the risen and glorified Christ, continue this theme, and always give the same order, first the coming and then the kingdom. And at the end of the New Testament, a whole book—Revelation—is taken up with the expansion of the now familiar thought and tells in detail how Christ will come, and what the kingdom will be. In addition to the above, Gospels, Epistles and Revelation speak of a work to be accomplished, which is preliminary to the coming and kingdom, and which, in the divine economy, makes the one and the other possible. As these passages are more than interesting, as they are vital to our subject, we make a selection from them, quoting them without comment: "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost." "Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold; them also I must bring; and they shall hear My voice; and there shall be one fold [flock] and one Shepherd." "Go ye therefore, and teach [disciple] all nations." "Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature." "Ye are witnesses of these things." "Ye shall be witnesses unto Me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth." "Delivering thee from the people [the Jews], and from the Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee; to open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins." "That by me the preaching might be fully known and that all the Gentiles might hear." "Blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in." "And this Gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come." "A great multitude which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and peoples, and tongues." Impressive as these passages of Scripture are, and clear as their teaching is to the effect that missionary service is related to all the world and is for the purpose of gathering to God an innumerable number of people in preparation for the King and the kingdom, there is yet another passage which is even more impressive and clear as related to the same particulars. As if to remove any possible misunderstanding in regard to the divine plan, the Spirit led to the declaration and preservation of words which tell us what God purposes to do in this present age in preparation for the age to come, and what part the Church is to play in the fulfilment of the purpose so announced. We refer to Acts 15:13-18. There James, quoting Peter, is the spokesman, and the great Apostle confirms his utterance by stating it as a foundation truth that "known unto God are all His works from the beginning of the world." He thus says: "Simeon hath declared how God at the first did visit the Gentiles to take out of them a people for His name; and to this agree the words of the prophets; as it is written, After this I will return and will build again the tabernacle of David, which is fallen down; and I will build again the ruins thereof, and I will set it up; that the residue of men might seek after the Lord, and all the Gentiles upon whom My name is called, saith the Lord, who doeth all these things." Here then, is a divine utterance and program. And simply speaking, it sets forth the following facts in the following order: first, a present work of grace in which God visits and gathers out, preeminently from the Gentiles, a people for. His name; second, the return of Christ; third, the restoration and establishment of the Jewish theocratic kingdom with its attendant worship; and fourth, the salvation in the kingdomage of the "residue" of the Jews, and of "all" the Gentiles upon whom God's name shall be called. And this program, in its first article, makes it clear what share the Church has in its fulfilment. To put it in a single sentence, it is this: God is visiting the nations, and Christians have the high privilege of visiting them with Him. He goes forth, in the persons of the missionaries, not to convert all the world—since not all men will accept of Him—but to gather out from it a willing people, heavenly in quality and innumerable in quantity, which shall be to the glory of His name throughout time and eternity. And, manifestly, this preparatory work will bring to pass the event which is described as following it, that is, the coming of Christ. This then is the final and consummating motive which God sets before Christians, namely, to go forth everywhere, preaching the good tidings to every creature, in order that the Church may be made complete and that the King and the kingdom may come. The Effect of Scriptural Motives It will need only passing consideration to discover that the three motives which have been mentioned, namely, the command, the compassion and the coming of Christ, are like the God who gave them, and are thus worthy of being accepted by the noblest and most devoted of men. And there are two reasons why they are this. First, because they represent spiritual and eternal truths; and second, because they make for the highest glory of God and the greatest good of mankind. As to the last effect, no other motives are so uplifting and purifying to the person who is moved by them, and no other motives are so sure of divine favor and blessing in their exercise. There is enough power in these motives, singly and collectively, to raise the missionary propaganda above everything earthly, selfish and narrow, and to place it, where it ever belongs, upon the plane of the heavenly, the spiritual and the infinite. Moreover there is enough potency here to turn the "forlorn hope" of present-day foreign missions, in which a Gideon's band of men and women are bravely fighting on against overwhelming odds, into an ever victorious army of the Church, where the battle will not only be fought but also be won, and where the end of saving the elect, and thus of bringing back the King and bringing in the kingdom, will be surely and speedily brought to pass. For what foes on earth, or what demons in hell, could stay the onward progress of a people which had determined, in the power of the Holy Spirit, to obey Christ's command, to show forth His compassion, and to press forward with uplifted faces to the rapturous and victorious meeting with Him who one day will descend with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God? Such motives as these are not simply constraining; they are invincible and triumphant. An Illustration Some years ago, while living in Toronto, I received a call from a Miss Kathleen Stayner, of that city. Miss Stayner had come to confer with me about the possibility of her serving in China. I saw at once that she had been born and bred a gentlewoman; and I learned afterwards that she had had an exceptionally good education both in Canada and in Europe; that she was an heiress; and, being an orphan, that she was free to come and go as she might choose. Also, I perceived, as our conversation advanced, that she was a young woman of great devotion, having turned her back upon all social allurements and having committed herself to an earnest and self-sacrificing service for Christ, including work for the Chinese in Toronto. The situation in respect to her going to China, therefore, was a most promising one, for there was nothing to hinder her proceeding to that land. But my growing confidence as we talked was suddenly arrested by Miss Stayner, for she unexpectedly declared that there was one difficulty in her way which was insurmountable. Asking what this was, I received this reply: "I have to confess that I do not love the Chinese." And then she explained: They are so ignorant and dirty!" This was a real obstacle, especially as she had been working among the Chinese. But in spite of it I replied: "Do you know, Miss Stayner, I do not think the question whether or not you love the Chinese is the one to be considered; it seems to me that the real question is whether or not you love the Lord." At this, her eyes kindled and she exclaimed: "Oh, yes, I do love Him!" "Then," I said, "if you love Him, how can you do anything else but obey His command and go?" At this, she looked at me earnestly and said: "Do you think then that I may dare to go?" "Under the circumstances," I replied, "I do not see how you may dare to stay." A few days later Miss Stayner applied to the Mission; a few months later she was accepted for service; and shortly after her acceptance she went on her way to China. Miss Stayner, however, was not to have the easy time in China which many missionaries experience there. For a period all went well and happily. She was located at the inviting station of Wenchow; she entered into the old, well developed and very promising work at that place; she made remarkable progress with the language; and she gained the confidence and love of the people. But one night, when she was staying with her Biblewoman at an out-station, she was suddenly aroused from her sleep by lights and voices, and thereupon discovered that robbers had forced their way into her room and were stealing what they could lay their hands upon. Miss Stayner protested, whereupon one of the robbers struck her with a bamboo pole. Later, she and the Bible-woman got out of a door at the back of the house, and, clad as they were and in the cold of the winter night, they fled over the hills to a clump of trees and bushes and hid themselves from view. There they remained for a long time, chilled and horror-stricken, until the robbers had sacked their house and departed. After this they were found by some of the villagers and brought back to their almost ruined home. Miss Stayner was seriously affected, physically, by this trying experience, and it became necessary that she should visit Shanghai for quiet and rest. Just at that time I visited that place, and I was thus able, one evening, to ask her about her work and to hear from her lips the account of her recent experiences. After the tale had been told, I said: "Miss Stayner, may I ask you a question?" "Yes," she replied, "what is it?" "It is this," I answered; "do you love the Chinese?" I shall never forget the look of astonishment which she gave me. "Why," she said, "what do you mean? Of course, I love the Chinese!" "I was just wondering," I replied, "if, having gone through such an experience at their hands, you were sorry you had come to China, and if possibly you now almost hated the Chinese." This remark perplexed her more than my first had done. But I then reminded her of our conversation in Toronto, which had quite passed from her mind. "Oh," she finally answered, "I had forgotten that I ever said that; but that was before I knew the Chinese; I love them all now!" But Miss Stayner was not at an end of her appointed trials. For only a few years had passed when she became afflicted with a climatic disease, which is terrible in its process and effects. It soon became evident that she must leave the country. This she did, coming home to Canada, and later going to a certain "Spa" in Germany. Happily she got better, and at last she was able to go back to her much loved work. But still later, her old trouble returned. She fought against it, and for a considerable time would not give up. But at last it was a question of life and death, and she reluctantly took her way back, first to Germany and then to England. Here, her strength gradually failed, and, finally, she finished her earthly course by falling asleep in Christ. It was my privilege to see our friend during this last visit. She was, in spite of her youth, a physical wreck, her hair being gray, her face being thin, and her strength and vigor having departed. But she had not one word of regret to express at having gone to China and was full of grateful praise to God that such a privilege had been hers. And she confessed that the one thing which had led her on and which gave her ever ample compensation for all that she had suffered was the knowledge that she was doing what she could to take the Gospel to the heathen and thus to hasten the return to earth of her beloved Lord. An Application Miss Stayner's life is more than an illustration; if is an interpretation. For it shows beyond misunderstanding what is the effect upon an open mind and heart of true scriptural motives. Here was a woman who had everything, naturally speaking, to keep her at home, but who deliberately chose to go abroad. Here was one who had faced the question of her responsibility toward the heathen; not emotionally, but calmly, and who finally had gone forth for no other reason than that her Master had commanded her to do so. Here was one who at first had little love for the heathen, but whose heart, in the path of obedience, became filled with compassion for them. And here, finally, was one who had remained steadfast and even praiseful through all her suffering and sorrow because she had learned to serve with her eyes fixed upon Him who is the Coming One. And thus the interpretation becomes an inspiration. For Miss Stayner's life and service are a constraining call, to all who know and love the Lord, to do as she did, in being wholly obedient to God and in committing all to Him. And it is not too much to say that if Christians should follow her as she followed Christ it would not be long before there would be produced a veritable revolution in missionary methods and results. Then indeed we might hope to see foreign missions turned into an apostolic triumph, where the old figure of speech, "terrible as an army with banners," would but feebly express what God would make His Church on earth to be. For it is manifest that our Father in heaven has large thoughts toward the heathen, and that He is ready to use His saints in their fulfilment whenever they will allow Him to do so. But it is to be remembered, that this last can only come to pass in the measure in which the followers of Christ are possessed and controlled by those motives which are truly and wholly divine. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 16: - CONSECRATION ======================================================================== Consecration (Exodus 28:40-43) By Rev. Henry W. Frost, Director for North America of the China Inland Mission, Germantown, Pennsylvania And for Aaron's sons thou shalt make coats, and thou shalt make for them girdles, and bonnets shalt thou make for them, for glory and for beauty. And thou shalt put them upon Aaron thy brother, and his sons with him; and shalt anoint them, and consecrate them, and sanctify them, that they may minister unto me in the priest's office. And thou shalt make them linen breeches to cover their nakedness; from the loins even unto the thighs they shall reach: And they shall be upon Aaron, and upon his sons, when they come in unto the tabernacle of the congregation, or when they come near unto the altar to minister in the holy [place]; that they bear not iniquity, and die: [it shall be] a statute for ever unto him and his seed after him. (Exodus 28:40-43) Some years ago, when I resided in Toronto, I went one Sabbath morning to attend service at Knox Church, of which the Revelation Dr. Henry M. Parsons was pastor. I went to the service in a very comfortable state of mind, longing of course, for a new blessing, but without any special sense of the kind of blessing which I needed. God, however, understood my real need, and before the sermon was done that morning my comfort was past and I was in distress of mind and spirit. The sermon had been upon a theme connected with the new life in Christ, and the Lord had made such a personal application of it to me that I felt wholly undone. My situation was similar to that of the bride in Solomon's Song who cried: "Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me!" And in that state of heart, I returned to my home. Immediately after dinner that day, I found a quiet place in our home where I might be alone with myself and God, for I needed to understand myself, and above all, to know God's purpose for me. And so I meditated and prayed, and prayed and meditated. Thus, there was brought to me, at last, the consciousness that I was wrong at the center of my life. Not that I doubted that I was saved, for I knew that I was a Christian; nor that I doubted God's acceptance of me as His servant, for I was being daily blessed and used in my work for Him; but that my life was an up and down one, sometimes in fellowship with God, and sometimes out of fellowship with Him; sometimes praising Him for victory won, and more often confessing sin as a result of deplorable defeat. Thus it was that I saw that what I needed was a new consecration. When I reached this point, I took up my Bible to study the subject of consecration. But not knowing where to turn, I sought the aid of the concordance, with the intention of working out a Bible reading on the subject. Here, however, I met with difficulty. There were few passages which referred to consecration. But I thought to myself that this did not matter, as consecration and sanctification are the same thing, and what I could not obtain under one word I should obtain under the other. But when I looked at the word sanctification, I was in the opposite difficulty, for there were so many passages that I knew not what to do with them. It was in this way that I turned to a passage which I had noticed, which spoke both of consecration and sanctification, namely, Exodus 28:40-43, and it was thus that I shut myself up to it and prayerfully meditated upon it. And I wish to say, that God taught me something from this portion of Scripture, that Sabbath afternoon, which has never been unlearned, and which has revolutionized my life. Not that since then I have never known spiritual inequality, and have ever walked blamelessly before God. Alas! my life has often been marred by failure and sin. Nevertheless, I say it to the praise of Christ, that things have been different from what they were, and that I have possessed a blessed secret of living which I had never possessed before. And it is because I have a longing to pass on to you the secret which God gave to me that I am writing thus personally, and that now, I shall beg to lead you in the study of the passage of Scripture referred to. The first thing that I noticed in my study is, that consecration and sanctification are not one and the same thing. We are dealing, as I believe, with a verbally inspired Scripture, and I observe that the Spirit says, "consecrate and sanctify." This signifies to me that consecration and sanctification-I speak from an experimental standpoint-are separate things. It is clear that they are closely connected, that one precedes the other and leads to the other, and that the other follows the one and results from that one. Indeed, one may truly say that they are inseparable. At the same time, consecration comes first and sanctification comes second. To put it in the form of a picture, consecration is the initial act of going through the outer door of a palace, and the subsequent acts of passing through other doors in the palace in order to occupy the whole and to reach the throne-room of the king; and sanctification is the palace itself, the whole of which is the home of the king, and where the king may be seen face to face. Or, to put it more simply and plainly, consecration is an initial act and many subsequent, similar acts; and sanctification is the consequent and resultant state. The second thing which I noticed is, that the one who was to be consecrated had to belong to the right family. There were many orders of people in the world at that time. First, there were the great nations without; then, there were the Israelites in an inner circle; then, there were the Levites at large in a more inner circle; then, there were the sons of Aaron still nearer the center; and, finally, there was Aaron himself at the very center. Now, consecration-in the sense used in this passage was not for the nations, nor for the Israelites, nor for the Levites at large. It was only for Aaron and Aaron's sons, and the only way, therefore, that a person could reach the experience of consecration was by being born into that particular family. This suggests, of course, the idea of exclusiveness. At the same time. it is more inclusive than it appears. For who are the successors of Aaron and Aaron's sons? The answer comes from Revelation 1:5-6, in John's ascription of praise: "Unto Him that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins by His blood, and He made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto His God and Father." Aaron and his sons were priests. We who believe in Christ are likewise priests. Thus we also may be consecrated. The third thing which I noticed is, that the person who was to be consecrated had to have the right dress on. Moses, before he came to the act of consecration, was commanded to make linen under and outer garments, and to put these upon Aaron and Aaron's sons. These were called the "garments for glory and for beauty." And notice the order of the words. If Moses, as a mere man, had been writing, he would have said, garments for beauty and for glory; but as a Spirit-inspired man, he said, "garments for glory and for beauty." This is important, for the order of words gives us the clue as to what the garments signify. Man ever seeks to put the beauty before the glory, for he argues that a person must become beautiful in order that he may become glorious. But God, as it were, says no, for it is impossible for a man to become beautiful, and, therefore, it is impossible for him to become glorious, and hence, that he must become glorious in order that he may become beautiful. In other words, God sees only one beauty in this world; it is the glory of His Christ; and, therefore we must be clothed upon with His glory if we are to appear beautiful in His holy presence. These thoughts are amply confirmed by a comparison of Revelation 19:8, and 2 Corinthians 5:21 : "And to her [the bride] was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white, for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints." "For He (God) hath made Him (Christ) to be sin for us who knew no sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." In short, if we have faith in Christ; we are clothed with the priestly garments, and hence, we may be consecrated. The fourth thing which I noticed is, that Aaron and his sons, before they were consecrated, had to be anointed. From the following chapter, the 20th and 21st verses, we learn what this anointing was. First, there was a ram of consecration, which was slain in sacrifice. Then, its blood was put upon the priest's right ear, thumb and toe. And, finally, oil was put upon the blood. Note the emblems and the order. It was not oil, and no blood; it was oil and blood. And it was not oil and then blood; it was first blood and then oil. In other words, there was first the sign of ownership through redemption, and after this there was the sign of acceptance for priestly service and empowering for that service. But once more, the one who believes in Christ has gone through this process. The believer is sprinkled with precious blood, and he is anointed with holy oil, for we have been bought with a price, even with the precious blood of Christ, and we have all been baptized by one Spirit into one body. Having observed these preliminary conditions, I came at last, that Sabbath day, to the thought of consecration itself. And here I met with a great surprise. I had, as I thought, a fairly clear conception of what consecration was. It was going to a consecration meeting and there joining with others in giving one's self to God. Or, if that was not enough, it was shutting one's self into one's room, and there making resolutions and taking vows to put away this and that and to take on this and that and so forever be the servant of God. But I had glanced at the margin of my Bible and had seen opposite the word "consecrate" the three words, "fill their hands," and what filling the hands had to do with consecration I did not know. Thus it was that I read the context of the passage and came to the 29th chapter, the 22nd-24th verses. And thus it was that I learned what true consecration meant, and what it must ever mean. This was what I found. Moses, after clothing and anointing Aaron and Aaron's sons, took the inward parts of the ram and its right shoulder, and also a loaf of bread, a cake of oiled bread, and a wafer out of the basket of unleavened bread, and laid all of these in the hands of Aaron and Aaron's sons. Then Aaron and his sons stood and waved these in the presence of the Lord. And as they did this-nothing more and nothing less-they were consecrated. Do you wonder, when I read this, that I was surprised? How different it was from what I had imagined. And yet how simple it was. But, simple as it is, it is profoundly deep. That ram of consecration symbolized Christ, for those rich inward parts and that strong, right shoulder set forth His eternal deity, and those various portions of bread, made from wheat into fine flour, manifested His matchless humanity. In other words, as those priests stood there holding up these several tokens before God, they declared-whether they fully understood it or not-that their only right in holy presence was through the redemption and eternal merit of Another; and that it was in that Person's life and glory that they appeared and dedicated themselves to priestly ministry. And as God looked down from heaven and saw, not them, but the uplifted and interposed symbols of that Other, of the Christ, He accepted Aaron and His sons and consecrated them to holy service. And this is what is necessary now. Anything else is high presumption and sin, for this is the Divine way of acceptance, power and glory. In other words, the watchword of every act of consecration is this: "Jesus only!" And do you ask, what is the watchword of sanctification? It is still, "Jesus only!" only this time, it is longer drawn out and it covers the whole of life. Paul put it thus: "For me to live is Christ!" It is for us to put it in the same way. But I almost hear some one Say: This is old-time doctrine, containing old-time ideals; but as for me, I live face to face with new-time conditions, where such doctrines and ideals are not possible of fulfillment. My reader, I will not argue with you. But I beg to suggest to you that you are wrong. For first, our Passage says: "It shall he a statute forever unto him, and his seed after him," and, since, as Christians, we are in the priestly line we are also within the privileges of the priestly succession. And also, God never repents of His gifts and callings, and what He has done once and of old He is able and ready to do again and now. Moreover, I have seen lives, in our own day, lived out wholly for Christ, and in the midst of most untoward circumstances, so that I am persuaded that such consecration as has been spoken of is quite possible for any saint of these present days, even amid the undoubtedly difficult conditions which the present times have produced. In closing, then, let me speak of some consecrated lives which I have personally known. Mr. Hudson Taylor, while once traveling in China, came to a river, and hired a boatman to ferry him across it. Just after he had done this, a Chinese gentleman, in silks and satins, reached the river and not observing Mr. Taylor, asked the boatman to hire the boat to him. This the man refused to do, saying that he had just engaged the boat to the foreigner. At this the Chinese gentleman looked at Mr. Taylor, and without a word, dealt him a heavy blow with his fist between the eyes. Mr. Taylor was stunned and staggered back, but he presently recovered himself, and, looking up, saw his assailant standing between himself and the river's brink. In an instant Mr. Taylor raised his hands to give the man a push into the stream. But in an instant more, he dropped his arms at his side. Mr. Taylor then said to the gentleman: "You see I could have pushed you into the stream. But the Jesus whom I serve would not let me do this. You were wrong in striking me, for the boat was mine. And since it is mine, I invite you to share it with me and to go with me across the river." The Chinese gentleman dropped his head in shame, and without a word, he stepped into the boat to accept the hospitality thus graciously offered to him. Mr. Taylor was a man of naturally quick temper, but evidently, for him to live was Christ. The well-known Revelation James Inglis was pastor of a large church in Detroit. He was a graduate of Edinburgh University and Divinity School, was very learned-he was afterwards requested to act with the American New Testament Revision Committee-he was unusually eloquent, and he was having a most successful ministerial career. Indeed, he was the most popular preacher in Detroit, if not in Michigan, having large audiences on Sundays, with people seated in the aisles and upon the pulpit stairs of his church, and with his listeners hanging upon his words. One week day, at this period, he sat in his study, preparing one of his sermons for the following Sunday, when a voice seemed to say to him: "James Inglis, whom are you preaching?" Mr. Inglis was startled, but he answered: "I am preaching good theology." But the Voice seemed to reply: "I did not ask you what you are preaching, but whom are you preaching?" My uncle answered: "I am preaching the Gospel." But the Voice again replied: "I did not ask you what you are preaching; I asked you whom are you preaching?" Mr. Inglis sat silent and with bowed head for a long time before he again replied. When he did, he raised his head and said: "O God, I am preaching James Inglis!" And then he added: "Henceforth I will preach no one but Christ, and Him crucified!" Then my uncle arose, opened the chest in his study which contained his eloquent sermons and deliberately put them one by one into the fire which was burning in his study stove. From that time on he turned his back upon every temptation to be oratorical and popular, preached simply and expositionally, and gave himself in life and words to set forth Jesus Christ before men. Later he became the editor of two widely read religious papers, and the teacher in the Scripture of such men as Dr. Brooks of St. Louis, Dr. Erdman of Philadelphia, Dr. Gordon of Boston, and Mr. Moody of Northfield. He died in 1872; but his name is still held in reverent and grateful remembrance by many of the most spiritual of God's saints in America and Europe. Mr. Inglis was by nature a man of proud and ambitious disposition; but it is manifest that it became true in his life that for him to live was Christ. A friend of mine-whose name I will not give-was a business man in one of our great American cities. He was an able financier and had become wealthy. Thus it came to pass that he was living in a beautiful brown stone house, situated on a prominent avenue, and in luxury. At the same time he was a Christian, being an elder in a Presbyterian church and generally active in good works. It was thus, when Mr. Hudson Taylor visited his city in 1888, that my friend offered to entertain him. The arrangement was brought to pass, and Mr. Taylor was in his home for about a week. My friend was thus brought into close contact with a man of God, the like of whom he had never before seen. As the days went by he was increasingly impressed by the godliness and winsomeness of the life before him. Finally, after Mr. Taylor had departed to another place, my friend knelt down and said to God: "Lord, if Thou wilt make me something like that little man I will give Thee everything I've got." And the Lord took him at his word. From that time onward his spiritual life visibly deepened and developed. At last one day he said to his wife: "My dear, don't you think we can do with a less expensive house than this, so that we may reduce our living expenses and give more money to the Lord?" He then proposed that they should sell the property, build a cheaper house, and give what might thus be gained to foreign missions. Happily, he had a wife who was a true "helpmeet" to him, and she heartily agreed to the proposal. So the old property was sold, the new house was built, and the sum gained was given to God for His cause abroad. About two years later my friend spoke again to his wife on this wise: "Dear, I feel badly about this house. The architect got me in for more money than I intended to spend on it. What do you say to selling it? I have got a lot on an adjacent street, and we can build there a cheaper house than this, and then we can give the difference to foreign missions." My friend's wife was not a woman who liked changes. However, she loved the Lord, and again she gave a ready assent to the proposal. So the first transaction was repeated, a plainer, cheaper house was built, and all that was made by the change was given to missions. Meanwhile, my friend's general business continued to prosper. Indeed, everything he touched seemed to turn into gold. But his personal and family expenses, by his deliberate choice, were constantly being reduced. He never lived meanly. At the same time he lived more and more simply. Thus he made money, and thus he saved money. Yet all the time he gave and gave to causes at home and abroad. And this continued until his death. At the time of his death he and his wife were supporting some thirteen missionaries, and previously, they had sent to the foreign field, providing for outfits and passages, over one hundred new and older workers. Now my friend, by nature, was a man who loved money. It had a fascination for him, both in the making of it and in the selfish spending of it. But it is manifest that such greediness had been taken out of his life. His heart was where his treasure was, and his real treasure was in heaven. In other words, he too was able to say: "For me to live is Christ!" Dear reader, whoever you are, the consecrated life is possible and practical. It was for the first century; it is also for the twentieth century. It was for early apostles and disciples; it is also for present day missionaries, ministers, lay workers and business men. In truth, it is for anybody and everybody who is the Lord's. As for you, therefore, but one thing is needed. Empty your hands of whatever you have taken up from the world, and then hold up these emptied hands to God. And as surely as God is holy, as surely as He is loving, as surely as He is gracious, He will fill your, even your, hands with Christ. And when you find yourself standing thus, holding up Jesus between yourself and God, hiding yourself beneath Him, confessing Him to be your only merit, glory and power, you too will be consecrated. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 17: - IS ROMANISM CHRISTIANITY? ======================================================================== Is Romanism Christianity? By T. W. Medhurst, Glasgow, Scotland I am aware that, if I undertake, to prove that Romanism is not Christianity, I must expect to be called "bigoted, harsh, uncharitable." Nevertheless I am not daunted; for I believe that on a right understanding of this subject depends the salvation of millions. One reason why Popery has of late gained so much power in Great Britain and Ireland, and is gaining, power still, is that many Protestants look on it now as a form of true Christianity; and think that, on that account, notwithstanding great errors, it ought to be treated very tenderly. Many suppose that at the time of the Reformation, it was reformed, and that it is now much nearer the truth than it was before that time. It is still, however, the same; and, if examined, will be found to be so different from, and so hostile to, real Christianity, that it is not, in fact, Christianity at all. Christianity, as revealed in the Sacred Writings, is salvation by Christ. It sets Him before us as at once a perfect man, the everlasting God, the Godman Mediator; who, by appointment of the Father, became a Substitute for all who were given Him. It teaches that by Him God's justice was magnified, and His mercy made manifest; that, for all who trust in Him, He fulfilled the law, and brought in a complete righteousness; and that by this alone they can be justified before God. It teaches that His death was a perfect sacrifice, and made full satisfaction and atonement for their sins, so that God lays no sin to their charge, but gives them a free and full pardon; that He has ascended to the right hand of God, and has sent down the Holy Spirit to be His only Vicar and Representative on earth; that He is the only Mediator between the righteous God and sinful man; that it is by the Holy Spirit alone that we are convinced of sin, and led to trust in Jesus that all who trust in Him, and obey Him with the obedience of faith and love, are saved, and, being saved, are made "kings and priests unto God," and have "eternal life" in Him. This is Christianity, the Christianity which the Apostles preached. But side by side with the Apostles, Satan went forth also, and preached what Paul calls "another gospel." Paul did not mean that it was called "another gospel;" but that as Satan "beguiled Eve through his subtlety" (2 Corinthians 11:3), so some, while professing to teach the Gospel, were turning men away "from the simplicity that is in Christ;" and by doing so, did, in fact, teach "another gospel." Paul, speaking of those who were thus deceived, said, "I marvel that ye are so soon removed from Him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the Gospel of Christ." He means, that there can be but one Gospel, though something else may be called the gospel; and he says of those who had thus perverted "the Gospel of Christ": "If any one preach any other gospel unto you... let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:6-9). He calls those who did so "false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ;" and he adds, "no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore, it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works" (2 Corinthians 11:13-15). Let us consider well the meaning of these passages of Scripture. Paul says that there cannot be another Gospel; the conclusion, therefore, is evident, that these teachers were not teachers of Christianity, but of a Satanic delusion. I submit that the teaching of Rome is at least as different from that of the Sacred Writings as that which Paul calls "another gospel;" and that, therefore, his words authorize us to say that Romanism is not Christianity. First, Christianity consists of what Christ has taught, and commanded in Scripture. But Romanism does not even profess to be founded on Scripture only: it claims a right to depart from what is contained in it-a right to add to Scripture what is handed down by tradition; and both to depart from and add to Scripture by making new decrees. It forbids the cup to the people, for instance, in what it calls "the mass," and yet admits that it was not forbidden to them at "the beginning of the Christian religion" (Council of Trent, Session 21, chap. 2). It says that councils and the pope have been empowered by the Holy Spirit to make decrees by which, in reality, the doctrines delivered by Christ are entirely annulled. To show how extensively this has been done, let the reader endeavor to trace the full effect of what Rome teaches as to baptismal regeneration, transubstantiation, justification by means of sacraments and deeds done by us, the invocation of saints-things which are entirely opposed to the teaching of Christ. The canons of the Council of Trent, which sat at intervals from 1545 to 1563, may be called the Bible of Romanism. They were translated into English, as late as 1848, by a Roman Catholic priest, under the sanction of Dr. Wiseman. The Council tells us that one end for which it was called was "the extirpation of heresies." What, then, according to it, is the standard of truth? It tells us that Rome receives The Sacred Scriptures and "The Unwritten Traditions... preserved in continuous succession in the Catholic Church, with equal affection of piety and reverence" (Session 4); also that "no one may dare to interpret the Sacred Scriptures" in a manner contrary to that "Church; whose it is to judge respecting the true sense and interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures;" nor may any one interpret them "in a manner contrary to the unanimous consent of the fathers" (Session 4). Christ commands us to "prove all things" (1 Thessalonians 5:21); to "search the Scriptures" (John 5:39); to ascertain for ourselves, as the Bereans did, whether what we hear agrees with what we read in Scripture (Acts 17:11). He commands us to "hold fast the form of sound words," uttered by Himself and His Apostles (2 Timothy 1:13); to "contend earnestly for the faith delivered once for all to the saints" (Jude 1:3). But Rome says, "Let no one dare to do so"-let all "Christian princes... cause [men] to observe" our decrees (Session 16), nor "permit" them to be "violated by heretics" (Session 25). The Romanist must not dare to have an opinion of his own; his mind must exist in the state of utter prostration and bondage; he must not attempt to understand the Scripture himself. And if others attempt it-if they dare to receive the teaching and do the will of Christ, instead of receiving fictions and obeying commands of men, which wholly subvert and destroy the truth and will of Jesus, Rome commands the civil ruler to restrain them; and, by the use of fines, imprisonment, and death, to compel them, if possible, to renounce what God requires them to maintain and follow, even unto death. The Bible, the whole Bible, nothing but the Bible, is the standard and the rule of Christianity. To know its meaning for ourselves, to receive its teaching, to rely on its promises, to trust in its Redeemer, to obey Him from delight of love, and to refuse to follow other teaching, is Christianity itself. But Romanism denies all this; and therefore, Romanism is not Christianity. Secondly: Christ commanded us to show. "meekness" towards those who oppose us (2 Timothy 2:25). He says, "Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who use you despitefully and persecute you" (Matthew 5:44). But Romanism teaches men to hate, and, if they are able, to persecute to the death all those who will not receive it. Its deeds have been diabolical and murderous. It is "drunken with the blood of the saints." It has inscribed on the page of history warnings which appeal to the reason and the feelings of all generations. Such a warning is what is told of the 24th of August, 1572. On that day the Protestants of Paris were devoted to slaughter by members of the Papal Church. For the one offence of being Protestants, thousands were slain. The streets of Paris ran with blood; everywhere cries and groans, were mingled with the clangor of bells, the clash of arms, and the oaths of murderers. The king, Charles IX; stood, it is said, at a window, and, every now and then, fired on the fugitives. Every form of guilt, cruelty, and suffering, made that fearful night hideous and appalling. Never, in any city, which has professedly been brought under the influence of Christianity, was there such a reveling in blood and crime. You may say, "Why do you recall the atrocities of a time so remote?" I answer, Because this deed received the sanction of the Church of Rome as a meritorious demonstration of fidelity to Romish precepts and doctrines. When the tidings of this wholesale murder were received in Rome, the cannon of St. Angelo were fired, the city was illuminated and Pope Gregory XIII and his cardinals went in procession to all the churches, and offered thanksgivings at the shrine of every saint. The Cardinal of Lorraine, in a letter to Charles IX, full of admiration and applause of the bloody deed, said, "That which you have achieved was so infinitely above my hopes, that I should have never dared to contemplate it; nevertheless, I have always believed that the deeds of your Majesty would augment the glory of God, and tend to immortalize your name." Some say that Rome has ceased to persecute. But this is not the fact; either as to her acts, or rules of action. She asserts that she is unchanged, unchangeable; that she is infallible, and cannot alter, except so far as necessity, or plans for the future, may require; and facts are often occurring which prove that persecution is still approved by her. Rome has little power now; her persecuting spirit is kept in abeyance for a time; but it is still there. When it is free from restraint, it knows no way of dealing with difference of opinion but by the rack, the stake, the thumbscrew, the iron boot, the assassin's dagger, or a wholesale massacre. Let all who value their liberty, all who love the truth as it is in Jesus have no fellowship with such deeds of darkness, nor with those who work them. Let us show that we have no sympathy with such a cruel spirit; and that we love the names and memory of the noble army of martyrs of the Reformation; of those who sealed their faith with their blood; of those who died to release their country and their posterity from the bondage of Rome. I agree with Dr. Samuel Waldegrave, when he says that, "The Convocation of the English clergy did wisely, when, in the days of Elizabeth, they enacted that every parish church in the land should be furnished with a copy of Foxe's Book of Martyrs;" and that it would be well if a copy of it were "in every house, yea, in every hand;" for "Rome is laboring, with redoubled effort, for the subjugation of Britain," and "the people have forgotten that she is a siren who enchants but to destroy." Thirdly: As to the sacrifice of Christ, Christianity teaches that He was "offered once for all, to bear the sins of many" (Hebrews 9:28); that those who are sanctified by His sacrifice are so "by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Hebrews 10:10); that "by one offering He has perfected forever those who are sanctified," or made holy (Hebrews 10:14): these passages declare that the sacrifice of Christ was offered once for all, never to be repeated. But Rome declares that Christ is sacrificed anew, every time that the Lord's supper, which she calls "the mass," is celebrated; and that those who administer it are sacrificing priests. The Council of Trent (Session 22) says, "Forasmuch as in this Divine sacrifice, which is celebrated in the mass, that same Christ is contained, and immolated in an unbloody manner, who once offered Himself in a bloody manner, on the altar of the cross, the holy synod teaches that this sacrifice is truly propitiatory, and that, by means thereof, this is effected that we obtain mercy and find grace in seasonable aid, if we draw nigh unto God, contrite and penitent, with a sincere heart and upright faith, with fear and reverence. For the Lord, appeased by the oblation thereof, and granting the grace and gift of penitence, forgives even heinous crimes and sins. For the victim is one and the same, the same now offering by the ministry of priests, who then offered Himself on the cross, the manner alone of offering being different." The synod commands the use of lights, incense, and the traditional vestments; also that the priests "mix water with the wine." In chapter 9, canon 1, the synod says, "If any one say that in the mass a true and proper sacrifice is not offered to God; or, that to be offered, is nothing else but that Christ is given us to eat; let him be anathema." In canon 3, it decreed that, "If any one say that the sacrifice of the mass is only a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving; or that it is a bare commemoration of the sacrifice consummated on the cross, but not a propitiatory sacrifice; or, that it profits him only who receives; and that it ought not to be offered for the living and the dead for sins; pains, satisfactions, and other necessities; let him be anathema." The Christ of Romanism is one who is sacrificed again and again for the remission of the sins both of the living and the dead; for those alive, and for those in purgatory. Is this the Christ of Christianity? In canon 1 of its 13th Session, the synod says, "If any one deny that, in the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist, are contained truly, really and substantially the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently the whole Christ, but say that He is only therein as in a sign, or in figure, or virtue; let him be anathema." The Christ of the Bible, and of Christianity, is in heaven "at the right hand of God," where "He ever lives to make intercession for those who come to God through Him" (Romans 8:34; Colossians 3:1; Hebrews 7:25); nor will He come in bodily form to earth again until He comes the second time, without sin, unto salvation, to be admired in all those who believe (Hebrews 9:28; 2 Thessalonians 1:10). But the Christ of Romanism is upon the altars of Rome; He is said to be brought there by the magic spell of her priests, and to be there in the form and shape of a wafer. What a fearful blasphemy! The priest pronounces certain words, gives the solemn consecration, and then elevates the wafer. Taste it-it is wafer; touch it is wafer; look at it-it is wafer; smell it-it is wafer; analyze it-it is wafer; but the priest affirms, the Council of Trent affirms, Romanism affirms, the poor victims of delusion affirm, as they bow down before it, "This is our Christ-our God!" Here is the climax of this superstition-it exhibits for the person of Christ a morsel of bread: Is that morsel of bread the Christ of the Bible? Is that system which declares it to be so, Christianity? Fourthly: Christianity is in direct opposition to Romanism as to the mode of a sinner's justification before God. What say the Scriptures? "By deeds of law shall no flesh living be justified before God" (Romans 3:20). "Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith, without deeds of law" (Romans 3:28). "Even David describes the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness without works" (Romans 4:6). Israel, "being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one who believes," or has faith (Romans 10:3-4). "God was in Christ, . . . not imputing their trespasses unto them" (2 Corinthians 5:19). "God has made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Corinthians 5:21). "Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Romans 5:1). The doctrine thus taught by Christianity is that all men are sinners; that without justification there is no hope for any sinner; that we are justified by the imputation of Christ's righteousness alone; and that His righteousness is received through faith. Now, what says Romanism? It says that the righteousness by which men are justified is that which the Holy Spirit, by the grace of God, through Christ, makes them work out for themselves; that it is received by means of "the sacrament of baptism... without which no one was ever justified;" that it is received "in ourselves," when we are renewed by the Holy Spirit; that it is a righteousness "imparted," "infused," "implanted," and not imputed (Session 6, chapter 7). Among the declarations of the Council are these: "If any one say that justifying faith is nothing else but confidence in the Divine mercy which remits sin for Christ's sake; or, that this confidence alone is that whereby we are justified; let him be anathema" (Session 6, canon 12). "If any one say that... good works are merely the fruits and signs of justification obtained, but not a cause of the increase thereof; let him be anathema" (canon 24). "If any one say that he who is justified by good works, which are done by him through the grace of God and the merit of Jesus Christ, whose living member he is, does not truly deserve increase of grace, eternal life," etc. ... "let him be anathema" (canon 32). Thus Romanism anathematizes the preaching of true Christianity! I will mention but one more proof that Romanism is not Christianity, though there are many others which might be given. Fifthly: Christianity says "there is one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5), who is at the right hand of the Father (Ephesians 1:20), where He "ever lives to make intercession" for us (Hebrews 7:25). Christianity says that there is but one Mediator; that we cannot draw near to God except through Jesus. What says Romanism? I quote from "a book of devotion for every day in the month of May," published by Papal authority. "Great is the need you have of Mary in order to be saved! Are you innocent? Still your innocence is, however, under great danger. How many, more innocent than You, have fallen into sin, and been damned? Are you penitent? Still your perseverance is very uncertain. Are you sinners? Oh, what need you have of Mary to convert you! Ah, if there were no Mary, perhaps you would be lost! However, by the devotion of this month, you may obtain her patronage, and your own salvation. Is it possible that a mother so tender can help hearing a Son so devout? For a rosary, for a fast, she has sometimes conferred signal graces upon the greatest of sinners. Think, then, what she will do for you for a whole month dedicated to her service!" Here you see that Mary is everything; that Jesus Christ is nothing. Romanism teaches also that it is right to ask the intercession of all departed saints (Session 25). How dreadful is it that sinners are thus kept back from Jesus, and are prevented from reaching God through Him. Popery is emphatically anti-Christian: it is the adversary of Christ in all the offices which He sustains. It is the enemy of His prophetic office; for it chains up that Bible which He inspired. It is the enemy of His priestly office; for, by the mass it denies the efficacy of that sacrifice which He offered once for all on Calvary. It is the enemy of His kingly office; for it tears the crown from His head to set it on that of the Pope. Can that be truly called Christianity, then, which is the reverse of it? Can that be fitly treated as Christianity which hates it, denounces it, and tries to destroy it? Can that be Christianity which forbids liberty of conscience, and the right of private judgment? Which commands the Bible to be burned? Which teaches the worship of saints and angels? Which makes the Virgin Mary command God? Which calls her the Mother of God, and the Queen of Heaven? Which sets aside the mediation of Christ, and puts others in His place? Which makes salvation depend on confession to man, and this is a confessional so filthy that Satan himself might well be ashamed of it? Can that be Christianity which condemns the way of salvation through faith, as a damnable heresy? Can that be Christianity which, by the bulls of its Popes, and decrees of its councils, requires both princes and people to persecute Christians? Which actually swears its bishops and archbishops to persecute them with all their might? Can that be Christianity which has set tip, and still maintains, the Inquisition? That which has been so cruel, so bloodthirsty, that the number slain by it of the servants of Christ, in about 1,200 years, is estimated at fifty millions, giving an average of 40,000 a year for that long period? No, it cannot be! With a voice of thunder, let Protestants answer, "No!" To aid such a system is to fight against God. He demands that we "resist the devil" (James 4:7), and have no fellowship with "works of darkness" (Ephesians 5:11). "No peace with Rome," must be on our lips, and be in our lives. "No peace with Rome," whether wearing her scarlet undisguised, or using the cloak of a Protestant name. The voice from heaven (Revelation 18:4): "Come out of her, My people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues," is proof that there may be true Christians in the Roman body; but it is proof also that even while in it, they are not of it; and that they will strive to escape from it, so as not to share in its sins. We are informed by God that this system is the work of Satan; that his ministers are "transformed as the ministers of righteousness, whose end shall be according to their works" (2 Corinthians 11:15); that it is he who turns men away "from the simplicity which is in Christ" (11:3); that it is he who is the author of that "mystery of iniquity" which was at work even while the Apostles were still living, and which was to be further revealed, and to remain, till it should be consumed by Christ, and "destroyed by the brightness of His coming;" a system which is according to the working of Satan, with all power, and signs, and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth that they might be saved" (2 Thessalonians 2:7-10). May those who love God, and yet have some connection with this system, listen to the command, "Come out of her, My people." May we in no degree partake of her sins: may we renounce, with a holy loathing, all her symbols; throw off, with righteous indignation, all allegiance to her corruptions. May we have nothing of Romanism in our doctrines, but contend earnestly for the pure faith of the Gospel of Jesus. May we have nothing of Romanism in our discipline. May we be subject, in all matters of religious faith and practice, to the Word of God, and to that alone. May we have nothing of Romanism in our services, in our buildings, in our forms, in our attire. Because Israel burned incense to the brazen serpent which Moses had made, Hezekiah broke it in pieces. (2 Kings 18:4). For the like reason, let us cease to use, on person or building, that form of the cross which the Romanist treats with superstitious regard. "Come out of her." Ye who seek salvation, go to Jesus. Him has God exalted to be a Prince and a Saviour. He is able to save to the uttermost those who come to God by Him. The Father is ready with out-stretched arms to clasp the penitent prodigal in His embrace. The Son is ready to give a free, full, complete forgiveness to: every redeemed sinner, and to justify all who come unto God by Him. The Holy Spirit is ready to sanctify, renew, instruct, and help all who call upon Him. The assembly of saved sinners on earth is ready to welcome you to partake of its fellowship and of its joys. Angels are ready with harps attuned, and fingers upon the chords, to give you a triumphant welcome, and to rejoice over you with joy. Come just as you are; come at once. "Him that cometh to Me," says Christ, "I will in no wise cast out" (John 6:37). ======================================================================== CHAPTER 18: - ROME, THE ANTAGONIST OF THE NATION ======================================================================== Rome, The Antagonist of the Nation By Rev. J. M. Foster, Boston, Massachusetts The Roman Catholic Church, both in Scriptures and in Christian history, figures as a politico-ecclesiastical system, the essential and deadly foe of civil and religious liberty, the hoary-headed antagonist of both Church and State. John Milton said: " Popery is a double thing to deal with, and claims a two-fold power, ecclesiastical and political, both usurped, and one supporting the other." Let us consider a few undeniable facts. I. ROME IS THE NATION'S ANTAGONIST BECAUSE IT IS A CORRUPT AND CORRUPTING SYSTEM OF FALSEHOOD AND IDOLATRY THAT POLLUTES OUR LAND. Cardinal Manning said: "The Catholic Church is either the masterpiece of Satan or the kingdom of the Son of God" ("Lectures on the Four-fold Sovereignty of God," London, 1871, page 171). Unquestionably, it is not the latter. Cardinal Newman declared: "Either the Church of Rome is the house of God or the house of Satan; there is no middle ground between them" (Essays 11, page 116). We solemnly affirm that she is not the former. The Church of Rome is Satan's counterfeit of the true Church of Christ. The heathen sacrificed to devils, not to God. As Israel took their idols from the nations about them, Rome Papal took her idolatry from Rome Pagan. When the "barbarian hordes" from the North over-ran the Roman Empire and dismembered it, the Bishop of Rome sent missionaries among them, proposing a union of Christianity and paganism. The pagan temples and priests and rites were incorporated with the Christian Church, and Rome became "baptized heathenism." "They feared the Lord and served graven images." The Bishop of Rome naturally had great influence among them. At his suggestion the lost unit y of the Western Empire was restored in recognizing him as the official ecclesiastical head. The Greek Emperor at Constantinople, Phocas, desired to strengthen his authority in the west and invoked the aid of the Roman bishop. Boniface III saw his opportunity and made a deal. If the Byzantium Emperor would acknowledge him as universal bishop, he would accede. Phocas recognized Boniface III in 606 A.D. The pagans worshipped the Caesars. Roman Catholics pay Divine honors to the pope. They ascribe to him the names, titles, attributes, words and works of God. The name of God and His works have been ascribed to the pope by their theologians, canonists, councils and the popes themselves. By the authority of canon law the pontiff is styled the Almighty's vicegerent. This is treason. The second commandment forbids worshipping of God by images, and yet Rome Papal has introduced the image worship of Pagan Rome, only changing the names. The Virgin Mary is substituted for Venus. The image of Christ takes the place of Jupiter. The idols of the pagan temples were not so numerous as the idols of the Romish cathedrals today. Pope Plus IV called the Council of Trent, which issued its creed in 1564. This creed of Pius IV, together with the decree of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, promulgated in 1854, and that of the pope's infallibility, issued in 1870, mark the doctrinal status of Rome today. Let us note a few facts in regard to this. 1. Rome restricts the use of the Bible. The fourth rule of the congregation of the "Index Of Prohibited Books", approved by Pius IV and still in force, runs as follows: "Since it is manifest by experience that if the Holy Bible in the vulgar tongue be suffered to be read everywhere without distinction, more evil than good arises, let the judgment of the bishop or inquisitor be abided by in this respect, so that, after consulting with the parish priest or the confessor, they may grant permission to read translations of the Scriptures, made by Catholic writers, to those whom they understand to be able to receive no harm, but an increase of faith and piety from such reading (which faculty let them have in writing). But whosoever shall presume to read these Bibles, or have them in possession without such faculty, shall not be capable of receiving absolution of their sins, unless they have first given up their Bibles to the ordinary." This prohibition has been followed up by later declarations. Pope Leo XII, in an Encyclical dated May 3, 1824, addressed the Latin bishops thus: "We also, venerable brothers, in conformity with our apostolic duty, exhort you to turn away your flocks from these poisonous pastures [i.e., vernacular Bibles]. Reprove, entreat, be instant in season and out of season, that the faithful committed to you (adhering strictly to the rules of the 'Congregation of the Index') be persuaded that if the Sacred Scriptures be everywhere indiscriminately published, more evil than advantage will arise thence, because of the rashness of men." And the way of the laity to the reading of the Holy Scriptures is further blocked by the second article in the creed of Plus IV: "I do admit the Holy Scriptures in the same sense that Holy Mother Church hath held and doth hold, whose business it is to judge the true sense and interpretation of them. Nor will I ever receive or interpret them except according to the unanimous consent of the Fathers." As the "Holy Mother Church "publishes no commentaries on the Holy Scriptures", nor "authorized interpretation" of Holy Writ; and as "the unanimous consent of the Fathers" is impossible, they having commented freely, each according to his ability, the way of the laity to the Word of God is closed. The difference between Protestantism and Romanism is, the Bible is an open book to the one and a sealed book to the other. The Reformed Churches have translated the whole Bible into 517 languages and dialects—all the great trunk languages spoken by three-fourths of the world's inhabitants—and published 300,000,000 copies. The Roman Church keeps the Bible locked up in the Latin tongue. It is true the Douay Bible was published, the New Testament in 1582 at Rheims, and the Old Testament at Douay in 1609. This is Rome's English Bible. But the people are forbidden to read it. A distinguished French Romanist, Henri Lasserre, struck with the fact that the children of the church knew "the Divine Book only in fragments, without logical or chronological order," brought out a translation of the four Gospels, for which he obtained the sanction of the Archbishop of Paris and of the Pope. The result was an immediate sale of 100,000 copies, so eager were the French Romanists for this novel work. But the Index shortly interfered. The Pope's express sanction was withdrawn, the printing and the sale peremptorily stopped, under the pretext that some passages were translated inaccurately. The fragments in Latin were preferred as safer than the whole in a language everyone could understand. Rome has made only two translations, and those not spontaneously, but because the inquirers insisted upon their possession. These two are for Uganda and for Japan. The large number of Protestants compelled the Roman missionaries to accede to the demands of their own inquirers and converts that they should possess the wonderful Book which their fellow countrymen were reading. 2. Rome accepts the Apocrypha of the Old Testament. The Apocrypha came this way. The larger part of the Jews never returned from the Babylonian captivity, but were dispersed in many countries. They had the Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures. They also had other writings, produced after Malachi, but not of equal authority. About B.C. 280, Ptolomy, the King of Egypt, invited Hebrew rabbi to come to Egypt and translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. The other Jewish writings were translated also, and used by the Alexandrian Jews of the dispersion, although they did not hold them as part of the Old Testament. In course of time the Latin language superseded the Greek in the West, and in their ignorance of Hebrew, Latin translations were made. not from the original Hebrew, but from the Greek version, and the Apocrypha was translated with it, Most of the Christian fathers had no knowledge of Hebrew, and read the Scriptures in Greek and Latin. They distinguished the Bible from the Apocryphal writings. So did Jerome, in his Latin Vulgate, 404 A.D., translated from Hebrew and Chaldee. So did Philo and Melito, A. D. 160, and the Jewish Talmud of the fifth century, and the great Roman Cardinal Cajetan (1518) and the learned Roman Catholic Archbishop Ximenes, to whom we owe the famous Complutensian Polyglot (1517), and Josephus (who lived about the time of Christ). Augustine differed from Jerome as to the authority of the Apocrypha, but Augustine did not know Hebrew and his testimony is valueless. But not one of the thirty bishops in the Council of Trent could read Hebrew, and only a few knew the Greek And yet that utterly incompetent Council decreed the Apocrypha to be a part of God's Holy Word, and to be accepted under pain of anathema. 3. Rome accepts tradition as of equal authority with the Scriptures. The Council of Trent (Session IV): "Seeing clearly that this (saving) truth and (moral) discipline are contained in the written books and the written traditions received by the Apostles from the mouth of Christ Himself or from the Apostles themselves, the Holy Ghost dictating, have come down even unto us, transmitted, as it were, from hand to hand;" and again: "Every sort of doctrine which is to be delivered to the faithful is contained in the Word of God, which is divided into Scripture and tradition." But such stupendous assertions require clear evidence. Where is "tradition" found? Has Rome recorded and registered it? Where is the digest and proof of it for the faithful to examine? How is it tested? How is it shown to be necessary? Abbe Migne made a compilation of the decrees of councils and writings of the ancients in 220 thick volumes, and called it "The Catholic Tradition". To this, many other works must be added. Are these mountains of chaff to be dug through before Christ is found? This is Satan's way of lies. 4. Rome has seven sacraments. Here is the decree of the Council of Trent: "If anyone saith the sacraments of the new law were not all instituted by Jesus Christ our Lord, or that they are more or less than seven, to-wit: baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, orders, and matrimony; or even that any one of these seven is not truly and properly a sacrament; let him be anathema" (Session VII; canon 1). The definition of a sacrament given by the Council was: "A visible sign of invisible grace, instituted for our sanctification." But the Scriptures teach that "A sacrament is an holy ordinance instituted by Christ, wherein by sensible signs, Christ and the benefits of the new covenant are represented, sealed and applied to believers." According to this there are only two sacraments of the New Testament: baptism and the Lord's Supper. The other five, penance, confirmation, extreme unction, orders, and matrimony, are not sacraments. Here the Church of Rome usurps the prerogatives of the Lord Jesus Christ, the sole and only Head of His body the Church. 5. Rome teaches transubstantiation. The Council of Trent (Session XII, chapter 4): "By the consecration of the bread and wine a conversion is made of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood, which conversion is by the Holy Catholic Church suitably and properly called transubstantiation." To this add Article V of the creed of Plus IV: "In the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist there are truly, really and substantially the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ." This doctrine, as the English Archbishop recently described it, "depends upon the acceptance of a metaphysical definition expressed in terms of mediaeval philosophy." The philosophy is that of Aristotle, who attempts to draw a distinction between "substance" and "accidents"—substance being the inner reality in which the qualities or accidents, the taste, smell, form, color, etc., inhere. But this contradicts the testimony of our senses. It is unreasonable and entirely unscriptural. 6. Rome sacrifices the mass. By sacrifice they mean "an act of external worship in which God is honored as the principle and end of man and all things, by the oblation of a visible creature, by submitting it to an appropriate transformation by a duly qualified minister" (Cath. Dic., page 813). This is its comment upon the Eucharistic sacrifices: "All that is included in the idea of sacrifice is found in the Eucharist. There is the oblation of a sensible thing, viz., of the body and blood of Christ under the appearance of bread and wine." "There is the mystical destruction of Christ the victim, for Christ presents Himself on the altar as in a state of death, through the mystical separation between His body and blood." "In this sacrifice of thanksgiving we offer God the most excellent gift He has bestowed upon us, viz., the 'Son in whom He is well pleased.'" Is not this awful presumption? Their Eucharistic sacrifice they hold to be "one with that of the cross; on the cross and altar we have the same victim and the same priest." Pope Pius V said: "Protestants have no sacrifice because the Reformation abolished the mass." But the old answer of Bishop Jewel is as true as ever: "Indeed the mass is abolished through the gracious working of God .... They did tell us that in their mass they were able to offer Christ, the Son of God, unto God His Father for our sins. Oh, blasphemous speech, and most injurious to the glorious work of our redemption! Such kind of sacrifice we have not. Christ Himself is our High Priest ... by whom we are sanctified, even by the offering of Christ once made, who took away our sins and fastened them upon the cross .... This is our sacrifice, this is our propitiation and sacrifice for the whole world. How, then, saith Pope Pius, we have no sacrifice?" 7. Rome denies the cup to the laity. The Council of Trent pronounces two anathemas as to this. One will suffice. "If anyone saith that the Holy Catholic Church was not induced by just cause and reasons to communicate under the species of bread only, laymen, and also clerics, when not consecrating, let him be anathema" (Session XXI; canon 1, 20). This is unscriptural. Our Lord instituted the feast in the use of both bread and wine. Down to the fifteenth century both elements were used. Denying the cup to the laity was the culmination of many previous errors, such as confounding the sign and the thing signified, the propitiating sacrifice of the mass, the priesthood of ministers and the stupendous miracle of converting bread and wine into the real flesh and blood of Christ. 8. Rome traffics in masses. The priests claim to remove souls from purgatory for a certain number of masses, each having a certain price. Not long ago Queen Christina of Spain left money for 5,000 masses to be said for herself and 5,000 for her husband. As no priest could offer the mass more than once a day, they had to be let out to country priests. More recently, the Abbe Brugidon endeavored to raise money toward building a church in Rome by receiving payment for masses to be said when the church was completed. There is much doubt as to whether the church will ever be built, but 260,000 masses have been already paid for. A number beyond the power of the Abbe ever to accomplish. Such stupendous frauds will shock the moral sense of the Christian world and awaken the Church to a recognition of the mystery of iniquity in the Church of Rome. II. ROME IS THE NATION's ANTAGONIST BECAUSE IT IS A POLITICAL SYSTEM OF FOREIGN DESPOTISM. Rome Pagan persecuted the Christians. Rome Pagan became Rome Christian under Constantine and ceased persecuting. Rome nominally Christian became Rome Papal and persecuted more severely than before. The pope controlled the kingdoms of Europe for twelve centuries. How did he gain this power? After the pope became universal bishop he longed to be free from the Byzantine yoke and wield civil power himself. His opportunity came at last to realize his ambition. Here it is. Clovis the Great entered Gaul and destroyed the Roman army in the battle of Soissons in 486. He then established the French monarchy and became the first of the dynasty of Merovingian kings. The Merovingian dynasty continued two hundred and fifty years, when it was superseded by the Carlovingian dynasty. The change came thus: Childeric III was the last of the Merovingian kings, a weak, incapable prince. Charles Martel was "the Mayor of the Palace," which placed him next to, but not on, the throne. The Saracens invaded France and threatened European civilization. Charles Martel conquered them in a seven days' battle between Tours and Poitiers in 732, and saved Europe from the scourge of Mohammedanism. The government of France was henceforth practically in his hands. His son and successor, Pepin the short, wished to remove Childeric III and establish himself on the throne of France, but he must have a legal permit. He appealed to the pope at Rome for such authority. The pope's opportunity had come. He offered to do as Pepin desired, providing Pepin would free the Holy See from the domination of Byzantium. So Pepin led his army across the Alps and conquered the provinces, entered Rome, made Stephen III a free Prince. The pope became the king of kings in 755. He girded on two swords, one on each side, emblems of temporal and spiritual power. And the pope crowned Pepin King of France. Now, the pope desired to revive the old Roman Empire. In 800 Charlemagne, the son and successor of Pepin, was invited to Rome and crowned by Pope Leo III as "Emperor of the Romans." In return for this Charlemagne decreed that one-tenth of all incomes must be given to the church on the severest pains of forfeiture. But the pope must have grounds for such assumptions of power. And so the "false decretals" of Isadore, which are now universally considered to have been bold and unblushing forgeries, were promulgated between 847 and 853. And about 858 the "Donation of Constantine," which is now acknowledged by Romanists to be spurious, was made to do service. These were requisitioned by Pope Nicholas I. The system grew as Innocent III placed the iron crown upon the head of Otho I in 962, as the "King of the Holy Roman Empire of the Germans"; as Hildebrand enforced celibacy upon his English clergy in 1073; as Adrian IV granted Ireland to King Henry II in 1156; and as Boniface VIII issued his famous Bull, Unum Sanctum, in 1303, which was quoted by Pope Pius IX in his Encyclical of 1864, and is good canon law today. Here are its contents: 1. It is necessary to salvation that every man should submit to the pope. 2. This is a necessary consequence of the dogma of papal supremacy. 3. It condemns the assertion by the state of any power over church property. 4. The temporal power of Christian princes does not exempt them from obedience to the head of the church. 5. The material sword is drawn for the church, the spiritual by the church. 6. The material sword must cooperate with the spiritual and assist it. 7. The secular power should be guided by the spiritual as the higher. 8. The spiritual has the pre-eminence over the material. 9. The temporal power is subordinate to the ecclesiastical as to the higher. 10. The temporal power, if it is not good, is judged by the spiritual. 11. To the ecclesiastical authority (that is, to the pope and his hierarchy) the words of the prophet Jeremiah apply: 'Lo, I have set thee this day over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root up and pull down and to waste and to destroy; and to build and to plant.' 12. When the temporal power goes astray it is judged by the spiritual. 13. For obtaining eternal happiness, each one is required to submit to the pope. 14. The supremacy of the pope even in temporal things is to be enforced. 15. The pope recognizes human authorities in their proper place, till they lift their will against God." The Holy Roman Empire reached its climax in 1164 when Hadrian IV trod on the neck of Frederick of Barbarossa, and went out of commission in 1806, when Napoleon Bonaparte compelled Joseph II to abdicate. When Victor Immanuel II entered Rome in 1870 and made the Quirinal the capital of United Italy, the pope called himself "the Prisoner of the Vatican" and issued one of the most shocking excommunications against the conqueror: "By the authority of the Almighty God, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost; and of the holy canons and of the undefiled Virgin Mary, mother and nurse of our Saviour, and of the celestial virtues, angels, archangels, thrones, dominions, powers, cherubim and seraphim; and of all the holy patriarchs and prophets, and of the apostles and evangelists, and of the holy innocents, who, in the sight of the Holy Lamb, are found worthy to sing the new song; and of the holy martyrs and holy confessors, and of the holy virgins and of the saints, together with all the holy and elect of God; we excommunicate and anathematize him, and from the threshold of the holy church of God Almighty we sequester him, that he may be tormented in eternal excruciating sufferings, together with Dathan and Abiram and those who say to the Lord God, 'Depart from us, we desire none of Thy ways!' And as fire is quenched by water, so let the light of him be put out forever more. May Father, Son and Holy Ghost curse him. May he be damned wherever he may be; whether in the house or in the field, whether in the highway or in the byway, whether in the wood or water, and whether in the church. May the Virgin Mary, St. Michael, St. John, St. Peter, St. Paul, the choir of the holy virgins, curse him. May he be cursed in living and dying, in eating and drinking, in fasting and thirsting, in slumbering and sleeping, in watching and walking, in standing or sitting, in lying down or walking, and in blood-letting. May he be cursed in his brain; may he be cursed in all his faculties; may he be cursed inwardly and outwardly; may he be cursed in hi s hair; may he be cursed in the crown of his head; in his temples, in his forehead and his ears; in his eyebrows, in his cheeks, in his jaw-bones, in his nostrils; in his foreteeth and his grinders; in his lips and in his throat; in his shoulders and in h is wrists; in his arms, his hands and his fingers. May he be damned in his mouth, in his breast, in his heart and in all the viscera of his body. May he be damned in his veins and in his groin and in his thighs, in his hips; in his knees; in his legs, feet and toe-nails. May he be cursed in all the joints and articulations of his body. From the top of his head to the sole of his foot may there be no soundness in him. May the Son of the living God, with all the glory of His majesty, curse him; and may heaven with all the powers that move therein rise up against him, curse him, and damn him! Amen. So let it be. Amen." But while the pope was pouring out the vials of his wrath, the Prussian army was sweeping the French at Sedan and Napoleon III surrendered and the German Empire became a firm union. The pope ex-communicated the German prelates who refused to accept the dogma of the pope's infallibility. They refused to vacate their parishes and the Ultramontanes attempted to force them out. The Germans interfered and the iron Chancellor, Bismarck, declared in the Parliament. "We are not going to Canossa, either physically or spiritually," and on July 4, 1872, the German Reichstag passed a law expelling the Jesuits from the Empire. France has later followed in separating Church and State and banishing the monastic orders. Spain has followed the same example and Portugal is doing likewise. But Great Britain and the United States persist in flirting with the great whore of the Tiber. The coronation oath of King George V was modified and "Home Rule" is voted to Ireland to please the Vatican. In the United States they have 11,000,000 and control 1,500,000 votes of the city governments of Boston, New York, Chicago and others and have ninety five percent of the municipal offices filled by Rome. The press of the country is censored by Roman Jesuits. The government at Washington went to Canossa when the President sent Judge Taft to Rome to consult the pope about the friars in the Philippines, the only difference being, Henry IV went in a coarse sackcloth and barefoot in the snow, standing at the gate three days, while Taft went in a swallow-tailed coat and white vest and shoes on his feet, and was received at once. But he bargained to pay the pope $7,500,000 for claims not worth $1,000,000 in the Islands; then $406,000 for damages to church property in quelling a rebellion provoked and fostered by the friars themselves. The solid Roman vote is a menace in our national elections. The Roman hierarchy owns $300,000,000 in America. They have a parochial school system and clamorously demand a share in the public school fund. Their policy is the refinement of duplicity. They join the infidels and skeptics in driving the Bible from our public schools, on the ground that the State is only a secular corporation and has no right to teach morals and religion. Then they turn with hypocritical distress and exclaim: "The public schools are godless, their education is dangerous because secular and an education without morals and religion is incomplete and vicious: we have built and equipped our parochial schools that our children may have an education in which morals and religion have their proper place and due share of attention; therefore we demand as a matter of fairness that the public school funds be shared with us to lighten this burden which we are forced to carry." But the answer which the organic people should return is: "This is a Christian State; the public school system is its agency for building up a Christian citizenship; morals and religion, so far as they are essential for discharging the functions of Christian citizenship, shall be taught in our public schools; and the school funds shall not be divided." While Cardinal Gibbons can have President Taft and his cabinet, the Judges of the Supreme Court, Senators and Representatives attending mass in the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Washington, the great political parties bidding for the solid Roman vote in national elections, and our national policy in the Philippines dictated by the Vatican, Rome may reasonably expect to capture our public schools through the Philippine educational policy. But our blessed Lord is upon the throne and His cause shall prevail. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 19: - THE TRUE CHURCH ======================================================================== The True Church By the Late Bishop Ryle Do you belong to the one true Church; to the Church outside of which there is no salvation? I do not ask where you go on Sunday; I only ask, "Do you belong to the one true Church?" Where is this one true Church? What is this one true Church like? What are the marks by which this one true Church may be known? You may well ask such questions. Give me your attention, and I will provide you with some answers. The one true Church is composed of all believers in the Lord Jesus. It is made up of all God's elect-of all converted men and women of all true Christians. In whomsoever we can discern the election of God the Father, the sprinkling of the blood of God the Son, the sanctifying work of God the Spirit, in that person we see a member of Christ's true Church. It is a Church of which all the members have the same marks. They are all born of the Spirit; they all possess "repentance towards God, faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ," and holiness of life and conversation. They all hate sin, and they all love Christ. They worship differently and after various fashions; some worship with a form of prayer, and some with none; some worship kneeling, and some standing; but they all worship with one heart. They are all led by one Spirit; they all build upon one foundation; they all draw their religion from one single Book-that is the Bible. They are all joined to one great center-that is Jesus Christ. They all even now can say with one heart, "Hallelujah"; and they can all respond with one heart and voice, "Amen and Amen." It is a Church which is dependent upon no ministers upon earth, however much it values those who preach the Gospel to its members. The life of its members does not hang upon church membership, and baptism, and the Lord's Supper-although they highly value these things, when they are to be had. But it has only one great Head one Shepherd, one chief Bishop-and that is Jesus Christ. He alone, by His Spirit, admits the members of this Church, though ministers may show the door. Till He opens the door no man on earth can open it-neither bishops, nor presbyters, nor convocations, nor synods. Once let a man repent and believe the Gospel, and that moment he becomes a member of this Church. Like the penitent thief, he may have no opportunity of being baptized; but he has that which is far better than any water-baptism-the baptism of the Spirit. He may not be able to receive the bread and wine in the Lord's Supper; but he eats Christ's body and drinks Christ's blood by faith every day he lives, and no minister on earth can prevent him. He may be excommunicated by ordained men, and cut off from the outward ordinances of the professing Church; but all the ordained men in the world cannot shut him out of the true Church. It is a Church whose existence does not depend on forms, ceremonies, cathedrals, churches, chapels, pulpits, fonts, vestments, organs, endowments, money, kings, governments, magistrates, or any act of favor whatsoever from the hand of man. It has often lived on and continued when all these things have been taken from it; it has often been driven into the wilderness or into dens and caves of the earth, by those who ought to have been its friends. Its existence depends on nothing but the presence of Christ and His Spirit; and they being ever with it, the Church cannot die. This is the Church to which the Scriptural, titles of present honor and privilege, and the promises of future glory, especially belong; this is the body of Christ; this is the flock of Christ; this is the household of faith and the family of God; this is God's building, God's foundation, and the temple of the Holy Ghost. This is the Church of the first-born, whose names fire written in heaven; this is the royal priesthood, the chosen generation, the peculiar people, the purchased possession, the habitation of God, the light of the world; the salt and the wheat of the earth; this is the "Holy Catholic Church" of the Apostle's Creed; this is the "One Catholic and Apostolic Church" of the Nicene Creed; this is that Church to which the Lord Jesus promises, "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it", and to which He says, "I am with you always, even unto the end of the world" Matthew 16:18; Matthew 28:20. This is the only Church which possesses true unity. Its members are entirely agreed on all the weightier matters of religion, for they are all taught by one Spirit. About God, and Christ, and the Spirit, and sin, and their own hearts, and faith, and repentance, and necessity of holiness, and the value of the Bible, and the importance of prayer, and the resurrection, and judgment to come-about all these points they are of one mind. Take three or four of them, strangers to one another, from the remotest corners of the earth; examine them separately on these points; you will find them all of one judgment. This is the only Church which possesses true sanctity. Its members are all holy. They are not merely holy by profession, holy in name, and holy in the judgment of charity; they are all holy in act, and deed, and reality, and life, and truth. They are all more or less conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. No unholy man belongs to this Church. This is the only Church which is truly catholic. It is not the Church of any one nation or people; its members are to be found in every part of the world where the Gospel is received and believed. It is not confined within the limits of any one country, or pent up within the pale of any particular forms or outward government. In it there is no difference between Jew and Greek, black man and white, Episcopalian and Presbyterian-but faith in Christ is all. Its members will be gathered from north, and south, and east, and west, in the last day, and will be of every name and tongue-but all one in Jesus Christ. This is the only Church which is truly apostolic. It is built on the foundation laid by the Apostles, and holds the doctrines which they preached. The two grand objects at which its members aim are apostolic faith and apostolic practice; and they consider the man who talks of following the Apostles without possessing these two things to be no better than sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. This is the only Church which is certain to endure unto the end. Nothing can altogether overthrow and destroy it. Its members may be persecuted, oppressed, imprisoned, beaten, beheaded, burned; but the true Church is never altogether extinguished; it rises again from its afflictions; it lives on through fire and water. The Pharaohs, the Herods, the Neros, the bloody Marys, have labored in vain to put down this Church; they slay their thousands, and then pass away and go to their own place. The true Church outlives them all and sees them buried each in his turn. It is an anvil that has broken many a hammer in this world, and will break many a hammer still; it is a bush which, often burning, yet is not consumed. This is the Church which does the work of Christ upon earth. Its members are a little flock, and few in number, compared with the children of the world; one or two here, and two or three there. But these are they who shake the universe; these are they who change the fortunes of kingdoms by their prayers; these are they who are the active workers for spreading the knowledge of pure religion and undefiled; these are the life-blood of a country, the shield, the defense, the stay and the support of any nation to which they belong. This is the Church which shall be truly glorious at the end. When all earthly glory is passed away then shall this Church be presented without spot before God the Father's throne. Thrones, principalities, and powers upon earth shall come to nothing; but the Church of the first-born shall shine as the stars at the last, and be presented With joy before the Father's throne, in the day of Christ's appearing. When the Lord's jewels are made up, and the manifestation of the sons of God takes place, one Church only will be named, and that is the Church of the elect. Reader, this is the true Church to which a man must belong, if he would be saved. Till you belong to this, you are nothing better than a lost soul. You may have countless outward privileges; you may enjoy great light, and knowledge-but if you do not belong to the body of Christ, your light, and knowledge, and privileges, will not save your soul. Men fancy if they join this church or that church, and become communicants, and go through certain forms, that all must be right with their souls. All were not Israel who were called Israel, and all are not members of Christ's body who profess themselves Christians. Take notice, you may be a staunch Episcopalian, or Presbyterian, or Independent, or Baptist, or Wesleyan, or Plymouth Brother-and yet not be long to the true Church. And if you do not, it will be better at last if you had never been born. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 20: - THE TESTIMONY OF FOREIGN MISSIONS TO... ======================================================================== The Testimony of Foreign Missions to the Superintending Providence of God By the Late Arthur T. Pierson God is in creation; cosmos would still be chaos with God left out. He is also in events; the whole of mission history is a mystery until read as His story. We are now to look at the proofs of a Superintending Providence of God in foreign missions. The word "providence" literally means fore vision, and hence, fore action—preparation for what is foreseen—expressing a divine, invisible rule of this world, including care, control, guidance, as exercised over both the animate and inanimate creation. In its largest scope it involves foreknowledge and foreordination, preservation and administration, exercised in all places and at all times. For our present purpose the word "providence" may be limited to the divine activity in the entire control of persons and events. This sphere of action and administration, or superintendence, embraces three departments: first, the natural or material—creation; second, the spiritual or immaterial—new creation; and third, the intermediate history in which He adapts and adjusts the one to the other, so that even the marred and hostile elements, introduced by sin, are made tributary to the final triumph of redemption. Man's degeneration is corrected in regeneration; the natural made subservient to the supernatural, and even the wrath of man to the love and grace of God. Manifestations of God Thus, intermediate between the mystery of creation and the mystery of the new creation lies the mystery of history, linking the other two. We are now briefly to trace the working of the Creator and Ruler of both the matter worlds and time worlds, controlling the blind forces of nature and the intelligent forces of human nature, so as to make all events and agencies serve His ends as Redeemer. In creation God specially manifests His eternity, power and wisdom; in history, His sovereignty and majesty, justice and righteousness; in redemption, His holiness and benevolence, and, most of all, grace or the voluntary exercise of His love. These positions being granted, we may expect to find, especially in mission history, proofs of God's Superintending Providence, of His three-fold administration as Lawgiver, King, and Judge; in His legislative capacity, commanding and counseling; in His executive capacity, governing and directing; in His judicial capacity, rewarding and punishing. Space allows only a general glance as of a landscape from a mountaintop. God's Enterprise The work of missions is pre-eminently God's enterprise—has on it the seal of His authority. He calls it His own "visiting of the nations to take out of them a people for His name." Thus the whole course of missions becomes God's march through the ages. He has His vanguard, the forerunners that prepare His way, making ready for, and heralding, His approach. He has His bodyguard, the immediate attendants that signalize His actual advance, bear His banners, and execute His will; and He has His rearguard the resultant movements consequent upon, and complementary to, the rest. In other words, God's Superintending Providence in missions is seen from three points of view: 1. In the divine preparations for world-wide evangelization. 2. In the divine co-operation in missionary activity. 3. In the divine benediction upon all faithful service. God's Preparations Each of these embraces many particulars which demand more than a rapid glance. God's preparations reached through millenniums. But within the century just closed we see Him moving, opening doors and shaping events, causing the removal of obstacles and the subsidence of barriers, raising up and thrusting forth workers, and furnishing new facilities; and conspicuously in promoting Bible translation and diffusion. God's Co-operation His cooperation is seen in the unity and continuity of the work, in the marked fitness between the workers and the work, the new fields and the new facilities. Startling correspondences in mission history reveal His omnipresence and faithfulness, such as synchronisms and successions among His chosen servants, parallel and converging lines of labor, and connecting links of service. All these, and much more, show, behind the lives and deeds of the workmen, a Higher Power that wrought in them both to will and to work. God's Benediction Mission history shows also clear traces of the Judge. Hindrances and hinderers at times removed by sudden retributive judgments; nations that would not serve His ends declining and even perishing; and churches, cursed with spiritual apathy and lethargy, decaying. On the other hand, His approval has been as marked in compensations for self-denial and in rewards for service; in making martyr blood the seed of new churches, and in lifting to a higher level the individual and church life that has been most unselfishly jealous and zealous of His kingdom. Pagan philosophers regarded the milky way as an old, disused path of the sun, upon which He had left some faint impression of His glorious presence in the golden stardust from His footsteps. To him who prayerfully watches mission history it is God's Via Lactea; He has passed that way, and made the place of His feet glorious. Brevity forbids more than the citation of instances sufficient to demonstrate and illustrate these positions. The evidence of divine co-working will of course be clearest where there is closest adherence to His declared methods of working. As to Divine Preparation for Missions what events and what messengers have been His chosen forerunners? The first half of the eighteenth century seemed more likely to be the mother of iniquity and idolatry than to rock the cradle of world-wide missions. Deism in the pulpit and practical atheism in the pew naturally begot apathy, if not antipathy, toward Gospel diffusion. A hundred and fifty years ago, in the body of the Church, disease was dominant and death seemed imminent. Infidelity and irreligion stalked about, God denying and God defying. In camp and court, at the bar and on the bench, in the home and in the Church, there was a plague of heresy and a moral leprosy. Three Great Forces How then came a century of modern missions! Three great forces God marshaled to cooperate: the obscure Moravians, the despised Methodists, and a little group of intercessors scattered over Britain and America. There had been a consecrated band in Saxony for about a hundred years, whose hearts? altars had caught fire at Huss's stake, and fed that fire from Spener's pietism, and Zinzendorf's zeal. Their great law was labor for souls, all at it and always at it. God had already made Herrnhut the cradle of missions and had there revived the apostolic church. Three principles underlay the whole life of the United Brethren: Each disciple is, first, to find his work in witness for God; second, his home where the widest door opens and the greatest need calls; and third, his cross in SELF-DENIAL for Christ. As Count Zinzendorf said: "The whole earth is the Lord's; men's souls are all His; I am debtor to all." A Symphony of Praise The Moravians providentially molded John Wesley; and the Holy Club of Lincoln College, Oxford, touched by this influence, took on a distinctively missionary character. Their motto had been, "Holiness to the Lord;" but holiness became wedded to service, and evangelism became the watchword of the Methodists. Just then, in America, and by a strange coincidence, Jonathan Edwards was unconsciously joining John Wesley in preparing the way for modern missions. In 1747, exactly 300 years after the United Brethren organized as followers of Huss, at Lititz in Bohemia, Edwards sent forth his bugle-blast from Northampton, New England, calling God's people to a visible union of prayer for a speedy and worldwide effusion of the Spirit. That bugle-blast found echo in Northampton in old England, and William Carey resolved to organize mission effort—with what results we all know. And, just as the French Revolution let hell loose, a new missionary society in Britain was leading the awakened Church to assault hell at its very gates. Sound it out and let the whole earth hear: Modern missions came of a symphony of prayer; and at the most unlikely hour of modern history, God's intercessors in England, Scotland, Saxony, and America repaired the broken altar of supplication, and called down the heavenly fire. That was God's way of preparation. The "monthly concert" made that prayer-spirit wide spreading and permanent. The humble Baptists, in widow Wallis' parlor at Kettering, made their covenant of missions; and regiments began to form and take up the line of march, until, before the eighteenth century was a quarter through its course, the whole Church was joining the missionary army. Sydney Smith sneered at the "consecrated cobblers" and tried to rout them from their nest; but the motto of a despised few became the rallying cry of the whole church of God. Divine Co-operation in Missions We turn now to look at the history of the century as a missionary movement. Nothing is more remarkable than the rapid opening of doors in every quarter. At the beginning of the century the enterprise of missions seemed, to worldly wise and prudent men, hopeless and visionary. Cannibalism in the Islands of the Sea, fetishism in the Dark Continent, exclusivism in China and Japan, the rigid caste system in India, intolerance in papal lands, and ignorance, idolatry, superstition, depravity, everywhere, in most cases conspiring together, reared before the Church impassable walls, with gates of steel. Most countries shut out Christian missions by organized opposition, so that to attempt to bear the good tidings was to dare death for Christ's sake. The only welcome awaiting God's messengers was that of cannibal ovens, merciless prisons, or martyr graves. Obstacles Removed As the little band advanced, on every hand the walls of opposition fell, and the iron gates opened of their own accord. India, Siam, Burma, China, Japan, Turkey, Africa, Mexico, South America, the Papal States and Korea were successively and successfully entered. Within five years, from 1853 to 1858, new facilities were given to the entrance and occupation of seven different countries, together embracing half the world's population! There was also a remarkable subsidence of obstacles, like to the sin king of the land below the sea level to let in its flood, as when the idols of Oahu were abolished just before the first band of missionaries landed at the Hawaiian shores, or as when war strangely prepared the way just as Robert W. McAll went to Paris to setup his first salle. Missionaries Called and Placed At the same time God was raising up, in unprecedented numbers, men and women, so marvelously fitted for the exact work and fields as to show unmistakable foresight and purpose. The biographies of leading missionaries read like chapters where prophecy lights up history. Think of William Carey's inborn adaptation as translator in India, of Livingstone's career as missionary explorer and general in Africa, of Catherine Booth's capacity as mother of the Salvation Army, of Jerry McAuley's preparation for rescue work in New York City, of Alexander Duff's fitness for educational work in India, of Adoniram Judson's schooling for the building of an apostolic church in Burma, of John Williams' unconscious training for evangelist in the South Seas. Then mark the unity and continuity of labor—one worker succeeding another at crises unforeseen by man, as when Gordon left for the Sudan on the day when Livingstone's death was first known in London, or Pilkington arrived in Uganda the very year when Mackay's death was to leave a great gap to be filled. Then study the theology of inventions and watch the furnishing of new facilities for the work as it advanced. He who kept back the four greatest inventions of reformation times—the mariner's compass, steam engine, printing press and paper—until His Church put on her new garments, waited to unveil nature's deeper secrets, which should make all men neighbors, until the reformed church was mobilized as an army of conquest! Divine Interference At times this Superintending Providence of God has inspired awe by unmistakably judicial strokes of judgment, as when in Turkey in 1839, in the crisis of missions, Sultan Mahmud suddenly died, and his edict of expulsion had no executive to carry it out, and his successor Abdul Medjid signalized the succession by the issuing of a new charter of liberty; or, as when in Siam, twelve years later, at another such crisis, God by death dethroned Chaum Klow, the reckless and malicious foe of missions, and set on the vacant throne Maha-Mong-Kut, the one man in the empire taught by a missionary and prepared to be the friend and patron of missions, as also his son and successor, Chulalangkorn! The Blood of the Martyrs These are but parts of His ways. The pages of the century's history are here and there written in blood, but even the blood has a golden luster. Martyrs there have been, like John Williams, and Coleridge Patteson, and James Hannington, Allen Gardiner, and Abraham Lincoln, and David Livingstone, the Gordons of Erromanga and the Gordon of Khartoum, the convert of Lebanon, and the court pages at Uganda; but every one of these deaths has been like seed which falls into the ground to die that it may bring forth fruit. The churches of Polynesia and Melanesia, of Syria and Africa, of India and China, stand rooted in these martyr graves as the oak stands in the grave of the acorn, or the wheat harvest in the farrows of the sown seed. It is part of God's plan that thus the consecrated heralds of the cross shall fill up that which is behind of the sufferings of Christ in their flesh for His body's sake which is the Church. The Divine Benediction of Missions The same Superintending Providence is seen in the results of missions. Two brief sentences fitly outline the whole situation as to the direct results in the foreign field: First, native churches have been raised up with the three features of a complete church life; self-support, self-government, and self-propagation; and second, the richest fruits of Christianity, both in the individual and in the community, have been found growing and ripening wherever there has been faithful Gospel effort. Then, as to the reflex action of missions on the church at home, two other brief sayings are similarly exhaustive: first, Thomas Chalmers' remark that "foreign missions act on home missions, not by exhaustion, but by fermentation;" and second, Alexander Duff's sage saying, that "the church that is no longer evangelistic, will cease to be evangelical" The whole hundred years of missions is a historic commentary on these four comprehensive statements. God's Word has never returned to Him void. Like the rain from heaven, it has come down, not to go back until it has made the earth to bring forth and bud, yielding not only bread for the eater, but seed for the sower, providing for salvation of souls and expansion of service. Everywhere God's one everlasting sign has been wrought; instead of the thorn has come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier, the myrtle tree—the soil of society exhibiting a total change in its products, as in the Fiji group, where a thousand churches displace heathen fanes and cannibal ovens, or as among the Karens, where on opposing hills the Schway Mote Tou Pagoda confronts the Kho Thah Byu Memorial Hall, typical of the old and the new. Along the valley of the Euphrates churches have been planted by the score; with native pastors supported by self-denying tithes of their members. Everywhere the seed of the Word of God being sown, it has sprung up in a harvest of renewed souls which in turn have become themselves the good seed of the kingdom, to become also the germs of a new harvest. Churches at Home On the other hand, God has distinctly shown approval of missionary zeal and enthusiasm in the church at home which has supplied the missionaries. Spiritual prosperity and progress may be gauged so absolutely by the measure of missionary activity, that the spirit of missions is now recognized as the spirit of Christ. The Scripture proverb is proven true: "There is that scattereth and yet increaseth, and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty;" and Christ's paradox is illustrated: "The life that is saved is lost, and the life that is lost is saved." Bishop Phillips Brooks compared the church that apologizes for doing nothing to spread the good news on the ground of its poverty and feebleness, to the parricide who, arraigned in court for his father's murder, pleads for mercy on account of his orphan hood! The hundred years have demonstrated that "religion is a commodity of which the more we export the more we have remaining."* The logic of events proves that the surest way to keep the church pure in faith and life, is to push missions with intelligence and holy zeal. [* Mr. Crowninshield objected in the Senate of Massachusetts to the incorporation of the A. B. C. F. M. that it was designed to "export religion, whereas there was none to spare from among ourselves." This is Mr. White's reply.] Missionary Characters What a distinct seal of God upon mission work is seen in the high ideals of character found in the missionaries themselves! If the workman leaves his impress on his work, it is no less true that the work leaves its mark on the workman. Even those who assail missions, applaud the missionaries; they may doubt the policy of sending the best men and women abroad to die by fever or violence, or waste their sweetness on the desert air; but even they do not doubt that the type of character, developed by mission work, is the highest known to humanity in this field have ripened into beauty and fragrance the fairest flowers and fruits of Christian life; and illustrated, as nowhere else, unselfish devotion to Christ, unswerving loyalty to the Word, and unsparing sacrifice for men. Was it not Theodore Parker who said, that it was no waste to have spent all the money missions had cost, if they gave us one Judson? On the mission field are to be found, if anywhere, the true succession of the apostles, the new accession to the goodly fellowship of the prophets, and the perpetual procession of the noble army of martyrs. Surely all this is the standing proof of the Superintending Providence of God. He who gave the marching orders gave at the same time the promise of His perpetual presence on the march; and He has kept His word: "Lo, I am with you all the days, even un to the end of the age." At every step faith has seen the Invisible Captain of the Lord's host, and, in all victories, behind the sword of Gideon, the sword of the Lord. God in All In the Acts of the Apostles, within the compass of twenty verses, fifteen times God is put boldly forward as the one Actor in all events. Paul and Barnabas rehearsed, in the ears of the church at Antioch and afterward at Jerusalem, not what they had done for the Lord, but all that He had done with them, and how He had opened the door of faith unto the Gentiles; what miracles and wonders God had wrought among the Gentiles by them. And, in the same spirit, Peter, before the council, emphasizes how God had made His choice of him as the very mouth whereby the Gentiles should hear the word of the Gospel and believe; how He had given them the Holy Ghost and put no difference between Jew and Gentile, purifying their hearts by faith; and how He who knew all hearts had thus borne them witness. Then James, in the same strain, refers to the way in which God had visited the Gentiles to take out of them a people for His name; and concludes by two quotations from the Old Testament which fitly sum up the whole matter: "The Lord who doeth all these things." "Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world" Acts 14:27-15:18. The meaning of such repeated phraseology cannot be mistaken. God is thus presented as the one Agent or Actor, even conspicuous apostles, like Paul and Peter, being only His instruments. No equal number of verses in the Word of God contain such emphatic and repeated lessons on man's insufficiency and nothingness, and God's all-sufficiency and almightiness. God was working upon man through man, choosing man to be His mouthpiece; with His key unlocking shut doors; Himself visiting the nations; taking out a people for His name, turning sinners into saints, purifying hearts and bearing them witness; He alone did all these wondrous things, according to His knowledge and plan of what He would do from the beginning. These are not the acts of the apostles, but the acts of God through the apostles. In the same spirit the praying saint of Bristol names his journal: "The Lord's Dealings with George Muller." God's Reserves There is thus indeed, a Superintending Providence of God in foreign missions; the King is there in imperial conduct, the Lawgiver in authoritative decree; the Judge in reward and penalty: God, the eternal, marshalling the ages with their events; God, the omnipresent, in all places equally controlling; God, the omniscient, wisely adapting all things to His ends. The Father of spirits, discerning the mutual fitness of the worker and his work, raises up men of the times for the times. Himself deathless, His work is immortal though His workmen are mortal, and the building moves on from cornerstone to capstone, while dying builders give place to others. He has opened the doors and made sea and land the highways for international intercourse, and the avenue s to international brotherhood. He has multiplied facilities for world-wide evangelization, practically annihilating time and space, and demolishing even the barriers of language. The printing and circulating of the Bible in five hundred tongues, reverses the miracle of Babel and repeats the miracle of Pentecost. Within the past century the God of battles has been calling out His reserves. Three most conspicuous movements of the century were the creation of a new regiment of Medical Missions, the Woman's Brigade, and the Young People's Crusade. The organization of the Church Army is now so complete that but one thing more is needful; namely, to recognize the Invisible Captain of the Lord's hosts as on the field, to hear His clarion call summoning us to the front, to echo His Word of command; and, in the firm faith of His leadership, pierce the very center of the foe, turn his staggering wings and move forward as one united host in one overwhelming charge. Historic Quickenings Perhaps the most conspicuous seal of God upon the mission work of the past century is found in the spiritual quickenings which have at some time visited with the power of God every field of labor which has been occupied in His name with energy of effort and persistence of prayer. We have called these "quickenings" rather than "revivals," for revival really means a restoration of life-vigor after a season of lapse into indifference and inaction, and properly applies to the Church. We treat now of quickenings out of a state of absolute spiritual death; and again we point to these as the most indisputable and unanswerable sanction and seal of God on modern missions. The following are among the most memorable of the century, arranged for convenience, in the order of time: 1815-1816 Tahiti, under the labors of Nott, Hayward, etc. 1818-1823 Sierra Leone, under William A. B. Johnson. 1819-1839 South Seas, under John Williams. 1822-1826 Hawaiian Islands, under Bingham, etc. 1831-1835 New Zealand, under Samuel Marsden, etc. 1832-1839 Burma and Karens, under Judson, etc. 1835-1839 Hilo and Puna, under Titus Coan. 1835-1837 Madagascar, under Griffiths, Johns, Baker, etc. 1842-1867 Germany, under J. Gerhard Oncken, etc. 1844-1850 Fiji Islands, under Hung and Calvert, etc. 1848-1872 Aneityum, under John Geddie, and others. 1845-1895 Old Calabar, under J. J. Fuller, etc. 1845-1847 Persia, under Fidelia Fiske, etc. 1856-1863 North American Indians, under William Duncan. 1859-1861 English Universities, under D. L. Moody and others. 1863-1870 Egypt and Nile Valley, under Drs. Lansing, Hogg, etc. 1863-1888 China, generally, especially Hankow, etc. 1864-1867 Euphrates District, under Crosby H. Wheeler, etc. 1867-1869 Aniwa, under John G. Paton, etc. 1872-1875 Japan, under J. H. Ballach, Verbeck, etc. 1872-1880 Paris, France, under Robert McAll. 1877-1878 Telugus, under Lyman Jewitt and Dr. Clough. 1877-1885 Formosa, under George L. Mackay. 1883-1890 Banza Manteke, under Henry Richards. 1893-1898 Uganda, under Pilkington, Roscoe, etc. Others might be added but these twenty-five instances sufficiently illustrate the fact that, throughout the wide domain of Christian effort, God has signally bestowed blessings. The instances italicized were marked by peculiar swift and sudden outpourings of spiritual power, and it will be seen that these form about half of the entire number, showing that God works in two very diverse ways, in some cases rewarding toil by rapid and sudden visitations of the Spirit, and in quite as many others by slower but equally sure growth and development. "In Diverse Manners" It is also very noticeable that in almost every one of these marked outpourings some peculiar principle or law of God's bestowment of blessing is exhibited and exemplified. For example, the work at Tahiti followed a long night of toil, and was the crown of peculiar persistence in the face of most stubborn resistance. At Sierra Leone, Johnson found about as hopeless a mass of humanity as ever was rescued from slave-ships, and he himself was an uneducated man, and at first an unordained layman. John Williams won his victories in the South Seas by the power of a simple proclamation of the Gospel, as an itinerant; and then first came into full view the power of native converts as evangelists. In the Hawaiian group and particularly in Hilo and Puna, it was the oral preaching to the multitudes that brought blessing—Titus Coan holding a three years' camp meeting. In New Zealand Marsden had first to lay foundations, patiently and prayerfully, and showed great faith in the Gospel. Judson and Boardman, in Burma, found among the Karens a people whom God had mysteriously prepared, though a subject and virtually enslaved race. Old Calabar was the scene of triumph over deep-rooted customs and age long superstitions; in Persia, the blessing came upon an educational work attempted single-handed among women and girls. William Duncan in his Metlakahtla reared a model state out of Indians hitherto so fierce and hostile that he dared not assemble hostile tribes in one meeting. The revival in the English universities is especially memorable as the real birth-time of the Cambridge Mission Band and the Student Volunteer Movement which crystallized fully twenty-five years later. In Egypt the transformation was gradual, dependent on teaching as much as preaching, but it has made the Nile Valley one of the marvels of missionary triumph. In China the most marked features were the influence of medical missions and the raising up of a body of unpaid lay-evangelists, who generated through their own home territory. On the Euphrates the conspicuous feature was the organization of a large number of self-supporting churches on the tithe system—sometimes starting with only ten members—with native pastors. At Aniwa three and a half years saw an utter subversion of the whole social fabric of idolatry. In Japan the signal, success was found in the planting of the foundations of a native church, and the remarkable spirit of prayer outpoured on native converts. In Formosa, Mackay won his victories by training a band of young men as evangelists, who with him went out to plant new missions. At Banza Manteke, Richards came to a crisis, and ventured literally to obey the New Testament injunctions in the Sermon on the Mount—for example, "give to him that asketh thee." In Uganda it was the new self-surrender and anointing of the missionaries, and reading of the Scriptures by the unconverted natives, on which God so singularly smiled. Pilkington said in London that he had never known three converts who had not been Bible readers. Lessons Thus, as we take the whole experience of the century together, we find the following emphatic lessons taught us: 1. God has set special honor upon His own Gospel. Where it has been most simply and purely preached the largest fruits have ultimately followed. 2. The translation, publication, and public and private reading of the Scriptures have been particularly owned by the Spirit. 3. Schools, distinctively Christian, and consecrated to the purposes of education of a thoroughly Christian type, have been schools of the Spirit of God. 4. The organization of native churches, on a self-supporting basis with native pastors, and sending out their own members as lay evangelists, has been sealed with blessing. 5. The crisis has always been turned by prayer. At the most disheartening periods, when all seemed hopeless, patient waiting on God in faith has brought sudden and abundant floods of blessing. 6. The more complete self-surrender of missionaries themselves, and their new equipment by the Holy Spirit, has often been the opening of a new era to the native church and the whole work. These are lessons worth learning. The secrets of success are no different from what they were in apostolic days. "The Finger of God" Our God is the same God, and His methods do not essentially change. He has commanded us to go into all the world and preach the good tidings to the whole creation; and the promise, "Lo, I am with you always," is inseparable from obedience. In connection with this Gospel message He has given us certain prominent aids, which are by no means to be reckoned as belonging to a realm of minor importance, and among them Christian teaching, Bible searching, fervent prayer, and Holy Spirit power outrank all other conditions of successful service. The survey of the century is like reading new chapters in the Acts; no true believer can attempt it carefully without finding a new Book of God in the history of this hundred years. Any man or woman who will take the score or more of marked quickenings we have outlined, and give a solid month to their consecutive study, will find all doubts dissipated that the living God has been at work, and that no field, however hard and stony and hopelessly barren, can ultimately resist culture on New Testament lines. In nothing do we need a new and clarified vision more than in the clear perception and conviction that the days of the supernatural are not past. Here is the school where these lessons are taught. Ten centuries of merely natural forces at work would never have wrought what ten years have accomplished, even when every human condition forbade success. A feeble band of missionaries in the midst of a vast host of the heathen have been compelled to master a foreign tongue, and often reduce it for the first time to written form, translate the Word of God, set up schools, win converts, and train them into consistent members and competent evangelists; remove mountains of ancestral superstitions and uproot sycamore trees of pagan customs; establish medical missions, Christian colleges, create Christian literature, model society on a new basis; and they have done all this within the lifetime of a generation, and sometimes within a decade of years! Even Pharaoh's magicians would have been compelled to confess, "This is the finger of God!" ======================================================================== CHAPTER 21: - THE PURPOSES OF THE INCARNATION ======================================================================== The Purposes of the Incarnation By Rev. G. Campbell Morgan, D. D., Pastor of Westminster Chapel, London, England Foreword The title of this meditation marks its limitation, and indicates its scope. Here is no attempt at defense of the statement of the New Testament that "the Word was made flesh." That is taken for granted as true. Moreover, here is no attempt to explain the method of the Holy Mystery. That is recognized as Mystery: a fact revealed which is yet beyond human comprehension or explanation. The scope is that of considering in broad outline the plain teaching of the New Testament as to the purposes of the Incarnation. Its final limitation is that of its brevity. If, however, it serve to arouse a deeper sense of the wonder of the great central fact of our common Faith, and thus to inspire further meditation, its object will be gained. The Incarnation The whole teaching of Holy Scripture places the Incarnation at the center of the methods of God with a sinning race. Toward that Incarnation everything moved until its accomplishment, finding therein fulfillment and explanation. The messages of the prophets and seers and the songs of the psalmists trembled with more or less certainty toward the final music which announced the coming of Christ. All the results also of these partial and broken messages of the past led toward the Incarnation. It is equally true that from that Incarnation all subsequent movements have proceeded, depending upon it for direction and dynamic. The Gospel stories are all concerned with the coming of Christ, with His mission and His message. The letters of the New Testament have all to do with the fact of the Incarnation, and its correlated doctrines and duties. The last book of the Bible is a book, the true title of which is The Unveiling of the Christ. Not only the actual messages which have been bound up in this one Divine Library, but all the results issuing from them, are finally results issuing from this self-same coming of Christ. It is surely important, therefore, that we should understand its purposes in the economy of God. There is a fourfold statement of purpose declared in the New Testament: the purpose to reveal the Father; the purpose to put away sin; the purpose to destroy the works of the devil; and the purpose to establish by another advent the Kingdom of God in the world. Christ was in conflict with all that was contrary to the purposes of God in individual, social, national, and racial life. There is a sense in which when we have said this we have stated the whole meaning of His coming. His revelation of the Father was toward this end; His putting away of sin was part of this very process; and His second advent will be for the complete and final overthrow of all the works of the devil. 1. To Reveal the Father "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him" (John 1:18). "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father" (John 14:9). This latter is Christ's own statement of truth in this regard, and is characterized by simplicity and sublimity. Among all the things Jesus said concerning His relationship to the Father, none is more comprehensive, inclusive, exhaustive, than this. The last hours of Jesus with His disciples were passing away. He was talking to them, and four times over they interrupted him. Philip said, "Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us". Philip's interruption was due, in the first place, to a conviction of Christ's relation in some way to the Father. He had been so long with Jesus as to become familiar in some senses with His line of thought. In all probability Philip was asking that there should be repeated to him and the little group of disciples some such wonderful thing as they had read of in the past of their people's history; as when the elders once ascended the mountain and saw God; or when the prophet saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and His train filled the temple; or when Ezekiel saw God in fire, and wheels; in majesty and glory. I cannot read the answer of Jesus to that request without feeling that He divested Himself, of set purpose, of anything that approached stateliness of diction, and dropped into the common speech of friend to friend, as,-looking back into the face of Philip, who was voicing, though he little knew it, the great anguish of the human heart, the great hunger of the human soul, He said, "Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father". That claim has been vindicated in the passing of the centuries. Revelation to the Race We will, therefore, consider first, what this revelation of God has meant to the race; and secondly, what it has meant to the individual. First, then, what conception of God had the race before Christ came? Taking the Hebrew thought of God, let me put the whole truth as I see it into one comprehensive statement. Prior to the Incarnation there had been a growing intellectual apprehension of truth concerning God, accompanied by a diminishing moral result. It is impossible to study the Old Testament without seeing that there gradually broke through the mists a clearer light concerning God. The fact of the unity of God; the fact of the might of God; the fact of the holiness of God; the fact of the beneficence of God; these things men had come to see through the process of the ages. Yet side by side with this growing intellectual apprehension of God there was diminishing moral result, for it is impossible to read the story of the ancient Hebrew people without seeing how they waxed worse and worse in all matters moral. The moral life of Abraham was far purer than life in the time of the kings. Life in the early time of the kings was far purer than the conditions which the prophets ultimately described. In proportion as men grew in their intellectual conception of God, it seemed increasingly unthinkable that He could be interested in their every-day life. Morality became something not of intimate relationship to Him, and therefore something that mattered far less. Think of the great Gentile world, as it then was, and as it still is, save where the message of the Evangel has reached it. We have had such remarkable teachers as Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius; men speaking many true things, flashing with light, but notwithstanding these things a perpetual failure in morals and a uniform degradation of religion has been universal. The failure has ever been due to a lack of final knowledge concerning God. At last there came the song of the angels, and the birth of the Son of God, through Whose Incarnation and ministry there came to men a new consciousness of God. He included in His teaching and manifestation all the essential things which men had learned in the long ages of the past He did not deny the truth of the unity of God; He re-emphasized it. He did not deny the might of God; He declared it and manifested it in many a gentle touch of infinite power, He did not deny the holiness of God; He insisted upon it in teaching and life, and at last by the mystery of dying. He did not deny the beneficence of God; He changed the cold word beneficence into the word throbbing with the infinite heart of Deity-Love. He did more. That which men had imperfectly expressed in song and prophecy He came to state-"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father"-not Elohim, not Jehovah, not Adonai; none of the great names of the past, although all of them are suggestive. In and through Him that truth of the Fatherhood was revealed. Fatherhood means a great deal more than we sometimes imagine. It is not merely a term of tenderness; it is also a term of law and discipline. But fatherhood means supremely that if the child have wandered away, the father will suffer everything to save and bring it home again. Within the realm of revealed religion this truth emerged, that the one God, mighty, holy, beneficent, is the Father who will sacrifice Himself to save the child. There man found the point of contact, in infinite love which never abandons him, never leaves him. That is the truth which, coming into revealed religion, saved it from being intellectual apprehension, minus moral dynamic, and sent running through all human life rivers of cleansing, renewal, regeneration. Wherever Christ comes to people who have never had direct revelation, He comes first of all as fulfillment of all that in their thought and scheme is true. He comes, moreover, for the correction of all that in their thought and scheme is false. All the underlying consciousness of humanity concerning God is touched and answered and lifted into the supreme consciousness whenever God is seen in Christ. All the gleams of light which have been flashing across the consciousness of humanity merge into the essential light when He is presented. Christ comes not to contradict the essential truth of Buddhism, but to fulfill it. He comes not to rob the Chinaman of his regard for parents, as taught by Confucius, but to fulfill it, and to lift him upon that regard into regard for the One great Father, God. He comes always to fulfill. Wherever He has come; wherever He has been presented; wherever men low or high in the intellectual scale, have seen God in Christ, their hands have opened and they have dropped their fetishes, and their idols, and have yielded themselves to Him. If the world has not come to God through Him, it is because the world has not yet seen Him; and if the world has not yet seen Him, the blame is upon the Christian Church. The wide issues of the manifestation of God in Christ are the union of intellectual apprehension and moral improvement, and the relation of religion to life. In no system of religion in the world has there come to men the idea of God which unites religion with morals, save in this revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Revelation to the Individual Secondly, the effect of the manifestation in relation to the individual In illustration we cannot do better than by taking Philip, the man to whom Christ spoke. To Philip's request, "Show us the Father and it sufficeth us", Jesus said, "Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know met Philip?" The evident sense of the question is, You have seen enough of Me, Philip, if you have really seen Me, to have found what you are asking for-a vision of God. What then had Philip seen? What revelations of Deity had come to this man who thought he had not seen and did not understand? We will adhere to what Scripture tells of what Philip had seen. All the story is in John. Philip is referred to by Matthew Mark, and Luke, as being among the number of the apostles but in no other way. John tells of four occasions when Philip is seen in union with Christ. Philip was the first man Jesus called to follow Him; not the first man to follow Him. There were other two who preceded Philip, going after Christ in consequence of the teaching of John. But Philip was the first man to whom Christ used that great formula of calling men which has become so precious in the passing of the centuries-"Follow me." What happened? "Philip findeth Nathanael, and saith unto him, We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, wrote." That was the first thing that Philip had seen in Christ according to his own confession: One Who embodied all the ideals of Moses and the prophets. We find Philip next in the sixth chapter, when the multitudes were about Christ, and they were hungry. Philip, who considered it impossible to feed the hungry multitude, now sees Someone Who in a mysterious way had resource enough to satisfy human hunger. Philip then listened while in matchless discourse Jesus lifted the thought from material hunger to spiritual need and declared, "I am the bread of life". So that the second vision Philip had of Jesus, according to the record, was a vision of Him, full of resource and able to satisfy hunger, both material and spiritual. We next see Philip in the twelfth chapter. The Greeks coming to him said, "Sir, we would see Jesus." Philip found his way with Andrew to Jesus, and asked Him to see the Greeks. Philip saw by what then took place that this Man had intimate relation with the Father, and that there was perfect harmony between them, no conflict, no controversy. He saw, moreover, that upon the basis of that communion with His Father, and that perfect harmony, His voice changed from the tones of sorrow to those of triumph,-"Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself." That was Philip's third vision of Jesus. It was the vision of One acting in perfect accord with God, bending to the sorrow that surged upon His soul, in order that through it He might accomplish human redemption. We now come back to the last scene. Philip said, "Show us the Father and it sufficeth us". Gathering up all the things of the past, Christ looked into the face of Philip and replied, "Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip?" No, Philip had not seen these things. They were there to be seen, and by and by, the infinite work of Christ being accomplished, and the glory of Pentecost having dawned upon the world, Philip saw it all; saw the meaning of the things he had seen, and had never seen; the things he had looked upon, and had never understood. He found that having seen Jesus he had actually seen the Father; that when he looked upon One Who embodied in His own personality all the facts of law and righteousness; Who was able to satisfy all the hunger of humanity; Who in cooperation with God was sent to share the sorrows of humanity in order to draw men to Himself and to save them; he had seen God. This manifestation wins the submission of the reason; appeals to the love of the heart; demands the surrender of the will. Here is the value of the Incarnation as revelation of God. Let us recall our thoughts for a moment from the particular application in the case of Philip, and think what this means to us. Is it true that this manifestation wins the submission of our reason, appeals to the love of our heart, asks the surrender of our will? Then to refuse God in Christ is to violate at some essential point our own humanity. To refuse we must violate reason, which is captured by the revelation; or we must crush the emotion, which springs in our heart in the presence of the revelation; or we must decline to submit our will to the demands which the manifestation makes. God grant that we may rather look into His face and say, "My Lord and my God"! So shall we find our rest, and our hearts will be satisfied. It shall suffice, as we see the Father in Christ. 2. To Take Away Sins "Ye know that he was manifested to take away sins; and in him is no sin" (1 John 3:5). In this text we get nearer to an understanding of the purpose of the Incarnation as it touches our human need. The simple and all-inclusive theme which it suggests is, first, that the purpose of the Incarnation was the taking away of sins; and secondly, that the process of accomplishment is that of the Incarnation. The Purpose First, then, we will take the purpose as declared, "He was manifested to take away sins". In order to understand this, we must take the terms in all their simplicity, and be very careful to find what they really mean. What is intended by this word "sins"? The sum total of all lawless acts. The thought is incomprehensible as to numbers when we think of the race, but let us remember that in the midst of that which overwhelms us in our thinking are our own actual sins. "Sins"-missing of the mark, whether wilful missing, or missing through ignorance, does not at present matter. The word includes all those thoughts and words and deeds in which we have missed the mark of the Divine purpose and the Divine ideal; those things which stand between man and God, so that man becomes afraid of God; those things which stand between man and his fellowmen, so that man becomes afraid of his fellowman, knowing that he has wronged him in some direction; those things which stand between man and his own success. Call them failures if you will; call them by any name you please; so that you understand the intention of the word. The phrase "to take away" is a statement of result, not a declaration of process. The Hebrew equivalent of the word "take away" is found in that familiar story of the scapegoat. It was provided that this animal should be driven away to the wilderness "unto a solitary land". This suggested that sins should be lifted from one and placed upon another, and by that one carried away out of experience, out of consciousness. That is the simple signification of this declaration, "He was manifested to bear sins"-to lift sins. He was manifested in order that He might come into relationship with human life, and passing underneath the load of human sins, lift them, take them away. Either this is the most glorious Gospel that man has ever heard; or it is the greatest delusion to which man has ever listened. In the heart of every man and woman there is a consciousness of sin. No one of us would be prepared to say, I have never deliberately done the thing I knew I ought not to do. That is consciousness of sin. We may affect to excuse it. We may be ready to argue as to the reason for it, and the issue of it; but if we could, we would undo it. We may profess to have turned our back upon these evangelical truths, and yet we know we have sinned and we wish we had not. Passing for a moment from that outer fringe of men and women, who are somewhat careless about the matter, to the souls who are in agony concerning it; who know their sin and loathe it; who carry the consciousness of wrongs done in past years as a perpetual burden upon their souls; who hate the memory of their own sins,-to such, a declaration like this is the most cruel word, or the kindest, that can be uttered. Cruel, if it be false; kind indeed, with the kindness of the heart of God, if it be true. If it be true that He was manifested somehow, in some mystery that we shall never perfectly understand, in order to get beneath my sins, my sins, my thought of impurity, my words of bitterness, my unholy deeds, and lift them and bear them away-that is the one Evangel I long for more than all. More valuable to me, a sinner, than anything else that He can do for me, is this. The Process Secondly, in order that this great purpose of the Incarnation, as declared, may be more powerfully and better understood, let us reverently turn to the indication of the process which we have in this particular text, "He was manifested to take away sins". Who was the Person? It is perfectly evident that John here, as always, has his eye fixed upon the Man of Nazareth; and yet it is equally evident that he is looking through Jesus of Nazareth to God. That is the meaning of his word "manifested" here. He is the Word made flesh. He is flesh, but He is the Word. He is Someone that John had appreciated by the senses, and yet He is Someone Whom John knew preeminently by the Spirit. Notice, that after he makes the affirmation, "He was manifested to take away sins," he adds this great word, "In Him is no sin"; or, "Missing of the mark was not in Him". The One in Whom there was no missing of the mark was manifested for the express purpose of lifting, bearing away, making not to be, the missing of the mark of others. "He was manifested"-and in the name of God let us not read into the "He" anything small or narrow. If we do, we shall at once be driven into the place of having to deny the declaration that He can take away sins. If He was man as I am man merely, then though He be perfect and sinless, He cannot take away sins. If into the "He" we will read all that John evidently meant according to the testimony of his own writing, we shall begin to see something of the stupendous idea, and something of the possibility at least of believing the declaration that "He was manifested to take away sins." Consider the manifestation and sins, as to man. The terms of the final promise of the Incarnation were, "Thou shalt call His name JESUS; for it is he that shall save his people from their sins." When the songs to which the shepherds listened were heard, what said they? "There is born to you this day a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord." The promise of the Incarnation was that of the coming of One to lift sins. During His life and ministry the words of Jesus were words revealing the meaning of sin; words calculated to rebuke sin and to bring men away from sin. The works of Jesus-and by works I mean miracles and signs and wonders-were chiefly works overtaking the results of sin. The miracles of Jesus were not supernatural in their effect upon men; they were always restorations of the unnatural to natural positions. When He cured disease it was the restoration of man to the normal physical condition. He was taking away the results of sin. I come now to the final thing in this manifestation-the process of the death; for in that solemn and lonely and unapproachable hour of the cross is the final fulfillment of the word of the herald on the banks of the Jordan, "Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world!" That phrase, "The Lamb of God," could have but one significance in the ears of the men who heard it. This was the voice of a Hebrew prophet speaking to Hebrews, and when he spoke of the Lamb taking away sins, they had no alternative other than to think of the long line of symbolical sacrifices which had been offered, and which they had been taught shadowed forth some great mystery of Divine purpose whereby sin might be dealt with. So in the hour of His death we find the ultimate meaning of that great word. Whereas by manifestation, from first to last, He is for evermore dealing with sins and with sin, lifting, correcting, arresting, by gleams of light suggesting to men the deepest meaning of His mission; it is when we come to the hour of His unutterable loneliness, and deep darkness, and passion-baptism, that we have that part of the manifestation in which we see, as nowhere else, and as never before, the meaning of this text, "He was manifested to take away sins". Reverently let us take one step further. The manifestation and sins, as to God. The manifested One was God. If that be once seen, then we shall for evermore look back upon that Man of Nazareth in His birth, His life, His cross, as but a manifestation. The whole fact cannot be seen, but the whole fact is brought to the point of visibility by the way of Incarnation. If indeed this One be very God manifested, then remember this, the whole measure of humanity is in Him, and infinitely more than the whole measure of humanity. Beyond the utmost bound of creation, God is. All creation, heaven and earth, suns and stars and systems, angels and archangels, principalities and powers, the hierarchies of whom we hear, but cannot perfectly explain their nature or their order, all these are in Him; but He is infinitely beyond them all. I begin to wonder. In amazement I begin to believe in the possibility of lifting the burden of my sin. The cross, like everything else, was manifestation. In the cross of Jesus there was the working out into visibility of eternal things. Love and light were wrought out into visibility by the cross. Love and light in the presence of the conditions of sin became sorrow-and became joy! In the cross I see the sorrow of God, and in the cross I see the joy of God, for "it pleased the Lord to bruise him." In the cross I see the love of God working out through passion and power for the redemption of man. In the cross I see the light of God refusing to make any terms with iniquity and sin and evil. The cross is the historic revelation of the abiding facts within the heart of God. The measure of the cross is God. If all the measure of humanity is in God and He is more, and the measure of the cross is God, then the measure of the cross wraps humanity about, so that no one individual is outside its meaning and its power. He Who was manifested is God. He can gather into His eternal life all the race as to its sorrow and as to its sin, and bear it. Yet remember this, It was not by the eternal facts that sins were taken away, but by the manifestation of those facts. This text does not affirm, and there is no text that begins to affirm, that He before He was manifested, takes away sins. There is a sense in which that is true; but "He was manifested to take away sins". The passion revealed in the cross was indeed the passion of God, but the passion of God became dynamic in human life when it became manifest through human form, in the perfection of a life, and the mystery of a death. Man's will is the factor always to be dealt with, and whereas the sin of man was gathered into the consciousness of God, and created the sorrow of God from the very beginning, it is only when that fact of the sorrow of Godhead is wrought out into visibility by manifestation, that the will of man can ever be captured or ever constrained to the position of trust and obedience which is necessary for his practical and effectual restoration to righteousness. Wherever man thus yields himself, trusting-that is the condition-his sins are taken away, lifted. If it be declared that God might have wrought this self-same deliverance without suffering, our answer is that the man who says so knows nothing about sin. Sin and suffering are co-existent. The moment there is sin, there is suffering. The moment there is sin and suffering in a human being it is in God multiplied. "The Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world." From the moment when man in his sin became a child of sorrow, the sorrow was most keenly felt in heaven. The man who is burdened with a sense of sin I would ask to contemplate the Person manifested. There is not one of us of whom it is not true that we live and move and have our being in God. God is infinitely more than I am; infinitely more than the whole human race from its first to its last If infinitely more, then all my life is in Him. If in the mystery of Incarnation there became manifest the truth that He, God, lifted sin, then I can trust. If that be the cleaving of the rock, then I can say as never before- "Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee." He was manifested, and by that manifestation I see wrought out the infinite truth of the passion of God which we speak of as the atonement. 3. To Destroy the Works of the Devil "To this end was the Son of God manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil" (1 John 3:8). There can be no question as to the One to Whom John referred when he said, "the Son of God." In all the writings of John it is evident that his eyes are fixed upon the man Jesus. Occasionally he does not even name Him; does not even refer to Him by a personal pronoun, but indicates Him by a word you can only use when you are looking at an object or a person. For instance, "That which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled". Upon another occasion he said, "He that saith he abideth in him, ought himself also to walk even as he walked." It is always the method of expression of a man who is looking at a Person. For evermore the actual human Person of Christ was present to the mind of John as he wrote of Him. How intimate he had been with Him we all know. One of the most tender and beautiful things in all the story of the life of Jesus is the story of John's pure human love for Him. The other disciples loved Him, but their love was of a different tone and quality from that of John. John must get close to Him, and lay his head upon His bosom. Yet if I said no more, I would not have uttered half the truth. If John, the mystic, the lover, laid his head upon the human bosom of the Man of Nazareth, he heard the beating of the heart of God. If he laid his hand upon Jesus when he talked to Him, he knew that beneath the warm touch of the human flesh there beat the mystic majesty of Deity. "That which our hands handled, concerning the Word of life." He is perfectly conscious of the flesh, but supremely conscious of the mystic Word veiled in flesh and shining through it. He is perfectly conscious of the human, and thereby finds Deity. So that when John comes to write of this One, he speaks of Him as "the Son of God." He remembers the warmth of His bosom, the gentleness of His touch, the love-lit glory of His eyes, but He is "the Son of God." The word "manifested" presupposes existence prior to manifestation. In the Man of Nazareth there was manifestation of One Who had existed long before the Man of Nazareth. The enemy is described here as the devil. We read that he is a murderer, a liar, a betrayer; the fountain-head of sin, the lawless one. The work of the murderer is destruction of life. The work of the liar is the extinguishing of light. The work of the betrayer is the violation of love. The work of the arch-sinner is the breaking of the law. These are the works of the devil. He is a murderer. This consists fundamentally in the destruction of life on its highest level, which is the spiritual. Alienation from God is the devil's work. It is also death on the level of the mental. Vision which fails to include God is practical blindness. On the physical plane, all disease and all pain are ultimately results of sin, and are among the works of the devil. These things all lie within the realm of his work as murderer, destroyer of human life. He is more. He is the liar, and to him is due the extinguishing of light, so that men blunder along the way. All ignorance, all despair, all wandering over the trackless deserts of life, are due to extinction of spiritual light in the mind of man. All ignorance is the result of the clouding of man's vision of God. "This is life eternal," age-abiding life. high life, deep life, broad life, long life, comprehensive life, "that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ." The proportion in which man knows God is the proportion in which he sees clearly to the heart of things. By and by, when the redemptive work of Christ has been perfected in man, and in the world, we shall find that all ignorance is banished, and man has found his way into light. But the liar, the one who brings darkness, has made his works far spread o'er all the face of humanity, and all ignorance and resultant despair, and all wandering aimlessly in every realm of life, are due to the work of the one whom Jesus designated a liar from the beginning. Again, the violation of love, as a work of the devil, is seen supremely in the way he entered into the heart of Judas, and made him the betrayer. All the avarice you find in the world today, and all the jealousy, and all the cruelty, are the works of the devil. Finally, he is the supreme sinner. Sin is lawlessness, which does not mean the condition of being without law, but the condition of being against law, breaking law. So that all wrong done to God in His world, all wrong done by man to man, all wrong done by man to himself, are works of the devil. To summarize then: death, darkness, hatred, find them where you will, are works of the devil. The Son of God was manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil. If at the beginning we saw Him as a soul in conflict with all these things, remember that was an indication of the program and a prophecy of the purpose. The Incarnation was not merely the birth of a little child in whom we were to learn the secret of childhood, and in whom presently we were to see the glories of manhood. All that is true; but it was the happening in the course of human events, of that one thing through which God Himself is able to destroy the works of the devil. What "Destroy" Means "To destroy." It is a word which means to dissolve, to loosen. It is the very same word as is used in the Apocalypse about loosing us from our sins; or if you will be more graphic, it is the word used in the Acts of the Apostles when you read that the ship was broken to pieces; loosed, dissolved, that which had been a consistent whole, was broken up and scattered and wrecked. The word "destroyed" may be perfectly correct, but let us understand it. He was manifested to do a work in human history the result of which should be that the works of the devil should lose their consistency. The cohesive force that makes them appear stable until this moment, He came to loosen and dissolve. He was manifested to destroy death by the gift of life. He was manifested to destroy darkness by the gift of light. He was manifested to destroy hatred by the gift of love. He was manifested to destroy lawlessness by the gift of law. He was manifested to loosen, to break up, to destroy the negatives which spoil, by the bringing of the positive that remakes and uplifts. He was manifested to destroy the works of the devil as to death, by the gift of life. This means first spiritual life, which is fellowship with God. It means also mental life, the vision of the open secret. Not yet perfectly do we understand, but already the trusting soul, utterly devoid of education, hears more in the wind at eventide, and sees more in the blossoming of the flowers than any merely scientific man can do. He who sees has the true intellectual vision which Christ has bestowed in His gift of life. "This is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God." The gift of life was to destroy death, and the man who has His gift of life laughs in the face of death, laughs triumphantly. I believe that there was laughter in the apostle's tone when he said, "O death, where is thy sting?" As though he had said, what hast thou done with thy victory? I trembled in thy presence once, O rider upon the pale horse; but now I laugh in thy face, for thy paleness has become the glistening white of an angel of light. So He destroys the works of the devil by giving the gift of life which destroys death. As to darkness. This is intimately associated with the thing already said. The gift of light always comes out of life. If there be death, then there is no vision. If there be life, there is light. Light means knowledge and hope and guidance, so that there is no more wandering aimlessly. By bringing light into human life and into the world He has destroyed the works of the devil. As to hatred. He destroyed hatred by His gift of love. Benevolence-and I am not using the word idly as we often do; I am using it in all its rich, spacious, gracious meaning-benevolence, well-willing, self-abnegation, kindness in the apostle's sense of the word when writing to the Galatians he gives kindness as one of the qualities of love, the specific doing of small things out of pure love. All these things are things by which the works of the devil are being destroyed. Hatred, avarice, jealousy, selfishness, are destroyed by shedding abroad love which is the warmth of life, as light is its illumination. By these things He destroys the works of the devil. As to lawlessness. This He destroys by the gift of law; passion for the rights of God, service to our fellowmen; the finding of self in the great abnegation, and the finding of self in the perfect freedom because I have become the bond-slave of the infinite Lord of love. Nineteen centuries ago the Son of God was manifested, and during those centuries in the lives of hundreds, thousands, He has destroyed the works of the devil, mastered death by the gift of life; cast darkness out by the incoming light; turned the selfishness of avarice and jealousy into love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness. He has taken hold of lawless men and made them into the willing, glad bond-servants of God. So has He destroyed the works of the devil. Historic Meaning of the Incarnation Do not forget the meaning of the Incarnation historically. It was the invasion of human history by One Who snatched the scepter from the usurper. It was the intrusion of forces into human history which dissolved the consistency of the works of the devil and caused them to break and fail. "How long, O Lord, how long?" is the cry of the heart of the saint today. Yet let us take heart as we look back and know that the victorious force has operated for nineteen centuries, and always toward consummation. Still, the works of the devil are manifest; the works of the flesh are manifest. Yes, but the fruit of the Spirit of life which has come through the advent of Christ is also manifest. All over the world today on many a branch of the vine of the Father's planting, the rich clusters of fruit are to be found. All, so far, is but preliminary. It is twilight only. High noon has not arrived; but it is twilight, and the noon must come. Further, the Incarnation was the coming of the Stronger than the strong man armed to destroy the works of the devil in my own life. Are the works of the devil death, darkness, hatred, and rebellion-the master forces of your being? Then I bring you the Evangel. I tell you of One manifested to destroy all such works. I tell you not merely as a theory, but as having the testimony of history attesting the truth of the announcement of this text. The forces of this Christ have operated, and are operating; and the things that were formerly established are loosened, and are falling to decay. He was manifested to destroy the works of the devil. If you are in the grip of forces of evil; if you realize that in your life His works are the things of strength, then I pray you, turn with full purpose of heart to the One manifested long ago, Who in all the power of His gracious victory, will destroy in you all the works of the devil, and set you free. 4. To Prepare for a Second Advent "Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for him, unto salvation" (Hebrews 9:28). We are all conscious that nothing is perfect; that the things which Christ came to do are not yet done; that the works of the devil are not yet finally destroyed; that sins are not yet experimentally taken away; that in the spiritual consciousness of the race, God is not yet perfectly known. "Now we see not yet all things subjected to Him." The victory does not seem to be won. It is impossible to read the story of the Incarnation, and to believe in it, and to follow the history of the centuries that have followed upon that Incarnation without feeling in one's deepest heart that something more is needed, that the Incarnation was preparatory, and that the consummation of its meaning can only be brought about by another coming, as per human history as was the first. "Christ ... shall appear a second time." There is no escape, other than by casuistry, from the simple meaning of those words. The first idea conveyed by them is that of an actual personal advent of Jesus yet to be. To spiritualize a statement like this and to attempt to make application of it in any other than the way in which a little child would understand it, is to be driven, one is almost inclined to say, to dishonesty with the simplicity of the scriptural declaration. There may be diversities of interpretations as to how He will come, and when He will come; whether He will come to usher in a millennium or to crown it; but the fact of His actual coming is beyond question. Paul in all his writings is conscious of this truth of the second advent. In some of them he does not dwell upon it at such great length, or with such clearness as in others, for the simple reason that it is not the specific subject with which he is dealing. In the Thessalonian letters we have most clearly set forth Paul's teaching concerning this matter. In the very center of the first letter we have a passage which declares in unmistakable language that "the Lord himself shall descend from heaven, with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord." James writing to those who were in affliction said, "Be ye also patient; establish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord is at hand." Peter with equal clearness said to the early disciples, "Be sober and set your hope perfectly on the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ." John, who leaned upon his Master's bosom, and who wrote the most wonderful of all mystic words concerning Him, said, "We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is. And every one that hath this hope set on him purifieth himself, even as he is pure." Jude said to those to whom he wrote, "Ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life." Every New Testament writer presents this truth as part of the common Christian faith. Belief in the personal actual second advent of Jesus gave the bloom to primitive Christianity, and constituted the power of the early Christians to laugh in the face of death, and to overcome all forces that were against them. There is nothing more necessary in our day than a new declaration of this vital fact of Christian faith. Think what it would mean if the whole church still lifted her face toward the east and waited for the morning; waited as the Lord would have her wait-not star-gazing, and almanac examining, but with loins girt for service, and lamps burning; waited as she served. If the whole Christian church were so waiting, she would cast off her worldliness and infidelity, and all other things which hinder her march to conquest. Meaning of the Second Advent This text does more than affirm the fact of the second advent. In a somewhat remarkable way, it declares the meaning thereof, "Christ... shall appear a second time, apart from sin." To rightly understand this, we must look upon it as putting the second advent into contrast with the first. That is what the writer most evidently means, for the context declares that He was manifested in the consummation of the ages to bear sins. He now says that "Christ... shall appear a second time apart from sin." All the things of the first advent were necessary to the second; but all the things of the second will be different from the things of the first. By His first advent sin was revealed. His own cross was the place where all the deep hatred of the human heart expressed itself most diabolically in view of heaven and earth and hell. There was also revelation of darkness as contrary to light. "Men loved the darkness rather than the light," was the supreme wail of the heart of Jesus. His presence in the world was, moreover, revelation of spiritual death as contrary to life. In the perpetual attempt of men to materialize His work, the attempt of His own disciples as well as of all the rest, and their absolute failure to appreciate the spiritual teaching He gave, we see what spiritual death really is. In His first advent He not only revealed sin, but bore it. In the words, "Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many," the reference is not merely to the final movement of the cross. The word "offered" is used in reference to God's action in giving Him. It would be perfectly correct interpretation to supply the word "offered" by the word "gave;" the word which we have in John's Gospel, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son." Let us put that word here-"Christ also, having been once given to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time." All through His life He was putting Himself underneath sin in order to take it away. He bore its limitations throughout the whole of His life. In poverty, in sorrow, in loneliness, He lived: and all these things are limitations resulting from sin. When Jesus Christ entered into the flesh, He entered into the limitations which follow upon sin, and He bore sin in His own consciousness through all the years; not poverty only, but sorrow in all forms, and loneliness. All the sorrows of the human heart were upon His heart until He uttered that unspeakable cry, "My God, my God, why 4hast Thou forsaken Me?" Having finally dealt with sin, and destroyed it at its very root at His first advent, His second advent is to be that of victory. He will come again; not to poverty, but to wealth. He will come again; not to sorrow, but with all joy. He will come again; not in loneliness, but to gather about Him all trusting souls who have looked and served and waited. All in His first advent of sorrow and loneliness, of poverty and of sin, will be absent from the second. The first advent was for atonement; the second will be for administration. He came, entering into human nature, and taking hold of it, to deal with sin and put it away. He has taken sin away, and He will come again to set up that kingdom, the foundations of which He laid in His first coming. "Judgment"-"Salvation." This text declares the purpose of the advent: "It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh judgment; so Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for him, unto salvation." A similarity is suggested. "It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh judgment." Over against that dual appointment stands, "So Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for him, unto salvation." There is a strange differentiation in the ending of the two declarations. We would expect that it would be written to complete the comparison, thus, it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh judgment; so Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, unto judgment. That would seem to be a balanced comparison, but the writer does not so write. This very difference unfolds the meanings of the first and second advents. It is appointed to men to die,-He was offered to bear the sins of many. After death judgment,-He is coming again unto salvation. As the first advent negated the death appointed unto men, the second advent will turn the judgment into salvation. "It is appointed unto men once to die." It is often somewhat carelessly affirmed that men must die. While admitting the truth of this statement we inquire, why must they die? Science can no more account for death than it can account for life. It has never yet been able to say why men die. How they die, yes; why they die, no! I will tell you why. Death is the wage of sin. Science will admit that death comes by the breaking of certain laws, but Science will use some other word than the word sin. "It is appointed unto men once to die," by the fiat of God Almighty because they are sinners, and no man can escape that fiat. But He was offered by God to bear the sins of many. That was the answer of the first advent to man's appointment to death. Beyond death there is another appointment, that of judgment. Who shall appeal against the absolute justice of that appointment? He "shall appear a second time, apart from sin unto salvation." To those who have heard the message of the first advent and have believed it, and trusted in His great work, and have found shelter in the mystery of His manifestation and bearing of sin-to such, salvation takes the place of judgment, But to the man who will not shelter beneath that first advent and its atoning value-judgment abides. All the things begun by His first advent will be consummated by the second. At His second advent there will be complete salvation for the individual righteousness, sanctification, redemption. We believed, and were saved. We believe, and are being saved. We believe and we shall be saved. The last movement will come when He comes. Those who have fallen on sleep are safe with God, and He will bring them with Him when He comes. They are not yet perfected, "God having provided some better thing concerning us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect." They are at rest, and consciously at rest. They are "absent from the body... at home with the Lord," but they are not yet perfected; they are waiting. We are waiting in the midst of earth's struggle-they in heaven's light and joy, for the second advent. Heaven is waiting for it. Earth is waiting for it. Hell is waiting for it. The universe is waiting for it. That coming will be to those who wait for Him. Who are those who wait for Him? "Ye turned unto God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven." The first thing is the turning from idols. Have we done that? The second thing is serving the living God. Are we doing that? Then because we have turned from idols, and are serving Him, we are waiting. That is the waiting the New Testament enjoins, and to those who wait, His second advent will mean salvation. "Christ shall appear." Glorious Gospel! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 22: - TRIBUTES TO CHRIST AND THE BIBLE BY INTE... ======================================================================== Tributes to Christ and the Bible by Intelligent Men Who Were Not Known as Active Christians Anonymous "Their rock is not as our Rock, even our enemies themselves being judges."- Deuteronomy 32:31. Benjamin Franklin "Young man, my advice to you is that you cultivate an acquaintance with and firm belief in the Holy Scriptures, for this is your certain interest. I think Christ's system of morals and religion, as He left them with us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see." Thomas Jefferson "I have said and always will say that the studious perusal of the sacred volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands." Daniel Webster "If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering and to prosper; but, if we and our posterity neglect its instructions and authority, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity. The Bible is the book of all others for lawyers as well as divines, and I pity the man who cannot find in it a rich supply of thought and rule of conduct. I believe Jesus Christ to be the Son of God. The miracles which He wrought establish in my mind His personal authority and render it proper for me to believe what He asserts." Ralph Waldo Emerson "Jesus is the most perfect of all men that have yet appeared." Napoleon Bonaparte "I know men, and I tell you Jesus Christ was not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist. There is between Christianity and other religions the distance of infinity. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and myself founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon sheer force. Jesus Christ alone founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men will die for Him. In every other existence but that of Christ how many imperfections! From the first day to the last He is the same; majestic and simple; infinitely firm and infinitely gentle. He proposes to our faith a series of mysteries and commands with authority that we should believe them, giving no other reason than those tremendous words, 'I am God.' "The Bible contains a complete series of acts and of historical men to explain time and eternity, such as no other religion has to offer. If it is not the true religion, one is very excusable in being deceived; for everything in it is grand and worthy of God. The more I consider the Gospel, the more I am assured that there is nothing there which is not beyond the march of events and above the human mind. Even the impious themselves have never dared to deny the sublimity of the Gospel, which inspires them with a sort of compulsory veneration. What happiness that Book procures for those who believe it!" Goethe "It is a belief in the Bible which has served me as the guide of my moral and literary life. No criticism will be able to perplex the confidence which we have entertained of a writing whose contents have stirred up and given life to our vital energy by its own. The farther the ages advance in civilization the more will the Bible be used." Thomas Carlyle "Jesus is our divinest symbol. Higher has the human thought not yet reached. A symbol of quite perennial, infinite character: whose significance will ever demand to be anew inquired into and anew made manifest." James Anthony Froude "The most perfect being who has ever trod the soil of this planet was called the Man of Sorrows." Charles Dickens "I commit my soul to the mercy of God, through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and exhort my dear children humbly to try to guide themselves by the teachings of the New Testament." (in his last will and testament) Shakespeare "I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting." (in his last will and testament) Lord Byron "If ever man was God, or God man, Jesus Christ was both." Matthew Arnold "To the Bible men will return because they cannot do without it. The true God is and must be pre-eminently the God of the Bible, the eternal who makes for righteousness, from whom Jesus came forth, and whose spirit governs the course of humanity." Diderot "No better lessons can I teach my child than those of the Bible." Professor Huxley "I have always been strongly in favor of secular education without theology, but I must confess that I have been no less seriously perplexed to know by what practical measures the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of moral conduct, is to be kept up in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion on these matters without the use of the Bible." John Stuart Mill "Who among His disciples, or among their proselytes, was capable of inventing the sayings of Jesus, or imagining the life and character ascribed to Him? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee; as certainly not Saint Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasies were of a totally different sort; and still less the early Christian writers. When this pre-eminent genius is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer and martyr to His mission who ever existed upon earth, religion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity; nor even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve his life." Rousseau "Can it be possible that the sacred personage whose history the Scriptures contain should be a mere man? Where is the man, where the philosopher, who could so live and so die without weakness and without ostentation? When Plato describes his imaginary righteous man, loaded with all the punishments of guilt, yet meriting the highest rewards of virtue, he exactly describes the character of Jesus Christ. What an infinite disproportion between the son of Sophroniscus and the Son of Mary. Socrates dies with honor, surrounded by his disciples listening to the most tender words-the easiest death that one could whisk to die. Jesus dies in pain, dishonor, mockery, the object of universal cursing-the most horrible death that one could fear. At the receipt of the cup of poison, Socrates blesses him who could not give it to him without tears; Jesus, while suffering the sharpest pains, prays for His most bitter enemies. If Socrates lived and died like a philosopher, Jesus lived and died like a god. "Peruse the books of philosophers with all their pomp of diction. How meager, how contemptible are they when compared with the Scriptures!... The majesty of the Scriptures strikes me with admiration." Pecaut "Christ's moral character rose beyond comparison above that of any other great man of antiquity. No one was ever so gentle, so humble, so kind as He. In His spirit He lived in the house of His heavenly Father. His moral life is wholly penetrated by God. He was the master of all, because He was really their brother." Ernest Renan "All history is incomprehensible without Him. He created the object and fixed the starting point of the future faith of humanity. He is the incomparable man to whom the universal conscience has decreed the title of Son of God, and that with justice. In the first rank of this grand family of the true sons of God we must place Jesus. The highest consciousness of God which ever existed in the breast of humanity was that of Jesus. Repose now in Thy glory, noble founder! Thy work is finished, Thy divinity established. Thou shalt become the corner-stone of humanity so entirely that to tear Thy name from this world would rend it to its foundations. Between Thee and God there will no longer be any distinction. Complete Conqueror of death, take possession of Thy kingdom, whither shall follow Thee, by the royal road which Thou hast traced, ages of adoring worshipers. Whatever may be the surprises of the future, Jesus will never be surpassed. His worship will grow young without ceasing; His legend will call forth tears without end; His sufferings will melt the noblest hearts; and all ages will proclaim that among the sons of men there is none born greater than Jesus. Even Paul is not Jesus. How far removed are we all from Thee, dear Master! Where is Thy mildness, Thy poetry? Thou to whom a flower didst bring pleasure and ecstasy, dost Thou recognize as Thy disciples these wranglers, these men furious over their prerogatives, and desiring that everything should be given to them? They are men; Thou art a god." Benjamin Disraeli "The wildest dreams of their rabbis have been far exceeded. Has not Jesus conquered Europe and changed its name to Christendom? All countries that refuse the cross wither, and the time will come, when the vast communities and countless myriads of America and Australia, looking upon Europe as Europe now looks upon Greece, and wondering how so small a space could have achieved such great deeds, will find music in the songs of Zion and solace in the parables of Galilee." Professor Hegard of the University of Copenhagen "The experiences of life, its sufferings and grief, have shaken my soul and have broken the foundation upon which I formerly thought I could build. Full of faith in the sufficiency of science, I thought to have found in it a sure refuge from all the contingencies of life. This illusion is vanished; when the tempest came, which plunged me in sorrow, the moorings, the cable of science, broke like thread. Then I seized upon that help which many before me have laid hold of. I sought and found peace in God. Since then I have certainly not abandoned science, but I have assigned to it another place in my life." When a man of brains speaks well of the Bible and Christ he consciously or unconsciously bears tribute to the inspiration of the one and the deity of the other. The Bible claims to be a revelation from God, and its character sustains its claim. "The Word of the Lord came expressly to Ezekiel." Ezekiel 1:13. "The Lord said unto me," exclaimed Jeremiah. Jeremiah 1:7. "Hear the Word of the Lord," says Isaiah. Isaiah 1:10. "Thus saith the Lord," rings through the Old Testament. And the New Testament puts the seal of inspiration upon the Old. "The Holy Ghost spake by the mouth of David." Acts 1:16. "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God." 2 Timothy 3:16. "The prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." 2 Peter 1:21. If the men who wrote this Book were not inspired, they were liars, and we have to explain how the Book which contains the highest morality ever given to earth could be written by a set of liars. And these bad men at the same time wrote their own doom, for there is no vice more severely condemned in the Bible than deception. To claim that good men wrote the Bible, and deny its inspiration, is on a par with the claim that Christ was a good man, while He pretended to be what He was not. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 23: - MODERN PHILOSOPHY ======================================================================== Modern Philosophy By Philip Mauro, Counselor-At-Law, New York City "Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit after (according to) the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. For in Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and ye are complete in Him, who is the Head of all principality and power." Colossians 2:8-10. In the foregoing passage occurs the only mention which the Scriptures make of philosophy. Nothing is more highly esteemed among men than philosophy. It is on all hands regarded as the supreme exercise and occupation of the human mind, and is indeed an occupation for which but very few men have the requisite intellectual equipment. As far back as the tradition of men goes, philosophy has held this high place in human estimation; and it is, therefore, a fact of much significance that, in all the Bible, philosophy is but once named. Even in our day the deference paid to philosophy is such that there are not many teachers of the Bible who would venture to warn their fellow-men of its dangers; for philosophers have managed to maintain in Christendom the same eminence which they occupied in heathendom. Indeed, a course in philosophy is now, and for some generations has been, considered an essential part of the education of a man who is preparing for the Christian ministry; and this is not the only one of the "rudiments of the world" which has found its way into our theological seminaries. It is, therefore, not surprising that, in the teaching imparted by these seminary graduates, philosophy holds a very different place from that assigned to it by the Bible. Not a Human Utterance We may be very sure, then, that the passage quoted above is not a human utterance. It does not express man's estimate of philosophy-far from it. In pronouncing that warning Paul is not repeating what he learned while pursuing his course in philosophy at the school of Gamaliel. No man would ever have coupled philosophy with vain deceit, or characterized it as a dangerous process against which God's people should be cautioned, lest thereby they should be despoiled of their possessions. No man ever defined philosophy as being according to human tradition and the basic principles of this evil world, and not according to Christ. This warning is from God Himself; but, alas, like many other of His solemn warnings, it has been despised and utterly disregarded. The thing against which this earnest warning was spoken has been welcomed with open arms, and incorporated into the theological machinery of our ecclesiastical systems. The consequences of this contemptuous disregard of God's warning are such as might have been expected. This word "beware" (sometimes rendered "take heed" in our version) does not occur very often in the New Testament. There are not many things whereof believers are bidden to "beware." Some of these are "the scribes," "dogs," "evil-workers," "the concision," and an "evil heart of unbelief" Mark 12:38; Php_3:2; Acts 13:40; Hebrews 3:12. The warning of our text is addressed to believers who have been instructed as to their oneness with Christ in His death (at the hands of the world), His burial, and His resurrection. Additional emphasis is given to the warning by the connection in which it occurs. The word rendered "spoil" signifies literally to make a prey of, as when one falls into the hands of robbers and is stripped by violence of his goods, or into the hands of smooth-tongued and plausible swindlers who gain his confidence, and by means of their arts fleece him of his valuables. It is heavenly treasure that is in contemplation here, even the believer's portion of the unsearchable riches of Christ. Hence empty deceit is contrasted with the fullness of the Godhead which dwells in Christ; and the despoiled condition of one who has been victimized through philosophy is contrasted with the enrichment of those who have apprehended by faith their completeness in Him who is the Head of all principality and power. But why, we may profitably inquire, is philosophy described as an instrument of spoliation in the hands of artful men? And why is it characterized as being after (i.e., according to) the rudiments, or basic principles, of the world? The word rendered "rudiments" occurs four times in Scripture. In Colossians 2:20 it is again rendered "rudiments." In Galatians 4:3; Galatians 4:9 it is rendered "elements." It seems to convey the idea of basic or foundation principles of the world-system. These elements are described in Galatians 4:9 as "weak and beggarly." They do not strengthen and enrich, but weaken and impoverish those who resort to them. Philosophy Defined The reason is perceived, in a general way at least, when we ascertain what philosophy is, namely, the occupation of attempting to devise, by the exercise of the human reason, an explanation of the universe. It is an interminable occupation for the reason that, if the explanation which philosophy is forever seeking were to be found, that discovery would be the end of philosophy. The occupation of the philosopher would be gone. It is interminable for the stronger reason that the philosopher is bound, by the rules of his profession, to employ in his quest only human wisdom, and it is written that the world, by its wisdom, does not come to the knowledge of God 1 Corinthians 1:19-21; 1 Corinthians 2:14. Incidentally, a large part of the time of the philosopher is occupied in criticizing and demonstrating the unreasonableness or absurdity of all philosophical systems except that espoused by himself. This, however, is merely the destructive part of his work, the constructive part being, as has been said, the employment of his reasoning faculties in the task of devising a system which will account, after a fashion, for the existence and origin of, and for the changes which appear to take place in, the visible universe. Having settled upon such a system, the philosopher must thenceforth defend it from the attacks of philosophers of opposing "Schools" (who will put forth weighty volumes demonstrating to their entire satisfaction that his philosophical system is a tissue of absurdities), and in replying to their many and various objections and criticisms. "Not According to Christ." We may thus see at a glance that philosophy is, in its essential character, in accordance with human tradition and the fundamental or primary principles of the world-system; and that it is not according to Christ, who is hated by the world, and who has laid the axe at the root of all its principles. Prominent among the elements of the world and of human tradition is the principle that the world reflects the grandeur of man, and that human reason is the highest and mightiest factor in it. In our day it has become a tenet of popular theology that the human reason is the final court of appeal in all matters of doctrine. In man's world human achievement is exalted to the highest place, and no limit is set to what may be accomplished by human ingenuity. "Let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make us a name" Genesis 11:4, is the program of humanity, as announced by those who established the basic principles of the world. In the great world-system that only is valued and lauded which is attained by the effort of man and redounds to his credit. Philosophy adheres strictly to this tradition and to these principles in that its various explanations, in order to receive recognition as "philosophical," must be purely the products of human reason exercised upon the results of human investigations. Philosophy Vs. Revelation It follows of necessity that philosophy and divine revelation are utterly irreconcilable. The very existence of philosophy as an occupation for the human mind depends upon the rigid exclusion of every explanation of the universe which is not reached by a speculative process. If a philosophy admits the existence of a God (as the philosophies just now in favor do), it is a god who either is dumb, or else is not permitted to tell anything about himself, or how he made and sustains the universe. Should the philosopher's god break through these restrictions, there would be straightway an end of his philosophy. For it is not the pursuit of truth that makes one a philosopher. The pursuit of truth, in order to be philosophical, must be conducted in directions in which truth cannot possibly be found. For the discovery of what philosophers pretend to be seeking would bring their philosophies to an end, and such a calamity must, of course, be avoided. Therefore, the moment one receives an explanation of the universe as coming from God who made it, he can have no further use for philosophy. One who has obtained the truth is no longer a seeker. The value of philosophy, therefore, lies not in its results, for there are none, but solely in the employment which its unverifiable speculations afford to those whose tastes and intellectual endowments qualify them to engage in it. Philosophy Vs. Christ Again, philosophy is "not according to Christ" for the simple and sufficient reason that the testimony of Christ puts an end, for all who accept it, to all philosophical speculations concerning the relations of humanity to God and to the universe, Christ set His seal to the truth and divine authority of the Old Testament Scriptures. He, moreover, revealed the Father; and finally He promised further revelations of truth through His apostles under the immediate teaching of the Holy Spirit. These revelations are not only directly opposed to philosophical speculations, but they cut the ground from under them. The testimony and teaching of Christ were not communicated to men for the purpose of informing them how man and the world came to be what they are-though they do reveal the truth as to that. The purpose of the doctrine of Christ and of His personal mission to the world was to show to men their true condition, as under the dominion of sin and death, and to accomplish eternal redemption for all who believethe good tidings and accept the gift of God's grace. The doctrine of Christ not only instructs men as to the way into the kingdom of God, but also entitles those who accept it to the immediate possession and enjoyment of many and valuable rights and privileges which can be acquired in no other way. If, therefore, you are a believer in Christ Jesus, trusting the merit of His sacrifice for your acceptance with God, beware lest any man despoil you of these inestimable rights and privileges through philosophy and vain deceit, according to the principles of the world, and not according to Christ. For in Him, and not elsewhere, dwells the fulness of the Godhead; and in Him, and not elsewhere, the believer may be filled to his utmost capacity. Philosophy can strip men of part of the inheritance of faith. It has nothing to offer them in exchange. Fruits of Philosophy It would be quite possible, for one who had the requisite leisure and curiosity, to trace the main developments of philosophy, and to examine the many different "Schools" to which it has given rise during a period of several thousand years. Having done so, he would find that philosophy consists, as already said, in the pursuit of the unattainable, and that, among all the varied fields of human activity there is none which has witnessed such an absolutely futile and barren expenditure of energy as the field of speculative philosophy. A philosopher of repute at the present time has declared that "philosophy has been on a false scent ever since the days of Socrates and Plato." The following of a false scent for more than two thousand years is surely not a record to boast of; and yet it is true that, so far as results are concerned, philosophy has nothing more encouraging than this to offer as an inducement for engaging in it. We do not, however, propose anything so stupendous (and so unprofitable) as a review of the history of philosophy, but merely a brief statement setting forth the status of philosophy at the present day. And this we undertake in order that the non-philosophical reader may be able to ascertain the character of the influence which philosophy is exerting, in these times of change and mental unrest, upon the immediate problems of humanity, and upon what is called "the progress of human thought." The great majority of men do no thinking beyond the matters which lie within the little circle of their personal interests. This unthinking majority takes its thoughts and opinions from an intellectual and cultured few, or from leaders who manage to gain their confidence. It is important, therefore, to ascertain what ideas are prevalent among those who are in a position to influence the opinions of the mass of mankind. This may easily be done by sampling the current philosophical teaching at the great universities of the English-speaking countries. Theistic and Atheistic Philosophy The various schools of philosophy which have flourished through the ages may be divided into two main classes, namely, theistic and atheistic. The former class embraces all philosophic systems which assume a god of some sort as the originator and sustainer of the universe. It may be remarked in passing that theistic philosophies are more dangerous to humankind than the atheistic class, for the reason that the former are well calculated to ensnare those who, by nature or training, have a repugnance to atheism. We need pay no attention to atheistic philosophy, for the reason that it is quite out of favor at the present day, and shows no sign of ever recovering a respectable status. Dualism and Pantheism Confining our attention, therefore, to theistic philosophies, we find several classes of these, namely, "Dualistic" and "Pantheistic." Dualism is the name which philosophers have been pleased to bestow upon those systems which maintain that God (or the "First Cause") created the universe as an act of His will, and has an existence distinct and apart from it. These systems are called "dualistic" because they count God as one entity, and the universe or creation as another entity, thus making two entities. The reader should understand clearly that when a learned professor of philosophy speaks of "dualism" he has Christianity in mind. Monism and Pluralism Pantheism, on the other hand, maintains that God and the universe are one being. There are several varieties of pantheism which have followers among living philosophers, e. g., monism and pluralism. Monism is that variety of pantheism which is most in favor at the present day. This system assumes as the basis of reality an "absolute" or "all-knower"-a monstrosity which comprehends in its vast being all things and all their relations and activities. Monism, therefore, asserts that there is but one entity. God has no existence apart from the universe, and never had. The latter is, therefore, eternal, and there has been no creation. It is a remarkable and highly significant fact that the basic principle of this ruling philosophy of our day is also the basic principle of the rapidly rising religio-economic system of socialism. For socialism is grounded upon the proposition that man is organically and essentially one with God and with the universe. From this strange agreement-this strange meeting of extremes far-reaching results may be expected. The Present Situation In order to obtain for our consideration a fair and accurate statement of the position of present-day philosophy, reference will be made to the "Hibbert Lectures" of 1909, on "The Present Situation in Philosophy," delivered by Professor William James, of Harvard University, at Manchester College, Oxford. These lectures have been published in a volume entitled "A Pluralistic Universe" (Longmans, Green & Co.). Professor James is one of the very few philosophers of note who reject the teaching of monism. He advocates a theory styled "Pluralism," of which a sufficient idea may be gained from the quotations to follow. It is of first importance to us to learn from Professor James what is the present status of dualism, since, as we have seen, that class embraces old-fashioned or Bible Christianity. As to this, he says: "Dualistic theism is professed as firmly as ever at all Catholic seats of learning, whereas it has of late years tended to disappear at our British and American Universities, and be replaced by a monistic pantheism more or less open or disguised" (page 24). According to this competent authority, the Roman Catholic colleges are the only ones of any consequence wherein the statements of the Bible regarding the creation and government of the universe, the origin of living creatures, including man, the origin of evil, etc., are even "professed." The great universities of, England and America, which were founded for the purpose of maintaining the doctrines of Scriptures, and spreading knowledge of them as the revelations of the living God, and as the foundations of all true learning, have been despoiled of all that made them useful for the nurture of young minds, and that made them valuable to the communities wherein they have flourished; and this momentous change has been accomplished through the agency of philosophy and vain deceit, according to the ancient tradition of men, according to the rudiments of the world, and not according to Christ. A Strange Phenomenon Herein, as it seems to the writer, we have an explanation for the strange phenomenon that Romanism is gaining ground rapidly in Protestant England and America, while steadily losing influence in those countries where it has had almost exclusive sway over the consciences of the people. The latter countries have never enjoyed the privileges of the open Bible. They have never had any links attaching them to the living Word of God. All they have had is "the church," and that they are now judging by its fruits. But in England and America it is far otherwise. For many generations, from father to son, the people have been knit by many strong and tender ties and associations to the Word of the living God. Its influences upon the customs and life of the people have been many and potent. Only those whose minds are blinded will deny the mighty influence which the Bible has exerted as a factor in the national prosperity of the English-speaking countries. The great universities have been their pride, and have been counted among the national bulwarks; and the Bible has been the foundation stone of the universities. But now a change has come-so swiftly and so stealthily that we can scarcely realize what has happened. The universities have discarded the teaching of the Bible, and have repudiated its authority as the divinely inspired teacher. Only at "Catholic seats of learning" is its teaching professed. What wonder, then, in a time of general disintegration and unrest, that the children of Bible-loving ancestors should be drawn by thousands to a system which has the appearance of stability, where all else is falling to pieces, and which, with all its errors, does proclaim the infallibility of the Holy Scriptures! Whoso is wise will consider these things. A Sudden Change Professor James, in his lectures at Manchester, treats the teaching of the Bible as being now so utterly discredited and out of date as to call for only a brief, passing reference in a discussion purporting to deal with "the present situation in philosophy." He says: "I shall leave cynical materialism entirely out of our discussion as not calling for treatment before this present audience, and I shall ignore old-fashioned dualistic theism for the same reason" (page 30). It is also important for Our purpose to note the suddenness of the great change which has taken place at our universities, whereby Christian doctrine has been relegated to a position of obscurity so profound that it calls for no consideration in a discussion of this sort. The lecturer, after remarking that he had been told by Hindu's that "the great obstacle to the spread of Christianity in their country was the puerility of our dogma of creation," added: "Assuredly, most members of this audience are ready to side with Hinduism in this matter." And then he proceeded to say that "those of us who are sexagenarians" have witnessed such changes as "make the thought of a past generation seem as foreign to its successor as if it were the expression of a different race of men. The theological machinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors, with its finite age of the world, its creation out of nothing, its juridical morality and eschatology, its treatment of God as an external contriver, an intelligent and moral governor, sounds as odd to most of us as if it were some outlandish savage religion" (page 29). Its Significance Let the reader not fail to grasp the significance of the statement. For hundreds of years the instruction imparted to the youths of England and America has been grounded upon the Scriptures as the oracles of God; and, in fact, the work of teaching has been carried on mainly by ministers of the Word. The positions which England and America have gained among the nations during those centuries is known to every one. God has greatly blessed them with national prosperity and world-wide dominion. But now, we are told (and it is true), that within a single generation the framework of our educational systems has been so changed that the language which expressed the abiding convictions of our ancestors sounds as strange in the atmosphere of our great universities as the language of a "different race of men," uttering the formulas of some "outlandish savage religion." Whether the change is for the better or for the worse is not, for the moment, in question. What we wish to impress upon our readers? minds at this point is simply the fact that a tremendous change has taken place, with amazing suddenness, and in regard to matters that are of vital importance to the whole world, and particularly to the English-speaking people. Effect upon Plastic Minds The effect upon the plastic minds of undergraduates of such words as those last quoted can easily be imagined. They artfully convey the suggestion that these young men are, in respect of their philosophical notions, vastly superior to the men of light and learning of past generations, and that it is by the repudiation of Christianity and its "lively oracles" that they furnish convincing proof of their intellectual superiority. There are few minds among men of the age here addressed, or of any age except they be firmly grounded and established in the truth-which could resist the insidious influence of such an appeal to the innate vanity of men. Such being then the influences to which the students at our universities are now exposed, is there not urgent need of impressing upon Christian parents (there are yet a few remaining) the warning of our text, and exhorting them to beware lest their children be despoiled through philosophy and empty deceit? A Great Peril What does this sudden and stupendous change portend? Is not the very existence of Christianized civilization (i.e., the social system which has been reared under the influence and protection of Christianity) imperiled by it? Beyond all doubt it is. Nor is our reasonable apprehension in this regard in any wise allayed by Professor James' statements that the principal factors of this change are "scientific evolutionism" and "the rising tide of social democratic ideals." Great is the mischief already accomplished by these mighty agencies of evil, and we are as yet but at the beginning of their destructive career. One more word Professor James speaks on this point: "An external creator and his institutions may still be verbally confessed at Church in formulas that linger by their mere inertia, but the life is out of them" (page 34). And with this agree the words of the risen Christ to the church in its Sardis stage, "Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead. Be watchful, and strengthen the things that remain that are ready to die" Revelation 3:1-2. Buddha or Christ? It is now in order to inspect briefly that system of philosophy which, in its several forms, has crowded out of our universities the doctrine of Christ (and which has incidentally made Him a liar). We have already stated that this reigning system, now holding almost undisputed sway in "Christian" England and America, is pantheism, which has flourished for thousands of years as the philosophical religious cult of India. We have seen how Professor James defers to the Hindu estimate of the Bible doctrine of creation, and sides with it. If the test of a doctrine is the way it is regarded by the Hindu's, it is quite logical to go to them for the interpretation of the universe which is to be taught at our schools and colleges. The philosophers of today have, therefore, nothing to offer to us that our ancestors did not understand as well as they, and that they were not as free to choose as we are. Did our ancestors then prefer the worse thing to the better when they chose, and founded great universities to preserve, the doctrines taught by Jesus Christ and His Apostles, rather than (as they might have done) the doctrines associated with the name of Buddha? Our present-day teachers of philosophy appear to say so. But if there remains any judgment at all in the twentieth-century man, he will remember, before lightly acquiescing in the removal of the ancient foundations, that whatever there may be of superiority in the social order of Christianized England and America over that of pantheistic India is due to the choice which our forefathers made when they accepted the teaching of the Gospel of Christ, and to the fact that every subsequent generation until the present has ratified and adhered firmly to that choice. What Benefit? What benefit, then, can any sane man expect as the result of this sudden and wholesale repudiation of teachings which are vital to Christianity, and the acceptance in their stead of the ancient doctrines of heathendom? Surely there never was a generation of men so unwise, so blinded by its own conceit, as this foolish generation, in thus casting away the guidance of that Book which has put England and America at the head of the nations, and which has been the source of everything that is commendable in so-called "civilized society," and in accepting in its place the brutalizing and degrading doctrines of pantheism. In whatever our eyes can rest upon with satisfaction in our past history or our present institutions, our art, literature, ethics, standards of family life and national life, etc., etc., we see the evidences of the influence of those teachings which have now been discarded by the wise men of our day as "puerile" in comparison with those of heathen philosophy. How long will it be before the righteous judgment of God overtakes the peoples who have thus turned with contempt from the source of all their greatness? The warning, therefore, should be sounded out, not only to the young men and women who are likely to be the dire victims of the "higher education" of the day, but to every dweller in civilized lands, to Beware lest any man make a prey of them through philosophy and vain deceit. For the matter we are considering vitally affects the interests of every civilized community. National Responsibility From the Bible and from secular history we learn that God deals not only with individuals on the ground of privilege and responsibility, but with nations also. Because of the extraordinary privileges granted to the Israelites, a heavier responsibility rested upon them than upon other nations, and they were visited for their unfaithfulness with corresponding severity. And now we are living in that long stretch of centuries known as "the times of the Gentiles," during which the natural branches of the olive tree (Israel) are broken off, and the branches of the wild olive tree are grafted into their place; that is to say, the period wherein the Gentiles are occupying temporarily Israel's place of special privilege and responsibility. The diminishing of them has become the riches of the Gentiles Romans 11:11-25. In dealing with a nation God looks to its rulers or leaders as responsible for its actions. The justice of this is specially evident in countries where the people choose their own rulers and governors. In our day the people are all-powerful. Rulers are chosen for the express purpose of executing the popular will. Likewise also the time has come when the people not only elect their rulers, but also heap to themselves teachers, because they will not endure sound doctrine 2 Timothy 4:3-4. We may be sure, then, that the persons we find in the professional chairs of our colleges are there by the mandate of the people, who have turned away their ears from the truth and give heed to fables which please their itching ears. By the very constitution of a democratic social order the teachers must teach what the people like to hear, or else give place to those who will. God will surely judge the privileged nations for this. The change has been great and sudden. The judgment will be swift and severe. Until our day, whatever may have been the moral state of the masses of people of England and America, governments were established on the foundations of Christian doctrine; kings and other rulers were sworn to defend the faith; the Bible was taught in the schools; and no one was regarded as fit for a position of public responsibility who was not a professed follower of Jesus Christ. As for the teachers in our schools and colleges, not one could have been found who did not hold and teach as the unchanging truth of God the doctrines of Bible Christianity. A Great Apostasy Recognizing these facts, which all must admit to be facts, however much they may differ as to the significance of them, it follows that we are living under the dark shadow of the greatest national apostasy that has ever taken place. During all the history of mankind there has never been such a wholesale turning away from the Source of national blessings, in order to take up with the gods of the heathen. Solemn Nonsense We have already stated that the regnant philosophy, i.e., pantheism, is expounded in our universities in two forms, known respectively as "monism" and "pluralism." Professor James, although a vigorous critic of monism, admits that the latter has almost complete possession of the field, and that his own cult of "pluralism" has very few adherents. These two species of pantheism are, however, alike in the essential matter that "both identify human substance with divine substance." From a Christian standpoint, therefore, it is not very important to distinguish between them. The principal difference is that monism (or "absolutism") "thinks that said substance becomes fully divine only in the form of totality, and is not its real self in any form but the all-form"; whereas pluralism maintains "that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected ......and that a distributive form of reality, the each-form, is logically as acceptable, and empirically as probable, as the all-form" (page 34). "For monism the world is no collection, but one great all-inclusive fact, outside of which there is nothing;" "And when the monism is idealistic, this all-enveloping fact is represented as an absolute mind that makes the partial facts by thinking them, just as we make objects in a dream by dreaming them, or personages in a story by imagining them." "The world and the all-thinker thus co-penetrate and soak each other up without residuum." "The absolute makes us by thinking us." "The absolute and the world are one fact." "This is the full pantheistic scheme, the immanence of God in His creation, a conception sublime from its tremendous unity." On the other hand, pluralism says that "reality may exist in a distributive form in the shape not of an all, but of a set of eaches." "There is this in favor of the eaches, that they are at any rate real enough to have made themselves at least appear to every one, whereas the absolute has as yet appeared immediately to only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously" (page 129). I have transcribed the foregoing specimens of this solemn nonsense in order that the reader may be informed of the choice which our great universities now set before the thousands of eager and receptive minds that throng them in quest of knowledge. The rulers of these educational institutions virtually say to their students, You must accept a pantheistic conception of the universe, but you may choose between a monistic universe and a pluralistic universe between a universe which consists of a single ponderous "All," or one comprising an indefinite number of miscellaneous "Eaches." Conflicting Schools Whichever of these "weak and beggarly" conceptions our young student adopts, he must be prepared to hear it assailed by the adherents of the rival school and criticized as highly irrational and absurd; and for this his course in philosophy prepares him. Thus the advocates of monism declare that pluralism is "infected and undermined by self-contradiction." On the other hand, Professor James maintains that the "absolute" of the monist "involves features of irrationality peculiar to itself." He points out that, upon the theory of absolute idealism, the all-knower must know, and be always distinctly conscious relation of every object in the whole universe, but also all that the object is not as that a "table is not a chair, not a rhinoceros, not a logarithm, not a mile away from the door, not worth five hundred pounds sterling, not a thousand centuries old," etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam. " Furthermore, if it be a fact that certain ideas are silly, the absolute has to have already thought the silly ideas to establish them in silliness. The rubbish in its mind would thus appear easily to outweigh in amount the more desirable material. One would expect it fairly to burst with such an obesity, plethora, and superfoetation of useless information" (page 128). And how about things that are criminal, vicious, and impure? These are of necessity just as much the thought-forms of the absolute as their opposites. A Philosopher's Verdict Again, after mentioning certain difficulties of the idealist theory, Professor James speaks disparagingly of "the oddity of inventing as a remedy for the inconveniences resulting from this situation a supernumerary conceptual object called an 'absolute,' into which you pack the self-same contradictions unreduced" (page 271). Once more we quote: "When I read transcendentalist literature .....I get nothing but a sort of marking of time, champing of jaws, pawing of the ground, and resettling into the same attitude, like a weary horse in a stall with an empty manger. It is but a turning over the same threadbare categories, bringing the same objections, and urging the same answers and solutions, with never a new fact or new horizon coming into sight" (page 265). This is what a philosopher of the front ranks says of the ruling philosophy of the day, whose speculations are being impressed upon the minds of our brightest college students. One comment may be permitted, namely, that if a foolish absolute did not Create men by thinking them, certainly foolish men have created an absolute by thinking it; and it is difficult to conceive how they could have employed their minds more foolishly. An Impossible Task This is the situation brought about, now that Christianity has been politely bowed out of our schools and seminaries in order to make room for the irrational philosophy of Hinduism! Very pertinent in this connection are the words of the prophet: "The wise men are ashamed; they are dismayed and taken. Lo, they have rejected the Word of the Lord, and what wisdom is in them?" Jeremiah 8:9. For the occupation in which our philosophers are engaged is the impossible task of trying to establish an explanation of the visible universe after having rejected the true account thereof received from its Creator. The god of the ruling philosophy is one who is not permitted to speak or make himself known in any way. Philosophy must needs put these restraints upon him for its own protection; for, should he break through them, the occupation of the philosopher would be gone. So he must remain in impenetrable obscurity, speaking no word, and making no intelligible sign or motion, in order that philosophers may continue their congenial business of making bad guesses at what he is like. A Warning It is not difficult for one who has come to the knowledge of the truth through receiving the Word of God, "not as the word of men, but as it is in truth the Word of God" 1 Thessalonians 2:13, to perceive the folly and futility of all this. But who shall deliver the ignorant, the innocent, and the unwary from being victimized and eternally despoiled by these men who, professing themselves to be wise, have become fools? We can but sound the alarm and give warning, especially to those who are responsible for bringing up children, of the dangers which infect the intellectualistic atmosphere of our universities, colleges and seminaries. A Reason for It In closing we may with profit to our readers point out a profound reason why the enemy of Christ, and of the men whom He seeks to save, should be desirous of impressing upon the minds of the latter the conception of pantheism. That doctrine wholly excludes the idea that man is a sinner, and hence it puts redemption outside the pale of discussion. Under the influence of that doctrine man would never discover his corrupt nature and his need of salvation, and hence, if not delivered from it, he would die in his sins. An enemy of man could devise against him no greater mischief than this. God Maligned But the doctrine which the philosophy of our day has imported from India works not only destruction to men, but also dishonor to God. Herein may its satanic character be clearly perceived by all who have eyes to see. Its foundation principle is that God and man are truly one in substance and being, and that the character of God is revealed in the history of humanity. This evil doctrine makes God the partner with man in all the manifold and grievous wickedness of humankind. It makes Him particeps criminis in all the monstrous crimes, cruelties, uncleanness and unnamable abominations, that have stained the record of humanity. It makes Him really the prime actor in all sins and wickedness's, since the thought and impulses prompting them originate with Him. Thus God is charged with all the evil deeds which the Bible denounces, and against which the wrath of the God of the Bible is declared. Satan's Pledge It may be that, somewhere in the dark places of this sinful world, there lurks a doctrine more monstrously wicked, more characteristically satanic than this, which is now installed in our seats of learning and there openly venerated as the last word of matured human wisdom; but, if such there be, the writer of these pages is not aware of its existence. That doctrine is virtually the assurance, given under the seal of those who occupy the eminences of human culture, learning and wisdom, that the pledge of the serpent given to the parents of the race of what would result if they would follow his track, has at last been redeemed. "Ye shall become as God," he declared; and now the leaders of the thought of the day unite in proclaiming that man and God are truly one substance and nature. Beware! Beware! This teaching is, indeed, according to human tradition-the most ancient of all human traditions; it is according to the basic principles of the world and of the god of this world, and not according to Christ. No greater danger menaces the younger men and women of the present generation than the danger that some man, some smooth-tongued, learned and polished professor, may make a prey of them by means of philosophy and vain deceit. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 24: - THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD ======================================================================== The Knowledge of God By David James Burrell, D.D., L.L. D., Minister of The Marble Collegiate Church, New York City The man who does not know God has not begun to live. He may eat and drink, make merry, accumulate a fortune or wear a crown; but he has not entered into that better life of high hopes and noble purposes and aspirations which make us worthy of our Divine birthright. For "this is life eternal, to know God." To put ourselves into just relations with God is literally a matter of life or death. All theologies are worth mastering but THEOLOGY is indispensable. We must know God. But where is He? "Oh, that I knew where I might find Him! Behold, I go forward but He is not there, and backward but I cannot perceive Him; on the left hand where He doth work, but I cannot behold Him; He hideth Himself on the right hand so that I cannot see Him!" The horizons recede as we approach them, and the darkness thickens as we grope like blind men feeling their way along the wall. There are three roads which are vainly trodden by multitudes who pursue this holy quest. Each of them is marked, "This way to God"; and each of them is a cul de sac or blind alley, which leaves the soul still groping and crying, "Oh, that I knew where I might find Him!" The first of these paths is Intuition. There are no natural atheists. All are born with an indwelling sense of God. We do not enter on conscious life like the inferior orders; but "trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our home". In regions of darkest paganism there are traces of two innate convictions; namely, a Divine birth and a sinful alienation. Hence the universal spirit of unrest so pathetically expressed by Augustine: "We came forth from God, and we shall be homesick until we return to Him." No doubt there have been some who, with no light but that which shines along the pathway of Intuition, have made the acquaintance of God; but the vast multitude have simply arrived at idolatry. They have made unto themselves gods "after the similitude of a man"; gods, like the Brocken of the Harz mountains, projected on the skies. An idol is a man-made god. It may be carved out of wood or conjured out of the gray matter of the brain; but all gods, whence so ever they come, are idols, except the one true God. The second pathway of the God-seekers is Reason. Here we come upon the philosophers and those who travel with them. This also leads to disappointment; as it is written, "The world by wisdom knew not God". The golden age of philosophy in Greece followed close on the decay of the Pantheon. It was when the people had lost confidence in their idols and the cry was heard, "Great Pan is dead!" that the Groves and Gardens and Painted Porches arose on the banks of the Ilyssus, The thoughtful men who assumed the name philosophoi, that is, "lovers of wisdom", were all seekers after God. The Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics and Peripatetics all hoped to discover Him by the light of reason. How vain the quest! When Simonides was asked for a definition of God, he required some weeks for meditation and then answered, "The more I think of Him, the more He is unknown!" The innumerable gods and altars of Athens had been laughed out of court; and the results of philosophic inquiry were recorded on that other altar which succeeded them, "To the Unknown God". The stock in trade of the philosophers of Athens was precisely that of the philosophers of our time. It consisted substantially of four arguments, to wit: (A) The ontological argument; to the effect that the being of God is involved in the idea of God. This is good as far as it goes, but it falls vastly short of demonstration; and in any case it reaches no conclusion as to the character of God. (B) The cosmological argument, which reasons from effect to cause and expresses itself in the epigram ex nihilo nihil fit; "out of nothing nothing comes". This is equally inconclusive, since the necessary Somewhat. to which it leads is but the merest shade of the shadow of a god. (C) The teleological argument, which proceeds from design to a designer; carrying with it a strong presumption as to infinite wisdom but taking little or no cognizance of the moral nature of God. (D) And the anthropological argument, which infers the moral nature of God from the moral nature of man. This goes further than the others; nevertheless it is so far from being final proof in the mathematical sense that one may reasonably question whether any truth-seeker was ever really convinced by it. These are the arguments which have been used by philosophers from time immemorial; and little has been added in the process of the passing years. The result, as a whole, is melancholy failure. The world by its wisdom, that is by the exercise of its unaided reason, has simply reached Agnosticism; it has not "found out God". Not to those who deem them themselves wise, but rather to the simple whose hearts are open God-ward, comes the great revelation. It is one thing to know about God and quite another to know Him. John Hay knew all about President Lincoln from his boyhood up; little "Tad" had no such information, but he knew his father, knew him through and through. The eyes of Faith see further than those of reason. Wherefore Jesus said, "Except ye become as a little child ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of God". The third of the alluring pathways is that of the five senses; that is, of Natural Science, which reaches its conclusions on the evidence of the physical senses. This rules out faith, which is the sixth sense divinely given to men for the apprehension of spiritual truths. To undertake to solve any of the great problems which have to do with our spiritual life by the testimony of the finger tips is to have one's labor for one's pains; since, in the nature of the case, "spiritual things are spiritually discerned". To undertake to grasp a spiritual fact by the physical senses is as preposterous as it would be to insist on seeing with the ears or hearing with the eyes. Faith is not credulity, nor is it unsubstantial, nor is it believing without evidence. On the contrary, it is both substantial and evidential: only it is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen". To refuse to exercise this sixth sense or power of spiritual apprehension is to shut oneself out forever from the possibility of apprehending God or any of the great, intangible, but real truths which center in Him. Yet we are constantly hearing, in certain quarters, of the importance of pursuing our theological studies "by the scientific method". With what result? "We have a world of facts", they say, "and from these facts, by the inductive process, we must arrive at our conclusions". It is like an example in Algebra: God is the unknown term; let this be expressed by "x": the problem then is to resolve "x" into known terms by the use of a multitude of seen and tangible facts. Can it be done? Go on and pursue your researches along the lines of evolution, until back of cosmos you come to chaos, and back of chaos to the nebula, and back of the nebula to the primordial germ; and that last infinitesimal atom will look up at you with the old question on its lips, as loud as ever and involving a problem as deep as when you began, "Whence came I?" What is your answer? God? Call it "God!" if you please; in fact, however, it is simply an impersonal indefinable, inescapable something or other which, for lack of a better term, is designated as a "First Cause", but which is infinitely far from what is meant by a personal God. Well, then, shall the quest be given up? Is the universal thought of God merely an ignis fatuus leading the hopeful traveler into a realm of impenetrable mists and shadows? Or is there still some way of finding out God? Yes, there is a fourth road by which we approach Him; and it is an highway cast up by the King Himself. It is called. "Revelation", or the Unveiling. There is an antecedent presumption in its favor; to wit, that if there is a God anywhere in the universe He would not leave us to grope our way hopelessly in the dark toward Him, but would somewhere, somehow, unveil Himself to us. Well, here is a Book, which claims to be Revelation. Of all the books in the literature of the ages it is the only one that claims to have been divinely authorized and "written by holy men as they were moved by the Spirit of God". It opens with the words, "In the beginning, God"; and proceeds to set forth the two great doctrines of Creation and Providence. It affirms, on the one hand, that everything in the universe has its origin in the creative power of God; and, on the other, that everything is sustained by the providence of God. In these two doctrines we have the sum and substance of Bible truth. But this is not all. In between the doctrines of Creation and Providence there walks, through all the corridors of Holy Writ, a mysterious Figure who is the fore-gleam of another revelation further on. At the outset this Figure appears in the protevangel as the "Seed of Woman", who is to come in the fullness of time to "bruise the serpent's head". And He appears and reappears, now in kingly guise, again as a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and again with a name written on His vesture, "Emmanuel", which being interpreted is "God with us". This Book, claiming to be the written Word of God, makes us acquainted with His being, personality and moral attributes; but it does not exhaust the theme. It leads us along a road, lighted by visions and prophecies, until it opens into another and clearer road; to wit, "The Incarnate Word of God". And this fifth road, the Incarnation, is the way which all truth-seekers must pursue if they would finally arrive at a just and saving knowledge of God. It is here that we meet Christ, bringing the message from the throne. He comes into our world with the express purpose of making God known to us; as it is written, "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him". He is called the Word, because He is the medium of communication between the Infinite and the finite; as it is written, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us": that is to say, the Incarnation is the articulation of the speech of God. In the Scriptures we have a letter from God; but in the Incarnation, we have the coming down of God to unveil Himself before us. The soul of sinful man is like a child lost among strangers, wild-eyed, lips trembling, eyes searching vainly for a familiar face. Ah, here the mother comes! And the child is sobbing out its happiness on her breast. "Cuddle doon, my bairnie!" So is it when the sinner finds Christ; or shall we not rather say, when Christ, the seeking God, finds him? If, then, we are ever to learn theology it must be as disciples, sitting in a docile attitude at the feet of Christ. He, as the incarnate Son, is our authoritative Teacher. What, therefore, has He to say about God? As to His being, He has little or nothing to say; for the obvious reason that God's being is the substratum of Christ's entire doctrine, without which it would be as insignificant as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. Moreover, all His teaching is postulated on the written Word, of which He said, "Search the Scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life; and they are they which testify of Me." And the moment we turn from the Incarnate Word to the written Word, we come upon the saying, "In the beginning, God". As to the moral attributes of God, the teaching of Jesus is indubitably clear. "God is a spirit", He says, "and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth". It need scarcely be said that a spirit, though invisible and impalpable, is a real self-conscious personality. The communion of Jesus with this Spirit is that of one person with another. He does not speak to Law, not to Energy, nor to an indefinable "Something not ourselves that maketh for righteousness", but to One with whom He is on familiar terms. "The only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father; He hath declared Him". As to Divine providence He speaks in no uncertain tone. The God whom He unveils is in and over all. Out on the hillsides He bids us "Consider the lilies, how they grow", and assures us that our Father, "who careth for them, will much more care for us". In pursuance of this fact He encourages us to pray, saying, "Ask and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you". Oh, great heart of the Infinite, quick to respond to our every cry for help ! The doctrine of prayer, as taught by Jesus, is simplicity itself. We are to run to God with our longings as children to their parents; "For if ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him". As to the moral attributes of God the teaching of Jesus is not only clear but most emphatic; because at this point it touches vitally our eternal welfare. The Divine holiness is presented not so much as an attribute as the condition of God's being. It is the light emanating from His throne, of which Christ is the supreme manifestation, as He said, "I am the light of the world"; and this light must ever be reflected in the life of His disciples, as He said, "Ye are the light of the world; let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify God". This holiness is not merely freedom from moral contamination; but such a sensitive aversion to sin as makes it impossible for God to look with complacency upon any creature who is defiled by it. Hence the appeal to the cultivation of a holy life; since "without holiness no man shall see God". Out of this atmosphere of holiness proceed two attributes which, like opening arms, embrace the world. One of them is Justice, or regard for law. No teacher ever lived, not even Moses, who emphasized as deeply as did Jesus the integrity of the moral law. He defended not only the law itself but the penalties affixed to its violation. The Decalogue is not so severe an arraignment of sin as the Sermon on the Mount, which rings with the inviolability of law. The other of the outstretched arms is Love. The fullness of Divine love is set forth in the words of Jesus: "When ye pray say, 'Our Father'". It was wisely observed by Madame de Stael that if Jesus had never done anything in the world except to teach us "Our Father" He would have conferred an inestimable boon upon all the children of men. God's love is manifest in the unceasing gifts of His providence; but its crowning token is the grace of salvation: "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life". And the reconciliation between Love and Justice is found at the Cross. Here "mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other". As law is sacred and inviolable, its penalty must be inflicted; it must be inflicted either upon the malefactor or upon some competent substitute who shall volunteer to suffer for him. It is the only begotten Son who volunteers, saying, "Here am I, send Me!" The justice of God is shown in the suffering inflicted upon His only begotten Son; and His love is correspondingly shown in the proffer of all the benefits of that vicarious suffering to every one on the sole condition of faith. It pleased God to vindicate His supreme majesty before His ancient people in the controversy on Carmel. All day the pagan priests assembled at their altar cried, "O Baal, hear us": but there was no voice nor any that regarded. At evening the lone prophet of Jehovah stood beside his altar and calmly made his prayer, "O God of Israel, let it be known this day that Thou art God!" Was there any that regarded? Lo, yonder in the twilight sky a falling fleece of fire! In awe-struck silence the people saw it descending, lower and lower, until it touched the sacrifice and consumed it. The logic of the argument was irresistible: they cried with one accord, "Jehovah is the God!" The antitype and parallel of that great controversy is at Calvary, where Christ, at once the ministering priest and the sacrifice upon the altar, made His last prayer with hands outstretched upon the cross; and the descending fire consumed Him as a whole burnt offering for the world's sin. The logic, here also, is unanswerable. In all the world there is no other gospel which adequately sets forth the Divine love. By the power of truth, by the triumph of righteousness, by the logic of events, by the philosophy of history, by the blood of the atonement, let the world answer, "Our God is the God of salvation; and there is none other beside Him!" The failure of other religions and philosophies has been grotesquely pathetic. The irony of Elijah on Carmel is merely an echo of the Divine burst of laughter out of heaven in response to those who cry: "Let us break His band asunder and cast away His cords from us!" He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision. The pantheons crumble and the priests die; one altar remains, to wit, the cross on Calvary .... It is the sole altar and supreme argument of the true God. But every man must for himself make answer to that argument. Each for himself, must fight his way into the truth. It is like the grapple which Jacob had with an unseen antagonist at the brookside. As the night wore on he came to understand that Omnipotence had laid hold upon him. Then came a sudden wrench, and Jacob fell, disabled. God had thrown him! He sank a helpless man, but, clinging still, cried, "I will not let Thee go except Thou bless me!" And thereupon the blessing was given, a blessing which God had waited through the weary years to bestow upon him: "Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, 'the Supplanter', but Israel; for as a prince hast thou prevailed with God". Then and there he received his guerdon of knighthood and entered into the higher life. At the close of that conflict the light of morning was glowing on the hills of Edom: how significant the words, "And the sun arose upon him!" The new life had begun; the long quest was over; Jacob had found God. And he went his way limping on his shrunken thigh, to bear through all the after years the token of that struggle until he came to heaven's gate, at peace with God. It is thus that every man finds God; in a close grapple that ends in self surrender, an utter yielding to the beneficent power of God. So true life begins with knowing God. It begins when a man, oppressed by doubt and uncertainty, hears His voice saying, "Reach hither thy hand and thrust it into My side!" It begins when, standing under the cross, he realizes, as Luther did, "He died for me, for me!" Then the day breaks and the shadows flee away. Love conquers doubt, and the soul, beholding the unveiling of the Infinite in the passion of Christ, cries out, "My Lord and My God!" ======================================================================== CHAPTER 25: - TABLE OF CONTENTS ======================================================================== Table of Contents Chapter 1. THE HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM - By Canon Dyson Hague, M. A., Rector of the Memorial Church, London, Ontario. Lecturer in Liturgics and Ecclesiology, Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada. Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of Huron. Chapter 2. THE MOSAIC AUTHORSHIP OF THE PENTATEUCH - By Professor George Frederick Wright, D. D., L. L. D., Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. Chapter 3. The Fallacies of the Higher Criticism By Professor Franklin Johnson, D. D., L. L. D. Chapter 4. THE BIBLE AND MODERN CRITICISM - By F. Bettex, D. D., Professor Emeritus, Stuttgart, Germany. (Translated from the original German, by David Heagle, D. D.) Chapter 5. THE HOLY SCRIPTURES AND MODERN NEGATIONS - By Professor James Orr, D. D., United Free Church College, Glasgow, Scotland. Chapter 6. CHRIST AND CRITICISM - By Sir Robert Anderson, K. C. B., L. L. D., Author of “The Bible and Modern Criticism,” etc., London, England. Chapter 7. OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND NEW TESTAMENT CHRISTIANITY - By Professor W. H. Griffith Thomas, Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada. Chapter 8. THE TABERNACLE IN THE WILDERNESS: DID IT EXIST? - A Question Involving the Truth or Falsity of the Entire Higher Critic Theory, by David Heagle, Ph. D., D. D., Professor of Theology and Ethics, Ewing College; Translator of the “Bremen Lectures;” Author of “Moral Education;” “That Blessed Hope,” etc. Chapter 9. INTERNAL EVIDENCE OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL - By Canon G. Osborne Troop, M. A. Montreal, Canada. Chapter 10. THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST TO THE OLD TESTAMENT - By William Caren, D. D., L. L. D., Late Principal of Knox College, Toronto, Canada. Chapter 11. THE EARLY NARRITIVES OF GENESIS - By Professor James Orr, D. D. United Free Church College, Glasgow, Scotland. Chapter 12. ONE ISAIAH - By Professor George L. Robinson, D. D., McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois. Chapter 13. THE BOOK OF DANIEL- By Professor Joseph D. Wilson, D. D., Theological Seminary of the Reformed Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Author of “Did Daniel Write Daniel?” Chapter 14. THE DOCTRINAL VALUE OF THE FIRST CHAPTER OF GENESIS - By the Revelation Dyson Hague, M. A. Vicar of the Church of the Epiphany; Professor of Liturgics, Wycliffe College, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Chapter 15 THREE PECULIARITIES OF THE PENTATEUCH WHICH ARE INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE GRAF-WELLHAUSEN THEORIES OF ITS COMPOSITION - By Andrew Craig Robinson, M. A., Ballineen, County Cork, Ireland. Author of “What about the Old Testament?” Chapter 16. THE TESTIMONY OF THE MONUMENTS TO THE TRUTH OF THE SCRIPTURES - By Professor George Frederick Wright, D. D., L. L. D., Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. Chapter 17. THE RECENT TESTIMONY OF ARCHEOLOGY TO THE SCRIPTURES - By M. G. Kyle, D. D., L. L. D., Egyptologist. Professor of Biblical Archaeology, Xenia Theological Seminary; Consulting Editor of “The Records of the Past,” Washington, D.C. (The numbers in brackets throughout this article refer to the notes at the end of the article). Chapter 18. SCIENCE AND CHRISTIAN FAITH - By Professor James Orr, D. D. United Free Church College, Glasgow, Scotland. Chapter 19. MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH THE HIGHER CRITICISM - By Professor J. J. Reeve, Southwestern Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas. Chapter 20 THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE - DEFINITION, EXTENT AND PROOF - By Rev. James M. Gray, D.D., Dean of Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, Ill. Chapter 21 INSPIRATION - By Evangelist L. W. Munhall, M. A., D. D., Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Author of “Highest Critics vs. Higher Critics.” Chapter 22 THE MORAL GLORY OF JESUS CHRIST, A PROOF OF INSPIRATION - By Rev. William G. Moorehead, D. D., President of Xenia Theological Seminary. Xenia, Ohio. Chapter 23 THE TESTIMONY OF THE SCRIPTURES TO THEMSELVES - By Rev. George S. Bishop, D. D., East Orange, New Jersey. Chapter 24 TESTIMONY OF THE ORGANIC UNITY OF THE BIBLE TO ITS INSPIRATION - By the late Arthur T. Pierson. Chapter 25 FULFILLED PROPHECY A POTENT ARGUMENT FOR THE BIBLE - By Arno C. Gaebelein, Editor “Our Hope,” New York City. Chapter 26 LIFE IN THE WORD - By Philip Mauro Attorney at Law, New York City. Chapter 27 IS THERE A GOD? - By Rev. Thomas Whitelaw, M.A., D.D., Killmarnock, Scotland. Chapter 28 GOD IN CHRIST THE ONLY REVELATION OF THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD - By Robert E. Speer, Secretary of The Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., New York City. Chapter 29 THE DEITY OF CHRIST - By Professor Benjamin B. Warfield, D. D., LL.D., Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey. Chapter 30 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF CHRIST - By Rev. Professor James Orr, D. D., United Free Church College, Glasgow, Scotland. Chapter 31 THE GOD-MAN - By the Late John Stock. Chapter 32 THE PERSON AND WORK OF JESUS CHRIST - From “Some Recent Phases of German Theology,” By Bishop Nuelsen, D. D., M. E. Church, Omaha, Nebraska. Chapter 33 THE CERTAINTY AND IMPORTANCE OF THE BODILY RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST FROM THE DEAD - By Rev. R. A. Torrey, D. D. Chapter 34 THE PERSONALITY AND DEITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT - By Rev. R. A. Torrey, D.D. Chapter 35 THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE SONS OF GOD - By Rev. W. J. Erdman, D. D., Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Chapter 36 OBSERVATIONS ON THE CONVERSION AND APOSTLESHIP OF ST. PAUL - By Lord Lyttelton, Analyzed and Condensed by Revelation J. L. Campbell, D. D., Cambridge, Mass. Chapter 37 CHRISTIANITY NO FABLE - By Rev. Thomas Whitelaw, M.A., D. D., Kilmarnock, Ayreshire, Scotland. Chapter 38 THE BIBLICAL CONCEPTION OF SIN - By Thomas Whitelaw, M. A., D. D., Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland. Chapter 39 PAUL’S TESTIMONY TO THE DOCTRINE OF SIN - By Professor Charles B. Williams, B. D., Ph. D., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas. Chapter 40 SIN AND JUDGMENT TO COME - By Sir Robert Anderson, K. C. B., L. L. D., London, England. Chapter 41 WHAT CHRIST TEACHES CONCERNING FUTURE RETRIBUTION - By William C. Proctor; F. Ph., Croydon, England. Chapter 42 THE ATONEMENT - By Professor Franklin Johnson, D. D., L. L. D. Author of “Old Testament Quotations in the New Testament,” etc., Chicago, Ill. Chapter 43 AT-ONE-MENT, BY PROPITIATION -By Dyson Hague, M. A., Vicar of The Church of the Epiphany, Toronto, Canada. Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral. London, Ontario (1908-1912). Chapter 44 THE GRACE OF GOD- By C. I. Scofield, D. D., Editor “Scofield Reference Bible.” Chapter 45 SALVATION BY GRACE - By Thomas Spurgeon, London, England. Chapter 46 THE NATURE OF REGENERATION -By Thomas Boston (1676-1732). Chapter 47 REGENERATION, CONVERSION, REFORMATION - By George W. Lasher. D. D., L. L. D., Author of “Theology for Plain People.” Cincinnati, Ohio. Chapter 48 JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH -By H. C. G. Moule, Bishop of Durham, Durham England. Chapter 49 THE DOCTRINES THAT MUST BE EMPHASIZED IN SUCCESSFUL EVANGELISM - By Evangelist L. W. Munhall, M.A., D. D., Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Chapter 50 PREACH THE WORD - By the Late Howard Crosby, Chancellor of the University of the City of New York. Chapter 51 PASTORAL AND PERSONAL EVANGELISM, OR WINNING MEN TO CHRIST ONE BY ONE - By John Timothy Stone, D.D., Chicago, Illinois, Ex-Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U. S. A. Chapter 52 THE SUNDAY SCHOOLÂ’S TRUE EVANGELISM - By Charles Gallaudet Trumbull, Editor “Sunday School Times,” Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Chapter 53 THE PLACE OF PRAYER IN EVANGELISM - By R. A. Torrey, D. D., Dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California. Chapter 54 FOREIGN MISSIONS, OR WORLD-WIDE EVANGELISM - By Robert E. Speer, Secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church U. S. A. Chapter 55 A MESSAGE FROM MISSIONS - By Charles A. Bowen, A.M., Ph. D., Olympia, Washington. Chapter 56 WHAT MISSIONARY MOTIVES SHOULD PREVAIL? - By Henry W. Frost, Director for North America of the China Inland Mission. Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Chapter 57 CONSECRATION - By Henry W. Frost, Director for North America of the China Inland Mission. Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Chapter 58 IS ROMANISM CHRISTIANITY? (Catholic church)- By T. W. Medhurst, Glasgow, Scotland. Chapter 59 ROME, THE ANTAGONIST OF THE NATION - By J. M. Foster, Boston, Massachusetts. Chapter 60 THE TRUE CHURCH- By the late Bishop Ryle. Chapter 61 THE TESTIMONY OF FOREIGN MISSIONS TO THE SUPERINTENDING PROVIDENCE OF GOD - By the late Arthur T. Pierson. Chapter 62 THE PURPOSES OF THE INCARNATION - By G. Campbell Morgan, D. D., Pastor of Westminster Chapel, London, England. Chapter 63 TRIBUTES TO CHRIST AND THE BIBLE BY BRAINY MEN NOT KNOWN AS ACTIVE CHRISTIANS - “Their rock is not as our Rock, even our enemies themselves being judges,” Deuteronomy 32:31. Chapter 64 MODERN PHILOSOPHY - By Philip Mauro, Attorney-at-Law. New York City. Chapter 65 THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD - By David James Burrell, D.D., L.L. D. Minister of the Marble Collegiate Church, New York City. Chapter 66 THE WISDOM OF THIS WORLD - By A. W. Pitzer, D. D., L.L. D., Salem, Virginia. Chapter 67 THE SCIENCE OF CONVERSION - H. M. Sydenstricker, Ph.D., West Point, Mississippi. Chapter 68 THE DECADENCE OF DARWINISM - By Henry H. Beach, Grand Junction, Colorado. Chapter 69 THE PASSING OF EVOLUTION - By Professor George Frederick Wright, D. D., L.L. D., Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. Chapter 70 EVOLUTIONISM IN THE PULPIT- By an Occupant of the Pew. Chapter 71 THE CHURCH AND SOCIALISM- By Professor Charles R. Erdman, D. D., Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey. Chapter 72 MILLENIAL DAWN: A COUNTERFEIT OF CHRISTIANITY (watchtower, Jehovah’s Witnesses)- By Professor William G. Moorehead, D. D., United Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Xenia, Ohio. Chapter 73 MORMONISM: ITS ORIGIN, CHARACTERISTICS AND DOCTRINES - By R. G. McNiece, D. D., for twenty years prior to 1897, Pastor First Presbyterian Church, Salt Lake City, Utah. Chapter 74. EDDYISM, COMMONLY CALLED "CHRISTIAN SCIENCE" - By Maurice E. Wilson, D. D., Dayton, Ohio. Chapter 75 MODERN SPIRITUALISM BRIEFLY TESTED BY SCRIPTURE (channeling)- By Algernon J. Pollock. Weston-Super-Mare, England. Chapter 76 SATAN AND HIS KINGDOM - By Mrs. Jessie Penn-Lewis, Leicester, England. Chapter 77 WHY SAVE THE LORD’S DAY? - By Daniel Hoffman Martin. D. D., Glens Falls, New York. Chapter 78 APOLOGETIC VALUE OF PAUL’S EPISTLES - By E. J.Stobo. Jr., B. A., S. T. D. Chapter 79 DIVINE EFFICACY OF PRAYER- By Arthur T. Pierson, D.D. Chapter 80 THE PROOF OF THE LIVING GOD, AS FOUND IN THE PRAYER LIFE OF GEORGE MULLER, OF BRISTOL - By Arthur T. Pierson.D.D. Chapter 81 OUR LORD’S TEACHINGS ABOUT MONEY - By Arthur T. Pierson, D.D. Chapter 82 THE SCRIPTURES - By A. C. Dixon. D. D. Pastor Metropolitan Tabernacle Church, London, England. Chapter 83 WHAT THE BIBLE CONTAINS FOR THE BELIEVER- By George F. Pentecost, D. D., Darien, Connecticut. Chapter 84 THE HOPE OF THE CHURCH- By John McNicol, B. A., B. D., Principal of the Toronto Bible Training School. Chapter 85 THE COMING OF CHRIST - By Professor Charles R. Erdman. D. D., Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey. Chapter 86 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE - By President E. Y. Mullins. D. D., L.L. D.Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.A. Chapter 87 A PERSONAL TESTIMONY - By Howard A. Kelly, M.D. Chapter 88 A PERSONAL TESTIMONY - By H. W. Webb-Peploe. Vicar of St. Paul’s. Onslow Square. London, and Prebendary of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Chapter 89 THE PERSONAL TESTIMONY OF CHARLES T. STUDD -Charles T. Studd. Chapter 90 A PERSONAL TESTIMONY - By Philip Mauro. Attorney-at- Law, New York City. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 26: - INTRODUCTION FROM BLUELETTER BIBLE ======================================================================== In the early 1900s many Christians found themselves fighting against the liberalism that was creeping into the church. This gave them a desire to set forth the fundamentals of the Christian faith. The task to compile such works defending the Scriptures was given first to A. C. Dixon, then to Louis Meyer, and then ultimately to R. A. Torrey. They compiled the works of many conservative writers and issued them in twelve volumes (later printed in a four-volume set). Included in their work are articles dealing with the fallacies of higher criticism, the inspiration and unity of Scripture, the archaeological attestation of Scripture, the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit, justification by faith, personal testimonies and much more. This work became known as The Fundamentals. The importance of The Fundamentals was that it showed that there are very reasonable defenses to answer claims against Scripture. This is the unabridged edition which features ninety different articles by sixty-six authors. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 27: - PREFACE ======================================================================== In 1909 God moved two Christian laymen to set aside a large sum of money for issuing twelve volumes that would set forth the fundamentals of the Christian faith, and which were to be sent free to ministers of the gospel, missionaries, Sunday School superintendents, and others engaged in aggressive Christian work throughout the English speaking world. A committee of men who were known to be sound in the faith was chosen to have the oversight of the publication of these volumes. Rev. Dr. A.C. Dixon was the first Executive Secretary of the Committee, and upon his departure for England Rev. Dr. Louis Meyer was appointed to take his place. Upon the death of Dr. Meyer the work of the Executive Secretary devolved upon me. We were able to bring out these twelve volumes according to the original plan. Some of the volumes were sent to 300,000 ministers and missionaries and other workers in different parts of the world. On the completion of the twelve volumes as originally planned the work was continued through The King's Business, published at 536 South Hope St., Los Angeles, California. Although a larger number of volumes were issued than there were names on our mailing list, at last the stock became exhausted, but appeals for them kept coming in from different parts of the world. As the fund was no longer available for this purpose, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, to whom the plates were turned over when the Committee closed its work, have decided to bring out the various articles that appeared in The Fundamentals in four volumes at the cheapest price possible. All the articles that appeared in The Fundamentals, with the exception of a very few that did not seem to be in exact keeping with the original purpose of The Fundamentals, will be published in this series. R. A. TORREY ======================================================================== CHAPTER 28: - DEDICATION ======================================================================== DEDICATION To the two laymen whose generosity made it possible to send several millions of volumes of The Fundamentals to ministers and missionaries in all parts of the world, for their confirmation and up building in the faith, these volumes are dedicated. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 29: - THE WISDOM OF THIS WORLD ======================================================================== The Wisdom of this World By Rev. A. W. Pitzer, D. D., LL. D., Salem, Virginia "There is a growing impression among eminent private thinkers that Christianity is losing its hold upon men, and that the Church is a waning power; that the religious world is drifting from its moorings, and faith is becoming a tradition of the past." The above quotation is from an editorial in the most popular newspaper published at the Capital of the United States. If the faith of the Church is to stand in the wisdom of men, then it will be the sport of every wind of doctrine, and be driven hither and thither, according to the course of the popular tide; and if the Church has no better anchor than the wisdom of this world, then, indeed, will it drift from all its moorings, and be tossed Continually upon the seas of ceaseless speculation. But if faith is to stand, not in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God, in the sure Word of Truth that liveth and abideth forever, then, like its Divine Author, it is and will be the same yesterday, today, and forever. If faith be founded upon the Word of Eternal Truth, then the Church has an anchor sure and stedfast, entering into that within the veil. One prophecy of Daniel is fulfilled: "Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased". The world has never witnessed a period of such incessant and intense mental activity. Nature, in all her vast domains, in her atoms and her masses, has been searched with keenest scrutiny, and compelled to give up her wondrous secrets. The microscope reveals worlds of order and beauty unseen by the unassisted eye; while the telescope sweeps the silent skies, and stars by the thousands and tens of thousands are discovered, and numbered, and catalogued. The electric spark sends thought, in printed words, with lightning speed around the globe. The microphone magnifies sound until the spider's, walk across a window echoes as the tread of an armed man. The phonograph receives upon its shining metallic disc the words and tones of the living speaker, and is able to reproduce them after a thousand years. All tongues, and tribes, and nations are brought into daily and direct intercourse and fellowship. Time and space are no longer barriers between men, races, and empires. Even the Dark Continent, unexplored equatorial Africa, has been penetrated by the heroic and dauntless Stanley, from Zanzibar to Bomma; and the cannibal tribes of the Upper Livingstone are no longer unknown to the civilized world. And still men run to and fro, restless and dissatisfied, crying for more light and more knowledge. No Real Conflict between Christianity and Science The Christian does not look with dismay upon these researches into Nature, these discoveries of Science; on the contrary, he hails with joy each new discovery as affording additional evidence of the wisdom, power, and goodness of God. Full well does he know that the facts written on the rock-leaves beneath, the star depths above, and the pages of Inspiration, when properly understood and interpreted, will be found to be in exact and perfect accord, showing forth the glory of the Infinite Writer of them all. There is no controversy between the man of faith and the man of wisdom, provided each one acts in his proper sphere. There is not, and never has been, any real conflict between Religion and Science. There may be conflicts between interpretations of Scripture and interpretations of the facts of Nature; but what God has written in His Word never conflicts with what God has written in His creation. The scientific skepticism of this day ought to remember how much Science owes to Christian men—to men who believed in a personal God; who believed in His written Word, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Redeemer. What shall be said of the "pious Christian, Copernicus, consecrating his life to God, to Man, to Science; who pioneered his way into the unknown universe, as the great Columbus of the heavens? What of Christian Galileo, who, while teaching the facts of Science, also believed the truths of Scripture?" What of the leaders in all departments of human progress, immortal names familiar as household words—what of Bacon, and Kepler, and Newton, and Herschel, and Hugh Miller? Or, later still, what of Chalmers, McCosh, Morse, Dawson, Southall, Cabell, LeConte, Henry, and hosts of others who lead the vanguard of the army of investigation and discovery in all the vast domain of human knowledge? The man of faith may point to these intellectual giants, and claim them as the humble disciples of the lowly Nazarene—as firm believers in the written Word of God. They led the onward march of human thought, but bowed in devout adoration before a personal God. How dense a darkness would envelop the race were all the light kindled by Christian men banished from the horizon of human knowledge. The Sphere of Science But let it be remembered that the Wisdom of this World is for this world only—not for the world to come. Its proper sphere is the seen and tangible; the Here and the Now, not the Unseen, the Hereafter, the Eternal. The wisdom of man has passed out of its proper sphere when it invades the domain of the Invisible and the Infinite; when it denies that the omnipresent personal Spirit can reveal to man that which the eye never saw, the ear never heard, and the heart never conceived. It has passed the boundary of the known, its only proper sphere, when it assumes to deny that the infinite God has revealed or can reveal Himself in His Word, His Son, His Spirit. The things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. We have the right to demand of the Wisdom of this World by what authority it asserts that there is nothing above and apart from Nature, nothing in all the boundless universe except matter and force. Why shall we give up all that man holds dear at the bidding of the Wisdom of this World whose highest, and best, and latest revelation is "a grave without a resurrection, and a universe without a God"! The Failure of Earthly Wisdom to Find and Know God The man of faith does not affirm the uselessness of earthly wisdom, but he does affirm that it has utterly failed to find out and know the true and living God. However useful and valuable the Wisdom of this World may be in its appropriate sphere, it has never yet given to men that knowledge of God upon which his soul could rest in satisfaction and peace. The World by Wisdom has never known God. At no time, in no country, among no people, has man, by wisdom, ever been able to make God known to his fellow men. Without the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, the true and living God had ever been the "Unknown God". Ancient Wisdom and the Knowledge of God The wise men of this generation are not backward in boasting of the world's present progress and wisdom, and yet the history and ruins of the old world, before the coming of our Lord, reveal evidences of a civilization that will bear all the light and tests of our day. Egypt, situated on the banks of that strange river whose source has been discovered far off in the ever-flowing waters of the Victoria Lake of equatorial Africa, speaks out to this self-satisfied generation in her mummified kings, her silent Sphinx, her matchless pyramids. Egypt, that could lift monster stones four hundred feet in the air, and adjust them to a mathematical line and not vary half a hair's breadth; "that could paint on glass, grind gold to dust, embalm the body so as to make flesh immortal ;" that built gigantic houses of stone that have outlived all nations and civilizations—this nation was wise in all the Wisdom of this World. And yet this grand old civilization lived and died in gross and utter ignorance of the one true and living God. The religion of the wisest men of On and Memphis "was Negritian fetishism, the lowest kind of Nature worship". The people bowed down and worshipped the Nile, the ox, the trees, the hills, and "birds, four-looted beasts, and creeping things". Egypt had wise priests, her magnificent temples, her gorgeous worship; but alas! all was of the earth, earthy. She knew not God; and her wise men, Jannes and Jambres, withstood Moses when he came to them with a message from the Living One, in whom they lived and moved, and had their being. No wonder that the people were "liars and thieves, sensual and treacherous;" with all their wisdom they knew not God. Subsequent to Egypt there arose four great world powers, following each other in succession, claiming and exercising universal dominion, and gathering unto themselves the civilization and glory of the known world—Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. Four kingdoms seen in dream by the great Nebuchadnezzar the image with the head of gold, breast of silver, belly of brass, legs of iron, feet partly of iron and part of clay, and interpreted by Daniel as the four kingdoms above named. But alas! not one or all of these nations ever attained unto that knowledge of God which is life eternal. The bricks of Babylon, the purple of Tyre, the army of Xerxes, the conquests of Alexander, the legions of Rome, the poetry of Homer, the philosophy of Socrates, the statues of Phidias, the orations of Cicero, the satires of Juvenal, the annals of Tacitus—these are the drifts from the waves of that ancient civilization, wise in all the Wisdom of this World; these are the drifts still floating on the current of human history as it moves on its majestic course to that eternity where time is not measured by days and nights, and weeks and years; and to that infinity where space is not measured by islands, continents and seas. There were walls seventy feet high, on which war-chariots might be driven four abreast; there were hanging gardens filled with flowers and birds; there were temples of polished marble, overlaid with ivory and gold; there were statues so lifelike as almost to speak; there were highways, firm and hard, stretching from imperial Rome to all the ends of the known world; there were arches and aqueducts, fountains and baths, painting and poetry. But, alas! upon that civilization might have been written the inscription upon the altar at Mars Hill, "To the Unknown God". It was all of this world, and of this world only; it was outward, material, transient; it was earthly, sensual, devilish. Dr. Garbett, in his "Dogmatic Faith", says: "With the sole exception of the knowledge of the true God, this old world carried human advancement to its highest pitch. For luster of genius, brilliancy of wit, fertility of imagination, depth of thought, artistic taste and skill, aesthetic sensibilities, and keen relish for pleasure, the latest period of heathen civilization has never yet been excelled, perhaps never equaled". And yet, in the midst of all this, vice and immorality were well-nigh universal; chastity was almost unknown; thousands of virgins were annually devoted to prostitution in the temples of the gods; the life of a man was esteemed of less value than the life of a dog; slavery was universal, and slaves were put to death for the most trivial causes; men fought with each other and with wild beasts in amphitheatres, where dainty Roman matrons gazed with eager delight upon the agonies of dying men, and turned their thumbs down over the polished marble in token of their desire for more blood. This old world with all its wisdom knew not God. In its splendid Pantheons there were lords many and gods many—gods of painting and statuary, of poetry and eloquence, of war and revenge, of drunkenness and lust, but no true, holy and living God. And when the polished Paul preached unto the wise men of Athens Jesus and the resurrection; they told him that he was a babbler, and a setter forth of strange gods. The men of this civilization worshipped, and served the creature more than the Creator; and for this cause God gave them up to vile and unnatural lusts and passions; they were filled with unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, murder, deceit, malignity—without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful. The Unutterable vileness of this godless wisdom is apparent in the fact that even now there are rooms in some of its buried and exhumed cities, into which no female is ever allowed to enter. "And so this ancient society perished of its own inherent rottenness. Its enormous, all pervading, universal vice sapped the foundation of virtue. The mass was corrupt to its very core. Its strength perished by the mere exhaustion of its vices." Godlessness and vice, irreligion and immorality, went hand in hand, as they always do, until the people, having lost all knowledge of God, lost also all shame and virtue; and this splendid civilization of this old world perished of its own hopeless and helpless corruption. The less the people knew of God, the viler and more debased did they become. Modern Wisdom's Failure to Find God The world of our day claims to have grown greatly wiser in the last nineteen centuries, but still it knows not God; nor will it, apart from His Word and His Son, ever know Him. Ring out the old battle-cry, the foolishness of God is wiser than men; this conflict will never cease; perish the craven, Who having undertaken to fight for Jehovah and His Christ, is appalled at the war drums of the enemy. Let the godless astronomer sweep the skies with his glass, and count and classify 270,000 stars, and then come and tall us that he neither saw nor heard of any personal God in all the infinitude of space; let the scientific smatterer gravely inform intelligent men that faith in God must now give place to knowledge of nature and her laws; let the atheistic materialist tell us that he has searched the boundless universe, and found no intelligent Spirit, but only matter and force; let the brazen blasphemer proclaim that Moses is a liar, Jesus an impostor, and man's immortality a delusion; to one and all we say—these things are almost as old as the human race; this godless creed was held by men wiser than you, long before you were born; it was held by the wise men of the ancient world in the days of its highest civilization; it is held now by the cannibal tribes of Ureega, Manyema, and Bengala, in the dark places of the earth, filled with the habitations of cruelty; you are simply asking us to go back to the times when the world by wisdom knew not God; and the race has had enough and more than enough of this godless wisdom; if Christ the Crucified cannot save us, then indeed are we doomed and damned forever. The Demand of Modern "Wise Men" The wise men of this world, filled with philosophy falsely so-called, ask, first, that we give up the miracles of the Old Testament; then the imprecatory Psalms; then the "immoral parts" of the Scriptures; then, the "vindictive and bloody laws of Moses;" then Moses himself; then, all the prophets; then, the miracles of the New Testament; then, the Apocalypse; then, the doctrine of eternal retribution; then, the Holy Ghost; then, Inspiration; then, Jesus Christ; then God Himself—this is the modest demand of the unbelieving wisdom of our day and generation; this substituting "knowledge of nature for faith in God"—this is "progress"; this is "advanced thought"—and so the race is left, its "grave without a resurrection", its "universe without a God," its sin without a Saviour. Thoughtful men understand well that the objective point of all these infidel attacks is the Cross and the Crucified. Shall we give up the blood and its cleansing and peace-giving power at the behest of boasting unbelief? Shall we cease to preach Christ and Him crucified because now, as of old, He is a stumbling-block to the Jew, a foolishness to the Greek? Shall we no longer preach Jesus and the resurrection because the wise men of modern Athens scornfully ask, "What do these babblers say?" The answer comes to us echoed down the ages; it comes from patriarchs and prophets, from apostles and martyrs; from saints of all ages and all lands who have endured all the evils and all the miseries that the malignity of men and devils could inflict. Go ask them if the Gospel is true, if it is the power of God unto salvation, if the Crucified is strong to save; and from Roman amphitheatres and catacombs, from the dens and caves of the earth, from jails and gibbets, from faggots and flames and furnaces; from India and Greenland, from China and Japan, from Ceylon and Madagascar, from the islands of the ocean, from the blood-washed millions who have gone up to glory and to God, there shall come this answer: "We know whom we have believed. Christ crucified is the wisdom of God and the power of God unto salvation". ======================================================================== CHAPTER 30: - THE SCIENCE OF CONVERSION ======================================================================== The Science of Conversion By Rev. H. M. Sydenstricker, Ph.D., West Point, Mississippi 1. The Case Stated The penetration of scientific investigation into the erstwhile unknown regions of things is one of the wonders of the age. All departments of creation are yielding up their secrets to the searching eye of science. The causes of things are being sought after, not only in the natural world, but in all realms as well, so that things may be brought more certainly and directly under the human will. The unseen operations by which powerful results are produced are forced to yield and tell their secrets. New powers are discovered in all realms of investigation and subdued as never before to the service of man. Practically everything is reduced to science, and men are learning the how and the wherefore of things physical, mental and spiritual. The better these things are understood, the more completely are we the masters of the world for whose subjection man was commissioned. Now our inquiry is whether the conversion of the human soul—the divinely wrought new birth—lies within the range of scientific investigation. Can the operations of the Divine forces and the divinely appointed means for the conversion of a soul be made to yield to scientific research, so that we can produce results with the same degree of certainty as does the chemist in his laboratory? Do the laws of cause and effect operate in the spiritual realm as in the natural world, and can we apply spiritual means and causes with the same degree of certainty as in physical things? Can we get out of the realm of the uncertain and the vague in working with human souls and operate with absolute assurance of adequate and satisfactory results? In this greatest of all works, and which is practically committed to man, has God left us to absolute uncertainties as to results? Is it not true that if the divinely ordained means be properly used the results can be obtained with the same scientific certainty as in other things, and results also which are in no sense spurious but the actual effect of efficient and properly applied causes? Are not the promises of God absolute, and do not many incidents in the work and history of the Church demonstrate that the conversion of souls was the direct result of God-appointed and man-applied means thereto, operated by purely scientific methods, although the workers had no thought of science in their work? Are we not bound to obey God's laws in all scientific operations in the physical world, and must we not scientifically obey His laws in the higher realm of His domain? 2. The Case Diagnosed A careful diagnosis of the case under consideration may help us towards a scientific answer to our investigation. To know the patient, and especially to know precisely the nature of the disease, is of prime importance in the successful treatment of it. Otherwise, all treatment is mere guess-work. Our subject in this inquiry is a degenerate human soul. Degenerate meaning an inherent unrighteousness and an innate corruption that has affected every fiber and faculty of the human soul. This total depravity does not mean that man is actually and practically as mean as he is capable of being, but it means that the total man is depraved in all of his parts, and that he is born in that condition. This native degeneracy is of a twofold nature: First, it is a legal condemnation descending to every human soul from a justly condemned ancestry who represented and stood for the whole race in the government of God under the covenant of works first made with man. Second, it is a complete moral corruption of the whole soul so that all the faculties of the soul are affected in such a way as to make them incapable of right action, so that every imagination of the heart is only evil continually. This morally degenerate man, in the adult stage, is also guilty of manifold actual sins, confirming his condemnation and making his moral nature all the more depraved. In addition to this already depraved condition, this degenerate man has no desire for a better life; his perverted natural taste refuses it, and he is even unwilling to consider anything better. He actually loves his depraved condition and revels in the things that develop still more the baser principles in him. Moreover, his intellect is so blunted that he is incapable of apprehending spiritual truths and his eyes are so stigmatized that he cannot see the light. Such then is the character of the unconverted man, the subject now under consideration. And it is very evident, that while we may be able with the aid of Divine revelation and human observation and experience to diagnose the case correctly, the remedy is found in a higher realm, though it may be applied in part through human agencies. 3. The Divine Proposition In view of this apparently hopeless case, what is the Divine proposition regarding it? What does the Divine plan contemplate? It is quite evident that the ultimate goal of the Divine proposition is to get rid of sin. But to get rid of the sin we must get rid of the sinner, otherwise sin remains. In getting rid of the sinner two things are possible, either by judgment to destroy the sinner and with him also the sin, or by Divine grace to convert the sinner and thus remove the sin. Both methods are used in the Divine government, but conversion is what now concerns us. The Divine proposition is not to destroy the sinner, but to save him by making out of him a totally new man—to transform him from a child of sin into a real child of God. Not merely a son of God, but an actually born child, so that by birth he becomes an heir of God and a joint-heir with Christ to a heavenly inheritance. That the Divine power is sufficient for such an achievement is not to be questioned for a moment. But does the work fall within the range of scientific investigation and are the methods to be used strictly scientific? Is the Divine method in applying complete salvation to this awfully degenerate soul really scientific? Is it supposable that God is less scientific in this the very greatest of all His works than He is in the lesser things in His government? Does He work by one set of laws in the natural world, and by different laws, or no laws at all, in the higher spiritual realm? But if God is scientific—if the conversion of the human soul is accomplished by scientific methods—it follows that the work is best done when done by God's methods, if indeed it can be done at all in any other way. And if God's method is scientific, has He adequately revealed to us His method so that it can be certainly and successfully used by us as His workers? And if this revelation is made to us we dare not depart from God's method, whatever other methods may be suggested. For, if we depart from the methods God has given and by which God Himself works, our work will be a failure entirely or the results will be inadequate and spurious. 4. The Means Discovered God's proposition being stated and His methods being scientific, we must next discover the means by which the work is to be accomplished. Let it be remembered that in all things pertaining to man in both temporal and spiritual matters God works by means, and usually through human agencies. But in the work of converting the human soul it is evident that the means are twofold. First, those means applied direct on the part of God to the soul from within; and second, those means applied from without through the senses by human agencies and instrumentalities. It is a fact, however, that even the means used directly on the part of God are at least in part applied through human agencies; so that the conversion of adult souls, so far as we are able to see, is ordinarily through human instrumentalities. Hence, the means by which the human soul is converted, or born into the family of God, are: (1) The Divine Spirit, which is the alone Divine Agent, and without which no soul, of infant or adult, can ever pass from spiritual death to spiritual life. This Divine Spirit operates how and where He pleases and with or without means and agencies. (2) The Word of God, which is the sword of the Spirit, reaching and quickening men's souls through the reasoning and emotional faculties. The Word is effectual only as accompanied by the quickening power of the Spirit, while at the same time it may be variously applied externally. (3) The benign influence of Christians, demonstrating the reality and power and blessedness of the new life in the soul of the converted man. (4) Real prayer, by which the regenerate soul brings the unregenerate to the very feet of the Divine Saviour and insistently implores the Divine grace. (5) An absolute faith on the part of the human agent. This faith is an absolute confidence in the ability of God and in His purpose to accomplish the work through the means then being used, whenever the conditions thereto are complied with. There can be no true faith when the available means are not used and the known conditions not complied with. 5. The Means Applied Here is where the science of conversion is especially manifest. Everything in nature must be clone in God's way, and God's way is always scientific, and all things are best done when we adhere most closely to God's methods. The conversion of the human soul is no exception to this rule. We can convert men most successfully when we adhere strictly to the Divine science of the work. Our failures are no doubt largely due to our not complying with God's ways of doing the work. We adhere strictly to God's laws in growing our crops. The seed is first placed where the dormant life powers are aroused and the seed caused to germinate. Afterwards follow the blade, the stalk and the mature fruit. No human power or wisdom can change this law of germination and growth. So the human soul being spiritually dead is incapable of doing anything towards an awakening to a new life; and being also unable even to will to do such a thing, it is quite evident that the very first thing essential is the direct application of the life-giving power of the Divine Spirit to the dormant soul. This life-giving touch prepares the soul for the effectual application of all the other appointed means by which the soul is brought into the realities and fullness of the new life. But ordinarily, if not always, the application of the life-giving Spirit through human agencies is in answer to prayer somehow and somewhere. May it not be true that every soul born into the kingdom of God is in answer to the supplication of some earnest Christian whose heart is as large as humanity and whose prayer touches every lost soul of man. Hence prayer is scientifically the first means and the prime force to be applied by the true Christian in producing the conversion of a human soul. It is perfectly certain that nothing can be effectively done until the Spirit is applied, and the Spirit is ordinarily given in answer to prayer that is, the quickening Spirit that arouses the soul and prepares it for the effectual application of other divinely appointed means. We question whether the Spirit is ever given without prayer where prayer is available, as in all other things human agencies are required when available. Second to the Spirit's work, and along with it, is the application of the Word by which the soul of the hearer is reached through the intellect, the reasoning faculties being aroused, and through them the appeal of the Gospel is forced into the newly awakened conscience. Here all the powers of eloquence and reason and persuasion come into full play and are made effectual in turning the eyes of the awakened soul to the cross. Next, the awakened soul now becomes co-operative with the Divine Spirit, and with the Word and with other external means, and the result is belief in the Word on the part of the aroused soul, and through the receiving of the Word there follows an actual, personal, living faith in the Christ set forth in the Gospel, followed by outward confession, obedience and Christian service. Hence the scientific order of the application of the means for the conversion of a soul is: The prayer of the Church and the Christian worker for the application of the quickening Spirit on the part of God. The preaching of the Word and the use of other external means. The responsive and cooperative and receptive act of the sinner, now made willing by the Spirit of God. And the wholly personal act of faith in Christ on the part of the sinner by which he actually receives by his own volition the Saviour as set before him, confesses Him and becomes obedient to Him as his Lord and Master. 6. The Conditions Imposed In all scientific operations there are conditions that must be complied with, otherwise the results are either spurious or disastrous. This accounts for the vast number of spurious conversions and lapses in the churches. Unscrupulous and ignorant men seeking after a display of numbers use all sorts of devices in all sorts of ways to produce apparent conversions. Just as well might the chemist go into his laboratory and throw together any and all sorts of chemicals and expect correct and scientific results. Correct results might accidentally follow, but the almost inevitable results would be poisons and explosions. Is not the same true in the unscriptural and unscientific methods used by many who pose as expert conversionists in so many of the pseudo revivals now so much in vogue? The conditions imposed for the true conversion of souls are both philosophic and scientific, and at the same time supremely gracious and benevolent, ever looking to the highest good of all concerned, both to the soul that is being saved and the worker through whom the results are accomplished. These conditions are imposed by God Himself. Hence He becomes responsible for the results when the conditions are really fulfilled on our part. The results may not always be as we may calculate or desire, but they will always correspond to the means as used. These conditions are twofold. On the part of the Christian worker in applying God's means for the salvation of men in God's ways. The danger here is in applying all sorts of human means in any way whatever so as to obtain apparent results. Often we blame God directly or indirectly for the poverty and character of the results, when as a matter of fact we have never complied with God's conditions, which are always natural, reasonable and scientific. Second, on the part of the sinner these conditions apply, because although he is spiritually dead, he is intellectually alive and morally a free agent, and hence responsible for his conduct, including his unbelief and his rejection of Christ as his Saviour. He is responsible for the opportunities placed before him, and consequently he is responsible for the conditions God has imposed for the salvation of his soul. No man, in any Gospel land at least, can truthfully and conscientiously claim that he has fully met God's conditions for his salvation and that God has rejected him, or that the results have not been adequate and scientific. On the other hand, no Christian worker has a right to the God-promised results until he has met the God-imposed conditions. A partial use of means, used in an indifferent way for only a limited time, is not scientific and is not meeting God's conditions. This is true not only in the work of actual soul-saving, but in the Christian life as well. 7. The Results Obtained The results obtained in the conversion of a human soul are equally scientific with the means used thereto. The primary result is a new man. Not an old man made over, but a new man, possessed of a new life and endowed with new and enlarged possibilities. A man with a new vision both of this life and of the eternal future. A man inspired with a new hope, the flukes of which are struck into the very throne of God and which is a positive and inalienable title to an inheritance in heaven. A man with a positive personal faith in Christ. A faith that makes Christ-his personal possession with all that Christ is and all that He has and all that He has done. A man whose whole life is reversed from the service of sin and self to the kind and willing service of Christ as his new Master. That such a man is the scientific result of the means that have been applied goes without argument. It is only in harmony with the great laws of God that govern His kingdom from the combination of the most minute chemical atoms to the swing of the spheres in His boundless universe. First of all, life produces life of its own kind. Hence the life-giving touch of the Divine Spirit imparts life of its own kind to the dormant soul and it becomes the living son of God. This result is as manifestly scientific as can be found in all nature. The immortal soul already exists endowed with all the possibilities of a finite being, but the eternal life is the scientific result of the life-giving touch of the Spirit of God. It is in fact impossible that the result be otherwise. Another result is the effect produced upon the will of the convert. His will is renewed and is now in harmony with the Divine will, and this is produced by the action of the Divine will upon the will of the sinner. Here again the Divine begets its likeness in the changed will of the converted soul. A natural and scientific result. Again, through the enlightening and persuading power of the Gospel the sinner is led to see the error of his way and the condition of his soul, and repentance of sins and faith in Christ are the result. The man is outwardly converted and his whole life and service reversed. These are again the scientific results of the means used according to the Divine order of things. That these results do not always follow the preaching of the Word may be largely due to the fact that the means have been used amiss for the mere gratification of the lust of the worker, or that other necessary means have been neglected, especially prayer. And the reason why so many conversions are not genuine is due to the fact that they are merely external conversions, the result of exciting rant called preaching the Gospel, while prayer for the internal work of the Spirit has been totally ignored. In the whole process of conversion it is a fundamental principle that like begets like, and means produce results according to purely scientific laws, and if the results are not scientific they are spurious, external and temporary. A beautiful and pointed illustration is found in the conversion of the congregation at the house of Cornelius. The means were used—though unwittingly on the part of men—in the scientific order. Prayer, the Holy Spirit, the preached Word; and the results were conversion, confession and Christian service. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 31: - THE DECADENCE OF DARWINISM ======================================================================== The Decadence of Darwinism By Rev. Henry H. Beach, Grand Junction, Colorado (Copyright, 1912, by Henry H. Beach.) This paper is not a discussion of variations lying within the boundaries of heredity; nor do we remember that the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures reveal anything on that subject; nor do we think that it can be rationally discussed until species and genus are defined. Failure to condition spontaneous generation by sterilized hay tea, arid a chronic inability to discover the missing link, have shaken the popularity of Darwinism. Will it recover? Or is it failing into a fixed condition of innocuous desuetude? As a purely academic question, who cares whether a protoplastic cell, or an amoeba, or an ascidian larva, was his primordial progenitor? It does not grip us. It is doubtful whether any purely academic question ever grips anybody. But the issue between Darwinism and mankind is not a purely academic question. Half his life Charles Darwin was afraid of the reproaches of Christians. It was something like the fear felt by another Charles, of the reproaches of the Huguenots were he to consent to the assassination of Coligny. He refers to it in the "Introduction to the Descent of Man": "During many years I collected notes on the origin and descent of man, without any intention of publishing on the subject, but rather with the determination not to publish; as I thought that I should thus add to the prejudices against my views." At the end of the book he says: "I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denominated by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to show why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lowly form, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction." He confessed his fear by protesting his innocence: "I have done nothing only explained a choice between two theories of bringing man into the world". This way of putting it is characteristic. He often refers to traversing the doctrine of successive creations, as the sum of his offending. The prestidigitator calls special attention to one hand while he works the trick with the other. His apprehensions were not altogether groundless. Professor Haeckel was braver, or more rash, when he styled the "Descent of Man" as "anti-Genesis"; with equal truth and moderation he might have added, anti-John, anti-Hebrews and anti-Christ. The point to pierce the business and bosoms of men is a denial of the integrity and reliability of the Word of God. We cannot depend on the Bible to show us "how to go to heaven" if it misleads us as to "how the heavens go" regarding the origin, nature, descent and destiny of brutes and men. Darwinists have been digging at the foundations of society and souls; and their powers of endurance are a matter of some moment. We venture to differentiate life and if we go too far are sure to be corrected: 1. Vegetable life is the sum of the forces which pervade the organism, causes it to grow and preserves it from decay. 2. Brute life is the sum of the forces which pervade the organism, causes it to grow, preserves it from decay, is conscious and thinks. 3. Human life is the sum of the forces which pervade the organism, causes it to grow, preserves it from decay, is conscious, thinks and is religious. It is logical to assume, until disproved, that these three kinds of life touch each other, but never merge. They associate as intimately as air and light, but are as far from passing from plants to brutes and from brutes to men as from not-being to being. "By faith we understand the ages to be set in order by the saying of God, in regard to the things seen not having come out of the things manifest" Hebrews 11:3. He who would overthrow Biblical Christianity expects to take the initiative. He recognizes that there is always a presumption in favor of an existing institution; and has always been swift to open the battle. Professor Huxley, in his article on evolution, in the ninth edition of the Britannica, has ably brought together the arguments for Darwinism; and we will follow his order. Growth Given a nucleated cell, and Darwinists have watched the process of generation from its beginning to birth, "with the best optical instruments". There have been two theories. The first theory is that nothing new is produced in the living world; the germs from which all organisms have developed have contained in miniature, and passed on down through successive generations, all the essential organs of adults. To get anything out of anything it must first be in it. This is archaic. The second theory is that evolution is progressive; it results from something innate in things, dynamic and pantheistic. This is up to date. All that the Darwinists, "with the best optical instruments", have actually seen is growth; but they have inferred a whole pantheon. Natural selection is the supreme demiurge; sexual selection and variation are subordinates. A billion years ago there was a God, but He immediately disappeared. It was necessary to have Him then, to bridge the gulf between nothing and something. Having discovered growth, they called it evolution, thinking perhaps the name might prove useful, but we trust not to be blamed for preferring growth, for "evolution" is something of a harlequin, having turned a complete somersault within a hundred years, while growth is universally acknowledged to be a character of vegetable, animal, and human life. In addition to finding natural growth, Professor Huxley claims the discovery of a "tendency to assume a definite living form". This of course is ridiculous. The sun rises with sufficient regularity to become a striking phenomenon, and we have discovered a tendency towards sunrises. Speculation is invoked, but speculation died with the great god Pan when Jesus was born. Scientific observations are dumb, except to say that all God's creatures are fearfully and wonderfully made. Likenesses It is settled that low adult forms and embryos of higher order are strikingly alike. An embryonic reptile passes through the transformations of a fish, and a man in the germ cannot be distinguished from any other mammal. Here the Darwinist drops his glass and jumps at the conclusion that all creations, even vegetables, are consanguined brothers. His microscope has failed him and he has forgotten the ardent astronomer who saw strange quadrupeds in the moon, until he discovered the mouse nest in the telescope. The apparently similar cells are different. The outcome proves it. One is a butterfly and the other is a whale. Indeed, Oscar Hertwig now claims to have found the differences of the denouement in the cells themselves. But it does not matter. The Darwinist has mistaken likeness for proof of parentage; as a matter of fact it never proves it. Parentage is more likely to prove likeness. In either case the origin must first be established and then the likeness may illustrate it. But recurring to the differentiation of life, as our Maker has conferred on us consciousness, thought and religiosity, and on brutes consciousness and thought, and on all of us that which preserves our bodies from decay and causes them to grow, it seems natural that, in the holy of holies of His laboratory, He has constructed us with similar characters, transient or permanent. #But the very nomenclature of evolution has been seduced and corrupted. "Reversion" and "rudiment" must be laid away with phlogiston and caloric. There is no retreating or abortions in the Divine economy, but God adjusts every feature to present and future conditions, and causes all to march regularly forward in the grand procession of eternal progress. But why, it may be asked, are so many creatures built on the same plan as, for instance, vertebrates? The answer is axiomatic. The whole creation is divided into vertebrata and invertebrate, because there must, in the nature of things, be at least two classes; or boundless monotony or an eternal loneliness. But why so many vertebrates? Because there can be but one best of a class and vertebrates are best. The number redounds to the glory of God, not the glory of evolution. This is kindergarten instruction, but some seem to miss it. But we submit a broader generalization. The whole universe bears a family resemblance. It is the warm touch of the Maker, and His universal style. Light is truth, and darkness is error. Holiness is purity, and sin is dirt. Physical birth and growth, decay and death, typify spiritual birth and growth, decay and death. Two pictures hang side by side. The subjects differ greatly and they differ in size. The larger is the "Domes of the Yosemite" and the smaller "Sunset in California". But they seem strangely alike. The smaller must have evolved from the larger. Some Mahatma, an adept of the Himalayas, able to do "the plant trick", has done it. No! The same artist painted both. Nature's limitless network of types and symbols and resemblances is wondrously beautiful. It wakens the spirit of poetry in the soul, but an absent-minded dreamer has gazed and forgotten himself, and is lost in a labyrinth of vagaries. Darwinists have been turning the world over searching for a common fatherhood, but they have found a common maker-hood. An Italian-a Dr. Barrago-gave his book the title, "Man, made in the image of God, was also made in the image of an ape", and Mr. Darwin refers to it without disapproval, and the blasphemy is logical. Darwinism degrades God and man. Rudiments The Darwinian notion of rudiments is that they are abortive reversions to ancestral types. Wherever one of the cult has heard of anything nearly or remotely like rudiments-for instance, Stanley Hall on rhythm, beating waves, ancestral fish and dancing-particularly outside the bounds of heredity, it has been grist for their mill. And yet they hardly know where to put these structures. If they claim that they are absolutely useless they place them outside the scope of natural selection; and if, on the other hand, they admit that they serve some purpose they admit that God may have made them. Huxley felt the difficulty when he confessed: "It is almost impossible to prove that any structure, however rudimentary, is useless; that is to say, that it plays no part whatever in the economy; and if it is in the slightest degree useful there is no reason why, on the hypothesis of direct creation, it should not have been created." (Britannica, Art. on Evolution). May we add that if Mr. Huxley and Mr. Darwin and I and you have failed to discover the use of anything, "there is no reason why it should not have been created"? We remember that we have not even defined life; that the most that we can do is to distinguish some of its forces; that we know as little of its essence as of that of matter. We may as well be modest. Accepting then the dictum of Professor Huxley-than whom no one has ever been better qualified that it is almost impossible to prove the uselessness of rudiments, we pass the Subject with the remark that, like likenesses, they are a signet of the Almighty and a badge of His creatures-not necessarily of kinship, but of remoter relations. There are some men who need the evidence of their own rudimentary mammae to prove to them that they belong to the same race with their wives and should endure the same hardships and do a little more work. Selections Sexual selection, as the name implies, is concerned with pairing and reproduction; but the Darwinian end in view, like that of natural selection, is evolution. But sexual selection fails to discriminate, and turns out degeneration. Ferai and unregenerate sexual selection is more lust than love. From hares to elephants wild things are blinded by jealousy and crazed by heat. Like the Jukes' family, they drop their young by the highway. We domesticate brutes and plants and, with great care and skill, breed them for improved points; but we soon tire and then dogs become pariahs, cats turn vagabonds, potatoes grow small, and horses are not worth catching and breaking. Cultivated apples never repeat their parent trees, but nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand sink far below them. The "loves of the plants", as Darwin's whimsical grandfather called them, are disreputable, and even, to this civilized day, human beings need to be restrained by law to prevent them from contracting unhealthful alliances. When the string breaks the kite falls. Ages before the time when Mr. Darwin dreamed that in the dim obscurity of the past we can see that the early progenitor of all the vertebrata must have been an aquatic animal, provided with branchiae, with the two sexes united in the same individual, with the most important organs of the body (such as brain and heart) imperfectly or not at all developed, and an animal "more like the larvae of the existing marine Ascidians than any other known form", God made one protoplastic cell and disappeared. That cell was a vegetable, and, as all cells are microscopic, invisible. It was also hermaphroditic. It contained hairs and rootlets, nuclei and nucleoli, mother stars and daughter stars, grouping, advancing and retreating, as if dancing quadrilles. And, as the story goes, this one cell has been the father and mother of all living creatures. Natural selection, aided only by sexual selection and accident, has evolved them, by almost imperceptible degrees. Evidently Darwin and Wallace followed what they thought the line of least resistance in introducing God before the first living germ, for, otherwise, there must have been degeneration to satisfy present conditions. But was it not an error in another regard? While they were in the business of making gods, it would have been easy to have allowed for three-one for plants, one for brutes, and one for men. Nobody was looking. They might have done it, but, as it is, there is a dead lift at each beginning. "We may feel sure," explains Mr. Darwin, "that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favorable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called natural selection or the survival of the fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left either a fluctuating element, as perhaps we see in certain polymorphic species, or would ultimately become fixed, owing to the nature of the organism and the nature of the conditions". ("Origin of Species," Vol. I, page 121). Natural selection is destruction and preservation. All "injurious" differences and variations are destroyed and some individuals with "favorable" parts preserved. Natural death is the means of destruction; and generation, of preservation. The "favorable" always prove the stronger, the "injurious" the weaker. Although sweetest graces and most resplendent virtues of the highest type of man are products of natural selection, they are conditioned promiscuously on killing the other fellow and procreating one's kind. The killing is done "by acts of God", as express companies phrase it, and by hatred, envy, anger, avarice, selfishness. In the struggle for existence the stronger gloat over the slain while poverty of spirit, meekness, mercy and peace die unhonored and unsung. By these means every kind of organic being will eventually gain the summit of finitude. It is immoral. Professor Huxley makes a notable concession to truth and sanity when he says: "It is quite conceivable that every species tends to produce varieties of a limited number and kind, and that the effect of natural selection is to favor the development of some of these, while it opposes the development of others along their predetermined lines of modification." (Britannica. Evolution). Taking the Professor's language as accurate, he surrenders natural selection. We were taught that it was as reliable as gravitation, but if we get the notion that some species improve, some are stationary and some deteriorate, agreeably with heredity and environment, we have no further use for it. To sum up the case for natural selection: (1) It is poor morals. A theory of nature must be ideal to be true. Natural selection is a scheme for the survival of the passionate and the violent, the destruction of the weak and defenseless. To be true, black must be white, and wrong must be right, and God an Ivan the terrible. (2) Its assumptions are false. It is false that unlimited attenuation of the steps of the process, and unlimited time for the accomplishment of it, assure us that it might have been possible. "Attenuation" and "time" would have been but conditions, not causes. They could prove nothing. It is false that in the struggle for existence the "fittest" survive. The "fittest" is an ambiguous word. With natural selection it means the strongest and best armed. They do not survive; they degenerate and expire. They who bear arms challenge attack. This providence may be penal or corrective. It is false that man is derived from a brute and a brute from a vegetable. One of the forces of human life makes for a recognition of God and a consciousness of sin against Him. This was not unfolded from anthropoid apes, for it is not in them. Brutes are distinguished from plants by self-consciousness, and this was not developed from plants, for it is not in them. (3) Natural selection is self-contradictory and impossible. Fifty years ago, Alfred Russel Wallace devised the scheme and wrote Charles Darwin about it. Mr. Darwin published the plan. He afterwards refers to Mr. Wallace as having. "an innate genius for solving difficulties". (Descent," p. 344). Two years ago, Mr. Wallace, in an address at the Darwin anniversary, before the Royal Institution in London, referring to Professor Haeckel said: "These unavailing efforts seem to lead us to the irresistible conclusion that beyond and above all terrestrial agencies, there is some great source of energy and guidance, which in unknown ways pervades every form of organized life, and which we ourselves are the ultimate and foreordained outcome". Thus, an author of the theory, himself, admits the contradiction of claiming a "selection" and denying a selector. Distribution The Darwinists assume that because certain creatures live now in limited areas, like the sloth in South America and the ornithorynchus in Australia and Tasmania, they have reached their present abodes by evolution through fishes. Let him assume it, but we beg for mercy to the man on the street who shrinks from that mode of transportation and believes that they might have been created in Western Asia, dispersed by various possible means, wherever climatic and other conditions were favorable, and suffered extinction, except where we find them;or that they might have been created where they are. The rapid extinction of the American bison suggests the possibility of extinction, as a factor of the process. Geological Succession Professor Huxley adduces only one more argument-successive geological forms. "It must", he remarks, "suffice in this place, to say that the successive forms of the Equine type have been fully worked out, while those of nearly all the other existing types of Ungulate mammals and of the Carnivores have been nearly as closely followed through the Tertiary deposits". We have a misty remembrance of having met that Equus before, and, somehow, associate him with pons asinorum. The Professor hangs his case on the term "successive"-"successive geological forms". He confuses it with "similar", but neither is offensive. Fossils and living forms belong in the same category, but a radical difference between "successive" forms breaks the chain of evolution. If the ungulate fossils are like living forms, we greet them as old friends, if unlike we beg an introduction. In either event it is not Darwinism, but Don Quixote attacking another windmill. The actual origination of man, brutes and plants, from one simplest and lowest form of organic life, by natural and Godless selections and variations, is the essence of Darwinism. It is admitted and undisputed that it was first definitely elaborated by Charles R. Darwin, and it stands or falls with Darwin's experiments and arguments, and they are marvelously unscientific. Louis Agassiz, Lord Kelvin, and Dr. Virchow having passed on, the outlook for experimental science has been looking dark; but suddenly the light is breaking. Professor Gaston Bonnier, of the Sorbonne, M. de Cyon, and others, have just struck a thrilling chord and scientific Europe is awakening. Criticizing Mr. Darwin in Pour et Contre le Darwinisme, M. Bonnier says: "The illustrious naturalist had no idea of the experimental method," and he adds that he was imaginative and careless in his observations. In corroboration of this-passing by the spike-horn deer, the aquatic bear and the worn-off human tail, which all who are familiar with "The Descent of Man" will recall-take, for instance, the following: "Some naturalists have maintained that all variations are connected with the act of sexual reproduction; but this is certainly an error; for I have given, in another work, a long list of sporting plants, as they are called by gardeners; that is, of plants which have suddenly produced a single bud with a new and sometimes widely different character from that of the other buds on the same plant. These bud variations, as they may be called, can be propagated by grafts, offsets, etc., and sometimes, by seed" ("Origin of Species," Vol. I, p. 35). How could Mr. Darwin know that the seed from which the tree of the strange bud had grown had not been pollenized, any number of generations previously, by the strange strain? What would happen if vegetable and animal atavism not a reversion to ancestral type, but latent generation, the waking and appearing of a strain as old, it may be, as the race, improved or damaged, even to the extent of freaks or monstrosities should be found to accord with all known facts of the case, and to answer the hard questions for which Darwinism was devised? Surely the progression of a character beneath the surface, whether for one year or a million-as the temper of a father not discernible in a son, but emerging in a grandson-is as credible as reversion under similar conditions. Backing up is hardly in harmony with the twentieth century. The teaching of Darwinism, as an approved science, to the children and youth of the schools of the world is the most deplorable feature of the whole wretched propaganda. It would be difficult to fix the responsibility of it. Darwin himself hesitated. Virchow tried, nobly, to protect the primary schools of Germany. The burden of his lecture at Munich is throughout a caution against evading the distinction between the problematical and the proven; they are not on the same evidential level. "He would teach", he said, "evolution, if it were only proven; it is, as yet, in the hypothetical stage; the audience ought to be warned that the speculative is only the possible, not actual truth; that it belongs to the region of belief, and not to that of demonstration. As long as a problem continues in the speculative stage, it would be mischievous to teach it in our schools. We ought not to represent our conjecture as a certainty, nor our hypothesis as a doctrine." Haeckel, always rash, advocated it. As they struggled, somebody lighted the fire. It was like the burning of the temple at Jerusalem. Titus had issued an order to spare it, but a Roman soldier threw a blazing torch into a small window and the whole structure was in flames. It was like the revenge of the Pied Piper of Hamlin Town. It was "Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be comforted, because they were not". ======================================================================== CHAPTER 32: - THE PASSING OF EVOLUTION ======================================================================== The Passing of Evolution By Professor George Frederick Wright, D.D., LL. D., Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio The word evolution is in itself innocent enough, and has a large range of legitimate use. The Bible, indeed, teaches a system of evolution. The world was not made in an instant, or even in one day (whatever period day may signify) but in six days. Throughout the whole process there was an orderly progress from lower to higher forms of matter and life. In short there is an established order in all the Creator's work. Even the Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which being planted grew from the smallest beginnings to be a tree in which the fowls of heaven could take refuge. So everywhere there is "first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear." But recently the word has come into much deserved disrepute by the injection into it of erroneous and harmful theological and philosophical implications. The widely current doctrine of evolution which we are now compelled to combat is one which practically eliminates God from the whole creative process and relegates mankind to the tender mercies of a mechanical universe the wheels of whose machinery are left to move on without any immediate Divine direction. This doctrine of evolution received such an impulse from Darwinism and has been so often confounded with it that it is important at the outset to discriminate the two. Darwinism was not, in the mind of its author, a theory of universal evolution, and Darwin rarely used the word. The title of Darwin's great work was, "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection." The problem which he set out to solve touched but a small part of the field of evolution. His proposition was simply that species may reasonably be supposed to be nothing more than enlarged or accentuated varieties, which all admit are descendants from a common ancestry. For example, there are a great many varieties of oak trees. But it is supposed by all botanists that these have originated from a common ancestor. Some chestnut trees, however, differ less from some oak trees than the extreme varieties of both do from each other. Nevertheless, the oak and the chestnut are reckoned not as varieties, but as different species. But the dividing line between them is so uncertain that it is impossible to define it in language; hence, some botanists have set up an independent species between the two, which they call "chestnut oak." What Is a "Species"? This, however, is but a single illustration of the great difficulty which scientific men have had in getting a satisfactory definition of species. That most generally accepted is "a collection of individual plants and animals which resemble each other so closely that they can reasonably be supposedto have descended from a common ancestor." It is easy to see, however, that this definition begs the whole question at issue. For we have no certain means of knowing how widely the progeny may in some cases differ from the parent; and we do not know but that resemblances may result from the action of other causes than that of parental connection. The definition is far from being one that would be accepted in the exact sciences. It may be "reasonably supposed" that such small differences as separate species have resulted through variations of individuals descended from a common ancestry, yet it is a long leap to assert that, therefore, it may be reasonably supposed that all the differences between animals or between plants may have arisen in a similar manner. A characteristic difference between the African elephant and the Indian elephant, for example, is that the African elephant has three toes on his hinder feet and the Indian has four. While, therefore, it may not be a great stretch of imagination to suppose that this difference has arisen by a natural process, without any outside intervention, it is an indefinitely larger stretch of the imagination to suppose that all the members of the general family to which they belong have originated in a like manner; for, this family, or order, includes not only the elephant, but the rhinoceros, hippopotamus, tapir, wild boar and horse. But many of Darwin's followers and expounders have gone to extreme lengths in their assertions, and have announced far more astonishing conclusions than these. Not only do they assert, with a positive ness of which Darwin was never guilty, that species have had a common origin through natural causes, but that all organic beings had been equally independent, of supernatural forces. It is a small thing that the two species of elephant should have descended from a common stock. Nothing will satisfy them but to assert that the elephant, the lion, the bear, the mouse, the kangaroo, the whale, the shark, the shad, birds of every description—indeed, all forms of animal life, including the oyster and the snail—have arisen by strictly natural processes from some minute speck of life, which originated in far distant time. Origin of Life It need not be said that such conclusions must rest upon very attenuated evidence, such as is not permitted to have weight in the ordinary affairs of life. But even this is only the beginning with thoroughgoing evolutionists. To be consistent they must not only have all species of animals or plants, but all animals and plants descending from a common origin, which they assert to be an almost formless protoplasm, which is supposed to have appeared in the earliest geological ages. Nor does this by any means bring them to their final goal, for to carry out their theory they must leap to the conclusion that life itself has originated, spontaneously, by a natural process, from inorganic matter. But of this they have confessedly no scientific proof. For, so far as is yet known, life springs only from antecedent life. The first chapter of Genesis, to which reference has already been made, furnishes as perfect a definition of plant life as has ever been given. Plant life, which is the earliest form of living matter, is described "as that which has seed in itself" and "yields seed after his kind." A half century ago the theory of spontaneous generation had many supporters. It was believed that minute forms of plant life had sprung up from certain conditions of inorganic matter without the intervention of seeds or spores. Bottles of water, which were supposed to have been shut off from all access of living germs, were found, after standing a sufficient length of time, to swarm with minute living organisms. But experiments showed that germs must have been in the water before it was set aside. For, on subjecting it to a higher degree of temperature, so as apparently to kill the germs, no life was ever developed in it. All positive basis for bridging the chasm between living matter and lifeless matter has thus been removed from the realm of science. The Mystery of First Beginnings This brings us to the important conclusion that the origin of life, and we may add of variations, is to finite minds an insoluble problem; and so Darwin regarded it. At the very outset of his speculation, he rested on the supposition that the Creator in the beginning breathed the forces of life into several forms of plants and animals, and at the same time endowed them with the marvelous capacity for variation which we know they possess. This mysterious capacity for variation lies at the basis of his theory. If anything is to be evolved in an orderly manner from the resident forces of primordial matter it must first have been involved through the creative act of the Divine Being. But no one knows what causes variation in plants or animals. Like the wind it comes, but we know not whence it cometh or whither it goeth. Breeders and gardeners do not attempt to produce varieties directly. They simply observe the variations which occur, and select for propagation those which will best serve their purposes. They are well aware that variations which they perpetuate are not only mysterious in their origin, but superficial in their character. In Darwinism the changing conditions of life, to which every individual is subjected, are made to take the place of the breeder and secure what is called natural selection. In this case, however, the peculiarities selected and preserved must always be positively advantageous to the life of the individuals preserved. But to be of advantage a variation must both be considerable in amount, and correlated to other variations so that they shall not be antagonistic to one another. For example, if a deer were born with the capability of growing antlers so large that they would be a decided advantage to him in his struggle for existence, he must at the same time have a neck strong enough to support its weight, and other portions of his frame capable of bearing the increased strain. Otherwise his antlers would be the ruin of all his hopes instead of an advantage. It is impossible to conceive of this combination of advantageous variations without bringing in the hand and the designing mind of the Original Creator. Of this, as of every other variety of evolution, it can be truly said in the words of one of the most distinguished physicists, Clerk Maxwell: "I have examined all that have come within my reach, and have found that every one must have a God to make it work." By no stretch of legitimate reasoning can Darwinism be made to exclude design. Indeed, if it should be proved that species have developed from others of a lower order, as varieties are supposed to have done, it would strengthen rather than weaken the standard argument from design. But the proof of Darwinism even is by no means altogether convincing, and its votaries are split up into as many warring sects as are the theologians. New schools of evolutionists arise as rapidly as do new schools of Biblical critics. Strangely enough the "Neo Darwinians" go back to the theory of Lamarck that variations are the result of effort and use on the part of the animal; whereas Darwin denied the inheritance of acquired characteristics; while Weissmann goes to the extreme of holding that natural selection must be carried back to the ultimate atoms of primordial matter, where he would set up his competitive struggle for existence. Romanes and Gulick, however, insist that specific variations often occur from "segregation," entirely independent of natural selection. Nor do the champions of evolution have a very exalted estimate of each other's opinions. In a letter to Sir Joseph Hooker in 1866, referring to Spencer, Darwin wrote: "I feel rather mean when I read him: I could bear and rather enjoy feeling that he was twice as ingenious and clever as myself, but when I feel that he is about a dozen times my superior, even in the master art of wriggling, I feel aggrieved. If he had trained himself to observe more, even at the expense, by a law of balancement, of some loss of thinking power, he would have been a wonderful man." ("Life and Letters," Vol. ii., p. 239). To account for heredity, Darwin, in his theory of "pangenesis," suggested that infinitesimal "gemmules" were thrown off from every part of the body or plant, and that they had "a mutual affinity for each other leading to their aggregation either into buds or into the sexual elements." But when he ventured the opinion that these were the same as Spencer's "vitalized molecules" in which dwelt an "intrinsic aptitude to aggregate into the forms" of the species, Spencer came out at once and said that it was no such thing. They were not at all alike. Darwin, in reply, said he was sorry for the mistake. But he had feared that as he did not know exactly what Spencer meant by his "vitalized molecules," a charge of plagiarism might be brought against him if he did not give Spencer due credit. But others seemed to find it as hard to understand what Darwin meant by his "gemmules" with their marvelous mutual "affi meant by "vitalized molecules." Bates wrote him that after reading the chapter twice he failed to understand it; and Sir H. Holland set it down as "very tough," while Hooker and Huxley thought the language was mere tautology, and both failed "to gain a distinct idea" from it. ("Letters of Darwin," Vol. if., p. 262). Indeed, thoroughgoing evolution has no such universal acceptance as is frequently represented to be the case. Few naturalists are willing to project the theory beyond the narrow limits of their own province. Such naturalists as Asa Gray and Alfred Russel Wallace, who in a general way accepted the main propositions of Darwinism, both insisted that natural selection could attain its ends only as giving effect to the designs of the Creator. Agassiz, Owen, Mivart, Sir William Dawson, and Weissmann either rejected the hypothesis altogether or so modified it that it bore little resemblance to the original. Professor Shaler declared, shortly before his death, "that the Darwinian hypothesis is still unverified." Dr. Etheride of the British Museum says that "in all this great museum there is not a particle of evidence of transmutation of species." Professor Virchow of Berlin declared that "the attempt to find the transition from the animal to man has ended in total failure." The list could be extended indefinitely. Haeckel, indeed, had from his imagination supplied the missing link between man and the apes, calling it Pithecanthropus. While, a few years after, Du Bois discovered in recent volcanic deposits in Java a small incomplete skull in one place, and near by a diseased femur (thigh bone), and not far away two molar teeth. These were hailed as remains of the missing link, and it was forthwith dubbed Pithecanthropus Erectus. The skull was indeed small, being only two-thirds the size of that of the average man. But Professor, Cope, one of our most competent comparative anatomists, concluded that as the "femur is that of a man, it is in no sense a connecting link." The erect form carries with it all the anatomical characteristics of a perfect man. ("Primary Factors," 1896, pt. 1, chap. vi.) But the Darwinians themselves have made their full share of erroneous assumptions of facts, and of illogical conclusions. It will suffice for our present purpose to refer to a few of these. Darwin himself made two great mistakes which in the eyes of discerning students vitiate his whole theory. 1. As to Geological Time. The establishment of Darwin's theory as he originally proposed it involved the existence of the earth in substantially its present condition for an indefinite, not to say infinite, period of time. In one of his calculations in the first edition of "Origin of Species," he arrived at the startling conclusion that 306,662,400 years is "a mere trifle" of geological time. It was not long, however, before his son, Sir George H. Darwin, demonstrated to the general satisfaction of physicists and astronomers that life could not have begun on earth more than 100 million years ago, and probably not more than 50 million; while Lord Kelvin would reduce the period to less than 30 million years, which Alfred Russel Wallace affirms is sufficient time for the deposition of all the geological strata. Evolutionists are now fighting hard and against great odds to be allowed 100 million years for the development of the present drama of life upon the earth. The difference between 306,662,400 years, regarded as "a mere trifle," and 24,000,000, or even 100,000,000 years, as constituting the whole sum, is tremendous. For, it necessitates a rapidity in the development of species which must be regarded as by leaps and bounds, and so would well accord with the theory of creation by special Divine intervention. If a critic of Darwinism had made so egregious an error as this which Darwin introduced into the very foundation of his theory, he would have been the subject of an immense amount of ridicule. The only excuse which Darwin could make was that at the time no one knew any better. But that excuse shows the folly of building such an enormous theory upon an unknown foundation. 2. As to the Minuteness of Beneficial Variations. The unlimited geological time required by Darwin's original theory is closely bound up with his view of the minuteness of the steps through which progress has been made. The words which he constantly uses when speaking of variations are "slight," "small," "extremely gradual," "insensible gradations." But early in the discussion it was shown by Mivart that "minute incipient variations in any special direction" would be valueless; since, to be of advantage in any case, they must be considerable in amount. And furthermore, in order to be of permanent advantage, a variation of one organ must be accompanied with numerous other variations in other parts of the organism. The absurdity in supposing the acquisition of advantageous qualities by chance variations is shown in the pertinent illustration adduced by Herbert Spencer from the anatomy of the cat. To give the eat power of leaping to any advantageous height, there must be a simultaneous variation in all the bones, sinews, and muscles of the hinder extremities; and, at the same time, to save the cat from disaster when it descends from an elevation, there must be variation of a totally different character in all the bones and tendons and muscles of the fore limbs. To learn the character of these changes, one has but to "contrast the markedly bent hind limbs of a cat with its almost straight fore limbs, or contrast the silence of the upward spring on to the table with the thud which the fore paws make as it jumps off the table." So numerous are the simultaneous changes necessary to secure any advantage here, that the probabilities against their arising fortuitously run up into billions, if not into infinity; so that they are outside of any rational recognition. The Origin of Man The failure of evolution to account for man is conspicuous. Early in the Darwinian discussion, Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin's most distinguished co-worker, instanced various physical peculiarities in man which could not have originated through natural selection alone, but which necessitated the interference of a superior directing power. Among these are: (a) the absence in man of any natural protective covering. The nakedness of man which exposes him to the inclemency of the weather could never in itself have been an advantage which natural selection could take hold of. It could have been of use only when his intelligence was so developed that he could construct tools for skinning animals and for weaving and sewing garments. And that practically involves all essential human attributes. (b) The size of the human brain. Man's brain is out of all proportion to the mental needs of the highest of the animal creation below him. Without man's intelligence such a brain would be an incumbrance rather than an advantage. The weight of the largest brain of a gorilla is considerably less than half that of the average man, and only one third that of the best developed of the human race. (c) This increase in the size of the brain is connected also with a number of other special adaptations of the bodily frame to the wants of the human mind. For example, the thumb of the hind limb of the ape becomes a big toe in man, which is a most important member for a being which would walk in an upright position, but a disadvantage to one who walks on all fours. The fore limbs of the ape are shortened into the arms of a man, thus adapting them to his upright position and to the various uses which are advantageous in that position. Furthermore, to make it possible to maintain the erect position of man there has to be a special construction of the ball and socket joints in the hip bones and in the adjustment of all the vertebra of the back and neck. All these would be disadvantageous to an ape-like creature devoid of man's intelligence. (d) Man's intellectual capacity belongs to a different order from that of the lower animals. Naturalists do indeed classify men and apes together in the same genus anatomically. But to denote the human species they add the word "sapiens." That is, they must regard his intelligence as a specific characteristic. The lower animals do indeed have many common instincts with man, and in many cases their instincts are far superior to those of man. But in his reasoning powers man is apparently separated from the lower animals, one and all, by an impassable gulf. Romanes, after collecting the manifestations of intelligent reasoning from every known species of the lower animals, found that they only equalled, altogether, the intelligence of a child 15 months old. He could find no such boundless outlook of intelligence in the lower animals as there is in man. As any one can see, it would be absurd to try to teach an elephant geology, an eagle astronomy, or a dog theology. Yet there is no race of human beings but has capacity to comprehend these sciences. Again, man is sometimes, and not improperly, defined as a "tool using animal." No animal ever uses, much less makes, a tool. But the lowest races of men show great ingenuity in making tools, while even the rudest flint implement bears indubitable evidence of a power to adapt means to ends which places its maker in a category by himself. Again, man is sometimes, and properly, defined as a "fire using animal." No animal ever makes a fire. Monkeys do indeed gather round a fire when it is made. But the making of one is utterly beyond their capacity. Man, however, even in his lowest stages knows how to make fire at his will. So great is this accomplishment, that it is no wonder the Greeks looked upon it as a direct gift from heaven. Again, man may properly be described as a "speaking animal." No other animal uses articulate language. But man not only uses it in speech but in writing. How absurd it would be to try to teach a learned pig to translate and understand the cuneiform inscriptions unearthed from the deserted mounds of Babylonia. Finally, man may properly be described as a "religious animal," but who would ever think of improving the nature of the lower animals by delivering sermons in their presence or distributing Bibles among them? Yet, the Bible—a Book composed of every species of literature, containing the highest flights of poetry and eloquence ever written, and presenting the sublimest conceptions of God and of the future life ever entertained—has been translated into every language under heaven, and has found in those languages the appropriate figures of speech for effectually presenting its ideas. The Cumulative Argument Now, all these peculiarities both in the body and the mind of man, to have been advantageous, must have taken place simultaneously and at the same time have been considerable in amount. To suppose all this to occur without the intervention of the Supreme Designing Mind is to commit logical "hara-kiri." Such chance combinations are beyond all possibility of rational belief. It is fair to add, however; that Darwin never supposed that man was descended from any species of existing apes; but he always spoke of our supposed ancestor as "ape-like," a form, from which the apes were supposed to have varied in one direction as far as man had in another. All efforts, however, to find traces of such connecting links as this theory supposes have failed. The Neanderthal skull was, according to Huxley, capacious enough to hold the brain of a philosopher. The Pithecanthropus Erectus of Du Bois had, as already remarked, the erect form of a man; in fact, was a man. The skeletons of prehistoric man so far as yet unearthed, differ no more from present races of men than existing races and individuals differ from each other. In short, everything points to the unity of the human race, and to the fact that, while built on the general pattern of the higher animals associated with him in the later geological ages, he differs from them in so many all important particulars, that it is necessary to suppose that he came into existence as the Bible represents, by the special creation of a single pair, from whom all the varieties of the race have sprung. It is important to observe, furthermore, in this connection, that the progress of the human race has not been uniformly upward. In fact the degeneration of races has been more conspicuous than their advancement; while the advancement has chiefly been through the influence of outside forces. The early art of Babylonia and Egypt was better than the later. The religious conceptions of the first dynasties of Egypt were higher than those of the last. All the later forms of civilization shine principally by borrowed light. Our own age excels, indeed, in material advancement. But for art and literature we fall far below the past, and for our best religion we still go back to the Psalm Singers and Prophets of Judaea, and to the words of Him who spake "as never man spake." Democracy has no guides whom it dares trust implicitly. We have much reason to fear that those we are following are blind guides leading on to an end which it is not pleasant to contemplate, and from which we can be delivered only by the coming of the Son of Man. Conclusion The title of this paper is perhaps a misnomer. For, doubtless, the passing of the present phase of evolution is not final. Theories of evolution have chased each other off the field in rapid succession for thousands of years. Evolution is not a new thing in philosophy, and such is the frailty of human nature that it is not likely to disappear suddenly from among men. The craze of the last half century is little more than the recrudescence of a philosophy which has divided the opinion of men from the earliest ages. In both the Egyptian and the East Indian mythology, the world and all things in it were evolved from an egg; and so in the Polynesian myths. But the Polynesians had to have a bird to lay the egg, and the Egyptians and the Brahmans had to have some sort of a deity to create theirs. The Greek philosophers struggled with the problem without coming to any more satisfactory conclusion. Aniximander, like Professor Huxley, traced everything back to an "infinity" which gradually worked itself into a sort of pristine "mud" (something like Huxley's exploded "bathybius"), out of which everything else evolved; while Thales of Miletus tried to think of water as the mother of everything, and Aneximenes practically deified the air. Diogenes imagined a "mind stuff" (something like Weissmann's "biophores," Darwin's "gemmules possessed with affinity for each other," and Spencer's "vitalized molecules") which acted as if it had intelligence; while Heraclitus thought that fire was the only element pure enough to produce the soul of man. These speculations culminated in the great poem of Lucretius entitled, De Rerum Natura, written shortly before the beginning of the Christian era. His atomic theory was something like that which prevails at the present time among physicists. Amid the unceasing motion of these atoms there somehow appeared, according to him, the orderly forms and the living processes of nature. Modern evolutionary speculations have not made much real progress overthose of the ancients. As already remarked, they are, in their bolder forms atheistic; while in their milder forms they are "deistic"—admitting, indeed, the agency of God at the beginning, but nowhere else. The attempt, however, to give the doctrine standing through Darwin's theory of the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection has not been successful; for at best, that theory can enlarge but little our comprehension of the adequacy of resident forces to produce and conserve variations of species, and cannot in the least degree banish the idea of design from the process. It is, therefore, impossible to get any such proof of evolution as shall seriously modify our conception of Christianity. The mechanism of the universe is so complicated that no man can say that it is closed to Divine interference. Especially is this seen to be the case since we know that the free will of man does pierce the joints of nature's harness and interfere with its order to a limited extent. Man, by cultivation, makes fruits and flowers grow where otherwise weeds would cover the ground. Man makes ten thousand combinations of natural forces which would not occur without his agency. The regular course of nature is interfered with every time a savage chips a flint implement or builds a canoe, or by friction makes a fire. We cannot banish God from the universe without first stultifying ourselves and reducing man's free will to the level of a mere mechanical force. But man is more than that; and this everyone knows. Furthermore, a great mistake is made when the dicta of specialists in scientific investigation are accepted in religious matters as of any particular value. Indeed, the concentration of specialists on narrow lines of investigation really unfits them for duly weighing religious evidence. Spiritual things are not to be discovered by material instruments nor detected by the material senses. Physical science cannot penetrate to the origin of anything; but must content itself to deal with processes already begun. Profound mystery hangs over the birth of every human soul. Who can tell when it becomes a free personality, reflecting the image of its Creator? Is the soul, as well as the body, begotten by the parent? This question has divided theologians from the time of Augustine to the present day. The worst foes of Christianity are not physicists but metaphysicians. Hume is more dangerous than Darwin; the agnosticism of Hamilton and Mansel is harder to meet than that of Tyndall and Huxley; the fatalism of the philosophers is more to he dreaded than the materialism of any scientific men. The sophistries of the Socratic philosophy touching the freedom of the will are more subtle than those of the Spencerian school. Christianity, being a religion of fact and history, is a free-born son in the family of the inductive sciences, and is not specially hampered by the paradoxes inevitably connected with all attempts to give expression to ultimate conceptions of truth. The field is now as free as it has ever been to those who are content to act upon such positive evidence of the truth of Christianity as the Creator has been pleased to afford them. The evidence for evolution, even in its milder form, does not begin to be as strong as that for the revelation of God in the Bible. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 33: - EVOLUTIONISM IN THE PULPIT ======================================================================== Evolutionism in the Pulpit By an Occupant of the Pew [From "Herald and Presbyter", November 22, 1911, Cincinnati, Ohio.—We reprint this excellent paper as the remarkable utterance of a Christian layman on a most important subject.—Editor] Perhaps the most remarkable movement in philosophic thought that has occurred in any age was the rise and general acceptance by scientific circles of the evolutionary theory as propounded by Darwin, Huxley and Spencer. It was remarkable that men of science, whose peculiar boast it is that they deal only with established facts, should have so readily departed from this rule and accepted a system based upon hypothesis only, and which was, and is still after the lapse of forty years, without a single known fact to support it. Even when allowance is made for the well-known eagerness of many scientists to do away with all dualism, which was Mr. Darwin's aim, it was still remarkable that men of trained intellect should have so promptly accepted at face value his two principal works, in which the expression, "we may well suppose," occurs over eight hundred times, as a basis for the argument. Pure supposition may answer as a foundation for fanciful sketches like those of Jules Verne's; but as ground upon which to base a sober scientific argument it appears to the average man as little less than farcical. Why it did not so appear to the scientific mind, the scientific mind may perhaps be able to explain. We frankly confess our inability to do so. Still more remarkable was the fact that so many theologians and Christian ministers adopted the new philosophy and were so ready to give up large portions of Holy Scripture because they could not be reconciled with it; inventing, as a salve to conscience the doctrine that "the Bible was not intended to teach science", one of those half-truths that are more misleading than a downright untruth. In this way the story of creation as given in Genesis was set aside, and the whole book discredited. As Christ could not by any logical possibility be made a product of evolution without an absolute denial of His supernatural birth and His Divine claims, and the new birth, or creation, for man in Him was open to the same objection, these truths were either obscured, minimized, or totally neglected and even denied. To such lengths were some of the sworn "defenders of the faith once delivered to the saints" ready to go in order to avoid being considered as hopelessly "unscientific" and "behind the times in scholarship." That was twenty years ago or more. But strangest of all is the fact that a few of these ministers are still clinging to the "gospel of dirt," as Carlyle aptly styled it, and are referring to it in a way that indicates a belief on their part that such reference is still evidence of up-to-date scholarship. As early as 1889 Professor Virchow, of Berlin, admittedly the ablest anthropologist of modern times, when summing up the results of investigations of this subject by himself and other leading scientists, covering a period of twenty years, declared: "In vain have the links which should bind man to the monkey been sought; not a single one is there to show, The so-called proanthropos, who should exhibit this link, has not been found. No really learned man asserts that he has seen him—Perhaps some one may have seen him in a dream, but when awake he will never be able to say that he has approached him. Even the hope of soon discovering him has departed; it is hardly spoken of." Shortly before his death, some ten years later, in an address before the International Medical Society, he spoke to the same effect, and with even a greater degree of positive ness, asserting that "the attempts to find the transition from animal to man have ended in total failure. The middle link has not been found and never will be." That the Darwinian theory of descent has in the realms of nature not a single fact to confirm it is the unequivocal testimony of men as distinguished in their respective departments of scientific research, as Dr. N. S. Shaler of Harvard University; Dr. Etheridge, fossiologist of the British Museum; Prof. L. S. Beale, of King's College, London; Prof. Fleischmann, of Erlangen, and others. Says Dr. Etheridge: "Nine-tenths of the talk of evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by fact. This museum is full of proofs, of the utter falsity of their views." Professor Beale asserts: "There is no evidence that man has descended from, or is, or was, in any way specially related to, any other organism in nature through evolution or by any other process. In support of all naturalistic conjectures concerning man's origin, there is not at this time a shadow of scientific evidence." Professor Fleischmann sums up his estimate of the Darwinian theory of the descent of man by affirming that "it has in the realms of nature not a single fact to confirm it. It is not the result of scientific research, but purely the product of the imagination." Even Professor Haeckel admits in his old age that he, among all his contemporaries, stands alone. "Most modern investigators," he confesses, "have come to the conclusion that the doctrine of evolution, and particularly Darwinianism, is an error and can not be maintained." Touching his last re-affirmation of his naturalistic views, Dr. A. C. Dixon tells us that a scholarly man in Geneva said to him at the time that it was "the note of the dying swan," and Haeckel the "only scientific man of eminence in Germany today who believes in Darwinian evolution." Several notable books bearing on this subject have appeared during the last two years. One by George Paulin, published by Scribners, entitled, "No Struggle for Existence; No Natural Selection," presents an array of facts in support of the two assertions made in this title, and against evolution, which must carry conviction to any unprejudiced mind. Another to the same effect is by Prof. L. T. Townsend, entitled, "Collapse of Evolution." Still another, and we believe an epoch-marking book, is from the pen of Prof. E. Dennert, Ph.D., recently published in Germany, and entitled, "At the Death Bed of Darwinism." A perusal of this book "leaves no room for doubt," as asserted in the preface of the American edition, "about the decadence of the Darwinian theory in the highest scientific circles of Germany; And outside of Germany the same sentiment is shared generally by the leaders of scientific thought." Thus we see that; on the testimony of the great majority of the ablest of its one-time leading advocates, the evolutionary theory is in articulo mortis. Nay, more, it is already dead, since the spirit (the theory of natural selection) has long since departed. Some of its friends may sit about the remains intently watching for some signs of renewed life, but they watch in vain. And yet there are ministers of the Gospel who, discrediting the Bible narrative of creation, are still basing arguments upon the Darwinian theory of the origin of species; glibly referring to the time "when our ancestors were dwellers in trees," and to their own "descent from monkeys, tadpoles and fish," "a much higher conception of man's origin," according to their refined taste, than is that given in Genesis. At, or a little before, the beginning of the decade just ended this might have passed for learned talk about the "settled results of science"; but today, among those who are really abreast of the movement of scientific thought, it is regarded as merely echoing in this generation the always unproved and now properly rejected speculations of a dead and gone generation of infidel philosophers." That among those who mourn the passing of evolution there are some naturalists and others who cling to it, as said by Dr. Goette, the eminent Strasburg zoologist, "simply because it seems to furnish a much-desired mechanical explanation of purposive adaptations," is not surprising, since it leaves them nothing but the hated alternative of accepting Genesis with its personal God and creative acts. But when we consider that the evolutionary theory was conceived in agnosticism, and born and nurtured in infidelity; that it is the backbone of the destructive higher criticism which has so viciously assailed both the integrity and authority of the Scriptures; that it utterly fails in explaining—what Genesis makes so clear—those tremendous facts in human history and human nature, the presence of evil and its attendant suffering; that it offers nothing but a negative reply to that supreme question of the ages, "If a man die, shall he live again?" that it, in fact, substitutes for a personal God "an infinite and eternal Energy" which is without moral qualities or positive attributes, is not wise, or good, or merciful or just; cannot love or hate, reward or punish; that it denies the personality of God and man, and presents them, together with nature, as under a process of evolution which has neither beginning nor end; and regards man as being simply a passing form of this universal Energy, and thus without free will, moral responsibility, or immortality, it becomes evident to every intelligent layman that such a system can have no possible points of contact with Christianity. He may well be pardoned if he views with astonishment ministers of the Gospel still clinging to it, and harbors a doubt of either their sincerity or sanity. If it be said that most ministers who accept evolution do so only in its milder form, the supernaturalistic which permits of belief in a personal God, but claims that evolution is His method of working, man and nature being products of it, it may be said in reply that this view, quite as much as the naturalistic, necessitates the giving up of the account in Genesis, and generally carries with it a belief that the Bible is but a history of the evolution of the religious idea, and not what it everywhere claims to be, a Divine and supernatural revelation. Moreover, it is that part of the system which they accept (the origin of the species) which has quietly but firmly been labeled and shelved as merely one of the past phases of philosophic thought. To hold to it still is to subject themselves to doubts in the minds of their hearers as those expressed in regard to the holders of the naturalistic view. We are not contending that there is not a sphere in which the law of evolution as propounded by Mr. Spencer is operative. On the contrary, we believe there is; but as said by Philip Mauro, it is "entirely confined to the sphere of the activities of fallen man." It is a most significant fact that it is from this sphere alone that Mr. Spencer draws all his illustrations, and for the simple reason that outside of it in all God's great universe, so far as known, there is not a scintilla of evidence that the law of evolution is, or ever has been, in operation. This fact has been the stumbling stone of the evolutionists from the first. All Mr. Spencer's pompous phraseology about a primitive homogeneous mass passing in endless cycles from the "imperceptible to the perceptible, and back again from the perceptible to the imperceptible," and from "indeterminate uniformity to determinate multiformity," has no more foundation in actual fact than an air castle or Gulliver's travels. The limits of this article forbid further reference to the interesting fact—evidence of which is superabundant and convincing—that the law of evolution is strictly confined to the sphere of human activities, save to note that it is not, as so many suppose, a "natural law," but is, to borrow a term from Dr. H. Bushnell, one of "unnature:" It is the law of human progress apart from God, and under the leadership of the prince of this world system who originated it. If, as some assert, the clergymen who accepted the evolutionary theory were driven to it by fear of ridicule, or of not being thought abreast of "the trend of modern thought," it was not only cowardly on their part, but grossly inconsistent with their Christian profession. For even a partial investigation of the subject must have made clear to them that evolutionism and Christianity are, essentially, intensely antagonistic. The pulpit efforts of some ministers at reconciling them would be laughable from a logical standpoint were the issues involved not so serious and the effects upon some of their unthinking hearers not so deplorable. Certainly, scholarship can no longer be pleaded as an excuse for clinging to Darwinism; and, in the interest of common honesty, these men ought to either drop their materialism or leave the Christian pulpit. Among the surprises that await the layman who would inform himself on this subject is the fact that much that was advanced by the leaders, including Mr. Darwin himself, in Support of the evolutionary hypothesis was merely tentative: It was only the smaller fry, the minnows and gudgeons, that were cocksure of its truth, and who gorged the unwholesome food. This may be affirmed with equal truth of a large part of what is taught by the ablest of the higher critics. Nor is the reason for it hard to find. It becomes apparent immediately one perceives how weak, unsatisfactory and illusive the evidence is that they offer in support of their destructive theories; evidence so insufficient and even trivial that, as said by Sir Robert Anderson, "it would be laughed out of any court in Christendom." The layman, coming to a knowledge of this fact, finds his first feeling to be one of astonishment that men calling themselves Christians can on grounds so frivolous repudiate large parts of Scripture, and deliberately sow the seed of unfaith in the minds and hearts of thousands of their hearers. This is apt to be followed by one of indignation at the low moral quality and cowardice of their action in thus undermining the faith of the Church while accepting its pay. For it is noticeable that however great their change of attitude toward the Scriptures and the doctrinal standards of the churches they are supposed to serve may be, no change is ever perceptible in the attitude of these gentlemen toward the acceptance of the salaries paid by these churches. And this despite the fact that, according to their own witness of themselves, their strong point is the possession and preaching of a very superior quality of ethics (?). Indeed, in listening to them one can hardly escape the conviction that righteousness, personal and civic, was a thing almost unknown before their advent. Certainly no one can blame the ordinary individual who, unskilled in the intellectual subtleties and plausible sophistries by which these gentlemen seek to justify their course, finds a feeling akin to disgust taking possession of him as he listens to their talk about being "governed solely by a desire for truth", in their actions in this matter, and of the "tenfold greater comfort, pleasure and profit" they derive from reading their polychrome Bibles; all of which, to his untrained and practical mind, sounds like unmitigated pharisaical cant. It is like a man who, having taken away all the foundation under his house save a few slender props, lies down in it declaring that he does so with a sense of security and peace to which he had been a stranger before. Apparently the wild guesswork of a profligate and infidel like Astruc, or the equally wild philological speculations of a skeptic like Wellhausen, have more weight with these seekers after truth than has the "thus saith the Lord Jehovah" of the inspired prophets, or the testimony of the Son of God, and of His apostles. Moreover, they seem to completely ignore, and to be utterly unable to testify from personal experience to, the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit working upon men's hearts through the Word. Far better would it be for all concerned if these ministers had the courage of their convictions, and sense of honor enough to compel them to leave the Christian Church, taking with them those of their flocks who think like them and wish to follow, for they may be sure that the pretty little amenities of morality and sociology which they have substituted for the Gospel of regeneration can never take its place, or lead a single soul out of the death and darkness of sin into the life and light that are to be found in Christ alone. Meanwhile, a few naturalists, clothed in sackcloth, may sit about the death bed of Materialism as mourners, and, in despair of finding anything else to fill the niche in their temple of lies left vacant by the removal of their idol, may on occasion galvanize the remains into an appearance of life. Their clerical sympathizers, too, may refuse to read the death bulletin already issued, or to take part in the obsequies. Nevertheless, there can be no reasonable doubt in any intelligent mind that Darwinism so far as it relates to man's origin and that of species in general is dead; and all who believe in a personal God and in a Divine revelation may say of it, paraphrasing Cushi's answer to King David: "The philosophic enemies of our Lord and King, and all of the isms that rise against His truth, be as this deadism." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 34: - THE CHURCH AND SOCIALISM ======================================================================== The Church and Socialism By Professor Charles R. Erdman, D. D., Princeton Theological Seminary The sudden rise of Socialism is the most surprising and significant movement of the age. A few years ago the term suggested a dream of fanatics; today it embodies the creed and the hope of intelligent millions. For example, in America the Socialistic vote increased from 20,000, in 1892, to 900,000 in 1912. In France this vote numbers 1,104,000, and in Germany more than 3,000,000; and in these and other lands multitudes who are not openly allied with political Socialism are imbued with Socialistic principles and are advocates of Socialistic theories. With this great movement the Christian Church is deeply concerned; first, because of the endeavor which many are making to identify Socialism with Christianity; and, secondly, because, on the other extreme, popular Socialism is suggested as a substitute for religion and is antagonistic to Christianity; and, thirdly, because the strength of Socialism consists largely in its protest against existing social wrongs to which the Church is likewise opposed but which can be finally righted only by the universal rule of Christ. I. Socialism, strictly defined, is an economic theory which proposes the abolition of private capital and the substitution of collective ownership in carrying on the industrial work of the world. This collective ownership is to extend to all the material instruments of production; these are to be publicly operated, and the products to be equitably distributed. The government is to be wholly in the hands of the people, and it is to assign to each individual his task and to determine his wage. Every citizen is to be actually a government employee. It is evident that Socialism is to be distinguished from Communism with which it is often confused. The latter advocates a collective ownership of all wealth. Socialism does not deny the right of private property, but of private capital. In a Socialistic state one might own a house, but he could not rent it to increase his income. He might own a yacht, but he could riot use it to carry passengers for pay. Under Communism there would be no private ownership, but it would be literally true that "no man could call aught that he possessed his own." Socialism is still more easily distinguished from Anarchism. The latter seeks the abolition of all government; but Socialism advocates the extension of the functions of government to regulate the life and labor of every individual and even in the most minute details. Anarchy means no government; Socialism proposes more government than any nation has ever known. Quite as obviously Socialism should never be confused with that extreme form of Anarchy known as Nihilism. The latter advocates the violent abolition of all existing institutions, social and political. It is true that Socialists often propose revolution and violence; but an ever increasing number believe their ends will be attained by a gradual process of social evolution moving toward the goal of a collective ownership of capital. It is not right therefore to identify Socialism with assassination, lawlessness and outrage. Most important of all is the distinction between Socialism and Christianity. This might seem to be self-evident. Christianity is a religion; Socialism an economic theory, or a political proposal, and with such theories and proposals Christianity and the Church have nothing to do. At the present time, however, there is a strong endeavor and an evident tendency to identify Socialism and the Christian Church. Some are insisting that Jesus Christ was a Socialist and that the early Church was established on Socialistic principles. Others declare that Socialism is merely the application of Christianity to industrial problems, and that it is the duty of a Christian minister to preach Socialism, and the supreme function of the Christian Church to introduce and support Socialism as the one cure for all existing social evils. As to Jesus Christ, it is impossible to identify Him with any social theory or political party. His teachings are of universal application and eternal validity; but they do not deal with the questions of political economy any more than with those of physical science. That He insisted upon justice, and brotherhood, and love, and self-sacrifice is evident; but to suggest that these virtues are the monopoly of any one political or economic party is presumptuous, and to prove that Christ advocated "collective ownership of property" is impossible. The fundamental economic problem relates to the division of wealth; and as to that Christ refused to speak. He rebuked social sins and injustice and selfishness, but when requested to divide a possession on a certain occasion He asked, "Who made Me a judge or a divider over you?" and that question has wide implications for the present day. When we read the story of the early Church there are statements which suggest Socialism or even Communism, as for instance when we read that "they had all things common," but a fuller investigation shows their Communism was local, voluntary, occasional, temporary. It was practiced only in Jerusalem, no one was compelled to divide or sell his property, not all adopted the practice, but many like Mary the mother of Mark kept their homes in the city. Furthermore, this Communism was only practiced for a time. It was prompted by love and designed to meet a special crisis, but never admitted or established as an abiding principle of Church life. As to the Church of today, it would be gross injustice to its members should it be identified with Socialism. While Socialists may adopt many of the Christian principles and feel impelled by Christian motives, they must remember that Christianity is something other than a social propaganda and far more than an economic theory. On the other hand, the Church recognizes that it has no right to ally itself with any political party, or to commit itself to any one form of social or industrial organization. The Church leaves its members free to adopt or reject Socialism as they may deem wise. A man may be an ardent Socialist and a sincere Christian, or he may be a true Christian and a determined opponent of Socialism. Most Christians admit the wisdom of many Socialistic proposals, but feel that they are at liberty to act without the interference of the Church. In America, for example, the public school system and post office department of the government are instances of the application of Socialistic principles. Government ownership might be extended to the railroads, mines, public utilities, factories; this would not involve questions of religion, but of expediency and political wisdom, with which problems the Church has nothing to do. On the other hand many Christians are persuaded that there are fallacies and weaknesses in the Socialistic scheme They believe, for instance, that Socialists are mistaken in assuming that labor is the sole factor in producing wealth, and that capital is the result or embodiment of robbery; they do not believe the formation and government of a completely organized Socialistic state would be practical or possible; they are convinced that Socialism, if realized, would involve a tyranny and slavery which would be incredible and intolerable. These are their sincere convictions and men who hold them should not be denied a place in the Church nor rebuked by the Church as though they were lacking in intelligence or in Christian sympathy and love. It should be recognized that the Church is not to invade the field of political economy, nor is it allied with any political or social order or propaganda. It is in this connection that the movement called "Christian Socialism" should be criticized. To say the least, the name it has adopted is unfortunate, for it implies, whether intentionally or not, that other Socialists are not Christians, and that other Christians should be Socialists. One might as well speak of Christian Democrats, or Christian Republicans, or Christian Suffragists. The implications would be much the same. "Christian Socialism," however, is not only an imperfect name; it is in most of its forms an unfortunate thing. In some cases, it is true, it is merely the expression of a benevolent desire that a spirit of justice and brotherhood should be shown by men in their social and industrial relations. This is innocent enough; but as presented by the great mass of its advocates, ... "Christian Socialism" is neither Christian nor Socialism .... It is disappointing to Christians and irritating to Socialists. It minimizes or denies such Christian truths as the incarnation, the virgin birth, the atonement, the resurrection, justification by faith, the work of the Holy Spirit, the second coming of Christ, and insofar it ceases to be true Christianity. On the other hand, it is not real Socialism. Few of its adherents deny the right of private capital, or insist upon the "collective ownership of the instruments of production." In the effort to unite Christianity and Socialism justice is done to neither. Such a union should never be attempted. From Socialism as a strict economic theory, Christianity is absolutely II. Popular Socialism, however, is something quite different from a scientific economic theory. It is a social creed, offered as a substitute for religion, promising material benefits to all mankind, and bitterly opposed to Christianity and the Church. Much of this hatred is due to ignorance and prejudice. Great multitudes who call themselves Socialists have vague conceptions of the problems of political science or of the serious difficulties involved in the establishment of a Socialistic state, but they are vividly conscious of their hatred against existing institutions which they hold responsible for the present social inequalities and wrongs. Christian teachers, therefore, do well to meet fairly and generously the attacks which Socialists are making upon the Church, and they should explain to Socialists their misconceptions and the obvious defects of their creed. 1. Popular Socialism is mistaken in identifying the Christian Church with "capital," and in regarding the Church as responsible for the present social order. It is commonly asserted that the Church is the "rich man's club"; that Christian ministers are controlled by men of wealth and afraid to rebuke social evils, that the Gospel is preached with the purpose of making poor men content with their present conditions and of preventing them from rising to assert their rights. As a matter of fact the Church is committed to no one social order. It has flourished under imperial rule as it has in great republics, but it is opposed to the wrongs and injustice of every system. Instead of being "the rich man's club" the great proportion of its members are wage earners, and a very small proportion are in the Church. As to the ministry, it is rarely recruited from the ranks of the wealthy, and its representatives are usually fearless in their rebuke of social sins. It is the glory of the Church that it welcomes to its services and blesses by its offices both rich and poor alike, and does more to obliterate class distinctions than any other agency in the world. 2. Popular Socialism unjustly places all capitalists under suspicion of dishonesty and selfishness. It is true that the more intelligent advocates of Socialism, as an economic proposal, discriminate between the responsibilities of individuals and the defects of a system. They even sympathize with capitalists who are compelled to act under conditions and laws which are beyond their control, and they attack no one class in a community, but seek for new institutions which, without violence or injustice, will secure a truer equality of opportunity and condition. But "popular Socialism" regards all men of wealth with enmity. Its outcries against the rich are engendering the bitterest class hatred and arousing passions which, unless controlled, will result in violence and anarchy and universal disaster. There can be no doubt that capital is often cruel, that at times it depends upon injustice and tyranny, and frequently exploits the helpless, and produces misery and distress; but these abuses are not universal. Where they exist they can be corrected by law; and it is merely begging the question to assert that they can be removed only by abolishing capital and substituting collective ownership. On the other hand, it must be remembered that large numbers of capitalists are scrupulously honest in their dealings and are devoted to the welfare of their employees. So far, however, has "popular Socialism" poisoned the public mind that these last statements would be received in many quarters with ridicule and incredulity. Yet it is undoubtedly true that many employers are conducting large business enterprises with a deep sense of their personal responsibility and in a spirit of sympathy and helpfulness. It should be noticed further that the very principles of industry, fidelity and honesty, taught by Christianity, enable men to increase their power and wealth, and this should be true under any form of social organization. The mere fact that one is possessed of wealth should not be regarded as evidence that he has been guilty of robbery and greed. 3. Popular Socialism fails to recognize that the principles of justice, fraternity and charity, by which its leaders claim to be animated, are Christian principles, and have been ex pressed by the Church as by no other society of men. It is hardly rational for Socialists to contend, as they do, that all the hospitals and orphanages and benevolent institutions in Christian and pagan lands, established and conducted by the Church, are mere weak endeavors to bolster up a false and decadent social system. They are rather the expression of the spirit of Christ, without which no social system can ever attain perfection or can long endure. 4. Popular Socialism is vitally defective in that it places the physical above the spiritual needs of mankind. It is, as a philosophy, definitely materialistic. It insists that better social conditions will produce better men; Christianity teaches that better men are needed to produce better conditions. Socialism endeavors to elevate individuals by elevating society; Christianity contends that society can be elevated only by the regeneration of individuals. To secure such regeneration is the supreme effort and function of the Church, and its chief message to Socialism is that the "life is more than meat and the body than raiment." To those who are crying for equality and opportunity and improved material conditions and fondly dreaming of a new age of universal plenty and comfort and happiness, the Church repeats the divine message, "Ye must be born again." If Socialism is ever to succeed as an economic theory, it can only be by the aid of the Church; for of all conceivable social systems, none would be more dependent upon high character and exalted principles than a socialistic state; and the production of such character and enforcement of such principles are the proved function of the Christian Church. III. Socialism is, however, something else than a scientific economic theory, or a popular materialistic philosophy, it is a serious protest against the social wrongs and cruelties of the age, against the defects of the present economic system. against special privilege and entrenched injustice, against prevalent poverty, and hunger, and despair. It is not always an intelligent protest. Its cry is sometimes inarticulate and wild; but it voices the social unrest, the sullen discontent, the bitter envy and sorrow of thousands who are attracted to Socialism merely by its protest against the present social order and its prophecies of a better age to come. 1. This protest of Socialism is a call to the Church to proclaim more insistently the social principles of Christ. This does not mean the adoption of a so-called "social gospel" which discards the fundamental doctrines of Christianity and substitutes a religion of good works; but a true Gospel of grace is inseparable from a Gospel of good works. Christian doctrines and Christian duties cannot be divorced. The New Testament no more clearly defines the relation of the believer to Christ than to the members of one's family, to his neighbors in society, and to his fellow-citizens in the state. These social teachings of the Gospel need a new emphasis today by those who accept the whole Gospel, and should not be left to be interpreted and applied by those alone who deny essential Christianity or substitute for religion some modern social creed. The Church must emphasize anew the teachings of Christ and His apostles relative to marriage and the family upon this sacred institution many professed Socialists are making a deadly assault. Socialism is not necessarily related to any one theory of marriage, but unfortunately it is too frequently allied with lax theories of divorce and proposals of free love which are destructive to the family and subversive of society. The Church must proclaim anew the teaching of her Lord relative to the stewardship of wealth. Many a man who believes himself to be an orthodox Christian becomes restless and declares he wishes to hear only "the simple Gospel" when his pastor begins to expound the Scriptural principles relative to Christian stewardship. It must be insisted that one is as responsible for the methods by which his power and position and property are acquired as for the way in which these are used; and that every man must render an account to the Lord not only for his use of one-tenth of his income, but for every fraction he selfishly retains or spends. Christians must be reminded that an infallible test of being a child of God is the treatment shown to one's neighbor who is in need. There must be a similar emphasis on the Scriptural principles relating to masters and servants, to employers and employees. It, on the one hand, there is an insistence upon justice and sympathy, so there must be on the other, upon absolute loyalty and fidelity. The conflict between capital and labor could be avoided without a reorganization of society should both parties be controlled by the plain teachings of the Gospel of Christ. There must he a new insistence upon the sacredness of the state and the truth that government is a divine institution. This means a new emphasis upon the duties of Christian citizenship. Every expression of anarchy and lawlessness should be severely reproved and speedily repressed; and every Christian citizen should seek by patient endeavor to solve the complex problems of modern social and industrial life, and to aid in the establishment of better customs and of juster laws. Socialism would lose much of its power if the Church were more careful to proclaim the explicit social doctrines which form an integral part of the Gospel of Christ. 2. This protest of Socialism demands of the Church a more consistent practice, on the part of her members, of the social teachings of Christ. It is easy to bring false charges against Christians; it is even customary today to hold the Church up to ridicule and scorn as a society of hypocrites untrue to their professions and their Lord. It is not necessary to even consider these accusations which spring from ignorance or prejudice or spite. The great masses of Christians are striving to be faithful and seeking to live well-pleasing to their Master. However, it is true that there are some in the Church who are consciously guilty of sins against society, and others who, because of the difficulty of the questions involved, excuse themselves on the ground that their wrong practices are necessitated by the industrial system of the age. Some are quite comfortable under what they regard as orthodox preaching, even though they know their wealth has come from the watering of stocks and from wrecking railroads, and from grinding the faces of the poor. The supposed orthodoxy of such preaching is probably defective in its statements of the social teachings of the Gospels. One might be a social bandit and buccaneer and yet believe in the virgin birth and in the resurrection of Christ; but one cannot be a Christian unless he believes "that if One died for all, then were all dead: and that He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them, and rose again;" and to live for Christ means to live for Him in every sphere and relationship of life, whether employer or employee, capitalist or laborer, stock-holder or wage-earner. We must all admit the grave complexity of modern life, and the delicacy and difficulty of the problems involved, yet we must not be content to countenance practices which are unjust or unchristian. To be absolutely true to conscience and to Christ will mean sacrifice and loss of money and social prestige. It is never easy to take up the cross daily and to follow Christ; but there is a new call for heroism, for martyrdom. Absolute loyalty to Christ in the business and social world today often means crucifixion, pain, death, but "it is the way the Master went; must not the servant tread it still?" 3. The protest of Socialism is a distinct call to the Church to define anew to herself her function, and to interpret anew the prophecies of her Lord. There are many who, in the name of Christianity, have been promising a new social order, a kingdom of God, which they declare the Church will introduce. The long continued failure to realize these promises has led to criticisms of the Church, and has done not a little to increase the bitterness of socialistic attacks upon her. The Church is now being held responsible for social sins and injustice, for the wrongs and grievances of the age; and for this unfortunate position she must largely blame herself. She has arrogated functions which are not her own; she has made promises for which there is no written word of Scripture. It should be remembered, for instance, that the state is quite as purely a divine institution as is the Church. It is for the state to secure social reconstruction when necessary; it is for the state to punish offenders, and to secure by legal enactments and legislative processes the abolition of abuses, and the establishment of justice. When the Church assumes functions belonging to the state, she involves herself in needless difficulties and places herself in a false position before the world. More important still it is to ask what predictions of Scripture support the assertion that the Church is herself to introduce the kingdom of God. She is certainly to promise the coming of that kingdom; she is even now to insist that her members shall obey its laws, but it is impossible for her to compel unchristian men to accept the principles of her Lord. Her supreme function is to secure, on the part of individuals, wholehearted devotion and allegiance to Christ. It is for her to increase as rapidly as possible her membership and to extend in every legitimate sphere her benevolent influence; but the real blessedness of the Church and of the world awaits the personal return of Christ. The hope of the world is not in a new social order instituted by unregenerate men; not a millennium made by man; not a commonwealth of humanity organized as a Socialistic state; but a kingdom established by Christ which will fill the earth with glory at the coming of the King. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 35: - MILLENNIAL DAWN: A COUNTERFEIT... (JW'S) ======================================================================== Millennial Dawn: A Counterfeit of Christianity By Professor William G. Moorehead, D. D., United Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Xenia, Ohio [Now Known as Jehovah's Witnesses or Watchtower Bible & Tract Society] Six rather bulky volumes, comprising in all some 2,000 pages, are published by the "Watch Tower and Tract Society" of Brooklyn, N.Y. The author of this work is Mr. Charles T. Russell. Formerly his publications issued from "Zion's Watch Tower", Pittsburgh, Pa. They then bore the somewhat ostentatious title, "Millennial Dawn," (1886). The volumes now bear the more modest inscription, "Studies in the Scriptures", (1911). Why the change in the title is made can only be conjectured. Some rather severe criticism and strictures of the views advocated in these books have brought Millennial Dawn into disrepute in the minds of many people, and accordingly we think the former title has been dropped and the later and less objectionable one substituted for it. Some color is given to this conjecture by the fact that certain evangelical terms are applied to the movement of which Mr. Russell is the head, as, e.g., "People's Pulpit of Brooklyn", "International Bible Students' League", "Brooklyn Tabernacle", "Bible House and Tract Society", (Our Hope, Feb., 1911). The later title and the various names now freely used tend to allay suspicion and to commend the propaganda of Mr. Russell and his followers to the Christian public. In the introduction to the first volume we are told that "our Society, realizing the need, is seeking to do all in its power to ... lift 'the Lord's standard for the people.' It has prepared six sets of Bible studies for Christian people of all denominations .... These are supplied at bare cost". The whole six volumes, "bound in cloth, embossed in silver", sell for the ridiculously small sum of $2.25-37½ cents each! The object is to scatter this literature throughout our country, Canada, and other lands, for we are assured that it is translated into no less than a dozen different languages. So it is asserted in the first volume. Some idea of the circulation may be had from the statement made in the title page of each of the first three volumes: "Series I. 3,358,000 edition". "Series II. 1,132,000 edition". "Series III. 909,000 edition". The enormous circulation of the books serves to show how industriously "Our Society" is propagating its literature, and the vast number of readers it is reaching, i.e., if these figures tell the truth! That the teaching of Dawnism has done immense harm is certain; that it is calculated to subvert the faith of Christians by substituting for the truth of Jesus Christ the calamitous doctrines of Mr. Russell cannot be denied; for the whole system is anti- Scriptural, anti-Christian, and a deplorable perversion of the Gospel of the Son of God. In the discussion of the system it is the doctrines of Millennial Dawn that are arraigned, not the author, Mr. Russell. It is conceivable that he is self deceived, as some think, and that he believes that what he has published is the truth of the Bible. This is within the range of possibility, of course. Personally, however, the present writer withholds his assent to this opinion. That Mr. Russell is being used of the Evil One to subvert the truth of God, that the Christ he commends to men as an object of trust, love, and worship, is not the Christ of God, is the profound conviction of not a few who are familiar With his views. This is a grave indictment, but it is deliberately made. To establish it beyond peradventure and contradiction is the aim of this paper. A summary of the chief errors and heresies embodied in Millennial Dawn is here submitted. 1. Jesus, in His pre-human existence, was a spiritual being, higher than the angels, but a creature. (Vol. I, pp. 177, 178, 179, 188). The book expressly teaches that our Lord, prior to His incarnation and during His earthly life, was only a creature, higher in the scale of being than other creatures, but not God. "We are told that our Lord, before He left His glory to become a man, was 'in a form of God'-a spiritual form, a spirit being; but since to be a ransom for mankind He had to be a man, of the same nature as the sinner whose substitute in death He was to become, it was necessary that His nature be changed. And Paul tells us that He took not the nature of angels, one step lower down than His own, but that He came down two steps and took the nature of man-He 'became a man'; He 'was made flesh'. Hebrews 2:16; Php_2:7-8; John 1:14." "Notice that this teaches not only that angelic nature is not the only order of spirit being, but that it is a lower nature than that of our Lord before He became a man; and He was not then so high as He now is, for 'God hath highly exalted Him', because of His obedience in becoming man's willing ransom. Php_2:8-9. He is now of the highest order of spirit being, a partaker of the Divine (Jehovah's) nature". The book further asserts: "If this principle be a correct one, it would show that God had no right to create Jesus higher than the angels, and then further to exalt Him to the Divine nature, unless He intended to do the same for all angels and for all men" (p. 188). There is no mistaking the significance of this teaching. Jesus Christ was originally a created being, but as a reward of His obedience unto death He is now exalted to be God! This is worse than the doctrine of Arius the Libyan which the Council of Nicea so solemnly condemned, of modern Unitarians which all evangelical Christians repudiate. Over against this fundamental error, one that does the Lord Jesus infinite dishonor and robs us of an Almighty Saviour, we place the inspired Word of Scripture, John 1:1 : "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God". By the Word of course is meant the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Three majestic truths are here set forth: (1). The Word's eternity-"In the beginning"-the noun is without the article; it is unmarked, uncounted duration that is meant. "Was", not came into existence; He was already in existence, before the creation of the universe; therefore prior to all beginning, in a timeless age which transcends time, in eternity, Christ was. Millennial Dawn says there was a time when Christ was not; the Apostle John affirms there never was a time when He was not. (2). His eternal personal existence is maintained: "The Word was with God"; His equality with God, for John goes on to ascribe to Him creation, (3). His Deity: "And the Word was God". Most emphatic is the order of the words in the original: "And God was the Word". Jesus Christ was no subordinate or created being. "Who subsisting in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant" Php_2:6-11, R.V. It is here taught that Christ existed in the form of God. "The form of a thing is the mode in which it reveals itself; and that is determined by its nature". John Chrysostom long ago said: "It is not possible to be of one essence and to have the form of another". Christ existed in the form of God because He Himself is God. Hence the Apostle asserts that He was God's equal, but in His self-abasement He did not hold fast to this equality but emptied Himself of it, and instead took the lowly form of a bond-servant. His humiliation presupposes His former dignity and glory. Had He not been infinitely more than a created being, it would have been no renunciation to become a servant; that He already was, according to the blasphemous teaching of Dawnism. Out of such a condition He could never have risen. The highest angel in heaven, far from having to stoop in order to become a servant, is but a servant and can never be aught else. But the very fact that He did humble Himself, even unto the death of the cross, is positive proof that He was no created being, no mere man, but God over all and blessed forever. Romans 9:5. But even in His amazing self-abasement He did not renounce His glorious attributes as a Divine Person: He veiled them beneath His lowly human garb, save when occasion demanded their display. Both Omnipotence and Omniscience belonged to Him while on earth, and He often exhibited both in the sight of men. The proof of this is abundant and conclusive. 2. In the incarnation our Lord had but one nature, not two natures, as Christians have always held. (Series I. pp. 179,180,184). We quote: "Neither was Jesus a combination of the two natures, human and spiritual. The blending of two natures produces neither the one nor the other, but an imperfect, hybrid thing, which is obnoxious to the Divine arrangement. When Jesus was in the flesh He was a perfect human being; previous to that He was a perfect spiritual being; and since His resurrection He is a perfect spiritual being of the highest or Divine order? Thus we see that in Jesus there was no mixture of natures, but that twice He experienced a change of nature; first, from spiritual to human; afterward, from human to the highest order of spiritual nature, the Divine; and in each case the one was given up for the other."-"We have no record of any being, either spiritual or human, ever having been changed from one nature to another, except the Son of God; and this was an exceptional case, for an exceptional purpose? Thus we find that the Scriptures regard the spiritual and human natures as separate and distinct, and furnish no evidence that the one will evolve or develop into the other" ... Here again there is no mistaking the teaching of Millennial Dawn. Before Christ appeared in human form among men He was a spirit being of a very high rank, but a creature. When He became a man His spirit nature was somehow dropped; it was not united with the human, it was not even merged into the human, it was "changed" into the purely and distinctively human nature, so that while on earth and during the whole period of His earthly life He was a man, only a man, perfect indeed, but a man with nothing superhuman or supernatural in Him or about Him. The spirit being ceased to be. The book asserts with a positive ness that error always assumes, that in Jesus Christ "there was no mixture of natures". The vital doctrine of the incarnation of the Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, is denied, and Christ is degraded to the level of Adam before his sin and fall. In short, the book virtually affirms that there was no incarnation whatever. It appears needless to point out how completely and thoroughly the Word of God contradicts this false and degrading view of our Lord's blessed Person. Let but a few texts be cited as evidence that Christ did actually assume our human nature, sinless of course, but true and genuine human nature. John 1:14 : "And the Word was made [became, R. V.] flesh and dwelt among us, (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth". Mark the prominent features of this great Scripture: (a). The Word, Christ, became flesh; He did not cease to be the Word in doing so; His incarnation was neither self-extinction, nor was He changed into a mere man. (b). He still remained the Word after He had assumed the human nature, for we are assured that "He dwelt among us", obviously the Word dwelt among us, for the pronoun He has the Word for its antecedent. (c). The term "dwelt" literally is "tabernacled", an allusion to the tabernacle of the wilderness. God said, "And let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them". And He symbolically did dwell in the Most Holy Place where the Shechinah appeared. So John affirms, "We beheld His glory", as at the Transfiguration. What was anciently seen in the tabernacle was witnessed in a far more vivid way on the Mount when Moses with Elijah appeared in glory and talked with the incarnate Son of God. Compare with this the further revelation of the same Apostle, 1 John 1:1-3, where three of the most trustworthy of our senses, hearing, sight, touch, are summoned to bear witness to the reality of the presence and glory of the Word of Life as He sojourned among men. (d). "Only begotten" Unigenitus. As used in Scripture this term always designates a single person in the household. As applied to Christ it occurs only in John's writings; here, 1:18; 3:16,18; 1 John 4:9. It marks off His sonship as unique, unshared by any others, even from those who are called the sons of God. John 16:28 : "I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father". From God, into the world, from the world back to God. Eternal Sonship with the Father (Greek, came out from); incarnation; exaltation; oneness with the Father, procession from the Father; redemption completed. He is the God-man, uniting two natures in one, distinct yet mysteriously constituting but one personality. 1 Timothy 3:16 : "God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory." Even if we substitute the revised reading of this great rhythmical verse it still testifies to the theanthropic person of our Lord: "He who was manifested in the flesh", etc. The plain and emphatic teaching is, that Christ, the Son of God, was manifested, i.e., the invisible, eternal Son who dwelt in the bosom of the Father, has been made visible and is brought nigh to us in that He has taken into union with Himself human flesh. He was justified in the Spirit, i.e., He was proved to be what He claimed to be, the Son of God; He was seen and served by angels; was preached unto the Gentiles as a Divine Saviour, and believed on as such; and finally was received up into glory. There we have the inspired history of the incarnation, the earthly life and ministry, and the exaltation of the Lord Jesus, the Son of God. One other Scripture must give its solemn warning against any and all who deny that Jesus Christ assumed our nature and was incarnated in human flesh: "Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God; and every spirit that confesseth not Jesus is not of God; and this is that spirit of the antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it cometh, and now it is in the world" 1 John 4:2; 1 John 3:3. The atonement of Jesus Christ was that of a mere man. (Study ix.) Millennial Dawnism reiterates to weariness that Christ during His sojourn on earth was only and solely a human being. Even the spirit nature He had before coming into the world was changed into a man and so ceased to be. His death, therefore, was a creature's death; His sacrifice only human; His atonement a mere man's. What a wretched caricature of Christ's person and work! What an inadequate and puerile conception it denotes of Divine justice and law, and of man's guilt and ruin by sin! Scripture testifies that man, by his wealth, by his righteousness, by his self-sacrifice, can never redeem himself, much less his fellow man. Psalms 49:6-12; Matthew 25:8-9. God claims this for Himself; He has found a ransom, He Himself is the Saviour of men, and He has laid help on His Fellow, His Equal, even Jesus our Lord. Everywhere in Scripture the sinner's justification before God rests upon what Paul describes as "the righteousness of God" Romans 3:21-26; Romans 4:1-8; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Php_3:9, etc.. That is, it is a Divine righteousness, provided in the Lord Jesus Christ and offered to all men who hear the Gospel. It is not a mere man's righteousness at all that we have in Christ; it is God's own righteousness, and therefore it meets and satisfies every claim upon us whether of law, or justice, or satisfaction to God, or holiness. The Apostle Paul does not shrink from ascribing even divinity to the blood of Christ: "Feed the flock of God which He hath purchased with His own blood" Acts 20:28. An uninspired man would never have dared to write so amazing, so matchless words as these. Of their genuineness there is ample proof.* [* The American Revision has "The Church of the Lord." It stands alone in this reading. The English Revision and the critical texts of Alford, Westcott and Hort. Scrivener, Weymouth and Nestle retain "Church of God". The phrase occurs often in Paul's writings, never once "The Church of the Lord". One can perceive why "Church of God" should be changed into "Church of the Lord," but it is difficult to see why if Paul wrote "Church of the Lord" it should be turned into "Church of God.] 4. The body of Jesus was not raised up from death. (Series II, pp. 125- 130). To explain the disappearance of the body which was crucified the book says: "Our Lord's human body was, however, supernaturally removed from the tomb; because had it remained there it would have been an insurmountable obstacle to the faith of the disciples. We know nothing about what became of it, except that it did not decay or corrupt? Whether it was dissolved into gases or whether it is still preserved somewhere as the grand memorial of God's love, of Christ's obedience, and of our redemption, no one knows; nor is such knowledge necessary" (pp. 129,130). In Series I, p. 231 we read: "Jesus, therefore, at and after His resurrection, was a spirit-a spirit being, and no longer a human being in any sense". Wicked and disastrous as are the teachings of Millennial Dawn noted above, this is immeasurably worse, if that be possible. Here the climax in audacity and falsehood is reached. For here the basal, the vital truth on which Christianity rests, viz., the absolute certainty of Christ's literal and bodily resurrection is denied, is utterly perverted in the face of the testimony of the Four Gospels, of all the Epistles, and of the Revelation, and of the glorified Son of God Himself. If Christ be not risen from the dead, then Christianity is wiped out as a supernatural system, and Christians are of all men the most pitiable, the most fearfully deceived. The heresiarchs of the early centuries, Cerinthus, Marcion, Valentinus were not more daring nor more destructive in their wild vagaries than is the author of these books. The lie invented by the chief priests and elders that His disciples stole His body away during the night while the soldiers slept is less shocking than the baseless and wicked speculation that it was dissolved into gas! To the devout, believing mind, nothing scarcely could be more blasphemous or dreadful than this slander. A thousand years before He appeared in human form the Spirit of God promised Him that His flesh should rest in hope, that it should not see corruption. Psalms 16:9-10; Acts 2:26-28. We know from the record how careful, how anxious we may almost say, Divine Providence was that His body after His death should be protected; hence the Roman guard, the new tomb wherein man never had lain, the official seal, the watch of angels, God's mighty guard, all combined to protect and safeguard the sacred remains until the resurrection. Then the disciples, Mary of Magdala, James the Lord's brother Galatians 1:19, Peter, John, all saw Him alive in His own veritable body; talked with Him, walked with Him, even ate with Him. "Dissolved into gas"! Shocking, most shocking! We learn from the narrative of the Gospels that the risen Saviour appeared to the disciples five times on that memorable first day of the week, that some six times besides He was seen by them; and how often besides during the forty days elapsing between His resurrection and His ascension we are not told. But we know full well that He gave His disciples proof on proof of the reality of His resurrection, that the very body in which He suffered and died on the cross was now risen in the power of an endless life. He was and still is, "This same Jesus". Some slight curiosity was felt to see what the author of Millennial Dawn would do with the repeated appearances of the Lord. Here is how he disposes of them: "The creating of the body and clothing in which He appeared to them, in the very room in which they were gathered, was proof unquestionable that Christ was no longer a human being. As a human being He could not come into the room without opening the door, but as a spirit He could, and there He instantly created and assumed such body of flesh and such clothing as He saw fit for the purpose intended." The writer totally ignores the supreme fact that the Lord's resurrection body, while retaining its identify, was a spiritual body 1 Corinthians 15:44, i.e., a body perfectly adapted to the spirit and its conditions; accordingly, it was no longer under the sway of the natural laws which govern other material bodies. For the notion that Christ instantly created a body with its appropriate dress each time He appeared to His disciples there is not the most distant hint in the entire Bible a notion invented by the exigencies of a theory. The Saviour's own words to His affrighted disciples appear to be designed to forestall such a silly and absurd idea: "Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I myself; handle Me and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see Me have" Luke 24:36-40:5. After His resurrection Jesus became Divine. (Series I, pp. 178,179; Series II, pp. 107,108,131,155). The teaching is, that as a reward for His perfect obedience Jesus was exalted after His death to the highest nature, the Divine. For this Christ-dishonoring doctrine there is not a shred of Scripture. Christ's exaltation is always joined with His bodily resurrection from the dead, and with His glorious person as the God-man Mediator. Acts 2:32-36; Romans 8:34; Ephesians 1:19-23; Php_2:6-11; 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10; 1 Timothy 2:5-6; 1 Timothy 3:16; Hebrews 1:3-4; 1 Peter 3:21-22; Revelation 1:17-18. The Lord Jesus did not and could not become Divine at His exaltation, for He was Divine from eternity. Can a mere creature become a sharer in the Godhead, and be endowed with the infinity and the almightiness of God? Is not the Divine Essence incommunicable? Believers are indeed said to be partakers of the Divine nature, 2 Peter 1:4, but this does not mean that they partake of the perfections of the Almighty. "Partakers of Christ" Hebrews 3:14 is exactly equivalent. But, was there a resurrection of Christ at all if Dawnism teaches the truth? His body was not raised; "He is no longer human in any sense or degree", we are told. His human spirit did not die, for He commended it to His Father. He promised the penitent thief that "this day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise", and it was His spirit that should be in that blessed place. The spirit being He had before His advent was changed into His human spirit, it did not retain a separate existence at all. Well then, Who or what was raised up? The books furnish unmistakable evidence that Mr. Russell holds that a particular class of the saved, called the "little flock", will share with Jesus in the possession of the Divine nature. This notion is taught with caution and reserve, but hints of it are met with here and there in the volumes. One can easily guess who constitute this favored company. On meeting with it one is instantly reminded of the lie of Satan, "Ye shall be as God" Genesis 3:5:6. The Second Advent of the Lord Jesus Christ took place in October, 1874. (Vol. II, 187,199; 234-245). This startling announcement is reached by a process of chronological and mathematical reasoning founded partly on the Hebrew Jubilee years. Of the results of his calculations Mr. Russell entertains no misgiving. He is persuaded, or affirms that he is, the Lord actually came to our earth in the fall of 1874 and He is now present here. (Vol. II, 240). Accordingly, the glorified Son of God has already been in the world personally and literally for thirty-seven years! In reading this amazing statement which is made again and again one stares, and rubs his eyes and stares. Old-fashioned Christians have for centuries believed that the glorious advent of Christ will be accompanied by the most majestic tokens of the Divine Presence and the most stupendous changes and revolutions in both earth and sky. They are profoundly convinced that the Word of God warrants such anticipation; nay, it is because of the Lord's own testimony touching this mighty event that they thus believe and expect. But this period of thirty-seven years since 1874 differs but little if at all from any other thirty-seven years during a thousand years. Nay, the student of history could point out period after period in the last five hundred years marked by immensely more tragic events than any of this. As if to put us on guard against being deceived by plausible arguments and evidences of His presence our Lord has with most solemn words warned us: "Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is the Christ, or Here; believe it not .... If therefore they shall say unto you, Behold, He is in the wilderness; go not forth: Behold, He is in the inner chambers; believe it not. For as the lightning cometh forth from the east, and is seen even unto the west; so shall be the coming of the Son of Man" Matthew 24:23-27, R. V. Mr. Russell refuses to accept the word "lightning", and he substitutes for it "bright shining", and makes it refer to the sun's rising. He does so to escape the idea of the suddenness of the advent as symbolized by the lightning's flash, for this rendering would contradict his theory that Christ's "presence" is gradually disclosed, that He may be long on the earth and but few (the Dawnists only) be cognizant of the stupendous fact. As usual he is totally mistaken. Every version examined (five English, three Italian, the Vulgate and the Spanish); every Lexicon (Thayer, Green, Liddell and Scott, Sophocles, and Vincent's Word Studies), translate the Greek word "lightning". Attention is called to this particular instance of mistranslation of Scripture for the reason that it is but a sample of the uniform effort to empty every text of its true meaning if it in any wise denies Millennial Dawnism. Scores of such abuses of Scripture as the above are encountered in these books; nay, the characteristic features of this vicious system betray Biblical perversion at every point. For example, Paul's three supernatural accompanists of the advent, the "shout", the "voice of the archangel", and the "trump of God" 1 Thessalonians 4:16 are all symbols and denote the agitation, dissatisfaction, and restlessness everywhere manifest throughout the civilized world since 1874! So we are oracularly told. If this be all the Apostle meant, then we must confess that the "majesty of the prediction is lost in the poverty of its fulfillment." Let one other text be mentioned- Revelation 6:16 : "Fall on us [cover, protect] and hide us from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne." "The thought is that of protection, not of destruction. The real fulfillment is already beginning." Furthermore, according to the plain teaching of Scripture the resurrection of the saints takes place at the Lord's Coming. 1 Corinthians 15:51-57; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. It appears also that the two events are contemporaneous and simultaneous; the Lord's Coming, even before He reaches the earth, effects the rising of sleeping saints and the transformation of living believers, when both together are caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17. We are assured that this majestic event will occur in "a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed, 1 Corinthians 15:51. Millennial Dawn likewise teaches that the resurrection takes place at the Lord's advent, but not immediately; four years lie between the Lord's "presence" on earth and the resurrection of the saints; the one occurs in 1874, the other in 1878. (Vol. III, pp. 234-5; 302-306). We read: "That in the spring of 1878 all the holy apostles and other 'overcomers' of the Gospel age who slept in Jesus were raised spirit beings, like unto their Lord and Master"? "The Lord Jesus and the risen saints already here [are] engaged in the great harvest work."-"Such is the present situation: the great Judge has come-not as at the first advent, in a body of humiliation, for sacrifice, but in the plenitude of His power as a spirit being". "And while we conclude that their resurrection is now an accomplished fact, and hence that they as well as the Lord are now present in the earth, the fact, that we do not see them is no obstacle to faith when we remember that, like their Lord, they are now spirit beings, and, like Him, invisible to men". Since 1874 Jesus Christ has been dwelling on the earth; since 1878 the risen saints have also been sojourning on the earth; and no mortal has the slightest inkling of it save C. T. Russell and his followers! All this is sufficiently astounding, but these notions stand not alone. Other marvelous things are encountered in the volumes we are reviewing. "The spring of 1878 marks the date when the nominal church systems were 'spewed out' Revelation 3:16, and from that time (A.D. 1878) they are not the mouth-pieces of God, nor in any degree recognized by Him" . . . "We recognize A.D. 1881 as marking the close of special favor to Gentiles-the close of the 'high-calling', or invitation to the blessings peculiar to this age-to become joint-heirs with Christ and partakers of the Divine nature" (Vol. 235). It requires courage or .recklessness to make the above statements. For thirty-three years the evangelical churches have been without Divine recognition, "spewed out" of the Lord's mouth! And yet during this same period the Gospel has been carried into the most hopelessly degraded and ignorant sections of our planet by the most devoted and truly apostolic servants of Jesus Christ since the first century. For thirty years all special favor to the Gentiles has ceased! This in the face of the most fruitful years of missions for almost ten centuries. The Dawnists have matchless courage. For bald assertion their equals it would be hard to find. 7. The final consummation of the age will take place in October, 1914. (Vol. II, p. 234, Vol. III, p. 153). This date, 1914, as terminating absolutely the present order of things of the world, is taken as fixed beyond doubt or peradventure. Dozens of times the writer of these books sets it down as positive and unalterable. He finds its parallel in the ministry and the rejection of the Saviour by the Israelites, A.D. 33 to A.D. 70, when Jerusalem's overthrow occurred and the Jews went into an exile which still endures. So the "harvest", or the final testing, runs from A.D. 1874 to 1914 when Gentile rule will be destroyed, Christendom be annihilated, all wrong end, and righteousness and peace fill the redeemed world. It is then that the Millennium, so long expected and so long yearned after, finally comes and the planet celebrates its glad, its unending jubilee! One grows weary of this everlasting attempt to fix chronologically the end of the age. For nearly a thousand years men, many of them devout and earnest Christians, have been quite sure that they had discovered the key of chronological prophecy and confidently announced the time of the end. Awhile before the year A.D. 1000 the world became panic stricken, for it was believed that date would coincide with the final judgment and world's end. Miller, Cumming, Elliott, Dimbleby, Totten, and one does not know how many more, tried their hands at fixing the date of the consummation, on chronological and astronomical grounds: they settled both day and date with exactness, and ignominiously failed, of course. Mark 13:32 should stop this nonsense, but alas, it does not. But three years remain of our age. One can readily perceive what enthusiasm the nearness of the end must arouse in the hearts of believers in Mr. Russell's dates. If but three years lie between us and the cosmical revolutions and convulsions which will shake the earth to its foundations, then why should Dawnists cling to their property and tightly grip their money. Soon it will not be needed, wealth will be worthless and bonds have no market. It is no surprise, therefore, that Mr. Russell's followers pour a continuous stream into the Watch Tower treasury, nor that sermons can be printed in multitudes of newspapers all over the land, nor that great halls can be hired for lectures, nor that these volumes can be sold at 37 cents a copy. 8. At the final resurrection, which is simultaneous for all the dead save "the little flock", the Gospel will be preached to the unsaved and the great mass of mankind will accept it and be saved. (Vol. I, Study 6, 8, 9). The preaching to the unsaved dead now at length raised up will last for one hundred years at least, and it may continue throughout the entire day of Christ, i.e., during the Millennium (p. 144). There are two world-wide judgments recorded in the Bible, that of the nations, Matthew 25:31-46; and that of Revelation 20:11-15 -the judgment before the Great White Throne, and which seems to be confined exclusively to the dead, small and great. The two include the race except the saints who come not into judgment as to life and death John 5:24. In neither of these judgments is there a hint that opportunity will be had for those arrayed before these thrones to repent, believe, and be saved. On the contrary, their eternal destiny is fixed by the Almighty Judge. Note how all-embracing these two judgments are; the one includes "all the nations", the other, "the dead, small and great". None escape save those who have part in "the first resurrection" Revelation 20:4-6. In both cases eternal doom, irreparable and indescribable, falls upon the impenitent and ungodly who rejected Christ in this world and life. Moreover, the judgment before the Great White Throne is expressly said to follow the thousand years: "But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished" Revelation 20:5. "The rest of the dead" include all who have no part in the first resurrection. Mr. Russell labors vigorously to cast doubt on the genuineness of Revelation 20:5. He seeks to negate its witness, for it squarely contradicts his theory that all the dead who share not in the first resurrection will be raised at the beginning of the Thousand Years, and they will then be given the opportunity to repent and be saved. But as usual he is quite wrong. He stands alone in his rejection of the verse. Every critical Greek text from Griesbach to Nestle. and Swete (1907) retains the words, nor does one of these scholars cherish the slightest suspicion of its integrity. 9. Two other errors of this vicious system can be no more than mentioned, not expanded, by reason of the limits to which this paper must needs be confined. One of these, the ninth error, essential and fundamental in Christianity, is the Person and work of the Holy Spirit. There is a strange and ominous silence regarding this most important subject very apparent in the writings of Mr. Russell. A careful reading of these volumes comprising more than a thousand pages has discovered but one solitary reference to the Spirit; it is a casual mention of the Spirit in connection with the Day of Pentecost. The statement is simply made as a historical fact, or rather as an event which marks a stage in the development of the Christian Church. Not one word of teaching has the writer found in Millenial Dawn as to the distinct personality of the Spirit, or as to His supreme agency in the salvation of sinners. To Him is ascribed in the Bible the regeneration, sanctification and spiritual growth of the believer. How vast the place that is assigned to Him in Scripture, in Creation, in the training of Israel for their mission, in the inspiration of the Old Testament prophets and psalmists, in the enduement of Christ Himself for His work of redemption, in the planting and training of the Christian Church, in the gifts bestowed on the apostles and prophets, in the guidance of the Church by its chosen teachers, and in the inspired writers of the New Testament, all attentive readers of Scripture know. Shortly before His crucifixion the Lord Jesus left with His disciples this majestic promise: "And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter ... even the Spirit of truth." "Another Comforter," that is, one instead of Himself, one like Himself and one that would continue and complete His own great revelation John 14:16-18; John 14:26; John 15:26-27; John 16:7-14. On the Day of Pentecost this promise was fulfilled by the gift of the Spirit in marvellous power and efficiency. But Russellism is totally and criminally silent touching this mighty truth. Mr. Russell is in no Biblical sense a Trinitarian. He ignores the person and work of the Spirit in his system of doctrine and has nothing to supply His place save his own views of the Word of God. Even the Son of God he affirms was once a creature, then a mere man, but now at length exalted to be Divine. This is in plain contradiction to God's own solemn assertion in Isaiah 43:10-11 : "Ye are My witnesses, saith Jehovah, and My servant whom I have chosen; that ye may know and believe Me. and understand that I am He: before Me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after Me. I, even I, am Jehovah; and besides Me there is no Saviour." Nor is he a monotheist. According to his teaching, there are other gods besides Jehovah. The "little flock" he holds are likewise to become sharers of the Divine nature and be exalted even as Jesus was. Here, therefore, the inference is quite plain, namely, that Mr. Russell admits a plurality of gods. In all this there is a curious analogy between Russell's theology and Mormonism; for Mormonism likewise holds that there are many gods; each of these was once a human being like we are and has grown by evolution into a god. One of the teachers of Mormonism, Brigham Young, affirms that Adam is our father and our God, the only God with whom we have to do. Millennial Dawn is essentially polytheistic; and as it has always happened with polytheism, this system, should it endure, will ultimately sink into idolatry. 10. The other error relates to the destiny of the wicked. On scarcely any other point does Mr. Russell so constantly and persistently dwell as on the doctrine of future and eternal punishment. He denies without qualification that the wicked, the lost, suffer in another life. As usual with him, the teaching of the Bible on this terrible theme he either evades or gives it a typical interpretation. The grotesque subject of one of his most popular lectures, a lecture he has delivered throughout our country, in Canada, and also in England, and published in a vast number of papers and periodicals, is "To Hell and Back Again." Crowds have listened with no little satisfaction to his assertions that there is no hell, no eternal punishment, and no hopelessness after death. He holds that in the resurrection which is to include both the righteous and the wicked, the gospel of salvation shall be preached to all who did not receive it, though having heard, while in this life, and to those who never had the opportunity while in the earthly life to hear and believe. For one hundred years the preaching to these classes shall continue and the great mass of them will believe and enter into eternal life. Those who persistently refuse the offer of salvation and reject the Lord's mercy will be annihilated; an act of Divine power will blot them out of existence forever. It needs but a remark or two in order to convince any honest and right-minded person that such teaching is not only unscriptural but the very opposite. Our Lord Himself, Jesus Christ the Son of God, revealed more of the eternal punishment of the lost than any other witness of God in the Bible. In twelve texts of the New Testament He speaks of the place where the wicked are confined as Gehenna, and in each save one the words of most solemn warning as to the eternal consequences of sin fell from His own lips. He describes it as the place where their worm never dies and where the fire is never quenched. He teaches that the punishment of the lost is of the same duration as the life of the saved-eternal. Matthew 25:46. In the Revelation it is called the lake of fire and the second death. These are the terms that are used to depict the eternal state of the wicked. The second death is not annihilation. We read in Revelation 19:20; Revelation 20:10 that after a thousand years in the lake of fire the Beast and the False Prophet are still there undestroyed. It is a forbidding theme, appalling to the natural heart, but nevertheless one clearly taught in the Scriptures that the rejecters of Jesus Christ, the haters of God, will be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power. Summmary of the False Doctrines of Millennial Dawn 1. Christ before His advent was not Divine. 2. When He was in the world He was still not Divine. 3. His atonement was exclusively human, a mere man's. 4. Since His resurrection He is Divine only, no longer human at all. 5. His body was not raised from the dead. 6. His Second Advent took place in 1874. 7. The saints were raised up in 1878. 8. Both Christ and the saints are now on earth and have been for thirty seven and thirty-three years respectively. 9. The professing Christian Church was rejected of God in 1878. 10. The final consummation and end will take place in 1914. 11. Silence as to the person and work of the Holy Spirit. 12. The destiny of the wicked. Such is the Millennial Dawn of C. T. Russell, a mixture of Unitarianism, Universalism, Second Probation, and Restorationism, and the Swedenborgian method of exegesis. Let the reader remember that imposition is not exposition, nor is eisegesis exegesis. Mr. Russell constantly employs both; he imposes on Scripture his own views and reads into it that which never entered the mind of the inspired writer. May God in His infinite mercy preserve His people from being deceived and betrayed by this counterfeit of Christianity. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 36: - MORMONISM: ITS ORIGIN, CHARACTERIS... ======================================================================== Mormonism: Its Origin, Characteristics, and Doctrines By Rev. R. G. McNiece, D. D., For Twenty Years Prior to 1897, Pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Salt Lake City, Utah The writer has lived in Salt Lake City, the official headquarters of Mormonism, for over thirty years, and he has improved the opportunity to secure a complete understanding of the system. In the great Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, during a whole generation, he has heard Mormonism expounded and defended, again and again, by its chief officials-by President Brigham Young, and President John Taylor, and their successors, Wilford Woodruff, Lorenzo Snow, and Joseph F. Smith. In various Mormon meeting-houses, also, from Idaho to Arizona, he has heard the system set forth by many of its chief apostles, bishops, and elders. Furthermore, the writer has diligently studied the chief official books of Mormonism, especially the "Book of Mormon", the "Doctrine and Covenants", the "Pearl of Great Price", and, supplementing these, the Mormon Catechism, Elder Robert's "New Witness for God", Professor Talmage's "Lectures on the Articles of Faith", the works of Apostle Orson Pratt, Lucy Smith's "History of the Prophet Joseph", and the Autobiography of Joseph Smith. And besides he has read a great mass of pamphlets and articles by Mormon officials. The standpoint of the writer is that of friendly sympathy and good-will toward the men and women among the common people in the Mormon ranks, whose sincerity he has no desire to call in question. But since Mormonism keeps from 1,500 to 2,000 missionaries scattered up and down the country, propagating this most erroneous and harmful system, organizing Mormon meetings, and separating families, in the Eastern, Middle, Southern and Northwestern States, patriotic and Christian people everywhere need to have a clear idea of what Mormonism really is, and the shameful way in which it dishonors the Bible and the Christian religion, so that they can help to protect their own communities from the curse. And it is impossible to understand its character, without understanding its origin, so let us consider that first. The Origin of the Mormon System 1. As an organization, it is only eighty-two years old, going back to April, 1830. About this time, or a few months before, the Book of Mormon was published; and on April 6th, 1830, the Mormon Church was organized with six members, in Fayette, Seneca County, New York. Notwithstanding the long-continued effort to surround this origin with great mystery, and various spectacular fireworks from heaven, as manipulated by Joseph Smith, there is no mystery about it. The period of eighty-two years is not long enough to take us back to the region of mystery. 2. The two main sources of its origin: The first source is a group of three designing men, who put their profane wits together to palm off on various communities in New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, this crude, bogus, manmade system under the garb of Christian phraseology, in order to deceive the unthinking. People in general think of Joseph Smith as the one man above all others who originated the Mormon System. But the facts are solid against such a proposition. Smith was ignorant and illiterate, hardly able to read until after he was a grown man. He knew practically nothing about the Bible, according to his mother's statement, and there is no substantial evidence in his life and conduct that he ever had any religion in his heart. A religious man, however erratic he might be, who had been trained in the Bible and in theology, was needed to give the bogus system some kind of religious setting. The only man connected with the scheme from its very beginning, long before the public organization, who had any such qualifications, was the Revelation Sidney Rigdon. About 1819, when 26 years of age, he was licensed to preach as a Baptist minister, and in 1821 became pastor of a small Baptist church in Pittsburg. He was an interesting speaker, but very erratic, and constantly presenting all sorts of wild and startling theories which unsettled the people. In 1824 he was deposed from the Baptist denomination because he was unwilling to work in harmony with its leaders. About two years later, he became a minister of the Campbellite denomination, and came under the powerful influence of that strong man, Alexander Campbell, who thoroughly indoctrinated him in all the doctrines and views peculiar at that time to the denomination. But Rigdon quarreled with Campbell, and argued if the latter could secure fame and authority for himself by organizing a new church, then he, Rigdon, could secure still greater fame and authority by giving to the world both a new revelation and a new religion, through the Book of Mormon. The two unprincipled men who assisted Rigdon in working out this scheme were Parley P. Pratt, who afterwards became one of the twelve apostles, and Joseph Smith. Pratt furnished the mental and moral audacity necessary to propagate such a dishonest scheme, and Joseph Smith furnished the avaricious cunning, which enabled him to so commercialize the whole affair that the great bulk of the financial profit and of the ecclesiastical power fell into his hands. He occupied a subordinate place only until Rigdon could put the spurious Book of Mormon into its present shape. But just as soon as the church was organized, Joseph Smith seized the reins of power, rode rough-shod over everything and everybody that stood in his way, and did not lay down the power until his death in June, 1844. The kind of man Pratt was is illustrated by the fact that he lost his life in 1857 near Fort Gibson, Arkansas, at the muzzle of a shot-gun in the hands of an enraged husband, whose wife Pratt had induced to desert her home and her children, and go with him to Utah as one of his plural wives. These three unprincipled men were the fabricators of the Mormon system. The Characteristics of Mormonism, Which Make It What It Is It is a strongly anti-American system. By that is meant that it flatly contradicts the fundamental principles of our free, representative government, by insisting that priesthood government in civil affairs is the only rightful government in this country, or any country. Apostle Orson Pratt, speaking for the Mormon Church, thus lays down the law: "The kingdom of God (by which he means the Mormon priesthood) is an order of government established by Divine authority .... All other governments are illegal and unauthorized .... Any people attempting to govern themselves by laws of their own making, and by officers of their own appointment, are in direct rebellion against the kingdom of God". (Orson Pratt's Works, p. 41). Nothing is left undone to magnify the power and authority of the priesthood, and the people are instructed that to disobey the priesthood is the same as disobeying God. One of the official books of the church thus sets forth this extravagant and blasphemous claim: "Men who hold the priesthood possess Divine authority thus to act for God; and by possessing part of God's power, they are in reality part of God;-and those who reject it, reject God. even the power of God". ("New Witness for God," p. 187). This tyrannical priesthood dictates and controls all the affairs of the people in the average Mormon community. 2. The Mormon System is thoroughly anti-Christian. While appropriating to itself Christian phraseology, and New Testament names and forms, it perverts or denies every fundamental doctrine of the Christian religion. It not only denies but ridicules the Christian doctrine of the spirituality of God, and teaches the people that He is a big man like Brigham Young. For Mormonism teaches that Adam is the god of this world. It denies that Christ's atonement has anything to do with our sins, but only with the sins of Adam. To get rid of our sins, we must work out our salvation through the teachings, and forms, and ordinances of the Mormon Church, with its multiplied baptisms for the dead. 3. Mormonism is a deliberate counterfeit of the Christian religion, intended to deceive the ignorant. It calls itself, "The Church of Jesus Christ", a name to which it can lay no claim. The term "Church" is a Christian name and belongs alone to Christians-to those who are loyal to the Christian Church, to Jesus Christ as the Divine and only head of the Church, and to the Bible as the supreme and only revelation from God. (1) Mormonism tries to palm off on the world a counterfeit prophet in the person of Joseph Smith. He had all the marks of a counterfeit or false prophet, and not one of the marks of a true prophet. In prophetic times, what were the marks of a true prophet? In the first place, he was a man of pure and upright life; he was noted for spirituality of mind, so that he could discern spiritual truth and teach it to others. He was loyal to God, everywhere and always, and he never made merchandise of his prophetic office. Joseph Smith was just the very opposite of this. Instead of living a pure and upright life, he was immoral and wicked, as we shall presently see. He had no spirituality whatever, and he constantly made merchandise of his pretended prophetic position, so that it secured for him houses and lands, and valuable corner lots and lucrative offices, such as the office of mayor, municipal magistrate, municipal judge, Lieutenant General of the Nauvoo Legion, and the nomination to be president. The Mormon people have allowed themselves to be grievously deceived by his Autobiography, written in 1838. He tries to make out that when he was fifteen, he was a pious, praying youth, greatly concerned about religion, and especially troubled because there were so many religious sects, he could not tell which one to join. Now let us see what Joseph Smith's immediate neighbors have to say about his character. There is no lack of evidence. Joseph Smith's father and mother, with the other children, removed from Vermont to Palmyra, Ontario County, New York, in the summer of 1815. They were fortunetellers, dreamers, vision-seers. The father was a money-digger, and the son Joseph became famous all through that region as a money-digger. Young Joseph was about eleven years old at this time, having been born in Sharon, Vermont, Dec. 23, 1805. After two or three years they moved about three miles south to Manchester, where they lived up to 1830. Take first the testimony of Pomeroy Tucker, editor of the "Wayne Sentinel," at Palmyra, on whose press the first edition of the Book of Mormon was printed. Says Mr. Tucker: "At this period (from 1820 to 1830) in the life and career of Joseph Smith, Jr., or Joe Smith, as he was universally named, and the Smith family, they were popularly regarded as an illiterate, whisky drinking, irreligious race of people; the first named, the chief subject of this biography, being unanimously voted the laziest and most worthless of the generation? He could utter the most palpable exaggeration, or marvelous absurdity, with the utmost apparent gravity". ("Origin, Rise and Progress of Mormonism", p.16). In 1833 sixty-two residents of Palmyra made affidavit, over their own signatures, to the following statements: "We, the undersigned, have been acquainted with the Smith family for a number of years while they resided near this place, and we have no hesitation in saying that we consider them destitute of Shat moral character which ought to entitle them to the confidence of any community .... Joseph Smith, Sr., and his son Joseph, were, in particular, considered entirely destitute of moral character and addicted to vicious habits". There is much more evidence of a similar character. (2) Mormonism tries to palm off on the world a counterfeit Bible, which it calls the "Book of Mormon" and sets forth as a revelation from God, putting it on the same level with our own Christian Bible, placing the two side by side in the Mormon pulpit. Now the Book of Mormon is simply a poor and weak imitation of our English Bible a lifeless counterfeit. Where did the Book of Mormon come from? Let all that absurd, fictitious yarn of Joseph Smith, about an angel disclosing to him the box hidden in the hill of Cumorah, New York, on whose golden plates, in the reformed Egyptian language, was contained the material out of which he translated the Book of Mormon-let all that be cut out as having not a particle of foundation. There was no angel. The only plates Joseph Smith ever dug out of the hill of Cumorah, or any other hill, were put there by himself or by one of his agents. While the literature in regard to the origin of the Book of Mormon is quite voluminous, the real facts about its origin can be stated in small compass: In 1808-09 the Revelation Solomon Spaulding settled down as a citizen in the town of Conneaut, in northeastern Ohio. He was a man of education, having graduated from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1785. He studied theology, and for a number of years was a minister of one of the Christian denominations in western New York. He had given up preaching, and had settled down in Conneaut as a business man, seeking to establish an iron foundry. Being fond of Bible literature and religious romance and archaeology, he became interested in the many Indian mounds in that region, and especially in their builders. This led him to plan a religious romance, in which he brought a colony of the Lost Tribes from Jerusalem into this country, where they developed into two nations, the Nephites and the Lamanites, a purely imaginary people. The Book of Mormon, composed of fifteen different books, gives an account of their wanderings, hardships and battles. The records are alleged to have been written on plates of brass. These plates begin to jingle on the second page of the Book of Mormon, and they continue to jingle until they are finally sealed up and hidden away in the hill of Cumorah, near Palmyra, in 420 A.D. Now there are ten intelligent witnesses, who stated over their affidavit in 1833, when the subject was fresh in mind, that about 1811-12, they heard Solomon Spaulding reading a religious story from the "Manuscript Found", trying to show that the American Indians are the descendants of the Lost Tribes. They remembered the quaint phraseology, and the queer names, Lehi, Nephi, Jarom, Moroni, and the rest. The expression, "and it came to pass", occurred so often, the boys nick-named Spaulding, "Old Come-to- Pass". When the Book of Mormon was published these witnesses identified at once the queer names and phraseology. When Esquire Wright heard the Book of Mormon read in Conneaut he exclaimed, "Old Come-to-Pass has come to life again". These witnesses were John Spaulding, brother of Solomon, his wife Martha Spaulding, Henry Lake, business partner of Solomon Spaulding, John N. Miller, who worked for Spaulding, Aaron Wright, Oliver Smith, and Naham Howard, three of Spaulding's neighbors, and Artemas Cunningham, of Geauga County, who visited Spaulding in October, 1811, to collect a debt. Spaulding showed him a story he was writing about the lost tribes. Mr. Cunningham spent half the night listening to the story. When the Book of Mormon appeared he recognized that in outline it was the same thing that Spaulding had read to him. The two other witnesses are the widow of Solomon Spaulding, and Mr. Joseph Miller, of Amity, Pennsylvania, where Spaulding died. The evidence clearly shows that the Book of Mormon grew out of Spaulding's story, but the defenders of Mormonism lose their mental balance whenever this subject is mentioned, and they treat it dishonestly. They say: "we have the Spaulding manuscript in the Oberlin College Library, brought back from Honolulu in 1884 by President Fairchild, and there is no connection between it and the Book of Mormon". Certainly not. No person well informed about the history of Mormonism ever claimed that there is any connection. But why say, "We have the Spaulding Manuscript"? All that the facts warrant is, "There is a Spaulding manuscript in Oberlin", and the possession of that manuscript will afford no help to the defenders of Mormonism against the plagiarism of the book until they do one thing which they are unable to do; namely, establish a general negative, and show that this manuscript in Oberlin College Library is the only manuscript which Solomon Spaulding ever wrote. This can not be done, for there is conclusive evidence that he wrote three or four manuscripts, and one of them was the "Manuscript Found", which he read to his neighbors, and which formed the basis of the Book of Mormon. So when the champions of Mormonism say: "The Book of Mormon could not have grown out of the Spaulding manuscript, for that manuscript is in Oberlin, and there is no connection between it and the Book of Mormon", they take a dishonest position by falsely assuming that this is the only manuscript Spaulding wrote, whereas there is positive evidence that he wrote several manuscripts. The fact, therefore, is established by abundant evidence that the Book of Mormon is a plagiarism from Spaulding's religious romance. Just when Rigdon, Pratt, and Smith first met and concocted the dishonest scheme of the buried plates is not altogether clear, probably about 1827. A strenuous attempt has been made to show that Rigdon and Pratt had no knowledge of the Book of Mormon until its publication, and they go through the wretched farce of pretending to be converted to Mormonism after the Book of Mormon had been published, which they say they knew nothing about before, although evidence shows that they both had been in the scheme to publish it since 1827. What a set of deceivers! The one important fact is the plagiarism of the Book of Mormon from the Spaulding romance, entitled "Manuscript Found". It is not specially important to know who edited the Spaulding story, and developed it into the present Book of Mormon. But all the evidence points to Sidney Rigdon, and it points to no one else. The evidence shows the following things: That a copy of the Spaulding manuscript was in the printing office of Patterson and Lambdin, in Pittsburg, for a good while after 1814; that Rigdon and Lambdin were on intimate terms from 1818 to the death of Lambdin in August, 1825; that more than two years before the publication of the Book of Mormon, Rigdon had spoken to several of his friends about the coming publication of a book from golden plates, which would produce a great religious revolution. During these two years Rigdon was preaching wild and startling doctrines, afterwards found in the Book of Mormon. Any one familiar with the peculiar Campbellite doctrines of that time can not read far into the Book of Mormon without discovering that the author had been a Campbellite. His "speech betrayeth" him in the employment of phraseology to which he had become accustomed while associated with the brethren of that denomination. Furthermore, the book is full of Rigdon's own peculiar views. He deserves credit, however, for making the Book of Mormon condemn polygamy, and for condemning it himself, which brought him into sharp conflict with both Joseph Smith and his successor, Brigham Young. (3) Mormonism imposes upon the people a counterfeit priesthood, which it calls the "Melchizedek and Aaronic priesthood", although there never was any Melchizedek order of priesthood. There was one man by that name, both a king and a priest, without predecessor or successor, and so chosen as a type of the priesthood of the Son of God. The Aaronic priesthood descended from father to son, in a marvelous way, for forty-five generations, until all priesthood was fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Since the one perfect sacrifice of Himself made by our great High Priest, Jesus Christ, any person who pretends to be a priest and claims the right to stand between us and God, is what our Saviour calls "a thief and a robber". What a bogus priesthood this pretended Mormon priesthood is! It has no more right to administer the Christian ordinances of baptism and the Lord's Supper, than any other group of unprincipled men who repudiate Jesus Christ as the Divine Head of the Church, and go through, the blasphemous farce of electing themselves members of "the holy priesthood". And yet Mormons tremble at the dictates of this bogus priesthood, and fear to exercise the freedom of opinion which is their right. The 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th Chapters of Hebrews give us Divine instruction as to the fact that all priesthood was forever fulfilled, and came to an end in Jesus Christ. 4. Mormonism imposes upon the people a counterfeit group of apostles. It requires four things to make a true apostle: First, He must have been acquainted with Jesus Christ before His crucifixion. Second, He must have seen Christ after His resurrection from the dead. Third, He must have received his commission as an apostle directly from Christ, as Divine Head of the Church. Fourth, He must be able to work miracles to show that God sent him. So that any group of men now who say they are apostles, are simply willful deceivers, and the truth is not in them. The Doctrines of the Mormon System All that has been said under the preceding division about the characteristics of Mormonism, has been a setting forth of its false and anti-Scriptural teachings on the four important subjects of prophecy, revelation, Divine authority of the bogus priesthood, and the bogus apostles. The Mormon Church does not publish its peculiar teachings and beliefs. If it did, it would gain no more converts; it waits until its converts are thoroughly entrapped before its peculiar doctrines are disclosed. Its whole system is carried on, so far as new converts are concerned, by means of the most systematic deception. Its missionaries wear black frock coats and white cravats so that the people are deceived into supposing that they are Christian ministers. In the Spring of 1844, when the Mormon Church was being severely condemned all over the country, John Wentworth, who was publishing a paper in Chicago, asked Joseph Smith to state what the Mormons believe. Smith and some of his associates put their heads together, and sent out thirteen articles as a summary of Mormon belief. It is simply another piece of deception, for these articles do not contain one doctrine peculiar? to Mormonism, but are rather a summary of doctrines held by the Christian denominations. And yet they stand today as representing Mormon belief. When we come to test these articles by the official books of Mormonism, we find they are thoroughly deceiving. Let us take up the first six or seven of these pretended articles of belief, and see how misleading they are. "Article 1. We Believe In God The Eternal Father, And In His Son Jesus Christ, And In The Holy Ghost." 1. By God the eternal Father, the Mormon officials mean Adam. (For convenience we will use the following abbreviations: B. of M. for Book of Mormon; D. & C. for Doctrine and Covenants; P. G. P. for Pearl of Great Price; Comp. for Compendium of Mormon Doctrine; Key, for Pratt's Key to Theol.; J. of D. for Journal of Discourses-volumes of Mormon Sermons; and M. C. for Mormon Catechism). Brigham Young taught that Adam was promoted to be the god of this world: "He (Adam) is our Father and our God, and the only God with whom we have to do". (J. of D., Vol. I, p. 50). 2. This Adam-god is a polygamist. "When our Father Adam came into the garden of Eden, he came into it with a celestial body, and brought Eve, one of his wives, with him". (Brigham Young, J. of D., I, 50). 3. The Mormon officials teach that those who build up large polygamous establishments on earth, will be promoted to be gods in the heavenly world, and will rule over kingdoms. Take this heathen teaching of Joseph Smith: "God Himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted Man (in other words, simply a big Mormon) .... And you have got to learn how to be gods yourselves, the same as all gods have done before you". (J. of D., VI, 4; Comp. 283). 4. It will be seen that Mormonism believes in many gods. "Are there more gods than one? Yes, many". (Catechism). 5. These gods continue to have. children forever. "Each god, through his wife or wives, raises up a numerous family of sons and daughters,-for each father and mother will be in a condition to multiply forever and ever". (The Seer, 1, 37). This is directly contrary to our Saviour's teaching in Mark 12:25 : "For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven". It seems incredible that such dishonoring heathenish views of God, the Almighty Creator and Governor of the world, should be held and propagated in Christian America, by an organization calling itself "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints". Paul's statement in Romans 1:21-24 seems verified in them. 6. They teach that the Holy Spirit is a kind of ethereal substance diffused through space. "The purest, most refined and subtle of all these substances (such as electricity, galvanism, magnetism) ... is that substance called the Holy Spirit". (Key, p. 39). How refreshing to turn to the Divine Word and read its convincing and authoritative teachings about God. We read in Genesis 1:1 : "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth"; in Deuteronomy 6:4 : "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord"; in Psalms 104:1 : "O Lord my God, Thou art very great; Thou art clothed with honor and majesty"; in Isaiah 45:5 : "I am the Lord, and there is none else"; in John 4:24 : "God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth"; in John 14:26 : "But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in My name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you". The Holy Spirit, then, is a Divine Person, and not an "ethereal substance". "Article 2. We Believe That Men Will Be Punished For Their Own Sins, And Not For Adam's Transgressions." But that is very different from holding that Adam did not transgress the law of God. Here is the teaching of the Mormon Catechism: "Was it necessary that Adam should partake of the forbidden fruit? Yes, unless he had done so, he would not have known good and evil here, neither could he have had mortal posterity". "Is it proper for us to consider the transgression of Adam and Eve as a grievous calamity, and that all mankind would have been infinitely more happy if the Fall had not occurred? No, but we ought to consider the Fall of our first parents as one of the great steps to eternal exaltation and happiness". (Catechism, Chapter 8). What saith the Scriptures?: "If we say that we. have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us" 1 John 1:8. "Wherefore as by one man [Adam] sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned" Romans 5:12. "For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord". "Article 3, We Believe That Through The Atonement Of Jesus Christ All Mankind May Be Saved, By Obedience To The Laws And Ordinances Of The Gospel". 1. That is, the bogus Mormon Gospel. According to the official teachings of Mormonism, who was Jesus Christ? The son of Adam-god and Mary. "The Father has begotten him in his own likeness. He was not begotten of the Holy Ghost. And who is the Father? He is the first of the human family". (Brigham Young, J. of D., I, 50). 2. Christ is represented as having plural wives. "We say it was Jesus Christ who was married (at Cana to the Marys and Martha), whereby He could see His seed before He was crucified" (Apostle O. Hyde, Sermon). "The atonement made by Jesus Christ brought about the resurrection from the dead, and restored life". (B. of M. Alma, 42:23). "Redemption from personal sins can only be obtained through obedience to the requirements of the Gospel [Mormon ceremonies] and a life of good works". "Will all the people be damned who are not Latter-Day Saints? Yes, and a great many of them except they repent speedily". (Brigham Young, J. of D., I, 339). Our Saviour said: "For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that through Him the world might be saved". "Article 4. We Believe That The First Principles And Ordinances Of The Bible Are: First, Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; Second Repentance; Third, Baptism by Immersion for the Remission of Sins; Fourth, Laying on of Hands for the Gift of the Holy Ghost." 1. "The sectarian doctrine of justification by faith alone has exercised an influence for evil since the early days of Christianity". (Talmage's Articlesof Faith, p. 120.) Paul says: "For ye are all the children of God by faith in Jesus Christ" Galatians 3:26:2. How to obtain the Holy Spirit: "There is a set mode by which this great gift (the Holy Spirit) is conferred upon mankind ... the laying on of hands by men who have themselves received it, and have been called of God and ordained to administer it". (That means the Mormon priesthood). Our Saviour said: "How much more shall your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them who ask Him". The Holy Spirit, our Say tour teaches, is given in answer to prayer, and is not dependent on the priesthood of the Mormon Church, or any other church. "Article 5. We Believe That A Man Must Be Called Of God By Prophecy, And By The Laying On Of Hands, By Those Who Are In Authority, To Preach The Gospel And Administer In The Ordinances Thereof." According to Mormonism, the only persons who have any right to administer the ordinances of Baptism and the Lord's Supper are the representatives of the Mormon priesthood. It unchurches all the Christian denominations, and impudently claims that the Mormon Church is the only true church; whereas it is not a church at all in the New Testament sense, and has no more authority than Dowie had, or Mrs. Eddy. Its priesthood is bogus in its origin and its authority. They are what our Saviour calls "thieves and robbers". Paul says in Ephesians 4:11-12 : "And He [Christ] gave some apostles; and some prophets; and some evangelists; and some pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ." "Article 6. We Believe In The Same Organization That Existed In The Primitive Church; Namely, Apostles, Prophets, Pastors, Teachers, Evangelists, Etc." We have shown that it is impossible for men to be true apostles now. Nor is there any warrant in the New Testament for such bogus officials as the "First Presidency of the Church", with its two Counsellors, or for the "High Council", with its despotic methods. The Mormon Church pronounces damnation upon Christian believers who receive baptism from the hands of Christian ministers. "Any person who shall be so wicked as to receive a holy ordinance of the Gospel from the ministers of these apostate (Christian) churches, will be sent down to hell with them unless he repents of the unholy and impious act". (The Seer, Vols. 1 and 2, p. 255). Our Saviour said to His disciples, and to all who should become His disciples to the end of time, in Matthew 28:19 : "Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost". "Article 7. We Believe In The Gift Of Tongues, Prophecy, Visions, Healing, Interpretation Of Tongues." "Article 8. We Believe The Bible To Be The Word Of God, So Far As It Is Correctly Translated; We Also Believe The Book Of Mormon To Be The Word Of God." 1. The priesthood can make additional Scriptures: "Wilford Woodruff is a prophet, ... and he can make Scriptures as good as those in the Bible". (Apostle J. W. Taylor, Conference, Salt Lake, April 5, 1897). "The living oracles [pretended priestly revelations] are worth more to the Latter-Day Saints than all the Bibles" .... (Apostle M. W. Merrill, Conference, Salt Lake, Oct., 1897). 2. Paul tells us, on the other hand, in 2 Timothy 3:16, that all genuine Scripture "is given by inspiration of God". The disgusting doctrine of plural marriage is omitted from these Articles of Faith. But it still Stands in the Book of Doctrine and Covenants as a revelation from God to be observed under pain of eternal damnation. Yet as Mrs. Orson Pratt said: "This pretended revelation was simply a dishonest trick on the part of Joseph Smith to cloak over his own wicked and immoral life, and to keep the peace in his household". it will be seen that the Mormon people are required to accept the pretended revelation sanctioning plural marriage, on pain of eternal damnation, from the following quotation from this bogus revelation which still stands in their official book: "For behold I reveal unto you a new and an everlasting covenant; and if you abide not that covenant then are you damned: for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into My glory? And again, as pertaining to the law of the Priesthood, if any man espouse a virgin and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent; and if he espouse the second and they are virgins and have vowed to no other man, then he is justified; for he cannot commit adultery with that that belongeth unto him and to none else; and if he have ten virgins given unto him by this law, he cannot commit adultery, for they belong unto him; and they are given unto him; therefore is he justified." ("Doctrine and Covenants," chap. 132). Now, what is this but a depraved and cunning bribe to every kind of social immorality? And that has been its direct result for two generations, with the iniquity still going on. It is difficult for any one to study this Mormon system as a whole, without coming to the conclusion that there is something in it beyond the power of man, something positively Satanic. And does it not seem to be a reproach on the Christian churches of this country that, after eighty years, such a system of downright heathenism should still hold the people of one of the great states of the West in absolute bondage, and through its hierarchical power, by means of colonization, be able to influence the election of senators and representatives in Congress from five other states? This latter fact makes it a national and not a local problem. The one important thing to be done is to double the Christian missionary forces in Utah, in order to bring deliverance to those who are in bondage. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 37: - EDDYISM, COMMONLY CALLED "CHRISTIAN SCI... ======================================================================== Eddyism, Commonly Called "Christian Science" By Rev. Maurice E. Wilson, D. D., Dayton, Ohio One of the keenest observers of America has made the remark that "the reason so many new isms are constantly springing up is because the old Gospel is so hard to live." People are looking for a comfortable life here, and an easy way to heaven. They are scanning earth and sky for a royal road. The fight with sin which the Gospel demands is a fierce and bitter fight; and many men and women are anxiously searching for a way of escape, desiring to be "carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease." This desire lies at the basis of Eddyism. Its fundamental principle is that sin and sickness have no real existence. They may be banished by a process of thought. There is no matter; mind is everything. And, in proportion to the progress of the individual in this creed, all disagreeable and unpleasant things vanish. Mrs. Eddy's basic propositions are four in number, and are thus expressed in her own words: "First, God is all in all. Second, God is good, good is mind. Third, Spirit, being all, nothing is matter. Fourth, Life, God, omnipotent good, deny death, evil, sin, disease. Disease, sin, evil, death, deny good, omnipotent God, Life" (p. 113, "Science and Health").* Unconscious of the absurdity of the thing, she placidly tells us that since these statements may be read backward as well as forward, this is a proof that they are true! "The Divine metaphysics .... proves the rule by inversion." So far as their value goes, these four propositions might just as well be read perpendicularly, or obliquely. And by the same method of argument, it would be easy to prove that angels, archangels, cherubim and seraphim, are butterflies, lizards, guinea pigs, and horses. [* NOTE: All quotations from "Science and Health" in this article are from the Edition of 1903.] It is not necessary in this article to review Mrs. Eddy's life or discuss her personality. It is interesting as the study of an eccentric character, but the personal aspect of this subject is a minor aspect. In seeking for the exact teachings of this 'ism', we naturally turn to the fountain and source of it all, the text-book, "Science and Health." This book is to Eddyism all that Blackstone is to the lawyer, or the pharmacopoeia to the physician—and a good deal more,—for never did a body of people accept the utterances and decrees of a superior more slavishly than do the disciples of this cult accept those of its founder. It is out of the question, of course, to consider all the teachings or positions of "Science and Health", and other writings of Mrs. Eddy. That would require more space than "THE FUNDAMENTALS" can give to the subject. To examine only a few of its underlying principles will be sufficient, if these claims can he shown to be contrary to the Word of God and to the experience and common sense of mankind, the whole thing must be rejected as unworthy of confidence. Not only this, but it should be opposed and aggressively combated as a pestiferous error. Now, "Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures" treats of such subjects as Prayer, Marriage, Atonement and Eucharist, Animal Magnetism, Science, Theology, Medicine, Physiology, Creation, and Spiritualism. And these chapters are as utterly destitute of logical arrangement, or natural sequence, as if they had been shaken up in a bag and drawn out by a blind man. Rather than offend the logical sense of the reader, I shall offend the book itself, and selecting a few of these topics consider them in their proper order. "God" What does Mrs. Eddy teach concerning God? Well, for one thing, that God is not a person. He is "Principle"; and of the same impersonal character as the "principle of mathematics." That is her own analogy—"the principle of mathematics." This statement is iterated and re-iterated with intense positive ness. God, moreover, is the only Principle. Mrs. Eddy denies that she is a pantheist. This at first is most astounding; but when we turn to her definition of pantheism we understand her denial. Pantheism, she tells us, is "a belief in the intelligence of matter" (p. 129, "Science and Health"). Since waters began to run, the world never heard so wonderful a definition of pantheism. Even Spinoza himself was not a pantheist according to this interpretation of the word. But inasmuch as in Eddyism "there is no matter", and "mind is everything", and "there is no mind but God", sensible people can reach only one conclusion. We have here out and out pantheism. The author tells us, "There is but one I or Us." "But one I or Us"! Mrs. Eddy declares that Christian Science completely cleansed her mind of all such trivial things as grammar. It certainly looks so. Again, we are told that "God is the only Ego." Perhaps the adherents of this cult believe its founder when she denies that she is a pantheist, but nobody else believes her. The God of Eddyism is hopelessly entangled in the meshes of His own creation. He is imprisoned as the sap is imprisoned in the tree. "Prayer" Consequently, the teachings of "Science and Health" preclude all need and all possibility of prayer. If God is only "Principle", one might as well pray to "the principle of mathematics", or to chemical affinity, or to the Constitution of the United States. There is an entire chapter devoted to "Prayer". But it is not Christian prayer at all. Mrs. Eddy's prayer is virtually a soliloquy, or an attempt at auto-suggestion. And this kind of prayer, we are told, "will be answered, inasmuch as we shall put our desires into practice." It may be worth while to note a few choice morsels from this chapter. "Desire is prayer," and then by way of a fling at the Christians of the world, we are informed that "the habit of pleading with Divine Mind, as one pleads with a human being, perpetuates the belief in God as humanly circumscribed." Is that a fact, or a falsehood? Do Christian men and women believe as they approach their heavenly Father that He is "humanly circumscribed"? Does such a thought ever occur to any of us who have lived in any true sense a life of prayer? Later we come upon the statement, that prayer, as understood by the Christian people of the last 1900 years, "implies the vain supposition that we have nothing to do but ask pardon, and that afterwards we shall be free to repeat the offence." I ask, again, is that a fact or a falsehood? The author either knew that statement to be false, or she did not. If she knew, then she meant to vilify the godly men and women who for all these generations have lifted up holy hands of prayer in the name of Christ their Lord. If she did not know, then it is evident that her chapter on prayer is a tissue of misrepresentations woven out of ignorance, and has as little value as the remainder of the book. There is no room within the confines of Eddyism for the prayer, "God be merciful to me a sinner"—a prayer which, our Lord Himself tells us, sent the publican down from the temple forgiven and justified. There is no place for it because we are distinctly told that "principle does not pardon." She is against "audible prayer", as she calls it. And having endlessly revised and expurgated, without sense and without conscience, her so-called Divine Revelation, she insists that we, who are not her disciples, worship a "corporeal Jehovah." She found it impossible to keep her hands off even the Lord's Prayer. Every Sabbath in every one of her congregations her version of the Lord's Prayer is read aloud, sentence by sentence alternately, with that version which we owe to Jesus Christ. The audience, led by one of the readers, recites the Christian version; and the other reader recites Mrs. Eddy's lingo, in which she addresses God as "Our Father-Mother God, all harmonious" (p. 16, "Science and Health"). As another has said, the alternating sentences produce a well-marked, almost physical nausea, as if one had suddenly been plunged into foul air. "The difficulty is to sit still; to resist the longing to get away, out into the street—anywhere to cleanse the mind of these sacrilegious puerilities." I can corroborate this from experience. As Eddyism is distinctly un-Christian in its views of God, so is it un- Christian in its views of prayer. "Sin and Atonement" Then there is the great fact of sin. Concerning this subject, too, Mrs. Eddy's teaching is pantheistic. It mistakes the whole purpose of Christ's coming into the world. "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost." "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" "Thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins." We very well know that the greatest impediment to man's progress is not sickness, but sin. And yet in the text-book of Eddyism we are told that "The only reality of sin is the awful fact that it seems real to human belief, until God strips off its disguise." "Sin is an illusion" we are informed. And so this scheme seeks to save the sinner by convincing him that he is not a sinner—unless he believes himself to be! Which is another earmark of pantheism. Pantheism necessarily excludes the possibility of sin. And this modern high-priestess of 60,000 American people does the same. If our reason be God's reason, our intelligence God's intelligence, our activity God's activity, of course we cannot sin. If God is Mind, and man is "the full expression of Mind" (as "Science and Health" says), there is nothing in us which is not God. God is God in the Apostle John or in the Emperor Nero, in Phillips Brooks or John Wilkes Booth. "God is all in all. God is good. Therefore all is good." Therefore nothing is evil! Now, this is not merely untrue, but it is pernicious in the highest degree. This is exactly the kind of doctrine which ill-balanced people—morally ill-balanced, I mean—will be only too pleased to welcome. For one person who seriously persuades himself that his headache is not a real headache, you may find twenty only too happy to persuade themselves that their sins are not real sins. I have but one name for teaching which denies sin and declares vice to be an illusion: it is neither more nor less than moral poison. Let us face facts. We all should like to know that sin is only a bad dream, as was taught by Brahmanism, and which we shall find to have been a dream when we awake. Men would give almost anything to be delivered from the sense of sin as a dread reality, for it makes them uncomfortable; it interferes with their peace of mind. To be delivered from the acute discomfort of shame, remorse, self-contempt, were surely more desirable for all men of lofty character than to be cured of any gnawing ulcer that eats into the flesh. And to be so delivered in the name of religion—to be told that since all is God, nothing can be evil—offers a tremendous bribe—a tremendous, but most unholy bribe. To accept this doctrine is to head straight for moral disaster. The higher evolution of our race consists in man's growing sensitiveness to the distinction between good and evil, and anything calculated to dull that sensitiveness, to wipe out that distinction, is high treason against humanity. To pretend to solve this problem of evil by denying its existence, to teach that "there is no will that is not God's will," so that whatever the individual does is God's doing, is far worse than folly, or one of the aberrations of an eccentric cult; it is a crime against the moral universe. As to the Atonement, or the relation of Christ to the fact of sin, Eddyism favors us with the amazing statement that "The Atonement is the exemplification of man's unity with God"! The idea of Christ giving His life as "a ransom for many", of being "made sin for us", though He "knew no sin," is entirely foreign to Mrs. Eddy's scheme. There is no sin to be atoned for, and no need for a ransom to be paid. Then, as if it were not enough to deny the reality of sin and the atonement, Eddyism indulges in what to the Christian is blasphemy. For example, "The true Logos is demonstrably Christian Science" (p. 134, "Science and Health"). If that be so, then we might read the first verse of the Gospel according to John in this way: "In the beginning was Christian Science, and Christian Science was with God, and Christian Science was God. All things were made by Christian Science, and without Christian Science was not anything made that was made." We are also told that the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, is Christian Science! And Mrs. Eddy herself is also the Word, and the Comforter, and the Second Advent, and the Woman in the Sun, and the Last Day. A comical side of this presents itself to us in the claim that the prophet Elijah was Christian Science; so were the river Euphrates, and the river Hiddekel, and the New Jerusalem! (See Glossary). "The Lord's Supper" As related to this whole subject of sin and atonement treated in this sacrilegious manner, we should consider for a moment her parody of the Lord's supper. She tells us that the passover which Jesus ate with His disciples the night before His death "was a mournful occasion, a sad supper"; and that it "closed forever Jesus' ritualism, or concessions to matter." What a contrast between our Lord's last supper and His last spiritual breakfast with His disciples in the bright morning hours, at the joyful meeting on the shore of the Galilean Sea! "This spiritual meeting with our Lord in the dawn of a new light, is the morning meal which Christian Scientists commemorate" (pp. 32-35, "Science and Health"). "Thus does Eddyism heap its insults upon the sacrament itself—the very heart and citadel of Christian worship. Jesus says, 'This do in remembrance of Me.' And Mrs. Eddy and her easy victims immediately set about doing something else. They must not even think of blood or pain or death, for these all are illusions of mortal mind. They will have nothing to do with the Lord's supper, because it is 'a mournful occasion.' And they must always be comfortable, able to forget sin and its consequences! 'The less said of them, the better.' That is her desperate advice. 'I lay down My life for the sheep,' said Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It was a mistake to dwell upon that. The agony in the Garden, the scourging, the torture of the crucifixion, all were errors of sinful sense!" So it is better, Eddyism thinks, to forget this "sad supper, taken at the close of day—with shadows falling around" (p. 32, "Science and Health"), and have a "last spiritual breakfast—in the bright morning hours" (p. 34, "Science and Health"). No cross, no passion, and a resurrection, not from the dead, but from sleep, or a swoon! The so-called "Communion Service" used to be held once a year; but in 1908 it was abolished from the Mother Church in Boston, because the crowd was inconvenient. That was the reason assigned, but in her order Mrs. Eddy decreed: "There shall be no more communion season in the Mother Church that has blossomed into spiritual beauty, communion universal and Divine." Thus this "dead rite," as she called it, was done away with. "Resurrection" It is important to note what Mrs. Eddy has to say about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. "The lonely precincts of the tomb gave Jesus a refuge from His foes", where "He met and mastered, on the basis of Christian Science, all the claims of medicine, surgery and hygiene" (p. 44, "Science and Health"). "But it was not a supernatural act" (p. 34, "Science and Health"). "His disciples believed Jesus dead while He was hidden in the sepulchre; whereas He was alive, demonstrating within the narrow tomb the power of Spirit to over-rule mortal, material sense" (p. 34, "Science and Health"). When "Jesus' students—saw Him after His crucifixion," they "learned that He had not died" (p. 46, "Science and Health"). Mrs. Eddy speaks of His condition "after what seemed to be death," and she quotes Paul in this fashion, "we were reconciled to God by the (seeming) death of His Son" (p.46, "Science and Health"). Now the public does not know all this, or any small part of it, indeed. No follower of Mrs. Eddy, so far as I have discovered, ever mentions these wholesale and outrageous denials of New Testament truth. They never refer to these things either on the platform or in their newspaper correspondence. Hence, until one goes to "Science and Health", to read and find out for himself, he is very apt to be deceived by the brazen pretensions of Mrs. Eddy to a place among Christian teachers. "Healing" Next we are to consider the matter of healing. It is the custom of Mother Eddy's followers to point to the wonderful cures that have been effected by themselves and their co-religionists. The aim of the healer is to persuade the patient that he is not sick, that he has no disease. If the case is a cancer he is told that the inflammation in the flesh is caused by mortal mind; the seat of the trouble is in the thought, the belief. A man drinks poison and dies; but it is not the poison that kills him; vicious belief, or mortal mind, sends him to his long home. If he only had been able to convince himself that the poison was pure, clear spring water, it would have done him no injury.* [* "If a dose of poison is swallowed through mistake, and the patient dies, even though physician and patient are expecting favorable results, does human belief, you ask, cause this death? Even so; and as directly as if the poison had been intentionally taken" (p. 177, "Science and Health").] The infant when he utters the first wail has an "inherited" belief in pain! The horse when left standing without his blanket on a bitter winter day takes cold because there is a sort of universal horse conviction that this will happen.*And this is called "science"! Of course, it is as unscientific as anything ever foisted upon the attention of the world a mere jumble of unlearned assumptions without a scintilla of proof. It is the philosophy of idealism gone mad. [* "You can even educate a healthy horse so far in physiology that he will take cold without his blanket; whereas the wild animal left to his instincts, sniffs the wind with delight. The epizootic is a humanly evolved ailment, which a wild horse might never have" (p. 179, "Science and Health").] This does not mean that the followers of Mrs. Eddy do not effect cures. They do. But just as astonishing cures, and a great many more of them, are effected by Catholic shrines all over the world—at Lourdes, for example—and by relics such as those of St. Anne in New York City. Francis Schlatter, in Denver a few years ago, and Alexander Dowie, in Chicago, probably far surpassed in this respect any single follower of Mrs. Eddy who ever coped with the ills that flesh is heir to—not even excepting the founder of the sect herself. And yet none of these other healers ever thought of denying the facts of the material world. The claims of Eddyism to cure organic diseases break down under the most elementary rules of criticism. That it does cure "functional" diseases, all will admit, for it is simply a matter of suggestion. It never has cured, and never will cure, any diseases, except those which have been cured again and again by "mental therapeutics." And from the works of healing in the temples of Aesculapius down to the present time, mankind has used, for better or worse, mental therapeutics. We often wonder why Mrs. Eddy and her followers are so sure that God is a physician, but are unwilling to trust Him as a surgeon. She is ready to turn over into His hands every case of stomach trouble or liver complaint; but for a broken leg or a dislocated shoulder, she wants a surgeon! I make bold to repeat that Eddyism has not one iota of evidence to support its theory of healing; "no evidence," as another has said, "but would be thrown out of the lowest police court." Its cures differ neither in character nor in numbers from those effected by others, as remarked above. And all may be accounted for by the well-known fact of the influence of mind over mind, and of mind over body. Professor Carpenter, the English physiologist, speaking of what is known as "expectant attention," says: "There is scarcely a malady in which amendment has not been produced by practices which can have had no other effect than to direct the attention of the sufferer to the parts, and to keep alive his confident expectation of a cure." But, as everybody knows, this method of operation will not cure diseased tissues, set broken bones, or heal structural derangement. Neither will it cure a toothache permanently, as the followers of Mrs. Eddy themselves prove by their patronage of the dentist. When one discovers, as I have more than once, a devout follower of Mrs. Eddy resting uneasily in a dentist's chair, he naturally asks himself if the nerves in the teeth are the only nerves that can cause pain? Some years ago Mrs. Eddy herself had a tooth removed under local anesthesia. It caused her theories to be held up to ridicule in a good many quarters. In her reply she gave out this ingenious explanation: that the dentist's belief in the means he employed was a mental force which combined with her own—exerted in a different direction—and produced a painless operation as a logical, mathematical "RESULTANT OF FORCES" (Brooklyn Eagle Library, 1901). Eddyism, therefore, denies evident facts, and claims for facts what universal experience proves to be false. Its advocates themselves give the lie to their creed every day of their lives by treating their bodies as if they were real. They eat and drink, and with the change of seasons they change the weight of their apparel. Mrs. Eddy declares that "Man has a Sensation less body" (p. 280, "Science and Health"). But yet "one should not tarry in the storm if the body is freezing" (p. 329, "Science and Health"). Why not? If the body is "sensation less," it will not be affected in the least by the degrees of Fahrenheit, either up or down. Anyway, Mrs. Eddy insists that there is neither heat nor cold. "Heat and cold are products of mind." Its Critics Of course, every one who denounces "Science and Health" is immediately reminded by the erudite members of this cult that he does not understand the book; and that he will forever be incapable of understanding its profundities until he becomes a disciple. His mental capacity will have to be enlarged before he can appreciate the fine distinctions to be found in the learned writings of this lady. It is amusing. A man, like General Horatio C. King, for example, may be college bred; may have spent years in the practice of the legal profession, and other years as a newspaper editor, and still others as an author; he may have traveled extensively, and been a student of the Bible all his life; but if he criticises "Science and Health", it is because he cannot understand its philosophy. A man may be acquainted with the entire history of thought from Thales to Hegel, he may be able to read Kant's "Critique" with some degree of pleasure; he may have spent years in the company of Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, Leibnitz, and other thinkers, but he is out of court as a critic unless he acknowledges the vast superiority of Mrs. Eddy. But if one is willing to make this acknowledgement—even though he be ignorant as night of all things else—he is at once entitled to a place among the wise men! Numbers The pity of it all is that the jargon of "Science and Health", and its kindred publications, is accepted as Gospel by over 60,000 people in this enlightened land of ours. It is well known that Eddyism claims anywhere from one to three millions in America. The official figures as given by Dr. Carroll in the last religious census are 85,717. But many of these even "are counted as members of the Mother Church in Boston, and also members of the branch churches throughout the world!" Dr. Carroll's estimate is that there are at least 20,000 duplications—which would leave a grand total for the last census of about 65,000 members. The official board has now for several years declined to give any reports to the public, which may mean that the crest of the wave was reached some time ago, and the movement has begun to recede. But even though the numbers were as great as claimed, this would prove nothing as to the truth of Mrs. Eddy's teachings. In India there are millions who worship the Ganges, and other millions who worship cows—and the Hindu mind is second to none in the world in its metaphysical aptitudes. It is sad to think that a single man or woman should be misled by Joe Smith, Alexander Dowie, or Mary Baker Eddy. Dishonesties But these false claims are not the only dishonesties perpetrated by Eddyism. The pages of "Science and Health" teem with them. The press agents of Mrs. Eddy will tell you that "unless preaching is accompanied by signs of healing the sick, one has no proof that he is presenting the Gospel as the Master said it should be" [Lloyd B. Coate]. But it is a dangerous thing to prove too much. If healing the sick is a necessary adjunct to presenting the Gospel, so is the power to "speak with tongues," "take up serpents", "drink any deadly thing", "cleanse the lepers", and "raise the dead)? It looks, therefore, as if, according to their own argument, all the lecturers and press agents and publishers and "readers" of Eddyism should immediately retire and cease their propaganda. How many dead have they raised in any community, from Boston down to the smallest town in which they have established themselves? One has a feeling that it would not be difficult to give the figures. How many lepers have they cleansed? There are plenty of opportunities in the world to try their hand at this. Let some of them repair to Molokai, for example, and get to work. Or does Eddyism enable any of its most ardent devotees to handle serpents that have poison in their fangs? Or to drink carbolic acid, just by way of proof? Or to speak with foreign tongues, without a course of study? How many languages did Mrs. Eddy speak? It looks as if she could not speak one with any very great degree of accuracy. But then she told the world that her Divine revelations had purged her mind of all such trifles as Latin and Greek and Hebrew. She certainly should not have been so reckless with her "new tongues," since, according to her own teaching, Jesus meant all His disciples to possess and use them. Take another example of dishonest treatment of the Word of God. In "Science and Health" (p. 75), after quoting the words of our Lord to His disciples, "Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go that I may awake him out of sleep," Mrs. Eddy declares that "He restored Lazarus by the understanding that he had never died," and this in spite of the fact that in the third verse below that in which Christ uses the figure of sleep—discovering that the disciples did not understand—He "said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead." Again, "the injunction, 'Believe—and thou shalt be saved!' demands self reliant trustworthiness." Every student of the Bible knows that these are the words of Paul to the Philippian jailer, and that he says, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." The Apostle is enjoining the very opposite of "self-reliant trustworthiness." He is showing to the trembling jailer that Jesus is the One upon whom he must rely! No doubt many of her disciples who were formerly members of the evangelical churches think they still have the same Saviour as of old. But it was her boast that she had "taken away their Lord." In a letter to Judge Septimius J. Hanna, the founder of Eddyism says: "I have marveled at the press and pulpit's patience with me, when I have taken away their Lord." Suppose a minister of the Gospel were to declare that "the true Christ is Calvinism", or that "Arminianism is the Holy Spirit", or that "Lutheranism lights the fires of the Holy Ghost", how long would it take the public to discover that such a man was unworthy of a place among Christian teachers? Yet this woman has gone on perpetrating blasphemies of this sort year after year. And when she and her followers are criticized and their statements denounced, some people are horrified and talk about persecution. Absurdities In conclusion, let us notice two or three specimen absurdities from the pages of "Science and Health", in addition to those already mentioned. They are taken somewhat at random. "Because the muscles of the blacksmith's arm are strongly developed, it does not follow that exercise has produced this result? The trip hammer is not increased by exercise. But why not, since muscles are as material as wood or iron?" (pp. 198 and 199, "Science and Health"). "Destructive electricity is not the offspring of an Infinite Good." Which implies a radical difference between harmful and harmless electricity. When it attends strictly to business and follows the wires, it is a moral agent; but when it breaks away, burns out a fuse, or sets a house afire, it becomes immoral! "The Christian Scientist takes the best care of his body when he leaves it most out of his thoughts." Therefore, the Spanish beggars and the Italian lazaroni would make ideal members of Mrs. Eddy's organization. "The less mind there is manifested in matter, the better. When the unthinking lobster loses his claw, it grows again. If the science of life were understood—the human limb would be replaced as readily as the lobster's claw—not with an artificial limb, but with a genuine one" (p. 489, "Science and Health"). It did not seem to occur to the author that while the lobster's claw grows again, the lamb's tail does not. But this is accounted for, no doubt, by the proposition that "the less mind there is manifested in matter, the better." The lobster gets his claw again because he has so little mind; the lamb does not get his tail, and the man does not get his leg, because each one of them has too much mind. The only hope for the one-legged man, then, is to become either a lunatic or a lobster! And yet there are people who are willing to apply to this farrago of irreligion and nonsense two of the most significant words in the English language, "Christian" and "Science." It is comforting, however, to know that it will come to an end by and by, and will be numbered with many other strange and indefensible infatuations that have "gone glimmering through the dream of things that were," ======================================================================== CHAPTER 38: - MODERN SPIRITUALISM BRIEFLY TESTED BY... ======================================================================== Modern Spiritualism Briefly Tested by Scripture By Algernon J. Pollock, Weston-Super-Mare, England [Condensed for the Fundamentals] I. Origin and Growth Modern Spiritualism claims as its birthday March 31, 1848, and the place of its birth Hydesville, Wayne County, New York, U. S. A.; but it is in reality almost as old as the world's history, and will go on to its close. That the number of adherents of Modern Spiritualism is amazingly large is borne out by Dr. F. Maack, of Hamburg, writing so recently as 1910. As an antagonist of Spiritualism, he is not likely to overstate the numbers. In Berlin alone, he says, there are probably 10,000 Spiritualists, among them exalted and court personages; 400 mediums, and from fifteen to twenty societies. In North America there are said to be 16,000,000 adherents; while in the whole world it was computed that in 1894 there were 60,000,000 Modern Spiritualists, with 200 journals exclusively devoted to the propaganda of this awful system. The number has grown considerably since. Add to these the demonized races of the heathen world; the millions of China, Japan and India; the countless tribes of Africa; the savage hordes of the Sudan; the cannibal inhabitants of the South Sea Islands; and you complete roughly the picture of Spiritualism covering the earth with darkness Ancient Spiritualism in the East, and Modern Spiritualism in the West, bringing in its train wickedness of every hideous kind. II. Attractions of Spiritualism Spiritualism, like all systems of error, works to a large extent underground. It does not present itself in its true colors to the uninitiated. Once a dupe is caught in its toils he is drawn farther and farther away from God. Some are attracted to it through sheer curiosity. The love of the unknown allures them. Some, believing it to be mere trickery, think they can detect the fraud, and so get entangled in the real thing. That there is trickery in it is certain; but with full allowance for all this, there are effects produced which can be attributed only to the influence of personating demons. Others again are drawn into it by the deep desire to fill the aching void made by the death of a loved one. When David, after agonizing prayer for the life of Bathsheba's child, heard of his death, he asked, "Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, BUT HE SHALL NOT RETURN TO ME" 2 Samuel 12:23. David evidently knew nothing of intercourse with the spirits of the departed. III. Refuses Test of Scripture A well-known spiritualistic author, writing under the nom de plume, "Oxford, M. A.," says: "So long as you reply to our arguments with a text, we cannot teach you. Any one who can so reply is beyond reach of reasonable teaching" ("Spirit Teachings," p. 198). The author of "Outlines of Spiritualism for the Young," says: "To assert that it [the Bible] is a holy and Divine book, that God inspired the writers to make known His Divine will, is a gross outrage on, and misleading to, the public. . . . The truth is, the Old Testament is neither more nor less than Jewish history . . . The New Testament is made up of traditions and theological speculations by unknown persons. A book so full of errors . . . requires to be read with care" ("Outlines," pp. 13,14). Refusal of the Bible could not be more explicit. IV. Modern Spiritualism Foretold The rise and progress of Modern Spiritualism is clearly indicated in Holy Scripture: "Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils; speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron; forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats" 1 Timothy 4:1-3. The gravity of the warning is emphasized by the way it is introduced, "Now the Spirit speaketh expressly." "Seducing Spirits" So crafty is the enemy that the spirits often advise the uninitiated to pray and to read the Bible. While the immediate purpose of such advice is to gain the victim's confidence, the ultimate object is to undermine faith in the Scriptures. The spirits giving such advice are well described as "seducing spirits." A lady, a Christian worker, was persuaded to attend a Spiritualistic meeting. She was advised to read the Bible and pray. This led her to believe that the spirit of a Christian was speaking to her. When the "seducing spirits" had thus gained her confidence, they led her to question certain parts of the Bible. The result was that she became a complete infidel, going absolutely to the bad, not only spiritually but morally. "By their fruits ye shall know them." In the temptation in the wilderness we see how Satan quoted Scripture, leaving out an essential part for his evil purpose; and we see how a text of Scripture sufficed for his defeat. Scripture clearly indicates deceitfulness as his chief characteristic. 2 Corinthians 2:11; 2 Corinthians 11:14-15. V. The Bible Opposed to Spiritualism Before quoting a few texts, so dreaded by "Oxford, M. A." and his confreres, it would be well to clear the ground by stating that Spiritualists affirm their belief in God as Creator and Sustainer; deny that the Lord Jesus was and is Divine; deny the existence of the devil, demons and angels. They affirm their belief in the existence of an impersonal God, and of human beings, either incarnate-that is, in their human bodies in this world; or discarnate-that is, disembodied in the spirit-world, as they term it. The system is simplicity itself. If there be no devil, Spiritualism cannot be Satanic. If there be no demons, there can be no truth in the charge that the spirits that communicate with the living, claimed by them to be the spirits of departed friends, are in reality personating demons, or "seducing spirits." Thus the way is cleared for Modern Spiritualism. Under the heading of "Biblical Spiritualism," if you please, the author of "Outlines" quotes a number of passages of Scripture in the vain endeavor to prove that the Bible is not opposed to Spiritualism. In every passage he quotes except one (the well-known case of the witch of Endor), we are given instances of angelic visitation. Mark well: in no instance does he quote the plain condemnations of Spiritualism the Bible contains. Is this honest? But since he appeals to the Bible, to the Bible we are well content to turn. 1. Old Testament Condemnation "And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and after wizards, to go a whoring after them, I-will cut him off from among his people" Leviticus 20:6; also 19:31. "A man also, or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death; they shall stone them with stones" Leviticus 20:27. "There shall not be found among you any one that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer" Deuteronomy 18:10-11. "They shall no more offer their sacrifices unto devils" Leviticus 17:7; Deuteronomy 32:17; Psalms 106:37. "And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep and that mutter; should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead? [See R.V.] To the law and the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them" Isaiah 8:19-20. From the foregoing we see in the Old Testament, that 1. Spiritualism is sternly forbidden by God. 2. It is defiling. 3. Its followers GOD would destroy. 4. Its mediums, THE PEOPLE were commanded to stone to death. 5. It is no new thing. Satan and his myriads of demons have been busy at their work of deception ever since the Fall. 6. It is not an advance on Christianity, as some affirm, but a backward movement to the worst features of heathenism. Isaiah 8:19-20 is especially conclusive; plainly showing that it is wrong for the living to seek the dead, rather than God Himself. Spiritualism is the setting aside of God Himself, hence of morality, uprightness, and every true principle. 2. New Testament Condemnation "Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit in the wilderness to be tempted of the devil" Matthew 4:1. This proves that there is a personal devil. Indeed, only one person is called in Scripture the devil, the Greek word meaning the accuser. Demon is really the correct description of the myriad fallen spirits who own Satan as their prince. Matthew 12:24. "They brought unto Him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed [Greek: daimonizomai-demonized or demon-possessed] with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that had the palsy; and He healed them" Matthew 4:24. This passage is most important, as from it and other Scriptures it is plain that demon-possession is distinct from disease, though the two are often, and naturally, present together; for disease is the product of sin. It has been contended that demon-possession and lunacy are the same, but this Scripture shatters that contention, as it differentiates between them: "There met Him two possessed with devils-and, behold, they cried out, saying, ... Art Thou come hither to torment us before the time? ... So the devils besought Him, saying, If Thou cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine. And He said unto them, Go. And when they were come out, they went into the herd of swine; and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down into a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters" Matthew 8:28-32. "And there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit; and he cried out, saying, Let us alone; what have we to do with Thee, Thou Jesus of Nazareth? Art Thou come to destroy us? I know Thee who Thou art, the Holy One of God" Mark 1:23-24. These passages prove that demons know and recognize the authority of the Lord Jesus as the Son of God; that they are aware of their future, and dread it. "Jesus ... rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him. And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him" Mark 9:25-26; Revelation 18:2. From these Scriptures and the preceding one Mark 1:23-24 we learn the unclean character of these seducing spirits. Further, that they are strong, sullen and vicious, and can hurt their victims physically to a dangerous degree. The case is cited of a minister who took up automatic writing. At first the communications were pure, and expressed in beautiful language. After a time they became mixed with obscene language. Then he heard voices, and things so preyed upon his mind that he became insane, and died in three months, raving mad. The following well-known passage from Spiritualistic literature is very significant: "They come, THE DOOR ONCE OPEN, in crowds, in riotous invasion. They run, they leap, they fly, they gesticulate, they sing, they whoop, and they curse .... Mind, body, soul, memory and imagination-nay the very heart-are polluted by the ghostly canaille." May God preserve the writer and reader from ever opening the door to such diabolical wickedness; or if already opened, may he or she seek the power of Him, who is stronger than the strong man armed, even of the Lord Jesus Christ. "Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils" Luke 8:2. "And Jesus asked him saying, What is thy name? And he said, Legion, because many devils were entered into him" Luke 8:30. Here is evidence that more than one demon may take possession of the human body. Mediums admit that at times several spirits control them, and hence the incoherency of the messages. "A certain damsel possessed with a spirit of divination met us-the same followed Paul and us, and cried, saying, These men are the servants of the most high God, which show unto us the way of salvation? But Paul being grieved, turned and said to the spirit, I command thee in the name of the Lord Jesus to come out of her.And he came out the same hour" Acts 16:16-18. "Then certain of the vagabond Jews, exorcists, took upon them to call over them which had evil spirits the name of the Lord Jesus, saying, We adjure you by Jesus, whom Paul preacheth. And there were seven sons of one Sceva, a Jew, and chief of the priests, which did so. And the evil spirit answered and said, Jesus I know and Paul I know; but who are ye? And the man, in whom the evil spirit was, leaped on them, and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of the house naked and wounded" Acts 19:13-16. The contrast between these passages is deeply instructive. The damsel, possessed by the evil spirit, advertises Paul and his companions as "servants of the most high God, which show unto us the way of salvation." Her conduct, very like that of modern mediums, who advise the reading of the Bible and prayer, did not deceive the Apostle. Observe how the Apostle uses the name of One whom he knew; whereas the exorcists, mere imitators, said, "We adjure thee by Jesus whom Paul preacheth," that is, One of whom they knew nothing for themselves. The consequences were disastrous; for instead of resisting the devil, and the devil fleeing, as in Paul's case of exorcism, the demon urged his victim to deeds of violence. "The things which the Gentiles (heathen) sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, ands not to God" 1 Corinthians 10:20-21. This passage proves that behind heathendom, idol worship, sun worship, etc., there is demon power; that heathendom with its frightfully wicked, base, voluptuous customs, is a vast system of Spiritualism. Missionaries in India and heathen lands are able to confirm what I allude to here. "And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues, yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone and of wood .... neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts" Revelation 9:20-21. "They are the spirits of devils, working miracles" Revelation 16:14. Revelation 9:20-21 clearly identifies the worship of devils with that of idols of gold, etc., and shows how violence and immorality are its accompaniments; while Revelation 16:14 adds the power of working miracles. The reader now has before him most ample testimony from Scripture as to the source of Spiritualism, its wickedness and powers, and of the utter condemnation meted out to it by God. 3. The One Possible Exception There is possibly one solitary instance in Scripture in which God permitted the spirit of one departed to revisit the earth for a specific purpose. (See 1 Samuel 28:3-25). We have here either a piece of skilful acting on the part of the witch of Endor; or, what seems more natural, there was a real appearance of Samuel at the behest, not of the witch, but of God Almighty Himself. King Saul, after a long course of evil, was in sore straits. In his dilemma he enquired of the Lord, but He did not answer him, "neither by dreams, nor by Urim nor by prophets." Disguised, Saul asked the witch to bring up Samuel. God then intervened. He restrained the personating demon from appearing at the medium's behest, and, judging from the matter-of-fact narration, allowed the spirit of Samuel to appear. The medium was evidently astonished beyond measure. "When the woman saw Samuel, she cried with a loud voice," charging Saul with deception. This is the only case on record in the Scriptures where, apparently, the spirit of one departed has been permitted to revisit the earth for a specific purpose, whereas Spiritualists claim that there is continual intercourse between living persons and departed spirits. And note, Samuel did not come at the call of the medium of Endor, and God will not allow the spirits of the departed to be at the beck and call of any medium, who may be of questionable character. 1 Chronicles 10:13-14 specifically tells us that Saul died for his transgressions, including his invoking the demon's aid: "So Saul died for his transgressions,-and also for asking counsel of one that had a familiar spirit, to enquire of it; and enquired not of the Lord." VI. Conception of Christ We have seen how the blessed Saviour went about "healing all that were oppressed of the devil," showing what He thought of Spiritualism. Yet, in spite of such plain testimony, Dr. Wisse, a noted Spiritualist, said: "All testimony received from advanced spirits only shows that Christ was a medium or reformer in Judea; that He is now an advanced spirit in the sixth sphere; but that He never claimed to be God and does not at present." The late Gerald Massey, poet, and Spiritualist, wrote: "I do not find that Christ claimed for Himself more than He held out as possible for others. When He identified Himself with the Father, it was in the oneness of mediumship. He was the great Medium or Mediator."* [*Another noted Spiritualist, Dr. J. M. Peebles, wrote, "The Apostle (Paul) with a singular clearness of perception pronounced the Nazarene a Mediator, i.e., a Medium, between God and man."] Could profanity go farther? The Lord Jesus again and again claimed for Himself that which He could share with none other. "For there is one God, and ONE MEDIATOR between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus; who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time" 1 Timothy 2:5-6, shatters the whole of his contention. The daring of confounding medium with Mediator is awful. A blow against redemption is thus aimed. It is not scholarship or philosophy, but profanity and knavery. We may well ask, Why cannot Spiritualism leave Christ's name alone? They seem impelled to endeavor to get His support for their system. It only proves most conclusively that Spiritualists feel the reality of Christianity and of Christ, and are forced to these attentions. They are not continually fighting against Mohammedanism and Brahminism and the like. VII. The Denials of Modern Spiritualism Modern Spiritualism denies- 1. The inspiration of the Bible. 2. The fall of man. 3. The Deity of the Lord Jesus. 4. The atoning value of His death. 5. The existence of a personal devil.* 6. The existence of demons. 7. The existence of angels. 8. The existence of heaven. 9. The existence of hell. [* "All spirit people of wisdom, knowledge and love say there is no burning hell-no fearful devil."-"Outlines," p. 15.] Enough has been written to prove the above statements, but it is as well to place it in clear tabulated form, so that the reader may see that Spiritualism is the absolute negation of Christianity. In 1866 at a Spiritualistic conference held at Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A., at which eighteen states and territories were represented, the following daring resolutions were passed: 1. To abandon all Christian ordinances and worship. 2. To discontinue all Sunday Schools. 3. To denounce sexual tyranny. 4. To affirm that animal food should not be used. We have so far had ample Biblical proof that 1 Timothy 4:1-3 applies to Spiritualism in its prediction that in the latter times some would depart from the faith and would pay heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils. To this Nos. 3 and 4 resolutions carry us on to "forbidding to marry" and "commanding to abstain from meats." And yet with all this negation of Christianity Spiritualists continue in many cases to be members and ministers of churches, calling themselves Christian Spiritualists. For instance, the late Revelation H. R. Haweis, M. A., Incumbent of St. James', Marylebone, a special preacher in Westminster Abbey, and Royal Institution Lecturer, said in 1900 in an address: "Spiritualism fitted very nicely on to Christianity; it seemed to be a legitimate development, not a contradiction, not an antagonist? Spiritualism had rehabilitated the Bible-They [spiritualistic phenomena] occur every day in London as well as in the Acts of the Apostles." VIII. "Three-Black I's" of Spiritualism. The Frank Swainson in his addresses on Spiritualism speaks of its "three black I's-Infidelity, Insanity and Immorality." 1. Infidelity In a Spiritualistic book, "Whatever Is, Is Right," circulating among a certain section of advanced Spiritualists, we read the following: "What is evil? Evil does not exist, evil is good." "What is a lie? A lie is the truth intrinsically; it holds a lawful place in creation; it is a necessity." "What is vice? Vice and virtue, too, are beautiful in the eyes of the soul." "What is virtue? Virtue is good and sin is good. The woman who came to the well of Sychar was just as pure in spirit before she met Christ, even though she was a harlot, as she was afterwards when she went to live a different life. There's no difference between Herod the murderer of the babies in Bethlehem, and Christ the Saviour of men." "What is murder? Murder is good. Murder is a perfectly natural act." "What are evil spirits? There are no evil spirits. There is no devil and no Christ. Christ and the devil are both alike." "For not a path on earth is trod That does not lead the soul to God." "No matter how bad that path may be, whether it be the path of the liar, the murderer; it is the path of Divine Ordination and Divine Destiny." 2. Insanity Dr. Forbes Winslow, Oxford Lecturer on Mental Diseases, of Charing Cross Hospital, said the prevalence of madness owing to Spiritualism was on the increase. The late Reader Harris, K. C., wrote: "The most remarkable case of mediumship I have met with was that of a lady, who commenced with a little seemingly innocent table-turning at a children's party, and finished up by death in a madhouse." Sir William Crookes, claimed by the Spiritualists as a strong sympathizer, wrote: "After witnessing the painful state of nervous and bodily prostration in which many of the experiments have left the medium fainting, pale, breathless, I cannot doubt but that the violence of psychic forces means a corresponding drain on the vital forces." Is this the high and holy substitute for Christianity? Is this the glorious effect of truth? 3. Immorality Mr. T. L. Harris, once a Spiritualistic medium, testifies that the marriage vow imposes no obligation on the Spiritualistic husband. They have been known to abandon their own wives, and prefer the company of those of whom the spirits told them that they had a closer spiritual affinity to them. Mrs. Woodhull, elected three years in succession as president of the Spiritist Societies in America, often lectured in favor of free love; and advocated the abolition of marriage ("forbidding to marry"), stigmatizing virtue and responsibility as the two thieves on the cross. She said: "It was the sublime mission of Spiritism to deliver humanity from the thraldom of matrimony, and to establish sexual emancipation." Rev. F. Swainson, writing of a lady of his acquaintance, says: "Up to the time that her husband came into contact with Spiritism he was all that could be desired. When he took to Spiritism he came in touch with a certain Spiritist woman, who claimed affinity. The result was this, that the man cruelly deserted his wife, and left her to die, as she is dying today, of a broken heart. That man today is passing as a leading official of a Spiritist circle in England." The charge against the "three black I's" of Modern Spiritualism is well proved. IX. What Spiritualism Offers I shall now describe what Spiritualism offers in place of the Bible as our guide, Christ as our Saviour, heaven as our eternal home. According to the author of "Outlines," man is made up of a soul, a spiritual body, and a physical body. "There is something more than the nerves which we cannot see, because it is as fine in its nature as the perfume of flowers. This fine something is called 'nerve-aura'-All above what is required for daily use is thrown off like perfume from flowers? Our spiritual bodies are formed of this fine nerve-aura, which is spiritualized matter. When our spiritual friends and guardians visit us, they-look-at our spiritual bodies, and by their purity or otherwise, they can see at a glance what kind of lives we live? People who indulge in evil habits, such as opium or tobacco smoking, and laudanum and intoxicating drink, carry the appetite with them at death; it is because some of the narcotic and alcohol from these things help to compose the spiritual body, that they crave or hunger for their kind. So that these spirit people seek those in the body who still indulge in these bad habits, and get their craving satisfied through other people" ("Outlines," pp. 30-32). So we read on: "I have explained to you how the spirit-body is formed that it is the spiritualized or refined particles of our physical body: so that you will understand me when I tell you that the spirit world is made up of refined or spiritualized particles given off by the earth. Every blade of grass, every tiny flower, shrub and tree, insect and animal, by their lives cause matter to become refined and spiritualized, which then ascends high above the clouds, and there spreads out in a broad belt, and surrounds the earth, like the rings of Saturn surround that planet. There are a great number of these rings or zones, one beyond the other, which may be called spirit worlds" ("Outlines," p. 33). Then we are told in "Outlines" that in the spirit-world souls may do wrong there, as they do here. When they do, they reap what they sow, and are punished, and thus they are gradually purified and blessed they become their own saviours, though why they should need to be saved seems a mystery. We read also that after death, if the spiritual life is kind, and gentle and good, the grosser elements of the spiritual body are eliminated, leaving the body more refined and spiritual; so that it can rise into a higher zone, which, in its turn, is composed of the more refined and spiritualized elements eliminated from this higher zone, and the third zone is composed of the still more refined and spiritualized elements from the second, and so on. And yet people who are too "clever" to believe the Bible are so foolish as to believe such bombastic nonsense put forward without one atom of proof. X. Shirks Awful Problems In "Outlines," while there is a stout refusal of the doctrine of total depravity, and the fall of man is denied,* there is no attempt whatever to adequately explain the awful sorrow and suffering in this world, and the still more awful sorrow of death. We are told God is too good to allow man's fall or the existence of what is malevolent, like Satan and his demons; but the present awful state of things, which God has allowed for His own wise and inscrutable purpose, the author of "Outlines" shirks and must shirk. He throws away the only lamp of truth-the Word of God. Can we wonder that he walks in darkness, and that his wisdom is folly indeed, fraught with awful consequences? [* "Thus, by his (man's) intellectual faculties, moral powers, and spiritual nature, he is 'God manifest in the flesh.'"-"Outlines."] We have now had ample proof from Scripture that Spiritualism is in reality demonism. Nay, more; in some way or other every form of evil has its origin, I believe, in this cult. Heathendom in its nameless horrors is Spiritualism. All false religions bear features of their common parent. They may vary as to details, and contradict each other (for Satan must have many baits for many minds), but the essence of all evil teaching is Satanic, and therefore Spiritualism in its essence. XI. The Power of Christ's Name While it is well that we should be aware of the awful power of Satan, the believer has no need to be personally afraid, if only he keeps near to the Lord and cleaves to His Word. "Resist the devil, and he will flee from you" James 4:7. "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour; whom resist, steadfast in the faith" 1 Peter 5:8-9. "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand" Ephesians 6:10-13. "Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them [that is, spirits that confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh]; because greater is He that is in you [that is, the Holy Ghost], than he that is in the world [that is, the devil]" 1 John 4:4. We may walk serenely through this evil world, conscious of the Lord's protecting hand, just as Elisha was calm, conscious that he was protected by the mountain being full of horses and chariots of fire. With all the glittering rewards of divination within the reach of the covetous Balaam, if only he would curse God's people, he was obliged to cry out, "Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, neither is there any divination against Israel" Numbers 23:23. A friend has just given me an authentic instance of the power of Christ's name. A Spiritualist in Bradford invited a Christian neighbor to one of their meetings. The Christian, wearied by her neighbor's importunity, made a compact with her, that if she attended once she would never again be invited. They went to the meeting. After a little while the medium, who had no previous knowledge of her, declared there was a Christian present, and until that Christian left the room they could not proceed. The Christian kept her seat. After a few minutes the medium again said there was a Christian present and insisted that the person should leave the meeting. The Christian lady thereupon retired. When her neighbor returned home, she informed her that the meeting proceeded after she left without any further difficulty. Such is the power of Christ's name. A Scriptural Test Amidst all the abounding evil, the uninstructed believer might well be bewildered. But Scripture furnishes a simple but thorough test of every system of teaching. It will be seen that the Person of Christ is the test. "Every spirit that CONFESSETH NOT that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is not of God; and this is that spirit of antichrist" 1 John 4:3. "He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son" 1 John 2:22. "Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost" 1 Corinthians 12:3. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 39: - SATAN AND HIS KINGDOM ======================================================================== Satan and His Kingdom By Mrs. Jessie Penn-Lewis, Leicester, England Satan and His Kingdom * [* Condensed from "The Warfare with Satan and the Way of Victory" published by Marshall Brothers, 10 Paternoster Row, London, E. C., England.] 1. Satan's Origin and Home The Scriptures give but veiled glimpses of his origin and home, for their purpose is more expressly to reveal God in His character; and Christ as the Redeemer of men; with the history of the redeemed from the fall of Adam, their salvation through the Cross, and their eternal destiny, when Christ shall have "abolished all rule and all authority and power" (1 Corinthians 15:24), contrary to the reign of God, and God Himself shall be All in all. Our Lord says of Satan, "he was a murderer from the beginning" (John 8:44) and John says of him that he "sinneth from the beginning" (1 John 3:8). 2. Satan's Position and Character In regard to the position and character of Satan we know that he is the very embodiment of a lie, for "There is no truth in him-he is a liar, and the father of it," said the Lord. The various names by which he is described in the Scriptures reveal his power. Fallen though he be, he is called by the Lord Jesus no less than three times the "prince of this world" (John 12:31; John 14:30; John 16:11), thus plainly recognizing his rule over the earth. That he is a personage of rank and power we learn from Jude: "Michael, the arch-angel, when contending with the devil, he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing judgment, but said, The Lord rebuke thee" (Jude 1:9). He is also called the "god of this age" (2 Corinthians 4:4, margin), for men obey and worship him, even unconsciously, when they do not obey and worship the Creator. The fallen archangel is moreover described as the "prince of the power of the air" (Ephesians 2:2), meaning wicked spiritual powers dwelling in the aerial heavens, for it seems the "Satanic confederation has its seat in the atmospheric heaven-in the spaces above and around our world" (Seiss). That the "prince of the power of the air" has power (when permission is granted) to wield the forces of the air we see in the history of Job; for at his bidding lightning fell from heaven to consume the flocks of the faithful servant of God, and he caused a wind to blow Job's house down and kill his children. In relation to his attacks upon the children of men the prince of this world is called the "tempter" (1 Thessalonians 3:5), because it is his fiendish delight to tempt others from loyal obedience to God. And he is named "the devil" (1 Timothy 3:6-7)-a word never used in the plural, and always, and only, of Satan himself. "The Hebrew name Satan occurs in the New Testament thirty-five times interchangeably with the Greek Diabolos, which is also used thirty-five times. The word Diabolos signifies "separator and slanderer" (Blackstone), or "malignant accuser." Satan is the great separator, and he separates by slandering. He separated the race of man from God in Eden, and ever since he has been separating men from each other, with hatred, malice, envy and jealousy. He is especially named the "accuser of the brethren" (Revelation 12:10), and we find him also described as "the great dragon," the "old serpent," and the "deceiver of the whole inhabited earth." That the adversary still has the world under his rule, is unmistakably shown in his attack upon the Lord Jesus in the wilderness. The Lord was led, under the constraint of the Holy Spirit, into the wilderness to be "tempted of the devil," and after other temptations, the devil showed Him "all the kingdoms of the inhabited earth. And the devil said unto Him, To Thee will I give all this authority, and the glory of them: for it hath been delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If Thou therefore wilt worship before me, it shall all be Thine" (Luke 4:5-7, margin). What a daring condition to put to the Son of God. The fallen archangel is craving for worship still. The extent of His claim to "all the kingdoms of the inhabited earth" the Son of God did not deny, and later the Lord plainly speaks of Satan's kingdom. "If Satan also is divided against himself, how shall his kingdom stand"? (Luke 11:18). And He adds, "The strong man fully armed guardeth his own court," until "a Stronger than he" comes upon him, and sets his captive free. How fitting therefore the petition, "Deliver us from the evil one" (Matthew 6:13)! John also emphasizes the universality of Satan's rule, for he writes, "The whole world lieth in the evil one" (1 John 4:19)-it is sunk in the darkness which is his sphere, and is under the rule of the "world-rulers of this darkness" (Ephesians 6:12). The Scripture makes no distinction between high and low, or between cultured and ignorant, when it states that the "whole world"-heathen and Christendom-lies "in" the realm of the evil one. In heathen lands, the deceiver is daring in his tyranny, holding men and women in gross and open sin. In civilized countries, the god of this age needs must veil his working. In these last days, however, he is beginning to more openly manifest himself as the prince of the world. He is familiarizing people with his name. Books to be popular must be about him, and in fashion's realm serpents have been the favorite ornaments of dress, while palmistry, clairvoyance, planchette, and other means of intercourse with the spirits of evil, abound on every hand. The adversary has also his organized governments, which the Apostle Paul describes as "principalities ... powers sovereigns of this present darkness" (Ephesians 6:12, C. H.). We read of "Satan's throne" (Revelation 2:13); of "his ministers" (2 Corinthians 11:15); of his "principalities" and his "powers"; and of his hosts of "spirits of evil" (Ephesians 6:12, C. H.) in the heavens. Daniel's account of his interview with the messenger from God supports the view that these principalities and powers of Satan are given charge of specified countries; for the Satanic "prince of Persia" withstood the heavenly messenger, who said that on his return he would again have to meet with the same Prince, together with the "Prince of Greece" (Daniel 10:13; Daniel 10:20). Satan therefore reigns over an aerial kingdom of hierarchies and spiritual powers, and a kingdom on earth in the world of men, and he governs by means of an organized government. But let us not forget that all these hosts are compelled to acknowledge the Sovereign Lord of the Universe! Unbelievers in God are alone to be found on earth, for the powers of evil "believe and shudder" (James 2:19), knowing that they are reserved unto judgment. 3. Satan's System of Religion In his organized government the adversary has also a religion for those whom he can delude and deceive, showing his perfect mimicry of the worship of the true God. Worship of Idols In 1 Corinthians one aspect of Satan's religion is revealed as we are shown what idol-worship actually means. They who would walk in fellowship with God must "flee from idolatry," lest they would hold "communion with demons." They dare not partake of the "table of the Lord," and of the "table of demons." (1 Corinthians 10:19-22, C. H.). The matter was vital to the Corinthians, as it now is to native Christians in heathen lands, for oftentimes the meat offered for sale had first been offered to idols, and some of the Corinthian Christians had accepted invitations to feasts celebrated in the temple of heathen gods-feasts which were acts of idolatrous worship. Thus we see how the fallen archangel not only deceives, and holds in darkness the human race, but he adds to their destruction, by seeking to meet the desire for an object of worship which lies dormant in every breast. Outward Profession of Godliness But apart from direct Satanic worship, Satan has other ways of meeting the need for some religion. Paul writes to the Romans, "Thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit sacrilege?" (Romans 2:22, margin) as he shows that no outward rite or ceremonial fulfillment of the law is acceptable to God. Satan knows this, and therefore persuades men that outward obedience to some creed is enough, thus deluding multitudes into a false peace by causing them to rest upon an outward ceremony or form of words. In the Lord's message to the church at Smyrna, He spoke of those who "say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan" (Revelation 2:9). It appears by this that the adversary has not only a religion which gives him worship through material images, but that his "synagogue" or congregation is made up of professors of religion who are without the inward truth. John writes, "If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness [i.e. in sin], we lie, and do not the truth" (1 John 1:6, A. V.), and the most severe words that ever passed the lips of Christ were His scathing exposures of the Pharisees. "They say and do not" He said, and "outwardly appear righteous unto men," when inwardly full of hypocrisy. He told them they were of their "father the devil," and called them "serpents," and the "offspring of vipers" (Matthew 23:15). And yet the Pharisees claimed God as their Father, and were the straitest sect in Israel in the outward fulfilling of the law! The Lord's strong words make it appear that Satan's invisible "church" is filled with those who make religion a cloak while they are really his subjects. Satan's Doctrines The Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy that the Holy Spirit had expressly told him that in the latter days the adversary would seek to draw many away from the faith by the teaching of spirits inculcating "doctrines of demons" (1 Timothy 4:1, m.). So that Satan has "doctrines" as well as system of worship-a "cup," a "table," and a "synagogue!" Paul said that the teaching would be given through men who would profess to be what they were not, and whose consciences would be seared as with a hot iron. These "teachings of demons," through false teachers acting under their control, had already begun in the first century, and seducing spirits were evidently at work in the church at Thyatira drawing servants of God from their Lord through the "deep things of Satan" (Revelation 2:24). One calling herself a prophetess was leading souls astray, teaching them to "eat things sacrificed to idols." The Lord's complaint was that the church suffered these things to be in its midst-things upon which He pronounced the most awful warning of certain judgment. Satan's religion has always one clearly defined mark in the omission of the Gospel of Calvary. And by this test all "gospels" that are not the Gospel may be recognized! The atoning death of the Son of God; His propitiation for sin; His blotting out of sin; His deliverance from the power of sin by the severing power of the Cross; His call of the blood-redeemed soul to the Cross in humiliation of self, and sacrifice for others-in brief, till that Calvary means, is emphatically repudiated, or else always carefully omitted, in the doctrines of the seducing spirits which are evolved in hell! Let everyone thus test the tenets of Theosophy, of Christian (?) Science, and all other teachings now being poured into the world by spirits of evil, who do not hesitate to appropriate for their purposes the very language describing the effects, and blessings of the Gospel. It cannot always be said that there is no mention of the Cross (and in his later workings, even of the Blood of Christ), in Satan's religious teaching, but it is the Cross as only an outward symbol without the inward power, for he knows that it is only the real acceptance of the death of Christ-or Cross of Christ-which saves from sin and delivers the soul from the power of Satan. 4. Satan's Subjects "The whole world lieth in the evil one," declares the Apostle John, but it is of the supremest importance to the prince of this world that those who dwell in his realm should not know it. To keep men ignorant of their position he blinds their minds! "The god of this world hath blinded the minds (margin: thoughts) of the unbelieving, that the light of the Gospel ... should not dawn upon them" (2 Corinthians 4:4). The adversary dreads the light of God, for light reveals things as they are, both in the natural and in the spiritual world. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). The truth about the love of God to men, of men as sinners needing a Saviour, and of God's gift of a perfect Saviour when really apprehended by the soul, must set free, and so the adversary hides the truth from his captives. They are kept "darkened in their understanding" and are thus "alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them" (Ephesians 4:18). That the truth must reach the understanding to be effectual in delivering the soul is evident from the Lord's words that the good ground which received the seed was in the one "that heareth the Word, and understandeth it" (Matthew 13:23; see also Colossians 1:9; 1 John 5:20). The adversary therefore labors to keep the understanding darkened, blinding the mind with (1) wrong thoughts about God, (2) prejudices of all kinds, (3) philosophy of earth, (4) false reasoning's concerning spiritual things, or else he occupies the thoughts with earthly things, earthly idols, or the cares and pleasures of this life. The Spirit of God alone can defeat the evil one, and destroy the veil which darkens men's minds. The adversary seeks to snatch away the Word of truth. "When anyone heareth the Word-and understandeth it not, then cometh the evil one, and snatcheth away" (Matthew 13:19). The adversary, or his minions, attends every preaching of the Word of truth, and when it does not enter the understanding it is easily snatched away. Once the smallest seed of the Word of truth enters the understanding it is sure to bring forth fruit in its season, unless it is choked by other things entering in. The adversary keeps his subjects in a false peace. "The strong man fully armed guardeth his own court," and "his goods are in peace" (Luke 11:21). Here the adversary is pictured as in full control of the darkened sinner, keeping him in peace, and the sinner is guarded carefully by the terrible one who is "fully armed" to meet every attempt to deliver the captive from his bonds. The poor soul resents his peace being disturbed, and cries, "Let me alone," but the time comes when the "Stronger than he"-the Man of Calvary-lays hold of the captive soul, and he is delivered "out of the power of darkness, and translated-into the kingdom of the Son" (Colossians 1:13). The adversary counterfeits the true work of God. "While men slept, his enemy came, and sowed tares also among the wheat" (Matthew 13:25; Matthew 13:38-39). The "tares are the sons of the evil one-the enemy that sowed them is the devil." The attention of the world must be drawn to the counterfeits, and the true living seed of God hidden, for the tares look like the wheat until the time of fruit! And God looks on! "Let both grow together till the harvest," He cries, for the tares cannot be uprooted without danger to the growing wheat. And the adversary also works on! The Lord's wheat, and the adversary's tares; the true and the counterfeit; are always found side by side throughout the inhabited earth. We must face the fact that the Scriptures declare these things to be true concerning all men, be they high or low, rich or poor, cultured or ignorant. There is no trace given of neutral ground. The Scripture "hath shut up all things under sin" (Galatians 3:22) that "every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God" (Romans 3:19, A. V.). "He that doeth sin is of the devil" (1 John 3:8). The Divine life which comes from God, and is implanted in the child of God, does not sin, for the good tree bears good fruit. The fallen life must also bring forth its own fruit of sin. Sin in greater or lesser degree it is true, but sin as God calls sin. We are children of the one by whose life we live. Children of God if His life is imparted to us, or "children of the devil" if we live under his control. The arch-fiend has studied the fallen race of Adam for many thousand years, and knows how to allure his subjects. Among the sons of men there are some with more spirit-capacity than others, and these are the ones especially open to his snares, and most likely to become his tools to work out his will. These souls would not be allured by the "flesh," nor would vain philosophy and reasonings charm them. Beguiled, as the serpent beguiled Eve, by the fascination of the knowledge of good and evil, he draws them on into unlawful dealings with the spirit-world, until some are given "a spirit of divination" (Acts 16:16) like the damsel at Philippi, or like Simon the sorcerer, and are led into "magical arts" as in the days of Paul. Such are the workings of the adversary today in spiritism, palmistry, crystal-gazing, and such like things. In the twentieth century professed Christian people are once more practising the "abominations" which caused the Lord to cast out the nations of Canaan before ú His people Israel. Abominations which Jehovah solemnly forbade Israel to touch. (Read Deuteronomy 18:9-12). But all is in fulfillment of the Apostle Paul's forecast of the latter days. The grievous times are upon us. Men are "lovers of self, lovers of money, ... lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God; holding a form of godliness" while denying the power thereof (2 Timothy 3:1-6). 5. Satan Conquered at Calvary Satan was conquered at Calvary. The disobedience of the first Adam was met by the obedience of the second-the Lord from heaven. The punishment of death was carried out upon the sinless One who took upon Him the sins of the world, and died as the Representative Man. The fallen race of Adam which God said must be "blotted out" (Genesis 6:7, Genesis 7:23), because, "every imagination of the thoughts of the heart was only evil continually," was nailed to the Cross in the person of the second Adam, and by the Cross the Lord from heaven triumphed over the prince of darkness. "Through death"-the very result of sin; "through death" the very weapon by which the evil one held his subjects in bondage; through death-the Prince of Life destroyed "him that had the power of death, that is, the devil" (Hebrews 2:14). Satan has fallen from heaven. He was "cast out," his power destroyed, his kingdom shaken, at the place called Calvary. But though the adversary was conquered at Calvary and cast down from his throne of power, he is left at large while the proclamation of the victory is sent throughout his dominions, for the purpose of giving the choice of masters to every human being. How bitterly the adversary resists the work of the Holy Spirit in men as their eyes are opened to the truth! But far more keenly does he resist the full enlightenment of the believer which makes him so possessed by the Holy Spirit that he becomes an equipped and aggressive warrior in the army of the Lord. 6. Satan's Devices Against the Full Deliverance of His Captives Note some of the ways in which the adversary resists the full deliverance of the soul after the light of the Gospel has dawned upon him: He seeks to keep back the soul from full surrender to God. "Ananias, why hath Satan filled thy heart to deceive the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part . . . ?" (Acts 5:3, margin) It was when all were placing their possessions entirely at the disposal of the Lord! Ananias laid part of his possessions at the Apostle's feet, pretending that it was "all"! Peter, filled with the Spirit discerned the truth, and his stern words at once unveil the source of the sin! Satan had "filled his heart" to make him "keep back part." Keep back part for self, is the tempter's whisper, for something kept for self gives place to the devil, and keeps the Redeemer from His Throne in the heart. He resists the removal of the filthy garments spotted by the flesh. "Satan standing at his right hand to be his adversary" (Zechariah 3:1). Joshua is seen standing before the Lord clothed in filthy garments with Satan as his adversary. Even so does the devil resist every child of God as he stands before the Lord seeking to be clothed with change of raiment. Clothed in the garments spotted by the flesh, the redeemed one stands in dumb helplessness before the Lord. The simple words, "The Lord rebuke thee, O Satan," are spoken and the foe is silenced. The soul seeking deliverance is here shown the way of victory over the adversary! Just as we are, we must stand before the Lord in our deep need, and count upon Him to rebuke the evil one. He uses others to tempt us from the way of the Cross. "Be it far from Thee, Lord ... But He turned and said unto Peter, Get thee behind Me, Satan" (Matthew 16:22-23). When the soul has yielded all in full surrender, and in dumb helplessness ceases from his own efforts to save himself, he knows by the Holy Spirit that he must take the Cross, and deny himself, if Christ is to see of the travail of His soul, and be satisfied. But "Be it far from thee," cries the adversary, through the lips of even servants of God, who have dimmer visions of the things of God, and know not the eternal loss to the soul who listens to their plea. But "Get thee behind me, Satan," the redeemed one must cry as he looks behind the human voice, and sees the adversary of God. He inflames the life of nature into division and strife. "If ye have bitter jealousy and faction in your heart [it] is earthly, natural [or animal], devilish" (James 3:14-15, m.). James points out that all "jealousy" and "faction" has its source in the life which he calls animal, and "devilish"! Satan is shown here to be the real power working through the fallen life of nature. Possibly when the believer has taken the Cross for himself, circumstances arise when "loyalty demands that he should stand up for a friend !" The spirit of faction comes in, or jealousy for others, and the adversary triumphs. The Apostle says that the wisdom which is from above is "without partiality." All faction, all jealousy for the "own," in friends, or denomination, is instigated by the evil one to keep the believer in the sphere lying under his rule. The wiles of the devil concerning "revelations." "I know a man in Christ-caught up into paradise" (2 Corinthians 12:2; 2 Corinthians 12:4). "I will love him, and will manifest Myself unto him" (John 14:21), is a promise made by the Lord on the eve of His passion. There is a moment when the promise is fulfilled, and Christ reveals Himself to the obedient heart, and the believer knows the Risen Lord. To some He is manifested in light above the brightness of the sun, as to Paul in a wondrous heavenly vision, and others are but conscious of His Presence in a peace and joy unspeakable. In any case the glorified Christ now becomes a living reality to the soul. What are the wiles of the adversary now but an attempt to personate the Lord! The believer must know that the evil one can fashion himself as an angel of light, and work with all "power and signs and lying wonders" (2 Thessalonians 2:9) to lead astray the very elect. We need to walk carefully with God at this stage of the spiritual life, not coveting wonderful experiences, but rather an ever-deepening conformity to the death of Jesus (Php_3:10), so that the life of Jesus may be manifested (2 Corinthians 4:10-11) to all around. "Visions and revelations" are not given to the soul for its own enjoyment, but for some definite purpose, as with the Apostle Paul when he was stoned in Lystra; called to Macedonia; or needed clearer guidance to remain in Athens. The wiles concerning the voice of God. "The sheep follow Him, for they know His voice-they know not the voice of strangers" (John 10:4-5). The Lord does speak to His children, and makes them to know His voice from the voice of strangers. They know it as a babe knows its mother's voice, but like the babe they may not be able to say how or why. When the believer is brought by the Spirit into the Spirit-sphere, and Christ is manifested to him, one of the first results is a knowledge of the voice of the Lord, in a way the soul has never realized before. The adversary knows that the believer has but little knowledge of his foe, so the wiles are soon planned to counterfeit the voice of the Lord, so as to confuse or to mislead the soul, either to destroy his faith in the guidance of the Spirit, or else to lead him in obedience to the voice of the devil, and in strong delusion to believe a lie. The believer who would overcome must now know how to distinguish the voice of the Lord from the voice of the foe. This may be done by its effect, and by its object. The voice of the Lord brings a deep calm over the spirit, whereas the voice of the devil often causes confusion, restlessness, agitation and uncertainty. The voice of the Lord is invariably in accord with the teaching of the Word of God, although the adversary also can quote Scripture, but it is usually texts with the portions omitted which safeguard, or interpret the whole, or else he uses isolated words wrenched from the context which explains them! The wiles of the adversary are the most subtle, and likely to succeed, in the early days of the life in the Spirit-sphere, for as the believer matures in the knowledge of God, the "mind of Christ" becomes the mind of the one closely in fellowship with God. It is well that the believer should understand this, lest he give advantage to the enemy by falling into discouragement, or depression, when the transition from childhood to manhood takes place, and God is teaching him how to use his spiritual senses, discerning good and evil. (Hebrews 5:14). The wiles concerning guidance. "As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God" (Romans 8:14). There is scarcely any subject connected with the spiritual life more difficult to explain, and more misunderstood than the subject of guidance! The words, "I was 'led' to do this or that," are so often used when there is no evidence of any leading at all. There are many wiles of the adversary around the subject. One tactic of the .evil one is to make souls confused and distracted over what is the will of God; others he deludes into throwing aside all use of their judgment and knowledge, to act upon some isolated text, or some "thought" that came to them in prayer; others are beguiled into an attitude of judgment upon the walk of others, or else into a position not far short of infallibility, though they would not use the word. Our text gives the principal mark of the true guidance of the Lord. "Led by the Spirit" means that He deals, and does not drive or force, therefore the soul must take heed not to force itself to any course of action which is repugnant to it, that is, pre-supposing that the will is surrendered to God, as ready to take any course unmistakably shown to be His will. Then let us understand, too, that as the life of Christ matures in the believer, the Spirit leads more from within by the working of life, which manifests itself as simply and naturally as the life of nature. When the believer becomes a "full grown man" (Hebrews 6:1, R. V. m.), with heart and will under the complete control of the Spirit, the new life will increasingly work in him with less and less perceived action to his consciousness. As many as are led by the Spirit, in this way, are indeed sons of God, with spirit, soul, and body, working out His will with ease and spontaneity. (1) They are "guided by the skillfulness of His hands" (Psalms 78:72), leading them hour by hour into the path prepared for them. (2) They are guided by their faithfulness to God: "The integrity of the upright shall guide them" (Proverbs 11:3)-for they know what to do by the very instinct of right and wrong which God has planted within them. (3) The "meek will He guide in judgment" (Psalms 25:9), for He uses their renewed minds (Romans 12:2), yea, giving them the very mind of Christ, which led Him to empty Himself, and be obedient unto death-the death of the Cross. The soul that knows this principle of sacrifice and self-effacement as the characteristic of the life of Christ, needs no inner voice nor special guidance, to tell him what course he is to take while walking in this present evil world! The wiles concerning "liberty." "Ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh" (Galatians 5:13, A. V.). The believer who has emerged into the life in the Spirit finds himself free in a way he has never known before. It is just now that the evil one is ready with new wiles to ensnare the freed one, suggesting to him (1) "You have liberty now to do anything, for you are free"; or (2) "You are under no man's control now, especially those who are in the flesh." And the adversary now does his best to counterfeit the true freedom in Christ by inciting rebellion to those in authority, and fleshly zeal under the name of the liberty of the Spirit. But the Word of God shows that the liberty wherewith Christ makes us free is really freedom from slavery to sin, and to the evil one. The freed soul passes under law to Christ, under the perfect law of liberty, which is liberty to do right, instead of seeing what is right, and doing what is wrong. Liberty to obey God instead of disobeying Him. The law of Christ comes in here, and shows that there is a limitation placed to liberty by the conscience of the weak brother. The freed one is not only to be subject to others in authority for the Lord's sake. but is to take heed lest his liberty of action become a "stumbling block to the weak" (1 Corinthians 8:9). The Apostle Paul sets the example to the believer, and he wrote, "I have not used my right, but forego every claim, lest I should by any means hinder the course of Christ's glad-tidings" (1 Corinthians 9:12, C. H. and note). The meaning of the word "claim" is "to hold out against." He would not "hold out" for his rights, but forego everything for himself rather than hinder the Gospel. Conclusion These wiles of the devil are those which will meet every believer who enters the sphere of the Spirit, and they are wiles which cease to a great extent as he progresses in the knowledge of God, and learns to know his foe. The preaching of the Cross is therefore the supreme need in this day of contact with the supernatural forces of the unseen world, and conformity to the death of Christ (Php_3:10), rather than the craving for signs and wonders, is the safest objective for all who desire to press on in the fullest knowledge of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 40: - WHY SAVE THE LORD'S DAY? ======================================================================== Why Save the Lord's Day? By Rev. Daniel Hoffman Martin, D. D., Glens Falls, New York The only command in the Decalogue which begins with the word "Remember" is the fourth: "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy," as if the Divine writer realized there would be more danger of forgetting this than any of the others, and of yielding to the subtle temptations of caprice and convenience as an excuse for violating it. "Remember" stands like a solitary sentinel in front of this solemn command, yet it has been chafed under, from the ancient Jew who was stoned for gathering sticks on the Sabbath, down to the Sunday saloon-keeper who, in commercializing his fellow-man's weakness, breaks three laws, that of the Sabbath, the State, and brotherly love. Jesus declared the Sabbath was made for man, that is, for mankind. It is to be kept holy, that is wholesomely, so that our threefold nature, body, mind and soul, may benefit. No law more wise and merciful ever came from the loving heart of God; a law as all-embracing in its design as sunlight, meeting the needs of king and peasant, master and servant, parent and child. Whence carne the wisdom condensed in this fourth commandment? Not from the Greeks, called the Wisest of nations, for these words were written a thousand years before Socrates was born. Not from the Romans, masters of jurisprudence, for these words antedate the founding of Rome, by seven hundred and fifty years. They come from our Heavenly Father and they embody the great septenary law which runs through nature; therefore it is of equal application to every nation on earth. The Sabbath is the savings bank of human existence. It conserves man's physical, mental, spiritual and eternal welfare. Why the First Day Instead of the Seventh? If you ask why the Jewish Saturday once observed as Lord's Day was changed to the First Day, the answer is that Jesus proclaimed Himself Lord also of the Sabbath day, therefore greater than the statute law of Moses. Jesus is the incarnate Legislator of the world. As Lord of the Sabbath, Jesus had the right to interpret and ennoble the day, so that it might be the greatest institution for the culture of the three-fold man. The Scribes and Pharisees had misconceived the genius of the Sabbath law. They missed its underlying principle, encumbered it with intricate and inflexible rules, assuming themselves to be the judges of every act. "The letter killeth, the spirit giveth life." Jesus rescued the Sabbath from its burial under a mass of ceremonialism, and revealed its true spirit and meaning. "Jesus did for the Sabbath what a skipper does for his ship, when she comes laboring into port, unable to make headway, because her hulk is covered with barnacles. He puts her into drydock, and scrapes off the barnacles. He does not scuttle the ship. So our Lord does not repeal nor annul the Sabbath law when He strips it of the intolerable burdens which the ceremonialists had heaped upon it." In order to emphasize His new idea of the old Sabbath the disciples chose a new day as Lord's Day. The disciples also desired to commemorate the greatest of all events Since the world's creation, namely, the resurrection of our Lord, for it was on the first day of the week that Jesus made His first five appearances. It was also on the first day of the week that the Holy Spirit was given, therefore Pentecost was commemorated on that day. (Acts 2). It was on this day also that the great tidings of salvation were first preached to the multitudes. (Acts 2). The first day became the day in which all the early Christians assembled for worship, and for communion. (Acts 20:77 and 1 Corinthians 11:23). It was the day also in which the prophecy of Revelation was granted to St. John on Patmos. (Revelation 1:10). All the church fathers kept the Lord's Day instead of the Jewish Sabbath, and thus the Christian Sabbath became the weekly holy day of the Christian dispensation, and is the only Sabbath day mentioned as a sacred rest day after the resurrection. Have We Outgrown the Sabbath Day? Is this king of days, created by our Father, sanctified by our Saviour, preserved by the Church, worth saving? Some would have us think we have outgrown it, that it belongs to another time, governed by different conditions. A moment's thought will show that it is impossible to outgrow a law of nature, such as this septenary law is proved to be. And here are a few of the reasons: The Body Needs It First, man has a body. Experience proves that the normal level of bodily energy cannot be maintained without the regular observance of a stated day of rest. We are like seven-day clocks that run down and have to be rewound. We are like musical instruments that play well for a time and get out of tune. We are storage batteries that leak their vital currents, and must be recharged. There was never an age when humanity needed this weekly rest-day more than now. Think of the fierce competition of modern business, and the relentless law of the survival of the strongest! Think of the feverish hurry and hustle of our American people! Ian Maclaren wrote thus about us: "I am now in New York, where everybody seems to be in a hurry. I asked a policeman what the excitement was all about. He thought I was joking. No one walks to business who can ride in a street car; none rides in a street car who can ride in a steam car, and he regrets there, is no pneumatic tube by which he might be shot to his office or shop. When there, he does not write letters if he can telegraph, or telegraph if he can telephone, and regrets there is no occupation for his feet while waiting at the phone." There is magnetism in our oxygen which stimulates our blood and explains our American push and rush. The difficulty, with our splendid American activity and achievement, is to arrest the momentum. Men rush so hard through the week that the Day of Rest finds them in the rushing mood. It is hard to stop. They want to do something or go somewhere, or keep up the pace by some dissipating use of the Lord's Day. Hence the Sunday excursions which generally make an incursion into the week's wages, and leave the working man more tired on that night than any other of the week. And there are Sunday amusements and dinner parties and receptions. But the human organism is not a machine of iron to run without rest, but a delicate bundle of nerves and tissues. But even iron machinery does better work and lasts longer when it has periodic rests, as the superintendent of the Pennsylvania railroad said recently about their locomotives. The Mind Needs It Second, man has a mind. It is a fact of common record that no set of men can keep working the same mental treadmill day after day without blunting the keen edge of their intellectual faculties. Note the employees who are held at their monotonous grind seven days out of seven, month after month, and you will observe that the average intelligence and moral standards are low. They read scarcely anything and take practically no interest in current events. A boy asked his father to take him "next Sunday to see the animals at the Bronx Zoo." The father has to work seven days a week, and he replied, "You needn't go to the Bronx to see animals; look at me, I am not much different from the horses I drive in front of my milk wagon." Do you wonder Jesus said the Sabbath was made for man? For man, that he might be something different from an animal. As soon as God had created man He ordained the Sabbath, because He knew the needs of man. We can ill afford to make light of God's merciful provision of this weekly arrest of physical and mental toil. Science supports the Divine law by showing in the analysis of the blood, that during our application to work through the week we recover in one night's rest only five-sixths of the ounce of oxygen consumed out of our system by the day's labor. Each morning finds one-sixth of an ounce lacking, so that a man is run down at the end of the week to the extent of that whole ounce of vitality. The Lord's Day is a physiological necessity for the restoration of that one ounce. When a man presumes to be wiser than this law of nature and of God, he usually pays the penalty by breaking down with that peculiar malady "Americanitis," a compound of insomnia and nervous debility. Then the physician most likely prescribes a sea voyage, for that will be an enforced rest for the depleted system. But a proper observance of the Lord's day would have supplied that very need, because the Lord's Day is a sea voyage between the two continents of monotony and drudgery. There would be little need of prolonged trips abroad, or sojourns in a sanitarium, if the Sabbath could have its claims respected. Fifty-two Sabbaths a year mean nearly two months vacation to every worker. When a man wipes the Sabbath out of his calendar he breaks a law of nature, and nature always squares accounts with broken law. Of many another could this doggerel be truthfully spoken concerning a man: "Who spent his health to get his wealth, And then with might and main He turned around and spent his wealth To get his health again." The Soul Needs It Third, man has a soul. A great jurist recently said: "In this strenuous age, our republic, instead of making light of one Sabbath, ought to have two each week, not only to repair its jaded nerves, but to tone up its moral sense." We have not fulfilled all the command when we have rested the body and diverted the mind. The soul has its rights, and not to recognize them is to leave our nature a truncated cone, the highest, finest part left undeveloped. We read of Jesus that "He went as His custom was into the synagogue on the Sabbath day." That His soul might keep its tryst with God, have larger breathing space, clearer light, and glimpses of the center of the spiritual universe, in which our spirits join and have their being. If Jesus needed that privilege, much more do we ordinary men. The shell fishes on the sea-shore live without water while the tide is out, but they depend upon the tide's return. If any of them are tossed by the waves beyond the reach of the tides, they die. Our souls are refreshed and nourished by communion with our Father in prayer, and through the means of grace provided by Divine worship on the Lord's Day. It is then we lay hold of our best yearnings, and stiffen them into fighting fiber for victorious warfare with the world, the flesh and the devil. The artist Turner kept on his easel a handful of precious stones of beautiful colors. For a half hour each morning he would silently sit and gaze at those glorious tints. He said he did this to keep his color-sense acute. If the artist's eye needed that influence to keep its color sense toned up, surely the human soul needs the tonic influence of spiritual worship. What is the cloud that looms over every man's path every day? Not sorrow, not poverty, not sickness, not business reverses. The cloud that looms over every path is TEMPTATION. Some time ago a man who had not been in church for many years, secured a pew in his old church, and is now one of its regular attendants. Someone asked him the reason. He said, "I have a growing family of sons and daughters. I have been watching my boys with some anxiety. I am alarmed at what I read in the daily papers about the ways of the world, the ease with which men under temptation go down like reeds in the wind, the frequency with which husbands and wives break up their homes. I am convinced there is only one place to bring up a family of children, and that is the church." Who will question that father's judgment? He does not want his sons to grow up without moral anchorage, he does not want his daughters to marry those who will play fast and loose with honor, and he knows that the church ,with its worship is the place where ideals are burnished up, where the dust is cleansed from the soul's wings, where false standards are corrected. If a busy brain worker could see a photograph of his mind as it appears on Saturday night, with its six layers of toil and grime, representing the six days contact with the world, he would see himself much in need of a spiritual bath on the Lord's Day. The average breadwinner is a human football, tossed hither and yon from the goal of Monday to the goal of Saturday, and literally dumped into the Sabbath morning bruised from the battle. He is apt to feel soured and out of sorts; and nothing so soothes the wounds as contact with the people of God in the Lord's house. A Complete Man So the Sabbath was made for man, that he might be in every sense MAN! Something more than a beast of burden, something more than a cash register, something more than a pendulum swinging between his home and his business. In an ordinary lifetime of seventy years there are ten years of Sundays. Therefore the manner in which a man keeps those three thousand six hundred and forty Sabbaths will make its impress on the man's life for all eternity. When a man says and thinks that he has a right to do as he pleases on the Lord's Day, with no reference to the sacredness of the day, or its claims upon his soul, we may conclude that man has not accepted his Heavenly Father's estimate of the worth of a man. He assesses himself at a lower value. God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him. But the man says, "I will rub out the Divine lineaments. God started me on an immortal journey but I am satisfied to let it end in the graveyard." There isn't much use trying to reason with a man who puts the body first and last, who regards his face as a mere opening for the alimentary canal, and who allows the lower nature to preside at the funeral of the higher. Man, do you think the Almighty God made a mistake when He started you on an eternal journey? Is your soul a joke? Has God not said: "If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on My holy day and call the Sabbath a delight, holy of the Lord and honorable and shall honor Him in not doing thy own ways, nor finding thy own pleasure, nor speaking thy own words, then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord, and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it" (Isaiah 58:13-14). The Law of Liberty There are those who say, "If the Sabbath was made for man, why may he not do as he pleases with it?" Because it was made for man's liberty, not for man's license, and the highest liberty is always found in conformity to law. So long as my doings affect no one else's liberty, I may do as I choose, but the moment I cross some one else's rights, I am not free to do as I choose. I am limited by the higher law of brotherly love. If you think you are at liberty to travel on the Lord's Day or attend a ball-game or concert on that day, you are not conforming to the law of brotherly love in that you force your fellow man to work for you on the day that you enjoy your freedom. But you reply, "Those people who toil on the Lord's Day receive extra pay." Extra pay! My friend, there is not gold enough in the bosom of the eternal hills to compensate a single toiler for his loss of the day of rest. EVERY MAN HAS A RIGHT TO HIS MANHOOD, AND NO MONEY COMPENSATION CAN REPLACE THE LOSS OF MANHOOD. "But the train of cars that I board on the Sabbath would run anyway, and I might as well go on it." My friend, how does that cancel your share of the moral responsibility for having forced your brother man to violate the law of the Sabbath? "Well, I am so busy during the week that I have no other day for recreation. From Monday to Saturday I grind like Samson at the mill." Yes, but you are no busier than the Sabbath-keeping toilers who manage to get their recreation at other times. If you honestly believe that you have no other day than the Lord's Day for your pleasure seeking, I ask you in all solemnity, have you any other day for the culture of your spiritual life? When are you going to attend to your immortal soul? Now is the accepted time, what are you doing with it? Some one has said, "The Lord's Day is like a rented house; it belongs to the proprietor, it is occupied by the tenant, but the tenant has no right to say, 'I will do what I please with this house, damage it, desecrate it, turn it into an evil resort.' No, the house is his to use and not abuse. The Sabbath is ours in the same way; he who diverts it from its proper purpose is dishonest. Will a man rob God? If a tramp tells me a pitiful tale and I have seven silver dollars and give six of them, what would you think of the ingrate if you were told he came at night and robbed me of the seventh? I wonder what God thinks of the man to whom He gives six days for his own free use and finds the man appropriating to himself that which is specially stamped as God's." What is the use of a Lord's Day if it is to be swamped between the secular hide of one worldly week gone, and of another coming, and to have nothing about it that distinguishes it from all the other days, except in some fanciful alteration in the style of its wordliness or carnality? Look at the people who have spent the entire Sabbath in pleasure-seeking. Not one gleam of spiritual light in their faces, not one crumb of spiritual food in their souls, going to bed at night a day's march nearer home. Home? Yes, if home is the grave and eternal death. Otherwise a day's march farther from home, if home is God, and if heaven is an experience into which men graduate from this earthly season of moral training and spiritual acquisition. Blue Laws Better Than Red Anarchy We are not pleading for a Puritan Sunday of bigotry or intolerance. We are not pleading for blue laws. But as between bigotry and a mush of concession give us bigotry every time. And even the bluest of blue laws would be preferable to red anarchy, We appeal for a safe and sane Sabbath, not in the interests of the Church or religion, but in the interests of all the people, believers and unbelievers, because the Sabbath was made for mankind. When I stood the other day in the little log cabin where Abraham Lincoln first saw the light, I thought of his regard for the Sabbath, and there came to my mind these words of his: "As we keep, or break, the Sabbath day, we nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope by which man rises." It is true there are many noble people who never get a Sabbath to themselves. They are busy in works of necessity and mercy. Jesus Himself sets the example of this, and leaves to our enlightened consciences to judge what is necessary, and what is not, to do on His day. The fundamental principle is to be "in the spirit on the Lord's Day," to be in tune with our Lord's mind, to be in harmony with our Lord's will. So if you ask what rules do you suggest for the proper observance of the Lord's Day I answer, THERE IS NO RULE BUT THE GOLDEN RULE THAT CAN GOVERN OUR RELATION TO THE LORD's DAY. Therefore, before I give a Sunday house party, or travel for my own pleasure, or talk a lot of twaddle at the telephone on the Lord's Day I will say, "I would not like to be obliged myself to work on Sunday; therefore it is wrong for me to oblige others to work. I will not buy a Sunday paper, knowing that I am forcing a hundred and fifty thousand compositors and pressmen to work seven days out of seven, and robbing a great army of men and boys of their right to a day of rest and worship. True, that newsboy is poor, and needs the money, but I refuse to take advantage of that boy's poverty by contributing to his moral detriment. It is bad that he is poor, it is worse that I Should make him a law-breaker." All over this country a hundred thousand boys are training for manhood with no reverence for the Sabbath, and no respect for authority, in order to supply a Sunday newspaper for people who would be infinitely better off to have one whole day in which the dust and rubbish of six secular days could not enter. When the attempt to introduce a Sunday newspaper was made in London, the "Evening Post" commented: "The best view which can be taken of our own Sunday newspapers must be that they are a nuisance. They are twice cursed; they curse him that prints them and him that reads them. They add new terrors to Sunday. On purely humanitarian grounds, without allowing theological reasons to have any weight whatever, we could wish them all away. If there is any more pathetic sight than a man deliberately sitting down to wade through a sextuple Sunday newspaper, we do not know what it is." That is the new indictment of the Sunday press from a secular viewpoint. We may easily see the harm it does from a spiritual viewpoint. A mind that has waded through the Sunday sheet is no more prepared for spiritual thoughts than is a man's clothing for appearance at church after rambling over fields of burdocks and nettles. The very purpose of the Sabbath was to give God's children one whole day free from the suggestions and contaminations of a wicked world. In the Name of Humanity O men, does it not touch a tender place in your hearts when you hear of the multitudes of wage earners who are pleading for a Sabbath restday? Railroad men, miners, actors, craftsmen of all sorts, signing petitions for a recognition of their right to a weekly day of rest, making their appeal on the grounds of common humanity. Here is one from a member of the bartenders' union. He said: "I cannot of course appeal to you from the standpoint of religion, but we have some interests in common with other men. I am myself the father of three children, but I scarcely know them. I am up in the morning before they are awake, and I return at night after they are in bed. This I do seven days a week, year in and year out." That from the bartenders' union. And similar appeals are made from thousands of other toilers; because every man has a right to his manhood, and the Sabbath was made for man. The Plain Duty of a Christian For Christian men and women there can be only one course of action. There may be perplexing situations at times, where even a Christian will be puzzled to decide just what to do; but with a mind brought, as the Apostle says, "into captivity to the obedience of Christ" the ground is level and the air cleared for meeting them. When we fully recognize the Lord's lordship of this Day of days, we will never go far astray. Every question as to the proper observance of it will be dealt with in its Divine relations to our Divine Master. It is more than half the answer to any question to be in tune with the principles involved in the solution of the question. "I was in the spirit on the Lord's Day," said the Apostle. To keep that pregnant phrase in mind will settle the details of every program of conduct on that day. God help us all to resist the drift of Sabbath secularization. Doubtless it will cost us something to be loyal to principle in this day of many jelly fish Christians, who have opinions without convictions, and prejudices without principles. A refreshing shadow of a great rock in a weary land is the man of convictions and principles who can resist the drifting sands of a loose interpretation of the Divine commands. The demand today is for rock Christians. We are living in a time when the people who settle questions of right and wrong for themselves seem to be in a minority. In matters of morals and dress most of us go in droves. A few people act as brain for the many, a few people act as conscience for the many. But we who have the light of God's Word need not be mastered by the mob. One is our Master, even Christ. A great many people are doing certain things on the Lord's Day, not because they have settled the question, as between themselves and their Lord, but because they have settled it as between themselves and their own preferences, or as between themselves and their associates. Let us be rock Christians, who will keep the Lord's Day holy because it holds us in touch with eternal and Divine things, and because it celebrates our relation to our Divine Master; and because the Lord's Day is the guerdon of our national prosperity, the hope of our civilization; and because the mouth of Jehovah hath spoken: "Them that honor Me I will honor." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 41: - THE APOLOGETIC VALUE OF PAUL'S EPISTLES ======================================================================== The Apologetic Value of Paul's Epistles By Rev. E. J. Stobo, Jr., B.A., S.T.D., Smith's Falls, Ontario, Canada "Paul is the greatest literary figure in the New Testament; round him all its burning questions lie." "There is nothing more certain in ancient literature than the authorship of the more important of the Pauline epistles." These utterances of Dr. Fairbairn in his "Philosophy of the Christian Religion" bring us face to face with the apologetic value of the writings of the Apostle to the Gentiles. The oldest Pauline epistle is divided by little more than twenty years from the death of Christ, and by a still shorter interval from the Epistle to the Hebrews and Apocalypse; so that Paul's interpretation of the Christ has a distinct bearing upon the Gospels and later Christian literature. In this paper we shall deal only with four epistles which are acknowledged by Biblical critics of all schools as undoubtedly genuine; viz., Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians and Romans. The four epistles in question have the advantage of being more or less controversial in their nature. Debate leads to clearness of statement, and we have the advantage of hearing the words of Paul as well as of understanding the views of those against whom he contends. The controversy in these epistles concerns the nature and destination of Christianity, and consequently we may expect to learn what Paul deemed central and essential in the Christian faith. There is enough Christology in these epistles to show us what Paul thought concerning the Great Founder of Christianity. Moreover there are, in these writings, references to the solemn crisis-experience in his spiritual history, and these of necessity have a bearing upon Luke's letters to Theophilus, which are popularly known as the Gospel of Luke and The Acts of the Apostles. With such clues to follow we are able to argue for the credibility of the other New Testament documents, and also for the accuracy of the portrait painted of its central figure, the Lord Jesus Christ. Our first argument has to do with The Apologetic Value of the References, in Paul's Epistles, to his Christian Experience. His theology is an outgrowth of his experience. His thinking is remarkably autobiographical. He resembles Luther in this respect as a religious teacher. His thinking is colored by the age in which he lives, and in such words as law, righteousness, justification, adoption, flesh, spirit, there is undying interest, if we remember the intense, tragic, moral struggle lying behind Paul's theology. The passages in these four epistles, which exhibit most conspicuously the autobiographical character, occur in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians and the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. From the former we learn that he belonged to a class which was thoroughly antagonistic to Jesus. His religion was Judaism. He was an enthusiastic in it. He says: "I advanced in the Jew's religion beyond many of mine own age among my countrymen, being more exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers." In other words he was a Pharisee of the most extreme type. His great aim in life was to become legally righteous, and thus all his prejudices were most strongly opposed to the new teaching. In the seventh chapter of Romans we learn that Paul in time made a great discovery. One of the commandments, the tenth, forbids coveting; and so he learned that a mere feeling, a state of the heart, is condemned as sin. In that hour his Pharisaism was doomed. "When the commandment came sin revived and I died." He discovered a world of sin within of which he had not dreamed, and legal righteousness seemed unattainable. That was a great step towards Christianity. He had been trying to satisfy the hunger of his soul with legal ordinances; he found them chaff, not wheat, and so he sought for true nourishment. Eventually he became a convert to Christianity. The Pauline letters give no detailed account of the memorable event like the narratives contained in the Book of the Acts. The main feature of the story is referred to in 1 Corinthians 15:8 where the Apostle enumerates the different appearances of the risen Christ: "Last of all He was seen of me also." Paul's conversion is one of the hard problems for those who undertake to give a purely naturalistic solution of the origins of Christianity. All attempts to explain it without recognizing the hand of God in it must be futile. He himself says devoutly concerning it: "It was the good pleasure of God to reveal His Son in me." This argues that Christianity is a supernatural religion. When a religious crisis comes to a man of Paul's type it possesses deep significance. For him to become a Christian meant everything. It meant to leap into a large cosmopolitan idea of Christianity, its nature and destination. He saw that all was over with Judaism and its legal righteousness, all over with the law itself as a way of salvation; that salvation must come to man through the grace of God, and that it might come through that channel to all men alike on equal terms, and that therefore the Jewish prerogative was at an end. These consequences are all borne out in the biographical notice in the first chapters of Galatians. It can easily be seen that if the accounts of Paul's conversion in the epistles be accepted, they lend support and give value to the accounts in the Acts of the Apostles; that the consequences of that conversion as previously indicated are in entire harmony with the teaching of the latter part of the Acts, and so we must come to the conclusion that the contents of that book are trustworthy whether Luke be the author or not. And since the Acts of the Apostles purports to be a continuation of the Gospel of Luke, we are led to conclude that the Gospel must be trustworthy also, and that all the Synoptists set forth real facts .... Such a conclusion involves the historicity of Jesus Christ. Our second argument is concerned with The Apologetic Value of the References in Paul's Epistles to the Person of Christ. The conversion of Paul admitted as a fact, we have seen that it leads back by degrees to the fact of Christ. But what sort of a Christ? The reader will be struck with the fact that, in these Epistles, The Earthly Life of the Christ is Represented as Singularly Free from the Miraculous. He is born of a woman, born under the law (Galatians 4:4); He springs from Israel, and is, according to the flesh, from the tribe of Judah and the seed of David (Romans 9:5; Romans 1:3); He is unknown to the princes of this world (1 Corinthians 2:8); He is poor, hated, persecuted, crucified (2 Corinthians 8:9; Galatians 6:14; 1 Corinthians 1:23-25; 1 Corinthians 2:2); He is betrayed at night just after He has instituted the supper (1 Corinthians 15:23); He dies on the cross, to which He had been fastened with nails, and is buried (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). This account it will be seen is at one with that of the Synoptists, with the exception that we do not hear of a supernatural birth, nor is there any emphasis placed upon supernatural works. In its main outlines the portrait of the man Jesus agrees perfectly with that of the Synoptic Gospels, and lends credence to the history of the Galilean Prophet. On the other hand Christ is Represented as a Being of Ideal Majesty. The doctrine of Christ's person as found in these four great epistles is no mere theological speculation; it is the outgrowth of religious experience. Jesus was, for Paul, the Lord because He was the Saviour. Four leading truths with reference to Christ are brought into prominence in his writings: A. In Relation to Time. He is God's Son who was "born of the seed of David according to the flesh". On the side of His humanity our Lord "was born." (Romans 1:2). That nature begins only then. He is possessed of another nature that dates back long before the incarnation. He is in a peculiar sense God's "own Son" (Romans 8:32), belonging to Him above all others, or as Alford well says, "His huios monogenês the only one of God's Sons who is one with Him in nature and essence, begotten of Him before all worlds. This Son was delivered up for us all. This idea is hinted at in 2 Corinthians 8:9 : "Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor," and finds full expression in the Epistle to the Philippians (Php_2:5-9), concerning which there is very little controversy. The straggling hints we have in the four great epistles confirm the teaching of the Letter to the Philippians, and above all the classic statement of the Fourth Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word." B. In Relation to Man. Paul says Christ was "made of a woman" (Galatians 4:4), and that He was sent into the world "in the likeness of sinful flesh" (Romans 8:3); that is, He came into the world by birth and bore to the eye the aspect of any ordinary man. But though Christ came in the likeness of sinful flesh, He was not a sinner. He "knew no sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21). The mind that was in Him before He came ruled His life after He came. However, Paul regards the resurrection as constituting an important crisis in the experience of Christ. Thereby He was declared to be the Son of God with power (Romans 1:4), "the man from heaven" (1 Corinthians 15:47); and yet to Paul, Jesus is a real man, a Jew with Hebrew blood in His veins, a descendant of David. The portrait thus painted agrees perfectly with that of the Evangelists who depict Him as a real man, but, in some strange fashion, different from other men, "His soul was like a star and dwelt apart." The Son of David was, for Paul, moreover, "The second man" (1 Corinthians 15:47). This title points out Christ as one who has, for His vocation, to undo the mischief wrought by the transgression of the first man. Hence He is called, in sharp contrast to the first man Adam, "a quickening spirit" (1 Corinthians 15:45). As the one brought death into the world, so the other brings life (1 Corinthians 15:22); and this teaching agrees with the declaration of the Synoptists: "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost;" "Thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins." C. In Relation to the Universe. He is represented in the Epistle to the Colossians as the Firstborn of all creation, as the Originator of creation as well as its final cause, all things in heaven and on earth visible and invisible, angels included. being made by Him and for Him (Colossians 1:15-16). This goes beyond anything found in the four great epistles, yet we may find rudiments of a cosmic doctrine even in these letters. For Paul it was an axiom that the universe has its final aim in Christ its King. (See 1 Corinthians 8:6). D. In Relation to God. Paul applies two titles to Christ, "the Son of God" and "the Lord." Both of these titles are combined in the introduction of the Epistle to the Romans, "His Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord." He is "declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by a resurrection of the dead" (Romans 1:4). The most convincing proof of the divinity of Christ Paul found in the resurrection. Writing to the Corinthians he says: "If Christ hath not been raised then is our preaching vain-your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:14-17). He submits to them the proof of his Apostleship in the fact that he has seen "Jesus our Lord" (1 Corinthians 9:1). He tells the Galatians that his gospel came "through revelation of Jesus Christ" (Galatians 1:12), and that Gospel, according to 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, contains five elementary facts: 1, Christ died for our sins; 2, He was buried; 3, He rose on the third day; 4, He appeared to many disciples, and 5, Last of all, He appeared to Paul himself. These are the things that are vital in Paul's preaching, When we remember that, as a Pharisee, his prejudices were all against the Gospel, we must come to the conclusion that Paul's testimony argues most strongly for the historicity of the resurrection and the truths involved therein. It may not be out of place to re-iterate what has already been stated regarding Paul's use of the expression, "His own Son," in Romans 8:3. This passage deals with the brotherhood of sons. Jesus, amid the multitudes having the right to call themselves sons of God, is an unique figure, towering above them all. In 2 Corinthians 4:4 it is stated that Christ is the image of God, and in Romans 8:29 it is said that the destiny of believers is to be conformed to the image of God's Son. The ideal for Christians is to bear the image of Christ. For Christ Himself is reserved the distinction of being the image of God. This throws a side light upon Paul's idea of Christ's sonship. He is represented as the one Lord by whom or on account of whom are all things (1 Corinthians 8:6). According as di ou or di on is accepted as the reading, Jesus is the Creator of all things or furnishes the Divine reason for creation. The groaning of the creation in labor for the bringing forth of a new redeemed world is a graphic picture of the relation of Christ's redemptive work to the physical universe. (Romans 8:22). It is true that this teaching goes beyond that of the Gospels in some particulars, but it agrees with John's Gospel when it teaches the creatorship of the Logos. (John 1:3). In 1 Corinthians 8:5-6, the term "Lord" gains equal significance to that of "Son". In view of pagan polytheism, the Apostle sets one real theon over against the many theoi legomenoi of paganism, and one real Lord over against its kurioi polloi. It would seem by this inscription that the Apostle desired to introduce Christ into the sphere of the truly divine. The famous benediction at the close of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians implies a very high conception of Christ's person and position. One could scarcely believe that Paul would use such a collocation of phrases as the grace of the Lord Jesus, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, unless Christ had been for him a Divine Being, even God. Now all this simply adds force to John's prologue: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The four great Pauline epistles agree, in the most important details, with the portraiture given us of Jesus in the Gospels. The conception of the person of Christ, as we have already shown, was not natural to Paul. He was a bitter opponent of Christianity. It was not the result of gradually changing convictions regarding the claims of Jesus Christ-all the testimony which bears upon the subject implies the contrary. It was not due to extreme mysticism, for Paul's writings impress us as being remarkably sane and logical. No endeavor to account for it upon merely natural grounds is satisfactory, and so we must accept his own statement of the case. The truth of the Messiahship of Jesus was a matter of revelation in the experience of his conversion, and if we accept that, we must necessarily accept all that it involves. The Gospels and Epistles do not contradict, but only supplement this portraiture. They add lines of beauty to the rugged outline painted by Paul, and are inextricably connected with the four great epistles. Accepting these letters as genuine and Paul's explanation of his doctrine as true, we must accept the whole of the New Testament documents as credible, and the portraiture of the Christ as that of a real person-Son of man and Son of God, the God-Man. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 42: - DIVINE EFFICACY OF PRAYER ======================================================================== Divine Efficacy of Prayer By Rev. Arthur T. Pierson, D.D. All the greatest needs, both of the Church and of the world, may be included in one: the need of a higher standard of godliness; and the all embracing secret of a truly godly life is close and constant contact with the unseen God; that contact is learned and practiced, as nowhere else, in the secret place of supplication and intercession. Our Lord's first lesson in the school of prayer was, and still is: "ENTER INTO THY CLOSET" (Matthew 6:6). The "closet" is the closed place, where we are shut in alone with God, where the human spirit waits upon an unseen Presence, learns to recognize Him who is a Spirit, and cultivates His acquaintance, fellowship, and friendship. Everything else, therefore, depends upon prayer. To the praying soul there becomes possible the faith which is the grasp of the human spirit upon the realities and verities of the unseen world. To the praying soul there becomes possible and natural the obedience which is the daily walk of the disciple with the unseen God. To the praying soul there becomes possible the patience, which is the habit of waiting for results yet unseen and hopes yet unrealized. To the praying soul there becomes possible the love that, like a celestial flood, drowns out evil tempers and hateful dispositions, and introduces us to a new world of gentle and generous frames. To the praying soul there becomes possible and increasingly real the holiness which is personal conformity to an unseen Divine image and ideal, and the innermost secret of a heavenly bliss. Those who yearn for revivals naturally lay much stress on preaching. But what is preaching without praying! Sermons are but pulpit performances, learned essays, rhetorical orations, popular lectures, or it may be political harangues, until God gives, in answer to earnest prayer, the preparation of the heart, and the answer of the tongue. It is only he who prays that can truly preach. Many a sermon that has shown no intellectual genius and has violated all homiletic rules and standards has had dynamic spiritual force. Somehow it has moved men, melted them, molded them. The man whose lips are touched by God's living coal from off the altar may even stammer, but his hearers soon find out that he is on fire with one consuming passion to save souls. We need saints in the pew as well as in the pulpit, and saintship everywhere is fed and nourished on prayer. The man of business who prays, learns to abide in his calling with God; his secular affairs and transactions become sacred by being brought into the searchlight of God's presence. His own business becomes his Father's business. He does not trample on God's commands in order to make money, nor does he drive his trade and traffic through the sacred limits of the Lord's day, or defraud his customers, "breaking God's law for a dividend." Praying souls become prevailing saints. Those who get farthest on in the school of prayer and learn most of its hidden secrets often develop a sort of prescience which comes nearest to the prophetic spirit, the Holy Spirit showing them "things to come." They seem, like Savonarola, to know something of the purpose of God, to anticipate His plans, and to forecast the history of their own times. The great supplicators have been also the seers. There is no higher virtue in a church than that it should be a praying church, for it is prayer that makes eternal realities both prominent and dominant. A church and a pastor may have any one of the current, popular types of "religious" life, and souls may not be saved; but, as the late Dr. Skinner, of New York, used to say: "If the peculiar type of piety is that which is inspired by a sense of the powers of the world to come; sinners will be saved and saints edified." Even the world that now is will feel the power of such piety. Praying feeds missions at home and abroad. It promotes giving. Parsimony is stifled in the atmosphere of God's presence. Gifts are multiplied and magnified when the giver is consecrated. When disciples begin to pray for souls they begin to yearn over them and to be willing to make sacrifices for their salvation. The key that can unlock the treasury of God's promises has marvelous power also to unlock the treasures of hoarded wealth, and makes even the abundance of deep poverty to abound into the riches of liberality till the widow's mites drop into the Lord's hands even more frequently than the millions of merchant princes. No man can breathe freely in the atmosphere of prayer while he stifles benevolent impulses. The giving of money prepares for the giving of self, and thus prayer makes missionary workers as well as missionary givers and supporters. Few, even amongst the most devout, have ever fully felt how far workers in "the mine of heathendom" depend on those who "hold the ropes." James Gilmour, whose rare and radiant spirit so impressed the rude Mongolians, said that, un-prayed for, he would feel like a diver in the river bottom with no air to breathe, or like a fireman on a blazing building with no water in his empty hose. Prayer is not to be thought the less of because we are so often driven to the throne of grace as a last resort. It is part of the philosophy of prayer that it shall reveal its full efficacy only when and where all beside fails us. Here, as in all else, it is only at the end of self with all its inventions. that we find the beginning of God with all His interpositions. A praying heart is the one thing that the devil cannot easily counterfeit. It is easy enough to imitate praying lips, so that hypocrites and Pharisees feign devoutness. But only God can open in the heart's depths those springs of supplication that often find no channel in language, but flow out in groanings which cannot be uttered. It is not worth while to waste much time in defending or advocating prayer. Experiment makes argument needless. This is not so much a science to be mastered by study as an art to be learned by practice. Like the Bible, prayer is self-evidencing. It is a mysterious union of Divine and human elements not easy of explanation; but to him who prays and puts God to the test along the lines of His own precepts and promises, God proves how real a force prayer is in His moral universe. The best way to prop up prayer is to practice it. The pivot of piety, therefore, is prayer. A pivot is of double use, it acts as a fastener and as a center; it holds other parts in place, and it is the axis of revolution. Prayer likewise, keeps one steadfast in faith and helps to all holy activity. Hence, as surely as God is lifting His people to a higher level of spirituality, and moving them to a more unselfish and self-denying service, there will be new emphasis laid by them upon supplication, and especially upon intercession. The revival of the praying-spirit is not only first in order of development, but it is first in order of importance, for without it there is no advance. Generally, if not uniformly prayer is both starting-point and goal to every movement in which are the elements of permanent progress. Whenever the Church's sluggishness is aroused and the world's wickedness arrested, somebody has been praying. If the secret history of all true spiritual advance could be written and read. there would be found some intercessors who, like Job, Samuel. Daniel, Elijah, Paul and James; like Jonathan Edwards, William Carey, George Muller, and Hudson Taylor, have been led to shut themselves in the secret place with God, and have labored fervently in prayer. And as the starting-point is thus found in supplication and intercession, so the final outcome must be that God's people shall have learned to pray; otherwise there will be rapid reaction and disastrous relapse from the better conditions secured. Prayer Puts Men in Touch with God There is a divine philosophy behind this fact. The greatest need is to keep in close touch with God; the greatest risk is the loss of the sense of the Divine. In a world where every appeal is to the physical senses and through them, reality is in direct proportion to the power and freedom of contact. What we see, hear, taste, touch or smell-what is material and sensible-we can not doubt. The present and material absorbs a but the future, the immaterial, the invisible, the spiritual, seem vague, distant, illusive, imaginary. Practically the unseen has little or no reality and influence with the vast majority of mankind. Even the unseen God Himself is to most men less a verity than the commonest object of vision; to many He, the highest verity, is really vanity, while the world's vanities are practically the highest verities. God's great corrective for this most disastrous inversion and perversion of the true relation of things is prayer. "Enter into thy closet." There all is silence, secrecy, solitude, seclusion. Within that holy of holies the disciple is left alone-all others shut out, that the suppliant may be shut in-with God. The silence is in order to the hearing of the still, small voice that is drowned in worldly clamor, and which even a human voice may cause to be unheard or indistinct. The secrecy is in order to a meeting with Him who seeth in secret and is best seen in secret. The solitude is for the purpose of being alone with One who can fully impress with His presence only when there is no other presence to divert thought. the place of seclusion with God is the one school where we learn that He is, and is the rewarder of those that diligently seek Him. The closet is "not only the oratory, it is the observatory," not for prayer only, but for prospect-the wide-reaching, clear-seeing, outlook upon the eternal! The decline of prayer is therefore the decay of piety; and, for prayer to cease altogether, would be spiritual death, for it is to every child of God the breath of life. We cannot too strongly emphasize this fact, that to keep in dose touch with God in the secret chamber of His presence is the great fundamental underlying purpose of prayer. To speak with God is a priceless privilege; but what shall be said of having and hearing Him speak with us! We can tell Him nothing He does not know; but He can tell us what we do not know, no imagination has ever conceived, no research ever unveiled. The highest of all possible attainments is the knowledge of God, and this is the practical mode of His revelation of Himself. Even His holy Word needs to be read in the light of His own presence if it is to be understood. The praying soul hears God speak. "And when Moses was gone into the tabernacle of the congregation to speak with Him, then he heard the voice of One speaking unto him from off the mercy seat that was upon the ark of testimony-from between the two cherubim, and He spake unto him" (Numbers 7:89). Where there is this close touch with God, and this clear insight into His name which is His nature, and into His Word which is His will made known, there will be a new power to walk with Him in holiness, and work with Him in service. "He made known His ways unto Moses, His acts unto the children of Israel." The mass of the people stood afar off and saw His deeds, such as the overthrowing of Pharaoh's hosts in the Red Sea; but Moses drew near into the thick darkness where God was, and in that thick darkness he found a light such as never shone elsewhere, and in that light he read God's secret plans and purposes and interpreted His wondrous ways of working. All practical power over sin and over men depends on maintaining this secret communion. Elijah was bidden, first, "go, hide thyself," and then, "go shew thyself." Those who abide in the secret place with God come forth to show themselves mighty to conquer evil, and strong to work and to walk for God. They are permitted to read the secrets of His covenant; they know His will; they are the meek whom He guides in judgment and teaches His way. They are His prophets, who speak for Him to others; because they watch the signs of the times, discern. His tokens, and read His signals. We sometimes count as mystics those who, like Savonarola and Catherine of Siena, claim to have communications from God; to have revelations of a definite plan of God for His Church, or for themselves as individuals, like the reformer of Erfurt, the founder of the Bristol Orphanages, or the leader of the China Inland Mission. But may it not be that if we stumble at these experiences it is because we do not have them ourselves? Have not many of these men and women afterward proved by their lives that they were not mistaken, and that God has led them by a way that no other eye could trace? Prayer Imparts God's Power In favor of close contact with the living God in prayer, there is another reason that rises perhaps to a still higher level. Prayer not only puts us in touch with God, and gives knowledge of Him and His ways, but it imparts to us His power. It is the touch which brings virtue out of Him. It is the hand upon the pole of a celestial battery, which charges us with His secret life, energy, efficiency. Things which are impossible with man are possible with God, and with a man in whom God is. Prayer is the secret of imparted power from God, and nothing else can take its place. Absolute weakness follows the neglect of secret communion with God-and the weakness is the more deplorable, because it is often unconscious and unsuspected, especially when one has never yet known what true power is. We see men of prayer quietly achieving results of the most surprising character. They have the calm of God, no hurry, or worry, or flurry; no anxiety, or care, no excitement or hustle or bustle-they do great things for God, and, like John the Baptist, are great in His eyes, yet they are little in their own eyes; they carry great loads, and yet are not weary nor faint; they face great crises, and yet are not troubled. And those who know not what treasures of wisdom and strength and courage and power are hidden in God's pavilion wonder how it is. They try to account for all this by something in the man-his talent, or tact, original methods, or favoring circumstances. Perhaps they try to imitate such a career by securing the patronage of the rich and mighty, or by dependence on organization, or fleshly energy-or what men call "determination to succeed"-they bustle about, labor incessantly, appeal for money and co-operation, and work out an apparent success, but there is none of that power of God in it which cannot be imitated. They compass themselves about with sparks, but there is no fire of God; they build up a great structure, but it is wood, hay, stubble; they make a great noise, but God is not in the clamor. Nothing is at once so undisputable and so over-awing as the way in which a few men of God have lived in Him and He in them. The fact is, that in the disciple's life the fundamental law is, "Not I, but Christ in me." In a grandly true sense there is but one Worker, one Agent, and He Divine; and all other so-called "workers" are instruments, and instruments only, in His hands. The first quality of a true instrument is passivity. An active instrument would defeat its own purpose; all its activity must be dependent upon the man who uses it. Sometimes a machine becomes uncontrollable, and then it not only becomes useless, but it becomes dangerous, and works damage and disaster. What would a man do with a plane, a knife, an axe, a saw, a bow, that had any will of its own and moved of itself? Does it mean nothing when, in the Word of God, we meet so frequently the symbols of passive service-the rod, the staff, the saw, the hammer, the sword, the spear, the threshing instrument, the flail; and, in the New Testament, the vessel? Does it mean that in proportion as a man is willful God can not use him; that the first condition of service is that the human will is to be lost in God's so that it presents no resistance to His, no persistence beyond or apart from His, and even ventures to offer no assistance to His? George Muller well taught that we are to wait to know whether a certain work is God's; then whether it is ours, as being committed to us; but, even then, we need to wait for God's way and God's time to do His own work, otherwise we rush precipitately into that which He means us to do, but only at His signal; or else, perhaps, we go on doing when He calls a halt. Many a true servant of God has, like Moses, begun before his Master was ready, or kept on working when his Master's time was past. Intercession There is one aspect of prayer to which particular attention needs to be called, because it is strongly emphasized in the Word, and because it is least used in our daily life, namely, intercession. This word, with what underlies it, has a very unique use and meaning in Scripture. It differs from supplication, first this, that supplication has mainly reference to the suppliant and his own supply; and again, because intercession not only concerns others, but largely implies the need of direct Divine interposition. There are many prayers that, in their answer, allow our co-operation and imply our activity. When we pray, "Give us this day our daily bread," we go to work to earn the bread for which we pray. That is God's law. When we ask God to deliver us from the evil one, we expect to be sober and vigilant, and resist the adversary. This is right; but our activity in many other matters hinders the full display of God's power, and hence also our impression of His working. The deepest convictions of God's prayer-answering are therefore wrought in cases where, in the nature of things, we are precluded from all activity in promoting the result. The Word of God teaches us that intercession with God is most necessary in cases where man is most powerless. Elijah is held before us as a great intercessor, and the one example given is his prayer for rain. Yet in this case he could only pray; there was nothing else he could do to unlock the heavens after three years and a half of drought. And is there not a touch of Divine poetry in the form in which the answer came? The rising cloud took the shape of "a man's hand," as though to assure the prophet how God saw and heeded the suppliant hand raised to Him in prayer! Daniel was powerless to move the king or reverse his decree; all he could do was to "desire mercies of the God of heaven concerning this secret;" and it was because he could do nothing else, could not even guess at the interpretation, inasmuch as he knew not even the dream-that it became absolutely sure, when both the dream and its meaning were made known, that God had interposed, and so even the heathen king himself saw, felt and confessed. All through history certain crises have arisen when the help of man was utterly vain. To the formal Christian, the carnal disciple, the unbelieving soul, this fact, that there is nothing that man could do, makes prayer seem almost a folly, perhaps a farce, a waste of breath. But to those who best know God, man's extremity is God's opportunity, and human helplessness becomes not a reason for the silence of despair, but the argument for praying in faith. Invariably those whose faith in prayer is supernaturally strong are those who have most proved that God has wrought, by their conscious compulsory cessation of all their own efforts as vain and hopeless. George Müller set out to prove to a half-believing Church and an unbelieving world that God does directly answer prayer; and to do this he purposely abstained from all the ordinary and otherwise legitimate methods of appeal, or of active effort to secure the housing, clothing and feeding of thousands of orphans. Hudson Taylor undertook to put missionaries into Inland China by dependence solely upon God, asking no collections and even refusing them in connection with public meetings, lest such meetings should be construed as appeals for help. He and his co-workers accustomed themselves to lay all wants before the Lord, and to expect the answer, and answer always came and still comes. The study of missionary history reveals the fact that, at the very times when, in utter despair of any help but God's there has been believing prayer, the interposition of God has been most conspicuously seen how could it be most conspicuous except amid such conditions? Every church ought to be a prayer circle; but this will not be so long as we wait for the whole Church, as a body, to move together. The mass of professing Christians have too little hold on God to enter heartily into such holy agreement. To all who yearn for a revival of the prayer-spirit we suggest that in every congregation a prayer circle be formed, without regard to number. Let any pastor unite with himself any man or woman in whom he discerns marks of peculiar spiritual life and power, and without publicity or any direct effort to enlarge the little company, begin with such to lay before God any matter demanding special Divine guidance and help. Without any public invitation which might draw unprepared people into a formal association-it will be found that the Holy Spirit will enlarge the circle as He fits others, or finds others fit, to enter it-and thus, quietly and without Observation, the little company of praying souls will grow as fast as God means it shall. Let a record be kept of every definite petition laid before God-for such a prayer circle should be only with reference to very definite matters and as God interposes and answers follow let the record of His interposition be carefully kept, that it may become a new inspiration both to praise and to believing prayer. Such a resort to united intercession we have ourselves known to transform a whole church, remove dissensions, rectify errors, secure harmony and unity, and promote Holy Spirit administration and spiritual life and growth beyond all other possible devices. If in any church the pastor is unhappily not a man who could or would lead in such a movement, let two or three disciples who feel the need and have the faith meet and begin, perhaps, by praying for him. In this matter there should be no waiting for anybody else; if there be but one believer who has power with God let such a one begin intercessory prayer. God will bring to the side of such an intercessor, in His own time and way, others whom He has made ready to act as supplicators. Not long since, in a church in Scotland, a minister suddenly began to preach with unprecedented power. The whole congregation was aroused and sinners marvelously saved. He himself did not understand the new enduement. In a dream of the night it was strangely suggested to him that the whole blessing was traceable to one poor old woman who was stone deaf, but who came regularly to church, and being unable to hear a word, spent all the time in prayer for the preacher and individual hearers. In the biography of Charles G. Finney similar facts are recorded of "Father Nash," Abel Cleary, and others. Examples might be multiplied indefinitely. But the one thing we would make prominent is this: God is summoning His people to prayer. He wills that "men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands without wrath and doubting"; that, first of all, supplication, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men. (1 Timothy 2:8). If this be done first of all, every other most blessed result will follow. God waits to be asked. In Him are the fountains of blessing and He puts at the disposal of His praying saints all their abundance; they are, however, sealed fountains to the ungodly and the unbelieving. There is one key that always unlocks even heaven's gates; one secret that puts connecting channels between those eternal fountains and ourselves. That key, that secret, is prevailing prayer. God has no greater controversy with His people today than this, that with boundless promises to believing prayer there are so few who actually give themselves unto intercession. This is represented as being a matter even of Divine wonderment: "And there is none that calleth upon Thy name, That stirreth up himself to take hold of Thee" (Isaiah 64:7). The very fact that so many disciples, and in so many parts of the world, are forming prayer circles or unions is itself a great incentive to increased and united prayer. True Prayer Our Lord taught a great lesson in Matthew 18:19. He said: "If two of you shall agree [symphonize] on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of My Father which is in heaven." The agreement referred to is not that of a mere human covenant, nor even sympathy; it is symphony. Symphony is agreement of sounds in a musical chord, and depends upon fixed laws of harmony. It can not be secured by any arbitrary arrangement. One cannot lay his fingers accidentally or carelessly upon the keys of a musical instrument and produce symphony of sounds. Such touch may evoke only intolerable discord, unless regulated by a knowledge of the principles of harmony. Nay, there is even a deeper necessity, namely, that the keys touched shall themselves be in tune with the whole instrument. Two conditions, then, are needful; first, that a skilful hand shall put the whole instrument in tune; and then that an equally skilful hand shall touch keys which are capable of producing together what is called "a true chord." This language evinces Divine design. He is teaching a great lesson on the mystery of prayer, which likewise demands two great conditions; first, that the praying soul shall be in harmony with God Himself; and then that those who unite in prayer shall, because of such unity with Him, be in harmony with each other. There must be, therefore, back of all prevailing supplication and intercession One who, with infinite skill, tunes the keys into accord with His own ear; and then touches them, like a master musician, so that they respond together to His will and give forth the chord which is in His mind. No true philosophy of prayer can ever be framed which does not include these conditions. Many have false conception of what prayer is. To them it is merely asking for what one wants. But this may be so far from God's standard as to lack the first essentials of prayer. It may be asking something to consume it upon our own lusts. We are to ask "in the name" of Christ. But that is not simply using His name in prayer. The name is the nature; it expresses the character, and is equivalent to the person. To ask in Christ's name is to come to God, as identified with the very person of Christ. A wife makes a purchase in her husband's name. Literally, she uses his name, not her own. She says, "I am Mrs. A---," which means, "I am his wife, identified with his personality, character, wealth, commercial credit, and business standing." To go to God in Christ's name is to claim identity with Christ as a member of His body, one with Him before the Father, and having in Him a right to the Father's gifts, a right to draw on the Father's infinite resources. Again, we are told that, if we ask anything "according to His will," He heareth us. But what is asking according to His will but ceasing to ask according to our own self-will? Here the impulse is not human, but essentially Divine. It implies a knowledge of His will, an insight into His own mind, and a sympathy with His purpose. Now is this possible unless by the Holy Spirit we are brought into such fellowship with God as that He can guide us in judgment and yearning, and teach us His way? He is indeed "able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think," but it is "according to His power which worketh in us." If that power work not in us first, how can it work for us, in answered prayer? In order to gain higher results, wrought for the Church or the world, in answer to supplication, there must first be deeper results wrought in the believer by the Holy Spirit. In other words, there must be a higher type of personal holiness if there is to be a higher measure of power in prayer. The carnal mind does not fall into harmony with God, does not even see and perceive His mind, and hence the carnally-minded disciple can not discern the will of God in prayer, but is continually hindered and hampered by mistaking self-impelled petitions for divinely inspired prayers, confounding what self-will craves with what is spiritually needful and Scripturally warranted. God is calling His people to a revival of faith in the Divine efficacy of prayer. Our Lord teaches us that the prayer of faith has the power of a fiat or a Divine decree. God said sublimely, "Let light be!" and light was. The Lord Jesus Christ says: "If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed" in which, however small, is the possibility and potency of life-"ye shall say to this mountain, Be thou removed; or to this sycamore tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and it shall obey you." This is the language not of petition, but of decree. It is, in some sort, a laying hold on Omnipotence, so that nothing is impossible to the praying soul. When we reach such heights of teaching and compare them with the low level of our life we are struck dumb with amazement, first at the astounding possibilities of faith, as put before us, and then at the equally astounding impossibilities which unbelief substitutes for the offered omnipotence of supplication. When we think of the possible heights of intercession we seem again to hear the saintly McCheyne crying out: "Do everything in earnest! If it is worth doing, then do it with all your might. Above all, keep much in the presence of God; never see the face of man till you have seen His face." That is the preparation of prayer, prevailing first with God to enable us to prevail with man. Jacobi must have been thinking along these lines when he said: "My watchword, and that of my reason, is not I, but One who is more and better than I; One who is entirely different from what I am-I mean God. I neither am, nor care to be, If He is not!" It is prayer that makes God real-the highest reality and verity; and that sends us back into the world with the conviction and consciousness that lie is, and is in us, mighty to work in us, and through us, as instruments, so that nothing shall be impossible to the instrument, because of the Workman, back of it, who holds and wields the weapon. The power of such prayer defies all competition or imitation by the most perfect forms of liturgy. Who can copy or canvass the imprisoned flame of a priceless gem with mere brush and pigments! Or counterfeit the photosphere of the sun with yellow chalk! There is a flame of God which prayer lights within; there is a glow and light and heat in the life which can be kindled only by a coal from the golden altar which is before the throne. It is only the few who find their way thither and know the enkindling power; but to those few the Church and the world owe mighty upheavals and outpourings. (Revelation 8). Chemical galvanism possesses this peculiarity, that an increase of its powers cannot be gained by increasing the dimensions of the cells of the battery, but can be by increasing their number. We need more intercessors if we are to have greatly increased power. The number of cells must be increased. More of God's people must learn to pray. The foes are too many for a few to cope with them, however empowered of God. The variety of human want and woe, the scattered millions of the unsaved, the wide territory to be covered with intercession-all these and other like considerations demand multiplied forces. Each human being has only a very limited knowledge of human need. Our individual circle of acquaintance is so comparatively narrow that even the most prayerful spirit cannot survey the whole field. But when in all parts of the destitute territory supplicators multiply, even these narrow circles, placed side by side and largely overlapping, cover the whole broad field of need. Our own personal and limited knowledge and range of intelligent sympathy meet and touch similar and sympathetic souls, so that what we do not see or feel or pray for, appeals to others of our fellow disciples; and so, in proportion as the intercessors multiply, every interest of mankind finds its representatives in the secret place and at the throne. We cannot make up for lack of praying by excess of working. In fact working without praying is a sort of practical atheism, for it leaves out God. It is the prayer that prepares for work, that arms us for the warfare, that furnishes us for the activity. It behooves us, studying intently the promises to prayer, to say unto the Lord: "This being Thy word, I will henceforth live as a man of prayer and claim my privilege and use my power as an intercessor." Here is the highest identification with the Son of God. It is almost being admitted to a sort of fellowship in His mediatory work! During this dispensation His work is mainly intercession. He calls us to take a subordinate part in the holy office, standing, like Phinehas, between the living and the dead to stay the plague; like Elijah, between heaven and earth to unlock heaven's flood-gates of blessing and command the fire and flood of God! Is this true? Then what can be more awful and august than such dignity and majesty of privilege! Ignatius welcomes the Numidian lion in the arena, saying: "I am grain of God; I must be ground between the teeth of lions to make bread for God's people." He felt in the hour of martyrdom the privilege of joining his dying Lord in a sacrifice that Bushnell would call "vicarious." Who will join the risen Lord in a service of intercession? The greatest difficulty in the way of practical conversion of men may not be in God's eyes so much a barrier of ungodliness among the heathen as a barrier of unbelief among His own disciples! The sixteenth century was great in painters, the seventeenth in philosophers, the eighteenth in writers, the nineteenth in preachers and inventors; God grant that the twentieth may be forever historically memorable as the century of intercessors. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 43: - THE PROOF OF THE LIVING GOD AS FOUND... ======================================================================== The Proof of the Living God as Found in the Prayer Life of George Muller, of Bristol By Rev. Arthur T. Pierson, D.D. In Psalms 68:4, we are bidden to "extol Him who rideth upon the heavens by His name, JAH, and to rejoice before Him;" and in the next verse, He is declared to be "a father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, in His holy habitation." The name, "Jah," here only found, is not simply an abbreviation of "Jehovah;" but the present tense of the Hebrew verb to be; and expresses the idea that this Jehovah is the Living, Present God; and, as the heavens are always over our heads, He is always a present Helper, especially to those who, like the widow and the orphan, lack other providers and protectors. George Müller, of Bristol, undertook to demonstrate to the unbelieving world that God is such a living, present God, and that He proves it by answering prayer; and that the test of this fact might be definite and conclusive, he undertook to gather, feed, house, clothe, and also to teach and train, all available orphans, who were legitimate children, but deprived of both parents by death and destitute. Sixty-Five Years of Proof This work, which he began in 1833, in a very small and humble way, by giving to a few children, gathered out of the streets, a bit of bread for breakfast, and then teaching them for about an hour and a half to read the Scriptures, he carried on for sixty-five years, with growing numbers until there were under his care, and in the orphan houses which he built, twenty two hundred orphans with their helpers; and yet, during all that time, Mr. Müller's sole dependence was Jah, the Living, Present God. He appealed to no man for help; and did not even allow any need to be known before it had been supplied, even his intimate co-workers being forbidden to mention any existing want, outside the walls of the institution. His aim and purpose were to effectually apply the test of prayer to the unseen God, in such a way as to leave no doubt that, in these very days in which we live it is perfectly safe to cut loose from every human dependence and cast ourselves in faith upon the promises of a faithful Jehovah. To make the demonstration more absolutely convincing, for some years he withheld even the annual report of the work from the public, although it covered only work already done, lest some should think such a report an indirect appeal for future aid. A human life thus filled with the presence and power of God is one of God's choicest gifts to His church and to the world. Demonstration and Illustration Things unseen and eternal are, to the average man, distant and indistinct, while what is seen and temporal is vivid and real. Practically, any object in nature that can be seen or felt is thus more actual to most men than the Living God. Every man who walks with God, and finds Him a present Help in every time of need, who puts His promises to the practical proof and verifies them in actual experience; every believer, who, with the key of faith, unlocks God's mysteries and with the key of prayer unlocks God's treasuries, thus furnishes to the race demonstration and illustration of the fact that "He is, and is a Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him." George Müller was such an argument and example-a man of like passions, and tempted in all points, as we are, but who believed God and was established by believing; who prayed earnestly that he might live a life and do a work, which should be a convincing proof that God hears prayer, and that it is safe to trust Him at all times; and who furnished just such a witness as he desired. Like Enoch, he truly walked with God, and had abundant testimony borne to him that he pleased God. And, when on the tenth day of March, 1898, it was told us of George Müller, that "he was not," we knew that "God had taken him": it seemed more like a translation than like death. The Man Himself To those familiar with his long life story, or who intimately knew him and felt the power of personal contact, he was one of God's ripest saints, and himself a living proof that a life of faith is possible; that God may be known, communed with, found, and become a conscious companion in the daily life. He proved for himself and for all others who will receive his witness, that to those who are willing to take God at His word and to yield self to His will, He is "the same yesterday and today and forever;" that the days of divine intervention and deliverance are past only so far as the days of faith and obedience are past; that believing prayer works still the wonders of which our fathers told in the days of old. All we can do in the limited space now at our disposal, is to present a brief summary of George Müller's work, the details of which are spread through the five volumes of his carefully written "Journal," and the facts of which have never been denied or doubted, being embodied in five massive stone buildings on Ashley Down, and incarnated in thousands of living orphans who have been, or still are, the beneficiaries upon the bounty of the Lord, as administered by this great intercessor. His Life Purpose One sentence from Mr. Müller's pen marks the purpose which was the very pivot of his whole being: "I have joyfully dedicated my whole life to the object of exemplifying how much may be accomplished by prayer and faith." This prepared both for the development of the character of him who had such singleness of aim and for the development of the work in which that aim found action. Mr. Müller's oldest friend, Robert C. Chapman, of Barnstaple, beautifully says that "when a man's chief business is to serve and please the Lord, all his circumstances becomes his servants;" a maxim verified in Mr. Müller's life work. No Visible Support Mr. James Wright, Mr. Müller's son-in-law and successor, said, in reviewing the sixty-five years of work, "It is written (Job 26:7) 'He hangeth the earth upon nothing'-that is, no visible support. And so we exult in the fact that 'The Scriptural Knowledge Institution for Home and Abroad' hangs, as it has ever hung, since its commencement, 'upon nothing,' that is, upon no visible support. It hangs upon no human patron, upon no endowment or funded property, but solely upon the good pleasure of the blessed God." Blessed lesson to learn: that to depend upon the invisible God is not to hang "upon nothing," though it be upon nothing visible. The power and permanence of the invisible forces that hold up the earth after sixty centuries of human history are sufficiently shown by the fact that this great globe still swings securely in space and is whirled through its vast orbit, and without variation of a second still moves with divine exactness in its appointed path. Mr. Müller therefore trusted the same invisible God to sustain with His unseen power all the work which faith suspended upon His truth and love and unfailing word of promise, though to the natural eye all these may seem as nothing. Summary of Work Done In the comprehensive summary contained in the fifty-ninth report, remarkable growth is apparent during the sixty-four years since the outset of the work in 1834. During the year ending May 26, 1898, the number of day schools was seven and of pupils 354; the number of children in attendance from the beginning 81,501. The number of home Sunday Schools, twelve, and of children in them 1,341; but, from the beginning, 32,944. The number of Sunday Schools aided in England and Wales, twenty-five. The amount expended in connection with home schools, 1736. 13s. 10d.; from the outset, £109,992. 19s. 10d. The Bibles and parts thereof circulated, 15,411; from the beginning 1,989,266. Money expended for this purpose the past year £439; from the first, £41,090. 13s. 3d. Missionary laborers aided, 115. Money expended £2,082. 9s. 6d.; from the outset, £261,859. 7s. 4d. Circulation of books and tracts, 3,101,338; money spent £1,100. 1s. 3d.; and from the first, £47,188. 11s. 10d. The number of orphans on Ashley Down 1,620, and from the first 10,024. Money spent that year, £22,523. 13s. 1d., and from the beginning £988,829. To carry conviction into action sometimes requires a costly sacrifice; but, whatever Mr. Müller's fidelity to conviction cost in one way, he had stupendous results of his life work to contemplate even while he lived. Giving with Praying Let any one look at these figures and facts, and remember that one poor man who had been solely dependent on the help of God and only in answer to prayer, could look back, over more than three score years and see how he had built five large orphan houses, and taken under his care over ten thousand orphans, expending for them within twelve thousand pounds of a round million! This same man had given aid to day schools and Sunday Schools, in Britain and other lands where nearly one hundred and fifty thousand children have been taught, at a cost of over one hundred and ten thousand pounds more. He had also circulated nearly two million Bibles and parts thereof, at cost of over forty thousand pounds; and over three million books and tracts, at a cost of nearly fifty thousand pounds more. Besides all this, he had spent over two hundred and sixty thousand pounds to aid missionary laborers in various lands. The sum total of the money thus expended during sixty years thus reached very nearly the astonishing aggregate of one and a half million of pounds sterling ($7,500,000). Mr. Müller's own gifts to the service of the Lord found, only after his death, full record and recognition. In the annual reports, an entry recurring with strange frequency, suggested a giver that must have reached a very ripe age: "from a servant of the Lord Jesus, who, constrained by the love of Christ, seeks to lay up treasure in heaven." If that entry be carefully followed throughout and there be added the personal gifts made by Mr. Müller to various benevolent objects, the aggregate sum from this "servant" reaches, up to March 1, 1898, a total of eighty-one thousand, four hundred and ninety British pounds, eighteen shillings and eight pence. After his death, it first became known that this "servant of the Lord Jesus" was no other than George Müller himself who thus donated, from money given to him or left to him for his own use by legacies, an amount equal to more than one-fifteenth of the entire sum expended from the beginning upon all five departments of the work (1,448,959 British pounds). This is a record of personal giving to which we know no parallel. His Investments Mr. Müller had received increasingly large sums from the Lord which he invested well and most profitably, so that for over sixty years he never lost a penny through a bad speculation! But his investments were not in lands, or banks, or railways, but in the work of God. He made "friends of the mammon of unrighteousness," and, when he failed, they received him into everlasting habitations. He continued year after year to make provision for himself, his beloved wife and daughter only by laying up treasure in heaven. Such a giver had a right to exhort others to systematic beneficence. He gave as not one in a million gives-not a tithe, not any fixed proportion of annual income, but all that was left after the simplest and most necessary supply of actual wants. While most disciples regard themselves as doing their duty if, after they have given a portion to the Lord, they spend all the rest on themselves, God led George Müller to reverse this rule and reserve only the most frugal sum for personal needs that the entire remainder might be given to him that needeth. An utter revolution in our habits of giving would be necessary were such a rule adopted. Mr. Müller's own words are: "My aim never was, how much I could obtain, but rather how much I could give." Yet this was not done in the spirit of an ascetic, for he had no such spirit. His Stewardship He kept continually before him his stewardship of God's property; and sought to make the most of the one brief life on earth and to use for the best and largest good the property held by him in trust. The things of God were deep realities, and, projecting every action and decision and motive into the light of the judgment seat of Christ, he asked himself how it would appear to him in the light of that tribunal. Thus he sought prayerfully and conscientiously so to live and labor, so to deny himself, and, by love; serve his Master, and his fellowmen that he should not be "ashamed before Him at His coming." But not in a spirit of fear; for if any man of his generation knew the perfect love that casts out fear it was he. He felt that God is love and love is of God. lie saw that love manifested in the greatest of gifts His only begotten Son; at Calvary he knew and believed the love that God hath to us; he received it into his own heart; it became an abiding presence manifested in obedience and benevolence; and, subduing him more and more, it became perfected so as to expel all tormenting fear and impart a holy confidence and delight in God. Favorite Texts Among the texts which strongly impressed and moulded Mr. Müller's habits of giving was Luke 6:38 : "Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom." He believed this promise and he verified it. His testimony is, "I had given, and God had caused to be given to me again, and bountifully." Again he read, "It is more blessed to give than to receive." He says that he believed what he found in the word of God and by His grace sought to act accordingly, and thus again records that he was blessed abundantly and his peace and joy in the Holy Spirit increased more and more. It will not be a surprise, therefore, that, as has been already noted, Mr. Müller's entire personal estate at his death, as sworn to, when the will was admitted to probate, was only 169 British pounds, 9 shillings, 4 pence, of which books, household furniture, etc., were reckoned at over 100 pounds, the only money in his possession being a trifle over sixty pounds, and even this only awaiting disbursement as God's steward. The Secret of It All To summarize Mr. Müller's service we must understand his great secret. Such a life and such a work are the result of one habit more than all else daily and frequent communion with God. He was unwearied in supplications and intercessions. In every new need and crisis, the one resort was the prayer of faith. He first satisfied himself that he was in the way of duty, then he fixed his mind on the unchanging word of promise; then, in the boldness of a suppliant who comes to a throne of grace in the name of Jesus Christ, and pleads the assurance of the immutable Promiser, he presented every petition. He was an unwearied intercessor. No delay discouraged him. This is seen particularly in the case of individuals for whose conversion or special guidance into the paths of full obedience he prayed. On his prayer list were the names of some for whom he had besought God daily by name, for from one to ten years before the answer was given. There were two parties, for whose reconciliation to God he prayed, day by day, for over sixty years, and who had not at the time of his death, turned unto God; but he said, "I have not a doubt that I shall meet them both in heaven; for my Heavenly Father would not lay upon my heart a burden of prayer for them for over three score years, if He had not concerning them purposes of mercy." This is a sufficient example of his almost unparalleled perseverance and importunity in intercession. However long the delay, he held on, as with both hands clasping the very horns of the altar; and his childlike spirit reasoned simply but confidently that the very fact of his own spirit being so long drawn out in prayer for one object, and of the Lord's enabling him so to continue patiently and believingly to wait on Him for the blessing, was a promise and prophecy of the answer; and so he waited on, so assured of the ultimate result that he praised God in advance, as having already received that for which he asked. One of the parties for whom for so many years he had unceasingly prayed, shortly after his departure, died in faith, having received the promises and embraced them and confessed Jesus as his Lord. The Privilege of All Mr. Müller frequently in his Journal and reports warned his fellow disciples not to regard him as a miracle worker, or his experience as so exceptional as to have little application to the ordinary spheres of life and service. With patient repetition he affirms that, in all essentials, such an experience is the privilege of all believers. God calls disciples to various forms of work, but all alike to the same faith. To say, therefore, "I am not called to build orphan houses, etc., and have no right to expect answers to my prayers as Mr. Müller did," is wrong and unbelieving. Every child of God is first to get into the sphere appointed of God, and therein to exercise full trust, and live by faith upon God's sure word of promise. Throughout all the thousands of pages written by his pen, he teaches that this experience of God's faithfulness is both the reward of past faith and prayer and the preparation of the servant of God for larger Work, more efficient service, and more convincing witness to his Lord. Supernatural Power No one can understand this work who does not see in it the supernatural power of God; without that, it is an enigma, defying solution; with that, all the mystery is an open mystery. He himself felt, from first to last, that this supernatural factor was the whole key to the work, and without that it would have been to himself a problem inexplicable. How pathetically he often compared himself and his work for God to the "burning bush in the wilderness," which always aflame and always threatened with apparent destruction, was not consumed, so that not a few turned aside, wondering to see this great sight. And why was it not burnt? Because Jehovah of Hosts who was in the bush dwelt in the man and in his work; or, as Wesley said with almost his last breath, "Best of all God is with us." This simile of the burning bush is the more apt, when we consider the rapid growth of the work. At first so very small as to seem almost insignificant, and conducted in one small rented house, accommodating thirty orphans; then enlarged until other rented premises became necessary; then one, two, three, four and even five immense structures being built until three hundred, seven hundred, eleven hundred and fifty, and finally two thousand and fifty inmates could find shelter within them; seldom has the world seen any such vast and rapid enlargement. Then look at the outlay! At first a trifling expenditure of perhaps four hundred pounds for the first year of the Scriptural Knowledge Institution, and of five hundred pounds for the first twelve months of the orphan work, and in the last year of Mr. Müller's life a grand total of over twenty-six thousand pounds for all the purposes of the work. The cost of the houses built on Ashley Down might have staggered even a man of large capital, but this poor man only cried and the Lord helped him. The first house cost fifteen thousand pounds, the second over twenty-one thousand, the third over twenty-three thousand, and the fourth and fifth from fifty thousand to sixty thousand more so that the total cost reached about one hundred and fifteen thousand pounds. Besides all this there was a yearly expenditure which rose as high as twenty-five thousand for the orphans alone, irrespective of those occasional outlays made needful for emergencies, such as improved sanitary precautions. Here is a burning bush indeed, always in seeming danger of being consumed, yet still standing on Ashley Down, and still preserved because the same presence of Jehovah burns in it. Not a branch of this many sided work has utterly perished, while the whole work still challenges unbelievers to turn aside and see the great sight, and take off their shoes from their feet; for is not all ground holy where God abides and manifests Himself? Abundant in Labors In attempting a survey of this great life work we must not forget how much of it was wholly outside of the Scriptural Knowledge Institution; namely, all that service which Mr. Müller was permitted to render to the church of Christ and the world at large, as preacher, pastor, witness for truth and author of books and tracts. His preaching period covered the whole time from 1826 to 1898, the year of his departure-over seventy years; and with an average through the whole period of probably three sermons a week, or over ten thousand for his lifetime, which is probably a low estimate, for, during his missionary tours, which covered over two hundred thousand miles and were spread through seventeen years, he spoke on an average once a day, even at his already advanced age. Probably those brought to the knowledge of Christ by his preaching would reach into the thousands, exclusive of orphans converted at Ashley Down. Then When we take into account the vast numbers addressed and impressed by his addresses given in all parts of the United Kingdom, on the Continent of Europe, and in America, Asia and Australia, and the still vaster numbers who have read his narrative, his books and tracts, or who have in Various other ways felt the quickening power of his example and life, we shall get some inadequate conception of the range and scope of the influence wielded by his tongue and pen, his labors and his life. Much of the best influence defies all tabulated statistics and evades all mathematical estimate-it is like the fragrance of the alabaster flask which fills all the house, but escapes our grosser senses of sight, hearing and touch. This part of George Müller's work belongs to a realm where we cannot penetrate. But God sees, knows and rewards it. A Doubter's Doubts Yet there are those who doubt or deny the sufficiency of even this proof, though so full and convincing. In a prominent daily newspaper, a correspondent, discussing the efficacy of prayer, thus referred to the experience of George Müller: "I resided in that country during most of the seventies, when he was often described as the best-advertised man in the Three Kingdoms. By a large number of religious people he was more spoken of than were Gladstone and Disraeli, and accordingly it is not miraculous that, although he said he had never once solicited aid on behalf of his charitable enterprise, money in a continuous stream flowed into his treasury. Even to non-religious persons in Great Britain his name was quite as familiar as that of Moody." "Doubtless Müller was quite sincere in his convictions, but, by the very peculiarity of his method, his wants were advertised throughout the world most conspicuously, thus receiving the benefit of a far larger publicity than would otherwise have obtained, and it being known that he was praying for money, money, of course, came in to him." "But were Müller's prayers answered invariably? According to a memoir by a personal friend, which has lately been published, this was far from having been the case, and he often felt aggrieved at what he considered a slight on the part of the Almighty, one of whose 'pets' (to quote Mr. Savage) he evidently imagined himself to be. For example, he prayed for two of his 'unconverted' friends for nearly fifty years without avail. There was absolutely nothing in his career which could not be accounted for as the result of purely natural causes." "If it was possible to admit that what he looked upon as answers to his prayers were due to special interventions of Providence in his behalf (in other Words, to favoritism), the question would inevitably arise, Why have the prayers of thousands of other Christian people, whose faith is quite as strong as Müller's, been disregarded? What are we to think of the little band of enthusiasts who left this country for Jerusalem a few months ago to see Christ 'appear in the clouds,' and who, at last accounts, were reported to be starving, with no immediate prospect of a return to their homes?" "LECTOR." "Lector" takes an easy way to evade the force of Mr. Müller's life witness. He contends that "the peculiarity" of his method, and the great "publicity" thus obtained, made him the "best advertised man in the Three Kingdoms," and so money poured in upon him from all quarters. Thus the most conspicuous testimony to a prayer-hearing God, furnished by any one individual in the century, is dismissed with one sweep of the pen, affirming that "there was absolutely nothing in his career which could not be accounted for as the result of purely natural causes." The Doubter Answered In answer I beg to submit twelve facts, all abundantly attested: 1. For sixty years and more he carried on a work for God, involving at times an average annual expenditure of $125,000, and never once, privately or publicly, made any direct appeal for money. 2. Of all his large staff of helpers no one is ever allowed to mention to an outside party any want of the work, however pressing the emergency. 3. Thousands of times correspondents inquired as to the existing wants, but in no case did they receive information, even though at a crisis of need, the object being to prove that it is safe to trust in God alone. 4. Reports of the work, annually published, have no doubt largely prompted gifts; but even these cannot account for the remarkable way in which the work has been supported. In order to show that dependence was not placed on these reports, they were not issued in one case, for over two years, yet there was no cessation of supplies. 5. The coincidences between the need and the supply can be accounted for on no law of chance or awakened public interest. In thousands of cases the exact sum or supply required has been received at the exact time needed, and when donors could have had no knowledge of the facts. 6. The facts spread over too long a time and too broad a field of details to be accounted a wide advertising system. Mr. Müller recorded thousands of cases of prayer for definite blessings, with equally definite answers. 7. Many interpositions and deliverances were independent of any human gifts or aid, as when a break in the heating apparatus necessitated a new boiler. No sooner had the repairs begun than a cold north wind set in which risked the health and even the lives of over four hundred orphans living in the house, which there was no other mode of heating. Mr. Müller carried the case to the Father of the fatherless, and the wind shifted to the south and blew soft and warm till the repairs were complete. 8. Hundreds of cases occurred, in course of sixty-five years, when there was not food for the next meal, yet God only was appealed to, and never but twice was it needful to postpone a meal, and then only for half an hour! Even direct and systematic appeals to the public could not have brought supplies for hundreds of orphans and helpers with such regularity for all those years. 9. Again, the supplies always kept pace with growing wants. Mr. Müller began on a very small scale, and the orphan work was only the last of five departments of the work of the Scriptural Knowledge Institution. Can it be accounted for on any purely natural basis that the popular heart and purse, without even full information of the progress of the five-fold enterprise, responded regularly to its claims? 10. Again, many a crisis, absolutely unknown to contributors, was met successfully by adequate supplies, without which, at that very time, the work must have ceased. Once, when a single penny was lacking after all available funds were gathered, that one penny was found in the contribution box, and it was all there was. 11. Again, Mr. Müller found that his relations with God always determined the measure of his help from man; unless his fellowship with his Heavenly Father was closely maintained, all else went wrong. The more absolute his dependence on God, his separation unto Him and his faith in Him, the more abundant and manifest His deliverances, so that, as he became more independent of man, he received the more from God through man. 12. Since his death in 1898, the work has been carried on by his successors and helpers on the same principles and with the same results. Though his strong personality is removed, the same God honors the same mode of doing His work, independent of the human instruments. Mr. Müller's life purpose was to furnish to the world and the Church a simple example of the fact that a man can not only live, but work on a large scale, by faith in the living God; that he has only to trust and pray and obey and God will prove his own faithfulness. The reports were published with sole reference to the work already done, and because donors were entitled to such knowledge of the way in which their money was expended. He never used his reports as appeals for help in work yet to be begun or carried on. Nor was his personal presence or influence necessary, for he traveled for eighteen years in forty-two countries, mentioning his work only at urgent request; and during all this time the work went on just as when at home. A Challenge to Unbelief One thing is obvious-there is a wide field still open for experiment. Let those who honestly believe that so great a life work may be entirely accounted for on a natural basis give us a practical proof. Let an institution be founded in some of our great cities similar to that in Bristol. Let there be no direct appeal made to anyone beyond the circulation of annual reports; or let there be the widest advertising of the fact that such a work is carried on, and that dependence is on public aid without direct solicitation. Of course, there must be no prayer, and no acknowledgment of God, lest someone think it to be religious and unscientific, and pious people should be moved to respond! Unbelievers outnumber Christian disciples five to one and the constituency is therefore very large. Let us have the experiment conducted, not on the faith basis, but in strictly scientific method! When we see an infidel carrying on such a work, building five great orphan houses and sustaining over 2,000 orphans from day to day without any direct appeal to human help, yet finding all supplies coming in without even a failure in sixty years, we shall be ready to reconsider our present conviction that it was because the living God heard and helped George Müller, that he who began with a capital of one shilling, took care of more than ten thousand orphans, aided hundreds of missionaries, scattered millions of Bibles and tracts, and in the course of his long life expended about $7,500,000 for God and humanity; and then died with all his possessions valued at less than eight hundred dollars. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 44: - OUR LORD'S TEACHINGS ABOUT MONEY ======================================================================== Our Lord's Teachings about Money By Rev. Arthur T. Pierson, D.D. Our Lord's teachings as to money gifts, if obeyed, would forever banish all limitations on church work and all concern about supplies. These teachings are radical and revolutionary. So far are they from practical acceptance that, although perfectly explicit, they seem more like a dead language that has passed out of use than like a living tongue that millions know and speak. Yet, when these principles and precepts of our Lord on giving are collated and compared, they are found to contain the materials of a complete ethical system on the subject of money, its true nature, value, relation and use. Should these sublime and unique teachings be translated into living, the effect not only upon benevolent work, but upon our whole spiritual character, would be incalculable. Brevity compels us to be content with a simple outline of this body of teaching, scattered through the four Gospel narratives, but gathered up and methodically presented by Paul in that exhaustive discussion of Christian giving in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9. 1. The Principle Of Stewardship The basis of Christ's teaching about money is the fundamental conception of stewardship. (Luke 12:42; Luke 16:1-8). Not only money, but every gift of God, is received in trust for His use. Man is not an owner, but a trustee, managing another's goods and estates, God being the one original and inalienable Owner of all. The two things required of stewards are that they be "faithful and wise," that they study to-employ God's gifts with fidelity and sagacity-fidelity so that God's entrustments be not perverted to self indulgence; sagacity, so that they be converted into as large gains as possible. This is a perfectly plain and simple basal principle, yet it is not the accepted foundation of our money-making and using. The vast majority, even of disciples, practically leave God out of their thoughts when they engage in finance. Men consider themselves owners; they "make money" by their industry, economy, shrewdness, application; it is theirs to do as they will with it. There is little or no sense of stewardship or of its implied obligation. If they give, it is an act, not of duty, but of generosity; it ranks, not under law, but under grace. Hence there is no inconsistency felt in hoarding or spending vast sums for worldly ends and appropriating an insignificant fraction to benevolent purposes. Such methods and notions would be utterly turned upside down could men but think of themselves as stewards, accountable to the one Master for having wasted His goods. The great day of account will bring an awful reckoning, not only to wasters, but to hoarders; for even the unfaithful servants brought back to their lord the talent and the pound at last, but without profit, and the condemnation was for not having used so as to increase the entrusted goods. 2. The Principle of Investment In our Lord's teachings we find this kindred principle of investment: "Thou oughtest to have put my money to the exchangers" (Matthew 25:27). Money-changing and investing is an old business. The "exchangers," as Luke renders, are the bankers, the ancient Trapezitae, who received money on deposit and paid interest for its use, like modern savings institutions. The argument of our Lord refutes the unfaithful servant on his own plea, which his course showed to be not an excuse, but a pretext. It was true that he dared not risk trading on his own account; why not, without such risk, get a moderate interest for his Master by lending to professional traders? It was not fear but sloth that lay behind his unfaithfulness and unprofitableness. Thus indirectly is taught the valuable lesson that timid souls, unfitted for bold and independent service in behalf of the kingdom, may link their incapacity to the capacity and sagacity of others who will make their gifts and possessions of use to the Master and His Church. James Watt, in 1773, formed a partnership with Matthew Boulton, of Soho, for the manufacture of steam engines-Watt, to furnish brains, and Boulton, hard cash. This illustrates our Lord's teaching. The steward has money, or it may be other gifts, that can be made of use, but he lacks faith and foresight, practical energy and wisdom. The Lord's "exchangers" can show him how to get gain for the Master. The Church boards are God's bankers. They are composed of practical men, who study how and where to put money for the best results and largest returns, and when they are what they ought to be, they multiply money many-fold in glorious results. The Church partly exists that the strength of one member may help the weakness of another, and that by co-operation of all, the power of the least and weakest may be increased. 3. The Subordination of Money Another most important principle is the subordination of money, as emphatically taught and illustrated in the rich young ruler. (Matthew 19:16-26). This narrative, rightly regarded, presents no enigma. With all his attractive traits, this man was a slave. Money was not his servant, but his master; and because God alone is to be supreme, our Lord had no alternative. He must demolish this man's idol, and when He dealt a blow at his money, the idolatry became apparent, and the slave of greed went away sorrowful, clinging to his idol. It was not the man's having great possessions that was wrong, but that his possessions had the man; they possessed him and controlled him. He was so far the slave of money that he could not and would not accept freedom by the breaking of its fetters. His "trust" was in riches how could it be in God? Behind all disguises of respectability and refinement, God sees many a man to be an abject slave, a victim held in bonds by love of money; but covetousness is idolatry, and no idolater can enter the kingdom of God. How few rich men keep the mastery and hold money as their servant, in absolute subordination to their own manhood, and the master hood of the Lord! 4. The Law of Recompense We ascend a step higher, and consider our Lord's teaching as to the law of recompense. "Give, and it shall be given unto you" (Luke 6:38). We are taught that getting is in order to giving, and consequently that giving is the real road to getting. God is an economist. He entrusts larger gifts to those who use the smaller well. Perhaps one reason of our poverty is that we are so far slaves of parsimony. The future may reveal that God has been withholding from us because we have been withholding from Him. It can scarcely be said by any careful student of the New Testament that our Lord encourages His disciples to look or ask for earthly wealth. Yet it is equally certain that hundreds of devout souls who have chosen voluntary poverty for His sake have been entrusted with immense sums for His work. George Müller conducted for over sixty years enterprises requiring at least some hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year. Note also the experiences of William Quarrier and Hudson Taylor, and D. L. Moody and Dr. Barnardo. Such servants of God, holding all as God's, spending little or nothing for self, were permitted to receive and use millions for God, and in some cases, like Müller's, without any appeal to men, looking solely to God. This great saint of Bristol found, in a life that nearly rounded out a century, that it was safe to give to God's purposes the last penny at any moment, with the perfect assurance that more would come in before another need should arise. And there was never one failure for seventy years! 5. Superior Blessedness Kindred to this law of recompense is the law of superior blessedness. "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35). Paul quotes this as a saying of our Lord, but it is not to be found in either of the Gospel narratives. Whether he meant only to indicate what is substantially our Lord's teaching, or was preserving some precious words of our Great Teacher, otherwise unrecorded, is not important. It is enough that this saying has the authority of Christ. Whatever the blessedness of receiving, that of giving belongs to a higher plane. Whatever I get, and whatever good it brings to me, I only am benefited; but what I give brings good to others to the many, not the one. But, by a singular decree of God, what I thus surrender for myself for the sake of others comes back even to me in larger blessing. It is like the moisture which the spring gives out in streams and evaporation, returning in showers to supply the very channels which filled the spring itself. 6. Computation by Comparison We rise a step higher in considering God's law of computation. How does He reckon gifts? Our Lord teaches us that it is by comparison. No one narrative is more telling on this theme than that of the poor widow [Mark 12:41-44; Luke 21:1-4] who dropped into the treasury her two mites. The Lord Jesus, standing near, watched the offerings cast into the treasury. There were rich givers that gave large amounts. There was one poor woman, a widow, who threw in two mites, and He declared her offering to be more than any of all the rest, because, while they gave out of a superfluity she gave out of a deficiency-they of their abundance, she of her poverty. She who cast her two mites into the sacred treasury, by so doing became rich in good works and in the praise of God. Had she kept them she had been still only the same poor widow. Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And the two mites "make a farthing." He who, as the Superintending Providence of nature, watches the fall of a sparrow, so that "one of them is not forgotten before God," also, as the Overseer of the treasury, invisibly sits and watches the gifts that are dropped into the chest, and even the widow's mite is not forgotten. He tells us here how He estimates money gifts not by what we give, but by what we keep-not by the amount of our contributions, but by their cost in self-denial. This widow's whole offering counted financially for but a farthing (kodrantês, a quadrant, equal to four mills, or two fifths of one cent, as three-fourths of an English farthing). What could he much more insignificant? But the two mites constituted her whole means of subsistence. The others reserved what they needed or wanted for themselves, and then gave out of their superabundance (perisseuontos). The contrast is emphatic; she "out of her deficiency," they "out of their super-sufficiency." Not all giving-so-called-has rich reward. In many cases the keeping hides the giving, in the sight of God. Self-indulgent hoarding and spending spread a banquet; the crumbs fall from the table, to be gathered up and labeled "charity." But when the one possession that is dearest, the last trusted resource, is surrendered to God, then comes the vision of the treasure laid up in heaven. 7. Unselfishness in Giving We ascend still higher to the law of unselfishness in giving. "Do good and lend, hoping for nothing again" (Luke 6:35). Much giving is not giving at all, but only lending or exchanging. He who gives to another of whom he expects to receive as much again, is trading. He is seeking gain, and is selfish. What he is after is not another's profit, but his own advantage. To invite to one's table those who will invite him again, is simply as if a kindness were done to a business acquaintance as a basis for boldness in asking a similar favor when needed. This is reciprocity, and may be even mean and calculating. True giving has another's good solely in view, and hence bestows upon those who cannot and will not repay, who are too destitute to pay back, and too degraded, perhaps, to appreciate what is done for them. That is like God's giving to the evil and unthankful. That is the giving prompted by love. To ask, therefore, "Will it pay?" betrays the selfish spirit. He is the noblest, truest giver who thinks only of the blessing he can bring to another's body and soul. He casts his breadseed beside all waters. He hears the cry of want and woe. and is concerned only to supply the want and assuage the woe. This sort of giving shows God-likeness, and by it we grow into the perfection of benevolence. 8. Sanctified Giving Our Lord announces also a law of sanctification. "The altar sanctifieth the gift"-association gives dignity to an offering (Matthew 23:19). If the cause to which we contribute is exalted it ennobles and exalts the offering to its own plane. No two objects can or ought to appeal to us with equal force unless they are equal in moral worth and dignity, and a discerning giver will respond most to what is worthiest. God's altar was to the Jew the central focus of all gifts; it was associated with His worship, and the whole calendar of fasts and feasts moved round it. The gift laid upon it acquired a new dignity by so being deposited upon it. Some objects which appeal for gifts we are at liberty to set aside because they are not sacred. We may give or not as we judge best, for they depend on man's enterprises and schemes, which we may not altogether approve. But some causes have Divine sanction, and that hallows them; giving becomes an act of worship when it has to do with the altar. 9. Transmutation Another law of true giving is that of transmutation. "Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations" (Luke 16:9). This, though considered by many an obscure parable, contains one of the greatest hints on money gifts that our Lord ever dropped. Mammon here stands as the equivalent for money, practically worshipped. It reminds us of the golden calf that was made out of the ear-rings and jewels of the crowd. Now our Lord refers to a second transmutation. The golden calf may in turn be melted down and coined into Bibles, churches, books, tracts, and even souls of men. Thus what was material and temporal becomes immaterial and spiritual, and eternal. Here is a man who has a hundred dollars. He may spend it all on a banquet, or an evening party, in which case the next day there is nothing to show for it. It has secured a temporary gratification of appetite-that is all. On the other hand, he invests in Bibles at ten cents each, and it buys a thousand copies of the Word of God. These he judiciously sows as seed of the Kingdom, and that seed springs up a harvest, not of Bibles, but of souls. Out of the unrighteous mammon he has made immortal friends, who, when he fails, receive him into everlasting habitations. May this not be what is meant by the true riches the treasure laid up in heaven in imperishable good? What revelations await us in that day of transmutation! Then, whatever has been given up to God as an offering of the heart, "in righteousness," will be seen as transfigured. Not only the magi's gold, frankincense and myrrh, and the alabaster box of ointment of spikenard, very precious, and the houses and lands of such as Barnabas, but fishermen's boats and nets, the abandoned "seat of custom," the widow's mites, and the cup of cold water-yes, when we had nothing else to give, the word of counsel, the tear of pity, the prayer of intercession. Then shall be seen both the limitless possibilities and the "transcendent riches" of consecrated poverty. Never will the work of missions, or any other form of service to God and man, receive the help it ought until there is a new conscience and a new consecration in the matter of money. The influence of the world and the worldly spirit is deadening to unselfish giving. It exalts self-indulgence, whether in gross or refined form. It leads to covetous hoarding or wasteful spending. It blinds us to the fact of obligation, and devises flimsy pretexts for diverting the Lord's money to carnal ends. The few who learn to give on Scriptural principles learn also to love to give. These gifts become abundant and systematic and self-denying. The stream of beneficence flows perpetually-there is no period of drought. Once it was necessary to proclaim to the people of God that what they had brought "was more than enough," and to "restrain them from bringing" (Exodus 36:6). So far as known, this is the one and only historic instance of such excess of generosity. But should not that always be the case? Is it not a shame and disgrace that there ever should be a lack of "meat in God's house"? When His work appeals for aid, should there ever be a reluctance to respond or a doling out of a mere pittance? Surely His unspeakable gift should make all giving to Him a spontaneous offering of love that, like Mary's, should bring its precious flask of spikenard and lavish its treasures on His feet, and fill the house with the odor of self sacrifice! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 45: - THE SCRIPTURES ======================================================================== The Scriptures By Rev. A. C. Dixon, D. D., Pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle Church, London, England When our Lord said, "Search the Scriptures," every Jew to whom He spoke knew what He meant. There were other writings in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, but the Scriptures were a body of writings marked off from all others by their sacredness and authority as the Word of God. Their history can be traced from the time of Moses to Christ. In Exodus 17:14 we read: "And the Lord said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua." As to the writing material Moses used we do not know, but we do know that in Egypt papyrus plant, linen and cotton cloth, the skins of animals and stone were used in making books of various kinds. The Ten Commandments were written on tables of stone, and with Egyptian mummies we have preserved even to this day cotton and linen cloth such as was frequently used for writing. In Deuteronomy 31:9 we have the historic record of the fact that Moses obeyed the command of God: "And Moses wrote this law and delivered it unto the priests, the sons of Levi, which bare the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord." And in verse 24: "It came to pass when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law in a book, until they were finished, that Moses commanded the Levites which bare the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord, saying, Take this book of the law and put it in the side of the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord your God." The book was finished and placed by the side of the Ark for safe keeping. In Joshua 1:8 we read: "This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein; for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success." Now that the pillar of fire by night and of cloud by day has departed, the Book is to be the guide of Israel and their religion is to he to a large extent a book religion. God is speaking to them out of the "Book of the Law." It is probable that the book which Joshua read was the identical manuscript which Moses wrote in the wilderness. There may have been copies made of it, but we have no record of the fact. Frequent mention of it is made through the books of the Bible. The same book, or a copy of it, appears again a thousand years afterward under the reign of Josiah, as we learn from 2 Kings 22:8 : "And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord. And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan and he read it." In Ezra we find it again in the hands of the prophet on the pulpit of wood in the open air, reading it and making its meaning plain unto the people. From these and other Scriptures three inferences may be fairly drawn: 1. The Bible is literature written by the command of God. He certainly commanded Moses to write the book of the law. To John on the Isle of Patmos a great voice as of a trumpet said, "What thou seest write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches." And before the vision vanishes he is commanded to "Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter." He is to write history, current events and predictions; and much of the "the Scriptures" may be classified under these three heads. 2. The Bible is literature written by the command of God, and under the guidance of God. In 2 Peter 1:21 we read: "No prophecy ever came by the will of man, but man spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit." 3. The Bible is literature written by the command of God, under the guidance of God, and preserved by the providential care of God. Moses commanded that the book of the law should be placed by the side of the Ark. No safer place could have been found, and the more I study the history of the Bible the more profoundly am I convinced that God has kept His book by the side of some ark all through the ages. As the Church has been under His care and protection, so has the Book. It is not difficult for me to believe that the manuscript which Hilkiah found in the Temple was the identical book which Moses wrote in the wilderness, and that this very manuscript was in the hands of Ezra on the pulpit of wood as he preached in the open air. It is only one thousand years from Joshua to Josiah and only one hundred and seventy-five years from Josiah to Ezra. There are now in our libraries scores of manuscripts which we know to be over a thousand years old, and two or three which have certainly been preserved more than fourteen hundred years. With the kindly oriental climate and the care which the Jewish reverence for the book would naturally lead them to have, it is not at all improbable that the manuscript of Moses should have been preserved for more than a thousand years. And the history of the Bible from the time of Christ to the present confirms the proposition that it has been preserved by the providential care of God. Let us now look at "the Scriptures" in their own light. In John 5:39 Jesus said: "Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of Me." And in 2 Timothy 3:16 we read, "All Scripture is God-breathed, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly furnished unto all good works." In these Scriptures are four things: 1. A Biblical Definition of the Bible The phrase, "the Scriptures," suggests a synthetic definition of the Bible. There were other writings, but these were the writings. They had them in the Hebrew tongue, and also a translation into the Greek, known as the "Septuagint," made nearly three hundred years before Christ. But it takes our second Scripture to complete this definition of the Bible "Every Scripture is God-breathed." A noted scholar has taken the pains to collate the texts in the New Testament where this Greek idiom occurs, and he declares that the King James version, and not the Revised, is the correct translation, and several eminent scholars on the Committee of Revision agreed with him. "All Scripture is God-breathed" is evidently what the Holy Spirit meant to write. Of course, the writers were inspired. "The Holy Ghost spake by the mouth of David" (Acts 1:16). "The word of the Lord came expressly unto Ezekiel" (Ezekiel 1:3). But the writings as well as the writers were inspired, because "all Scripture is God-breathed." God, who "breathed into man the breath of life and he became a living soul," has also breathed into His Book the breath of life, so that it is "the Word of God which liveth and abideth forever." There are many writers, but one Author. These writers were not automatons. Each one shows his own style and personality which the Holy Spirit uses. 2. A Biblical Use of the Bible It is four-fold: "Profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness? "Doctrine" is the teaching, not of the man as he may express his opinion in social converse, but of the ambassador who carries with him the weight of his government's authority; and in the Bible we find God's official proclamation of love, pardon, cleansing, righteousness and peace. The word "reproof" comes after doctrine, because it has to do with the character which doctrine makes. The Bible is profitable not only for the doctrine which we get out of it, but it is the standard by which we try our doctrines. It proves and reproves. It is the plumb-line that we drop by the wall to see if it is straight. It is the yard-stick by which we measure every creed. The word "correction" means restoration, and gives a thought in advance of doctrine and reproof. It has in it the thought of making right what we have found to be wrong. The plumb-line may show that the wall leans, but it cannot straighten it. The yard-stick may reveal that the cloth is too short, but it cannot lengthen it. The Bible, however, not only shows us wherein we are wrong, but it can right us. When Canova saw the piece of marble which, at great expense, had been secured for a celebrated statue; his practiced eye discovered a little piece of black running through it, and he rejected it. He could discover the black, but he could not make the black white. The Bible discovers the black and makes it white. The fourth word, "instruction," means literally "child-culture," and has in it all that the parent needs for the growth, development and maturing of the child. The Bible is a training school in righteousness. Other books give training in music, rhetoric, oratory, but the specialty of the Bible is training in righteousness. 3. A Biblical Method of Bible Study It is suggested by the two words "search" and "profitable." Whatever is profitable is apt to cost labor. The worthless we can get without effort. Hence the strength of the phrase, "Search the Scriptures." It means to "look through and through." It is the word used in the Scripture, "The Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God." As God searches our hearts so let us search the Bible. The Bible unsearched is a mine unworked, the difference between the Klondike years ago and the Klondike enriching its industrious owners today. To learn the Word of God requires diligent and persistent searching. A man who died in an English almshouse several years ago gave to his relatives an unproductive piece of land, so worthless that he did not have to pay taxes on it, The relatives searched it, and as a result they are today millionaires. The pauper was rich without knowing it, and he was ignorant of the fact because he did not search his possessions. Every Christian with the Bible in hand is rich whether he knows it or not. Let him search and find hidden treasures. This search implies sight and light. There is need of spiritual discernment. "The natural man discerneth not the things of God." And hence the need of inspiration which comes from trusting the Holy Spirit as the Revealer of Truth. When Galileo turned his little telescope to the heavens, he found that he really had a new pair of eyes. He could now see the mountains of the moon, the satellites of Neptune, and the ring around Saturn. So we read the Bible in the light of the Bible, and as more light comes, better sight is imparted; while, on the other hand, as better sight is imparted, more light is revealed. The Christian with spiritual discernment can afford to "search the Scriptures" with the Holy Spirit alone as his guide. Commentaries are good, but not good as substitutes for independent search. When Alexander the Great stood before Diogenes as he sat by his tub, the general asked the philosopher what he could do for him. The rather grim reply was, "Simply get out of my light." And any searcher has a right to say "Get out of my light" to every one whose shadow comes between him and the Truth. Any method of searching is good, though some may be better than others. The "grasshopper method" by which we take a word or subject and jump from one place to another, collating the texts which have the word or subject in them, is not to be despised. God shook the world through Dwight L. Moody, who was fond of this method. I have learned to love what, for lack of a better word, I call the sectional method, by which one begins at a certain place and goes through paragraph, chapter or book, gathering and classifying every thought. It reminds one of Mr. Spurgeon's saying suggested by the worm-eaten Bible which he found on the table of a Scottish wayside inn. Holding it up to the light, he noticed only one hole through which the light shone. One worm, it seems, had begun at Genesis and eaten through to Revelation, and Spurgeon prayed, "Lord, make me a book-worm like that." Such a book-worm never turns into an earth-worm. It will have wings by and by. But whatever be your method, do not fail to read the Bible by books. Read Genesis at a sitting. You can do it in less than three hours. Then take Exodus; then Leviticus, and so on through the whole library of sixty-six volumes. The astronomer should look at the heavens as a whole before he takes to his telescope. The botanist should look at the fields and gardens before he takes to his microscope. If you have not read the Scriptures, a book at a sitting, you may take it for granted that you do not know your Bible. A study of words yields a rich harvest of knowledge and blessing. Luther said that he studied the Bible as he gathered apples. First, he shook the whole tree, that the ripest might fall. Then he climbed the tree and shook each limb, and when he had shaken each limb, he shook each branch, and after each branch every twig, and then looked under each leaf. Let us search the Bible as a whole; shake the whole tree; read it as rapidly as you would any other book; then shake every limb, studying book after book. Then shake every branch, giving attention to the chapters when they do not break the sense. Then shake every twig by careful study of the paragraphs and sentences, and you will be rewarded, if you will look under every leaf, by searching the meaning of words. 4. A Biblical Motive for Bible Study This is two-fold: 1. That we may have right thinking about eternal life. "In them ye think ye have eternal life." In Christ we have eternal life, but in the Scriptures is our thinking about it. We have the blessedness of the man whose "delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law doth he meditate day and night." My arch of salvation rests upon two pillars. The first pillar is what Christ did for me, and that is always the same length. Time was when the second pillar was assurance of salvation through my feelings. If I felt well and happy, that pillar was of the right length, and seemed solid enough, but when depressed feelings came, the pillar seemed shorter and threatened the arch. One day, however, I read 1 John 5:13 : "These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God, that ye may know that ye have eternal life." And I saw that I was expected to trust the Scriptures and not my feelings for assurance. From that day the pillar of assurance has been all the time of the same length, for God's Word never changes. Feelings may come and go, but "I keep on believing" the promise. I think I have eternal life, not because I feel so and so, but because God says so. Now the pillar of Christ's merit and the pillar of His promise are of the same length, and the arch of salvation is no longer threatened by changing feelings. 2. That we may learn of Jesus. "They are they which testify of Me." Few things are more interesting and none more profitable than tracing the Messianic idea through the Bible. It begins with the curse upon the serpent in Genesis, and closes with "the Lamb as it had been slain in the midst of the throne" in Revelation. In Christian character the image of Christ is marred by imperfections, but in the Scriptures the portrait is perfect. A friend described to me a painting which hung on the wall of his boyhood home. When you first saw it, it was a beautiful landscape with trees, streams, houses and people, but, while gazing upon it, all these beautiful things began to form into a human face. On a closer inspection you perceived that the whole picture was intended to give the face of Christ. The devout student of the Scriptures is constantly having experiences like this. He sees in the Bible trees of faithfulness, streams of truth, landscapes of loveliness in deed and character, but they are all so arranged in their relation to Christ as to bring out the features of His character. While we thus see Him as He is, we become more and more like Him, until by and by we shall see His unveiled face and be completely transformed into His likeness. "Search the Scriptures" for a vision of the Lord Jesus Christ. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 46: - THE PLACE OF PRAYER IN EVANGELISM ======================================================================== The Place of Prayer in Evangelism By Rev. R. A. Torrey, D. D., Dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California The most important human factor in effective evangelism is PRAYER, Every great awakening in the history of the Church from the time of the Apostles until today has been the result of prayer. There have been great awakenings without much preaching, and there have been great awakenings with absolutely no organization, but there has never been a true awakening without much prayer. The first great ingathering in human history had its origin, on the human side, in a ten days' prayer meeting. We read of the small company of early disciples: "These all with one accord continued stedfastly in prayer" (Acts 1:14). The result of that ten days' prayer meeting is recorded in the 2nd chapter of the Acts of the Apostles: "They were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance" (Acts 2:4), and "there were added unto them in that day about 3,000 souls" (Acts 2:41). That awakening proved real and permanent; those who were gathered in on that greatest day in all Christian history, "continued stedfastly in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers" (Acts 2:42). "And the Lord added to them day by day those that were being saved" (Acts 2:47). Every great awakening from that day to this has had its earthly origin in prayer. "The Great Awakening" in the 18th century, in which Jonathan Edwards was one of the central figures, began with his famous "Call to Prayer." The work of David Brainerd among the North American Indians, one of the most marvelous works in all history, had its origin in the days and nights that Brainerd spent before God in prayer for an enduement of power from on high for this work. In 1830 there was a revival in Rochester, New York, in which Charles G. Finney was the outstanding human agent. This revival spread throughout that region of the state and 100,000 persons were reported as having connected themselves with the churches as the result of this work. Mr. Finney himself attributed his success to the spirit of prayer which prevailed. He says in his autobiography: "When I was on my way to Rochester, as we passed through a village some thirty miles east of Rochester, a brother minister whom I knew, seeing me on the canal boat, jumped aboard to have a little conversation with me, intending to ride but a little way and return. He, however, became interested in conversation, and upon finding where I was going, he made up his mind to keep on and go with me to Rochester. We had been there but a few days when this minister became so convicted that he could not help weeping aloud at one time as he passed along the street. The Lord gave him a powerful spirit of prayer, and his heart was broken. As he and I prayed together, I was struck with his faith in regard to what the Lord was going to do there. I recollect he would say, 'Lord, I do not know how it is; but I seem to know that Thou art going to do a great work in this city.' The spirit of prayer was poured out powerfully, so much so, that some persons stayed away from the public services to pray, being unable to restrain their feelings under preaching. "And here I must introduce the name of a man, whom I shall have occasion to mention frequently, Mr. Abel Clary. He was the son of a very excellent man and an elder of the church where I was converted. He was converted in the same revival in which I was. He had been licensed to preach; but his spirit of prayer was such he was so burdened with the souls of men that he was not able to preach much, his whole time and strength being given to prayer. The burden of his soul would frequently be so great that he was unable to stand, and he would writhe and groan in agony. I was well acquainted with him, and knew something of the wonderful spirit of prayer that was upon him. He was a very silent man, as almost all are who have that powerful spirit of prayer. "The first I knew of his being in Rochester, a gentleman who lived about a mile west of the city called on me one day, and asked me if I knew a Mr. Abel Clary, a minister, and I told him that I knew him well. 'Well,' said he, 'he is at my house, and has been there for some time, and I don't know what to think of him.' I said, 'I have not seen him at any of our meetings.' 'No,' he replied, 'he cannot go to meetings, he says. He prays nearly all the time day and night, and in such an agony of mind that I do not know what to make of it. Sometimes he cannot even stand on his knees, but will lie prostrate on the floor, and groan and pray in a manner that quite astonishes me.' I said to the brother, 'I understand it; please keep still. It will come out all right; he will surely prevail.' "I knew at the time a considerable number of men who were exercised in the same way. A Deacon P-of Camden, Oneida County; a Deacon T-of Adams, in the same county; this Mr. Clary, and many others among the men, and a large number of women partook of the same spirit, and spent a great part of their time in prayer. Father Nash, as we called him, who in several of my fields of labor came to me and aided me, was another of those men that had such a powerful.spirit of prevailing prayer. This Mr. Clary continued in Rochester as long as I did, and did not leave it until after I had left. He never, that I could learn, appeared in public, but gave himself wholly to prayer." Perhaps the most remarkable awakening ever known in the United States was the great revival of 1857. As far as its human origin can be traced it began in the prayers of a humble city missionary in New York named Landfear. He not only prayed himself but organized a noon meeting for prayer. At first the attendance was very small; at one meeting there were only three present, at another two, and at one meeting he alone was present. But he and his associates persisted in prayer until a fire was kindled that spread throughout the whole city, until prayer meetings were being held at every hour of the day and night, not only in churches but in theaters. When this had gone on for some time, Dr. Gardner Spring, one of the most eminent Presbyterian ministers in America, said to a company of ministers, "It is evident that a revival has broken out among us, and we must preach." One of the ministers replied, "Well, if there is to be preaching, you must preach the first sermon," and Dr. Gardner Spring consented to preach. But no more people came out to hear him preach than had come out for prayer. So the dependence was put upon prayer and not preaching; the fire spread to Philadelphia, and then all over the land until it is said that there was no part of the country where prayer meetings were not going on, and the whole nation was moved and there were conversions and accessions to the Church everywhere by the hundreds and thousands. This awakening in America was followed by a similar awakening, though in some respects even more remarkable, in Ireland, Scotland and England, in 1859 and 1860. The most important human factors in the origin of the wonderful work seem to have been four young men who began to meet together in the old schoolhouse in the neighborhood of Kells in the north of Ireland. Here night after night they wrestled with God in prayer. About the spring of 1858 a work of power began to manifest itself. It spread from town to town and from county to county; congregations became too large for any building, meetings were held in the open air, oftentimes attended by many thousands of people. Hundreds of persons were frequently convicted of sin in a single meeting; men were smitten down with conviction of sin while working in the field. In some places the criminal courts and jails were closed because there were no cases to try and no criminals to be incarcerated. The fruits of that wonderful work abide to this day. Many of the leading persons even in the churches of America were converted at that time in the North of Ireland. While men like Dr. Grattan Guinness and Brownlow North were greatly used at that time, the revival spread not so much through preachers as through prayer. The wonderful work of Mr. Moody in England, Scotland and Ireland in 1873, and the years that followed, beyond a question had its origin on the manward side in prayer. His going to England at all was in answer to the importunate prayers of a bedridden saint The first demonstration of God's power through his preaching Was in a church in the north of London a year before he went to England for this work. In this meeting 500 people definitely accepted Christ in a single night. This was the direct and immediate outcome of the prayers of this same bedridden saint. While the spirit of prayer continued, Mr. Moody went on with power, but as is always the case, in the course of time less and less was made of prayer and his work fell off perceptibly in power. The great Welsh revival in 1904 and 1905 was unquestionably the outcome of prayer. A year before the writer began his work in Cardiff, it was announced that he was going to Cardiff, and for a year prayer went up from thousands of devoted Christians that there would be not only a revival in Cardiff but throughout Wales. When we reached Cardiff we found that early morning prayer meetings had been held in Penarth, one of the suburbs of Cardiff, for months. Yet at first the work went very slowly. There were great crowds, most enthusiastic singing, but little manifestation of real convicting and regenerating power. A day of fasting and prayer was appointed. This was observed not only in Cardiff but in different parts of Wales. There came an immediate turn of the tide; the power of God fell. On that day, at a meeting held in another part of Wales by a few devoted men of God, the power of God was manifested in a most remarkable way. For a whole year after our meetings closed in Cardiff, the work went on in that city, meetings every night with a very large number of conversions. The week following the meetings in Cardiff a minister associated with the work went up into one of the valleys of Wales, and there was a mighty manifestation of the power of God with large numbers of conversions, and all over Wales the work of God continued, largely without human instruments except in the way of prayer. 100,000 conversions were reported in a year. Of course, not all of these proved steadfast, and doubtless there were extravagances in some places, but after making all allowance, it was one of the most remarkable works of God in modern times, and from Wales there went forth a fire from God to the uttermost parts of the earth and only eternity will reveal the glorious results of that work. And not only has it been demonstrated over and over again in a large way that widespread revivals are the certain outcome of intelligent and prevailing prayer, but in smaller circles the power of prayer has been demonstrated over and over again. In a very obscure village in the state of Maine, where apparently nothing was being accomplished by the churches, a few earnest Christian men got together and organized a prayer band. They selected apparently the most hopeless case in all the village and centered their prayers upon him, importuning God for his conversion. The man was a drunkard and a wreck. In a short time the man was thoroughly converted. Then the praying band centered its prayers upon another man, the second hardest case in the village, and he was converted; and so the work went on until about 200 were converted in a single year. In a little village in the state of Michigan, way off from the railroad, a Presbyterian and a Methodist minister united in an effort to win the unsaved to Christ. They were backed by a faithful praying band. While the Presbyterian preached and the Methodist exhorted, this praying band were in the back room crying to God for His blessing on the work. They would select individuals in the community to pray for. In some instances these men would come into the meeting the very night they were being prayed for and be converted. The work grew to be so remarkable that ministers and multitudes of the people would drive for miles to witness the wonderful work. The history of foreign missions abounds in illustrations of the importance and power of prayer in world-wide evangelism All will recall "the haystack" prayer meeting and its results, and the sending out of the 100 by the China Inland Mission in 1887. Illustrations of this character could easily be multiplied. The history of the Church demonstrates beyond a question that the most important human factor in the evangelism of the world is prayer. The great need of the present hour is prayer. In our work at home and abroad we are placing more and more dependence upon men, machinery, and methods, and less and less upon God. Evangelism at home. is becoming more and more mechanical, and methods are being resorted to that are more and more revolting to all spiritually minded people; while evangelism abroad is becoming more and more merely educational and sociological. What is needed above everything else today is prayer, true prayer, prayer in the power of the Holy Ghost, and prayer that meets the conditions of prevailing prayer so plainly laid down in the Word of God. All that is said thus far is more or less general, but if anything practical is to be accomplished we must be specific, in what directions should we put forth prayer, if we would see that effective evangelism for which so many are longing? First of all, we should pray for individuals. Under God's guidance we should select individuals upon whom we should center our prayers. Every minister and every Christian should have a prayer list, i.e., he should write at the top of a sheet of paper the following words (or words to the same effect): "God helping me, I will pray earnestly and work persistently for the conversion of the following persons:" Then he should kneel before God and ask God definitely and in the most thoughtful earnestness and sincerity, to show him whom to put on that prayer list, and as God leads him to put different persons on that prayer list, he should write their names down. Then each day he should go to God in very definite prayer with that prayer list and cry to God in the earnestness of the Holy Spirit for the conversion of these individuals and never cease to pray for them until they are definitely converted. If there were space we could record most marvelous instances of conversion in many lands as the outcome of such prayer lists. Second, we should pray for the individual church and community. Pray definitely for a spiritual awakening, pray that the members of the church be brought onto a higher plane of Christian living, that the church be purged from its present compromise with the world, that the members of the church be clothed upon with power from on high and filled with a passion for the salvation of the lost. We should pray that through the church and its membership, many may be converted and that there be a genuine awakening in the church and community. Any church or community that is willing to pay the price can have a true revival. That price is not building a tabernacle and calling some widely-known evangelist and putting large sums of money into advertising and following other modern methods. These things may all be right in their place, but they are not the price of a revival. The price of a revival is honest, earnest prayer in the Holy Spirit, prayer that will not take no for an answer. Let a few people in any church or community get thoroughly right with God themselves, then let them band themselves together and cry to God for a revival until the revival comes, with a determination to pray through no matter how long it takes; then let them put themselves at God's disposal for Him to use them in any way He will, in personal work or testimony or anything else, then let them go out as God leads them, dealing in love and wisdom and persistence with the unsaved, and a genuine revival of God's work in the power of the Holy Ghost is bound to result. The writer has said substantially this around the world; time and again, the advice has been followed, and the result has always been the same, a real, effective, thorough-going work of God. In the church in Chicago of which he himself was pastor, during the eight years of his active pastorate there was a constant revival, and in all those eight years there was never a week without conversions. The great majority of those converted united with other churches, but the smallest number ever received into that church in any one year was 250. In the thirteen years that have elapsed since he left the active pastorate of that church, the work has continued to go on, at first under another pastor, and now for several years with no pastor at all. Many illustrations of the same thing could be given. A most notable instance is that of the Charlotte Chapel in Edinburgh under the leadership of Joseph W. Kemp. Third, we should pray for the work in foreign lands. The history of foreign missions proves that the most important factor in effective missionary work is prayer. Men and women are needed for foreign missions, money is needed, but what is needed most of all is prayer. We should pray very definitely for God's guidance upon the secretaries and other officers of our foreign missionary boards. The problems that confront them are beyond the wisdom of any man to solve; the secretaries need wisdom from above and that wisdom is given in answer to prayer. We should pray very definitely that laborers be thrust forth into the harvest which is so plenteous and so ripe at the present time. (Matthew 9:37-38). Not only should we pray that men and women be called into the foreign field, but we should pray for definite fields and for the definite thrusting forth of laborers into those fields. We should pray very specifically for the men and women who have gone into the field. Only one who has visited the foreign field can have any realization of how much the missionaries need our prayers. One feels when he gets to the foreign field as if the very atmosphere was taken possession of by "the prince of the power of the air." The burdens that the foreign missionary has to bear and the conflicts that he has to endure would be appalling if we did not believe in a God who answers prayer. But we have no right to leave the devoted men and women who have gone out to the foreign field to fight the battle alone. Realizing that their "wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual host of wickedness in the heavenlies," we should with all prayer and supplication pray at all seasons in the Spirit, and watch thereunto in all perseverance, that God would give to these men and women victory in their personal conflict, and power in their efforts to win men from the delusions of the false religions that eternally destroy to the truth of the Gospel that eternally saves. We should pray too very definitely for the converts on the foreign fields, for their deliverance from error and delusion and sin, and that they may become intelligent, well-balanced, strong and useful members of the body of Christ. We should pray for the churches as organizations that are formed as the outcome of missionary effort in foreign lands. Finally, we should pray for the evangelization of the world in the present generation. The awful war now in progress emphasizes the need of prayer, especially in connection with our foreign work. The past few years have been years of marvelous opportunity in foreign missionary work. God has been calling the church as never before to the evangelization of the world, but the church as a whole has slept on and not responded to the call, and it almost seems as if the door was at last being closed and that our Lord was saying to us as He said to the disciples who slept in the Garden of Gethsemane, "Sleep on now, the opportunity I gave you and that you despised is now gone." We cannot have it so. Let us pray that God will give us one more opportunity. I believe He will, as dark as the present day seems. Let us pray just as earnestly that God will lead His church to improve the one more opportunity as it is given. Let us be very earnest, very persistent in our prayers. Let us determine that we will not take no for an answer, and we shall see world-wide evangelization, and that glad day for which we are longing above all other days will speedily come when "the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and the trump of God," and when His completed body, the church, will be caught up to meet Him in the air. "Even so, come, Lord Jesus." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 47: - WHAT THE BIBLE CONTAINS FOR THE BELIEVER ======================================================================== What the Bible Contains for the Believer By Rev. George F. Pentecost, D. D., Darien, Connecticut 1. The Bible is the Only Book That Can Make Us Wise unto Salvation. The Bible is not a book to be studied as we study geology and astronomy, merely to find out about the earth's formation and the structure of the universe; but it is a book revealing truth, designed to bring us into living union with God. We may study the physical sciences and get a fair knowledge of the facts and phenomena of the material universe; but what difference does it make to us, as spiritual beings, whether the Copernican theory of the universe is true, or that of Ptolemy? On the other hand, the eternal things of God's Word do so concern us. Scientific knowledge, and the words in which that knowledge is conveyed, have no power to change our characters, to make us better, or give us a living hope of a blessed immortality; but the Word of God has in it a vital power, it is "quick and powerful" living and full of Divine energy (Hebrews 4:12)-and when received with meekness into our understanding and heart is able to save our souls (James 1:18; James 1:21), for it is the instrument of the Holy Spirit wherewith He accomplishes in us regeneration of character. The Word of God is a living seed containing within itself God's own life, which, when it is received into our hearts, springs up within us and "brings forth fruit after its kind;" for Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of God, is the living germ hidden in His written Word. Therefore it is written, "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life" (John 6:63), and so it is that "he that heareth My words"-that is, receiveth them into good and honest hearts-that heareth the Word and understandeth it, "hath everlasting life" (John 5:24). Of no other book could such things as these be said. Hence we say, the Word of God is the instrument in His hand to work in us and for us regeneration and salvation; "for of His own will begat He us with the Word of truth, the engrafted Word, which is able to save your souls" (James 1:18; James 1:21). This leads us to say that we are related to God and the eternal verities revealed in this Book, not through intellectual apprehension and demonstration, but by faith. Not by reasoning, but by simple faith, do we lay hold on these verities, resting our faith in God, who is under and in every saving fact in the Book. (See 1 Peter 1:21). It seems to me, therefore, to be the supreme folly for men to be always speculating and reasoning about these spiritual and revealed things; and yet we meet constantly even good people who are thus dealing with God's Word. First of all, they treat the revelation as though it were only an opinion expressed concerning the things revealed, and so they feel free to dissent from or receive it with modification, and deal with it as they would with the generalizations and conclusions, more or less accurate, of the scientists, and the theories, more or less true, of the philosophers. If the Word commends itself to their judgment they accept it; thus making their judgment the criterion of truth, instead of submitting their opinions to the infallible Word of God. It is not seldom that we hear a person say they believe the Word of God to be true; and then the very next instant, when pressed by some statement or declaration of that Word, they say, "Ah! but then I believe so and so"-something entirely different from what God has declared. Then again, many people who profess to believe God's Word seem never to think of putting themselves into practical and saving relation to it. They believe that Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world, but they never believe on Him or in Him; in other words, that He is a Saviour to them. God's Book is full of doctrines and promises. We declare them, and some one says, "You must prove that doctrine or that promise to be true." The only way to prove a doctrine to be true is by a personal experience of it through faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ says, "Ye must be born again." Should you attempt to master the meaning and power of that doctrine by mere speculation, you would presently land just where Nicodemus did, and say, "How can these things be?" Instead of doing so, suppose you attend further to what is said, namely, "Whosoever believeth is born of God" (1 John 5:1; John 1:12-13). In obedience to this Divine teaching, not knowing how it is to be done in us, we take that Word and yield ourselves to Jesus Christ; and lo! there dawns upon us an experience that throws light upon all that which before was a mystery. We have experienced no physical shock, but a great change is wrought in us, especially in our relation to God. "Old things are passed away, and behold all things are become new" (2 Corinthians 5:17). Thus we come into an experimental understanding of the doctrine of the new birth. So every other doctrine pertaining to the spiritual life is by God's grace transmuted into experience. For just as a word stands for an idea or thought, so the doctrines of God stand for experiences; but the doctrine must be received before the experience can be had. And, moreover, we are to receive all doctrines, all truth, through faith in Him, for Christ and His Word are inseparable, just as a man's note is only current and valuable because the man is good. A banknote is received in the faith of the bank it represents. Should the bank fail, the note instantly becomes worthless. But there are some things revealed in the Word of God which we believe without experience. For instance, we believe that this "vile body" (Php_3:21), dishonored by sin and upon the neck of which death will soon put his foot, will in the day of "His appearing and kingdom" (2 Timothy 4:1; 1 Thessalonians 4:15) be raised, changed and fashioned like unto His glorious body (Php_3:21). Do you know how we can so surely believe these things? We answer, because God has proved to us so much of His Word that when He announces something yet to be made true, on the basis of past experience we reach out toward and accept as true the promise of the future things. Indeed, He already makes it true in our hearts, for "faith is the substance of things hoped for" (Hebrews 11:1). For even here we have a present spiritual experience which is as an earnest to us of the culmination yet future; for we are already risen with Christ. (Colossians 2:13; Colossians 3:1; Ephesians 2:5-6; Romans 8:11). 2. The Bible Contains in Itself the Absolute Guarantee of Our Inheritance in Christ. Suppose we should come to you some day and call in question your ownership of your house, and demand that you give it up-a homestead bequeathed to you by your father. "Why do you make such a demand upon me?" you ask. "Because," we reply, "it is not your house; you have no right to it; at least you do not know that it is yours." "Oh, yes," you reply, "I am quite sure it is my house." "How do you know? What is your reason for believing it is your house?" "Why, because my father lived here before me." "That is no good reason." "Well, I have lived here undisputed for five years myself." "It does not hence follow that the house is yours." "But I am very happy in it; I enjoy myself here." "Well, but my dear sir, that you may do, and still have no right to it." At last, pushed to the wall, you take us with you down to the court-house, and show us your father's will, duly written, signed, sealed and recorded. This may serve to illustrate the point. A great many Christians are at a loss where and how to ground their "title." It is not in the fact that you are a descendant of a saintly father, a child of believing parents, for, as old Matthew Henry says, "Grace does not run in the blood;" nor is it that you have membership in the visible Church of Christ; nor is it to be found in delightful frames and feelings-in a word, not even a genuine Christian experience constitutes your "title-deed." Where then are we to bottom our hope? Why, just in the naked bare Word of God. It is written, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth My words, and believeth on Him that sent Me hath everlasting life," etc. (John 5:24). Straight to the record do we appeal for a final test as to our possession in God. "This is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life" (1 John 5:11-12). Our faith lays hold on the Son of God, in whom we have redemption (Ephesians 1:7) by means of and through the recorded Word of promise, for this record was "written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through His name" (John 20:31). The Scriptures are the covenants, old and new, in which God has guaranteed to us, by word and oath (Hebrews 6:17-18), sealed with the blood of Jesus Christ (Matthew 26:28), an inheritance among the saints. We do not emphasize this point in any wise to underrate Christian experience (for it is most blessed and true), or undervalue the blessing of believing parents, or the Church and her ordinances, but only to draw your attention to "the more sure Word of prophecy" (2 Peter 1:19), which is better to us for confirmation than visions and voices, frames and feelings, parental benedictions, and church sacraments. 3. The Word of God is the Means Appointed for the Culture of Our Christian Life. James tells us (1:18) that the Word of truth is the instrument of our regeneration, and Jesus tells us that the truth not only "makes us free," but prays the Father that we may be "sanctified through the truth" (John 6:32-36; John 17:17-19). And Paul tells us, in words which the Holy Ghost teacheth, that "Christ loved the church, and give Himself for it, that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the Word," etc. (Ephesians 5:25; Ephesians 5:27). "This is the will of God, even your sanctification" (1 Thessalonians 4:3), for God hath not called us to uncleanness, but unto holiness (1 Thessalonians 4:7). After regeneration, nothing can be more important than this. We are told in the Bible and we believe it-that by and by we shall be in another state of existence-in heaven in the presence of the loving and glorified Jesus; that we shall see His face, and His name shall be on our foreheads (Revelation 22:4), that we shall be with the angels, an innumerable company, and with the spirits of just men made perfect, the saints of all ages (Hebrews 12:23), that we shall know them and be in their society (Matthew 17:3; 1 Corinthians 13:12), that we shall be absolutely untainted with sin, as glorious as the uncreated light of God. (Revelation 21:4; Revelation 21:27; Matthew 13:45). This being the place and the company toward which we are being borne along so rapidly, we want to be prepared for both place and society. Ah, friends, you are anxious to be cultured for this world and its "best society," in its knowledge, in its customs, and in its manners. Yes, you lavish time and money upon yourself and your children, in order that they may be furnished with the accomplishments and culture of this world. You say when you appear in good society you want to be at ease, to be a peer among the most accomplished, and you wish the same for your children. Were you invited to go six months hence to take up your abode at the Court of St. James, as the guest of England's noble king, you would ransack all the books at your command that treated of court etiquette and manners; you would brush up in English history, so that you might not be taken unawares either in your knowledge of the affairs of the country, or in court ceremonial. But in a little while we are going to the court of the King immortal, eternal, in the kingdom of glory. We know not the day nor the hour when the Lord will come, or call us hence; and we want to be ready, both as to purity of character and the courtly culture of the heavenly city. We wish to be familiar with the history of redemption, and with the mysteries of the kingdom. We should not want to appear as an awkward stranger in our Father's house of light. We can only get this sanctification of character and culture of life and manner by constant familiarity and communion with God and the saints through the Word. Men of the world are anxious that they, or, it may be, that their children, should appear well in the society of this world. To this end they devote themselves and them to the schools of the world and fashion; the dancing school and the academy, they fancy, is the only place where polite manners and courtly grace may be acquired. Believers, too, are anxious that their children should be cultured and accomplished in every way worthy of being the King's sons or daughters, as by grace they are. But they should not think of seeking for them the entree of what is called in this world the "best society", or sending them to fashionable finishing-schools and dancing academies, in order to such end. If they may have their hearts filled with the dear, great love of God, and the sweet grace of Christ; if they hang on the chamber walls of their souls as pictures, "Whatsoever things are honest, just, pure, lovely and of good report, and think on these things" (Php_4:8); if they journey through this world in companionship with Him; if the Holy Spirit guides them through the Word, as Bunyan's Pilgrim was led through the "house of the interpreter," and shows them wonderful and beautiful things out of His law; if the fruit of the Spirit, which "is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance" (Galatians 5:22-23), adorns their lives and characters-Christians are not then afraid that their children will be a whit behind the foremost society people in the land in culture of mind and heart, and grace of manner. Ah, there is a heavenly culture and a Divine grace of manner that far transcend anything found in the schools of this world. Only a Christian could think of saying with Paul, standing before his judge, "except these bonds" (Acts 26:29). John Bunyan, locked up for twelve years in Bedford Jail, with his Bible and concordance for his constant companions, produced and sent forth to the world his immortal dream, written with such beauty of style and in such chaste and simple manner, as to make it classic in English literature. So perfect and matchless was the intellectual and spiritual culture of this unlearned "tinker of Elstow," that the scholarly John Owen testified before the King, "Your Majesty, if I could write as does that tinker in Bedford Jail I would gladly lay down all my learning." Where did John Bunyan get his culture? In glorious fellowship with Moses in the Law, with David in the Psalms, with Isaiah and the prophets and holy men of God, who wrote as they were moved by the Holy Spirit; with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; with Paul, Peter and all the rest who wrote and spoke not the thoughts, nor in the words, of man's wisdom, but God's thoughts, and in words which the Holy Spirit giveth. Read Homer and Milton, Shakespeare and Dante; read Bacon, Macaulay, Addison and Carlyle; go through all the best literature of all ages, and it will fall infinitely short of the purity, beauty and grandeur of thought and expression found in God's Word. Goethe, who said he was "not Christian," has declared of the canonical Gospels: "The human mind, no matter how much it may advance in intellectual culture, and in the extent and depth of the knowledge of nature, will never transcend the high moral culture of Christianity as it shines and glows in the canonical Gospels." Renan, the French infidel author, concludes his life of Jesus with these remarkable words "Whatever may be the surprises of the future, Jesus will never Be surpassed; His worship will grow young without ceasing; His legend will call forth tears without end; His suffering will melt the noblest hearts; all ages will proclaim that among the sons of men there is none born greater than Jesus." And Strauss, the rationalistic German author of the "Life of Jesus," says: "Jesus presents within the sphere of religion the culminating point, beyond which posterity can never go; yea, which it cannot even equal. He remains the highest model of religion within the reach of our thought, and no perfect piety is possible without His presence in the heart." Thus the power of the "Book and the Person" for the highest culture of the highest nature of man, is affirmed by the great apostle of modern culture, and by those who do not admit the Divine origin of the Scriptures, or the deity of Him of whom they are from first to last the witness. If, then, you want to know how to serve God and do His will on the earth, and be thoroughly prepared and cultured for heaven hereafter, take His Word, and make it the rule and companion of your life. 4. The Bible is the Christian's Armory. The Christian's calling in the world is that of a soldier. He must fight the good fight of faith. (1 Timothy 6:12; 2 Timothy 4:7). Sinners are to be won from the power of the devil to God. Their intelligence, their wills, and their affections, are to be stormed and carried for Him; they are to be turned from the power of darkness to light; their prison-houses of sin are to be broken into; their chains knocked off and the captives set free (Acts 26:16-18). We also, in our own Christian life and pilgrimage, are set upon by the powers of darkness; by the fiery darts of the devil. Doubts, infidelity, temptations, evil imaginations, unclean, unholy, and vain thoughts assail us, poured in upon our souls by Satan, the lusts of the flesh being thus set on fire of hell, if by this means the child of God may be overtaken in a fault or overcome by sin. But this warfare is not carnal, or after the manner of the flesh. "For though we walk in the flesh [have our lives as other men do in fleshly bodies] we do not war after the flesh: (for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds); casting down imaginations [reasonings] and every high thing [lofty edifice] which is being raised against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought in obedience to Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:3-5). Just as Joshua went up against Jericho, and took its strongholds and high towers, and cast them down and made captive the city, not with carnal weapons, but with trumpets of rams' horns (Joshua 6), so we, proceeding against the strongholds, imaginations, and infidel arguments of men, are to take the Gospel trump. The sword we are to wield is the "Word of God, the sword of the Spirit" (Ephesians 6:17) which makes him who wields it invincible. The Bible itself must be brought out, not only as the best defense against all the assaults of infidelity from the lofty towers of human reasonings, but also as the mighty weapon to overcome and bring the enemies of God into captivity to Christ. "They overcame by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony" (Revelation 12:11). "Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God; having your loins girt about with truth; and having on the breastplate of righteousness, and your feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace; and above all, taking the shield of faith, whereby ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked; and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God" (Ephesians 6:13-17). We have only to recall how our Saviour overcame the devil with the all prevailing weapon, "It is written," in order that we may be furnished with the secret of successful warfare for Him. Very often Christians, young and old, come to us in the "inquiry room" and say, "Won't you come and talk with this friend of mine?" "Why don't you talk with him (or her) yourself?" we reply. "Because I don't know what to say to him, and, besides, you know more of the Bible." "Well, why don't you know more of the Bible?" To this, various answers are given. At any rate we meet here one grave mistake. An ignorance of the Bible, which not only furnishes us with our spiritual weapons, but "thoroughly furnishes us unto all good works" (2 Timothy 3:17), leads many earnest Christians to the doubtful use of their own argumentation in dealing with their own and others' souls. It is a hopeless task to pull down the strongholds of the unregenerate mind and heart with anything less than these Divine weapons. But all may equip themselves from this great armory. The Bible contains ideas which no philosophy or human theory can furnish, and therefore puts us in possession of weapons which the enemy cannot withstand when hard pushed by them, re-enforced as they are by the invisible and mighty presence of the Holy Spirit, and which renders us impregnable to the assaults of the adversary. Of this mighty power of the Word and Spirit of God we have a splendid example in the case of Stephen, and other early disciples, whose words, drawn from the Scripture, the Jews could not withstand. We have never yet met an infidel or atheist whose arguments we could not turn aside when depending simply on the Word of God. Nay, more, we have never yet met one in the "inquiry rooms" who has been able to withstand God's Word and the mighty facts of the Bible, when, in humble, dependence upon God we have set them in array before him. If you know God's thoughts and seek to be guided by the Holy Spirit, He will say out of your mouth the right word at the right time, both to ward off an assault and to strike a telling blow for the truth. And amidst all this warfare, the light and love and gentleness of Jesus Christ will so shine out in your bearing and manner that they will be convinced of your sincerity, and God will give you the victory. 5. The Bible is a Perfect Map and Chart to the Christian on Pilgrimage Through the World. With God's Word in hand and heart you may tread your way with perfect safety and confidence through all the labyrinths of this world. The straight and narrow way is so clearly and sharply marked that he who runs may read. It is a highway (unseen, it may be, by the worldly) in which a wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err (Isaiah 35:8), for it is everywhere marked by His commandments. More than that, we have an unseen Guide, even the Spirit of Truth, who leads us, and says to us, in places of doubt or uncertainty, "This is the way, walk ye in it" (Isaiah 30:21). Thus, a pilgrim and a stranger, you may keep your onward way to the city of God in safety and confidence, following in the light of the Word, which is "a lamp to your feet, and a light unto your path" (Psalms 119:105), the path that no one knoweth save He that leadeth thee. Yea, and you will find that the way, over hills and through valleys, shines more and more unto the perfect day. (Proverbs 4:18). The Word of God is a chart that marks all the rocks and reefs in the sea of life; if we heed, and sail our frail bark by it, we shall come safely into the haven of rest at last. But if we are heedless and proud, and self-sufficient in our own conceits, we shall make shipwreck of our faith. A young lieutenant in the English navy discovered a small but dangerous rock in the Mediterranean, never before known, and reported it to the admiralty. It was telegraphed to all the stations, and ordered to be put down on all the charts. The first ship to sail over the spot was under command of an old captain, who, noting the warning newly placed on his chart, desired to know by whom the rock was reported. On being informed he replied: "There is no such rock there. I have sailed over this sea for twenty years, and if such a rock had been there I would have found it." And then in his pride and conceit he gave orders to his sailing-master to steer directly over the spot indicated. The gallant ship was driven over the danger spot under full sail. There was a tremendous crash, and the noble vessel went down with all hands. Many a Christian suffers shipwreck through unheeding conceit or neglect of his infallible chart. May the Holy Spirit incline us to study diligently our Divine chart, and sail closely by it! 6. The Bible Reveals Things to Come. It contains not only the history of the past, of God's dealings with nations, but it also contains much unfulfilled prophecy. Revelation is a book devoted to things that "must shortly come to pass." Prophecy has been called unacted history, and history is but fulfilled prophecy. It is a mistake to suppose that God's hand in history has been limited to those nations mentioned in the Bible. Could we have the story of God in history, it would be seen that His providence has been in and over all the great and small events of all nations. Daniel in his great prophecy has given a rapid and graphic sketch of the course of history from the golden-headed Babylonian Empire down to the end of time, when the "Son of man shall come with the clouds of heaven"-when there "shall be given Him dominion and glory, and a kingdom, that all nations and languages should serve Him." When He comes, "His dominion will be an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and His kingdom one which shall not be destroyed" (Daniel 2:44; Daniel 7:13-27). Meantime God among nations will be overturning, and "overturning, and overturning until He comes whose right it is" (Ezekiel 21:27). The Book of Revelation is a detailed exposition of the second and seventh chapters of Daniel, and the two books should be read together. Emperors and kings and cabinets are rapidly bringing to pass things that God has marked out in prophecy ages ago. But they know not what they do. There are "signs in the heavens," and on the earth there is "distress of nations with perplexity; and the sea and the waves roaring; men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth; for the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud, with power and great glory" (Luke 21:25-27). Of the day and hour when the flaming heavens shall reveal the "appearing and kingdom" of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Timothy 4:1), no man knoweth; but we are bidden to wait and be ready, lest we be surprised by the great and notable day of the Lord. To this end the Scriptures are also written, that the loving Student of them may live in advance of history, and be overtaken by no untoward event. If His prophetic Word dwell richly in our hearts and minds, there will be no great surprise for us as time goes on. We shall discern through the prophetic telescope, dimly, it may be, the approaches of those things out of which history is made. Should it be our blessed lot to be "alive, and remain Unto the coming of the Lord" (1 Thessalonians 4:15) we shall see the sign of Him in the heavens (Matthew 24:30) before the startled and amazed world, lying in sin and mocking unbelief (2 Peter 3:3; Luke 18:8), are overwhelmed in that "everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power" (2 Thessalonians 1:7-9). We know that there is a growing disposition on the part of many excellent Christians to make light (they know not what they do) of all prophetic study; but our risen Lord, in His last revelation to John concerning things to come, caused him to write, at the very outset: "Blessed is he that readeth and they that hear the words of this prophecy; and keep those things which are written therein; for the time is at hand;" and at the close of the book to add: "These sayings are faithful and true; and the Lord God of the holy prophets sent His angel to show unto His servants the things which must shortly be done. Behold I come quickly; blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book" (Revelation 22:6-7). May the Spirit of God give us a mind to study His Word reverently and believingly with a prepared heart, as did Ezra (Ezra 7:10), in the light and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Then will He "show us things to come" (John 16:13). ======================================================================== CHAPTER 48: - THE HOPE OF THE CHURCH ======================================================================== The Hope of the Church By Rev. John McNicol, B.A., B.D., Principal of the Toronto Bible Training School There are many indications of a revival of interest in the study of eschatology. The latest attack upon the Christian faith is being directed against the eschatological teaching of the New Testament. The Christian Church was founded upon the promise of a speedy return of Christ to establish His Kingdom in the world, but its history has taken an entirely different course. The expectation of the early Christians was not fulfilled. The teaching of the apostles has been falsified. Such is the argument that is now being used in some quarters to discredit the founders of Christianity. This is compelling Christian scholars to give renewed attention to the teaching of the new Testament about the Lord's second coming, and will doubtless lead to more earnest and thorough examination of the whole outlook of Christ and His apostles upon the future. It is acknowledged that the eschatology of the New Testament is not the eschatology of the Church today. The hope of the early Christians is not the hope of the average Christian now. It has become our habit to think of the change which comes at death, or our entrance into heaven, as the crowning point in the believer's life, and the proper object of our hope. Yet the apostles never speak of death as something which the Christian should look forward to or prepare for. They do not ignore death altogether, nor do they cast a halo about it. It is always an enemy, the last enemy that is to be destroyed. But they do not take account of it at all in the scheme of things with which we have now to reckon. As a matter of fact the early Christians were taught that they had died already-"Ye died and your life is hid with Christ in God" Colossians 3:3, R. V.. Nor is heaven set forth as the Christian's hope. The New Testament represents the Church as in heaven already. We have been raised up with Christ and made to sit with Him in the heavenly places. Ephesians 2:6. Our warfare is carried on against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Ephesians 6:12. Our citizenship is there. Php_3:20. Browning's conception of the experience of Lazarus when he came back from the tomb: "Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth, Earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven," is almost precisely the apostolic representation of the believer's life upon earth. It is potentially a life in heaven. Neither death nor heaven, then, can be the Church's hope, for, in their essential relation to the Christian life, death lies in the past and heaven in the present. The conversion of the world is not the object of the Church's hope. It is quite true that this glorious consummation lies in the future, for "the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea," but the task of bringing this about was not committed to the Church. On the contrary, the New Testament descriptions of the last days of the Church upon earth preclude the thought. They are depicted in dark colors. 2 Timothy 3:1-5; 2 Peter 3:1-4. The history of the preaching of the Gospel in the world should be enough to show that this cannot be the object set before us, for, while whole nations have been evangelized, not a single community has ever been completely converted, it is a striking fact that the apostles had nothing to say about the conversion of the world. While they were busy preaching the Gospel in the world they gave no indication that they expected this work to result at length in the transformation of the world. They were not looking for a change in the world, but for the personal presence of their Lord. Jesus Christ Himself was their hope, and His appearing they intensely loved and longed for. The attitude of the New Testament Church is represented by the Apostle John in the closing words of the Apocalypse. Visions of heavenly glory and millennial peace have passed before him. He has seen the new heaven and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness, and the Holy City, New Jerusalem, whose light was like a stone most precious. But, at the end of it all, the longing of the aged apostle is not for these things to come. Greater than all these glories, dearer than all these dear things, is the Master Himself, and the prayer that rises from his heart as he closes his wondrous book is simply, "Come, Lord Jesus." The hope of the Church, then, is the Personal Return of her Lord. As Dr. David Brown stated it in his book on the Second Advent, sixty years ago, "the Redeemer's second appearing is the very pole-star of the Church." Let us see how this hope lies upon the pages of the New Testament revelation, and how it influenced the life of the New Testament Church. 1. Christ taught His disciples to expect His return. This was the last of the stages through which His teaching about Himself advanced. In the early part of His ministry He seems to have kept His personality in the background; He forbade those whom He healed to tell about Him. Then there came a time when He asked the disciples, "Who do men say that I am?" and led them to think of His divine origin. After that He began to instruct them about His approaching death and resurrection, "His departure which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem" Luke 9:31. In the last days of His ministry His return to the world largely occupied His own thoughts, and He kept it prominently before the minds of His disciples. During His last journey to Jerusalem He foreshadowed His own history in the parable of the nobleman going into a far country to receive a kingdom and return, who left His servants behind with the command, "Occupy till I come" Luke 19:12-13. One evening during the last week He sat on the Mount of Olives, looking down no doubt upon the massive buildings of the temple, the total destruction of which He had just foretold. The disciples gathered about Him with the request: "Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of Thy coming and of the end of the world?" Matthew 24:3. It is evident from the form of this question that His coming was no new thought to them. It was occupying their minds already. They knew that He was coming again, and they wished to know how to recognize the approach of that event. In answer to the question, the Lord unfolded a panorama of intervening history, and emphasized the need of watchfulness because the time of His coming would he uncertain. "Watch therefore, for ye know not on what day your Lord cometh. Therefore be ye also ready, for in an hour that ye think not the Son of Man cometh." He enforced this teaching with two striking illustrations of the twofold kind of preparation needed on the part of the disciples, the inward preparation of spiritual life set forth in the parable of the virgins, and the outward preparation of diligent service in that of the talents. Then He closed His discourse with a graphic picture of the changed conditions in which He would appear when He came the second time as the Son of Man sitting upon the throne of His glory. Through the sad and dark hours of the very last night His thoughts were occupied with His return. In the upper room, when the faithful little band were grouped about Him in sorrow for the parting which all vaguely felt was near, He began His farewell words to them with this comforting assurance: "Let not your hearts be troubled. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go ... I will come again" John 14:1-3. A few hours afterwards He was in the midst of the shameful scenes of His trial. Mark His answer to the high priest, when He calmly acknowledged the claim to be the Christ, the Son of God: "Nevertheless, I say unto you, henceforth ye shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven" Matthew 24:64. He did not look like the Messiah at that moment as He stood there with bound hands before His accusers. His appearance seemed to belie His words. But the time would come when they would see that His claim was true. This was what was in His thoughts. Through all the shame of those awful hours, the vision of His return in glory to the world that was rejecting Him now shone like a beacon upon His soul; and "for the joy that was set before Him, He endured the cross, despising the shame." At His ascension the same truth was brought again to the minds of the disciples. As they stood gazing in wonder towards the place where the Lord had disappeared from their view, the two angels were sent to remind them of His return. "This same Jesus who is taken up from you into heaven shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven" Acts 1:11. It was this thought that sent the disciples back to Jerusalem with the joy which Luke describes in the closing verses of his Gospel. It is very clear, therefore, that when Jesus departed from this world after His first coming He left His disciples radiant with the joyful assurance of His coming again. 2. The apostles taught their converts to wait for the coming of the Lord. All the New Testament churches have the expectant attitude. No matter in what part of the world or in what stage of development they are found, they have this characteristic in common. The conversion of the Thessalonians is described as "turning to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven" 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10. The Corinthians "come behind in no gift, waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ" 1 Corinthians 1:7. To the Galatians Paul writes, "We through the Spirit by faith wait for the hope of righteousness" Galatians 5:5; and to the Philippians, "Our citizenship is in heaven, whence also we wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ" Php_3:20. In the Epistle to the Hebrews the same attitude is disclosed, for there we read: "Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for Him, unto salvation" Hebrews 9:28. It is evident that the early Christians not only looked back to a Saviour who had died for them, but forward to a Saviour who was to come. There were two poles in their conversion. Their faith was anchored in the past in the facts of the death and resurrection of the Lord, and also in the future in the assured hope of His return. It is manifest, therefore, that the second coming of the Saviour occupied a most important place in the Gospel which the apostles preached, and which these Christians received. 3. The whole life and work of the New Testament Church has the coming of the Lord in view. All the lines of her activity and experience lead to this event. The sanctification of the disciple is a preparation for the coming of the Lord. Paul writes to the Thessalonians: "The very God of peace sanctify you wholly, and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" 1 Thessalonians 5:23. John puts the same thing in his own tender way: "And now, little children, abide in Him, that, when He shall appear, we may have confidence and not be ashamed before Him at His coming" 1 John 2:28. Christian service gets its encouragement in the same inspiring issue. Paul exhorts Timothy to fidelity, charging him to "keep the commandment, without spot, without reproach, until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ" 1 Timothy 6:14. And Peter writes to his fellow elders: "Feed the flock of God which is among you, and when the Chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away" 1 Peter 5:2; 1 Peter 5:4. The patience of the early Christians in suffering and trial is hounded by the same event. "Be patient therefore, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand" James 5:7-8. "Let your forbearance be known unto all men, the Lord is at hand" Php_4:5. Their life of fellowship and brotherly love reaches its holy consummation at the Lord's return. "The Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men, even as we also do toward you, to the end He may establish your hearts un-blameable in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all his saints" 1 Thessalonians 3:12-13. Their acts of worship; as for example, their observance of the Lord's supper, have the same end in view. "As often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord's death till He come" 1 Corinthians 11:26. Thus, whatever aspect of the Church's life and work we consider, we find it to be a stream which moves on towards one glorious future The appearing of the Lord Jesus Himself fills the whole horizon. 4. The New Testament grace of hope rests upon the coming of the Lord. This word is emptied today of much of the meaning it had among the early Christians. It has come to be a vague and misty thing, the general habit of expecting things somehow to turn out well. Their hope was no such shallow optimism. It was the light that shone from that one glad coming event, casting its sacred glow over all their lives. Paul sums up the true Christian attitude in these words: "The grace of God hath appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us, to the intent that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly and righteously and godly in this present world; looking for the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ" Titus 2:11-13. The word hope was often upon the lips of the apostles. It is used more than a score of times in the epistles in direct connection with the coming of the Lord. It is not unlikely that, even when it is used alone without any qualifying phrase, as in the expressions, "We are saved by hope," "rejoicing in hope," it has the same specific reference. The Epistle to the Hebrews makes frequent use of the word in this way. There was a special reason for this. The Hebrew Christians were a small and despised community, living under the continual influence of that majestic ritual which was still going on in the temple at Jerusalem. The return of Christ was delayed, and there was a strong tendency to slip back into the old ceremonial system. Their patience and hope had need of every encouragement. The writer of the epistle turns their eyes again and again from the shadows of the past to the realities that lay before them. Their Messiah had indeed come to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, but He would come a second time, in glory, with a final and complete salvation. This was the hope set before them to which they had fled for refuge. Hebrews 6:18. Let them hold fast their boldness and the glorying of their hope firm unto the end. Hebrews 3:6. In a beautiful passage in his first epistle, the apostle John points out the practical value of this Christian grace in its essential relation to the coming of the Lord: "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is. And every man that hath this hope in Him purifieth himself, even as He is pure" 1 John 3:2,3:5. Redemption is not complete until the second coming of the Lord. The apostles think of salvation in three different ways; sometimes with reference to the past, as a fact already assured at the moment of belief in the Lord Jesus Christ; sometimes with reference to the present, as a process still going on; and sometimes with reference to the future, as an act yet to be accomplished. In this last sense Paul uses the word when he says, "Now is our salvation nearer than when we first believed" Romans 13:11; and Peter also, in the phrase, "kept by the power of God through faith unto a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time" 1 Peter 1:5. Our Lord refers to the same thing when, after telling the disciples about the signs of His coming, He adds, "When these things begin to come to pass, look up, and lift up your heads, because your redemption draweth nigh" Luke 21:28. One of the most complete types of the history of redemption is to be found in the ceremonies of the day of atonement. It was an essential part of the work of the high priest on that day that he should come forth from within the veil, and laying aside his linen garments, reappear to bless the waiting congregation. Our great High Priest is now within the veil. He has offered the atoning sacrifice on the altar of Calvary, and with the merit of that sacrifice He has gone in to appear in the presence of God for us. But the great day of atonement is not yet closed. When His work within the veil is ended, He shall come forth, arrayed again in His garments of glory and beauty, for the final blessing of His waiting people. "Having been once offered to bear the sins of many, He shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for Him, unto salvation." Think of what this crowning act of redemption will mean for the Redeemer Himself, when, attended with heavenly glory, He prepares to descend to the very world that witnessed His suffering, sorrow, and shame. What will it mean to Him when the multitudes of the redeemed gather about Him, and at last He sees of the travail of His soul and is satisfied? Is it not reasonable that there should be such a manifestation of the Redeemer to the world? Is it reasonable that the despised Man of Nazareth should be the only view the world should have of Him Who is to be the Heir of all things? Is it likely that God would allow His Son's retirement from the world in apparent defeat without any subsequent vindication? If the prophetic vision of the suffering Servant had an actual personal fulfillment, surely the prophetic vision of the conquering King will also have a personal fulfillment. As the world was astonished at Him when He came the first time, because "His visage was so marred more than any man, and His form more than the sons of men," so it will be astonished when he comes a second time, and the prophet's vision breaks upon its view: "Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah, this that is glorious in His apparel, marching in the greatness of His strength?" Isaiah 63:1. And what will it mean for the redeemed? There will be, of course, the happy reunion of all the saints when the dead are raised and the living are changed, for, when the Lord descends from heaven with a shout, "the dead in Christ shall rise first, and we that are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air." But glorious as these things are, they are only preliminary steps to a higher and holier bliss. The climax of redemption will be the manifested union of the Church with her Lord in the marriage of the Lamb. For then the Bridegroom shall come to claim His Bride, and take her to share His glory and His throne. Then the Church that Christ loved and purchased shall be presented to Him a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing. Then the astonished world, beholding her transformation, shall cry, "Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness leaning on her Beloved?" Think of what it will mean when, after sharing His humiliation in the midst of a scoffing and unbelieving world, the redeemed Church is exalted to His side, and, as the consort of the King of kings and Lord of lords, stands "all rapture through and through in God's most holy sight." Nothing less than this is the destiny that awaits the Church of Jesus Christ. If the Lord committed to His disciples the promise of His personal return, and if it occupied so large a place in the lives of the early Christians, surely it is unfair to banish it from the Church today. It is unfair to the world, for this truth is part of the Gospel which should be delivered to the world. It is unfair to the Church, for it deprives the people of Christ of one of the most powerful motives for spiritual life and service. It is unfair to Christ Himself, for it obscures the reality of His personal presence within the heavenly veil and substitutes for it the thin air of a mere spiritual influence. The hope of the second coming of our Lord has an important bearing upon Christian life and doctrine. It has a vital relation especially to some points of our faith which are being attacked or obscured by the subtle tendencies of modern thought. 1. It is bound up with belief in the supreme and infallible authority of the Holy Scriptures. It would never be adopted on rationalistic grounds. Those who receive it rest their belief wholly on the authority of Scripture, believing that therein God has spoken in a way that can be trusted. They accept. the Bible as the record of God's revelation to man, and believe that in prophecy He has disclosed His purpose concerning the future of the world. It is a protest against the tendency within the Church to exalt the human reason above the Word of God, and to reduce inspired prophecy to the level of merely human foresight. 2. It bears testimony to the presence of God in human history. The tendency of our times is to explain away the supernatural element in history whether in the past, the present, or the future. To this tendency those who accept the doctrine of the second coming refuse to yield. The history of the world is controlled by God; His hand is on the affairs of men. In the person of Jesus Christ He has already supernaturally intervened in the course of human history. It is believed, on the authority of His Word, that He will supernaturally intervene again. The first coming of Christ was a descent of God into the life of the human race. The Scriptures teach us to expect another divine descent, not to bring history to a close, but to introduce new forces and to inaugurate a new dispensation. 3. It exalts the divine person and work of the incarnate Son of God. It is in direct opposition to the Unitarian tendencies which pervade so large a part of modern religious thought. It holds the truth of the Lord's continued existence in a glorified body, and regards this fact as of primary importance and of prophetic significance. The personal existence of the risen Son of Man is not to be dissolved away into a mere general spiritual presence. The risen and ascended Redeemer exists today in heaven in the true reality of His glorified humanity; and "this same Jesus," it is believed, shall be revealed one day in His glorious personality from behind the unseen veil, to carry on the redemption of the world to its full completion. 4. It takes due account of the fall of the human race. The tendency today is greatly to exalt man and to ignore the fact of the fall. The great advance that is being made in every department of human knowledge and activity predisposes men to form the highest conceptions of the possibilities of the race. The theory of evolution, which dominates modern thinking, leads men to expect a gradual perfecting of the race under the laws of its own being, which will issue at last, with the beneficent aid of Christianity, in a perfect state of human society and the redemption of the race as a whole. But human sin is too deep-rooted and too widespread for the attainment of this end in the present order of things, even with the aid of existing spiritual agencies, it is acknowledged to be the teaching of Scripture that, even with the aid of divine grace, the triumph of the kingdom of God in the individual is not complete in the present order, but only at his translation to a higher order at the resurrection. It would seem that the analogy should hold as regards the race, and that the triumph of the kingdom in the race as an organic unity will be brought about only by a supernatural intervention of divine power and the introduction of humanity into a new order of things. 5. It presents a sublime view of God's great purpose in His creation. It places the redemption of the whole world, the restoration of all things, in the very forefront of the divine purpose regarding fallen man. Everything has been arranged and foreordained by God to this end. This is the divine event to which the whole creation moves. He who has this hope has a large vision, a vision not limited to the present day and its affairs. He sees the will of God moving on through the history of the ages. The present age is but preparatory. A grander age is to be ushered in by the advent of the victorious Redeemer, an age in which man shall come to his own at last, and creation shall be restored to its harmony, under its true Head, the glorified Son of Man. 6. It provides the most inspiring motive for Christian life and service. It is a supremely practical hope. The repeated instructions of the Lord and His apostles to be ready for His return indicate the force this doctrine had as a motive in the lives of the early Christians. The great leaders who have left their impress on the history of the Church did not discard this doctrine, but made it a real hope in their own lives. Martin Luther, in the midst of the throes of the Reformation, wrote, "I ardently hope that, amidst these internal dissensions on the earth, Jesus Christ will hasten the day of His corning." The acute and learned Calvin saw that this was the Church's true hope. "We must hunger after Christ," he said, "till the dawning of that great day when our Lord will fully manifest the glory of His kingdom. The whole family of the faithful will keep in view that day." The intrepid soul of John Knox was nerved by this hope. In a letter to his friends in England he wrote: "Has not the Lord Jesus, in despite of Satan's malice, carried up our flesh into heaven? And shall He not return? We know that He shall return, and that with expedition." John Wesley believed this same truth, as is shown by his comment on the closing verses of Revelation: "The spirit of adoption in the bride in the heart of every true believer says, with earnest desire and expectation, 'Come and accomplish all the words of this prophecy.'" It formed the burden of Milton's sublime supplication: "Come forth out of Thy royal chambers, O Prince of all the kings of the earth; put on the visible robes of Thy imperial majesty; take up that unlimited scepter which Thy Almighty Father hath bequeathed Thee. For now the voice of Thy bride calls Thee, and all creatures sigh to be renewed." It was the ardent longing of the seraphic Rutherford: "Oh, that Christ would remove the covering, draw aside the curtains of time, and come down. Oh, that the shadows and the night were gone." It was the prayer of Richard Baxter in the "Saints' Everlasting Rest:" "Hasten, O my Saviour, the time of Thy return. Send forth Thine angels and let that dreadful, joyful trumpet sound. Thy desolate Bride saith come. The whole creation saith come. Even so, come, Lord Jesus." And if we would follow in the steps of these men, we will return to the simple, unmistakable New Testament type of experience, and, with faces uplifted towards the veil, within which the Lord of glory waits, and with hearts all aglow with a personal love for Him, we will carry on through all our life and service the same apostolic prayer. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 49: - THE COMING OF CHRIST ======================================================================== The Coming of Christ By Professor Charles R. Erdman, D. D., Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey The return of Christ is a fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith. It is embodied in hymns of hope; it forms the climax of the creeds; it is the sublime motive for evangelistic and missionary activity; and daily it is voiced in the inspired prayer: "Even so: Come, Lord Jesus." It is peculiarly a Scriptural doctrine. It is not, on the one hand, a dream of ignorant fanatics, nor, on the other, a creation of speculative theologians; but it is a truth divinely revealed, and recorded in the Bible with marked clearness, emphasis and prominence. Like the other great truths of revelation it is a controverted doctrine. The essential fact is held universally by all who admit the authority of Scripture; but as to certain incidental, although important, elements of the teaching, there is difference of opinion among even the most careful and reverent students. Any consideration of the theme demands, therefore, modesty, humility and abundant charity. According to the familiar view outlined in this paper, the Bible describes the "second coming of Christ" as personal, glorious, imminent. 1. His Coming Will Be Personal By personal is meant all that may be suggested by the words visible, bodily, local; and all that may be contrasted with that which is spiritual, providential, figurative. Of course, the spiritual presence of Christ is a blessed reality; one of the most comforting and inspiring of truths is the teaching that Christ does come to each believer, by His Holy Spirit, and dwells within, and empowers for service and suffering and growth in grace; but this is to be held in harmony with the other blessed truth that Christ will some day literally appear again in bodily form, and "we shall see Him" and shall then "be like Him," when "we see Him as He is." Nor yet did that special manifestation of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost fulfill the promise of Christ's return. Subsequent to Pentecost, Peter urged the Jews to repent in order that Jesus, whom for a time "the heavens had received," might be "sent back again;" he wrote his epistles of comfort based upon the hope of a returning Lord, while Paul and the other inspired Apostles, long after Pentecost, emphasized the coming of Christ as the highest incentive for life and service. According to the interpretation of others, Christ is said "to come" in various providential events of history, as notably in the destruction of Jerusalem. This tragedy of history is supposed by many to fulfill the prophecies spoken by Christ in His great discourse on the Mount of Olives, recorded in Matthew 24, and Mark 13, and Luk 21. When one combines these predictions, it becomes evident that the capture of the holy city by Titus was a real but only a partial fulfillment of the words of Christ. As in the case of so many Old Testament prophecies, the nearer event furnished the colors in which were depicted scenes and occurrences which belonged to a distant future, and in this case to "the end of the age." When Jerusalem fell, the people of God were not delivered nor the enemies of God punished, nor did "the sign of the Son of Man" appear in the heavens, as was predicted of the time when He comes again; and long after the fall of the city, John wrote in Gospel and in Apocalypse of the coming of the King. Nor is the coming of Christ to be confused with death. It is true that this dark messenger ushers us into an experience which is, for the believer, one of great blessedness; "to depart is to be with Christ which is very far better," "to be absent from the body" is "to be at home with the Lord;" but death is for us inseparable from pain and loss and sorrow and tears and anguish; and even those who are now with their Lord, in heavenly joy, are waiting for their bodies of glory and for the rewards and reunions which will be theirs at the appearing of Christ. More marvelous than the scenes at Pentecost, more startling than the fall of Jerusalem, more blessed than the indwelling of the Spirit or the departure to be with the Lord, will be the literal, visible, bodily, return of Christ. No event may seem less probable to unaided human reason; no event is more certain in the light of inspired Scripture. "This same Jesus which is taken up from you into heaven shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven." "Behold, He cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see Him" (Acts 1:11; Revelation 1:7). 2. His Coming, Glorious This coming of Christ is to be glorious, not only in its attendant circumstances, but also in its effects upon the Church and the world. Our Lord predicted that He would return "in His own glory, and the glory of His Father, and of the holy angels" (Luke 9:26). He will then be revealed in His Divine majesty. Once during His earthly ministry, on the mount of transfiguration, there was given to His followers a glimpse of the royal splendor He had for a time laid aside, and in which He will again appear. As on the great day of atonement the high priest put off his usual robes "for glory and for beauty" and appeared in spotless white, when he offered the sacrifices for sin and went into the holy place to intercede for the waiting people, so our Great High Priest laid aside the robes of His imperial majesty when stooping from heaven He assumed His garb of sinless flesh, and offered Himself as the perfect sacrifice and entered into the holy places not made with hands to appear in the presence of God for us; but as the high priest again assumed his garments of scarlet and blue and purple and gold when he came forth to complete his work in the presence of the people, so Christ, when He returns to bless, and to receive the homage of the world, will be manifest in His Divine glory (Hebrews 9:24-28). As He appeared to Isaiah in his vision, to the disciples on the holy mount, to Saul on his way to Damascus, to John on Patmos, so will the Son of Man appear when, as He promised, He is seen "sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven" (Matthew 26:64). Nothing could be more natural than such a triumphant return of the risen, ascended Lord. What a pathetic picture Christ would present in the history of the race, if, after all His claims and promises, the world should see Him, last of all, hanging on a cross as a malefactor, or laid lifeless in a tomb! "He was despised and rejected of men;" but He is to return again "with power and great glory," attended by thousands of the heavenly host. As the Epistle to the Hebrews strikingly says: "When He again bringeth in the first born into the inhabited earth He saith, And let all the angels of God worship Him" (Hebrews 1:6). "Thou art coming, O my Saviour, Thou art coming, O my King, In Thy beauty all resplendent; In Thy glory all transcendent; Well may we rejoice and sing: Coming! in the opening East Herald brightness slowly swells; Coming! O my glorious Priest, Hear we not Thy golden bells." Then Christ will reign in glory over all the world. It is true that now "all power" has been given to Him "in heaven and on earth," but that power has not been fully manifest; "we see not yet all things put under Him." He has "sat down on the right hand of God," but He is "henceforth expecting till His enemies be made the footstool of His feet." He is now reigning, seated on His Father's throne; but this world is still in reality a revolted province, and Christ is yet to sit upon His own throne; then "before Him every knee will bow, and every tongue confess that He is Lord" (Hebrews 10:12-13; Php_2:10-11). These expressions need not be interpreted with such crass literalness as to suggest that Christ will rule visibly in some one earthly locality, "establishing in Jerusalem an oriental court;" but they at least mean that the coming of Christ will be followed by the universal reign of Christ. "When the Son of Man shall come in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then shall He sit on the throne of His glory" (Matthew 25:31). He will determine who may enter and who must be excluded from His kingdom. He will then say: "Come ye blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." Then will be fulfilled His prediction: "Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of My Father who is in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, Lord, Lord,-and then will I profess unto them, I never knew you, depart from Me, ye that work iniquity" (Matthew 7:21-23). He will be the supreme Judge, but He will also be manifest as the universal Ruler in His perfected kingdom. Then the voices will be heard proclaiming: "The kingdom of the world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ; and He shall reign forever and ever" (Revelation 11:15). In this glory of Christ His followers are to share. The resurrection of the dead will take place when He returns: "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits; then they that are Christ's at His coming." The body of the believer is thus to be raised in glory. "It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: it is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory." As to how the spirits now with Christ are to he united with their resurrection bodies, the Bible is absolutely silent; but we know that this will be at the coming of the Lord (1 Corinthians 15:22-23; 1 Corinthians 15:42-43). Then, too, the bodies of living believers will be glorified, and made deathless and immortal like the body of their Divine Lord. "For our citizenship is in heaven; whence also we wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of His glory" (Php_3:20-21). Sometimes it is carelessly said that "nothing is so sure as death"; one thing is more sure; it is this: some Christians will never die. One generation of believers will be living when Christ returns, and they will be translated, without the experience of death. What "is mortal will be swallowed up of life." They never will be unclothed," but "clothed upon" with the glory of immortality. "Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed" (1 Corinthians 15:51-52; 2 Corinthians 5:4). Then, also, will be the blessed reunion in glory of the risen and the transfigured followers of Christ. "For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we that are alive, that are left unto the coming of the Lord, shall in no wise precede them that are fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven, with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord" (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18). "Some from earth, from glory some, Severed only 'Till He Come.'" The time of the return of the Lord will be, furthermore, the time of the reward of His servants. The Son of Man is likened to a nobleman who has gone "into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom, and to return." He has entrusted various talents to his servants with the command to use them wisely, until his return. When he has "come back again, having received the kingdom," then he "maketh a reckoning with them." It is popularly said, and in a sense it is true, that when our loved ones go to be with Christ "they have gone to their reward"; but more strictly speaking, the full reward of the blessed awaits the coming of Christ. Whatever may be meant by being "set over many things," or having "authority over ten cities," the complete recompense of the faithful is "at the resurrection of the just" (Matthew 25:14-23; Luke 19:11-27; Luke 14:14). That the real coronation day of the Christian is not at death but at "the appearing of Christ" was strikingly suggested by Paul when, realizing that he was to die before the Lord returned, he gave to Timothy his triumphant farewell: "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord the righteous Judge shall give to me at that day: and not to me only, but also to all them that have loved His appearing" (2 Timothy 4:7-8). So Peter encourages pastors to be faithful, by the familiar promise: "And when the chief Shepherd shall be manifested, ye shall receive the crown of glory that fadeth not away" (1 Peter 5:1-4). In large measure this reward will consist in being changed into a moral likeness to Christ. This is far more marvelous than the transfiguration of our bodies, but no less real. "Beloved, now are we the children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that if He shall be manifested, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him even as He is" (1 John 3:1-3). The reward which awaits the followers of Christ further includes the fulfillment of the blessed prophecies which declare the saints are to reign with Christ .... "Know ye not that the saints shall judge the earth-Know ye not that we shall judge angels?" "If we endure we shall also reign with Him." "I appoint unto you a kingdom-and ye shall sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel." (1 Corinthians 6:2-3; 2 Timothy 2:12; Luke 22:30). Whatever may be denoted by promises so full of wonder and mystery, they do not mean that "the saints are to rule on earth in the flesh." Believers will previously have been "raised in glory," transfigured, translated. As coregents with their Lord they may be privileged to perform blessed ministries for the world, but they nevertheless will belong to His immortal and heavenly kingdom. "They are like the angels of God ... being the children of the resurrection" (Luke 20:35-36). Such a rule of Christ and His people must secure unparalleled blessedness for the world. "The end of the world" does not mean, in prophecy, the end of the earth and the destruction of its inhabitants; but the end of "the present age," which is to be followed by an age of glory. The "present evil age" is predicted to close amid scenes of fiery judgment upon the enemies of God, and with portents and convulsions which will affect the very earth itself; but the results will be what is figuratively described as the "new heavens and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness." Nature itself will become more beautiful and joyous. "The whole creation which is groaning and travailing in pain together until now will be delivered from the bondage of corruption unto the liberty of the glory of the children of God" (Romans 8:21). In spite of the sin and failures of man, we are not to look for the destruction of this globe, but for an era when the true full life of humanity will be realized, when all shall know the Lord from the least unto the greatest, when all art and science and social institutions shall be Christian, when "nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore" (Isaiah 2:1-4). Such an age, of which poets have sung and philosophers have dreamed, such an era as psalmists, and prophets, and apostles have promised, will dawn at the coming of the King, Inspired by such a hope the waiting Church has learned to sing: "Come, Lord, and tarry not; Bring the long looked for day; O, why these years of waiting here, These ages of delay? "Come, and make all things new; Build up this ruined earth; Restore our faded Paradise, Creation's second birth. "Come, and begin Thy reign Of everlasting peace; Come, take the kingdom to Thyself, Great King of righteousness." 3. Imminent The Bible further describes the coming of Christ as imminent. It is an event which may occur in any lifetime. Whatever difficulties the fact involves, there is no doubt that all the inspired writers and their fellow Christians believed that Christ might return in their generation. This has been the normal attitude of the Church ever since. Paul describes believers as men "who have turned to God from idols" and who "wait for His Son from heaven." Christians are further described as "those that wait for Him," and as "those that love His appearing." They are everywhere in the New Testament exhorted to "watch," and to be ready for the return of their Lord. His coming is their constant encouragement and inspiration and hope. (1 Thessalonians 4:10; 2 Peter 4:8; Matthew 24:42; Mark 13:35; Mark 13:37; Luke 21:36; Php_4:5). However, "imminent" does not mean "immediate." Confusion of these ideas has led some writers to assert that "Paul and the early Christians were mistaken in their views as to the Lord's return." But, when Paul used such a phrase as "we that are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord," he meant simply to identify himself with his fellow Christians, and to suggest that, if he lived until Christ came, their blessed experience would also be his. He could not have said, "ye that are alive and remain;" that would have indicated that Paul was to die first. This he did not then know. He believed that the Lord might return in his life time; he never asserted that He would. "Imminence" as related to our Lord's return indicates uncertainty as to time, but possibility of nearness. "Take ye heed, watch, for ye know not when the time is" (Mark 13:33). Such statements rebuke those who have brought the doctrine into disrepute by announcing dates for "the end of the world," and by setting times for the coming of Christ. So, too, they suggest caution to those who assert that the age is now drawing to its close; it may be, but of this there is no certainty. These Scriptural exhortations to watch seem to contradict, also, those who teach that a "Millennium," a thousand years or a protracted period of righteousness, must intervene between the present time and the advent of Christ. Those who hold this last view are commonly called "Post-Millennialists" to distinguish them from "Pre-Millennialists," who hold that the return of Christ will precede and usher in such an age of universal blessedness. The great objection to the Pre-Millennial position is the apparent prediction of 2Peter 3, that at the coming of Christ, in "the day of the Lord," the earth will be destroyed; there could then be no place for a millennium. The difficulty in the Post-Millennial theory is the repeated description of this present age as one of mingled good and evil, in which iniquity, as well as righteousness, continues to develop uninterruptedly; there is thus no time for a millennium before the Lord returns. As to the passage from Peter, it is obviously no more subversive of one of these theories than of the other. No one can possibly review the picture, which the Apostle draws in his two epistles, of the apostasy and skepticism and godlessness already prevailing and surely deepening as "the day of the Lord" draws near, and find any place for a previous millennium before "that day." The predictions of fiery judgments and consequent "new heavens and new earth" must be read in connection with Isaiah 65 and 66, from which Peter is quoting. It will then be seen that these expressions are in-so-far figurative that the earth still continues with its life, its nations, its progress, after these judgments are over. Terrific convulsions, and governmental, social and cosmic changes, only introduce a new and better age. So, too, "the day of the Lord" is a familiar phrase, and as we read Zechariah 14 we see that while, in that day, the Lord comes amidst appalling portents, His coming and the day itself are followed by a scene of great blessedness on this same earth; the Nile is still flowing in its course and the nations are going up to Jerusalem to worship. (Note also that in 2 Peter 3:10 the most ancient manuscripts do not read "burned up" but "discovered.") There are other positive statements of Scripture which intimate that the millennium follows the coming of Christ. According to Daniel, it is after the Son of Man comes with the clouds of heaven that He is given "dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations and languages should serve Him,-and the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven," are "given to the people of the saints of the Most High;-and all dominions shall serve and obey Him" (Daniel 7:13-14; Daniel 7:27). According to the Psalms, the appearing of the Lord, in flaming fire upon His adversaries, prepares the way for the establishment of His glorious kingdom, as "He comes to rule the world with righteousness and the peoples with equity" (Psalm 96, 97,98 etc.). According to Paul (2 Thessalonians 1 and 2) the advent described by Daniel is not to an earth which is enjoying millennial peace, but it is "in flaming fire" to destroy an existing "Man of Sin" whose career is the culmination of the lawlessness already manifest and to continue until the personal coming of Christ. According to our Lord Himself His return is to bring "the regeneration," not the destruction of the world (Matthew 19:28; Luke 22:28-30). But this rule of blessedness is preceded by judgments that come "as a snare on all the earth" (Luke 21:29-36). According to Peter, "seasons of refreshing" and "the restitution of all things," not annihilation of the globe, will come with the return of Christ (Acts 3:19-21). According to John, the coming of Christ (Revelation 19) precedes the millennium (Revelation 20:1-6). However, great the divergence of views among students of prophecy may seem to be, and in spite of the many varieties of opinion among the representatives of the two schools which have been mentioned in passing, the points of agreement are far more important. The main difference is as to the order, rather than as to the reality of events. The great body of believers are united in expecting both an age of glory and a personal return of Christ. As to many related events they differ; but as to the one great precedent condition of that coming age or that promised return of the Lord there is absolute harmony of conviction: the Gospel must first be preached to all nations (Matthew 24:14). The Church must continue to "make disciples of all the nations-even unto the end of the age" (Matthew 28:19-20). This is therefore a time, not for unkindly criticism of fellow Christians, but for friendly conference; not for disputing over divergent views, but for united action; not for dogmatic assertion of prophetic programs, but for the humble acknowledgment that "we know in part;" not for idle dreaming, but for the immediate task of evangelizing a lost world. For such effort, no one truth is more inspiring, than that of the return of Christ. None other can make us sit more lightly by the things of time, none other is more familiar as a Scriptural motive to purity, holiness, patience, vigilance, love. Strengthened by this blessed hope let us press forward with passionate zeal to the task that awaits us: "Till o'er our ransomed nature The Lamb for sinners slain, Redeemer, King, Creator, In bliss returns to reign!" ======================================================================== CHAPTER 50: - THE TESTIMONY OF CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE ======================================================================== The Testimony of Christian Experience By President E. Y. Mullins, D.D., L.L. D., Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.A. Human experience is the one datum of all philosophy, and all science. The experience of the individual and of the race is the grist which is poured into all the scientific and philosophic mills. Hence Christian experience as a distinct form of human experience ought to receive more attention than it has ever received before. Professor Bowne has emphasized the fact that whatever your philosophy, your experience is the same. You may call things by any names you wish and it will not affect experience. Christian Science says that all is mind; that a cobble stone, for example, is simply an idea and not a real piece of matter. We will suppose that some one hurls it and it strikes your head and sends you off for relief. Then you have an experience in the realm of the ideal. You have an ideal stone, striking an ideal head, and raising an ideal bump and producing an ideal dizziness and pain, and requiring the application of an ideal liniment, which produces an ideal cure, and affords you an ideal satisfaction and peace of mind. But all this does not in the slightest degree alter the experience itself. And if you were going to rear a philosophic system on the principle deduced from sudden contact of cobble stones with human craniums, you would be compelled to take this concrete human experience to begin with. John Jasper Philosophy Science and philosophy are beginning to recognize the evidential value of Christian experience though they are very slow about it and very reluctant about it even yet, apparently because it is not as obvious to the sense as the facts of the physical world. The world has laughed long at brother John Jasper who contends that the "Sun do move" around the earth because he sees it on one side of his house in the morning and on the other side at night. But we know there is a system and set of motions in the background more comprehensive and wonderful than the rising and setting sun alone can explain. Now to refuse to accept the testimony of Christian experience because it lies in a realm behind sense—experience is to adopt the John Jasper attitude towards truth. Science and philosophy have both been guilty of this to a greater or lesser extent. They have been pursuing the Ptolemaic system of truth with brother Jasper instead of the Copernican with modern astronomy. Religious Radium Nobody now doubts the existence of radium, and yet as one says, it has been "bombarding". the universe for aeons and under the very nose of science, and yet it was only discovered yesterday and already threatens to revolutionize science. Now religious experience is the radium of the spiritual universe, which needs only discovery to revolutionize any man's thought as to life and destiny. Christian experience, the experience of regeneration and conversion, of moral transformation through Christian agencies, has evidential value in several directions. Experience and Philosophy I. It is the supplemental link to complete philosophy. Philosophy is man reaching up towards God. Christian experience is the effect of God reaching down to man. Philosophy seems always on the point of discovering the secret of the universe, but it never succeeds in doing it. We thought awhile ago that idealism had come to the Kingdom to save us from materialistic science, and it did good service. But idealism has become so abstract and impersonal that it cannot be distinguished from Naturalism. These two philosophies are still debating and disputing, but their differences are chiefly imaginary. The dispute reminds one of the reply of the unlearned American who had traveled abroad. He was saying he had visited the Matterhorn and the Jung Frau, and Lake Geneva and Lake Leman. "But," a friend interposed, "Lake Geneva and Lake Leman are synonymous." "Oh, I know that, but Lake Geneva is a great deal more synonymous than Lake Leman," he replied. Idealism in its abstract form is perhaps just a little more "synonymous" than Naturalism, that is all. Secret of Philosophy's Failure Now why is it that philosophy seems to expend so much labor for naught. To me it is clear that the reason why it seems to labor so long without satisfactory results is that it refuses to consider all human experience, including the religious. It splits experience up into little bits and hunts among the bits for some single abstract principle which will explain all the rest. It is very much as if one were going to attempt to explain the ocean and all its contents, its variety and marvelous abundance of life, and instead of searching its depths should take a single fish and scale off from the fish a single scale, and on that scale as a foundation build up his theory of the ocean and its contents; how accurate do you suppose his account would be? And yet this is analagous to what philosophers have done. Spinoza scaled off from the world of experience and being the idea of substance, and built a pantheistic system on that scale. Hegel scaled off the conception of reason or the idea and reared a vast idealistic system on that. Schopenhauer scaled off the conception of will and reared his pessimistic system of philosophy on that. Haeckel has scaled off the conception of matter and builds his materialistic system on that. Another takes motion or energy and force, and so on, I had almost said ad infinitum. The result of the process is that the philosophers get clear away from human life and experience. They fix their gaze on the photograph of a dim and far away image of reality and become absorbed in excessive stargazing, metaphysical cliff-climbing and transcendental soap bubble-blowing. They are like the Indian juggler who hung his ladder on thin air without touching the ground below, sprang upon it, climbed out of sight, pulled the ladder after him, and disappeared in the clouds. The Remedy All this ought not to discredit philosophy but teach it a lesson. Men fail to find the secret of the world until God and God's dealing with men are considered. Dr. Ashmore tells of some men on a raft floating down the Mississippi river who stopped for supper one night, and their float went on, but returned after awhile to the same place or a similar one. They did this several times until they discovered that they were caught in an eddy of vast dimensions and were being swept in a circle back again repeatedly to the starting point. So has philosophy moved in a circle, with way stations along the route but never able to escape from the circular movement of human thought. There is one way for philosophy to escape from its situation and find the current on the bosom of the river of thought which will carry it on to its destination. That current is religious experience wherein man's upward soaring thought is met by God's descending revelation and love. When this current of thought is once reached, a new day will dawn for philosophy and ere long the philosophers will see the gleam on the gates of pearl and the sparkle of the jasper walls of the city of God, whither they would find the way. The Clue to All Philosophies Christian experience takes all the abstractions of philosophy and recombines them and gives us the conception of the Fatherhood of God. The one substance of Monism comes back as the one person behind the world. The one idea of Hegel comes back as the thought and plan of eternal love. The one energy of those who glorify force and change comes back as the beneficent will of the Holy and loving Father. The plan and progress of nature and the moral ongoing of the world come back as the infinite and eternal design of the Holy and Loving. Thus When in our hearts we can say and know what we mean when we say it, the word "Abba" Father, we hold in our hands the clew to all the philosophies which remain in a state of unstable equilibrium until we find this key. All philosophy is thus summed up as in the words of Dr. Fairbairn: "God is the Father, everlasting in His love. Love was the end for which He made the world, for which He made every human soul. His glory is to diffuse happiness, to fill up the silent places of the universe with voices that speak out of glad hearts. Because He made man for love He cannot bear man to be lost. Rather than see the loss, He will suffer sacrifice. In the place we call hell, love as really is as in the place we call heaven, though in the one place it is the complacency of pleasure in the holy and the happy which seems like the brightness of everlasting sunshine or the glad music of waves that break in perennial laughter, but in the other it is the compassion of pity for the bad and the miserable which seems like a face shaded with everlasting regret or the muffled weeping of a sorrow too deep to be heard. That grand thought of a God who is eternal Father, all the more regal and sovereign that He is absolutely Father, can never fail to touch the heart of the man who understands it, be he savage or sage." And we may add, cannot fail to become the one generalization large enough and broad enough to include all the data of life and history and of science and philosophy. Unique Claims of Christianity II. In the second place, Christian experience sheds light on all the unique claims of Christianity. Professor James, you know, and other scientific observers concede that religious experience is a witness to the supernatural; only he refuses to admit that Christ is the author of it, and does not concede the other unique Christian claims. The attempt is to find a common denominator, so to speak, between Christianity and other religions and show that all are essentially alike and that the distinctive Christian ideas are over-beliefs. But these men have not thought through the problem of Christian experience, in particular they are shy of facing the actual claim of Christ and His relation to it all. Christ's place in Christian experience is the supreme matter. All other Christian claims go with this. The Deity of Christ Proved Now the spiritually regenerated and morally transformed man proves the deity of Christ, proves His presence in religious experience for the following reasons: a. First of all because no man has moral resources to transform himself. The Indian myth that the Creator first laid the world egg and then hatched himself out of it will scarcely supply an explanation of the regenerated life. The law of moral gravitation in a man's life no more reverses itself suddenly than the law of physical gravitation. When apples begin to fall towards the clouds and Niagara Falls becomes a Niagara leap upwards, then we may look for men to be suddenly changed from murderers into saints. You cannot juggle the immoral elements of a sinner's nature into the moral elements of a saint any more than you can combine the acid of an unripe lemon and an unripe apple and unripe grapefruit and get the taste of a caramel. You cannot combine moral shadows by any sort of manipulation and produce moral sunshine. b. The morally transformed life proves the deity of Christ also because when the sinner turns to Christ he gets the response. Christ invites him and he responds. He calls and Christ answers. He calls to Mohammed and Mohammed does not come; he calls to Confucius and Confucius does not come; he calls to Buddha and Buddha does not come; he calls to Christ and Christ comes. The whole process is as simple as that. In his outward life also a new force begins to work a new design, a new labor working to an end. But especially within is there Another, one with whom there is fellowship, to whom he becomes passionately devoted, whose presence is happiness and whose absence is sorrow, who can sing with full meaning, "How tedious and tasteless the hours, when Jesus no longer I see," etc. The Miracle of Experience Thus Christ acts upon the soul in experience as God and manifests all the power of God. Such a life proves Christ's claim again because intellectual difficulties die in the light of this experience. The mysteries are not all solved. But the difficulties cease to be relevant. Miracles do not trouble him now, because he has a sample of the miracle working power in his own soul. Hume's argument that miracles cannot be true because contrary to experience is exactly reversed and the Christian says miracles are true because they accord precisely with his experience. He cannot explain ultimately why the morning glory opens under sunlight and closes under darkness any more than he could before. Nor can he explain life and spirit. He has what is better than explanation of life, life itself. In particular he has moral reinforcement. This is the final test of any religion, what can it do with a bad man? None of them can compete with Christ in this respect. Look at Peter and Saul of Tarsus, and Augustine, and John Bunyan, and George Muller, and S. H. Hadley and thousands of others. A sense of moral power comes with Christian experience. The moral heights lift themselves up to the very heavens, but they no longer seem impossible. The spirit of a strong runner enters a man, the spirit and sense of conquest and the moral transformation follows. There is not a grace or virtue that Christ cannot and has not produced in human character, not all at the same time or in the same person, but all have been produced. Christ A Finality In this way Christ becomes final for the man, final for his reason, final for his conscience, final for his will, final for his intellect and most of all, final for his faith, his hope and his love, his aspiration. Nothing higher can be conceived. He now understands why all the creeds of Christendom have Christ as their center. He becomes a judge and critic of other religious systems than the Christian discerning that their un-workableness is due to their lack of Christ. He understands the perennial and remarkable power of the Scriptures over the human heart as Christ's power. Ten thousand other witnesses and confessors around him and a long line of them running back to Christ confirm his experience and thus create a spiritual community the parts of which mutually support each other. Of course, this experience is convincing to the man who has it and should be to the outside observer. To the latter is presented a new spiritual cosmos, a great system with laws and forces analogous to the physical cosmos. There are not here planets revolving around a sun. but there are redeemed souls by the million revolving around a Saviour. There is not a law of physical gravitation acting between bodies directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the distance, but there is a Kingdom of persons whose law of gravitation is love. There is not a physical law of the transformation of energy pervading the spiritual cosmos, but there is the law of the transfiguration of character, according to which "we all with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord are transfigured into the same image from glory unto glory." Christ the Key Christ is the only key to this experience. Mr. James, seeking to discredit a certain kind of reasoning from design, says if you throw a handful of beans on a table you can, by manipulating the beans, make any sort of figure your own design may wish to produce, and so with arguments from design in nature, he says. But he fails to state that the reverse is true. You can manipulate the beans so as to destroy a figure or design already present. Christ is the figure seen in religious experience, in Christian history, in the creeds of Christendom, in the Bible. You cannot get rid of that figure except by manipulating the beans with a destructive purpose. Christian Pragmatism III. In the third place Christian experience transfers the whole problem of Christian evidences to the sphere of practical life. In this phase of it, Christianity has a point of contact with the new philosophy of Pragmatism. The pragmatic philosophy says the ultimate question for every man is, "What shall I do to be saved?", and that the ultimate task of philosophy is not to solve the insoluble riddle of the universe but to save men from pessimism. Now Pessimism, says the pragmatist, is just one of the two possible modes of reacting upon or interpreting the total experience of life. The optimist sees ground for hope, the pessimist does not. The boy who was asked while fishing how many fish he had caught, exemplifies the optimist. Unwilling to confess failure, he replied, "When I catch this one I am after and two more, I'll have three." As in interpreter of experience he was an adept and would endure the most searching tests of the pragmatic philosophy; it was an instance of a purpose to "create reality." Now the Christian method throughout is the practical method of answering the question, "What must I do to be saved?" Its answer is in Christian experience. It says to every man, You can test the reality and power of Christ practically. It says to every man, You have a "seeing spot" in your soul which God gives and which will recognize Christ, if you submit to Him, just as philosophy tells us we all have a blind spot and that if focused right we cannot see a black mark on a white card with our eyes open, and the card in front of us. Christianity does not say renounce reason but only waive your speculative difficulties in the interest of your moral welfare. The Gospel is practical in its methods. The man born blind did not have to accept any theory of Christ, God or the universe, neither Monism or Idealism, nor any special form of theism. One thing only was required. Says Christ, "Let me anoint your eyes with clay and you go wash in the pool of Siloam." This he did. His faith worked. It grew by exercise. They plied him with questions and he said, "A man named Jesus healed me." Later, "He was a good man." Later, "He is a prophet." And finally, "He worshipped him." He rose from faith to faith under the guidance and inspiration of Christ and this is the experience of all who put their trust in Him. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 51: - A PERSONAL TESTIMONY ======================================================================== A Personal Testimony By Howard A. Kelly, M. D. (To those who have believed that faith in the Bible and the God of the Bible does not harmonize with the modern scientific spirit the following testimony from a distinguished physician and surgeon should be of great value.) The Editor of Appleton's Magazine says of Dr. Kelly: Dr. Howard Kelly, of Baltimore, holds a position almost unique in his profession. With academic, professional, and honorary degrees from the Universities of Pennsylvania, Washington and Lee, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh, his rank as a scholar is clearly recognized. For some twenty years Professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Johns Hopkins University, his place as a worker and teacher in the applied science of his profession has been beyond question the highest in America and Europe. At least a dozen learned societies in England, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Austria, France and the United States have welcomed him to membership as a master in his specialty in surgery. Finally, his published works have caused him to be reckoned the most eminent of all authorities in his own field. I have, within the past twenty years of my life, come out of uncertainty and doubt into a faith which is an absolute dominating conviction of the truth and about which I have not a shadow of doubt. I have been intimately associated with eminent scientific workers; have heard them discuss the profoundest questions; have myself engaged in scientific work, and so know the value of such opinions. I was once profoundly disturbed in the traditional faith in which I have been brought up-that of a Protestant Episcopalian-by inroads which were made upon the book of Genesis by the higher critics. I could not then gainsay them, not knowing Hebrew nor archaeology well, and to me, as to many, to pull out one great prop was to make the whole foundation uncertain. So I floundered on for some years trying, as some of my higher critical friends are trying today, to continue to use the Bible as the Word of God and at the same time holding it of composite authorship, a curious and disastrous piece of mental gymnastics-a bridge over the chasm separating an older Bible-loving generation from a newer Bible-emancipated race. I saw in the book a great light and glow of heat, yet shivered out in the cold. One day it occurred to me to see what the book had to say about itself. As a short, but perhaps not the best method, I took a concordance and looked out "Word," when I found that the Bible claimed from one end to the other to be the authoritative Word of God to man. I then tried the natural plan of taking it as my text-book of religion, as I would use a text-book in any science, testing it by submitting to its conditions. I found that Christ Himself invites men (John 7:17) to do this. I now believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God, inspired in a sense utterly different from that of any merely human book. I believe Jesus Christ to be the Son of God, without human father, conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary. That all men without exception are by nature sinners, alienated from God, and when thus utterly lost in sin the Son of God Himself came down to earth, and by shedding His blood upon the cross paid the infinite penalty of the guilt of the whole world. I believe he who thus receives Jesus Christ as his Saviour is born again spiritually as definitely as in his first birth, and, so born spiritually, has new privileges, appetites and affections; that he is one body with Christ the Head and will live with Him forever. I believe no man can save himself by good works, or what is commonly known as a "moral life," such works being but the necessary fruits and evidence of the faith within. Satan I believe to be the cause of man's fall and sin, and his rebellion against God as rightful governor. Satan is the Prince of all the kingdoms of this world, yet will in the end be cast into the pit and made harmless. Christ will come again in glory to earth to reign even as He went away from the earth, and I look for His return day by day. I believe the Bible to be God's Word, because, as I use it day by day as spiritual food, I discover in my own life as well as in the lives of those who likewise use it a transformation correcting evil tendencies, purifying affections, giving pure desires, and teaching that concerning the righteousness of God which those who do not so use it can know nothing of. It is as really food for the spirit as bread is for the body. Perhaps one of my strongest reasons for believing the Bible is that it reveals to me, as no other book in the world could do, that which appeals to me as a physician, a diagnosis of my spiritual condition. It shows me clearly what I am by nature-one lost in sin and alienated from the life that is in God. I find in it a consistent and wonderful revelation, from Genesis to Revelation, of the character of God, a God far removed from any of my natural imaginings. It also reveals a tenderness and nearness of God in Christ which satisfies the heart's longings, and shows me that the infinite God, Creator of the world, took our very nature upon Him that He might in infinite love be one with His people to redeem them. I believe in it because it reveals a religion adapted to all classes and races, and it is intellectual suicide knowing it not to believe it. What it means to me is as intimate and difficult a question to answer as to be required to give reasons for love of father and mother, wife and children. But this reasonable faith gives me a different relation to family and friends; greater tenderness to these and deeper interest in all men. It takes away the fear of death and creates a bond with those gone before. It shows me God as a Father who perfectly understands, who can give control of appetites and affections, and rouse one to fight with self instead of being self-contented. And if faith so reveals God to me I go without question, wherever He may lead me. I can put His assertions and commands above every seeming probability in life, dismissing cherished convictions and looking upon the wisdom and ratiocinations of men as folly if opposed to Him. I place no limits to faith when once vested in God, the sum of all wisdom and knowledge, and can trust Him though I should have to stand alone before the world in declaring Him to be true. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 52: - A PERSONAL TESTIMONY ======================================================================== A Personal Testimony By Rev. H. W. Webb-Peploe, M.A., Vicar of St. Paul's, Onslow Square, London, and Prebendary of St. Paul's Cathedral Every man, I believe, if asked to record his own spiritual experiences, would be ready to acknowledge that in his case at least while he owes very much to the holy zeal of some beloved relation or friend—the work of the Holy Spirit was so wonderfully carried on that none but Divine wisdom could possibly have met and overcome the needs which arose from day to day, from the moment that he was first "convinced" or convicted "of sin" and made to realize his true position before God. At all events, in seeking to record my own personal experiences (as I have been earnestly requested to do, or I would never have thought of so writing) I can only marvel and rejoice at the wonderful way in which God so graciously provided for my spiritual wants as they arose. The one real wonder in such a case is that the love of God could continue to exhibit itself towards one who so ungratefully sought to resist it, till at length He has enabled "even me" to say from the heart: "Higher than the highest heaven, Deeper than the deepest sea, Lord, Thy love at last hath conquered; None of self, and all of Thee." To my honored parents I owe practically more than I can tell. From my earliest youth I had every spiritual advantage and help. I cannot doubt that, in after days, the instruction received from both their words and example did tend to make me obedient to the voice of God in my soul. Indeed, I could never give way to temptation without sore prickings of conscience; and especially after my confirmation (for which I was prepared by Dr. Boyd, afterwards Dean of Exeter) I went through pains and sorrows for a time whenever I had sinned against the light. But neither warnings nor pleadings had any lasting effects, till at length in the autumn of 1856, while I was residing with Mr. Jenkins, Vicar of Hazlewood, Derbyshire, as a private pupil before going to Cambridge, I was invited to stay for a night at Osmaston Manor, the splendid home of the late Mr. Frank Wright. In the evening his son (to be later the Revelation Henry Wright, Hon. Secretary of the Church Missionary Society)—at that time just entering manhood like myself asked me to go with him on the roof to see the moonlight effects. His invitation was with a purpose—for he was even then "a master" in soul winning; and though I cannot now remember any particular arguments that he used, I know that he sent me to my room deeply moved with the sense of my own folly and sin in giving my life to the world instead of to God. Next morning he gave me a Bible (for I had not, I believe, taken one to my tutor's), after writing in it the words of St. Paul to Titus, "Holding fast the faithful word." That Bible I have and treasure still after forty-seven years of time. From Osmaston Manor I drove to the town of Derby, and by the time I arrived there I had begun to think myself a fool for listening so readily to one who had indeed convicted me of sin, but had not succeeded in persuading me to accept Christ Jesus as my Lord. Consequently I began (as so many others have done in like circumstances) to wish that I could get rid of the painful impressions produced; and having observed on the town walls that the races were going on at Derby that day, and having a few hours to spare before I was due at my tutor's, I thought I would see if by my first visit to the race course I could shake off my sense of heaviness and distress. As I reached the course the gates were closed to allow a race being run without danger of interruption, and as I came to those gates the horses dashed by, and I saw the only horse-race I have ever witnessed in my life. At that moment a young man—almost as young as myself—touched his hat and, holding out a small piece of paper to me, said, "I beg pardon, sir; would you kindly read this?" I thought that he wanted me to read it for him, so I took it and looked at it as if to help him. What was my astonishment to find only these (printed) words on the paper: "Reader, if you died tonight, would your soul be IN HELL?" I simply turned and fled like a terrified coward (as I was), no longer thinking of the races, but only how to escape from the judgment of God and from the awful grasp of the devil, both of which seemed to be equally terrible. I had some six or seven miles to go to my tutor's, but I believe I accomplished this distance (uphill) in an hour, so eager was I to flee from the wrath that I had invoked. But still, as it will be observed, I was only convicted of my own folly, and was not resting my soul on Christ. "By the law is the knowledge of sin," and "The law is our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ." "Knowing the terrors of the law" God had, through His messenger, "persuaded me" so far that I was utterly ashamed of the past; but though the impression was deep, I dare not say what would have happened if the good Lord had not raised up in a remarkable way other helpers for my soul. My tutor's kind words now began to impress me, and my good friend Henry Wright wrote me beautiful letters; but (for the few weeks that remained before I was to meet the temptations of Cambridge) perhaps my chief and most valuable helper was a young farmer named Stephens, who lived in the parish. Him I had hitherto avoided carefully, because I had heard that he had "been converted in a most remarkable manner after living a life of grievous folly and sin," and that "he was always now trying to speak to people about their souls." Some two or three days after my experience in Derby, I came to one of the so-called "stiles" in Derbyshire, which are simply like a narrow "V." As I put my foot through it, my friend Stephens met me in the stile and suddenly said, "At last we are face to face. Now, why did you avoid me? I wish you would come and read the Bible with me. I want to know more of it, and I am sure you must, too." Here was at least a third person who, in the course of one week, had been led of God to offer a special call to my soul! How could I resist the voice of grace, mercy and peace? Thank God, I did not! I went regularly and often, for the short time that remained, to read the Word of God arid to pray with my young friend; and though I have never seen him or the stranger of Derby again, I feel it only a duty and a privilege to acknowledge (when asked to narrate my conversion) how much under God I owe to His two humble messengers. And was the life consistent and spiritual ever afterwards? I am asked. Alas, no! There were many ups and downs, and many declensions from grace. So weak did the Lord see His servant to be, that in mercy and love He had to save me from temptation by allowing a terrible fall of some fifteen or sixteen feet to take place, when I was showing off as champion gymnast soon after I went up to Cambridge. From that time I had to spend three years almost entirely on my couch, passing all my examinations (even that of my ordination) in a recumbent position. From this I twice rose, as if determined to have my own way. One year I gained the University cup for high and broad jumping, and the next I secured the cup for diving and swimming; but on each occasion I had to go back to my couch to learn of God for another whole year. Much more could be told of the Lord's merciful dealings with a sinner; but what has been said will, I hope, suffice to prove the truth of the words with which I opened this account, and also to show how entirely the work is the Lord's, though He deigns to make use of His human vessels to carry grace to the soul. To Him let me offer my tribute of thanks, and give all possible glory and praise that He has deigned to take such a poor sinner and number him among His sons, enabling me to say with all my heart, "Whereas I was blind, now I see." Jesus Christ is indeed to me all in all, and "Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable gift." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 53: - THE PERSONAL TESTIMONY (OF C.T. STUDD) ======================================================================== The Personal Testimony Of Charles T. Studd I was brought up in the Church of England and was pretty religious—so most people thought. I was taken to church and baptized the right day, and after a time I was confirmed and took communion. But I did not know anything about Jesus Christ personally. I knew a little about Him, as I may know a little about President Taft, but I did not know Him. There was not a moment in my life when I ever doubted that there was a God, or that Jesus Christ was the Saviour of the world; but I did not know Him as my personal Saviour. We boys were brought up to go to church regularly, but, although we had a kind of religion, it was not a religion that amounted to much. It was just like having a toothache. We were always sorry to have Sunday come, and glad when we came to Monday morning. The Sabbath was the dullest day of the whole week, and just because we got hold of the wrong end of religion. A man may get hold of the wrong end of a poker, and I got hold of the wrong end of religion and had to pay dearly for it. We had lots of ministers and lots of churches all around us, but we never saw such a thing as a real convert. We didn't believe much in converts in those days. We thought that the Chinese and Africans had to be converted; but the idea of an Englishman being converted was absurd, because it made him out a heathen before he was converted. My father was just a man of the world, loving all sorts of worldly things. He had made a fortune in India and had come back to England to spend it. He was very fond of sports of all kinds. He would go into regular training that he might go fox hunting, but above all he was an enthusiast on horse racing. He was passionately fond of horses to begin with and when he saw fine horses he would buy them and train them, and then he would race them. He had a large place in the country, where he made a race course, and he won the biggest steeple-chase in London three times. At last he got hold of a horse better than anyone he had ever had, and so certain was he of winning the race that he wrote to a friend in London and said, "If you are a wise man you will come to the race tomorrow and put every penny you have on my horse." Unknown to my father this man had been converted. Mr. Moody had come to England and had been preaching. Nobody believed very much at that time in a man getting up to preach the Gospel unless he had two things—the title of Reverend, and a white tie round his neck. The papers could not understand such a preacher as Mr. Moody, who had neither, and of course they printed column after column against him. But they could not help seeing that he could get more people to his meetings than half a dozen archbishops, and that more were converted than by twenty ordinary ministers, Of course they did not put the right construction on things. They said that Mr. Sankey had come over to sell organs, and Mr. Moody to sell his hymn books. My father read the papers day after day and these things tickled him immensely. I remember one evening he threw the paper down and said, "Well, anyhow, when this man comes to London I am going to hear him. There must be some good about the man or he would never be abused so much by the papers." Well, father went up to London the next day according to promise, and met his friend. This man had been over to Ireland when Mr. Moody was there, and as he was about to leave Dublin had missed his train. God was even in that, missing a train. It was Saturday night, and the man had to remain over Sunday. As he was looking about the streets that evening he saw the big bills advertising Moody and Sankey, and he thought, "I will just go and hear those Americans." He went and God met him; he went again and God converted him. He was a new man, and yet when my father wrote that letter he never said anything about it. When they met and drove along in a carriage father talked of nothing but horses, and told this man if he were a wise man he would put up every penny he had on that horse. After father had finished his business he came back to this friend and said, "How much money have you put on my horse?" "Nothing." My father said, "You are the biggest fool I ever saw; didn't I tell you what a good horse he was? But though you are a fool, come along with me to dinner." After dinner my father said, "Now, where shall we go to amuse ourselves?" His friend said, "Anywhere." My father said, "Well, you are the guest; you shall choose where we shall go." "Well, we will go and hear Moody." My father said, "Oh, no, this isn't Sunday. We will go to the theater, or concert." But the man said, "You promised to go wherever I chose." So my father had to go. They found the building was full and there were no seats in the hall except special ones. This man knew he would never get my father there again, so he worked himself into the crowd until he came across one of the committee. He said to him, "Look here; I have brought a wealthy sporting gentleman here, but I will never get him here again if we do not get a seat." The man took them in and put them right straight in front of Mr. Moody. My father never took his eyes off Mr. Moody until he finished his address. After the meeting my father said, "I will come and hear this man again. He just told me everything I had ever done." My father kept going until he was right soundly converted. That afternoon my father had been full of a thing that takes possession of a man's heart and head more than anything else—that passion for horse racing; and in the evening he was a changed man. It was the same skin, but a new man altogether inside. When we boys came home from college we didn't understand what had come over him, but father kept continually telling us that he was born again. We thought he was just born upside down, because he was always asking us about our souls, and we didn't like it. Of course, he took us to hear Mr. Moody, and we were impressed a good deal, but were not converted. When my father was converted of course he could not go on living the same life as before. He could not go to balls, card parties, and all that sort of thing. His conscience told him so, and he said to Mr. Moody: "I want to be straight with you. If I become a Christian will I have to give up racing, and shooting, and hunting, and theaters, and balls?" "Well," Mr. Moody said, "Mr. Studd, you have been straight with me; I will be straight with you. Racing means betting, and betting means gambling, and I don't see how a gambler is going to be a Christian. Do the other things as long as you like." My father asked again about the theater and cards, and Mr. Moody said, "Mr. Studd, you have children and people you love; and now you are a saved man yourself, and you want to get them saved. God will give you some souls and as soon as ever you have won a soul you won't care about any of the other things." Sure enough, we found to our astonishment that father didn't care for any of those things any longer; he only cared about one thing, and that was saving souls. He took us to hear Mr. Moody and other men, and when Mr. Moody left England my father opened his country house, and held meetings there in the evenings. He asked ministers and business men from London to come down and speak to the people about their souls. The people would come for miles to attend the meetings, and many were converted. One of these gentlemen came down to preach one day and as I was going out to play cricket he caught me unawares and said, "Are you a Christian?" I said, "I am not what you call a Christian. I have believed on Jesus Christ since I was knee high. Of course I believe in the church, too." I thought by answering him pretty close I would get rid of him, but he stuck tight as wax and said, "Look here, God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. You believe Jesus Christ died?" "Yes." "You believe He died for you?" "Yes." "Do you believe the other half of the verse—'shall have everlasting life'" "No," I said, "I don't believe that." He said, "Don't you think you are a bit inconsistent, believing one half of the verse and not the other half?" "I suppose I am." "Well," he said, "are you always going to be inconsistent?" "No," I said, "I suppose not always." He said, "Will you be consistent now?" I saw that I was cornered and I began to think, "If I go out of this room inconsistent, I won't carry very much self-respect." I said, "Yes, I will be consistent." "Well, don't you see that eternal life is a gift? When somebody gives you a present at Christmas, what do you do?" "I take it and say, 'Thank you.'" He said, "Will you say 'Thank you' to God for this gift?" Then I got down on my knees and I did say "Thank you" to God. And right then and there joy and peace came into my soul. I knew then what it was to be born again, and the Bible, which had been so dry to me before, became everything. One day when I was in London, a friend asked me to come to tea with him and his wife who were Christians. After tea, when we were talking about the Bible around the open fire, this friend said, "Have you heard of the wonderful blessing Mrs. Watson has got lately?" I said, "Why, she has been a Christian a long time." He said, "Yes, but she is quite different now." I had heard people talking about getting other blessings besides conversion, but I would not believe it. Then my friend opened his Bible and showed plainly enough from the Scriptures that there were other blessings besides conversion. Then he said, "Have you these other blessings?" I said, "No, I have not." I was just angry because I wanted to know what I was going to do for God. We knelt down and asked God very simply that God would give us all He had for us. When I went back to my room I got hold of "The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life." That night I just meant business, and it seemed to come so plain—old truths, it may be, but they seemed to grip me that time. I had known about Jesus Christ's dying for me, but I had never understood that if he had died for me, then I didn't belong to myself. Redemption means "buying back" so that if I belonged to Him, either I had to be a thief and keep what wasn't mine, or else I had to give up everything to God. When I came to see that Jesus Christ had died for me, it didn't seem hard to give up all to Him. It seemed just common, ordinary honesty. Then I read in the book: "When you have surrendered all to God, you have given him all the responsibility, as well as everything else. It is God who is responsible to look after you and all you have to do is to trust. Put your hand in His and the Lord will lead you. It seemed quite a different thing after that and in a very short time God had told me what to do and where to go. God doesn't tell a person first by his head; He tells him first by the heart. God put it in my heart and made me long to go to China. There were lots of difficulties in the way. Possibly some of you have difficulties in your way. Don't you turn aside because of the difficulties. There was not one of all my relatives but thought that I had gone clean mad. My elder brother, who was a true Christian, said to me one evening, "Charlie, I think you are making a great mistake." I said, "There is no mistake about it." He said: "You are away every night at the meetings and you do not see mother. I see her, and this is just breaking her heart. I think you are wrong." I said, "Let us ask God. I do not want to be pig-headed and go out there of my own accord, I just want to do God's will." It was hard to have this brother, who had been such a help, think it was a mistake. We got down on our knees and put the whole matter in God's hands. That night I could not get to sleep, but it seemed as though I heard someone say this verse over and over, "Ask of me and I will give thee the heathen for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." I knew it was God's voice speaking to me. When I got to China I knew why He said that verse so often. Winning souls out there is the same thing as here, only more difficult. The devil comes to one and says, "Why don't you go home? You can save more souls there than here." But I had received marching orders to go to China and I had God to give them as plain to go back. Not only did God make it right with the brother, but the night I was leaving home God made my mother willing that I should go to China. My father made me become of age at twenty-five. I was twenty-three when I went to China; and for two or three years it seemed as if God kept me walking up and down that country. Finally I was sent to a station where there had been a riot. Every missionary's house had been knocked down, and they had been sent away; but the British consul was there, although he had been nearly killed. When a friend and myself got into that town we meant to hold the fort. When the consul saw us it was as though he had seen a couple of ghosts. He said, "However did you get here? There are guards in every gate of the city to prevent any foreign devil from coming in." We said that God had brought us in and told him what we had come for. He said, "No; you cannot stay here; I can give you a passport up or down the river, but no foreigners are allowed here except myself." After a little he said, "If you would like to stay in that hovel there you can; but there is not room for more than one." Then we began to discuss which should stay. My friend was going to be married and I was not, but he wanted to stay. Finally, the consul asked us to dinner, and in the midst of dinner he turned to me and said, "Studd, will you stay with me?" That settled the matter. I didn't know why God had sent me to that place until some time afterwards. One day when I was reading the harmony of the Gospels I came to where Christ talked with the rich young man. Then God seemed to bring all the vows I had made back to me. A few days later the post, which came only every half-month, brought letters from the solicitor and banker to show what I had become heir to. Then God made me just ordinarily honest and told me what to do. Then I learned why I had been sent to that particular place. I needed to draw up papers giving the "power of attorney," and for that I had to have the signature of one of Her Majesty's officers. I went to this consul and when he saw the paper he said, "I won't sign it. You don't know what you are doing." Finally, he said that he would give me two weeks to think it over and then if I wished he would sign it. I took it back at the end of two weeks and he signed it and off the stuff went. God has promised to give a hundredfold for everything we give to him. An hundredfold is a wonderful percentage; it is ten thousand per cent. God began to give me back the hundredfold wonderfully quick. Not long after this I was sent down to Shanghai. My brother, who had been very ill, had gone right back into the world again. On account of his health the doctors sent him round the world in search of better. lie thought he would just come and touch at Shanghai and see me. He said he was not going to stay very long for he was mighty afraid he would get too much religion. He took his berth for Japan about the next day after he arrived. But God soon gave him as much religion as he could hold and he cancelled that passage to Japan and stayed with me six months. When I saw that brother right soundly converted I said, "This is ten thousand per cent and more." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 54: - A PERSONAL TESTIMONY ======================================================================== A Personal Testimony By Philip Mauro, Attorney-At-Law, New York City I came to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ on May 24th, 1903, being then in my forty-fifth year. I did not at that time fully understand what had happened to me, and only learned subsequently, through the study of the Scriptures, that, by the grace of God through faith in His Son Jesus Christ, I had been quicken Ephesians 2:5, and had passed from death unto life John 5:24. Formal Profession Not an Anchor for the Soul For many years previous to that time I had been drifting steadily away from even a formal profession of Christ. There was no aspiration in my soul beyond the gratification of self; and all the exertion which I was putting forth had for its sole object the acquisition and accumulation of means for ministering to that gratification through life. I do not except from this category the consideration bestowed upon my family (who would doubtless give me a good character as an indulgent husband and father), for I count these as within the definition of "self." The things which I valued, such as reputation, the good opinion of men, success in business enterprises and the like, engrossed my time and thought, and beyond these, which were all of a temporal nature, there was no object in view. I can now clearly see that I had unconsciously made money a god to trust in and to bestow my affections upon, and can therefore comprehend the statement of Scripture that covetousness is idolatry. Whether or not there was an existence beyond the grave was a matter about which I had speculated much but had dismissed it from my thought. Having become a thorough-going rationalist (and being no more irrational than the generality of those who assume that self-flattering title) I took the ground that it was possible to believe only what could be made evident to the physical senses, and having rejected the witness of God, and so made Him a liar 1 John 5:9-10, and having disregarded "the evidence of things not seen" Hebrews 11:1, I was perishing for lack of knowledge while passing, in my own estimation and that of others, as a "very well informed man." I had become a church-member and communicant at the age of sixteen; had been for many years thereafter quite a regular attendant on church services, and had heard innumerable sermons; yet I was as ignorant as any Hottentot concerning God's one and only way of salvation. Such is the wretched condition of millions of excellent people in this "Christian" land and in this "enlightened" century. The Gospel is hid from them because "the god of this age" hath blinded their minds "lest the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them" 2 Corinthians 4:4. Worldly Prosperity Unsatisfying "Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again" John 4:13. Let me add briefly, as touching my material circumstances, that in the practice of my chosen profession (law) I was sufficiently successful to gratify my own ambition and to excite the envy of others; that I was blessed with excellent physical health; and that my domestic relations were all that could be desired. Nothing seemed to be lacking that could insure or contribute to happiness and contentment. But peace of mind and rest of conscience are not to be found in what the world calls "easy circumstances." Notwithstanding that I had apparently every reason to be well satisfied with my lot, and every opportunity to enjoy the good things of this world, my mental condition was anything but satisfactory. It is hard to picture the state of a mind subject to increasingly frequent and protracted spells of depression, for which there seemed to be no reason or explanation. Certainly I was thoroughly discontented, desperately unhappy, and becoming more and more an easy prey to gloomy thoughts and vague, indefinable apprehensions. No longer could I find mental satisfaction and diversion in the places and things which once supplied them. My gratifications had been largely of an intellectual order, and my mind had been much occupied in efforts to pierce the veil of the material universe, and to discover what, if anything, lay concealed behind it. This quest had carried me into the domains of science, philosophy, occultism, theosophy, etc., etc. All this pursuit had yielded nothing more reliable than conjecture, and had left the inquirer after the truth wearied, baffled and intellectually starved. Life had no meaning, advantage, purpose or justification; and the powers of the much-vaunted human intellect seemed unequal to the solution of the simplest mysteries. The prospect before me was unspeakably dark and forbidding. "Where Is the Wise?" (1 Corinthians 1:20) But some remedy against settled despair must be found. So I followed others in the attempt to find distraction in the gaieties, amusements and excitements of a godless, pleasure-seeking world, among whom I was as godless as any. Some good people who were interested in me, and who had an inkling of my condition, assured me that what I needed was more "diversion" and "relaxation," and that I was "working too hard," etc. This view of the matter was urged by church members. No one told me the simple truth; namely, that I needed Christ and His salvation. O, the innumerable millions who are stumbling through life, vaguely conscious of a great need, but ignorant of its nature, and having no one to tell them! I have given this description of my unhappy state at some length in the belief that among those who may read it, many will recognize it as a description of the main features of their own condition. To such I can say with the utmost assurance that there is deliverance for you, full and complete, and that it is not far off, but it is close by. "The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that is, the word of faith which we preach; that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" Romans 10:8-9. So completely has that old condition of mental distress and unrest passed away that I would not now be able to even recall and describe it, but for a record which I made within six months of my conversion. " Who shall deliver me? I thank God through Jesus Christ, our Lord" Romans 7:24-25. One never-to-be-forgotten evening in New York City I strolled out in my usual unhappy frame of mind, intending to seek diversion at the theater. This purpose carried me as far as the lobby of a theater on Broadway, and caused me to take my place in the line of ticket purchasers. But an unseen hand turned me aside, and the next thing that I remember I had wandered far from the theater and my attention was arrested by a very faint sound of singing which came to my ears amid the noises on Eighth Avenue, near Forty-fourth Street. There is no natural explanation of my being attracted by, and of my following up, that sound. Nevertheless, I pushed my way into the building (a very plain, unattractive affair, bearing the sign "Gospel Tabernacle,") whence the sound emanated, and found myself in a prayer meeting. I was not much impressed by the exercises, and in fact was not at all in sympathy with what transpired. What did, however, make an impression upon me was the circumstance that, as I was making my way to the door after the meeting, several persons greeted me with a pleasant word and a shake of the hand, and one inquired about my spiritual state. I went away from that meeting still in complete ignorance of the simple truth that my wretchedness was all due to the fact that I was an un-reconciled and unpardoned sinner, and of the greater truth that there was One who had died for my sins, who had reconciled me to God by His blood, and through whom I could obtain forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Again I say that no natural explanation will account for the fact that I was constrained to return to a place so utterly devoid of attractions and so foreign to all my natural tastes and inclinations. The people were not in the social grade to which I had been accustomed, and I would have found nothing at all congenial in their Society. And here I wish to call particular attention to a striking instance of the fact that God's ways are not as our ways, and that the wisdom of man is foolishness with God. I should have supposed that, in order to convince me of the truth of the Bible and of Christianity it would be necessary to employ the best efforts of a faculty of the profoundest theologians, versed in all the arguments of skeptical philosophy, and able to furnish plausible replies to them. But God, in His wisdom, sent me to learn the way of everlasting life from a company of exceedingly plain, humble people, of little education, to whom I regarded myself as immeasurably superior in all the higher branches of knowledge. It is true that these people knew very little of what is taught in colleges and seminaries; but they did have that knowledge which is the highest and most excellent of all, that knowledge for which one of the most scholarly of men of his day was willing to sacrifice all his advantages, counting them but refuse, and to cast away all his brilliant prospects, saying, "I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord" Php_3:8. So that my estimate of my own attainments was altogether wrong; and the actual truth was that, in comparison with the simplest of those who had knowledge of Jesus Christ as Savior and who confessed Him as Lord, I was but an ignoramus. I do not remember how many times I went to these meetings before I yielded to the Spirit's influence, and I do not remember that I was conscious of any benefit from attending the meetings, which, from the ordinary standpoint, would have been pronounced decidedly dull. The crisis in my life came on the evening of May 24th, 1903, when, yielding to an inward prompting which, gentle as it was, yet overpowered all my natural reluctance and repugnance to such an act, I went forward and knelt with a few others at the front of the meeting room. I took the sinner's place, and confessed myself in need of the grace of God. A Christian man (the same who at first asked me about my soul) kneeled by me and called on the Lord Jesus to save me. Of course, the act of publicly kneeling and calling on the name of the Lord is not a necessary part of the process of conversion. There is no specified place or manner in which the gift of eternal life is received. What is necessary, however, is that one should believe God, first as to the fact that he is a sinner and can do nothing for himself; and second, that Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the Eternal Son of God, is the Sin-Bearer for all who believe on Him-"Who was delivered for our offenses, and raised again for our justification" Romans 4:25. I did not know the nature of what was happening, for I did not believe in sudden conversions. I supposed that a change of nature, if it occurred at all, must be very gradual-an "evolution," in fact. But my ignorance of the process did not stand in the way of the mighty power of God, acting in grace, to quicken me into new life Ephesians 1:19; Ephesians 2:5. I called upon the name of the Lord, with a deep conviction of sin in my heart, and that was enough. "If Any Man Be In Christ, He Is a New Creature" In the years that have elapsed I have come to a better understanding of the tremendous change which took place that night-though only in eternity will I fully comprehend it. Certainly it was life from the dead. Spiritual things from that moment became realities, and took a place in my thought and consciousness. The things that once had a hold upon me began to lose their attraction. I soon learned by a happy experience that if a man be in Christ, there is a new creation-an entirely new environment-that old things have passed away, and all things have become new; and that all things are of God 2 Corinthians 5:17-18. In a very short time the habits of my life, as well as the occupations of my heart and mind, underwent a great change. The habit of daily Bible reading, and of morning and evening prayer, was immediately established. Often previously I had tried to pray, as I felt the pressure of misery and distress of mind; and innumerable times both publicly and privately, I had "said my prayers;" but it was not praying, for I was in unbelief. I did not believe the Word of God, but criticized and rejected it. I did not believe in the virgin birth of our Lord, nor in His vicarious death, nor in His physical resurrection. The doctrine of His blood-shedding for the sins of others, and of His being made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him 2 Corinthians 5:21 I regarded as unphilosophical and unworthy of belief. The only God I knew was the god of materialism, a creature of man's vain imagination. I had no knowledge of "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." Doubts and Difficulties Swept Away Perhaps the most wonderful change Which was manifest to my consciousness, when my mind began to resume its normal activity and to inquire into what had happened, was this, that all my doubts, questionings, skepticism and criticism concerning God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, concerning the full inspiration accuracy and authority of the Holy Scriptures as the incorruptible Word of God, concerning the sufficiency of Christ's atonement to settle the question of sin, and to provide a ground upon which God could, in perfect righteousness, forgive and justify a sinner, and concerning an assured salvation and perfect acceptance in Christ, were swept away completely. From that day to this I have never been troubled by doubts of God and His Word. "If Thou Shalt Believe in Thine Heart" This experience is to me, and will be to any one who reflects upon it, very wonderful and impressive. I had no notion at all that intellectual difficulties and questionings could be removed in any way except by being answered, one by one, to the intellectual satisfaction of the person in whose mind they existed. But my doubts and difficulties were not met in that way. They were simply removed when I believed on the Crucified One, and accepted Him as the Christ of God, and as my personal Savior. The explanation of this is that the seat of unbelief is not in the head, but in the heart Romans 10:9. It is the will that is wrong; and the bristling array of doubts and difficulties which spring up in the mind are mere disguises and pretexts supplied by the enemy of souls, behind which the unbelieving heart tries to shelter itself and to justify its unbelief. This is the explanation of those words of our Lord, who knew what was in man, "Ye will not come to Me that ye might have life" John 5:40. It is man's unbroken and unyielded will that prevents him from coming to the Fountain of eternal life and receiving that unspeakable gift of God. And this, too, is why it is written, "For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness" Romans 10:9. The natural mind is the congenial breeding place of doubts and questionings, and (as it deems these to be of great importance) it supposes that these must be dealt with seriatim. The natural man knows nothing about being "transformed by the renewing of the mind" Romans 12:2, arid he "receives not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" 1 Corinthians 2:14. But when the heart, the center of man's being, that inmost place to which God alone has access, is persuaded, the whole man is changed, and the mind likewise renewed and purged of its pestilential brood of doubts and reasonings. Therefore, what had previously held me back from accepting the salvation that is freely offered through Christ Jesus was not the brood of doubts and reasonings with which my head teemed. In supposing that the difficulty lay there I was miserably deceived, as are myriads of others "in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not, lest the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should dawn upon them" 2 Corinthians 4:4, R. V. God took no notice at all of the questionings of my puny mind, which seemed to me very formidable and worthy of the most respectful consideration. He dealt with them according to His own sovereign will and removed them in a moment. This was not difficult at all to Him who "taketh up the isles as a very little thing." Hence the stupendous change, whereby one dead in trespasses and sins is quickened together with Christ (Ephesians 2:5, is not accomplished through any process of reasoning, nor is it the outcome of any process of development. It is the immediate and mighty work of God-"the working of His mighty power which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places" Ephesians 1:19-20; and it is a work which is done instantly in them that believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. I should, of course, be wholly at a loss to interpret this experience but for the Scriptures; and thereby the Divine authorship of these is further confirmed. In the light of the Scriptures it is easy to see that what had occurred was an inwrought conviction produced by the Holy Spirit, the One now ministering in the world, testifying of a risen, ascended and glorified Christ, at the right hand of God, and convicting of sin, of righteousness and of judgment. "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee; because he trusteth in Thee" Isaiah 26:3. Another marked result of believing "the witness of God which He hath testified of His Son" 1 John 5:9 has been the complete deliverance from the spells of mental depression, which were rapidly developing into a state of settled melancholia, or what is called "nervous prostration," from which so many are suffering in these times of high pressure, and concerning the cause of which they are totally ignorant. The mind cannot be kept in perfect peace that is "stayed" upon material and perishing things. It is manifestly a satisfactory and sufficient explanation of peace of mind that it is "stayed" upon the unchangeable God. This deliverance from mental depression was not immediate, for I did not learn at once to stay my mind on Him; but the change began immediately and progressed until settled peace became the normal mental condition. I have learned, in a word, that the redemption that is in Christ Jesus covers and meets all the consequences of sin whether manifested in soul, or mind, or body. Our salvation is of the Lord and is for the whole man, "spirit, soul and body." "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, and thy house" Acts 16:31. Within two months from the event related above (which, by the way, through timidity and fear of comment and ridicule I tried to keep as much as possible to myself) I was put in a position where I was compelled to open my lips to a beloved member of my own family, suffering as I could plainly see, from what had formerly oppressed me, and to preach Christ for the first time. What effort the delivery of this sermon cost me cannot be described. It consisted of these words: "What you need is the Lord Jesus Christ;" and after their utterance the preacher had not another word to say, and the only visible result was a very awkward and constrained silence. Yet this simple, clumsily-given testimony, together with some verses of Scripture read at random, were used by the Spirit of God to quicken another dead soul. There were yet two more of the household to be brought to a knowledge of Christ, but it was not long before these likewise, and without any pressure from us, accepted Christ, and were translated out of darkness into His marvelous light. "The path of the righteous is as the dawning light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day" Proverbs 4:18, R. V. It was a great and wonderful surprise to us to find that there was such a thing as an assurance of salvation, with immediate and unmistakable blessings given to believers as an earnest and first-fruits of the inheritance of the saints. All our previous theological instruction had been to the effect that if one lived "a good Christian life" (which many deluded souls are trying to do before they have got it) he might possibly be saved hereafter, but that there was no certainty for anybody until the "day of judgment." But even greater surprises awaited us. Blessed as it is to know upon the evidence of Christ's own statement, prefaced by His "Verily, verily, I say unto you," that He who hears His Word and believes on Him who sent Him has everlasting life and shall not come into judgment, but is passed from death unto life John 5:24, there was much more to follow. God's goodness toward us did not stop at revealing the truth as to our acceptance in Christ and our consequent eternal security. He led us to see that it was our duty and privilege to take at once the place of rejection with Christ, who has been cast out of this age and all of its affairs and enterprises, the rulers (or leaders) of this age having crucified the Lord of Glory 1 Corinthians 2:8. He showed us that Christ had given Himself for our sins for the express purpose "that He might deliver us from this present evil age" Galatians 1:4 and that His will for the redeemed of this age is that they should go forth "unto Him without the camp, bearing His reproach" Hebrews 13:13. The camp is, superficially at least, an attractive place, full of gaiety and revelry, with every possible device to delight the eye and gratify the mind of the flesh. By keeping the bright things as much as possible in evidence, and pushing the wretchedness, suffering and misery into the background, the camp manages to keep up appearances, particularly as its occupants are quite willing to be deceived, and are pretty well agreed that it is the duty of every dweller therein to be an "optimist." Having led the Christ of God outside the gate, and put Him to death, the leaders of this "present evil age" have devoted their great talents and energies, under the superb direction and management of the "god of this age," to the one object of making such "progress," and developing such a glorious "civilization," as will demonstrate that the world has no need of Christ. In carrying out this great undertaking the "leaders of this age" are sufficiently astute to provide a place inside the camp even for those "who profess and call themselves Christians," making them welcome in the world, and even giving them positions of prominence therein, upon the single easy condition that they will accept the age's gospel of progress, and subscribe heartily to the doctrine that "the world is getting better every day." This condition the aforesaid "Christians" are for the greater part quite ready, not only to accept, but even to make it an article of religion, changing the Scriptures so far as necessary to that end. "Ye Are Complete In Him" (Colossians 2:10) The Lord has further shown us that, so far from finding it a deprivation to withdraw ourselves from the pursuits and amusements of the camp and from its godless mirth, which is as the crackling of dry thorns under a pot, we have in fact gained unspeakably thereby. The new interests which now occupy us (having to do with Him in whose presence is fullness of joy, and at whose right hand are pleasures for evermore,) are far more satisfying, and contribute far more real gratification than all the things in which, for want of knowledge of something better, we used to be interested, and in the pursuit of which we spent our time and money. It seems, humanly speaking, impossible to make our friends and associates in the old life understand that we have not suffered any deprivations whatever. "Having the understanding darkened," they can only see the worthless things which we have cast aside, and can take no cognizance of the riches of grace and glory which the believer in Christ has, "in whom it hath pleased the Father that all fulness should dwell" Colossians 1:19. It is as if a beggar were given, through kingly munificence, a suit of rich apparel, and should hasten to put it on, joyfully casting aside the rags with which he was previously clad, and some onlookers, likewise clad in dingy garments, should be able to see only the discarded rags, and should thereupon hasten away clasping their own rags tightly around them for fear a like experience might befall them. "If I Go, I Will Come Again" (John 14:3) The Lord has also enabled us to look beyond "this present evil age," of which Satan is the god, to the age that is soon to come, in which Christ will return to earth, and all His redeemed with Him, as prophesied since Enoch's time Jude 1:14; Revelation 19:11-16; etc., and "to the times of restitution of all things which God hath spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began" Acts 3:21. But, more than that, we have been led to look, not for earthly happiness or for bliss after death, but for that event, which is nearer still, and which it is the Privilege of the believer to expect at any moment, when the Lord Himself shall call upon His own to meet Him in the air 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17; 1 Corinthians 15:51-52. And so the grace of God, which brings salvation, hath appeared, "teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world; looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us" Titus 2:11-14. This is not the teaching of the wisdom of this age, nor of the leaders of this age; nor is it the teaching of those professed ministers of Christ who have accepted the gospel of this age-the gospel of its progress and betterment; but it is the teaching of "the grace of God" and of the Word of God, and we have accepted and rejoice in it. "Yea, and all that would live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution." It would not be a truthful representation of the matter to make it appear that there have been no unpleasant experiences attending and resulting from this departure from our old ways and entering upon "the one true and living way." There has been, of course, much adverse comment, much irritation, much hostility aroused, we have heard many references to "selfrighteousness," "fanaticism," and the like. To desert the ways of the world is, of course, to condemn those ways; and they who are walking in them cannot be expected to take it kindly. They turn away exclaiming, "'Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel'? 2 Kings 5:12. Then why this narrow-mindedness and bigotry?" And, as might also be expected, the greatest resentment of our conduct has been aroused in those who, while professing to belong to Christ, are casting their lot indiscriminately with them who openly reject Him. This, of course, we can endure patiently, because He said, "If the world hate you, ye know that it hated Me before it hated you" John 15:18; and the more so, because we know that those who cherish and display such feelings do it in ignorance of the truth. We remember that we were, and not so very long ago, in precisely the same darkness, and that it required the power and grace of God to let the light into our darkened minds. We know, too, that we can help these precious souls for whom Christ died, only by maintaining our separated path, and by praying that the scales may fall from their eyes also, that they may see what is the true "course of this world" Ephesians 2:2, of which its leaders are so boastful, and where it will inevitably carry them who pursue it to the end; and above all may see that there is eternal life only in Christ and through faith in His atoning sacrifice and in His resurrection from among the dead Romans 10:9; Acts 17:3; Romans 4:24-25; 1 Corinthians 15:1-4; 1 Corinthians 15:13; 1 Corinthians 15:19, etc. "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him" John 3:36. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 55: - COPYRIGHT INFORMATION ======================================================================== "The Fundamentals" were originally copyrighted in 1909 or 1910. They are now in the public domain. This module was created from text available at blueletterbible.org. Here are the links to the texts: http://www.blueletterbible.org/commentaries/comm_author.cfm?AuthorID=16("http://www.blueletterbible.org/commentaries/comm_author.cfm?AuthorID=16") ======================================================================== CHAPTER 56: - THE HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM ======================================================================== The History of the Higher Criticism By Canon Dyson Hague, M. A., Rector of the Memorial Church, London, Ontario. Lecturer in Liturgics and Ecclesiology, Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada. Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of Huron. What is the meaning of the Higher Criticism? Why is it called higher? Higher than what? At the outset it must be explained that the word "Higher" is an academic term, used in this connection in a purely special or technical sense. It is not used in the popular sense of the word at all, and may convey a wrong impression to the ordinary man. Nor is it meant to convey the idea of superiority. It is simply a term of contrast. It is used in contrast to the phrase, "Lower Criticism." One of the most important branches of theology is called the science of Biblical criticism, which has for its object the study of the history and contents, and origins and purposes, of the various books of the Bible. In the early stages of the science Biblical criticism was devoted to two great branches, the Lower, and the Higher. The Lower Criticism was employed to designate the study of the text of the Scripture, and included the investigation of the manuscripts, and the different readings in the various versions and codices and manuscripts in order that we may be sure we have the original words as they were written by the Divinely inspired writers. (See Briggs, Hex., page 1). The term generally used now-a-days is Textual Criticism. If the phrase were used in the twentieth century sense, Beza, Erasmus, Bengel, Griesbach, Lachmann, Tregelles, Tischendorff, Scrivener, Westcott, and Hort would be called Lower Critics. But the term is not now-a-days used as a rule. The Higher Criticism, on the contrary, was employed to designate the study of the historic origins, the dates, and authorship of the various books of the Bible, and that great branch of study which in the technical language of modern theology is known as Introduction. It is a very valuable branch of Biblical science, and is of the highest importance as an auxiliary in the interpretation of the Word of God. By its researches floods of light may be thrown on the Scriptures. The term Higher Criticism, then, means nothing more than the study of the literary structure of the various books of the Bible, and more especially of the Old Testament. Now this in itself is most laudable. It is indispensable. It is just such work as every minister or Sunday School teacher does when he takes up his Peloubet's Notes, or his Stalker's St. Paul, or Geikie's Hours with the Bible, to find out all he can with regard to the portion of the Bible he is studying; the author, the date, the circumstances, and purpose of its writing. Why is Higher Criticism Identified with Unbelief? How is it, then, that the Higher Criticism has become identified in the popular mind with attacks upon the Bible and the supernatural character of the Holy Scriptures? The reason is this. No study perhaps requires so devout a spirit and so exalted a faith in the supernatural as the pursuit of the Higher Criticism. It demands at once the ability of the scholar, and the simplicity of the believing child of God. For without faith no one can explain the Holy Scriptures, and without scholarship no one can investigate historic origins. There is a Higher Criticism that is at once reverent in tone and scholarly in work. Hengstenberg, the German, and Horne, the Englishman, may be taken as examples. Perhaps the greatest work in English on the Higher Criticism is Horne's Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scripture. It is a work that is simply massive in its scholarship, and invaluable in its vast reach of information for the study of the Holy Scriptures. But Horne's Introduction is too large a work. It is too cumbrous for use in this hurrying age. (Carter's edition in two volumes contains 1,149 pages, and in ordinary book form would contain over 4,000 pages, i.e., about ten volumes of 400 pages each). Latterly, however, it has been edited by Dr. Samuel Davidson, who practically adopted the views of Hupfield and Halle and interpolated not a few of the modern German theories. But Horne's work from first to last is the work of a Christian believer; constructive, not destructive; fortifying faith in the Bible, not rationalistic. But the work of the Higher Critic has not always been pursued in a reverent spirit nor in the spirit of scientific and Christian scholarship. Subjective Conclusions. In the first place, the critics who were the leaders, the men who have given name and force to the whole movement, have been men who have based their theories largely upon their own subjective conclusions. They have based their conclusions largely upon the very dubious basis of the author's style and supposed literary qualifications. Everybody knows that style is a very unsafe basis for the determination of a literary product. The greater the writer the more versatile his power of expression; and anybody can understand that the Bible is the last book in the world to be studied as a mere classic by mere human scholarship without any regard to the spirit of sympathy and reverence on the part of the student. The Bible, as has been said, has no revelation to make to unbiblical minds. It does not even follow that because a man is a philological expert he is able to understand the integrity or credibility of a passage of Holy Scripture any more than the beauty and spirit of it. The qualification for the perception of Biblical truth is neither philosophic nor philological knowledge, but spiritual insight. The primary qualification of the musician is that he be musical; of the artist, that he have the spirit of art. So the merely technical and mechanical and scientific mind is disqualified for the recognition of the spiritual and infinite. Any thoughtful man must honestly admit that the Bible is to be treated as unique in literature, and, therefore, that the ordinary rules of critical interpretation must fail to interpret it aright. German Fancies In the second place, some of the most powerful exponents of the modern Higher Critical theories have been Germans, and it is notorious to what length the German fancy can go in the direction of the subjective and of the conjectural. For hypothesis-weaving and speculation, the German theological professor is unsurpassed. One of the foremost thinkers used to lay it down as a fundamental truth in philosophical and scientific enquiries that no regard whatever should be paid to the conjectures or hypotheses of thinkers, and quoted as an axiom the great Newton himself and his famous words, "Non fingo hypotheses": I do not frame hypotheses. It is notorious that some of the most learned German thinkers are men who lack in a singular degree the faculty of common sense and knowledge of human nature. Like many physical scientists, they are so preoccupied with a theory that their conclusions seem to the average mind curiously warped. In fact, a learned man in a letter to Descartes once made an observation which, with slight verbal alteration, might be applied to some of the German critics: "When men sitting in their closet and consulting only their books attempt disquisitions into the Bible, they may indeed tell how they would have made the Book if God had given them that commission. That is, they may describe chimeras which correspond to the fatuity of their own minds, but without an understanding truly Divine they can never form such an idea to themselves as the Deity had in creating it." "If," says Matthew Arnold, "you shut a number of men up to make study and learning the business of their lives, how many of them, from want of some discipline or other, seem to lose all balance of judgment, all common sense." The learned professor of Assyriology at Oxford said that the investigation of the literary source of history has been a peculiarly German pastime. It deals with the writers and readers of the ancient Orient as if they were modern German professors, and the attempt to transform the ancient Israelites into somewhat inferior German compilers, proves a strange want of familiarity with Oriental modes of thought. (Sayce, "Early History of the Hebrews," pages 108-112). Anti-Supernaturalists In the third place, the dominant men of the movement were men with a strong bias against the supernatural. This is not an ex-parte statement at all. It is simply a matter of fact, as we shall presently show. Some of the men who have been most distinguished as the leaders of the Higher Critical movement in Germany and Holland have been men who have no faith in the God of the Bible, and no faith in either the necessity or the possibility of a personal supernatural revelation. The men who have been the voices of the movement, of whom the great majority, less widely known and less influential, have been mere echoes; the men who manufactured the articles the others distributed, have been notoriously opposed to the miraculous. We must not be misunderstood. We distinctly repudiate the idea that all the Higher Critics were or are anti-supernaturalists. Not so. The British-American School embraces within its ranks many earnest believers. What we do say, as we will presently show, is that the dominant minds which have led and swayed the movement, who made the theories that the others circulated, were strongly unbelieving. Then the higher critical movement has not followed its true and original purposes in investigating the Scriptures for the purposes of confirming faith and of helping believers to understand the beauties, and appreciate the circumstances of the origin of the various books, and so understand more completely the Bible? No. It has not; unquestionably it has not. It has been deflected from that, largely owing to the character of the men whose ability and forcefulness have given predominance to their views. It has become identified with a system of criticism which is based on hypotheses and suppositions which have for their object the repudiation of the traditional theory, and has investigated the origins and forms and styles and contents, apparently not to confirm the authenticity and credibility and reliability of the Scriptures, but to discredit in most cases their genuineness, to discover discrepancies, and throw doubt upon their authority: The Origin of the Movement Who, then, were the men whose views have molded the views of the leading teachers and writers of the Higher Critical school of today? We will answer this as briefly as possible. It is not easy to say who is the first so-called Higher Critic, or when the movement began. But it is not modern by any means. Broadly speaking, it has passed through three great stages: 1. The French-Dutch. 2. The German. 3. The British-American. In its origin it was Franco-Dutch, and speculative, if not skeptical. The views which are now accepted as axiomatic by the Continental and British-American schools of Higher Criticism seem to have been first hinted at by Carlstadt in 1521 in his work on the Canon of Scripture, and by Andreas Masius, a Belgian scholar, who published a commentary on Joshua in 1574, and a Roman Catholic priest, called Peyrere or Pererius, in his Systematic Theology, 1660. (LIV. Cap. i.) But it may really be said to have originated with Spinoza, the rationalist Dutch philosopher. In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Cap. vii-viii), 1670, Spinoza came out boldly and impugned the traditional date and Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and ascribed the origin of the Pentateuch to Ezra or to some other late compiler. Spinoza was really the fountain-head of the movement, and his line was taken in England by the British philosopher Hobbes. He went deeper than Spinoza, as an outspoken antagonist of the necessity and possibility of a personal revelation, and also denied the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. A few years later a French priest, called Richard Simon of Dieppe, pointed out the supposed varieties of style as indications of various authors in his Historical Criticism of the Old Testament, "an epoch-making work." Then another Dutchman, named Clericus (or Le Clerk), in 1685, advocated still more radical views, suggesting an Exilian and priestly authorship for the Pentateuch, and that the Pentateuch was composed by the priest sent from Babylon (2Ki 17), about 678, B.C., and also a kind of later editor or redactor theory. Clericus is said to have been the first critic who set forth the theory that Christ and his Apostles did not come into the world to teach the Jews criticism, and that it is only to be expected that their language would be in accordance with the views of the day. In 1753 a Frenchman named Astruc, a medical man, and reputedly a free-thinker of profligate life, propounded for the first time the Jehovistic and Elohistic divisive hypothesis, and opened a new era. (Briggs' Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch, page 46). Astruc said that the use of the two names, Jehovah and Elohim, shewed the book was composed of different documents. (The idea of the Holy Ghost employing two words, or one here and another there, or both together as He wills, never seems to enter the thought of the Higher Critic!) His work was called "Conjectures Regarding the Original Memoirs in the Book of Genesis," and was published in Brussels. Astruc may be called the father of the documentary theories. He asserted there are traces of no less than ten or twelve different memoirs in the book of Genesis. He denied its Divine authority, and considered the book to be disfigured by useless repetitions, disorder, and contradiction. (Hirschfelder, page 66). For fifty years Astruc's theory was unnoticed. The rationalism of Germany was as yet undeveloped, so that the body was not yet prepared to receive the germ, or the soil the weed. The German Critics The next stage was largely German. Eichhorn is the greatest name in this period, the eminent Oriental professor at Gottingen who published his work on the Old Testament introduction in 1780. He put into different shape the documentary hypothesis of the Frenchman, and did his work so ably that his views were generally adopted by the most distinguished scholars. Eichhorn's formative influence has been incalculably great. Few scholars refused to do honor to the new sun. It is through him that the name Higher Criticism has become identified with the movement He was followed by Vater and later by Hartmann with their fragment theory which practically undermined the Mosaic authorship, made the Pentateuch a heap of fragments, carelessly joined by one editor, and paved the way for the most radical of all divisive hypotheses. In 1806 De Wette, Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Heidelberg, published a work which ran through six editions in four decades. His contribution to the introduction of the Old Testament instilled the same general principles as Eichhorn, and in the supplemental hypotheses assumed that Deuteronomy was composed in the age of Josiah (2 Kings 22:8). Not long after, Vatke and Leopold George (both Hegelians) unreservedly declared the post-Mosaic and post-prophetic origin of the first four books of the Bible. Then came Bleek, who advocated the idea of the Grundschift or original document and the redactor theory; and then Ewald, the father of the Crystallization theory; and then Hupfield (1853), who held that the original document was an independent compilation; and Graf, who wrote a book on the historical books of the Old Testament in 1866 and advocated the theory that the Jehovistic and Elohistic documents were written hundreds of years after Moses' time. Graf was a pupil of Reuss, the redactor of the Ezra hypothesis of Spinoza. Then came a most influential writer, Professor Kuenen of Leyden in Holland, whose work on the Hexateuch was edited by Colenso in 1865, and his "Religion of Israel and Prophecy in Israel," published in England in 1874-1877. Kuenen was one of the most advanced exponents of the rationalistic school. Last, but not least, of the continental Higher Critics is Julius Wellhausen, who at one time was a theological professor in Germany, who published in 1878 the first volume of his history of Israel, and won by his scholarship the attention if not the allegiance of a number of leading theologians. (See Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch, Green, pages 59-88). It will be observed that nearly all these authors were Germans, and most of them professors of philosophy or theology. The British-American Critics The third stage of the movement is the British-American. The best known names are those of Dr. Samuel Davidson, whose "Introduction to the Old Testament," published in 1862, was largely based on the fallacies of the German rationalists. The supplementary hypothesis passed over into England through him and with strange incongruity, he borrowed frequently from Baur. Dr. Robertson Smith, the Scotchman, recast the German theories in an English form in his works on the Pentateuch, the Prophets of Israel, and the Old Testament in the Jewish Church, first published in 1881, and followed the German school, according to Briggs, with great boldness and thoroughness. A man of deep piety and high spirituality, he combined with a sincere regard for the Word of God a critical radicalism that was sttrangely inconsistent, as did also his namesake, George Adam Smith, the most influential of the present-day leaders, a man of great insight and scriptural acumen, who in his works on Isaiah, and the twelve prophets, adopted some of the most radical and least demonstrable of the German theories, and in his later work, "Modern Criticism and the Teaching of the Old Testament," has gone still farther in the rationalistic direction. Another well-known Higher Critic is Dr. S. R. Driver, the Regius professor of Hebrew at Oxford, who, in his "Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament," published ten years later, and his work on the Book of Genesis, has elaborated with remarkable skill and great detail of analysis the theories and views of the continental school. Driver's work is able, very able, but it lacks originality and English independence. The hand is the hand of Driver, but the voice is the voice of Kuenen or Wellhausen. The third well-known name is that of Dr. C. A. Briggs, for some time Professor of Biblical Theology in the Union Theological Seminary of New York. An equally earnest advocate of the German theories, he published in 1883 his "Biblical Study"; in 1886, his "Messianic Prophecy," and a little later his "Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch." Briggs studied the Pentateuch, as he confesses, under the guidance chiefly of Ewald. (Hexateuch, page 63). Of course, this list is a very partial one, but it gives most of the names that have become famous in connection with the movement, and the reader who desires more will find a complete summary of the literature of the Higher Criticism in Professor Bissell's work on the Pentateuch (Scribner's, 1892). Briggs, in his "Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch" (Scribner's, 1897), gives an historical summary also. We must now investigate another question, and that is the religious views of the men most influential in this movement. In making the statement that we are about to make, we desire to deprecate entirely the idea of there being anything uncharitable, unfair, or unkind, in stating what is simply a matter of fact. The Views of the Continental Critics Regarding the views of the Continental Critics, three things can be confidently asserted of nearly all, if not all, of the real leaders. 1. They were men who denied the validity of miracle, and the validity of any miraculous narrative. What Christians consider to be miraculous they considered legendary or mythical; "legendary exaggeration of events that are entirely explicable from natural causes." 2. They were men who denied the reality of prophecy and the validity of any prophetical statement. What Christians have been accustomed to consider prophetical, they called dexterous conjectures, coincidences, fiction, or imposture. 3. They were men who denied the reality of revelation, in the sense in which it has ever been held by the universal Christian Church. They were avowed unbelievers of the supernatural. Their theories were excogitated on pure grounds of human reasoning. Their hypotheses were constructed on the assumption of the falsity of Scripture. As to the inspiration of the Bible, as to the Holy Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation being the Word of God, they had no such belief. We may take them one by one. Spinoza repudiated absolutely a supernatural revelation. And Spinoza was one of their greatest. Eichhorn discarded the miraculous, and considered that the so-called supernatural element was an Oriental exaggeration; and Eichhorn has been called the father of Higher Criticism, and was the first man to use the term. De Wette's views as to inspiration were entirely infidel. Vatke and Leopold George were Hegelian rationalists, and regarded the first four books of the Old Testament as entirely mythical. Kuenen, says Professor Sanday, wrote in the interests of an almost avowed Naturalism. That is, he was a free-thinker, an agnostic; a man who did not believe in the Revelation of the one true and living God. (Brampton Lectures, 1893, page 117). He wrote from an avowedly naturalistic standpoint, says Driver (page 205). According to Wellhausen the religion of Israel was a naturalistic evolution from heathendom, an emanation from an imperfectly monotheistic kind of semi-pagan idolatry. It was simply a human religion. The Leaders Were Rationalists In one word, the formative forces of the Higher Critical movement were rationalistic forces, and the men who were its chief authors and expositors, who "on account of purely philological criticism have acquired an appalling authority," were men who had discarded belief in God and Jesus Christ Whom He had sent. The Bible, in their view, was a mere human product. It was a stage in the literary evolution of a religious people. If it was not the resultant of a fortuitous concourse of Oriental myths and legendary accretions, and its Jahveh or Jahweh, the excogitation of a Sinaitic clan, it certainly was not given by the inspiration of God, and is not the Word of the living God. "Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost," said Peter. "God, who at sundry times and in diverse manners spake by the prophets," said Paul. Not so, said Kuenen, the prophets were not moved to speak by God. Their utterances were all their own. (Sanday, page 117). These then were their views and these were the views that have so dominated modern Christianity and permeated modern ministerial thought in the two great languages of the modern world. We cannot say that they were men whose rationalism was the result of their conclusions in the study of the Bible. Nor can we say their conclusions with regard to the Bible were wholly the result of their rationalism. But we can say, on the one hand, that inasmuch as they refused to recognize the Bible as a direct revelation from God, they were free to form hypotheses ad libitum. And, on the other hand, as they denied the supernatural, the animus that animated them in the construction of the hypotheses was the desire to construct a theory that would explain away the supernatural. Unbelief was the antecedent, not the consequent, of their criticism. Now there is nothing unkind in this. There is nothing that is uncharitable, or unfair. It is simply a statement of fact which modern authorities most freely admit. The School of Compromise When we come to the English-writing Higher Critics, we approach a much more difficult subject. The British-American Higher Critics represent a school of compromise. On the one hand they practically accept the premises of the Continental school with regard to the antiquity, authorship, authenticity, and origins of the Old Testament books. On the other hand, they refuse to go with the German rationalists in altogether denying their inspiration. They still claim to accept the Scriptures as containing a Revelation from God. But may they not hold their own peculiar views with regard to the origin and date and literary structure of the Bible without endangering either their own faith or the faith of Christians? This is the very heart of the question, and, in order that the reader may see the seriousness of the adoption of the conclusions of the critics, as brief a resume as possible of the matter will be given. The Point in a Nutshell According to the faith of the universal church, the Pentateuch, that is, the first five books of the Bible, is one consistent, coherent, authentic and genuine composition, inspired by God, and, according to the testimony of the Jews, the statements of the books themselves, the reiterated corroborations of the rest of the Old Testament, and the explicit statement of the Lord Jesus (Luke 24:44; John 5:46-47) was written by Moses (with the exception, of course, of Deut 34, possibly written by Joshua, as the Talmud states, or probably by Ezra) at a period of about fourteen centuries before the advent of Christ, and 800 years or so before Jeremiah. It is, moreover, a portion of the Bible that is of paramount importance, for it is the basic substratum of the whole revelation of God, and of paramount value, not because it is merely the literature of an ancient nation, but because it is the introductory section of the Word of God, bearing His authority and given by inspiration through His servant Moses. That is the faith of the Church. The Critics' Theory But according to the Higher Critics: 1. The Pentateuch consists of four completely diverse documents. These Completely different documents were the primary sources of the composition which they call the Hexateuch: (a) The Yahwist or Jahwist, (b) the Elohist, (c) the Deuteronomist, and (d) the Priestly Code, the Grundschift, the work of the first Elohist (Sayce Hist. Heb., 103), now generally known as J. E. D. P., and for convenience designated by these symbols. 2. These different works were composed at various periods of time, not in the fifteenth century, B.C., but in the ninth, seventh, sixth and fifth centuries; J. and E. being referred approximately to about 800 to 700 B.C.; D to about 650 to 625 B.C., and P. to about 525 to 425 B.C. According to the Graf theory, accepted by Kuenen, the Elohist documents were post-exilian, that is, they were written only five centuries or so before Christ. Genesis and Exodus as well as the Priestly Code, that is, Leviticus and part of Exodus and Numbers were also post-exilic. 3. These different works, moreover, represent different traditions of the national life of the Hebrews, and are at variance in most important particulars. 4. And, further. They conjecture that these four suppositive documents were not compiled and written by Moses, but were probably constructed somewhat after this fashion: For some reason, and at some time, and in some way, some one, no one knows who, or why, or when, or where, wrote J. Then someone else, no one knows who, or why, or when, or where, wrote another document, which is now called E. And then at a later time, the critics only know who, or why, or when, or where, an anonymous personage, whom we may call Redactor I, took in hand the reconstruction of these documents, introduced new material, harmonized the real and apparent discrepancies, and divided the inconsistent accounts of one event into two separate transactions. Then some time after this, perhaps one hundred years or more, no one knows who, or why, or when, or where, some anonymous personage wrote another document, which they style D. And after a while another anonymous author, no one knows who, or why, or when, or where, whom we will call Redactor II, took this in hand, compared it with J. E., revised J. E., with considerable freedom, and in addition introduced quite a body of new material. Then someone else, no one knows who, or why, or when, or where, probably, however, about 525, or perhaps 425, wrote P.; and then another anonymous Hebrew, whom we may call Redactor III, undertook to incorporate this with the triplicated composite J. E. D., with what they call redactional additions and insertions. (Green, page 88, cf. Sayce, Early History of the Hebrews, pages 100-105). It may be well to state at this point that this is not an exaggerated statement of the Higher critical position. On the contrary, we have given here what has been described as a position "established by proofs, valid and cumulative" and "representing the most sober scholarship." The more advanced continental Higher Critics, Green says, distinguish the writers of the primary sources according to the supposed elements as J1 and J2, E1 and E2, P1, P2 and P3, and D1 and D2, nine different originals in all. The different Redactors, technically described by the symbol R., are Rj., who combined J. and E.; Rd., who added D. to J. E., and Rh., who completed the Hexateuch by combining P. with J. E. D. (H. C. of the Pentateuch, page 88). A Discredited Pentateuch 5. These four suppositive documents are, moreover, alleged to be internally inconsistent and undoubtedly incomplete. How far they are incomplete they do not agree. How much is missing and when, where, how and by whom it was removed; whether it was some thief who stole, or copyist who tampered, or editor who falsified, they do not declare. 6. In this redactory process no limit apparently is assigned by the critic to the work of the redactors. With an utter irresponsibility of freedom it is declared that they inserted misleading statements with the purpose of reconciling incompatible traditions; that they amalgamated what should have been distinguished, and sundered that which should have amalgamated. In one word, it is an axiomatic principle of the divisive hypothesizers that the redactors "have not only misapprehended, but misrepresented the originals" (Green, page 170). They were animated by "egotistical motives." They confused varying accounts, and erroneously ascribed them to different occasions. They not only gave false and colored impressions; they destroyed valuable elements of the suppositive documents and tampered with the dismantled remnant. 7. And worst of all. The Higher Critics are unanimous in the conclusion that these documents contain three species of material: * (a) The probably true. * (b) The certainly doubtful. * (c) The positively spurious. "The narratives of the Pentateuch are usually trustworthy, though partly mythical and legendary. The miracles recorded were the exaggerations of a later age." (Davidson, Introduction, page 131). The framework of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, says George Adam Smith in his "Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament," is woven from the raw material of myth and legend. He denies their historical character, and says that he can find no proof in archaeology for the personal existence of characters of the Patriarchs themselves. Later on, however, in a fit of apologetic repentance he makes the condescending admission that it is extremely probable that the stories of the Patriarchs have at the heart of them historical elements. (Pages 90-106). Such is the view of the Pentateuch that is accepted as conclusive by "the sober scholarship" of a number of the leading theological writers and professors of the day. It is to this the Higher Criticism reduces what the Lord Jesus called the writings of Moses. A Discredited Old Testament As to the rest of the Old Testament, it may be briefly said that they have dealt with it with an equally confusing hand. The time-honored traditions of the Catholic Church are set at naught, and its thesis of the relation of inspiration and genuineness and authenticity derided. As to the Psalms, the harp that was once believed to be the harp of David was not handled by the sweet Psalmist of Israel, but generally by some anonymous post-exilist; and Psalms that are ascribed to David by the omniscient Lord Himself are daringly attributed to some anonymous Maccabean. Ecclesiastes, written, nobody knows when, where, and by whom, possesses just a possible grade of inspiration, though one of the critics "of cautious and well-balanced judgment" denies that it contains any at all. "Of course," says another, "it is not really the work of Solomon." (Driver, Introduction, page 470). The Song of songs is an idyll of human love, and nothing more. There is no inspiration in it; it contributes nothing to the sum of revelation. (Sanday, page 211). Esther, too, adds nothing to the sum of revelation, and is not historical (page 213). Isaiah was, of course, written by a number of authors. The first part, chapters 1 to 40, by Isaiah; the second by a Deutero-Isaiah and a number of anonymous authors. As to Daniel, it was a purely pseudonymous work, written probably in the second century B.C. With regard to the New Testament: The English writing school have hitherto confined themselves mainly to the Old Testament, but if Professor Sanday, who passes as a most conservative and moderate representative of the critical school, can be taken as a sample, the historical books are "yet in the first instance strictly histories put together by ordinary historical methods, or, in so far as the methods on which they are Composed, are not ordinary, due rather to the peculiar circumstances of the case, and not to influences, which need be specially described as supernatural" (page 399). The Second Epistle of Peter is pseudonymous, its name counterfeit, and, therefore, a forgery, just as large parts of Isaiah, Zechariah and Jonah, and Proverbs were supposititious and quasi-fraudulent documents. This is a straightforward statement of the position taken by what is called the moderate school of Higher Criticism. It is their own admitted position, according to their own writings. The difficulty, therefore, that presents itself to the average man of today is this: How can these Critics still claim to believe in the Bible as the Christian Church has ever believed it? A Discredited Bible There can be no doubt that Christ and His Apostles accepted the whole of the Old Testament as inspired in every portion of every part; from the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Malachi, all was implicitly believed to be the very Word of God Himself. And ever since their day the view of the Universal Christian Church has been that the Bible is the Word of God; as the twentieth article of the Anglican Church terms it, it is God's Word written. The Bible as a whole is inspired. "All that is written is God-in-spired." That is, the Bible does not merely contain the Word of God; it is the Word of God. It contains a revelation. "All is not revealed, but all is inspired." This is the conservative and, up to the present day, the almost universal view of the question. There are, it is well known, many theories of inspiration. But whatever view or theory of inspiration men may hold, plenary, verbal, dynamical; mechanical, superintendent, or governmental, they refer either to the inspiration of the men who wrote, or to the inspiration of what is written. In one word, they imply throughout the work of God the Holy Ghost, and are bound up with the concomitant ideas of authority, veracity, reliability, and truth divine. (The two strongest works on the subject from this standpoint are by Gaussen and Lee. Gaussen on the Theopneustia is published in an American edition by Hitchcock and Walden, of Cincinnati; and Lee on the Inspiration of Holy Scripture is published by Rivingtons. Bishop Wordsworth, on the "Inspiration of the Bible," is also very scholarly and strong. Rivingtons, 1875). The Bible can no longer, according to the critics, be viewed in this light. It is not the Word in the old sense of that term. It is not the Word of God in the sense that all of it is given by the inspiration of God. It simply contains the Word of God. In many of its parts it is just as uncertain as any other human book. It is not even reliable history. Its records of what it does narrate as ordinary history are full of falsifications and blunders. The origin of Deuteronomy, e.g., was "a consciously refined falsification." (See Moller, page 207). The Real Difficulty But do they still claim to believe that the Bible is inspired? Yes. That is, in a measure. As Dr. Driver says in his preface, "Criticism in the hands of Christian scholars does not banish or destroy the inspiration of the Old Testament; it pre-supposes it." That is perfectly true. Criticism in the hands of Christian scholars is safe. But the preponderating scholarship in Old Testament criticism has admittedly not been in the hands of men who could be described as Christian scholars. It has been in the hands of men who disavow belief in God and Jesus Christ Whom He sent. Criticism in the hands of Horne and Hengstenberg does not banish or destroy the inspiration of the Old Testament. But, in the hands of Spinoza, and Graf, and Wellhausen, and Kuenen, inspiration is neither pre-supposed nor possible. Dr. Briggs and Dr. Smith may avow earnest avowals of belief in the Divine character of the Bible, and Dr. Driver may assert that critical conclusions do not touch either the authority or the inspiration of the Scriptures of the Old Testament, but from first to last, they treat God's Word with an indifference almost equal to that of the Germans. They certainly handle the Old Testament as if it were ordinary literature. And in all their theories they seem like plastic wax in the hands of the rationalistic moulders. But they still claim to believe in Biblical inspiration. A Revolutionary Theory Their theory of inspiration must be, then, a very different one from that held by the average Christian. In the Bampton Lectures for 1903, Professor Sanday of Oxford, as the exponent of the later and more conservative school of Higher Criticism, came out with a theory which he termed the inductive theory. It is not easy to describe what is fully meant by this, but it appears to mean the presence of what they call "a divine element" in certain parts of the Bible. What that really is he does not accurately declare. The language always vapors off into the vague and indefinite, whenever he speaks of it. In what books it is he does not say. "It is present in different books and parts of books in different degrees." "In some the Divine element is at the maximum; in others at the minimum." He is not always sure. He is sure it is not in Esther, in Ecclesiastes, in Daniel. If it is in the historical books, it is there as conveying a religious lesson rather than as a guarantee of historic veracity, rather as interpreting than as narrating. At the same time, if the histories as far as textual construction was concerned were "natural processes carried out naturally," it is difficult to see where the Divine or supernatural element comes in. It is an inspiration which seems to have been devised as a hypothesis of compromise. In fact, it is a tenuous, equivocal, and indeterminate something, the amount of which is as indefinite as its quality. (Sanday, pages 100-398; cf. Driver, Preface, ix.) But its most serious feature is this: It is a theory of inspiration that completely overturns the old-fashioned ideas of the Bible and its unquestioned standard of authority and truth. For whatever this so-called Divine element is, it ap- pears to be quite consistent with defective argument, incorrect interpretation, if not what the average man would call forgery or falsification. It is, in fact, revolutionary. To accept it the Christian will have to completely readjust his ideas of honor and honesty, of falsehood and misrepresentation. Men used to think that forgery was a crime, and falsification a sin. Pusey, in his great work on Daniel, said that "to write a book under the name of another and to give it out to be his is in any case a forgery, dishonest in itself and destructive of all trustworthiness." (Pusey, Lectures on Daniel, page 1). But according to the Higher Critical position, all sorts of pseudonymous material, and not a little of it believed to be true by the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, is to be found in the Bible, and no antecedent objection ought to be taken to it. Men used to think that inaccuracy would affect reliability and that proven inconsistencies would imperil credibility. But now it appears that there may not only be mistakes and errors on the part of copyists, but forgeries, intentional omissions, and misinterpretations on the part of authors, and yet, marvelous to say, faith is not to be destroyed, but to be placed on a firmer foundation. (Sanday, page 122). They have, according to Briggs, enthroned the Bible in a higher position than ever before. (Briggs, "The Bible, Church and Reason," page 149). Sanday admits that there is an element in the Pentateuch derived from Moses himself. An element! But he adds, "However much we may believe that there is a genuine Mosaic foundation in the Pentateuch, it is difficult to lay the finger upon it, and to say with confidence, here Moses himself is speaking." "The strictly Mosaic element in the Pentateuch must be indeterminate." "We ought not, perhaps, to use them (the visions of Exodus 3 and 33) without reserve for Moses himself" (pages 172-174-176). The ordinary Christian, however, will say: Surely if We deny the Mosaic authorship and the unity of the Pentateuch we must undermine its credibility. The Pentateuch claims to be Mosaic. It was the universal tradition of the Jews. It is expressly stated in nearly all the subsequent books of the Old Testament. The Lord Jesus said so most explicitly. (John 5:46-47). If Not Moses, Who? For this thought must surely follow to the thoughtful man: If Moses did not write the Books of Moses, who did? If there were three or four, or six, or nine authorized original writers, why not fourteen, or sixteen, or nineteen? And then another and more serious thought must follow that. Who were these original writers, and who originated them? If there were manifest evidences of alterations, manipulations, inconsistencies and omissions by an indeterminate number of unknown and unknowable and undateable redactors, then the question arises, who were these redactors, and how far had they authority to redact, and who gave them this authority? If the redactor was the writer, was he an inspired writer, and if he was inspired, what was the degree of his inspiration; was it partial, plenary, inductive or indeterminate. This is a question of questions: What is the guarantee of the inspiration of the redactor, and who is its guarantor? Moses we know, and Samuel we know, and Daniel we know, but ye anonymous and pseudonymous, who are ye? The Pentateuch, with Mosaic authorship, as Scriptural, divinely accredited, is upheld by Catholic tradition and scholarship, and appeals to reason. But a mutilated cento or scrap-book of anonymous compilations, with its pre-and post-exilic redactors and redactions, is confusion worse confounded. At least that is the way it appears to the average Christian. He may not be an expert in philosophy or theology, but his common sense must surely be allowed its rights. And that is the way it appears, too, to such an illustrious scholar and critic as Dr. Emil Reich. (Contemporary Review, April, 1905, page 515). It is not possible then to accept the Kuenen-Wellhausen theory of the structure of the Old Testament and the Sanday-Driver theory of its inspiration without undermining faith in the Bible as the Word of God. For the Bible is either the Word of God, or it is not. The children of Israel were the children of the Only Living and True God, or they were not. If their Jehovah was a mere tribal deity, and their religion a human evolution; if their sacred literature was natural with mythical and pseudonymous admixtures; then the Bible is dethroned from its throne as the exclusive, authoritative, Divinely inspired Word of God. It simply ranks as one of the sacred books of the ancients with similar claims of inspiration and revelation. Its inspiration is an indeterminate quantity and any man has a right to subject it to the judgment of his own critical insight, and to receive just as much of it as inspired as he or some other person believes to be inspired. When the contents have passed through the sieve of his judgment the inspired residuum may be large, or the inspired residuum may be small. If he is a conservative critic it may be fairly large, a maximum; if he is a more advanced critic it may be fairly small, a minimum. It is simply the ancient literature of a religious people containing somewhere the Word of God; "a revelation of no one knows what, made no one knows how, and lying no one knows where, except that it is to be somewhere between Genesis and Revelation, but probably to the exclusion of both." (Pusey, Daniel, xxviii.) No Final Authority Another serious consequence of the Higher Critical movement is that it threatens the Christian system of doctrine and the whole fabric of systematic theology. For up to the present time any text from any part of the Bible was accepted as a proof-text for the establishment of any truth of Christian teaching, and a statement from the Bible was considered an end of controversy. The doctrinal systems of the Anglican, the Presbyterian, the Methodist and other Churches are all based upon the view that the Bible contains the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. (See 39 Articles Church of England, vi, ix, xx, etc.) They accept as an axiom that the Old and New Testaments in part, and as a whole, have been given and sealed by God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. All the doctrines of the Church of Christ, from the greatest to the least, are based on this. All the proofs of the doctrines are based also on this. No text was questioned; no book was doubted; all Scripture was received by the great builders of our theological systems with that unassailable belief in the inspiration of its texts, which was the position of Christ and His apostles. But now the Higher Critics think they have changed all that. They claim that the science of criticism has dispossessed the science of systematic theology. Canon Henson tells us that the day has gone by for proof-texts and harmonies. It is not enough now for a theologian to turn to a book in the Bible, and bring out a text in order to establish a doctrine. It might be in a book, or in a portion of the Book that the German critics have proved to be a forgery, or an anachronism. It might be in Deuteronomy, or in Jonah, or in Daniel, and in that case, of course, it would be out of the question to accept it. The Christian system, therefore, will have to be re-adjusted if not revolutionized, every text and chapter and book will have to be inspected and analyzed in the light of its date, and origin, and circumstances, and authorship, and so on, and only after it has passed the examining board of the modern Franco-Dutch-German criticism will it be allowed to stand as a proof-text for the establishment of any Christian doctrine. But the most serious consequence of this theory of the structure and inspiration of the Old Testament is that it overturns the juridic authority of our Lord Jesus Christ. What of Christ's Authority? The attitude of Christ to the Old Testament Scriptures must determine ours. He is God. He is truth. His is the final voice. He is the Supreme Judge. There is no appeal from that court. Christ Jesus the Lord believed and affirmed the historic veracity of the whole of the Old Testament writings implicitly (Luke 24:44). And the Canon, or collection of Books of the Old Testament, was precisely the same in Christ's time as it is today. And further. Christ Jesus our Lord believed and emphatically affirmed the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch (Matthew 5:17-18; Mark 12:26-36; Luke 16:31; John 5:46-47). That is true, the critics say. But, then, neither Christ nor His Apostles were critical scholars! Perhaps not in the twentieth century sense of the term. But, as a German scholar said, if they were not critici doctores, they were doctores veritatis who did not come into the world to fortify popular errors by their authority. But then they say, Christ's knowledge as man was limited. He grew in knowledge (Luke 2:52). Surely that implies His ignorance. And if His ignorance, why not His ignorance with regard to the science of historical criticism? (Gore, Lux Mundi, page 360; Briggs, H. C. of Hexateuch, page 28). Or even if He did know more than His age, He probably spoke as He did in accommodation with the ideas of His contemporaries! (Briggs, page 29). In fact, what they mean is practically that Jesus did know perfectly well that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, but allowed His disciples to believe that Moses did, and taught His disciples that Moses did, simply because He did not want to upset their simple faith in the whole of the Old Testament as the actual and authoritative and Divinely revealed Word of God. (See Driver, page 12). Or else, that Jesus imagined, like any other Jew of His day, that Moses wrote the books that bear his name, and believed, with the childlike Jewish belief of His day, the literal inspiration, Divine authority and historic veracity of the Old Testament, and yet was completely mistaken, ignorant of the simplest facts, and wholly in error. In other words, He could not tell a forgery from an original, or a pious fiction from a genuine document. (The analogy of Jesus speaking of the sun rising as an instance of the theory of accommodation is a very different thing). This, then, is their position: Christ knew the views He taught were false, and yet taught them as truth. Or else, Christ didn't know they were false and believed them to be true when they were not true. In either case the Blessed One is dethroned as True God and True Man. If He did not know the books to be spurious when they were spurious and the fables and myths to be mythical and fabulous; if He accepted legendary tales as trustworthy facts, then He was not and is not omniscient. He was not only intellectually fallible, He was morally fallible; for He was not true enough "to miss the ring of truth" in Deuteronomy and Daniel. And further. If Jesus did know certain of the books to be lacking in genuineness, if not spurious and pseudonymous; if He did know the stories of the Fall and Lot and Abraham and Jonah and Daniel to be allegorical and imaginary, if not unverifiable and mythical, then He was neither trustworthy nor good. "If it were not so, I would have told you." We feel, those of us who love and trust Him, that if these stories were not true, if these books were a mass of historical unveracities, if Abraham was an eponymous hero, if Joseph was an astral myth, that He would have told us so. It is a matter that concerned His honor as a Teacher as well as His knowledge as our God. As Canon Liddon has conclusively pointed out, if our Lord was unreliable in these historic and documentary matters of inferior value, how can He be followed as the teacher of doctrinal truth and the revealer of God? (John 3:12). (Liddon, Divinity of Our Lord, pages 475-480). After the Kenosis Men say in this connection that part of the humiliation of Christ was His being touched with the infirmities of our human ignorance and fallibilities. They dwell upon the so-called doctrine of the Kenosis, or the emptying, as explaining satisfactorily His limitations. But Christ spoke of the Old Testament Scriptures after His resurrection. He affirmed after His glorious resurrection that "all things must be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms Concerning Me" (Luke 24:44). This was not a statement made during the time of the Kenosis, when Christ was a mere boy, or a youth, or a mere Jew after the flesh (1 Corinthians 13:11). It is the statement of Him Who has been declared the Son of God with power. It is the Voice that is final and overwhelming. The limitations of the Kenosis are all abandoned now, and yet the Risen Lord not only does not give a shadow of a hint that any statement in the Old Testament is inaccurate or that any portion thereof needed revision or correction, not only most solemnly declared that those books which we receive as the product of Moses were indeed the books of Moses, but authorized with His Divine imprimatur the whole of the Old Testament Scriptures from beginning to end. There are, however, two or three questions that must be raised, as they will have to be faced by every student of present day problems. The first is this: Is not refusal of the higher critical conclusions mere opposition to light and progress and the position of ignorant alarmists and obscurantists? Not Obscurantists It is very necessary to have our minds made perfectly clear on this point, and to remove not a little dust of misunderstanding. The desire to receive all the light that the most fearless search for truth by the highest scholarship can yield is the desire of every true believer in the Bible. No really healthy Christian mind can advocate obscurantism. The obscurant who opposes the investigation of scholarship, and would throttle the investigators, has not the spirit of Christ. In heart and attitude he is a Mediaevalist. To use Bushnell's famous apologue, he would try to stop the dawning of the day by wringing the neck of the crowing cock. No one wants to put the Bible in a glass case. But it is the duty of every Christian who belongs to the noble army of truth-lovers to test all things and to hold fast that which is good. He also has rights even though he is, technically speaking, unlearned, and to accept any view that contradicts his spiritual judgment simply because it is that of a so-called scholar, is to abdicate his franchise as a Christian and his birthright as a man. (See that excellent little work by Professor Kennedy, "Old Testament Criticism and the Rights of the Unlearned," F. H. Revell). And in his right of private judgment he is aware that while the privilege of investigation is conceded to all, the conclusions of an avowedly prejudiced scholarship must be subjected to a peculiarly searching analysis. The most ordinary Bible reader is learned enough to know that the investigation of the Book that claims to be supernatural by those who are avowed enemies of all that is supernatural, and the study of subjects that can be understood only by men of humble and contrite heart by men who are admittedly irreverent in spirit, must certainly be received with caution. (See Parker's striking work, "None Like It," F. H. Revell, and his last address). The Scholarship Argument The second question is also serious: Are we not bound to receive these views when they are advanced, not by rationalists, but by Christians, and not by ordinary Christians, but by men of superior and unchallengeable scholarship? There is a widespread idea among younger men that the so-called Higher Critics must be followed because their scholarship settles the questions. This is a great mistake. No expert scholarship can settle questions that require a humble heart, a believing mind and a reverent spirit, as well as a knowledge of Hebrew and philology; and no scholarship can be relied upon as expert which is manifestly characterized by a biased judgment, a curious lack of knowledge of human nature, and a still more curious deference to the views of men with a prejudice against the supernatural. No one can read such a suggestive and sometimes even such an inspiring writer as George Adam Smith without a feeling of sorrow that he has allowed this German bias of mind to lead him into such an assumption of infallibility in many of his positions and statements. It is the same with Driver. With a kind of sic volo sic jubeo airy ease he introduces assertions and propositions that would really require chapter after chapter, if not even volume after volume, to substantiate. On page after page his "must be," and "could not possibly be," and "could certainly not," extort from the average reader the natural exclamation: "But why?" "Why not?" "Wherefore?" "On what grounds?" "For what reason?" "Where are the proofs?" But of proofs or reason there is not a trace. The reader must be content with the writer's assertions. It reminds one, in fact, of the "we may well suppose," and "perhaps" of the Darwinian who offers as the sole proof of the origination of a different species his random supposition! ("Modern Ideas of Evolution," Dawson, pages 53-55). A Great Mistake There is a widespread idea also among the younger students that because Graf and Wellhausen and Driver and Cheyne are experts in Hebrew that, therefore, their deductions as experts in language must be received. This, too, is a mistake. There is no such difference in the Hebrew of the so-called original sources of the Hexateuch as some suppose. The argument from language, says Professor Bissell ("Introduction to Genesis in Colors," page vii), requires extreme care for obvious reasons. There is no visible cleavage line among the supposed sources. Any man of ordinary intelligence can see at once the vast difference between the English of Tennyson and Shakespeare, and Chaucer and Sir John de Mandeville. But no scholar in the world ever has or ever will be able to tell the dates of each and every book in the Bible by the style of the Hebrew. (See Sayce, "Early History of the Hebrews," page 109). The unchanging Orient knows nothing of the swift lingual variations of the Occident. Pusey, with his masterly scholarship, has shown how even the Book of Daniel, from the standpoint of philology, cannot possibly be a product of the time of the Maccabees. ("On Daniel," pages 23-59). The late Professor of Hebrew in the University of Toronto, Professor Hirschfelder, in his very learned work on Genesis, says: "We would search in vain for any peculiarity either in the language or the sense that would indicate a two-fold authorship." As far as the language of the original goes, "the most fastidious critic could not possibly detect the slightest peculiarity that would indicate it to be derived from two sources" (page 72). Dr. Emil Reich also, in his "Bankruptcy of the Higher Criticism," in the Contemporary Review, April, 1905, says the same thing. Not All on One Side A third objection remains, a most serious one. It is that all the scholarship is on one side. The old-fashioned conservative views are no longer maintained by men with pretension to scholarship. The only people who oppose the Higher Critical views are the ignorant, the prejudiced, and the illiterate. (Briggs' "Bible, Church and Reason," pages 240-247). This, too, is a matter that needs a little clearing up. In the first place it is not fair to assert that the upholders of what are called the old-fashioned or traditional views of the Bible are opposed to the pursuit of scientific Biblical investigation. It is equally unfair to imagine that their opposition to the views of the Continental school is based upon ignorance and prejudice. What the Conservative school oppose is not Biblical criticism, but Biblical criticism by rationalists. They do not oppose the conclusions of Wellhausen and Kuenen because they are experts and scholars; they oppose them because the Biblical criticism of rationalists and unbelievers can be neither expert nor scientific. A criticism that is characterized by the most arbitrary conclusions from the most spurious assumptions has no right to the word scientific. And further. Their adhesion to the traditional views is not only conscientious but intelligent. They believe that the old-fashioned views are as scholarly as they are Scriptural. It is the fashion in some quarters to cite the imposing list of scholars on the side of the German school, and to sneeringly assert that there is not a scholar to stand up for the old views of the Bible. This is not the case. Hengstenberg of Basle and Berlin, was as profound a scholar as Eichhorn, Vater or De Wette; and Keil or Kurtz, and Zahn and Rupprecht were competent to compete with Reuss and Kuenen. Wilhelm Moller, who confesses that he was once "immovably convinced of the irrefutable correctness of the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis," has revised his former radical conclusions on the ground of reason and deeper research as a Higher Critic; and Professor Winckler, who has of late overturned the assured and settled results of the Higher Critics from the foundations, is, according to Orr, the leading Orientalist in Germany, and a man of enormous learning. Sayce, the Professor of Assyriology at Oxford, has a right to rank as an expert and scholar with Cheyne, the Oriel Professor of Scripture Interpretation. Margoliouth, the Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford, as far as learning is concerned, is in the same rank with Driver, the Regius Professor of Hebrew, and the conclusion of this great scholar with regard to one of the widely vaunted theories of the radical school, is almost amusing in its terseness. "Is there then nothing in the splitting theories," he says in summarizing a long line of defense of the unity of the book of Isaiah; "is there then nothing in the splitting theories? To my mind, nothing at all!" ("Lines of Defense," page 136). Green and Bissell are as able, if not abler, scholars than Robertson Smith and Professor Briggs, and both of these men, as a result of the widest and deepest research, have come to the conclusion that the theories of the Germans are unscientific, unhistorical, and unscholarly. The last words of Professor Green in his very able work on the "Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch" are most suggestive. "Would it not be wiser for them to revise their own ill-judged alliance with the enemies of evangelical truth, and inquire whether Christ's view of the Old Testament may not, after all, be the true view?" Yes. That, after all, is the great and final question. We trust we are not ignorant. We feel sure we are not malignant. We desire to treat no man unfairly, or set down aught in malice. But we desire to stand with Christ and His Church. If we have any prejudice, we would rather be prejudiced against rationalism. If we have any bias, it must be against a teaching which unsteadies heart and unsettles faith. Even at the expense of being thought behind the times, we prefer to stand with our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in receiving the Scriptures as the Word of God, without objection and without a doubt. A little learning, and a little listening to rationalistic theorizers and sympathizers may incline us to uncertainty; but deeper study and deeper research will incline us as it inclined Hengstenberg and Moller, to the profoundest conviction of the authority and authenticity of the Holy Scriptures, and to cry, "Thy word is very pure; therefore, Thy servant loveth it." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 57: - THE MOSAIC AUTHORSHIP OF THE PENTATEUCH ======================================================================== The Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch By Professor George Frederick Wright, D. D., LL. D., Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio During the last quarter of a century an influential school of critics has deluged the world with articles and volumes attempting to prove that the Pentateuch did not originate during the time of Moses, and that most of the laws attributed to him did not come into existence until several centuries after his death, and many of them not till the time of Ezekiel. By these critics the patriarchs are relegated to the realm of myth or dim legend and the history of the Pentateuch generally is discredited. In answering these destructive contentions and defending the history which they discredit we can do no better than to give a brief summary of the arguments of Mr. Harold M. Wiener, a young orthodox Jew, who is both a well established barrister in London, and a scholar of the widest attainments. What he has written upon the subject during the last ten years would fill a thousand octavo pages; while our condensation must be limited to less than twenty. In approaching the subject it comes in place to consider 1. The Burden of Proof The Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch has until very recent times been accepted without question by both Jews and Christians. Such acceptance, coming down to us in unbroken line from the earliest times of which we have any information, gives it the support of what is called general consent, which, while perhaps not absolutely conclusive, compels those who would discredit it to produce incontrovertible opposing evidence. But the evidence which the critics produce in this case is wholly circumstantial, consisting of inferences derived from a literary analysis of the documents and from the application of a discredited evolutionary theory concerning the development of human institutions. 34 2. Failure of the Argument from Literary Analysis (a) Evidence of Textual Criticism. It is an instructive commentary upon the scholarly pretensions of this whole school of critics that, without adequate examination of the facts, they have based their analysis of the Pentateuch upon the text which is found in our ordinary Hebrew Bibles. While the students of the New Testament have expended an immense amount of effort in the comparison of manuscripts, and versions, and quotations to determine the original text, these Old Testament critics have done scarcely anything in that direction. This is certainly a most unscholarly proceeding, yet it is admitted to be the fact by a higher critic of no less eminence than Principal J. Skinner of Cambridge, England, who has been compelled to write: "I do not happen to know of any work which deals exhaustively with the subject, the determination of the original Hebrew texts from the critical standpoints." Now the fact is that while the current Hebrew text, known as the Massoretic, was not established until about the seventh century A.D., we have abundant material with which to compare it and carry us back to that current a thousand years nearer the time of the original composition of the books. (1) The Greek translation known as the Septuagint was made from Hebrew manuscripts current two or three centuries before the Christian era. It is from this version that most of the quotations in the New Testament are made. Of the 350 quotations from the Old Testament in the New, 300, while differing more or less from the Massoretic text, do not differ materially from the Septuagint. (2) The Samaritans early broke away from the Jews and began the transmission of a Hebrew text of the Pentateuch on an independent line which has continued down to the present day. (3) Besides this three other Greek versions were made long before the establishment of the Massoretic text. The most important of these was one by Aquila, who was so punctilious that he transliterated the word Jehovah in the old Hebrew characters, instead of translating it by the Greek word meaning Lord as was done in the Septuagint. (4) Early Syriac material often provides much information concerning the original Hebrew text. (5) The translation into Latin known as the Vulgate preceded the Massoretic text by some centuries, and was made by Jerome, who was noted as a Hebrew scholar. But Augustine thought it sacrilegious not to be content with the Septuagint. All this material furnishes ample ground for correcting in minor particulars the current Hebrew text; and this can be done on well established scientific principles which largely eliminate conjectural emendations. This argument has been elaborated by a number of scholars, notably by Dahse, one of the most brilliant of Germany's younger scholars, first in the "Archiv fuer Religions-Wissenschaft" for 1903, pp. 305-319, and again in an article which will appear in the "Neue Kirchliche Zeitschrift" for this year; and he is following up his attack on the critical theories with an important book entitled, "Textkritische Materialien zur Hexateuchfrage," which will shortly be published in Germany. Although so long a time has elapsed since the publication of his first article on the subject, and in spite of the fact that it attracted world-wide attention and has often been referred to since, no German critic has yet produced an answer to it. In England and America Dr. Redpath and Mr. Wiener have driven home the argument. (See Wiener's "Essays in Pentateuchal Criticism", and "Origin of the Pentateuch.") On bringing the light of this evidence to bear upon the subject some remarkable results are brought out, the most important of which relate to the very foundation upon which the theories concerning the fragmentary character of the Pentateuch are based. The most prominent clue to the documentary division is derived from the supposed use by different writers of the two words, "Jehovah" and "Elohim," to designate the deity. Jehovah was translated in the Septuagint by a word meaning "Lord", which appears in our authorized version in capitalized form, "LORD." The revisers of 1880, however, have simply transliterated the word, so that "Jehovah" usually appears in the revision wherever "LORD" appeared in the authorized version. Elohim is everywhere translated by the general word for deity, "God." Now the original critical division into documents was made on the supposition that several hundred years later than Moses there arose two schools of writers, one of which, in Judah, used the word "Jehovah" when they spoke of the deity, and the other, in the Northern Kingdom, "Elohim." And so the critics came to designate one set of passages as belonging to the J document and the other to the E document. These they supposed had been cut up and pieced together by a later editor so as to make the existing continuous narrative. But when, as frequently occurred, one of these words is found in passages where it is thought the other word should have been used, it is supposed, wholly on theoretical grounds, that a mistake had been made by the editor, or, as they call him, the "redactor," and so with no further ceremony the objection is arbitrarily removed without consulting the direct textual evidence. But upon comparing the early texts, versions, and quotations it appears that the words, "Jehovah" and "Elohim," were so nearly synonymous that there was originally little uniformity in their use. Jehovah is the Jewish name of the deity, and Elohim the title. The use of the words is precisely like that of the English in referring to their king or the Americans to their president. In ordinary usage, "George V.", "the king," and "King George" are synonymous in their meaning. Similarly "Taft," "the president," and "President Taft" are used by Americans during his term of office to indicate an identical concept. So it was with the Hebrews. "Jehovah" was the name, "Elohim" the title, and "Jehovah Elohim"-Lord God-signified nothing more. Now on consulting the evidence, it appears that while in Genesis and the first three chapters of Exodus (where this clue was supposed to be most decisive) Jehovah occurs in the Hebrew text 148 times, in 118 of these places other texts have either Elohim or Jehovah Elohim. In the same section, while Elohim alone occurs 179 times in the Hebrew, in 49 of the passages one or the other designation takes its place; and in the second and third chapters of Genesis where the Hebrew text has Jehovah Elohim (LORD God) 23 times, there is only one passage in which all the texts are unanimous on this point. These facts, which are now amply verified, utterly destroy the value of the clue which the higher critics have all along ostentatiously put forward to justify their division of the Pentateuch into conflicting E and J documents, and this the critics themselves are now compelled to admit. The only answer which they are able to give is in Dr. Skinner's words that the analysis is correct even if the Clue which led to it be false, adding "even if it were proved to be so altogether fallacious, it would not be the first time that a wrong clue has led to true results." On further examination, in the light of present knowledge (as Wiener and Dahse abundantly show), legitimate criticism removes a large number of the alleged difficulties which are put forward by higher critics and renders of no value many of the supposed clues to the various documents. We have space to notice but one or two of these. In the Massoretic text of Exodus 18:6 we read that Jethro says to Moses, "I thy father-in-law Jethro am come," while in the seventh verse it is said that Moses goes out to meet his father-in-law and that they exchange greetings and then comeb into the tent. But how could Jethro speak to Moses before they had had a meeting? The critics say that this confusion arises from the bungling patchwork of an editor who put two discordant accounts together without attempting to cover up the discrepancy. But scientific textual criticism completely removes the difficulty. The Septuagint, the old Syriac version, and a copy of the Samaritan Pentateuch, instead of "I thy father-in-law Jethro am come", read, "And one said unto Moses, behold thy father-in-law Jethro" comes. Here the corruption of a single letter in the Hebrew gives us "behold" in place of "I". When this is observed the objection disappears entirely. Again, in Genesis 39:20-22 Joseph is said to have been put into the prison "where the king's prisoners were bound. And the keeper of the prison" promoted him. But in Genesis 40:2-4; Genesis 40:7 it is said that he was "in ward of the house of the captain of the guard... and the captain of the guard" promoted Joseph. But this discrepancy disappears as soon as an effort is made to determine the original text. In Hebrew, "keeper of the prison" and "captain of the guard" both begin with the same word and in the passages where the "captain of the guard" causes trouble by its appearance, the Septuagint either omitted the phrase or read "keeper of the prison," in one case being supported also by the Vulgate. In many other instances also, attention to the original text removes the difficulties which have been manufactured from apparent discrepancies in the narrative. (b) Delusions of Literary Analysis. But even on the assumption of the practical inerrancy of the Massoretic text the arguments against the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch drawn from the literary analysis are seen to be the result of misdirected scholarship, and to be utterly fallacious. The long lists of words adduced as characteristic of the writers to whom the various parts of the Pentateuch are assigned are readily seen to be occasioned by the different objects aimed at in the portions from which the lists are made. Here, however, it is necessary to add that besides the E and J documents the critics suppose that Deuteronomy, which they designate "D", is an independent literary production written in the time of Josiah. Furthermore, the critics pretend to have discovered by their analysis another document which they Call the Priestly Code and designate as "P". This provides the groundwork of most of the narrative, and comprises the entire ceremonial portion of the law. This document, which, according to these critics did not come into existence till the time of Ezekiel, largely consists of special instructions to priests telling them how they were to perform the sacrifices and public ceremonials, and how they were to determine the character of contagious diseases and unsanitary conditions. Such instructions are necessarily made up largely of technical language such as is found in the libraries of lawyers and physicians, and it is easy enough to select from such literature a long list of words which are not to be found in contemporary literature dealing with the ordinary affairs of life and aiming directly at elevating the tone of morality and stimulating devotion to higher spiritual ends. Furthermore, an exhaustive examination (made by Chancellor Lias) of the entire list of words found in this P document attributed to the time of Ezekiel shows absolutely no indication of their belonging to an age later than that of Moses. The absurdity of the claims of the higher critics to having established the existence of different documents in the Pentateuch by a literary analysis has been shown by a variety of examples. The late Professor C. M. Mead, the most influential of the American revisers of the translation of the Old Testament, in order to exhibit the fallacy of their procedure, took the Book of Romans and arbitrarily divided it into three parts, according as the words "Christ Jesus," "Jesus," or "God" were used; and then by analysis showed that the lists of peculiar words characteristic of these three passages were even more remarkable than those drawn up by the destructive critics of the Pentateuch from the three leading fragments into which they had divided it. The argument from literary analysis after the methods of these critics would prove the composite character of the Epistle to the Romans as fully as that of the critics would prove the composite character of the Pentateuch. A distinguished scholar, Dr. Hayman, formerly head-master of Rugby, by a similar analysis demonstrated the composite character of Robert Burns' little poem addressed to a mouse, half of which is in the purest English and the other half in the broadest Scotch dialect. By the same process it would be easy to prove three Macaulays and three Miltons by selecting lists of words from the documents prepared by them when holding high political offices and from their various prose and poetical writings. 3. Misunderstanding Legal Forms and the Sacrificial System Another source of fallacious reasoning into which these critics have fallen arises from a misunderstanding of the sacrificial system of the Mosaic law. The destructive critics assert that there was no central sanctuary in Palestine until several centuries after its occupation under Joshua, and that at a later period all sacrifices by the people were forbidden except at the central place when offered by the priests, unless it was where there had been a special theophany. But these statements evince an entire misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the facts. In what the critics reckon as the oldest documents (J and E) the people were required three times a year to present themselves with sacrifices and offerings "at the house of the Lord? (Exodus 34:26; Exodus 23:19). Before the building of the temple this "house of the Lord was at Shiloh" (Joshua 18:1; Judges 18:31; 1 Samuel 2:24). The truth is that the destructive critics upon this point make a most humiliating mistake in repeatedly substituting "sanctuaries" for "altars," assuming that since there was a plurality of altars in the time of the Judges there was therefore a plurality of sanctuaries. They have completely misunderstood the permission given in Exodus 20:24 : "An altar of earth thou shalt make unto Me and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt offerings, and thy peace offerings, thy sheep, and thine oxen; in all places, A. V.; [in every place, R. V.], where I record My name I will come unto thee and I will bless thee. And if thou make Me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stones." In reading this passage we are likely to be misled by the erroneous translation. Where the revisers read in "every place" and the authorized version in "all places" the correct translation is "in all the place" or "in the whole place." The word is in the singular number and has a definite article before it. The whole place referred to is Palestine, the Holy Land, where sacrifices such as the patriarchs had offered were always permitted to laymen, provided they made use only of an altar of earth or unhewn stones which was kept free from the adornments and accessories characteristic of heathen altars. These lay sacrifices were recognized in Deuteronomy as well as in Exodus. (Deuteronomy 16:21). But altars of earth or unhewn stone, often used for the nonce only and having no connection with a temple of any sort, are not houses of God and will not become such on being called sanctuaries by critics several thousand years after they have fallen out of use. In accordance with this command and permission the Jews have always limited their sacrifices to the land of Palestine. When exiled to foreign lands the Jews to this day have ceased to offer sacrifices. It is true that an experiment was made of setting up a sacrificial system in Egypt for a time by a certain portion of the exiles; but, this was soon abandoned. Ultimately a synagogue system was established and worship outside of Palestine was limited to prayer and the reading of Scriptures. But besides the lay sacrifices which were continued from the patriarchal times and guarded against perversion, there were two other classes of offerings established by statute; namely, those individual offerings which were brought to the "house of God" at the central place of worship and offered with priestly assistance, and the national offerings described in Num 28ff. which were brought on behalf of the whole people and not of an individual. A failure to distinguish clearly between these three classes of sacrifices has led the critics into endless confusion, and error has arisen from their inability to understand legal terms and principles. The Pentateuch is not mere literature, but it contains a legal code. It is a product of statesmanship consisting of three distinct elements which have always been recognized by lawgivers; namely, the civil, the moral, and the ceremonial, or what Wiener calls the "jural laws," the "moral code" and "procedure." The jural laws are those the infractions of which can be brought before a court, such as "Thou shalt not remove thy neighbor's landmark." But "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" can be enforced only by public sentiment and Divine sanctions. The Book of Deuteronomy is largely occupied With the presentation of exhortations and motives, aiming to secure obedience to a higher moral code, and is in this largely followed by the prophets of the Old Dispensation and the preachers of the present day. The moral law supplements the civil law. The ceremonial law consists of directions to the priests for performing the various technical duties, and were of as little interest to the mass of people as are the legal and medical books of the present time. All these strata of the law were naturally and necessarily in existence at the same time. In putting them as successive Strata, with the ceremonial law last, the critics have made an egregious and misleading blunder. 4. The Positive Evidence Before proceeding to give in conclusion a brief summary of the circumstantial evidence supporting the ordinary belief in the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch it is important to define the term. By it we do not mean that Moses wrote all the Pentateuch with his own hand, or that there were no editorial additions made after his death. Moses was the author of the Pentateuchal Code, as Napoleon was of the code which goes under his name. Apparently the Book of Genesis is largely made up from existing documents, of which the history of the expedition of Amraphel in chapter 14 is a noted specimen; while the account of Moses' death, and a few other passages are evidently later editorial additions. But these are not enough to affect the general proposition. The Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch is supported by the following, among other weighty considerations: 1. The Mosaic era was a literary epoch in the world's history when such Codes were common. It would have been strange if such a leader had not produced a code of laws. The Tel-el-Amarna tablets and the Code of Hammurabi testify to the literary habits of the time. 2. The Pentateuch so perfectly reflects the conditions in Egypt at the period assigned to it that it is difficult to believe that it was a literary product of a later age. 3. Its representation of life in the wilderness is so perfect and so many of its laws are adapted only to that life that it is incredible that literary men a thousand years later should have imagined it. 4. The laws themselves bear indubitable marks of adaptation to the stage of national development to which they are ascribed. It was the study of Maine's works on ancient law that set Mr. Wiener out upon his re-investigation of the subject. 5. The little use that is made of the sanctions of a future life is, as Bishop Warburton ably argued, evidence of an early date and of a peculiar Divine effort to guard the Israelites against the contamination of Egyptian ideas upon the subject. 6. The omission of the hen from the lists of clean and unclean birds is incredible if these lists were made late in the nation's history after that domestic fowl had been introduced from India. 7. As A. C. Robinson showed in Volume VII of this series it is incredible that there should have been no intimation in the Pentateuch of the existence of Jerusalem, or of the use of music in the liturgy, nor any use of the phrase, "Lord Of Hosts," unless the compilation had been completed before the time of David. 8. The subordination of the miraculous elements in the Pentateuch to the critical junctures in the nation's development is such as could be obtained only in genuine history. 9. The whole representation conforms to the true law of historical development. Nations do not rise by virtue of inherent resident forces, but through the struggles of great leaders enlightened directly from on high or by contact with others who have already been enlightened. The defender of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch has no occasion to quail in presence of the critics who deny that authorship and discredit its history. He may boldly challenge their scholarship, deny their conclusions, resent their arrogance, and hold on to his confidence in the well authenticated historical evidence which sufficed for those who first accepted it. Those who now at second hand are popularizing in periodicals, Sunday School lessons, and volumes of greater or less pretensions the errors of these critics must answer to their consciences as best they can, but they should be made to feel that they assume a heavy responsibility in putting themselves forward as leaders of the blind when they themselves are not able to see. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 58: - THE FALLACIES OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM ======================================================================== The Fallacies of the Higher Criticism By Franklin Johnson, D.D., LL.D. The errors of the higher criticism of which I shall write pertain to its very substance. Those (if a secondary character the limits of my space forbid me to consider. My discussion might be greatly expanded by additional masses of illustrative material, and hence I close it with a list of books which I recommend to persons who may wish to pursue the subject further. Definition of "The Higher Criticism." As an introduction to the fundamental fallacies of the higher criticism, let me state what the higher criticism is, and then what the higher critics tell us they have achieved. The name "the higher criticism" was coined by Eichhorn, who lived from 1752 to 1827. Zenos,* [* "The Elements of the Higher Criticism."] after careful consideration, adopts the definition of the name given by its author: "The discovery and verification of the facts regarding the origin, form and value of literary productions upon the basis of their internal characters." The higher critics are not blind to some other sources of argument. They refer to history where they can gain any polemic advantage by doing so. The background of the entire picture which they bring to us is the assumption that the hypothesis of evolution is true. But after all their chief appeal is to the supposed evidence of the documents themselves. Other names for the movement have been sought. It has been called the "historic view," on the assumption that it represents the real history of the Hebrew people as it must have unfolded itself by the orderly processes of human evolution. But, as the higher critics contradict the testimony of all the Hebrew historic documents which profess to be early, their ,heory might better, be called the "unhistoric view." The higher criticism has sometimes been called the "documentary hypothesis." But as all schools of criticism and all doctrines of inspiration are equally hospitable to the supposition that the biblical writers may have consulted documents, and may have quoted them, the higher criticism has no special right to this title. We must fall back, therefore, upon the name "the higher criticism" as the very best at our disposal, and upon the definition of it as chiefly an inspection of literary productions in order to ascertain their dates, their authors, and their value, as they themselves, interpreted in the light of the hypothesis of evolution, may yield the evidence. "ASSURED RESULTS" OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM. I turn now to ask what the higher critics profess to have found out by this method of study. The "assured results" on which they congratulate themselves are stated variously. In this country and England they commonly assume a form less radical than that given them in Germany, though sufficiently startling and destructive to arouse vigorous protest and a vigorous demand for the evidences, which, as we shall see, have not been produced and cannot be produced. The less startling form of the "assured results" usually announced in England and America may be owing to the brighter light of Christianity in these countries. Yet it should be noticed that There are higher critics in this country and England who go beyond the principal German representatives of the school in their zeal for the dethronement of the Old Testament and the New, in so far as these' holy books are presented to the world as the very Word of God, as a special revelation from heaven. The following statement from Zenos [Page 205] may serve to introduce us to the more moderate form of the "assured results" reached by the higher critics. It is concerning the analysis of the Pentateuch, or rather of the Hexateuch, the Book of Joshua being included in the survey. "The Hexateuch is a composite work whose origin and history may be traced in four distinct stages: (1) A writer designated as J. Jahvist, or Jehovist, or Judean prophetic historian, composed a history of the people of Israel about 800 B. C. (2) A writer designated as E. Elohist, or Ephraemite prophetic historian, wrote a similar work some fifty years later, or about 750 B. C. These two were used separately for a time, but were fused together into JE by a redactor [an editor], at the end of the seventh century. (3) A writer of different character wrote a book constituting the main portion of our present Deuteronomy during the reign of Josiah, or a short time before 621 B. C. This writer is designated.as D. To his work were added an introduction and an appendix, and with these accretions it was united with JE by a second redactor, constituting JED. (4) Contemporaneously with Ezekiel the ritual law began to be reduced to writing. It first appeared in three parallel forms. These were codified by Ezra not very much earlier than 444 B. C., and between that date and 280 B.C. it was joined with JED by a final redactor. Thus no less than nine or ten men were engaged in the production of the Hexateuch in its present form, and each one can be distinguished from the rest by his vocabulary and style and his religious point of view." Such is the analysis of the Pentateuch as usually stated in this country. But in Germany and Holland its chief representatives carry the division of labor much further. Wellhausen distributes the total task among twenty-two writers, and Kuenen among eighteen. Many others resolve each individual writer into a school of writers, and thus multiply the numbers enormously. There is no agreement among the higher critics concerning this analysis, and therefore the cautious learner may well wait till those who represent the theory tell him just what it is they desire him to learn. While some of the "assured results" are thus in doubt, certain things are matters of general agreement. Moses wrote little or nothing, if he ever existed. A large part of the Hexateuch consists of unhistorical legends. We may grant that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ishmael and Esau existed, or we may deny this. In either case, what is recorded of them is chiefly myth. These denials of the truth of the written records follow as matters of course from the late dating of the books, and the assumption that the writers could set down only the national tradition. They may have worked in part as collectors of written stories to be found here and there; but, if so, these written stories were not ancient, and they were diluted by stories transmitted orally. These fragments, whether written or oral, must have followed the general law of national traditions, and have presented a mixture of legendary chaff, with here and there a grain of historic truth to be sifted out by careful winnowing. Thus far of the Hexateuch. The Psalms are so full of references to the Hexateuch that they must have been written after it, and hence after the captivity, perhaps beginning about 400 B. C. David may possibly have written one or two of them, but probably he wrote none, and the strong conviction of the Hebrew people that he was their greatest hymn-writer was a total mistake. These revolutionary processes are carried into the New Testament, and that also is found to be largely untrustworthy as history, as doctrine, and as ethics, though a very good book, since it gives expression to high ideals, and thus ministers to the spiritual life. It may well have influence, but it can have no divine authority. The Christian reader should consider carefully this invasion of the New Testament by the higher criticism. So long as the movement was confined to the Old Testament many good men looked on with indifference, not reflecting that the Bible, though containing "many parts" by many writers, and though recording a progressive revelation, is, after all, one book. But the limits of the Old Testament have long since been overpassed by the higher critics, and it is demanded of us that we. abandon the immemorial teaching of the church concerning the entire volume. The picture of Christ which the New Testament sets before us is in many respects mistaken. The doctrines of primitive Christianity which it states and defends were well enough for the time, but have no value for us today except as they commend themselves to our independent judgment. Its moral precepts are fallible, and we should accept them or reject them freely, in accordance with the greater light of the twentieth century. Even Christ could err concerning ethical questions, and neither His commandments nor His example need constrain us. The foregoing may serve as an introductory sketch, all too brief, of the higher criticism, and as a basis of the discussion of its fallacies, now immediately to follow. First Fallacy: The Analysis of the Pentateuch. I. The first fallacy that I shall bring forward is its analysis of the Pentateuch. 1. We cannot fail to observe that these various documents and their various authors and editors are only imagined. As Green* [* "Moses and His Recent Critics," pages 104, 105] has said, "There is no evidence of the existence of these documents and redactors, and no pretense of any, apart from the critical tests which have determined the analysis. All tradition and all historical testimony as to the origin of the Pentateuch are against them. The burden of proof is wholly upon the critics. And this proof should be clear and convincing in proportion to the gravity and the revolutionary character of the consequences which it is proposed to base upon it." 2. Moreover, we know what can be done, or rather what cannot be done, in the analysis of composite literary productions. Some of the plays of Shakespeare are called his "mixed plays," because it is known that he collaborated with another author in their production. The very keenest critics have sought to separate his part in these plays from the rest, but they confess that the result is uncertainty and dissatisfaction. Coleridge professed to distinguish the passages contributed by Shakespeare by a process of feeling, but Macaulay pronounced this claim to be nonsense, and the entire effort, whether made by the analysis of phraseology and style, or by esthetic perceptions, is an admitted failure. And this in spite of the fact that the style of Shakespeare is one of the most peculiar and inimitable. The Anglican Prayer Book is another composite production which the higher critics have often been invited to analyze and distribute to its various sources. Some of the authors of these sources lived centuries apart. They are now well known from the studies of historians. But the Prayer Book itself does not reveal one of them, though its various vocabularies and styles have been carefully interrogated. Now if the analysis of the Pentateuch can lead to such certainties, why should not the analysis of Shakespeare and the Prayer Book do as much? How can men accomplish in a foreign language what they cannot accomplish in their own? How can they accomplish in a dead language what they cannot accomplish in a living language? How can they distinguish ten or eighteen or twenty-two collaborators in a small literary production, when they cannot distinguish two? These questions have been asked many times, but the higher critics have given no answer whatever, preferring the safety of a learned silence; "The oracles are dumb." 3. Much has been made of differences of vocabulary in the Pentateuch, and elaborate lists of words have been assigned to each of the supposed authors. But these distinctions fade away when subjected to careful scrutiny, and Driver admits that "the phraseological criteria * * * are slight." Orr, [The Problem of the Old Testament," page 230] who quotes this testimony, adds, "They are slight, in fact, to a degree of tenuity that often makes the recital of them appear like trifling." Second Fallacy: The Theory of Evolution Applied to Literature and Religion. II. A second fundamental fallacy of the higher criticism is its dependence on the theory of evolution as the explanation of the history of literature and of religion. The progress of the higher criticism towards its present sate has been rapid and assured since Vatke (Die Biblische Theologie Wissenschaftlich Dargestellt) discovered in the Hegelian philosophy of evolution a means of biblical criticism. The Spencerian philosophy of evolution, aided and reinforced by Darwinism, has added greatly to the confidence of the higher critics. As Vatke, one of the earlier members of the school, made the hypothesis of evolution the guiding presupposition of his critical work, so today does Professor Jordan (Biblical Criticism and Modern Thought," T. and T. Clark, 1909) the very latest representative of the higher criticism. "The nineteenth century," he declares, "has applied to the history of the documents of the Hebrew people its own magic word, evolution. The thought represented by that popular word has been found to have a real meaning in our investigations regarding the religious life and the theological beliefs of Israel." Thus, were there no hypothesis of evolution, there would be no higher criticism. The "assured results" of the higher criticism have been gained, after all, not by an inductive study of the biblical books to ascertain if they present a great variety of styles and vocabularies and religious points of view. They have been attained by assuming that the hypothesis of evolution is true, and that the religion of Israel must have unfolded itself by a process of natural evolution. They have been attained by an interested cross-examination of the biblical books to constrain them to admit the hypothesis of evolution. The imagination has played a large part in the process, and the so-called evidences upon which the "assured results" rest are largely imaginary. But the hypothesis of evolution, when applied to the history of literature, is a fallacy, leaving us utterly unable to account for Homer, or Dante, or Shakespeare, the greatest poets of the world, yet all of them writing in the dawn of the great literatures of the world. It is a fallacy when applied to the history of religion, leaving us utterly unable to account for Abraham and Moses and Christ, and requiring us to deny that they could have been such men as the Bible declares them to have been. The hypothesis is a fallacy when applied to- the history of the human race in general. Our race has made progress under the influence of supernatural revelation; but progress under the influence of supernatural revelation is one thing, and evolution is another. Buckle ["History of Civilization in England."] undertook to account for history by a thorough-going application of the hypothesis of evolution to its problems; but no historian today believes that he succeeded in his effort, and his work is universally regarded as a brilliant curiosity. The types of evolution advocated by different higher critics are widely different from one another, varying from the pure naturalism of Wellhausen to the recognition of some feeble rays of supernatural revelation; but the hypothesis of evolution in any form, when applied to human history, blinds us and renders us incapable of beholding the glory of God in its more signal manifestations. Third Fallacy: The Bible a Natural Book. III. A third fallacy of the higher critics is the doctrine concerning the Scriptures which they teach. If a consistent hypothesis of evolution is made the basis of our religious thinking, the Bible will be regarded as only a product of human nature working in the field of religious literature. It will be merely a natural book. If there are higher critics who recoil from this application of the hypothesis of evolution and who seek to modify it by recognizing some special evidences of the divine in the Bible, the inspiration of which they speak rises but little higher than the providential guidance of the writers. The church doctrine of the full inspiration of the Bible is almost never held by the higher critics of any class, even of the more believing. Here and there we may discover one and another who try to save some fragments of the church doctrine, but they are few and far between, and the sal-age to which they cling is so small and poor that it is scarcely worth while. Throughout their ranks the storm of opposition to the supernatural in all its forms is so fierce as to leave little place for the faith of the church that the Bible is the very Word of God to man. But the fallacy of this denial is evident to every believer who reads the Bible with an open mind. He knows by an immediate consciousness that it is the product of the Holy Spirit. As the sheep know the voice of the shepherd, so the mature Christian knows that the Bible speaks with a divine voice. On this ground every Christian can test the value of the higher criticism for himself. The Bible manifests itself to the spiritual perception of the Christian as in the fullest sense human, and in the fullest sense divine. This is true of the Old Testament, as well as of the New. Fourth Fallacy: The Miracles Denied. IV. Yet another fallacy of the higher critics is found in their teachings concerning the biblical miracles. If the hypothesis of evolution is applied to the Scriptures consistently, it will lead us to deny all the miracles which they record. But if applied timidly and waveringly, as it is by some of the English and American higher critics, it will lead us to deny a large part of the miracles, and to inject as much of the natural as is any way possible into the rest. We shall strain out as much of the gnat of the supernatural as we can, and swallow,as much of the camel of evolution as we can. We shall probably reject all the miracles of the Old Testament, explaining some of them as popular legends, and others as coincidences. In the New Testament we shall pick and choose, and no two of us will agree concerning those to be rejected and those to be accepted. If the higher criticism shall be adopted as the doctrine of the church, believers will be left in a distressing state of doubt and uncertainty concerning the narratives of the four Gospels-, and unbelievers will scoff and mock. A theory which leads to such wanderings of thought regarding the supernatural in the Scriptures must be fallacious. God is not a God of confusion. Among the higher critics who accept some of the miracles there is a notable desire to discredit the virgin birth of our Lord, and their treatment of this event presents a good example of the fallacies of reasoning by means of which they would abolish many of the other miracles. One feature of their argument may suffice as an exhibition of all. It is the search for parallels in the pagan mythologies. There are many instances in the pagan stories of the birth of men from human mothers and divine fathers, and the higher critics. would create the impression that the writers who record the birth of Christ were influenced by these fables to emulate them, and thus to secure for Him the honor of a celestial paternity. It turns out, however, that these pagan fables do not in any case present to us a virgin mother; the child is always the product of commerce with a god who assumes a human form for the purpose. The despair of the higher critics in this hunt for events of the same kind is well illustrated by Cheyne (Bible Problems, page 86), who cites the record of the Babylonian king Sargon, about 3,800 B. C.. This monarch represents himself as having "been born of a poor mother in secret, and as not knowing his father." There have been many millions of such instances, but we do not think of the mothers as virgins. Nor does the Babylonian story affirm that the mother of Sargon was a virgin, or even that his father was a god. It is plain that Sargon did not intend to claim a supernatural origin, for, after saying that he "did not know his father," he adds that "the brother of his father lived in the mountains." It was a case like multitudes of others in which children, early orphaned, have not known their fathers, but have known the relations of their fathers. This statement of Sargon I quote from a translation of it made by Cheyne himself in the "Encyclopedia Biblica." He continues, "There is reason to suspect that something similar was originally said by the Israelites of Moses." To substantiate this he adds, "See Encyclopedia Biblica, `Moses,' section 3 with note 4." On turning to this reference the reader finds that the article was written by Cheyne himself, and that it contains no evidence whatever. Fifth Fallacy: The Testimony of Archaeology Denied. V. The limitation of the field of research as far as possible to the biblical books as literary productions has rendered many of the higher critics reluctant to admit the new light derived from archaeology. This is granted by Cheyne. ["Bible Problems," page 142.] "I have no wish to deny," he says, "that the so-called `higher critics' in the past were as a rule suspicious of Assyriology as a young, and, as they thought, too self-assertive science, and that many of those who now recognize its contributions to knowledge are somewhat too mechanical in the use of it, and too skeptical as to the influence of Babylonian culture in relatively early times in Syria, Palestine and even Arabia." This grudging recognition of the testimony of archaeology may be observed in several details. 1. It was said that the Hexateuch must have been formed chiefly by the gathering up of oral traditions, because it is not to be supposed that the early Hebrews possessed the art of writing and of keeping records. But the entire progress of archaeological study refutes this. In particular the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets has shown that writing in cuneiform characters and in the Assyrio-Babylonian language was common to the entire biblical world long before the exodus. The discovery was made by Egyptian peasants in 1887. There are more than three hundred tablets, which came from various lands, including Babylonia and Palestine. Other finds have added their testimony to the fact that writing and the preservation of records were the peculiar passions of the ancient civilized world. Under the constraint of the overwhelming evidences, Professor Jordan writes as follows: "The question as to the age of writing never played a great part in the discussion." He falls back on the supposition that the nomadic life of the early Hebrews would prevent them from acquiring the art of writing. He treats us to such reasoning as the following: "If the fact that writing is very old is such a powerful argument when taken alone, it might enable you to prove that Alfred the Great wrote Shakespeare's plays." 2. It was easy to treat Abraham as a mythical figure when the early records of Babylonia were but little known. The entire coloring of those chapters of Genesis which refer to Mesopotamia could be regarded as the product of the imagination. This is no longer the case. Thus Clay,* writing of Gen 14, says: "The theory of the late origin of all the Hebrew Scriptures prompted the critics to declare this narrative to be a pure invention of a later Hebrew writer. The patriarchs were relegated to the region of myth and legend. Abraham was made a fictitious father of the Hebrews. Even the political situation was declared to be inconsistent with fact. Weighing carefully the position taken by the critics in the light of what has been revealed through the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, we find that the very foundations upon which their theories rest, with reference to the points that could be tested, totally disappear. The truth is, that wherever any light has been thrown upon the subject through excavations, their hypotheses have invariably been found wanting. [* "Light on the Old Testament from Babel." 1907. Clay is Assistant Professor arid Assistant Curator of the Babylonian Section, Department of Archaeology, in the University of Pennsylvania.] But the higher critics are still reluctant to admit this new light. Thus Kent [Biblical World, Dec., 1906] says, "The primary value of these stories is didactic and religious, rather than historical." 3. The books of Joshua and judges have been regarded by the higher critics as unhistorical on the ground that their portraiture of the political, religious, and social condition of Palestine in the thirteenth century B. C. is incredible. This cannot be said any longer, for the recent excavations in Palestine have shown us a land exactly like that of these books. The portraiture is so precise, and is drawn out in so many minute lineaments, that it cannot be the product of oral tradition floating down through a thousand years. In what details the accuracy of the biblical picture of early Palestine is exhibited may be seen perhaps best in the excavations by Macalister ["Bible Side-Lights from the Mound of Gezer"] at Gezer. Here again there are absolutely no discrepancies between the Land and the Book, for the Land lifts up a thousand voices to testify that the Book is history and not legend. 4. It was held by the higher critics that the legislation which we call Mosaic could not have been produced by Moses, since his age was too early for such codes. This reasoning was completely negatived by the discovery of the code of Hammurabi, the Amraphelt [0n this matter see any dictionary of the Bible, art. "Amraphel."] of Gen 14. This code is very different from that of Moses; it is more systematic; and it is at least seven hundred years earlier than the Mosaic legislation. In short, from the origin of the higher criticism till this present time the discoveries in the field of archaeology have given it a succession of serious blows. The higher critics were shocked when the passion of the ancient world for writing and the preservation of documents was discovered. They were shocked. when primitive Babylonia appeared as the land of Abraham. They were shocked when early Palestine appeared as the and of Joshua and the Judges. They were shocked when Amraphel came back from the grave as a real historical character, bearing his code of laws. They were shocked when the stele of the Pharaoh of the exodus was read, and it was proved that he knew a people called Israel, that they had no settled place of abode, that they were "without grain" for food, and that in these particulars they were quite as they are represented by the Scriptures to have been when they had fled from Egypt into the wilderness.* The embarrassment created by these discoveries is manifest in many of the recent writings of the higher critics, in which, however, they still cling heroically to their analysis and their late dating of the Pentateuch and their confidence in the hypothesis of evolution as the key of all history. [* The higher critics usually slur over this remarkable inscription, and give us neither an accurate translation nor a natural interpretation of it. I have, therefore, special pleasure in quoting the following from Driver, "Authority and Archaeology" page 61: "Whereas the other places named in the inscription all have the determinative for `country,' Ysiraal has the determinative for 'men': it follows that the reference is not to the land of Israel, but to Israel as a tribe or people, whether migratory, or on the march." Thus this distinguished higher critic sanctions the view of the record which I have adopted. He represents Maspcro and Naville as doing the same.] Sixth Fallacy: The Psalms Written after the Exile. VI. The Psalms are usually dated by the higher critics after the exile. The great majority of the higher critics are agreed here, and tell us that these varied and .touching and magnificent lyrics of religious experience all come to us from a period later than 450 B. C. A few of the critics admit an earlier origin of three or four of them, but they do this waveringly, grudgingly, and against the general consensus of opinion among their fellows. In the Bible a very large number of the Psalms are ascribed to David, and these, with a few insignificant and doubtful exceptions, are denied to him and brought down, like the rest, to the age of the second temple. This leads me to the following observations: 1. Who wrote the Psalms? Here the higher critics have no answer. Of the period from 400 to 175 B. C, we are in almost total ignorance. Josephus knows almost nothing about it, nor has any other writer told us more. Yet, according to the theory, it was precisely in these centuries of silence: when the Jews had no great writers, that they produced this magnificent outburst of sacred song. 2. This is the more remarkable when we consider the well known men to whom the theory denies the authorship of any of the Psalms. The list includes such names as Moses, David, Samuel, Nathan, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the long list of preexilic prophets. We are asked to believe that these men composed no Psalms, and that the entire collection was contributed by men so obscure that they have left no single name by which we can identify them with their work. 3. This will appear still more extraordinary if we consider the times in which, it is said, no Psalms were produced, and contrast them with the times in which all of them were produced. The times in which none were produced were the great times, the times of growth, of mental ferment, of conquest, of imperial expansion, of disaster, and of recovery. The times in which none were produced were the times of the splendid temple of Solomon, with its splendid worship. The times in which none were produced were the heroic times of Elijah and Elisha, when the people of Jehovah struggled for their existence against the abominations of the pagan gods. On the other hand, the times which actually produced them were the times of growing legalism, of obscurity, and of inferior abilities. All this is incredible. We could believe it only if we first came to believe that the Psalms are works of slight literary and religious value. This is actually done by Wellhausen, who says [Quoted by Orr, "The Problem of the Old Testament," page 435] "They certainly are to the smallest extent original, and are for the most part imitations which illustrate the saying about much writing." The Psalms are not all of an equally high degree of excellence, and there are a few of them which might give some faint color of justice to this depreciation of the entire collection. But as a whole they are exactly the reverse of this picture. Furthermore, they contain absolutely no legalism, but are as free from it as are the Sermon on the Mount and the Pauline epistles. Yet further, the writers stand out as personalities, and they must have left a deep impression upon their fellows. Finally, they were full of the fire of genius kindled by the Holy Spirit. It is impossible for us to attribute the Psalms to the unknown mediocrities of the period which followed the restoration. 4. Very many of the Psalms plainly appear to be ancient. They sing of early events, and have no trace of allusion to the age which is said to have produced them. 5. The large number of Psalms attributed to David have attracted the special attention of the higher critics. They are denied to him on various grounds. He was a wicked man, and hence incapable of writing these praises to the God of righteousness. He was an iron warrior and statesman, and hence not gifted with the emotions found in these productions. He was so busy with the cares of conquest and administration that he had no leisure for literary work. Finally, his conception of God was utterly different from that which moved the psalmists. The larger part of this catalogue of inabilities is manifestly erroneous. David, with some glaring faults, and with a single enormous crime, for which he was profoundly penitent, was one of the noblest of men. He was indeed an iron warrior and statesman, but also one of the most emotional of all great historic characters. He was busy, but busy men nest seldom find relief in literary occupations, as Washington, during the Revolutionary War, poured forth a continual tide of letters, and as Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, and Gladstone, while burdened with the cares of empire, composed immortal books. The conception of God with which David began his career was indeed narrow (I. Sam. 26 :19) . But did he learn nothing in all his later experiences, and his associations with holy priests and prophets? He was certainly teachable: did God fail to make use of him in further revealing Himself to His people? To deny these Psalms to David on the ground of his limited views of God in his early life, is this not to deny that God made successive revelations of Himself wherever He found suitable channels? If, further, we consider the unquestioned skill of David in the music of his nation and his age (I. Sam. 16:14-25), this will constitute a presupposition in favor of his interest in sacred song. If, finally, we consider his personal career of danger and deliverance, this will appear as the natural means of awakening in him the spirit of varied religious poetry. His times were much like the Elizabethan period, which ministered unexampled stimulus to the English mind. From all this we may turn to the singular verdict of Professor Jordan: "If a man says he cannot see why David could not have written Ps 51 and 139, you are compelled to reply as politely as possible that if he did write them then any man can write anything." So also we may say, "as politely as possible," that if Shakespeare, with his "small Latin and less Greek," did write his incomparable dramas, "then any man can write anything'"; that if Dickens, with his mere elementary education, did write his great novels, "then any man can write anything"; and that if Lincoln, who had no early schooling, did write his Gettysburg address, "then any man can write anything." Seventh Fallacy: Deuteronomy Not Written by Moses. VII. One of the fixed points of the higher criticism is its theory of the origin of Deuteronomy. In I. Kings 22 we have the history of the finding of the book of the law in the temple, which was being repaired. Now the higher critics present this finding, not as the discovery of an ancient document, but as the finding of an entirely new document, which had been concealed in the temple in order that it might be found, might be accepted as the production of Moses, and might produce an effect by its assumed authorship. It is not supposed for a moment that the writer innocently chose the fictitious dress of Mosaic authorship for merely literary purposes. On the contrary, it is steadfastly maintained that he intended to deceive, and that others were with him in the plot to deceive. This statement of the case leads me to the following reflections: 1. According to the theory, this was an instance of pious fraud. And the fraud must have been prepared deliberately. The manuscript must have been soiled and frayed by special care, for it was at once admitted to be ancient. This supposition of deceit must always repel the Christian believer. 2. Our Lord draws from the Book of Deuteronomy all the three texts with which He foils the tempter, Matthew 4:1-11, Luke 4:1-14.' It must always shock the devout student that his Saviour should select His weapons from an armory founded on deceit. 3. This may be called an appeal to ignorant piety, rather than to scholarly criticism. But surely the moral argument should have some weight in scholarly criticism. In the sphere of religion moral impossibilities are as insuperable as physical and mental. 4. If we turn to consideration of a literary kind, it is to be observed that the higher criticism runs counter here to the statement of the book itself that Moses was its author. 5. It runs counter to the narrative of the finding of the book, and turns the finding of an ancient book into the forgery of a new book. 6. It runs counter to the judgment of all the intelligent men of the time who learned of the discovery. They judged the book to have come down from the Mosaic age, and to be from the pen of Moses. We hear of no dissent whatever. 7. It seeks support in a variety of reasons, such as style, historical discrepancies, and legal contradictions, all of which prove of little substance when examined fairly. Eighth Fallacy: The Priestly Legislation Not Enacted Until the Exile. VIII. Another case of forgery is found in the origin of the priestly legislation, if we are to believe the higher critics. This legislation is contained in a large number of passages scattered through Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. It has to do chiefly with the tabernacle and its worship, with the duties of the priests and Levites, and with the relations of the people to the institutions of religion. It is attributed to Moses in scores of places. It has a strong coloring of the Mosaic age and of the wilderness life. It affirms the existence of the tabernacle, with an orderly administration of the ritual services. But this is all imagined, for the legislation is a late production. Before the exile there were temple services and a priesthood, with certain regulations concerning them, either oral or written, and use was made of this tradition; but as a whole the legislation was enacted by such men as Ezekiel and Ezra during and immediately after the exile, or about 444 B. C. The name of Moses, the fiction of a tabernacle, and the general coloring of the Mosaic age, were given it in order to render it authoritative and to secure the ready obedience of the nation. But now: 1. The moral objection here is insuperable. The supposition of forgery, and of forgery so cunning, so elaborate, and so minute, is abhorrent. If the forgery had been invented and executed by wicked men to promote some scheme of selfishness, it would have been less odious. But when it is presented to us as the expedient of holy men, for the advancement of the religion of the God of righteousness, which afterwards blossomed out into Christianity, we must revolt. 2. The theory gives us a portraiture of such men as Ezekiel and Ezra which is utterly alien from all that we know of them. The expedient might be worthy of the prophets of Baal or of Chemosh; it was certainly not worthy of the prophets of Jehovah, and we dishonor them when we attribute it to them and place them upon a low plane of craft and cunning of which the records concerning them are utterly ignorant. 3. The people who returned from the exile were among the most intelligent and enterprising of the nation, else they would not have returned, and they would not have been deceived by the sudden appearance of Mosaic laws forged for the occasion and never before heard of. 4. Many of the regulations of this legislation are drastic. It subjected the priests and Levites to a rule which must have been irksome in the extreme, and it would not have been lightly accepted. We may be certain that if it had been a new thing fraudulently ascribed to Moses, these men would have detected the deceit, and would have refused to be bound by it. But we do not hear of any revolt, or even of any criticism. Such are some of the fundamental fallacies of the higher criticism. They constitute an array of impossibilities. I have stated them in their more moderate forms, that they may be seen and weighed without the remarkable extravagances which some of their advocates indulge. In the very mildest interpretation which can be given them, they are repugnant to the Christian faith. No Middle Ground. But might we not accept a part of this system of thought without going to any hurtful extreme? Many today are seeking to do this. They present to us two diverse results. 1. Some, who stand at the beginning of the tide, find themselves in a position of doubt. If they are laymen, they know not what to believe. If they are ministers, they know not what to believe or to teach. In either case, they have no firm footing, and no Gospel, except a few platitudes which do little harm and little good. 2. The majority of those who struggle to stand here find it impossible to do so, and give themselves up to the current. There is intellectual consistency in the lofty church doctrine of inspiration. There may be intellectual consistency in the doctrine that all things have had a natural origin and history, under the general providence of God, as distinguished from His supernatural revelation of Himself through holy men, and especially through His co-equal Son, so that the Bible is as little supernatural as the "Imitation of Christ" or the "Pilgrim's Progress." But there is no position of intellectual consistency between these two, and the great mass of those who try to pause at various points along the descent are swept down with the current. The natural view of the Scriptures is a sea which has been rising higher for three-quarters of a century. Many Christians bid it welcome to pour lightly over the walls which the faith of the church has always set up against it, in the expectation that it will prove a healthful and helpful stream. It is already a cataract, uprooting, destroying, and slaying. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 59: - THE BIBLE AND MODERN CRITICISM ======================================================================== The Bible and Modern Criticism By F. Bettex, D.D., Professor Emeritus, Stuttgart, Germany. Translated from the original German by David Heagle, D.D. It is undeniable that the universe, including ourselves, exists. Whence comes it all? For any clear-thinking mind there are only three possibilities. Either the universe has existed always, it produced itself, or it was created by a Divine, a Supreme Being. THE UNIVERSE NOT ETERNAL The eternity of the universe is most clearly disproved by its evolution. From a scientific point of view that hypothesis is now discredited and virtually abandoned. Astronomers, physicists, biologists, philosophers, are beginning to recognize more and more, and men like Secchi, Dubois-Reymond, Lord Kelvin, Dr. Klein and others, unanimously affirm that creation has had a beginning. It always tends towards an entropy, that is, toward a perfect equilibrium of its forces, a complete standstill; and the fact that it has not yet reached such a condition is proof that it has not always existed. Should creation, however, ever come to a standstill, it could never again put itself in motion. It has had a beginning, and it will have an end. That is demonstrated most clearly by its still unfinished evolution. Should anyone say to us, of a growing tree or of a young child, that either of these forms of life has existed forever, we would at once reply, Why has it not then long ago, in the past eternity, grown up so as to reach the heaven of heavens? In like manner, reasons that great astronomer, William Herschel, with regard to the Milky-Way, that just as its breaking up into different parts shows that it cannot always endure, so we have, in this same fact, proof that it has not eternally existed. God the Author of All Things There remains, therefore, only this alternative: either the world produced itself, or it was created. That all things came into existence spontaneously, and therefore that we must suppose an origination of immeasurably great effects without any cause, or believe that at some time a nothing, without either willing or knowing it, and without the use of means, became a something-this is the most unreasonable assumption that could possibly be attributed to a human being. How could anything act before it existed? or a thing not yet created produce something? There is nothing more unreasonable than the creed of the. unbeliever, notwithstanding all his prating about the excellence of reason. But if this world did not produce itself, then it must have been created by some Higher Power, some Cause of all causes, such as was that First Principle upon which the dying Cicero called. Or, to use the words of Dr. Klein, that originating cause must have been a "Supreme Intelligence that has at its command unlimited creative power" (Kosmologische Briefe, p. 27). Hence what that Intelligence does is both illimitable ante anfathomable, and it can at any time either change this world or make a new one. It is therefore prima facie silly for us, with our prodigiously narrow experience, to set any kind of bounds to the Supreme Being; and a God who works no miracles and is the slave of his own laws implanted in nature; such a God as the New Theology preaches, is as much lacking in being a true Divinity as is the unconscious, but all-wise "cosmic ether" of Spiller, or the "eternal stuff" of other materialists. We conclude, then, that the universe was created, or that God is the author of all things. Revelation in Nature But now the question arises whether God, who is both the Creator of all things and the Father of spirits, has revealed Himself to his creatures, or to His own children, the work of His hands. Such a question might surely provoke one's laughter. For what is the entire universe? what is this created nature of which we form a part? what is air? and water? and fire? what are all organized beings, my body with its many parts put together in such a highly artistic and inscrutable fashion; my soul with its infinite capabilities so little understood by myself? What are all these matters but a progressive revelation of God, given to us, as it were, in a series of concentric circles rising one above another toward their Source? For this purpose it was that God created the visible, so that through it we might perceive the invisible, and for this purpose the whole creation was made, so that through it might be manifested the invisible things of God, even his eternal power and godhead (Romans 1:20). Creation-is only the language of "the Word that was in the beginning, and was with God, and was God, and by Whom all things were made" (John 1:1-3). What does this Word declare? What else but the great infinite name of God the Father, the primal source of all things, the name that must be hallowed? There was a time, however, even before the world was, when there existed nothing but God and his name. All the different works of creation are only letters in this great name. Revelation in the Bible But there is another revelation which God has given of Himself to men-a more definite and personal one. Thus, e. g., he declared Himself to Adam, and through Enoch and Noah to the antediluvians, and again after the flood to other generations through Noah and his sons. But because at the building of the tower of Babel men turned stubbornly away from God, He gave them up to the thoughts of their own heart, and selected one man, Abraham, to go out from his friends and kindred, so that in his seed all the nations of the world might be blessed. Then, first, out of Abraham came the people of Israel, to whom were committed the oracles of God; and from this period began the history of the written Word. Moses narrates the beginning of things, also records the law, and holy men of God speak and write as they are moved by the Holy Spirit. That is inspiration-a divine in-breathing. But here a distinction must be made. The Bible reports matters of history, and in doing so includes many genealogies which were composed, first of all, not for us, but for those most immediately concerned, and for the angels (1 Corinthians 4:9). Also it reports many sins and shameful deeds; for just as the sun first illuminates himself and then sheds his radiance upon the ocean and the puddle, the eagle and the worm, so the Bible undertakes to represent to us not only God, but also man just as he is. In giving us these narratives it may be said, moreover, that God, who numbers the very hairs of our head, exercised a providential control, so that what was reported by His chosen men should be the real facts, and nothing else. To what extent He inspired those men with the very words used by them, it is not for us to know, but probably more fully than we suspect. But when God, after having communicated the law to Moses on Mount Sinai and in the Tabernacle, communes with him as a friend with friend, and Moses writes "all the words of this law in a book" (Dent. 28:58; 31 :24), then Moses really becomes the pen of God. When God speaks to the prophets, "Behold, I put my words in thy mouth," and "a?1 the words that thou hearest thou shalt say to this people," then these prophets become the very mouth of God. When Christ appears to John on Patmos, and says, "To the angel of the church write these things," this is an instance of verbal dictation. But just here we are amused at those weak-minded critics who, with hackneyed phrases, talk so glibly about "mechanical instruments" and "mere verbal dictation." Does then a self-revelation of the Almighty and a making known of His counsels, a gracious act which exalts the human agent to be a co-worker with Jehovah, annihilate personal freedom? Or does it not rather enlarge that freedom, and lift it up to a higher and more joyous activity? Am I then a "mechanical instrument" when with deep devotion and with enthusiasm I repeat after Christ, word for word, the prayer which He taught his disciples? The Bible is, consequently, a book which originated according to the will and with the co-operation of God; and as such it is our guide to eternity, conducting man, seemingly without a plan and yet with absolute certainty, all the way from the first creation and from Paradise on to the second or higher creation and to the New Jerusalem (Comp. Genesis 2:8-10 with Revelation 21:1-2). PROOF OF THE BIBLE'S INSPIRATION How does the Bible prove itself to be a divinely inspired, heaven-given book, a communication from a Father to His children, and thus a revelation? First, by the fact that, as does no other sacred book in the world, it condemns man and all his works. It does not praise either his wisdom, his reason, his art, or any progress that he has made; but it represents him as being in the sight of God, a miserable sinner, incapable of doing anything good, and deserving only death and endless perdition. Truly, a book which is able thus to speak, and in consequence causes millions of men, troubled in conscience, to prostrate themselves in the dust, crying, "God be merciful to me a sinner," must contain more than mere ordinary truth. Secondly, the Bible exalts itself far above all merely human books by its announcement of the great incomprehensible mystery that, "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son; that whosover believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16). Where is there a god among all the heathen nations, be he Osiris, Brahma, Baal, Jupiter or Odin, that would have promised those people that, by taking upon himself the sin of the world and suffering its punishment, he would thus become a savior and redeemer to them? Thirdly, the Bible sets the seal of its divine origin upon itself by means of the prophecies. Very appropriately does God inquire, through the prophet Isaiah, "Who, as I, shall call, and shall declare it, and set it in order for Me since I established the ancient people? and the things that are coming and shall come to pass, let them declare" (Isaiah 44:7). Or says again, "I am God, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times, things not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure; calling a ravenous bird from the east, and the man of My counsel from afar country. Yea, I have spoken, I will also bring it to pass; I have purposed, I will also do it" ( Isaiah 46:10-11) . Or, addressing Pharaoh, "Where are thy wise men, and let them tell thee, and let them know what the Lord of Hosts hath purposed upon Egypt" (Isaiah 19:12). Again we say, where is there a god, or gods, a founder of religion, such as Confucius, Buddha, or Mohammed, who could, with such cer, tainty, have predicted the future of even his own people? Or where is there a statesman who in these times can foretell what will be the condition of things in Europe one hundred or even ten years from now? Nevertheless the prophecies of Moses and his threatened judgments upon the Israelites have been literally fulfilled. Literally also have been fulfilled, (although who at the time would have believed it?) the prophecies respecting the destruction of those great ancient cities, Babylon, Nineveh and Memphis. Who in these times would believe a like prophecy respecting London, Paris, or New York? Moreover, in a literal way has been fulfilled what the prophets David and Isaiah foresaw concerning the last sufferings of Christ-His death on the cross, His drinking of vinegar, and the casting of lots for His garments. And there are other prophecies which will still be most literally fulfilled, such as the promises made to Israel, the final judgment, and the end of the world. "For," as Habakkuk says, "the vision is yet for an appointed time, and will not lie. Though it tarry, wait for it; it will surely come" (Isaiah 2:3). Furthermore, the Bible has demonstrated its peculiar power by its influence with the martyrs. Think of the hundreds of thousands who, at different times and among different peoples, have sacrificed their all, their wives, their children, all their possessions, and finally life itself, on account of this book. Think of how they have, on the rack and at the stake, confessed the truth of the Bible, and borne testimony to its power. However, O ye critics and despisers of God's Word, if you will only write such a book and then die for it, we will believe you. Lastly, the Bible shows itself every day to be a divinely given book by its beneficent influence among all kinds o£ people. It converts to a better life the ignorant and the learned, the beggar on the street and the king upon his throne, yonder poor woman dwelling in an attic, the greatest poet and the profoundest thinker, civilized Europeans and uncultured savages. Despite all the scoffing and derision of its enemies, it has been translated into hundreds of languages, and has been preached by thousands of missionaries to millions of people. It makes the proud humble and the dissolute virtuous; it consoles the unfortunate, and teaches man how to live patiently and die triumphantly. No other book or collection of books accomplishes for man the exceeding great benefits accomplished by this book of truth. Modern Criticism and Its Rationalistic Method In these times there has appeared a criticism which, constantly growing bolder in its attacks upon this sacred book, now decrees, with all self-assurance and confidence, that it is simply a human production. Besides other faults found with it, it is declared to be full of errors, many of its books to be spurious, written by unknown men at later dates than those assigned, etc., etc. But we ask, upon what fundamental principle, what axiom, is this verdict of the critics based? It is upon the idea that, as Renan expressed it, reason is capable of judging all things, but is itself judged by nothing. That is surely a proud dictum, but an empty one if its character is really noticed. To be sure, God has given reason to man, so that, in his customary way of planting and building, buying and selling, he may make a practical use of created nature by which he is surrounded. But is reason, even as respects matters of this life, in accord with itself? By no means. For, if that were so, whence comes all the strife and contention of men at home and abroad, in their places of business and their public assemblies, in art and science, in legislation, religion and philosophy? Does it not all proceed from the conflicts of reason? The entire history of our race is the history of millions of men gifted with reason who have been in perpetual conflict one with another. Is it with such reason, then, that sentence is to be pronounced upon a divinely given book? A purely rational revelation would certainly be a contradiction of terms; besides, it would be wholly superfluous. But when reason undertakes to speak of things entirely supernatural, invisible and eternal, it talks as a blind man .does about colors, discoursing of matters concerning which it neither knows nor can know anything; and thus it makes itself ridiculous. It has not ascended up to heaven, neither has it descended into the deep; and therefore a purely rational religion is no religion at all. Incompetency of Reason for Spiritual Truth Reason alone has never inspired men with great sublime conceptions of spiritual truth, whether in the way of discovery or invention; but usually it has at first rejected and ridiculed such matters. And just so it is with these rationalistic critics, they have no appreciation or understanding of the high and sublime in God's Word. They understand neither the majesty of Isaiah, the pathos of David's repentance, the audacity of Moses' prayers, the philosophic depth of Ecclesiastes , nor the wisdom of Solomon which "uttereth her voice in the streets." According to them ambitious priests, at a later date than is commonly assigned, compiled all those books to which we have alluded; also they wrote the Sinaitic law, and invented the whole story of Moses' life. ("A magnificent fiction"-so one of the critics calls that story.) But if all this is so, then we must believe that cunning falsifiers, who were, however, so the critics say, devout men, genuine products of their day (although it calls for notice that the age in which those devout men lived, should, as was done to Christ, have persecuted and killed them, when usually an age loves its own children) ; that is to say, we must believe not only that shallow-minded men have uncovered for us eternal truths and the most distant future, but also that vulgar, interested liars, have declared to us the inexorable righteousness of a holy God! Of course, all that is nonsense; no one can believe it. But if these critics discourse, as sometimes they do, with great self-assurance upon topics such as the history of Israel, the peculiar work of the prophets, revelation, inspiration, the essence of Christianity, the difference between the teachings of Christ and those of Paul, anyone who intelligently reads what they say is impressed with the idea that, although they display much ingenuity in their efforts, after all they do not really understand the matters concerning which they speak. In like manner they talk with much ingenuity and show of learning about men with whom they have only a far-off acquaintance; and they discuss events in the realm of the Spirit where they have had no personal experience. Thus they both illustrate and prove the truth of the Scripture teaching that "the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God." These critics say that God, not being a man, cannot speak; consequently there is no word of God! Also, God cannot manifest Himself in visible form; therefore all the accounts of such epiphanies are mythical tales! Inspiration, they tell us, is unthinkable; hence all representations of such acts are diseased imagination! Of prophecy there is none; what purports to be such was written after the events! Miracles are impossible; therefore all the reports of them, as given in the Bible, are mere fictions! Men always seek, thus it is explained, their own advantage and personal glory, and just so it was with those "prophets of Israel." Such is what they call "impartial science," "unprejudiced research," "objective demonstration." Nothing New in These "New" Views Moreover, these critics claim for their peculiar views that they are "new theology," and the "latest investigation." But that also is untrue. Even in the times of Christ the famous rabbi Hillel and his disciple Gamaliel substituted for the Mosaic law all manner of "traditions" (Matthew 15:2-9; Matthew 23:16-22). Since then other learned rabbis, such as Ben Akiba, Maimonides and others, have engaged in Bible criticism; not only casting doubts upon the genuineness of various books of the Old Testament, but also denying the miracles and talking learnedly about "myths." Even eighteen hundred years ago Celsus brought forward the same objections as those now raised by modern criticism; and in his weak and bungling production, the "Life of Jesus," David Strauss has in part repeated them. Also there have been other noted heretics, such as Arius (317 A. D.), who denied the divinity of Christ, and Pelagius in the fifth century, who rejected the doctrine of original sin. Indeed this exceedingly new theology adopts even the unbelief of those old Sadducees who said "there is no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit" (Acts 23:8), and whom Christ reproved with the words, "Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God" (Matthew 22:29). It certainly does not argue for the spiritual progress of our race, that such a threadbare and outworn unbelieving kind of science should again, in these days, deceive and even stultify thousands of people. No Agreement Among the Critics Do these critics then, to ask the least of them, agree with one another? Far from it. To be sure, they unanimously deny the inspiration of the Bible, the divinity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit, the fall of man and the forgiveness of sins through Christ; also prophecy and miracles, the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, heaven and hell. But when it comes to their pretendedly sure results, not any two of them affirm the same things; and their numerous publications create a flood of disputable, self-contradictory and mutually destructive hypotheses. For example, the Jehovah of the Old Testament is made to be some heathen god, either a nomadic or steppe god, the weather-god Jahu, or the god of West-Semitism. It was David who first introduced this divinity; and according to some authors the peculiar worship of this god was, with its human sacrifices (!), only a continuation of the Baal-Moloch worship! Of Abraham it is sometimes affirmed that he never existed, but at other times that he was a Canaanite chief, dwelling at Hebron. No! he is the myth of the Aurora; and Sarah, or Scharratu, is the wife of the moon-god Sin, and so on. The twelve sons of Jacob are very probably the twelve months of the year. As to Moses, some teach there never was such a man, also that the ten commandments were composed in the time of Manasseh. No! the more moderate writers say that Moses is a historical character. It was in Midian that he learned about Jah, the tribal god of the Kenites; and he determined with this divinity to liberate his people. Elijah is simply a myth; or he was some unfortunate prophet who had perhaps been struck by lightning. And so, too, this modern criticism knows for sure that it was not Solomon, but a wholly unknown king, living after the time of Ezra, who wrote Ecclesiastes; also that there never was a Daniel, but that again some unknown author wrote the book bearing that name. Moreover, Kautsch tells us that this book first made its appearance in January, 164 B. C., while other critics are positive that it was in 165. Query: Why could not that unknown author have been named Daniel? So also Wellhausen knows of twenty-two different authors-all of them, to be sure, unknown-for the books of Moses, while Kuenen is satisfied with sixteen. The noted English critic, Canon Cheyne, is said to have taken great pains to tear the book of Isaiah's prophecies into one hundred and sixty pieces, all by unknown writers; which pieces were scattered through ten different epochs including four and a half centuries ("Modern Puritan," 1907, p. 400). Likewise this critic knows that the first chapter of 1 Samuel originated with an unknown writer living some five hundred years after the time of that prophet; also that Hannah's glory-song, as found in 2 Kings, was written by some other "unknown." That Eli ruled over Israel for forty years is, "in all likelihood," the unauthentic statement of a later day (Hastings' Bible Dictionary). Why so? we may ask.-The book of Deuteronomy was written, we are told, in 561 B. C., and Ecclesiastes in 264 B.C.; and a German critic, Budde, is certain that the book of job has somehow lost its last chapter, and that fifty-nine verses of this book should be wholly expunged. Such are a few illustrations of the way in which Holy Scripture is treated by the criticism we are considering. But, surely, it would not require much sagacity and intelligence for one, by applying such peculiar methods, say, to Goethe's works, to demonstrate critically that a good share of those productions, such as Erlkönig, Iphigenia, Götz von Berlichingen, the Wahlverwandschaften, Faust (Parts I. and II.), belong, if judged of by their style of composition and their historical and philosophical views, to wholly different epochs, and that they originated with many different authors. Moreover, it could easily be shown that none of those authors lived in the times when Napoleon Bonaparte revolutionized Europe, since his name is not mentioned in any of the productions specified. Criticism as Applied to the New Testament Of course this modern criticism does not stop short of the New Testament. This part of the Bible, Harnack says, narrates for us incredible stories respecting the birth and childhood of Christ. "Nevermore," he goes on to assert, "shall we believe that he walked upon the sea and commanded the storm." It stands to reason that He did not rise from the dead. The Fourth Gospel is spurious, and so also is (according to late critical authority) the Epistle to the Romans. The Book of Revelation is only the occasion for derisive laughter on the part of these skeptical critics; and because it is so, the curse mentioned in its last chapter is made applicable to them (vs. 18, 19). Nevertheless, these men sin most seriously against Christ. In their view the very Son of God, the Word that was in the beginning with God, and that was God, and without Whom nothing exists, is only a fanatical young rabbi; entangled in the peculiar views and superstitions of his people; and he died upon the cross only because he misconceived of the character of his own mission and the nature of his times. Jesus "is not indispensable to the Gospel," so writes Harnack. Now all this is what is denominated Biblical criticism. It is a jumble of mere hypotheses, imaginings and assertions, brought forward often without even the shadow of proof, and with no real certainty. Still, in these times it represents itself to thousands of nominal Christians and to hundreds of miserably deceived theological students who are to become preachers of God's word, as being the "assured results of the latest scientific research." May God have mercy, if such is the case! What Are the Fruits of this Criticism? Now, if these people were of the truth, and if they would only believe Him who says, "I am the way, the truth and the life," they would not be under the necessity of tediously working their way through the numerous publications (statistics show that there appear in Europe and America annually some eight hundred of these works) ; but they would find in His teaching a simple and sure means for testing the character of these critical doctrines. "Ye shall know them by their fruits," is what Christ says of the false teachers who came in His name. "Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?" (Matthew 7:16). Are the fruits of modern criticism good? Where are the grapes or figs that grow on this thornbush? Has not this criticism already robbed, and perhaps forever, thousands of people of their first love, their undoubting faith, and their joyous hope? Has it not sowed dissension, fostered pride and self-conceit, and injured before all the world the authority of both the church and its ministers? Has it not offended Christ's "little ones?" (Matthew 18:6-7). And does it not every day furnish the enemies of God with opportunities for deriding and scorning the truth? Where are the souls that it has led to God-comforting, strengthening, purifying and sanctifying them? Where are the individuals who even in the hour of death have continued to rejoice in the benefits of this criticism? In the study-room it ensnares, in lecture-halls it makes great pretenses, for mere popular lectures it is still serviceable; but when the thunders of God's power break in upon the soul, when despair at the loss of all one has loved takes possession of the mind, when remembrance of a miserable lost life or of past misdeeds is felt and realized, when one is on a sick-bed and death approaches, and the soul, appreciating that it is now on the brink of eternity, calls for a Saviorjust at this time when its help is most needed, this modern religion utterly fails. In the year 1864, in Geneva, one of those modern theologians was summoned to prepare for execution a young man who had committed murder and robbery. But he candidly exclaimed, "Call some one else, I have nothing to say to him." This incompetent criticism did not know of any consolation for the sin-burdened soul; therefore an orthodox clergyman was obtained. and the wretched man, murderer though he was, died reconciled to God through the blood of Christ. But suppose that all the teachings of this criticism were true, what would it avail us? It would put us in a sad condition indeed. For then, sitting beside ruined temples and broken-down altars, with no joy as respects the hereafter, no hope of everlasting life, no God to help us, no forgiveness of sins, feeling miserable, all desolate in our hearts and chaotic in our minds, we should be utterly unable either to know or believe anything more. Can such a view of the world, such a religion, which, as was said of Professor Harnack's lectures in America, only destroys, removes and tears down, be true? No! If this modern criticism is true, then away with all so-called Christianity, which only deceives us with idle tales! Away with a religion which has nothing to offer us but the commonplace teachings of morality! Away with faith! Away with hope! Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die! These Teachings in the Light of Scripture But let us hear what God's word has to say regarding this topic: 2 Peter 1:21 -"For no prophecy ever came by the will of man; but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." 2 Timothy 3:16-17 -"All Scripture given by inspiration of God is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness; that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works." Galatians 1:11-12 -"I certify you, brethren, that the Gospel which was preached by me is not after man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ." Romans 1:16.-"I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ; for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth." Acts 20:30.-But "of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them." 2 Peter 2:1.-"There were false prophets also among the people, * * * who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them." 1 Corinthians 1:20-21.-"Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe." Colossians 2:4-8.-"This I say, lest any man should beguile you with enticing words," or "spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ." 1 Corinthians 3:19.-"For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God." 1 Corinthians 2:5.-"That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." 1 Corinthians 2:4.-"And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power." 1 Corinthians 2:12-13.-"Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual." Colossians 1:21 and 2 Corinthians 10:5.-Therefore "you that were sometime alienated and enemies in your minds by wicked works," now "bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ." Galatians 1:9.-"As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed." 1 Corinthians 15:17.-"Whosoever says that Christ is not risen, his faith is vain, he is yet in his sins." 2 John 1:7; 2 John 1:9-11.-"For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist. * * * Whosoever transgresseth and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son. If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed; for he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds." Luke 11:52.-"Woe unto you lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge; ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered." Conclusion Let us then, by repudiating this modern criticism, show our condemnation of it. What does it offer us? Nothing. What does it take away? Everything. Do we have any use for it? No! It neither helps us in life nor comforts us in death; it will not judge us in the world to come. For our Biblical faith we do not need either the encomiums of men, nor the approbation of a few poor sinners. We will not attempt to improve the Scriptures and adapt them to our liking, but we will believe them. We will not criticize them, but we will ourselves be directed by them. We will not exercise authority over them, but we will obey them. We will trust Him who is the way, the truth, and the life. His word shall make us free. Respice finem, "consider the end"-that is what even the old Romans said. True rationalism adjudges all things from the standpoint of eternity; and it asks of every religion, What can you do for me with regard to the great beyond? What does this Biblical criticism offer us here? Only fog and mist, or, at best, an endless state of indecision, something impersonal and inactive, just like its god, whose very nature is inconceivable. "Eternal life," writes one of these modernists, "is only the infinitely weak vestige of the present life." (!) Here also the maxim proves itself true, "By their fruits ye shall know them." Just as for our present life this criticism offers us no consolation, no forgiveness of sins, no deliverance from "the fear of death, through which we are all our lifetime subject to bondage," so also it knows nothing respecting the great beyond-nothing with regard to that new heaven and new earth wherein righteousness shall dwell, nothing with regard to that golden city which shines with eternal light, nothing with regard to a God who wipes away all tears from our eyes. It is utterly ignorant of the glory of God, and on that account it stands condemned. "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that Thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God" (John 6:68-69). And He answered, "Behold, I come quickly: hold that fast which thou hast; that no man take thy crown" (Revelation 3:11). ======================================================================== CHAPTER 60: - HOLY SCRIPTURE AND MODERN NEGATIONS ======================================================================== Holy Scripture and Modern Negations By Professor James Orr, D.D., United Free Church College, Glasgow, Scotland Is there today in the midst of criticism and unsettlement a tenable doctrine of Holy Scripture for the Christian Church and for the world; and if there is, what is that doctrine? That is unquestionably a very pressing question at the present time. "Is there a book which we can regard as the repository of a true revelation of God and an infallible guide in the way of life, and as to our duties to God and man?" is a question of immense importance to us all. Fifty years ago, perhaps less than that, the question hardly needed to be asked among Christian people. It was universally conceded, taken for granted, that there is such a book, the book which we call the Bible. Here, it was believed, is a volume which is an inspired record of the whole will of God for man's salvation; accept as true and inspired the teaching of that book, follow its guidance, and you cannot stumble, you cannot err in attaining the supreme end of existence, in finding salvation, in grasping the prize of a glorious immortality. Now, a change has come. There is no disguising the fact that we live in an age when, even within the Church, there is much uneasy and distrustful feeling about the Holy Scriptures-a hesitancy to lean upon them as an authority and to use them as the weapons of precision they once were; with a corresponding anxiety to find some surer basis in external Church authority, or with others, in Christ Himself, or again in a Christian consciousness, as it is named,-a surer basis for Christian belief and life. We often hear in these days reference to the substitution, in Protestantism, of an "INFALLIBLE BIBLE FOR AN INFALLIBLE CHURCH", and the implication is that the one idea is just as baseless as the other. Sometimes the idea is taken up, quite commonly perhaps, that the thought of an authority external to ourselves-to our own reason or conscience or spiritual nature-must be wholly given up; that only that can be accepted which carries its authority within itself by the appeal it makes to reason or to our spiritual being, and therein lies the judge for us of what is true and what is false. That proposition has an element of truth in it; it may be true or may be false according as we interpret it. However, as it is frequently interpreted it leaves the Scriptures-but more than that, it leaves Jesus Christ Himself-without any authority for us save that with which our own minds see fit to clothe Him. But in regard to the INFALLIBLE BIBLE AND THE INFALLIBLE CHURCH, it is proper to point out that there is a considerable difference between these two things-between the idea of an authoritative Scripture and the idea of an infallible Church or an infallible Pope, in the Roman sense of that word. It may be a clever antithesis to say that Protestantism substituted the idea of an infallible Book for the older Romish dogma of an infallible Church; but the antithesis, the contrast, unfortunately has one fatal inaccuracy about it. The idea of the authority of Scripture is not younger, but older than Romanism. It is not a late invention of Protestantism. It is not something that Protestants invented and substituted for the Roman conception of the infallible Church; but it is the original conception that lies in the Scriptures themselves. There is a great difference there. It is a belief-this belief in the Holy Scripture-which was accepted and acted upon by the Church of Christ from the first. The Bible itself claims to be an authoritative Book, and an infallible guide to the true knowledge of God and of the way of salvation. This view is implied in every reference made to it, so far as it then existed, by Christ and His Apostles. That the New Testament, the work of the Apostles and of apostolic men, does not stand on a lower level of inspiration and authority than the Old Testament, is, I think, hardly worth arguing. And in that sense, as a body of writings of Divine authority, the books of the Old and the New Testament were accepted by the Apostles and by the Church of the post-apostolic age. Take the writings of any of the early Church fathers-I have waded through them wearily as teacher of Church History-take Tertullian or Origen, or others, and you will find their words saturated with references to Scripture. You will find the Scriptures treated in precisely the same way as they are used in the Biblical literature of today; namely, as the ultimate authority on the matters of which they speak. I really do the fathers an injustice in this comparison, for I find things said and written about the Holy Scriptures by teachers of the Church today which those early fathers would never have permitted themselves to utter. It has now become fashionable among a class of religious teachers to speak disparagingly of or belittle the Holy Scriptures as an authoritative rule of faith for the Church. The leading cause of this has undoubtedly been the trend which the criticism of the Holy Scriptures has assumed during the last half century or more. By all means, let criticism have its rights. Let purely literary questions about the Bible receive full and fair discussion. Let the structure of books be impartially examined. If a reverent science has light to throw on the composition or authority or age of these books, let its voice be heard. If this thing is of God we cannot overthrow it; if it be of man, or so far as it is of man, or so far as it comes in conflict with the reality of things in the Bible, it will come to naught-as in my opinion a great deal of it is fast coming today through its own excesses. No fright, therefore, need be taken at the mere word, "Criticism." On the other hand, we are not bound to accept every wild critical theory that any critic may choose to put forward and assert, as the final word on this matter. We are entitled, nay, we are bound, to look at the presuppositions on which each, criticism proceeds, and to ask, How far is the criticism controlled by those presuppositions? We are bound to look at the evidence by which the theory is supported, and to ask, Is it really borne out by that evidence? And when theories are put forward with every confidence as fixed results, and we find them, as we observe them, still in constant process of evolution and change, constantly becoming more complicated, more extreme, more fanciful, we are entitled to inquire, Is this the certainty that it was alleged to be? Now that is my complaint against much of the current criticism of the Bible-not that it is criticism, but that it starts from the wrong basis, that it proceeds by arbitrary methods, and that it arrives at results which I think are demonstrably false results. That is a great deal to say, no doubt, but perhaps I shall have some justification to offer for it before I am done. I am not going to enter into any general tirade against criticism; but it is useless to deny that a great deal of what is called criticism is responsible for the uncertainty and unsettlement of feeling existing at the present time about the Holy Scriptures. I do not speak especially of those whose philosophical standpoint compels them to take up an attitude of negation to supernatural revelation, or to books which profess to convey such a revelation. Criticism of this kind, criticism that starts from the basis of the denial of the supernatural, has of course, to be reckoned with. In its hands everything is engineered from that basis. There is the denial to begin with, that God ever has entered into human history, in word and deed, in any supernatural way. The necessary result is that whatever in the Bible affirms or flows from such interposition of God is expounded or explained away. The Scriptures on this showing, instead of being, the living oracles of God, become simply the fragmentary remains of an ancient Hebrew literature, the chief value of which would seem to be the employment it affords to the critic to dissect it into its various parts, to overthrow the tradition of the past in regard to it, and to frame ever new, ever changing, ever more wonderful theories of the origin of the books and the so-called legends they contain. Leaving, however, such futile, rationalistic criticism out of account-because that is not the kind of criticism with which we as Christian people have chiefly to deal in our own circles-there is certainly an immense change of attitude on the part of many who still sincerely hold faith in the supernatural revelation of God. I find it difficult to describe this tendency, for I am desirous not to describe it in any way which would do injustice to any Christian thinker, and it is attended by so many signs of an ambiguous character. Jesus is recognized by the majority of those who represent it as "the Incarnate Son of God," though with shadings off into more or less indefinite assertions even on that fundamental article, which make it sometimes doubtful where the writers exactly stand. The process of thought in regard to Scripture is easily traced. First, there is an ostentatious throwing overboard, joined with some expression of contempt, of what is called the verbal inspiration of Scripture-a very much abused term. Jesus is still spoken of as the highest revealer, and it is allowed that His words, if only we could get at them-and on the whole it is thought we can-furnish the highest rule of guidance for time and for eternity. But even criticism, we are told, must have its rights. Even in the New Testament the Gospels go into the crucible, and in the name of synoptical criticism, historical criticism; they are subject to wonderful processes, in the course of which much of the history gets melted out or is peeled off as Christian characteristics. Jesus, we are reminded, was still a man of His generation, liable to error in His human knowledge, and allowance must be made for the limitations in His conceptions and judgments. Paul is alleged to be still largely dominated by his inheritance of Rabbinical and Pharisaic ideas. He had been brought up a Pharisee, brought up with the rabbis, and when he became a Christian, he carried a great deal of that into his Christian thought, and we have to strip off that thought when we come to the study of his Epistles. He is therefore a teacher not to be followed further than our own judgment of Christian truth leads us. That gets rid of a great deal that is inconvenient about Paul's teaching. The Old Testament and the Critics If these things are done in the "green tree" of the New Testament, it is easy to see what will be done in the "dry tree" of the Old. The conclusions of the more advanced school of critics are here generally accepted as once for all settled, with the result-in my judgment, at any rate-that the Old Testament is immeasurably lowered from the place it once held in our reverence. Its earlier history, down to about the age of the kings, is largely resolved into myths and legends and fictions. It is ruled out of the category of history proper. No doubt we are told that the legends are just as good as the history, and perhaps a little better, and that the ideas which they convey to us are just as good, coming in the form of legends, as if they came in the form of fact. But behold, its laws, when we come to deal with them in this manner, lack Divine authority. They are the products of human minds at various ages. Its prophecies are the utterances of men who possessed indeed the Spirit of God, which is only in fuller degree what other good men, religious teachers in all countries, have possessed-not a spirit qualifying, for example, to give real predictions, or to bear authoritative messages of the truth to men. And so, in this whirl and confusion of theories-you will find them in our magazines, you will find them in our encyclopedias, you will find them in our reviews, you will find them in many books which have appeared to annihilate the conservative believers-in this whirl and confusion of theories, is it any wonder that many should be disquieted and unsettled, and feel as if the ground on which they have been wont to rest was giving way beneath their feet? And so the question comes back with fresh urgency. What is to be said of the place and value of Holy Scripture? Is There a Tenable Doctrine for the Christian Church of Today? One of the urgent needs of our time, and a prime need of the Church, is just a replacement of Holy Scripture, with due regard, I grant, to any really ascertained facts in regard to its literary history, in the faith and lives of men, as the truly inspired and divinely sealed record of God's revealed will for men in great things of the soul. But then, is such a position tenable? In the fierce light of criticism that beats upon the documents and upon the revelation of God's grace they profess to contain, can this position be maintained? I venture to think, indeed, I am very sure, it can. Let me try to indicate-for I can do hardly any more-the lines along which I would answer the question, Have we or can we have a tenable doctrine of Holy Scripture? For a satisfactory doctrine of Holy Scripture-and by that I mean a doctrine which is satisfactory for the needs of the Christian Church, a doctrine which answers to the claim the Scripture makes for itself, to the place it holds in Christian life and Christian experience, to the needs of the Christian Church for edification and evangelization, and in other ways-I say, for a satisfactory doctrine of Holy Scripture it seems to me that three things are indispensably necessary. There is necessary, first, a more positive view of the structure of the Bible than at present obtains in many circles. There is necessary, second, the acknowledgment of a true supernatural revelation of God in the history and religion of the Bible. There is necessary, third, the recognition of a true supernatural inspiration in the record of that revelation. These three things, to my mind, go together-a more positive view of the structure of the Bible; the recognition of the supernatural revelation embodied in the Bible; and a recognition in accordance with the Bible's own claim of a supernatural inspiration in the record of the Bible. Can we affirm these three things? Will they bear the test? I think they will. The Structure of the Bible First as to the structure of the Bible, there is needed a more positive idea of that structure than is at present prevalent. You take much of the criticism and you find the Bible being disintegrated in many ways, and everything like structure falling away from it. You are told, for example, that these books-say the Books of Moses are made up of many documents, which are very late in origin and cannot claim historical value. You are told that the laws they contain are also, for the most part, of tolerably late origin, and the Levitical laws especially are of post-exilian construction; they were not given by Moses; they were unknown when the Children of Israel were carried into captivity. Their temple usage perhaps is embodied in the Levitical law, but most of the contents of that Levitical law were wholly unknown. They were the construction-the invention, to use a term lately employed of priests and scribes in the post-exilian period. They were put into shape, brought before the Jewish community returned from Babylon, and accepted by it as the law of life. Thus you have the history of the Bible turned pretty much upside down, and things take on a new aspect altogether. Must I then, in deference to criticism, accept these theories, and give up the structure which the Bible presents? Taking the Bible as it stands, I find and you will find if you look there also, without any particular critical learning you will find it-what seems to be evidence of a very definite internal structure, part fitting into part and leading on to part, making up a unity of the whole in that Bible. The Bible has undeniably a structure as it stands. It is distinguished from all other books of the kind, from all sacred books in the world, from Koran and Buddhist scriptures and Indian scriptures and every other kind of religious books. It is distinguished just by this fact, that it is the embodiment of a great plan or scheme or purpose of Divine grace extending from the beginning of time through successive ages and dispensations down to its culmination in Jesus Christ and the Pentecostal outpourings of the Spirit. The history of the Bible is the history of that development of God's redemptive purpose. The promises of the Bible mark the stages of its progress and its hope. The covenants of the Bible stand before us in the order of its unfolding. You begin with Genesis. Genesis lays the foundation and leads up to the Book of Exodus; and the Book of Exodus, with its introduction of the law-giving, leads up to what follows. Deuteronomy looks back upon the history of the rebellions and the laws given to the people, and leads up to the conquest. I need not follow the later developments, coming away down through the monarchy and the prophecy and the rest, but you find it all gathered up and fulfilled in the New Testament. The Bible, as we have it, closes in Gospel and Epistle and Apocalypse, fulfilling all the ideas of the Old Testament. There the circle completes itself with the new heaven and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. Here is a structure; here is the fact; here is a structure, a connected story, a unity of purpose extending through this Book and binding all its parts together. Is that structure an illusion? Do we only, and many with us, dream that it is there? Do our eyes deceive us when we think we see it? Or has somebody of a later date invented it, and put it all, inwrought it all, in these earlier records, legends and stories, or whatever you like to call it-skillfully woven into the story until it presents there the appearance of naturalness and truth? I would like to find the mind capable of inventing it, and then the mind capable of putting it in and working it into a history once they got the idea itself. But if not invented, it belongs to the reality and the substance of the history; it belongs to the facts; and therefore to the Book that records the facts. And there are internal attestations in that structure of the Bible to the genuineness of its contents that protest against the efforts that are so often made to reduce it to fragments and shiver up that unity and turn it upside down. "Walk about Zion ... tell the towers thereof; mark ye well her bulwarks;" you will find there's something there which the art of man will not avail to overthrow. "Now, that is all very well," I hear some one say, "but there are facts on the other side; there are those manifold proofs which our critical friends adduce that the Bible is really a collection of fragments and documents of much later date, and that the history is really quite a different thing from what the Bible represents it to be." Well, are we to sit down and accept their dictum on that subject without evidence? When I turn to the evidence I do not find them to have that convincing power which our critical friends assign to them. I am not rejecting this kind of critical theory because it goes against my prejudices or traditions; I reject it simply because it seems to me the evidence does not sustain it, and that the stronger evidence is against it. I cannot go into details; but take just the one point that I have mentioned-this post-exilian origin of the Levitical law. I have stated what is said about that matter-that those laws and institutions that you find in the middle of the Books of the Pentateuch-those laws and institutions about priests and Levites and sacrifices and all that-had really no existence, had no authoritative form, and to a large extent had not existence of any kind until after the Jews returned from Babylon, and then they were given out as a code of laws which the Jews accepted. That is the theory which is stated once and again. But let the reader put himself in the position of that returned community, and see what the thing means. These exiles had returned from Babylon. They had been organized into a new community. They had rebuilt their Temple, and then long years after that, when things had got into confusion, those two great men, Ezra and Nehemiah, came among them, and by and by Ezra produced and publicly proclaimed this law of Moses-what he called the law of Moses, the law of God by the hand of Moses-which he had brought from Babylon. A full description of what happened is given in the eighth chapter of the Book of Nehemiah. Ezra reads that law from his pulpit of wood day after day to the people, and the interpreter gives the sense. Now, mind you, most of the things in this law, in this book that he is reading to the people, had never been heard of before-never had existed, in fact; priests and Levites such as are there described had never existed. The law itself was long and complicated and burdensome, but the marvelous thing is that the people meekly accept it all as true-meekly accept it as law, at any rate-and submit to it, and take upon themselves its burdens without a murmur of dissent. That is a very remarkable thing to start with. But remember, further, what that community was. It was not a community with oneness of mind, but it was a community keenly divided in itself. If you read the narrative you will find that there were strong opposing factions in that community; there were parties strongly opposed to Ezra and Nehemiah and their reforms; there were many, as you see in the Book of Malachi, who were religiously faithless in that community. But marvelous to say, they all join in accepting this new and burdensome and hitherto unheard of law as the law of Moses, the law coming down to them from hoary antiquity. There were priests and Levites in that community who knew something about their own origin; they had genealogies and knew something about their own past. According to the new theory, these Levites were quite a new order; they had never existed at all before the time of the exile, and they had come into existence through the sentence of degradation that the prophet Ezekiel had passed upon them in the 44th chapter of his book. History is quite silent about this degradation. If anyone asks who carried out the degradation, or why was it carried out, or when was it done, and how came the priests to submit to the degradation, there is no answer to be given at all. But it came about somehow, so we are told. And so these priests and Levites are there, and they stand and listen without astonishment as they learn from Ezra how the Levites had been set apart long centuries before in the wilderness by the hand of God, and had an ample tithe provision made for their support, and cities, and what not, set apart for them to live in. People know a little about their past. These cities never had existed except on paper; but they took it all in. They are told about these cities, which they must have known had never existed as Levitical cities. They not only hear but they accept the heavy tithe Burdens without a word of remonstrance, and they make a covenant with God pledging themselves to faithful obedience to all those commands. Those tithes laws, as we discover, had no actual relation to their situation at all. They were drawn up for a totally different case. They were drawn up for a state of things in which there were few priests and many Levites. The priests were only to get the tithe of a tenth, But in this restored community there were a great many priests and few Levites. The tithe laws did not apply at all, but they accepted these as laws of Moses. And so I might go over the provisions of the law one by one-tabernacle and priests and ritual and sacrifices and Day of Atonement-these things, in their post-exilian form, had never existed; they were spun out of the inventive brains of scribes; and yet the people accepted them all as the genuine handiwork of the ancient law-giver. Was ever such a thing heard of before? Try it in any city. Try to get the people to take upon themselves a series of heavy burdens of taxation or tithes or whatever you like, on the ground that it had been handed down from the middle ages to the present time. Try to get them to believe it; try to get them to obey it, and you will find the difficulty. Is it credible to anyone who leaves books and theories in the study and takes a broad view of human nature with open eyes? I aver that for me, at any rate, it is not; and it will be a marvel to me as long as I am spared to live, how such a theory has ever gained the acceptance it has done among unquestionably able and sound-minded men. I am convinced that the structure of the Bible vindicates itself, and that these counter theories break down. A Supernatural Revelation I think it is an essential element in a tenable doctrine of Scripture, in fact the core of the matter, that it contains a record of a true supernatural revelation; and that is what the Bible claims to be not a development of man's thoughts about God, and not what this man and that one came to think about God, how they came to have the ideas of a Jehovah or Yahveh, who was originally the storm-god of Sinai, and how they manufactured out of this the great universal God of the prophets-but a supernatural revelation of what God revealed Himself in word and deed to men in history. And if that claim to a supernatural revelation from God falls, the Bible falls, because it is bound up with it from beginning to end. Now, it is just here that a great deal of our modern thought parts company with the Bible. I am quite well aware that many of our friends who accept these newer critical theories, claim to be just as firm believers in Divine revelation as I am myself, and in Jesus Christ and all that concerns Him. I rejoice in the fact, and I believe that they are warranted in saying that there is that in the religion of Israel which you cannot expunge, or explain on any other hypothesis but Divine revelation. But what I maintain is that this theory of the religion of the Bible which has been evolved, which has peculiarly come to be known as the critical view, had a very different origin in men who did not believe in the supernatural revelation of God in the Bible. This school as a whole, as a wide-spread school, holds the fundamental position-the position which its adherents call that of the modern mind that miracles did not happen and cannot happen. It takes the ground that they are impossible; therefore its followers have to rule everything of that kind out of the Bible record. I have never been able to see how that position is tenable to a believer in a living personal God who really loves His creatures and has a sincere desire to bless them. Who dare to venture to assert that the power and will of such a Being as we must believe God to be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ-is exhausted in the natural creation? That there are no higher things to be attained in God's providence than can be attained through the medium of natural law? That there is in such a Being no capability of revealing Himself in words and deeds beyond nature? If there is a dogmatism in the world, it is that of the man who claims to limit the Author of the universe by this finite bound. We are told sometimes that it is a far higher thing to see God in the natural than to see Him in something that transcends the natural; a far higher thing to see God in the orderly regular working of nature than to suppose that there has ever been anything transcending that ordinary natural working. I think we all do see God, and try to see Him more and more, in the ordinary and regular working of nature. I hope all try every day to see God there. But the question is, Has this natural working not its limits? Is there not something that nature and natural workings cannot reach, cannot do for men, that we need to have done for us? And are we so to bind God that He cannot enter into communion with man in a supernatural economy of grace, an economy of revelation, an economy of salvation? Are we to deny that He has done so? That is really the dividing line both in Old Testament and New between the different theories. Revelation, surely, all must admit if man is to attain the clear knowledge of God that is needed; and the question is one of fact, Has God so revealed Himself? And I believe that it is an essential part of the answer, the true doctrine of Scripture, to say, "Yes, God has so revealed Himself, and the Bible is the record of that revelation, and that revelation shines in its light from the beginning to the end of it." And unless there is a whole-hearted acceptance of the fact that God has entered, in word and deed, into human history for man's salvation, for man's renovation, for the deliverance of this world, a revelation culminating in the great Revealer Himself-unless we accept that, we do not get the foundation for the true doctrine of Holy Scripture. The Inspired Book Now, just a word in closing, on Inspiration. I do not think that anyone will weigh the evidence of the Bible itself very carefully without saying that at least it claims to be in a peculiar and especial manner an inspired book. There is hardly anyone, I think, who will doubt that Jesus Christ treats the Old Testament in that way. Christ treats it as an imperfect stage of revelation, no doubt. Christ, as the Son of Man, takes up a lordly, discretionary attitude towards that revelation, and He supersedes very much what is in, it by something higher, but Christ recognizes that there was true Divine revelation there, that He was the goal of it all; He came to fulfill the law and the prophets. The Scriptures are the last word with Him-"Have ye not read" "Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures." And it is just as certain that the Apostles treated the Old Testament in that way, and that they claimed in a peculiar sense the Spirit of God themselves. They claimed that in them and in their word was laid "the foundation on which the Church was built," Jesus Christ Himself, as the substance of their testimony, being the chief corner-stone; "built upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets." And if you say, "Well, are these New Testament Apostles and Prophets?" That is in Ephesians, 2nd chapter. You go to the fifth verse of the third chapter and you find this mystery of Christ which God had revealed to His holy Apostles and Prophets by His Spirit; and it is on that the Church was built. And when you come to Timothy (2 Timothy 3:14-17) to that classical passage, you find the marks there by which inspired Scripture is distinguished. Take the book of Scripture and ask just this question: Does it answer to the claim of this inspired volume? How are we to test this? I do not enter here into the question that has divided good men as to theories of inspiration-questions about inerrancy in detail, and other matters. I want to get away from these things at the circumference to the center. But take the broader test. The Bible's Own Test of Inspiration What does the Bible itself give us as the test of its inspiration? What does the Bible itself name as the qualities that inspiration imparts to it? Paul speaks in Timothy of the Sacred Writings that were able to make wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. He goes on to tell us that ALL Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, in order that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. When you go back to the Old Testament and its praise of the Word of God you will find the qualities of inspiration are just the same. "The law of the Lord is perfect", etc. Those are the qualifies which the inspired Book is alleged to sustain-qualities which only a true inspiration of God's Spirit could give; qualities beyond which we surely do not need anything more. Does anyone doubt that the Bible possesses these qualities? Look at its structure; look at its completeness; look at it in the clearness and fullness and holiness of its teachings; look at it in its sufficiency to guide every soul that truly seeks light unto the saving knowledge of God. Take the Book as a whole, in its whole purpose, its whole spirit, its whole aim and tendency, and the whole setting of it, and ask, Is there not manifest the power which you can only trace back, as it traces back itself, to God's Holy Spirit really in the men who wrote it? ======================================================================== CHAPTER 61: - CHRIST AND CRITICISM ======================================================================== Christ and Criticism By Sir Robert Anderson, KCB., LLD., Author of In his "Founders of Old Testament Criticism" Professor Cheyne of Oxford gives the foremost place to Eichhorn. He hails him, in fact, as the founder of the cult. And according to this same authority, what led Eichhorn to enter on his task was "his hope to contribute to the winning back of the educated classes to religion." The rationalism of Germany at the close of the eighteenth century would accept the Bible only on the terms of bringing it down to the level of a human book, and the problem which had to be solved was to get rid of the element of miracle which pervades it. Working on the labors of his predecessors, Eichhorn achieved this to his own satisfaction by appealing to the oriental habit of thought, which seizes upon ultimate causes and ignores intermediate processes. This commended itself on two grounds. It had an undoubted element of truth, and it was consistent with reverence for Holy Scripture. For of the founder of the "Higher Criticism" it was said, what cannot be said of any of his successors, that "faith in that which is holy, even in the miracles of the Bible, was never shattered by Eichhorn in any youthful mind." In the view of his successors, however, Eichhorn's hypothesis was open to the fatal objection that it was altogether inadequate. So the next generation of critics adopted the more drastic theory that the Mosaic books were "mosaic" in the sense that they were literary forgeries of a late date, composed of materials supplied by ancient documents and the myths and legends of the Hebrew race. And though this theory has been modified from time to time during the last century, it remains substantially the "critical" view of the Pentateuch. But it is open to two main objections, either of which would be fatal. It is inconsistent with the evidence. And it directly challenges the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ as a teacher; for one of the few undisputed facts in this controversy is that our Lord accredited the books of Moses as having divine authority. The True and the Counterfeit It may be well to deal first with the least important of these objections. And here we must distinguish between the true Higher Criticism and its counterfeit. The rationalistic "Higher Criticism," when putting the Pentateuch upon its trial, began with the verdict and then cast about to find the evidence; whereas, true criticism enters upon its inquiries with an open mind and pursues them without prejudice. The difference may be aptly illustrated by the position assumed by a typical French judge and by an ideal English judge in a criminal trial. The one aims at convicting the accused, the other at elucidating the truth. "The proper function of the Higher Criticism is to determine the origin, date, and literary structure of an ancient writing." This is Professor Driver's description of true criticism. But the aim of the counterfeit is to disprove the genuineness of the ancient writings. The justice of this statement is established by the fact that Hebraists and theologians of the highest eminence, whose investigation of the Pentateuch problem has convinced them of the genuineness of the books, are not recognized at all. In Britain, at least--and I am not competent to speak of Germany or America--no theologian of the first rank has adopted their "assured results." But the judgment of such men as Pusey, Lightfoot and Salmon, not to speak of men who are still with us, they contemptuously ignore; for the rationalistic Higher Critic is not one who investigates the evidence, but one who accepts the verdict. The Philological Inquiry If, as its apostles sometimes urge, the Higher Criticism is a purely philological inquiry, two obvious conclusions follow. The first is that its verdict must be in favor of the Mosaic books; for each of the books contains peculiar words suited to the time and circumstances to which it is traditionally assigned. This is admitted, and the critics attribute the presence of such words to the jesuitical skill of the priestly forgers. But this only lends weight to the further conclusion that Higher Criticism is wholly incompetent to deal with the main issue on which it claims to adjudicate. For the genuineness of the Pentateuch must be decided on the same principles on which the genuineness of ancient documents is dealt with in our courts of justice. And the language of the documents is only one part of the needed evidence, and not the most important part. And fitness for dealing with evidence depends upon qualities to which Hebraists, as such, have no special claim. Indeed, their writings afford signal proofs of their unfitness for inquiries which they insist on regarding as their special preserve. Take, for example, Professor Driver's grave assertion that the presence of two Greek words in Daniel (they are the names of musical instruments) demand a date for the book subsequent to the Greek conquest. It has been established by Professor Sayce and others that the intercourse between Babylon and Greece in, and before, the clays of Nebuchadnezzar would amply account for the presence in the Chaldean capital of musical instruments with Greek names. And Colonel Conder, moreover,--a very high authority--considers the words to be Akkadian, and not Greek at all! But apart from all this, we can imagine the reception that would be given to such a statement by any competent tribunal. The story bears repeating-it is a record of facts-that at a church bazaar in Lincoln some years ago, the alarm was raised that pickpockets were at work, and two ladies had lost their purses. The empty purses were afterwards found in the pocket of the Bishop of the Diocese! On the evidence of the two purses the Bishop should be convicted as a thief, and on the evidence of the two words the book of Daniel should be convicted as a forgery! Historical Blunder Here is another typical item in the Critics' indictment of Daniel. The book opens by recording Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Jerusalem in the third year of Jehoiakim, a statement the correctness of which is confirmed by history, sacred and secular. Berosus, the Chaldean historian, tells us that during this expedition Nebuchadnezzar received tidings of his father's death, and that, committing to others the care of his army and of his Jewish and other prisoners, "he himself hastened home across the desert." But the German sceptics, having decided that Daniel was a forgery, had to find evidence to support their verdict. And so they made the brilliant discovery that Berosus was here referring to the expedition of the following year, when Nebuchadnezzar won the battle of Carchemish against the army of the king of Egypt, and that he had not at that time invaded Judea at all. But Carchemish is on the Euphrates, and the idea of "hastening home" from there to Babylon across the desert is worthy of a schoolboy's essay! That he crossed the desert is proof that he set out from Judea; and his Jewish captives were, of course, Daniel and his companion princes. His invasion of Judea took place before his accession, in Jehoiakam'.s third year, whereas the battle of Carchemish was fought after his accession, in the king of Judah's fourth year, as the biblical books record. But this grotesque blunder of Bertholdt's "Book of Daniel" in the beginning of the nineteenth century is gravely reproduced in Professor Driver's "Book of Daniel" at the beginning of the twentieth century. Critical Profanity But to return to Moses. According to "the critical hypothesis," the books of the Pentateuch are literary forgeries of the Exilic Era, the work of the Jerusalem priests of those evil days. From the Book of Jeremiah we know that those men were profane apostates; and if "the critical hypothesis" be true, they were infinitely worse than even the prophet's inspired denunciations of them indicate. For no eighteenth century atheist ever sank to a lower depth of profanity than is displayed by their use of the Sacred Name. In the preface to his "Darkness and Dawn," Dean Farrar claims that he "never touches the early preachers of Christianity with the finger of fiction." When his story makes Apostles speak, he has "confined their words to the words of a revelation." But ex. hyp., the authors of the Pentateuch "touched with the finger of fiction" not only the holy men of the ancient days, but their Jehovah God. "Jehovah spake unto Moses, saying." This and kindred formulas are repeated times without number in the Mosaic books. If this be romance, a lower type of profanity is inconceivable, unless it be that of the man who fails to be shocked and revolted by it. But no; facts prove that this judgment is unjust. For men of unfeigned piety and deep reverence for divine things can be so blinded by the superstitions of "religion" that the imprimatur of the church enables them to regard these discredited books as Holy Scripture. As critics they brand the Pentateuch as a tissue of myth and legend and fraud, but as religionists they assure us that this "implies no denial of its inspiration or disparagement of its contents. ["The Higher Criticism: Three Papers," by Professors Driver and Kirkpatrick] Errors Refuted by Facts In controversy it is of the greatest importance to allow opponents to state their position in their own words; and here is Professor Driver's statement of the case against the Books of Moses: "We can only argue on grounds of probability derived from our view of the progress of the art of writing, or of literary composition, or of the rise and growth of the prophetic tone and feeling in ancient Israel, or of the period at which the traditions contained in the narratives might have taken shape, or of the probability that they would have been written down before the impetus given to culture by the monarchy had taken effect, and similar considerations, for estimating most of which, though plausible arguments on one side or the other may be advanced, a standard on which we can confidently rely scarcely admits of being fixed." ("Introduction," 6th ed., page 123.) This modest reference to "literary composition" and "the art of writing" is characteristic. It is intended to gloss over the abandonment of one of the chief points in the original attack. Had "Driver's Introduction" appeared twenty years earlier, the assumption that such a literature as the Pentateuch could belong to the age of Moses would doubtless have been branded as an anachronism. For one of the main grounds on which the books were assigned to the latter days of the monarchy was that the Hebrews of six centuries earlier were an illiterate people. And after that error had been refuted by archaeological discoveries, it was still maintained that a code of laws so advanced, and so elaborate, as that of Moses could not have originated in such an age. This figment, however, was in its turn exploded, when the spade of the explorer brought to light the now famous Code of Khammurabi, the Amraphel of Genesis, who was king of Babylon in the time of Abraham. Instead, however, of donning the white sheet when confronted by this new witness, the critics, with great effrontery, pointed to the newly-found Code as the original of the laws of Sinai. Such a conclusion is natural on the part of men who treat the Pentateuch as merely human. But the critics cannot have it both ways. The Moses who copied Khammurabi must have been the real Moses of the Exodus, and not the mythical Moses of the Exile, who wrote long centuries after Khammurabi had been forgotten! An Incredible Theory The evidence of the Khammurabi Code refutes an important count in the critics' indictment of the Pentateuch; but we can call another witness whose testimony demolishes their whole case. The Pentateuch, as we all know, and the Pentateuch alone, constitutes the Bible of the Samaritans. Who, then, were the Samaritans? And how and when did they obtain the Pentateuch? Here again the critics shall speak for themselves. Among the distinguished men who have championed their crusade in Britain there has been none more esteemed, none more scholarly, than the late Professor Robertson Smith; and here is an extract from his "Samaritans" article in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica": "They (the Samaritans) regard themselves as Israelites, descendants of the ten tribes, and claim to possess the orthodox religion of Moses * * * The priestly law, which is throughout based on the practice of the priests in Jerusalem before the Captivity, was. reduced to form after the Exile, and was published by Ezra as the law of the rebuilt temple of Zion. The Samaritans must, therefore, have derived their Pentateuch from the Jews after Ezra's reforms." And in the same paragraph he says that, according to the contention of the Samaritans, "not only the temple of Zion, but the earlier temple of Shiloh and the priesthood of Eli, were schismatical." And yet, as he goes on to say, "the Samaritan religion was built on the Pentateuch alone." Now mark what this implies. We know something of racial bitterness. We know more, unfortunately, of the fierce bitterness of religious strife. And both these elements combined to alienate the Samaritans from the Jews. But more than this, in the post-exilic period distrust and dislike were turned to intense hatred--"abhorrence" is Robertson Smith's word--by the sternness and contempt with which the Jews spurned their proffered help in the work of reconstruction at Jerusalem, and refused to acknowledge them in any way. And yet we are asked to believe that, at this very time and in these very circumstances, the Samaritans, while hating the Jews much as Orangemen hate the Jesuits, and the whole Jewish cult as schismatical, not only accepted these Jewish books relating to that cult as the "service books" of their own ritual, but adopted them as their "Bible," to the exclusion even of the writings of their own Israelite prophets, and the venerated and sacred books which record the history of their kings. In the whole range of controversy, religious or secular, was there ever propounded a theory more utterly incredible and preposterous! Another Preposterous Position No less preposterous are the grounds on which this conclusion is commended to us. Here is a statement of them, quoted from the standard textbook of the cult, Hasting's "Bible Dictionary": "There is at least one valid ground for the conclusion that the Pentateuch was first accepted by the Samaritans after the Exile. Why was their request to be allowed to take part in the building of the second temple refused by the heads of the Jerusalem community? Very probably because the Jews were aware that the Samaritans did not as yet possess the Law-Book. It is hard to suppose that otherwise they would have met with this refusal. Further, anyone who, like the present writer, regards the modern criticism of the Pentateuch as essentially correct, has a second decisive reason fro adopting the above view." (Professor Konig's article, "Samaritan Pentateuch," page 68.) Here are two "decisive reasons" for holding that "the Pentateuch was first accepted by the Samaritans after the Exile." First, because "very probably" it was because they had not those forged books that the Jews spurned their help; and so they went home and adopted the forged books as their Bible! And, secondly, because criticism has proved that the books were not in existence till then. To characterize the writings of these scholars as they deserve is not a grateful task but the time has come to throw off reserve, when such drivel as this is gravely put forward to induce us to tear from our Bible the Holy Scriptures on which our Divine Lord based His claims to Messiahship. The Idea of Sacrifice a Revelation The refutation of the Higher Criticism does not prove that the Pentateuch is inspired of God. The writer who would set himself to establish such a thesis as that within the limits of a Review Article might well be admired for his enthusiasm and daring, but certainly not for his modesty or discretion. Neither does it decide questions which lie within the legitimate province of the true Higher Criticism, as ex. gr., the authorship of Genesis. It is incredible that for the thousands of years that elapsed before the days of Moses, God left His people on earth without a revelation: It is plain, moreover, that many of the ordinances divinely entrusted to Moses were but a renewal of an earlier revelation. The religion of Babylon is clear evidence of such a primeval revelation. How else can the universality of sacrifice be accounted for? Could such a practice have originated in a human brain? If some demented creature conceived the idea that killing a beast before his enemy's door would propitiate him, his neighbours would no doubt have suppressed him. And if he evolved the belief that his god would be appeased by such an offensive practice, he must have supposed his god to be as mad as himself. The fact that sacrifice prevailed among all races can be explained only by a primeval revelation. And the Bible student will recognize that God thus sought to impress on men that death was the penalty of sin, and to lead them to look forward to a great blood shedding that would bring life and blessing to mankind. But Babylon was to the ancient world what Rome has been to Christendom. It corrupted every divine ordinance and truth, and perpetuated them as thus corrupted. And in the Pentateuch we have the divine re-issue of the true cult. The figment that the debased and corrupt version was the original may satisfy some professors of Hebrew, but no one who has any practical knowledge of human nature would entertain it. Insufficient Evidence At this stage, however, what concerns us is not the divine authority of the books, but the human error and folly of the critical attack upon them. The only historical basis of that attack is the fact that in the revival under Josiah, "the book of the law" was found in the temple by Hilkiah, the high priest, to whom the young king entrusted the duty of cleansing and renovating the long neglected shrine. A most natural discovery it was, seeing that Moses had in express terms commanded that it should be kept there (2 Kings 22:8; Deuteronomy 31:26). But according to the critics, the whole business was a detestable trick of the priests. For they it was who forged the books and invented the command, and then hid the product of their infamous work where they knew it would. be found. And apart from this, the only foundation for "the assured results of modern criticism," as they themselves acknowledge, consists of "grounds of probability" and "plausible arguments"! In no civilized country would an habitual criminal be convicted of petty larceny on such evidence as this; and yet it is on these grounds that we are called upon to give up the sacred books which our Divine Lord accredited as "the Word of God" and made the basis of His doctrinal teaching. Christ or Criticism? And this brings us to the second, and incomparably the graver, objection to "the assured results of modern criticism." That the Lord Jesus Christ identified Himself with the Hebrew Scriptures, and in a very special way with the Book of Moses, no one disputes. And this being so, we must make choice between Christ and Criticism. For if "the critical hypothesis" of the Pentateuch be sustained, the conclusion is seemingly inevitable, either that He was not divine, or that the records of His teaching are untrustworthy. Which alternative shall we adopt? If the second, then every claim to inspiration must be abandoned, and agnosticism must supplant faith in the case of every fearless thinker. Inspiration is far too great a question for incidental treatment here; but two remarks with respect to it may not be inopportune. Behind the frauds of Spiritualism there lies the fact, attested by men of high character, some of whom are eminent as scientists and scholars, that definite communications are received in precise words from the world of spirits. [The fact that, as the Christian believes, these spirits are demons who impersonate the dead, does not affect the argument] And this being so, to deny that the Spirit of God could thus communicate truth to men, or, in other words, to reject verbal inspiration on a priori grounds, betrays the stupidity of systematized unbelief. And, secondly, it is amazing that any one who regards the coming of Christ as God's supreme revelation of Himself can imagine that (to put it on no higher ground than "Providence") the Divine Spirit could fail to ensure that mankind should have a trustworthy and true record of His mission and His teaching. A More Hopeless Dilemma But if the Gospel narrative be authentic, we are driven back upon the alternative that He of whom they speak could not be divine. "Not so," the critics protest, "for did He not Himself confess His ignorance? And is not this explained by the Apostle's statement that in His humiliation He emptied Himself of His Deity?" And the inference drawn from this (to quote the standard text-book of the cult) is that the Lord of Glory "held the current Jewish notions respecting the divine authority and revelation of the Old Testament." But even if this conclusion--as portentous as it is profane--could be established, instead of affording an escape from the dilemma in which the Higher Criticism involves its votaries, it would only serve to make that dilemma more hopeless and more terrible. For what chiefly concerns us is not that, ex. hyp., the Lord's doctrinal teaching was false, but that in unequivocal terms, and with extreme solemnity, He declared again and again that His teaching was not His own but His Father's, and that the very words in which He conveyed it were God-given. A few years ago the devout were distressed by the proceedings of a certain Chicago "prophet," who claimed divine authority for his lucubration's. Kindly disposed people, rejecting a severer estimate of the man and his platform utterances, regarded him merely as a profane fool. Shall the critics betray us into forming a similarly indulgent estimate of -- My pen refuses to complete the sentence! And will it be believed that the only scriptural basis offered us for this astounding position is a verse in one of the Gospels and a word in one of the Epistles! Passing strange it is that men who handle Holy Scripture with such freedom when it conflicts with their "assured results" should attach such enormous importance to an isolated verse or a single word, when it can be misused to support them. The verse is Mark 13:32, where the Lord says, with reference to His coming again: "Of that day and hour knoweth no one; no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father." But this follows immediately upon the words: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away." The Words of God The Lord's words were not "inspired"; they were the words of God in a still higher sense. "The people were astonished at His teaching," we are told, "for He taught them as one having exousia." The word occurs again in Acts 1:7, where He says that times and seasons "the Father hath put in His own exousia." And this is explained by Php_2:6-7 : "He counted it not a prize (or a thing to be grasped) to be on an equality with God, but emptied Himself"--the word on which the kenosis theory of the critics depends. And He not only stripped Himself of His glory as God; He gave up His liberty as a man. For He never spoke His own words, but only the words which the Father gave Him to speak. And this was the limitation of His "authority"; so that, beyond what the Father gave Him to speak, He knew nothing and was silent. But when He spoke, "He taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes." From their scribes. they were used to receive definite teaching, but it was teaching based on "the law and the prophets." But here was One who stood apart and taught them from a wholly different plane. "For," He declared, "I spake not -from Myself; but the Father which sent Me, He bath given Me a commandment what I should say and what I should speak. * * * The things, therefore, which I speak, even as the Father bath said unto Me, so I speak" ( John 12:49-50, R. V. ) . And let us not forget that it was not merely the substance of His teaching that was divine, but the very language in which it was conveyed. So that in His prayer on the night of the betrayal He could say, not only "I have given them Thy word," but "I have given them the words which Thou gavest Me." [*Both the logos and the rêmata John 17:5; John 17:14; as again in Chap. 14:10; 24.) His words, therefore, about Moses and the Hebrew Scriptures were not, as the critics, with such daring and seeming profanity, maintain, the lucubration's of a superstitious and ignorant Jew; they were the words of God, and conveyed truth that was divine and eternal. When in the dark days of the Exile, God needed a prophet who would speak only as He gave him words, He struck Ezekiel dumb. Two judgments already rested on that people the seventy years' Servitude to Babylon, and then the Captivity -and they were warned that continued impenitence would bring on them the still more terrible judgment of the seventy years' desolations. And till that last judgment fell, Ezekiel remained dumb (Ezekiel 3:26; Ezekiel 24:27; Ezekiel 33:22). But the Lord Jesus Christ needed no such discipline. He came to do the Father's will, and no words ever passed His lips save the words given Him to speak. In this connection, moreover, two facts which are strangely overlooked claim prominent notice. The first is that in Mark 13 the antithesis is not at all between man and God, but between the Son of God and the Father. And the second is that He had been re-invested with all that, according to Philp 2, He laid aside in coming into the world. "All things have been delivered unto Me of My Father," He declared; and this at a time when the proofs that "He was despised and rejected of men" were pressing on Him. His reassuming the glory awaited His return to heaven, but here on earth the all things were already His (Matthew 11:27). After the Kenosis The foregoing is surely an adequate reply to the kenosis figment of the critics; but if any should still doubt or cavil, there is another answer which is complete and crushing. Whatever may have been the limitations under which He rested during His ministry on earth, He was released from them when He rose from the dead. And it was in His post-resurrection teaching that He gave the fullest and clearest testimony to the Hebrew Scriptures. Then it was that, "beginning at Moses, and all the prophets, He expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself." And again, confirming all His previous teaching about those Scriptures, "He said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning Me." And the record adds: "Then opened He their mind that they might understand the Scriptures." And the rest of the New Testament is the fruit of that ministry, enlarged and unfolded by the Holy Spirit given to lead them into all truth. And in every part of the New Testament the Divine authority of the Hebrew Scriptures, and especially of the Books of Moses, is either taught or assumed. The Vital Issue Certain it is, then, that the vital issue in this controversy is not the value of the Pentateuch, but the Deity of Christ. And yet the present article does not pretend to deal with the truth of the Deity. Its humble aim is not even to establish the authority of the Scriptures, but merely to discredit the critical. attack upon them by exposing its real character and its utter feebleness. The writer's method, therefore, has been mainly destructive criticism, the critics' favourite weapon being thus turned against themselves. A Demand for Correct Statement One cannot but feel distress at having to accord such treatment to certain distinguished men whose reverence for divine things is beyond reproach. A like distress is felt at times by those who have experience in dealing with sedition, or in suppressing riots. But when men who are entitled to consideration and respect thrust themselves into "the line of fire," they must take the consequences. These distinguished men will not fail to receive to the full the deference to which they are entitled, if only they will dissociate themselves from the dishonest claptrap of this crusade ("the assured results of modern criticism"; "all scholars are with us"; and so on--bluster and falsehood by which the weak and ignorant are browbeaten or deceived) and acknowledge that their "assured results" are mere hypotheses, repudiated by Hebraists and theologians as competent and eminent as themselves. Things to Fear The effects of this "Higher Criticism" are extremely grave. For it has dethroned the Bible in the home, and the good, old practice of "family worship" is rapidly dying out. And great national interests also are involved. For who can doubt that the prosperity and power of the Protestant nations of the world are due to the influence of the Bible upon character and conduct? Races of men who for generations have been taught to think for themselves in matters of the highest moment will naturally excel in every sphere of effort or of enterprise. And more than this, no one who is trained in the fear of God will fail in his duty to his neighbour, but will prove himself a good citizen. But the dethronement of the Bible leads practically to the dethronement of God; and in Germany and America, and now in England, the effects of this are declaring themselves in ways, and to an extent, well fitted to cause anxiety for the future. Christ Supreme If a personal word may be pardoned in conclusion, the writer would appeal to every book he has written in proof that he is no champion of a rigid, traditional "orthodoxy." With a single limitation, he would advocate full and free criticism of Holy Scripture. And that one limitation is that the words of the Lord Jesus Christ shall be deemed a bar to criticism and "an end of controversy" on every subject expressly dealt with in His teaching. "The Son of God is come"; and by Him came both grace and TRUTH. And from His hand it is that we have received the Scriptures of the Old Testament. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 62: - OT CRITICISM AND NT CHRISTIANITY ======================================================================== Old Testament Criticism and New Testament Christianity By Professor W. H. Griffith Thomas, D. D., Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada A large number of Christians feel compelled to demur to the present attitude of many scholars to the Scriptures of the Old Testament. It is now being taught that the patriarchs of Jewish history are not historic persons; that the records connected with Moses and the giving of the law on Sinai are unhistorical; that the story of the tabernacle in the wilderness is a fabricated history of the time of the Exile; that the prophets cannot be relied on in their references to the ancient history of their own people, or in their predictions of the future; that the writers of the New Testament, who assuredly believed in the records of the Old Testament, were mistaken in the historical value they assigned to those records; that our Lord Himself, in His repeated references to the Scriptures of His own nation, and in His assumption of the Divine authority of those Scriptures, and of the reality of the great names they record, was only thinking and speaking as an ordinary Jew of His day, and was as liable to error in matters of history and of criticism as any of them were. The present paper is intended to give expression to some of the questions that have arisen in the course of personal study, in connection with collegiate work and also during several years of ordinary pastoral ministry. It is often urged that problems of Old Testament criticism are for experts alone, and can only be decided by them. We venture to question the correctness of this view, especially when it is remembered that to many people "experts" means experts in Hebrew philology only. By all means let .us have all possible expert knowledge; but, as Biblical questions are complex, and involve several considerations, we need expert knowledge in archaeology, history, theology, and even spiritual experience, as well as in philology. Every available factor must be taken into account, and the object of the present paper is to emphasize certain elements which appear liable to be overlooked, or at least insufficiently considered. We do not question for an instant the right of Biblical criticism considered in itself. On the contrary, it is a necessity for all who use the Bible to be "critics" in the sense of constantly using their "judgment" on what is before them. What is called "higher" criticism is not only a legitimate but a necessary method for all Christians, for by its use we are able to discover the facts and the form of the Old Testament Scriptures. Our hesitation, consequently, is not intended to apply to the method, but to what is believed to be an illegitimate, unscientific, and unhistorical use of it. In fact, we base our objections to much modern criticism of the Old Testament on what we regard as a proper use of a true higher criticism. 1. Is the Testimony of Nineteen Centuries of Christian History and Experience of No Account in This Question? For nearly eighteen centuries these modern views of the Old Testament were not heard of. Yet this is not to be accounted for by the absence of intellectual power and scholarship in the Church. Men like Origen, Jerome, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Calvin, Luther, Melancthon, to say nothing of the English Puritans and other divines of the seventeenth century, were not intellectually weak or inert, nor were they wholly void of critical acumen with reference to Holy Scripture. Yet they, and the whole Church with them, never hesitated to accept the view of the Old Testament which had come down to them, not only as a heritage from Judaism, but as endorsed by the apostles. Omitting all reference to our Lord, it is not open to question that the views of St. Paul and St. Peter and St. John about the Old Testament were the views of the whole Christian Church until the end of the eighteenth century. And, making every possible allowance for the lack of historical spirit and of modern critical methods, are we to suppose that the whole Church for centuries never exercised its mind on such subjects as the contents, history, and authority of the Old Testament? Besides, this is a matter which cannot be decided by intellectual criticism alone. Scripture appeals to conscience, heart and will, as well as to mind; and the Christian consciousness, the accumulated spiritual experience of the body of Christ, is not to be lightly regarded, much less set aside, unless it is proved to be unwarranted by fact. While we do not say that "what is new is not true," the novelty of these modern critical views should give us pause before we virtually set aside the spiritual instinct of centuries of Christian experience. 2. Does the New Criticism Readily Agree with the Historical Position of the Jewish Nation? The Jewish nation is a fact in history, and its record is given to us in the Old Testament. There is no contemporary literature to check tile account there given, and archaeology affords us assistance on points of detail only, not for any long or continuous period. This record of Jewish history can be proved to have remained the same for many centuries. Yet much of modern criticism is compelled to reconstruct the history of the Jews on several important pints. It involves, for instance, a very different idea of the character of the earliest form of Jewish religion from that seen in the Old Testament as it now stands; its views of the patriarchs are largely different from the conceptions found on the face of the Old Testament narrative; its views of Moses and David are essentially altered from what we have before us in the Old Testament. Now what is there in Jewish history to support all this reconstruction? Absolutely nothing. We see through the centuries the great outstanding objective fact of the Jewish nation, and the Old Testament is at once the means and the record of their national life. It rose with them, grew with them, and it is to the Jews alone we can look for the earliest testimony to the Old Testament canon. In face of these facts, it is bare truth to say that the fundamental positions of modern Old Testament criticism are utterly incompatible with the historic growth and position of the Jewish people. Are we not right, therefore, to pause before we accept this subjective reconstruction of history? Let anyone read Wellhausen's article on "Israel" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and then ask himself whether he recognizes at all therein the story as given in the Old Testament. 3. Are the Results of the Modern View of the Old Testament Really Established? It is sometimes said that modern criticism is no longer a matter of hypothesis; it has entered the domain of facts. Principal George Adam Smith has gone so far as to say that "modern criticism has won its war against the traditional theories. It only remains to fix the amount of the indemnity." But is this really so? Can we assert that the results of modern criticism are established facts? Indeed Dr. Smith has himself admitted, since writing the above words, that there are questions still open which were supposed to be settled and closed twenty years ago. In the first place, is the excessive literary analysis of the Pentateuch at all probable or even thinkable on literary grounds? Let anyone work through a section of Genesis as given by Dr. Driver in his "Introduction", and see whether such a complex combination of authors is at all likely, or whether, even if likely, the various authors can now be distinguished? Is not the whole method far too purely subjective to be probable and reliable? Further, the critics are not agreed as to the number of documents, or as to the portions to be assigned to each author. A simple instance of this may be given. It is not so many years ago when criticism was content to say that Isaiah 40-66, though not by Isaiah, was the work of one author, an unknown prophet of the Exile. But the most recent writers like Duhm, Macfadyen and Wade consider these chapters to be the work of two writers, and that the whole Book of Isaiah (from three authors) did not receive its present form until long after the return from the Exile. Then, these differences in literary analysis involve differences of interpretation and differences of date, character, and meaning of particular parts of the Old Testament. To prove this, we ask attention to the following extracts from a review of a work on Genesis by Professor Gunkel of Berlin. The review is by Professor Andrew Harper of Melbourne, and appeared in the "Critical Review" for January, 1902. Professor Harper's own position would, we imagine, be rightly characterized as generally favourable to the moderate position of the critical movement. His comments on Gunkel's book are, therefore, all the more noteworthy and significant. "It will change the whole direction of the conflict as to the early books of the Pentateuch and lead it into more fruitful directions, for it has raised the fundamental question whether the narratives in Genesis are not far older than the authors of the documents marked J. E. P., and whether they are not faithful witnesses to the religion of Israel before prophetic times." "His conclusion will, in many respects, be welcome to those who have felt how incredible some of the assumptions of the Kuenen-Wellhausen school of critics are." "It will be obvious at a glance what an upsetting of current conceptions in regard to the history of religion must follow if it be accepted." "They are sufficient, if made good, to upset the whole of the current reconstructions of the religion of Israel. To most readers it will be seen that he has in large part made them good." "There can be no doubt that his book most skilfully begins a healthy and much-needed reaction. It should, therefore, be read and welcomed by all students of the Old Testament whose minds are open." In view of Gunkel's position thus endorsed by Professor Harper, is it fair to claim victory for the modern critical theories of the Old Testament? When an able scholar like Professor Harper can speak of a new work as "sufficient to upset the whole of the current reconstructions of the religion of Israel," it is surely premature to speak even in a moment of rhetorical enthusiasm, as Dr. George Adam Smith does, of "victory" and "indemnity." Dr. Smith himself now admits that Gunkel has overturned the Wellhausen theory of the patriarchal narratives. And the same scholar has told us that distinction in the use of the name for God is "too precarious" as the basis of arguments for distinctions of sources. For ourselves we heartily endorse the words of an American scholar when he says: "We are certain that there will be no final settlement of Biblical questions on the basis of the higher criticism that is now commonly called by that name. Many specific teachings of the system will doubtless abide. But so far forth as it goes upon the assumption that statements of fact -in the Scriptures are pretty generally false, so far forth it is incapable of establishing genuinely permanent results." [Dr. G. A. Smith, "Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament", p. 35. Dr. Willis J. Beecher, in "The Bible Student and Teacher", January, 1904] Sir W. Robertson Nicoll, editor of the "British Weekly," remarked quite recently that the "assured results" seem to be vanishing, that no one really knows what they are. 4. Is the Position of Modern Criticism Really Compatible with a Belief in the Old Testament as a Divine Revelation? The problem before us is not merely literary, nor only historical; it is essentially religious, and the whole matter resolves itself into one question: Is the Old Testament the record of a Divine revelation? This is the ultimate problem. It is admitted by both sides to be almost impossible to minimize the differences between the traditional and the modern views of the Old Testament. As a reviewer of Dr. George Adam Smith's book, "Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament", rightly says: "The difference is immense; they involve different conceptions of the relation of God to the world; different views as to the course of Israel's history, the process of revelation, and the nature of inspiration. We cannot be lifted from the old to the new position by the influence of a charming literary style, or by the force of the most enthusiastic eloquence." ("American Journal of Theology", Vol. VI., p. 114) In view of this fundamental difference, the question of the trustworthiness of the Old Testament becomes acute and pressing. In order to test this fairly and thoroughly, let us examine some of the statements made on behalf of the modern view. We may consider first the rise and progress of religion in Israel. Dr. G. A. Smith says: "It is plain, then, that to whatever heights the religion of Israel afterwards rose, it remained before the age of the great prophets not only similar to, but in all respects above-mentioned identical with, the general Semitic religion; which was not a monotheism, but a polytheism with an opportunity for monotheism at the heart of it, each tribe being attached to one god, as to their particular Lord and Father." ["Modern Criticism", p. 130] Consider what is meant by the phrase, "in all respects above-mentioned identical with the general Semitic religion," as applied to the religion of Israel previous to the eighth century B. C. Can this view be fairly deduced from the Old Testament as we now have it? Still more, is such a view conceivable in the. light of the several preceding centuries of God's special dealings with Israel? Wherein, on this assumption, consisted the uniqueness of Israel from the time of Abraham to the eighth century B. C.? We may next take the character of the narratives of Genesis. The real question at issue is the historical character. Modern criticism regards the account in Genesis as largely mythical and legendary. Yet it is certain that the ,Jews of the later centuries accepted these patriarchs as veritable personages, and the incidents associated with them as genuine history. St. Paul and the other New Testament writers assuredly held the same view. If, then, they are not historical, surely the truths emphasized by prophets and apostles from the patriarchal stories are so far weakened in their supports? Take, again, the legislation which in the Pentateuch is associated with Moses, and almost invariably introduced by the phrase, "The Lord spake unto Moses." Modern criticism regards this legislation as unknown until the Exile, or a thousand years after the time of Moses. Is it really possible to accept this as satisfactory? Are we to suppose that "The Lord spake to Moses" is only a well-known literary device intended to invest the utterance with greater importance and more solemn sanction? This position, together with the generally accepted view of modern criticism about the invention of Deuteronomy in the days of Josiah, cannot be regarded as in accordance with historial fact or ethical principle. Canon Driver and Dr. G. A. Smith, it is true, strongly assert the compatibility of the new views with a belief in the Divine authority of the Old Testament, and so far as they themselves are concerned we of course accept their statements ex animo. But we wish they would give us more clearly and definitely than they have yet done, the grounds on which this compatibility may be said to rest. To deny historicity, to correct dates by hundreds of years, to reverse judgments on which a nation has rested for centuries, to traverse views which have been the spiritual sustenance of millions, and then to say that all this is consistent with the Old Testament being regarded as a Divine revelation, is at least puzzling, and does not afford mental or moral satisfaction to many who do not dream of questioning the bona fides of scholars who hold the views now criticized. The extremes to which Dr. Cheyne has gone seem to many the logical outcome of the principles with which modern criticism, even of a moderate type, starts. Facilis descensus Averno, and we .should like to be shown the solid and logical halting-place where those who refuse to go with Cheyne think that they and we can stand. Sir W. Robertson Nicoll, commenting March 12, 1903, on a speech delivered by the then Prime Minister of Great Britain (Mr. Balfour) in connection with the Bible Society's Centenary, made the following significant remarks: "The immediate results of criticism are in a high degree disturbing. So fat they have scarcely been understood by the average Christian. But the plain man who has been used to receive everything in the Bible as a veritable Word of God cannot fail to be perplexed, and deeply perplexed, when he is told that much of the Old Testament and the New is unhistorical, and when he is asked to accept the statement that God reveals Himself by myth and legend as well as by the truth, of fact. Mr. Balfour must surely know that many of the higher critics have ceased to be believers. More than twenty years ago the present writer, walking with Julius Wellhausen in the quaint streets of Greifswald, ventured to ask him whether, if his views were accepted, the Bible could retain its place in the estimation of the common people. `I cannot see how that is possible,' was the sad reply." It is no mere question of how we may use the Old Testament for preaching, or how much is left for use after the critical views are accepted. But even our preaching will lack a great deal of the note of certitude. If. we are to regard certain biographies as unhistorical, it will not be easy to draw lessons for conduct, and if the history is largely legendary, our deductions about God's government and providence must be essentially weakened. But the one point to be faced is the historic credibility of those parts of the Old Testament questioned by modern criticism, and the historical and religious value of the documents of the Pentateuch. Meanwhile, we ask to have char proof of the compatibility of the modern views with the acceptance of the Old Testament as the record of a Divine revelation. 5. Modern Criticism Based on a Sound Philosophy Such as Christians Can Accept? At the foundation of much modern thought is the philosophy known as Idealism, which, as often interpreted, involves a theory of the universe that finds no room for supernatural interpositions of any kind. The great law of the universe, including the physical, mental, and moral realms, is said to be evolution, and though this doubtless presupposes an original Creator, it does not, on the theory now before us, permit of any subsequent direct intervention of God during the process of development. This general philosophical principle applied to history has assuredly influenced, if it has not almost moulded, a great deal of modern criticism of the Old Testament. It is not urged that all who accept even the position of a moderate criticism, go the full length of the extreme evolutionary theory; but there can be no reasonable doubt that most of the criticism of the Old Testament is materially affected by an evolutionary theory of all history which tends to minimize Divine intervention in the affairs of the people of Israel. It is certainly correct to say that the presupposition of much present-day critical reasoning is a denial of the supernatural, and especially of the predictive element in prophecy. As to the theory of evolution regarded as a process of uninterrupted differentiation of existences, under purely natural laws, and without any Divine intervention, it will suffice to say that it is "not proven" in the sphere of natural science, while in the realms of history and literature it is palpably false. The records of history and of literature reveal from time to time the great fact and factor of personality, the reality of personal power, and this determinative element has a peculiar way of setting at naught all idealistic theories of a purely natural and uniform progress in history and letters. The literature of today is not necessarily higher than that produced in the past; the history of the last century is not in every way .and always superior to that of its predecessors. Even a "naturalistic" writer like Professor Percy Gardner testifies to the fact and force of personality in the following remarkable terms: "There is, in fact, a great force in history which is not, so far as we can judge, evolutional, and the law of which is very hard to trace-the force of personality and character." And quite apart from such instances of personality as have arisen from time to time through the centuries, there is one Personality who has not yet been accounted for by any theory of evolution--the Person of Jesus of Nazareth. There are sufficient data in current Old Testament criticism to warrant the statement that it proceeds from presuppositions concerning the origins of history, religion, and the Bible, which, in their essence, are subversive of belief in a Divine revelation. And such being the case, we naturally look with grave suspicion on results derived from so unsound a philosophical basis. 6. Can Purely Naturalistic Premises Be Accepted with Out Coming to Purely Naturalistic Conclusions? Kuenen and Wellhausen are admittedly accepted as masters by our leading Old Testament "higher critics" in England, Scotland, and America, and the results of their literary analysis of the Pentateuch are generally regarded as conclusive by their followers. On the basis of this literary dissection, certain conclusions are formed as to the character and growth of Old Testament religion, and, as a result, the history of the Jews is reconstructed. The Book of Deuteronomy is said to be mainly, if not entirely, a product of the reign of Josiah, the accounts of the tabernacle and worship are of exilic date; monotheism in Israel was of late date, and was the outcome of a growth from polytheism; and the present Book of Genesis reflects the thoughts of the time of its composition or compilation in or near the date of the Exile. Now it is known that Kuenen and Wellhausen deny the supernatural element in the Old Testament. This is the "presupposition" of their entire position. Will anyone say that it does not materially affect their conclusions? And is there any safe or logical halting-ground for those who accept so many of their premises? The extreme subjectivity of Canon Cheyne ought not to be a surprise to any who accept the main principles of modern higher criticism; it is part of the logical outcome of the general position. We gladly distinguish between the extremists and the other scholars who see no incompatibility between the acceptance of many of the literary and historical principles of Kuenen and Wellhausen and a belief in the Divine source and authority of the Old Testament. But we are bound to add that the unsatisfying element in the writings of moderate men like Canon Driver and Principal George Adam Smith is that, while accepting so much of the "naturalism" of the German school, they do not give us any clear assurance of the strength of the foundation on which they rest and ask us to rest. The tendency of their position is certainly towards a minimizing of the supernatural in the Old Testament. Take, as one instance, the Messianic element. In spite of the universal belief of Jews and Christians in a personal Messiah, a belief derived in the first place solely from the Old Testament, and supported for Christians by the New, modern criticism will not allow much clear and undoubte(4 prediction of Him. Insight into existing conditions is readily granted to the prophets, but they are not allowed to have had much foresight into future conditions connected with the Messiah. Yet Isaiah's glowing words remain, and demand a fair, full exegesis such as they do not get from many modern scholars. Dr. James Wells, of Glasgow, wrote in the "British Weekly" some time ago of the new criticism on this point: "The fear of prediction in the proper sense of the term is ever before its eyes. It gladly enlarges on fore-shadowings, a moral historical growth which reaches its culmination in Christ; and anticipations of the Spirit of Christ; but its tendency. is always to minimize the prophetic element in the Old Testament." Another example of the tendency of modern criticism to minimize and explain away the supernatural element may be given from a book entitled, "The Theology and Ethics of the Hebrews," by Dr. Archibald Duff, Professor in the Yorkshire College, Bradford. This is his account of Moses at the burning bush: "He was shepherding his sheep among the red granite mountains . . . . The man sat at dawn by the stream, and watched the fiery rocks. Yonder gleamed the level sunlight across the low growth. Each spine glistened against the rising sun. The man was a poet, one fit for inspiration. He felt that the dreams of his soul were the whisperings of his God, the place His sanctuary. He bowed and worshipped," (p. 6.) This, at least, is not the prima facie impression derived from the account given in Exodus. One more illustration may be given of modern critical methods of dealing with narratives of the Old Testament which were evidently intended to be regarded as historical. In the "International Critical Commentary" on Numbers, Dr. G. B. Gray, of Mansfield College, Oxford, thus writes on what he terms "the priestly section of the book" "For the history of the Mosaic age the whole section is valueless." "The historical impression given by (P) of the Mosaic age is altogether unhistorical, and much of the detail . . . can . . . be demonstrated to be entirely unreal, or at least untrue of the age in question." "This history is fictitious." These statements at once set aside the history contained in more than three-quarters of the whole Book of Numbers, while as to the rest Dr. Gray's verdict is by no means reassuring, and he clearly does not possess much confidence in even the small quantity that escapes his condemnation. The brazen serpent is said to be an invention on the part of some "who had come under the higher prophetic teaching" before Hezekiah, and is meant "to controvert the popular belief" in the healing power of the serpent by ascribing it to Jehovah. As to the story of Balaam, Dr. Gray wrotes [sic] : "It may, indeed, contain other historical features, such as the name of Balak, who may have been an actual king of Moab; but no means at present exist for distinguishing any further between the historical or legendary elements and those which are supplied by the creative faculty and the religious feeling of the writers." What is any ordinary earnest Christian to make of all these statements? The writer of the Book of Numbers evidently composed what professes to be history, and what he meant to be read as history, and yet according to Dr. Gray all this has no historical foundation. We can only say that the Christian Church will require very much more convincing proofs before they can accept the critical position, and it does not facilitate our acceptance of this wholesale process of invention to be told that it is due to "the creative faculty and the religious feeling of the writers." As to the fact that so many of our British and American "higher critics" are firm believers in the Divine authority of the Old Testament, and of a Divine revelation embodied in it, we cannot but feel the force of the words of the late Dr. W. H. Green, of Princeton: "They who have themselves been thoroughly grounded in the Christian faith may, by a happy inconsistency, hold fast their old convictions, while admitting principles, methods, and conclusions that are logically at war with them. But who can be surprised if others shall with stricter logic carry what has been thus commended to them to its legitimate conclusions?" 7. Can We Overlook the Evidence of Archaeology? It is well known that during the last sixty years a vast number of archaeological discoveries have been made in Egypt, Palestine, Babylonia, and Assyria. Many of these have shed remarkable light on the historical features of the Old Testament. A number of persons and periods have been illuminated by these discoveries and are now seen with a clearness which was before impossible. Now it is a simple and yet striking fact that not one of these discoveries during the whole of this tune has given any support to the distinctive features and principles of the higher critical position, while, on the other hand, many of them have afforded abundant confirmation of the traditional and conservative view of the Old Testament. Let us consider a few of these discoveries. Only a little over forty years ago the conservative "Speaker's Commentary" actually had to take into consideration the critical arguments then so prevalent in favour of the late invention of writing. This is an argument which is never heard now in critical circles. The change of attack is most striking. While forty or fifty years ago it was argued that Moses could not possibly have had sufficient learning to write the Pentateuch, now it is argued as the result of these modern discoveries that he would have been altogether behind his contemporaries if he had not been able to write. Again, the Babylonian story of the flood agrees in long sections with the account in Genesis, and it is known that the Babylonian version was in existence for ages before the dates assigned. to the Genesis narrative by the critical school. Professor Sayce rightly calls this a crucial test of the critical position. The historicity of the kings mentioned in Gen 14 was once seriously questioned by criticism, but this is impossible today, for their historical character has been proved beyond all question, and, in particular, it is now known that the Amraphel of that chapter is the Hammurabi of the Monuments and a contemporary with Abraham. The puzzling story of Sarah and Hagar is also now seen to be in exact agreement with Babylonian custom. Then again, the Egypt of Joseph and Moses is true to the smallest details of the life of the Egypt of that day and is altogether different from the very different Egypt of later ages. Sargon, who for centuries was only known from the one reference to him in Isaiah 20:1, is now seen to have been one of the most important kings of Assyria. And the Aramaic language of Daniel and Ezra, which has so often been accused of lateness, is proved to be in exact accord with the Aramaic of that age, as shown by the Papyri discovered at Elephantine in Egypt. Now these, and others like them, are tangible proofs which can be verified by ordinary people. Hebrew philology is beyond most of us and is too subjective for any convincing argument to be based upon it, but archaeology offers an objective method of putting historical theories to the test. Not the least important feature of the archaeological argument is that a number of leading archaeologists who were formerly in hearty agreement with the critical school, have now abandoned this view and oppose it. As Sir William Robertson Nicoll has forcibly said: "The significant fact is that the great first-hand archaeologists as a rule do not trust the higher criticism. This means a great deal more than can be put on paper to account for their doubt. It means that they are living in an atmosphere where arguments that flourish outside do not thrive." Professor Flinders Petrie, the great Egyptologist, uttered these words not long ago: "I have come to the conclusion that there is a far more solid basis than seems to be supposed by many critics . . . . I have not the slightest doubt that contemporary documents give a truly solid foundation for the records contained in the Pentateuch . . . . The essential point is that some of these critical people support from an a priori basis instead of writing upon ascertained facts. We should remember that writing at the time of the Exodus was as familiar as it is now . . . . The fact is that it is hopeless for these people by means merely of verbal criticism to succeed in solving all difficulties that arise." 8. Are the Views of Modern Criticism Consistent with the Witness of Our Lord to the Old Testament? The Christian Church approaches the Old Testament mainly and predominantly from the standpoint of the resurrection of Christ. We naturally inquire what our Master thought of the Old Testament, for if it comes to us with His authority, and we can discover His view of it, we ought to be satisfied. In the days of our Lord's life on earth one pressing question was, "What think ye of the Christ?" Another was, "What is written in the Law? How readest thou?" These questions are still being raised in one form or another, and today, as of old, the two great problems-two "storm-centres"; as they have well been called-are Christ and the Bible. The two problems really resolve themselves into one, for Christ and the Bible are inseparable. If we follow Christ, He will teach us of the Bible; and if we study our Bible, it will point us to Christ. Each is called the Word of God. Let us, first of all, be quite clear as to our meaning of our Lord as "The Word of God." "In the beginning was the Word." A word is an oral or visible expression of an invisible thought. The thought needs the word for its expression, and the word is intended to represent the thought accurately, even if not completely. We cannot in any degree be sure of the thought unless we can be sure of the word. Our Lord as the Word, therefore, is the personal and visible expression of the invisible God. (John 14; Hebrews 1:3.) We believe that He is an accurate "expression" of God, and that as the Word He reveals God and conveys God's will to us in such a way as to be inerrant and infallible. As the Incarnate Word He is infallible. He came, among other things, to bear witness to the truth (John 18:37), and it is a necessary outcome of this purpose that He should bear infallible witness. He came to reveal God and God's will, and this implies and requires special knowledge. It demands that every assertion of His be true. The Divine knowledge did not, because it could not, undergo any change by the Incarnation. He continued to subsist in the form of God even while He existed in the form of man. (Php_2:6. See Dr. Gifford's "The Incarnation:") In view of this position, we believe that, as Bishop Ellicott says ("Christus Comprobator") we have a right to make this appeal to the testimony of Christ to the Old Testament. The place it occupied in His life and ministry is sufficient warrant for referring to His use of it. It is well known that, as far as the Old Testament canon is concerned, our highest authority is that of our Lord Himself; and what is true of the Old Testament as a whole, is surely true of these parts to which our Lord specifically referred. Let us be clear, however, as to what we mean in malting this appeal. We do not for an instant intend thereby to close all possible criticism of the Old Testament. There are numbers of questions quite untouched by anything our Lord said, and there is consequently ample scope for sober, necessary, and valuable criticism. But what we do say is, that anything in the Old Testament stated by our Lord as a fact, or implied as a fact, is, or ought to be, thereby closed for those who hold Christ to be infallible. Criticism can do anything that is not incompatible with the statements of our Lord; but where Christ has spoken, surely "the matter is closed." What, then, is our Lord's general view of the Old Testament? There is no doubt that His Old Testament was practically, if not actually, the same as ours, and that He regarded it as of Divine authority, as the final court of appeal for all questions connected with it. The way in which He quotes ft shows this. To the Lord Jesus the Old Testament was authoritative and final, because Divine. No one can go through the Gospels without being impressed with the deep reverence of our Lord for the Old Testament, and with His constant use of it in all matters of religious thought and life. His question, "Have ye never read?" His assertion, "It is written," His testimony, "Ye search the Scriptures" (R. V), are plainly indicative of His view of the Divirie authority of the Old Testament as we have it. He sets His seal to its historicity and its revelation of God. He supplements, but never supplants it. He amplifies and modifies, but never nullifies it. He fulfils, i.e. fills full, but never makes void. This general view is confirmed by His detailed references to the Old Testament. Consider His testimonies to the persons, and to the facts of the old covenant. There is scarcely a historical book, from Genesis to 2 Chronicles, to which our Lord does not refer; while it is perhaps significant that His testimony includes references to every book of the Pentateuch, to Isaiah, to Jonah, to Daniel, and to miracles-the very parts most called in question today. Above all, it is surely of the deepest moment that at His temptation He should use three times as the Word of God the book about which there has, perhaps, been most controversy of all. Again, therefore, we say that everything to which Christ can be said, on any honest interpretation, to have referred, or which He used as a fact, is thereby sanctioned and sealed by the authority of our Infallible Lord. "Dominus locutus est; causa finita est." Nor can this position be turned by the statement that Christ simply adopted the beliefs of His day without necessarily sanctioning them as correct. Of this there is not the slightest proof, but very much to the contrary. On some of the most important subjects of His day He went directly against prevailing opinion. His teaching about God, about righteousness, about the Messiah, about .tradition, about the Sabbath, about the Samaritans, about women, about divorce, about the baptism of John, were diametrically opposed to that of the time. And this opposition was deliberately grounded on the Old Testament which our Lord charged them with misinterpreting. The one and only question of difference between Him and the Jews as to the Old Testament was that of interpretation. Not a vestige of proof can be adduced that He and they differed at all in their general view of its historical character or Divine authority. If the current Jewish views were wrong, can we think our Lord would have been silent on a matter of such moment, about a book which He cites or alludes to over four hundred times, and which He made His constant topic in teaching concerning Himself? If the Jews were wrong, Jesus either knew it, or He did not. If He knew it, why did He not correct them as in so many other and detailed instances? If He did not know it-but I will not finish. Nor can this witness to the Old Testament be met by asserting that the limitation of our Lord's earthly life kept Him within current views of the Old Testament which need not have been true views. This statement ignores the essential force of His personal claim to be "the Word." On more than one occasion our Lord claimed to speak from God, and that everything He said had the Divine warrant. Let us notice carefully what this involves. It is sometimes said that our Lord's knowledge was limited, and that He lived here as man, not as God. Suppose we grant this for argument's sake. Very well; as man He lived in God and on God, and He claimed that everything He said and did was from God and through God. If, then, the limitations were from God, so also were the utterances; and, as God's warrant was claimed for every one of these, they are therefore Divine and infallible. (John 5:19; John 5:30; John 7:13; John 8:26; John 12:49; John 14:24; John 17:8.) Even though we grant to the full a theory that will compel us to accept a temporary disuse or non-use of the functions of Deity in the Person of our Lord, yet the words actually uttered as man are claimed to be from God, and therefore we hold them to be infallible. We rest, therefore, upon our Lord's personal claim to say all and do all by the Father, from the Father, for the Father. There is, of course, no question of partial knowledge after the resurrection, when our Lord was manifestly free from all limitations of earthly conditions. Yet it was after His resurrection also that He set His seal to the Old Testament. (Luke 24:44.) We conclude that our Lord's positive statements on the subject of the Old Testament are not to be rejected without charging Him with error. If, on these points, on which we can test and verify Him, we find that He is not reliable, what real comfort can we have in accepting His higher teaching, where verification is impossible? We believe we are on absolutely safe ground when we say that what the Old Testament was to our Lord, it must be and shall be to us. Conclusion We ask a careful consideration of these eight inquiries. Taken separately, they carry weight, but taken together they have a cumulative effect, and should be seriously pondered by all who are seeking to know the truth on this momentous subject. We may be perfectly sure that no criticism of the Old Testament will ever be accepted by the Christian Church as a whole, which does not fully satisfy the following conditions: 1. It must admit in all its assumptions, and take fully into consideration, the supernatural element which differentiates the Bible from all other books. 2. It must be in keeping with the enlightened spiritual experience of the saints of God in all ages, and make an effectual appeal to the piety and spiritual perception of those who know by personal experience the power of the Holy Ghost. 3. It must be historically in line with the general tradition of Jewish history and the unique position of the Hebrew nation through the centuries. 4. It must be in unison with that apostolic conception of the authority and inspiration of the Old Testament,. which is so manifest in the New Testament. 5. Above all, it must be in accordance with the universal belief of the Christian Church in our Lord's infallibility as a Teacher, and as "the Word made flesh." If and when modern higher criticism can satisfy these requirements, it will not merely be accepted, but will command the universal, loyal, and even enthusiastic adhesion of all Christians. Until then, we wait, and also maintain our position that "the old is better." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 63: - THE TABERNACLE IN THE WILDERNESS: DID... ======================================================================== The Tabernacle in the Wilderness: Did it Exist? By David Heagle, Ph.D., D.D., Professor of Theology and Ethics, Ewing College; Translator A Question Involving the Truth or Falsity of the Entire Higher-Critic Theory Introducton The question as to whether or not the old Mosaic Tabernacle ever existed is one of far greater consequence than most people imagine. It is so, particularly because of the very intimate connection existing between it and the truth or falsity of the highercritic theory in general. If that theory is all that the critics claim for it, then of course the Tabernacle had no existence; and this is the view held by at least most of the critics. But if, on the other hand, the old Mosaic Tabernacle did really exist, and the story of it as given in the Bible is not, as the critics assert, merely a fiction, then the highercritic scheme cannot be true. The question, therefore, to be discussed in the following pages, viz., whether the Mosaic Tabernacle really did or did not exist, is certainly one of great and wide-reaching significance; which significance will become more and more apparent as the discussion goes forward. With this brief introduction we take up the subject; merely premising further, that this article was originally prepared as a booklet, in which shape it contained a considerable amount of matter not appearing here. The Discussion One peculiarity of the higher criticism is what may be called its unbounded audacity in attacking and attempting to destroy many of the most solidly established facts of the Bible. No matter with what amount of evidence any particular Scripture fact may be capable of demonstration, if it happens to oppose any of the more fundamental notions of the critical hypothesis, away it must go as unworthy of acceptance by so-called "science," or at all events, the entire array of critical doubts and imaginings is brought to bear, in order to cast suspicion upon it, or to get rid of it in some way. I. The Bible Side of the Question A striking illustration of such procedure is furnished by the peculiar treatment accorded by the critics to that old religious structure which, being built by Moses near Mt. Sinai, is usually named the Tabernacle, or the Tabernacle in the Wilderness. That such a structure not only existed, but was for some five hundred years a very conspicuous object in ancient Israelitish history, is a fact to which the Bible itself lends no small amount of evidence. For example, there are found in the book of Exodus alone some thirteen chapters devoted to a minute description of the plan and construction of that building. Then, as explanatory of the Tabernacle's services, its dedication, means of transportation, the work of the priests and Levites to some extent., and various other matters connected with the structure, the entire book of Leviticus with some ten chapters in Numbers may be cited. Besides, scattered all through both the Old and New Testaments there are many allusions and notices--some of them merely incidental, but others more historical in nature--all of which go toward establishing the Tabernacle's historicity. And finally--which is perhaps the most convincing testimony of all--we have given us in the New Testament one whole book, the Epistle to the Hebrews, which concerns, especially explaining from a Christian point of view, the typology and religious significance of that old building. II. The Higher-Critic View With so much evidence, therefore, to be adduced,. even from the Scriptures, in support of the Tabernacle's historicity, one would think that it requires at least some literary bravery, not to say presumptuous audacity, for any individual or class of men to assail, with the expectation of overthrowing, a fact so solidly established as would seem to be that of the Tabernacle's real existence. Nevertheless, difficult as such task may appear, the critics have not hesitated most vigorously to undertake it. According to their notion the whole story of the Tabernacle, as recorded in the Bible, is simply a fiction, or, more properly speaking, a literary forgery-a concoction gotten up perhaps by some of those priestly scribes who returned with Ezra from the Babylonian exile; their special purpose in devising such a story being to help in the introduction of a new temple ritual at Jerusalem, or perhaps it was also to glorify the distant past in the history of the Israelites. [As explained by Nodelke, another purpose of this forgery was "to give pre-existence to the temple and to the unity of worship." But this is virtually included in the two purposes above named.] III. The Question More Fully Stated Thus we have presented to us two widely different and opposing views respecting the Tabernacle's existence. One of them, which is the view of at least most higher critics, is that this old structure never existed at all; while, on the other hand, the orthodox and Biblical conception is that not only in the days of Moses but long afterwards this fabric had a most interesting and important history. Which, then, of these two so widely different doctrines are we pleased to accept? IV. Importance of This Discussion 1. Whichever one is accepted by us, certain it is that an earnest discussion, such as we hope to effect, of the question above stated, is a matter of no little consequence. Such a discussion is important, first of all, because of the light which it will throw upon all the history of God's first chosen people--the Israelites. It will at least tell us something about the kind of civilization this ancient people must have had; and more particularly will it tell us whether that civilization was, as the higher critics represent, one low down on the scale, or whether these Israelites had already made a good degree of progress in all the arts, disciplines, and branches of knowledge which usually belong to a moderately high state of civilizatipn. Surely, then, there is at least some benefit to be derived from the study before us. 2. But another advantage which will come from this same study is that it will help us to a solution of a somewhat curious, but yet important, historical problem; viz., whether as a matter of history the Temple preceded the Tabernacle, as the higher -critics claim, and, therefore, that the Tabernacle must be regarded as only "a diminutive copy" of the Temple; or vice versa, whether, as is taught by the Bible, the Tabernacle went first, and hence that the Temple was in its construction patterned after the Tabernacle. To be sure, at first sight this does not appear to be a very important question; yet when the historical, literary and other connections involved in it are considered, it does after all become a question of no little significance. 3. But the most determinative and, therefore the most significant interest we have in a discussion of the question as proposed, is the bearing which it has upon the truth or falsity of the higher criticism. As is known to persons conversant with that peculiar method of Bible study, one of its main contentions is that the whole Levitical or ceremonial law--that is, the law of worship. as recorded especially in Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers--did not originate, or at all events did not make its appearance, until somewhere near the close of the Babylonian exile, or about the time when Ezra first appears in Jewish history. By thus removing all that part of the Pentateuch down the centuries, from the time of Moses to the time of Ezra, the critics are able not only to deny the Mosaic authorship of this Pentateuchal literature, but also to construct a scheme of their own by which all the separate "documents" into which they are accustomed to divide the Pentateuch can be put together in a kind of whole; each particular document being singled out and designated according to its date, authorship, and other peculiarities, such as the critics suppose belong to it. Moreover, in this way the Pentateuch is all torn to pieces, and instead of its being really a connected, organic whole, such as the orthodox world has always conceived it to be, it is by this peculiar higher-critic method transformed into a mere patch-work, a disjointed affair, having no more divine authority or inspiration connected with it than any other piece of human literature that has come into being through the law of evolution. Such, however, is exactly what the critics would make of the Pentateuch, and indeed of much else in the Bible, if they could have their way. But now suppose that after all the old Mosaic Tabernacle did really exist, what effect would that have upon the success of the critical hypothesis? It would absolutely frustrate all attempts to carry this hypothesis successfully through. Such would necessarily be the result, because, first of all, if that portion of the Pentateuch which contains the ceremonial or Levitical law is transferred down to Ezra's time, the old Tabernacle, for the services of which this law was designed, must necessarily come with it. But then, in the second place, a really existing Tabernacle so far down the centuries, or long after the Temple at Jerusalem had been built and was regarded by the Jews as their great central place of worship, would have been not only an architectural curiosity, but an anachronism such as even the critical imagination could scarcely be accused either of devising or accepting. The only way, therefore, open for the critics, if they are still to hold fast their theory, is for them to do precisely what they have undertaken; namely, to blot out or destroy the Tabernacle as a real existence, entire story of it, as given in the Bible, in the form of a fiction. This they have really attempted. But by so doing the critics must, after all, confess that the foundation upon which they build is very insecure, because it is simply an assumption. If, therefore, in opposition to such assumption, this article shall be able to demonstrate that the old Mosaic Tabernacle actually existed, then the underpinning of the critical hypothesis is at once removed, and the entire edifice with all of its many stories must collapse. And if all this is true, then it is not too much to say, as is affirmed in the sub-title of this article, that the whole truth or falsity of the critical scheme depends upon what may be proven true respecting the Tabernacle's non-existence or existence. And thus, moreover, is made to appear the exceeding importance of the discussion we have undertaken. V. Quotations from the Higher Critics But what do the higher critics themselves say with regard to this matter of the Tabernacle's real existence? To quote from only a few of them, Wellhausen, e. g., who is the great coryphaeus of the higher-critic doctrine, writes as follows: "The Temple, which in reality was not built until Solomon's time, is by this document [the so-called Priestly Code] regarded as so indispensable, even for the troubled days of the wilderness before the settlement, that it is made portable, and in the form of a tabernacle set up in the very beginning of things. For the truth is that the Tabernacle is a copy, not the prototype, of the temple at Jerusalem" (Proleg., Eng. trans., p. 37). So also Graf, who preceded Wellhausen in higher-critic work, affirms that the Tabernacle is only "a diminutive copy of the Temple," and that "all that is said about this structure in the middle books of the Pentateuch is merely post-exilic accretion." Once more, to hear from a more recent authority, Dr. A. R. S. Kennedy, in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, has these words: "The attitude of modern Old Testament scholarship to the priestly legislation as now formulated in the Pentateuch, and in particular to those sections of it which deal with the sanctuary and its worship, is opposed to the historicity of P's [that is, the old Mosaic] Tabernacle." The same or a similar representation is given by Benzinger in the Encyclopaedia Biblica; and in fact this is, and must necessarily be, the attitude of all consistent higher critics toward the matter under consideration. For it would never do for the adherents of the critic theory to admit that away back in the old Mosaic times the Tabernacle, with all its elaborate ritual, and with the lofty moral and spiritual ideas embodied in it, could have existed; because that would be equivalent to admitting the falsity of their own doctrine. Accordingly with one voice the critics all, or nearly all, stoutly proclaim that no historicity whatever must be allowed to Moses' Tabernacle. VI. Certain Great Presumptions To come then to the actual discussion of our subject, it might be said, in the first place, that there are certain great presumptions which lie in the way of our accepting the higher critic theory as true. 1. One of these presumptions is, that this whole critic hypothesis goes on the assumption that what the Bible tells us regarding the real existence of the Tabernacle is not true, or, in other words, that in a large part of its teachings the Bible speaks falsely. Can we believe that? Most assuredly not, so long as we have any real appreciation of the lofty system of moral truth which is taught in this wonderful booka book which, more than any other ever produced, has taught the entire world common honesty, whether in literary work or other acts. Therefore we say, regarding this whole matter of the Bible's speaking falsely, Judaeus Apella credat, non ego! Let the higher critics believe that if they will, but surely not we! Robert Burns has a poem, in which he says of lying in general: "Some books are lies frae end to end, And some great lies were never penned; E'en ministers, they hae been kenned, In holy rapture, A rousing whid at times to vend, An' nail it wi' Scripture." Surely, the higher critics would not undertake to reduce our Christian Scriptures to the level of a book that has in it no truth from beginning to end; and yet it must be confessed that one serious tendency of their theory is greatly to lessen the general credibility of this sacred volume. 2. But another presumption lying against the truthfulness of this higher criticism is, that it makes all the civilized ages from Ezra ,down to the present time to be so utterly lacking both in historic knowledge and literary sagacity, that, excepting a few higher critics, no one ever supposed the whole world was being deceived by this untrue story of the Tabernacle's real existence; when, if the facts were told, all these numerous ages have not only been themselves deceived, but have been also instrumental, one after another, in propagating that same old falsehood down the centuries l Again we say: Judaeus Apella credat, non ego! The higher-critic pretensions to having a greater wisdom and knowledge than is possessed by all the rest of the world, are very well known; but this illustration of that peculiarity seems to us rather to cap the climax. 3. And here, if we choose to go farther, it might be shown that, if this peculiar doctrine is true, then the Savior and all of his Apostles were mistaken. For certainly Christ (see Matthew 12:3-4) and perhaps all the Apostles without exception, did believe in the Tabernacle as a real existence; and one of the Apostles, or at least an apostolic writer, went so far, in the Book of Hebrews, as to compose what may be termed an extensive and inspired commentary on that sacred structure--on its apartments, furniture, priesthood and services; bringing out particularly, from a Christian point of view, the rich typical significance of all those matters. Now that all these inspired men and the Savior Himself should either have been themselves deceived or should try to deceive others with regard to an important matter of Old Testament history is surely incredible. VII. External Evidence 1. Just here, however, we desire to introduce some considerations of a different nature. There exists, even outside of the Bible, a small amount of evidence in support of the Tabernacle's existence, and although we have already alluded to a part of this testimony, under the head of favoring presumptions, yet it will bear repetition or rather a fuller consideration. Now, as we conceive of this evidence, it consists, in the first place, of various notices or even of full descriptions of the Tabernacle as ,a real existence, which are found in very ancient writings, some of these writings being quite different from our Christian Scriptures. To be sure, a large part of this literature is copied in one way and another from the Bible, and none of it dates anything like so far back in time as do at least the earlier books of the Old Testament; and yet, as we shall see, some of it is very old, sufficiently so to give it a kind of confirmatory force in support of what the Bible has to say concerning the matter in hand. The first testimony, then, of this sort to which we allude, is a full description of the Tabernacle in all its parts, services, priesthood and history, very nearly the same as that which is given in our modern Bibles, which can be found in the earliest translation ever made of the Old Testament-that is, the Septuagint. This translation appeared some two or three centuries before the time of Christ, and therefore it ought to be pretty good evidence of at least what its contemporaries, or those far-off times, held to be true with regard to the matter under consideration. Then another testimony of like character comes from the Greek Apocrypha to the Old Testament, a work which appeared, or at least most of it, before the time of Christ; in which production there are found various allusions to the Tabernacle, and all of them to it as a real existence; as, e, g., in Jude. 9:8; Wis. of Sol. 9 :8 ; Eccl. 24 :10, 15 ; and 2 Mac. 2:5. Moreover, in his Antiquities, Josephus, who wrote toward the end of the first century, gives another full description of that old structure in its every part, including also something of its history. ( See Antiq., Bk. III., Chs. VI. to XII. ; also Bk. V., Ch. L, Sec. 19; Ch. IL, Sec. 9; Ch. X., Sec. 2; Bk. VIII., Ch. IV., Sec. 1.) And finally, in that vast collection of ancient Jewish traditions, comments, laws, speculations, etc., which goes under the name of the Talmud, there are not infrequent references made to this same old structure; and one of the treatises (part of the Bereitha)* in that collection is devoted exclusively to a consideration of this building. [* The Bereitha (or Baraitha) is an apocryphal part of the Talmud; but it is very old, and embodies about the same quality of tradition in general as does the compilation made by Jehudah ha-Nasi, which is usually considered the genuine Mishna, or basis of the Talmud.] With so much literature, therefore, of one kind and another, all telling us something about the Tabernacle, and all or at least most of it going back for its origin to very near the time when at least the last part of the Old Testament was written, we have in these various sources, considered as a whole, if not an independent or direct testimony to the Tabernacle's existence, certainly something that points clearly in that direction. Or, in other words, inasmuch as these old writings, containing the various notices and descriptions which we have mentioned, existed away back so near to Old Testament times, these must have been acquainted with the best traditions of their day regarding what is taught in that part of our Bible; and, therefore, they must have known more about the truth of things as connected with the Tabernacle and its real existence than any authorities existing in these late times of ours possibly could. Or, at all events, they knew more about those matters than any of the mere guesswork speculations of modern higher critics possibly can, or are in a condition to know.* [* The value of this evidence is of course only that which belongs to tradition; still it should be remembered that this tradition is a written one, dating away back to near the times of the Old Testament. Moreover, it could be shown that this same kind of written tradition reaches back through the later books of the Old Testament, at least in a l negative way, even to 'the time of Ezra; who surely ought to know whether, as the critics say, the story of the Tabernacle as a fact of history was invented in his own day and generation. But inasmuch as Ezra does not tell us anything about that matter, it stands to reason, that as has since been reported by this long line of tradition, most of it being of a positive nature, no such invention ever took place, but that this story is simply a narrative of actual fact. At all events, as said in the text, it is far more likely that this old and long-continued tradition ais correct in what it asserts, than is any of the denials of the higher critics.] 2. But there is another kind of evidence, of this external nature. which is more direct and independent, and therefore more significant with regard to the Tabernacle's existence. That evidence is what may be called the archaeological contribution to our argument. Part of it will be given later; but here we will simply call attention, first, to the fact that in all the region of Mt. Sinai there are to be seen at least some evidences of the possible presence there, even as is recorded in the Bible of the Israelites, at the time when they built the Tabernacle. [See Addenda] Moreover, there have recently been made some discoveries in the Holy Land connected with the different places where the Bible locates the Tabernacle during the long period of its history in that country, which, to say the least, are not contradictory, but rather confirmatory of Biblical statements. One such discovery, as we will call it, is connected with a fuller exploration recently made of that old site where for some 365 years, according to Jewish tradition, the old Mosaic Tabernacle stood, and where it underwent the most interesting of its experiences in the Holy Land. That site was, as is well known, the little city of Shiloh, located near the main thoroughfare leading up from Bethel to Shechem. In the year 1873 the English Palestine Exploration Fund. through some of its agents, made a thorough examination of this old site, and among other of its very interesting ruins was found a place which Colonel Charles Wilson thinks is the very spot where, once and for so long a time, the Tabernacle stood. That particular place is at the north of a rather low "tell," or mound, upon which the ruins are located; and, to copy from Colonel Wilson's description, this tell "slopes down to a broad shoulder, across. which a sort of local court, 77 feet wide and 412 feet long, has been cut out. The rock is in places scarped to a height of five feet, and along the sides are several excavations and a few small cisterns." This is the locality where, as Colonel Wilson thinks, the Mosaic Tabernacle once really stood; and as confirmatory of his conclusion he farther says that this spot is tile only one connected with the ruins which is large enough to receive a building of the dimensions of the Tabernacle. Therefore his judgment is that it is "not improbable" that this place was originally "prepared" as a site for that structure. Now whether the general judgment of men either at present or in the future will coincide with Colonel Wilson as to the matter in hand we do not know; but we will simply repeat Colonel Wilson's words, and say that it is not improbable that this site, as indicated, is a real discovery as to the place where the old Tabernacle once stood. We need not dwell longer here on the matter, but will only observe that if the very ruins of the old Tabernacle, so far as its site is concerned, can still be seen, that surely ought to be pretty good evidence that this building once existed. VIII. Positive Biblical Evidences But to come now to the more positive and conclusive evidences regarding the matter under consideration, we may observe that these consist particularly of various historical notices scattered throughout the Old Testament; and so numerous and clear in their testimony are these notices that they would seem to prove, beyond all possibility of doubt, that the old Mosaic Tabernacle really existed.* However, the critics claim here that it is only the earlier historical books of the Old Testament that can be legitimately used for proving a matter so far in the past as was this structure. [* According to Bishop Hervey, in his Lectures on Chronicles (p. 171), mention is made of the Tabernacle some eighteen times in the historical books following the Pentateuch--that is, in Joshua, Judges, 1&2 Samuel, 1&2 Kings, and 1&2 Chronicles; and in the Pentateuch itself, which the higher critics have by no means proven to be unhistorical, that structure is mentioned over eighty times.] 1. Testimony of First Kings Complying then with that requirement, at least in part, we begin our investigation with the First Book of Kings. This is a piece of literature against the antiquity and general credibility of which the critics can raise no valid objection; hence it should be considered particularly good evidence. Moreover, it might be said of this book, that having probably been constructed out of early court-records as they were kept by the different kings of Judah and Israel, those original documents, or at least some of them, take us away back to the very times of Solomon and David, or to the period when, as we shall soon see, the Mosaic Tabernacle was still standing at Gibeon. This was also, it may be observed, the general period during which the Tabernacle, having been taken down, was removed from Gibeon and stored away in Solomon's temple at Jerusalem; and it is to the account of this transference that our attention is now, first of all, directed. In 1 Kings 8:4, we read: "And they brought up the ark of Jehovah, and the tent of meeting, and all the holy vessels that were in the tent; even these did the priests and Levites bring up." A mere cursory reading of these words gives one the impression that the "tent of meeting," which was brought up from somewhere by the priests and Levites, was nothing else than the old Mosaic Tabernacle; and as to the place f rom which it was brought, that is not told us in the Scriptures; but a comparison of texts (see 2 Chronicles 1:3; 1 Kings 3:1; 1 Kings 3:4) would seem to indicate that the Tabernacle was first transported from Gibeon to Mt. Zion, where the ark of the covenant was at this time, and then afterwards it was, with other sacred matters, carried up to Mt. Moriah, where it was put away in the temple. All this seems to be sufficiently clear; only now the question arises whether, after all, this was really the old Mosaic structure or some other tent, as, e. g., the one built by David in Jerusalem, and which seems, at this time, to have been still in existence [See 2 Samuel 6:17; 2 Samuel 7:2; 1 Chronicles 15:1; 1 Chronicles 16:1. Cf. 1 Kings 1:29] Most of the critics, including even Wellhausen, are agreed that the words, "tent of meeting" (ohel moed), as used in this and various other texts of. Scripture, do really signify the old Mosaic structure; and one reason for their so holding is that those words form a kind of technical expression by which that old structure was commonly, or at least often, denoted in the Bible.* Only one other term is used as frequently as this is to indicate that structure; this other term being, in Hebrew, mishkan, which is usually translated, in our English versions, "tabernacle," and means "dwelling-place." Now if this rendering of those words is correct, we would seem to have already reached the goal of our endeavor. That is to say, we have actually found the Tabernacle in existence. It existed, as an undeniable reality in the times of David and Solomon, or at least in those of Solomon; and a positive proof of that matter are these words we have just quoted from 1 Kings 8:4. [* The words ohel moed seem to have been used first to designate the smaller tent (see p. 37 with footnote) which Moses used as a place of communion between Jehovah and his people; hence it was called the "tent of meeting." But afterwards, when the regular tabernacle became such a place, the words were applied also to that structure.] But the higher critics, or especially Wellhausen, are not so easily to be caught with an admission as to an interpretation of words; for even though Wellhausen does concede that the words "tent of meeting" signify as we have stated; nevertheless he undertakes to get rid of their real force by asserting that in this passage they are an interpolation, or that they do not belong to the original Hebrew text. However, neither he nor any other higher critic has ever yet been able to give any textual authority for such an assertion; they only try to argue the matter from internal evidence. But internal evidence alone, and especially such slim evidence of that kind as the critics have been able to adduce in this connection, is insufficient to establish the end desired. Besides, those words, "tent of meeting," are certainly found in our present Hebrew text, as also in the Septuagint version; both of which items being so, it is not at all likely that Wellhausen's ipse dixit will have the effect of changing them. Such being the case, we may conclude that the structure which was carried by the priests and Levites up to Mt. Moriah and stored away in the Temple, was really the old Mosaic Tabernacle. We quote only one other passage from this First Book of Kings. It is a part of the account of Solomon's going to Gibeon, and of his offering sacrifice there. The words are found in v. 4, Chap. 3, and read as follows: "And the king went to Gibeon, to sacrifice there; for that was the great high place." Then in the second verse of this same chapter the king's conduct in thus going to Gibeon is farther explained by the statement that the people sacrificed in the high places, because "there was no house built for the name of Jehovah until those days." The "days" here indicated are, as is 'explained by the preceding verse, those in which "Solomon made an end of building his own house and the house of Jehovah;" and the entire passage then would signify that at least one reason why Solomon offered sacrifice in Gibeon was because this was the customary way among the people. They offered sacrifices in the high places before the temple at Jerusalem was built, but not ordinarily, or legitimately, afterwards. Then there is another reason indicated why Solomon went particularly to Gibeon--because this was the "great high place." Why it was so called, must have been because of some special fact or circumstance connected with it; and among the explanations given none appears so natural or to accord so well with other teachings of Scripture as the suggestion that this distinction was applied to Gibeon because the old Mosaic Tabernacle, with the brazen,altar, was still there. That would certainly be a sufficient reason for accrediting peculiar eminence to this one of all the many high places which at that time seem to have existed in the Holy Land. Accordingly, Solomon went over to Gibeon, and offered sacrifice there; and then we read that, in the night following this devotional act, the king had a dream in which Jehovah appeared unto him and made to him very extraordinary promises. Now this epiphany of Jehovah at Gibeon is really another reason for one's believing that the Tabernacle was located at this place. For it is not to be supposed that any Jewish author, writing after the temple was built (when this account of Solomon's dream was written), would allow it to be said that the great and idolatry-hating God of the Israelites had made a gracious and extraordinary revelation. of himself at any of the common high places in the Holy Land, half-heathenish and largely devoted to the service of idols, as these places generally were. But if it must be admitted that the Tabernacle was really located at Gibeon, then all becomes clear, both why Solomon went there to offer sacrifice, and why Jehovah made at this place a gracious revelation of himself; also why this, of all the high places in the Holy Land, was called emphatically "great:" Then, moreover, it might be said that we have surely demonstrated the existence of the Tabernacle, not only as taught by this passage from First Kings, but also by the other one which we have noticed. 2. Testimony of Chronicles But now turning over to the two books of Chronicles; we find here quite a number of passages which teach in the clearest and most positive manner that the Tabernacle existed at Gibeon not only in the time of Solomon, but also before. These two books of Chronicles, it should be remembered, are really a kind of commentary, or an extension made, upon Samuel and Kings. Such is the opinion of many competent scholars; and one reason for their so holding, is that very evidently the books of Samuel and Kings were among the principal sources from which the author of Chronicles drew his information; although it must be acknowledged also that he used still other sources besides those named. Writing then at a somewhat distant date, say one or two hundred years from the time of the final composition, or redaction, of Kings and Samuel,* and doubtless having at his command a considerable amount of tradition, besides his written sources, the Chronicler must have been in very good condition to write what may be considered a kind of interpretive commentary upon not only the books of Samuel, but also upon the First Book of Kings, two passages from which we have just noticed. If that was so, and the two books of Chronicles are to be understood then as giving us some additional information as to what is found in Kings, then the historical notices in First Kings which we have examined become as it were illuminated and made stronger and more positive in their nature than when considered alone. For instance, in First Kings we were told that Solomon went to Gibeon and offered sacrifice there, because "that was the great high place ;" bilt now in 1 Chronicles 1:3 we have it all explained, both how Gibeon came to be so called, and what was Solomon's special reason for going there to offer sacrifice. It was, as is taught very plainly here in Chornicles, because "the tent of meeting of God which Moses the servant of Jehovah had made in the wilderness" was at that time in Gibeon. Thus the rather uncertain mention of matters at Gibeon which is given in First Kings is made clear and positive by what is said in Chronicles. So also in 1 Chronicles 21:29, which is a part of the account given of David's offering sacrifice on the threshing-floor of Ornan, we have again stronger language used than is found in Kings, telling us of the existence of the old Mosaic Tabernacle. For in explaining David's conduct the Chronicler says as follows: "For the tabernacle of Jehovah which Moses made in the wilderness and the altar of burnt offering were at that time in the high place at Gibeon:" Whatever of uncertainty, therefore, or lack of positive indication, may exist as connected with the passages we have quoted from Kings, there is no such uncertainty or lack of positive ness here in Chronicles. On the contrary, these two books, which give us quite an amount of information respecting the Tabernacle, are always, or at least generally, very clear and positive; and on this account, it might be added, the statements made in Chronicles have sometimes been taken as a kind of guide to the study of the Tabernacle history in general. [* It is claimed by the critics that all the historical books of the Old Testament underwent a revision during the exile; and according to the best authorities, Chronicles was composed shortly after the Persian rule, or about 330 B. C. Selecting, then, about the middle of the exilic period (586 to 444 B. C.) as the date for the final revision of Kings and Samuel, this would make the composition of Chronicles fall near 200 years after that revision. But of course Samuel and Kings were originally composed, or compiled, at a much earlier date; the former appearing probably about 900, and the latter about 600 B. C.] But here again the critics make their appearance, and are "all up in arms" against any use to be made of these two books of Chronicles for determining a matter of ancient history. Of all the untrustworthy historical literature to be found in the Old Testament there is nothing quite so bad, so the critics tell us, as is in general Chronicles; and Wellhausen goes so far as to say that one special purpose served by these two books is that they show how an author may use his original sources with such freedom as to make them say about what he pleases, or anything according to his own ideas. (See Proleg., Eng. trans., p. 49.) So also Graf, DeWette, and others, have very energetically attacked the credibility of these two books. But over against all that is said by the critics as to the Chronicler's lack of veracity and his violent dealing with his sources, we will simply, or first, put the testimony of one of the higher critics themselves. It is what Dillman, who in point of learning and reliability is acknowledged to be among the very foremost of all the critics, says with regard to this very matter in hand: "It is now recognized," affirms that eminent critic, "that the Chronicler has worked according to sources, and there can be no talk, with regard to him, of fabrications or misrepresentations of the history." So also Dr. Orr observes that there is no reason for doubting "the perfect good faith" of the author of Chronicles; and Prof. James Robertson, of Glasgow University, farther adds that all such matters as the critics have urged against the Chronicler's veracity or misuse and even invention of sources, are "superficial and unjust;" and that "there is no reason to doubt the honesty of the author in the use of such materials as he has command of, nor is there any to question the existence of the writings to which he refers." We take it, therefore, that these two books of Chronicles embody not only the best historical knowledge, but also the best traditions still in existence at their date; and such being the case, it is clearly incontrovertible that, as is so unmistakably taught in these books, the old Mosaic Tabernacle must have existed. And so long as the critics are unable to impeach the testimony of these books, which would seem to be impossible, that testimony must stand.* [* It is claimed by the critics, and especially by Wellhausen, that during the exile the Jewish notions respecting the past of their national and tribal history underwent a radical change, so much so that nearly all the religious features of that history were conceived of as having been very different from what they really were. Or in other words, the Jewish writers of the exilic period were, so the critics tell us, accustomed to project religious and priestly matters belonging to their history in a much later period away back to the earliest times. Consequently the general ideas of the temple and of the temple service were thus projected back even to the days of Moses; and in this way, it is explained, the notion of a Mosaic Tabernacle with an elaborate ritualistic service came into being. But really there is no evidence in all the Old Testament writings, or at all events no evidence that the Jews knew anything about, that such a change ever took place. Hence the critics are decidedly wrong when they represent that the author of Chronicles was only influenced by the spirit of his age when he undertook to misrepresent, as it is claimed he did, numerous matters connected with the past history of this people. The truth is that the Chronicler was either a base falsifier, or what he tells us in his history must be received as genuine facts.] 3. Testimony of Samuel Now, however, let us give attention to the books of Samuel. Here is certainly another piece of literature against the general credibility of which the critics can have but little to say. And what do these books tell us respecting the Tabernacle's history? Very much, indeed; far more than we shall have space here fully to examine. In the first place, these books tell us that during at least part of the times which they in general describe, the Mosaic Tabernacle was located at Shiloh, up in the Ephraimite district. Then next we learn that at least one of the great festivals connected with the Tabernacle services-the "yearly sacrifice" it is called-was still being observed. Also we learn that this is the place where Samuel's parents, Elkanah and Hannah, went up every year, in order to take part in that sacrifice. Moreover, it was in the sanctuary at Shiloh, or in some one of its apartments, that Samuel slept at the time when he had those extraordinary revelations of Jehovah talking with him, and where also he came into such intimate and important relations with the aged Eli and his house. And among still other items reported in those books there is one that invites our special attention. In 1 Samuel 2:22, mention is made of certain "women that did service at the door of the tent meeting." And it was with these women, as we farther learn, that Eli's two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, committed at least a part of their wickedness, for which they were so severely condemned, and afterward punished by Jehovah. Now whatever else this passage may signify, it certainly intends to teach, by its use of the words "tent of meeting," that in the time of Samuel the old Mosaic Tabernacle was in existence at Shiloh. For, as we have already seen, those words, "tent of meeting,'-' formed a characteristic expression by which in Old Testament times the Tabernacle was, quite often at least, designated and known. This much, as we have already noticed, even Wellhausen is willing to admit. However, the critics raise here two objections. One of them is that the sanctuary at Shiloh was not really a tent or tabernacle, but rather a solid structure, built perhaps out of stone, wood, or some other material; and the special reason given by the critics for this view is that, in Samuel's account of the structure at Shiloh, there are "posts," "doors," and some other matters usually indicative of a solid structure mentioned. But this difficulty can be very easily explained from a statement made in the Jewish Mishna, (See Conder's "Tent Work in Palestine,"- Vol. 2, p. 84.) which is that the lower part of the sanctuary at Shiloh "was of stone," but that above this there was a tent. Or a more decisive answer to this objection is that in various Scriptures (such as 2 Samuel 7:6; Psalms 78:60; 1 Kings 8:4; Joshua 18:1, and still others) the structure under consideration is positively called "a tent" and "a tabernacle." Then the other objection raised by the critics is that these words, "tent of meeting," as found in 1 Samuel 2:22, are an interpolation, or that the whole passage containing those words is spurious. The reason which they give for such an assertion is that this passage is not found in the Septuagint. But in reply to such objection it may be said, first, that this is not the only passage in the Bible in which mention is made of these women "at the door of the tent of meeting." In Exodus 38:8, like mention is made; and, as Dr. Orr has observed, it is inconceivable even on the supposition, which he does not accept, of a post-exilic origin of the last indicated passage, that just this one mention of the matter alluded to should occur, unless there was behind this matter some old and wellestablished tradition; or, in other words, the genuineness of the text in Exodus argues for the genuineness of the text in Samuel. Besides, as Dr. Orr has again suggested, there may have been some special reason of delicacy or of regard for the good moral reputation of the Israelites, on the account of which the makers of the Septuagint version threw out this item respecting the wickedness of Hophni and Phinehas as connected with these women. Then, moreover, as an offset to the Septuagint's authority-which, owing to the known faultiness of its present text and its general inexactness as a translation, is surely not great-it can be urged that the entire clause containing the words "tent of meeting" is found alike in the old Syriac or Peshita version, in the Vulgate, and in the only extant Targum (that of Jonathan Ben Uzziel) on this particular passage; all of which very ancient authorities* render it as certain as anything of a textual nature could well be made, that the old original text in 1 Samuel 2:22 was exactly as it is now in our present-day Hebrew Bible. [* The Targum on Samuel, which is attributed to Jonathan Ben Uzziel, is commonly believed to have been produced some time during the first century; the Peshito version of the Scriptures is thought to have been made somewhat later, probably in the second century; while the Latin Vulgate, by Jerome, was completed between the years 390 and 405 A. D.] And, finally, as perhaps the crowning feature of this array of evidence for the genuineness of the text under consideration, it can be affirmed that, for English readers at least, there exists one authority, easy to be consulted, which would seem to put beyond all reasonable doubt the genuineness of this text. That authority is our Revised English Version of the Scriptures-a literary work that in point of scholarship and general reliability stands perhaps second to none produced in recent years. And now, if anybody will take the trouble to consult this Revised Version, he will see that this entire disputed passage is retained, or that the many eminent scholars, both English and American, who wrought on this translation are agreed that the words, "tent of meeting," or ohel moed, as in Hebrew, are genuine, and properly belong to this passage. Such being the case, the critics are put in a bad plight; and anyway it does not argue much to the credit of their hypothesis when, in order to carry it through, it becomes necessary so often to make the claim of interpolation. Of course, anyone can make what he pleases of any passage of Scripture, provided he only has the privilege of doctoring it sufficiently beforehand. And with regard to this particulat passage it may be said that neither Wellhausen nor any other higher critic can do anything to alter it; because so long as those words ohel moed, or "tent of meeting," remain in the various textual authorities which we have quoted, so long it will be impossible to expunge them from our present Hebrew Bible; and no matter what authorities the critics may be able to quote as omitting these words, the preponderance of authority, as matters now stand, will always be in favor of their retention. We claim then a real victory here, in being able to substantiate so conclusively, as we think we have done, the genuineness of this text in Samuel. But what now is the general result of our examinations with regard to the testimony which Samuel gives us? If our conclusion with regard to the passage just examined is correct, and we are fully persuaded that it is, then we surely have demonstrated in the clearest way that not only in the days of Samuel, but probably long before, the Tabernacle did exist, and was located at Shiloh. 4. Testimony of Jeremiah and Ps 78 And here, if we care to go still further in this investigation of passages, we might find some very interesting testimony to the Tabernacle's historicity in Ps 78 and in the prophecy of Jeremiah. But since we wish to be as brief as possible, while not neglecting the real strength of our argument, we will simply indicate, or quote, the Scriptures referred to, and leave the discussion or interpretation of them to the reader himself. One of these passages is found, as said, is Psalms 78:59-60, and reads as follows: "When God heard this he was wroth, and greatly abhorred Israel; so that he forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh, the tent which he placed among men." Another passage, from Jeremiah 7:12-14, reads thus: "But go ye now unto my place which was in Shiloh, where I caused my name to dwell at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel. Therefore will I do unto the house which is called by my name, wherein ye trust [the temple at Jerusalem], and unto the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I have done to Shiloh." Still another passage may be found in Jeremiah 26:6, and reads: "Then will I make this house like Shiloh, and will make this city [Jerusalem] a curse to all nations of the earth."* [* These passages in Jeremiah are very important as evidence in favour of the Tabernacle's real existence, since even the higher critics must admit that the chapters containing them were written a considerable time before the exile; and therefore these passages could not, except upon the violent theory of redaction, have been affected by writings appearing either during or after the exile. And as to Ps 78, which is even more explicit about the structure at Shiloh's being the old Mosaic Tabernacle, it is much easier to say, as the critics do, that this Psalm is post-exilic, than it is to prove such assertion.] All these passages, it should be observed, compare the Temple at Jerusalem with the Tabernacle at Shiloh; and they express the threat, that, unless the Israelites repented, God would destroy the Temple at Jerusalem as he had long before destroyed, or removed, the Tabernacle at Shiloh. 5. Testimony of Judges and Joshua Yet once more, in order to make our story of the Tabernacle complete, it is necessary for us to go back somewhat in history; and so we now quote from the books of judges and Joshua. In Joshua 18:1 we read: "And the whole congregation of the children of Israel assembled themselves together at Shiloh and set up the tent of meeting there." Then, turning over to Judges 18:31, we again read, about the idolatrous images set up in Dan, that these continued there "all the time that the house of God was at Shiloh." From these two passages we learn not only how the "house of God" came to be located at Shiloh-because the children of Israel, probably under the leadership of Joshua, set it up there-but we learn also that the two descriptive terms, "tent of meeting" and "house of God," signify the same thing; for it is hardly possible that the "tent of meeting" erected at Shiloh in the days of Joshua had been replaced in the time of the judges by another structure, different in kind, and now called the "house of God." 6. Argument from History of the Sacred Ark But now yet, before we give the entire story of the Tabernacle, we desire to notice another kind of argument, which is drawn from the history of the sacred ark. There does not seem to be any notice of the Tabernacle as a structure by itself in the book of Deuteronomy; but in the tenth chapter of this book, verses 1 to 5, there is given an account of the construction, not of the Tabernacle, but of what must be considered as its most important piece of furniture, that is, the Ark of the Covenant, as it is usually called, or as the critics prefer to term it, the Ark of Yahweh (Jehovah). Now, although the critics take a very different view regarding the date and authority of Deuteronomy from that which has always been accepted by orthodox scholars, yet especially upon the ground of the passage referred to, they are willing to admit that at least some kind of a sacred ark was constructed even in the days of Moses. Moreover, if consistent with the facts as recorded in the Bible, the critics cannot deny that this same sacred ark, whatever was its form or purpose, was not only carried by the Israelites on all their journeys through the wilderness; but was also finally located by them at Shiloh; whence, after undergoing various fortunes, it was deposited in the .holy of holies of Solomon's Temple. This the critics in general admit; and they are compelled to do so by their own accepted documents of "J," "E," etc. Now, that being the case, it follows that if the history of the sacred ark can be traced all the way through, or rather all the way 'back from the days of Solomon's Temple to the days of Moses, somewhat the same thing can be done also with the Tabernacle. For the Tabernacle, as is very evident from what the critics call the Priestly Document, was built, among other purposes, for the housing of this sacred ark; and the same documentary evidence which establishes that fact establishes also the farther fact that for a long period such was really the case. That is to say, the sacred ark and the old Mosaic Tabernacle went together, according to Biblical history, down to the times of Shiloh; and they were, after some period of separation, even brought together again at the dedicatory services of Solomon's Temple. To be sure, not all of this is admitted by the critics; but they cannot deny that the same old ark, which, according to Deuteronomy 10:1-5, was built by Moses, was finally deposited in Solomon's Temple.* With this much conceded, all the rest that we have claimed must necessarily follow; or, in other words, the admitted history of the Ark of Jehovah establishes also the historicity of the Mosaic Tabernacle, or at least helps to do so. [* Wellhausen positively states that according to the Law, that is, the Priestly Document, the Tabernacle is "the inseparable companion of the ark," and that "The two things necessarily belong to each other." He also admits, on the ground of other` Biblical evidence, that toward the end of the period of judges there are distinct traces of the ark as existing: moreover, that this same "ark of Jehovah" was finally deposited m Solomon's Temple. (See Proleg., Eng. Trans., pp. 41, 42.] IX. Entire Story of the Tabernacle Now then we are prepared to give the entire story of that old structure which was built at Mt. Sinai; only one item being still lacking. This we can learn from 1 Sam., Chaps. 21 and 22; and it is, that for a brief period the Tabernacle seems to have been located at Nob, some distance south of Shiloh. With this item then supplied, our story may go forward. As vouched for by the different historic notices we have been considering, it is as follows: Built by the Israelites near Mt. Sinai, it was afterward carried by that people all through the wilderness. Then, having crossed the Jordan with them, and being set up at Shiloh, it seems for a long time to have remained in that place. Next, for a brief period, it would appear to have been located at Nob, down in the Benjaminite country; and from this point being carried a little to the north and west, it was set up at Gibeon, where it seems to have remained for many years. And finally upon the erection of the temple in Jerusalem, it was transferred to that place, and stored away there for safe-keeping; and this is the last notice which the Bible gives of it as a matter of history. It had served its purpose, and the time came now for it to be laid aside as a memorial, or to give place for another and a more imposing structure. X. Intimate Connection of This Story with Other Biblical History Speaking somewhere of the extraordinary influence exerted by Christianity in our world, Renan says that any attempt to separate this religion from the history of humanity would be like "tearing up the tree of civilization by its roots." Very much like that, it seems to us, is the intimacy of relation existing between the history of the Tabernacle and all the rest of the history recorded in the Old Testament. Any attempt, therefore. such as that which is made by the critics, to remove the Tabernacle as a matter of fact from Old Testament history, or to turn it into a mere fiction, would necessarily result in failure. It would do so because the effect of it would be really to destroy all the surrounding and connected history given in the Old Testament; which is, of course, impossible. The very extravagance, therefore, of this higher-critic theory, or the vastness of its undertaking, is a sure proof of its inherent falsity. Dr. Valpy French, considering only the peculiar construction of this Tabernacle story, how wide reaching it is, and how it is made to conform so accurately with many details of archaeology and topography, pronounces it, if viewed as a mere fiction, "a literary impossibility;" and he suggests that a simpler method to be employed by the critics, in getting rid of this troublesome story, would be for them "to credit the last redactor with the authorship of the whole Old Testament Scriptures." So also Professor Sayce affirms that, regarded as an invention, the Tabernacle story is "too elaborate, too detailed to be conceivable." XI. Objections of the Higher Critics It remains for us yet, in order to render our discussion really complete, to notice a few of the many objections which the higher critics have brought forward against the Tabernacle's historicity. These objections, however, are, for the most part, so very frivolous in character, or so utterly lacking in support either from fact or reason, that they do not really deserve an answer. Nevertheless, to furnish the reader with some notion of their real character, we will undertake to give them a cursory examination. They may all be divided into four classes. The first class embraces all those objections which are based upon the idea that the account given in the Bible of the Tabernacle's construction and services, is very unrealistic or impractical in its nature. A second class proceeds on the notion that the Mosaic Tabernacle is altogether too costly, highly artistic, and ponderous an affair, to have been produced by the Israelites at Mt. Sinai, and afterward carried by them all through the wilderness. Another of these classes-which is really only one objection-represents that in the very oldest sources out of which the Pentateuch was, according to the critic notion, constructed, there is mention made of another tent, much smaller than was the Mosaic Tabernacle, and different from that structure also in other respects; and that, therefore, this second tabernacle, as it may be called, being better substantiated by literary documents than is the Mosaic structure, it is not consistent with an acceptance of all the facts in the case to allow that the larger or Mosaic tent really existed. And finally, there is still one class, or a single objection, which makes bold to affirm that in all the earlier historic books of the Old Testament, even from judges to 2 Kings, there is no sure mention made of the Tabernacle as a real existence. Now, if we were to try to answer all these objections, it might be said of the last one, that it is already answered. We have answered that objection by showing not only that there is mention made in those earlier historic books of the Old Testament of the Tabernacle as a real existence, but also that this mention is both sure and abundant. The many historical notices which we have examined, all telling about the Tabernacle's construction and history, is positive proof to that effect. Then, furthermore, with regard to the alleged fact that in the earliest sources, out of which according to the critic theory the Pentateuch was constructed, there is mention made of another or second tent, different from the Mosaic structure, we have to say with respect to this objection, first of all, that it is far from being proven that there are in the Pentateuch any such oldest sources as the critics allege. That item is only a part of the still unproven theory of the higher critics, in their interpretation of the Old Testament.*1 And then, secondly, we might say, respecting this objection, that it is a difficulty which orthodox scholars have often noticed and which they have explained in various ways. Perhaps the best explanation is to allow the reality of the difficulty and to attribute it to some obscurity or even seeming contradiction existing in the Pentateuchal notices. But whatever the real difficulty may be, it certainly is not insuperable; and a very good explanation of it is that there were really two tents, but one of them, that is, the smaller tent, was only a kind of provisional structure, perhaps the dwelling-place of Moses, which was used also for religious purposes, while the larger or Sinaitic Tabernacle was being prepared.*2 With some allowance for one or two statements made in the Pentateuch which seem not fully to accord with this view, it will answer all the real exigencies of the case. Or, at all events, nearly any explanation which preserves the integrity of the Pentateuchal literature, and tries to reconcile its seeming differences of statement, on the ground that this literature deals with facts, and is not in large share pure fiction, is vastly preferable to any of the theories which the critics have thus far advanced with regard to this matter. [*1 The fact of the higher-critic theory being as yet in an unproven state might be, urged as one important consideration in favour of the Tabernacle's real existence; and especially could such an argument be legitimately made, inasmuch as the proof of the correctness of that theory does not all come from an assured non-existence of the Mosaic structure. But since an argument of that kind would be, to some extent at least, "reasoning in a circle," we do not make use of it.] [*2 Notices of such smaller tent seem to be made in Exodus 33:7-11; Numbers 11:16; Numbers 12:4-5, and Deuteronomy 31:14-15; and from these various passages the critics claim that they can discover at least three points of difference existing between this smaller tent and the larger or Levitical one. These differences are as follows: (1) The smaller tent was always pitched outside the camp; but according to the priestly or Levitical history the larger tent was located within the camp. (2) The smaller tent was only a place of Jehovah's revelation, or of his communing with his people; but the larger or priestly structure was, besides, a place of most elaborate worship. (3) In the Levitical or larger tent the priests and Levites regularly served, but in the smaller structure it was only Joshua, the "servant" of Moses, who had charge of the building. All these differences, however, are easily explained by the theory, given above, of there having been really two tents. Besides, it should be observed that after Moses' death no further mention is made in the Scriptures of this smaller structure; which fact would seem to be a strong proof that the smaller one of the two tents was, primarily at least. a private structure used by Moses.] There remain then only two classes of objections which need still to be answered. And with regard to one of these classes, that is, the first in our list, it may be stated that although the objections put forward under this head are quite numerous, yet a single illustration of them will show how utterly lacking in substantial character or reasonableness each and all of them really are. The illustration of which we will make use is taken from Bishop Colenso's famous attack upon the truthfulness of the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua. In that attack he puts forward the singular objection that the Tabernacle was, in its dimensions, far too small to accommodate all the vast host of the Israelites standing before its door, as the Scriptures seem to indicate was the case with them on a few occasions.* That vast host must have numbered, according to the data given in the Pentateuch, as many at least as some two millions of people; and now Colenso makes the objection that this great host, standing in ranks, as he would make it, of nine, one rank behind another, in front of the Tabernacle door, would have formed a procession some sixty miles long; which, surely, would have been not only a practical impossibility so far as their gathering at the door of the Tabernacle was concerned, but would have been also a complete demonstration of the untruthfulness or unreliability of this Pentateuchal record. [* Vid. Leviticus 8:35; Numbers 10:3; Numbers 27:18-22. Also comp. Numbers 16:16-19.] But there is one thing connected with this record which Bishop Colenso seems not to have understood. It is that when the author of it was speaking of the whole congregation of Israel as standing, or gathered, in front of the Tabernacle door, he was speaking only in general terms. His language then would imply, not that every individual belonging to the vast Israelitish host stood at the place mentioned, but only that a large and representative multitude of these people was thus gathered. Or the words might signify that even the whole congregation of the Israelites was, on a few occasions, gathered about the Tabernacle, as it had been gathered around Mt. Sinai when the law was given-not all the people near the Tabernacle door, but only the leaders, while the great body of the congregation stood behind them, or around the structure, like a great sea of human beings stretching away in the distance. Either of these explanations would meet all the demands of the language used; and, as Dr. Orr has remarked, some least particle of common sense must be allowed to the writer of this Pentateuchal record; otherwise, with the "crude absurdities" attributed to him by Bishop Colenso, he could never have written anything in the least degree rational, or that would bear a moment's reflection even by himself. Besides, as Dr. Orr has noticed, it is only a customary way of speaking to say that a whole town or even a large city was gathered together in mass-convention, when the place of such meeting was perhaps only some large hall or good-sized church. Before attacking, therefore, so eagerly with his arithmetical calculations the truthfulness of the Biblical account, this higher-critic bishop would have done well to have reflected a little upon the common use of language. That would have saved him from falling into a bigger blunder than he tries to fasten upon the writer of this Pentateuchal record. XII. Greatest of the Objections But there is still one objection raised by the critics which seems to be more serious in nature. It is an objection based upon what may be called a physical impossibility, or the incompetency of the Israelites, while at Mt. Sinai or journeying through the desert, either to construct or carry with them such a ponderous, highly artistic and costly a fabric as was the Sinaitic Tabernacle. These people in the desert and at Mt. Sinai, we are told, were the merest wandering Bedouins, having but little civilization and being "poor even to beggary;" and of course such a people possessed neither the means nor the intellectual capability necessary for the construction and transportation of the Tabernacle. This peculiar objection, however, rests upon at least two mistakes. The first one is that the Israelites at this time were in such extreme poverty. The Bible tells us that when the children of Israel left Egypt they went out "every man armed;" and they carried with them all their herds and flocks, leaving "not a hoof behind." Moreover, by means of .the many gifts, or exactions of "jewels of silver" and "jewels of gold" which they received from the Egyptians, they "utterly spoiled" that people. Such is the representation given in the Bible. And then, too, when these Israelites came to Mt. Sinai, here also, according to the reports of modern travellers and explorers, they could have found various materials necessary for constructing the Tabernacle, such as an abundance of copper existing in mines, various kinds of precious stones, as well as, growing in this region in considerable abundance, the shittim-wood or acacia tree, out of which the boards and pillars and most of the furniture of the Tabernacle were actually constructed. So far, therefore, as possessing, or being able to get, the means necessary for a construction of the Tabernacle was concerned, these people would seem to have been pretty well supplied. And then, with regard to the other mistake made by the critics, viz., that these Israelites were intellectually incompetent to build the Tabernacle, this assertion also is not substantiated by facts. For, in the first place, it should be remembered that all these Hebrews had from their birth dwelt in Egypt, a country which, of all lands in the world, was at that time the most advanced in all kinds of mechanical, architectural and industrial art. This, e. g., was the country where the great pyramids had been produced, and where existed, at that time, at least most of the magnificent temples, tombs, obelisks, statues and palaces, the ruins of which still remain. Accordingly, when the children of Israel came out of Egypt, they must have brought with them a good amount of the architectural and mechanical wisdom peculiar to that country. Moreover, we are taught in the Bible that these people, while in Egypt, dwelt in houses; which, of course, they must have built for themselves; also that, as slaves, their lives had been made bitter by "all manner of service in the field," and by "hard service in brick and in mortar," and that they had built "store-cities," such as Pithom and Raamses. Putting, therefore, all these experiences which the Israelites had in Egypt together, it can be easily seen how they could have learned, even from the Egyptians, sufficient wisdom to construct and transport the Tabernacle. But if we are required yet to name any one particular achievement, ever accomplished by these people, that was great enough to warrant the belief of their being able to construct and carry with them all through the wilderness the Sinaitic Tabernacle, then, both with promptness and high appreciation, we point to that very extraordinary conquest which they made of the Holy Land, and also to the almost equally extraordinarily long march made by them through the wilderness; and we wish to say that any people who could accomplish two such prodigious deeds as were these could easily have accomplished the so much easier task of building and transporting the old Mosaic "tent of meeting.". Our conclusion, therefore, is that, all teachings of the higher critics to the contrary notwithstanding, those Israelitish people were abundantly competent, both in point of intellectual ability and of material supplies, to accomplish each and all of the works which are accredited them in the Bible. XIII. Marks of Egypt and the Desert But this line of argument is one that can be pursued to a much greater extent, and it can be shown that instead of the conditions surrounding the Israelites at Mt. Sinai and while they were in the wilderness being against the truthfulness of the Biblical record appertaining to those matters, such conditions are really in favour of that record's truthfulness, as well as of the Tabernacle's real existence. For illustration, we are told in the Bible that the wood out of which a large part of the Tabernacle was constructed, was not taken from the lofty cedars growing in Lebanon, nor from the sycamores growing in the Palestinian valleys, but from the humble acacia or shittim-wood tree, which, as we have already seen, flourishes quite plentifully in the Sinaitic region; all of which particulars accord fully with the topographical facts in the case. So also, if we are to believe in the testimonies of ancient Egyptian monuments and the results of modern Egyptian explorations, there is many a resemblance which can be found to exist between matters connected with old Egyptian temples, their structure; furniture, priesthood and services, and other like matters appertaining to the Tabernacle. Indeed, some of these resemblances go so far in their minute details as to an arrangement of buildings according to the points of compass--a peculiarity which was found both in Egypt and in connection with the Tabernacle; different apartments in the structure, graded according to sanctity; the possession of a sacred ark or chest, peculiarly built and located; strange winged figures, which as existing in the Tabernacle were called "cherubim;" a gradation of the priests; priestly dress and ornaments; the breast-plate and mitre worn by the high-priest; different animals offered in sacrifice; the burning of incense, etc., that the impression left upon the mind of a person who knows about these things as existing in ancient Egypt and then reads in the Bible about similar matters connected with the Tabernacle is, that whoever wrote this Biblical account must himself have been in Egypt and have seen the old Egyptian worship and temples, in order to make his record conform in so many respects to what was found in that country.* [* Prof. Sayce undertakes to show that the foreign influences affecting the structure of the Tabernacle and the nature of its services came rather from Babylonia and Assyria than from Egypt, yet, so far as all the topographical items mentioned above are concerned, they can all be abundantly substantiated by facts from history and archaeology.] So also if we give attention to the peculiar experiences had by the Israelites during their march through the wilderness, we shall see from what the Bible tells us about their setting up and taking down the Tabernacle; about the wagons furnished for its transportation; about the pillar of cloud going before it or resting upon it, in connection with their long march; also about the necessity of going outside of the camp in order to perform some of the Tabernacle services,-from all these and various other indications given in the Bible, we can surely perceive that the conditions of these people were such as to warrant the belief that they did indeed, as the Bible represents, journey through a wilderness, and that they carried with them their tent of worship. In his book, entitled "Nature and the Supernatural," Dr. Horace Bushnell tells of an important legal case that once was gained by one of the lawyers noticing, in the web of a sheet of paper which he held in his hand, certain "water-marks" which had been made in the paper during the process of its manufacture. These water-marks being indelible, they served as the best kind of proof of certain facts which it was desired to establish. And so we would characterize all those evidences coming from a correspondence of the Bible account with archaeological facts, which have to do with the Israelites being in Egypt and their journeying through the Sinaitic desert, as so many water-marks left indelibly, not upon, but in the very web of the Biblical record; proving not only the undeniable truthfulness of this record, but also the real existence of the Tabernacle. XIV. Summary of the Argument To sum up then the different points which we have endeavoured to make in our argument, it will be remembered that, in the first place, after having outlined our general proposition, and after having from various considerations shown the importance of its discussion, we affirmed that there are certain great presumptions which lie in the way of our accepting the higher-critic theory as true. Next we introduced some archaeological and other testimony external to the Bible, which we found to be helpful in proving the Tabernacle's historicity. And then, by quite an extended examination of the many historical notices respecting the Tabernacle, or respecting the sacred ark as connected with it, which are found in the Old Testament, we established, we think, as a matter beyond all reasonable doubt, the actual historicity of this structure; showing how it was built near Mt. Sinai and then was known to exist continuously for some five hundred years, or from the time of Moses unto the time of David and Solomon. And then, finally, to make our argument as complete as possible, we noticed, somewhat briefly and yet with considerable fullness, the many objections which the higher critics have raised against the Tabernacle's existence, showing that none of these objections is really valid, and turning the last one into a positive proof on our side of the question. XV. Conclusion And now, if there remains yet anything which needs to be said, it seems to us it is only the assertion that, whether the higher critics will admit it or not, the old Mosaic Tabernacle, surely did exist. Or if there are persons who, in spite of all the numerous important testimonies which we have adduced from the Bible and other sources to the Tabernacle's historicity, still persist in denying such evidence, and in saying that the whole matter was only a priestly fiction, then what the Saviour says, with respect to some of the sceptics living in his day, is quite applicable: If they believe not Moses and the prophets, neither would they believe though one rose from the dead." Or to state the case a little differently and somewhat humorously, it might be said that the fact of any person's denying the real existence of the Tabernacle, when so much positive evidence exists in favour of it, reminds one of what Lord Byron says with regard to Bishop Berkeley's philosophical denial of the existence of matter: "When Bishop Berkeley says it is no matter. Then 'tis no matter what he says." But if the Tabernacle in the wilderness did really exist, then what becomes of the peculiar theory of the higher critics-That necessarily falls to the ground, or is proven to be untrue; for, as was shown in the early part of this discussion, the entire critic hypothesis rests upon, or has for one of its main pillars, the assumed non-existence of the Tabernacle, or what amounts to the same thing, the alleged late origin of the Mosaic ritualistic law. Both of these premises being now demonstrated to be unsound, the Tabernacle "which Moses made in the wilderness" will very likely remain where the Bible puts it--among the great undeniable facts of the world's history, and not, as the critics would have it, among fictions or forgeries. Addenda Various Facts Respecting Places Where the Tabernacle Was Built or Located I. Mount Sinai Its Location and Present Appearance Dr. J. W. Dawson, in his "Modern Science in Bible Lands," gives the following facts with regard to the location and present appearance of the mountain near which the Tabernacle was built. "The actual position of Mount Sinai has been a subject of keen controversy, which may be reduced to two questions: 1st, Was Mount Sinai in the peninsula of that name or elsewhere? 2d, Which of the mountains of the peninsula was the Mount of the Law? As to the first of these questions, the claims of the peninsula are supported by an overwhelming mass of tradition and of authority, ancient and modern. "If this question be considered as settled, then it remains to inquire which of the mountain summits of that group of hills in the southern end of the peninsula, which seems to be designated in the Bible by the general name of Horeb, should be regarded as the veritable 'Mount of the Law?' Five of the mountain summits of this region have laid claim to this distinction; and their relative merits the explorers [those of the English Ordnance Survey] test by seven criteria which must be fulfilled by the actual mountain. These are: (1) A mountain overlooking a plain on which the millions of Israel could be assembled. (2) Space for the people to 'remove and stand afar off' when the voice of the Lord was heard, and yet to hear that voice. (3) A defined peak distinctly visible from the plain. (4) A mountain so precipitous that the people might be said to stand under it and to touch its base. (5) A mountain capable of being isolated by boundaries. (6) A mountain with springs and streams of water in its vicinity. (7) Pasturage to maintain the flocks of the people for a year. "By these criteria the surveyors reject two of the mountains, Jebel el Ejmeh and Jebel Ummalawi, as destitute of sufficient water and pasturage. Jebel Katharina, whose claims arise from a statement of Josephus that Sinai was the highest mountain of the district, which this peak actually is, with the exception of a neighboring summit twenty-five feet higher, they reject because of the fact that it is not visible from any plain suitable for the encampment of the Israelites. Mount Serbal has in modern times had some advocates; but the surveyors allege in opposition to these that they do not find, as has been stated, the Sinaitic inscriptions more plentiful there than elsewhere, that the traces of early Christian occupancy do not point to it any more than early tradition, and that it does not meet the topographical requirements in presenting a defined peak, convenient camping-ground, or a sufficient amount of pasturage. "There only remains the long-established and venerated Jebel Musa-the orthodox Sinai; and this, in a remarkable and conspicuous manner, fulfils the required conditions, and, besides, illustrates the narrative itself in unexpected ways. This mountain has, however, two dominant peaks, that of Jebel Musa proper, 7,363 feet in height, and that of Ras Sufsafeh, 6,937 feet high; and of these the explorers do riot hesitate at once to prefer the latter. This peak or ridge is described as almost isolated, as descending precipitously to the great plain of the district, Er Rahah, which is capable of accommodating two millions of persons in full view of the peak, and has ample camping ground for the whole host in its tributary valleys. Further, it is so completely separated from the neighbouring mountains that a short and quite intelligible description would define its limits, which could be easily marked out. "Another remarkable feature is, that we have here the brook descending out of the mount referred to in Exodus (Ch. 32:20), and, besides this, five other perennial streams in addition to many good springs. The country is by no means desert, but supplies much pasturage; and when irrigated and attended to, forms good gardens, and is indeed one of the best and most fertile spots of the whole peninsula. The explorers show that the statements of some hasty travelers who have given a different view are quite incorrect, and also that there is reason to believe that there was greater rainfall and more verdure in ancient times than at present in this part of the country. They further indicate the Wady Shreick, in which is the stream descending from the mount, as the probable place of the making and destruction of the golden calf, and a hill known as Jebel Moneijeh, the mount of conference, as the probable site of the Tabernacle. They think it not improbable that while Ras Sufsafeh was the Mount of the Law, the retirement of Moses during his sojourn on the mount may have been behind the peak, in the recesses of Jebel Musa, which thus might properly bear his name." II. Shiloh Its Ruins as Recently Investigated Colonel Sir Charles Wilson thus describes the present ruins of Shiloh, in "Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement" for 1873, pp. 37, 38: "The ruins of Seilun (Shiloh) cover the surface of a `tell,' or mound, on a spur which lies between two valleys, that unite about a quarter of a mile above Khan Lubban, and thence run to the sea. The existing remains are those of a fellahin village, with few earlier foundations, possibly of the date of the Crusades. The walls are built with old materials, but none of the fragments of columns mentioned by some travellers can now be seen. On the summit are a few heavy foundations, perhaps those of a keep, and on the southern side is a building with a heavy sloping buttress. The rock is exposed over nearly the whole surface, so that little can be expected from excavation. Northwards, the `tell' slopes down to a broad shoulder across which a sort of level court, 77 feet wide and 412 feet long, has been cut out. The rock is in places scarped to a height of five feet, and along the sides are several excavations and a few small cisterns. The level portion of the rock is covered by a few inches of soil. It is not improbable that the place was thus prepared to receive the Tabernacle, which, according to Rabbinical traditions, was a structure of low stone walls, with the tent stretched over the top. At any rate, there is no other level space on the `tell' sufficiently large to receive a tent of the dimensions of the Tabernacle. "The spring of Seilûn is in a small valley which joins the main one a short distance northeast of the ruins. The supply, which is small, after running a few yards through a subterranean channel, was formerly led into a rock-hewn reservoir, but now runs to waste." To the above items Major Claude R Conder, R. E., in his "Tent Life in Palestine;" Vol I, pp. 81, 82, adds as follows: "There is no site in the country fixed with greater certainty than that of Shiloh. The modern name Seilûn preserves the most archaic form, which is found in the Bible in the ethnic Shilonite (1 Kings 11:29). The position of the ruins agrees exactly with the very definite description given in the Old Testament of the position of Shiloh, as `on the north side of Bethel (now Beitin), on the east side of the highway that goeth up from Bethel to Shechem, and on the south of Lebonah' (Lubbin) (Judges 21:19). It is just here that Shiloh still stands in ruins. The scenery of the wild mountains is finer than that in Judea; the red colour of the cliffs, which are of great height, is far more picturesque than' the shapeless chalk mountains near Jerusalem; the fig gardens and olive groves are more luxuriant, but the crops are poor compared with the plain and round Bethlehem. A deep valley runs behind the town on the north, and in its sides are many rock-cut sepulchres. "The vineyards of Shiloh have disappeared, though very possibly once surrounding the spring, and perhaps extending down the valley westwards, where water is also found. With the destruction of the village, desolation has spread over the barren hills around." III. Nob Site of the Village Identified So thinks Rev. W. Shaw Caldecott. See his treatise on "The Tabernacle, Its History and Structure," pp. 53, 54: "Four miles to the north of Jerusalem, anu at the distance of a quarter of a mile to the east of the main road, is a curiously knobbed and double-topped hill, named by the Arabs Tell (or Tuleil) el-Full. The crown of this hill is thirty feet higher than Mount Zion, and Jerusalem can be plainly seen from it. On its top is a large pyramidal mound of unhewn stones, which Robinson supposes to have been originally a square tower of 40 or 50 feet, and to have been violently thrown down. No other foundations are to be seen. At the foot of the hill are ancient substructions, built of large unhewn stones in low, massive walls. These are on the south side, and adjoin the great road. "If we take the Scriptural indications as to the site of Nob (height), this hill and these ruins fulfil all the conditions of the case. "(a) Nob was so far regarded as belonging to Jerusalem, as one of its villages (thus involving its proximity), that David's bringing Goliath's head and sword to the Tabernacle at Nob was regarded as bringing them to Jerusalem (1 Samuel 17:54). "(b) A clearer indication as to its situation is, however, gained by the record of the restoration towns and villages in which Nob is mentioned, the name occurring between those of Anathoth and Ananiah (Nehemiah 11:32). These two places still bear practically the same names, and their sites are well known. In the narrow space between Anata and Hanina stands the hill Tell el-Full, which we take to be ancient Nob. "(c) Another indication is contained in Isaiah's account of Sennacherib's march on Jerusalem, the picturesque climax of which is, `This very day shall he halt at Nob; he shaketh his hand at the mount of the daughter of Zion, the hill of Jerusalem' (Isaiah 10:28-32). There are only two hills on the north from which the city can be seen, so as to give reality to the poet's words. One' of these is Neby Samwil, and the other is Tell el-Full." IV. Gibeon Identity of Ancient City with El-Jib, also the "Great High Place," of 1 Kings 3:4, Indicated In Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, Art. Gibeon, J. F. Stenning says as follows: "The identity of Gibeon with the village of El-Jib, which lies some six or seven miles northwest of Jerusalem, is practically beyond dispute. The modern village still preserves the first part of the older name, while its situation agrees in every respect with the requirements of the history of the Old Testament. Just beyond Tell el-Full (Gibeah), the main road north from Jerusalem to Beitin (Bethel) is joined by a branch road leading up from the coast. The latter forms the continuation of the most southerly of three routes which connect the Jordan valley with the Maritime Plains. * * * Now just before this road (coming up from the Jordan valley) leaves the higher ground and descends to the Shepheleh, it divides into two, the one branch leading down to the Wady Suleiman, the other running in a more southerly direction by way of the Bethhorons. Here, on this fertile, open plateau, slightly to the south of the main road, rises the hill on which the modern village of El-Jib is built, right on the frontier line which traverses the central range to the south of Bethel. It was the natural pass across Palestine, which in early times served as the political border between North and South Israel, and it was owing to its position that Gibeon acquired so much prominence in the reigns of David and Solomon. A short distance to the east of the village, at the foot of the hill, there is, further, a stone tank o. reservoir of considerable size, supplied by a spring which rises in a cave higher up." This spring, the explorers tell us, was probably the ancient "pool of Gibeon" mentioned in 2 Samuel 2:13. Also, respecting the "great high place," Smith's Dictionary has the following: "The most natural position for the high place of Gibeon is the twin mountain immediately south of El-Jib, so close as to be all but a part of the town, and yet quite separate and distinct. The testimony of Epiphanius viz., that the `Mount of Gibeon' was the highest round Jerusalem, by which Dean Stanley supports his conjecture (that the present Neby Samwil was the great high place), should be received with caution, standing, as it does, quite alone and belonging to an age which, though early, was marked by ignorance and by the most improbable conclusions." Some additional facts, as given by Rev. W. Shaw Caldecott (ibid. pp. 60-62), are as follows: "El-Jib is built upon an isolated oblong hill standing in a plain or basin of great fertility. The northern end of the hill is covered 'over with old massive ruins, which have fallen down in every direction, and in which the villagers now live. Across the plain to the south is the lofty range of Neby Samwil. * * * Gibeon was one of the four towns in the division of Benjamin given as residences for the sons of Aaron (Joshua 21:17). It was thus already inhabited by priests, and this, added to its other advantages, made it, humanly speaking, a not unsuitable place for the capital of the new kingdom. No remains of (very ancient) buildings have been discovered, such as those of er-Ramah and Tell el-Full." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 64: - THE INTERNAL EVIDENCE OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL ======================================================================== The Internal Evidence of the Fourth Gospel By Canon G. Osborne Troop, M. A., Montreal, Canada The whole Bible is stamped with the Divine "Hall-Mark"; but the Gospel according to St. John is primus inter pares. Through it, as through a transparency, we gaze entranced into the very holy of holies, where shines in unearthly glory "the great vision of the face of Christ". Yet man's perversity has made it the "storm center" of New Testament criticism, doubtless for the very reason that it bears such unwavering testimony both to the deity of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and to His perfect humanity. The Christ of the Fourth Gospel is no unhistorical, idealized vision of the later, dreaming church, but is, as it practically claims to be, the picture drawn by "the disciple whom Jesus loved", an eye-witness of the blood and water that flowed from His pierced side. These may appear to be mere unsupported statements, and as such will at once be dismissed by a scientific reader. Nevertheless the appeal of this article is to the instinct of the "one flock" of the "one Shepherd". "They know His voice" ... "a stranger will they not follow." 1. There is one passage in this Gospel that flashes like lightning-it dazzles our eyes by its very glory. To the broken-hearted Martha the Lord Jesus says with startling suddenness, "I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth on Me, though he die, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me, shall never die." It is humbly but confidently submitted that these words are utterly beyond the reach of human invention. It could never have entered the heart of man to say, "I am the resurrection and the life." "There is a resurrection and a life," would have been a great and notable saying, but this Speaker identifies Himself with the resurrection and with life eternal. The words can only be born from above, and He who utters them is worthy of the utmost adoration of the surrendered soul. In an earlier chapter John records a certain question addressed to and answered by our Lord in a manner which has no counterpart in the world's literature. "What shall we do," the eager people cry; "What shall we do that we might work the works of God?" "This is the work of God", our Lord replies, "that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent" (John 6:28-29). I venture to say that such an answer to such a question has no parallel. This is the work of God that ye accept ME. I am the Root of the tree which bears the only, fruit pleasing to God. Our Lord states the converse of this in chapter 16, when He says that the Holy Spirit will "convict the world of sin ... because they believe not on ME." The root of all evil is unbelief in Christ. The condemning sin of the world lies in the rejection of the Redeemer. Here we have the root of righteousness and the root of sin in the acceptance or rejection of His wondrous personality. This is unique, and proclaims the Speaker to be "separate from sinners" though "the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." Truly, "He is His own best evidence, His witness is within." 2. Pass on to the fourteenth chapter, so loved of all Christians. Listen to that Voice, which is as the voice of many waters, as it sounds in the ears of the troubled disciples: "Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in ME. In My Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto Myself; that where I am, there ye may be also." Who is he who dares to say: "Ye believe in God, believe also in Me"? He ventures thus to speak because He is the Father's Son. Man's son is man can God's Son be anything less than God? Elsewhere in this Gospel He says: "I and the Father are one". The fourteenth chapter reveals the Lord Jesus as completely at home in the heavenly company. He speaks of His Father and of the Holy Spirit as Himself being one of the utterly holy Family. He knows all about His Father's house with its many mansions. He was familiar with it before the world was. Mark well, too, the exquisite touch of transparent truthfulness: "If it were not so, I would have told you." An ear-witness alone could have caught and preserved that touching parenthesis, and who more likely than the disciple whom Jesus loved? As we leave this famous chapter let us not forget to note the wondrous words in verse 23: "If a man love Me, he will keep My words; and My Father will love him, and WE will come unto him and make our abode with him." This saying can only be characterized as blasphemous, if it be not the true utterance of one equal with God. On the other hand, does any reasonable man seriously think that such words originated in the mind of a forger? "Every one that is of the truth heareth My Voice", and surely that voice is here. 3. When we come to chapter 17 we pass indeed into the very inner chamber of the King of kings. It records the high-priestly prayer of our Lord, when He "lifted up His eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour is come, glorify Thy Son that Thy Son may also glorify Thee." Let any man propose to himself the awful task of forging such a prayer, and putting it into the mouth of an imaginary Christ. The brain reels at the very thought of it. It is, however, perfectly natural that St. John should record it. It must have fallen upon the ears of himself and his fellow-disciples amidst an awestricken silence in which they could hear the very throbbing of their listening hearts. For their very hearts were listening through their ears as the Son poured out His soul unto the Father. It is a rare privilege, and one from which most men would sensitively shrink, to listen even to a fellowman alone with God. Yet the Lord Jesus in the midst of His disciples laid bare His very soul before His Father, as really as if He had been alone with Him. He prayed with the cross and its awful death full in view, but in the prayer there is no slightest hint of failure or regret, and there is no trace of confession of sin or need of forgiveness. These are all indelible marks of genuineness. It would have been impossible for a sinful man to conceive such a prayer. But all is consistent with the character of Him who "spake as never man spake", and could challenge the world to convict Him of sin. With such thoughts in mind let us now look more closely into the words of the prayer itself. "Father, the hour is come; glorify Thy Son, that Thy Son also may glorify Thee: As Thou hast given Him power over all flesh, that He should give eternal life to as many as Thou hast given Him. And this is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." Here we have again the calm placing of Himself on a level with the Father in connection with eternal life. And it is not out of place to recall the consistency of this utterance with that often-called "Johannine" saying recorded in Matthew and Luke: "All things are delivered unto Me of My Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him." We read also in St.John 14:6 : "No man cometh unto the Father but by Me". And as we reverently proceed further in the prayer we find Him saying: "And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own self, with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was." These words are natural to the Father's Son as we know and worship Him, but they are beyond the reach of an uninspired man, and who Can imagine a forger inspired of the Holy Ghost? Such words would, however, be graven upon the very heart of an ear-witness such as the disciple whom Jesus loved. We have in this prayer also the fuller revelation of the "one flock" and "one Shepherd" pictured in chapter ten: "Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on Me through their word; that they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us: That the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me. And the glory which Thou gavest Me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be perfected into one; and that the world may know that Thou hast sent Me, and hast loved them, as Thou hast loved Me." In these holy words there breathes a cry for such a unity as never entered into the heart of mortal man to dream of. It is no cold and formal ecclesiastical unity, such as that suggested by the curious and unhappy mistranslation of "one fold" for "one flock" in St.John 10:16. It is the living unity of the living flock with the living Shepherd of the living God. It is actually the same as the unity subsisting between the Father and the Son. And according to St. Paul in Romans 8:19, the creation is waiting for its revelation. The one Shepherd has from the beginning had His one flock in answer to His prayer, but the world has not yet seen it, and is therefore still unconvinced that our Jesus is indeed the Sent of God. The world has seen the Catholic Church and the Roman Catholic Church, but the Holy Catholic Church no eye as yet has seen but God's. For the Holy Catholic Church and the Shepherd's one flock are one and the same, and the world will not see either "till He come." The Holy Catholic Church is an object of faith and not of sight, and so is the one flock. In spite of all attempts at elimination and organization wheat and tares together grow, and sheep and wolves-in-sheep's-clothing are found together in the earthly pasture grounds. But when the Good Shepherd returns He will bring His beautiful flock with Him, and eventually the world will see and believe. "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out!" The mystery of this spiritual unity lies hidden in the high-priestly prayer, but we may feel sure that no forger could ever discover it, for many of those who profess and call themselves Christians are blind to it even yet. 4. The "Christ before Pilate" of St. John is also stamped with every mark of sincerity and truth. What mere human imagination could evolve the noble words: "My kingdom is not of this world; if My kingdom were of this world, then would My servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is My kingdom not from hence. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth My voice"? The whole wondrous story of the betrayal, the denial, the trial, the condemnation and crucifixion of the Lord Jesus, as given through St. John, breathes with the living sympathy of an eye-witness. The account, moreover, is as wonderful in the delicacy of its reserve as in the simplicity of its recital. It is entirely free from sensationalism and every form of exaggeration. It is calm and judicial in the highest degree. If it is written by the inspired disciple whom Jesus loved, all is natural and easily "understanded of the people"; while on any other supposition, it is fraught with difficulties that cannot be explained away. "I am not credulous enough to be an unbeliever," is a wise saying in this as in many similar connections. 5. The Gospel opens and closes with surpassing grandeur. With Divine dignity it links itself with the opening words of Genesis: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ... And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." What a lifelike contrast with this sublime description is found in the introduction of John the Baptist: "There came a man sent from God whose name was John". In the incarnation Christ did not become a man but man. Moreover in this Paul and John are in entire agreement. "There is one God", says St. Paul to Timothy; "one Mediator also between God and man Himself Man-Christ Jesus." The reality of the Divine Redeemer's human nature is beautifully manifested in the touching interview between the weary Savior and the guilty Samaritan woman at the well; as also in His perfect human friendship with Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus, culminating in the priceless words, "Jesus wept." And so by the bitter way of the Cross the grandeur of the incarnation passes into the glory of the resurrection. The last two chapters are alive with thrilling incident. If any one wishes to form a true conception of what those brief chapters contain, let him read "Jesus and the Resurrection," by the saintly Bishop of Durham (Dr. Handley Moule) and his cup of holy joy will fill to overflowing. At the empty tomb we breathe the air of the unseen kingdom, and presently we gaze enraptured on the face of the Crucified but risen and ever living King. Mary Magdalene, standing in her broken-hearted despair, is all unconscious of the wondrous fact that holy angels are right in front of her and standing behind her is her living Lord and Master. Slowly but surely the glad story spreads from lip to lip and heart to heart, until even the honest but stubborn Thomas is brought to his knees, crying in a burst of remorseful, adoring joy, "My Lord and my God!" Then comes the lovely story of the fruitless all-night toil of the seven fishermen, the appearance at dawn of the Stranger on the beach, the miraculous draught of fishes, the glad cry of recognition, "It is the Lord" the never-to-be- forgotten breakfast with the risen Saviour, and His searching interview with Peter, passing into the mystery of St. John's old age. In all these swiftly-drawn outlines we feel ourselves instinctively in the presence of the truth. We are crowned with the Saviour's beatitude: "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed," and we are ready to yield a glad assent to the statement which closes chapter twenty: "Many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life in His Name." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 65: - THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST TO THE OT ======================================================================== The Testimony of Christ to the Old Testament By William Caven, D. D., Ll. D., Late Principal Of Knox College, Toronto, Canada Both Jews and Christians receive the Old Testament as containing a revelation from God, While the latter regard it as standing in close and vital relationship to the New Testament. Everything connected with the Old Testament has, of recent years, been subjected to the closest scrutiny-the authorship of its several books, the time when they were written, their style, their historical value, their religious and ethical teachings. Apart from the veneration with which we regard the Old Testament writings on their own account, the intimate connection which they have with the Christian Scriptures necessarily gives us the deepest interest in the conclusions which may be reached by Old Testament criticism. For us the New Testament Dispensation presupposes and grows out of the Mosaic, so the books of the New Testament touch those of the Old at every point: In vetere testamento novum latet, et in novo vetus patet. (In the Old Testament the New is concealed, and in the New the Old is revealed). We propose to take a summary view of the testimony of our Lord to the Old Testament, as it is recorded by the Evangelists. The New Testament writers themselves largely quote and refer to the Old Testament, and the views which they express regarding the old economy and its writings are in harmony with the statements of their Master; but, for various reasons, we here confine ourselves to what is related of the Lord Himself. Let us refer, first, to what is contained or necessarily implied in the Lord's testimony to the Old Testament Scriptures, and, secondly, to the critical value of His testimony. I. The Lord's Testimony to the Old Testament Our Lord's authority-though this is rather the argumentum silentio-may be cited in favor of the Old Testament canon as accepted by the Jews in His day. He never charges them with adding to or taking from the Scriptures, or in any way tampering with the text. Had they been guilty of so great a sin it is hardly possible that among the charges brought against them, this matter should nor even be alluded to. The Lord reproaches His countrymen with ignorance of the Scriptures, and with making the law void through their traditions, but He never hints that they have foisted any book into the canon, or rejected any which deserved a place in it. Now, the Old Testament canon of the first century is the same as our own. The evidence for this is complete, and the fact is hardly questioned. The New Testament contains, indeed, no catalogue of the Old Testament books, but the testimony of Josephus, of Melito of Sardis, of Origen, of Jerome, of the Talmud, decisively shows that the Old Testament canon, once fixed, has remained unaltered. Whether the steady Jewish tradition that the canon was finally determined by Ezra and the Great Synagogue is altogether correct or not, it is certain that the Septuagint agrees with the Hebrew as to the canon, thus showing that the subject was not in dispute two centuries before Christ. Nor is the testimony of the Septuagint weakened by the fact that the common Old Testament Apocrypha are appended to the canonical books; for "of no one among the Apocryphal books is it so much as hinted, either by the author, or by any other Jewish writer, that it was worthy of a place among the sacred books" (Kitto's Cyclo., art. "Canon"). The Lord, it is observed, never quotes any of the aprocryphal books, nor refers to them. No Part Assailed If our Lord does not name the writers of the books of the Old Testament in detail, it may at least be said that no word of His calls in question the genuineness of any book, and that he distinctly assigns several parts of Scripture to the writers whose names they pass under. The Law is ascribed to Moses; David's name is connected with the Psalms; the prophecies of Isaiah are attributed to Isaiah, and the prophecies of Daniel to Daniel. We shall afterward inquire whether these references are merely by way of accommodation, or whether more importance should be attached to them; in the meantime, we note that the Lord does not, in any instance, express dissent from the common opinion, and that, as to several parts of Scripture, He distinctly endorses it. The references to Moses as legislator and writer are such as these: To the cleansed leper He says, "Go thy way, shew thyself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded" (Matthew 8:4). "He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives" (Matthew 19:8). "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead" (Luke 16:31). "For Moses said, Honor thy father and thy mother; and, Whoso curseth father or mother, let him die the death" (Mark 7:10). "And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:27). "All things must he fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me" (Luke 24:44). "There is one that accuseth you, even Moses, in whom ye trust. For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed Me: For he wrote of Me. But if ye believed not his writings, how shall ye believe My words?" (John 5:45-47). "Did not Moses give you the law, and yet none of you keepeth the law?" (John 7:19). "Moses therefore gave unto you circumcision. * * * If a man on the Sabbath day receive circumcision, that the law of Moses should not be broken," etc. (John 7:22-23). The omitted parenthetical words-"not because it is of Moses, but of the fathers"-seem clearly to show, it may be remarked in passing, that the Lord is not unobservant of historical exactness. The Psalms are quoted by our Lord more than once, but only once is a writer named. The 110th Psalm is ascribed to David; and the vadidity of the Lord's argument depends on its being Davidic. The reference, therefore, so far as it goes, confirms the inscriptions of the Psalms in relation to authorship. Isaiah 6:9 is quoted thus: "In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand" (Matthew 13:14-15). Again, chapter 29:13 of Isaiah's prophecy is cited: "Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites. * * * This people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me" (Mark 7:6). When, in the beginning of His ministry, the Lord came to Nazareth, there was delivered unto Him in the synagogue "the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor," etc. (Luke 4:17-18). The passage read by our Lord is from the 61st chapter of Isaiah, which belongs to the section of the book very often, at present, ascribed to the second, or pseudo, Isaiah; but we do not press this point, as it may be said that the Evangelist, rather than Christ, ascribes the words to Isaiah. In His great prophecy respecting the downfall of the Jewish state the Lord refers to "the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet:" As in Daniel 9:27, we read that "For the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate," and in chapter 12:11, that "the abomination that maketh desolate (shall) be set up." Narratives and Records Authentic When Christ makes reference to Old Testament narratives and records, He accepts them as authentic, as historically true. He does not give or suggest in any case a mythical or allegorical interpretation. The accounts of the creation, of the flood, of the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as many incidents and events of later occurrence, are taken as authentic. It may, of course, be alleged that the Lord's references to the creation of man and woman, the flood, the cities of the plain, etc., equally serve His purpose of illustration whether He regards them as historical or not. But on weighing His words it will be seen that they lose much of their force and appropriateness unless the events alluded to had a historical character. Let us refer more particularly to this matter. When the Pharisees ask Christ whether it is lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause, He answers them: "Have ye not read, that He which made them in the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?" (Matthew 19:4-5). Again: "As the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be. For as in the days that were before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and knew not, until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be" (Matthew 24:37; Matthew 24:39). Again: "And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mighty works, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee" (Matthew 11:23-24). These utterances, every one feels, lose their weight and solemnity, if there was no flood such as is described in Genesis, and if the destruction of wicked Sodom may be only a myth. Illustrations and parallels may, for certain purposes, be adduced from fictitious literature, but when the Lord would awaken the conscience of men and alarm their fears by reference to the certainty of divine judgment, He will not confirm His teaching by instances of punishment which are only fabulous. His argument that the Holy and Just God will do as He has done-will make bare His arm as in the days of old-is robbed, in this case, of all validity. A view frequently urged in the present day is that, as with other nations, so with the Jews, the mythical period precedes the historical, and thus the earlier narratives of the Old Testament must be taken according to their true character. In later periods of the Old Testament we have records which, on the whole, are historical; but in the very earliest times we must not look for authentic history at all. An adequate examination of this theory (which has, of course, momentous exegetical consequences) cannot here be attempted. We merely remark that our Lord's brief references to early Old Testament narrative would not suggest the distinction so often made between earlier and later Old Testament records on the score of trustworthiness. The Old Testament from God We advance to say that Christ accepts the Old Dispensation and its Scriptures as, in a special sense, from God; as having special, divine authority. Many who recognize no peculiar sacredness or authority in the religion of the Jews above other religions of the world, would readily admit that it is from God. But their contention is that all religions (especially what they are pleased to call the great religions) have elements of truth in them, that they all furnish media through which devout souls have fellowship with the Power which rules the universe, but that none of them should exalt its pretensions much above the others, far less claim exclusive divine sanction; all of them being the product of man's spiritual nature, as molded by his history and environment, in different nations and ages. This is the view under which the study of comparative religion is prosecuted by many eminent scholars. A large and generous study of religions-their characteristics and history-tends, it is held, to bring them into closer fellowship with each other; and only ignorance or prejudice (say these unbiased thinkers) can isolate the religion of the Old Testament or of the New, and refuse to acknowledge in other religions the divine elements which entitle them to take rank with Judaism or Christianity. The utterances of Jesus Christ on this question of the divinity of the Old Testament religion and cults are unmistakable; and not less clear and decided is His language respecting the writings in which this religion is delivered. God is the source in the directest sense, of both the religion and the records of it. No man can claim Christ's authority for classing Judaism with Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Parseeism. There is nothing, indeed, in the Lord's teaching which forbids us to recognize anything that is good in ethnic religions-any of those elements of spiritual truth which become the common property of the race and which were not completely lost in the night of heathenism; but, on the other hand, it is abundantly evident that the Jewish faith is, to our Lord, the one true faith, and that the Jewish Scriptures have a place of their own-a place which cannot be shared with the sacred books of other peoples. Samaritanism, even though it had appropriated so largely from the religion of Israel, He will not recognize. "For salvation is of the Jews." Almost any reference of our Lord to the Old Testament will support the statement that He regards the Dispensation and its Scriptures as from God. He shows, e.g., that Old Testament prophecy is fulfilled in Himself, or He vindicates His teaching and His claims by Scripture, or He enjoins obedience to the law (as in the case of the cleansed lepers), or He asserts the inviolability of the law till its complete fulfillment, or He accuses a blinded and self-righteous generation of superseding and vacating a law which they were bound to observe. A few instances of explicit recognition of the Old Testament Scriptures as proceeding from God and having divine authority, may be here adduced. In His Sermon on the Mount the Lord makes this strong and comprehensive statement:"Verily, I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled" (Matthew 5:18). In the context the law is distinguished from the prophets and designates, therefore, the Pentateuch; and surely the divine origin of this part of Scripture is unquestionably implied. No such inviolability could be claimed for any merely human institution or production. When the hypocritical and heartless son pretended to devote to God what should have gone to support his indigent parents, he "made the commandment of God of none effect," "for God commanded, saying, Honor thy father and mother" (Matthew 15:4). In purging the temple the Lord justifies His action in these words: "It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer" (Matthew 21:13). Again: "As touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?" (Matthew 22:32). Again: "Laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things ye do" (Mark 7:8). So many passages of the Old Testament are quoted or alluded to by the Lord as having received, or as awaiting fulfillment, that it is scarcely necessary to make citations of this class. These all most certainly imply the divinity of Scripture; for no man, no creature, can tell what is hidden in the remote future. We are not forgetting that the Lord fully recognizes the imperfect and provisional character of the Mosaic law and of the Old Dispensation. Were the Old faultless, no place would have been found for the New. Had grace and truth come by Moses, the advent of Jesus Christ would have been unnecessary. So when the Pharisees put the question to Christ why Moses commanded to give to a wife who has found no favor with her husband a writing of divorcement and to put her away, He replied: "Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so" (Matthew 19:8). The Mosaic legislation was not in every part absolutely the best that could be given, but it was such as the divine wisdom saw best for the time being and under the special circumstances of the Hebrew people. Not only did the Old Testament set forth a typical economy, which must give place to another, but it embodied ethical elements of a provisional kind which must pass away when the incarnate Son had fully revealed the Father. The Old Testament is conscious of its own imperfections, for Jeremiah thus writes: "Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers, in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt." But in all this there is nothing to modify the proposition which we are illustrating, viz., that our Lord accepts the Old Testament economy and its Scriptures as from God, as stamped with divine authority, and as truly making known the divine mind and will. Marcion and the Gnostics did not receive any part of the Old Testament Scriptures, and the Old Dispensation itself they held to be of evil origin. So decided were they against the Old Testament that they would not admit into their New Testament canon the books which especially bear witness to the Old. But the Christian Church has followed its Master in regarding the Old Testament as the Word of God, as the Bible of the ages before the Advent, and as still part of the Bible for the Christian Church. Not until the days of developed rationalism was this position called in question, except among unbelievers. But it is obvious that the style of criticism which, in our own time, is frequently applied to the Old Testament (not to say anything about the New), touching its histories, its laws, its morality, is quite inconsistent with the recognition of any special divine characteristics or authority as belonging to it. The very maxim so often repeated, that criticism must deal with these writings precisely as it deals with other writings is a refusal to Scripture, in limine, of the peculiar character which it claims, and which the Church has ever recognized in it. If a special divine authority can be vindicated for these books, or for any of them, this fact, it is clear, ought to be taken into account by the linguistic and historical critic. Logically, we should begin our study of them by investigating their title to such authority, and, should their claim prove well founded, it should never be forgotten in the subsequent critical processes. The establishment of this high claim will imply in these writings moral characteristics (not to mention others) which should exempt them from a certain suspicion which the critic may not unwarrantably allow to be present when he begins to examine documents of an ordinary kind. It is not, therefore, correct to say that criticism, in commencing its inquiries, should know nothing of the alleged divine origin or sacred character of a book. If the book has no good vouchers for its claims to possess a sacred character, criticism must proceed unhindered; but correct conceptions of critical methods demand that every important fact already ascertained as to any writings should be kept faithfully before the mind in the examination of them. Science must here unite with reverential feeling in requiring right treatment of a book which claims special divine sanction, and is willing to have its claims duly investigated. The examination of a witness of established veracity and rectitude would not be conducted in precisely the same manner as that of a witness whose character is unknown or under suspicion. Wellhausen's style of treating the history of Israel can have no justification unless he should first show that the claim so often advanced in "Thus saith the Lord" is entirely baseless. So far from admitting the validity of the axiom referred to, we distinctly hold that it is unscientific. A just and true criticism must have respect to everything already known and settled regarding the productions to which it is applied, and assuredly so momentous a claim as that of divine authority demands careful preliminary examination. But criticism, it may be urged, is the very instrument by which we must test the pretensions of these writings to a special divine origin and character, and, hence, it cannot stand aside till this question has been considered. In requiring criticism to be silent till the verdict has been rendered, we are putting it under restrictions inconsistent with its functions and prerogatives. The reply, however, is that the principal external and internal evidences for the divine origin of the Scriptures can be weighed with sufficient accuracy to determine the general character and authority of these writings before criticism, either higher or lower, requires to apply its hand. "The heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is to give glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man's salvation, the many other incomparable excellences, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evince itself to be the word of God" (Conf. of Faith 1:5). But all of these considerations can, in all that is material, be weighed and estimated before technical criticism begins its labors, as they have been estimated to the entire conviction of the divinity of Scripture on the part of thousands who had no acquaintance with criticism. Should the fair application of criticism, when its proper time comes, tend to beget doubt as to the general conclusion already reached regarding the Bible, it will doubtless be right to review carefully the evidence on which our conclusion depends; but the substantive and direct proofs of the Scriptures being from God should first be handled, and the decision arrived at should be kept in mind, while criticism is occupied with its proper task. This seems to us the true order of the procedure. God Speaks Our Lord certainly attributes to the Old Testament a far higher character than many have supposed. God speaks in it throughout; and while He will more perfectly reveal Himself in His Son, not anything contained in the older revelation shall fail of its end or be convicted of error. Christ does not use the term "inspiration" in speaking of the Old Testament, but when we have adduced His words regarding the origin and authority of these writings, it will be evident that to Him they are God-given in every part. It will be seen that His testimony falls not behind that of His Apostles who say: "Every Scripture inspired of God" (2 Timothy 3:16), and "The prophecy came not in old time by the will of man; but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost" (2 Peter 1:21). Words and Commands of God In speaking of Christ as teaching that the Old Testament is from God we have referred to passages in which He says that its words and commands are the words and commands of God; e.g., "God commanded, saying, Honor thy father and thy mother: and He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death" (Matthew 15:4). Again: "Have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?" In a comprehensive way the laws of the Pentateuch, or of the Old Testament, are called "the commandments of God." "In vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men. * * * Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition" (Mark 7:8-9); and in the context of this last quotation the commandment of God is identified with what "Moses spake," showing that the words of Moses are also the words of God. Passages like these do more than prove that the Old Testament Scriptures. express on the whole the mind of God, and, therefore, possess very high authority. If it can certainly be said that God spake certain words, or that certain words and commandments are the words and commandments of God, we have more than a general endorsement; as when, e.g., the editor of a periodical states that he is responsible for the general character and tendency of articles which he admits, but not for every sentiment or expression of opinion contained in them. It needs, of course, no proof that the words quoted in the New Testament as spoken by God are not the only parts of the Old which have direct divine authority. The same thing might evidently be said of other parts of the book. The impression left, we think, on every unprejudiced mind is that such quotations as the Lord made are only specimens of a book in which God speaks throughout. There is not encouragement certainly to attempt any analysis of Scripture into its divine and its human parts or elements-to apportion the authorship between God and the human penman, for, as we have seen, the same words are ascribed to God and to His servant Moses. The whole is spoken by God and by Moses also. All is divine and at the same time all is human. The divine and the human are so related that separation is impossible. Absolute Infallibility of Scripture Attention may be specially called to three passages in which the Lord refers to the origin and the absolute infallibility of Scripture. Jesus asked the Pharisees, "What think ye of Christ" Whose Son is He" They say unto Him, The Son of David. He saith unto them, How then doth David in spirit call Him Lord?" The reference is to Ps 110, which the Lord says David spake or wrote "in spirit;" i.e., David was completely under the Spirit's influence in the production of the Psalm, so that when he calls the Messiah his "Lord" the word has absolute authority. Such is clearly the Lord's meaning, and the Pharisees have no reply to His argument. The Lord does not say that the entire Old Testament was written "in the Spirit," nor even that all the Psalms were so produced; He makes no direct statement of this nature; yet the plain reader would certainly regard this as implied. His hearers understood their Scriptures to have been all written by immediate inspiration of God, and to be the word of God; and He merely refers to Ps 110 as having the character which belonged to Scripture at large. In John 10:34-36 Christ vindicates Himself from the charge of blasphemy in claiming to be the Son of God: "Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods. If he called them gods unto whom the word of God came, and the Scripture cannot be broken; say ye of Him whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?" The Scripture cannot be broken" ou dunatai luthenai. The verb signifies to loose, unbind, dissolve, and as applied to Scripture means to subvert or deprive of authority. The authority of Scripture is then so complete-so pervasive-as to extend to its individual terms. "Gods" is the proper word because it is used to designate the Jewish rulers. If this is not verbal inspiration, it comes very near it. One may, of course, allege that the Lord's statement of inerrancy implies only that the principal words of Scripture must be taken precisely as they are, but that He does not claim the like authority for all its words. Without arguing this point, we merely say that it is not certain or obvious that the way is left open for this distinction. In face of Christ's utterances it devolves on those who hold that inspiration extends to the thought of Scripture only, but not to the words, or to the leading words but not to the words in general, to adduce very cogent arguments in support of their position. The onus probandi, it seems to us, is here made to rest on them. The theory that inspiration may be affirmed only of the main views or positions of Scripture, but neither of the words nor of the development of the thoughts, cannot, it seems clear, be harmonized with the Lord's teaching. Before adverting to a third text we may be allowed to set down these words of Augustine in writing to Jerome: "For I acknowledge with high esteem for thee, I have learned to ascribe such reverence and honor to those books of the Scriptures alone, which are now called canonical, that I believe most firmly that not one of their authors has made a mistake in writing them, And should I light upon anything in those writings, which may seem opposed to truth, I shall contend for nothing else, than either that the manuscript was full of errors, or that the translator had not comprehended what was said, or that I had not understood it in the least degree." In His sermon on the Mount our Lord thus refers to His own relation to the Old Testament economy and its Scriptures: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled" (Matthew 5:17-18). No stronger words could be employed to affirm the divine authority of every part of the Old Testament; for the law and the prophets mean the entire Old Testament Scriptures. If this declaration contemplates the moral element of these Scriptures, it means that no part of them shall be set aside by the New Dispensation, but "fulfilled"-i. e., filled up and completed by Jesus Christ as a sketch is filled up and completed by the painter. If, as others naturally interpret, the typical features of the Old Testament are included in the statement, the term "fulfilled," as regards this element, will be taken in the more usual meaning. In either case the inviolability and, by implication, the divine origin of the Old Testament could not be more impressively declared. Mark how comprehensive and absolute the words are: "One jot or one tittle." "Jot" (iota) is yod, the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet; "tittle," literally little horn or apex, designates the little lines or projections by which Hebrew letters, similar in other respects, differ from each other. We have here, one might say, the inspiration of letters of the Old Testament. Everything contained in it has divine authority, and must, therefore, be divine in origin; for it is unnecessary to show that no such authority could be ascribed to writings merely human, or to writings in which the divine and the human interests could be separated analytically. Should it be said that the "law," every jot and tittle of which must be fulfilled, means here the economy itself, the ordinances of Judaism, but not the record of them in writing, the reply is that we know nothing of these ordinances except through the record, so that what is affirmed must apply to the Scriptures as well as to the Dispensation. The only questions which can be well raised are, first, whether the "law and the prophets" designate the entire Scriptures or two great divisions of them only; and, secondly, whether the words of Jesus can be taken at their full meaning, or, for some reason or other,, must be discounted. The first question it is hardly worth while to discuss, for, if neither jot nor tittle of the "law and the prophets" shall fail, it will hardly be contended that the Psalms, or whatever parts of the Old Testament are not included, have a less stable character. The latter question, of momentous import, we shall consider presently. Fulfilment of Prophecy The inspiration of the Old Testament Scriptures is clearly implied in the many declarations of our Lord respecting the fulfilment of prophecies contained in them. It is God's prerogative to know, and to make known, the future. Human presage cannot go beyond what is foreshadowed in events which have transpired, or is wrapped up in causes which we plainly see in operation. If, therefore, the Old Testament reveals, hundreds of years in advance, what is coming to pass, omniscience must have directed the pen of the writer; i.e., these Scriptures, or at least their predictive parts, must be inspired. The passage already quoted from the Sermon on the Mount may be noticed as regards its bearing on prophecy: "I am not come to destroy the law or the prophets, but to fulfil." While plerosai, as referring to the law, has the special meaning above pointed out; as referring to the prophets, it has its more common import. We have here, then, a general statement as to the Old Testament containing prophecies which were fulfilled by Christ and in Him. Here are examples. The rejection of Messiah by the Jewish authorities, as well as the ultimate triumph of His cause, is announced in the 118th Psalm; in words which Christ applies to Himself: "The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner." The desertion of Jesus by His disciples when He was apprehended fulfils the prediction of Zechariah: "I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall all be scattered" (Matthew 26:31). Should angelic intervention rescue Jesus from death, "how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?" All that related to His betrayal, apprehension, and death took place, "that the Scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled" (Matthew 26:56). "Had ye believed Moses," said our Lord, "ye would have believed Me, for he wrote of Me" (John 5:46). The 41st Psalm pre-announces the treachery of Judas in these words: "He that eateth bread with Me hath lifted up his heel against Me;" and the defection of the son of perdition takes place, "that the Scriptures may be fulfilled" (John 17:12). The persistent and malignant opposition of His enemies fulfils that which is written: "They hated Me without a cause" (John 15:25). Finally, in discoursing to the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, the Lord, "beginning at Moses and all the prophets, expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things Concerning Himself. "And He said unto them: These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms, concerning Me. Then opened lie their understanding that they might understand the Scriptures, and said unto them: "Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day" (Luke 24:44-46). It is not denied that in some instances the word "fulfil" is used in the New Testament merely as signifying that some event or condition of things corresponds with or realizes something that is written in the Old Testament; as when the words in Isaiah, "By hearing ye shall hear and shall not understand," are said to be fulfilled in the blind obduracy of the Pharisees. Nor, again, is it denied that "fulfil" has the meaning of filling, or expanding, or completing. But clearly our Lord, in the passages here cited, employs the term in another acceptation. He means nothing less than this: that the Scriptures which He says were "fulfilled" were intended by the Spirit of God to have the very application which He makes of them; they were predictions in the sense ordinarily meant by that term. If the Messiah of the Old Testament were merely an ideal personage, there would be little force in saying that the Lord "opened the understanding" of the disciples that they might see His death and resurrection to be set forth in the prophecies. But to teach that the Old Testament contains authentic predictions is, as we have said, to teach that it is inspired. The challenge to heathen deities is, "Show the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods" (Isaiah 41:23). We thus find that our Lord recognizes the same Old Testament canon as we have, that so far as He makes reference to particular books of the canon He ascribes them to the writers whose names they bear, that He regards the Jewish religion and its sacred books as in a special sense-a sense not to be affirmed of any other religion-from God, that the writers of Scripture, in His view, spake in the Spirit, that their words are so properly chosen that an argument may rest on the exactness of a term, that no part of Scripture shall fail of its end or be convicted of error, and that the predictions of Scripture are genuine predictions, which must all in their time receive fulfilment. We cannot here discuss the doctrine of inspiration; but on the ground of the Lord's testimony to the Old Testament, as above summarized, we may surely affirm that He claims for it throughout all that is meant by inspiration when we use that term in the most definite sense. No higher authority could well be ascribed to apostolic teaching, or to any part of the New Testament Scriptures, than the Lord attributes to the more ancient Scriptures when He declares that "jot or tittle shall not pass from them till all be fulfilled," and that if men "hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead" (Luke 16:31). II. The Value of Christ's Testimony It remains that we should briefly advert to the value, for the scientific student of the Bible, of Christ's testimony to the Old Testament. The very announcement of such a topic may not be heard without pain, but in view of theories with which Biblical students are familiar, it becomes necessary to look into the question. Can we, then, accept the utterances of Christ on the matters referred to as having value-as of authority-in relation to the Biblical scholarship? Can we take them at their face value, or must they be discounted? Or again, are these words of Jesus valid for criticism on some questions, but not on others? There are two ways in which it is sought to invalidate Christ's testimony to the Old Testament. 1. Ignorance of Jesus Alleged It is alleged that Jesus had no knowledge beyond that of His contemporaries as to the origin and literary characteristics of the Scriptures. The Jews believed that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, that the narratives of the Old Testament are all authentic history, and that the words of Scripture are all inspired. Christ shared the opinions of His countrymen on these topics, even when they were in error. To hold this view, it is maintained, does not detract from the Lord's qualifications for His proper work, which was religious and spiritual, not literary; for in relation to the religious value of the Old Testament and its spiritual uses and applications He may confidently be accepted as our guide. His knowledge was adequate to the delivery of the doctrines of His kingdom, but did not necessarily extend to questions of scholarship and criticism. Of these He speaks as any other man; and to seek to arrest, or direct, criticism by appeal to His authority, is procedure which can only recoil upon those who adopt it. This view is advanced, not only by critics who reject the divinity of Christ, but by many who profess to believe that doctrine. In the preface to his first volume on the Pentateuch and Joshua, Colenso thus writes: "It is perfectly consistent with the most entire and sincere belief in our Lord's divinity to hold, as many do, that when He vouchsafed to become a "Son of man" He took our nature fully, and voluntarily entered into all the conditions of humanity, and, among others, into that which makes our growth in all ordinary knowledge gradual and limited. * * * It is not supposed that, in His human nature, He was acquainted more than any Jew of His age with the mysteries of all modern sciences, nor * * * can it be seriously maintained that, as an infant or young child, He possessed a knowledge surpassing that of the most pious and learned adults of His nation, upon the subject of the authorship and age of the different portions of the Pentateuch. At what period, then, of His life on earth, is it to be supposed that He had granted to Him as the Son of man, supernaturally, full and accurate information on these points?" etc. (vol. i., p. 32). "It should also be observed," says Dr. S. Davidson, "that historical and critical questions could only belong to His human culture, a culture stamped with the characteristics of His age and country." The doctrine of the Kenosis is invoked to explain the imperfection of our Lord's knowledge on critical questions, as evidenced by the way in which He speaks of the Pentateuch and of various Old Testament problems. The general subject of the limitation of Christ's knowledge during His life on earth is, of course, a very difficult one, but we do not need here to consider it. The Gospel of Mark does speak of the day and hour when the heaven and earth shall pass away as being known to the Father only, and not to the Son; but without venturing any opinion on a subject so mysterious, we may, at least, affirm that the Lord's knowledge was entirely adequate to the perfect discharge of His prophetical office. To impute imperfection to Him as the Teacher of the Church were indeed impious. Now the case stands thus: By a certain class of critics we are assured that, in the interests of truth, in order to an apologetic such as the present time absolutely requires, the traditional opinions regarding the authorship of the Old Testament books and the degree of authority which attaches to several, if not all of them, must be revised. In order to save the ship, we must throw overboard this cumbrous and antiquated tackling. Much more, we are assured, than points of scholarship are involved; for intelligent and truth loving men cannot retain their confidence in the Bible and its religion, Unless we discard the opinions which have prevailed as to the Old Testament, even though these opinions can apparently plead in their favor the authority of Jesus Christ. Now mark the position in which the Lord, as our Teacher, is thus placed. We have followed Him in holding opinions which turn out to be unscientific, untrue; and so necessary is it to relinquish these opinions that neither the Jewish nor the Christian faith can be satisfactorily defended if we cling to them. Is it not, therefore, quite clear that the Lord's teaching is, in something material, found in error-that His prophetical office is assailed? For the allegation is that, in holding fast to what He is freely allowed to have taught, we are imperiling the interests of religion. The critics whom we have in view must admit either that the points in question are of no importance, or that the Lord was imperfectly qualified for His prophetical work. Those who have reverence for the Bible will not admit either position. For why should scholarship so magnify the necessity to apologetics of correcting the traditional opinion as to the age and authorship of the Pentateuch, and other questions of Old Testament criticism, unless it means to show that the Old Testament requires more exact, more enlightened, handling than the Lord gave it? Should it be replied that the Lord, had He been on earth now, would have spoken otherwise on the topics concerned, the obvious answer is, that the Lord's teaching is for all ages, and that His word "cannot be broken," 2. Theory of Accommodation The theory of accommodation is brought forward in explanation of those references of Christ to the Old Testament which endorse what are regarded as inaccuracies or popular errors. He spake, it is said, regarding the Old Testament, after the current opinion or belief. This belief would be sometimes right and sometimes wrong; but where no interest of religion or morality was affected-where spiritual truth was not involved-He allowed Himself, even where the common belief was erroneous, to speak in accordance with it. Some extend the principle of accommodation to the interpretation of the Old Testament as well as to questions of canon and authorship; and in following it the Lord is declared to have acted prudently, for no good end could have been served, it is alleged, by crossing the vulgar opinion upon matters of little importance, and thus awakening or strengthening suspicion as to His teaching in general. As to the accommodation thus supposed to have been practiced by our Lord, we observe that if it implies, as the propriety of the term requires, a more accurate knowledge on His part than His language reveals, it becomes difficult, in many instances, to vindicate His perfect integrity. In some cases where accommodation is alleged, it might, indeed, be innocent enough, but in others it would be inconsistent with due regard to truth; and most of the statements of the Lord touching the Old Testament to which attention has been directed in this discussion seem to be of this latter kind. Davidson himself says: "Agreeing as we do in the sentiment that our Savior and His Apostles accommodated their mode of reasoning to the habitual notions of the Jews, no authority can be attributed to that reasoning except when it takes the form of an independent declaration or statement, and so rests on the speaker's credit." Now the statements of Christ respecting the Old Testament Scriptures to which we desire specially to direct attention are precisely of this nature. Are not these "independent declarations"? "One jot or one tittle shall not pass," etc.; "The Scripture cannot be broken;" "David in spirit calls him Lord;" "All things must be fulfilled which are written in the Law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms concerning Me." Further, we may say as before, that if our Lord's statements-His obiter dicta, if you will-about the authorship of parts of Scripture give a measure of countenance to opinions which are standing in the way of both genuine scholarship and of faith, it is hard to see how they can be regarded as instances of a justifiable accommodation. It seems to us (may we reverently use the words) that in this case you cannot vindicate the Lord's absolute truthfulness except by imputing to Him a degree of ignorance which would unfit Him for His office as permanent Teacher of the Church. Here is the dilemma for the radical critic-either he is agitating the Church about trifles, or, if his views have the apologetical importance which he usually attributes to them, he is censuring the Lord's discharge of His prophetic office; for the allegation is that Christ's words prove perplexing and misleading in regard to weighty issues which the progress of knowledge has obliged us to face. Surely we should be apprehensive of danger if we discover that views which claim our adhesion, on any grounds whatever, tend to depreciate the wisdom of Him whom we call "Lord and Master," upon whom the Spirit was bestowed "without measure," and who "spake as never man spake." It is a great thing in this controversy to have the Lord on our side. Are, then, the Lord's references to Moses and the law to be regarded as evidence that He believed the Pentateuch to be written by Moses, or should they be classed as instances of accommodation? When we take in cumulo all the passages in which the legislation of the Pentateuch and the writing of it are connected with Moses, a very strong case is made out against mere accommodation. The obvious accuracy of speech observed in some of these references cannot be overlooked; e.g., "Moses, therefore, gave you circumcision (not because it is of Moses, but of the fathers)." Again, "There is one that accuseth you, even Moses in whom ye trust; for had ye believed Moses ye would have believed Me, for he wrote of Me; but if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe My words?" This is not the style of one who does not wish his words to be taken strictly! Two Positions Clear Two positions may, I think, be affirmed: 1. The legislation of the Pentateuch is actually ascribed to Moses by the Lord. If this legislation is, in the main, long subsequent to Moses, and a good deal of it later than the exile, the Lord's language is positively misleading, and endorses an error which vitiates the entire construction of Old Testament history and the development of religion in Israel. 2. Moses is to such extent the writer of the law that it may, with propriety, be spoken of as "his writings." All admit that there are passages in the Books of Moses which were written by another hand or other hands, and should even additions other than certain brief explanatory interpolations and the last chapter of Deuteronomy have to be recognized (which has not yet been demonstrated) the Pentateuch would remain Mosaic. Should Moses have dictated much of his writings, as Paul did, they would, it is unnecessary to say, be not the less his: The words of Jesus we consider as evidence that He regarded Moses as, substantially, the writer of the books which bear his name. Less than this robs several of our Lord's statements of their point and propriety. It is hardly necessary to say that we have no desire to see a true and reverent criticism of the Old Testament, and of the New as well, arrested in its progress, or in the least hindered. Criticism must accomplish its task, and every lover of truth is more than willing that it should do so. Reluctance to see truth fully investigated, fully ascertained and established, in any department of thought and inquiry, and most of all in those departments which are highest, is lamentable evidence of moral weakness, of imperfect confidence in Him who is the God of truth. But criticism must proceed by legitimate methods and in a true spirit. It must steadfastly keep before it all the facts essential to be taken into account. In the case of its application to the Bible and religion, it is most reasonable to demand that full weight should be allowed to all the teachings, all the words of Him who only knows the Father, and who came to reveal Him to the world, and who is Himself the Truth. If all Scripture bears testimony to Christ, we cannot refuse to hear Him when He speaks of its characteristics. It is folly, it is unutterable impiety, to decide differently from the Lord any question regarding the Bible on which we have His verdict; nor does it improve the case to say that we shall listen to Him when He speaks of spiritual truth, but shall count ourselves free when the question is one of scholarship. Alas for our scholarship when it brings us into controversy with Him who is the Prophet, as He is the Priest and King of the Church, and by whose Spirit both Prophets and Apostles spake! Nothing has been said in this paper respecting the proper method of interpreting the different books and parts of the Old Testament, nor the way of dealing with specific difficulties. Our object has been to show that the Lord regards the entire book, or collection of books, as divine, authoritative, infallible. But in the wide variety of these writings there are many forms of composition, and every part, it is obvious to say, must be understood and explained in accordance with the rules of interpretation which apply to literature of its kind. We have not been trying in advance to bind up the interpreter to an unintelligent literalism in exegesis, which should take no account of what is peculiar to different species of writing, treating poetry and prose, history and allegory, the symbolical and the literal, as if all were the same. The consideration of this most important subject of interpretation with which apologetical interests are, indeed, closely connected, has not been before us. But nothing which we could be called upon to advance regarding the interpretation of the Old Testament could modify the results here reached in relation to the subject of which we have spoken. Our Lord's testimony to the character of the Old Testament must remain unimpaired. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 66: - THE EARLY NARRATIVES OF GENESIS ======================================================================== The Early Narratives of Genesis By Professor James Orr, D.D., United Free Church College, Glasgow, Scotland By the early narratives of Genesis are to be understood the first eleven chapters of the book-those which precede the times of Abraham. These chapters present peculiarities of their own, and I confine attention to them, although the critical treatment applied to them is not confined to these chapters, but extends throughout the whole Book of Genesis, the Book of Exodus, and the later history with much the same result in reducing them to legend. We may begin by looking at the matter covered by these eleven chapters with which we have to deal. See what they contain. First, we have the sublime proem to the Book of Genesis, and to the Bible as a whole, in the account of the Creation in Gen 1. However it got there, this chapter manifestly stands in its fit place as the introduction to all that follows. Where is there anything like it in all literature? There is nothing anywhere, in Babylonian legend or anywhere else. You ask perhaps what interest has religious faith in the doctrine of creation-in any theory or speculation on how the world came to be? I answer, it has the very deepest interest. The interest of religion in the doctrine of creation is that this doctrine is our guarantee for the dependence of all things on God-the ground of our assurance that everything in nature and Providence is at His disposal. "My help cometh from the Lord which made heaven and earth." Suppose there was anything in the universe that was not created by God-that existed independently of Him how could we be sure that that element might not thwart, defeat, destroy the fulfillment of God's purposes? The Biblical doctrine of creation forever excludes that supposition. Following on this primary account of creation is a second narrative in a different style from chapter 2 to 4-but closely connected with the first by the words, "In the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven." This is sometimes spoken of as a second narrative of creation, and is often said to contradict the first. But this is a mistake. As the critic Dillmann points out, this second narrative is not a history of creation in the sense of the first at all. It has nothing to say of the creation of either heaven or earth, of the heavenly bodies, of the general world of vegetation. It deals simply with man and God's dealings with man when first created, and everything in the narrative is regarded and grouped from this point of view. The heart of the narrative is the story of the temptation and the fall of man. It is sometimes said that the Fall is not alluded to in later Old Testament Scripture, and therefore cannot be regarded as an essential part of revelation. It would be truer to say that the story of the Fall, standing there at the commencement of the Bible, furnishes the key to all that follows. What is the picture given in the whole Bible Old Testament and New? Is it not that of a world turned aside from God living in rebellion and defiance to Him-disobedient to His calls and resisting His grace? What is the explanation of this universal apostasy and transgression if it is not that man has fallen from his first estate? For certainly this is not the state in which God made man, or wishes him to be. The truth is, if this story of the Fall were not there at the beginning of the Bible, we would require to put it there for ourselves in order to explain the moral state of the world as the Bible pictures it to us, and as we know it to be. In chapter 4, as an appendage to these narratives, there follows the story of Cain and Abel, with brief notices of the beginning of civilization in the line of Cain, and of the start of a holier line in Seth. Next, returning to the style of Gen 1 -what is called the "Elohistic" style-we have the genealogical line of Seth extending from Adam to Noah. You are struck with the longevity ascribed to those patriarchal figures in the dawn of time, but not less with the constant mournful refrain which ends each notice, Enoch's alone excepted, "and he died." This chapter connects directly with the account of creation in Gen 1, but presupposes equally the narrative of the Fall in the intervening chapters. We often read in critical books assertions to the contrary of this. The "priestly writer," we are told, "knows nothing" of a Fall. But that is not so. Wellhausen, that master-critic, is on my side here. Speaking of the so-called "priestly" sections in the story of the flood, he says, "The flood is well led up to; in Q. (that is his name for the priestly writing) we should be inclined to ask in surprise how the earth has come all at once to be so corrupted after being in the best of order. Did we not know it from J. E.? (that is, the Fall Narrative)." Another leading critical authority, Dr. Carpenter, writes in the same strain. Then you come to the flood story in Genesis 6:9, in which two narratives are held to be interblended. There are two writers here, criticism says-the Elohistic and the Jehovistic,-yet criticism must own that these two stories fit wonderfully into one another, and the one is incomplete without the other. If one, for instance, gives the command to Noah and his house to enter the Ark, it is the other that narrates the building of the Ark. If one tells of Noah's "house," it is the other that gives the names of Noah's sons. What is still move striking, when you compare these Bible stories with the Babylonian story of the deluge, you find that it takes both of these so-called "narratives" in Genesis to make up the one complete story of the tablets. Then, following on the flood and the covenant with Noah, the race of mankind spreads out again as depicted in the table of nations in chapter 10. In verse Genesis 10:25 it is noted that in the days of Peleg was the earth divided; then in chapter 11 you have the story of the divine judgment at Babel confusing human speech, and this is followed by a new genealogy extending to Abraham. Such is a brief survey of the material, and on the face of it it must be acknowledged that this is a wonderfully well-knit piece of history of its own kind which we have before us, not in the least resembling the loose; incoherent, confused mythologies of other nations. There is nothing resembling it in any other history or religious book, and when we come to speak of the great ideas which pervade it, and give it its unity, our wonder is still increased. Ah, yes, our critical friends will tell us, the great ideas are there, but they were not originally there. They were put in later by the prophets. The prophets took the old legends and put these grand ideas into them, and made them religiously profitable. If that was the way in which God chose to. give us His revelation, we would be bound gratefully to accept it, but I must be pardoned if I prefer to believe that the great ideas did not need to be put into these narratives; that they were there in the things themselves from the very first. The truth is, a great deal here depends on your method of approach to these old narratives. There is a saying, "Everything can be laid hold of by two handles," and that is true of these ancient stories. Approach them in one way and you make them out to be a bundle of fables, legends, myths, without historical basis of any kind. Then wonderful feats can be performed in the handling of the myths. Prof. Gunkel, for example, that very capable Old Testament scholar, is not content with the analysis of books and chapters and verses, but adds to it the analysis of personalities. He will show you, for instance, that Cain is composed originally out of three distinct figures, blended together, Noah out of another three, and so on. I have ventured to describe Gunkel's theory as the explanation of the patriarchal history on the ancient principle of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. Only that does not quite answer to the kind of history we have in these narratives, which stand in such organic connection with the rest of revelation. Approach these narratives in another way and they are the oldest and most precious traditions of our race; worthy in their intrinsic merit of standing where they do at the commencement of the Word of God, and capable of vindicating their right to be there; not merely vehicles of great ideas, but presenting in their own archaic way-for archaic they are in form-the memory of great historic truths. The story of the Fall, for example, is not a myth, but enshrines the shuddering memory of an actual moral catastrophe in the beginning of our race, which brought death into the world and all our woe. Coming now to deal a little more closely with these narratives, I suppose I ought to say something on the critical aspect of the question. But this I must pass over briefly, for I want to get to more important matters. In two points only I would desire to indicate my decided break with current critical theory. The one is the carrying down of the whole Levitical system and history connected with it to the post-exilian age. That, I believe, is not a sound result of criticism, but one which in a very short time will have to be abandoned, as indeed it is already being abandoned or greatly modified in influential quarters. This applies specially to the date of Gen 1. Professor Delitzsch, a commentator often cited as having come round practically to the newer critical view, takes a firm stand here. In his new commentary on Gen 1, he tells us: "The essential matters in the account of the creation are among the most ancient foundations of the religion of Israel-there are no marks of style which constrain us to relegate the Elohistic account of the creation to the exile-it is in any case a tradition reaching back to the Mosaic period." The other point on which I dissent is the idea that the Israelites began their religious history without the idea of the one true God, Maker of heaven and earth; that they began with a tribal god, the storm god of Sinai or some other local deity, and gradually clothed him from their own minds with the attributes which belong to Jehovah. This, which is the product of the evolutionary theory of religion, and not a fair deduction from any evidence we possess, I entirely disbelieve, and I am glad to say that this view also is being greatly modified or parted with. It is this theory, however, which lies behind a great deal of the criticism of these early narratives of Genesis. Those things, it is said, could not be; those great ideas could not be there; for man at that early stage could not have evolved them. Even God, it appears, could not have given them to him. Our "could be's," however, will have to be ruled by facts, and my contention is that the facts are adverse to the theory as currently set forth. I come now to the question, Is there any external corroboration or confirmation of these early narratives in Genesis? Here let me say a little of the relation of these narratives to Babylonia. Everyone has heard something of the wonderful discoveries in Babylonia, and it would be difficult to exaggerate the brilliance and importance of these marvelous discoveries. The point which concerns us chiefly is the extraordinary light thrown on the high culture of early Babylonia. Here, long before the time of Abraham, we find ourselves in the midst of cities, arts, letters, books, libraries, and Abraham's own age-that of Hammurabi-was the bloom time of this civilization. Instead of Israel being a people just emerging from the dim dawn of barbarism, we find in the light of these discoveries that it was a people on whom from its own standpoint the ends of the earth had come-heir to the riches of a civilization extending millenniums into the past. If you say this creates a difficulty in representing the chronology (I may touch on this later), I answer that it gives much greater help by showing how the knowledge of very ancient things could be safely handed down. For us the chief interest of these discoveries is the help they give us in answering the question, How far do these narratives in Genesis embody for us the oldest traditions of our race? There are two reasons which lead us to look with some confidence to Babylonia for the answer to this question. For one thing, in early Babylonia we are already far back into the times to which many of these traditions relate; for another, the Bible itself points to Babylonia as the Original city of those traditions. Eden was in Babylonia, as shown by its rivers, the Euphrates and Tigris. It was in Babylonia the Ark was built; and on a mountain in the neighborhood of Babylonia the Ark rested. It was from the plain of Shinar, in Babylonia, that the new distribution of the race took place. To Babylonia, therefore, if anywhere, we are entitled to look for light on these ancient traditions, and do we not find it? I read sometimes with astonishment of the statement that Babylonian discovery has done little or nothing for the confirmation of these old parts of Genesis-has rather proved that they belong to the region of the mythical. Take only one or two examples. I leave over meanwhile the Babylonian story of the creation and the flood, and take that old tenth chapter of Genesis, the "Table of Nations." Professor Kautzsch, of Halle, a critic of note, says of that old table, "The so-called Table of Nations remains, according to all results of monumental exploration, an ethnographic original document of the first rank which nothing can replace." In this tenth chapter of Genesis, verses 8-10, we have certain statements about the origin of Babylonian civilization. We learn (1) that Babylonia is the oldest of civilizations; (2) that Assyrian civilization was derived from Babylonia; and (3) strangest of all, that the founders of Babylonian civilization were not Semites, but Hamites-descendants of Cush. Each of these statements was in contradiction to old classical notices and to what was currently believed till recently about those ancient people. Yet it will not be disputed that exploration has justified the Bible on each of these points. Assyria, undoubtedly, was younger than Babylonia; it derived its civilization, arts, religion, institutions, all that it had, from Babylonia. Strangest of all, the originators of Babylonia civilization, the Acadians, or Sumerians; were a people not of Semitic, but apparently of Turanian or what the Bible would call Hamitic stock. Take another instance; in verse 22 Elam appears as the son of Shem, but here was a difficulty. The Elamites of history were not a Semitic, but an Aryan people, and their language was Aryan. Even Professor Hommel, in defending the ancient Hebrew tradition, thought he had to admit an error here. But was there? A French expedition went out to excavate Susa, the capital of Elam, and below the ruins of the historical Elam discovered bricks and other remains of an older civilization, with Babylonian inscriptions showing the people to be of Semitic stock; so Elam was, after all, the son of Shem. In the story of the Tower of Babel in chapter 11, again is it not interesting to find the Bible deriving all the streams of mankind from the Plain of Shinar, and to find archaeology bringing corroborative proof that probably all the greater streams of civilization do take their origin from this region? For that is the view to which the opinions of scholars now tend. Glance now at the stories of Creation, of Paradise, and of the Deluge. The story of Paradise and the Fall we may dismiss in this connection, for except in the case of the picture on an ancient seal which does bear some relation to the story of the temptation in Eden, there has yet been no proper parallel to the Bible story of the fall. On the other hand, from the ruins of Assyrian libraries have been disinterred fragments of an account of creation, and the Babylonian version of the story of the deluge, both of which have been brought into comparison with the narratives of the Bible. Little need be said of the Babylonian creation story. It is a debased, polytheistic, long drawn-out, mythical affair, without order, only here and there suggesting analogies to the divine works in Genesis. The flood story has much more resemblance, but it too is debased and mythical, and lacks wholly in the higher ideas which give its character to the Biblical account. Yet this is the quarry from which our critical friends would have us derive the narratives in the Bible. The Israelites borrowed them, it is thought, and purified these confused polytheistic legends and made them the vehicles of nobler teaching. We need not discuss the time and manner of this borrowing, for I cannot see my way to accept this version of events at all. There is not only no proof that these stories were borrowed in their crude form from the Babylonians, but the contrast in spirit and character between the Babylonians? products and the Bible's seems to me to forbid any such derivation. The debased form may conceivably arise from corruption of the higher, but not vice versa. Much rather may we hold with scholars like Delitzsch and Kittel, that the relation is one of cognateness, not of derivation. These traditions came down from a much older source, and are preserved by the Hebrews in their purer form. This appears to me to explain the phenomena as no theory of derivation can do, and it is in accordance with the Bible's own representation of the line of revelation from the beginning along which the sacred tradition can be transmitted. Leaving Babylonia, I must now say a few words on the scientific and historical aspects of these narratives. Science is invoked to prove that the narratives of creation in Gen 1, the story of man's origin and fall in chapters 2 and 3, the account of patriarchal longevity in chapters 5 and 11, the story of the deluge, and other matters, must all be rejected because in patent contradiction to the facts of modern knowledge. I would ask you, however, to suspend judgment until we have looked at the relation in which these two things, science and the Bible, stand to each other. When science is said to contradict the Bible, I should like to ask first, What is meant by contradiction here? The Bible was never given us in order to anticipate or forestall the discoveries of modern twentieth century science. The Bible, as every sensible interpreter of Scripture has always held, takes the world as it is, not as it is seen through the eyes of twentieth century specialists, but as it lies spread out before the eyes of original men, and uses the popular every-day language appropriate to this standpoint. As Calvin in his commentary on Genesis 1 says: "Moses wrote in the popular style, which, without instruction, all ordinary persons endowed with common sense are able to understand. * * * He does not call us up to heaven; he only proposes things that lie open before our eyes." It does not follow that because the Bible does not teach modern science, we are justified in saying that it contradicts it. What I see in these narratives of Genesis is that, so true is the standpoint of the author, so divine the illumination with which he is endowed, so unerring his insight into the order of nature, there is little in his description that even yet, with our advanced knowledge, we need to change. You say there is the "six days" and the question whether those days are meant to be measured by the twenty-four hours of the sun's revolution around the earth-I speak of these things popularly. It is difficult to see how they should be so measured when the sun that is to measure them is not introduced until the fourth day. Do not think that this larger reading of the days is a new speculation. You find Augustine in early times declaring that it is hard or altogether impossible to say of what fashion these days are, and Thomas Aquinas, in the middle ages, leaves the matter an open question. To my mind these narratives in Genesis stand out as a marvel, not for its discordance with science, but for its agreement with it. Time does not permit me to enter into the details of the story of man's origin in Genesis, but I have already indicated the general point of view from which I think this narrative is to be regarded. It would be well if those who speak of disagreement with science would look to the great truths embedded in these narratives which science may be called upon to confirm. There is, for example: (1) The truth that man is the last of God's created works-the crown and summit of God's creation. Does science contradict that? (2) There is the great truth of the unity of the human race. No ancient people that I know of believed in such unity of the race, and even science until recently cast doubts upon it. How strange to find this great truth of the unity of the mankind confirmed in the pages of the Bible from the very beginning. This truth holds in it already the doctrine of monotheism, for if God is the Creator of the Beings from whom the whole race sprang, He is the God of the whole race that sprang from them. (3) There is the declaration that man was made in God's image-that God breathed into man a spirit akin to His own-does the science of man's nature contradict that, or does it not rather show that in his personal, spiritual nature man stands alone as bearing the image of God on earth, and founds a new kingdom in the world which can only be carried back in its origin to the divine creative cause. (4) I might cite even the region of man's origin, for I think science increasingly points to this very region in Babylonia as the seat of man's origin. Is it then the picture of the condition in which man was created, pure and unfallen, and the idea that man, when introduced into the world, was not left as an orphaned being-the divine care was about him-that God spake with him and made known His will to him in such forms as he was able to apprehend-is it this that is in contradiction with history? It lies outside the sphere of science to contradict this. Personally, I do not know of any worthier conception than that which supposes God to have placed Himself in communication with man, in living relations with His moral creatures, from the very first. Certainly there would be contradiction if Darwinian theory had its way and we had to conceive of man as a slow, gradual ascent from the bestial stage, but I am convinced, and have elsewhere sought to show, that genuine science teaches no such doctrine. Evolution is not to be identified offhand with Darwinianism. Later evolutionary theory may rather be described as a revolt against Darwinianism, and leaves the story open to a conception of man quite in harmony with that of the Bible. Of the fall, I have already said that if the story of it were not in the Bible we should require to put it there for ourselves in order to explain the condition of the world as it is. On the question of patriarchal longevity, I would only say that there is here on the one hand the question of interpretation, for, as the most conservative theologians have come gradually to see, the names in these genealogies are not necessarily to be construed as only individuals. But I would add that I am not disposed to question the tradition of the extraordinary longevity in those olden times. Death, as I understand it, is not a necessary part of man's lot at all. Had man not sinned, he would never have died. Death-the separation of soul and body, the two integral parts of his nature-is something for him abnormal, unnatural. It is not strange, then, that in the earliest period life should have been much longer than it became afterward. Even a physiologist like Weissmann tells us that the problem for science today is-not why organisms live so long, but why they ever die. I have referred to Babylonian story of the flood, and can only add a word on the alleged contradiction of science on this subject. Very confident statements are often made as to the impossibility of such a submergence of the inhabited world, and destruction of human and animal life as the Bible represents. It would be well if those who speak thus confidently would study the accumulated evidence which distinguished scientific men have brought forward, that such a catastrophe as Genesis describes is not only possible, but has actually taken place since the advent of man. My attention was first drawn to this subject by an interesting lecture by the late Duke of Argyle given in Glasgow, and the same view has been advocated by other eminent geological specialists on glacial and post-glacial times, as Prestwich, Dawson, Howorth, Dr. Wright, etc. The universal terms employed need not be read as extending beyond the regions inhabited by man. There seems to be no substantial reason for doubting that in the flood of Noah we have an actual historical occurrence of which traditions appear to have survived in most regions of the world. In conclusion, it is clear that the narratives of Creation, the Fall, the Flood, are not myths, but narratives enshrining the knowledge or memory of real transactions. The creation of the world was certainly not a myth, but a fact, and the representation of the stages of creation dealt likewise with facts. The language used was not that of modern science, but, under divine guidance, the sacred writer gives a broad, general picture which conveys a true idea of the order of the divine working in creation. Man's fall was likewise a tremendous fact, with universal consequences in sin and death to the race. Man's origin can only be explained through an exercise of direct creative activity, whatever subordinate factors evolution may have contributed. The flood was an historical fact, and the preservation of Noah and his family is one of the best and most widely attested of human traditions. In these narratives in Genesis and the facts which they embody are really laid the foundation of all else in the Bible. The unity of revelation binds them up with the Christian Gospel. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 67: - ONE ISAIAH ======================================================================== One Isaiah By Professor George L. Robinson, D. D., Mccormick Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois "For about twenty-five centuries no one dreamt of doubting that Isaiah the son of Amoz was the author of every part of the book that goes under his name; and those who still maintain the unity of authorship are accustomed to point, with satisfaction, to the unanimity of the Christian Church on the matter, till a few German scholars arose, about a century ago, and called in question the unity of this book." Thus wrote the late Dr. A. B. Davidson, Professor of Hebrew in New College, Edinburgh, (Old Testament Prophecy, p. 244, 1903). The History of Criticism The critical disintegration of the Book of Isaiah began with Koppe, who in 1780 first doubted the genuineness of chapter 50. Nine years later Doederlein suspected the whole of chapters 40-66. He was followed by Rosenmueller, who was the first to deny to Isaiah the prophecy against Babylon in chapters 13:1-14:23. Eichhorn, at the beginning of the last century, further eliminated the oracle against Tyre in chapter 23, and, with Gesenius and Ewald, also denied the Isaianic origin of chapters 24-27. Gesenius also ascribed to some unknown prophet chapters 15 and 16. Rosenmueller went further, and pronounced against chapters 34 and 35; and not long afterwards (1840), Ewald questioned chapters 12 and 33. Thus by the middle of the nineteenth century some thirty-seven or thirty eight chapters were rejected as no part of Isaiah's actual writings. In 1879-80, the celebrated Leipzig professor, Franz Delitzsch, who for years previous had defended the genuineness of the entire book, finally yielded to the modern critical position, and in the new edition of his commentary published in 1889, interpreted chapters 40-66, though with considerable hesitation, as coming from the close of the period of Babylonian exile. About the same time (1888-90), Canon Driver and Dr. George Adam Smith gave popular impetus to similar views in Great Britain. Since 1890, the criticism of Isaiah has been even more trenchant and microscopic than before. Duhm, Stade, Guthe, Hackmann, Cornill and Marti on the Continent, and Cheyne, Whitehouse, Box, Glazebrook, Kennett and others in Great Britain and America, have questioned portions which hitherto were supposed to be genuine. The Disintegration of "Deutero-Isaiah" Even the unity of chapters 40-66, which were supposed to be the work of the Second, or "Deutero-Isaiah," is given up. What prior to 1890 was supposed to be the unique product of some celebrated but anonymous sage who lived in Babylonia (about 550 B.C.), is now commonly divided and subdivided and in large part distributed among various writers from Cyrus to Simon. At first it was thought sufficient to separate chapters 63-66 as a later addition to "Deutero-Isaiah's" prophecies; but more recently it has become the fashion to distinguish between chapters 40-55, which are alleged to have been written in Babylonia about 549-538 B.C., and chapters 56-66, which are now claimed to have been composed about 460-445 B.C. Some carry disintegration farther even than this, especially in the case of chapters 56-66, which are subdivided into various fragments and said to be the product of a school of writers rather than of a single pen. Opinions also. conflict as to the place of their composition, whether in Babylonia, Palestine, Phoenicia, or Egypt. Recent Views Among the latest to investigate the problem is the Revelation Robert H. Kennett, D. D., Regius Professor of Hebrew and Fellow of Queen's College, Cambridge, whose Schweich Lectures (1909) have recently been published for the British Academy by the Oxford University Press, 1910. The volume is entitled, "The Composition of the Book of Isaiah in the Light of History and Archaeology", and is a professed "attempt to tell in a simple way the story of the book of Isaiah." The results of his investigations he sums up as follows (pp. 84-85): (1) All of chapters 3, 5, 6, 7, 20 and 31, and portions of chapters 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 10, 14, 17, 22 and 23, may be assigned to Isaiah the son of Amoz. (2) All of chapters 13, 40 and 47, and portions of chapters 14, 21, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46 and 48, may be assigned to the time of Cyrus. (3) All of chapters 15, 36, 37 and 39, and portions of chapters 16 and 38, may be assigned to the period between Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander the Great, but cannot be dated precisely. (4) Chapter 23:1-14 may be assigned to the time of Alexander the Great (332 B.C.). (5) All of chapters 11, 12, 19, 24-27, 29, 30, 32-35, 42, 49-66, and portions of chapters 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 10, 16, 17, 18, 23, 41, 44, 45 and 48, may be assigned to the second century B.C. Dr,. Kennett thus assigns more than one-half of the book of Isaiah to the Maccabean Age. Prof. C. F. Kent, also, in his "Sermons, Epistles and Apocalypses of Israel's Prophets," 1910, makes the following noteworthy observations on the prophecies of the so-called "Deutero-Isaiah." He says: "The prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah...afford by far the best approach for the study of the difficult problems presented by Is 40-66...Chapters 56-66 are generally recognized as post-exilic. In Is 56 and the following chapters there are repeated references to the temple and its service, indicating that it had already been restored. Moreover, these references are not confined to the latter part of the book ... The fact, on the one hand, that there are few, if any, allusions to contemporary events in these chapters, and, on the other hand, that little or nothing is known of the condition and hopes of the Jews during this period (the closing years of the Babylonian exile) makes the dating of these prophecies possible although far from certain ... Also the assumption that the author of these chapters lived in the Babylonian exile is not supported by a close examination of the prophecies themselves. Possibly their author was one of the few who, like Zerubbabel, had been born in Babylon and later returned to Palestine. He was also dealing with such broad and universal problems that he gives few indications of his date and place of abode; but all the evidence that is found points to Jerusalem as the place where he lived and wrote...The prophet's interest and point of view center throughout in Jerusalem, and he shows himself far more familiar with conditions in Palestine than in distant Babylon. Most of his illustrations are drawn from the agricultural life of Palestine. His vocabulary is also that of a man dwelling in Palestine, and in this respect is in marked contrast with the synonyms employed by Ezekiel, the prophet of the Babylonian exile" (pp. 27,28). That is to say, the two most recent investigators of the Book of Isaiah reach conclusions quite at variance with the opinions advocated in 1890, when Delitzsch so reluctantly allowed that chapters 40-66 may have sprung from the period of Babylonian exile. These last twenty-seven chapters are now found to have been written most probably in Palestine rather than in Babylonia, and are no longer claimed to speak primarily to the suffering exiles in captivity as was formerly supposed. The Present State of the Question The present state of the Isaiah question is, to say the least, complex, if not chaotic. Those who deny the integrity of the book may be divided into two groups which we may call moderates and radicals. Among the moderates may be included Drs. Driver, G. A. Smith, Skinner, Kirkpatrick, Koenig, A. B. Davidson and Whitehouse. These all practically agree that the following chapters and verses are not Isaiah's: Isaiah 11:10-16; Isaiah 12:1-6; Isaiah 13:1-14:23; Isaiah 15:1-16:12; Isaiah 21:1-10; Isaiah 21:24-27; Isaiah 21:34-66. That is to say, some forty-four chapters out of the whole number, sixty-six, were not written by Isaiah; or, approximately 800 out of 1,292 verses are not genuine. Among the radicals are Drs. Cheyne, Duhm, Hackmann, Guthe, Marti and Kennett. These all reject approximately 1,030 verses out of the total 1,292, retaining the following only as the genuine product of Isaiah and his age: Isaiah 1:2-26; Isaiah 1:29-31; Isaiah 2:6-19; Isaiah 3:1; Isaiah 3:5; Isaiah 3:8-9; Isaiah 3:12-17; Isaiah 3:24; Isaiah 4:1; Isaiah 5:1-14; Isaiah 5:17-29; Isaiah 6:1-13; Isaiah 7:1-8:22; Isaiah 9:8-10:9; Isaiah 10:13-14; Isaiah 10:27-32; Isaiah 14:24-32; Isaiah 17:1-14; Isaiah 18:1-6; Isaiah 20:1-6; Isaiah 22:1-22; Isaiah 28:1-4; Isaiah 28:7-22; Isaiah 29:1-6; Isaiah 29:9-10; Isaiah 29:13-15; Isaiah 30:1-17; Isaiah 31:1-4. That is, only about 262 verses out of the total, 1,292, are allowed to be genuine. This is, we believe, a fair statement of the Isaiah question as it exists today. On the other hand, there are those who still defend the unity of Isaiah's book, e.g., Strachey (1874), Naegelsbach (1877), Bredenkamp (1887), Douglas (1895), W. H. Cobb (1883-1908), W. H. Green (1892), Vos (1898-99), Thirtle (1907) and Margoliouth (1910). [Compare also the writer's "The Book of Isaiah," Y. M. C. A. Press, N.Y., 1910] The Prime Reason for Dissecting Isaiah The fundamental axiom of criticism is the dictum that a prophet always spoke out of a definite historical situation to the present needs of the people among whom he lived, and that a definite historical situation shall be pointed out for each prophecy. This fundamental postulate underlies all modern criticism of Old Testament prophecy. This principle on the whole is sound, but it can easily be overworked. Certain cautions are necessary, for example: (1) It is impossible to trace each separate section of prophecy, independently of its context, to a definite historical situation. Besides, the prophets often speak in poetry, and poetry ought not as a rule to be taken literally. (2) It is not necessarily the greatest event in a nation's history or the event about which, we happen to know the most, that may actually have given birth, humanly speaking, to a particular prophecy. Israel's history is full of crises and events, any one of which may easily be claimed to furnish an appropriate, or at least a possible, background for a given prophecy. (3) The prophets usually spoke directly to the needs of their own generation, but they spoke also to the generations yet to come. Isaiah, for example, commanded, "Bind thou up the testimony, seal the law among My disciples" (Isaiah 8:16); that is, preserve My teachings for the future. Again in Isaiah 30:8, he says, "Now go, write it before them on a tablet, and inscribe it in a book, that it may be for the time to come forever and ever." And also in Isaiah 42:23, "Who is there among you that will give ear to this? that will hearken and hear for the time to come?" Alleged External Evidence Against Unity Recently certain writers have appealed to the author of 2 Chronicles to prove that chapters 40-66 existed as a separate collection in his age. Whitehouse in the New Century Bible ("Isaiah", Vol. I, p. 70), says:"This is clear from 2 Chronicles 36:22 ff, in which the passage Isaiah 44:28 (that Cyrus would cause the temple to be built) is treated as the word of Jeremiah. The so-called 'Deutero-Isaiah' (chs. 40-66) must at that time (c. 300 B.C.) have been regarded as a body of literature standing quite apart from the Isaianic collection or collections which then existed." But the evidence obtained from this source is so doubtful that it is well nigh valueless. For it is not the prediction concerning Cyrus to which the chronicler points as "the word of Jehovah by the mouth of Jeremiah," but "the three-score-and- ten years" spoken of in verse 21 of the same context which Jeremiah did predict. Cf. 2 Chronicles 36:21. On the other hand, the order of the prophets among the Jews of antiquity was (1) Jeremiah, (2) Ezekiel, (3) Isaiah, and (4) The Twelve; accordingly, any portion of any of these prophecies might be cited as belonging to Jeremiah, because his book stood first. In any case, to seek for external evidence in behalf of the dissection of the book is indicative! The Literary History of the Book When or how the Book of Isaiah was edited and brought into its present form is unknown. Jesus ben-Sirach, the author of Ecclesiasticus, writing c. 180 B.C., cites Isaiah as one of the notable worthies of Hebrew antiquity, in whose days, "the sun went backward and he added life to the king" (Ecclus. 48:20-25; cf. Isaiah 38:4-8); and he adds, who "saw by an excellent spirit that which should come to pass at the last, and comforted them that mourned in Zion." Evidently, therefore; at the beginning of the second century B.C., at the latest, the Book of Isaiah had reached its present form, and the last twenty-seven chapters were already ascribed to the son of Amoz. Furthermore, there is absolutely no proof that chapters 1-39, or any other considerable section of Isaiah's prophecies ever existed by themselves as an independent collection; nor is there any ground for thinking that the promissory and Messianic portions have been systematically interpolated by editors long subsequent to Isaiah's own time. It is quite arbitrary to suppose that the earlier prophets only threatened. Certain False Presuppositions Certain false presuppositions govern critics in their disintegration of the Book of Isaiah. Only a few examples need be given by way of illustration. (1) To one, "the conversion of the heathen" lay quite beyond the horizon of any eighth-century prophet, and consequently Isaiah 2:2-4 and all similar passages should be relegated to a subsequent age. (2) To another, "the picture of universal peace" in Isaiah 11:1-9 is a symptom of late date, and therefore this section. and kindred ones must be deleted. (3) To another, the thought of "universal judgment" upon "the whole earth" in Isaiah 14:26 quite transcends Isaiah's range of thought. (4) To still another, the apocalyptic character of chapters 24-27 represents a phase of Hebrew thought which prevailed in Israel only after Ezekiel. (5) Even to those who are considered moderates the poetic character of a passage like chapter 12 and the references to a return from captivity as in Isaiah 11:11-16, and the promises and consolations such as are found in chapter 33; are cited as grounds for assigning these and kindred passages to a much later age. Radicals deny in toto the existence of Messianic passages among Isaiah's own predictions. But, to deny to Isaiah of the eighth century all catholicity of grace, all universalism of salvation or judgment, every highly developed Messianic ideal, every rich note of promise and comfort, all sublime faith in the sacrosanct character of Zion, as some do, is unwarrantably to create a new Isaiah of greatly reduced proportions, a mere preacher of righteousness, a statesman of not very optimistic vein, and the exponent of a cold ethical religion without the warmth and glow of the messages which are actually ascribed to the prophet of the eighth century. The Writer's Personal Attitude More and more the writer is persuaded that the fundamental postulates of much criticism are unsound, and that broad facts must decide the unity or collective character of Isaiah's book. To determine the exact historical background of each individual section is simply impossible, as the history of criticism plainly shows. Verbal exegesis may do more harm than good. Greater regard must be paid to the structure of the book. When treated as an organic whole, the book is a grand masterpiece. One great purpose dominates the author throughout, which, as he proceeds, is brought to a climax in a picture of Israel's redemption and the glorification of Zion. Failure to recognize this unity incapacitates a man to do it exegetical justice. The prophecies of the Book of Isaiah simply can not be properly understood without some comprehension of the author's scheme of thought as a whole. There is an obvious, though it may be to some extent an editorial, unity to Isaiah's prophecies. But there is as true a unity in the Book of Isaiah as is usually found in a volume of sermons. To regard them as a heterogeneous mass of miscellaneous prophecies which were written at widely separated times and under varied circumstances from Isaiah's own period down to the Maccabean age, and freely interpolated throughout the intervening centuries, is to lose sight of the great historic realities and perspective of the prophet. In short the whole problem of how much or how little Isaiah wrote would become immensely simplified if critics would only divest themselves of a mass of unwarranted presuppositions and arbitrary restrictions which fix hard and fast what each century can think and say. Accordingly, the writer's attitude is that of those who, while welcoming all ascertained results of investigation, decline to accept any mere conjectures or theories as final conclusions. And while he acknowledges his very great debt to critics of all latitudes, he nevertheless believes that the Book of Isaiah, practically as we have it, may have been, and probably was, all written by Isaiah, the son of Amoz, in the latter half of the eighth century B.C. Arguments for One Isaiah It is as unreasonable to expect to be able to prove the unity of Isaiah as to suppose that it has been disproved. Internal evidence is indecisive in either case. There are arguments, however, which corroborate a belief that there was but one Isaiah. Here are some of those which might be mentioned: 1. The Circle of Ideas is strikingly the same throughout. For example, take the name for God which is almost peculiar to the Book of Isaiah, "the Holy One of Israel". This title for Jehovah occurs in the Book of Isaiah a total of twenty-five times and only six times elsewhere in the Old Testament (one of which is in a parallel passage). It interlocks all the various portions with one another and stamps them with the personal imprimatur of him who saw the vision of the majestic God seated upon His throne, high and lifted up, and heard the angelic choirs singing: "Holy, Holy, Holy is Jehovah of hosts: the whole earth is full of Thy glory" (Chapter 6). The presence of this Divine name in all the different sections of the book is of more value in identifying Isaiah as the author of all these prophecies than though his name had been inscribed at the beginning of every chapter, for the reason that his theology is woven into the very fiber and texture of the whole book. The title occurs twelve times in chapters 1-39, and thirteen times in chapters 40-66; and it is simply unscientific to say that the various alleged authors of the disputed portions all employed the same title through imitation. (Isaiah 1:4; Isaiah 5:19; Isaiah 5:24; Isaiah 10:20; Isaiah 12:6; Isaiah 17:7; Isaiah 29:19; Isaiah 30:11-12; Isaiah 30:15; Isaiah 31:1; Isaiah 37:23. Also, Isaiah 41:14; Isaiah 41:16; Isaiah 41:20; Isaiah 43:3; Isaiah 43:14; Isaiah 45:11; Isaiah 47:4; Isaiah 48:17; Isaiah 49:7; Isaiah 54:5; Isaiah 55:5; Isaiah 60:9; Isaiah 60:14. Compare 2 Kings 19:22; Psalms 71:22; Psalms 78:41; Psalms 89:18; Jeremiah 50:29; Jeremiah 51:5). Another unique idea which occurs with considerable repetition in the Book of Isaiah is the thought of a "highway". Cf. Isaiah 11:16; Isaiah 35:8; Isaiah 40:3; Isaiah 43:19; Isaiah 49:11; Isaiah 57:14; Isaiah 62:10. Another is the idea of a "remnant". Cf. Isaiah 1:9; Isaiah 6:13; Isaiah 10:20-22; Isaiah 11:11-12; Isaiah 11:16; Isaiah 14:22; Isaiah 14:30; Isaiah 15:9; Isaiah 16:14; Isaiah 17:3; Isaiah 17:6; Isaiah 21:17; Isaiah 28:5; Isaiah 37:31; Isaiah 46:3; Isaiah 65:8-9. Another is the position occupied by "Zion" in the prophet's thoughts. Cf. Isaiah 2:3; Isaiah 4:5; Isaiah 18:7; Isaiah 24:23; Isaiah 27:13; Isaiah 28:16; Isaiah 29:8; Isaiah 30:19; Isaiah 31:9; Isaiah 33:5; Isaiah 33:20; Isaiah 34:8; Isaiah 46:13; Isaiah 49:14; Isaiah 51:3; Isaiah 51:11; Isaiah 52:1; Isaiah 57:13; Isaiah 59:20; Isaiah 60:14; Isaiah 62:1; Isaiah 62:11; Isaiah 65:11; Isaiah 65:25; Isaiah 66:8. Still another is the expression, "pangs of a woman in travail." Cf. Isaiah 13:8; Isaiah 21:3; Isaiah 26:17-18; Isaiah 42:14; Isaiah 54:1; Isaiah 66:7. All these, and many others which are less distinctive, stamp psychologically the book with an individuality which it is difficult to account for if it be broken up into various sections and distributed, as some do, over the centuries. 2. Literary Style. As negative evidence, literary style is not a very safe argument, for as Professor McCurdy says, "In the case of a writer of Isaiah's endowments, style is not a sure criterion of authorship" ("History, Prophecy and the Monuments," II, p. 317 n.). Yet it is remarkable that the clause, "for the mouth of Jehovah hath spoken it", should be found three times in the Book of Isaiah, and nowhere else in the Old Testament. Cf. Isaiah 1:20; Isaiah 40:5; Isaiah 58:14. It is also singular that the Divine title, "the Mighty One of Israel," should occur three times in Isaiah and nowhere else in the Old Testament. Cf. Isaiah 1:24; Isaiah 49:26; Isaiah 60:16. And it is noteworthy that the phrase, "streams of water," should occur twice in Isaiah and nowhere else. Cf. Isaiah 30:25; Isaiah 44:4. And most peculiar is the tendency on the part of the author to emphatic reduplication. Cf. Isaiah 2:7-8; Isaiah 6:3; Isaiah 8:9; Isaiah 24:16; Isaiah 24:19; Isaiah 40:1; Isaiah 43:11; Isaiah 43:25; Isaiah 48:15; Isaiah 51:12; Isaiah 57:19; Isaiah 62:10. Isaiah's style differs widely from that of every other Old Testament prophet and is as far removed as possible from that of Ezekiel and the post-exilic prophets. 3. Historical References. Take for example, first, the prophet's constant reference to Judah and Jerusalem, Isaiah 1:7-9; Isaiah 3:8; Isaiah 5:13; Isaiah 24:19; Isaiah 25:2; Isaiah 40:2; Isaiah 40:9; Isaiah 62:4. Also, to the temple and its ritual of worship and sacrifice. In Isaiah 1:11-15, when all was prosperous, the prophet complained that the people are profuse and formal in their ceremonies and sacrifices; in Isaiah 43:23-24, on the contrary, when the country had been overrun by the Assyrians and Sennacherib had besieged the city, the prophet complains that they had not brought to Jehovah the sheep of their burnt offerings, nor honored Him with their sacrifices. In Isaiah 66:1-3; Isaiah 66:6; Isaiah 66:20, not only is the existence of the temple and the observance of the temple ritual presupposed, but those are sentenced who place their trust in the material temple, and the outward ceremonials of temple worship. As for the "exile", the prophet's attitude to it throughout is that of both anticipation and realization. Thus in Isaiah 57:1, judgment is only threatened, not yet inflicted: "The righteous is taken away from the evil to come." That is to say, the exile is described as still future. On the other hand, in chapter Isaiah 3:8, "Jerusalem is ruined, and Judah is fallen"; while in chapter Isaiah 11:11-12, "the Lord will set His hand again the second time to recover the remnant ... from the four corners of the earth." To interpret such statements literally without regard to Isaiah's manifest attitude to the exile, leads only to confusion. No prophet realized so keenly or described so vividly the destiny of the Hebrews. 4. The Predictive Element. This is the strongest proof of the unity of the Book of Isaiah. Prediction is the very essence of prophecy. Isaiah was pre-eminently a prophet of the future. With unparalleled suddenness he repeatedly leaps from despair to hope, from threat to promise, from the actual to the ideal. What Kent says of "Deutero-Isaiah" may with equal justice be said of Isaiah himself: "While in touch with his own age, the great unknown prophet lives in the atmosphere of the past and the future" (Cf. "Sermons, Epistles and Apocalypses of Israel's Prophets", p. 28). Isaiah spoke to his own age, but he also addressed himself to the ages to come. His verb tenses are characteristically futures and prophetic perfects. Of him A. B. Davidson's words are particularly true: "If any prophetic book be examined ... it will appear that the ethical and religious teaching is always secondary, and that the essential thing in the book or discourse is the prophet's outlook into the future" (Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, article, "Prophecy and Prophets"). Isaiah was exceptionally given to predicting: thus, (1) Before the Syro-Ephraimitic war (734 B.C.), he predicted that within sixty-five years Ephraim should be broken in pieces (Isaiah 7:8); and that before the child Maher-shalal-hash-baz should have knowledge to cry, "My father" or "My mother", the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria should be carried away (Isaiah 8:4; cf. Isaiah 7:16). There are numerous other predictions among his earlier prophecies. (Cf. Isaiah 1:27-28; Isaiah 2:2-4; Isaiah 6:13; Isaiah 10:20-23; Isaiah 11:6-16; Isaiah 17:14). (2) Shortly before the downfall of Samaria in 722 B.C. Isaiah predicted that Tyre shall be forgotten seventy years, and that after the end of seventy years her merchandise shall be holiness of Jehovah. (Cf. Isaiah 23:15). (3) Likewise prior to the siege of Ashdod in 711 B.C., he proclaimed that within three years Moab should he brought into contempt (Isaiah 16:14), and that within a year all the glory of Kedar should fail (Isaiah 21:16). (4) And not long prior to the siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib in 701 B.C., he predicted that in an instant, suddenly, a multitude of Jerusalem's foes should be as dust (Isaiah 29:5); that yet a very little while and Lebanon should be turned into a fruitful field (Isaiah 29:17); that Assyria should be dismayed and fall by the sword but not of men (Isaiah 30:17; Isaiah 30:31; Isaiah 31:8). Furthermore, that for days beyond a year, the careless women of Jerusalem should be troubled (Isaiah 32:10; Isaiah 32:16-20); and that the righteous in Zion should see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, and return and come with singing (Isaiah 33:17-24; Isaiah 35:4; Isaiah 35:10); but that Sennacherib on the contrary should hear tidings and return without shooting an arrow into the city (Isaiah 37:7; Isaiah 37:26-29; Isaiah 37:33-35). In like manner after the siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib, 701 B.C., the prophet continued to predict; and, in order to demonstrate, to the suffering remnant about him the deity of Jehovah and the folly of idolatry, pointed to the predictions which he had already made in the earlier years of his ministry, and to the fact that they had been fulfilled. For example, he says: In Isaiah 41:21-23; Isaiah 41:26 ff.: "Who hath declared it from the beginning that we may know, and beforetime that we may say, He is right?" In Isaiah 42:9; Isaiah 42:23 : "Behold the former things are come to pass and new things do I declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them." In Isaiah 43:9; Isaiah 43:12 : "Who among them can declare this and show us former things? (i.e., things to come in the immediate future). I have declared, and I have saved and I have showed." In Isaiah 44:7-8; Isaiah 44:27-28 : "Who, as I, shall call, and shall declare it? ... The things that are coming and that shall come to pass, let them (the idols) declare. Have not I declared unto thee of old and showed it? And ye are My witnesses. ... That saith of Cyrus, He is My shepherd, and shall perform all My pleasure, even saying of Jerusalem, she shall be built; and of the temple, thy foundation shall be laid." In Isaiah 45:1-4; Isaiah 45:11; Isaiah 45:21 : "It is I Jehovah, who call thee by thy name, even the God of Israel .... I have called thee by thy name: I have surnamed thee though thou hast not known Me. ... Ask of Me the things that are to come. I have raised him (Cyrus) up in righteousness, and he shall build My city, and he shall let My exiles go free." In Isaiah 46:10-11 : "Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done; calling a ravenous bird (Cyrus) from the east, the man of My counsel. ... Yea, I have spoken, I will also bring it to pass." In Isaiah 48:3; Isaiah 48:5 : "I have declared the former things from of old, ... and I showed them, suddenly I did them, and they came to pass. ... I have declared it to thee from of old; before it came to pass I showed it thee; lest thou shouldst say, Mine idol hath done them." And again in Isaiah 48:6-8; Isaiah 48:14-16 : "I have showed thee new things from this time, even hidden things; ... before this day thou heardest them not, ... yea, from of old thine ear was not opened, ... Who, among them hath declared these things? ... I even I have spoken; yea, I have called him; from the beginning I have not spoken in secret." To which long list of predictions the prophet adds by way of lamentation: "Oh, that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments (including predictions) ! then had thy peace been like a river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea" (Isaiah 48:18). Cyrus a Subject of Prediction From all these numerous explicit and oft-repeated predictions one thing is obvious, namely, that great emphasis is laid on prediction throughout the Book of Isaiah. "Cyrus" must be considered as predicted from any point of view. The only question is, Does the prophet emphasize the fact that he is himself predicting the coming of Cyrus? or, that former predictions concerning Cyrus are now in his time coming to pass? Canon Cheyne's remark upon this point is apropos. He says: "The editor, who doubtless held the later Jewish theory of prophecy, may have inferred from a number of passages, especially Isaiah 41:26; Isaiah 48:3; Isaiah 48:6; Isaiah 48:14, that the first appearance of Cyrus had been predicted by an ancient prophet, and observing certain Isaianic elements in the phraseology of these chapters may have identified the prophet with Isaiah" ("Introduction to the Book of Isaiah," p.238). Why not regard "the editor's" inference legitimate? Dr. George Adam Smith likewise allows that Cyrus is the fulfillment of former predictions. He says: "Nor is it possible to argue as some have tried to do, that the prophet is predicting these things as if they had already happened. For as part of an argument for the unique divinity of the God of Israel, Cyrus, alive and irresistible, and already accredited with success, is pointed out as the unmistakable proof that former prophecies of a deliverance for Israel are already coming to pass. Cyrus, in short, is not presented as a prediction but as a proof that a prediction is being fulfilled" (Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, art. "Isaiah", p. 493). Further, he says: "The chief claim, therefore, which chapters 40 ff. make for the God of Jehovah is His power to direct the history of the world in conformity to a long predicted and faithfully followed purpose. This claim starts from the proof that Jehovah has long before predicted events now happening or about to happen, with Cyrus as their center" (Idem, p. 496). [The italics are ours.] Hence in any case it must be allowed that Cyrus is the subject of prediction. It really makes little difference at which end of history one stands, whether in the eighth century B.C. or in the sixth, Cyrus, to the author of chapters 40-48, is the subject of prediction. Whether, indeed, he is really predicting Cyrus in advance of all fulfillment, or whether Cyrus to him is the fulfillment of some ancient prediction does not alter the fact that Cyrus was the subject of prediction on the part of somebody. As was stated above, the whole question is, which does the prophet emphasize, (1) the fact that he is predicting? or, (2) that former predictions are now before his eyes coming to pass? The truth is, the prophet seems to live in the atmosphere of both the past and the future. This is true of Isaiah, who in his inaugural vision (ch. 6) paints a scene which Delitzsch describes as "like a prediction in the process of being fulfilled". The same is presumably true of chapters 24-27. There the prophet repeatedly projects himself into the future, and speaks from the standpoint of the fulfillment of his prediction. This was an outstanding characteristic of Isaiah. At one time he emphasizes the fact that he is predicting, and a little later he seems to emphasize that his predictions are coming to pass. Accordingly, if a decision must be made as to when Cyrus was actually predicted, it is obviously necessary to assume that he was predicted long before his actual appearance. This is in keeping with the Deuteronomic test of prophecy, which says: "When a prophet speaketh in the name of Jehovah, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which Jehovah hath not spoken; the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously, thou Shalt not be afraid of him" (Deuteronomy 18:22). There is a similar prediction in the Old Testament: King Josiah was predicted by name two centuries before he came. (1 Kings 13:2; cf. 2 Kings 23:15-16). Dr. W. H. Cobb, in the "Journal of Biblical Literature and Exegesis", 1901 (p. 79), pleads for a "shrinkage of Cyrus", because Cyrus figures only in chapters 40-48, and is then dismissed. Dr. Thirtle in his volume entitled, "Old Testament Problems" (pp. 244-264), argues that the name "Cyrus" is a mere appellative, being originally not Koresh (Cyrus), but Horesh (workman, artificer, image-breaker), and that chapter 44:27, 28 is therefore a gloss. But in opposition to these views the present writer prefers to write Cyrus large, and to allow frankly that he is the subject of prediction; for, the very point of the author's argument is, that he is predicting events which Jehovah alone is capable of foretelling or bringing to pass; in other words, that prescience is the proof of Jehovah's deity. Isaiah lived in an age when prediction was needed; cf. Amos 3:9. Political events were kaleidoscopic and there was every incentive to predict. But Jehovah's predictions alone were trustworthy. That Isaiah's prophecies contain wonderful predictions is attested both by Jesus ben-Sirach in Ecclus. 48-20-25, which was written about 180 B.C., and by Josephus in his "Antiquities" XI, I, 1, 2, dating from about 100 A.D. Why should men object to prediction on so large a scale? Unless there is definiteness about any given prediction, unless it transcends ordinary prognostication there is no especial value in it. The only possible objection is that prediction of so minute a character is "abhorrent to reason". But the answer to such an objection is already at hand; it may be abhorrent to reason, but it is certainly a handmaid to faith. Faith has to do with the future even as prediction has to do with the future; and the Old Testament is pre-eminently a book which encourages faith. The one outstanding differentiating Characteristic of Israel's religion is predictive prophecy. Only the Hebrews ever predicted the coming of the Messiah of the kingdom of God. Accordingly, to predict the coming of a Cyrus as the human agent of Israel's salvation is but the reverse side of the same prophet's picture of the Divine agent, the obedient, suffering Servant of Jehovah, who would redeem Israel from their sin. Deny to Isaiah the son of Amoz the predictions concerning Cyrus, and the prophecy is robbed of its essential character and unique perspective; emasculate these latter chapters of Isaiah of their predictive feature, and they are reduced to a mere vaticinium ex eventu, and their religious value is largely lost. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 68: - THE BOOK OF DANIEL ======================================================================== The Book of Daniel By Professor Joseph D. Wilson, D. D., Theological Seminary of the Reformed Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Author of "Did Daniel Write Daniel?" Modern objections to the Book of Daniel were started by German scholars who were prejudiced against the supernatural. Daniel foretells events which have occurred in history. Therefore, argue these scholars, the alleged predictions must have been written after the events. But the supernatural is not impossible, nor is it improbable, if sufficient reason for it exists. It is not impossible, for instance, that an event so marvelous as the coming of the Divine into humanity in the person of Jesus Christ should be predicted. So far from being impossible, it seems to common sense exceedingly probable; and furthermore, it seems not unreasonable that a prophet predicting a great and far distant event, like that indicated above, should give some evidence to his contemporaries or immediate successors that he was a true prophet. Jeremiah foretold the seventy years captivity. Could his hearers be warranted in believing that? Certainly. For he also foretold that all those lands would be subjected to the king of Babylon. A few years showed this latter prophecy to be true, and reasonable men believed the prediction about the seventy years. But the attacks of the German scholars would have been innocuous had it not been for their copyists. The German scholars-even theological professors-are not necessarily Christians. Religion is with them an interesting psychological phenomenon. Their performances are not taken too seriously by their compeers. But outside of their learned circles a considerable number of writers and professors in schools, anxious to be in the forefront, have taken the German theories for proven facts, and by saying "all scholars are agreed," etc., have spread an opinion that the Book of Daniel is a pious fraud. There is another class of impugners of Daniel-good men, who do not deny the ability of God to interpose in human affairs and foretell to His servants what shall be hereafter. These men, accepting as true what they hear asserted as the judgment of "all scholars" and regretfully supposing that Daniel is a fiction, have endeavored to save something from the wreck of a book which has been the stay of suffering saints through the ages, by expatiating on its moral and religious teaching. It is probable that these apologists-victims themselves of a delusion which they did not create but which they have hastily and foolishly accepted have done more harm than the mistaken scholars or the hasty copyists, for they have fostered the notion that a frond may be used for holy ends, and that a forger is a proper teacher of religious truth, and that the Son of God approved a lie. The scholars find that in chapter 8 of Daniel, under the figure of a very little horn, Antiochus Epiphanies is predicted as doing much hurt to the Jews. The vision is of the ram and he-goat which represent Persia and Greece, so specified by name. A notable horn of the he-goat, Alexander the Great, was broken, and in its place came four horns, the four kingdoms into which the Greek empire was divided. From one of these four sprang the little horn. That this refers primarily to Antiochus Epiphanies there is no doubt. He died about 163 B.C. The theory of the rationalistic critics is that some "pious and learned Jew" wrote the Book of Daniel at that time to encourage the Maccabees in their revolt against this bad king; that the book pretends to have been written in Babylon, 370 years before, in order to make it pass current as a revelation from God. This theory has been supported by numerous arguments, mostly conjectural, all worthless and, in a recent publication, a few designedly delusive. The imaginary Jew is termed "pious" because lofty religious ideas mark the book, and "learned" because he exhibits so intimate an acquaintance with the conditions and environments of the Babylonian court four centuries before his date. But as no man, however learned, can write an extended history out of his own imagination without some inaccuracies, the critics have searched diligently for mistakes. The chief of these supposed mistakes will be considered below. We meet a difficulty at the threshold of the critics' hypothesis. Daniel 9:26 predicts the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple; a calamity so frightful to the Jewish mind that the Septuagint shrank from translating the Hebrew, What sort of encouragement was this? The hypothesis limps at the threshold. Having Antiochus Epiphanies in chapter 8 the rationalistic critics try to force him into chapter 7. They find a little horn in chapter 7, and struggle to identify him with the "very little horn" of chapter 8. There is no resemblance between them. The words translated "little horn" are different in the different chapters. The little horn of chapter 7 springs up as an eleventh horn among ten kings. He is diverse from other kings. He continues till the Son of Man comes in the clouds of heaven and the kingdom which shall never be destroyed is set up. Antiochus Epiphanies, the little horn of chapter 8, comes out of one of the four horns into which Alexander's kingdom resolved itself. He was not diverse from other kings, but was like scores of other bad monarchs, and he did not continue till the Son of Man. These divergences render the attempted identification absurd, but an examination of the two sets of prophecies in their entirety shows this clearly. Chapters 2 and 7 are a prophecy of the world's history to the end. Chapters 8 and 11 refer to a crisis in Jewish history, a crisis now long past. Chapter 2, the Image with its head of gold, breast of silver, belly of brass, legs of iron, feet and toes of mingled iron and clay, tells of four world kingdoms, to be succeeded by a number of sovereignties, some strong, some weak, which would continue till the God of heaven should set up a kingdom never to be destroyed. Chapter 7, the Four Beasts, is parallel to the Image. The same four world-empires are described; the fourth beast, strong and terrible, to be succeeded by ten kings, who should continue till the coming of the Son of Man, who should set up an everlasting kingdom. These four world-empires were Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. There have been no other World-empires since. Efforts have been made to unite the divided sovereignties of Europe by royal intermarriages and by conquest, but the iron and Clay would not cleave together. The rapidity of the Greek conquest is symbolized by the swift leopard with four wings; its division by four heads. The Roman empire is diverse from the others-it was a republic and its iron strength is dissipated among the nations which followed it and which exist today, still iron and clay. These prophecies which are illustrated in every particular by history to the present moment stand in the way of the unbelieving theory. The Roman empire, the greatest of all, must be eliminated to get rid of prediction, and any shift promising that end has been welcomed. One set of critics makes the kingdom of the Seleucidae, which was one of the parts of the Greek empire, the fourth world-kingdom, but it never was a world-kingdom. It was part of the Greek empire-one of the four heads upon the leopard. Another set creates an imaginary Median empire between Babylon and Persia. There was no such empire. The Medo-Persian empire was one. Cyrus, the Persian, conquered Babylon. All history says so and the excavations prove it. Among the nations which were to take the place of the fallen Roman empire, another power was to rise-"a little horn," shrewd and arrogant. It was to wear out the saints of the Most High, to be diverse from the other ten sovereignties, to have the other sovereignties given into its hand, and to keep its dominion till the coming of the Son of Man. Whatever this dread power is, or is to be, it was to follow the fall of the Roman empire and to rise among the nations which, ever since, in some form or other have existed where Rome once held sway. Whether that power, differing from civil governments and holding dominance over them, exists now and has existed for more than a thousand years, or is to be developed in the future, it was to arise in the Christian era. The words are so descriptive, that no reader would ever have doubted were it not that the prophecy involves prediction. The attempt of the "very little horn" of chapter 8, Antiochus Epiphanies, to extirpate true religion from the earth, failed. Yet it was well-nigh successful. The majority of the nation were brought to abandon Jehovah and to serve Diana. The high priest in Jerusalem sent the treasurers of the temple to Antioch as an offering to Hercules. Jews out-bade each other in their subservience to Antiochus. His cruelties were great but his blandishments were more effective for his purpose; "by peace he destroyed many". Idolatrous sacrifices were offered throughout Judea. Judaism was all but dead, and with its death the worship of the one God would have found no place in all the earth. This prophecy encouraged the few faithful ones to resist the Greek and their own faithless fellow countrymen. God foresaw and forewarned. The warning was unheeded by the mass of the Jews. Sadduceeism then did not believe in the supernatural and it has repeated its disbelief. Fortunately there was a believing remnant and true religion was saved from extinction. The Seventy Weeks. (Daniel 9:24-27). "Weeks" in this prophecy are not weeks of days but "sevens," probably years, but whether astronomical years of 365 1/4 days or prophetic years of 360 days does not appear. Our Lord's saying when referring to the prophecy of Daniel (Matthew 24:15), "Let him that readeth understand," seems to indicate a peculiarity about the period foretold. From the issuance of a commandment to restore and rebuild Jerusalem unto Messiah there would be sixty-nine sevens, i.e., 483 years. Messiah would be cut off and have nothing, and the people of a prince would destroy Jerusalem and the temple. It came to pass in the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate. Messiah appeared; He was cut off; He had nothing, no place to lay His head, nothing except a cross. And before the generation which crucified Him passed away, the soldiers of the Roman emperor destroyed the city and sanctuary, slew all the priests and ended Jewish church and nation. Unto Messiah the Prince there were to be 483 years from an edict to rebuild Jerusalem. That edict was issued in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes Longimanus. Somewhere between 454 B. C. and 444 B.C. is the date, with the preponderance of opinion in favor of the later date. Four hundred and eighty-three years brings us to 29-39 A.D. Or, if prophetic years are meant, the terminus ad quem is 22-32 A.D. Pontius Pilate was procurator of Judea from 26 A.D. to 36 A.D. All this is plain enough, and if the words of Daniel had been written after the death of our Saviour and the fall of Jerusalem, no one could fail to see that Jesus Christ is indicated. But if written in the exile this would be supernatural prediction, and hence the struggles of the critics to evade somehow the implications of the passage. To find some prominent person who was "cut off" prior to 163 B.C. was the first desideratum. The high priest Onias, who was murdered through the intrigues of rival candidates for his office, was the most suitable person. He was in no respect the Messiah, but having been anointed he might be made to serve. He died 171 B.C. The next step was to find an edict to restore and rebuild Jerusalem, 483 years before 171 B.C. That date was 654 B.C., during the reign of Manasseh, son of Hezekiah. No edict could be looked for there. But by deducting 49 years, the date was brought to 605 B.C., and as in that year Jeremiah had foretold (Jeremiah 25:9) the destruction of Jerusalem, perhaps this would do. There were two objections to this hypothesis; one, that a prophecy of desolation and ruin to a city and sanctuary then in existence was not a commandment to restore and rebuild, and !the other objection was that this also was a supernatural prediction, and as such, offensive to the critical mind. Accordingly, recourse was had to the decree of Cyrus (Ezra 1:1-4) made in 536 B.C. But the decree of Cyrus authorized, not the building of Jerusalem, but the building of the temple. It is argued that forts and other defenses, including a city wall must have been intended by Cyrus, and this would be rebuilding Jerusalem; but the terms Of the edict are given and no such defenses are mentioned. Nor is it likely that a wise man like Cyrus would have intended or permitted a fortified city to be built in a remote corner of his empire close to his enemy, Egypt, with which enemy the Jews had frequently coquetted in previous years. At all events, the city was not restored until the twentieth year of Artaxerxes, as appears from Nehemiah 2:3; Nehemiah 2:8; Nehemiah 2:13, etc., where Nehemiah laments the defenseless condition of Jerusalem. Permission to build could safely be given then, for Egypt had been conquered and the loyalty of the Jews to Persia had been tested. Moreover, the date of Cyrus' decree does not meet the conditions. From 536 B.C. to 171 B.C. Isaiah 365 years and not 483. A "learned and pious Jew" would not have made such a blunder in arithmetic in foisting a forgery upon his countrymen. There were four decrees concerning Jerusalem issued by the Persian court. The first under Cyrus, alluded to above, the second under Darius Hystaspis. (Ezra 6). The third in the seventh year of Artaxerxes. (Ezra 7:12-26). All of these concern the temple. The fourth in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes was the only one to restore and rebuild a walled town. The Book of Daniel was translated into Greek about 123 B. C., forty years after the death of Antiochus Epiphanies. This prophecy of the Seventy Weeks troubled the Jewish translators. It foretold disaster to Jerusalem. City and sanctuary would be destroyed. They had been destroyed 464 years before by Nebuchadnezzar. Would they be destroyed again? The translators were unwilling to believe that such a calamity would occur again. Could they not make out that the words referred to the troubles under Antiochus? It was true that he had destroyed neither city nor temple, but he had polluted the temple. Perhaps that was equivalent to destruction. At all events they did not dare to say that another destruction of Jerusalem lay in the future. But there stood the words. From the going forth of commandment to restore Jerusalem unto Messiah the Prince would be seven weeks and three score and two weeks, 483 years. They could do nothing with those words. They left them out, and mangled the rest of the passage to give obscurely the impression that the disasters there foretold were a thing of the past. This mistranslation of a Divine oracle to make it say what they wished it to say was a high-handed proceeding, but it did not prevent its fulfillment. At the time appointed Messiah came and was crucified and Jerusalem fell. The critics' efforts to force some meaning, other than a prediction of Christ, into this prophecy is thus seen to be not without precedent. Supposed Inaccuracies But the rationalistic interpretations of the aforementioned great prophecies are so unnatural, so evidently forced in order to sustain a preconceived theory, that they would have deceived none except those predisposed to be deceived. Accordingly attempts have been made to discredit the Book of Daniel; to show that it could not have been written in Babylon; to expose historical inaccuracies and so forth. The scholars discovered some supposed inaccuracies, and, the fashion having been set, the imitation scholars eagerly sought for more and with the help of imagination have compiled a considerable number. They are in every case instances of the inaccuracy of the critics. (1) First, may be mentioned, as the only one ever having had any weight, the fact that no historian mentions Belshazzar. It was therefore assumed that "the learned and pious Jew", whom the critics imagined, had invented the name. Since 1854 this "inaccuracy" has disappeared from the rationalistic dictionaries and other productions. The excavations have answered that. (2) Disappointed at the discovery of the truth, the critics now find fault with the title "king" which Daniel gives to Belshazzar and assert that no tablets have been found dated in his reign. It is not probable that any such tablets will be found, for his father outlived him and even though Belshazzar were co-king, his father's name would be in the dates. The tablets, however, show that Belshazzar was the commander of the troops, that he was the man of action-his father being a studious recluse-that he was the darling of the people and that the actual administration was in his hands. He was the heir to the throne and even if not formally invested, was the virtual king in the eyes of the people. (3) It is objected next that Belshazzar was not the son of Nebuchadnezzar as the queen mother says in Daniel 5:11. If he were the grandson through his mother the same language would be used, and the undisturbed reign of Nabonidus in turbulent Babylon is accounted for in this way. (4) The quibble that the monuments do not say that Belshazzar was slain at the taking of Babylon is unworthy of the scholar who makes it. It is admitted that Belshazzar was a prominent figure before the city was captured, that "the son of the king died" and that he then "disappeared from history". He was heir to the kingdom. He was a soldier. His dynasty was overthrown. He disappeared from history. Common sense can make its inference. (5) It is hard, however, for the impugners of Daniel to let the Belshazzar argument go. To have him appear prominently in the inscriptions, after criticism had decided that he never existed, is awkward. Accordingly, we have a long dissertation ("Sayce's Higher Criticism and the Monuments," 497-531) showing that the claim of Cyrus to have captured Babylon without fighting is inconsistent with the accounts of the secular historians, which dwell upon the long siege, the desperate fighting, the turning of the river, the surprise at night, etc. Very well, the two accounts are inconsistent. But what has this to do with Daniel? His account is as follows: "In that night was Belshazzar the Chaldean king slain, and Darius the Mede received the kingdom" (Daniel 5:31). Not a word about a siege, etc. An account entirely consistent with the inscription of Cyrus. And yet the critic has the audacity to say that "the monumental evidence has here pronounced against the historical accuracy of the Scripture narrative"! ("H. C. & M.", 531). This is not criticism; it is misrepresentation. (6) Daniel mentions the "Chaldeans" as a guild of wise men. This has been made a ground of attack. "In the time of the exile", they tell us, "the Chaldeans were an imperial nation. Four centuries afterward the term signified a guild; therefore, Daniel was written four centuries afterward". It is strange that none of the critics consulted Herodotus, the historian nearest to Daniel in time. He visited Babylon in the same century with Daniel and uses the word in the same sense as Daniel and in no other. (Herod. 1:181,185). (7) The Book of Daniel spells Nebuchadnezzar with an "n" in the penultimate instead of an "r"; therefore, the critics argue, it must have been written 370 years later. But Ezra spells it with an "n". So do 2Kings, 1 & 2 Chronicles, and so does Jeremiah seven times out of sixteen. Jeremiah preceded Daniel and if either Kings or Chronicles was written in Babylon we have the same spelling in the same country and about the same time. (8) As to the Greek words in Daniel, relied on by Driver to prove a late date: When we discover that these are the names of musical instruments and that the Babylonians knew the Greeks in commerce and in war and realize that musical instruments carry their native names with them, this argument vanishes like the rest. (9) But, it is urged, Daniel gives the beginning of the captivity (Daniel 1:1) in the third year of Jehoiakim, 606 B.C., whereas Jerusalem was not destroyed till 587 B.C., therefore, etc. Daniel dates the captivity from the time that he and the other youths were carried away. A glance at the history will suggest when that was. Pharaoh Necho came out of Egypt against Babylon in 609 B.C. He met and defeated Josiah at Megiddo. He then marched on northward. In three months he marched back to Egypt, having accomplished nothing against Babylon. The interval, 609 to 605 B.C., was the opportunity for Nebuchadnezzar. He secured as allies or as subjects the various tribes in Palestine, as appears from Berosus. Among the rest "Jehoiakim (2 Kings 24:1) became his servant three years". During that time he took as guests or as hostages the noble youths. At the end of the three years, in 605, Necho re-appeared on his way to fatal Carchemish. Jehoiakim renounced Nebuchadnezzar, and sided with Necho. A merciful Providence counted the seventy years captivity from the very first deportation and Daniel tells us when that was. The captivity ended in 536 B.C. (10) The Aramaic. One critic said Aramaic was not spoken in Babylon. Others, not so self-confident, said the Aramaic in Babylon was different from Daniel's Aramaic. None of them knew what Aramaic was spoken in Babylon. There was Ezra's Aramaic. It was like Daniel's and Ezra was a native of Babylon. To save their argument they then post-dated Ezra too. In 1906 and 1908, there were unearthed papyrus rolls in Aramaic written in the fifth century, B.C. It is impossible to suggest redactors and other imaginary persons in this case, and so the Aramaic argument goes the way of all the rest. Before these recent finds the Aramaic weapon had begun to lose its potency. The clay tablets, thousands of which have been found in Babylonia, are legal documents and are written in Babylonian. Upon the backs of some of them were Aramaic filing marks stating in brief the contents. These filings were for ready reference and evidently in the common language of the people, the same language which the frightened Chaldeans used when the angry monarch threatened them. (Daniel 2:4). There are some other alleged inaccuracies more frivolous than the above. Lack of space forbids their consideration here. Two new objections to the genuineness of Daniel appear in a dictionary of the Bible, edited by three American clergymen. The article on Daniel states that "the BABA BATHRA* ascribes the writing not to Daniel but along with that of some other books to the men of the Great Synagogue". THIS STATEMENT IS CORRECT IN WORDS, BUT BY CONCEALMENT CONVEYS A FALSE IMRESSION. The trick lies in the phrase, "some other books". What are those other books? They are Ezekiel, Hosea, Amos-all the minor prophets-and Esther. The statement itself is nonsensical, like many other things in the Talmud, but whatever its meaning, it places Daniel on the same footing as Ezekiel and the rest. [*The passage is found in the Talmud Babylon, Tract Baba Bathra, fol. 15a., and reads, "The men of the Great Synagogue have written Ezekiel, the Twelve Minor Prophets, Daniel and Esther."-Editor] The other objection is as follows: "Chapter 11 (of Daniel) with its four world-kingdoms is wonderfully cleared when viewed from this standpoint (i.e. as a Maccabean production). The third of these kingdoms is explicitly named as the Persian. (11:2). The fourth to follow is evidently the Greek". Every phrase in this is false. The chapter says nothing about four world kingdoms. Nor does Daniel 11:2 say explicitly, or any other way, that the Persian was the third; nor that the Greek was the fourth. No explanation or modification of these astonishing statements is offered. How could the writer expect to escape detection? True, the Baba Bathra is inaccessible to most people, but Daniel 11 is in everybody's hands. Daniel was a wise and well-known man in the time of Ezekiel, else all point in the irony of Ezekiel 28:3 is lost. He was also eminent for goodness and must have been esteemed an especial recipient of God's favor and to have had intercourse with the Most High like Noah and Job. Ezekiel 14:15; Ezekiel 14:20 : "When the land sinneth, though Noah, Daniel and Job were in it, they shall deliver but their own souls". A striking collocation: Noah the second father of the race, Job the Gentile and Daniel the Jew. Daniel is better attested than any other book of the Old Testament. Ezekiel mentions the man. Zechariah appears to have read the book. The bungling attempt of the Septuagint to alter a prediction of disaster to one of promise; our Saviour's recognition of Daniel as a prophet; these are attestations. Compare Ezekiel; there is not a word in the Bible to show that he ever existed, but as he does not plainly predict the Saviour no voice is raised or pen wagged against him. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 69: - THE DOCTRINAL VALUE OF THE FIRST CHAPTERS... ======================================================================== The Doctrinal Value of the First Chapters of Genesis By Dyson Hague, M. A., Vicar Of The Church Of The Epiphany; Professor Of Liturgics, Wycliffe College, Toronto, Ontario, Canada The Book of Genesis is in many respects the most important book in the Bible. It is of the first importance because it answers, not exhaustively, but sufficiently, the fundamental questions of the human mind. It contains the first authoritative information given to the race concerning these questions of everlasting interest: the Being of God; the origin of the universe; the creation of man; the origin of the soul; the fact of revelation; the introduction of sin; the promise of salvation; the primitive division of the human race; the purpose of the elected people; the preliminary part in the program of Christianity. In one word, in this inspired volume of beginnings, we have the satisfactory explanation of all the sin and misery and contradiction now in this world, and the reason of the scheme of redemption. Or, to put it in another way. The Book of Genesis is the seed in which the plant of God's Word is enfolded. It is the starting point of God's gradually unfolded plan of the ages. Genesis is the plinth of the pillar of the Divine revelation. It is the root of the tree of the inspired Scriptures. It is the source of the stream of the holy writings of the Bible. If the base of the pillar is removed, the pillar falls. If the root of the tree is cut out, the tree will wither and die. If the fountain head of the stream is cut off, the stream will dry up. The Bible as a whole is like a chain hanging upon two staples. The Book of Genesis is the one staple; the Book of Revelation is the other. Take away either staple, the chain falls in confusion. If the first chapters of Genesis are unreliable, the revelation of the beginning of the universe, the origin of the race, and the reason of its redemption are gone. If the last chapters of Revelation are displaced the consummation of all things is unknown. If you take away Genesis, you have lost the explanation of the first heaven, the first earth, the first Adam, and the fall. If you take away Revelation you have lost the completed truth of the new heaven, and the new earth, man redeemed, and the second Adam in Paradise regained. Further: in the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. you have the strong and sufficient foundation of the subsequent developments of the kingdom of God; the root-germ of all Anthropology, Soteriology, Christology, Satanology, to say nothing of the ancient and modern problems of the mystery and culpability of sin, the Divine ordinance of the Lord's Day, the unity of the race, and God's establishment of matrimony and the family life. We assume from the start the historicity of Genesis and its Mosaic authorship. It was evidently accepted by Christ the Infallible, our Lord and God, as historical, as one single composition, and as the work of Moses. It was accepted by Paul the inspired. It was accepted universally by the divinely inspired leaders of God's chosen people. (See Green's "Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch.") It has validated itself to the universal Church throughout the ages by its realism and consistency, and by what has been finely termed its subjective truthfulness. We postulate especially the historicity of the first chapters. These are not only valuable, they are vital. They are the essence of Genesis. The Book of Genesis is neither the work of a theorist or a tribal annalist. It is still less the product of some anonymous compiler or compilers in some unknowable era, of a series of myths, historic in form but unhistoric in fact. Its opening is an apocalypse, a direct revelation from the God of all truth. Whether it was given in a vision or otherwise, it would be impossible to say. But it is possible, if not probable, that the same Lord God, who revealed to His servant as he was in the Spirit on the Lord's Day the apocalypse of the humanly unknown and unknowable events of man's history which will transpire when this heaven and this earth have passed away, would also have revealed to His servant, being in the Spirit, the apocalypse of the humanly unknowable and unknown events which transpired before this earth's history began. It has been asserted that the beginning and the end of things are both absolutely hidden from science. Science has to do with phenomena. It is where science must confess its impotence that revelation steps in, and, with the authority of God, reveals those things that are above it, The beginning of Genesis, therefore, is a divinely inspired narrative of the events deemed necessary by God to establish the foundations for the Divine Law in the sphere of human life, and to set forth the relation between the omnipotent Creator and the man who fell, and the race that was to be redeemed by the incarnation of His Son. The German rationalistic idea, which has passed over into thousands of more or less orthodox Christian minds, is that these earliest chapters embody ancient traditions of the Semitic-oriental mind. Others go farther, and not only deny them to be the product of the reverent and religious mind of the Hebrew, but assert they were simply oriental legends, not born from above and of God, but born in the East, and probably in pagan Babylonia. We would therefore postulate the following propositions: 1. The Book of Genesis has no doctrinal value if it is not authoritative. 2. The Book of Genesis is not authoritative if it is not true. For if it is not history, it is not reliable; and if it is not revelation, it is not authoritative. 3. The Book of Genesis is not true if it is not from God. For if it is not from God, it is not inspired; and if it is not inspired, it possesses to us no doctrinal value whatever. 4. The Book of Genesis is not direct from God if it is a heterogeneous compilation of mythological folklore by unknowable writers. 5. If the Book of Genesis is a legendary narrative, anonymous, indefinitely erroneous, and the persons it described the mere mythical personifications of tribal genius, it is of course not only non-authentic, because nonauthenticated, but an insufficient basis for doctrine. The residuum of dubious truth, which might with varying degrees of consent be extracted therefrom, could never be accepted as a foundation for the superstructure of eternally trustworthy doctrine, for it is an axiom that that only is of doctrinal value which is God's Word. Mythical and legendary fiction, and still more, erroneous and misleading tradition, are incompatible not only with the character of the God of all truth, but with the truthfulness, trustworthiness, and absolute authority of the Word of God. We have not taken for our credentials cleverly invented myths. The primary documents, if there were such, were collated and revised and re-written by Moses by inspiration of God. A sentence in Margoliouth's "Lines of Defence" deserves an attentive consideration today. We should have some opportunity, said the Oxford professor, of gauging the skill of those on whose faith the old-fashioned belief in the authenticity of Scripture has been abandoned. (p. 293). One would perhaps prefer to put the idea in this way. Our modern Christians should have more opportunity not only of appraising the skill, but of gauging also the spiritual qualifications of a critical school that has been characterized notoriously by an enthusiasm against the miraculous, and a precipitate adoption o which militates against the historicity of Genesis. Christians are conceding too much nowadays to the agnostic scientist, and the rationalistic Hebraist, and are often to blame if they allow them to go out of their specific provinces without protest. Their assumptions ought to be watched with the utmost vigilance and jealousy. (See Gladstone, "The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture," pp. 62-83). But to resume. The Book of Genesis is the foundation on which the superstructure of the Scriptures rests. The foundation of the foundation is the first three chapters, which form in themselves a complete monograph of revelation. And of this final substructure the first three verses of the first chapter are the foundation. In the first verse of Genesis in words of supernatural grandeur, we have a revelation of God as the first cause, the Creator of the universe, the world and man. The glorious Being of God comes forth without explanation, and without apology. It is a revelation of the one, personal, living, God. There is in the ancient philosophic cosmogony no trace of the idea of such a Being, still less of such a Creator, for all other systems began and ended with pantheistic, materialistic, or hylozoistic conceptions. The Divine Word stands unique in declaring the absolute idea of the living God, without attempt at demonstration. The spirituality, infinity, omnipotence, sanctity of the Divine Being, all in germ lie here. Nay more. The later and more fully revealed doctrine of the unity of God in the Trinity may be said to lie here in germ also, and the last and deepest revelation to be involved in first and foremost. The fact of God in the first of Genesis is not given as a deduction of reason or a philosophic generalization. It is a revelation. It is a revelation of that primary truth which is received by the universal human mind as a truth that needs no proof, and is incapable of it, but which being received, is verified to the intelligent mind by an irresistible force not only with ontological and cosmological, but with teleological and moral arguments. Here we have in this first verse of Genesis, not only a postulate apart from Revelation, but three great truths which have constituted the glory of our religion. (1) The Unity of God; in contradiction to all the polytheisms and dualisms of ancient and modern pagan philosophy. (2) The Personality of God; in contradiction to that pantheism whether materialistic or idealistic, which recognizes God's immanence in the world, but denies His transcendence. For in all its multitudinous developments, pantheism has this peculiarity, that it denies the personality of God, and excludes from the realm of life the need of a Mediator, a Sin-Bearer, and a personal Saviour. (3) The Omnipotence of God; in contradiction, not only to those debasing conceptions of the anthropomorphic deities of the ancient world, but to all those man-made idols which the millions of heathenism today adore. God made these stars and suns, which man in his infatuation fain would worship. Thus in contradiction to all human conceptions and human evolutions, there stands forth no mere deistic abstraction, but the one, true, living and only God. He is named by the name Elohim, the name of Divine Majesty, the Adorable One, our Creator and Governor; the same God who in a few verses later is revealed as Jehovah-Elohim, Jehovah being the Covenant name, the God of revelation and grace, the Ever-Existent Lord, the God and Father of us all. (Green, "Unity of Genesis," pp. 31,32; "Fausset's Bib. Ency.," p. 258). One of the theories of modernism is that the law of evolution can be traced through the Bible in the development of the idea of God. The development of the idea of God? Is there in the Scriptures any real trace of the development of the idea of God? There is an expansive, and richer, and fuller revelation of the attributes and dealings and ways and workings of God; but not of the idea of God. The God of Genesis 1:1 is the God of Psalm 90; of Isaiah 40:28; of Hebrews 1:1; and Revelation 4:11. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Here in a sublime revelation is the doctrinal foundation of the creation of the universe, and the contradiction of the ancient and modern conceptions of the eternity of matter. God only is eternal. One can well believe the story of a Japanese thinker who took up a strange book, and with wonderment read the first sentence: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." It struck him that there was more philosophy of a theological character, and satisfying to the mind and soul, in that one sentence than in all the sacred books of the orient. That single sentence separates the Scriptures from the rest of human productions. The wisest philosophy of the ancients, Platonic-Aristotelian or Gnostic, never reached the point that the world was created by God in the sense of absolute creation. In no cosmogony outside of the Bible is there a record of the idea that God created the heaven and the earth, as an effort of His will, and the fiat of His eternal, self-existent Personality. Ex nihilo nihil fit. The highest point reached by their philosophical speculations was a kind of atomic theory; of cosmic atoms and germs and eggs possessed of some inexplicable forces of development, out of which the present cosmos was through long ages evolved. Matter was almost universally believed to have existed from eternity. The Bible teaches that the universe was not causa sui or a mere passive evolution of His nature, nor a mere transition from one form of being to another, from non-being to being, but that it was a direct creation of the personal, living, working God, who created all things out of nothing, but the fiat of His will, and the instrumentality of the eternal Logos. In glorious contrast to agnostic science with its lamentable creed, "I believe that behind and above and around the phenomena of matter and force remains the unsolved mystery of the universe," the Christian holds forth his triumphant solution, "I believe that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." (John 1:1-3; Hebrews 1:1; Colossians 1:16). The first verse of the Bible is a proof that the Book is of God. And so with regard to the subsequent verses. Genesis is admittedly not a scientific history. It is a narrative for mankind to show that this world was made by God for the habitation of man, and was gradually being fitted for God's children. So in a series of successive creative developments from the formless chaos, containing in embryonic condition all elemental constituents, chemical and mechanical, air, earth, fire, and water, the sublime process is recorded, according to the Genesis narrative in the following order: 1. The creation by direct Divine act of matter in its gaseous, aqueous, terrestrial and mineral condition successively. (Genesis 1:1-10; cf. Colossians 1:16; Hebrews 11:3). 2. The emergence by Divine creative power of the lowest forms of sea and land life, (Genesis 1:11-13). 3. The creation by direct Divine act of larger forms of life, aquatic and terrestrial; the great sea monsters and gigantic reptiles (the sheretjim and tanninim). (Dawson, "Origin of the World," p. 213; Genesis 1:20-21).The emergence by Divine creative power of land animals of higher organization, herbivora and smaller mammals and carnivora. (Genesis 1:24-25). And finally the creation by direct Divine act of man. (Genesis 1:26-27). Not first but last. The last for which the first was made, as Browning so finely puts it. Herein is the compatibility of Genesis and science, for this sublime order is just the order that some of the foremost of the nineteenth and twentieth century scientists have proclaimed. It is remarkable, too, that the word for absolutely new creation is only used in connection with the introduction of life. (Genesis 1:1-2; Genesis 1:27). These three points where the idea of absolute creation is introduced are the three main points at which modern champions of evolution find it impossible to make their connection. Next we have in this sublime revelation the doctrinal foundation for the beginning of mankind. Man was created, not evolved. That is, he did not come from protoplasmic mud-mass, or sea ooze bathybian, or by descent from fish or frog, or horse, or ape; but at once, direct, full made, did man come forth from God. When you read what some writers, professedly religious, say about man and his bestial origin your shoulders unconsciously droop; your head hangs down; your heart feels sick. Your self-respect has received a blow. When you read Genesis, your shoulders straighten, your chest emerges. You feel proud to be that thing that is called man. Up goes your heart, and up goes your head. The Bible stands openly against the evolutionary development of man, and his gradual ascent through indefinite aeons from the animal. Not against the idea of the development of the plans of the Creator in nature, or a variation of species by means of environment and processes of time. That is seen in Genesis, and throughout the Bible, and in this world. But the Bible does stand plainly against that garish theory that all species, vegetable and animal, have originated through evolution from lower forms through long natural processes. The materialistic form of this theory to the Christian is most offensive. It practically substitutes an all-engendering protoplasmic call for the only and true God. But even the theistic supernaturalistic theory is opposed to the Bible and to Science for these reasons. 1. There is no such universal law of development. On the contrary, scientific evidence is now standing for deterioration. The flora and the fauna of the latest period show no trace of improvement, and even man, proud man, from the biological and physiological standpoint has gained nothing to speak of from the dawn of history. The earliest archaeological remains of Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, show no trace of slow emergence from barbarism. That species can be artificially improved is true, but that is not transmutation of species. (Dawson, "Origin of the World," pp. 227- 277). 2. No new type has ever been discovered. Science is universally proclaiming the truth of Genesis 1:11-12; Genesis 1:21; Genesis 1:24-25 "after his kind," "after their kind"; that is, species by species. Geology with its five hundred or so species of ganoids proclaims the fact of the non-transmutation of species. If, as they say, the strata tell the story of countless aeons, it is strange that during those countless aeons the trilobite never produced anything but a trilobite, nor has the ammonite ever produced anything but an ammonite. The elaborately artificial exceptions of modern science only confirm the rule. (See Townsend, "Collapse of Evolution.") 3. Nor is there any trace of transmutation of species. Man develops from a single cell, and the cell of a monkey is said to be indistinguishable from that of a man. But the fact that a man cell develops into a man and the monkey cell develops into a monkey, shows there is an immeasurable difference between them. And the development from a cell into a man has nothing whatever to do with the evolution of one species into another. "To science, species are practically unchangeable units" ("Origin of the World," p. 227). Man is the sole species of his genus, and the sole representative of his species. The abandonment of any original type is said to be soon followed by the complete extinction of the family. 4. Nor has the missing link been found. The late Robert Etheridge of the British Museum, head of the geological department, and one of the ablest of British paleontologists; has said: "In all that great museum there is not a particle of evidence of transmutation of species. Nine-tenths of the talk of evolutionists is not founded on observation, and is wholly unsupported by facts." And Professor Virchow is said to have declared with vehemence regarding evolution: "It's all nonsense. You are as far as ever you were from establishing any connection between man and the ape." A great gulf is fixed between the theory of evolution and the sublime statement of Genesis 1:26-27. These verses give man his true place in the universe as the consummation of creation. Made out of the dust of the ground, and created on the same day with the highest group of animals, man has physiological affinities with the animal creation. But he was made in the image of God, and therefore transcendently superior to any animal. "Man is a walker, the monkey is a climber," said the great French scientist, De Quatrefages, years ago. A man does a thousand things every day that a monkey could not do if he tried ten thousand years. Man has the designing, controlling, ordering, constructive, and governing faculties. Man has personality, understanding, will, conscience. Man is fitted for apprehending God, and for worshipping God. The Genesis account of man is the only possible basis of revelation. The revelation of fatherhood; of the beautiful, the true, the good; of purity, of peace; is unthinkable to a horse, a dog, or a monkey. The most civilized simian could have no affinity with such ideas. There is no possibility of his conceiving such conceptions, or of receiving them if revealed. It is, ... moreover, the only rational basis for the doctrine of regeneration in opposition to the idea of the evolution of the human character, and of the great doctrine of the incarnation. Man once made in the image of God, by the regenerating power of the Holy Ghost is born again and made in the image of God the Son. Further, we have in this sublime revelation of Genesis the doctrinal foundation of: 1. The unity of the human race. 2. The fall of man. 3. The plan of redemption. 1. With regard to the first, Sir William Dawson has said that the Bible knows but one Adam. Adam was not a myth, or an ethnic name. He was a veritable man, made by God; not an evolutionary development from some hairy anthropoid in some imaginary continent of Lemuria. ... The Bible knows but one species of man, one primitive pair. ... This is confirmed by the Lord Jesus Christ in Matthew 19:4. ... It is re-affirmed by Paul in Acts 17:26, whichever reading may be taken, and in Romans 5:12; 1 Corinthians 15:21; 1 Corinthians 15:47; 1 Corinthians 15:49. Nor is there any ground for supposing that the word Adam is used in a collective sense, and thus leave room for the hypotheses of the evolutionary development of a large number of human pairs. All things in both physiology and ethnology, as well as in the sciences, which bear on the subject, confirm the idea of the unity of the human race. (Saphir, p. 206). 2. With regard to the fall of man. The foundation of all Harmartology and Anthropology lies in the first three chapters of Genesis. It teaches us that man was originally created for communion with God, and that whether his personality was dichotomistic or trichotomistic, he was entirely fitted for personal, intelligent fellowship with his Maker, and was united with Him in the bonds of love and knowledge. Every element of the Bible story recommends itself as a historic narrative. Placed in Eden by his God, with a work to do, and a trial-command, man was potentially perfect, but with the possibility of fall. Man fell, though it was God's will that man should rise from that human posse non peccari as a free agent into the Divine non posse peccari. (Augustine, "De Civitate Dei", Book 22, Chap. 30). Man fell by disobedience, and through the power of a supernatural deceiver called that old serpent, the devil and Satan, who from Genesis 3 to Revelation 19 appears as the implacable enemy of the human race, and the head of that fallen angel-band which abandoned through the sin of pride their first principality. This story is incomprehensible if only a myth. The great Dutch theologian, Van Oosterzee says, "The narrative presents itself plainly as history. Such an historic fantastic clothing of a pure philosophic idea accords little with the genuine spirit of Jewish antiquity." (Dog. ii, p. 403). Still more incomprehensible is it, if it is merely an allegory which refers fruit, serpent, woman, tree, eating, etc., to entirely different things from those mentioned in the Bible. It is history. It is treated as such by our Lord Jesus Christ, who surely would not mistake a myth for history, and by St. Paul, who hardly built Romans 5, and 1Corinthians 15, on cleverly composed fables. It is the only satisfactory explanation of the corruption of the race. From Adam's time death has reigned. This story of the fall stands, moreover, as a barrier against all Manicheanism, and against that Palagianism which declares that man is not so bad after all, and derides the doctrine of original sin which in all our Church confessions distinctly declares the possession by every one from birth of this sinful nature. (See, e.g., Art. IX of "Anglican Church.") The penalty and horror of sin, the corruption of our human nature, and the hopelessness of our sinful estate are things definitely set forth in the Holy Scripture, and are St. Paul's divinely-inspired deductions from this fact of the incoming of sin and death through the disobedience and fall of Adam, the original head of the human race. The race is in a sinful condition. (Romans 5:12). Mankind is a solidarity. As the root of a tree lives in stem, branch, leaf and fruit; so in Adam, as Anselm says, a person made nature sinful, in his posterity nature made persons sinful. Or, as Pascal finely puts it, original sin is folly in the sight of man, but this folly is wiser than all the wisdom of man. For without it, who could have said what man is. His whole condition depends upon this imperceptible point. ("Thoughts," ch. xiii-11). This Genesis story further is the foundation of the Scripture doctrine of all human responsibility, and accountability to God. A lowered anthropology always means a lowered theology, for if man was not a direct creation of God, if he was a mere indirect development, through slow and painful process, of no one knows what, or how, or why, or when, or where, the main spring of moral accountability is gone. The fatalistic conception of man's personal and moral life is the deadly gift of naturalistic evolution to our age, said Prof. D. A. Curtis recently. 3. With regard to our redemption, the third chapter of Genesis is the basis of all Soteriology. If there was no fall, there was no condemnation, no separation and no need of reconciliation. If there was no need of reconciliation, there was no need of redemption; and if there was no need of redemption, the Incarnation was a superfluity, and the crucifixion folly. (Galatians 3:21). So closely does the apostle link the fall of Adam and the death of Christ, that without Adam's fall the science of theology is evacuated of its most salient feature, the atonement. If the first Adam was not made a living soul and fell, there was no reason for the work of the Second Man, the Lord from heaven. The rejection of the Genesis story as a myth, tends to the rejection of the Gospel of salvation. One of the chief corner stones of the Christian doctrine is removed, if the historical reality of Adam and Eve is abandoned, for the fall will ever remain as the starting point of special revelation, of salvation by grace, and of the need of personal regeneration. In it lies the germ of the entire apostolic Gospel. Finally, we have in Genesis 2 the doctrinal foundation of those great fundamentals, the necessity of labor, the Lord's Day of rest, the Divine ordinance of matrimony, and the home life of mankind. The weekly day of rest was provided for man by his God, and is planted in the very forefront of revelation as a Divine ordinance, and so also is marriage and the home. Our Lord Jesus Christ endorses the Mosaic story of the creation of Adam and Eve, refers to it as the explanation of the Divine will regarding divorce, and sanctions by His infallible imprimatur that most momentous of ethical questions, monogamy. Thus the great elements of life as God intended it, the three universal factors of happy, healthy, helpful life, law, labor, love, are laid down in the beginning of God's Book. Three other remarkable features in the first chapters of Genesis deserve a brief reference. The first is the assertion of the original unity of the language of the human race. (Genesis 11:1). Max Muller, a foremost ethnologist and philologist, declares that all our languages, in spite of their diversities, must have originated in one common source. (See Saphir, "Divine Unity," p. 206; Dawson, "Origin of the World," p. 286; Guinness, "Divine Programme," p. 75). The second is that miracle of ethnological prophecy by Noah in Genesis 9:26-27, in which we have foretold in a sublime epitome the three great divisions of the human race, and their ultimate historic destinies. The three great divisions, Hamitic, Shemitic, and Japhetic, are the three ethnic groups into which modern science has divided the human race. The facts of history have fulfilled what was foretold in Genesis four thousand years ago. The Hamitic nations, including the Chaidean, Babylonic, and Egyptian, have been degraded, profane, and sensual. The Shemitic have been the religious with the line of the coming Messiah. The Japhetic have been the enlarging, and the dominant races, including all the great world monarchies, both of the ancient and modern times, the Grecian, Roman, Gothic, Celtic, Teutonic, British and American, and by recent investigation and discovery, the races of India, China, and Japan. Thus Ham lost all empire centuries ago; Shem and his race acquired it ethically and spiritually through the Prophet, Priest and King, the Messiah; while Japheth, in world-embracing enlargement and imperial supremacy, has stood for industrial, commercial, and political dominion. The third is the glorious promise given to Abraham, the man to whom the God of glory appeared and in whose seed, personal and incarnate, the whole world was to be blessed. Abraham's personality is the explanation of the monotheism of the three greatest religions in the world. He stands out in majestic proportion, as Max Muller says, as a figure, second only to One in the whole world's history. Apart from that promise the miraculous history of the Hebrew race is inexplicable. In him centers, and on him hangs, the central fact of the whole of the Old Testament, the promise of the Saviour and His glorious salvation. (Genesis 11:3; Genesis 22:18; Galatians 3:8-16). In an age, therefore, when the critics are waxing bold in claiming settledness for the assured results of their hypothetic eccentricities, Christians should wax bolder in contending earnestly for the assured results of the revelation in the opening chapters of Genesis. The attempt of modernism to save the supernatural in the second part of the Bible by mythicalizing the supernatural in the first part, is as unwise as it is fatal. Instead of lowering the dominant of faith amidst the chorus of doubt, and admitting that a chapter is doubtful because some doctrinaire has questioned it, or a doctrine is less authentic because somebody has floated an unverifiable hypothesis, it would be better to take our stand with such men as Romanes, Lord Kelvin, Virchow, and Liebig, in their ideas of a Creative Power, and to side with Cuvier, the eminent French scientist, who said that Moses, while brought up in all the science of Egypt, was superior to his age, and has left us a cosmogony, the exactitude of which verifies itself every day in a reasonable manner; with Sir William Dawson, the eminent Canadian scientist, who declared that Scripture in all its details contradicts no received result of science, but anticipates many of its discoveries; with Professor Dana, the eminent American scientist, who said, after examining the first chapters of Genesis as a geologist, "I find it to be in perfect accord with known science"; or, best of all, with Him who said, "Had you believed Moses, you would have believed Me, for he wrote of Me. But if you believe not his writings, how shall you believe My words?" (John 5:45-46). ======================================================================== CHAPTER 70: - THREE PECULIARITIES... WITH THE GRAF WELL... ======================================================================== Three Peculiarities of the Pentateuch Which Are Incompatible with the Graf Wellhausen Theories of Its Composition By Andrew Craig Robinson, M. A., Ballineen, County Cork, Ireland, Author Of "What About The Old Testament?" There are-amongst others-three very remarkable peculiarities in the Pentateuch which seem to be incompatible with modern theories of its composition, and to call for some explanation from the critics. The first of these peculiarities is: The Absence of the Name "Jerusalem" from the Pentateuch The first occurrence of the name "Jerusalem" in the Bible is in the Book of Joshua (Joshua 10:1): "Now it came to pass when Adonizedek, King of Jerusalem", etc. In the Pentateuch the city is only once named (Gen 14) and then it is called "Salem"-an abbreviation of its cuneiform name "Uru-salem". Now on the traditional view of the Pentateuch the absence of the name Jerusalem presents no difficulty; the fact that Bethel, Hebron, and other shrines are named, whilst Jerusalem is not, would merely mean that at these other shrines the patriarchs had built their altars, whilst at Jerusalem they had not. But from the point of view of modern critics who hold that the Pentateuch was in great part composed to glorify the priesthood at Jerusalem, and that the Book of Deuteronomy in particular was produced to establish Jerusalem as the central and only acceptable shrine for the worship of Israel-this omission to name the great city, then of historic and sacred fame, which they wished to exalt and glorify, seems very strange indeed. According to the theories of the critics the composers of the Pentateuch had a very free hand to write Whatsoever they wished, and they are held to have freely exercised it. It seems strange then to find the "Yahvist," supposed to have been written in the Southern Kingdom, and to have been imbued with all its prejudices, consecrating Bethel by a notable theophany (Genesis 28:16; Genesis 28:19), whilst in all that he is supposed to have written in the Pentateuch he never once even names his own Jerusalem. And so the "priestly writer" also, to whom a shrine like Bethel ought to be anathema, is found nevertheless consecrating Bethel with another theophany: "Jacob called the name of the place where God spoke with him Bethel" (Genesis 35:14-15), and he never even names Jerusalem. What is the explanation of all this? What is the inner meaning of this absence of the name Jerusalem from the Pentateuch? Is it not this: that at the time the Pentateuch was Written, Jerusalem, with all her sacred glories, had not entered yet into the life of Israel. The second remarkable peculiarity to which attention is called is: The Absence of Any Mention of Sacred Song from the Ritual of the Pentateuch This is in glaring contrast to the ritual of the second temple, in which timbrels, harps, and Levite singers bore a conspicuous part. Yet it was just in the very time of the second temple that the critics allege that a great portion of the Pentateuch was composed. How is it then that none of these things occur in the Mosaic ritual? It might have been expected that the priests in post-exilic times would have sought to establish the highest possible sanction for this musical ritual, by representing it as having been ordained by Moses. But no such ordinance in point of fact occurs, and the Pentateuch stands in its primitive simplicity, destitute of any ordinance of music in connection with the ritual, except those passages in which the blowing of the trumpets is enjoined at the Feast of Trumpets, the blowing of the trumpet throughout the land in the year of Jubilee, and the command, contained in a single passage (Numbers 10:10), that in the day of gladness, and in the beginnings of the months, over the burnt offerings and over the sacrifices of the peace offerings the silver trumpets were to sound. No mention in connection with the ritual of cymbals, harps, timbrels, or psalteries; no mention of sacred song, or Levite singers. NO music proper entered into the ritual, only the crude and warlike blare of trumpets. No ordinance of sacred song, no band of Levite singers. The duties of the Levites, in the Book of Numbers, are specially defined. The sons of Gershom were to bear the tabernacle and its hangings on the march; the sons of Kohath bore the altars and the sacred vessels; the sons of Merari were to bear the boards and bands and pillars of the sanctuary. No mention whatsoever of any ministry of sacred song. A strange omission this would be, if the "Priestly Code" (so-called) which thus defines the duties of the Levites, had been composed in post-exilic times, when Levite singers-sons of Asaph-cymbals, harp, and song of praise formed leading features in the ritual. Does it not seem that the Mosaic Code, enjoining no music but the simple sounding of the trumpet-blast, stands far behind these niceties of music and of song, seeming to know nothing of them all? The third remarkable peculiarity to which attention is called is: The Absence of the Divine Title "Lord of Hosts" from the Pentateuch The first occurrence of this Divine title in the Bible is in 1 Samuel 1:3 : "And this man went out of his city yearly to worship and to sacrifice unto the Lord of hosts in Shiloh." After this it occurs in a number of the remaining books of the Bible, and with increasing frequency. The pre-Samuelitic period of the history of Israel is thus differentiated from the post-Samuelitic period by this circumstance, that in connection with the former period this title is never used, whilst in connection with the latter it is used, and with growing frequency-at all stages of the history, even down to the end of the Book of Malachi; occurring altogether 281 times. Now the theory of the criticism of the present day is that the Pentateuch was composed, edited, and manipulated, during a period of more than four hundred years, by motley groups and series of writers, of differing views, and various tendencies. One writer composed one part, and one composed another; these parts were united by a different hand; and then another composed a further part; and this by yet another was united to the two that went before; and after this another portion was composed by yet another scribe, and afterwards was joined on to the three. Matter was absorbed, interpolated, harmonized, smoothed over, colored, edited from various points of view, and with different-not to say opposing-motives. And yet when the completed product-the Pentateuch-coming out of this curious literary seething pot is examined, it is found to have this remarkable characteristic, that not one of the manifold manipulators-neither "J", nor "E", nor "JE", nor "D", nor "RD", nor "P", nor "P2", nor "P3", nor "P4", nor any one of the "Redactors of P", who were innumerable-would appear to have allowed himself to be betrayed even by accident into using this title, "Lord of hosts", so much in vogue in the days in which he is supposed to have written; and the Pentateuch, devoid as it is of this expression, shows an unmistakable mark that it could not possibly have been composed in the way asserted by the criticism, because it would have been a literary impossibility for such a number of writers, extending over hundreds of years, to have one and all, never even by accident, slipped into the use of this Divine title for Jehovah, "Lord of hosts", so much in vogue during those centuries. In point of fact the Pentateuch was written before the title was invented. These three peculiarities of the Pentateuch to which attention is here drawn, are points absolutely undeniable. No one can say that the name "Jerusalem" does occur in the Pentateuch; no one can say that any mention of sacred song does occur in the ritual of the Pentateuch; and no one can say that the Divine title "Lord of hosts" does occur in the Pentateuch. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 71: - THE TESTIMONY OF THE MONUMENTS... ======================================================================== The Testimony of the Monuments to the Truth of the Scriptures By Professor George Frederick Wright, D. D., LL. D., Oberlin College. All history is fragmentary. Each particular fact is the center of an infinite complex of circumstances. No man has intelligence enough to insert a supposititious fact into circumstances not belonging to it and make it exactly fit. This only infinite intelligence, could do. A successful forgery, therefore, is impossible if only we have a sufficient number of the original circumstances with which to compare it. It is this principle which gives such importance to the cross-examination of witnesses. If the witness is truthful, the more he is questioned the more perfectly will his testimony be seen to accord with the framework of circumstances into which it is fitted. If false, the more will his falsehood become apparent. Remarkable opportunities for cross-examining the Old Testament Scriptures have been afforded by the recent uncovering of long-buried monuments in Bible lands and by deciphering the inscriptions upon them. It is the object of this essay to give the results of a sufficient portion of this cross-examination to afford a reasonable test of the competence and honesty of the historians of the Old Testament, and of the faithfulness with which their record has been transmitted to us. But the prescribed limits will not permit the half to be told; while room is left for an entire essay on the discoveries of the last five years to be treated by another hand, specially competent for the task. Passing by the monumental evidence which has removed objections to the historical statements of the New Testament, as less needing support, attention will be given first to one of the Old Testament narratives, which is nearest to us in time, and against which the harshest judgments of modern critics have been hurled. We refer to the statements in the Book of Daniel concerning the personality and fate of Belshazzar. The Identification of Belshazzar In the fifth chapter of Daniel Belshazzar is called the "son of Nebuchadnezzar," and is said to have been "king" of Babylon and to have been slain on the night in which the city was taken. But according to the other historians he was the son of Nabonidus, who was then king, and who is known to have been out of the city when it was captured, and to have lived some time afterwards. Here, certainly, there is about as glaring an apparent discrepancy as could be imagined. Indeed, there would seem to be a flat contradiction between profane and sacred historians. But in 1854 Sir Henry Rawlinson found, while excavating in the ruins of Mugheir (identified as the site of the city of Ur, from which Abraham emigrated), inscriptions which stated that when Nabonidus was near the end of his reign he associated with him on the throne his eldest son, Bil-shar-uzzur, and allowed him the royal title, thus making it perfectly credible that Belshazzar should have been in Babylon, as he is said to have been in the Bible, and that he should have been called king, and that he should have perished in the city while Nabonidus survived outside. That he should have been called king while his father was still living is no more strange than that Jehoram should have been appointed by his father, Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, seven years before his father's death (see 2 Kings 1:17; 2 Kings 8:16), or that Jotham should have been made king before his father, Uzziah, died of leprosy, though Uzziah is still called king in some of the references to him. That Belshazzar should have been called son of Nebuchadnezzar is readily accounted for on the supposition that he was his grandson, and there are many things to indicate that Nabonidus married Nebuchadnezzar's daughter, while there is nothing known to the contrary. But if this theory is rejected, there is the natural supposition that in the loose use of terms of relationship common among Oriental people "son" might be applied to one who was simply a successor. In the inscriptions on the monuments of Shalmaneser II., referred to below, Jehu, the extirpator of the house of Omri, is called the "son of Omri." The status of Belshazzar implied in this explanation is confirmed incidentally by the fact that Daniel is promised in verse 6 the "third" place in the kingdom, and in verse 29 is given that place, all of which implies that Belshazzar was second only. Thus, what was formerly thought to be an insuperable objection to the historical accuracy of the Book of Daniel proves to be, in all reasonable probability, a mark of accuracy. The coincidences are all the more remarkable for being so evidently undesigned. The Black Obelisk Of Shalmaneser From Various inscriptions in widely separated places we are now able to trace the movements of Shalmaneser II. through nearly all of his career. In B.C. 842 he crossed the Euphrates for the sixteenth time and carried his conquests to the shores of the Mediterranean. Being opposed by Hazael of Damascus, he overthrew the Syrian army, and pursued it to the royal city and shut it up there, while he devastated the territory surrounding. But while there is no mention of his fighting with the Tyrians, Sidonians, and Israelites, he is said to have received tribute from them and "from Jehu, the son of Omri." This inscription occurs on the celebrated Black Obelisk discovered many years ago by Sir Henry Rawlinson in the ruins of Nimroud. On it are represented strings of captives with evident Jewish features, in the act of bringing their tribute to the Assyrian king. Now, though there is no mention in the sacred records of any defeat of Jehu by the Assyrians, nor of the paying of tribute by him, it is most natural that tribute should have been paid under the circumstances; for in the period subsequent to the battle of Karkar, Damascus had turned against Israel, so that Israel's most likely method of getting even with Hazael would have been to make terms with his enemy, and pay tribute, as she is said to have done, to Shalmaneser. The Moabite Stone One of the most important discoveries, giving reality to Old Testament history, is that of the Moabite Stone, discovered at Dibon, east of the Jordan, in 1868, which was set up by King Mesha (about 850 B. C.) to signalize his deliverance from the yoke of Omri, king of Israel. The inscription, is valuable, among other things, for its witness to the civilized condition of the Moabites at that time and to the close similarity of their language to that of the Hebrews. From this inscription we learn that Omro, king of Israel, was compelled by the rebellion of Mesha to again subjugate Moab; and that after doing so, he and his son occupied the cities of Moab for a period of forty years, but that, after a series of battles, it was restored to Moab in the days of Mesha. Whereupon the cities and fortresses retaken were strengthened, and the country repopulated, while the methods of warfare were similar to those practiced by Israel. On comparing this with 2 Kings 3:4-27, we find a parallel account which dovetails in with this in a most remarkable manner, though naturally the biblical narrative treats lightly of the reconquest by Mesha, simply stating that, on account of the horror created by the idolatrous sacrifice of his eldest son upon the walls before them, the Israelites departed from the land and returned to their own country. The Expedition of Shishak In the fourteenth chapter of 1 Kings we have a brief account of an expedition of Shishak, king of Egypt, against Jerusalem in the fifth year of Rehoboam. To the humiliation of Judah; it is told that Shishak succeeded in taking away the treasures of the house of Jehovah and of the king's house, among them the shields of gold which Solomon had made; so that Rehoboam made shields of brass in their stead. To this simple, unadorned account there is given a wonderful air of reality as one gazes on the southern wall of the court of the temple of Amen at Karnak and beholds the great expanse of sculptures and hieroglyphics which are there inscribed to represent this campaign of Shishak. One hundred and fifty-six places are enumerated among those which were captured, the northernmost being Megiddo. Among the places are Gaza, Adullam, Beth-Horon, Aijalon, Gibeon, and Juda-Malech, in which Dr. Birch is probably correct in recognizing the sacred city of Jerusalem,-Malech being the word for royalty. Israel in Egypt The city of Tahpanhes, in Egypt, ,mentioned by Jeremiah as the place to which the refugees fled to escape from Nebuchadnezzar, was discovered in 1886 in the mound known as Tel Defenneh, in the northeastern portion of the delta, where Mr. Flinders Petrie found not only evidences of the destruction of the palace caused by Nebuchadnezzar, but apparently the very "brick work or pavement" spoken of in Jeremiah 43:8 : "Then came the word of the Lord unto Jeremiah in Tahpanhes, saying, Take great stones in thine hand, and hide them in mortar in the brickwork, which is at the entry of Pharaoh's house in Tahpanhes, in the sight of the men of Judah," adding that Nebuchadnezzar would "set his throne upon these stones," and "spread his royal pavilion over them." A brick platform in partial ruins, corresponding to this description, was found by Mr. Petrie adjoining the fort "upon the northwest." In every respect the arrangement corresponded to that indicated in the Book of Jeremiah. Farther to the north, not a great way from Tahpanhes, on the Tanitic branch of the Nile, at the modern village of San, excavations revealed the ancient Egyptian capital Tanis, which went under the earlier name of Zoan, where the Pharaoh of the oppression frequently made his headquarters. According to the Psalmist, it was in the field of "Zoan" that Moses and Aaron wrought their wonders before Pharaoh; and, according to the Book of Numbers, "Hebron" was built only seven years before Zoan. As Hebron was a place of importance before Abraham's time, it is a matter of much significance that Zoan appears to have been an ancient city which was a favorite dwelling-place of the Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings, who preceded the period of the Exodus, and were likely to be friendly to the Hebrews, thus giving greater credibility to the precise statements made in Numbers, and to the whole narrative of the reception of the patriarchs in Egypt. The Pharaoh of the Oppression, "who knew not Joseph," is generally supposed to be Rameses II., the third king of the nineteenth dynasty, known among the Greeks as Sesostris, one of the greatest of the Egyptian monarchs. Among his most important expeditions was one directed against the tribes of Palestine and Syria, where, at the battle of Kadesh, east of the Lebanon Mountains, he encountered the Hittites. The encounter ended practically in a drawn battle, after which a treaty of peace was made. But the whole state of things revealed by this campaign and subsequent events shows that Palestine was in substantially the same condition, of affairs which was found by the children of Israel when they occupied it shortly after, thus confirming the Scripture account. This Rameses during his reign of sixty-seven years was among the greatest builders of the Egyptian monarchs. It is estimated that nearly half of the extant temples Were built in his reign, among which are those at Karnak, Luxor, Abydos, Memphis, and Bubastis. The great Ramesseum at Thebes is also his work, and his name is found carved on almost every monument in Egypt. His oppression of the children of Israel was but an incident in his remarkable career. While engaged in his Asiatic campaigns he naturally made his headquarters at Bubastis, in the land of Goshen, near where the old canal and the present railroad turn off from the delta toward the Bitter Lakes and the Gulf of Suez. Here the ruins of the temple referred to are of immense extent and include the fragments of innumerable statues and monuments which bear the impress of the great oppressor. At length, also, his mummy has been identified; so that now we have a photograph of it which illustrates in all its lineaments the strong features of his character. The Store Cities of Pithom and Rameses But most interesting of all, in 1883, there were uncovered, a short distance east of Bubastis, the remains of vast vaults, which had evidently served as receptacles for storing grain preparatory to supplying military and other expeditions setting out for Palestine and the far East. Unwittingly, the engineers of the railroad had named the station Rameses. But from the inscriptions that were found it is seen that its original name was Pithom, and its founder was none other than Rameses II., and it proves to be the very place where it is said in the Bible that the children of Israel "built for Pharaoh store-cities, Pithom and Raamses" (Exodus 1:11), when the Egyptians "made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick." It was in connection with the building of these cities that the oppression of the children of Israel reached its climax, when they were compelled (after the straw with which the brick were held together failed) to gather for themselves stubble which should serve the purpose of straw, and finally, when even the stubble failed, to make brick without straw (Exodus 5). Now, as these store pits at Pithom were uncovered by Mr. Petrie, they were found (unlike anything else in Egypt) to be built with mortar. Moreover, the lower layers were built of brick which contained straw, while the middle layers were made of brick in which stubble, instead of straw, had been used in their formation, and the upper layers were of brick made without straw. A more perfect circumstantial confirmation of the Bible account could not be imagined. Every point in the confirmation consists of unexpected discoveries. The use of mortar is elsewhere unknown in Ancient Egypt, as is the peculiar succession in the quality of the brick used in the construction of the walls. Thus have all Egyptian explorations shown that the writer of the Pentateuch had such familiarity with the country, the civilization, and the history of Egypt as could have been obtained only by intimate, personal experience. The leaf which is here given is in its right place. It could not have been inserted except by a participant in the events, or by direct Divine revelation. The Hittites In Joshua 1:4, the country between Lebanon and the Euphrates is called the land of the Hittites. In 2 Samuel 24:6, according to the reading of the Septuagint, the limit of Joab's conquests was that of "the Hittites of Kadesh," which is in Coele Syria, some distance north of the Present Baalbeck. Solomon is also said to have imported horses from "the kings of the Hittites"; and when the Syrians were besieging Samaria, according to 2 Kings 7:6, they were alarmed from fear that the king of Israel had hired against them "the kings of the Hittites." These references imply the existence of a strong nation widely spread over the northern part of Syria and the regions beyond. At the same time frequent mention is made of Hittite families in Palestine itself. It was of a Hittite (Genesis 23:10) that Abraham bought his burying-place at Hebron. Bathsheba, the mother of Solomon, had been the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and Esau had two Hittite wives. Hittites are also mentioned as dwelling with the Jebusites and Amorites in the mountain region of Canaan. Until the decipherment of the inscriptions on the monuments of Egypt and Assyria, the numerous references in the Bible to this mysterious people were unconfirmed by any other historical authorities, so that many regarded the biblical statements as mythical, and an indication of the general untrustworthiness of biblical history. A prominent English biblical critic declared not many years ago that an alliance between Egypt and the Hittites was as improbable as would be one at the present time between England and the Choctaws. But, alas for the over-confident critic, recent investigations have shown, not only that such an alliance was natural, but that it actually occurred. From the monuments of Egypt we learn that Thothmes III of the eighteenth dynasty, in 1470 B.C., marched to the banks of the Euphrates and received tribute from "the Greater Hittites" to the amount of 3,200 pounds of silver and a "great piece of crystal." Seven years later tribute was again sent from "the king of the Greater Hittite land." Later, Amehophis III. and IV. are said, in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, to have been constantly called upon to aid in repelling the attacks of the Hittite king, who came down from the north and intrigued with the disaffected Canaanitish tribes in Palestine; while in B.C. 1343, Rameses the Great attempted to capture the Hittite capital at Kadesh, but was unsuccessful, and came near losing his life in the attempt, extricating himself from an ambuscade only by most heroic deeds of valor. Four years later a treaty of peace was signed between the Hittites and the Egyptians, and a daughter of the Hittite king was given in marriage to Rameses. The Assyrian monuments also bear abundant testimony to the prominence of the Hittites north and west of the Euphrates, of which the most prominent state was that with its capital at Carchemish, in the time of Tiglath-pileser I., about 1100 B.C. In 854 B.C. Shalmaneser II. Included the kings of Israel, of Ammon, and of the Arabs, among the "Hittite" princes whom he had subdued, thus bearing most emphatic testimony to the prominence which they assumed in his estimation. The cuneiform inscriptions of Armenia also speak of numerous wars with the Hittites, and describe "the land of the Hittites" as extending far westward from the banks of the Euphrates. Hittite sculptures and inscriptions are now traced in abundance from Kadesh, in Coele Syria, westward to Lydia, in Asia Minor, and northward to the Black Sea beyond Marsoran. Indeed, the extensive ruins of Boghaz- Keui, seventy-five miles southwest of Marsovan, seem to mark the principal capital of the Hittites. Here partial excavations have already revealed sculptures of high artistic order, representing deities, warriors and amazons, together with many hieroglyphs which have not yet been translated. The inscriptions are written in both directions, from left to right, and then below back from right to left. Similar inscriptions are found in numerous other places. No clue to their meaning has yet been found, and even the class of languages to which they belong has not been discovered. But enough is known to show that the Hittites exerted considerable influence upon the later civilization which sprung up in Greece and on the western coasts of Asia Minor. It was through them that the emblem of the winged horse made its way into Europe. The mural crown carved upon the head of some of the goddesses at Boghaz-Keui also passed into Grecian sculpture; while the remarkable lions sculptured over the gate at Mycenae are thought to represent Hittite, rather than Babylonian art. It is impossible to overestimate the value of this testimony in confirmation of the correctness of biblical history. It shows conclusively that the silence of profane historians regarding facts stated by the biblical writers is of small account, in face of direct statements made by the biblical historians. All the doubts entertained in former times concerning the accuracy of the numerous biblical statements concerning the Hittites is now seen to be due to our ignorance. It was pure ignorance, not superior knowledge, which led so many to discredit these representations. When shall we learn the inconclusiveness of negative testimony? The Tel El-Amarna Tablets In 1887 some Arabs discovered a wonderful collection of tablets at Tel el- Amarna, an obscure settlement on the east bank of the Nile, about two hundred miles above Cairo and about as far below Thebes. These tablets were of clay, which had been written over With cuneiform inscriptions, such as are found in Babylonia, and then burnt, so as to be indestructible. When at length the inscriptions were deciphered, it appeared that they were a collection of official letters, which had been sent shortly before 1300 B.C. to the last kings of the eighteenth dynasty. There were in all about three hundred letters, most of which were from officers of the Egyptian army scattered over Palestine to maintain the Egyptian rule which had been established by the preceding kings, most prominent of whom was Tahu-times III., who flourished about one hundred years earlier. But many of the letters were from the kings and princes of Babylonia. What surprised the world most, however, was that this correspondence was carried on, not in the hieroglyphic script of Egypt, but in the cuneiform script of Babylonia. All this was partly explained when more became known about the character of the Egyptian king to whom the letters were addressed. His original title was Amenhotep IV., indicating that he was a priest of the sun god who is worshiped at Thebes. But in his anxiety to introduce a religious reform he changed his name to Aken-Aten,-Aten being the name of the deity worshiped at Heliopolis, near Cairo, where Joseph got his wife. The efforts of Aken-Aten to transform the religious worship of Egypt were prodigious. The more perfectly to accomplish it, he removed his capital from Thebes to Tel el-Amarna, and there collected literary men and artists and architects in great numbers and erected temples and palaces, which, after being buried in the sand with all their treasures for more than three thousand years, were discovered by some wandering Arabs twenty-two years ago. A number of the longest and most interesting of the letters are those which passed between the courts of Egypt and those of Babylonia. It appears that not only did Aken-Aten marry a daughter of the Babylonian king, but his mother and grandmother were members of the royal family in Babylonia, and also that one of the daughters of the king of Egypt had been sent to Babylonia to become the wife of the king. All this comes out in the letters that passed back and forth relating to the dowry to be bestowed upon these daughters and relating to their health and welfare. From these letters we learn that, although the king of Babylon had sent his sister to be the wife, of the king of Egypt, that was not sufficient. The king of Egypt requested also the daughter of the king of Babylon. This led the king of Babylon to say that he did not know how his sister was treated; in fact, he did not know whether she was alive, for he could not tell whether or not to believe the evidence which came to him. In response, the king of Egypt wrote: "Why don't you send some one who knows your sister, and whom you can trust?" Whereupon the royal correspondents break off into discussions concerning the gifts which are to pass between the two in consideration of their friendship and intimate relations. Syria and Palestine were at this time also, as at the present day, infested by robbers, and the messengers passing between these royal houses were occasionally waylaid. Whereupon the one who suffered loss would claim damages from the other if it was in his territory, because he had not properly protected the, road. An interesting thing in connection with one of these robberies is that it took place at "Hannathon," one of the border towns mentioned in Joshua 19:14, but of which nothing else was ever known until it appeared in this unexpected manner. Most of the Tel el-Amarna letters, however, consist of those which were addressed to the king of Egypt (Amenhotep IV). by his officers who were attempting to hold the Egyptian fortresses in Syria and Palestine against various enemies who were pressing hard upon them. Among these were the Hittites, of whom we hear so much in later times, and who, coming down from the far north, were gradually extending their colonies into Palestine and usurping control over the northern part of the country. About sixty of the letters are from an officer named Ribaddi, who is most profuse in his expressions of humility and loyalty, addressing the king as "his lord" and "sun," and calling himself the "footstool of the king's feet," and saying that he "prostrates himself seven times seven times at his feet." He complains, however, that he is not properly supported in his efforts to defend the provinces of the king, and is constantly wanting more soldiers, more cavalry, more money, more provisions, more everything. So frequent are his importunities that the king finally tells him that if he will write less and fight more he would be better pleased, and that there would be more hopes of his maintaining his power. But Rib-addi says that he is being betrayed by the "curs" that are surrounding him, who represent the other countries that pretend to be friendly to Egypt, but are not. From this correspondence, and from letters from the south of Palestine, it is made plain that the Egyptian power was fast losing its hold of the country, thus preparing the way for the condition of things which prevailed a century or two later, when Joshua took possession of the promised land, and found no resistance except from a number of disorganized tribes then in possession. In this varied correspondence a large number of places are mentioned with which we are familiar in Bible history, among them Damascus, Sidon, Lachish, Ashkelon, Gaza, Joppa, and Jerusalem. Indeed, several of the letters are written from Jerusalem by one Abd-hiba, who complains that some one is slandering him to the king, charging that he was in revolt against his lord. This, he says, the king ought to know is absurd, from the fact that "neither my father nor my mother appointed me to this place. The strong arm of the king inaugurated me in my father's territory. Why should I commit an offense against my lord, the king?" The argument being that, as his office is not hereditary, but one which is held by the king's favor and appointment, his loyalty should be above question. A single one of these Jerusalem letters may suffice for an illustration: "To My Lord the King:-Abd-hiba, your servant. At the feet of my lord the king, seven and seven times I fall. Behold the deed which Milki-il and Suardata have done against the land of my lord the king-they have hired the soldiers of Gazri, of Gimti and of Kilti, and have taken the territory of Rubuti. The territory of the king is lost to Habiri. And now, indeed, a city of the territory of Jerusalem, called Bit-Ninib, one of the cities of the king, has been lost to the people of Kilti. Let the king listen to Abd-hiba, his servant, and send troops that I may bring back the king's land to the king. For if there are no troops, the land of the king will be lost to the Habiri. This is the deed of Suardata and Milki-il * * * (defective), and let the king take care of his land." The discovery of these Tel el-Amarna letters came like a flash of lightning upon the scholarly world. In this case the overturning of a few spadefuls of earth let in a flood of light upon the darkest portion of ancient history, and in every way confirmed the Bible story. As an official letter-writer, Rib-addi has had few equals, and he wrote on material which the more it was burned the longer it lasted. Those who think that a history of Israel could not have been written in Moses' time, and that, if written, it could not have been preserved, are reasoning without due knowledge of the facts. Considering the habits of the time, it would have been well nigh a miracle if Moses and his band of associates coming out of Egypt had not left upon imperishable clay tablets a record of the striking events through which they passed. Accuracy of Geographical Details Many persons doubtless wonder why it is that the Bible so abounds in "uninteresting" lists of names both of persons and places which seem to have no relation to modern times or current events. Such, however, will cease to wonder when they come to see the relation which these lists sustain to our confidence in the trustworthiness of the records containing them. They are like the water-marks in paper, which bear indelible evidence of the time and place of manufacture. If, furthermore, one should contemplate personal explorations in Egypt, Canaan, or Babylonia, he would find that for his purposes the most interesting and important portions of the Bible would be these very lists of the names of persons and places which seemed to encumber the historical books of the Old Testament. One of the most striking peculiarities of the Bible is the "long look" toward the permanent wants of mankind which is everywhere manifested in its preparation; so that it circulates best in its entirety. No man knows enough to abridge the Bible without impairing its usefulness. The parts which the reviser would cut out as superfluous are sure, very soon, to be found to be "the more necessary." If we find that we have not any use for any portion of the Bible, the reason doubtless is that we have not lived long enough, or have not had sufficiently wide experience to test its merits in all particulars. Gezer was an important place in Joshua's time, but it afterward became a heap of ruins, and its location was unknown until 1870, when M. Clermont-Ganneau discovered the site in Tel Jezer, and, on excavating it, found three inscriptions, which on interpretation read "Boundary of Gezer." Among the places conquered by Joshua one of the most important and difficult to capture was Lachish (Joshua 10:31). This has but recently been identified in Tel el-Hesy, about eighteen miles northeast of Gaza. Extensive excavations, first in 1890 by Dr. Flinders Petrie, and finally by Dr. Bliss, found a succession of ruins, one below the other, the lower foundations of which extended back to about 1700 B.C., some time before the period of conquest, showing at that time a walled city of great strength. In the debris somewhat higher than this there was found a tablet with cuneiform inscriptions corresponding to the Tel el-Amarna tablets, which are known to have been sent to Egypt from this region about 1400 B.C. At a later period, in the time of Sennacherib, Lachish was assaulted and taken by the Assyrian army, and the account of the siege forms one of the most conspicuous scenes on the walls of Sennacherib's palace in Nineveh. These sculptures are now in the British Museum. Among the places mentioned in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence from which letters were sent to Egypt about 1400 B.C., are Gebal, Beirut, Tyre, Accho (Acre), Hazor, Joppha, Ashkelon, Makkadah, Lachish, Gezer, Jerusalem; while mention is also made of Rabbah, Sarepta, Ashtaroth, Gaza, Gath, Bethshemesh, all of which are familiar names, showing that the Palestine of Joshua is the Palestine known to Egypt in the preceding century. Two hundred years before this (about 1600 B.C.) also, Thothmes III. conquered Palestine, and gives in an inscription the names of more than fifty towns which can be confidently identified with those in the Book of Joshua. Finally, the forty-two stations named in Numbers 33 as camping places for the children of Israel on their way to Palestine, while they cannot all of them be identified, can be determined in sufficient numbers to show that it is not a fictitious list, nor a mere pilgrim's diary, since the scenes of greatest interest, like the region immediately about Mount Sinai, are specially adapted to the great transactions which are recorded as taking place. Besides, it is incredible that a writer of fiction should have encumbered his pages with such a barren catalogue of places. But as part of the great historical movement they are perfectly appropriate. This conformity of newly discovered facts to the narrative of Sacred Scripture confirms our confidence in the main testimony; just as the consistency of a witness in a cross-examination upon minor and incidental points establishes confidence in his general testimony. The late Sir Walter Besant, in addition to his other literary and philanthropic labors, was for many years secretary of the Palestine Exploration Fund. In reply to the inquiry whether the work of the survey under his direction sustained the historical character of the Old Testament, he says: "To my mind, absolute truth in local details, a thing which cannot possibly be invented, when it is spread over a history covering many centuries, is proof almost absolute as to the truth of the things related." Such proof we have for every part of the Bible. The Fourteenth of Genesis The fourteenth chapter of Genesis relates that "In the days of Amraphel, king of Shinar, Arioch, king Of Ellasar, Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, and Tidal, king of Goiim (nations), they made war with Beta, king of Sodom, and with Bersha, king of Gomorrah, and Shinab, king of Admah, and Shemeber, king of Zeboim, and the king of Bela (the same is Zoar)." The Babylonian kings were successful and the region about the Dead Sea was subject to them for twelve years, when a rebellion was instigated and in the following year Chedorlaomer and the kings that were with him appeared on the scene and, after capturing numerous surrounding cities, joined battle with the rebellious allies in the vale of Siddim, which was full of slime pits. The victory of Chedorlaomer was complete, and after capturing Lot and his goods in Sodom he started homeward by way of Damascus, near which place Abraham overtook him, and by a successful stratagem scattered his forces by night and recovered Lot and his goods. This story, told with so many details that its refutation would be easy if it were not true to the facts and if there were contemporary records with which to compare it, has been a special butt for the ridicule of the Higher Critics of the Wellhausen school, Professor Noldeke confidently declaring as late as 1869 that criticism had forever disproved its claim to be historical. But here again the inscriptions on the monuments of Babylonia have come to the rescue of the sacred historian, if, indeed, he were in need of rescue. (For where general ignorance was so profound as it was respecting that period forty years ago, true modesty should have suggested caution in the expression of positive opinions in contradiction to such a detailed historical statement as this is). From the inscriptions already discovered and deciphered in the Valley of the Euphrates, it is now shown beyond reasonable doubt that the four kings mentioned in the Bible as joining in this expedition are not, as was freely said, "etymological inventions," but real historical persons. Amraphel is identified as the Hammurabi whose marvelous code of laws was so recently discovered by De Morgan at Susa. The "H" in the latter word simply expresses the rough breathing so well known in Hebrew. The "p" in the biblical name has taken the place of "b" by a well-recognized law of phonetic change. "Amrap" is equivalent to "Hamrab." The addition of "il" in the biblical name is probably the suffix of the divine name, like "el" in Israel. Hammurabi is now known to have had his capital at Babylon at the time of Abraham. Until recently this chronology was disputed, so that the editors and contributors of the New Schaff-Herzog Cyclopedia dogmatically asserted that as Abraham lived nearly 300 years later than Hammurabi, the biblical story must be unhistorical. Hardly had these statements been printed, however, when Dr. King of the British Museum discovered indisputable evidence that two of the dynasties which formerly had been reckoned as consecutive were, in fact, contemporaneous, thus making it easy to bring Hammurabi's time down exactly to that of Abraham. Chedorlaomer is pretty certainly identified as Kudur-Lagamar (servant of Lagamar, one of the principal Elamire gods). Kudur-Lagamar was king of Elam, and was either the father or the brother of Kudur-Mabug, whose son, Eri-Aku (Arioch), reigned over Larsa and Ur, and other cities of southern Babylonia. He speaks of Kudur-Mabug "as the father of the land of the Amorites," i.e., of Palestine and Syria. Tidal, "king of nations," was supposed by Dr. Pinches to be referred to on a late tablet in connection with Chedorlaomer and Arioch under the name Tudghula, who are said, together, to have "attacked and spoiled Babylon." However much doubt there may be about the identification of some of these names, the main points are established, revealing a condition of things just such as is implied by the biblical narrative. Arioch styles himself king of Shumer and Accad, which embraced Babylon, where Amraphel (Hammurabi) was in his early years subject to him. This furnishes a reason for the association of Chedorlaomer and Amraphel in a campaign against the rebellious subjects in Palestine. Again, Kudur-Mabug, the father of Arioch, styles himself "Prince of the land of Amurru," i.e., of Palestine and Syria. Moreover, for a long period before, kings from Babylonia had claimed possession of the whole eastern shore of the Mediterranean, including the Sinaitic Peninsula. In light of these well-attested facts, one reads with astonishment the following words of Wellhausen, written no longer ago than 1889: "That four kings from the Persian Gulf should, 'in the time of Abraham,' have made an incursion into the Sinaitic Peninsula, that they should on this occasion have attacked five kinglets on the Dead Sea Littoral and have carried them off prisoners, and finally that Abraham should have set out in pursuit of the retreating victors, accompanied by 318 men servants, and have forced them to disgorge their prey,-all these incidents are sheer impossibilities which gain nothing in credibility from the fact that they are placed in a world which had passed away." And we can have little respect for the logic of a later scholar (George Adam Smith), who can write the following: "We must admit that while archaeology has richly illustrated the possibility of the main outlines of the Book of Genesis from Abraham to Joseph, it has not one whir of proof to offer for the personal existence or the characters of the patriarchs themselves. This is the whole change archaeology has wrought; it has given us a background and an atmosphere for the stories of Genesis; it is unable to recall or certify their heroes." But the name Abraham does appear in tablets of the age of Hammurabi. (See Professor George Barton in Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 28, 1909, page 153). It is true that this evidently is not the Abraham of the Bible, but that of a small farmer who had rented land of a well-to-do land owner. The preservation of his name is due to the fact that the most of the tablets preserved contain contracts relating to the business of the times. There is little reason to expect that we should find a definite reference to the Abraham who in early life migrated from his native land. But it is of a good deal of significance that his name appears to have been a common one in the time and place of his nativity. In considering the arguments in the case, it is important to keep in mind that where so few facts are known, and general ignorance is so great, negative evidence is of small account, while every scrap of positive evidence has great weight. The burden of proof in such cases falls upon those who dispute the positive evidence. For example, in the article above referred to, Professor Barton argues that it is not "quite certain" that Arioch (Eri-Agn) was a real Babylonian king. But he admits that our ignorance is such that we must admit its "possibility." Dr. Barton further argues that "we have as yet no evidence from the inscriptions that Arad- Sin, even if he were called Iri-Agu, ever had anything to do with Hammurabi." But, he adds, "Of course, it is possible that he may have had, as their reigns must have overlapped, but that remains to be proved." All such reasoning (and there is any amount of it in the critics of the prevalent school) reveals a lamentable lack in their logical training. When we have a reputable document containing positive historical statements which are shown by circumstantial evidence to be possible, that is all we need to accept them as true. When, further, we find a great amount of circumstantial evidence positively showing that the statements conform to the conditions of time and place, so far as we know them, this adds immensely to the weight of the testimony. We never can fill in all the background of any historical fact. But if the statement of it fits into the background so far as we can fill it in, we should accept the fact until positive contrary evidence is produced. No supposition can he more extravagant than that which Professor Barton seems to accept (which is that of the German critic, Meyer) that a Jew, more than 1,000 years after the event, obtained in Babylon the amount of exact information concerning the conditions in Babylonia in Abraham's time, found in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, and interpolated the story of Chedorlaomer's expedition into the background thus furnished. To entertain such a supposition discredits the prevalent critical scholarship, rather than the Sacred Scriptures. But present space forbids further enumeration of particulars. It is sufficient to say that while many more positive confirmations of the seemingly improbable statements of the sacred historians can be adduced, there have been no discoveries which necessarily contravene their statements. The cases already here enumerated relate to such widely separated times and places, and furnish explanations so unexpected, yet natural, to difficulties that have been thought insuperable, that their testimony cannot be ignored or rejected. That this history should be confirmed in so many cases and in such a remarkable manner by monuments uncovered 3,000 years after their erection, can be nothing else than providential. Surely, God has seen to it that the failing faith of these later days should not be left to grope in darkness. When the faith of many was waning and many heralds of truth were tempted to speak with uncertain sound, the very stones have cried out with a voice that only the deaf could fail to hear. Both in the writing and in the preservation of the Bible we behold the handy-work of God. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 72: - THE RECENT TESTIMONY OF ARCHAEOLOGY... ======================================================================== The Recent Testimony of Archaeology to the Scriptures By M. G. Kyle, D. D., L. L. D., Egyptologist. Professor Of Biblical Archaeology, Xenia Theological Seminary. Consulting Editor of the Records of the Past, Washington, D.C. Introduction "Recent" is a dangerously capacious word to entrust to an archaeologist. Anything this side of the Day of Pentecost is "recent" in biblical archaeology. For this review, however, anything since 1904 is accepted to be, in a general way, the meaning of the word "recent." "Recent testimony of archaeology" may be either the testimony of recent discoveries or recent testimony of former discoveries. A new interpretation, if it be established to be a true interpretation, is a discovery. For to uncover is not always to discover; indeed, the real value of a discovery is not its emergence, but its significance, and the discovery of its real significance is the real discovery. The most important testimony to the Scriptures of this five-year archaeological period admits of some classification: 1. The Historical Setting of the Patriarchal Reception in Egypt. The reception in Egypt accorded to Abraham and to Jacob and his sons [Genesis 12:10-20; Genesis 13:1; Genesis 47:1-12] and the elevation of Joseph there [Genesis 41:14-46] peremptorily demand either the acknowledgment of a mythical element in the stories, or the belief in a suitable historical setting thereof. Obscure, insignificant, private citizens are not accorded such recognition at a foreign and unfriendly court. While some have been conceding a mythical element in the stories [Orr, "The Problem of the Old Testament," pp. 57-58, quoting Schultz, Wellhausen, Kuenen, W. R. Smith, G. B. Gray, H. P. Smith, F. H. Woods.], archaeology has uncovered to view such appropriate historical setting that the patriarchs are seen not to have been obscure, insignificant, private citizens, nor Zoan a foreign and unfriendly court. The presence of the Semitic tongue in Hyksos? territory has long been known [Brugsch, "Egypt under the Pharaohs," Broderick edition, Chap. VI. ]; from still earlier than patriarchal times until much later, the Phoenicians, first cousins of the Hebrews, did the foreign business of the Egyptians [Ibid.], as the English, the Germans, and the French do the foreign business of the Chinese of today; and some familiarity, even sympathy, with Semitic religion has been strongly suspected from the interview of the Hyksos kings with the patriarchs [Genesis 41:25-39]; but the discovery in 1906 [Petrie, "Hyksos and Israelite Cities."], by Petrie, of the great fortified camp at Tel-el-Yehudiyeh set at rest, in the main, the biblical question of the relation between the patriarchs and the Hyksos. The abundance of Hyksos scarabs and the almost total absence of all others mark the camp as certainly a Hyksos camp [Ibid, pp. 3 and 10, Plate IX ]; the original character of the fortifications, before the Hyksos learned the builders' craft from the Egyptians, shows them to have depended upon the bow for defense [Ibid, pp. 5-9. Plates II, III, IV]; and, finally, the name Hyksos, in the Egyptian Haq Shashu [Budge, "History of Egypt," Vol. III, pp. 137-138] "Bedouin princes," brings out, sharp and clear, the harmonious picture of which we have had glimpses for a long time, of the Hyksos as wandering tribes of the desert, of "Upper and Lower Ruthen" [Kyle, Recueil de Travaux, Vol. XXX, "Geographic and Ethnic Lists of Rameses II."] i.e., Syria and Palestine, northern and western Arabia, "Bow people" [Muller, "Asien und Europa." 2tes Kapitel], as the Egyptians called them, their traditional enemies as far back as pyramid times. [Ibid] Why, then, should not the patriarchs have had a royal reception in Egypt? They were themselves also the heads of wandering tribes of "Upper and Lower Ruthen," in the tongue of the Egyptians, Haq Shashu, "Bedouin princes"; and among princes, a prince is a prince, however small his principality. So Abraham, the Bedouin prince, was accorded princely consideration at the Bedouin court in Egypt; Joseph, the Bedouin slave, became again the Bedouin prince when the wisdom of God with him and his rank by birth became known. And Jacob and his other sons were welcome, with all their followers and their wealth, as a valuable acquisition to the court party, always harassed by the restive and rebellious native Egyptians. This does not prove racial identity between the Hyksos and the patriarchs, but very close tribal relationship. And thus every suspicion of a mythical element in the narrative of the reception accorded the patriarchs in Egypt disappears when archaeology has testified to the true historical setting. 2. The Hittite Vindication A second recent testimony of archaeology gives us the great Hittite vindication. The Hittites have been, in one respect, the Trojans of Bible history; indeed, the inhabitants of old Troy were scarcely more in need of a Schliemann to vindicate their claim to reality than the Hittites of a Winckler. In 1904 one of the foremost archaeologists of Europe said to me: "I do not believe there ever were such people as the Hittites, and I do not believe 'Kheta' in the Egyptian inscriptions was meant for the name Hittites." We will allow that archaeologist to be nameless now. But the ruins of Troy vindicated the right of her people to a place in real history, and the ruins of Boghatz-Koi bid fair to afford a more striking vindication of the Bible representation of the Hittites. Only the preliminary announcement of Winckler's great treasury of documents from Boghatz-Koi has yet been made [Winckler, O. L. Z., December 15, 1906]. The complete unfolding of a long-eclipsed great national history is still awaited impatiently. But enough has been published to redeem this people completely from their half-mythical plight, and give them a firm place in sober history greater than imagination had ever fancied for them under the stimulus of any hint contained in the Bible. There has been brought to light a Hittite empire [Ibid] in Asia Minor, with central power and vassal dependencies round about and with treaty rights on equal terms with the greatest nations of antiquity, thus making the Hittite power a third great power with Babylonia and Egypt, as was, indeed, foreshadowed in the great treaty of the Hittites with Rameses II., inscribed on the projecting wing of the south wall of the Temple of Amon at Karnak [Bouriant, Recueil de Travaux, Vol. XIII, pp. 15 ff.; Budge, "History of Egypt," Vol. V, pp. 48 ff.; Good- win, "Records of the Past," 1st Series, Vol. IV, pp. 25 ff.], though Rameses tried so hard to obscure the fact. The ruins at the village of Boghatz-Koi are shown also to mark the location of the Hittite capital [Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatischen Gesselschaft: 1902, p. 5. Muller, Recueil de Travaux, Vol. VIII, 126 ff. Budge, "History of Egypt," V, 30 ff.], and the unknown language on the cuneiform tablets recovered there to be the Hittite tongue [Winckler, O. L. Z., December 15, 1906. [Sonderabzug, p. 15].], while the cuneiform method of writing, as already upon the Amarna tablets [Ibid. [Sonderabzug, p. 22]], so still more clearly here, is seen to have been the diplomatic script, and in good measure the Babylonian to have been the diplomatic language of the Orient in that age [Conder. "Tel Amarna Tablets." Budge, "History of Egypt," Vol. IV, pp.184-241.]. And the large admixture of Babylonian words and forms in these Hittite inscriptions opens the way for the real decipherment of the Hittite language [Winckler, O. L. Z., December 15, 1906. Sonderabzug.], and imagination can scarcely promise too much to our hopes for the light which such a decipherment will throw upon the historical and cultural background of the Bible. Only one important point remains to be cleared up, the relation between the Hittite language of these cuneiform tablets and the language of the Hittite hieroglyphic inscription [Messersmidt, Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatischen Ges-selchaft; Corpus, Unscrip. Het.-1902]. That these were identical is probable; that the hieroglyphic inscriptions represent an older form of the language, a kind of "Hieratic," is possible; that it was essentially different from the language of these tablets is improbable. There has been the Hittite vindication; the complete illumination of Hittite history is not likely to be long delayed. 3. The Palestinian Civilization Other recent testimony of archaeology brings before us the Palestinian civilization of the conquest period. Palestinian explorations within the last few years have yielded a startling array of "finds" illustrating things mentioned in the Bible, finds of the same things, finds of like things, and finds in harmony with things [Vincent, "Canaan."] Individual mention of them all is here neither possible nor desirable. Of incomparably greater importance than these individually interesting relics of Canaanite antiquity is the answer afforded by recent research to two questions: 1. First in order, Does the Canaanite culture as revealed by the excavations accord with the story of Israel at the conquest as related in the Bible? How much of a break in culture is required by the Bible account, and how much is revealed by the excavations? For answer, we must find a standpoint somewhere between that of the dilettante traveler in the land of the microscopic scientist thousands of miles away. The careful excavator in the field occupies that sane and safe middle point of view. Petrie [Petrie, "Lachish."], Bliss [Bliss, "A Mound of Many Cities."], Macalister [Macalister, "Bible Side Lights from the Mound of Gezer."], Schumacker [Schumacker, "Excavations at Megiddo."] and Sellin [Sellin, Tel-Taannek, "Denkschriften der Kaiserlichen Akademie in Wien."]-these are the men with whom to stand. And for light on the early civilization of Palestine, the great work of Macalister at Gezer stands easily first. Historical Value of Pottery In determining this question of culture, too much importance has been allowed to that estimate of time and chronological order which is gained exclusively from the study of pottery. The pottery remains are not to be undervalued, and neither are they to be overvalued. Time is only one thing that shows itself in similarity or dissimilarity in pottery. Different stages of civilization at different places at the same time, and adaptation to an end either at the same time or at widely different times, show themselves in pottery, and render very uncertain any chronological deduction. And, still more, available material may result in the production of similar pots. Pottery in two very different civilizations arising one thousand years or more apart. This civilization of pots, as a deciding criterion, is not quite adequate, and is safe as a criterion at all only when carefully compared with the testimony of location, intertribal relations, governmental domination, and literary attainments. These are the things, in addition to the pots, which help to determine-indeed, which do determine how much of a break in culture is required by the Bible account of the Conquest, and how much is shown by excavations. Since the Israelites occupied the cities and towns and vineyards and olive orchards of the Canaanites, and their "houses full of all good things" [Deuteronomy 6:10-11; Joshua 24:13; Nehemiah 9:25.], had the same materials and in the main the same purposes for pottery and would adopt methods of cooking suited to the country, spoke the "language of Canaan" [Isaiah 19:18.], and were of the same race as many of the people of Canaan, intermarried, though against their law [Ezekiel 16:44-46; Deuteronomy 7:3.], with the people of the land, and were continually chided for lapses into the idolatry and superstitious practices of the Canaanites [Judges 2:11-15; Judges 3:7; Judges 8:33-35; Judges 18:30-31.], and, in short, were greatly different from them only in religion, it is evident that the only marked, immediate change to be expected at the Conquest is a change in religion, and that any other break in culture occasioned by the devastation of war will be only a break in continuance of the same kind of culture, evidence of demolition, spoliation, and reconstruction. Exactly such change in religion and interruption in culture at the Conquest period excavations show. Religion and Culture (a) The rubbish at Gezer shows history in distinct layers, and the layers themselves are in distinct groups [Macalister, Q. S., 1903, pp, 8-9,49.]. At the bottom are layers Canaanite, not Semitic; above these, layers Semitic, Amorite giving place to Jewish; and higher still, layers of Jewish culture of the monarchy and later times. (b) The closing up of the great tunnel to the spring within the fortifications at Gezer is placed by the layers of history in the rubbish heaps at the period of the Conquest [Macalister, Q. S., 1908, p. 17.] But when a great fortification is so ruined and the power it represents so destroyed that it loses sight of its water-supply, surely the culture of the time has had an interruption, though it be not much changed. Then this tunnel, as a great engineering feat, is remarkable testimony to the advanced state of civilization at the time of its construction; but the more remarkable the civilization it represents, the more terrible must have been the disturbance of the culture which caused it to be lost and forgotten [Vincent, in Q. S., 1908, p. 228.]. (c) Again, there is apparent an enlargement of the populated area of the city of Gezer by encroaching upon the Temple area at the period of the Conquest [Macalister, Q. S., 1903, p. 49.], showing at once the crowding into the city of the Israelites without the destruction of the Canaanites, as stated in the Bible, and a corresponding decline in reverence for the sacred enclosure of the High Place. While, at a time corresponding to the early period of the Monarchy [ Ibid.], there is a sudden decrease of the populated area corresponding to the destruction of the Canaanites in the city by the father of Solomon's Egyptian wife [1 Kings 9:16.]. (d) Of startling significance, the hypothetical Musri Egypt in North Arabia, concerning which it has been said [Winckler, Orientalistische Forschungen, Series I, pp. 24-41.]the patriarchs descended thereto, the Israelites escaped from there, and a princess thereof Solomon married, has been finally and definitely discredited. For Gezer was a marriage dower of that princess whom Solomon married [1 Kings 9:16.], a portion of her father's dominion, and so a part of the supposed Musri, if it ever existed, and if so, at Gezer, then, we should find some evidence of this people and their civilization. Of such there is not a trace. But, instead, we find from very early times, but especially at this time, Egyptian remains in great abundance [Macalister, Q. S., 1903, p. 309.]. (e) Indeed, even Egyptian refinement and luxuries were not incongruous in the Palestine of the Conquest period. The great rock-hewn, and rock-built cisterns at Taannek [Sellin, "Tel-Taannek," p. 92.], the remarkable engineering on the tunnel at Gezer [Macalister, Q. S., 1908, Jan.-Apr.], the great forty-foot city wall in an Egyptian picture of Canaanite war [Petrie, "Deshasha," Plate IV.], the list of richest Canaanite booty given by Thothmes III [Birch, "Records of the Past," 1st Series, Vol. II, pp. 35-52, "Battle of Megiddo." Also Lepsius, "Denkmaler." Abth. III. B1. 32, 31st, 30th, 30B, "Auswahl," XII, L. 42-45.], the fine ceramic and bronze utensils and weapons recovered from nearly every Palestinian excavation [Macalister-Vincent, Q. S., 1898-08.], and the literary revelations of the Amarna tablets [ Budge, "History of Egypt," Vol. IV, pp. 184-241.], together with the reign of law seen by a comparison of the scriptural account with the Code of Hammurabi, show [Gen 21-38. King, "Code of Hammurabi."] Canaanite civilization of that period to be fully equal to that of Egypt. (f) Then the Bible glimpses of Canaanite practices and the products of Canaanite religion now uncovered exactly agree. The mystery of the High Place of the Bible narrative, with its sacred caves, lies bare at Gezer and Taannek. The sacrifice of infants, probably first-born, and the foundation and other sacrifices of children, either infant or partly grown, appear in all their ghastliness in various places at Gezer and "practically all over the hill" at Taannek [Macalister, Q. S., 1903, ff., and "Bible Side Lights," Chap. III. Also Sellin, "Tel-Taannek," pp. 96-97.]. (g) But the most remarkable testimony of archaeology of this period is to the Scripture representations of the spiritual monotheism of Israel in its conflict with the horrible idolatrous polytheism of the Canaanites, the final overthrow of the latter and the ultimate triumph of the former. The history of that conflict is as plainly written at Gezer in the gradual decline of the High Place and giving way of the revolting sacrifice of children to the bowl and lamp deposit as it is in the inspired account of Joshua, Judges and Samuel. And the line that marks off the territory of divine revelation in religion from the impinging heathenism round about is as distinct as that line off the coast of Newfoundland where the cold waters of the North beat against the warm life-giving flow of the Gulf Stream. The revelation of the spade in Palestine is making to stand out every day more clearly the revelation that God made. There is no evidence of a purer religion growing up out of that vile culture, but rather of a purer religion coming down and overwhelming it. 2. Another and still more important question concerning Palestine civilization is, What was the source and course of the dominant civilization and especially the religious culture reflected in the Bible account of the millennium preceding and the millennium succeeding the birth of Abraham? Was it from without toward Canaan or from Canaan outward? Did Palestine in her civilization and culture of those days, in much or in all, but reflect Babylonia, or was she a luminary? Palestine and Babylonia The revision of views concerning Palestinian civilization forced by recent excavations at once puts a bold interrogation point to the opinion long accepted by many of the source and course of religious influence during this formative period of patriarchal history, and the time of the working out of the principles of Israel's religion into the practices of Israel's life. If the Palestinian civilization during this period was equal to that of Egypt, and so certainly not inferior to that of Babylonia, then the opinion that the flow of religious influence was then from Babylonia to Palestine must stand for its defense. Here arises the newest problem of biblical archaeology. And one of the most expert cuneiform scholars of the day, Albert T.Clay [Clay, "Amurru, The Home of the Northern Semites."], has essayed this problem and announces a revolutionary solution of it by a new interpretation of well-known material as well as the interpretation of newly acquired material. The solution is nothing less, indeed, than that instead of the source of religious influence being Babylonia, and its early course from Babylonia into Palestine, exactly the reverse is true, "That the Semitic Babylonian religion is an importation from Syria and Palestine [Amurru], that the creation, deluge, antediluvian patriarchs, etc., of the Babylonian Came from Amurru, instead of the Hebraic stories having Come from Babylonia, as held by nearly all Semitic scholars." This is startling and far reaching in its consequences. Clay's work must be put to the test; and so it will be, before it can be finally accepted. It has, however, this initial advantage, that it is in accord with the apparent self consciousness of the Scripture writers and, as we have seen, exactly in the direction in which recent discoveries in Palestinian civilization point. 4. Palestine and Egypt Again archaeology has of late furnished illumination of certain special questions of both Old and New Testament criticism. 1. "Light from Babylonia" by L. W. King [King, "Chronology of the First Three Babylonian Dynasties."] of the British Museum on the chronology of the first three dynasties helps to determine the date of Hammurabi, and so of Abraham's call and of the Exodus, and, indeed, has introduced a corrective element into the chronology of all subsequent history down to the time of David and exerts a far-reaching influence upon many critical questions in which the chronological element is vital. Sacrifice in Egypt 2. The entire absence from the offerings of old Egyptian religion of any of the great Pentateuchal ideas of sacrifice, substitution, atonement, dedication, fellowship, and, indeed, of almost every essential idea of real sacrifice, as clearly established by recent very exhaustive examination of the offering scenes [Kyle, Recueil de Travaux. "Egyptian Sacrifices." Vol. XXVII, "Further Observations," Vol. XXXI. Bibliotheca Sacra, Apr., 1905, pp. 323-336.], makes for the element of revelation in the Mosaic system by delimiting the field of rationalistic speculation on the Egyptian side. Egypt gave nothing to that system, for she had nothing to give. The Future Life in the Pentateuch 3. Then the grossly materialistic character of the Egyptian conception of the other world and of the future life, and the fact, every day becoming clearer, that the so-called and so-much-talked-about resurrection in the belief of the Egyptians was not a resurrection at all, but a resuscitation to the same old life on "oxen, geese, bread, wine, beer, and all good things," is furnishing a most complete solution of the problem of the obscurity of the idea of the resurrection in the Pentateuchal documents. For, whether they came from Moses when he had just come from Egypt or are by some later author attributed to Moses, when he had just come from Egypt; the problem is the same: Why is the idea of the resurrection so obscure in the Pentateuch? Now to have put forth in revelation the idea of the resurrection at that time, before the growth of spiritual ideas of God and of worship here, of the other world and the future life there, and before the people under the influence of these new ideas had outgrown their Egyptian training, would have carried over into Israel's religious thinking all the low, degrading materialism of Egyptian belief on this subject. The Mosaic system made no use of Egyptian belief concerning the future life because it was not by it usable, and it kept away from open presentation of the subject altogether, because that was the only way to get the people away from Egypt's conception of the subject. Wellhausen's Mistake 4. The discovery of the Aramaic papyri at Syene [Margoliouth, "Expository Times," December, 1907. Josephus, "Antiquities," 11:7; Deadorus Siculus: Sec. 3; 17-35. Nehemiah 13:28; Nehemiah 12:22; Nehemiah 12:2 Esdras 5:14.] made possible a new chapter in Old Testament criticism, raised to a high pitch hopes for contemporary testimony on Old Testament history which hitherto hardly dared raise their heads, and contributed positive evidence on a number of important points. Tolerable, though not perfect, identifications are made out for Bagoas, Governor of the Jews; of Josephus and Diodorus; Sanballat, of Nehemiah and Josephus; and Jochanan, of Nehemiah and Josephus. But more important than all these identifications is the information that the Jews had, at that period, built a temple and offered sacrifice far from Jerusalem. Wellhausen [Wellhausen, Ency. Brit., Vol. 18, p. 509.] lays down the first stone of the foundation of his Pentateuchal criticism in these words: "The returning exiles were thoroughly imbued with the ideas of Josiah's reformation and had no thought of worshiping except in Jerusalem. It cost them no sacrifice of their feelings to leave the ruined High Places un-rebuilt. From this date, all Jews understood, as a matter of course, that the one God had only one sanctuary." So much Wellhausen. But here is this petition of the Jews at Syene in the year 407 B.C. after Nehemiah's return declaring that they had built a temple there and established a system of worship and of sacrifices, and evidencing also that they expected the approval of the Jews at Jerusalem in rebuilding that temple and re-establishing that sacrificial worship, and, what is more, received from the governor of the Jews permission so to do, a thing which, had it been opposed by the Jews at Jerusalem was utterly inconsistent with the Jewish policy of the Persian Empire in the days of Nehemiah. New Testament Greek 5. Then the re-dating of the Hermetic writings [Petrie, "Personal Religion in Egypt Before Christianity."] whereby they are thrown back from the Christian era to 500-300 B.C. opens up a completely new source of critical material for tracing the rise and progress of theological terms in the Alexandrian Greek of the New Testament. In a recent letter from Petrie, who has written a little book on the subject, he sums up the whole case, as he sees it, in these words: "My position simply is that the current religious phrases and ideas of the B.C. age must be grasped in order to understand the usages of religious language in which the New Testament is written. And we Can never know the real motive of New Testament writings until we know how much is new thought and how much is current theology in terms of which the Eu-angelos is expressed." Whether or not all the new dates for the writings shall be permitted to stand, and Petrie's point of view be justified, a discussion of the dates and a critical examination of the Hermetic writings from the standpoint of their corrected dates alone can determine; but it is certain that the products of the examination cannot but be far-reaching in their influence and in the illumination of the teachings of Christ and the Apostles. 5. Identifications Last and more generally, of recent testimony from archaeology to Scripture we must consider the identification of places, peoples, and events of the Bible narrative. For many years archaeologists looked up helplessly at the pinholes in the pediment of the Parthenon, vainly speculating about what might have been the important announcement in bronze once fastened at those pinholes. At last an ingenious young American student carefully copied the pinholes; and from a study of the collocation divined at last the whole imperial Roman decree once fastened there. So, isolated identification of peoples, places, and events in the Bible may not mean so much; however startling their character, they may be, after all, only pinholes in the mosaic of Bible history, but the collocation of these identifications, when many of them have been found, indicates at last the whole pattern of the mosaic. Now the progress of important identifications has of late been very rapid. It will suffice only to mention those which we have already studied for their intrinsic importance together with the long list of others within recent years. In 1874, Clermont-Ganneau discovered one of the boundary stones of Gezer [Clermont-Ganneau in "Bible Side Lights," p. 22.] , at which place now for six years Mr. R. A. Stewart Macalister has been uncovering the treasures of history of that Levitical city [Macalister, "Bible Side Lights." Also Q. S., 1902-09.]; in 1906, Winckler discovered the Hittites at their capital city; in 1904-1905, Schumacker explored Megiddo; in 1900-1902, Sellin, Taannek; Jericho has now been accurately located by Sellin and the foundations of her walls laid bare; the Edomites, long denied existence in patriarchal times, have been given historical place in the time of Meremptah by the papyrus Anastasia [Muller, "Asien und Europa."]; Moab, for some time past in dispute, I identified beyond further controversy at Luxor in 1908, in an inscription of Rameses II., before the time of the Exodus [Kyle, Recueil de Travaux, Vol. XXX. "Ethnic and Geographical Lists of Rameses II."]; while Hilprecht at Nippur [Hilprecht, "Explorations in Babylonia."], Glaser in Arabia [Weber, Forschungsreisen-Edouard Glaser; also "Studien zur Sudarabischen Altertumskunde," Weber.], Petrie at Maghereh and along the route of the Exodus [Petrie, "Researches in Sinai."], and Reisner at Samaria have been adding a multitude of geographical, ethnographical and historical identifications. The completion of the whole list of identifications is rapidly approaching, and the collocation of these identifications has given us anew, from entirely independent testimony of archaeology, the whole outline of the biblical narrative and its surroundings, at once the necessary material for the historical imagination and the surest foundation of apologetics. Fancy for a moment that the peoples, places and events of the wanderings of Ulysses should be identified: all the strange route of travel followed; the remarkable lands visited and described, the curious creatures, half human and half monstrous, and even unmistakable traces of strange events, found, all just as the poet imagined, what a transformation in our views of Homer's great epic must take place! Henceforth that romance would be history. Let us reverse the process and fancy that the peoples, places, and events of the Bible story were as little known from independent sources as the wanderings of Ulysses; the intellectual temper of this age would unhesitatingly put the Bible story in the same mythical category in which have always been the romances of Homer. If it were possible to blot out biblical geography, biblical ethnology, and biblical history from the realm of exact knowledge, so would we put out the eyes of faith, henceforth our religion would be blind, stone blind. Thus the value of the rapid progress of identifications appears. It is the identifications which differentiate history from myth, geography from the "land of nowhere," the record of events from tales of "never was," Scripture from folk-lore, and the Gospel of the Saviour of the world from the delusions of hope. Every identification limits by so much the field of historical criticism. When the progress of identification shall reach completion, the work of historical criticism will be finished. Conclusion The present status of the testimony from archaeology to Scripture, as these latest discoveries make it to be, may be pointed out in a few words. Not Evolution 1. The history of civilization as everywhere illuminated is found to be only partially that of the evolutionary theory of early Israelite history, but very exactly that of the biblical narrative; that is to say, this history, like all history sacred or profane, shows at times, for even a century or two, steady progress, but the regular, orderly progress from the most primitive state of society toward the highest degree of civilization, which the evolutionary theory imperatively demands, if it fulfill its intended mission, fails utterly. The best ancient work at Taannek is the earliest. From the cave dwellers to the city builders at Gezer is no long, gentle evolution; the early Amorite civilization leaps with rapid strides to the great engineering feats on the defenses and the water-works. Wherever it has been possible to institute comparison between Palestine and Egypt, the Canaanite civilization in handicraft, art, engineering, architecture, and education has been found to suffer only by that which climate, materials and location impose; in genius and in practical execution it is equal to that of Egypt, and only eclipsed, before Graeco-Roman times, by the brief glory of the Solomonic period. Harmony with Scripture 2. When we come to look more narrowly at the details of archaeological testimony, the historical setting thus afforded for the events of the Bible narrative is seen to be exactly in harmony with the narrative. This is very significant of the final outcome of research in early Bible history. Because views of Scripture must finally square with the results of archaeology; that is to say, with contemporaneous history, and the archaeological testimony of these past five years well indicates the present trend toward the final conclusion. The Bible narrative plainly interpreted at its face value is everywhere being sustained, while, of the great critical theories proposing to take Scripture recording events of that age at other than the face value, as the illiteracy of early Western Semitic people, the rude nomadic barbarity of Palestine and the Desert in the patriarchal age, the patriarchs not individuals but personifications, the Desert "Egypt," the gradual invasion of Palestine, the naturalistic origin of Israel's religion, the inconsequence of Moses as a law-giver, the late authorship of the Pentateuch, and a dozen others, not a single One is being definitely supported by the results of archaeological research. Indeed, reconstructing criticism hardly finds it worth while, for the most part, to look to archaeology for support. The recent testimony of archaeology to Scripture, like all such testimony that has gone before, is definitely and uniformly favorable to the Scriptures at their face value, and not to the Scriptures as reconstructed by criticism. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 73: - SCIENCE AND CHRISTIAN FAITH ======================================================================== Science and Christian Faith By Professor James Orr, D.D., United Free Church College, Glasgow, Scotland In many quarters the belief is industriously circulated that the advance of "science," meaning by this chiefly the physical sciences-astronomy, geology, biology, and the like has proved damaging, if not destructive, to the claims of the Bible, and the truth of Christianity. Science and Christianity are pitted against each other. Their interests are held to be antagonistic. Books are written, like Draper's "Conflict Between Religion and Science," White's "Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom," and Foster's "Finality of the Christian Religion," to show that this warfare between science and religion has ever been going on, and can never in the nature of things cease till theology is destroyed, and science holds sole sway in men's minds. This was not the attitude of the older investigators of science. Most of these were devout Christian men. Naville, in his book, "Modern Physics," has shown that the great discoverers in science in past times were nearly always devout men. This was true of Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, and Newton; it was true of men like Faraday, Brewster, Kelvin, and a host of others in more recent times. The late Professor Tait, of Edinburgh, writing in "The International Review," said: "The assumed incompatibility of religion and science has been so often and confidently asserted in recent times that it has come * * * to be taken for granted by the writers of leading articles, etc., and it is, of course, perpetually thrust before their too trusting readers. But the whole thing is a mistake, and a mistake so grave that no truly scientific man * * * runs, in Britain, at least, the smallest risk of making it. * * * With a few, and these very singular exceptions, the truly scientific men and true theologians of the present day have not found themselves under the necessity of quarrelling." The late Professor G. J. Romanes has, in his "Thoughts on Religion," left the testimony that one thing which largely influenced him in his return to faith was the fact that in his own university of Cambridge nearly all the men of most eminent scientific attainments were avowed Christians. "The curious thing," he says, "is that all the most illustrious names were ranged on the side of orthodoxy. Sir W. Manson, Sir George Stokes, Professors Tait, Adams, Clerk Maxwell, and Bayley-not to mention a number of lesser lights, such as Routte, Todhunter, Ferrers, etc.,-were all avowed Christians" (page 137). It may be held that things are now changed. To some extent this is perhaps true, but anyone who knows the opinions of our leading scientific men is aware that to accuse the majority of being men of unchristian or unbelieving sentiment is to utter a gross libel. If by a conflict of science and religion is meant that grievous mistakes have often been made, and unhappy misunderstandings have arisen, on one side and the other, in the Course of the progress of science,-that new theories and discoveries, as in astronomy and geology, have been looked on with distrust by those who thought that the truth of the Bible was being affected by them,-that in some cases the dominant church sought to stifle the advance of truth by persecution,-this is not to be denied. It is an unhappy illustration of how the best of men can at times err in matters which they imperfectly understand, or where their prejudices and traditional ideas are affected. But it proves nothing against the value of the discoveries themselves, or the deeper insight into the ways of God of the men who made them, or of real contradiction between the new truth and the essential teaching of the Scriptures. On the contrary, as a minority generally perceived from the first, the supposed disharmony with the truths of the Bible was an unreal one, early giving way to better understanding on both sides, and finally opening up new vistas in the contemplation of the Creator's power, wisdom, and majesty. It is never to be forgotten, also, that the error was seldom all on one side; that science, too, has in numberless cases put forth its hasty and unwarrantable theories and has often had to retract even its truer speculations within limits which brought them into more perfect harmony with revealed truth. If theology has resisted novelties of science, it has often had good reason for so doing. It is well in any case that this alleged conflict of Christianity with science should be carefully probed, and that it should be seen where exactly the truth lies in regard to it. 1. Science and Law-Miracle It is perhaps more in its general outlook on the world than in its specific results that science is alleged to be in conflict with the Bible and Christianity. The Bible is a record of revelation. Christianity is a supernatural system. Miracle, in the sense of a direct entrance of God in word and deed into human history for gracious ends, is of the essence of it. On the other hand, the advance of science has done much to deepen the impression of the universal reign of natural law. The effect has been to lead multitudes whose faith is not grounded in direct spiritual experience to look askance on the whole idea of the supernatural. God, it is assumed, has His own mode of working, and that is by means of secondary agencies operating in absolutely uniform ways; miracles, therefore, cannot be admitted. And, since miracles are found in Scripture,-since the entire Book rests on the idea of a supernatural economy of grace,-the whole must be dismissed as in conflict with the modern mind. Professor G. B. Foster goes so far as to declare that a man can hardly be intellectually honest who in these days professes to believe in the miracles of the Bible. It is overstating the case to speak of this repugnance to miracle, and rejection of it in the Bible, as if it were really new. It is as old as rationalism itself. You find it in Spinoza, in Reimarus, in Strauss, in numberless others. DeWette and Vatke, among earlier Old Testament critics, manifested it as strongly as their followers do now, and made it a pivot of their criticism. It governed the attacks on Christianity made in the age of the deists. David Hume wrote an essay against miracles which he thought had settled the question forever. But, seriously considered, can this attack on the idea of miracle, derived from our experience of the uniformity of nature's laws, be defended? Does it not in itself involve a huge assumption, and run counter to experience and common sense? The question is one well worth asking. First, what is a miracle? Various definitions might be given, but it will be enough to speak of it here as any effect in nature, or deviation pore its ordinary course, due to the interposition of a supernatural cause. It is no necessary part, it should be observed, of the Biblical idea of miracle, that natural agencies should not be employed as far as they will go. If the drying of the Red Sea to let the Israelites pass over was due in part to a great wind that blew, this was none the less of God's ordering, and did not detract from the Supernatural character of the event as a whole. It was still at God's command that the waters were parted, and that a way was made at that particular time and place for the people to go through. These are what theologians call "providential" miracles, in which, so far as one can see, natural agencies, under divine direction, suffice to produce the result. There is, however, another and more conspicuous class, the instantaneous cleansing of the leper, e.g., or the raising of the dead, in which natural agencies are obviously altogether transcended. It is this class about which the chief discussion goes on. They are miracles in the stricter sense of a complete transcendence of nature's laws. What, in the next place, is meant by the uniformity of nature? There are, of course, laws of nature-no one disputes that. It is quite a mistake to suppose that the Bible, though not written in the twentieth century, knows nothing of a regular order and system of nature. The world is God's world; it is established by His decree; He has given to every creature its nature, its bounds, its limits; all things continue according to His ordinances (Psalms 119:91). Only, law in the Bible is never viewed as having an independent existence. It is always regarded as an expression of the power or wisdom of God. And this gives the right point of view for considering the relation of law to miracle. What, to begin with, do we mean by a "law" of nature? It is, as science will concede, only our registered observation of the order in which we find causes and events linked together in our experience. That they are so linked no one questions. If they were not, we should have no world in which we could live at all. But then, next, what do we mean by "uniformity" in this connection? We mean no more than this-that, given like causes, operating under like conditions, like effects will follow. Quite true; no one denies this either. But then, as J. S. Mill, in his Logic, pointed out long ago, a miracle in the strict sense is not a denial of either of these truths. A miracle is not the assertion that, the same causes operating, a different result is produced. It is, on the contrary, the assertion that a new cause has intervened, and this a cause which the theists cannot deny to be a vera causa-the will and power of God. Just as, when I lift my arm, or throw a stone high in the air, I do not abolish the law of gravitation but counteract or overrule its purely natural action by the introduction of a new spiritual force; so, but in an infinitely higher way, is a miracle due to the interposition of the First Cause of all, God Himself. What the scientific man needs to prove to establish his objection to miracle is, not simply that natural causes operate uniformly, but that no other than natural causes exist; that natural causes exhaust all the causation in the universe. And that, we hold, he can never do. It is obvious from what has now been said that the real question at issue in miracle is not natural law, but Theism. It is to be recognized at once that miracle can only profitably be discussed on the basis of a theistic view of the universe. It is not disputed that there are views of the universe which exclude miracle. The atheist cannot admit miracle, for he has no God to work miracles. The pantheist cannot admit miracle, for to him God and nature are one. The deist cannot admit miracle, for he has separated God and the universe so far that he can never bring them together again. The question is not, Is miracle possible on an atheistic, a materialistic, a pantheistic, view of the world, but, Is it possible on a theistic view-on the view of God as at once immanent in His world, and in infinite ways transcending it? I say nothing of intellectual "honesty," but I do marvel, as I have often said, at the assurance of any one who presumes to say that, for the highest and holiest ends in His personal relations with His creatures, God can work only within the limits which nature imposes; that He cannot act without and above nature's order if it pleases Him to do so. Miracles stand or fall by their evidence, but the attempt to rule them out by any a priori dictum as to the uniformity of natural law must inevitably fail. The same applies to the denial of providence or of answers to prayer on the ground of the uniformity of natural law. Here no breach of nature's order is affirmed, but only a governance or direction of nature of which man's own use of natural laws, without breach of them, for special ends, affords daily examples. 2. Scripture and the Special Sciences Approaching more nearly the alleged conflict of the Bible or Christianity with the special sciences, a first question of importance is, What is the general relation of the Bible to science? How does it claim to relate itself to the advances of natural knowledge? Here, it is to be feared, mistakes are often made on both sides-on the side of science in affirming contrariety of the Bible with scientific results where none really exists; on the side of believers in demanding that the Bible be taken as a text-book of the newest scientific discoveries, and trying by forced methods to read these into them. The truth on this point lies really on the surface. The Bible clearly does not profess to anticipate the scientific discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its design is very different; namely, to reveal God? and His will and His purposes of grace to men, and, as involved in this, His general relation to the creative world, its dependence in all its parts on Him, and His orderly government of it in Providence for His wise and good ends. Natural things are taken as they are given, and spoken of in simple, popular language, as we ourselves every day speak of them. The world it describes is the world men know and live in, and it is described as it appears, not as, in its recondite researches, science reveals its inner constitution to us. Wise expositors of the Scriptures, older and younger, have always recognized this, and have not attempted to force its language further. To take only one example, John Calvin, who wrote before the Copernican system of astronomy had obtained common acceptance, in his commentary on the first chapter of Genesis penned these wise words: "He who would learn astronomy and other recondite arts," he said, "let him go elsewhere. Moses wrote in a popular style things which, without instruction, all ordinary persons endued with common sense are able to understand. * * * He does not call us up to heaven, he only proposes things that lie open before our eyes." To this hour, with all the light of modern science around us, we speak of sun, moon and stars "rising" and "setting," and nobody misunderstands or affirms contradiction with science. There is no doubt another side to this, for it is just as true that in depicting natural things, the Bible, through the Spirit of revelation that animates it, seizes things in so just a light-still with reference to its own purposes-that the mind is prevented from being led astray from the great truths intended to be conveyed. It will serve to illustrate these positions as to the relation of the Bible to science if we look at them briefly in their application to the two sciences of astronomy and geology, in regard to which conflict has often been alleged. 1. The change from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican system of astronomy-from the view which regarded the earth as the center of the universe to the modern and undoubtedly true view of the earth as moving round the sun, itself, with its planets, but one of innumerable orbs in the starry heavens-of necessity created great searching's of heart among those who thought that the language of the Bible committed them to the older system. For a time there was strong Opposition on the part of many theologians, as well as of students of science, to the new discoveries of the telescope. Galileo was imprisoned by the church. But truth prevailed, and it was soon perceived that the Bible, using the language of appearances, was no more committed to the literal moving of the sun round the earth than are our modern almanacs, which employ the same forms of speech. One would have to travel far in these days to find a Christian who feels his faith in the least affected by the discovery of the true doctrine of the solar system. He rejoices that he understands nature better, and reads his Bible without the slightest sense of contradiction. Yet Strauss was confident that the Copernican system had given its death-blow to Christianity; as Voltaire before him had affirmed that Christianity would be overthrown by the discovery of the law of gravitation and would not survive a century. Newton, the humble-minded Christian discoverer of the law of gravitation, had no such fear, and time has shown that it was he, not Voltaire, who was right. These are specimens of the "conflicts" of Christianity with science. The so-called "astronomical objection" to Christianity more specially takes the form of enlarging on the illimitableness of the universe disclosed by science in contrast with the peculiar interest of God in man displayed in the Christian Gospel. "What is man that thou art mindful of him?" (Psalms 8:4). Is it credible that this small speck in an infinity of worlds should be singled out as the scene of so tremendous an exhibition of God's love and grace as is implied in the Incarnation of the Son of God, the Sacrifice of the Cross, the Redemption of Man? The day is well-nigh past when even this objection is felt to carry much weight. Apart from the strange fact that up to this hour no evidence seems to exist of other worlds inhabited by rational intelligences like man-no planets, no known systems (on this point A. R. Wallace's "Man and the Universe" may be consulted)-thoughtful people have come to realize that quantitative bigness is no measure of God's love and care; that the value of a soul is not to be estimated in terms of stars and planets; that sin is not less awful a fact even if it were proved that this is the only spot in the universe in which it has emerged. It is of the essence of God's infinity that He cares for the little as well as for the great; not a blade of grass could wave, or the insect of a day live its brief life upon the Wing, if God were not actually present, and minutely careful of it. Man's position in the universe remains, by consent, or rather by proof, of science, an altogether peculiar one. Link between the material and the spiritual, he is the one being that seems fitted, as Scripture affirms he is, to be the bond of unity in the creation (Hebrews 2:6-9). This is the hope held out to us in Christ (Ephesians 1:10). One should reflect also that, while the expanse of the physical universe is a modern thought, there has never been a time in the Christian Church when God-Himself infinite-was not conceived of as adored and served by countless hosts of ministering spirits. Man was never thought of as the only intelligence in creation. The mystery of the divine love to our world was in reality as great before as after the stellar expanses were discovered. The sense of "conflict," therefore, though not the sense of wonder, awakened by the "exceeding riches" of God's grace to man in Christ Jesus, vanishes with increasing realization of the depths and heights of God's love "which passeth knowledge" (Ephesians 3:19). Astronomy's splendid demonstration of the majesty of God's wisdom and power is undiminished by any feeling of disharmony with the Gospel. 2. As it is with astronomy, so it has been with the revelations of geology of the age and gradual formation of the earth. Here also doubt and suspicion were-naturally enough in the circumstances-at first awakened. The gentle Cowper could write in his "Task" of those "* * * who drill and bore The solid earth and from the strata there Extract a register, by which we learn That He who made it, and revealed its date To Moses, was mistaken in its age." If the intention of the first chapter of Genesis was really to give us the "date" of the creation of the earth and heavens, the objection would be unanswerable. But things, as in the case of astronomy, are now better understood, and few are disquieted in reading their Bibles because it is made Certain that the world is immensely older than the 6,000 years which the older chronology gave it. Geology is felt only to have expanded our ideas of the vastness and marvel of the Creator's operations through the aeons of time during which the world, with its teeming populations of fishes, birds, reptiles, mammals, was preparing for man's abode-when the mountains were being upheaved, the valleys being scooped out, and veins of precious metals being inlaid into the crust of the earth. Does science, then, really, contradict Genesis 1? Not surely if what has been above said of the essentially popular Character of the allusions to natural things in the Bible be remembered. Here certainly is no detailed description of the process of the formation of the earth in terms anticipative of modern science-terms which would have been unintelligible to the original readers-but a sublime picture, true to the order of nature, as it is to the broad facts even of geological succession. If it tells how God called heaven and earth into being, separated light from darkness, sea from land, clothed the world with vegetation, gave sun and moon their appointed rule of day and night, made fowl to fly, and sea monsters to plow the deep, created the cattle and beasts of the field, and finally made man, male and female, in His own image, and established him as ruler over all God's creation, this orderly rise of created forms, man crowning the whole, these deep ideas of the narrative, setting the world at the very beginning in its right relation to God, and laying the foundations of an enduring philosophy of religion, are truths which science does nothing to subvert, but in myriad ways confirms. The "six days" may remain as a difficulty to some, but, if this is not part of the symbolic setting of the picture-a great divine "week" of work-one may well ask, as was done by Augustine long before geology was thought of, what kind of "days" these were which rolled their course before the sun, with its twenty four hours of diurnal measurement, was appointed to that end? There is no violence done to the narrative in substituting in thought "aeonic" days-vast cosmic periods-for "days" on our narrower, sun-measured scale. Then the last trace of apparent "conflict" disappears. 3. Evolution and Man In recent years the point in which "conflict" between Scripture and science is most frequently urged is the apparent contrariety of the theory of evolution to the Bible story of the direct creation of the animals and man. This might be met, and often is, as happened in the previous cases, by denying the reality of any evolutionary process in nature. Here also, however, while it must be conceded that evolution is not yet proved, there seems a growing appreciation of the strength of the evidence for the fact of some form of evolutionary origin of species-that is, of some genetic connection of higher with lower forms. Together with this, at the same time, there is manifest an increasing disposition to limit the scope of evolution, and to modify the theory in very essential points-those very points in which an apparent conflict with Scripture arose. Much of the difficulty on this subject has arisen from the unwarrantable confusion or identification of evolution with Darwinism. Darwinism is a theory of the process of evolution, and both on account of the skill with which it was presented, and of the singular eminence of its propounder, obtained for a time a very remarkable prestige. In these later days, as may be seen by consulting a book like R. Otto's "Naturalism and Religion," published in "The Crown Library," that prestige has greatly declined. A newer evolution has arisen which breaks with Darwin on the three points most essential to his theory: 1. The fortuitous character of the variations on which "natural selection" works. Variations are now felt to be along definite lines, and to be guided to definite ends. 2. The insufficiency of "natural selection" (on which Darwin almost wholly relied) to accomplish the tasks Darwin assigned to it. 3. The slow and insensible rate of the changes by which new species were supposed to be produced. Instead of this the newer tendency is to seek the origin of new species in rapid and sudden changes, the causes of which lie within the organism-in "mutations," as they are coming to be called-so that the process may be as brief as formerly it was supposed to be long. "Evolution," in short, is coming to be recognized as but a new name for "creation," only that the creative power now works from within, instead of, as in the old conception, in an external, plastic fashion. It is, however, creation none the less. In truth, no conception of evolution can be formed, compatible with all the facts of science, which does not take account, at least at certain great critical points, of the entrance of new factors into the process we call creation. 1. One such point is the transition from inorganic to organic existence-the entrance of the new power of life. It is hopeless to seek to account for life by purely mechanical and chemical agencies, and science has well-nigh given up the attempt. 2. A second point is in the transition from purely organic development to consciousness. A sensation is a mental fact different in kind from any merely organic change, and inexplicable by it. Here, accordingly, is a new rise, revealing previously unknown spiritual powers. 3. The third point is in the transition to rationality, personality, and moral life in man. This, as man's capacity for self-conscious, self-directed, progressive life evinces, is something different from the purely animal consciousness, and marks the beginning of a new kingdom. Here, again, the Bible and science are felt to be in harmony. Man is the last of God's created works-the crown, and explanation of the whole-and he is made in God's image. To account for him, a special act of the Creator, constituting him what he is, must be presupposed. This creative act does not relate to the soul only, for higher spiritual powers could not be put into a merely animal brain. There must be a rise on the physical side as well, corresponding with the mental advance. In body, as in spirit, man comes from his Creator's hand. If this new evolutionary conception is accepted, most of the difficulties which beset the Darwinian theory fall away. 1. For one thing, man need no longer be thought of as a slow development from the animal stage-an ascent through brutishness and savagery from an ape-like form. His origin may be as sudden as Genesis represents. 2. The need for assuming an enormous antiquity of man to allow for the slow development is no longer felt. And (3) the need of assuming man's original condition to have been one of brutal passion and subjection to natural impulse disappears. Man may have come from his Creator's hand in as morally pure a state, and as capable of sinless development, as Genesis and Paul affirm. This also is the most worthy view to take of man's origin. It is a view borne out by the absence of all reliable evidence of those ape-like intermediate forms which, on the other hypothesis, must have intervened between the animal-progenitors and the finished human being. It is a view not contradicted by the alleged evidences of man's very great antiquity-100,000, 200,000, or 500,000 years-frequently relied on; for most of these and the extravagant measurements of time connected with them, are precarious in the extreme. The writer's book, "God's Image in Man and its Defacement," may be consulted on these points. The conclusion from the whole is, that, up to the present hour, science and the Biblical views of God, man, and the world, do not stand in any real relation of conflict. Each book of God's writing reflects light upon the pages of the other, but neither contradicts the other's essential testimony. Science itself seems now disposed to take a less materialistic view of the origin and nature of things than it did a decade or two ago, and to interpret the creation more in the light of the spiritual. The experience of the Christian believer, with the work of missions in heathen lands, furnishes a testimony that cannot be disregarded to the reality of this spiritual world, and of the regenerating, transforming forces proceeding from it. To God be all the glory! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 74: - MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH THE HIGHER... ======================================================================== My Personal Experience with the Higher Criticism By Professor J. J. Reeve, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas The purpose of this article is to state in a very brief way the influences which led me to accept certain of the views of the Higher Criticism, and after further consideration, to reject them. Necessarily the reasons for rejecting will be given at greater length than those for accepting. Space will not permit me to mention names of persons, books, articles and various other influences which combined to produce these results. I shall confine myself to an outline of the mental processes which resulted from my contact with the Critical Movement. In outlining this change of view, I shall deal with- 1. The Presuppositions of the Higher Criticism These presuppositions and assumptions are the determining elements in the entire movement. Once they are understood, it is not difficult to understand the higher critics. It is their philosophy or world-view that is responsible for all their speculations and theories. Their mental attitude towards the world and its phenomena is the same as their attitude toward the Bible and the religion therein revealed. These presuppositions appealed to me very strongly, Having spent some time at one of the great American universities, thus coming in contact with some of the leading minds of the country, the critical view was presented to me very ably and attractively. Though resisted for a time, the forcefulness of the teaching and influence of the university atmosphere largely won my assent. The critics seemed to have the logic of things on their side. The results at which they had arrived seemed inevitable. But upon closer thinking I saw that the whole movement with its conclusions was the result of the adoption of the hypothesis of evolution. My professors had accepted this view, and were thoroughly convinced of its correctness as a working hypothesis. Thus I was made to feel the power of this hypothesis and to adopt it. This worldview is wonderfully fascinating and almost compelling. The vision of a cosmos developing from the lowest types and stages upward through beast and man to higher and better man is enchanting and almost overwhelming. That there is a grain of truth in all this most thinkers will concede. One can hardly refuse to believe that through the ages "An increasing purpose runs," that there is "One God, one law, one element, and one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves." This world-view had to me at first a charm and witchery that was almost intoxicating. It created more of a revolution than an evolution in my thinking. But more careful consideration convinced me that the little truth in it served to sugar-coat and give plausibility to some deadly errors that lurked within. I saw that the hypothesis did not apply to a great part of the world's phenomena. That this theory of evolution underlies and is the inspiration of the Higher Criticism goes without saying. That there is a grain of truth in it we may admit or not, as we see fit, but the whole question is, what kind of evolution is it that has given rise to this criticism. There are many varieties of the theory. There is the Idealism of Hegel, and the Materialism of Haeckel; a theistic evolution and an anti-theistic; the view that it is God's only method, and the view that it is only one of God's methods; the theory that includes a Creator, and the theory that excludes Him; the deistic evolution, which starts the world with God, who then withdraws and leaves it a closed system of cause and effect, antecedent and consequent, which admits of no break or change in the natural process. There is also the theory that on the whole there is progress, but allowance must be made for retrogression and degeneration. This admits of the direct action of God in arresting the downward process and reversing the current; that is, there is an evolution through revelation, etc., rather than a revelation by evolution. On examining the evolution of the leaders of the Critical School, I found that it was of a naturalistic or practically deistic kind. All natural and mental phenomena are in a closed system of cause and effect, and the hypothesis applies universally, to religion and revelation, as well as to mechanisms. This type of evolution may not be accepted by all adherents of the Critical School, but it is substantially the view of the leaders, Reuss, Graf, Vatke, Kuenen and Wellhausen. To them all nature and history are a product of forces within and in process of development. There has not been and could not be any direct action of God upon man, there could be no break in the chain of cause and effect, of antecedent and consequent. Hence there can be no miracle or anything of what is known as the supernatural. There could be no "interference" in any way with the natural course of events, there could be no "injection" of any power into the cosmic process from without, God is shut up to the one method of bringing things to pass. He is thus little more than a prisoner in His own cosmos. Thus I discovered that the Critical Movement was essentially and fundamentally anti-supernatural and anti-miraculous. According to it all religious movements are human developments along natural and materialistic lines. The religion of Israel and the Bible is no exception, as there can be no exception to this principle. The revelation contained in the Bible is, strictly speaking, no revelation; it is a natural development with God in the cosmic process behind it, but yet a steady, straight-lined, mechanical development such as can be traced step by step as a flight of stairs may be measured by a foot-rule. There could have been no epoch-making revelation, no revivals and lapses, no marvelous exhibitions of divine power, no real redemption. With these foregone conclusions fixed in their minds, the entire question is practically settled beforehand. As it is transparently clear that the Bible on the face of it does not correspond to this view, it must be rearranged so as to correspond to it. To do this, they must deny point-blank the claims and statements of most of the Bible writers. Now, if the Bible claims to be anything, it claims to be a revelation from God, a miraculous or supernatural book, recording the numerous direct acts of God in nature and history, and His interference with the natural course of events. Are the writers of the Bible correct, or are the critics' It is impossible that both should be right. Reasoning thus, it became perfectly clear to me that the presuppositions and beliefs of the Bible writers and of the critics were absolutely contradictory. To maintain that the modern view is a development and advance upon the Biblical view, is absurd. No presupposition can develop a presupposition which contradicts and nullifies it. To say that the critical position and the Biblical position, or the traditional evangelical view which is the same as the Biblical, are reconcilable, is the most fatuous folly and delusion. Kuenen and others have recognized this contradiction and have acknowledged it, not hesitating to set aside the Biblical view. Many of their disciples have failed to see as clearly as their masters. They think the two can be combined. I was of the same opinion myself, but further reflection showed this to he an impossibility. I thought it possible to accept the results of the Higher Criticism without accepting its presuppositions. This is saying that one can accept as valid and true the results of a process and at the same time deny the validity of the process itself. But does not this involve an inner contradiction and absurdity? If I accept the results of the Kuenen-Wellhausen hypothesis as correct, then I accept as correct the methods and processes which led to these results, and if I accept these methods, I also accept the presuppositions which give rise to these methods. If the "assured results" of which the critics are so fond of boasting are true, then the naturalistic evolution hypothesis which produced these results is correct. Then it is impossible to accept the miraculous or supernatural, the Bible as an authoritative record of supernatural revelation is completely upset and its claims regarding itself are false and misleading. I can see no way of escaping these conclusions. There is no possible middle ground as I once fondly imagined there was. Thus I was compelled to conclude that although there is some truth in the evolutionary view of the world, yet as an explanation of history and revelation it is utterly inadequate, so inadequate as to be erroneous and false. A world-view must be broad enough to admit of all the facts of history and experience. Even then it is only a human point of view and necessarily imperfect. Will any one dare to say that the evolutionary hypothesis is divine? Then we would have a Bible and a philosophy both claiming to be divine and absolutely contradicting each other. To attempt to eliminate the miraculous and supernatural from the Bible and accept the remainder as divine is impossible, for they are all one and inextricably woven together. In either case the Book is robbed of its claims to authority. Some critics do not hesitate to deny its authority and thus cut themselves loose from historical Christianity. In spite, however, of the serious faults of the Higher Criticism, it has given rise to what is known as the Scientific and Historical method in the study of the Old Testament. This method is destined to stay and render invaluable aid. To the scholarly mind its appeal is irresistible. Only in the light of the historical occasion upon which it was produced, can the Old Testament be properly understood. A flood of light has already been poured in upon these writings. The scientific spirit which gave rise to it is one of the noblest instincts in the intellectual life of man. It is a thirst for the real and the true, that will be satisfied with nothing else. But, noble as is this scientific spirit, and invaluable as is the historical method, there are subtle dangers in connection with them. Everything depends upon the presuppositions with which we use the method. A certain mental attitude there must be. What shall it be? A materialistic evolution such as Kuenen and his conferees, or a theistic evolution which admits the supernatural? Investigating in the mental attitude of the first of these, the scholar will inevitably arrive at or accept the results of the critics. Another, working at the same problem with Christian presuppositions, will arrive at very different conclusions. Which shall we have, the point of view of the Christian or the critic? I found that the critics claim to possess the only really scientific method was slightly, true but largely false. His results were scientific because they fitted his hypothesis. The Christian scholar with his broader presuppositions was peremptorily ruled out of court. Anything savoring of the miraculous, etc., could not be scientific to the critic, and hence it could not be true, therefore, it must be discarded or branded as Myth, Legend, Poesy, Saga, etc. Such narrowness of view is scarcely credible on the part of scholars who claim to be so broad and liberal. Another question confronted me. How can so many Christian scholars and preachers accept the views of the critics and still adhere to evangelical Christianity with intense devotion? As we have seen, to accept the results of Criticism is to accept the methods and presuppositions which produced these results. To accept their assumptions is to accept a naturalistic evolution which is fundamentally contradictory to the Biblical and Christian point of view. It is therefore essentially contradictory to Christianity, for what is the latter if it is not a supernaturally revealed knowledge of the plan of salvation, with supernatural power to effectuate that salvation? All who have experienced the power of Christianity will in the main assent to this definition. How then can Christians who are Higher Critics escape endorsing the presuppositions of the Critics? There is art inner contradiction between the assumptions of their scientific reason and the assumptions of their religious faith. A careful study of the attitude of these mediating critics, as they are called, has revealed a sense of contradiction somewhere of which they are vaguely conscious. They maintain their attitude by an inconsistency. Thus it is they have many difficulties which they cannot explain. This inner contradiction runs through much of their exegesis and they wonder that evangelical Christians do not accept their views. Already many of them are not quite so sure of their "assured results" as they were. Many evangelical Christians do not accept these views because they can "see through" them. The second line of thinking which led me to reject the Critics' view was a consideration of: 2. Their Methods At first I was enthusiastic over the method. Now at last we have the correct method that will in time solve all difficulties. Let it be readily granted that the historical method has settled many difficulties and will continue to do so, yet the whole question lies in the attitude of mind a man brings to the task. Among the critics their hypothesis is absolute and dominates every attempt to understand the record, shapes every conclusion, arranges and rearranges the facts in its own order, discards what does not fit or reshapes it to fit. The critics may deny this but their treatment of the Old Testament is too well known to need any proof of it. The use of the Redactor is a case in point. This purely imaginary being, unhistorical and unscientific, is brought into requisition at almost every difficulty. It is acknowledged that at times he acts in a manner wholly inexplicable. To assume such a person interpolating names of God, changing names and making explanations to suit the purposes of their hypothesis and imagination is the very negation of science, notwithstanding their boast of a scientific method. Their minds seem to be in abject slavery to their theory. No reason is more impervious to facts than one preoccupied with a theory which does not agree with these facts. Their mental attitude being biased and partial, their methods are partial and the results very one-sided and untrustworthy. They give more credence to the guesses of some so-called scholar, a clay tablet, a heathen king's boast, or a rude drawing in stone, than to the Scripture record. They feel instinctively that to accept the Bible statements would be the ruin of their hypothesis, and what they call their hard-won historical method. In this their instinct is true. The Bible and their hypothesis are irreconcilable. As their theory must not be interfered with, since it is identical with the truth itself, the Bible must stand aside in the interests of truth. For this reason they deny all historicity to Genesis 1-11, the stories of Creation, the Fall, the Flood, etc. No theory of naturalistic evolution can possibly admit the truth of these chapters. Likewise, there is but a substratum of truth in the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses. Nearly all legislation is denied to the latter, because it represents too rapid an advance, or a stage too advanced. But is such the case? Centuries before Moses, laws, government, civilization, culture, art, education, religion, temples, ritual and priest-hood had flourished in Babylonia and Egypt and were a chief factor in the education of Moses. With all this previous development upon which to build, what objections to ascribing these laws to Moses, who, during the forty years under divine guidance, selected, purified, heightened, and adopted such laws as best served the needs of the people. The development of external laws and customs had preceded Moses and there is no need to suppose a development afterward in the history of the people. That history records the fitful attempts at the assimilation of these laws. To maintain that they were at first put in the exact form in which they have come down to us is wholly unnecessary and contrary to certain facts in the records themselves. But to my mind one of the greatest weaknesses of the critical position is, that because there is little or no mention of the laws in the history that follows the death of Moses, therefore these laws could not have existed. To the critic this is one of the strongest arguments in his favor. Now he has found out how to make the history and the laws correspond. But does the non-mention or non-observance of a law prove its non-existence" All history shows that such is not the case. Moreover, the books of Joshua, Judges and Samuel make no pretence at giving a complete detailed history. If non-mention or non-observance were proof of non-existence, then the Book of the Covenant and Deuteronomy could not have existed until the return from Exile; for the laws against idolatry were not carried out until then. Apply this same method of reasoning to laws in general and the most absurd results will follow. The Decalogue could never have existed, for all of its laws are constantly being broken. No New Testament could have existed through the Dark Ages, for almost every precept in it was violated during that period. The facts of life plainly show that men with the law of God in their hands will continually violate them. But why did not Joshua and those succeeding him for several centuries carry out the law of Moses? The answer is obvious. The circumstances did not permit of it, and no one, not even Moses, had any idea of the law being fully observed at once. He looked forward to a time when they should be settled and should have a capital and central sanctuary. Moreover, a large portion of the laws was intended for the priest alone and may have been observed. The laws were flexible and to be fulfilled as the circumstances permitted. If the Book of Deuteronomy could not be observed, the Book of the Covenant could be followed. Changes and modifications were purposely made by Moses to meet the demands of the changing circumstances. If the non-fulfillment of these laws proved their non-existence, then the Book of the Covenant and Deuteronomy were not in existence in the time of Jehoiakim, for idolatry was then rampant. By its arbitrary methods, Modern Criticism does wholesale violence to the record of the discovery of the Law Book as recorded in 2 Kings 22:8-20. It denies any real discovery, distinctly implies fraud upon the part of the writers, assumes a far too easy deception of the king, the prophetess, the king's counselors, Jeremiah and the people. It implies a marvelous success in perpetrating this forged document on the people; The writers did evil that good might come, and God seems to have been behind it all and endorsed it. Such a transaction is utterly incredible. "The people would not hear Moses and the prophet, yet they were easily persuaded by a forged Mosaic document." The critics disagree among themselves regarding the authorship of the Book of Deuteronomy. Some maintain it was by the priestly class and some by the prophetic class, but there are insuperable objections to each. They have failed to show why there were so many laws incorporated in it which absolutely contradict a later date and why the Mosaic dress succeeded so well although contradictory to some of the genuinely Mosaic laws. According to the critics also, Ezra perpetrated a tremendous fraud when he palmed off his completed Code as of Mosaic origin. That the people should accept it as genuinely Mosaic, although it increased their burdens and contradicted many laws previously known as Mosaic, is incredible. That such a people at such a time and under such circumstances could be so easily imposed upon and deceived, and that such a man as Ezra could perform such a colossal fraud and have it all succeed so well, seems inconceivable except by a person whose moral consciousness is dulled or benumbed by some philosophical theory. According to the critics, the authors of Deuteronomy and the Levitical Code not only produced such intensely religious books and laws, but were at the same time deliberate inventors and falsifiers of history as well as deceivers of the people. What such views imply regarding the character of God who is behind it all we shall consider later. Space does not permit me to more than refer to the J. E. P. analysis. That certain documents existed and were ultimately combined to make up the five books of Moses no one need doubt. It in no way detracts from their inspiration or authenticity to do so, nor does it in any way deny the essentially Mosaic origin of the legislation. But the J. E. P. analysis on the basis of the different names for God I found to require such an arbitrary handling and artificial manipulation of the text, to need the help of so many Redactors whose methods and motives are wholly inexplicable, with a multitude of exceptions to account for, that I was convinced the analysis could not be maintained. Astruc's clue in Exodus 6:3, which was the starting point for the analysis, cannot be made to decide the time of the use of the names of God, for the text is not perfectly certain. There is considerable difference between the two readings, "was known," "made myself known." Even if God had not previously revealed Himself by the name Jahveh, that does not prove the name unknown or that God was not known by that name. And even if he had so revealed Himself, the earlier record would not be less authentic, for they were either written or rewritten and edited after the revelation to Moses in the light of a fuller revelation. Thus it was made perfectly clear that El, Elohim, El-Elyon, E1- Shaddai, were identical with Jahveh. The methods of the critics in regarding the earlier histories as little more than fiction and invention, to palm off certain laws as genuinely Mosaic, found some lodgment in my mind for a time. But the more I considered it, the more I was convinced that it was the critics who were the inventors and falsifiers. They were the ones who had such a facile imagination, they could "manufacture" history at their "green tables" to suit their theories and were doing so fast and loose. They could create nations and empires out of a desert, and like the alchemists of the Middle Ages with their magic wand, transform all things into their own special and favorite metal. To charge the Scripture writers with this invention and falsification is grossly to malign them and slander the God that wrought through them. The quality of their products does not lend countenance to such a view, and it is abhorrent to the Christian consciousness. Such a conception cannot be long held by any whose moral and religious natures have not been dulled by their philosophical presuppositions. The habit of discarding the Books of Chronicles, because they give no history of Northern Israel, lay considerable emphasis upon the temple and priesthood, pass over the faults and sins of the kings, etc., and are therefore a biased and untrustworthy history, has appeared to me an aberration from common sense, and is scarcely credible among men of such intelligence. When the compiler of Chronicles covers the same history of Kings, he agrees with these histories substantially, though varying in some minor details. If he is reliable in this material, why not in the other material, not found in Kings? The real reason is that he records many facts about the temple and its services which do not fit in with the critics' hypothesis, and therefore something must be done to discredit the Chronicler and get rid of his testimony. But my third reason for rejecting the critical standpoint is 3. The Spirit of the Movement Grant that there is a genuine scientific interest underlying it all, the real question is, what is the standpoint of the scientific mind which investigates. What is authoritative with him? His philosophical theory and working hypothesis, or his religious faith? In other words, does his religion or philosophy control his thinking? Is it reason or faith that is supreme? Is his authority human or divine? There is no question here of having one without the other, that is, having faith without reason, for that is impossible. The question is, which is supreme? For some time I thought one could hold these views of the Old Testament and still retain his faith in evangelical Christianity. I found, however, that this could be done only by holding my philosophy in check and within certain limits. It could not be rigorously applied to all things. Two supreme things could not exist in the mind at the same time. If my theories were supreme, then I was following human reason, not faith, and was a rationalist to that extent. If the presuppositions of my religious faith were supreme and in accordance with the Biblical presuppositions and beliefs, then my philosophy must be held in abeyance. The fundamentals of our religious faith, as known in the Bible and history, are a belief in divine revelation, the miraculous birth, the life and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the God-Man. Inseparable from these there is also the fact of a supernatural power in regeneration. The philosophy of the critics cannot consistently make room for these. Thus the real question becomes one of authority, viz.: shall the scientific hypothesis be supreme in my thinking, or the presuppositions of the Christian faith? If I make my philosophical viewpoint supreme, then I am compelled to construe the Bible and Christianity through my theory and everything which may not fit into that theory must be rejected. This is the actual standpoint of the critic. His is a philosophical rather than a religious spirit. Such was Gnosticism in the early centuries. It construed Christ and Christianity through the categories of a Graeco-Oriental philosophy and thus was compelled to reject some of the essentials of Christianity. Such was the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, which construed Christianity through the categories of the Aristotelian Logic and the Neo-platonic Philosophy. Such is the Higher Criticism which construes everything through the hypothesis of evolution. The spirit of the movement is thus essentially scholastic and rationalistic. It became more and more obvious to me that the movement was entirely intellectual, an attempt in reality to intellectualize all religious phenomena. I saw also that it was a partial and one-sided intellectualism, with a strong bias against the fundamental tenets of Biblical Christianity. Such a movement does not produce that intellectual humility which belongs to the Christian mind. On the contrary, it is responsible for a vast amount of intellectual pride, an aristocracy of intellect with all the snobbery which usually accompanies that term. Do they not exactly correspond to Paul's word, "vainly puffed up in his fleshly mind and not holding fast the head, etc.?" They have a splendid scorn for all opinions which do not agree with theirs. Under the spell of this sublime contempt they think they can ignore anything that does not square with their evolutionary hypothesis. The center of gravity of their thinking is in the theoretical not in the religious, in reason, not in faith. Supremely satisfied with its self-constituted authority, the mind thinks itself competent to criticise the Bible, the thinking of all the centuries, and even Jesus Christ Himself. The followers of this cult have their full share of the frailties of human nature. Rarely, if ever, can a thoroughgoing critic be an evangelist, or even evangelistic; he is educational. How is it possible for a preacher to be a power for God, whose source of authority is his own reason and convictions? The Bible can scarcely contain more than good advice for such a man. I was much impressed with their boast of having all scholarship on their side. It is very gratifying to feel oneself abreast with the times, up to date, and in the front rank of thought. But some investigation and consideration led me to see that the boast of scholarship is tremendously overdone. Many leading scholars are with them, but a majority of the most reverent and judicious scholars are not. The arrogant boasts of these people would be very amusing, if they were not so influential. Certainly most of the books put forth of late by Old Testament scholars are on their side, but there is a formidable list on the other side and it is growing larger every day. Conservative scholarship is rapidly awakening, and, while it will retain the legitimate use of the invaluable historical method, will sweep from the field most of the speculations of the critics. A striking characteristic of these people is a persistent ignoring of what is written on the other side. They think to kill their antagonist by either ignoring or despising him. They treat their opponents something as Goliath treated David, and in the end the result will be similar. They have made no attempt to answer Robertson's "The Early Religion of Israel;" Orr's "The Problem of the Old Testament," Wiener's "Studies in Biblical Law" and "Studies in Pentateuchical Criticism," etc. They still treat these books which have undermined the very foundations of their theories with the same magnificent scorn. There is a nemesis in such an attitude. But the spirit of the critical movement manifests some very doubtful aspects in its practical working out among the pastors and churches. Adherents of this movement accept the spiritual oversight of churches which hold fast to the Biblical view of the Bible, while they know that their own views will undermine many of the most cherished beliefs of the churches. Many try to be critics and conservative at the same time. They would "run with the hare and hunt with the hounds," professing to be in full sympathy with evangelical Christianity while abiding their opportunity to inculcate their own views, which, as we have seen, is really to forsake the Christian standpoint. The morality of such conduct is, to say the least, very doubtful. It has led to much mischief among the churches and injury to the work. A preacher who has thoroughly imbibed these beliefs has no proper place in an evangelical Christian pulpit. Such a spirit is not according to the spirit of the religion they profess to believe. But another weighty reason for rejecting the Higher Criticism is 4. A Consideration of Its Results Ten or twenty years ago these scholars believed their views would immensely advance the cause of Christianity and true religion. They are by no means so sure of that now. It is not meeting with the universal acceptance they anticipated. Making a mere hypothesis the supreme thing in our thinking, we are forced to construe everything accordingly. Thus the Bible, the Christ and the religious experiences of men are subjected to the same scientific analysis. Carry this out to its logical conclusion and what would be the result? There would be all science and no religion. In the array of scientific facts all religion would be evaporated. God, Christ, the Bible, and all else would be reduced to a mathematical or chemical formula. This is the ideal and goal of the evolutionary hypothesis. The rationalist would rejoice at it, but the Christian mind shrinks with horror from it. The Christian consciousness perceives that an hypothesis which leads to such results is one of its deadliest foes. Another danger also arises here. When one makes his philosophy his authority, it is not a long step until he makes himself his own god. His own reason becomes supreme in his thinking and this reason becomes his lord. This is the inevitable logic of the hypothesis mentioned, and some adherents of the school have taken this step. They recognize no authority but their own moral instincts and philosophical reason. Now, as the evolution theory makes all things exist only in a state of change, of flux, or of becoming, God is therefore changing and developing, the Bible and Christ will be outgrown, Christianity itself will be left behind. Hence, there is no absolute truth, nothing in the moral religious world is fixed or certain. All truth is in solution; there is no precipitate upon which we can rely. There is no absolute standard of Ethics, no authority in religion, every one is practically his own god. Jesus Christ is politely thanked for His services in the past, gallantly conducted to the confines of His world and bowed out as He is no longer needed and His presence might be very troublesome to some people. Such a religion is the very negation of Christianity, is a distinct reversion to heathenism. It may be a cultured and refined heathenism with a Christian veneer, but yet a genuine heathenism. I am far from saying that all adherents of this school go to such lengths, but why do they not? Most of them had an early training under the best conservative influences which inculcated a wholesome reverence for the Bible as an authority in religion and morals. This training they can never fully outgrow. Many of them are of a good, sturdy religious ancestry, of rigid, conservative training and genuine religious experience. Under these influences they have acquired a strong hold upon Christianity and can never be removed from it. They hold a theoretical standpoint and a religious experience together, failing, as I believe, to see the fundamental contradiction between them. Slowly the Christian consciousness and Christian scholarship are asserting themselves. Men are beginning to see how irreconcilable the two positions are and there will be the inevitable cleavage in the future. Churches are none too soon or too seriously alarmed. Christianity is beginning to see that its very existence is at stake in this subtle attempt to do away with the supernatural, I have seen the Unitarian, the Jew, the free thinker, and the Christian who has imbibed critical views, in thorough agreement on the Old Testament and its teachings. They can readily hobnob together, for the religious element becomes a lost quantity; the Bible itself becomes a plaything for the intellect, a merry-go-round for the mind partially intoxicated with its theory. As has been already intimated, one of the results of the critical processes has been to rearrange the Bible according to its own point of view. This means that it has to a large extent set it aside as an authority. Such a result is serious enough, but a much more serious result follows. This is the reflection such a Bible casts upon the character and methods of God in His revelation of Himself to men. It will scarcely be doubted by even a radical critic, that the Bible is the most uplifting book in the world, that its religious teachings are the best the world has known. If such be the case, it must reflect more of God's character and methods than any other book. The writers themselves must exemplify many of the traits of the God they write about. What then must be the methods of a holy and loving God? If He teaches men truth by parable or history or illustration, the one essential thing about these parables or histories is that they be true to life or history or nature. Can a God who is absolutely just and holy teach men truths about Himself by means of that which is false? Men may have taught truth by means of falsehoods and other instruments and perhaps succeeded, but God can hardly be legitimately conceived of as using any such means. Jesus Christ taught the greatest of truths by means of parables, illustrations, etc., but every one was true to life or nature or history. The Christian consciousness, which is the highest expression of the religious life of mankind, can never conceive of Jesus as using that which was in itself untrue, as a vehicle to convey that which is true. In like manner if God had anything to do with the Old Testament, would He make use of mere myths, legends, sagas, invented and falsified history, which have no foundation in fact and are neither true to nature, history nor life? Will God seek to uplift mankind by means of falsehood? Will He sanction the use of such dishonest means and pious frauds, such as a large part of the Pentateuch is, if the critics are right? Could He make use of such means for such a holy purpose and let His people feed on falsehood for centuries and centuries and deceive them into righteousness? Falsehood will not do God's will; only truth can do that. Is there nothing in the story of creation, of the fall, the flood, the call and promise to Abraham, the life of Jacob and Joseph and the great work of Moses? If all these things are not true to fact or to life, then God has been an arch-deceiver and acts on the Jesuit maxim, "The end justifies the means." This would apply to the finding of the Law in Josiah's time, and the giving of the law under Ezra. That such a lot of spurious history, deceptive inventions and falsifying history should achieve such a success is most astonishing. Is it possible that a holy God should be behind all this and promote righteousness thereby? This surely is conniving at evil and using methods unworthy of the name of God. To say that God was shut up to such a method is preposterous. Such a conception of God as is implied in the critical position is abhorrent to one who believes in a God of truth. Perhaps the Book of Daniel at the hands of the critic best illustrates this point. No one can deny the religious quality of the book. It has sublime heights and depths and has had a mighty influence in the world. No one can read the book carefully and reverently without feeling its power. Yet according to the modern view the first six or seven chapters have but a grain of truth in them. They picture in a wonderfully vivid manner the supernatural help of God in giving Daniel power to interpret dreams, in delivering from the fiery furnace, in saving from the lion's mouth, smiting King Nebuchadnezzar, etc. All this is high religious teaching, has had a great influence for good and was intended for a message from God to encourage faith. Yet, according to the critics these events had no foundation in fact, the supernatural did not take place, the supposed facts upon which these sublime religious lessons are based could never have occurred. Yet the God of truth has used such a book with such teaching to do great good in the world. He thus made abundant use of fiction and falsehood. According to this view He has also been deceiving the best people of the world for millenniums, using the false and palming it off as true. Such a God may be believed in by a critic, but the Christian consciousness revolts at it. It is worthy of a Zeus, or perhaps the Demiurge of Marcion, but He is not the God of Israel, not the God and Father of Jesus Christ. "But," says the critic, "the religious lessons are great and good." Are they? Can a story or illustration or parable teach good religious lessons when it is in itself essentially untrue to nature, history and life? To assert such a thing would seem to imply a moral and religious blindness that is scarcely credible. It is true there are many grave difficulties in the book of Daniel, but are they as great as the moral difficulty implied in the critical view? The foregoing embody my chief reasons for rejecting the position of the Critical School with which I was once in sympathy. Their positions are not merely vagaries, they are essentially attempts to undermine revelation, the Bible and evangelical Christianity. If these views should ultimately prevail, Christianity will be set aside for what is known as the New Religion, which is no religion, but a philosophy. All critics believe that traditional Christianity will largely, if not altogether, give place to the modern view, as it is called. But we maintain that traditional Christianity has the right of way. It must and will be somewhat modified by the conception of a developing revelation and the application of the historical method, but must prevail in all its essential features. It has a noble ancestry and a glorious history. The Bible writers are all on its side; the bulk of Jewish scholars of the past are in the procession; it has Jesus, the Son of God, in its ranks with the apostles, prophets, the martyrs, the reformers, the theologians, the missionaries and the great preachers and evangelists. The great mass of God's people are with it. I prefer to belong to that goodly company rather than with the heathen Porphyry, the pantheistic Spinoza, the immoral Astruc, the rationalistic Reuss, Vatke, Graf, Kuenen and Wellhausen, with a multitude of their disciples of all grades. Theirs is a new traditionalism begun by those men and handed down to others in England and America. Most of these disciples owe their religions life and training almost entirely to the traditional view. The movement has quickened study of the Old Testament, has given a valuable method, a great many facts, a fresh point of view, but its extravagancies, its vagaries, its false assumptions and immoralities will in time be sloughed by the Christian consciousness as in the past it has sloughed off Gnosticism, Pantheism, Scholasticism and a host of other philosophical or scientific fads and fancies. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 75: - THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE - DEFINITION... ======================================================================== The Inspiration of the Bible--Definition, Extent and Proof By James M. Gray, D. D., Dean of Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, Ill. In this paper the authenticity and credibility of the Bible are assumed, by which is meant * (1), that its books were written by the authors to whom they are ascribed, and that their contents are in all material points as when they came from their hands; and * (2), that those contents are worthy of entire acceptance as to their statements of fact. Were there need to prove these assumptions, the evidence is abundant, and abler pens have dealt with it. Let it not be supposed, however, that because these things are assumed their relative importance is undervalued. On the contrary, they underlie inspiration, and, as President Patton says, come in on the ground floor. They have to do with the historicity of the Bible, which for us just now is the basis of its authority. Nothing can be settled until this is settled, but admitting its settlement which, all things considered, we now may be permitted to do, what can be of deeper interest than the question as to how far that authority extends? This is the inspiration question, and while so many have taken in hand to discuss the others, may not one be at liberty to discuss this? It is an old question, so old, indeed, as again in the usual recurrence of thought to have become new. Our fathers discussed it, it was the great question once upon a time, it was sifted to the bottom, and a great storehouse of fact, and argument, and illustration has been left for us to draw upon in a day of need. For a long while the enemy's attack has directed our energies to another part of the field, but victory there will drive us back here again. The other questions are outside of the Bible itself, this is inside. They lead men away from the contents of the book to consider how they came, this brings us back to consider what they are. Happy the day when the inquiry returns here, and happy the generation which has not forgotten how to meet it. 1. Definition of Inspiration 1. Inspiration is not revelation. As Dr. Charles Hodge expressed it, revelation is the act of communicating divine knowledge to the mind, but inspiration is the act of the same Spirit controlling those who make that knowledge known to others. In Chalmer's happy phrase, the one is the influx, the other the efflux. Abraham received the influx, he was granted a revelation; but Moses was endued with the efflux, being inspired to record it for our learning. In the one case there was a flowing in and in the other a flowing out. Sometimes both of these experiences met in the same person, indeed Moses himself is an illustration of it, having received a revelation at another time and also the inspiration to make it known, but it is of importance to distinguish between the two. 2. Inspiration is not illumination. Every regenerated Christian is illuminated in the simple fact that he is indwelt by the Holy Spirit, but every such an one is not also inspired, but only the writers of the Old and New Testaments. Spiritual illumination is subject to degrees, some Christians possessing more of it than others, but, as we understand it, inspiration is not subject to degrees, being in every case the breath of God, expressing itself through a human personality. 3. Inspiration is not human genius. The latter is simply a natural qualification, however exalted it may be in some cases, but inspiration in the sense now spoken of is supernatural throughout. It is an induement coming upon the writers of the Old and New Testaments directing and enabling them to write those books, and on no other men, and at no other time, and for no other purpose. No human genius of whom we ever heard introduced his writings with the formula, "Thus saith the Lord," or words to that effect, and yet such is the common utterance of the Bible authors. No human genius ever yet agreed with any other human genius as to the things it most concerns men to know, and, therefore, however exalted his equipment, it differs not merely in degree but in kind from the inspiration of the Scriptures. In its mode the divine agency is inscrutable, though its effects are knowable. We do not undertake to say just how the Holy Spirit operated on the minds of these authors to produce these books any more than we undertake to say how He operates on the human heart to produce conversion, but we accept the one as we do the other on the testimony that appeals to faith. 4. When we speak of the Holy Spirit coming upon the men in order to the composition of the books, it should be further understood that the object is not the inspiration of the men but the books-not the writers but the writings. It terminates upon the record, in other words, and not upon the human instrument who made it. To illustrate: Moses, David, Paul, John, were not always and everywhere inspired, for then always and everywhere they would have been infallible and inerrant, which was not the case. They sometimes made mistakes in thought and erred in conduct. But however fallible and errant they may have been as men compassed with infirmity like ourselves, such fallibility or error was never under any circumstances communicated to their sacred writings. Ecclesiastes is a case in point, which on the supposition of its Solomonic authorship, is giving us a history of his search for happiness "under the sun." Some statements in that book are only partially true while others are altogether false, therefore it cannot mean that Solomon was inspired as he tried this or that experiment to find what no man has been able to find outside of God. But it means that his language is inspired as he records the various feelings and opinions which possessed him in the pursuit. This disposes of a large class of objections sometimes brought against the doctrine of inspiration-those, for example, associated with the question as to whether the Bible is the Word of God or only contains that Word. If by the former be meant that God spake every word in the Bible, and hence that every word is true, the answer must be no; but if it be meant that God caused every word in the Bible, true or false, to be recorded, the answer should be yes. There are words of Satan in the Bible, words of false prophets, words of the enemies of Christ, and yet they are God's words, not in the sense that He uttered them, but that He caused them to be recorded, infallibly and inerrantley recorded, for our profit. In this sense the Bible does not merely contain the Word of God, it is the Word of God. Of any merely human author it is the same. This paper is the writer's word throughout, and yet he may quote what other people say to commend them or dispute them. What they say he records, and in doing so he makes the record his in the sense that he is responsible for its accuracy. 5. Let it be stated further in this definitional connection, that the record for whose inspiration we contend is the original record-the autographs or parchments of Moses, David, Daniel, Matthew, Paul or Peter, as the case may be, and not any particular translation or translations of them whatever. There is no translation absolutely without error, nor could there be, considering the infirmities of human copyists, unless God were pleased to perform a perpetual miracle to secure it. But does this make nugatory our contention? Some would say it does, and they would argue speciously that to insist on the inerrancy of a parchment no living being has ever seen is an academic question merely, and without value. But do they not fail to see that the character and perfection of the God-head are involved in that inerrancy? Some years ago a "liberal" theologian, deprecating this discussion as not worth while, remarked that it was a matter of small consequence whether a pair of trousers were originally perfect if they were now rent. To which the valiant and witty David James Burrell replied, that it might be a matter of small consequence to the wearer of the trousers, but the tailor who made them would prefer to have it understood that they did not leave his shop that way. And then he added, that if the Most High must train among knights of the shears He might at least be regarded as the best of the guild, and One who drops no stitches and sends out no imperfect work. Is it not with the written Word as with the incarnate Word? Is Jesus Christ to be regarded as imperfect because His character has never been perfectly reproduced before us? Can He be the incarnate Word unless He were absolutely without sin? And by the same token, can the scriptures be the written Word unless they were inerrant? But if this question be so purely speculative and valueless, what becomes of the science of Biblical criticism by which properly we set such store today? Do builders drive piles into the soft earth if they never expect to touch bottom? Do scholars dispute about the scripture text and minutely examine the history and meaning of single words, "the delicate coloring of mood, tense and accent," if at the end there is no approximation to an absolute? As Dr. George H. Bishop says, does not our concordance, every time we take it up, speak loudly to us of a once inerrant parchment? Why do we not possess concordances for the very words of other books? Nor is that original parchment so remote a thing as some suppose. Do not the number and variety of manuscripts and versions extant render it comparatively easy to arrive at a knowledge of its text, and does not competent scholarship today affirm that as to the New Testament at least, we have in 999 cases out of every thousand the very word of that original text? Let candid consideration be given to these things and it will be seen that we are not pursuing a phantom in contending for an inspired autograph of the Bible. 2. Extent of Inspiration 1. The inspiration of scripture includes the whole and every part of it. There are some who deny this and limit it to only the prophetic portions, the words of Jesus Christ, and, say, the profounder spiritual teachings of the epistles. The historical books in their judgment, and as an example, do not require inspiration because their data were obtainable from natural sources. The Bible itself, however, knows of no limitations, as we shall see: "All scripture is given by inspiration of God." The historical data, most of it at least, might have been obtained from natural sources, but what about the supernatural guidance required in their selection and narration? Compare, for answer, the records of Creation, the fall, the deluge, etc., found in Genesis with those recently discovered by excavations in Bible lands. Do not the results of the pick-axe and the spade point to the same original as the Bible, and yet do not their childishness and grotesqueness often bear evidence of the human and sinful mould through which they ran? Do they not show the need of some power other than man himself to lead him out of the labyrinth of error into the open ground of truth? Furthermore, are not the historical books in some respects the most important in the Bible? Are they not the bases of its doctrine? Does not the doctrine of sin need for its starting point the record of the fall? Could we so satisfactorily understand justification did we not have the story of God's dealings with Abraham? And what of the priesthood of Christ? Dismiss Leviticus and what can be made of Hebrews? Is not the Acts of the Apostles historical, but can we afford to lose its inspiration? And then, too, the historical books are, in many cases, prophetical as well as historical. Do not the types and symbols in them show forth the Saviour in all the varying aspects of His grace-Has not the story of Israel the closest relation as type and anti-type to our spiritual redemption? Does not Paul teach this in 1 Corinthians 10:6-11? And if these things were thus written for our learning, does not this imply their inspiration? Indeed, the historical books have the strongest testimony borne to their importance in other parts of the Bible. This will appear more particularly as we proceed, but take, in passing, Christ's use of Deuteronomy in His conflict with the tempter. Thrice does He overcome him by a citation from that historical book without note or comment. Is it not difficult to believe that neither He nor Satan considered it inspired? Thus without going further, we may say, with Dr. DeWitt of Princeton, that it is impossible to secure the religious infallibility of the Bible-which is all the objector regards as necessary-if we exclude Bible history from the sphere of its inspiration. But if we include Bible history at all, we must in the whole of it, for who is competent to separate its parts? 2. The inspiration includes not only all the books of the Bible in general but in detail, the form as well as the substance, the word as well as the thought. This is sometimes called the verbal theory of inspiration and is vehemently spoken against in some quarters. It is too mechanical, it degrades the writers to the level of machines, it has a tendency to make skeptics, and all that. This last remark, however, is not so alarming as it sounds. The doctrine of the eternal retribution of the wicked is said to make skeptics, and also that of a vicarious atonement, not to mention other revelations of Holy Writ. The natural mind takes to none of these things. But if we are not prepared to yield the point in one case for such a reason, why should we be asked to do it in another? And as to degrading the writers to the level of machines, even if it were true, as it is not, why should fault be found when one considers the result? Which is the more important, the free agency of a score or two of mortals, or the divinity of their message? The whole argument is just a spark from the anvil on which the race is ever trying to hammer out the deification of itself. But we are insisting upon no theory-not even the verbal theory-if it altogether excludes the human element in the transmission of the sacred word. As Dr. Henry B. Smith says, "God speaks through the personality as well as the lips of His messengers," and we may pour into that word "personality" everything that goes to make it-the age in which the person lived, his environment, his degree of culture, his temperament and all the rest. As Wayland Hoyt expressed it, "Inspiration is not a mechanical, crass, bald compulsion of the sacred writers, but rather a dynamic, divine influence over their freely-acting faculties" in order that the latter in relation to the subject-matter then in hand may be kept inerrant, i.e., without mistake or fault. It is limiting the Holy One of Israel to say that He is unable to do this without turning a human being into an automaton. Has He who created man as a free agent left himself no opportunity to mould his thoughts into forms of speech inerrantly expressive of His will, without destroying that which He has made? And, indeed, wherein resides man's free agency, in his mind or in his mouth? Shall we say he is free while God controls his thought, but that he becomes a mere machine when that control extends to the expression of his thought? But returning to the argument, if the divine influence upon the writers did not extend to the form as well as the substance of their writings; if, in other words, God gave them only the thought, permitting them to express it in their own words, what guarantee have we that they have done so? An illustration the writer has frequently used will help to make this clear. A stenographer in a mercantile house was asked by his employer to write as follows: "Gentlemen: We misunderstood your letter and will now fill your order." Imagine the employer's surprise, however, when a little later this was set before him for his signature: "Gentlemen: We misunderstood your letter and will not fill your order." The mistake was only of a single letter, but it was entirely subversive of his meaning. And yet the thought was given clearly to the stenographer, and the words, too, for that matter. Moreover, the latter was capable and faithful, but he was human, and it is human to err. Had not his employer controlled his expression down to the very letter, the thought intended to be conveyed would have failed of utterance. In the same way the human authors of the Bible were men of like passions with ourselves. Their motives were pure, their intentions good, but even if their subject-matter were the commonplaces of men, to say nothing of the mysterious and transcendent revelation of a holy God, how could it be an absolute transcript of the mind from which it came in the absence of miraculous control? In the last analysis, it is the Bible itself, of course, which must settle the question of its inspiration and the extent of it, and to this we come in the consideration of the proof, but we may be allowed a final question. Can even God Himself give a thought to man without the words that clothe it? Are not the two inseparable, as much so "as a sum and its figures, or a tune and its notes?" Has any case been known in human history where a healthy mind has been able to create ideas without expressing them to its own perception? In other words, as Dr. A. J. Gordon once observed: "To deny that the Holy Spirit speaks in scripture is an intelligible proposition, but to admit that He speaks, it is impossible to know what He says except as we have His Words." 3. Proof of Inspiration 1. The inspiration of the Bible is proven by the philosophy, or what may be called the nature of the case. The proposition may be stated thus: The Bible is the history of the redemption of the race, or from the side of the individual, a supernatural revelation of the will of God to men for their salvation. But it was given to certain men of one age to be conveyed in writing to other men in different ages. Now all men experience difficulty in giving faithful reflections of their thoughts to others because of sin, ignorance, defective memory and the inaccuracy always incident to the use of language. Therefore it may be easily deduced that if the revelation is to be communicated precisely as originally received, the same supernatural power is required in the one case as in the other. This has been sufficiently elaborated in the foregoing and need not be dwelt upon again. 2. It may be proven by the history and character of the Bible, i.e., by all that has been assumed as to its authenticity and credibility. All that goes to prove these things goes to prove its inspiration. To borrow in part, the language of the Westminster Confession, "the heavenliness of its matter, the efficacy of its doctrine, the unity of its various parts, the majesty of its style and the scope and completeness of its design" all indicate the divinity of its origin. The more we think upon it the more we must be convinced that men unaided by the Spirit of God could neither have conceived, nor put together, nor preserved in its integrity that precious deposit known as the Sacred Oracles. 3. But the strongest proof is the declarations of the Bible itself and the inferences to be drawn from them. Nor is this reasoning in a circle as some might think. In the case of a man as to whose veracity there is no doubt, no hesitancy is felt in accepting what he says about himself; and since the Bible is demonstrated to be true in its statements of fact by unassailable evidence, may we not accept its witness in its own behalf? Take the argument from Jesus Christ as an illustration. He was content to be tested by the prophecies that went before on Him, and the result of that ordeal was the establishment of His claims to be the Messiah beyond a peradventure. That complex system of prophecies, rendering collusion or counterfeit impossible, is the incontestable proof that He was what He claimed to be. But of course, He in whose birth, and life, and death, and resurrection such marvelous prophecies met their fulfillment, became, from the hour in which His claims were established, a witness to the divine authority and infallible truth of the sacred records in which these prophecies are found.-( The New Apologetic, by Professor Robert Watts, D. D.) It is so with the Bible. The character of its contents, the unity of its parts, the fulfillment of its prophecies, the miracles wrought in its attestation, the effects it has accomplished in the lives of nations and of men, all these go to show that it is divine, and if so, that it may be believed in what it says about itself. A. Argument for the Old Testament To begin with the Old Testament, (a) consider how the writers speak of the origin of their messages. Dr. James H. Brookes is authority for saying that the phrase, "Thus saith the Lord" or its equivalent is used by them 2,000 times. Suppose we eliminate this phrase and its necessary context from the Old Testament in every instance, one wonders how much of the Old Testament would remain. (b) Consider how the utterances of the Old Testament writers are introduced into the New. Take Matthew 1:22 as an illustration, "Now all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet." It was not the prophet who spake, but the Lord who spake through the prophet. (c) Consider how Christ and His apostles regard the Old Testament. He came "not to destroy but to fulfill the law and the prophets." Matthew 5:17. "The Scripture cannot be broken." John 10:35. He sometimes used single words as the bases of important doctrines, twice in Matthew 22, at verses 31,32 and 42-45. The apostles do the same. See Galatians 3:16, Hebrews 2:8; Hebrews 2:11; Hebrews 12:26-27. (d) Consider what the apostles directly teach upon the subject. Peter tells us that "No prophecy ever came by the will of man, but men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit" (2 Peter 1:21, R.V.). "Prophecy" here applies to the word written as is indicated in the preceding verse, and means not merely the foretelling of events, but the utterances of any word of God without reference as to time past, present or to come. As a matter of fact, what Peter declares is that the will of man had nothing to do with any part of the Old Testament, but that the whole of it, from Genesis to Malachi, was inspired by God. Of course Paul says the same, in language even plainer, in 2 Timothy 3:16, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable." The phrase "inspiration of God" means literally God-breathed. The whole of the Old Testament is God-breathed, for it is to that part of the Bible the language particularly refers, since the New Testament as such was not then generally known. As this verse is given somewhat differently in the Revised Version we dwell upon it a moment longer. It there reads, "Every scripture inspired of God is also profitable," and the caviler is disposed to say that therefore some scripture may be inspired and some may not be, and that the profitableness extends only to the former and not the latter. But aside from the fact that Paul would hardly be guilty of such a weak truism as that, it may be stated in reply first, that the King James rendering of the passage is not only the more consistent scripture, but the more consistent Greek. Several of the best Greek scholars of the period affirm this, including some of the revisers themselves who did not vote for the change. And secondly, even the revisers place it in the margin as of practically equal authority with their preferred translation, and to be chosen by the reader if desired. There are not a few devout Christians, however, who would be willing to retain the rendering of the Revised Version as being stronger than the King James, and who would interpolate a word in applying it to make it mean, "Every scripture (because) inspired of God is also profitable." We believe that both Gaussen and Wordsworth take this view, two as staunch defenders of plenary inspiration as could be named. B. Argument for the New Testament We are sometimes reminded that, however strong and convincing the argument for the inspiration of the Old Testament, that for the New Testament is only indirect. "Not one of the evangelists tells us that he is inspired," says a certain theological professor, "and not one writer of an epistle, except Paul." We shall be prepared to dispute this statement a little further, but in the meantime let us reflect that the inspiration of the Old Testament being assured as it is, why should similar evidence be required for the New? Whoever is competent to speak as a Bible authority knows that the unity of the Old and New Testaments is the strongest demonstration of their common source. They are seen to be not two books, but only two parts of one book. To take then the analogy of the Old Testament. The foregoing argument proves its inspiration as a whole, although there were long periods separating the different writers, Moses and David let us say, or David and Daniel, the Pentateuch and the Psalms, or the Psalms and the Prophets. As long, or longer, than between Malachi and Matthew, or Ezra and the Gospels. If then to carry conviction for the plenary inspiration of the Old Testament as a whole, it is not necessary to prove it for every book, why, to carry conviction for the plenary inspiration of the Bible as a whole is it necessary to do the same? We quote here a paragraph or two from Dr. Nathaniel West. He is referring to 2 Timothy 3:16, which he renders, "Every scripture is inspired of God," and adds: "The distributive word 'Every' is used not only to particularize each individual scripture of the Canon that Timothy had studied from his youth, but also to include, along with the Old Testament the New Testament scriptures extant in Paul's day, and any others, such as those that John wrote after him. "The Apostle Peter tells us that he was in possession, not merely of some of Paul's Epistles, but 'all his Epistles,' and places them, canonically, in the same rank with what he calls 'the other scriptures,' i.e., of equal inspiration and authority with the 'words spoken before by the Holy Prophets, and the commandment of the Lord and Savior, through the Apostles.' 2 Peter 3:2; 2 Peter 3:16. "Paul teaches the same co-ordination of the Old and New Testaments. Having referred to the Old as a unit, in his phrase 'Holy Scriptures,' which the revisers translate 'Sacred Writings,' he proceeds to particularize. He tells Timothy that 'every scripture,' whether of Old or New Testament production, 'is inspired of God.' Let it be in the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Prophets, the Historical Books, let it be a chapter or a verse; let it be in the Gospels, the Acts, his own or Peter's Epistles, or even John's writings, yet to be, still each part of the Sacred Collection is God-given and because of that possesses divine authority as part of the Book of God." We read this from Dr. West twenty years ago, and rejected it as his dictum. We read it today, with deeper and fuller knowledge of the subject, and we believe it to be true. It is somewhat as follows that Dr. Gaussen in his exhaustive "Theopneustia" gives the argument for the inspiration of the New Testament. (a) The New Testament is the later, and for that reason the more important revelation of the two, and hence if the former were inspired, it certainly must be true of the latter. The opening verses of the first and second chapters of Hebrews plainly suggest this: "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son * * * Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard." And this inference is rendered still more conclusive by the circumstance that the New Testament sometimes explains, sometimes proves, and sometimes even repeals ordinances of the Old Testament. See Matthew 1:22-23 for an illustration of the first, Acts 13:1919 to 39 for the second and Galatians 5:6 for the third. Assuredly these things would not be true if the New Testament were not of equal, and in a certain sense, even greater authority than the Old. (b) The writers of the New Testament were of an equal or higher rank than those of the Old. That they were prophets is evident from such allusions as Romans 16:25-27, and Ephesians 3:4-5. But that they were more than prophets is indicated in the fact that wherever in the New Testament prophets and apostles are both mentioned, the last named is always mentioned first (see 1 Corinthians 12:28; Ephesians 2:20, Ephesians 4:11). It is also true that the writers of the New Testament had a higher mission than those of the Old, since they were sent forth by Christ, as he had been sent forth by the Father (John 20:21). They were to go, not to a single nation only (as Israel), but into all the world (Matthew 28:19). They received the keys of the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 16:19). And they are to be pre-eminently rewarded in the regeneration (Matthew 19:28). Such considerations and comparisons as these are not to be overlooked in estimating the authority by which they wrote. (c) The writers of the New Testament were especially qualified for their work, as we see in Matthew 10:19-20; Mark 13:11; Luke 12:2; John 14:2626 and John 16:13-14. These passages will be dwelt on more at length in a later division of our subject, but just now it may be noticed that in some of the instances, inspiration of the most absolute character was promised as to what they should speak the inference being warranted that none the less would they be guided in what they wrote. Their spoken words were limited and temporary in their sphere, but their written utterances covered the whole range of revelation and were to last forever. If in the one case they were inspired, how much more in the other? (d) The writers of the New Testament directly claim divine inspiration. See Acts 15:23-29, where, especially at verse 28, James is recorded as saying, "for it seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things." Here it is affirmed very clearly that the Holy Ghost is the real writer of the letter in question and simply using the human instruments for his purpose. Add to this 1 Corinthians 2:13, where Paul says: "Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual," or as the margin of the Revised Version puts it, "imparting spiritual things to spiritual men." In 1 Thessalonians 2:13 the same writer says: "For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of man, but as it is in truth the word of God." In 2 Peter 3 :2 the apostle places his own words on a level with those of the prophets of the Old Testament, and in verses 15 and 16 of the same chapter he does the same with the writings of Paul, classifying them "with the other scriptures." Finally, in Revelation 2:7, although it is the Apostle John who is writing, he is authorized to exclaim: "He that hath an ear let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches," and so on throughout the epistles to the seven churches. C. Argument for the Words The evidence that the inspiration includes the form as well as the substance of the Holy Scriptures, the word as well as the thought, may be gathered in this way. 1. There were certainly some occasions when the words were given to the human agents. Take the instance of Balaam (Numbers 22:38; Numbers 23:12; Numbers 23:16). It is clear that this self-seeking prophet thought, i.e., desired to speak differently from what he did, but was obliged to speak the word that God put in his mouth. There are two incontrovertible witnesses to this, one being Balaam himself and the other God. Take Saul (1 Samuel 10:10), or at a later time, his messengers (1 Samuel 19:20-24). No one will claim that there was not an inspiration of the words here. And Caiaphas also (John 11:49-52), of whom it is expressly said that when he prophesied that one man should die for the people, "this spake he not of himself." Who believes that Caiaphas meant or really knew the significance of what he said? And how entirely this harmonizes with Christ's promise to His disciples in Matthew 10:19-20 and elsewhere. "When they deliver you up take no thought (be not anxious) how or what ye shall speak; for it shall be given you in that hour what ye shall speak. For it is not ye that speak but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you." Mark is even more emphatic: "Neither do ye premeditate, but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye, for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost." Take the circumstance of the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:4-11), when the disciples "began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance." Parthians, Medes, Elamites, the dwellers in Mesopotamia, in Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, the strangers of Rome, Cretes and Arabians all testified, "we do here them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God!" Did not this inspiration include the words? Did it not indeed exclude the thought? What clearer example could be desired? To the same purport consider Paul's teaching in 1Cor 14 about the gift of tongues, lie that speaketh in an unknown tongue, in the Spirit speaketh mysteries, but no man understandeth him, therefore he is to pray that he may interpret. Under some circumstances, if no interpreter be present, he is to keep silence in the church and speak only to himself and to God. But better still, consider the utterance of 1 Peter 1:10-11, where he speaks of them who prophesied of the grace that should come, as "searching what, or what manner of time, the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify when He testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow, to whom it was revealed," etc. "Should we see a student who, having taken down the lecture of a profound philosopher, was now studying diligently to comprehend the sense of the discourse which he had written, we should understand simply that he was a pupil and not a master; that he had nothing to do with originating either the thoughts or the words of the lecture, but was rather a disciple whose province it was to understand what he had transcribed, and so be able to communicate it to others. "And who can deny that this is the exact picture of what we have in this passage from Peter? Here were inspired writers studying the meaning of what they themselves had written. With all possible allowance for the human peculiarities of the writers, they must have been reporters of what they heard, rather than formulators of that which they had been made to understand."-A. J. Gordon in "The Ministry of the Spirit," pp. 173,174. 2. The Bible plainly teaches that inspiration extends to its words. We spoke of Balaam as uttering that which God put in his mouth, but the same expression is used by God Himself with reference to His prophets. When Moses would excuse himself from service because he was not eloquent, He who made man's mouth said, "Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say" (Exodus 4:10-12). And Dr. James H. Brookes' comment is very pertinent. "God did not say I will be with thy mind, and teach thee what thou shalt think; but I will be with thy mouth and teach thee what thou shalt say. This explains why, forty years afterwards, Moses said to Israel, 'Ye shall not add unto the word I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it.' (Deuteronomy 4:2.)" Seven times Moses tells us that the tables of stone containing the commandments were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables (Exodus 31:16). Passing from the Pentateuch to the poetical books we find David saying, "The Spirit of the Lord spake by me, and His word was in my tongue" (2 Samuel 23:1-2). He, too, does not say, God thought by me, but spake by me. Coming to the prophets, Jeremiah confesses that, like Moses, he recoiled from the mission on which he was sent and for the same reason. He was a child and could not speak. "Then the Lord put forth His hand and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold I have put My word in thy mouth" (Jeremiah 1:6-9). All of which substantiates the declaration of Peter quoted earlier, that "no prophecy ever came by the will of man, but man spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit." Surely, if the will of man had nothing to do with the prophecy, he could not have been at liberty in the selection of the words. So much for the Old Testament, but when we reach the New, we have the same unerring and verbal accuracy guaranteed to the apostles by the Son of God, as we have seen. And we have the apostles making claim of it, as when Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:12-13 distinguishes between the "things" or the thoughts which God gave him and the words in which he expressed them, and insisting on the divinity of both; "Which things also we speak," he says, "not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth." In Galatians 3:16, following the example of His divine Master, he employs not merely a single word, but a single letter of a word as the basis of an argument for a great doctrine. The blessing of justification which Abraham received has become that of the believer in Jesus Christ. "Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ." The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews bases a similar argument on the word "all" in Hebrews 1:8, on the word "one" in Hebrews 1:11, and on the phrase "yet once more" in Hebrews 12:26-27. To recur to Paul's argument in Galatians, Archdeacon Farrar in one of his writings denies that by any possibility such a Hebraist as he, and such a master of Greek usage could have argued in this way. He says Paul must have known that the plural of the Hebrew and Greek terms for "seed" is never used by Hebrew or Greek writers to designate human offspring. It means, he says, various kinds of grain. His artlessness is amusing. We accept his estimate of Paul's knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, says Professor Watts, he was certainly a Hebrew of the Hebrews, and as to his Greek he could not only write it but speak it as we know, and quote what suited his purpose from the Greek poets. But on this supposition we feel justified in asking Dr. Farrar whether a lexicographer in searching Greek authors for the meanings they attached to spermata, the Greek for "seeds," would not be inclined to add "human offspring" on so good an authority as Paul? Nor indeed would they be limited to his authority, since Sophocles uses it in the same way, and Aeschylus. "I was driven away from my country by my own offspring" (spermata)-literally by my own seeds, is what the former makes one of his characters say. Dr. Farrar's rendering of spermata in Galatians 3:16 on the other hand would make nonsense if not sacrilege. "He saith not unto various kinds of grain as of many, but as of one, and to thy grain, which is Christ." "Granting then, what we thank no man for granting, that spermata means human offspring, it is evident that despite all opinions to the contrary, this passage sustains the teaching of an inspiration of Holy Writ extending to its very words." 3. But the most unique argument for the inspiration of the words of scripture is the relation which Jesus Christ bears to them. In the first place, He Himself was inspired as to His words. In the earliest reference to His prophetic office (Deuteronomy 18:18), Jehovah says, "I will put My words in His mouth, and He shall speak * * * all that I shall command Him." A limitation on His utterance which Jesus everywhere recognizes. "As My Father hath taught Me, I speak these things;" "the Father which sent Me, He gave Me a commandment what I should say, and what I should speak;" "whatsoever I speak therefore, even as the Father said unto Me, so I speak;" "I have given unto them the words which Thou gavest Me," "the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life." (John 6:63; John 8:26; John 8:28; John 8:40; John 12:49-50). The thought is still more impressive as we read of the relation of the Holy Spirit to the God-man. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me because He hath anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor;" "He through the Holy Ghost had given commandments unto the apostles;" "the revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave unto Him;" "these things saith He that holdeth the seven stars in His right hand;" "He that hath an ear let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches" (Luke 4:18; Acts 1:2; Revelation 1:1; Revelation 2:1; Revelation 2:11). If the incarnate Word needed the unction of the Holy Ghost to give to men the revelation He received from the Father in Whose bosom He dwells; and if the agency of the same Spirit extended to the words He spake in preaching the gospel to the meek or dictating an epistle, how much more must these things be so in the case of ordinary men when engaged in the same service? With what show of reason can one contend that any Old or New Testament writer stood; so far as his words were concerned, in need of no such agency."-The New Apologetic, pp.67,68. In the second place He used the scriptures as though they were inspired as to their words. In Matthew 22:31-32, He substantiates the doctrine of the resurrection against the skepticism of the Sadducees by emphasizing the present tense of the verb "to be," i.e., the word "am" in the language of Jehovah to Moses at the burning bush. In verses 42-45 of the same chapter He does the Same for His own Deity by alluding to the second use of the word "Lord" in Psalm 110. "The LORD said unto my Lord * * * If David then call him Lord, how is he his son?" In John 10:34-36, He vindicates Himself from the charge of blasphemy by saying, "Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If He called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?" We have already seen Him (in Matt 4) overcoming the tempter in the wilderness by three quotations from Deuteronomy without note or comment except, "It is written." Referring to which Adolphe Monod says, "I know of nothing in the whole history of humanity, nor even in the field of divine revelation, that proves more clearly than this the inspiration of the scriptures. What! Jesus Christ, the Lord of heaven and earth, calling to his aid in that solemn moment Moses his servant" He who speaks from heaven fortifying himself against the temptations of hell by the word of him who spake from earth? How can we explain that spiritual mystery, that wonderful reversing of the order of things, if for Jesus the words of Moses were not the words of God rather than those of men? How shall we explain it if Jesus were not fully aware that holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost? "I do not forget the objections which have been raised against the inspiration of the scriptures, nor the real obscurity with which that inspiration is surrounded; if they sometimes trouble your hearts, they have troubled mine also. But at such times, in order to revive my faith, I have only to glance at Jesus glorifying the scriptures in the wilderness; and I have seen that for all who rely upon Him, the most embarrassing of problems is transformed into a historical fact, palpable and clear. Jesus no doubt was aware of the difficulties connected with the inspiration of the scriptures, but did this prevent Him from appealing to their testimony with unreserved confidence? Let that which was sufficient for Him suffice for you. Fear not that the rock which sustained the Lord in the hour of His temptation and distress will give way because you lean too heavily upon it." In the third place, Christ teaches that the scriptures are inspired as to their words. In the Sermon on the Mount He said, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." Here is testimony confirmed by an oath, for "verily" on the lips of the Son of Man carries such force. He affirms the indestructibility of the law, not its substance merely but its form, not the thought but the word. "One jot or tittle shall in no wise pass from the law." The "jot" means the yod, the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet, while the "tittle" means the horn, a short projection in certain letters extending the base line beyond the upright one which rests upon it. A reader unaccustomed to the Hebrew needs a strong eye to see the tittle, but Christ guarantees that as a part of the sacred text neither the tittle nor the yod shall perish. The elder Lightfoot, the Hebraist and rabbinical scholar of the Westminster Assembly time, has called attention to an interesting story of a certain letter yod found in the text of Deuteronomy 32:18. It is in the word teshi, to forsake, translated in the King James as "unmindful." Originally it seems to have been written smaller even than usual, i.e., undersized, and yet notwithstanding the almost infinite number of times in which copies have been made, that little yod stands there today just as it ever did. Lightfoot spoke of it in the middle of the seventeenth century and although two more centuries and a half have passed since then with all their additional copies of the book, yet it still retains its place in the sacred text. Its diminutive size is referred to in the margin, "but no hand has dared to add a hair's breadth to its length," so that we can still employ his words, and say that it is likely to remain there forever. The same scholar speaks of the effect a slight change in the form of a Hebrew letter might produce in the substance of the thought for which it stands. He takes as an example two words, "Chalal" and "Halal," which differ from each other simply in their first radicals. The "Ch" in Hebrew is expressed by one letter the same as "H," the only distinction being a slight break or opening in the left limb of the latter. It seems too trifling to notice, but let that line be broken where it should be continuous, and "Thou shalt not profane the Name of thy God" in Leviticus 18:21, becomes "Thou shalt not praise the Name of thy God." Through that aperture, however small, the entire thought of the Divine mind oozes out, so to speak, and becomes quite antagonistic to what was designed. This shows how truly the thought and the word expressing it are bound together, and that whatever affects the one imperils the other. As another says, "The bottles are not the wine, but if the bottles perish, the wine is sure to be spilled." It may seem like narrow-mindedness to contend for this, and an evidence of enlightenment or liberal scholarship to treat it with indifference, but we should be prepared to take our stand with Jesus Christ in the premises, and if necessary, go outside the camp bearing our reproach. 4. Difficulties and Objections That there are difficulties in the way of accepting a view of inspiration like this goes without saying. But to the finite mind there must always be difficulties connected with a revelation from the Infinite, and it can not be otherwise. This has been mentioned before. Men of faith, and it is such we are addressing, and not men of the world, do not wait to understand or resolve all the difficulties associated with other mysteries of the Bible before accepting them as divine, and why should they do so in this case? Moreover, Archbishop Whately's dictum is generally accepted, that we are not obliged to clear away every difficulty about a doctrine in order to believe it, always provided that the facts on which it rests are true. And particularly is this the case where the rejection of such a doctrine involves greater difficulties than its belief, as it does here. For if this view of inspiration be rejected, what have its opponents to give in its place? Do they realize that any objections to it are slight in comparison with those to any other view that can be named? And do they realize that this is true because this view has the immeasurable advantage of agreeing with the plain declarations of Scripture on the subject? In other words, as Dr. Burrell says, those who assert the inerrancy of the scripture autographs do so on the authority of God Himself, and to deny it is of a piece with the denial that they teach the forgiveness of sins or the resurrection from the dead. No amount of exegetical turning and twisting can explain away the assertions already quoted in these pages, to say nothing of the constant undertone of evidence we find in the Bible everywhere to their truth. And speaking of this further, are we not justified in requiring of the objector two things? First, on any fair basis of scientific investigation, is he not obliged to dispose of the evidence here presented before he impugns the doctrine it substantiates? And second, after having disposed of it, is he not equally obligated to present the scriptural proof of whatever other view of inspiration he would have us accept? Has he ever done this, and if not, are we not further justified in saying that it can not be done? But let us consider some of the difficulties. 1. There are the so-called discrepancies or contradictions between certain statements of the Bible and the facts of history or natural science. The best way to meet these is to treat them separately as they are presented, but when you ask for them you are not infrequently met with silence. They are hard to produce, and when produced, who is able to say that they belong to the original parchments? As we are not contending for an inerrant translation, does not the burden of proof rest with the objector? But some of these "discrepancies" are easily explained. They do not exist between statements of the Bible and facts of science, but between erroneous interpretations of the Bible and immature conclusions of science. The old story of Galileo is in point, who did not contradict the Bible in affirming that the earth moved round the sun but only the false theological assumptions about it. In this way advancing light has removed many of these discrepancies, and it is fair to presume with Dr. Charles Hodge that further light would remove all. 2. There are the differences in the narratives themselves. In the first place, the New Testament writers sometimes change important words in quoting from the Old Testament, which it is assumed could not be the case if in both instances the writers were inspired. But it is forgotten that in the scriptures we are dealing not so much with different human authors as with one Divine Author. It is a principle in ordinary literature that an author may quote himself as he pleases, and give a different turn to an expression here and there as a changed condition of affairs renders it necessary or desirable. Shall we deny this privilege to the Holy Spirit? May we not find, indeed, that some of these supposed misquotations show such progress of truth, such evident application of the teaching of an earlier dispensation to the circumstances of a later one, as to afford a confirmation of their divine origin rather than an argument against it? We offered illustrations of this earlier, but to those would now add Isaiah 59:20 quoted in Romans 11:26, and Amos 9:11 quoted in Acts 15:16. And to any desiring to further examine the subject we would recommend the valuable work of Professor Franklin Johnson, of Chicago University, entitled "The Quotations in the New Testament from the Old." Another class of differences, however, is where the same event is sometimes given differently by different writers. Take that most frequently used by the objectors, the inscription on the Cross, recorded by all the evangelists and yet differently by each. How can such records be inspired, it is asked. It is to be remembered in reply, that the inscription was written in three languages calling for a different arrangement of the words in each case, and that one evangelist may have translated the Hebrew, and another the Latin, while a third recorded the Greek. It is not said that any one gave the full inscription, nor can we affirm that there was any obligation upon them to do So. Moreover, no one contradicts any other, and no one says what is untrue. Recalling what was said about our having to deal not with different human authors but with one Divine Author, may not the Holy Spirit here have chosen to emphasize some one particular fact, or phase of a fact of the inscription for a specific and important end? Examine the records to determine what this fact may have been. Observe that whatever else is omitted, all the narratives record the momentous circumstances that the Sufferer on the cross was THE KING OF THE JEWS. Could there have been a cause for this? What was the charge preferred against Jesus by His accusers? Was He not rejected and crucified because He said He was the King of the Jews? Was not this the central idea Pilate was providentially guided to express in the inscription? And if so, was it not that to which the evangelists should bear witness? And should not that witness have been borne in a way to dispel the thought of collusion in the premises? And did not this involve a variety of narrative which should at the same time be in harmony with truth and fact? And do we not have this very thing in the four gospels? These accounts supplement, but do not contradict each other. We place them before the eye in the order in which they are recorded. This is Jesus THE KING OF THE JEWS THE KING OF THE JEWS This is THE KING OF THE JEWS Jesus of Nazareth THE KING OF THE JEWS The entire inscription evidently was "This is Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews," but we submit that the foregoing presents a reasonable argument for the differences in the records. 3. There is the variety in style. Some think that if all the writers were alike inspired and the inspiration extended to their words, they must all possess the same style as if the Holy Spirit had but one style! Literary style is a method of selecting words and putting sentences together which stamps an author's work with the influence of his habits, his condition in society, his education, his reasoning, his experience, his imagination and his genius. These give his mental and moral physiognomy and make up his style. But is not God free to act with or without these fixed laws? There are no circumstances which tinge His views or reasoning's, and He has no idiosyncrasies of speech, and no mother tongue through which He expresses His character, or leaves the finger mark of genius upon His literary fabrics. It is a great fallacy then, as Dr. Thomas Armitage once said, to suppose that uniformity of verbal style must have marked God's authorship in the Bible, had He selected its words. As the author of all styles, rather does he use them all at his pleasure. He bestows all the powers of mental individuality upon His instruments for using the scriptures, and then uses their powers as He will to express His mind by them. Indeed, the variety of style is a necessary proof of the freedom of the human writers, and it is this which among other things convinces us that, however controlled by the Holy Spirit, they were not mere machines in what they wrote. Consider God's method in nature. In any department of vegetable life there may be but one genus, while its members are classified into a thousand species. From the bulbous root come the tulip, the hyacinth, the crocus, and the lily in every shape and shade, without any cause either of natural chemistry or culture. It is exclusively attributable to the variety of styles which the mind of God devises. And so in the sacred writings. His mind is seen in the infinite variety of expression which dictates the wording of every book. To quote Armitage again, "I cannot tell how the Holy Spirit suggested the words to the writers any more than some other man can tell how He suggested the thoughts to them. But if diversity of expression proves that He did not choose the words, the diversity of ideas proves that He did not dictate the thoughts, for the one is as varied as the other." William Cullen Bryant was a newspaper man but a poet; Edmund Clarence Stedman was a Wall Street broker and also a poet. What a difference in style there was between their editorials and commercial letters on the one hand, and their poetry on the other! Is God more limited than a man? 4. There are certain declarations of scripture itself. Does not Paul say in one or two places "I speak as a man," or "After the manner of man?" Assuredly, but is he not using the arguments common among men for the sake of elucidating a point? And may he not as truly be led of the Spirit to do that, and to record it, as to do or say anything else? Of course, what he quotes from men is not of the same essential value as what he receives directly from God, but the record of the quotation is as truly inspired. There are two or three ether utterances of his of this character in the 7th chapter of 1 Corinthians, where he is treating of marriage. At verse 6 he says, "I speak this by permission, not of commandment," and what he means has no reference to the source of his message but the subject of it. In contradiction to the false teaching of some, he says Christians are permitted to marry, but not commanded to do so. At verse 10 he says, "Unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord," while at verse 12 there follows, "but to the rest speak I, not the Lord." Does he declare himself inspired in the first instance, and not in the second? By no means, but in the first he is alluding to what the Lord spake on the subject while here in the flesh, and in the second to what he, Paul, is adding thereto on the authority of the Holy Spirit speaking through him. In other words, putting his own utterances on equality with those of our Lord, he simply confirms their inspiration. At verse 40 he uses a puzzling expression, "I think also that I have the Spirit of God." As we are contending only for an inspired record, it would seem easy to say that here he records a doubt as to whether he was inspired, and hence everywhere else in the absence of such record of doubt the inspiration is to be assumed. But this would be begging the question, and we prefer the solution of others that the answer is found in the condition of the Corinthian church at that time. His enemies had sought to counteract his teachings, claiming that they had the Spirit of God. Referring to the claim, he says with justifiable irony, "I think also that I have the Spirit Of God" (R. V.). "I think" in the mouth of one having apostolic authority, says Professor Watts, may be taken as carrying the strongest assertion of the judgment in question. The passage is something akin to another in the same epistle at the 14th chapter, verse 37, where he says, "If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord." Time forbids further amplification on the difficulties and objections nor is it necessary, since there is not one that has not been met satisfactorily to the man of God and the child of faith again and again. But there is an obstacle to which we would call attention before concluding-not a difficulty or objection, but a real obstacle, especially to the young and insufficiently instructed. It is the illusion that this view of inspiration is held only by the unlearned. An illusion growing out of still another as to who constitute the learned. There is a popular impression that in the sphere of theology and religion these latter are limited for the most part to the higher critics and their relatives, and the more rationalistic and iconoclastic the critic the more learned he is esteemed to be. But the fallacy of this is seen in that the qualities which make for a philologist, an expert in human languages, or which give one a wide acquaintance with literature of any kind, in other words the qualities of the higher Critic, depend more on memory than judgment, and do not give the slightest guarantee that their possessors can draw a sound conclusion from what they know. As the author of "Faith and Inspiration" puts it, the work of such a scholar is often like that of a quarryman to an architect. Its entire achievement, though immensely valuable in its place, is just a mass of raw and formless material until a mind gifted in a different direction, and possessing the necessary taste and balance shall reduce or put it into shape for use. The perplexities of astronomers touching Halley's comet is in point. They knew facts that common folks did not know, but when they came to generalize upon them, the man on the street knew that he should have looked in the west for the phenomenon when they bade him look in the east. Much is said for example about an acquaintance with Hebrew and Greek, and no sensible man will underrate them for the theologian or the Bible scholar, but they are entirely unnecessary to an understanding of the doctrine of inspiration or any other doctrine of Holy Writ. The intelligent reader of the Bible in the English tongue, especially when illuminated by the Holy Spirit, is abundantly able to decide upon these questions for himself. He cannot determine how the Holy Spirit operated on the minds of the sacred penmen because that is not revealed, but he can determine on the results secured because that is revealed. He can determine whether the inspiration covers, all the books, and whether it includes not only the substance but the form, not only the thoughts but the words. We have spoken of scholars and of the learned, let us come to names. We suppose Dr. Sanday, of Oxford, is a scholar, and the Archbishop of Durham, and Dean Burgon, and Professor Orr, of Glasgow, and Principal Forsyth, of Hackney College, and Sir Robert Anderson, and Dr. Kuyper, of Holland, and President Patton, of Princeton, and Howard Osgood of the Old Testament Revision Committee and Matthew B. Riddle of the New, and G. Frederick Wright and Albert T. Clay, the archaeologists, and Presidents Moorehead and Mullins, and C. I. Scofield, and Luther T. Townsend, for twenty-five years professor in the Theological School of Boston University, and Arthur T. Pierson of the Missionary Review of the World, and a host of other living witnesses-Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Reformed Dutch. We had thought John Calvin a scholar, and the distinguished Bengel, and Canon Faussett, and Tregelles, and Auberlen, and Van Oosterzee, and Charles Hodge and Henry B. Smith, and so many more that it were foolishness to recall them. These men may not stand for every statement in these pages, they might not care to be quoted as holding technically the verbal theory of inspiration for reasons already named, but they will affirm the heart of the contention and testify to their belief in an inspiration of the Sacred Oracles which includes the words. Once when the writer was challenged by the editor of a secular daily to name a single living scholar who thus believed, he presented that of a chancellor of a great university, and was told that he was not the kind of scholar that was meant! The kind of scholar not infrequently meant by such opposers is the one who is seeking to destroy faith in the Bible as the Word of God, and to substitute in its place a Bible of his own making. The Outlook had an editorial recently, entitled "Whom Shall We Believe?" in which the writer reaffirmed the platitudes that living is a vital much more than an intellectual process, and that truth of the deeper kind is distilled out of experience rather than logical processes. This is the reason he said why many things are hidden from the so-called wise, who follow formal methods of exact observation, and are revealed to babes and sucklings who know nothing of these methods, but are. deep in the process of living. No spectator ever yet understood a great contemporary human movement into which he did not enter. Does this explain why the cloistered scholar is unable to accept the supernatural inspiration of the scriptures while the men on the firing line of the Lord's army believe in it even to the very words? Does it explain the faith of our missionaries in foreign lands? Is this what led J. Hudson Taylor to Inland China, and Dr. Guinness to establish the work upon the Congo, and George Mueller and William Quarrier to support the orphans at Bristol and the Bridge of Weirs? Is this-the belief in the plenary inspiration of the Bible the secret of the evangelistic power of D. L. Moody, and Chapman, and Torrey, and Gipsy Smith, and practically every evangelist in the field, for to the extent of our acquaintance there are none of these who doubt it? Does this tell why "the best sellers on the market," at least among Christian people, have been the devotional and expository books of Andrew Murray, and Miller and Meyer, and writers of that stamp? Is this why the plain people have loved to listen to preachers like Spurgeon, and McLaren, and Campbell Morgan, and Len Broughton and A. C. Dixon and have passed by men of the other kind? It is, in a word, safe to challenge the whole Christian world for the name of a man who stands out as a winner of souls who does not believe in the inspiration of the Bible as it has been sought to be explained in these pages. But we conclude with a kind of concrete testimony-that of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America, and of a date as recent as 1893. The writer is not a Presbyterian, and therefore with the better grace can ask his readers to consider the character and the intellect represented in such an Assembly. Here are some of our greatest merchants, our greatest jurists, our greatest educators, our greatest statesmen, as well as our greatest missionaries, evangelists and theologians. There may be seen as able and august a gathering of representatives of Christianity in other places and on other occasions, but few that can surpass it. For sobriety of thought, for depth as well as breadth of learning, for wealth of spiritual experience, for honesty of utterance, and virility of conviction, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America must command attention and respect throughout the world. And this is what it said on the subject we are now considering at its gathering in the city of Washington, the capital of the nation, at the date named: "THE BIBLE AS WE NOW HAVE IT, IN ITS VARIOUS TRANSLATIONS AND REVISIONS, WHEN FREED FROM ALL ERRORS AND MISTAKES OF TRANSLATORS, COPYISTS AND PRINTERS, (IS) THE VERY WORD OF GOD, AND CONSEQUENTLY WHOLLY WITHOUT ERROR." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 76: - INSPIRATION ======================================================================== Inspiration By Evangelist L. W. Munhall, M. A., D. D., Germantown, Pennsylvania. Author of "The Highest Critics Vs. The Higher Critics" The Bible is inspired. It is therefore God's Word. This is fundamental to the Christian faith. "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing, by the Word of God" (Romans 10:17). But, it is asked, What do you mean by inspiration? Because there are numerous theories of inspiration, this is a proper question. Also, it is well, before answering the question, to state some of these theories: * First, "The thoughts of the penman were inspired." * Second, "The thoughts were partially inspired." But they who hold to this view are very indefinite in their statements of the extent of this inspiration. * Third, "There were different degrees of inspiration." The advocates of this view use the difference between "illumination" and inspiration to prove their theory. * Fourth, "At one time the writers were inspired in the supervision of the work they did;" at another, "In the view they took of the work they were called upon to do;" and at another, "In directing the work." But in all these views the theorists are at sea, and leave all who trust to their pilotage at sea, as to the exact character and limitations of inspiration. * Fifth, "Dynamic inspiration". But the efforts of those who hold to this view, to explain what they mean by the term are exceedingly vague and misty. But the popular and current theory now is that the "Concept" is inspired. But no one attempts to tell what the "Concept" is; indeed, I doubt if any one knows. Also let this be said in this connection: Those who hold to any or all of the above named theories, in part or in whole, are emphatic in declaring that the Bible is not verbally inspired. The noisy ones will say, "No scholar believes in verbal inspiration." In this they bear false witness. Another expression in common use among them is this: "Such belief drives men into infidelity." And yet no one of them ever knew of a case. This class, with as much care and evident satisfaction as an infidel, hunt out the apparent contradictions and errors in the authorized and revised versions, and exultingly declare: "Here is conclusive evidence that the Bible is not verbally inspired." Some of these gentlemen are dishonest because: * First, they know that most of these apparent errors and contradictions were long ago satisfactorily answered, even to the silencing of infidel scoffers; and * Second, they know that no one believes that the translations and revisions are inspired. The doctrine of verbal inspiration is simply this: The original writings, ipsissima verba, came through the penmen direct from God; and the critics are only throwing dust into the air when they rail against verbal inspiration and attempt to disprove it by pointing out the apparent errors and discrepancies of the authorized and revised texts. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, in 1893, by a unanimous vote made the following deliverance: "The Bible as we now have it in its various translations and revisions when freed from all errors and mistakes of translators, copyists and printers, is the very Word of God, and consequently, wholly without error." We mean by Inspiration that the words composing the Bible are God breathed. If they are not, then the Bible is not inspired at all, since it is composed only and solely of words. "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God" (2 Timothy 3:16). The word rendered Scripture in this passage is Graphe. It means writing, anything written. The writing is composed of words. What else is this but verbal inspiration; and they wrest the "Scriptures unto their own destruction", who teach otherwise. Prof. A. A. Hodge says: "The line can never rationally be drawn between the thoughts and words of Scripture .... That we have an inspired Bible, and a verbally inspired one, we have the witness of God Himself." Prof. Gaussen says: "The theory of a Divine Revelation, in which you would have the inspiration of thoughts, without the inspiration of the language, is so inevitably irrational that it cannot be sincere, and proves false even to those who propose it." Canon Westcott says: "The slightest consideration will show that words are as essential to intellectual processes as they are to mutual intercourse. ... Thoughts are wedded to words as necessarily as soul to body. Without it the mysteries unveiled before the eyes of the seer would be confused shadows; with it, they are made clear lessons for human life." Dean Burgon, a man of vast learning, says: "You cannot dissect inspiration into substance and form. As for thoughts being inspired, apart from the words which give them expression, you might as well talk of a tune without notes, or a sum without figures. No such theory of inspiration is even intelligible. It is as illogical as it is worthless, and cannot be too sternly put down." This doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture, in all its elements and parts, has always been the doctrine of the Church. Dr. Westcott has proved this by a copious catena of quotations from Ante-Nicene Fathers in Appendix B to his "Introduction to the Study of the Gospels". He quotes Clemens Romanus as saying that the Scriptures are "the true utterances of the Holy Ghost". Take a few quotations from the Fathers: 1. Justin, speaking of the words of Scripture, says: "We must not suppose that the language proceeds from the men that are inspired, but from the Divine Word Himself, who moves them. Their work is to announce that which the Holy Spirit proposes to teach, through them, to those who wish to learn the true religion. The Divine power acts on men just as a plectrum on a harp or lyre." "The history Moses wrote was by the Divine Inspiration." And so, of all the Bible. 2. Irenaeus. "The writers spoke as acted on by the Spirit. All who foretold the Coming of Christ (Moses, David, Isaiah, etc.), received their inspiration from the Son, for how else could Scripture 'testify' of Him alone?" "Matthew might have written, 'The generation of Jesus was on this wise,' but the Holy Spirit, foreseeing the corruption of the truth, and fortifying us against deception, says, through Matthew, 'The generation of Jesus the Messiah was on this wise.'" "The writers are beyond all falsehood" i.e., they are inerrant. 3. Clement of Alexandria. The foundations of our faith rest on no insecure basis. We have received them through God Himself through the Scripture, not one jot or tittle of which shall pass away till all is accomplished, for the mouth of the Lord, the Holy Spirit, spoke it. He ceases to be a man who spurns the tradition of the Church, and turns aside to human opinions; for the Scriptures are truly holy, since they make us holy, God-like. Of these Holy Writings or Words, the Bible is composed. Paul calls them God-breathed. (2 Timothy 3:15-16). The Sacred Writings consist of these holy letters or syllables, since they are "God-breathed". Again, "The Jews and Christians agree as to the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, but differ in interpretation. By our faith, we believe that every Scripture, since it is God-breathed, is profitable. If the words of the Lord are pure words, refined silver, tried seven times, and the Holy Spirit has, with all care, dictated them accurately, it was on this account the Saviour said that not one jot or tittle of them should pass away." 4. Origen. "It is the doctrine acknowledged by all Christians, and evidently preached in the churches, that the Holy Spirit, inspired the Saints, Prophets and Apostles, and was present in those of old time, as in those He inspired at the Coming of Christ; for Christ, the Word of God, was in Moses when he wrote, and in the Prophets, and by His Spirit He did speak to them all things. The records of the Gospels are the Oracles of the Lord, pure Oracles, purified as silver seven times tried. They are without error, since they were accurately written, by the co-operation of the Holy Spirit." "It is good to adhere to the words of Paul and the Apostles, as to God and our Lord Jesus Christ. There are many writings, but only one Book; four Evangelists, but only one Gospel. All the Sacred Writings breathe the same fullness. There is nothing, in the Law, the Prophets, the Gospel, the Apostles, that did not come from the fullness of God. Whoever has received these Scriptures as inspired by the Creator of the world, must expect to find in them all the difficulties which meet those who investigate the system of the universe. But God's hand is not destroyed by our ignorance on particular points. The divinity of the Scriptures remains undisturbed by our weakness. It is a point in the teaching of the Church, that the Scriptures were written by the Spirit of God, and on this the opinion of the whole Church is one. All things that are written are true. He who is a student of God's Oracles must place himself under the teaching of God." So much for this Father of "Biblical Criticism," mighty in the Church. 5. Augustine. The view of the Holy Scriptures held by Augustine was that held by Tertullian, Cyprian and all Fathers of the North African Church. No view of verbal inspiration could be more rigid. "The Scriptures are the letters of God, the voice of God, the writings of God." "The writers record the words of God. Christ spoke by Moses, for He was the Spirit of the Creator, and all the prophecies are the voice of the Lord. From the Spirit came the gift of tongues. All Scripture is profitable since it is inspired of God. The Scriptures, whether in History, Prophecy, Psalms or Law, are of God. They cannot stand in part and fall in part. They are from God, who spake them all." "As it was not the Apostles who spoke, but the Spirit of the Father in them, so it is the Spirit that speaks in all Scriptures". "It avails nothing what I say, what he says, but what saith the Lord". Prof. B. B. Warfield, of Princeton Theological Seminary, said in an article, on The Westminster Doctrine of Inspiration: "Doubtless enough has been said to show that the confession teaches precisely the doctrine which is taught in the private writings of the framers, which was also the General Protestant Doctrine of the time, and not of that time only or of the Protestants only; for despite the contrary assertion that has recently become tolerably current, essentially this doctrine of inspiration (verbal) has been the doctrine of the Church of all ages and of all names." There is nothing truer in the world than that both the Jewish Church and the Christian Church believed the doctrine, because of their conception of the Holy Scriptures as the result of the "Creative Breath of God," even as matter itself, the soul of man, and the world, were created by the same "Breath of the Almighty"-the very conception Paul had when he said, "Every Scripture is God-breathed!" The pervasive evidence of verbal inspiration stares one in the face at the opening of every page of the Bible. It is not a "few texts", here and there, on which it depends, but it "stands" rooted in the whole body of the Word of God. He who knows what the Jews understood by the expression, "the Oracles of God", a divinely oracular Book, different from every other-a Book of God's own "Testimony"-will know that no other conception of its contents could prevail than this, that it was "divinely inspired", having "God" as its Author, and truth without error as its matter. The manner in which the Old Testament is quoted in the New is crowning demonstration of its verbal inspiration. That subjectless verb, "saith" (rendered, "It saith"), that nominative, the "Scripture saith", that personal subject, "He" ("He saith"), that identification of God with the "Scripture," ("the Scripture foreseeing," giving to it eyes, mouth and foreknowledge, as a living organism equal with God), that recognition of the human writer, as "Moses saith," "David saith," "Isaiah saith," is a divinely governed authorship; therefore it is all one to say, "Moses saith," "It saith." "the Scripture saith", "He saith", since in all it is "God saith"-all this proves the "high place," the estimate and conception which Christ, His Apostles, and the whole Jewish and Christian Church, had of the "Scriptures", and that they are a God breathed, oracular Book, created by the Breath of God-a verbally inspired Book, whose "words" were the "Words of God", infallible, authoritative, final, the court of last appeal, the very "Utterance" and "Voice" "of God," who spoke in time past in the Prophets, and who has spoken to us in these last days in His Son-"words" commanded to be written in the days of Moses and commanded to be written in the Apostles" days-the Spirit promised "to guide," to permit no lapse of "remembrance," and to "reveal" the future. Such form of citation, quotation, reference, and allusion to the Old Testament came from the conception of the Scriptures as the verbally inspired Book of God. It was by means of this specific and customary formula of quotation, Christ and His Apostles made known to the Church their exalted estimate of the "Volume of the Book." On this ground alone arose all the high attributes ascribed to it-its Divine origin, sanctity, sublimity, infallibility, authority and sufficiency for mankind. This uniform emphasis of the Scriptures as the product of the "Breath of God," not mere "human literature," as the critics would have it, nor a "human element" uncontrolled by the Divine, nor the miserable excuse of "wordless thoughts", the thoughts "inspired", but the "words not"-is characteristic of the treatment the Old Testament Scriptures everywhere receive in the New Testament. On no other view than that of verbal inspiration could such a manner of quotation, whether strict or free, have arisen. It is as the "Creation" and the "Oracles" of God they are referred to. On this their authority, holiness, perfection and perpetuity rest. And as to the "authorship" of the "Books" of Scripture, the citation of different texts existing in different "Books", render the names of different human authors, as "Moses saith", "David saith", "Isaiah saith", is proof that the authors of the texts are the authors of the "Books" in which they are found, and which bear their name. Only "Higher Critics" could dispute this. Some Proofs of Verbal Inspiration The Bible plainly teaches that its words are inspired, and that it is the Word of God. Let us examine into this matter a little, by considering briefly three kinds of evidence, viz.: * First. Direct testimony. * Second. Inferential testimony. * Third. Resultant testimony. FIRST. Let us note the Direct Testimony of the Bible to the fact of verbal inspiration. "And Moses said Unto the Lord, I am not eloquent (a man of words), neither heretofore nor since Thou hast spoken unto Thy servant: for I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue. And the Lord said unto him, Who hath made man's mouth" .... Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt speak, (Exodus 4:10-12). "And the Lord said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee, and with Israel" (Exodus 34:27). "And He said, Hear now My words: if there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream. ... With him (Moses) will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches; and the similitude of the Lord shall he behold" (Numbers 12:6; Numbers 12:8). "Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish from it" (Deuteronomy 4:2). "But the prophet which shall speak a word presumptuously in My name, which I have not commanded him to speak, ... that prophet shall die" (Deuteronomy 18:20). In Mark 12:36, Jesus said: "David himself said in the Holy Spirit." If we turn to 2 Samuel 23:2, we will find what it was David said: "The Spirit of the Lord spake by me, and His word was upon my tongue." Jeremiah said: "Ah! Lord God! behold I cannot speak, for I am a child. But the Lord saith unto me, Say not I am a child, for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak. Be not afraid of their faces, for I am with thee to deliver thee, saith the Lord. Then the Lord put forth His hand and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put My words in thy mouth" (Jeremiah 1:6-9). Balaam was compelled to speak against his will. He said: "Lo, I am come unto thee; have I now any power at all to say anything? the word that God putteth in my mouth, that shall I speak." He did his very utmost to curse the Israelites, but as often as he tried it, he blessed them. Balak at last said, "Neither curse them at all, nor bless them at all." But Balaam answered, "Told not I thee, saying, All the Lord speaketh, that must I do" (Numbers 22:38; Numbers 23:26). In the five books of Moses, in the books called historical, and books included under the general title of the Psalms, such expressions as the following occur hundreds of times: "Thus saith the Lord;" "The Lord said;" "The Lord spake;" "The Lord hath spoken;" "The saying of the Lord;" and "The word of the Lord." There is no other thought expressed in these books concerning inspiration than that the writers spoke and wrote the very words that God gave them. Turning to the books called prophetical, we find Isaiah saying, "Hear the word of the Lord" (Isaiah 1:10); and no fewer than twenty times does he explicitly declare that his writings are the "words of the Lord." Almost one hundred times does Jeremiah say, "The word of the Lord came unto me," or declare he was uttering the "words of the Lord," and the "word of the living God." Ezekiel says that his writings are the "words of God" quite sixty times. Here is a sample: "Son of man, all My words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears. And go get thee to them of the captivity, unto the children of thy people, and speak unto them, and tell them, Thus saith the Lord God" (Ezekiel 3:10-11). Daniel said, "And when I heard the voice of His words" (Daniel 10:9). Hosea said, "The word of the Lord" (Hosea 1:1). "The word of the Lord that came to Joel" (Joel 1:1). Amos said, "Hear the word of the Lord" (Amos 3:1). Obadiah said, "Thus saith the Lord God" (Obadiah 1:1). "The word of the Lord came unto Jonah" (Jonah 1:1). "The word of the Lord that came to Micah" (Micah 1:1). Nahum said, "Thus saith the Lord" (Nahum 1:12). Habakkuk wrote, "The Lord answered me and said" (Habakkuk 2:2). "The word of the Lord which came to Zephaniah" (Zephaniah 1:1). "Came the word of the Lord by Haggai the prophet" (Haggai 1:1). "Came the word of the Lord unto Zechariah? (Zechariah 1:1). "The word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi" (Malachi 1:1). And in this last of the Old Testament books, is it twenty-four times said, "Thus saith the Lord." The words Jesus Himself uttered were inspired. The words He spoke were not His own, but actually put into His mouth. In the most express manner it was foretold that Christ should thus speak, just as Moses spake. "A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up, like unto me. To Him ye shall hearken." Twice it is said, "like unto me." And how like to Moses, except as the whole context shows, "like unto" him in verbal inspiration? To Moses God said: "I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what to say. Thou shalt put words in Aaron's mouth, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach you what you shall say. And he shall be thy spokesman to the people. And he shall be to thee instead of a mouth, and thou shalt be to him instead of God" (Exodus 4:11-16). Therefore did Jesus, the Prophet, utter inspired words "like unto Moses." The very words He spoke God put into His mouth and on His tongue. Therefore did He say, assuring the Jews that Moses wrote of Him: "I have not spoken from Myself, but the Father who sent Me gave Me commandment what I should say and what I should speak. I speak therefore even as the Father said to Me, even so I speak" (John 12:49-50). "I have given unto them the words Thou gavest Me, and they have received them" (John 17:8). "The Son can do nothing from Himself" (5:19). Since Jesus Christ had to be divinely helped, "like unto Moses", the very words put into His mouth, Himself God's mouth, and as God to the people, how should not the Evangelists and Apostles need the same Divine guidance and help to qualify them for their work, and guarantee its inerrant truthfulness and its Divine authority? If Moses and Isaiah, if Jesus Christ Himself, had to be divinely assisted, how should the narrators of New Testament history and oracles be exempted from the same Divine activity of the Spirit, all-controlling and guiding into the full truth? What are the words of Jesus to John, and to the Seven Churches of the Apocalypse, but the literal words of God dictated verbally by Jesus Christ? Jesus said to the disciples, "And when they lead you to the judgment, and deliver you up, be not anxious beforehand what ye shall Speak: but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye: for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost" (Mark 13:11). This same gift included all the disciples on the day of Pentecost, for "They were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance" (Acts 2:1; Acts 2:4). The multitude that heard "marveled, saying, Behold, are not all these which speak Galileans? And how hear we every man in our own language? ... We do hear them speaking in our tongues the mighty works of God" (Acts 2:7; Acts 2:11). Paul says: "Which things also we speak, not in words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth" (1 Corinthians 2:13). "And for this cause we also thank God without ceasing, that, when ye received from us the word of the message, even the word of God, ye accepted it not as the word of men, but, as it is in truth, the word of God" (1 Thessalonians 2:13). And so the Bible uniformly teaches the doctrine of verbal inspiration. It is the Word of God. This is the invariable testimony of the Book itself. It never, in a single instance, says that the thoughts of the writers were inspired; or, that these writers had a "Concept." The Scriptures are called "The oracles of God" (Romans 3:2); "The Word of God" (Luke 8:11); "The Word of the Lord" (Acts 13:48); "The Word of life" (Php_2:16); "The Word of Christ" (Colossians 3:16); "The Word of truth" (Ephesians 1:13); "The Word of faith" (Romans 10:8); and, by these and similar statements, do they declare, more than two thousand times, that the Bible is the Word of God-that the words are God-breathed, are inspired (theopneustos). SECOND. What of the Inferential Testimony to the fact of verbal inspiration? I mean by Inferential Testimony that which is assumed by the Bible, and the natural implication belonging to many of its statements. The Bible assumes to be from God in that it meets man face to face with drawn sword and says: "Thou shalt!" and "Thou shalt not!" and demands immediate, unconditional and irreversible surrender to the authority of heaven, and submission to all the laws and will of God, as made known in its pages. This of itself would not signify a great deal, though unique, were it not for the striking and significant results of such submission; but, the natural inference of such assumption is, that the words of demand and command are from God. A great many statements of the Bible plainly indicate that the words are inspired. The following are a few instances: "Forever, O Lord, Thy Word is settled in heaven" (Psalms 119:89). This is characteristic of the entire Psalm. "The words of the Lord are pure words" (Psalms 12:6). "Is not My word like as a fire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?" (Jeremiah 23:29). "The Word of our God shall stand forever" (Isaiah 40:8); and so on, almost ad infinitum. Everywhere in the sacred record you find this same suggestion of Divine authorship. Jesus and the Apostles always recognized it, and gave it prominence and emphasis. Its importance and value should not be underestimated. THIRD. The Resultant Testimony. What of it? Paul tells us that "Every sacred writing" is "God-breathed." (Pasa Graphe Theopneustos). "No prophecy ever came by the will of man; but men spake from God, being moved [pheromenoi, borne along] by the Holy Spirit" (2 Peter 1:21). (This passage does not justify the so-called "mechanical theory of inspiration." Such theory is nowhere taught in the Scriptures. Indeed, the obvious fact that the individual characteristics of the writers were in no way changed or destroyed, disproves such theory.) It is said: "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul" (Genesis 2:7). Elihu said, "The Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life" (Job 33:4). Now, then, the very same Almighty power that gave life to Adam and Elihu, and which made the "Heavens ... and all the host of them," is, in some mysterious sense, in the words of the Sacred Record. Therefore are we told: "For the Word of God is living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart" (Hebrews 4:12). What results will follow believing the Word and submission to its requirements? 1. It will impart spiritual life and save the soul. "Receive with meekness the implanted Word, which is able to save your souls" (James 1:21). "Having been begotten again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the Word of God, which liveth and abideth" (1 Peter 1:23). "Of His own will begat He us by the Word of truth" (James 1:18). Jesus said: "The words I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life" (John 6:63). As a good seed contains the germ of life, so that when cast into the soil of earth at the proper season, under the influence of sunshine and showers, it germinates and springs up to reproduce itself in kind; even so the words of the Bible, if received into the mind and heart to be believed and obeyed, germinate, and spiritual life is the result, reproducing its kind; and that believing soul is made partaker of the Divine nature. (2 Peter 1:4). "He is a new creature (creation); the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new" (2 Corinthians 5:17). The power and life of the Almighty lie hidden in the words of the Sacred Record; they are God-breathed; and that power and life will be manifest in the case of every one who will receive them with meekness to believe them and submit to their requirements. All the books men have written cannot do this. 2. It has cleansing power. "Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to Thy Word" (Psalms 119:9). Jesus said: "Already ye are clean because of the Word which I have spoken unto you" (John 15:3). "That He might sanctify it, having cleansed it, by the washing of water with the Word" (Ephesians 5:26). 3. By the Word we are kept from evil and the power of the evil one. The Psalmist said: "By the words of Thy lips I have kept me from the paths of the destroyer" (Psalms 17:4); and, "Thy Word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against Thee" (Psalms 119:11). Therefore, Jesus said: "I have given them Thy Word .... Sanctify them through (in) the truth. Thy Word is truth" (John 17:14; John 17:17). The voice said: "Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. ... The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the Word of our God shall stand forever" (Isaiah 40:6; Isaiah 40:8). "For we can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth" (2 Corinthians 13:8). This, then, is the sum of our contention: The Bible is made up of writings, and these are composed Of words. The WORDS are inspired-God breathed. Therefore is the Bible inspired-is God's Word. This is plainly seen: First, in the uniform declaration of the Book. All the Old Testament Prophets, Jesus our Lord, and all the New Testament writers, bear the same testimony concerning this transcendentally important matter. Not a single word or thought to the contrary can anywhere be found in all their declarations. The attitude of Jesus toward the Old Testament and His utterances confirm beyond question our contention. He had the very same Old Testament we have today. He believed it to be the Word of God, and proclaimed it as such. He said, "One jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the laws, till all be fulfilled." In thwarting the tempter He said: "It is written! it is written! it is written!" In confounding the Jews, He said: "If ye believed Moses ye would believe Me; for he wrote of Me." He never criticised the Scriptures, but always appealed to them as His Father's words, authoritative and final. Jesus is the life and the light of man. The same is true of the Scriptures. Jesus said: "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." The Psalmist said, "Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path." In an inexplicable way Jesus is identified with the Word. "The Word was God ... and the Word became flesh." And when the victories of the Gospel shall have been finally accomplished, and Jesus shall assert His regal rights, His name is called, "The Word of God." (See Revelation 19:11; Revelation 19:13). Second. The Bible assumes to be God's Word by its imperious demands. Who but God has a right to require of men what the Bible does? Third. The Bible has fulfilled all its claims and promises. The marvelous, far-reaching results of proclaiming and believing it, demonstrably prove its supernatural origin and character. That there are difficulties, I well enough know. But many difficulties have disappeared as a result of patient, reverent, scholarly research; and without doubt others will soon go the same way. So, while I bid the scholars and reverent critics God-speed in their noble work, with the late learned Bishop Ryle I say: "Give me the plenary verbal theory with all its difficulties, rather than the doubt. I accept the difficulties, and humbly wait for their solution; but while I wait I am standing on a rock." Let this, then, be our attitude, to tell it out to the wide world that the blessed Bible, the "Holy Scriptures" of both Testaments, are the product of the "Breath of God," who made heaven and earth, and "breathed" into man His soul; the product of that Divine "Breath" that regenerates, that illuminates and sanctifies the soul; a "God-breathed Scriptures", whose "words" are the "words of God." Tell it to the Church in her seminaries, universities and colleges, from her pulpits, Sunday Schools and Bible classes, and sound it in every convention, conference and assembly that her conception and estimate of the Scriptures must be no lower and no less than were the high conception and estimate of the "Volume of the Book" by our Lord and His Apostles; that what they regarded as the "Breath of God", she must so regard in opposition to every breath of man that dares to breathe otherwise. Say, with the immortal Athanasius, who knew how to read Greek better than the "drift of scholarly opinion" "in our time": "O my child, not only the ancient, but the new Scriptures are God-breathed, as Paul saith, 'Every Scripture is God-breathed'". Say to the rising ministry, "Speak as the Oracles of God speak"-the words that "God hath spoken," the words that Christ has written. Be at least, as decent as Balaam! "Whatsoever life saith unto you, do;" and whatsoever He saith unto you, say. Tell it to every reader and hearer of the Word, that what "Moses saith" and "David saith" and "Isaiah, Peter, Paul, John and the Scripture, saith", is what "God saith". Tell it to the dying saint, when his last pulse quivers at the wrist, and friends are weeping by his bed, and "Science" has exhausted in vain all her poor resources, that God, who breathed the Scriptures, "cannot lie", that Jesus is a Rock, and that the "firm Foundation" laid in the Word for his faith can never disappoint his trust. To every question of Exegesis or of Criticism, return the answer, "What saith the Scriptures?" "How readest thou?" "It is written!" And cease to deride the most sacred, age-established, and time-honored tradition the Apostolic Church has left us. With such an attitude as this, the days will revisit the Church, as once they were "in the beginning", and God, honored in His Word, will no longer restrain the Spirit, but open the windows of heaven, and pour upon her a blessing so great that there will not be room to receive it. God hasten the day! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 77: - THE MORAL GLORY OF JESUS CHRIST A PROOF OF... ======================================================================== The Moral Glory of Jesus Christ a Proof of Inspiration By William G. Moorehead, D. D., President Of Xenia Theological Seminary, Xenia, Ohio The glories of the Lord Jesus Christ are threefold: Essential, official and moral. His essential glory is that which pertains to Him as the Son of God, the equal of the Father. His official glory is that which belongs to Him as the Mediator. It is the reward conferred on Him, the august promotion He received when He had brought His great work to a final and triumphant conclusion. His moral glory consists of the perfections which marked His earthly life and ministry; perfections which attached to every relation He sustained, and to every circumstance in which He was found. His essential and official glories were commonly veiled during His earthly sojourn. His moral glory could not be hid; He could not be less than perfect in everything; it belonged to Him; it was Himself. This moral glory now illumines every page of the four Gospels, as once it did every path He trod. The thesis which we undertake to illustrate and establish is this: That the moral glory of Jesus Christ as set forth in the four Gospels cannot be the product of the unaided human intellect, that only the Spirit of God is competent to execute this matchless portrait of the Son of Man. The discussion of the theme falls into two parts: I. A brief survey of Christ's moral glory as exhibited in the Gospels. II. The application of the argument. 1. Christ's Moral Glory The Humanity of Jesus 1. The moral glory of Jesus appears in His development as Son of Man. The nature which He assumed was our nature, sin and sinful propensities only excepted. His was a real and a true humanity, one which must pass through the various stages of growth like any other member of the race. From infancy to youth, from youth to manhood, there was steady increase both of His bodily powers and mental faculties; but the progress was orderly. "No unhealthy precocity marked the holiest of infancies." He was first a child, and afterwards a man, not a man in child's years. As Son of Man He was compassed about with all the sinless infirmities that belong to our nature. He has needs common to all; need of food, of rest, of human sympathy and of divine assistance. He is subject to Joseph and Mary, He is a worshiper in the synagogue and the Temple; He weeps over the guilty and hardened city, and at the grave of a loved one; He expresses His dependence on God by prayer. Nothing is more certain than that the Gospel narratives present the Lord Jesus as a true man, a veritable member of our race. But we no sooner recognize this truth than we are confronted by another which sets these records alone and unapproachable in the field of literature. This second fact is this: At every stage of His development, in every relation of life, in every part of His service He is absolutely perfect. To no part of His life does a mistake attach, over no part of it does a cloud rest, nowhere is there defect. Nothing is more striking, more unexampled, than the profound contrast between Jesus and the conflict and discord around Him, that between Him and those who stood nearest Him, the disciples, John Baptist, and the mother, Mary. All fall immeasurably below Him. The Pattern Man 2. The Gospels exalt our Lord infinitely above all other men as the representative, the ideal, the pattern man. Nothing in the judgment of historians stands out so sharply distinct as race, national character-nothing is more ineffaceable. The very greatest men are unable to free themselves from the influences amid which they have been born and educated. Peculiarities of race and the spirit of the age leave in their characters traces that are imperishable. To the last fiber of his being Luther was German, Calvin was French, Knox was Scotch; Augustine bears the unmistakable impress of the Roman, and Chrysostom is as certainly Greek. Paul, with all his large heartedness and sympathies is a Jew, always a Jew. Jesus Christ is the only One who is justly entitled to be called the Catholic Man. Nothing local, transient, individualizing, national, or sectarian dwarfs the proportions of His wondrous character. "He rises above the parentage, the blood, the narrow horizon which bounded, as it seemed, His life; for He is the archetypal man in whose presence distinctions of race, intervals of ages, types of civilization and degrees of mental culture are as nothing" (Liddon). He belongs to all ages, He is related to all men, whether they shiver amid the snows of the arctic circle, or pant beneath the burning heat of the equator; for He is the Son of Man, the Son of mankind, the genuine offspring of the race. Unselfishness and Dignity 3. The Lord's moral glory appears in His unselfishness and personal dignity. The entire absence of selfishness in any form from the character of the Lord Jesus is another remarkable feature of the Gospels. He had frequent and fair opportunities of gratifying ambition had His nature been tainted with that passion. But "even Christ pleased not himself;" He "sought not his own glory;" He came not "to do his own will." His body and His soul with all the faculties and activities of each were devoted to the supreme aims of His mission. His self-sacrifice included the whole range of His human thought and affection and action; it lasted throughout His life; its highest expression was His ignominious death on the cross of Calvary. The strange beauty of His unselfishness as it is displayed in the Gospel narratives appears in this, that it never seeks to draw attention to itself, it deprecates publicity. In His humility He seems as one naturally contented with obscurity; as wanting the restless desire for eminence which is common to really great men; as eager and careful that even His miracles should not add to His reputation. But amid all His self-sacrificing humility He never loses His personal dignity nor the self-respect that becomes Him. He receives ministry from the lowly and the lofty; He is sometimes hungry, yet feeds the multitudes in desert places; He has no money, yet He never begs, and He provides the coin for tribute to the government from a fish's mouth. He may ask for a cup of water at the well, but it is that He may save a soul. He never flies from enemies; He quietly withdraws or passes by unseen. Hostility neither excites nor exasperates Him. He is always calm, serene. He seems to care little for Himself, for His own ease or comfort or safety, but everything for the honor and the glory of the Father. If multitudes, eager and expectant, press upon Him, shouting, "Hosanna to the son of David," He is not elated; if all fall away, stunned by His words of power, He is not cast down. He sought not a place among men, He was calmly content to be the Lord's Servant, the obedient and the humble One. It was invariably true of Him that "He pleased not Himself." And yet through all His amazing self-renunciation, there glances ever and anon something of the infinite majesty and supreme dignity which belong to Him because He is the Son of God. The words of Van Oosterzee are as true as they are beautiful and significant: "It is the same King's Son who today dwells in the palace of His Father, and tomorrow, out of love to His rebellious subjects in a remote corner of the Kingdom, renouncing His princely glory, comes to dwell amongst them in the form of a servant : and is known only by the dignity of His look, and the star of royalty on His breast, when the mean cloak is opened for a moment, apparently by accident." Superiority to Human Judgment and Intercession 4. The Gospels exhibit the Lord Jesus as superior to the judgment and the intercession of men. When challenged by the disciples and by enemies, as He often was, Jesus never apologizes, never excuses Himself, never confesses to a mistake. When the disciples, terrified by the storm on the lake, awoke Him saying, "Master, carest thou not that we perish?", He did not vindicate His sleep, nor defend His apparent indifference to their fears. Martha and Mary, each in turn, with profound grief, say, "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died." There is not a minister of the gospel the world over who would not in similar circumstances explain or try to explain why he could not at once repair to the house of mourning when summoned thither. But Jesus does not excuse His not being there, nor His delay of two days in the place where He was when the urgent message of the sisters reached Him. In the consciousness of the perfect rectitude of His ways, He only replies, "Thy brother shall rise again." Peter once tried to admonish Him, saying, "This be far from thee, Lord; this shall not be unto thee." But Peter had to learn that it was Satan that prompted the admonition. Nor does He recall a word when the Jews rightly inferred from His language that He "being man made Himself God" (John 10:30-36). He pointed out the application of the name Elohim (God) to judges under the theocracy; and yet He irresistibly implies that His title to Divinity is higher than, and distinct in kind from, that of the Jewish magistrates. He thus arrives a second time at the assertion which had given so great offense, by announcing His identity with the Father, which involves His own proper Deity. The Jews understood Him. He did not retract what they accounted blasphemy, and they again sought His life. He is never mistaken, and never retracts. So likewise He is superior to human intercession. He never asks even His disciples nor His nearest friends, and certainly never His mother Mary, to pray for Him. In Gethsemane He asked the three, to watch with Him, He did not ask them to pray for Him. He bade them pray that they might not enter into temptation, but He did not ask them to pray that He should not, nor that He should be delivered out of it. Paul wrote again and again, "Brethren; pray for us"-"pray for me." But such was not the language of Jesus. It is worthy of note that the Lord does not place His own people on a level with Himself in His prayers. He maintains the distance of His own personal dignity and supremacy between Himself and them. In His intercession He never uses plural personal pronouns in His petitions, lie always says, "I" and "me," "these" and "them that thou hast given me;" never "we" and "us," as we speak and should speak in our prayers. The Sinlessness of Jesus 5. The sinlessness of the Saviour witnesses to His moral glory. The Gospels present us with one solitary and unique fact of human history-an absolutely sinless Man! In His birth immaculate, in His childhood, youth and manhood, in public and private, in death and in life, He was faultless. Hear some witnesses. There is the testimony of His enemies. For three, long years the Pharisees were watching their victim. As another writes, "There was the Pharisee mingling in every crowd, hiding behind every tree. They examined His disciples, they cross-questioned all around Him. They looked into His ministerial life, into His domestic privacy, into His hours of retirement. They came forward with the sole accusation they could muster-that He had shown disrespect to Caesar. The Roman judge who ought to know, pronounced it void." There was another spy-Judas. Had there been one failure in the Redeemer's career, in his awful agony Judas would have remembered it for his comfort; but the bitterness of his despair, that which made his life intolerable, was, "I have betrayed the innocent blood." There is the testimony of His friends. His disciples affirm that during their intercourse with Him His life was unsullied. Had there been a single blemish they would have detected it, and, honest historians as they were, they would have recorded it, just as they did their own shortcomings and blunders. The purest and most austere man that lived in that day, John the Baptist, shrank from baptizing the Holy One, and in conscious unworthiness he said, "I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?" Nor is His own testimony to be overlooked. Jesus never once confesses sin. He never once asks for pardon. Yet is it not He who so sharply rebukes the self-righteousness of the Pharisees? Does He not, in His teaching, seem to ignore all human piety that is not based upon a broken heart? But yet He never lets fall a hint, He never breathes a prayer which implies the slightest trace of blameworthiness. He paints the doom of incorrigible and unrepentent sinners in the most dreadful colors found in the entire Bible, but He Himself feels no apprehension, He expresses no dread of the penal future; His peace of mind, His fellowship with Almighty God is never disturbed nor interrupted. If He urge sorrow upon others and tears of penitence, it is for their sins; if He groan in agony, it is not for sins of His own, it is for others'. He challenges His bitterest enemies to convict Him of Sin (John 8:46). Nor is this all. "The soul," it has been said, "like the body has its pores," and the pores are always open. "Instinctively, unconsciously, and whether a man will or not, the insignificance or the greatness of the inner life always reveals itself." From its very center and essence the moral nature is everthrowing out about itself circles of influence, encompasses itself with an atmosphere of self-disclosure. In Jesus Christ this self-revelation was not involuntary, nor accidental, nor forced: it was in the highest degree deliberate. There is about Him an air of superior holiness, of aloofness from the world and its ways, a separation from evil in every form and of every grade, such as no other that has ever lived has displayed. Although descended from an impure ancestry, He brought no taint of sin into the world with Him; and though He mingled with sinful men and was assailed by fierce temptations, He contracted no guilt, lie was touched by no stain. He was not merely undefiled, but He was undefilable. He was like a ray of light which parting from the fountain of light can pass through the foulest medium and still be unstained and untouched. He came down into all the circumstances of actual humanity in its sin and misery, and yet He kept the infinite purity of heaven with Him. In the annals of our race there is none next to or like Him. Assemblage and Correlation of Virtues 6. The exquisite assemblage and correlation of virtues and excellencies in the Lord Jesus form another remarkable feature of the Gospel narratives. There have been those who have displayed distinguished traits of character; those who by reason of extraordinary gifts have risen to heights which are inaccessible to the great mass of men. But who among the mightiest of men has shown himself to be evenly balanced and rightly poised in all his faculties and powers? In the very greatest and best, inequality and disproportion are encountered. Generally, the failings and vices of men are in the inverse ratio of their virtues and their powers. "The tallest bodies cast the longest shadows." In Jesus Christ there is no unevenness. In Him there is no preponderance of the imagination over the feeling, of the intellect over the imagination, of the will over the intellect. There is in Him an uninterrupted harmony of all the powers of body and soul, in which that serves which should serve, and that rules which ought to rule, and all works together to one adorable end. In Him every grace is in its perfect ness, none in excess, none out of place, and none wanting. His justice and His mercy, His peerless love and His truth, His holiness and His freest pardon never clash; one never clouds the other. His firmness never degenerates into obstinacy, or His calmness into indifference. His gentleness never becomes weakness, nor His elevation of soul forgetfulness of others. In His best servants virtues and graces are uneven and often clash. Paul had hours of weakness and even of petulance. He seems to have regretted that he called himself a Pharisee in the Jewish Sanhedrin and appealed to that party for help, for in his address before the proconsul Felix he said, "Or let these same here say, if they found any evil doing in me, while I stood before the Council, except it be for this one voice, that I cried standing among them, Touching the resurrection of the dead I am called in question by you this day." John the Apostle of love even wished to call down fire from heaven to consume the inhospitable Samaritans. And the Virgin mother must learn that even she cannot dictate to Him as to what He shall do or not do. In Jesus there is the most perfect balance, the most amazing equipoise of every faculty and grace and duty and power. In His whole life one day's walk never contradicts another, one hour's service never clashes with another. While He shows lie is master of nature's tremendous forces, and the Lord of the unseen world, He turns aside and lays His glory by to take little children in His arms and to bless them. While He must walk amid the snares His foes have privily spread for His feet, He is equal to every occasion, is in harmony with the requirements of every moment. "He never speaks where it would be better to keep silence, He never keeps silence where it would be better to speak; and He always leaves the arena of controversy a victor." His unaffected majesty, so wonderfully depicted in the Gospels, runs through His whole life, and is as manifest in the midst of poverty and scorn, at Gethsemane and Calvary, as on the Mount Of Transfiguration and in the resurrection from the grave. Omnipotence and Omniscience 7. The evangelists do not shrink from ascribing to the Lord Jesus divine attributes, particularly Omnipotence and Omniscience. They do so as a mere matter of fact, as what might and should be expected from so exalted a personage as the Lord Jesus was. How amazing the power is which He wields when it pleases Him to do so! It extends to the forces of nature. At His word the storm is hushed into a calm, and the raging of the sea ceases. At His pleasure He walks on the water as on dry land. It extends to the world of evil spirits. At His presence demons cry out in fear and quit their hold on their victims. His power extends into the realm of disease. Every form of sickness departs at His command, and He cures the sick both when He is beside them and at a distance from them. Death likewise, that inexorable tyrant that wealth has never bribed, nor tears softened, nor human power arrested, yielded instantly his prey when the voice of the Son of God bade him. But Jesus equally as certainly and as fully possessed a superhuman range of knowledge as well as a superhuman power. He knew men; knew them as God knows them. Thus He saw into the depths of Nathaniel's heart when he was under the fig tree; He saw into the depths of the sea, and the exact coin in the mouth of a particular fish; He read the whole past life of the woman at the well, although He had never before met with her. John tells us that "He needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man" (John 2:25). He knew the world of evil spirits. He was perfectly acquainted with the movements of Satan and of demons. He said to Peter, "Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have you that he might sift you as wheat: I made supplication for thee that thy faith fail not" (Luke 22:31-32). He often spoke directly to the evil spirits that had control of people, ordering them to hold their peace, to come out and to enter no more into their victims. He knew the Father as no mere creature could possibly know Him. "All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him" (Matthew 11:27). A difficulty will be felt when we attempt to reconcile this infinite knowledge of men, of the unseen world, and of God Himself, which the Son of God possessed, with the statement in Mark that He did not know the day nor the hour of His Second Advent. But the difficulty is no greater than that other in John, where we are told that His face was wet with human tears while the almighty voice was crying, "Lazarus, come forth." In both cases the divine and the human are seen intermingling, and yet they are perfectly distinct. Such are some of the beams of Christ's moral glories as they shine everywhere on the pages of the Four Gospels. A very few of them are here gathered together. Nevertheless, what a stupendous picture do they form! In the annals of our race there is nothing like it. Here is One presented to us who is a true and genuine man, and yet He is the ideal, the representative, the pattern man, claiming kindred in the universality of His manhood with all men; sinless, yet full of tenderness and pity; higher than the highest, yet stooping to the lowest and to the most needy; perfect in all His words and ways, in His life and in His death! Who taught the evangelists to draw this matchless portrait? The pen which traced these glories of Jesus-could it have been other than an inspired pen? This question leads us to the second part of our task, which can soon be disposed of. 2. The Application of the Argument Nothing is more obvious than the very commonplace axiom, that every effect requires an adequate cause. Given a piece of machinery, complex, delicate, exact in all its movements, we know that it must be the Product of a competent mechanic. Given a work of consummate art, we know it must be the product of a consummate artist. None but a sculptor with the genius of an Angelo could carve the "Moses." None but a painter with the hand, the eye, and the brain of a Raphael could paint the "Transfiguration." None but a poet with the gifts of a Milton could write "Paradise Lost." Here are four brief records of our Lord's earthly life. They deal almost exclusively with His public ministry; they do not profess even to relate all that He did in His official work (cf. John 21:25). The authors of these memorials were men whose names are as household words the world over; but beyond their names we know little more. The first was tax collector under the Roman government; the second was, it is generally believed, that John Mark who for a time served as an attendant on Paul and Barnabas, and who afterward became the companion and fellow-laborer of Peter; the third was a physician and the devoted friend and co-worker of Paul; and the fourth was a fisherman. Two of them, Matthew and John, were disciples of Jesus; whether the others, Mark and Luke, ever saw Him during His earthly sojourn cannot be determined. These four men, unpracticed in the art of writing, unacquainted with the ideals of antiquity, write the memorials of Jesus? life. Three of them traverse substantially the same ground, record the same incidents, discourses and miracles. While they are penetrated with the profoundest admiration for their Master, they never once dilate on His great qualities. All that they do is to record His actions and His discourses with scarcely a remark. One of them indeed, John, intermingles reflective commentary with the narrative; but in doing this John carefully abstains from eulogy and panegyric. He pauses in His narrative only to explain some reference, to open some deep saying of the Lord, or to press some vital truth. Yet, despite this absence of the smallest attempt to delineate a character, these four men have accomplished what no others have done or can do-they have presented the world with the portrait of a Divine Man, a Glorious Saviour. Matthew describes Him as the promised Messiah, the glory of Israel, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham; the One in whom the covenants and the promises find their ample fulfillment; the One who accomplishes all righteousness. Mark exhibits Him as the mighty Servant of Jehovah who does man's neglected duty, and meets the need of all around. Luke depicts Him as the Friend of man, whose love is so intense and comprehensive, whose pity is so divine, that His saving power goes forth to Jew and Gentile, to the lowliest and the loftiest, to the publican, the Samaritan, the ragged prodigal, the harlot, the thief, as well as to the cultivated, the moral, the great. John presents Him as the Son of God, the Word made flesh; as Light for a dark world, as Bread for a starving world, as Life for a dead world. Matthew writes for the Jew, Mark for the Roman, Luke for the Greek, and John for the Christian; and all of them write for every kindred, and tribe, and tongue and people of the entire globe, and for all time! What the philosopher, the poet, the scholar, the artist could not do; what men of the greatest mind, the most stupendous genius have failed to do, these four unpracticed men have done-they have presented to the world the Son of Man and the Son of God in all His perfections and glories. A Fact to Be Explained How comes it to pass that these unlearned and ignorant men (Acts 4:13) have so thoroughly accomplished so great a task? Let us hold fast our commonplace axiom, every effect must have an adequate cause. What explanation shall we give of this marvelous effect? Shall we ascribe their work to genius? But multitudes of men both before and since their day have possessed genius of the very highest order; and these gifted men have labored in fields akin to this of our four evangelists. The mightiest minds of the race-men of Chaldea, of Egypt, of India, of China, and of Greece-have tried to draw a perfect character, have expended all their might to paint a god-like man. And with what result? Either he is invested with the passions and the brutalities of fallen men, or he is a pitiless and impassive spectator of the world's sorrows and woes. In either case, the character is one which may command the fear but not the love and confidence of men. Again, we ask, How did the evangelists solve this mighty problem of humanity with such perfect Originality and precision? Only two answers are rationally possible: 1. They had before them the personal and historical Christ. Men could no more invent the God-man of the Gospels than they could create a world. The almost irreverent words of Theodore Parker are grounded in absolute truth: "It would have taken a Jesus to forge a Jesus." 2. They wrote by inspiration of the Spirit of God. It cannot be otherwise. It is not enough to say that the Divine Model was before them: they must have had something more, else they never could have succeeded. Let it be assumed that these four men, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, were personally attendant on the ministry of Jesus that they saw Him, heard Him, companied with Him for three years. Yet on their own showing they did not understand Him. They testify that the disciples, the Apostles among the number, got but the slenderest conceptions of His person and His mission from His very explicit teachings. They tell us of a wonderful incapacity and weakness in all their apprehensions of Him The Sun of righteousness was shining on them and around them, and they could see only the less! He told them repeatedly of His approaching death, and of His resurrection, but they did not understand Him; they even questioned among themselves what the rising from the dead should mean (Mark 9:10) poor men! And yet these men, once so blind and ignorant, write four little pieces about the person and the work Of the Lord Jesus which the study and the research of Christendom for eighteen hundred years have not exhausted, and which the keenest and most hostile criticism has utterly failed to discredit. But this is not all. Others have tried their hand at composing the Life and Deeds of Jesus. Compare some of these with our Four Gospels. Spurious Gospels The Gospel narrative observes an almost unbroken silence as to the long abode of Jesus at Nazareth. Of the void thus left the church became early impatient. During the first four centuries many attempts were made to fill it up. Some of these apocryphal gospels are still extant, notably that which deals with the infancy and youth of the Redeemer; and it is instructive to notice how those succeeded who tried to lift the veil which covers the earlier years of Christ. Let another state the contrast between the New Testament records and the spurious gospels: "The case stands thus: our Gospels present us with a glorious picture of a mighty Saviour, the mythic gospels with that of a contemptible one. In our Gospels He exhibits a superhuman wisdom; in the mythic ones a nearly equal superhuman absurdity. In our Gospels He is arrayed in all the beauty of holiness; in the mythic ones this aspect of character is entirely wanting. In our Gospels not one stain of sinfulness defiles His character; in the mythic ones the Boy Jesus is both pettish and malicious. Our Gospels exhibit to us a sublime morality; not one ray of it shines in those of the mythologists. The miracles of the one and of the other stand contrasted on every point." (Row). These spurious gospels were written by men who lived not long after the apostolic age; by Christians who wished to honor the Saviour in all they said about Him; by men who had the portraiture of Him before them which the Gospels supply. And yet these men, many of them better taught than the Apostles, with the advantage of two or three centuries of Christian thought and study, could not produce a fancy sketch of the Child Jesus without violating our sense of propriety, and shocking our moral sense. The distance between the Gospels of the New Testament and the pseudo gospels is measured by the distance between the product of the Spirit of God, and that of the fallen human mind. Uninspired "Lives of Christ" Let us take another illustration. The nineteenth century has been very fruitful in the production of what are commonly called "Lives of Christ." Contrast with the Gospels four such "Lives," perhaps the completest and the best, taken altogether, of those written by English-speaking people-Andrews', Geikie's, Hanna's and Edersheim's. The authors of our Gospels had no models on which to frame their work. The path they trod had never before been pressed by human feet. The authors of the "Lives" have not only these incomparable narratives as their pattern and the chief source of all their material, but numberless other such "Lives" suggestive as to form and construction, and the culture and the research of eighteen centuries lying behind them. But would any one venture for a moment to set forth these "Lives" as rivals of our Gospels? Much information and helpfulness are to be derived from the labors of these Christian scholars, and others who have toiled in the same field; but how far they all fall below the New Testament record it is needless to show. Indeed, all such writings are largely antiquated and scarcely read, though they are quite young in years, so soon does man's work decay and die. Let the contrast be noted as to size or bulk. Andrews' book contains 615 pages; Geikie's over 1,200; Hanna's over 2,100; Edersheim's, 1,500 pages. The four combined have no less than 5,490 pages, enough in these busy days to require months of reading to go but once through their contents. Bagster prints the Four Gospels in 82 pages; the Oxford, in 104; Amer. Rev., 120. In the Bagster, Matthew has but 23; Mark, 13; Luke, 25; and John, 21.Less than one hundred pages of the Four Gospels against more than five thousand four hundred of the four "Lives." Countless volumes, great and small, in the form of commentary, exposition, notes, harmony and history are written on these brief records. How happens it that such stores of wisdom and knowledge He garnered in these short pieces? Who taught the evangelists this superhuman power of expansion and contraction, of combination and separation, of revelation in the words and more revelation below the words? Who taught them so to describe the person and work of the Lord Jesus as that the description satisfies the most illiterate and the most learned, is adapted to minds of the most limited capacity, and to those of the widest grasp? Whence did they derive the infinite skill they display in grouping together events, discourses, and actions in such fashion that vividly before us is the deathless beauty of a perfect Life? There is but one answer to these questions, there can be no other. The Spirit of the living God filled their minds with His unerring wisdom and controlled their human speech. To that creative Spirit who has peopled the world with living organisms so minute that only the microscope can reveal their presence, it is not hard to give us in so brief a compass the sublime portrait of the Son of Man. To men it is impossible. Inspiration Extends throughout the Bible Now if it be conceded that the Four Gospels are inspired, we are compelled by every rule of right reason to concede the inspiration of the rest of the New Testament. For all the later communications contained in the Acts, the Epistles, and the Revelation, are already in germ form in the Gospels, just as the Pentateuch holds in germ the rest of the Old Testament. If the Holy Spirit is the author of the Four Gospels He is none the less the author of the entire New Testament. If He creates the germ, it is He also that must unfold it into mature fruit. If He makes the seed He must likewise give the increase. To this fundamental truth the writers of the later communications bear the most explicit testimony. Paul, John, James, Peter and Jude severally intimate that what they have to impart is from Christ by His Spirit. Furthermore, if we admit the inspiration of the New Testament we must also admit that of the Old. For, if any one thing has been established by the devout and profound study and research of evangelical scholarship it is this, that the Scriptures of the Old Testament hold in germ the revelation contained in the New. The Latin Father spoke as profoundly as truly when he said, "The New Testament lies hid in the Old, and the Old stands revealed in the New." Ancient Judaism had one supreme voice for the chosen people, and its voice was prophetic. Its voice was the significant word, Wait. As if it kept reminding Israel that the Mosaic Institutions were only temporary and typical, that something infinitely better and holier was to take their place; and so it said, Wait. Wait, and the true Priest will come, the Priest greater than Aaron, greater than Melchizedek-the Priest of whom these were but thin shadows, dim pictures. Wait, and the true Prophet, like unto Moses, greater than Moses, will appear. Wait, and the real sacrifice, that of which all other offerings were but feeble images, will be made and sin be put away. If any man deny the inspiration of the Old Testament, sooner or later he will deny that of the New. For the two are inseparably bound up together. If the one fall, so will the other. Already the disastrous consequences of such a course of procedure are apparent in Christendom. For years the conflict has raged about the trustworthiness, the integrity and the authority of the Old Testament. Not long since one who is identified with the attacking party arrayed against that Scripture announced that the victory is won, and nothing now remains save to determine the amount of the indemnity. It is very noteworthy that the struggle has indeed measurably subsided as to the Old Testament, although there are no signs of weakening faith in it on the part of God's faithful children, and the fight now turns with increasing vigor on the New Testament, and pre-eminently about the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Men who are Christians at least in name, who occupy influential seats in great Universities and even Theological Schools, do not shrink from impeaching the New Testament record touching the Virgin Birth of the Lord Jesus, His resurrection from the dead, and His promise of one day returning to this earth in majesty and power. One cannot renounce the Scriptures of the Old Testament without relaxing his hold, sooner or later, on the New. Christ is the center of all Scripture, as He is the center of all God's purposes and counsels. The four evangelists take up the life and the moral glory of the Son of Man, and they place it alongside of the picture of the Messiah as sketched by the prophets, the historical by the side of the prophetic, and they show how exactly the two match. So long as the Four Gospels remain unmutilated and trusted by the people of God, so long is the doctrine of the Bible's supreme authority assured. God spoke to the fathers in the prophets: He now speaks to us in His Son whom He hath made Heir of all things. In either case, whether by the prophets or by the Son, the Speaker is God. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 78: - THE TESTIMONY OF THE SCRIPTURES TO THEMSELVES ======================================================================== The Testimony of the Scriptures to Themselves By George S. Bishop, D.D., East Orange, New Jersey My subject is, The Testimony of the Scriptures to Themselves-their own self-evidence-the overpowering, unparticipated witness that they bring. Permit me to expand this witness under the following heads: 1. Immortality. 2. Authority. 3. Transcendent Doctrine. 4. Direct Assertion. 1. IMMORTALITY-"I have written!" All other books die. Few old books survive, and fewer of those that survive have any influence. Most of the books we quote from have been written within the last three or even one hundred years. But here is a Book whose antemundane voices had grown old, when voices spake in Eden. A Book which has survived not only with continued but increasing lustre, vitality, vivacity, popularity, rebound of influence. A Book which comes through all the shocks without a wrench, and all the furnaces of all the ages-like an iron safe-with every document in every pigeon-hole, without a warp upon it, or the smell of fire. Here is a Book of which it may be said, as of Immortal Christ Himself: "Thou hast the dew on Thy youth from the womb of the morning." A Book dating from days as ancient as those of the Ancient of Days, and which when all that makes up what we see and call the universe shall be dissolved, will still speak on in thunder-tones of majesty, and whisper-tones of light, and music-tones of love, for it is wrapping in itself the everlasting past, and opening and expanding from itself the everlasting future; and, like an all irradiating sun, will still roll on, while deathless ages roll, the one unchanging, unchangeable Revelation of God. 2. Immortality is on these pages, and AUTHORITY SETS HERE HER SEAL. This is the second point. A Standard. Useless to talk about no standard. Nature points to one. Conscience cries out for one-conscience which, without a law, constantly wages the internal and excruciating war of accusing or else excusing itself. There must be a Standard and an Inspired Standard-for Inspiration is the Essence of Authority, and authority is in proportion to inspiration-the more inspired the greater the authority-the less, the less. Even the rationalist Rothe, a most intense opponent, has admitted that "that in the Bible which is not the product of direct inspiration has no binding power." Verbal and direct inspiration is, therefore, the "Thermopylae" of Biblical and Scriptural faith. No breath, no syllable; no syllable, no word; no word, no Book; no Book, no religion. We hold, from first to last, that there can be no possible advance in Revelation-no new light. What was written at first, the same thing stands written today, and will stand forever. The emanation of the mind of God it is complete, perfect. "Nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it"; its ipse dixit is peremptory, final. "If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this Book; and if any man shall take away from the words of the Book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the Book Of life, and out of the Holy City, and from the things which are written in this Book." The Bible is the Word of God, and not simply CONTAINS IT. This is clear. Because the Bible styles itself the Word of God. "The Word of the Lord is right," says the Psalmist. Again, "Thy Word is a lamp to my feet." "Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way" By taking heed thereto according to Thy Word." "The grass withereth," says Isaiah, "the flower thereof fadeth, but the Word of our God shall stand forever." Not only is the Bible called the Word of God, but it is distinguished from all other books by that very title. It is so distinguished in the 119th Psalm, and everywhere the contrast between it and every human book is deepened and sustained. If we will not call the Bible the Word of God, then we cannot call it anything else. If we insist upon a description rigorously exact and unexposed to shafts of wanton criticism, then the Book remains anonymous. We cannot more consistently say, "Holy Scripture," because the crimes recorded on its pages are not holy; because expressions like "Curse God and die," and others from the lips of Satan and of wicked men, are unholy. The Bible, however, is "holy" because its aim and its methods are holy. The Bible, likewise, is the Word of God, because it comes from God; because its every word was penned by God; because it is the only exponent of God; the only rule of His procedure, and the Book by which we must at last be judged. (1) The Bible is authority because in it, from cover to cover, God is the Speaker. Said a leader of our so-called orthodoxy to a crowded audience but a little while ago: "The Bible is true. Any man not a fool must believe what is true. What difference does it make who wrote it?" This difference, brethren; the solemn bearing down of God on the soul! My friend may tell me what is true; my wife may tell me what is true; but what they say is not solemn. Solemnity comes in when God looks into my face-God! And behind Him everlasting destiny-and talks with me about my soul. In the Bible God speaks, and God is listened to, and men are born again by God's Word. "So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God." It is God's Revelation that faith hears, and it is on God revealed that faith rests. (2) The Bible is the Word of God. It comes to us announced by miracles and heralded with fire. Take the Old Testament-Mount Sinai; take the New Testament-Pentecost. Would God Himself stretch out His hand and write on tables in the giving, and send down tongues of fire for the proclamation of a Revelation, every particle and shred of which was not His own? In other words, would He work miracles and send down tongues of fire to signalize a work merely human, or even partly human and partly Divine? How unworthy of God, how impious, how utterly impossible the supposition! (3) The Bible comes clothed with authority in the high-handed and exalted terms of its address. God in the Bible speaks out of a whirlwind and with the voice of Elias. What grander proof of literal inspiration can be than in the high-handed method and imperative tone of prophets and apostles which enabled them-poor men, obscure, and without an influence; fishermen, artisans, publicans, day-laborers-to brave and boldly teach the world from Pharaoh and from Nero down? Was this due to anything less than God speaking in them-to the overpowering impulse and seizure of God? Who can believe it? Who is not struck with the power and the wisdom of God? "His words were in my bones," cries one. "I could not stay. The lion hath roared, who will not fear; the Lord hath spoken, who can but prophesy?" (4) The Bible is the optime of authority, because it is from first to last a glorious projection on the widest scale of the decrees of God. The sweep of the Bible is from the creation of angels to a new heaven and new earth, across a lake of fire. What a field for events! What an expanse beyond the sweep or even reach of human fore-thought, criticism, or co-operation! What a labyrinth upon whose least and minutest turning hangs entire redemption, since a chain is never stronger than its smallest link! Who then will dare to speak till God has spoken? "I will declare the decree!" That pushes everything aside that makes the declaration an extension, so to say, of the Declarer. "I will declare the decree!" When we consider that the Bible is an exact projection of the decrees of God into the future, this argument is seen to lift, indeed, to a climax; and, in fact, it does reach to the very crux of controversy; for the hardest thing for us to believe about God is to believe that He exactly, absolutely knows, because He has ordained, the future. Every attribute of God is easier to grasp than that of an infallible Omniscience. "I will declare the decree," therefore, calls for direct inspiration. (5) The Bible is the optime of authority, because the hooks at the end of the chain prove the dictated inspiration of its every link. Compare the fall in Genesis-one link-with the resurrection in the Apocalypse the other. Compare the old creation in the first chapters of the Old Testament with the new creation in the last chapters of the New. "We open the first pages of the Bible," says Vallotton, "and we find there the recital of the creation of the world by the Word of God of the fall of man, of his exile far from God, far from Paradise, and far from the tree of life. We open the last pages of the last of the 66 books dating 4,000 years later. God is still speaking. He is still creating. He creates a new heaven and a new earth. Man is found there recovered. He is restored to communion with God. He dwells again in Paradise, beneath the shadow of the tree of life. Who is not struck by the strange correspondence of this end with that beginning? Is not the one the prologue, the other the epilogue of a drama as vast as unique?" (6) Another argument for the supreme authority of Scripture is the character of the investigation challenged for the Word of God. The Bible courts the closest scrutiny. Its open pages blaze the legend, "Search the Scriptures!" Ereunao-"Search." It is a sportsman's term, and borrowed from the chase. "Trace out," "track out"-follow the word in all its usages and windings. Scent it out to its remotest meanings, as a dog the hare. "They searched," again says St. Luke, in the Acts, of the Bereans. There it is another word, anakrino-"they divided up," analyzed, sifted, pulverized, as in a mortar-to the last thought. What a solemn challenge is this! What book but a Divine Book would dare speak such a challenge? If a book has been written by man, it is at the mercy of men. Men can go through it, riddle it, sift it, and leave it behind them, worn out. But the Bible, a Book dropped from heaven, is "God breathed." It swells, it dilates, with the bodying fullness of God. God has written it, and none can exhaust it. Apply your microscopes, apply your telescopes, to the material of Scripture. They separate, but do not fray, its threads. They broaden out its nebulae, but find them clustered stars. They do not reach the hint of poverty in Scripture. They nowhere touch on coarseness in the fabric, nor on limitations in horizon, as always is the case when tests of such a character are brought to bear on any work of man's. You put a drop of water, or a fly's wing, under a microscope. The stronger the lens, the more that drop of water will expand, till it becomes an ocean filled with sporting animalcules. The higher the power, the more exquisite, the more silken, become the tissues of the fly's wing, until it attenuates almost to the golden and gossamer threads of a seraph's. So is it with the Word of God. The more scrutiny, the more divinity; the more dissection, the more perfection. We cannot bring to it a test too penetrating, nor a light too facinating, nor a touchstone too exacting. The Bible is beyond all attempts at not only exhaustion, but comprehension. No human mind can, by searching, find out the fullness of God. "For what man knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man save the Spirit of God." 3. That leads up to the third point. The Scriptures testify to their Divine Original by their TRANSCENDENT DOCTRINE, THEIR OUTSHINING LIGHT, THEIR NATIVE RADIANCE, THE GLOW OF THE DIVINE, THE WITNESS OF THE SPIRIT. We should expect to find a Book, that came from God, penciled with points of jasper and of sardine stone-enhaloed with a brightness from the everlasting hills. We should look for that about the Book which, flashing conviction at once, should carry overwhelmingly and everywhere by its bare, naked witness-by what it simply is. That, just as God, by stretching out a hand to write upon the "plaister" of a Babylonian palace, stamped, through mysterious and disjointed words, conviction of Divinity upon Belshazzar, and each one of his one thousand "lords"; so, after that same analogue-why not?-God should stretch out His hand along the unrolling palimpsests of all the ages, and write upon them larger words, which, to the secret recognition of each human soul, should say, not only, "This is Truth," but "This is Truth, God-spoken!" The Bible is the Word of God, because it is the Book of Infinites-the revelation of what nature, without it, never could have attained, and, coming short of the knowledge of which, nature were lost. The greatest need of the soul is salvation. It is such a knowledge of God as shall assure us of "comfort" here and hereafter. Such a knowledge, nature outside of the Bible does not contain. Everywhere groping in his darkness, man is confronted by two changeless facts. One, his guilt, which, as he looks down, sinks deeper and deeper. The other, the justice of God, which as he looks up, lifts higher and higher. Infinite against infinite infinite here, Infinite there-no bridge between them! Nature helps to no bridge. It nowhere speaks of atonement. Standing with Uriel in the sun, we launch the proposition that the Scriptures are Divine in their very message because they deal with three Infinites: Infinite Guilt; Infinite Holiness; Infinite Atonement. A book must itself be infinite which deals with infinites; and a book must be Divine which divinely reconciles infinites. Infinite Guilt! Has my guilt any bottom? Is Hell any deeper? Is there, in introspection, a possible lower, more bottomless nadir? Infinite guilt! That is what opens, caves away under my feet, the longer, the more carefully I plumb my own heart-my nature, my record. Infinitely guilty! That is what I am far, Oh, how far, below the plane of self-apology, or ghastly "criticism" of the Book which testifies to this. Infinitely guilty! That is what I am. Infinitely sinking, and, below me an infinite Tophet. I know that. As soon as the Bible declares it, I know it, and with it I know that witnessing Bible Divine. I know it-I do not know how-by an instinct, by conscience, by illumination, by the power of the Spirit of God, by the Word without, and by the flashed conviction in me which accord. And, counterpoised above me, a correlative Infinite-God! What can be higher? What zenith loftier? What doming of responsibility more dread or more portentous? Infinite God above me-coming to judge me! On the way now. I must meet Him. I know that. I know it, as soon as the Bible declares it. I know it-I do not know how-by an instinct. Even the natural man must picture to himself when thus depicted, and must fear, "A God in grandeur, and a world on fire." An infinitely Holy God above me, coming to judge me. That is the second Infinite. Then the third and what completes the Triangle, and makes its sides eternally, divinely equal Infinite Atonement-an Infinite Saviour God on the cross making answer to God on the throne-my Jesus-my Refuge my Everlasting Jehovah. By these three Infinites-especially this last this Infinite Atonement, for which my whole being cries out its last cry of exhaustion-by this third side of the stupendous Triangle-the side which, left to myself, I could never make out the Bible proves itself the soul's Geometry, the one Eternal Mathematics, the true Revelation of God. We take the ground that these three things-Guilt, God, Atonement-set thus in star-like apposition and conjunction, speak from the sky, more piercingly than stars do, saying: "Sinner and sufferer, this Revelation is Divine!" We take the open ground that a single stray leaf of God's Word, found by the wayside by one who never had seen it before, would convince him at once that the strange and the wonderful words were those of his God were Divine. The Scriptures are their own self-evidence. We take the ground that the sun requires no critic-truth no diving-bell. When the sun shines, he shines the sun. When God speaks, His evidence is in the accent of His words. How did the prophets of old know, when God spoke to them, that it Was God? Did they subject the voice, that shook their every bone, and make their flesh dissolve upon them, to a critical test? Did they put God, so to say-as some of our moderns would seem to have done-into a crucible, into a chemist's retort, in order to certify that He was God? Did they find it necessary to hold the handwriting of God in front of the blowpipe of anxious philosophical examination, in order to bring out and to make the invisible, visible? The very suggestion is madness. The Scriptures are their own self-evidence. The refusal of the Bible on its simple presentation is enough to damn any man, and, if persisted in, will damn him-for: "A glory gilds the sacred page, Majestic, like the sun; It gives a light to every age; It gives, but borrows none." 4. Glory spreads over the face of the Scriptures, but this glory, when scrutinized closely, is seen to contain certain features and outlines testimonies inside of itself, direct assertions, which conspire to illustrate again its high Divinity, and to confirm its claim. This is our fourth point: THE SCRIPTURES SAY OF THEMSELVES THAT THEY ARE DIVINE. They not only assume it; they say it. And this, "Thus saith the Lord," is intrinsic-a witness inside of the witness, and one upon which something more than conviction-confidence, or Spirit-born, and saving faith-depends. The argument from the self-assertion of Scripture is cumulative. (1) The Bible claims that, as a Book, it comes from God. In various ways it urges this claim. One thing: it says so. "God in old times spake by the prophets; God now speaks by His Son." The question of Inspiration is, in its first statement, the question of Revelation itself. If the Book be Divine, then what it says of itself is Divine. The Scriptures are inspired because they say they are inspired. The question is simply one of Divine testimony, and our business is, as simply, to receive that testimony. "Inspiration is as much an assertion," says Haldane, "as is justification by faith. Both stand and equally, on the authority of Scripture, which is as much an ultimate authority upon this point as upon any other." When God speaks, and when He says, "I speak !" there is the whole of it. He is bound to be heard and obeyed. In the Bible God speaks, and speaks not only by proxy. Leviticus is a signal example of this. Chapter after chapter of Leviticus begins: "And the Lord spake, saying;" and so it runs on through the chapter. Moses is simply a listener, a scribe. The self-announced Speaker is God. In the Bible God Himself comes down and speaks, not in the Old Testament alone, and not alone by proxy. "The New Testament presents us," says Dean Burgon, "with the august spectacle of the Ancient of Days holding the entire volume of the Old Testament Scriptures in His hands, and interpreting it of Himself. He, the Incarnate Word, who was in the beginning with God, and who was God-that same Almighty One is set forth in the Gospels as holding the "volume of the Book" in His hands, as opening and unfolding it, and explaining it everywhere of Himself." Christ everywhere receives the Scripture, and speaks of the Scriptures, in their entirety-the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms, the whole Old Testament canon-as the living Oracle of God. He accepts and He endorses everything written, and even makes most prominent those miracles which infidelity regards as most incredible. And He does all this upon the ground of the authority of God. He passes over the writer "leaves him out of account. In all His quotations from the Old Testament, He mentions but four of the writers by name. The question with Him is not a question of the reporter, but of the Dictator. And this position of our Saviour which exalted Scripture as the mouthpiece of the living God was steadily maintained by the Apostles and the apostolic Church. Again and over again, in the Book of the Acts, in all the Epistles, do we find such expressions as "He saith," "God saith," "The oracles of God," "The Holy Ghost saith," "Well spake the Holy Ghost by Esaias the prophet." The Epistle to the Hebrews furnishes a splendid illustration of this, where, setting forth the whole economy of the Mosaic rites, the author adds, "The Holy Ghost this signifying." Further on, and quoting words of Jeremiah, he enforces them with the remark, "The Holy Ghost is witness to us also." The imperial argument on Psalm 95 he clenches with the application, "Wherefore, as the Holy Ghost saith, Today if ye will hear His voice." Throughout the entire Epistle, whoever may have been the writer quoted from, the words of the quotation are referred to God. (2) But now let us come closer, to the very exact and categorical and unequivocal assertion. If the Scriptures as a Book are Divine, then what they say of themselves is Divine. What do they say? In this inquiry, let us keep our fingers on two words, and always on two words-the apostolic keys to the whole Church position: "Graphe"-writing, writing, the Writing-not somebody, something back of the Writing. The Writing. "He Graphe," that was inspired. And what is meant by inspired? "Theopneustos," God-breathed. "God-breathed!" That sweeps the whole ground. God comes down as a blast on the pipes of an organ-in voice like a whirlwind, or in still whispers like Aeolian tones, and saying the Word, He Seizes the hand, and makes that hand, in His own the pen of a most ready writer. Pasa Grafe Theopneustos! "All sacred writing." More exactly, "Every sacred writing," every mark on the parchment, is "God-breathed." So says St. Paul. Pasa Grafe Theopneustos! The sacred assertion is not of the instruments, but of the Author; not of the agents, but of the product. It is the sole and sovereign vindication of what has been left on the page when Inspiration gets through. "What is written," says Jesus, "how readest thou?" Man can only read what is written. Pasa Grafe Theopneustos! God inspires not men, but language. The phrase, "inspired men," is not found in the Bible. The Scripture never employs it. The Scripture says that "holy men were moved"-pheromenoi-but that their writing, their manuscript, what they put down and left on the page, was God-breathed. You breathe upon a pane of glass. Your breath congeals there; freezes there; stays there; fixes an ice-picture there. That is the notion. The writing on the page beneath the hand of Paul was just as much breathed on, breathed into that page, as was His soul breathed into Adam. The chirograph was God's incarnate voice, as truly as the flesh of Jesus sleeping on the "pillow" was incarnate God. We take the ground that on the original parchment-the membrane every sentence, word, line, mark, point, pen-stroke jot, tittle was put there by God. On the original parchment. There is no question of other, anterior parchments. Even were we to indulge the violent extra-Scriptural notion that Moses or Matthew transcribed from memory or from other books the things they have left us; still, in any, in every case, the selection, the expression, the shaping and turn of the phrase on the membrane was the work of an unaided God. But what? Let us have done with extra-Scriptural, presumptuous suppositions. The burning Isaiah, the perfervid, wheel-gazing Ezekiel; the ardent, seraphic St. Paul, caught up, up, up, up into that Paradise which he himself calls the "third heaven"-were these men only "copyists," mere self-moved "redactors"? I trow not. Their pens urged, swayed, moved hither and thither by the sweep of a heavenly current, stretched their leathered tops, like that of Luke upon St. Peter's dome, into the far-off Empyrean, winged from the throne of God. We take the ground that on the original parchment-the membrane every sentence, word, line, mark, point, pen-stroke jot, tittle was put there by God. On the original parchment. Men may destroy that parchment. Time may destroy it. To say that the membranes have Suffered in the hands of men, is but to say that everything Divine must suffer, as the pattern Tabernacle suffered, when committed to our hands. To say, however, that the writing has suffered-the words and letters-is to say that Jehovah has failed. The writing remains. Like that of a palimpsest, it will survive and reappear, no matter what circumstances, what changes, come in to scatter, obscure, disfigure, or blot it away. Not even one lonely THEOS [God was manifest in the flesh (1 Timothy 3:16)] writ large by the Spirit of God on the Great Uncial "C" as, with my own eyes I have seen it-plain, vivid, glittering, outstarting from behind the pale and overlying ink of Ephraim the Syrian-can be buried. Like Banquo's ghost, it will rise; and God Himself replace it, and, with a hammer-stroke, beat down deleting hands. The parchments, the membranes, decay; the writings, the words, are eternal as God. Strip off the plaister from Belshazzar's palace, yet Mene! Mene! Tekel! Upharsin! remain. They remain. Let us go through them, and from the beginning, and see what the Scriptures say of themselves. One thing; they say that God spake, "anciently and all the way down, in the prophets." One may make if he pleases the "en" instrumental-as it is more often instrumental-i.e., "by" the prophets; but in either case, in them or by them, the Speaker was God. Again; the Scriptures say that the laws the writers promulgated, the doctrines they taught, the stories they recorded-above all, their prophecies of Christ-were not their own; were not originated, nor conceived by them from any outside sources-were not what they had any means before of knowing, or of comprehending, but were immediately from God; they themselves being only recipient, only concurrent with God, as God moved upon them. Some of the speakers of the Bible, as Balaam, the Old Prophet of Bethel, Caiaphas, are seized and made to speak in spite of themselves; and, with the greatest reluctance, to utter what is farthest from their minds and hearts. Others-in fact all-are purblind to the very oracles, instructions, visions, they announce. "Searching what, or what manner of time, the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify!" i.e., the prophets themselves did not know what they wrote. What picture can be more impressive than that of the prophet him-self hanging over and contemplating in surprise, in wonder, in amazement, his own autograph-as if it had been left upon the table there-the relict of some strange and supernatural hand? How does that picture lift away the Bible from all human hands and place it back, as His original deposit, in the hands of God. Again; it is said that "the Word of the Lord came" to such and such a writer. It is not said that the Spirit came, which is true; but that the Word itself came, the Dabar-Jehovah. And it is said: "Hayo Haya Dabar," that it substantially came, essentially came; "essendo fuit"-so say Pagninus, Montanus, Polanus-ie: it came germ, seed and husk and blossom-in its totality-words which the Holy Ghost teacheth-the "words." Again; it is denied, and most emphatically, that the words are the words of the man-of the agent. "The word was in my tongue". St. Paul asserts that "Christ spake in him" (2 Corinthians 13:3). "Who hath made man's mouth? Have not I, the Lord? I will put My words into thy mouth." That looks very much like what has been stigmatized as the "mechanical theory." It surely makes the writer a mere organ, although not an unconscious, or unwilling, unspontaneous organ. Could language more plainly assert or defend a verbal direct inspiration? In the line with the fact, again it is said that the word came to the writers without any study-"suddenly"-as to Amos where he is taken from following the flock. Again; when the word thus came to the prophets they had not the power to conceal it. It was "like a fire in their bones" which must speak or write, as Jeremiah says, or consume its human receptacle. And to make this more clear, it is said that holy men were pheromenoi, "moved," or rather carried along in a supernatural ecstatic current-a delectatio scribendi. They were not left one instant to their wit, wisdom, fancies, memories, or judgments either to order, or arrange, or dispose, or write out. They were only reporters, intelligent, conscious, passive, plastic, docile, exact, and accurate reporters. They were like men who wrote with different kinds of ink. They colored their work with tints of their own personality, or rather God colored it, having made the writer as the writing, and the writer for that special writing; and because the work ran through them just as the same water, running through glass tubes, yellow, green, red, violet, will be yellow, violet and green, and red. God wrote the Bible, the whole Bible, and the Bible as a whole. He wrote each word of it as truly as He wrote the Decalogue on the tables of stone. Higher criticism tells us-the "New Departure" tells us-that Moses was inspired, but the Decalogue not. But Exodus and Deuteronomy seven times over declare that God stretched down the tip of His finger from heaven and left the marks, the gravements, the cut characters, the scratches on the stones. (Exodus 24:12). "I will give thee tables of stone, commandments, which I have written" (Exodus 31:18). "And He gave unto Moses, upon Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone written with the finger of God" (Exodus 32:16). The tables were the work of God and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables. (Deuteronomy 4:12). "The Lord spake unto you out of the midst of the fire, and He declared unto you His covenant, even ten commandments and He wrote them upon two tables of stone" (Deuteronomy 5:22). "These words the Lord spake, and He wrote them in two tables of stone, and delivered them unto me" (Deuteronomy 9:10). "And the Lord delivered unto me two tables of stone written with the finger of God"! Seven times, and to men to whom writing is instinct; to beings who are most of all impressed, not by vague vanishing voices, but by words arrested, fixed, set down; and who themselves cannot resist the impulse to commit their own words to some written deposit, even of stone, or of bark, if they have not the paper; seven times, to men, to whom writing is instinct and who are inclined to rely for their highest conviction on what they have styled "documentary evidence," i.e., on books; God comes in and declares, "I have written"! The Scriptures, whether with the human instrument or without the human instrument, with Moses or without Moses, were written by God. When God had finished, Moses had nothing else to do but carry down God's autograph. That is our doctrine. The Scriptures-if ten words, then all the words-if the law, then the Gospels-the writing, the writings, He Graphe-Hai Graphai expressions repeated more than fifty times in the New Testament alone-this, these were inspired. Brethren, the danger of our present day-the "down grade" as it has been called, of doctrine, of conviction, of the moral sentiment-a decline more constantly patent, as it is more blatantly proclaimed-does it not find its first step in our lost hold upon the very inspiration of the Word of God? Does not a fresh conviction here lie at the root of every remedy which we desire, as its sad lack lies at the root of every ruin we deplore? ======================================================================== CHAPTER 79: - THE TESTIMONY OF THE ORGANIC UNITY OF... ======================================================================== The Testimony of the Organic Unity of the Bible to its Inspiration By Arthur T. Pierson The argument for the inspiration of the Bible which I am to present is that drawn from its unity. This unity may be seen in several conspicuous particulars, upon some of which it will be well to dilate. 1. THE UNITY IS STRUCTURAL. In the Book itself appears a certain archetypal, architectural plan. The two Testaments are built on the same general scheme. Each is in three parts: historic, didactic, prophetic; looking to the past, the present, and the future. Here is a collection of books; in their style and character there is great variety and diversity; some are historical, others poetical; some contain laws, others lyrics; some are prophetic, some symbolic; in the Old Testament we have historical, poetical, and prophetical divisions; and in the New Testament we have historic narratives, then twenty-one epistles, then a symbolic apocalyptic poem in oriental imagery. And yet this is no artificial arrangement of fragments. We find "the Old Testament patent in the New; the New latent in the Old." In such a Book, then, it is not likely that there would be unity; for all the conditions were unfavorable to a harmonious moral testimony and teaching. Here are some sixty or more Separate documents, written by some forty different persons, scattered over wide intervals of space and time, strangers to each other; these documents are written in three different languages, in different lands, among different and sometimes hostile peoples, with marked diversities of literary style, and by men of all grades of culture and mental capacity, from Moses to Malachi; and when we look into these productions, there is even in them great unlikeness, both in matter and manner of statement; and yet they all constitute one volume. All are entirely at agreement. There is diversity in unity, and unity in diversity. It is "e pluribus unum." The more we study it, the more do its unity and harmony appear. Even the Law and the Gospel are not in conflict. They Stand, like the cherubim, facing different ways, but their faces are toward each other. And the four Gospels, like the cherubic creatures in Ezekiel's vision, facing in four different directions, move in one. All the criticism of more than three thousand years has failed to point out one important or irreconcilable contradiction in the testimony and teachings of those who are farthest separated-there is no collision, yet there could be no collusion! How can this be accounted for? There is no answer which can be given unless you admit the supernatural element. If God actually superintended the production of this Book, then its unity is the unity of a Divine plan and its harmony the harmony of a Supreme Intelligence. As the baton rises and falls in the hand of the conductor of some grand orchestra, from violin and bass-viol, cornet and flute, trombone and trumpet, flageolet and clarinet, bugle and French horn, cymbals and drum, there comes one grand harmony! There is no doubt, though the conductor were screened from view, that one master mind controls all the instrumental performers. But God makes His oratorio to play for more than a thousand years; the key is never lost and never changes except by those exquisite modulations that show the master composer; and when the last strain dies away it is seen that all these glorious movements and melodies have been variations on one grand theme! Did each musician compose as he played, or was there one composer back of all the players"-"one supreme and regulating mind? in this Oratorio of the Ages? If God was the master musician planning the whole and arranging the parts, then we can understand how Moses? grand anthem of creation glided into Isaiah's oratorio of the Messiah; by and by sinks into Jeremiah's plaintive wail, swells into Ezekiel's awful chorus, changes into Daniel's rapturous lyric; and, after the quartette of the evangelists, closes with John's full choir of saints and angels! The temple, first built upon Mount Moriah, was built of stone, made ready before it was brought thither; there was neither hammer nor ax nor any tool of iron heard in the house while it was in building. What insured symmetry in the temple when constructed, and harmony between the workmen in the quarries and the shops, and the builders on the hill? One presiding mind planned the whole; one intelligence built that whole structure in ideal before it was in fact. The builders built more wisely than they knew, putting together the ideas Of the architect and not their own. Only so can we account for the structural unity of the Word of God. The structure was planned and wrought out in the mind of a Divine Architect, who superintended His own workmen and work. Moses laid its foundations, not knowing who should build after him, or what form the structure should assume. Workman after workman followed; he might see that there was agreement with what went before, but he could not foresee that what should come after would be only the sublime carrying out of the grand plan. During all those sixteen centuries through which the building rose toward completion, there was no sound of ax or hammer, no chipping or hacking to make one part fit its fellow. Everything is in agreement with everything else, because the whole Bible was built in the thought of God before one book was laid in order. The building rose steadily from cornerstone to cap-stone, foundations first, then story after story, pillars on pedestals, and capitals on pillars, and arches on capitals, till, like a dome flashing back the splendors of the noonday, the Apocalypse spans and crowns and completes the whole, glorious with celestial visions. 2. THE UNITY IS HISTORIC. The whole Bible is the history of the kingdom of God. Israel represents that kingdom. And two things are noticeable. All centers about the Hebrew nationality. With their origin and progress the main historical portion begins; and with their apostasy and captivity it stops. The times of the Gentiles filled the interval and have no proper history; prophecy, which is history anticipated, takes up the broken thread, and gives us the outline of the future when Israel shall again take its place among the nations. 3. THE UNITY IS DISPENSATIONAL. There are certain uniform dispensational features which distinguish every new period. Each dispensation is marked by seven features, in the following order: (a) Increased light; (b) Decline of spiritual life; (c) Union between disciples and the world; (d) A gigantic civilization worldly in type; (e)Parallel development of good and evil; (f) Apostasy on the part of God's people; (g) Concluding judgment. We are now in the seventh dispensation, and the same seven marks have been upon all alike, showing one controlling power-Deus in Historia. 4. THE UNITY IS PROPHETIC. Of all prophecy, there is but one center, The kingdom and the King.1. Adam, the first king, lost his scepter by sin. His probation ended in failure and disaster. 2. The second Adam, in His probation, gained the victory, routed the tempter, and stood firm. The two comings of this King constituted the two focal centers of the prophetic ellipse, His first coming was to make possible an empire in man and over man. His second coming will be to set that empire up in glory. All prophecy moves about these two advents. It touches Israel only as related to the kingdom: and the Gentiles only as related to Israel. Hence, in the Old Testament, Nineveh, Babylon, and Egypt loom up as the main foes to the kingdom, as represented by the Hebrews; and in the New Testament, the Beast, Prophet, and Dragon are conspicuous as the gigantic adversaries of that kingdom after Israel again takes her place. There are some six hundred and sixty-six general prophecies in the Old Testament, three hundred and thirty-three of which refer particularly to the coming Messiah, and meet only in Him. 5. THE UNITY IS THEREFORE ALSO PERSONAL: "In the volume of the Book It is written of Me." There is but one Book, and within it but one Person. Christ is the center of the Old Testament prophecy, as He is of New Testament history. From Genesis 3 to Malachi 3, He fills out the historic and prophetic profile. Not only do the three hundred and thirty-three predictions unite in Him, but even the rites and ceremonies find in Him their only interpreter. Nay, historic characters prefigure Him, and historic events are the pictorial illustrations of His vicarious ministry. The Old Testament is a lock of which Christ is the key. The prophetic plant becomes a burning bush, as twig after twig of prediction flames with fulfillment. The crimson thread runs through the whole Bible. Beginning at any point you may preach Jesus. The profile-at first a drawing, without color, a mere outline-is filled in by successive artists, until the life tints glow on the canvas of the centuries, and the perfect portrait of the Messiah is revealed. 6. THE UNITY IS SYMBOLIC. I mean that there is a corresponding use of symbols, Whether in form, color, or numbers. In form, we have the square, the cube, and the circle, throughout, and used as types of the same truths. In color, we have the white for purity, the lustrous white for glory, the red for guilt of sin and the sacrifice for sin, the blue for truth and fidelity to promise, the purple for royalty, the pale or livid hue for death, and the black for woe and disaster. In numbers there is plainly a numerical system. One seems to represent unity, two correspondence and confirmation or contradiction, three is the number of Godhead, four of the world and man. Seven, which is the sum of three and four, stands for the combination of the Divine and human; twelve, the product of three and four, for the Divine interpenetrating the human; ten, the sum of one, two, three, and four, is the number of completeness; three and a half, the broken number, represents tribulation; six, which stops short of seven, is unrest; eight, which is beyond the number of rest, is the number of victory. All this implies one presiding mind, and it could not be man's mind. 7. THE UNITY IS DIDACTIC. In the entire range and scope of the ethical teaching of the Bible there is no inconsistency or adulteration. But we need to observe a distinction maintained throughout as to natural religion and spiritual religion. There is a natural religion. Had man remained loyal to God, the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man would have been the two great facts and laws of humanity; the broad, adequate basis of the natural claim of God to filial obedience, and of man to fraternal love. But man sinned. He fell from the filial relationship; he disowned God as his Father. Hence, the need of a new and spiritual relationship and religion. In Christ, God's fatherhood is restored and man's brotherhood re-established, but these are treated as universal only to the circle of believers. A new obedience is now enforced, resting its claim, not on creation and providence, but on new creation and grace. Man learns a supernatural love and life. Upon this didactic unity we stop to expatiate. In not one respect are these doctrinal and ethical teachings in conflict, from beginning to end; we find in them a positive oneness of doctrine which amazes us. Even where at first glance there appears to be conflict, as between Paul and James, we find, on closer examination, that instead of standing face to face, beating each other, they stand back to back, beating off common foes. We observe, moreover, a progressive development of revelation. Bernhard devoted the powers of his master mind to tracing the "Progress of Doctrine in the New Testament." He shows that although the books of the New Testament are not even arranged in the order of their production, that order could not, in one instance, be changed without impairing or destroying the symmetry of the whole book; and that there is a regular progress in the unfolding of doctrine from the Gospel according to Matthew to the Revelation of St. John. A wider examination will show the very same progress of doctrine in the whole Bible. Most wonderful of all, this moral and didactic unity could not be fully understood till the Book was completed. The progress of preparation, like a scaffolding about a building, obscured its beauty; but when John placed the cap-stone in position and declared that nothing further should be added, the scaffolding fell and a grand cathedral was revealed. 8. THE UNITY IS SCIENTIFIC. The Bible is not a scientific book, but it follows one consistent law. Like an engine on its own track, it thunders across the track of science, but is never diverted from its own. * (1). No direct teaching or anticipation of scientific truth is here found. * (2). No scientific fact is ever misstated, though common, popular phraseology may be employed. * (3). An elastic set of terms is used, which contain, in germ, all scientific truth as the acorn enfolds the oak. These statements deserve a little amplification, as this has been supposed to be the weak side of the Bible. Yet, after a study of the Word on the one hand and natural science on the other, I believe we may safely challenge any living man to bring one well-established fact of science against which the Bible really and irreconcilably militates! God led inspired men to use such language, as that without revealing scientific facts in advance, it accurately accommodates itself to them when discovered. The language is so elastic and flexible as to contract itself to the narrowness of ignorance, and yet expand itself to the dimensions of knowledge. If the Bible may, from imperfect human language, select terms which may hold hidden truths till ages to come shall disclose the inner meaning, that would seem to be the best solution of this difficult problem. And now, when we come to compare the language of the Bible with modern science, we find just this to be the fact. For example, we are told that the Bible term "firmament" is but an ancient blunder crystallized. Modern science says, "Ye have heard it hath been said by them of old time, there is a solid sphere above us which revolves with its starry lamps; but this is an old notion of ignorance, for there is nothing but vast space filled with ether above us, and stars have an apparent motion because the earth turns on its axis." But this word "firmament," which has been declared "irreconcilable with modern astronomy," we find, on consulting our Hebrew lexicon, means simply an "expanse." If Moses had been Mitchell, he could not have chosen a better word to express the appearance, and yet accommodate the reality. He actually anticipated science. This is one of the "mistakes of Moses" to which the modern blasphemer does not refer! The general correspondence between the Mosaic account of creation and the most advanced discoveries of science, proves that only He who built the world, built the Book. As to the order of creation, Moses and geology agree. Both teach that at first there was an abyss, or watery waste, whose dense vapors shut out light. Both make life to precede light; and the life to develop beneath the abyss. Both make the atmosphere to form an expanse by lifting watery vapors into cloud, and so separating the fountains of waters above from the fountains below. Both tell us that continents next lifted themselves from beneath the great deep, and brought forth grass, herb, and tree. Both teach that the heavens became cleared of cloud, and the sun and moon and stars, which then appeared, began to serve to divide day from night, and to become signs for seasons and years. Both then represent the waters bringing forth moving and creeping creatures, and fowl flying in the expanse, followed next by the race of quadruped mammals, and, last of all, by man himself. There is the same agreement as to the order of animal creation. Geology and comparative anatomy combine to teach that the order was from lower to higher types. First, the fish, in which the proportion of brain to spinal cord is as 2 to 1; then reptiles, in which it is as 2 1/2 to 1; birds, 3 to 1; mammals, 4 to 1; man, 33 to 1. Now, this is exactly the order of Moses. Who told him what modern science has discovered, that fish and reptiles belong below birds? As Mr. Tullidge says: "With the advance of discovery, the opposition supposed to exist between Revelation and Geology has disappeared; and of the eighty theories which the French Institute counted in 1806 as hostile to the Bible, not one now stands." Take an example of this scientific accuracy from astronomy. Says Jeremiah in 30:22, "The host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured." Hipparchus about a century and a half before Christ, gave the number of stars as 1,022, and Ptolemy, in the beginning of the second century of the Christian era, could find but 1,026. We may, on a clear night, with the unaided eye, see only 1,160 or in the whole celestial sphere, about 3,000. But when the telescope began to be pointed to the heavens, less than three centuries ago, by Galileo, then men began to know that the stars are as countless as the sand on the seashore. When Lord Rosse turned his great mirror to the sky, lo! the number of visible stars increased to nearly 400,000,000! John Herschel resolves the nebulae into suns, and finds in the cloudy scarf about Orion, "a gorgeous bed of stars," and the Milky Way itself proves to be simply a grand procession of stars absolutely without number. And so, the exclamation of the prophet, 600 years before Christ, 2,200 years before Galileo, "the host of heaven cannot be numbered," proves to be not a wild, poetic exaggeration, but literal truth. Who was Jeremiah's teacher in astronomy? Let us take an example from natural philosophy. Moses accords with modem discoveries as to the nature of light, in not representing this mystery as being made, but "called forth," commanded to shine. If light be only "a mode of motion," how appropriate such phraseology! In Job 37:13-14, we read of the dayspring that it takes hold of the ends of the earth; it is turned as clay to the seal, and they stand as a garment. The ancient cylindrical seals rolled over the clay, and left an impress of artistic beauty. What was without form before, stood out in bold relief, like sculpture. So, as the earth revolves, and brings each portion of its surface successively under the sun's light and heat, what was before dull, dark, dead, discloses and develops beauty, and the clay stands like a garment, curiously wrought in bold relief and brilliant colors. Considered either as science or poetry, where, in any other book of antiquity, can you find anything equal to that? That phrase, "takes hold of the ends of the earth," conveys the idea of a bending of the rays of light, like the fingers of the hand when they lay hold. When the sunlight would touch the extremities of the earth, it is bent by the atmosphere so as to secure contact, and, but for this, vast portions, out of the direct line of the sun's rays, would be dark, cold and dead. Who taught Job, 1,500 years or more before Christ, to use terms that Longfellow or Tennyson might covet to describe refraction? "When the morning stars sang together," Job 38:7, has been always taken to be a high flight of poetry. And when in the Psalms 65:8, we read, "Thou makest the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice," the Hebrew word means to give forth a tremulous sound, or to make vibrations-to sing. In these poetic expressions, what scientific truth was wrapped up! Light comes to the eye in undulations or vibrations, as tones of sound to the ear. There is a point at which these vibrations are too rapid or delicate to be detected by our sense of hearing; then a more delicate organ, the eye, must take note of them; they appeal to the optic nerve instead of the auditory nerve, and as light and not sound. Thus, light really sings. "The lowest audible tone is made by 16.5 vibrations of air per second; the highest, by 38,000; between these extremes lie eleven octaves. Vibrations do not cease at 38,000 but our organs are not fitted to hear beyond those limitations." And so it is literally true that "the morning stars sang together." Here is Divine phraseology that has been standing there for ages uninterrupted. And now we may read it just as it stands: "Thou makest the outgoings [or light radiations] of the morning and evening to sing," i.e., to give forth sound by vibration. Solomon, in Ecclesiastes 12:6, has left us a poetic description of death. How that "silver cord" describes the spinal marrow; the "golden bowl", the basin which holds the brain; the "pitcher", the lungs; and the "wheel", the heart! The circulation of the blood was discovered twenty-six hundred years afterward by Harvey. Is it not very remarkable that the language Solomon uses exactly suits the fact-a wheel pumping up through one pipe to discharge through another? 9. Last of all, THE UNITY OF THE BIBLE IS ORGANIC. And this means it is the unity of organized being. Organic unity implies three things: first, that all parts are necessary to a complete whole; secondly, that all are necessary to complement each other; and thirdly, that all are pervaded by one life principle. Let us apply these laws to the Word of God. (1). All the parts of the Bible are necessary to its completeness. Organic unity is dependent on the existence and cooperation of organs. An oratorio is not an organic unit. Any part of it may be separated from the rest, or displaced by a new composition. But if this body of mine loses an eye, a limb, or the smallest joint of the finger, it is forever maimed; its completeness is gone. Not one of the books of the Bible could be lost without maiming the body of truth here contained. Every book fills a place. None can be omitted. For example, the Book of Esther has long been criticised as not necessary to the completeness of the Canon, and particularly, because "it does not even once contain the name of God." But that book is the most complete exhibition of the providence of God. It teaches a Divine Hand behind human affairs; unbiased freedom of resolution and action as consistent with God's overruling sovereignty; and all things working together to produce grand results. The book that thus exhibits God's providence does not contain the name of God; perhaps because this book is meant to teach us of the Hidden Hand that, unseen, moves and controls all things. "Ruth" seems to be only a love-story to some; but how rich this book is in foreshadowings of Gospel truth, especially illustrating the double nature of the God-man, our Redeemer. Boaz is a type of Christ-Lord of the Harvest, Dispenser of Bread, Giver of Rest, He is Goel-the Redeemer. Boaz, the near kinsman, buying back the lost inheritance and marrying Ruth, suggests Jesus, the God-man, our near Kinsman, yet of a higher family, the Redeemer of our lost estate, and Bridegroom of the redeemed Church. The Epistle to Philemon seems at first only a letter tea friend about a runaway slave. But this letter is full of illustrations of grace. The sinner has run away from God, and robbed Him besides. The law allows him no right of asylum; but grace concedes him the privilege of appeal. Christ, God's Partner, intercedes. He sends him back to the Father, no more a slave but a son. (2). The second law of organic unity is that all parts are necessary to complement each other. Cuvier has framed in scientific statement this law of unity. Organized being in every case forms a whole-a complete system-all parts of which mutually correspond; none of these parts can change without the other also changing; and consequently each taken separately indicates and gives all the others. For instance, the sharp-pointed tooth of the lion requires a strong jaw ;these demand a skull fitted for the attachment of powerful muscles, both for moving the jaw and raising the head; a broad, well developed shoulder-blade must accompany such a head; and there must be an arrangement of bones of the leg which admits of the leg-paw being rotated and turned upward, in order to be used as an instrument to seize and tear the prey; and of course there must be strong claws arming the paw. Hence from one tooth, the animal could be modeled though the species had perished. Thus the Four Gospels are necessary to each other and to the whole Bible. Each presents the subject from a different point of view, and the combination gives us a Divine Person reflected, projected before us, like an object with proportions and dimensions. Matthew wrote for the Jew, and shows Jesus as the King of the Jews, the Royal Lawgiver. Mark wrote for the Roman, and shows Him as the Power of God, the Mighty Worker. Luke wrote for the Greek, and shows Him as the Wisdom of God, the human Teacher and Friend. John, writing to supplement and complement the other Gospels, shows Him as Son of God, as well as Son of man, having and giving eternal life. These are not Gospels of Matthew, etc., but one Gospel of Christ, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The first three present the person and work of Christ from the outward, earthly side; the last, from the inward and heavenly. In the beginning of each Gospel we find emphasized: in Matthew, Christ's genealogy, in Mark His majesty, in Luke His humanity, in John His divinity. So, in the close of each: in Matthew His resurrection, in Mark His ascension, in Luke His parting benediction and promise of enduement, and in John the added hint of His second coming. The Epistles are likewise all necessary to complete the whole and complement each other. There are five writers, each having his own sphere of truth. Paul's great theme is Faith, and its relations to justification, sanctification, service, joy and glory. James treats of Works, their relation to faith, as its justification before man. He is the counterpart and complement of Paul. Peter deals with Hope, as the inspiration of God's pilgrim people. John's theme is Love, and its relation to the light and life of God as manifested in the believer. In his Gospel, he exhibits eternal life in Christ; in his epistles, eternal life as seen in the believer. Jude sounds the trumpet of warning against apostasy, which implies the wreck of faith, the delusion of false hope, love grown cold, and the utter decay of good works. What one of all these writers could we drop from the New Testament? The Unity of the Bible is the unity of one organic whole. The Decalogue demands the Sermon on the Mount. Isaiah's prophecy makes necessary the narrative of the Evangelists. Daniel fits into the Revelation as bone fits socket. Leviticus explains, and is explained by, the Epistle to the Hebrews. The Psalms express the highest morality and spirituality of the Old Testament; they link the Mosaic code with the Divine ethics of the Gospels and the Epistles. The passover foreshadows the Lord's supper, and the Lord's supper interprets and fulfills the passover. Even the little book of Jonah makes more complete the sublime Gospel according to John; and Ruth and Esther prophetically hint the Acts of the Apostles. Nay, when you come to the last chapters of Revelation, you find yourself mysteriously touching the first chapters of Genesis; and lo! as you survey the whole track of your thought, you find you have been following the perimeter of a golden ring; the extremities actually bend around, touch, and blend. You read in the first of Genesis of the first creation; in the last of the Revelation, of the new creation-the new heaven and the new earth; there, of the river that watered the garden; here, of the pure river of the water of life; there, of the Tree of Life in the first Eden; here, of the Tree of Life which is in the midst of the Paradise of God; there, of the God who came down to walk with and talk with man; here, we read that the Tabernacle of God is with men; there, we read of the curse that came by sin, here, we read: "And there shall be no more curse." (3). The third and last law of organic unity is, that one life principle must pervade the whole. The Life of God is in His Word. That Word is "quick"-living. Is it a mirror? yes, but such a mirror as the living eye; is it a seed? yes, but a seed hiding the vitality of God; is it a sword? yes, but a sword that, omnisciently discerns and omnipotently pierces the human heart. Hold it reverently; for you have a living Book in your hand. Speak to it, and it will answer you. Bend down and listen; you shall hear in it the heart-throbs of God. This Book, thus one, we are to hold forth as the Word of Life and the Light of God, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. We shall meet opposition. Like the birds that beat themselves into insensibility against the light in the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, the creatures of darkness will assault this Word, and vainly seek to put out its eternal light. But they shall only fall stunned and defeated at its base, while it still rises from its rock pedestal, immovable and serene! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 80: - FULFILLED PROPHECY A POTENT ARGUMENT... ======================================================================== Fulfilled Prophecy a Potent Argument for the Bible By Arno C. Gaebelein, Editor of "Produce your cause, saith the Lord; bring forth your strong reasons, saith the King of Jacob. Let them bring them forth, and show us what shall happen; let them show the former things, what they be, that we may consider them, and know the latter end of them, or declare us things to come. Show the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know, that ye are gods" (Isaiah 41:21-23). "I declare the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure" (Isaiah 46:10). This is Jehovah's challenge to the idol-gods of Babylon to predict future events. He alone can do that. The Lord can declare the end from the beginning, and make known things that are not yet done. The dumb idols of the heathen know nothing concerning the future. They cannot predict what is going to happen. And man himself is powerless to know future events and cannot find out things to come. Jehovah, who has made this challenge and declaration, has also fully demonstrated His power to do so. He has done it in His holy Word, the Bible. Other nations possess books of a religious character, called "sacred books." Not one of them contains any predictions concerning the future. If the authors of these writings had attempted to foretell the future, they would have thereby furnished the strongest evidence of their deceptions. The Bible is the only book in the world which contains predictions. It is pre-eminently that, which no other book could be, and none other is, a book of prophecy. These predictions are declared to be the utterances of Jehovah; they show that the Bible is a supernatural book, the revelation of God. Prophecy Neglected and Denied In view of this fact it is deplorable that the professing Church of today almost completely ignores and neglects the study of prophecy, a neglect which has for one of its results the loss of one of the most powerful weapons against infidelity. The denial of the Bible as the inspired Word of God has become widespread. If prophecy were intelligently studied such a denial could not flourish as it does, for the fulfilled predictions of the Bible give the clearest and most conclusive evidence that the Bible is the revelation of God. To this must be added the fact that the destructive Bible criticism, which goes by the name of "Higher Criticism," denies the possibility of prophecy. The whole reasoning method of this school, which has become so popular throughout Christendom, may be reduced to the following: Prophecy is an impossibility; there is no such thing as foretelling future events. Therefore a book which contains predictions of things to come, which were later fulfilled, must have been written after the events which are predicted in the book. The methods followed by the critics, the attacks made by them upon the authenticity of the different books of the Bible, especially upon those which contain the most startling prophecies (Isaiah and Daniel), we cannot follow at this time. They deny everything which the Jewish Synagogue and the Christian Church always believed to be prophecy, a supernatural unfolding of future events. Past, Present and Future The prophecies of the Bible must be first of all divided into three classes: 1. Prophecies which have found already their fulfillment. 2. Prophecies which are now in process of fulfillment. Many predictions written several thousand years ago are now being accomplished before our eyes. We mention those which relate to the national and spiritual condition of the Jewish people and the predictions concerning the moral and religious condition of the present age. 3. Prophecies which are still unfulfilled. We have reference to those which predict the second, glorious and visible coming of our Lord, the re- gathering of Israel and their restoration to the land of promise, judgments which will fall upon the nations of the earth, the establishment of the Kingdom, the conversion of the world, universal peace and righteousness, the deliverance of groaning creation, and others. These great prophecies of future things are often robbed of their literal and solemn meaning by a process of spiritualization. The visions of the prophets concerning Israel and Jerusalem, and the glories to come in a future age, are almost generally explained as having their fulfillment in the Church during the present age. However, our object is not to follow the unfulfilled prophecies, but prophecies fulfilled and in process of fulfillment. At the close of our treatise we shall point out briefly that in the light of fulfilled prophecies, the literal fulfillment of prophecies still future is perfectly assured. Fulfilled Prophecy a Vast Theme Fulfilled prophecy is a vast theme of much importance. It is equally inspiring and interesting. Volumes could be written to show how hundreds of Divine predictions written in the Bible have passed into history. What God announced through His chosen instruments has come to pass. History is bearing witness to the fact that the events which transpired among nations were pre-written in the Bible, even as prophecy is nothing less than history written in advance. As much as space permits we shall call attention to the fulfilled prophecies relating to the person of Christ; to the Jewish people; and to a number of nations, whose history, whose rise and downfall, are divinely predicted in the Bible. Furthermore, we shall mention the great prophetic unfoldings as given in the Book of Daniel, and how many of these predictions have already found a most interesting fulfillment. Messianic Prophecies and Their Fulfillment The Old Testament contains a most wonderful chain of prophecies concerning the person, the life and work of our Lord. As He is the center of the whole revelation of God, the One upon whom all rests, we turn first of all to a few of the prophecies which speak of Him. This also is very necessary. The destructive criticism has gone so far as to state that there are no predictions at all concerning Christ in the Old Testament. Such a denial leads to and is linked with the denial of Christ Himself, especially the denial of His Deity and His work on the cross. To follow the large number of prophecies concerning the coming of Christ into the world and the work He was to accomplish we cannot attempt in these pages. We point out briefly in a general way what must be familiar to most Christians who search the Scriptures. Christ is first announced in Genesis 3:15 to be the seed of the woman, and therefore a human being. In Genesis 9:26-27 the supremacy of Shem is predicted. The full revelation of Jehovah God is connected with Shem and in due time a son of Shem, Abraham, received the promise that the predicted seed was to come from him. (Genesis 12:8). Messiah was to come from the seed of Abraham. Then the fact was revealed that He was to come from Isaac and not from Ishmael, from Jacob and not from Esau. But Jacob had twelve sons. The Divine prediction pointed to Judah and later to the house of David of the tribe of Judah from which the Messiah should spring. When we come to the prophecies of Isaiah we learn that His mother is to be a virgin. (Isaiah 7:14). But the son born of the virgin is Immanuel, God with us. Clearly the prophetic Word in Isaiah states that the Messiah would be a child born and a Son given with the names, "Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace" (Isaiah 9:6). The promised Messiah is to be the seed of a woman, of the seed of Abraham, of David, born of a virgin. He is to be Immanuel, the Son given, God manifested in the flesh. This promised Messiah, the Son of David, should appear (according to Isaiah 11:1) after the house of David had been stripped of its royal dignity and glory. And what more could we say of the prophecies which speak of His life, His poverty, the works He was to do, His rejection by His own people, the Jews. In that matchless chapter in Isaiah, the fiftythird, the rejection of Christ by His own nation is predicted. In another chapter a still more startling prophecy is recorded: "Then I said, I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for naught and in vain." This is Messiah's lament on account of His rejection. Then follows the answer, which contains a most striking prophecy: "It is a light thing that Thou shouldest be My servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel: I also will give Thee for a light to the Gentiles, that Thou mayest be My salvation unto the ends of the earth" (Isaiah 49:5-6). Here the revelation is given that He would not alone be rejected by His own nation, but that He would also bring salvation to the Gentiles. What human mind could have ever invented such a program! The promised Messiah of Israel, the longed-for One, is predicted to be rejected by His own people and thus becomes the Saviour of the despised Gentiles. His sufferings and His death are even more minutely predicted. In the Book of Psalms the sufferings of Christ, the deep agony of His soul, the expressions of His sorrow and His grief, are pre-written by the Spirit of God. We mention only one Psalm, the twenty-second. His death by crucifixion is prophesied. Yet death by crucifixion was in David's time an unknown mode of death. Cruel Rome invented that horrible form of death. The cry of the forsaken One is predicted in the very words which came from the lips of our Saviour out of the darkness which enshrouded the cross. So are also predicted the words of mockery by those who looked on; the piercing of His hands and feet; the parting of the garments and the casting of the lots. In the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, the purpose of His death is so blessedly predicted. He was to die the substitute of sinners. There we find also His burial and His resurrection predicted. All this was recorded 700 years before our Lord was born. In the Psalms we find the prophecy that the rejected One would occupy a place at the right hand of God (Psalms 110:1). He was to leave the earth. David's Son and David's Lord was to have a place in the highest glory, even at the right hand of God, to wait there till His enemies are made His footstool. It is indeed a wonderful chain of prophecies concerning Christ. We could give a very few of these predictions. How they all were long ago literally fulfilled in the coming, in the life, in the death, in the resurrection and ascension of our adorable Lord, all true believers know. The Jewish People When Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, asked the court chaplain for an argument that the Bible is an inspired book, he answered, "Your Majesty, the Jews." It was well said. To the Jews were committed the oracles of God. (Romans 3:2). These oracles of God, the Holy Scriptures, the Law and the Prophets, are filled with a large number of predictions relating to their own history. Their unbelief, the rejection of the Messiah, the results of that rejection, their dispersion into the corners of the earth, so that they would be scattered among all the nations, the persecutions and sorrows they were to suffer, the curses which were to come upon them, their miraculous preservation as a nation, their future great tribulation and final restoration-all these and much more were over and over announced by their own prophets. All the different epochs of the remarkable history of Israel were predicted long before they were reached. Their sojourn in Egypt and servitude, as well as the duration of that period, was announced to Abraham. The Babylonian captivity of 70 years and the return of a remnant to occupy the land once more was announced by the pre-exile prophets, who also predicted a far greater and longer exile, their present world-wide dispersion and a return which up to 1914 has not yet come. Of the deepest interest and the greatest importance in connection with the predictions of the return from Babylon is the naming of the great Persian king through whom the return was to be achieved. This great prophecy is found in the Book of Isaiah: "That saith of Cyrus, He is My shepherd, and shall perform all My pleasure: even saying of Jerusalem, She shall be built; and of the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid. Thus saith Jehovah to His anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the loins of kings, to open the doors before him, and the gates shall not be shut" (Isaiah 44:28; Isaiah 45:1). This prediction was made about 200 years before Cyrus was born. A careful study of the part of Isaiah where these words are found will show that they are linked with the challenge of Jehovah and the declaration that He knows the end from the beginning; the passages we have already quoted. In naming an unborn king and showing what his work would be, Jehovah demonstrates that He knows the future. The great Jewish historian, Josephus, informs us that when Cyrus found his name in the Book of Isaiah, written about 200 years before, an earnest desire laid hold upon him to fulfill what was written. The beginning of the Book of Ezra gives the proclamation of Cyrus concerning the temple. When the Prophet Isaiah received the message which contained the name of the Persian king, he wrote it down faithfully, though he did not know who Cyrus was. Two centuries later Cyrus appeared and then issued his proclamation which fulfilled Isaiah's prediction. Higher criticism denies the genuineness of all this. In order to disprove this prophecy as well as others, they declare that Isaiah did not write the book which bears his name. For about 2500 years no one ever thought of even suggesting that Isaiah is not the author of the book. They have invented an unknown person, whom they call Deutero-Isaiah, i.e., a second Isaiah. They claim that he wrote chapters 40-66. With this they have not stopped. They speak now of a third Isaiah, a Trito-Isaiah, as they call him. With their supposed learning they claim to have discovered that some of the chapters of Isaiah were written in Babylon and others in Palestine. However, all the arguments, advanced by the critics for a composite authorship and against one Isaiah who lived and wrote his book at the time specified in the beginning of Isaiah, are disproven by the book itself. One only needs to study this book to find out the unity of the message. One person must be the author of the Book of Isaiah. A Remarkable Chapter The Pentateuch contains many of the prophecies concerning the future history of the Jews. One of the most remarkable chapters is the twenty eighth chapter in Deuteronomy. It is one of the most solemn chapters in the Pentateuch. Orthodox Hebrews read in their synagogues each year through the entire five books of Moses. When they read this chapter, the Rabbi reads in a subdued voice. And well may they read it softly and ponder over it, for here is pre-written the sad and sorrowful history of their wonderful nation. Here thousands of years ago the Spirit of God through Moses outlined the history of the scattered nation, all their suffering and tribulation, as it has been for well nigh two millenniums and as it is still. Here are arguments for the Divine, the supernatural origin of this book which no infidel has ever been able to answer; nor will there ever be found an answer. It would take many pages to follow the different predictions and show their literal fulfillment in the nation which turned away from Jehovah and disobeyed His Word. Apart from such general predictions as are found in verses 64-66 and fulfilled in the dispersion of Israel, there are others which are more minute. The Roman power, which was used to break the Jews, is clearly predicted by Moses, and that in a time when no such power existed. Read verses 49-50: "The Lord shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flieth, a nation, whose language thou shalt not understand." The eagle was the standard of the Roman armies; the Jews understood many oriental languages, but were ignorant of Latin. "Which shall not regard the person of the old, nor show favor to the young." Rome killed the old people and the children. "And he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, until thy high and fenced walls come down, wherein thou trustedst, throughout all thy land"(verse 52). Fulfilled in the siege and overthrow of Jerusalem by the Roman legions."The tender and delicate woman among you, which would not adventure to set the sole of her foot upon the ground for delicateness and tenderness, shall eat her children, for lack of all things in the siege and straitness wherewith thine enemy shall distress thee in thy gates" (54-57). Fulfilled in the dreadful sieges of Jerusalem, perhaps the most terrible events in the history of blood and tears of this poor earth. Every verse, beginning with the fifteenth, to the end of this chapter has found its oft repeated fulfillment. It does not surprise us that the enemy hates this book, which bears such a testimony, and would have it classed with legends. Of much interest is the last verse of this great prophetic chapter. "And Jehovah will bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I said unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again; and there ye shall sell yourselves unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and no man shall buy you." When Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, all who did not die in the awful calamity were sent to the mines of Egypt, where the slaves were constantly kept at work without being permitted to rest or sleep till they succumbed. The whip of Egypt fell once more upon them and they suffered the most terrible agonies. Others were sold as slaves. According to Josephus, about 100,000 were made slaves so that the markets were glutted and the word fulfilled, "No man shall buy you." Their Dispersion and Preservation When Balaam beheld the camp of Israel he uttered a prophecy which is still being fulfilled. "Lo, the people shall dwell alone and shall not be reckoned among the nations" (Numbers 23:9). God had separated the nation and given to them a land. And this peculiar people, living in one of the smallest countries of the earth, has been scattered throughout the world, has become a wanderer, without a home, without a land. Like Cain they wander from nation to nation. Though without a land they are still a nation. Other nations have passed away; the Jewish nation has been preserved. They are among all the nations and yet not reckoned among the nations. All this is written beforehand in the Bible. "And you will I scatter among the nations, and I will draw out the sword after you: and your land shall be a desolation and your cities shall be a waste" (Leviticus 26:33). "And Jehovah will scatter you among the people, and ye shall be left few in number among the nations, whither Jehovah shall lead you away" (Deuteronomy 4:27). "And Jehovah will scatter you among all peoples, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth; and there thou shalt serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou nor thy fathers, even wood and stone. And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, and there shall be no rest for the sole of thy foot; but Jehovah will give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and pining of soul. And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear night and day, and shalt have no assurance of thy life. In the morning thou shalt say, Would it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would it were morning! for the fear of thy heart which thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes, which thou shalt see" (Deuteronomy 28:64-67). "And yet for all that, when they be in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them, neither will I abhor them, to destroy them utterly, and to break My covenant with them; for I am Jehovah their God" (Leviticus 26:44). In many other passages the Spirit of God predicts their miraculous preservation. "Massacred by thousands, yet springing up again from their undying stock, the Jews appear at all times and in all regions. Their perpetuity, their national immortality, is at once the most curious problem to the political inquirer; to the religious man a subject of profound and awful admiration." [*Milman: "History of the Jews."] Herder called the Jews "the enigma of history". What human mind could have ever foreseen that this peculiar people, dwelling in a peculiar land, was to be scattered among all nations, suffer there as no other nation ever suffered, and yet be kept and thus marked out still as the covenant people of a God, whose gifts and callings are without repentance. Here indeed is an argument for the Word of God which no infidel can answer. Jehovah has predicted the history of His earthly people. "Though I make a full end of all nations whither I have scattered thee, yet will I not make a full end of thee" (Jeremiah 30:11). The Land and the City Palestine, the God-given home of Israel, the land which once flowed with milk and honey, has become barren and desolate. Jerusalem, once a great city, the hallowed city of David, is trodden down by the Gentiles. All this is more than once predicted in the Word of Prophecy. "I will make thee a wilderness, and cities which are not inhabited. And I will prepare destroyers against thee, every one with his weapons; and they shall cut down thy choice cedars, and cast them into the fire. And many nations shall pass by this city, and they shall say every man to his neighbor, Wherefore has the Lord done thus unto this great city" Then they shall answer, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord their God, and worshipped other gods and served them" (Jeremiah 22:7-9). "And the generation to come, your children that shall rise up after you, and the foreigner that shall come from a far land shall say, when they shall see the plagues of that land even all the nations shall say, Wherefore hath Jehovah done thus unto this land, what meaneth the heat of this great anger?" (Deuteronomy 29:22-25). Thus it has come to pass. Their land is being visited by Gentiles from all over the world who behold the desolations. Many other passages could be added to the above-passages which prophesied the very condition of the promised land and the city of Jerusalem which are found there now, and which have existed for nearly two thousand years. The national rejection of Israel and the fulfillment of the threatened curses have come to pass, and the land in its barren condition witnesses to it. Even the duration of all this is indicated in the prophetic Word. There is a striking passage in Hosea. "I will go and return to My place, till they acknowledge their offence and seek My face; in their affliction they will seek Me early. Come, let us return unto the Lord; for He hath torn, and He will heal us; He hath smitten and He will bind us up. After two days will He revive us; in the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live in His sight" (Hosea 5:15-6:2). According to this prophecy Jehovah is to be in their midst and is to return to His place. It refers to the manifestation of the Lord Jesus Christ among His people. They rejected Him; He returned to His place. They are to acknowledge their offence. Elsewhere in the Word predictions are found which speak of a future national repentance of Israel when the remnant of that nation will confess the blood-guiltiness which is upon them. According to this word in Hosea, they are going to have affliction, and when that great affliction comes they will seek His face, and confess their sins, and express their trust in Jehovah. They acknowledge that for two days they were torn and smitten by the judgments of the Lord, afflicted, as predicted by their own prophets. A third day is coming when all will be changed. These days are prophetic days. Several ancient Jewish expositors mention the fact that these days stand each for a thousand years. The two days of affliction and dispersion would therefore stand for two thousand years, and they are almost expired. The third day would mean the day of the Lord, the thousand years of the kingdom to come. Nor must we forget that our Lord Jesus Christ, too, predicted the great dispersion of the nation, the fall of Jerusalem, and that Gentiles were to rule over that city, till the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. (Luke 21:10-24). No Government, No Sacrifice, No Holy Place "For the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice, and without an image, and without an ephod, and without teraphim" (Hosea 3:4). No further comment is needed on this striking prediction. Their political and religious condition for 1900 years corresponds to every word given through Hosea the prophet. Prophecies About Other Nations Besides the many predictions concerning the people Israel, the prophets have much to say about the nations with whom Israel came in touch and whose history is bound up with the history of the chosen people of God. Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, Ammon, Moab, Tyre, Sidon, Idumea, and others are mentioned in the Prophetic Word. Their ultimate fate was predicted by Jehovah long before their downfall and overthrow occurred. The Prophet Ezekiel was entrusted with many of the solemn messages announcing the judgment of these nations. The reader will find these predictions in chapters 25-37. The predictions concerning Ammon, Moab, Edom and the Philistines are recorded in the twenty-fifth chapter. Tyrus and its fall is the subject of chapters 26 to 28:19. A prophecy about Sidon is found in the concluding verses of the twenty-eighth chapter. The prophecies concerning the judgment and degradation of Egypt are given at greater length in chapters 29 and 30. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum and Habakkuk, all contain prophecies concerning different nations foretelling what should happen to them. A mass of evidence can be produced to show that all these predictions came true. Many of them seemed to fail, but after centuries had passed, their literal fulfillment, even to the minutest detail, had become history. We must confine ourselves to a very few of these predictions and their fulfillment. The siege and capture of the powerful and extremely wealthy city of Tyrus by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, is predicted in Ezekiel 26:7-11. It came literally to pass. One of the proofs is to be found in a contract tablet in the British Museum dated at Tyrus in the fortieth year of the king. The overthrow predicted by Ezekiel had come to pass. The walls were broken down and the city was ruined. The noise of the song ceased and the sound of the harps was no more heard. But not all that Ezekiel predicted had been fulfilled by the Babylonian conqueror. The Divine prediction states, "They shall lay thy stones and thy timber and thy dust in the midst of the water" (verse 12). Nebuchadnezzar had not done this. History acquaints us with the fact that the Tyrians, before the destruction of the city had come, had removed their treasures to an island about half a mile from the shore. About 250 years later Alexander came against the island city. The ruins of Tyre which Nebuchadnezzar had left standing were used by Alexander. He constructed out of them with great ingenuity and perseverance a dam from the mainland to the rock city in the sea. Thus literally it was fulfilled, "They shall lay thy stones and thy timber and thy dust in the midst of the water." The sentence pronounced upon that proud city, for so long the powerful mistress of the sea, "Thou shalt be built no more," has been fully carried out. Of still greater interest are the prophecies which foretell the doom of Egypt. Ezekiel and Nahum mention the Egyptian city No. (Ezekiel 30:14-16; Nahum 3:8). No is Thebes and was the ancient capital of Egypt. The Egyptian name is No-Amon. It had a hundred gates, as we learn from Homer, and was a city of marvelous beauty. It was surrounded by walls twenty-four feet thick, and had a circumference of one mile and three quarters. The Lord announced through Ezekiel that this great city should be rent asunder and that its vast population should be cut off. Five hundred years later Ptolemy Laltyrus, the grandfather of Cleopatra, after besieging the city several years razed to the ground the previously ruined city. Every word given through Ezekiel had come true. One could fill many pages showing the literal fulfillment of Ezekiel's great predictions relating to Egypt. The decline and degradation predicted has come true. The rivers and canals of Egypt have dried up. The land has become desolate. The immense fisheries which yielded such a great income to the rulers of Egypt are no longer in existence. Ezekiel 30:7 has found a literal fulfillment. Egypt is a land of ruins and wasted cities. The instruments whom God used in accomplishing this were strangers (Ezekiel 30:12) like Cambyses, Amroo, Ochus and others. "There shall be no more a prince of the land of Egypt" (Ezekiel 30:13). This too has been literally fulfilled. Ochus subdued rebellious Egypt 350 B.C., and since that time no native prince has ruled in Egypt. It is also written that Egypt should become the basest of the kingdoms, "Neither shall it exalt itself any more above the nations; for I will diminish them that they shall no more rule over the nations." This degradation has fully come to pass. Who would ever have thought that this magnificent country with its vast resources, its wonderful commerce, its great prosperity, its luxuries, the land of marvelous structures, could ever experience such a downfall! Another significant fact is that in spite of the great humiliation and degradation through which Egypt has passed for so many centuries, it is not to experience a total extinction. In this respect her fate differs from that of other nations, "They shall be there a base kingdom" (Ezekiel 29:14); this is the condition of Egypt today. And other prophets announce the same fact. One of the earliest prophets is Joel. He prophesied between 860 and 850 B.C. He predicted at that early date, "Egypt shall be a desolation." Isaiah also foretells the awful judgment of this great land of ancient culture. In the light of unfulfilled prophecy we discover the reason why God has not permitted the complete extinction of Egypt. Egypt is yet to be lifted out of the dust and is to receive a place of blessing only second to that of Israel (Isaiah 19:22-25). This will be fulfilled when our Lord comes again. And what more could we say of Idumea, Babylonia, Assyria and other lands. Moab and Ammon, the enemies of Israel, once flourishing nations, have passed away and the numerous judgment predictions have come true. (See Jeremiah 48-49). Edom is gone. "O thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, that boldest the height of the hill, though thou shouldest make thy nest as high as the eagle, I will bring thee down from thence, saith Jehovah" (Jeremiah 49:16). "Thou shalt be desolate, O Mount Seir, and all Idumea, even all of it" (Ezekiel 35:15). It was an atheist who was first used to report that during a journey of eight days he had found in the territory of Idumea the ruins of thirty cities. Babylonia and Assyria, once the granaries of Asia, the garden spots of that continent, enjoying a great civilization, are now in desolation and mostly unproductive deserts. The predictions of Isaiah and Jeremiah have been fulfilled. The judgments predicted to come upon Babylon were also fulfilled long ago. ["How utterly improbable it must have sounded to the contemporaries of Isaiah and Jeremiah, that the great Babylon, this oldest metropolis Of the world, founded by Nimrod, planned to be a city on the Euphrates much larger than Paris of today, surrounded by walls four hundred feet high, on the top of which four chariots, each drawn by four horses, could be driven side by side; in the center a large, magnificent park an hour's walk in circumference, watered by machinery; in it the king's twelve palaces, surrounding the great temple of the sun-god with its six hundred-foot tower and its gigantic golden statue-should be converted into a heap of ruins in the midst of a desert! Who today would have any faith in a similar prophecy against Berlin or London or Paris or New York?" (Prof. Bettex.)] The Book of Daniel The Book of Daniel, however, supplies the most startling evidences of fulfilled prophecy. No other book has been so much attacked as this great book. For about two thousand years wicked men, heathen philosophers, and infidels have tried to break down its authority. It has proven to be the anvil upon which the critics' hammers have been broken to pieces. The Book of Daniel has survived all attacks. It has been denied that Daniel wrote the book during the Babylonian captivity. The critics claim that it was written during the time of the Maccabees. Kuenen, Wellhausen, Canon Farrar, Driver and others but repeat the statements of the assailant of Christianity of the third century, the heathen Porphyry, who contended that the Book of Daniel was a forgery. Such is the company in which the higher critics are found. The Book of Daniel has been completely vindicated. The prophet wrote the book and its magnificent prophecies in Babylon. All doubt as to that has been forever removed, and men who still repeat the infidel oppositions against the book, oppositions of a past generation, mustbe branded as ignorant, or considered the willful enemies of the Bible. Nebuchadnezzar's Great Dream The great dream of Nebuchadnezzar is recorded in the second chapter of the Book of Daniel. Nebuchadnezzar who had been constituted by Jehovah a great monarch over the earth (Jeremiah 27:5-9) desired to know the future. All his astrologers and soothsayers, his magicians and mediums, could not do that. Their predictions left him still in doubt (Daniel 2:29). God gave him then a dream which contained a most remarkable revelation. The great man-image the king beheld is the symbol of the great world empires Which were to follow the Babylonian empire. The image had a head of gold; the chest and arms were of silver; the trunk and the thighs were of brass; the two legs of iron, and the two feet were composed of iron mixed with clay. The Lord made known through the prophet the meaning of this dream. Nebuchadnezzar and the empire over which he ruled is symbolized by the golden head. An inferior kingdom was to come after the Babylonian Empire; its symbol is silver. This kingdom was to be followed by a third kingdom of brass to bear rule over all the earth. The fourth kingdom was to be strong as iron and was to subdue all things. Exactly three great world powers came after the Babylonian Empire, the Medo-Persian, the Graeco-Macedonian and the Roman. Interesting it is to learn, from the different metals of which the image was composed, the process of deterioration which was to characterize the successive monarchies. The fourth empire, the Roman world power, is seen in its historic division, indicated by the two legs. The empire consisted of two parts, the East and West Roman sections. Then the division of the Empire into kingdoms in which iron (monarchical form of government) and the clay (the rule of the people) should be present is also predicted. How all this has come to pass is too well known to need any further demonstration. These empires have come and gone and the territory of the old Roman Empire presents today the very condition as predicted in Nebuchadnezzar's dream. Monarchies and republics are in existence upon that territory. The final division into ten kingdoms has not yet been accomplished. The unfulfilled portion of this dream we do not follow here. The reader may find this explained in the author's exposition of Daniel. Daniel's Great Vision of the World Powers In the seventh chapter Daniel relates his first great vision. The four beasts he saw rising out of the sea, the type of nations, are symbolical of the same world powers. The lion with eagle's wings is Babylonia. Jeremiah also pictured Nebuchadnezzar as a lion. "The lion has come up from his thicket and the destroyer of the Gentiles is on his way" (Jeremiah 4:7). Ezekiel speaks of him as a great eagle. (Ezekiel 17:3). The Medo- Persian Empire is seen as a bear raised up on one side and having three ribs in its mouth. The one side appeared stronger because this second world empire had Persia for its stronger element. The three ribs the bear holds as prey predict the conquests of that empire. Medo-Persia conquered exactly three great provinces, Susiana, Lydia and Asia Minor. The leopard with four wings and four heads is the picture of the Graeco-Macedonian Empire. The four wings denote its swiftness and rapid advance so abundantly fulfilled in the conquests of Alexander the Great. The four heads of the leopard predict the partition of this empire into the kingdoms of Syria, Egypt, Macedonia and Asia Minor. The fourth beast, the great nondescript, with its ten horns, and the little horn, still to come, is the Roman Empire. These are wonderful things. Be it remembered that the prophet received the vision when the Babylonian Empire still existed. Here also the character of these empires typified by ferocious beasts is revealed. The great nations of Christendom which occupy the ground of the Roman Empire testify unconsciously to the truth of this great prophecy. The emblems of these nations are not doves, little lambs or other harmless creatures. They have chosen the lion, the bear, the unicorn, the eagle and the double-headed eagle. Alexander the Great Predicted In the eighth chapter a new prophecy is revealed through Daniel. Once more the Medo-Persian Empire is seen, this time under the figure of a ram with two horns, one higher than the other, and the higher one came up last. It foretells the composition of that empire. It was composed of the Medes and the Persians; the Persians came in last and were the strongest. It conquered in three directions. This corresponds to the bear with the three ribs in the previous chapter. The he-goat which Daniel sees coming from the west with a great rush is the type of the leopard empire, the Graeco-Macedonian. The same swiftness as revealed in the leopard with four wings is seen here again. The notable horn upon the he-goat, symbolizing the Macedonian Empire, is Alexander the Great. Josephus tells us that Alexander was greatly moved when the Jewish high priest Jaddua acquainted him with the meaning of this prophecy written over two hundred years before. And how was it fulfilled, what is predicted in Daniel 8:5-8? 334 B.C. the notable horn, Alexander, in goat-like fashion, leaped across the Hellespont and fought successful battles, then pushed on to the banks of the Indus and the Nile and from there to Shushan. The great battles of the Granicus (334 B.C.), Issus (333 B.C.), and Arbella (331 B.C.) were fought, and with irresistible force he stamped the power of Persia and its king, Darius Codomannus, to the ground. He conquered rapidly Syria, Phoenicia, Cyprus, Pyre, Gaza, Egypt, Babylonia, Persia. In 329 he conquered Bactria, crossed the Oxus and Jaxaitis and defeated the Scythians. And thus he stamped upon the ram after having broken its horns. But when the he-goat had waxed very great, the great horn was broken. This predicted the early and sudden death of Alexander the Great. He died after a reign of 12 years and eight months, after a career of drunkenness and debauchery in 323 B.C. He died when he was but 32 years old. Then four notable ones sprang up in the place of the broken horn. This too has been fulfilled, for the empire of Alexander was divided into four parts. Four of the great generals of Alexander made the division, namely, Cassander, Lysimachus, Seleucus and Ptolemy. The four great divisions were Syria, Egypt, Macedonia, and Asia Minor. Antiochus Epiphanes In verses 19 to 24 of the eighth chapter of Daniel the coming of a wicked leader, to spring out of one of the divisions of the Macedonian Empire and the vile work he was to do, is predicted. He was to work great havoc in the pleasant land, that is, Israel's land. History does not leave us in doubt about the identity of this wicked king. He is the eighth king of the Seleucid dynasty, who took the Syrian throne and is known by the name of Antiochus Epiphanes, and bore also the name of Epimanes, i.e., "the Madman." He was the tyrant and oppressor of the Jews. His wicked deeds of oppression, blasphemy and sacrilege are fully described in the Book of the Maccabees. Long before he ever appeared Daniel saw him and his wicked work in his vision. And all this has been fulfilled in Antiochus Epiphanes. When he had conquered Jerusalem he sacrificed a sow upon the altar of burnt offerings and sprinkled its broth over the entire building. He corrupted the youths of Jerusalem by introducing lewd practices; the feast of tabernacles he changed into the feast of Bacchus. He auctioned off the high-priest-hood. All kinds of infamies were perpetrated by him and the most awful obscenity permitted and encouraged. All true worship was forbidden, and idol worship introduced, especially that of Jupiter Olympus. The whole city and land was devastated and some 100,000 pious Jews were massacred. Such has been the remarkable fulfillment of this prophecy. Even the duration of this time of trouble was revealed; and 2,300 days are mentioned. These 2,300 days cover about the period of time during which Antiochus Epiphanes did his wicked deeds. The chronology of these 2,300 days is interesting. Judas Maccabaeus cleansed (lit. justified) the sanctuary from the abomination about December 25, 165 B.C. Antiochus died a miserable death two years later. Going back 2,300 days from the time Judas the Maccabean cleansed the defiled temple, brings us to 171 B.C. when we find the record of Antiochus' interference with the Jews. Menelaus had bribed Antiochus to make him high priest, robbed the temple and instituted the murder of the high priest Onias III. The most wicked deeds in the defilement of the temple were perpetrated by the leading general of Antiochus, Apollonius, in the year 168 B.C. We believe these 2,300 days are therefore literal days and have found their literal fulfillment in the dreadful days of this wicked king from the North. There is no other meaning attached to these days and the foolish speculations that these days are years, etc., lack Scriptural foundation altogether. The Greatest of All The greatest prophecy in the Book of Daniel is contained in the ninth chapter, the prophecy concerning the 70 weeks, transmitted from heaven through Gabriel. (Daniel 9:24-27). To many readers of the Book of Daniel it is not quite clear what the expression "seventy weeks" means, and when it is stated that each week represents a period of seven years, many Christians do not know why such is the case. A brief word of explanation may therefore be in order. The literal translation of the term "seventy weeks" is "seventy sevens." Now this word "sevens" translated "weeks" may mean "days" and it may mean "years." What then is meant here, seventy times seven days or seventy times seven years? It is evident that the "sevens" mean year weeks, seven years to each prophetic week. Daniel was occupied in reading the books and in prayer with the seventy years of the Babylonian captivity. And now Gabriel is going to reveal to him something which will take place in "seventy sevens," which means seventy times seven years. The proof that such is the case is furnished by the fulfillment of the prophecy itself. First we notice in the prophecy that these 70 year-weeks are divided in three parts. Seven times seven (49 years) are to go by till the commanded rebuilding and restoration of Jerusalem should be accomplished. In the twentieth year of Artaxerxes the command was given to rebuild Jerusalem. It was in the year 445 B.C., exactly 49 years after the wall of Jerusalem and the city had been rebuilt. Then 62 weeks are given as the time when Messiah should be cut off and have nothing. This gives us 434 years (62 times 7). Here is a prediction concerning the death of Christ. Has it been fulfilled? Chronology shows that exactly 483 years after Artaxerxes gave the command to restore Jerusalem (445 B. C.), 434 years after the city had been restored, the death of our Lord Jesus Christ took place. To be more exact, on the day on which our Lord Jesus Christ entered Jerusalem for the last time, the number of years announced by Gabriel expired and the Lord was crucified that week. The proof of it is perfect. But there is more to be said. As a result of the cutting off of Messiah something else is prophesied. "And the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary." The prince that is to come (and is yet to come) is the little horn of Dan 7. He arises out of the Roman Empire. The people of the prince that shall come are therefore the Roman people. They have fulfilled this prophecy by destroying the temple and the city. The Wars of the Ptolemies and Seleucidae The greater part of the eleventh chapter in Daniel has been historically fulfilled. It is an interesting study. So accurate are the predictions that the enemies of the Bible have tried their very best to show that Daniel did not write these prophecies several hundred years before they occurred. But they have failed in their miserable attempts. We place the startling evidence before our readers. PROPHECY GIVEN B.C. 534 FULFILLMENT "And now will I shew thee the truth. Behold, there shall stand up yet three kings in Persia; and the fourth shall be far richer than they all: and by his strength through his riches he shall stir up all against the realm of Grecia." (Verse Daniel 11:2.) See Ezra 4:5-24. The three kings were: Ahasuerus, Artaxerxes and Darius, known in history as Cambyses, Pseudo Smerdis, and Darius Hystaspis (not Darius the Mede). The fourth one was Xerxes, who, as history tells us, was immensely rich. The invasion of Greece took place in 480 B.C. "And a mighty king shall stand up, that shall rule with great dominion, and do according to his will." (Verse Daniel 11:3.) The successors of Xerxes are not mentioned. The mighty king in this verse is the notable horn seen by Daniel on the hegoat in chapter 8, Alexander the Great, 335 B.C. "And when he shall stand up, his kingdom shall be broken, and shall be divided toward the four winds of heaven; and not to his posterity, nor according to his dominion which he ruled: for his kingdom shall be plucked up even for others besides those." (Verse Daniel 11:4.) B.C. 323. Alexander died young. The notable horn was broken: His kingdom was divided into four parts (four winds) after the battle of Ipsus 301 B.C. His posterity did not receive the kingdom, but his four generals, Ptolemy, Lysimachus, Seleucus Nicator and Cassander. Not one of these divisions reached to the glory of Alexander's dominion. "And the king of the South shall be strong, and one of his princes; and he shall be strong above him, and have dominion; his dominion shall be a great dominion." (Verse Daniel 11:5.) Asia and Greece are not followed but Syria and Egypt become prominent, because the King of the North from Syria, and the King of the South, Egypt, were to come in touch with the Jews. The holy land became involved with both. The King of the South was Ptolemy emy Lagus. One of his princes was Seleucus Nicator. He established a great dominion, which extended to the Indus. "And in the end of years they shall join themselves together; for the king's daughter of the South shall come to the King of the North to make an agreement; but she shall not retain the power of the arm; neither shall he stand, nor his arm: but she shall be given up, and they that brought her, and he that begat her, and he that strengthened her in these times." (Verse Daniel 11:6.) Here is another gap. This verse takes us to 250 B.C. The two who make an alliance are the Kings of the North (Syrian division of the Grecian Empire) and of the South (Egypt). This alliance was effected by the marriage of the daughter of the King of the South, the Egyptian Princess Berenice. daughter of Ptolemy II, to Antiochus Theos, the King of the North. The agreement was that Antiochus had to divorce his wife and make any child of Berenice his heir in the kingdom. The agreement ended in calamity. When Ptolemy died Antiochus Theos in 247 called back his former wife. Berenice and her young son were poisoned and the first wife's son, Callinicus, was put on the throne as Seleucus II. "But out of a branch of her roots shall one stand up in his estate, which shall come with an army, and shall enter into the fortress of the King of the North, and shall deal against them, and shall prevail." (Verse Daniel 11:7.) The one out of her roots (Berenice, who had been murdered) was her own brother, Ptolemy Euergetes, who avenged her death. He conquered Syria. He dealt against Seleucus II, King of the North, and slew the wife of Antiochus Theos, who had Berenice poisoned. He seized the fortress, the port of Antioch. "And shall also carry captives into Egypt their gods, with their princes, and with their precious vessels of silver and gold; and he shall continue more years than the King of the North." (Verse Daniel 11:8.) Ptolemy Euergetes did exactly as predicted. He returned with 4,000 talents of gold and 40,000 talents of silver and 2,500 idols and idolatrous vessels. Many of these Cambyses had taken to Persia. "So the King of the South shall come into his kingdom, and shall return into his own land." (Verse Daniel 11:9.) In 240 B.C. Seleucus Callinicus the King of the North invaded Egypt. He had to return defeated. His fleet perished in a storm. (Literal translation): "and the same [King of the North] shall come into the realm of the King of the South, but shall return into his own land." The sons of Seleucus Callinicus were Seleucus III and Antiochus the Great. Seleueus (Ceraunos) III began war against Egyptian Provinces in Asia Minor. He was unsuccessful. The other son Antioch invaded Egypt and passed through because Ptolemy Philopater did not oppose him. In218 B.C. Antiochus continued his warfare and took the fortress Gaza. "But his sons shall be stirred up, and shall assemble a multitude of great forces; and one shall certainly come, and overflow, and pass through: then shall he return, and be stirred up, even to his fortress." (Verse Daniel 11:10.) In 217 B.C. Ptolemy aroused himself and fought Antiochus the Great with an immense army. He defeated Antiochus. The multitude was given into the hands of Ptolemy Philopater. "And the King of the South shall be moved with choler, and shall come forth and fight with him, even with the King of the North: and he shall set forth a great multitude but the multitude shall be given into his hand." (Verse Daniel 11:11.) The people of Egypt rose up and the weakling Ptolemy became courageous. His victory is again referred to. It was won at Raphia. He might have pressed his victory. But he did not make use of it but gave himself up to a licentious life. Thus "he was not strengthened by it." "And when he hath taken away the multitude, his heart shall be lifted up, and he shall cast down many ten thousands: but he shall not be strengthened by it." (Verse Daniel 11:12.) (Literal: "And the multitude shall rise up and his courage increase.") About 14 years later, 203 B.C., Antiochus assembled a great army, greater than the army which was defeated at Raphia, and turned against Egypt. Ptolemy Philopater had died and left an infant son Ptolemy Epiphanes. "For the King of the North shall return, and shall set forth a multitude greater than the former and shall certainly come after certain years with a great army and with much riches." (Verse Daniel 11:13.) Antiochus had for his ally Philip, King of Macedon. Also in Egypt many rebels stood up. And then there were, as we read in Josephus, wicked Jews, who helped Antiochus. These "robbers of thy people" established the vision. They helped along the very things which had been predicted, as to trials for them. "And in those times there shall many stand up against the King of the South: also the robbers of thy people shall exalt themselves to establish the vision; but they shall fall." (Verse Daniel 11:14.) All this was fulfilled in the severe struggles, which followed. "So the King of the North shall come, and cast up a mount, and take the most fenced cities: and the arms of the South shall not withstand, neither his chosen people, neither shall there be any strength to withstand." (Verse Daniel 11:15.) The invasion of the glorious land by Antiochus followed. He subjected the whole land unto himself. He also was well disposed towards the Jews because they sided with Antiochus the Great against Ptolemy Epiphanes. "But he that cometh against him shall do according to his own will, and none shall stand before him: and he shall stand in the glorious land, which by his hand shall be consumed." (Verse Daniel 11:16.) This brings us to the years 198-195 B.C. Antiochus aimed to get full possession of Egypt. An agreement was made. In this treaty between Antiochus and Ptolemy Epiphanes, Cleopatra, daughter of Antiochus was espoused to Ptolemy. Why is Cleopatra called "daughter of women?" Because she was very young and was under the care of her mother and grandmother. The treaty failed. "He shall also set his face to enter with the strength of his whole kingdom, and an agreement shall be made with him; thus shall he do: and he shall give him the daughter of women, corrupting her: but she shall not stand on his side, neither be for him." (Verse Daniel 11:17.) A few years later Antiochus conquered isles on the coast of Asia Minor. "After this shall he turn his face unto the isles, and shall take many: but a prince [literally: Captain] for his own behalf shall cause the reproach offered by him to cease; without his own reproach he shall cause it to turn upon him." (Verse Daniel 11:18.) The captain predicted is Scipio Asiaticus. Antiochus had reproached the Romans by his acts and he was defeated. This defeat took place at Magnesia 190 B.C. "Then he shall turn his face toward the fort of his own land: but he shall stumble and fall, and not be found." (Verse Daniel 11:19.) Antiochus returns to his own land. He came to a miserable end trying to plunder the temple of Belus in Elymais, "Then shall stand up in his estate a raiser of taxes in the glory of the kingdom: but within few days he shall be destroyed, neither in anger, nor in battle." (Verse Daniel 11:20.) This is Seleucus Philopater B.C. 187-176. He was known as a raiser of taxes. He had an evil reputation with the Jews because he was such an exactor among them. His tax collector Heliodorus poisoned him and so he was slain "neither in anger, nor in battle." "And in his estate shall stand up a vile person, to whom they shall not give the honor of the kingdom: but he shall come in peaceably, and obtain the kingdom by flatteries." (Verse Daniel 11:21.) This vile person is none other than Antiochus Epiphanes. He had no claim on royal dignities, being only a younger son of Antiochus the Great. He seized royal honors by trickery and with flatteries. He is the little horn of chapter 8. "And with the arms of a flood shall they be overflown from before him, and shall be broken; yea, also the prince cf the covenant." (Verse Daniel 11:22.) He was successful in defeating his enemies. The prince of the covenant may mean his nephew Ptolemy Philometor. He also vanquished Philometor's generals. "And after the league made with him he shall work deceitfully: for he shall come up, and shall become strong with a small people." (Verse Daniel 11:23.) He reigned friendship to young Ptolemy but worked deceitfully. To allay suspicion he came against Egypt with a small force but took Egypt as far as Memphis. "He shall enter peaceably even upon the fattest places of the province; and he shall do that which his fathers have not done, nor his father's father; he shall scatter among them the prey, and spoil, and riches: yea, and he shall forecast his devices against the strongholds, even for a time." (Verse Daniel 11:24.) He took possession of the fertile places in Egypt under the pretense of peace. He took Pelusium and laid seige to the fortified places Naucratis and Alexandria. "And he shall stir up his power and his courage against the King of the South with a great army; and the King of the South shall be stirred up to battle with a very great and mighty army; but he shall not stand: for they shall forecast devices against him." (Verse Daniel 11:25.) This King of the South is Ptolemy Physcon, who was made king after Philometor had fallen into the hands of Antiochus. He had a great army but did not succeed, because treason had broken out in his own camp. "Yea, they that feed of the portion of his meat shall destroy him, and his army shall overflow: and many shall fall down slain." (Verse Daniel 11:26.) Additional actions of Antiochus and warfare, in which he was successful, followed. "And both these kings' hearts shall be to do mischief, and they shall speak lies at one table; but it shall not prosper: for yet the end shall be at the time appointed." (Verse Daniel 11:27.) The two kings are Antiochus Epiphanes and his associate Philometor. They made an alliance against Ptolemy Euergetes II, also called Physcon. But they spoke lies against each other and did not succeed in their plans. "Then shall he return into his land with great riches; and his heart shall be against the holy covenant; and he shall do exploits, and return to his own land." (Verse Daniel 11:28.) In 168 B.C. he returned from his expedition, and had great riches. Then he marched, through Judea and did his awful deeds. A report had. come to his ears that the Jewish people had reported him dead. In the first and second book of the Maccabees we read of his atrocities. Then he retired to Antioch. "At the time appointed he shall return, and come toward the South; but it shall not be as the former, or as the latter." (Verse Daniel 11:29.) He made still another attempt against the South. However, he had not the former success. "For the ships of Chittim shall come against him; therefore he shall be grieved, and return, and have indignation against the holy covenant: so shall he do; he shall even return, and have intelligence with them that forsake the holy covenant." (Verse Daniel 11:30.) The ships of Chittim are the Roman fleet. When within a few miles of Alexandria he heard that ships had arrived. He went to salute them. They delivered to him the letters of the senate, in which he was commanded, on pain of the displeasure of the Roman people, to put an end to the war against his nephews. Antiochus said, "he would go and consult his friends;" on which Popilius, one of the legates, took his staff, and instantly drew a circle round Antiochus on the sand, where he stood; and commanded him not to pass that circle, till he had given a definite answer. As a grieved and defeated man he returned and then he fell upon Judea once more to commit additional wickedness. Apostate Jews sided with him. "And arms shall stand on his part and they shall pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate." (Verse Daniel 11:31.) This brings us to the climax of the horrors under Antiochus Epiphanes. The previous record of it is contained in chapter 8. He sent Apollonius with over 20,000 men to destroy Jerusalem. Multitudes were slain, and women and children led away as captives. He issued a command that all people must conform to the idolatry of Greece. A wicked Grecian was sent to enforce the word of Antiochus. All sacrifices ceased and the God-given ceremonials of Judaism came to an end. The temple was polluted by the sacrifices of swine's flesh. The temple was dedicated to Jupiter Olympius. Thus the prediction was fulfilled. "And such as do wickedly against the covenant shall he corrupt by flatteries: but the people that do know their God shall be strong, and do exploits, "And they that understand among the people shall instruct many: yet they shall fall by the sword, and by flame, by captivity, and by spoil, many days. "Now when they shall fall, they shall be holpen with a little help: but many shall cleave to them with flatteries." (Verses Daniel 11:32-34.). These verses describe the condition among the Jewish people. There were two classes.Those who did wickedly against the covenant, the apostate, and those who knew God, a faithful remnant. The apostates sided with the enemy, and the people who knew God were strong. This has reference to the noble Maccabees. There was also suffering and persecution Many More Fulfilled Prophecies Many other fulfilled prophecies might be quoted. In the last chapter of Daniel an interesting prediction is made concerning the time of the end. "Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." Sir Isaac Newton, the discoverer of the law of gravitation, wrote on Daniel and expressed his belief that some day people would travel at the rate of fifty miles an hour. The French infidel Voltaire many years later laughed at Newton's statement and held it up to ridicule. The time of the end is here and the prophecy of Daniel 12:4 has come true. In the New Testament are also written prophecies which are now in process of fulfillment. 1 Timothy 4:1-2; 2 Timothy 3:1-5; 2 Timothy 4:1-3; 2 Peter 1:2; Jude's Epistle, and other Scriptures predict the present day apostasy. Unfulfilled Prophecy As stated before, there are many unfulfilled prophecies in the Bible. The literal fulfillment of prophecies in the past vouches for the literal fulfillment of every prophecy in the Word of God. Some of them were uttered several thousand years ago. The world still waits for their fulfillment. May we remember that God does not need to be in a hurry. He knows indeed the end from the beginning. He takes His time in accomplishing His eternal purposes. And may we, His people, who know and love His Word, not neglect prophecy, for the Prophetic Word is the lamp which shineth in a dark place. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 81: - LIFE IN THE WORD ======================================================================== Life in the Word By Philip Mauro, Attorney at Law, New York City [Copyrighted by the Fleming H. Revell Company, and published herewith by permission] Introduction It must be evident to all who pay close attention to the spiritual conditions of our day that there is being made at this time a very determined and widespread effort to set aside entirely the authority of the Bible. Let us note that one of the unique characteristics of that Book is that it claims the right to control the actions of men. It speaks "as one having authority." It assumes, and in the most peremptory and uncompromising way, to rebuke men for misconduct, and to tell them what they shall do and what they shall not do. It speaks to men, not as from the human plane, or even from the standpoint of superior human wisdom and morality; but as from a plane far above the highest human level, and as with a wisdom which admits of no question or dispute from men. It demands throughout unqualified submission. But this assumption of control over men is a direct obstacle to the democratic spirit of the times, which brooks no authority higher than that of "the people," that is to say, of Man himself. To establish and to make universal the principles of pure democracy is the object, whether consciously or unconsciously, of the great thought-movements of our era; and the essence and marrow of democracy is the supreme authority of Man. Hence the conflict with the Bible. Not only is the Bible, with its peremptory assertion of supremacy and control over mankind, directly counter to the democratic movement, but it is now the only real obstacle to the complete independence of humanity. If only the authority of the Scriptures is gotten rid of, mankind will have attained the long-coveted state of absolute independence, which is equivalent to utter lawlessness. The state of ideal democracy would be accurately described as "lawlessness," since it is manifest that an individual or a society which is under no restraint except such as is self-imposed, is really under no restraint at all. To attain this ideal state is the end and purpose of present day movements; and, in order to promote these movements, that mighty spiritual intelligence who is designated "the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience" (Ephesians 2:2) very wisely, and with consummate subtlety, directs the attack, from many different quarters, against the authority of the Bible. The great mass of men, including the majority of the leaders of the age, are already completely absorbed in the activities of the world and utterly indifferent to the claims of the Bible. As to these, it is only necessary to take care that they are not aroused from their indifference. But the Bible nevertheless, by reason of its hold upon the consciences of the few, exerts, upon society as a whole, a mighty restraining influence, against which the assaults of the enemies of truth are now being directed. In some quarters the authority of the Bible is directly assailed and its Divine origin disputed in the name of "Science" and of "Scholarship." Much of the learning and theological activity of the day are concentrated upon the attempt to discredit the Bible, and to disseminate views and theories directly at variance with its claims of divine inspiration and authority. In other quarters the attack takes the form of a pretense of conceding the inspiration of the Bible, coupled with the claim that other writers and other great literary works were equally inspired. "God is not limited," we are told, "and can speak to man, and does speak to man, in our day, in like manner as in the days of Moses, Isaiah, or Paul." Manifestly it makes practically no difference whether the Bible be dragged down to the level of other books, or other books be exalted to the level of the Bible. The result is the Same in both cases; namely, that the unique authority of the Bible is set aside. But even in quarters where the Divine origin of the Bible is fully recognized, the enemy is actively at work with a view to weakening its influence. There is much teaching abroad (heard usually in connection with certain spiritual manifestations which have become quite common of late) to the effect that those who have the Spirit dwelling in them, and speaking directly to and through them, are independent of the Word of God. This is the form which the idea of a continuing revelation takes in quarters where a direct attack on the authority of Scripture would fail. But the result is the same. In such a state of things it is manifestly of the very highest importance to insist unceasingly upon the sufficiency, finality and completeness of the Revelation given by God in His Word. With the desire to serve this purpose, even though it be in a very small degree, these pages are written. It would be, however, a task far beyond the capacity of the writer to present all the unique characteristics of the Bible, whereby it is so distinguished from other books that it occupies a class by itself. The writer has, therefore, singled out for consideration one special attribute or characteristic of the Holy Scriptures; namely, that signified by the word "living." If one is able to apprehend, however feebly, the tremendous fact that the Word of God is a LIVING Word, such knowledge will go far towards affording him protection from what is perhaps the greatest danger of these "perilous times." 1. The Incarnate Word, and the Written Word: Both Are "Living" Of the many statements which the Bible makes concerning the Word of God, none is more significant, and surely none is of greater importance to dying men, than the statement that the Word of God is a LIVING Word. In Php_2:16 we have the expression, "The Word of Life." The same expression occurs in 1 John 1:1. It is here used of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word, whereas in Philippians it is apparently the Written Word that is spoken of. The Written Word and the Incarnate Word are so identified in Scripture that it is not always clear which is referred to. The same things are said of each, and the same characters attributed to each. The fundamental resemblance lies in the fact that each is the revealer or tangible expression of the Invisible God. As the written or spoken word expresses, for the purpose of communicating to another, the invisible and inaccessible thought, so Jesus Christ as the Incarnate Word, and the Holy Scriptures as the Written Word, express and communicate knowledge of the invisible and inaccessible God. "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." "Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me" (John 14:9; John 14:11). In Hebrews 4:12 we find the statement that "The Word of God is LIVING and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword" (R.V.). Clearly this refers to the Written Word. But the very next verse, without any change of subject, directs our attention to the Searcher of hearts (Revelation 2:23), saying, "Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in His sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do." Again in 1 Peter 1:23 we read of "the Word of God which liveth," or more literally, "the Word of God living." Here again there might be uncertainty as to whether the Incarnate Word or the Written Word be meant; but it is generally understood that the latter is in view, and the quotation from Isaiah 40:6-8 would confirm this idea. From these passages we learn that the Word of God is spoken of as a "living" Word. This is a very remarkable statement, and is worthy of our closest examination and most earnest consideration. Why is the Word of God thus spoken of? Why is the extraordinary property of LIFE, or vitality, attributed to it? In what respects can it be said to be a living Word? But the expression "living," as applied to the Word of God, manifestly means something more than partaking of the kind of life with which we are acquainted from observation. God speaks of Himself as the "Living God." The Lord Jesus is the "Prince of Life." (Acts 3:15). He announced Himself to John in the vision of Patmos as "He that liveth." Eternal life is in Him. (1 John 5:11). It is clear, then, that when we read, "The Word of God is living," we are to understand thereby that it lives with a spiritual, an inexhaustible, an inextinguishable, in a word a divine, life. If the Word of God be indeed living in this sense, then we have here a fact of the most tremendous significance. In the world around us the beings and things which we call "living" may just as appropriately be spoken of as "dying." What we call "the land of the living" might better be described as the land of the dying. Wherever we look we see that death is in possession, and is working according to its invariable method of corruption and decay. Death is the real monarch of this world, and we meet at every turn the gruesome evidence and results of the universal sway of him who has "the power of death, that is, the devil" (Hebrews 2:14). "Death reigned" (Romans 5:17), and still reigns over everything. The mighty and awful power of death has made this earth of ours a great burying ground a gigantic cemetery. Can it be that there is an exception to this apparently universal rule? Is there, indeed, in this world of dying beings, where the forces of corruption fasten immediately upon everything into which life has entered, and upon all the works of so-called living creatures, one object which is really LIVING, an object upon which corruption cannot fasten itself, and which resists and defies all the power of death? Such is the assertion of the passages of Scripture which we have quoted. Surely, then, if these statements be true, we have here the most astounding phenomenon in all the accessible universe; and it will be well worth while to investigate an object of which so startling an assertion is seriously, if very unobtrusively, made. Before we proceed with our inquiry let us note one of many points of resemblance between the Incarnate Word and the Written Word. When "the Word was made flesh and dwelt [tabernacled] among us" (John 1:14), there was nothing in His appearance to manifest His Deity, or to show that "in Him was life" (John 1:4). That fact was demonstrated, not by His blameless and unselfish behavior, nor by His incomparable teachings and discourses, but by His resurrection from the dead. The only power which is greater than that of death is the power of life. He had, and exercised, that power, and holds now the keys of death and of hades. (Revelation 1:18, R. V.) Similarly, there is nothing in the appearance and behavior (so to speak) of the Bible to show that it has a characteristic, even divine life, which other books have not. It bears the same resemblance to other writings that Jesus, the son of Mary, bore to other men. It is given in human language just as He came in human flesh. Yet there is between it and all other books the same difference as between Him and all other men, namely, the difference between the living and the dying. "The word of God is living." It will require, therefore, something more than a hasty glance or a casual inspection to discern this wonderful difference; but the difference is there, and with diligence and attention we may discover some clear indications of it. 2. No Definitions of Life Man's wisdom and learning are incapable of furnishing a definition of life. The attempts of the wisest and most learned to furnish such a definition only serve to exhibit the futility of the attempt. Herbert Spencer, who has made the most ambitious attempt of modern times to explain the visible universe, gives this as the result of his best efforts to define life: "Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations." This definition manifestly stands as much in need of explanation as that which it purports to explain. But it will Serve at least to remind us that the wisdom of men is foolishness with God. Another eminent man of science defined life as "the twofold internal movement of composition and decomposition, at once general and continuous." These modern definitions are scarcely an improvement upon that of Aristotle, who defined life as "the assemblage of the operations of nutrition, growth, and destruction." What a marvelous thing is life, and how far it transcends the comprehension of man, since his best efforts to define it give results so ridiculously inadequate! The ignorance of scientific men on this subject is frankly confessed by Alfred Russell Wallace, who in one of his latest books, "Man's Place in the Universe," says, "Most people give scientific men credit for much greater knowledge than they possess in these matters." And again: "As to the deeper problems of life, and growth, and reproduction, though our physiologists have learned an infinite amount of curious and instructive facts, they can give us no intelligible explanation of them." But, if none of us can say what life is, we can all distinguish between that which is living (even in the ordinary sense of the word) and that which is not living; and our best idea of the meaning of life is obtained by comparing that which has life (whether animal or vegetable) with that which has not life, as minerals, or any non-living matter. We know that between the two there is a great gulf, which only divine power can span; for it is only the living God who can impart life to that which is lifeless. We look then at the Written Word of God to see if it manifests characteristics which are found only in living things, and to see if it exhibits, not merely the possession of life of the perishable and corruptible sort with which we are so familiar by observation, and which is in each of us, but life of a different order, imperishable and incorruptible. 3. Perennial Freshness The Bible differs radically from all other books in its perpetual freshness. This characteristic will be recognized only by those who know the Book in that intimate way which comes from living with it, as with a member of one's family. I mention it first because it was one of the first unique properties of the Bible which impressed me after I began to read it as a believer in Christ. It is a very remarkable fact that the Bible never becomes exhausted, never acquires sameness, never diminishes in its power of responsiveness to the quickened soul who comes to it. The most familiar passages yield as much (if not more) refreshment at the thousandth perusal, as at the first. It is indeed as a fountain of living water. The fountain is the same, but the water is always fresh, and always refreshing. We can compare this to nothing but what we find in a living companion, whom we love and to whom we go for help and fellowship. The person is always the same, and yet without sameness. New conditions evoke new responses; and so it is with the Bible. As a living Book it adapts itself to the new phases of our experience and the new conditions in which we find ourselves. From the most familiar passage there comes again and again a new message; just as our most familiar friend or companion will have something new to say, as changed conditions and new situations require it from time to time. This is true of no other book. What man's book has to say we can get the first time; and the exceptions arise merely from lack of clearness on the writer's part, or lack of apprehension on the part of the reader. Man can touch only the surface of things, and he cares only about surface appearances. So, in all his writings, whatever substance they contain lies on the surface, and can be gathered by a capable reader at once. If the Word of God may be compared in this particular to a living person, the books of men may be compared to pictures or statues of living persons. However beautifully or artistically executed, a single view may readily exhaust the latter, and a second and third look will be mere repetitions. The difference is that which exists between the living and the dead. The Word of God is LIVING. But while the Bible resembles in this important respect a living person, who is our familiar, sympathetic, and responsive companion, it differs from such a human companion in that the counsel, comfort, and support it furnishes are far above and beyond what any human being can supply; and the only explanation of this is that the source of its life and powers is not human, but Divine. 4. The Bible Does Not Become Obsolete One of the most prominent characteristics of books written by men for the purpose of imparting information and instruction is that they very quickly become obsolete, and must be cast aside and replaced by others. This is particularly true of books on science, text-books, school-books and the like. Indeed it is a matter of boasting (though it would be hard to explain why) that "progress" is so rapid in all departments of learning as to render the scientific books of one generation almost worthless to the next. Changes in human knowledge, thought and opinion occur so swiftly, that books, which were the standards yesterday, are set aside today for others, which in turn will be discarded for yet other "authorities" tomorrow. In fact, every book which is written for a serious purpose begins to become obsolete before the ink is dry on the page. This may be made the occasion of boasting of the great progress of humanity, and of the wonderful advances of "science;" but the true significance of the fact is that man's books are all, like himself, dying creatures. The Bible, on the other hand, although it treats of the greatest and most serious of all subjects, such as God, Christ, eternity, life, death, sin, righteousness, judgment, redemption is always the latest, best, and only authority on all these and other weighty matters whereof it treats. Centuries of "progress" and "advancement" have added absolutely nothing to the sum of knowledge on any of these subjects. The Bible is always fresh and thoroughly "up to date." Indeed it is far, far ahead of human science. Progress cannot overtake it, or get beyond it. Generation succeeds generation, but each finds the Bible waiting for it with its ever fresh and never failing stores of information touching matters of the highest concern, touching everything that affects the welfare of human beings. 5. Science and the Bible Human teachers and teachings have, indeed, frequently set themselves in opposition to some of the statements of the Bible; and it has often been announced, upon human authority, that errors in history and in matters of science have been detected in the Bible. Some, indeed, have endeavored to save the reputation and authority of the Bible by saying that it was not written to teach men "science." In a sense this is true. The Bible was not written to impart that kind of knowledge which "puffeth up," but just the contrary. It was written to impart that kind of information which takes man down by showing him his true position as a ruined, perishing creature, under the condemnation and power of death, and utterly "without strength," that is to say, incapable of doing anything to deliver himself out of this deplorable condition, It declares that, "if any man think that he knoweth anything, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know" (1 Corinthians 8:2). Such is the plain declaration of Scripture as to the limitations of all human knowledge; and he who knows the most is most conscious of these limitations. But if, by the statement that the Bible was not written to teach "science," it be meant that the Bible is unscientific, that statement is not true. On the contrary, the Bible is the only book in the world that is truly "scientific ;" for it is the only book which gives precise, accurate and absolutely reliable information upon every subject whereof it treats. It is the only book in the world upon every statement of which one may safely put implicit confidence. Countless millions have believed the statements of the Word of God, every one of them to his unspeakable advantage, not one of them to his hurt. We used to hear a great deal, some thirty years ago, about the many "mistakes of Moses," and the errors which "science," with her keen eye, had detected in the Scriptures. But we hear very little today from scientists themselves about the "conflicts between science and religion." These conflicts have, one by one, ceased, as "science" has revised her hasty conclusions and corrected her blunders. The writer has been a diligent student of the physical sciences and of the philosophies based on them, for upwards of twenty-five years, and a practicing lawyer for a still longer period, and having now acquired a fair knowledge of the text of Scripture, he can say that he is aware of no demonstrated fact of science which is in conflict with a single statement of the Bible. Among all the "assured results of science" there exists not, to his knowledge, evidence sufficient in character and amount to convict the Bible of a single error or misstatement. Of course, such evidence could not exist. The Lord Jesus said of the Word of God, "Thy Word is truth" (John 17:17); and of course, true knowledge of God's creation cannot conflict with His Word. A recent book by Alfred Russel Wallace entitled, "Man's Place in the Universe" (1904), furnishes a striking illustration, on a large scale, of the way in which "science," after leading the thought of cultured and highly educated minds away from the truth revealed by Scripture, sometimes leads it back again. The reading of Scripture undoubtedly gives, and was clearly intended to give, the impression that the earth is the center of interest in the universe, and the object of the Creator's special care; that it was fitted with elaborate pains to be the habitation of living creatures, and especially of man; and that the sun, moon and stars were created with special reference to their service to the earth. Hence, for many centuries, man believed that the earth was the center of the universe, and (though the Bible does not say so) that the Sun and stars were relatively small bodies which moved around and waited upon it. But these ideas have been completely upset by the discoveries of modern astronomers, who ascertained, at least to their entire satisfaction, that not only is the sun enormously larger than the earth, but that it is attended by other planets, the largest of which is twelve hundred times larger than the earth. Moreover, it has also been learned, so we are told, that our sun itself is but one of an almost infinite number of stars, many of which are immensely greater in size, and which, it may be assumed, are themselves the centers of planetary systems on a much grander scale than our little solar system. In such a universe as modern astronomy has brought into the view of man our little earth, once thought to be its center of interest and importance, shrinks into utter insignificance. In proportion to the vast universe of which it is a member its size is relatively less than that of a tiny particle of dust in proportion to the mass of the earth itself. How, therefore, can it be supposed that the Creator of so inconceivably great and complex a universe would have a special regard for this insignificant attendant of a fourth-rate sun, and for the still more insignificant creatures who dwell upon it? The earth with all its occupants could drop out of the universe and be no more missed than a single grain of sand from the seashore or a single drop of water from the ocean. It is inevitable that these teachings of astronomy concerning the universe should have produced impressions directly opposite to those produced by Scripture, and should have placed obstacles in the way of believing the doctrine of redemption by the incarnation and sacrificial death of the Son of God. But now comes Mr. Wallace, the contemporary of Charles Darwin, and probably at the present day one of the most prominent men of science, and reverses the ideas which have been so widely disseminated in the name of science. Mr. Wallace masses a great body of evidence, derived both from astronomy and physics, to support the propositions, First, that the solar system occupies (and always has occupied) approximately the central portion of this vast universe, getting all the advantages due to such favorable position; Second, that the earth is certainly the only habitable planet in the solar system, and presumably the only habitable spot in the whole universe. Mr. Wallace, by a vast accumulation of facts and inferences, shows that the physical conditions necessary for the maintenance of life depend upon a great variety of complex and delicate adjustments, such as distance from the sun, the mass of the planet, its obliquity to its orbit, the amount of water as compared with land, the surface distribution of land and water, the permanence of this distribution, the density of the earth, the volume and density of the atmosphere, the amount of carbon-dioxide therein, etc. These, and other essential conditions, are met (says Mr. Wallace) only in a planet such as this earth, situated and constructed as it is. From Mr. Wallace's premises, if the universe is assumed to be the work of an intelligent Creator, it would follow that everything in this inconceivably vast and complex universe has been planned and arranged with special reference to making this little earth of ours a place suitable for the habitation of living beings, and especially of mankind. We give Mr. Wallace's conclusions in his own words. He says: "This completes my work as a connected argument, founded wholly upon the facts and principles accumulated by modern science; and it leads, if my facts are substantially correct and my reasoning sound, to one great and definite conclusion,-that man, the culmination of conscious organic life, has been developed HERE ONLY in the whole vast material universe we see around us." Thus we have the surprising fact that one of the foremost living exponents of the teachings of science, a man who certainly attaches no importance to the teachings of Scripture, has been at great pains to show that the earth is, after all, the center of, and most important place in, the whole universe; and that, so far as any purpose can be detected in it, the universe may well be supposed to exist for the sole benefit of the earth, and for the sake of producing therein those peculiar conditions necessary for the existence and maintenance of life. We may say then that, considered merely as a book of instruction, the Bible is, as to every subject whereof it treats, not merely abreast of, but far ahead of, the learning of these and all other times, whether past or future. The impressions it makes upon believing minds are the impressions of truth, even though (as in the instance we have just been considering) contemporary science may give, as its settled conclusions, impressions directly to the contrary. Unlike other books of instruction THE BIBLE DOES NOT BECOME OBSOLETE. This is a fact of immense significance; and its only explanation is that the Bible is a LIVING book, the Word of the living God. All other books partake of the infirmity of their authors, and are either dying or dead. On the other hand, "The Word of God is living." 6. The Bible is Indestructible The Bible manifests the possession of inherent and imperishable life in that it survives all the attempts that have been made to destroy it. The Bible is the only book in the world that is truly hated. The hatred it arouses is bitter, persistent, murderous. From generation to generation this hatred has been kept alive. There is doubtless a supernatural explanation for this continuous display of hostility towards the Word of God, for that Word has a supernatural enemy who has personally experienced its power. (Matthew 4:1-10). But the natural explanation of this hatred is that the Bible differs notably from other books in that it gives no flattering picture of man and his world, but just the reverse. The Bible does not say that man is a noble being, ever aspiring towards the attainment of exalted ideals. It does not describe the career of humanity as "progress," as the brave and successful struggle of man against the evils of his environment; but quite the contrary, declares it to be a career of disobedience and departure from God, a preference for darkness rather than for light, "because their deeds are evil." The Bible does not represent man as having come, without any fault of his own, into adverse circumstances, and as being engaged in gradually overcoming these by the development and exercise of his inherent powers. It does not applaud his achievements, and extol his wonderful civilization. Quite the contrary. It records how God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. (Genesis 6:5). It speaks of man as "being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, strife, guile, evil dispositions; whisperers, slanderers, hateful to God, insolent, proud, vaunting, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, perfidious, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful" (Romans 1:29-31 Gr.). It says that "They are all under sin," that "There is none righteous, no not one. There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no not one" (Romans 3:10-12). Man's condition by nature is described as "dead in trespasses and sins," "children of disobedience; among whom also we all had our conduct in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath" (Ephesians 2:1-3). The Bible has nothing to say in praise of man or of his natural endowments. On the contrary, it derides his wisdom as "foolishness with God." It declares that God has made foolish the wisdom of this age (1 Corinthians 1:20); that the natural man is incapable of receiving the things of the Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 2:14); and that if any man thinks that he knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know. (1 Corinthians 8:2). Nor does the Bible predict the ultimate triumph of "civilization." It does not say that the progress of humanity shall bring it eventually to a vastly better state of things. It does not say that human nature shall improve under the influences of education and self-culture, even with that of Christianity added. On the contrary, it declares that evil men "shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived" (2 Timothy 3:13). Even of "this present evil age" (Galatians 1:4), during which the professing church is the most conspicuous object on earth, and during which the world has the enormous benefit resulting from the light of revelation and an open Bible, it is not predicted that man and his world would undergo any improvement, or that the developments of the age would be in the direction of better conditions on earth. On the contrary, the Bible declares that "in the last days perilous (or difficult) times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, lovers of money, vaunting, proud, evil speakers, disobedient to parents, untruthful, unholy, without natural affection, implacable, slanderers, inconsistent, savage, not lovers of good, betrayers, headstrong, puffed up, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God; having a form of piety, but denying the power of it" (2 Timothy 3:1-5 Gr.). Such is the character of man, and such is to be the result, as Scripture foretells it, of all his schemes of betterment, education, development, self culture, civilization and character-building. And because of this the Bible is heartily detested. Men have sought nothing more earnestly than they have sought to destroy this appallingly accurate portrait of themselves and their doings. How astonishing it is that any intelligent person should suppose that man drew this picture of himself, and predicted this as the outcome of all his own efforts! No wonder the Bible is hated, and for the simple and sufficient reason that it declares the truth about man and his world. The Lord Jesus set forth clearly both the fact and its explanation when He said to His unbelieving brethren, "The world cannot hate you; but Me it hateth, because I testify of it that the works thereof are evil" (John 7:7). Again, the Bible is hated because it claims the right to exercise, and assumes to exercise, authority over man. It speaks as one having authority. It issues commands to all. It says, "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not." It does not simply advise or commend one course of action rather than another, as one would address an equal, but it directs men imperatively what they shall do, and what they shall not do. In this manner it addresses all ranks and conditions of men-kings and governors, parents and children, husbands and wives, masters and servants, rich and poor, high and low, free and bond. In this, too, we have a characteristic of the Bible which distinguishes it from all other books. It is no respecter of persons. But for this cause also it is hated; for men are becoming more and more impatient of all external authority. The principles of democracy, the essence of which is the supremacy (virtually the divinity) of man, has thoroughly leavened all society in the progressive nations of the earth. There is a sentiment abroad, which finds frequent expression and meets always with a sympathetic reception, to the effect that man has been shackled through the ages by narrow theological ideas whereof the Bible is the source, and that the time has arrived for him to throw off this bondage, to arise in his true might and majesty, and to do great things for himself. It is a most impressive fact that, in all the visible universe, there is nothing that assumes authority over man, or that imposes laws upon him, except the Bible. Once thoroughly rid of that troublesome book, and man will be finally rid of all authority, and will have arrived at that state of lawlessness predicted in the New Testament prophecies; wherein society will be ready to accept the leadership of that "lawless one," whose coming is to be after the working of Satan, with all power, and signs, and wonders of falsehood, and with all deceit of unrighteousness in them that perish, because they received not a love of the truth that they might be saved. (2 Thessalonians 2:7-10). This is perhaps the main purpose of the persistent attempts in our day, mostly in the name of scholarship and liberal theology, to break down the authority of Scripture; and we may see with our own eyes that the measure of success of this great apostasy is just what the Bible has foretold. Other books arouse no hatred. There may be books which men dislike, and such they simply let alone. But the Bible is, and always has been, hated to the death. It is the one book that has been pursued from century to century, as men pursue a mortal foe. At first its destruction has been sought by violence. All human powers, political and ecclesiastical, have combined to put it out of existence. Death has been the penalty for possessing or reading a copy; and such copies as were found have been turned over to the public executioner to be treated as was the Incarnate Word. No expedient that human ingenuity could devise or human cruelty put into effect, has been omitted in the desperate attempt to put this detested book out of existence. But the concentrated power of man utterly failed in the attempt. Why? Here is one book among countless millions which is singled out for relentless hatred, and that fact alone is sufficient to provoke astonishment and invite the closest scrutiny to ascertain the explanation of the unique phenomenon. What characteristic is it that distinguishes this Book from all other books in so strange a fashion? Has its influence upon men been corrupting or otherwise evil? Does it teach doctrines dangerous to individuals or communities? Does it promote disorder, vice or crime? On the contrary, it will not be questioned that its influence, wherever it has gone, has been beneficial beyond that of all other books combined, and that the most fruitful human lives are those which have been molded by its teachings. One explanation alone will account for the astounding fact that such a Book should be the only one now or ever in existence to provoke active and persistent animosity among men who refuse to acknowledge it as from God; namely, that it declares man to be a fallen creature, and his whole career to be the mere outworking of his corrupt nature in the path of disobedience; and that it predicts in plain language what the end of that path will be for all who do not accept God's method of deliverance out of it through Jesus Christ. But, violence having failed to rid man of the Bible, other means have been resorted to in the persistent effort to accomplish that object. To this end the intellect and learning of man have been enlisted. The Book has been assailed from every side by men of the highest intelligence, culture and scholarship. Since the art of printing has been developed there has been in progress a continuous war of books. Many books against THE Book-man's books against God's Book. Its authority has been denied, and its veracity and even its morality have been impugned, its claims upon the consciences of men have been ridiculed; but all to no purpose, except to bring out more conspicuously the fact that the "Word of God is LIVING," and with an indestructible life. Should any other book incur the hatred of man (which no other book ever has, seeing that all others are man's own productions) it would not be necessary to take measures for its destruction. A book produced by dying men need only be let alone to die of its own accord. The seeds of death are in it from the start. One Book alone has incurred man's hatred, because it is the one Book that is not his own. It is the only thing in the whole world that is hostile to the whole world-system. One Book only has man attempted to destroy; and yet, in this attempt, though in it all his powers and resources have been employed, he has most conspicuously and ignominiously failed. Why? A little less than a century and a half ago a book made its appearance which attracted wide attention, particularly in the upper circles of intellect and culture. It was vauntingly entitled the "Age of Reason," and its author, Thomas Paine, was probably without superior in intelligence among his contemporaries. So confident was the author of this book that his reasoning's proved the untrustworthiness of Scripture, and destroyed its claim upon the consciences of men as the revelation of the living God, that he predicted that in fifty years the Bible would be practically out of print. But nearly thrice fifty years have passed since this boast was uttered. The boaster and his book have passed away; and their very names are well-nigh forgotten. But the Word of God has maintained its place, and not by human power. They who believe and cherish it are a feeble folk. Not many wise, not many mighty, not many high-born are among them. They have no might of their own to stand against the enemies of the Bible. The situation resembles a scene recorded in 1 Kings 20:27, where the Israelites went out against the Syrians, and we read that "The children of Israel pitched before them like two little flocks of kids; but the Syrians filled the country." But notwithstanding such great odds, the victory is certain. The enemies of the Bible have indeed filled the country. Yet, they shall all pass away; but the Word of the Lord shall not pass away. Again, in more recent times, a book of man was put forth, and was hailed as a work which would quickly destroy the credibility of Scripture and put an end to its authority and influence. This was Charles Darwin's "Descent of Man," a book whose influence has been greater, doubtless, than any other that has made its appearance during a century past. The main feature of this work was that it set forth an explanation of the origin of living beings, including man, radically different from that of Genesis, and propounded a theory of propagation of living species directly contrary to the great and immutable law declared nine times over in the first chapter of the Bible in the brief but significant expression, "after his kind." The delight which Darwin's book caused among the enemies of the Bible, and the spirit in which its appearance was welcomed, are well illustrated by the title bestowed upon it by the eminent naturalist Haeckel, who called it the "Anti-Genesis," declaring that by a single stroke Darwin had annihilated the dogma of Creation. But it was not because of its supposed contribution to truth that Darwin's book was so widely and cordially received, and his utterly unproved hypothesis so readily accepted as an "assured result of science." Its vogue was largely due to the fact that it struck at the very foundation of Scripture. It is useless to pretend that Darwin's theory might be true, and the Bible nevertheless entitled to respect. The Lord Jesus said to a learned man of His day, "If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?" (John 3:12). If the Bible does not give us a truthful account of the events of the six days recorded in its first chapter, it is not to be trusted as to any of its statements. But we have now the record of about half a century since the publication of Darwin's book; and, though the great movements of unbelief and apostasy are swiftly running their predicted course, there never was a time when the absolute and divine accuracy of Scripture from beginning to end, was more firmly grasped and tenaciously held by those who know it best, and never a time since "science" began to be looked to as an authority and instructor of men when there was less "scientific" basis for the prevalent questioning of the statements of the Bible. There can be, of course, no real conflict between the Bible and any true discovery of science. Such conflicts as have been supposed to exist arose from hasty and incorrect conclusions, whose chief value in the eyes of many lay in the fact that they contradicted the Bible. As science has been compelled, however reluctantly, to correct her blunders, or to acknowledge that supposedly demonstrated truths were at best but unproved conjectures, the "conflicts" have died out; so that, at the present time, the assured teachings of "science" afford no weapons against the statements of the Bible. On the contrary, the investigations of men, in fields of geology, physics, and paleontology, have brought into view much information recorded ages ago in the Bible, information which, at the time the latter was written, was not in the knowledge of man. As has been already said, there is not a single assertion of the Bible that is in conflict with any demonstrated fact of science. All the investigations, of all the searchers, in all the various fields of search, have not availed to produce evidence sufficient in character and amount to convict Scripture of a single false statement. But it is time to bring to a close our remarks under this heading, though they might be greatly extended. We have called attention to the strange fact that, of all the millions of books that have existed, the Bible is the only one that has excited deep and persistent hatred, the only Book which men have sought to get rid of, and that by every conceivable means. We have further called attention to the still stranger fact that, in this attempt to destroy the Bible, the powers of state, of religion, and of learning, have all been enlisted, and that, nevertheless, the number of copies of the Bible goes on steadily increasing. How can these facts be explained except by the statement that "the Word of God is LIVING," and that the source of its life is beyond the reach of man-in the very Being of the Living God? 7. The Bible Is a Discerner of Hearts The power of discernment belongs only to an intelligent living being; and the power of discernment possessed by man does not go beneath the surface of things. Yet the passage in Hebrews, already quoted (4:12), asserts that the Word of God is a "discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." This is a very remarkable statement, yet it is true, and millions of men have felt and recognized the searching and discerning power of the Word of God. We go to it not so much to learn the thoughts of other men, as to learn our own thoughts. We go to other books to find what was in the hearts and minds of their authors; but we go to this Book to find what is in our own hearts and minds. To one who reads it with ever so little spiritual intelligence, there comes a perception of the fact that this Book understands and knows all about him. It lays bare the deepest secrets of his heart, and brings to the surface of his consciousness, out of the unfathomable depths and unexplorable recesses of his own being, "thoughts and intents" whose existence was unsuspected. It reveals man to himself in a way difficult to describe, and absolutely peculiar to itself. It is a faithful mirror which reflects us exactly as we are. It detects our motives, discerns our needs; and having truthfully discovered to us our true selves, it counsels, reproves, exhorts, guides, refreshes, strengthens, and illuminates. It has been pointed out that the Greek word rendered "discerner" in Hebrews 4:12, means literally "critic" (kritikos), and that this is its only occurrence in Scripture. How very significant is it that the designation "higher critics" has been assumed by that little coterie of men who claim to be able, by their own powers of literary discernment, to assign the dates of production of books and parts of books of Scripture, to detect spurious passages, alleged interpolations, and the like, and to split up books into fragments, assigning bits to one imaginary author and other bits to another; whereas as a matter of fact, it is the Bible itself that is the "Critic" of men. This is in keeping with the subversive principles of this present evil age, wherein man is seeking to put himself in the place of God. This is "man's day." Man is now the critic of everything, and particularly of God's Word. Of that he is a "higher critic." There is, however, no external evidence to support the higher critical views as to the late origin of the Pentateuch, Daniel, the latter part of Isaiah, etc.; per contra every pertinent discovery in the ruins of ancient cities corroborates the statements-of Scripture. These theories rest entirely upon the alleged intuitive perceptions of sinful men, compassed about by infirmity, who claim to be able to pass infallibly upon the style and contents of each book of the Bible, to decide when it was written, by whom it could not have been written, and even to divide it up into various portions, assigning each to a different "source." But high scholarship is not incompatible with belief in the full inspiration and accuracy of Scripture. Dean Burgon, one of the famous scholars of Oxford, says: "I must be content with repudiating, in the most unqualified way, the notion that a mistake of any kind whatever is consistent with the texture of a narrative inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. "The Bible is none other but the Word of God, not some part of it more and some part of it less so, but all alike the utterance of Him that sitteth upon the throne, absolute, fault- less, unerring, supreme-'The witness of God which He hath testified of His Son.'" The time is at hand when the haughtiness of man shall be brought low, and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day. Then the Word of God shall judge the critics. Meanwhile, the living Word shall continue to be the discerning companion of all who resort to it for the help which is not to be had elsewhere in this world of the dying. In going to the Bible we never think of ourselves as going back to a book of the distant past, to a thing of antiquity; but we go to it as to a book of the present-a living book. And so indeed it is, living in the power of an endless life, and able to build us up and to give us an inheritance among all them that are sanctified. (Acts 20:32). 8. The Translatability of Scripture The Word of God manifests itself as a living Word in the very unique property it has of adapting itself and its message to all peoples, and of speaking in all languages, tongues and dialects. The extreme mobility and adaptability of Scripture, as manifested in this way, is comparable only to the power which a living being has of making himself at home in different countries from that in which he was born. We have here again a characteristic which distinguishes the Bible from all other books, as any one may, with a little attention, clearly perceive. It is a universal rule that a book does not thrive except in the language in which it was written. Men's books will not always bear translation; and the greater the literary value of a book the more it is likely to suffer loss in being translated from one language into another. Change of locality is, to the great majority of books, absolutely destructive. But to this rule the Bible is a marvelous exception. It seems to run freely into the mould of every language, to adapt itself perfectly thereto, and to speak with equal directness, clearness and authority to all peoples and tribes and nations, in their mother tongue. It does not occur to us that, in reading our common English Bible, we are reading a translation of an Oriental book; and indeed, when an example of the purest and best English is desired, men go with one accord to the Bible. Considered merely as a poem, there is nothing more exquisite in the English language than the Twenty-third Psalm; and it has been stated that in other languages besides English this Shepherd Psalm is a model of poetical excellence. It never occurs to one reading it that he is reading a translation from another and very different language. Is not this indeed a very extraordinary fact, and the more so when we consider that the Bible, though a unit, is at the same time highly composite? It comprises specimens of every kind of literature, historical, poetical, biographical, didactic, prophetic, epistolary, etc. Moreover, it is not the production of a single human being, clothed in a uniform literary style of dress. On the contrary, its several parts were penned by men in widely varying stations in life, from herdsmen and unlearned fishermen, to kings and statesmen; and its styles are as divergent as its writers. Nor was it the product of one era or period, which would tend to impart some common characteristics, and to prevent wide divergences. As much as fifteen hundred years elapsed between the writing of its first and its last pages. Yet all parts and styles alike accommodate themselves to the change of language far more readily and perfectly than any human being is able to do when acquiring another tongue. The property we are now considering is the more remarkable when we consider also the nation from which this unique volume has come. The Jews were anything but a literary people. They were not at all remarkable for culture, learning, art, or philosophy; and they were quite cut off by their peculiar customs, traditions, and religious institutions, from the progressive nations around them. There is no other Jewish literature that is worth talking about. Yet, from such a people has come a volume whose sixty-six books, now that we have them all together, evidently constitute one complete structure, unitary in design, yet which was fifteen centuries in attaining its completed state. This book; after the Jewish people were disintegrated and scattered,-even as that very book had distinctly foretold,-and had become the most despised and persecuted people on earth, has entered into the place of supremacy in every nation which has attained to any degree of civilization, and has held that place without a rival for eighteen centuries, during which period of time every human institution has been overturned, not once only, but again and again. Why is it that the universal Book did not have its origin in the literature of Greece, or of ancient Rome, or in the Elizabethan epoch of English literature? Why is it that nations which have been famed for their culture and literary genius have produced nothing comparable to the Bible? What collection of sixty-six books from the writings of about thirty authors of any nation could be made that would present any of the characteristics we have been noticing? Yet, it is certain that, it the Bible had a natural, instead of a supernatural origin, it would be far surpassed by the literary product of the literary nations of the earth. This property of adaptability to all languages and peoples will impress us still more if we compare it in this respect with other Oriental books. The mere fact that it is an Oriental book makes its career among the Occidental nations still more miraculous. All attempts to domesticate other Oriental books, particularly sacred books, have been complete failures. Other Oriental books are sought by scholars only, or by others who have a special interest for inquiring into their contents. Already the Bible, or portions of it, has been translated into upwards of four hundred languages and dialects; so that it is revealing the grace of God in the gift of His Son, to practically every nation, kindred, tongue and tribe, throughout the world, and is speaking to all peoples in their own native tongues. Like a living person, the Bible has made its way into all lands, has adapted itself to all environments, entered into relations of the most intimate kind with all peoples, and has exerted upon them all its own unique influence. It makes no difference what the people are to whom it goes, how radically different all their customs and institutions from those of that very peculiar people Israel; the Bible makes itself perfectly at home, and takes its own place without delay. Can this, or anything remotely approaching it, be said of any other book? And if not, are we not compelled, if we would have an explanation of this extraordinary difference, to fall back upon the statement that the "Word of God is living"? No other explanation will account for any of the facts we have been considering. This explanation accounts for them all. The fact we are here considering, that is to say, the career of the Bible among the peoples of the earth, is, indeed, a stupendous and continuing miracle. Why has this particular Book gone to the ends of the earth, and assumed everywhere, and maintained against all opposition, the place of supremacy? What has given to this collection of writings, coming from an insignificant, peculiar, narrow-minded and isolated people, its universal character? Why is it that all other books, or collections of books, including the productions of the mightiest intellects and embodying the most superb and lofty specimens of human thought, wisdom, learning and experience, have been narrowly circumscribed in their area of influence, both as to time and space? Why has this particular Book continued ever widening its sphere of influence as the centuries pass, while every other book, after its first vogue, steadily contracts and dwindles? Why does this Book increase while all others decrease? There is no natural explanation for these remarkable facts. In this day, when a natural explanation is sought for all things, the wise men can advance no theory to account for these facts. We sometimes hear, from the enemies of the truth, the admission that the Bible is inspired, but coupled with the statement that other books are equally inspired. For example, a prominent preacher in New York city recently said in an article published in a popular magazine, "God spake to Abraham, and to Samuel and to Isaiah. He has spoken to Henry Ward Beecher, to Tennyson, and to Ruskin." But neither this prominent preacher, nor any other man who is trying in like manner to put the Word of God on the same level as other books, is able to tell us why the writings of these other "inspired" men do not afford some indications of their divine origin similar to those characteristics of the Bible to which we are now calling attention. The Apostle Paul in the last of his writings (2 Timothy 2:8-9) said, "Remember that Jesus Christ of the seed of David was raised from the dead according to my gospel; wherein I suffer as an evil-doer even unto bonds; but the word of God is not bound." In these words we have thee sufficient and the only explanation of the extraordinary and unique career of the Bible. The human custodian of the Word of God may be bound, and may be treated as a malefactor for merely being the bearer of the message; but the living Word of the living God is not, and cannot be, bound. Jehovah Himself has said, "So shall My Word be that goeth forth out of My mouth. It shall not return unto Me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it" (Isaiah 55:11). But there is more to be noted under this heading. The Bible is the universal Book also in that it not only speaks to all peoples in their own mother tongue, but it addresses itself to all classes of society. Missionaries from every part of the world have reported how the most depraved, ignorant and vicious people will listen at once to the words of Scripture as to no other book, and will recognize them as "good words." Like God Himself His Word is no respecter of persons. Indeed, its sternest denunciations are addressed to persons of rank and of social, ecclesiastical, or political prominence. Its best promises are for the meek and lowly. It has a message for all men, and to the highest as well as the lowest it speaks "with authority," never exhorting from the standpoint merely of superior human wisdom and intelligence, but always as delivering the message of God. The Bible adapts itself thus to successive generations of men, exhibiting to each individual human being an intimate knowledge of his characteristics, trials and needs. It seems to be waiting for an opportunity to become acquainted with each child of Adam, to direct the steps of his life-journey through this great and terrible wilderness, to warn him of dangers and pitfalls, and to be the man of his counsel to every one who wills not to reject its offer of fellowship. Does not this warrant us in saying that "the Word of God is LIVING"? 9. The Word Exhibits the Characteristic of Growth Growth is one of the characteristics of a living being. The Word of God lodges and grows in human hearts, for there is its real lodgment, rather than in the printed page. The Psalmist says, "Thy Word have I hid in my heart" (Psalms 119:11). The book of Deuteronomy has much to say about the Word of God. In chapter thirty it declares (verse 14) that "The Word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart." This is repeated in Romans 10:8, with the addition, "that is, the word of faith which we preach." In 1 Thessalonians 2:13 Paul says to the Thessalonians, "When ye received the Word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the Word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe." The believing heart is its lodgment, and there it works to effect some definite results. In Colossians 3:16 we have the admonition, "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom." It is in the believing heart that the Word dwells richly. The Lord Jesus, in explaining the parable of the sower, said, "The seed is the Word of God" (Luke 8:11); and again, "The sower soweth the Word" (Mark 4:14). (A seed, of course, is worthless except it have life in it). And He further explained that the seed which fell on good ground "are they which, in an honest and good heart, having heard the Word keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience" (Luke 8:15). To the unbelieving Jews the Lord said, "And ye have not His Word abiding in you; for whom He hath sent, Him ye believe not" (John 5:38). In Colossians 1:5-6, Paul speaks of the "Word of the truth of the Gospel, which is come unto you, as it is in all the world, and bringeth forth fruit." In these passages we have presented to us the thought of the Word as a living seed or germ, first finding lodgment in the heart of man, and then abiding and growing there. The growth of the Word of God is specifically mentioned in several striking passages in the Acts of the Apostles. Acts 6:7 : "And the Word of God increased; and the number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem greatly." Here we are told specifically that the Word of God increased. We learn from this that the mere multiplication of copies of the Scriptures is in itself of no importance. It is of no avail to have the Book in the house, and on the shelf or table, if it be not taken into the heart. But when so received into the heart, the Word of God grows and increases. It is assimilated into the life of him who receives it, and henceforth is a part of himself. It is important to note what stimulated this recorded increase of the Word of God. The Apostles, who were its custodians or depositories, had found themselves taken up with ministering to the material wants of the flock, and they brought this matter before the body of disciples saying, "It is not reason that we should leave the Word of God and serve tables," and they asked that suitable men be appointed for that service while they should give themselves continually "to prayer and the ministry of the Word." The growth of the Word then, accompanied by a great multiplication of the number of disciples, was the result of faithful ministry of the Word-a ministry which was sustained by prayer. This method of promoting the growth of the Word of God is highly important. Every believer, having the Word in his heart and in his mouth, may be and should be the means of its propagation; and the extent to which the Word has been spread abroad in this inconspicuous way will not be known until the time when all things shall be manifested. There are great multitudes who would never get the Word from the printed page, or from the spoken sermon or address. Hence the importance of these epistles of Christ written not with ink, but with the SPIRIT of the living God, not in tablets of stone, but in the fleshy tablets of the heart. 2 Corinthians 3:3). Such epistles are read by many who never read the printed page; and the eternal destiny of many souls may depend upon the distinctness and legibility of that writing. May our lives, as believers, be so transparent that the Word written in our hearts may be distinctly seen; and thus, as sons of God we shall shine "as lights in the world holding forth the Word of life" (Php_2:15-16). The second passage which speaks expressly of the growth of the Word of God is Acts 12:21-24. In this chapter are narrated the last episodes in the life of Herod Antipas. In the first part of the chapter we read how he killed James, the brother of John, with the sword, and finding this course to be popular with the Jews, he apprehended Peter also, and put him in custody, intending after the passover to make this leader of the Apostles the object of a public demonstration, which doubtless would have strengthened Herod still further in the regard of the people. But Peter was delivered from prison by an angel of the Lord who was sent for that purpose. The closing verses of the chapter tell of a disagreement between Herod and the citizens of Tyre and Sidon, some undescribed incident having occurred which caused the former to be highly displeased with the latter. But they, having gained the favor of King Herod's chamberlain, one Blastus, made overtures of peace and sent a delegation to the king. The reception of this embassy was made an occasion of much pomp and circumstance. Herod put on his royal apparel, sat upon his throne, received the delegation, "and made an oration unto them." This oration was received with extravagant demonstrations. "The people gave a shout, saying, It is the voice of a god, and not of a man." Herod accepted this tribute, and no doubt was highly pleased therewith. But it is a dangerous thing for mortal and sinful man, however high his station, to accept glory which belongs to God alone. For immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory; and he was eaten of worms and gave up the ghost. "But the word of God grew and multiplied." There is a tremendous lesson here for the many who, in these closing days of the age, are participating in the various movements which, however diverse in appearance, have all the common object of putting man in the place of God, and the word of man in the place of the Word of God. Herod was not stricken down for persecuting the Church, for imprisoning Peter, or for putting James to death, nor yet for his previous murder of John the Baptist. He was smitten for permitting his word to be acclaimed as the Word of God, Herod had often heard the Word of the Lord, for he had listened attentively to the preaching of the Baptist. He had heard of the ministry and miracles of the Lord Jesus, and had even seen Him on that dark betrayal night. He was, therefore, not smitten for something done in ignorance. The angel of Jehovah had two ministries in that chapter. One was to deliver Peter, who, according to the word of his Lord, was to serve Him to old age (John 21:18). The other was to declare, by smiting the King, the difference between the Word of God and that of the most important man of the country. Doubtless that was a great oration which Herod delivered on that day. It contained most probably striking utterances, pregnant with wisdom and garbed in the attractions of human eloquence. It was, moreover, the King on his throne who spoke, and we know how the throngs gather to listen on such occasions. On the other hand, and in striking contrast, the Word of God was in the charge of "unlearned and ignorant men," a despised and persecuted company, whose Leader had but just suffered the ignominious death of a malefactor. What then has become of the words of King Herod? All have utterly perished, centuries ago, from the memory of men. He himself was eaten of worms, "But the Word of God grew and multiplied," and has continued so to do from that time to the present. Not very long ago, at the convening of the American Congress, a message from the President was addressed to that body. Much comment was made on that message because of its great length. Some industrious person counted the words, and found them to be upwards of thirty thousand. They were serious words, too, and weighty, as human utterances go. They dealt with the most important affairs and interests of the nation that regards itself as the greatest on earth. But they were not "the words of eternal life." And for all that the occasion was so recent, and the subject matter so important, it is doubtful if any person can now recall a single sentence of that great message. Few, indeed, would care to do so, or would receive the slightest benefit there from, if they could. The words of kings, and emperors, and presidents, are dying words. From the moment of their utterance they begin to perish; but "the Word of God is living." Being the utterance of the living God that Word can never pass away. The last of the three passages which speaks of the growth of the Word of God is in Acts 19; and again the context adds greatly to the impressiveness of the lesson taught by the passage. The scene of the first of the three incidents was in Jerusalem, of the second in Caesarea, just west of Galilee, and of the third in Ephesus, a Gentile city. Thus there is special mention made of the growth of the Word of God in Judea, in Palestine outside of Judea, and in the Gentile regions beyond. This would seem to signify that the Word of God was not to be limited to territorial boundary, but was to spread and grow in every part of the earth. The Apostle Paul had spent two years in Ephesus, preaching to such purpose that "all they which dwelt in Asia heard the Word of the Lord Jesus, both Jews and Greeks." And God, moreover, "wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul" (Acts 19:10-11). One result of this ministry was that "many of them which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men; and they counted the price of them and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed" (verses Acts 19:19-20). This is, indeed, a very notable event-a grand demonstration of the power and sufficiency of the Word of God. These books, intrinsically worth so great a sum as fifty thousand pieces of silver, became worse than worthless in the hands of their owners after the latter had received the Word of God. The books thus destroyed had been held in the highest estimation, because they were the manuals of necromancy, or occult arts. They instructed their readers in just such things as are coming into great favor in the present day. But when their owners "believed," they could no longer practice the "curious arts," or even retain the books that described them. It is very easy to destroy the books of men. Great and mighty as are the powers of darkness which were back of the books burned at Ephesus, those evil powers are not comparable to that which has directed the career of the Word of God. Many have been the attempts to consume it in the flames, but in vain; for the Word of God is living. This scene at Ephesus has been re-enacted in many a human life. When in quest of help, enlightenment, wisdom, guidance, and knowledge of the unseen, men turn to books; and though disappointed again and again, the inquiring mind, which has felt the need of a source of light external to itself, and has realized that there must be such a source somewhere, never shakes off the habit of seeking it in books. There appears to be a deep-seated consciousness that the desired help is to be found in some book. But men cannot impart to the books written by them what is not in themselves; and so they who gather many books gain little to compensate for their cost and labor. Conjectures and human opinions, philosophies and vain deceits, with all the obscurities and contradictions contained in them, do but leave the mind in perplexity and bewilderment concerning every matter of real importance. And, after all, if one cannot have certainties, but must put up with mere opinions, why should he not prefer his own to another man's, seeing that all are at the best but mere guesses, whereof one is as likely to be true as another? The "wise men" can tell us nothing, for "lo, they have rejected the Word of the Lord; and what wisdom is in them?" (Jeremiah 8:9). But when, to one who has undergone this weariness of a vain quest for something sure and satisfying in the books of men, the Word of God comes with the convincing power which it alone possesses, and with the restful assurance which it alone can impart, the books of men become worthless-mere rubbish, fit only to be food for flames. Conjectures are now exchanged for certainties, and profitless speculations for knowledge certified by the sure testimony of Him who knoweth and understandeth all things. The writer lately heard a servant of Christ relate an incident in his own life which aptly illustrates what we have been saying. Speaking on the injunction of Ephesians 6:10, "Be strong in the Lord," he said, "I well remember a section in my book-case long ago which contained a highly prized set of Emerson's works. One essay in particular I read and re-read, and had marked favorite passages in it, The burden of it was, 'Young man, be strong.' This phrase occurred again and again, and it thrilled and excited me. But it pointed me to no source of strength, for the writer knew of none. He never once said, 'Be strong in the Lord;' and the time came when, realizing the cruel mockery of the words, and the emptiness of this entire system of philosophy, I put the set of well-printed and choicely bound volumes into the flames." He discovered in the Bible the Source of all strength, and the Book displaced the entire set of man's philosophies and empty deceits. "So mightily grew the Word of God and prevailed." Happy is the man who has "received the Word of God" (Acts 8:14; Acts 11:1, etc.), who has made room for it in his life, and in whose heart and mind it has grown and prevailed. 10. A Life-Giving Word We come now to something higher and deeper. The great mystery of a living thing is the power it possesses of propagating its kind. To trace the stream of life to its source is confessedly impossible to man, nor does any philosophic theory account for that stream. The attempt made in recent years to explain life as a mere property of atoms of non-living matter grouped in certain complex combinations, has been confessedly a failure. Professor Huxley, probably the ablest defender of this theory, and who at one time predicted that "protoplasm" (as he named the physical basis of life) might one day be produced in the laboratory, was constrained to admit, before his death, that there was no known link between the living and the non-living. In the era of great scientific activity which marked the last half of the nineteenth century, many and persistent efforts were made to bring about spontaneous generation; that is to say, to demonstrate that life could be caused by human manipulation to spring up out of non-living matter, and apart from antecedent life. Great was the desire of unbelieving men of science to find a support for this theory, for if established it would flatly contradict the first chapter of the Bible, and thus discredit the statements of the latter upon a subject of the highest importance. In that chapter the first law of biology is enunciated in the words "after his kind;" and this law is applied both to the vegetable kingdom and to the animal-to grass, and herb, and fruit tree, to fowl and fishes, and creeping things, to wild beast and tame beast. Each was commanded to bring forth "after his kind;" and it is needless to say that each has strictly obeyed that Divine command. The inspired account of Creation does not describe the method whereby God brought into existence the several species of living creatures, and gave to each the distinct characteristics which were to be its perpetual and unvarying endowment. This matter, therefore, belongs to the realm of speculation, into which it is unprofitable to enter. What concerns us is the fact, distinctly stated, and manifestly deemed by the Spirit of God to be of great importance for our instruction in the truth, that God, in creating the numerous species of living creatures, vegetable and animal, put a permanent difference between them, rigidly confining each species to the reproduction of its own kind. So important was this law in the mind of the Creator, and so careful was He to impress it upon the mind of man, that the formula is stated nine times in the first chapter of Genesis. There is an emphasis in this which has great significance in view of the theory of organic evolution, which, but a few years ago, was advanced as a "scientific" explanation of the origin of species of living beings, and was accepted as such by nearly all the wise and learned of this world. After many years' investigation of the philosophy of evolution, an investigation carried on in full sympathy with the widest application of that captivating theory, I have yet to see proof of a single fact showing, or tending to show, the operation of the so-called "law" or "principle" of evolution in the world of Nature. No instance has ever been found of a living thing of one species coming from ancestors of another species; and there is not the slightest ground for the belief that such a thing ever happened. On the other hand, every one of the countless billions of reproductions of living creatures-the grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit-which occur every year, are in accordance with the divine command recorded in the first chapter of Genesis. Oak trees have never betrayed the slightest tendency to produce any fruit but acorns, nor acorns to produce any trees but oaks. The theory of organic evolution, promulgated by Darwin and Wallace, has nothing to commend it except that it offers an alternative to the acceptance of the account of the origin of species given in the Bible. The attempts made by the empiricists of the last century to bring about, or to demonstrate the possibility of, spontaneous generation of living organisms by human manipulation apart from pre-existing organisms of the same species, were at first thought to have been successful. Infusions of hay were prepared which, after being tightly sealed in suitable flasks, were heated to a temperature sufficiently high (as was supposed) to destroy all life within the flasks. These were then set aside for awhile, and kept under observation; and in the course of time they were found to contain minute living organisms. These "results of science" were heralded far and wide, and great: was the rejoicing occasioned thereby. But other men of science, among whom the most prominent was Liebig; went over the ground again, repeating the experiments more carefully; and their results showed that, in the earlier experiments, either the flasks had not been tightly sealed, or else the heat to which they were exposed had not been sufficiently great to destroy all the living organisms therein. So conclusive were these later experiments that the theory of spontaneous generation (or "abiogenesis") has had no standing whatever from that time to the present. The following quotations will accurately inform the reader as to the best scientific opinion on this subject. Lord Kelvin who, until his recent death, held the leading place among scientific men, used this positive language: "Inanimate matter cannot become living except under the influence of matter already living. This is a fact in science which seems to me as well ascertained as the law of gravitation." Again he said: "I am ready to accept as an article of faith in science, valid for all time and in all space, that life is produced by life and only by life." Professor Huxley, the advocate of the theory of "animal automatism," who at one time contended earnestly that vitality was merely a property of "protoplasm," (that is to say, the property of a particular chemical compound of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen) left this record before his death: "The present state of knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not-living." Professor Tyndall says: "Every attempt made in our day to generate life independent of antecedent life has utterly broken down." Such has indeed been, and such must ever he, the result of all human attempts to start the flow of a stream of life, or to divert one which God has started, so as to change the form of manifestation which the Author and Giver of life has given to each species of living creatures. We wish the reader to understand that we rest nothing Whatever upon the outcome of the foregoing scientific controversy, nor upon the above quoted (or any other) statements of human opinion however high their source. Faith has no foundation other than the Word of God. Men of science may be right or wrong in their deductions from the fragmentary information possessed by them. Generally they are wrong, as is clearly enough shown by the fact that a large part of the work of each generation of men of science consists in overturning or modifying the theories of their predecessors. The foregoing is given as an illustration of the utter futility of setting up the deductions of the human reason against the assertions of the Word of God, and as a caution to the reader, if he be a child of God through faith in Jesus Christ, not to give the slightest credence to any statements made in the name of "science" or "scholarship" which call into question what is written in the inspired Scriptures. We may ask then, Is the Word of God a living Word in this particular sense? Does it have the mysterious power of imparting life; and if so, is the life it imparts of the same sort as its own? Does it reproduce "after its kind"? This brings up the great subject of spiritual conception and generation, concerning which the Scripture gives not a little information. Into this highly interesting but difficult subject we will not now enter. Even the beginning and maintenance of physical life in plants and animals (including man) are great and inscrutable mysteries. This is true in all stages of the process, particularly in the initial stage of germination, which is the beginning of a new individual existence by the quickening of a seed derived from a previously existing individual of the same species. How much more mysterious, then, must be the process of spiritual generation! The Lord Jesus, in His conversation with the learned and intellectual Pharisee, Nicodemus, indicated that the subject was a very mysterious one, by the words, "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born [or begotten] of the Spirit." Therefore, even after we have learned all that is given us to know concerning the beginning of physical life in the naturally begotten, and of spiritual life in the supernaturally begotten, the subject remains as mysterious as ever, since the Author of life has reserved it among the "secret things" which "belong unto the Lord our God" (Deuteronomy 29:29). But the fact of natural generation cannot be questioned, though the process be involved in unfathomable mystery. The fact of spiritual generation is equally sure to all who believe the Word of God. The Bible plainly declares it, and those who believe on the Christ of God know also by experience the beginning of a new kind of life in their own souls. For present purposes it is sufficient to point out that spiritual generation is analogous (as might be expected) to natural generation, being effected by means of a seed, which, having been deposited in a prepared place, is quickened by the Spirit of God, and becomes itself "spirit,"-that is to say a new nature which is spiritual in its character; for "that which is born [or begotten] of the Spirit is spirit" (John 3:6). The fact of spiritual conception, and the nature of the seed whereby it is effected, are plainly declared in 1 Peter 1:23 : "Being born [or having been begotten] again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by THE WORD OF GOD WHICH LIVETH and abideth for ever." There is an immense amount of truth of the highest importance contained in this passage; but the statement which especially concerns us is that the seed of the new birth is from the living Word ("the Word which LIVETH"). This statement plainly teaches that the Word of God possesses the highest endowment of a living being, namely, that of imparting life. And with this agrees the teaching of the Lord Jesus in the parable of the sower, in the explanation of which He said, "The seed is the Word of God" (Luke 8:11). In consequence of the transgression and fall of the first man, who was the original depository Of the life of humanity (Genesis 2:7), the life in him, being "corruptible," became vitiated. Hence, by inexorable law, the seed of his generations also became corrupted. It follows that all men in their natural generation are begotten of corruptible (and corrupted) seed; and have received (and hence must impart to their succeeding generations) a corrupted life. What, therefore, was needed, in order to bring into existence a human family answering to God's purpose in the creation of man (Genesis 1:26), was a new and incorruptible seed. This has been supplied in the Word of God. All who believe that Word are begotten again (or from above); not this time of corruptible seed, "but of incorruptible, by the Word of God which liveth." It is a living Word. It is to be noted that this Scripture testifies that the seed of the living Word is not merely uncorrupted, but is "incorruptible." It partakes, therefore, of the nature of the "uncorruptible God" (Romans 1:23). This is the guaranty to us that the Word of God is not subject to the corrupting influences of the corrupted and decaying world into which it is come. It is the only thing which has not succumbed to the forces of decay and death which reign universally in the earth. Indeed, it has not been affected in the slightest degree by those forces. This has been pointed out at length in the foregoing pages; but the grand truth comes to us with peculiar force in connection with the passage in 1 Peter. We need not be at all concerned as to whether the truth of God, embodied by Him in His word, has been corrupted, for it is incorruptible. And by that Word they who believe are begotten again through the operation of the Holy Spirit. To them "the Spirit is life" (Romans 8:10). The same truth is declared in James 1:18, in the words, "Of His own will begat He us with the Word of Truth." Such is the spiritual conception of the "sons of God." These are born, or begotten. In no other way is a "son" brought into existence save by being begotten of a father. The sons of God must be begotten of God. The Apostle John tells us that they are begotten, "not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man" (John 1:13). The Apostle James tells us that "of His own will" they are begotten. Therefore, though the process be inscrutably mysterious, there can be no doubt as to the fact. When the Word of God is truly "heard" and thereby received into a prepared heart, that word becomes truly a seed, spiritual and incorruptible in nature, which, when quickened by the Spirit of God, becomes the life-germ of a new creature-a son of God. The same truth is very clearly taught in our Lord's explanation of His parable of the sower, to which reference has already been made. Inasmuch as we have His own interpretation of this parable, we need be in no uncertainty as to its meaning. He says, "Those by the wayside are they that hear; then cometh the Devil and taketh away the Word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and he saved" (Luke 8:12). And again: "But that on the good ground are they which, in an honest and good heart, having heard the Word keep it and bring forth fruit with patience." The method of spiritual conception set forth in these Scriptures, which is effected in a manner quite analogous to natural conception, furnishes the explanation of the connection between "believing" and "life" referred to in many passages of Scripture. One of the most familiar of these is John 5:24 where the Lord Jesus states in the simplest language that the man who hears His Word and believes on Him who sent Him has everlasting life, and is passed out of death into life. Such a man receives the seed in his heart, and the seed is there quickened into life. Indeed, the great purpose of the Written Word is to impart life-even eternal (that is to say divine) life-to those who are dead through trespasses and sins. The Gospel of John, which is devoted largely to the great subject of eternal life, and from which a large part of our information concerning it is derived, was "written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and that believing ye might have life through his name" (John 20:31). The same truth is declared in the familiar passage in Romans 10:9, which sets forth very definitely the special truth which constitutes the substance and marrow of God's revelation in His Word, and which He calls upon men to believe and obey through the preaching of the Gospel, namely that Jesus Christ, who died for sinners, has been raised from the dead, and that He is Lord of all, to the glory of God the Father. The main point to be apprehended in this connection is that a certain state of preparedness of heart is necessary in order that the "good seed" of the Word may germinate and grow there. Such a prepared heart is described in Scripture as a believing heart. That prepared state is manifested when a man believes God, as Abraham did (Romans 4:17); or, in other words, when a man is ready to receive the Word of God as the Word of God, as the Thessalonians did (1 Thessalonians 2:13). When a man has been brought, by the operation of the Spirit of God, who is the "Spirit of LIFE in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:2; Romans 8:10), into this state of preparation, then the Word of God, being received into the heart, acts as a seed falling into good soil. Though it be (as we might say) but the tiniest portion of God's truth as revealed in His Word which is thus received by faith, yet it Suffices through His power as the means whereby He may quicken a dead soul. For surely the life of the Word is in every part thereof. Such is the power of the living truth to impart life; and herein lies the difference between the truth which God has revealed in His Word, and truth which may be found elsewhere. For there is much truth which is not living truth. The multiplication table is truth; but it is not living truth. It has no quickening power. The theorems of geometry are truth; but they are not living truth. Never yet has any man been heard to testify that he had been the wretched and hopeless slave of sin, and had continued in spiritual darkness, fast bound in misery and vice until his eyes were opened by the great truth that two and two make four, or that three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles; and that thereby his life had been transformed, his soul delivered from bondage, and his heart filled with joy and peace in believing. On the other hand, in the case Of a true conversion, it may have been but the shortest and simplest statement of "the Word of the truth of the Gospel" (Colossians 1:5) that was heard and believed, such as that "Christ died for the ungodly" (Romans 5:6), yet it suffices, through the mighty power of Him who raised up Christ from among the dead, to quicken together with Christ a soul that previously was dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 1:20; Ephesians 2:5). Thus the Word of truth becomes, in some inscrutable way, the vehicle for imparting that life of which the risen Christ, the Incarnate Word, is the only Source. Eternal life for the individual soul begins through believing "the testimony of God" (1 Corinthians 1:2), and the testimony of God which He has in grace given to perishing sinners that they may believe and be saved, is "concerning His Son" (Romans 1:3; 1 John 5:10). "And this is the record [or testimony], that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son" (1 John 5:11). Therefore it is written of those who experienced the new birth, "For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:26). The teaching and preaching of the day are largely permeated by a notion to the effect that "science" is in some undefined way supplying to a greater or less extent new foundations for religious faith. We cannot, therefore, insist too strongly upon the vital difference (-for it is vital-being a difference upon which life depends) between truth revealed by God through His Word, and truth discovered by the investigations of man, and generally spoken of as "scientific" truth. Truth thus obtained has no relation whatsoever to faith and eternal life; and the effort to substitute it for, or to oppose it to, the truth revealed in God's Word as the basis of faith, must be ascribed to the activity of the "spirit of error." Many unspiritual teachers in these last days, and many superficial readers of Scripture, deem it incredible that salvation, which is the beginning of the life of the risen Christ in the soul of a perishing man, should be wrought through an operation so apparently simple as that of receiving God's Word, through faith, into the heart. The clear declarations of God's Word on this subject are indeed frequently ridiculed in pulpit utterances. But to such minds the germination of a seed by merely casting it into the ground would be equally incredible. These spiritually-blinded ones, wise in their own conceits, miss altogether the teaching of the Bible concerning the wonderful process of spiritual conception and generation, which, in view of the equally mysterious process of natural conception, should not be deemed "a thing incredible." "For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made" (Romans 1:20). The passage in 1Peter 1 sets forth, moreover, the fact that spiritual generation through the Word of God conforms to the great biological law stated with such emphatic iteration in the first chapter of Genesis, namely, that the life imparted is the same in kind as that of its source, all the characteristics of the latter being reproduced in it. Emphasis is laid on the fact that the seed is incorruptible, and that the Word, which is its source, is eternal. Moreover, as in John's Gospel, the new, incorruptible, and eternal life, which proceeds from spiritual conception by the Word of God, is put into direct contrast with the natural life or "flesh." "For," continues the Apostle Peter, "all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass." The prominent characteristic of grass is that it withereth, and of the flower of grass, or of plant life, is that it falleth away. "The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: but"-in direct contrast with this "the Word of the Lord endureth for ever." So it does, and so do all they who are begotten of the incorruptible seed of the Word. The passage closes with the unmistakably plain statement, "And this is the Word which, by the Gospel, is preached unto you" The result of spiritual generation is, of course, a Spiritual infant-a babe. Consequently the next words of the inspired Apostle are in full keeping with, and in confirmation of, the truth we have been considering. "Wherefore, laying aside all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and all evil speakings" (which are characteristics of the "old man") "as new-born babes, desire the sincere milk of the Word, that ye may grow thereby" (1 Peter 2:1-2). We all know that it is of the first importance that a babe should have appropriate nourishment in order that it may grow; but this belongs to the subject of spiritual nutrition, which will be considered later on. Other Scriptures testify with equal clearness to the great and glorious truth that those who are begotten of the Spirit, through the incorruptible seed of the Word, receive a nature of the same sort as that of the Divine Source of their life. In the eighth chapter of Romans there is a section devoted to the "sons of God," in whom the Spirit dwells (verses 9-16); and of these it is declared that God predestinated them "to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born among many brethren" (verse 30). Here the truth of likeness with the Son of God is broadly stated. Other passages declare specific features included in this general likeness. Thus 1 John 3:9 states that "whosoever is born of God doth not commit [or practice] sin; for His [God's] seed remaineth in him; and he cannot sin because he is born [begotten] of God. In this the children of God are manifest." The new nature which characterizes the new creature is one that cannot sin; and hence, when this new nature begins to manifest itself in the quickened soul, there is a struggle between its desires and those of the old nature ("the flesh"); for the flesh has desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit has desires against the flesh, and these are directly opposed, the one to the other (Galatians 5:17). Every one who has been begotten from above knows from experience what this struggle means. Again, in 1 John 3:2-3, it is stated that now, even at the present time, are we (believers) the sons of God, though we appear so little like it. What we shall be does not yet appear; but we know, upon the clear testimony of Scripture, that "when He shall appear we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is." These statements are so clear that it is not necessary to cite to those who believe the Word of God other passages which declare that spiritual procreation is according to the law repeated nine times in Genesis 1, "after his kind." In closing this important section of our subject (which might be greatly amplified if our purpose were to treat exhaustively the great truth of spiritual generation) it will be profitable to notice briefly the close relation between the Written Word and the Incarnate Word in the matter of the impartation of Spiritual life. This truth brings before us the Son of God in His wonderful and unique character of the Source of Life to a world and to human beings, which had fallen under the power and dominion of death. "Through one man [Adam] sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so death passed upon [lit. passed through to] all men" (Romans 5:12). Thus death entered and established its universal sovereignty over all men. Such expressions as "death reigned," "sin reigned unto death" (Romans 5:14; Romans 5:1721), state a fact Whereof the evidences meet our eye whichever way we look. Therefore, after Adam's transgression and the ruin wrought by it, the most urgent need of the world was LIFE. To this end the Son of God became a partaker of flesh and blood, "that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is the devil" (Hebrews 2:14). "I am come," He said, "that they might have life" (John 10:10). In the Gospel by John, the first thing asserted of Him, after setting forth His eternal Deity, and His mighty work as Creator, is the significant statement, "In Him was LIFE" (John 1:4). This is He who "cometh down from heaven and giveth life unto the world" (John 6:33). We need not cite the many passages of Scripture which witness to Christ as the new Source of life to a world that had fallen under the power of death; but would call attention only to a few of those which connect Him directly with the wonderful process of spiritual generation. The very first of all prophecies, that concerning the woman's "seed" (Genesis 3:15) is thus fulfilled in Him; and the designation "seed," thus at the very beginning applied to Him as coming in flesh and blood, carries with it the great promise of a new humanity which was to spring up from and out of Himself. Again, as the "seed" of Abraham, He is the inheritor (for Himself and for His generations) of all the promises made "to Abraham and his seed." That we might not miss the meaning of this truth, so precious to those who, through faith. "are the children of Abraham" (Galatians 3:6), it is expressly stated as follows: "Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of ONE, And to thy SEED, which is Christ" (Galatians 3:16). Finally, as David's seed He is the rightful Heir to the kingdom, which he will establish on the earth in the coming age. In promise of this there are many passages such as these: "I will raise up thy seed after thee, which shall be of thy sons; and I will establish his kingdom" (1 Chronicles 17:11). "Upon David, and upon his seed and upon his house, and upon his throne, shall there be peace forever from the Lord" (1 Kings 2:33). "I have made a covenant with My chosen, I have sworn unto David My servant, thy seed will I establish forever, and build up thy throne to all generations" (Psalms 89:3-4). "His seed shall endure forever, and his throne as the sun before Me" (Psalms 89:36). Thus Christ is set forth as the Seed of the woman, as the Seed of Abraham, and as the Seed of David. But the great purpose of a seed, and its marvelous inherent power, is to reproduce its kind; and the designation "seed" as applied to the Son of Man has this significance also. He Himself takes up this great lesson when he refers to Himself as the kernel of wheat, saying: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn [kernel] of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit" (John 12:24). Thus the One who alone had a title to live as a man of flesh and blood, laid that life down, submitting voluntarily to the power of death, in order that, instead of dwelling forever "alone" (as man) He might bring forth "much fruit." These are His generations, the "many sons" which He brings into glory (Hebrews 2:10), the "children" of whom He speaks saying, "Behold I, and the children which God hath given me" (Hebrews 2:13). If we keep in mind the fact that the grains of wheat in the ear are all reproductions of the original seed, we shall see how forcibly and beautifully the parable of the "corn of wheat" teaches the lesson of spiritual generation. The life in those who have been quickened together with Christ (Ephesians 2:5) is truly His life reproduced in them by the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, and whose law sets us free from the law of sin and death (Romans 8:2). We may thus say, "Christ who is our life" (Colossians 3:4); and as this new life unfolds itself in the being of the believer, and manifests the characteristics of the One who is its source, the former is able also to say, "For me to live is Christ" (Php_1:21). Whether, therefore, we are regarding the Written Word or the Incarnate Word, it is true (as has been well said) that ?the Word? is the whole matter or substance of what God has revealed; but it is also true that any portion of that matter or substance which enters into a human heart, and which, as a seed, germinates and performs there the stupendous miracle of reproduction, is also the Word, imparting life "after his kind"-life incorruptible and everlasting as the Word itself. Thus, in the highest sense of which we can take knowledge, the Word of God is a "Word of Life"-living and reproducing its kind; and thus is being fulfilled the promise to Him who died that we might live, of Whom it was said of old "He shall see His seed, He shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand. He shall see of the travail of His soul and shall be satisfied" (Isaiah 53:10-11). The believer, too, may say with David, "As for me, I will behold Thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Thy likeness" (Psalms 17:15). That will be glory for us; but, what is more important, it will be glory also for Him. 11. The Life-Sustaining Word The life possessed by human beings is not only a derived life, that is, a life obtained from an external source, but it is a dependent life, requiring continual sustenance. It must be sustained by constant and suitable nutrition, received into the body at short intervals. Man's strength whereof he boasts, and indeed his very existence in the body, are dependent on food, and this food itself must be organic matter, that is to say, matter which has once been living. The fact of this dependence upon food, and upon food which man is utterly unable to make for himself out of inorganic matter, though all the materials are within his reach, should teach him a lesson in humility; but it seems not to have that effect. We say that man is utterly unable to produce food-stuff though all the materials whereof it is composed are abundantly at hand. This is a pertinent and obvious fact, though one whereof little account is taken. God has imparted to the lowly plant the ministry of supplying food to all the animal creation, and has taught to it, and to it alone, the marvelous secret of converting the minerals of the earth and air-inert, lifeless elements, utterly incapable of furnishing nourishment to animals or man into living tissue, endowed with the property of nourishing living creatures higher in the scale of life. "He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man; that he may bring forth food out of the earth" (Psalms 104:14). The humble vegetable organism knows how to extract the nitrogen from the earth, and the carbon from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and to combine these, in exactly the proper proportions, with the oxygen and hydrogen in water, and with traces of lime and other elements, forming with the aid of heat and light from the sun, living tissue, suitable and necessary for food. This wonderful operation of chemical synthesis is carried on by the modest vegetable so unostentatiously as to attract little notice; and though it has been under the observation of inquisitive and imitative man for thousands of years he has not the faintest notion of how it is done. All the learning and skill of all the chemists in the world, with the resources of all the laboratories in the world, could not produce an ounce of food, though the elements out of which it is made exist everywhere, and in the greatest abundance. But God, having imparted physical life to His creatures, has also made ample provision for the maintenance of that life, by supplying through the inscrutable synthesis carried on unceasingly by the vegetable kingdom, abundant food, capable, when taken into the body and properly assimilated, of supplying the waste that is constantly in progress in every part of the body, and of maintaining the strength thereof. Furthermore, if the conversion of minerals into food-stuff by the members of the vegetable kingdom is a process displaying the marvelous wisdom of God, the process of digestion and nutrition is not less so. Nothing could be more improbable than that food, taken into the body by way of the mouth, should, without any attention or supervision from the tenant of that body, be digested, the valuable parts separated from the worthless, the latter discharged from the body, the former converted into tissue, muscle, bone, sinew, nerve-cell, blood-corpuscle, hair, nails, etc., and distributed automatically throughout the body, each to the place requiring it, and all in due proportion. In this we have again a process far transcending the comprehension of the most learned men, who must eat and be nourished like other men, and who are equally ignorant of the process whereby their lives are sustained, and whereby they gain the strength which they use to deny God and glorify man. Men boast in these days of their "independence," and make much of "self reliance." But this is the height of presumptuous folly; for man is a most helplessly dependent creature, not even able, like the plant, to prepare his own food from the mineral elements, but dependent daily upon living creatures much lower than himself in the scale of being. And so far from having a basis for self-reliance, he does not know how to conduct the simplest of the vital processes of his own body. If his Creator, of whom principally man loves to fancy himself independent, should turn over to him the operation of the least of those essential processes for the briefest time, the poor creature would miserably perish. As with the physical life, so is it with the spiritual life of those who have been begotten again of the incorruptible seed of the Word. These spiritual beings require appropriate food; and God has abundantly provided for this need. In studying the important subject of spiritual nutrition we shall learn again the relation between Christ, the Incarnate Word, and the Written Word. Both are spoken of repeatedly as food for the children of God. The third, fourth and fifth chapters of the Gospel by John treat of the imparting of eternal life as the free gift of God through Jesus Christ, the Son of God, to all who believe on Him; and the sixth chapter treats of spiritual nutrition. Therein, after feeding the multitude miraculously, thus showing Himself as the one by whose power food is multiplied in the earth, He reveals Himself as "the Bread of Life." Twice He says, "I am that bread of life" (verses John 6:35; John 6:48) and in verse John 6:33, "For the bread of God is He which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world." He Who gives the life is the One who also sustains it. Again He says, "I am the living bread which came down from heaven" (verse John 6:51). And of His words He says, "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing; the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life" (verse John 6:63). These sayings to the natural mind are, of course, meaningless; but they are addressed to faith. "How can this man give us His flesh to eat?" is the question which the unbelieving heart asks. How Christ can impart Himself to sustain the "inner man" is a question to which no answer can now be had. The process is incomprehensible to man. But we have seen that the process of physical nutrition is equally beyond human comprehension and contrary to all a priori probabilities. Looking more particularly at what is said in this connection concerning the written or spoken Word of God we find that the Word of God is "living" in the sense that, like other living substance, it has the property of furnishing nutrition, and thereby sustaining life. It is a life-sustaining Word. But here a notable difference attracts our attention. Physical food comes up out of the earth (Psalms 104:14), while spiritual food comes down out of heaven. (John 6:50). Reference has already been made to the fact that, after setting forth the great truth of spiritual conception and generation through the incorruptible seed of the Word of God, the Apostle Peter enjoins attention to spiritual nutrition. "Wherefore," he says, "as new-born babes desire the sincere milk of the word that ye may grow thereby" (1 Peter 2:1-2). Evidently his Lord's threefold injunction, "Feed My sheep," "Feed My lambs," had impressed upon him the importance of spiritual nutrition. But proper feeding requires appetite for wholesome food, and so he seeks to excite a desire in young Christians for that whereby they may grow. And he immediately connects the Word with Christ saying, "If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious." The importance of nourishing and sustaining the new life received upon coming to Christ, and the unhappy consequences which always result from neglect of the appropriate diet, have been so often and so forcibly stated by the servants of Christ that it seems hardly necessary to dwell upon this matter. What our subject specially calls for is to note the correspondence between God's way of sustaining man's physical life by food derived from a living source, and His way of sustaining the believer's spiritual life by food from a living source, that is to say from the living Word. The passages which present the Word of God as the food for His children are very familiar; and in bringing them to mind again we would impress it upon our readers that these statements are not to be taken as if they were poetical or figurative, but as very literal, practical and immensely important. In making man it was not God's plan that he should live by bread, or physical food alone, but "by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord" (Deuteronomy 8:3). The manna was given to His people in the wilderness to teach them this lesson, and that they might learn their dependence upon God. Hence, this passage was used by the Second Man in His combat with the devil in the wilderness, it being the purpose of the latter to inculcate in man the idea of independence of God. Thus did the Man Jesus Christ, with the Sword of the Spirit, strike sure and true at the central purpose of His great adversary. It is by every word of God that man is to be fed. No part of the Bible can be neglected without loss and detriment; and it will be observed that there is, in the Bible, a variety of spiritual nutriment analogous to the variety of physical food which God has provided for the needs of the physical man. If there be milk for babes, there is also strong food for those who are mature. And there is the penalty of arrested growth paid by those who remain content with the relatively weak diet suitable for infants, who know, perhaps, only that their sins are forgiven; as the Apostle John says: "I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you" (1 John 2:12). But those who have to be fed on a milk diet, that is to say, the simplest elementary truths of the Gospel, are unskillful in the word of righteousness. Infants cannot do anything for themselves, much less can they prepare food, or render any service to others. Hence the Apostle Paul, writing to the Hebrews, upbraids some of them because, at a time when they ought to have been teachers, they had need to be taught again the first principles, and were become "such as have need of milk and not of strong food. For every one that useth milk is unskillful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. But strong food belongeth to them that are of full age" (Hebrews 5:12-14). Jeremiah says, "Thy words were found and I did eat them" (Jeremiah 15:16). Thereby he found spiritual strength to sustain him in his most difficult and trying ministry, from which, because of his timid and sensitive disposition, he shrank back in agony of soul. To be a good and effective minister of Christ it is necessary that one be well nourished through partaking largely of the abundant spiritual food which the living Word supplies. Thus Paul admonished his child in the faith, Timothy, to whom he wrote, "If thou put the brethren in remembrance of these things, thou shalt be a good minister of Jesus Christ, nourished up in the words of faith and of good doctrine" (1 Timothy 4:6). One practical point with reference to the process of nutrition should be noted. While the living creature cannot comprehend the process, and has no part whatever in supervising it, or carrying it on, and while he is therefore not responsible for the results, the process cannot be carried on unless he takes the food into his being and properly masticates it. Therefore, up to the point of swallowing the food, the living being is responsible, and his volition is exercised. After that the process passes beyond his knowledge and control. Food may be of the best quality, and may be in greatest abundance, but it imparts no nourishment while it remains in the pantry, or on the table. In like manner the responsibility is with the child of God to partake of the spiritual food so plentifully provided, and to meditate therein day and night (Psalms 1:2). Meditation upon what is read is to spiritual nutrition what mastication is to physical nutrition; and it takes time. The result, however, is ample compensation for time so occupied, for we read of him who observes this simple rule of spiritual dictation that "He shall be like a tree planted by rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season, his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper" (Psalms 1:3). It means a fruitful life, a vigorous and healthful life, and a prosperous ife. These results are just as sure to follow obedience to the laws of spiritual diet as physical nutrition is to follow attention to the proper reception of material food; and the contrary results are just as sure to follow neglect of those laws in the one case as in the other. The natural mind would be likely to demand an explanation; but faith does not require to know the process, it being sufficient to hear the command. If one refused to partake of his natural food until instructed as to the process of digestion he would starve. In each case the process is inscrutable, but the fact is certain. 12. The Life-Transforming Word FEEDING upon the Word of God, the bread of life, must necessarily be beneficial to the whole man, including his intellectual and physical being as well as his spiritual. Much deference is paid in these days to the "powers of the mind." Intellectual prowess is what wins the victories in the fierce commercial struggle of the times. Business men are, of course, keen to take advantage of this condition, as may be seen by the many and costly advertisements of "brain foods;" and many millions of dollars are annually acquired by the shrewd exploiters of these preparations. This, of course, could not be unless there were multitudes who give heed to the assurance that, by the use of the advertised article, it is possible to produce "a new set of brains." The Bible does not speak of a new set of brains, but it does say to believers, "Be renewed in the spirit of your mind" (Ephesians 4:23), and, "Be not conformed to this world [or age], but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Romans 12:2). The new man requires a new mind, and provision is made to that end. The old mind, with all its habits of self-occupation (a sure breeder of unhappiness and discontent), its morbid tendencies, its craving for excitement and sensation, its imaginations, appetites, tastes, inclinations and desires, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, is to be displaced, and a new mind substituted; for godliness has the promise of the vigor of the life that now is, as well as of that which is to come. How, then, is this injunction to be carried out? It is of importance to millions of anxious souls to have a clear answer to this question. And it may be had. The every-day incidents and the atmosphere amid which the average man and woman spend their time are such as to produce mental disturbances and disorders to an extent which, if understood, and if anything could impress this thoughtless and excited age, would create wide-spread alarm. It was stated recently that there were twenty-eight thousand inmates of the insane asylums of New York State (a single state of the Union) prior to October, 1907, and that in six months following the industrial convulsion of that month the number of inmates was increased by three thousand. The startling increase in the number of suicides adds its forcible testimony; and the frequency with which one encounters cases of mental depression, insomnia, melancholia, and other nervous disorders, tells of wide-spread and insidious foes which attack the seat of reason, and which call for methods and means of defense and repair which are beyond the resources of medicine. The writer knows by experience the indescribable horrors of depressed and morbid mental states, and knows, too, what a transformation is effected by the "renewing of the mind" according to the Biblical injunction. Full provision is made for this marvelous transformation, and the conditions wherein it is effected are plainly set forth and are accessible to every believer. In this case the study of the word used in the command ("be transformed") will make us acquainted with the conditions essential to the transformation. The word in question seems to have been set apart by the Holy Spirit for the purpose of teaching the important and wonderful secret of the transformation of the believer, during his existence in the body, into the likeness of Christ; so that all believers might be able to say with Paul, "We have the mind of Christ." It will, therefore, surely repay the reader to note carefully the usages of this particular word. Its first occurrence is in the Gospel narratives of the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ, and is in fact the very word there translated "transfigured" (Matthew 17:2; Mark 9:2). The word is literally "metamorphosed." "His face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as the light." This may well serve to teach the nature of the change contemplated. It is one that brings the radiance of heaven into the mind and tinges even the commonplace things with a glow of heavenly light. The next occurrence of the word is, as we have already seen, in Romans 12:2, where believers are enjoined to be not cut out on the pattern of this age, but to be metamorphosed or transfigured by the renewing of their minds. The third and last occurrence of the word tells us plainly how this great transformation is brought about. For the Bible is a very practical book. It comes, moreover, from One Who understands perfectly the limitations of man, Who knows and declares that the latter is, in his natural state, "without strength," that is to say, utterly impotent (Romans 5:6). We may be sure, therefore, that when God calls upon the quickened soul to do a thing, He puts the means required for it within His reach. And so, in these plain words we read the conditions requisite for effecting the desired transformation: "We all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord" (2 Corinthians 3:18). The word here translated "are changed" is the same word (metamorphosed or transfigured) used in the other passages cited; and these are the only occurrences of that word in the Bible. The teaching is very clear. When the Jews read the Word of God a veil is over their hearts, their minds being blinded (verse 14). Or, as stated in Romans 11:25, "blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in." Hence, they do not behold there Him of whom the Scriptures testify. But, for us who believe, the veil is done away in Christ, and consequently, all we beholding are transfigured into the same image by the Divine and irresistible operation of the Holy Spirit. If, when we look into the Word of God. we do not see Christ there, we look to no purpose, for He is everywhere in the Book. Let it be carefully noted that this transformation is not the work of the man who beholds Christ in the Word; for the process is carried on while the former is not occupied with himself at all, or with his transformation, but is absorbed in the contemplation of the glory of the Lord. The transformation is effected by the power of the Spirit of God; and we may learn from this passage the important lesson that occupation with, and concern about, the work of the Spirit in us can only hinder that work. Let it suffice us that He Who has begun a good work in us will perform it until the day of Christ. (Php_1:6). Our part, and it should be also our delight, is to be continually beholding or contemplating the glory of the Lord; and while so doing we "are changed" into the same image, and all the faster if we are unconscious of ourselves. Let it be also noted that the transformation is a gradual operation, calling for steadfastness in contemplating the object placed before us by the Holy Spirit. Little by little, as our gaze is fixed upon Him, the old traits and dispositions which are unlike Him are replaced by His own characteristics. Thus the work proceeds "from glory to glory." The conformation to His image, which is God's purpose for all the sons of God (Romans 8:29), is not accomplished, as some would have it, by an instantaneous transfiguration, a convulsive upheaval and displacement of the old nature, brought about by working one's emotions into an ecstatic state; but is accomplished gradually while the believer is continually occupied with Christ ("beholding"). There is no hysterical short-cut to the desired result. For Christ must be known from the Written Word under the tuition of the Holy Spirit; and the process should continue during the whole term of the believer's existence in the body. Thus the living Word becomes the regulator and transformer of the minds of those who diligently seek it. Under its potent influence confusion of thought, perplexities, depressed mental states, and other hurtful conditions are dissipated, and the serene tranquility and repose of the mind of Christ are reproduced in those who are redeemed by His precious blood. We are passing through the domain of death, the country of the last enemy that is to be destroyed, and who has put all things in this scene under his feet (1 Corinthians 15:26-27). On every hand our eyes meet the unmistakable evidences of the supreme sovereignty of death. But in this domain of death there is a Living Word-a Living Word in a dying world. The forces of corruption and decay cannot fasten upon it, and it laughs at the attacks of its enemies. But that Word is here, not merely to manifest life, but rather to impart life to those who are perishing, and to bring them into vital contact with the new Life-Source of humanity. the Son of God, the Second Man, the Lord from Heaven, Who liveth and was dead, and behold He is alive forevermore, and has the keys of death and of Hades (1 Corinthians 15:47; Revelation 1:18). He, as Man, has crossed the gulf between the realm of death and that of life. To that end He became "a partaker of flesh and blood," not to improve flesh and blood, but in order that "through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage" (Hebrews 2:14-15). Having Himself crossed that gulf He is the Way of life to all who believe on Him, who, having heard His Word-the Word of life-have likewise passed out of death into life (John 5:24). This is the wonderful provision of God for the deliverance of dying men. In order that they might not die, and because God wills not that any should perish (2 Peter 3:9), He has sent into this dying world a Word of Life. For God is not the God of the dead, but of the living (Matthew 22:32). In comparison with the provision of divine wisdom, power and grace, from the God who quickeneth the dead (Romans 4:17), how pitifully foolish and vain are all human schemes for the betterment, reform and cultivation of that old man who has fallen under the sovereignty of death! Men are very ingenious, but none has yet brought forward a scheme for abolishing or escaping death, or for raising the dead. Without that, of what avail are plans of improvement" And what end do they serve but to blind men's minds to the truth that they are dead, and so are beyond all but the power of a God who raises the dead" Surely these schemes are the most successful devices of "the god of this age." What men need is not morality, but life; not to make death respectable, but to receive the gift of eternal life; not decent interment, but a pathway out of the realm of death. Many men have brought forward their schemes for the "uplift of humanity" (though the results thereof are not yet discernible); but there is only One Man who makes, or ever made, the offer of eternal life. None other has ever said, "I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth on Me though he were dead yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth on Me shall never die" (John 11:25-26). He only claims to be the "Fountain of Living Waters" (Jeremiah 2:13; John 4:14; John 7:37), and says to all who are suffering the thirst of death, "Come unto Me and drink" (John 7:37). Therefore, in concluding these reflections upon the Living Word, we obey the command, "Let him that heareth say, Come," and would lovingly repeat the last invitation of grace recorded in the Word of Life: "Let Him That Is Athirst Come. And Whosoever Will, Let Him Take The Water Of Life Freely." (Revelation 22:17). ======================================================================== CHAPTER 82: - IS THERE A GOD? ======================================================================== Is There a God? By Thomas Whitelaw, M. A., D. D., Kilmarnock, Scotland Whether or not there is a supreme personal intelligence, infinite and eternal, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, the Creator, upholder and ruler of the universe, immanent in and yet transcending all things, gracious and merciful, the Father and Redeemer of mankind, is surely the profoundest problem that can agitate the human mind. Lying as it does at the foundation of all man's religious beliefs—as to responsibility and duty, sin and salvation, immortality and future blessedness, as to the possibility of a revelation, of an incarnation, of a resurrection, as to the value of prayer, the credibility of miracle, the reality of providence,—with the reply given to it are bound up not alone the temporal and eternal happiness of the individual, but also the welfare and progress of the race. Nevertheless, to it have been returned the most varied responses. The Atheist, for example, asserts that there is no God. The Agnostic professes that he cannot tell whether there is a God or not. The Materialist boasts that he does not need a God, that he can run the universe without one. The (Bible) Fool wishes there was no God. The Christian answers that he cannot do without a God. 1. The Answer of the Atheist "There Is No God" In these days it will hardly do to pass by this bold and confident negation by simply saying that the theoretical atheist is an altogether exceptional specimen of humanity, and that his audacious utterance is as much the outcome of ignorance as of impiety. When one meets in the "Hibbert Journal" from the pen of its editor such a statement as this: "Society abounds with earnest and educated persons who have lost faith in a living personal God, and see their fellows and foresee themselves passing out of life entirely without hope," and when Blatchford in the English "Clarion" writes: "There is no Heavenly Father watching tenderly over us, His creatures, lie is the baseless shadow of a wistful dream," it becomes apparent that theoretical atheism is not extinct, even in cultured circles, and that some observations with regard to it may still be needful. Let these observations be the following: 1. Belief that there is no God does not amount to a demonstration that no God is. Neither, it is true, does belief that God is prove the truth of the proposition except to the individual in whose heart that belief has been awakened by the Divine Spirit. To another than him it is destitute of weight as an argument in support of the theistic position. At the same time it is of importance, while conceding this, to emphasize the fact that disbelief in the existence of a Divine Being is not equivalent to a demonstration that there is no God. 2. Such a demonstration is from the nature of the case impossible. Here again it may be true as Kant contends that reason cannot demonstrate (that is, by logic) the existence of God; but it is equally true, as the same philosopher admits, that reason can just as little disprove the existence of God. It was well observed by the late Prof. Calderwood of the Edinburgh University that "the divine existence is a truth so plain that it needs no proof, as it is a truth so high that it admits of none." But the situation is altered when it comes to a positive denial of that existence. The idea of God once formed in the mind, whether as an intuition or as a deduction, cannot be laid aside without convincing evidence that it is delusive and unreal. And such evidence cannot be produced. As Dr. Chalmers long ago observed, before one can positively assert that there is no God, he must arrogate to himself the wisdom and ubiquity of God. He must explore the entire circuit of the universe to be sure that no God is there. He must have interrogated all the generations of mankind and all the hierarchies of heaven to be certain they had never heard of a God. In short, as Chalmers puts it, "For man not to know God, he has only to sink beneath the level of our common nature. But to deny God he must be God himself." 3. Denial of the divine existence is not warranted by inability to discern traces of God's presence in the universe. Prof. Huxley, who once described himself in a letter to Charles Kingsley as "exactly what the Christian world called, and, so far as he could judge, was justified in calling him, an atheist and infidel," appeared to think it was. "I cannot see," he wrote, "one shadow or tittle of evidence that the Great Unknown underlying the phenomena of the universe stands to us in the relation of a Father, loves us and cares for us as Christianity asserts." Blatchford also with equal emphasis affirms: "I cannot believe that God is a personal God who interferes in human affairs. I cannot see in science, or in experience, or in history, any signs of such a God or of such intervention." Neither of these writers, however, it may be presumed, would on reflection advance their incapacity to perceive the footprints or hear the voices of the Creator as proof that no Creator existed, any more than a blind man would maintain there was no sun because he could not see it, or a deaf man would contend there was no sound because he never heard it. The incapacity of Huxley and Blatchford to either see or hear God may, and no doubt does, serve as an explanation of their atheistical creed, but assuredly it is no justification of the same, since a profounder reasoner than either has said: The invisible things of God since the creation of the world are dearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even His everlasting power and divinity; so that they [who believe not] are without excuse.? 4. The majority of mankind, not in Christian countries only, but also in heathen lands, from the beginning of the world onward, have believed in the existence of a Supreme Being. They may frequently, as Paul says, have "changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things;" but deeply seated in their natures, debased though these were by sin, lay the conception of a Superhuman Power to whom they owed allegiance and whose favor was indispensable to their happiness. It was a saying of Plutarch that in his day a man might travel the world over without finding a city without temples and gods; in our day isolated cases have been cited of tribes—the Andaman Islanders by Sir John Lubbock, and the Fuegians, by Admiral Fitzroy—who have exhibited no signs that they possessed a knowledge either of God or of religion. But it is at least open to question whether the investigators on whose testimony such instances are advanced did not fail to discover traces of what they sought either through want of familiarity with the language of the natives, or through starting with the presupposition that the religious conceptions of the natives must be equally exalted with their own. In any case, on the principle that exceptions prove the rule, it may be set down as incontrovertible that the vast majority of mankind have possessed some idea of a Supreme Being; so that if the truth or falsehood of the proposition, "There is no God," is to be determined by the counting of votes, the question is settled in the negative, that is, against the atheist's creed. 2. The Confession of the Agnostic "I Cannot Tell Whether There Is a God or Not" Without dogmatically affirming that there is no God, the Agnostic practically insinuates that whether there, is a God or not, nobody can tell and it does not much matter—that man with his loftiest powers of thought and reason and with his best appliances of research, cannot come to speech with God or obtain reliable information concerning Him, can only build up an imaginary picture, like an exaggerated or overgrown man, and call that God—in other words, can only make a God after his own image and in his own likeness without being sure whether any corresponding reality stands behind it, or even if there is, whether that reality can be said to come up to the measure of a Divine Being or be entitled to be designated God. The agnostic does not deny that behind the phenomena of the universe there may be a Power, but whether there is or not, and if there is, whether that Power is a Force or a Person, are among the things unknown and unknowable, so that practically, God being outside and beyond the sphere of man's knowledge, it can never be of consequence whether there be a God or not—it can never be more than a subject of curious speculation, like that which engages the leisure time of some astronomers, whether there be inhabitants in the planet Mars or not. As thus expounded, the creed of the agnostic is open to serious objections. 1. It entirely ignores the spiritual factor in man's nature,—either denying the soul's existence altogether, or viewing it as merely a function of the body; or, if regarding it as a separate entity distinct from the body, and using its faculties to apprehend and reason about external objects, yet denying its ability to discern spiritual realities. On either alternative, it is contradicted by both Scripture and experience. From Genesis to Revelation the Bible proceeds upon the assumption that man is more than "six feet of clay," "curiously carved and wondrously articulated," that "there is a spirit in man," and that this spirit has power not only to apprehend things unseen but to come into touch with God and to be touched by Him, or, in Scripture phrase, to see and know God and to be seen and known by Him. Nor can it be denied that man is conscious of being more than animated matter, and of having power to apprehend more than comes within the range of his senses, for he can and does entertain ideas and cherish feelings that have at least no direct connection with the senses, and can originate thoughts, emotions and volitions that have not been excited by external objects. And as to knowing God, Christian experience attests the truth of Scripture when it says that this knowledge is no figure of speech or illusion of the mind, but a sober reality. It is as certain as language can make it that Abraham and Jacob, Moses and Joshua, Samuel and David, Isaiah and Jeremiah, had no doubt whatever that they knew God and were known of Him; and multitudes of Christians exist today whom it would not be easy to convince that they could not and did not know God, although not through the medium of the senses or even of the pure reason. 2. It takes for granted that things cannot be adequately known unless they are fully known. This proposition, however, cannot be sustained in either Science or Philosophy, in ordinary life or in religious experience. Science knows there are such things as life (vegetable and animal), and force (electricity and magnetism for example), but confesses its ignorance of what life and force are as to their essence—all that is understood about them being their properties and effects. Philosophy can expound the laws of thought, but is baffled to unriddle the secret of thought itself, how it is excited in the soul by nerve-movements caused by impressions from without, and how it can express itself by originating counter movements in the body. In ordinary life human beings know each other adequately for all practical purposes while aware that in each there are depths which the other cannot fathom, each being shut off from the other by what Prof. Dods calls "the limitations of personality." Nor is the case different in religious experience. The Christian, like Paul, may have no difficulty in saying, "Christ liveth in me," but he cannot explain to himself or others, how. Hence the inference must be rejected that because the finite mind cannot fully comprehend the infinite, therefore it cannot know the infinite at all, and must remain forever uncertain whether there is a God or not. Scripture, it should be noted, does not say that any finite mind can fully find out God; but it does say that men may know God from the things which He has made, and more especially from the Image of Himself which has been furnished in Jesus Christ, so that if they fail to know Him, they are without excuse. 3. It virtually undermines the foundations of morality. For if one cannot tell whether there is a God or not, how can one be sure that there is any such thing as morality? The distinctions between right and wrong which one makes in the regulation of his conduct may be altogether baseless. It is true a struggle may be made to keep them up out of a prudential regard for future safety, out of a desire to be on the winning side in case there should be a God. But it is doubtful if the imperative "ought" would long resound within one's soul, were the conclusion once reached that no one could tell whether behind the phenomena of nature or of consciousness there was a God or not. Morality no more than religion can rest on uncertainties. 3. The Boast of the Materialist "I Do Not Need a God; I Can Run the Universe Without One" Only grant him to begin with an ocean of atoms and a force to set them in motion and he will forthwith explain the mystery of creation. If we have what he calls a scientific imagination, he will let us see the whole process,—the molecules or atoms circling and whirling, dancing and skipping, combining and dividing, advancing and retiring, selecting partners and forming groups, closing in their ranks and opening them out again, building up space-filling masses, growing hotter and hotter as they wheel through space, whirling swifter and swifter, till through sheer velocity they swell and burst, after which they break up into fragments and cool down into a complete planetary system. Inviting us to light upon this globe, the materialist will show us how through long centuries, mounting up to millions of years, the various rocks which form the earth's crust were deposited. Nay, if we will dive with him to the bottom of the ocean he will point out the first speck of dead matter that sprang into life, protoplasm, though he cannot tell when or how. Having startled us with this, he will lead us up the Great Staircase of Nature with its 26 or 27 steps, and tell us how on this step the vegetable grew into an animal, and how after many more steps the animal became a man, and thus the whole evolutionary drama will be unrolled. Concerning this theory of the universe, however, it is pertinent to make these remarks: 1. Taken at its full value, with unquestioning admission of the alleged scientific facts on which it is based, it is at best only an inference or working hypothesis, which may or may not be true and which certainly cannot claim to be beyond dispute. 2. So far from securing universal acceptance, it has been repudiated by scientists of the highest repute. "The Kant-Laplace theory of the origin of the solar system by the whirling masses of nebulous matter, till rings flew off and became the worlds we see," says a German writer, "can no more be defended by any scientist" (Neue Kirchliche Zeitschrift, 1905; p. 957). The attempt to explain in this way the origin of the universe, says Merz, can be described as "belonging to the romance of science" (European Thought in the 19th Cent., p. 285). Indeed Laplace himself put it forward "with great reserve, and only as a likely suggestion" (ibid., p. 285). As regards the derivation of man from the lower animals, it is enough to remember that the late Prof. Virchow maintained that "we cannot designate it as a revelation of science, that man descends from the ape or from any other animal" (Nature, Dec. 8, 1877); that Prof. Paulsen, speaking of Haeckel, says "he belongs already to a dead generation," and calls his theory of materialistic evolution "an example of incredible frivolity in the treatment of serious problems" (see Princeton Review, Oct., 1906, p. 443); that Prof. Von E. Pfenningsdorf declares "the materialistic explanation of the world to be untenable" (see Theologische Rundschau, 1905, p. 85); that Fleischman in his book, "Die Desendenz Theorie," denies evolution altogether; that Dr. Rudolph Otto admits that "popular Darwinism (Darwinisms Vulgaris)," by which he means "that man is really descended from monkeys," is "theoretically worthless" (Naturalism and Religion, p. 94); and that Prof. Pettigrew of St. Andrew's University writes: "There is, it appears to me, no proof that man is directly descended from the ape, and indirectly from the mollusc or monad" (Design in Nature, Vol. III, p. 1324). 3. Conceding all that evolutionists demand, that from matter and force the present cosmos has been developed, the question remains, whether this excludes or renders unnecessary the intervention of God as the prime mover in the process. If it does, one would like to know whence matter and force came. For the atoms or molecules, formerly supposed to be ultimates and indivisible, have now been proved by science to be manufactured and capable of being analyzed into myriads of electrons; and it is hardly supposable that they manufactured themselves. Moreover, one would like to know how these atoms or electrons came to attract and repel one another and form combinations, if there was no original cause behind them and no aim before them? If even matter be construed as a form of energy, or force, the difficulty is not removed, since force in its last analysis is the output of will and will implies intelligence or conscious personality. From this conclusion escape is impossible, except by assuming that matter and force existed from eternity; in which case they must have contained in themselves the germs of life and intelligence—in other words must themselves have been God in posse, if not in esse, in potentiality if not in reality. But against this pantheistical assumption must ever lie the difficulty of explaining how or why the God that was latent in matter or force was so long in arriving at consciousness in man, and how before man appeared, the latent God being unconscious could have directed the evolutionary process which fashioned the cosmos. Till these inquiries are satisfactorily answered, it will not be possible to accept the materialistic solution of the Universe. 4. The Desire of the (Bible) Fool: "I Wish There Was No God" Only a few words need be given to this rejoinder, as the fool does not say in his intellect, but only in his heart, there is no God. In his case the wish is father to the thought. Secretly persuaded in his mind that there is a God, he would much rather there had been none. It would suit him better. But the fact that he cannot advance to a categorical denial of the Divine Existence is an indirect witness to the innate conviction which the human heart possesses, that there is a God in whom man lives and moves and has his being. 5. The Declaration of the Christian "I Cannot Do Without a God, Without a God I Can Neither Account for the Universe Around Me, Nor Explain Jesus Christ Above Me, Nor Understand The Spiritual Experiences Within Me" 1. Without a God the material universe around the Christian is and remains a perplexing enigma. When he surveys that portion of the universe which lies open to his gaze, he sees marks of wisdom, power and goodness that irresistibly suggest the idea of a God. When he looks upon the stellar firmament with its innumerable orbs, and considers their disposition and order, their balancing and circling, he instinctively argues that these shining suns and systems must have been created, arranged and upheld by a Divine Mind. When, restricting his attention to the earth on which he stands, he notes the indications of design or of adaptation of means to end which are everywhere visible, as witnessed, for example, in the constancy of nature's laws and forces, in the endless variety of nature's forms, inanimate and animate, as well as in their wonderful gradation not only in their kinds but also in the times of their appearing, and in the marvelous adjustment of organs to environment, he feels constrained to reason that these things are not the result of chance which is blind or the spontaneous output of matter, which in itself, so far as known to him, is powerless, lifeless and unintelligent, but can only be the handiwork of a Creative Mind. When further he reflects that in the whole round of human experience, effects have never been known to be produced without causes; that designs have never been known to be conceived or worked out without designers and artificers; that dead matter has never been known to spring into life either spontaneously or by the application of means; that one kind of life has never been known to transmute itself spontaneously or to be transmuted artificially into another, neither a vegetable into an animal, nor an animal into a man; and when lastly, accepting the guidance of science, he perceives that in the upward ascent or evolution of nature dead matter was, after an interval, perhaps of millions of years, followed by vegetable life, and this again by animal existence, and this by man precisely as Scripture asserts, he once more feels himself shut up to the conclusion that the whole cosmos must he the production of mind, even of a Supreme Intelligence infinitely powerful, wise and good. Like the Hebrew psalmist he feels impelled to say, "O Lord! how manifold are Thy works: in wisdom hast Thou made them all!" Should the philosopher interject, that this argument does not necessarily require an Infinite Intelligence but only an artificer capable of constructing such a universe as the present, the answer is that if such an artificer existed he himself would require to be accounted for, since beings that are finite must have begun to be, and therefore must have been caused. Accordingly, this artificer must have been preceded by another greater than himself, and that by another still greater, and so on traveling backwards forever. Hence it was argued by Kant that pure reason could not demonstrate the existence of God, but only of a competent demiurge or world-builder. But this reasoning is fallacious. The human mind cannot rest in an endless succession of effects without a First Cause, like a chain depending from nothing. Kant himself seemed to recognize the unsatisfactory character of his logic, since, after casting out God from the universe as Creator, he sought to bring Him in again as Supreme Moral Governor. But if man's moral nature cannot be explained without a Supreme Moral Lawgiver, on what principle can it be reasoned that man's intellectual nature demands less than a Supreme Intelligence? 2. Without a God the Christian cannot explain to himself the Person of Jesus. Leaving out of view what the Gospels report about His virgin birth (though we do not regard the narratives as unhistorical or the fact recorded as incredible), and fixing attention solely on the four records, the Christian discerns a personality that cannot be accounted for on ordinary principles. It is not merely that Jesus performed works such as none other man did, and spoke words such as never fell from mortal lips; it is that in addition His life was one of incomparable goodness—of unwearied philanthropy, self-sacrificing love, lowly humility, patient meekness and spotless purity—such as never before had been witnessed on earth, and never since has been exhibited by any of His followers. It is that Jesus, being such a personality as described by those who beheld His glory to be that of an only-begotten from a Father, full of grace and truth, put forth such pretensions and claims as were wholly unfitting in the lips of a mere man, and much more of a sinful man, declaring Himself to be the Light of the World and the Bread of Life: giving out that He had power to forgive sins and to raise the dead; that He had pre-existed before He came to earth and would return to that pre-existent state when His work was done, which work was to die for men's sins; that He would rise from the dead and ascend up into heaven, both of which He actually did; and asserting that He was the Son of God, the equal of the Father and the future Judge of mankind. The Christian studying this picture perceives that, while to it belong the lineaments of a man, it also wears the likeness of a God, and he reasons that if that picture was drawn from the life (and how otherwise could it have been drawn?) then a God must once have walked this earth in the person of Jesus. For the Christian no other conclusion is possible. Certainly not that of the New Theology, which makes of Jesus a sinful man, distinguishing Him from Christ, the so-called ideal figure of the creeds, and calling Him divine only in the sense that other men are divine though in a lesser degree than He. But even the New Theology cannot escape from the implication of its own creed. For if Jesus was the divinest man that ever lived on earth, then naturally His Word should carry more weight than that of any other, and He taught emphatically, not only that there was a personal God whose Son He was, but that men should pray: "Our Father which art in Heaven." 3. Without a God the Christian cannot understand the facts of his own consciousness. Take first the idea of God of which he finds himself possessed on arriving at the age of intelligence and responsibility. How it comes to pass that this great idea should arise within him if no such being as God exists, is something he cannot understand. To say that he has simply inherited it from his parents or absorbed it from his contemporaries is not to solve the problem, but only to put it back from generation to generation. The question remains, How did this idea first originate in the soul? To answer that it gradually grew up out of totemism and animism as practiced by the low-grade races who, impelled by superstitious fears, conceived material objects to be inhabited by ghosts or spirits, is equally an evasion of the problem. Because again the question arises, How did these low-grade races arrive at the conception of spirits as distinguished from bodies or material objects in general? Should it be responded that veneration for deceased ancestors begat the conception of a God, one must further demand by what process of reasoning they were conducted from the conception of as many gods as there were deceased ancestors to that of one Supreme Deity or Lord of all. The only satisfactory explanation of the latent consciousness of God which man in all ages and lands has shown himself to be possessed of is, that it is one of the soul's intuitions, a part of the intellectual and moral furniture with which it comes into the world; that at first this idea or intuition lies within the soul as a seed corn which gradually opens out as the soul rises into full possession of its powers and is appealed to by external nature; that had sin not entered into the world this idea or intuition would have everywhere expanded into full bloom, filling the soul with a clear and radiant conception of the Divine Being, in whose image it has been made; but that now in consequence of the blighting influence of sin this idea or intuition has been everywhere more or less dimmed and weakened and in heathen nations corrupted and debased. Then rising to the distinctly religious experience of conversion, the Christian encounters a whole series or group of phenomena which to him are inexplicable, if there is no God. Conscious of a change partly intellectual but mainly moral and spiritual, a change so complete as to amount to an inward revolution, what Scripture calls a new birth or a new creation, he cannot trace it to education or to environment, to philosophical reflection or to prudential considerations. The only reasonable account he can furnish of it is that he has been laid hold of by an unseen but Superhuman Power, so that he feels constrained to say like Paul: "By the grace of God I am what I am." And not only so, but as the result of this inward change upon his nature, he realizes that he stands in a new relation to that Supreme Power which has quickened and renewed him, that he can and does enter into personal communion with Him through Jesus Christ, addressing to Him prayers and receiving from Him benefits and blessings in answer to those prayers. These experiences of which the Christian is conscious may be characterized by the non-Christian as illusions, but to the Christian they are realities; and being realities they make it simply impossible for him to believe there is no God. Rather they inspire him with confidence that God is, and is the Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him, and that of Him and through Him and to Him are all things; to whom be glory for ever. Amen. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 83: - GOD IN CHRIST THE ONLY REVELATION OF... ======================================================================== God in Christ the Only Revelation of the Fatherhood of God By Robert E. Speer "They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the hour cometh, that whosoever killeth you shall think that he offereth service unto God. And these things will they do, because they have not known the Father nor me." (John 16:2-3). These words suggest to us that it is not enough for a man just to believe in God. Everything depends on what kind of a god it is in whom he believes. It is a rather striking and surprising comparison at first that our Lord institutes here between a mere belief in God and the possibly horrible moral consequences, on the one hand, and a knowledge of God in Christ and its sure moral effects, on the other. And the lesson would seem to he the inadequacy of any religious faith that does not recognize the revelation of the Father in Jesus Christ and that does not know Jesus Christ as God. It is a little hard for us to take such a great thought as this into our lives, and yet our Lord puts it in unmistakable clearness: on the one hand, the moral inadequacy of a mere belief in God; on the other hand, the moral and spiritual adequacy of a recognition of God as Father exposed in Christ as God. Theism Not Sufficient In the former of these two verses our Lord makes the first of these two points unmistakably clear. He saw no adequate guarantee of moral rectitude and justice in a mere theistic faith. He suffered in His own death the possibly bitter fruits of a mere theistic faith. The men who put Him to death were ardent believers in God, and they thought they were doing a fine thing for God when they crucified the Son of God. And He told His disciples that the day would come when conscientious men would take out service of God in executing them, and that those who would put them to death would not be bad men, but men who thought that by killing them they were doing God's will. We see exactly the same great error in our own day. It is no sufficient protection to a man to believe in one God. There are no more rigid monotheists in the world than Mohammedans, and there are some who tell us that in India the moral conditions of the Mohammedans are even worse than the moral conditions of the polytheistic Hindus around about them. It is not so much a matter of how many gods you believe in. I would rather believe in three good gods than in one bad one. One religion is superior to another religion, not because it has less or more gods than that other religion, but because the character of its gods is superior to the character of the gods of that other religion. Our Lord understood completely that a mere faith in God was not going to make a good man, that a man might believe in God and be a murderer, or an adulterer, he might believe in God and put the very apostles of Jesus Christ to death and think that thus he was doing God a great service. Conscientiousness Not Sufficient It seems to me that it is worth while to stop here for a moment incidentally to note how easy a thing it is for a man to be guilty of conscientious error and crime. It is no defense of a man's conduct to say that he is conscientiously satisfied with what he did. I suppose that most bad things have been done in all good conscience, and that most of the sins that we commit today we commit with a perfectly clean conscience. There is such a thing as a moral color-blindness that is just as real as a physical colorblindness. I was visiting a little while ago one of our well-known girls? schools, and had a discussion with one of the teachers, who said that she thought it did not make so much difference what a pupil believed or did, provided only she was conscientious in her belief and conduct. I told her that it must be quite easy to go to school to her if it did not matter whether you answered right or not, if only you were conscientiously honest in what you said. She might get two absolutely contrary answers to a question and mark each one of them perfect. The whole foundations of the moral universe fall out from beneath the man or the woman who will take that view of it, that there is not really any objective standard of right or wrong at all, that everything hinges on just how a person feels about it, and if they only feel comfortable over the thing it is all right. These men who were going to put the disciples of Jesus Christ to death had no qualms of conscience about it. They would think in doing it that they were doing God a service. The idea that our Lord means to bring out is this, that the standards of a man are dependent upon his conception of God, and He saw no guarantee of moral rectitude and justice in a man's life except as that man grasped the revelation of God as Father that had been made in Jesus Christ, and himself knew Jesus Christ as God. Christ's Mention of the "Father" There is no room here to trace this great thought through all the teaching of our Lord, but it would be a good and helpful thing if many of us would take the four Gospels and sit down with two sheets of paper, and write down on one sheet everything that Jesus had to say about the Father, and on the other every mention in Christ's teaching of the name of God. Lately, I read through the last discourses of Jesus in John with this in mind. Only four times does Jesus so much as mention the name of God, while He speaks of the Father at least forty times. Evidently our Lord conceived that His great message to men was a message of God as Father revealed in His own life, and He conceived this to be a great practical moral truth, that was to save men from those errors of judgment, of act and of character about which a man has no sure guarantee under a mere monotheistic faith. In Relation to our Religious Faith 1. I think we might just as well now go right to the heart of the thing by considering, first of all, THE RELATIONSHIP OF THIS REVELATION THAT JESUS CHRIST MADE OF THE FATHER-CHARACTER OF GOD IN HIMSELF TO OUR OWN RELIGIOUS FAITH. We begin our Christian creed with the declaration, "I believe in God the Father Almighty." I believe that no man can say those words sincerely and honestly, with an intellectual understanding of what he is saying, who is not saying them with his feet solidly resting on the evangelical conviction; for we know practically nothing about God as Father except what we learn from the revelation of God as Father in Jesus Christ. Men say sometimes that the idea of God as Father was in the Old Testament, and there is a sense doubtless in which we can find it there: a patriotic sense for one thing, a poetic sense for another thing. The Hebrews thought of God as the Father, the national Father of Israel. Now and then there is some splendid burst in the prophets that contains that idea, as when Jeremiah, crying out for God, says, "I am a Father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn." Or when Israel is itself crying out through Isaiah, "Jehovah is our Father. He is the potter and we are the clay." But in each sense it is a sort of nationalistic conception of God as the Father of the whole people Israel. And even when the note comes out poetically, it is patriotic still. Turn some time to the 103rd Psalm, where there is the best expression of it, "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him," and even there it is the national cry. Or turn to the 89th Psalm, and there, too, it is national and patriotic: "And he shall cry unto me, Jehovah, thou art my Father, my God; and the rock of my salvation." And if in all the great body of the religious poetry of Israel there are only two or three distinct notes of the fatherhood of God, we cannot believe that that idea filled any very large place in the heart of Israel. And in the very last of all the Old Testament prophecies, the complaint of God is just this, that the Israelites would not conceive of Him as their Father, and that even the political conception of God as the Father of the nation was no reality in the experience of the people. A New Conception The revelation of God as the Father of men was a practically new conception exposed in the teaching and in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ-not in His teaching alone. We should never have known God as Father by the message of Jesus Christ only; we should never have been able to conceive what Christ's idea of God was if we had not seen that idea worked out in the very person of Jesus Christ Himself. It was not alone that He told us what God was. He said that when He walked before men, He was Himself one with the Father on Whom the eyes of men might gaze: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no one cometh unto the Father, but by me. If ye had known me, ye would have known my Father also; from henceforth ye have known Him and have seen Him. Philip saith unto Him, Lord show us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus said unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, Show us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? The words that I say unto you I speak not from myself: but the Father abiding in me doeth His works." John and Matthew We cannot separate the Christological elements of the Gospel from the Gospel. The effort is made by throwing the Gospel of John out of court, and then we are told that with the Gospel of John gone the real work of Christ was just in His message, making known the Father to men, and that the Christological character that we impose upon the Gospel was something foisted upon it later, and not something lying in the mind and thought of Jesus Christ Himself. But I do not see how men can take that view of it until they cut out also the 11th chapter of Matthew. Christ sets forth there the essentially Christological character of His gospel just as unmistakably as it is set forth anywhere in the Gospel of John: "No man knoweth the Son save the Father; and no man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him." What I mean is just this, that the only defense of the Unitarian position is a ripping of the Gospel apart so that you cannot recognize it as the Gospel any more. You cannot tear Christ's revelation of the fatherhood of God away from the person of Christ. He did not expose the fatherhood of God by what He said; He exposed the father-hood of God by what He was; and it is a species of intellectual misconception to take certain words of His and say those words entitle us to believe in God as our Father, while we reject Jesus Christ as His Divine Son, and think that it is possible to hold to the first article of our Christian creed without going on to the second article of it, "And I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord." Christ Is All If you and I subtract from our conception of God what we owe to the person of Jesus Christ, we have practically nothing left. The disciples knew that they would have little left. When it was proposed that they should separate themselves from Christ and the revelation that He was making, these men stood absolutely dumbfounded. "Why, Lord," they said, "what is to become of us? We have no place to go. Thou hast the words of eternal life. There is nothing for us in Judaism any more." Monotheism was in Judaism; the revelation of God was in Judaism; but that was nothing to the disciples now that they had seen that glorious vision of His Father made known to men in Jesus Christ His Son. It would seem to follow that our attitude towards Jesus Christ is determinative of our life in the Father, and that the imagination that we have a life in the Father that rests on a rejection of the? claims of Jesus Christ is an imagination with no foundations under it at all. Take those great words of our Lord: "He that loveth me not keepeth not my words; and the word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father's who sent me. If man love me, he will keep my word: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him and make our abode with him." All through these last discourses of Jesus you come upon the two terms, "word" and "words." In the Greek they are not just the singular and the plural of the same word. The word that is translated "word" here is the same word that in the beginning of this Gospel is translated "word," logos, which does not mean the utterances of Jesus, which does not mean. the things that Jesus said, which does not mean the ideals of life that Jesus erected. We are not complying with that condition when we try to be kind and unselfish and to obey the Golden Rule. What Jesus is setting forth there as the condition of a right attitude toward God is a man's acceptance of the inner secret of His own life, a man's deliberate committing of himself to the great principles that underlie the character and the person of Jesus. a sympathetic union with Himself. And He summed it all up in those words to Philip, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." It is in this sense, I say, that you and I cannot honestly declare that we "believe in God the Father" unless we go right on to say, "And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord." for we know practically nothing about God as Father except what was revealed of God as Father in Him Who said, "I and the Father are one." Do we believe in the fatherhood of God in that sense? Practical Application 2. Perhaps we can answer that question better by going on to ask, in the second place, whether we are REALIZING IN OUR LIVES ALL THE PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THIS REVELATION OF THE FATHER CHARACTER OF GOD IN JESUS CHRIST. For one thing, think how it interprets the mystery and the testing of life. Now life is simply an enigma on the merely theistic hypothesis. We get absolutely no comfort, no light, no illumination upon what we know to be the great problem of life from a simple belief in God. It only becomes intelligible to us as we understand God to be our Father in the sense in which Jesus Christ revealed Him. Dr. Babcock used to put it in the simple phrase: "You have got to take one of two interpretations of it. You have got to read your life in the terms of fate, or you have got to read it in the terms of fatherhood." Once I accept the revelation of God made in Jesus Christ, my life is still a hard problem to me. There are many things in it that are terribly confused and difficult still; but I begin to get a little light on its deep and impenetrable mysteries. It was just in this point of view that the writer of the great epistle to the Hebrews thought he had some clue to the mystery of his own life, to the chastening of it, to the hard and burning discipline through which he sees we are all passing. It was only when he conceived of himself as being a son of the great Potter Who was shaping the clay Himself that the mystery began to clear a little from his pathway. And it was just so, you remember, that Christ got light on the mystery of His life: "Father, not my will, but thine be done." Only as He remembered and rested deeply upon the character of God as His Father did those great experiences through which He was passing have full intelligibility to Him. After all, it was no fancy that connected the two great ideas of Isaiah, the living idea of the fatherhood of God and the metaphorical idea of God as the Potter shaping his clay. It is only so that we understand both aspects of our human life. We turn to Rabbi Ben Ezra and see the mystery wrought out there: "He fixed thee mid this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent. Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed." When the wheel moves fast, and the hand of the Potter seems cruel upon the clay, and the friction is full of terrible heat, we begin to understand something of it all in realizing that the Potter's hand is the hand of a Father shaping in fatherly discipline the life of His son. "If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as sons." Our Ideals Or think, in the second place, how this conception of God inspires and rectifies the ideals of our lives. It was this that suggested the idea to Jesus here. He saw that there was absolutely no guarantee of right standards of life in a mere theistic faith, and there are none. We cannot morally trust Unitarianism if we take it away from living contact with the evangelical tradition. There is too much loose, subjective caprice in it, there is not enough firm and unassailable anchorage in the objective realities of a revelation of the character of God made known to us in His divine Son. We have no guarantee whatever of just and perfect moral ideals that we do not get from the exposure of the father-character of God in the person of Jesus Christ and from personal union with God in Him. As a simple matter of fact the best ideals of our life we all owe to just that revelation. The ideal of purity-the Jews never had it. They had an ideal of ritual cleanliness, but they had no Christian ideal of moral purity. You cannot find the ideal of purity anywhere in the world where the conception of the father-revelation of God in Christ has not gone. Explain it as you will, it is a simple fact of comparative religion. Can any man find the full ideal of moral purity anywhere in this world where it has not been created by the revelation of the father-character of God in Christ? We owe it to that, and we can not be sure of its perpetuation save where the conviction of that great revelation abides in the faith of man. Or take our ideal of work. Where did Christ get His ideal of work? "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." On what ground did He rest His claim upon men to work? "Son, go work today in my vineyard." Our whole ideal of a workingman's life, of a man's using his life to the fullness of its power in an unselfish service is an ideal born of the revelation of the father-character of God in Christ. And forgiveness is an ideal of the same kind. We owe all the highest and noblest ideals of our life to that revelation. And it seems to us something less than fair for a man to take those ideals and then deny their origin, trampling under foot the claims of Him from Whom those ideals came into our lives. Sweetens Obedience And think how rational and sweet this conception of God makes obedience. There is something rational but hardly sweet in the thought of obedience to Him under the simple theistic conception. All the joy of obedience comes when I think of myself as my Father's son and sent to do my Father's will. Our Lord thought of His life just so. "Simon," He said that last night that Simon tried to defend Him by force-"put up thy sword into its sheath. The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?" We get our ideals of obedience and the joy and the delight of obedience from the thought that after all we are simply to obey our Father. In the 14th chapter of the Gospel of John, we get a little vision of what Christ conceives to be the sweetness and the tenderness and the beauty that can come into life from a real acceptance of this revealing of His. "In that day," He says, "ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you. He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me; and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him and will manifest myself unto him. If a man love me, he will keep my word; and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him and make our abode with him." I remember an interview I had some years ago at Asheville. As we sat under the trees, the man with whom I was talking told me he had had a home; he was sure it was the sweetest home that could be found in all the Southern States; and he did not have it any more. The eye that had marked his coming and brightened when he came watched for him no more, and little arms that had been thrown around his neck, and that made his homecoming in the evening a very taste of heaven to him, were no longer there to greet him, nor any little voice to call to him as he came. And he told me that when first that great eclipse fell upon his life it seemed to him that the whole thing was done and that a man was not warranted in trying to live any more. But he found here in this 14th chapter of John these great assurances of which I have just been speaking, that there was another eye that could take the place of that eye that had waited in the years that had passed, other arms that could take the place of those little arms that were now busy with the other children round about the throne of God in heaven. There had come back into life the tenderness and mark you, that too is a thought that came when Jesus Christ revealed the Father in Himself-there had come back into his life the tenderness and the joy and the gentleness that he had known before, simply because now he had come a little more fully to realize what it was that Jesus Christ by His life and teachings had exposed for the life of man. Courage and Hope And what new courage and hope it brings into a man's life. You say to me, "Man, you have got to be like God," and I reply, "Take your preposterous blasphemy away. To be like God?" But you say to me, "He is your own Father, and you are His son. We are not asking you to become like that to which you are essentially unlike; we are simply asking you to become like your Father. It is His own nature in you that He will develop until restored to its full relationship to Him from Whom it came." You talk to us that way about our duty as men in the world, and it makes all the difference between death and life to us. If God the Father did not come near to men in Jesus Christ, I do not know what I am going to do; I do not know where to find the help that I know I need. Nowhere else in the world has any voice arisen to offer it to men. But if God came near men in Jesus Christ and thereby guaranteed our own kinship to Him, I may believe that I can become like Him Whose son I am. It is on just this ground that St. Paul makes his appeal: "Be ye therefore imitators of God as dear children." Relation to Prayer Life 3. And, last of all, think on THE LIGHT THAT THIS CONCEPTION OF GOD THROWS UPON OUR LIFE OF PRAYER. I suspect that prayer has been just a sham to many of us, or a thing that we have done because other people told us it was the thing to do. We never got anything out of it; it never meant anything to us. We might just as well have talked to stone walls as to pray the way we have prayed. We went out and said, "God," and we might just as well have said, "hills," or "mountains," or "trees," or anything else. Why have we not gone into the school of Christ and learned there, alike from His practice and His doctrine, what real prayer is and how a man can do it. You cannot find a single prayer of Christ addressed to God, not one; nor can you find a single prayer of Christ's in which He so much as mentions God. The third verse of the 17th chapter of John, which says, "And this is eternal life, that they might believe in thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent," may be an exception, but you will find that Westcott, and others of the best New Testament commentators, regard that phrase as a parenthesis of John the Evangelist, and not part of our Lord's great prayer. I hope I am not misunderstood. I am meaning only that Christ's conception of God and His practice of prayer did not rest merely on the theistic interpretation of the universe and the nature of its Creator in His majesty and almightiness. They rested on the father conception which He revealed in Himself. Just run over in your thought His prayers: the prayer that He taught us to pray, "Our Father, who art in heaven;" the prayer He offered Himself when the disciples of John the Baptist came to Him: "I thank thee, Father, lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and the understanding, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father, for it seemeth good in thy sight;" the prayer that He offered in the temple, when Philip and Andrew came to Him with the message about the Greeks who were seeking to see Him: "Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour? But for this cause came I unto this hour;" the prayer that He offered before the grave of Lazarus, "Father, I thank thee that thou hearest me, and I know that thou hearest me always;" the prayer that He put up in Gethsemane, "My Father, if this cup cannot pass from me except I drink it, thy will be done;" and the last prayer of all, when, as a tired little child, He lay down in His Father's arms and fell asleep: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." He never pushed God off into His almightiness; not once in all His life of supplication can you find Him dealing with God in this way. He never smote the heart with the chill of the divine attributes. You may be recalling, perhaps, that one cry of His from the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"-a quotation from one of the Psalms and a shout of victory. I think that could be demonstrated to be a shout of victory and not a cry of isolation; but that alone would be your exception. All the other times it was, "Father," "my Father," "holy Father," "righteous Father"-sometimes, we may believe, in the quiet intimacy of His secret consciousness, "my dear Father." What a reality this conception of prayer gives to it. We are not praying to any cold theistic God alone; we are praying to our Father made real to us, warm with the warmth of a great tenderness for us, living with a great consciousness of all our human suffering and struggle and conflict and need. It makes prayer, for one thing, a rational thing. I can go to my Father and ask Him for the things that I need. There is an exquisite passage in Andrew Bonar's journals in which he speaks of sitting one day in his study and looking out of his window and seeing two of his children pass through the fields. He said as he saw those little children making their way across the fields, the love in his heart overcame him, and he pushed his books away from him on the table, and went to the door and called out across the field to them, and they came running eagerly in response to their father's loving call. And when they had come, and he had caressed them, he said he gave each one of them something simply because the ecstasy of his fatherly love made it impossible that he should not do something then for those two children who were so dear to his heart. Do you suppose that God is an inferior sort of a father? Do you suppose that there are impulses in us toward our children, or in our fathers toward us, that are not simply just the dim and the faded suggestion of nobler and diviner impulses of the father heart of God? Prayer in the sense of supplication for real things becomes a rational reality to men who believe in God in Jesus Christ. Fellowship And how sweet it makes prayer in the sense of living fellowship. Do you suppose that we are nobler characters than that great Father after Whom these human fatherhoods of ours are named? Do you suppose that if it is sweet to us to have our little children come creeping to us in the dark, it is not sweet to our heavenly Father here, everywhere, to have men, His sons, come stealing to His side and His love? This is no excessive way of putting it. Is it not guaranteed to us by those words which our Lord spoke that Easter morning as He stood there by His open grave, and the woman who adored Him was about to clasp His feet, "Mary, go and tell my disciples that I ascend unto my Father, and your Father, my God and your God." Yes, that is the right way to put it today. No God for us, nowhere through the whole universe a real and satisfying God for us, except the God Who is discovered to us in Jesus Christ, and Who is calling to us today by the lips of Christ, "My son, O my son," and Who would have us call back to Him, if we be true men, "My Father, O my Father." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 84: - THE DEITY OF CHRIST ======================================================================== The Deity of Christ By Professor Benjamin B. Warfield, D. D., LL. D., Princeton Theological Seminary A recent writer has remarked that our assured conviction of the deity of Christ rests, not upon "proof-texts or passages, nor upon old arguments drawn from these, but upon the general fact of the whole manifestation of Jesus Christ, and of the whole impression left by Him upon the world." The antithesis is too absolute, and possibly betrays an unwarranted distrust of the evidence of Scripture. To make it just, we should read the statement rather thus: Our conviction of the deity of Christ rests not alone on the scriptural passages which assert it, but also on His entire impression on the world; or perhaps thus: Our conviction rests not more on the scriptural assertions than upon His entire manifestation. Both lines of evidence are valid; and when twisted together form an unbreakable cord. The prooftexts and passages do prove that Jesus was esteemed divine by those who companied with Him; that He esteemed Himself divine; that He was recognized as divine by those who were taught by the Spirit; that in fine, He was divine. But over and above this Biblical evidence the impression Jesus has left upon the world bears independent testimony to His deity, and it may well be that to many minds this will seem the most conclusive of all its evidences. It certainly is very cogent and impressive. Experience As Proof The justification which the author we have just quoted gives of his neglecting the scriptural evidence in favor of that borne by Jesus? impression on the world is also open to criticism. "Jesus Christ," he tells us, "is one of those essential truths which are too great to be proved, like God, or freedom, or immortality." Such things rest, it seems, not on proofs but on experience. We need not stop to point out that this experience is itself a proof. We wish rather to point out that some confusion seems to have been fallen into here between our ability to marshal the proof by which we are convinced and our accessibility to its force. It is quite true that "the most essential conclusions of the human mind are much wider and stronger than the arguments by which they are supported;" that the proofs "are always changing but the beliefs persist." But this is not because the conclusions in question rest on no sound proofs; but because we have not had the skill to adduce, in our argumentative presentations of them, the really fundamental proofs on which they rest. Unconscious Rationality A man recognizes on sight the face of his friend, or his own handwriting. Ask him how he knows this face to be that of his friend, or this handwriting to be his own, and he is dumb, or, seeking to reply, babbles nonsense. Yet his recognition rests on solid grounds, though he lacks analytical skill to isolate and state these solid grounds. We believe in God and freedom and immortality on good grounds, though we may not be able satisfactorily to analyze these grounds. No true conviction exists without adequate rational grounding in evidence. So, if we are solidly assured of the deity of Christ, it will be on adequate grounds, appealing to the reason. But it may well be on grounds not analyzed, perhaps not analyzable, by us, so as to exhibit themselves in the forms of formal logic. We do not need to wait to analyze the grounds of our convictions before they operate to produce convictions, any more than we need to wait to analyze our food before it nourishes us; and we can soundly believe on evidence much mixed with error, just as we can thrive on food far from pure. The alchemy of the mind, as of the digestive tract, knows how to separate out from the mass what it requires for its support; and as we may live without any knowledge of chemistry, so we may possess earnest convictions, solidly founded in right reason, without the slightest knowledge of logic. The Christian's conviction of the deity of his Lord does not depend for its soundness on the Christian's ability convincingly to state the grounds of his conviction. The evidence he offers for it may be wholly inadequate, while the evidence on which it rests may be absolutely compelling. Testimony in Solution The very abundance and persuasiveness of the evidence of the deity of Christ greatly increases the difficulty of adequately stating it. This is true even of the scriptural evidence, as precise and definite as much of it is. For it is a true remark of Dr. Dale's that the particular texts in which it is definitely asserted are far from the whole, or even the most impressive, proofs which the Scriptures supply of our Lord's deity. He compares these texts to the salt-crystals which appear on the sand of the sea-beach after the tide has receded. "These are not," he remarks, "the strongest, though they may be the most apparent, proofs that the sea is salt; the salt is present in solution in every bucket of sea-water." The deity of Christ is in solution in every page of the New Testament. Every word that is spoken of Him, every word which He is reported to have spoken of Himself, is spoken on the assumption that He is God. And that is the reason why the "criticism" which addresses itself to eliminating the testimony of the New Testament to the deity of our Lord has set itself a hopeless task. The New Testament itself would have to be eliminated. Nor can we get behind this testimony. Because the deity of Christ is the presupposition of every word of the New Testament, it is impossible to select words out of the Blew Testament from which to construct earlier documents in which the deity of Christ shall not be assumed. The assured conviction of the deity of Christ is coeval with Christianity itself. There never was a Christianity, neither in the times of the Apostles nor since, of which this was not a prime tenet. A Saturated Gospel Let us observe in an example or two how thoroughly saturated the Gospel narrative is with the assumption of the deity of Christ, so that it crops out in the most unexpected ways and places. In three passages of Matthew, reporting words of Jesus, He is represented as speaking familiarly and in the most natural manner in the world, of "His angels" (Matthew 13:41; Matthew 16:27; Matthew 24:31). In all three He designates Himself as the "Son of man"; and in all three there are additional suggestions of His majesty. "The Son of man shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that cause stumbling and those that do iniquity, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire." Who is this Son of man who has angels, by whose instrumentality the final judgment is executed at His command? "The Son of man shall come in the glory of His Father with His angels; and then shall He reward every man according to his deeds." Who is this Son of man surrounded by His angels, in whose hands are the issues of life? The Son of man "shall send forth His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other." Who is this Son of man at whose behest His angels winnow men? A scrutiny of the passages will show that it is not a peculiar body of angels which is meant by the Son of man's angels, but just the angels as a body, who are His to serve Him as He commands. In a word, Jesus Christ is above angels (Mark 13:32)-as is argued at explicit length at the beginning of the Epistle to the Hebrews. "To which of the angels said he at any time, Sit on my right hand. etc." (Hebrews 1:13). Heaven Come to Earth There are three parables recorded in the fifteenth chapter of Luke as spoken by our Lord in His defense against the murmurs of the Pharisees at His receiving sinners and eating with them. The essence of the defense which our Lord offers for Himself is, that there is joy in heaven over repentant sinners! Why "in heaven," "before the throne of God"? Is He merely setting the judgment of heaven over against that of earth, or pointing forward to His future vindication? By no means. He is representing His action in receiving sinners, in seeking the lost, as His proper action, because it is the normal conduct of heaven, manifested in Him. He is heaven come to earth. His defense is thus simply the unveiling of what the real nature of the transaction is. The lost when they come to Him are received because this is heaven's way; and He cannot act otherwise than in heaven's way. He tacitly assumes the good Shepherd's part as His own. The Unique Position All the great designations are not so much asserted as assumed by Him for Himself. He does not call Himself a prophet, though He accepts this designation from others: He places Himself above all the prophets, even above John the greatest of the prophets, as Him to whom all the prophets look forward. If He calls Himself Messiah, He fills that term, by doing so, with a deeper significance, dwelling ever on the unique relation of Messiah to God as His representative and His Son. Nor is He satisfied to represent Himself merely as standing in a unique relation to God: He proclaims Himself to be the recipient of the divine fullness, the sharer in all that God has (Matthew 11:28). He speaks freely of Himself indeed as God's Other, the manifestation of God on earth, whom to have seen was to have seen the Father also, and who does the work of God on earth. He openly claims divine prerogatives-the reading of the heart of man, the forgiveness of sins, the exercise of all authority in heaven and earth. Indeed, all that God has and is He asserts Himself to have and be; omnipotence, omniscience, perfection belong as to the one so to the other. Not only does He perform all divine acts; His self-consciousness coalesces with the divine consciousness. If His followers lagged in recognizing His deity, this was not because He was not God or did not sufficiently manifest His deity. It was because they were foolish and slow of heart to believe what lay patently before their eyes. The Great Proof The Scriptures give us evidence enough, then, that Christ is God. But the Scriptures are far from giving us all the evidence we have. There is, for example, the revolution which Christ has wrought in the world, if, indeed, it were asked what the most convincing proof of the deity of Christ is, perhaps the best answer would be, just Christianity. The new life He has brought into the world; the new creation which He has produced by His life and work in the world; here are at least His most palpable credentials. Take it objectively. Read such a book as Harnack's "The Expansion of Christianity," or such an one as Von Dobschfitz's "Christian Life in the Primitive Church"-neither of which allows the deity of Christ-and then ask, Could these things have been wrought by power less than divine? And then remember that these things were not only wrought in that heathen world two thousand years ago, but have been wrought over again every generation since; for Christianity has re-conquered the world to itself each generation. Think of how the Christian proclamation spread, eating its way over the world like fire in the grass of a prairie. Think how, as it spread, it transformed lives. The thing, whether in its objective or in its subjective aspect, were incredible, had it not actually occurred. "Should a voyager," says Charles Darwin, "chance to be on the point of shipwreck on some unknown coast, he will most devoutly pray that the lesson of the missionary may have reached thus far. The lesson of the missionary is the enchanter's wand." Could this transforming influence, undiminished after two millenniums, have proceeded from a mere man? It is historically impossible that the great movement which we call Christianity, which remains unspent after all these years, could have originated in a merely human impulse; or could represent today the working of a merely human force. The Proof Within Or take it subjectively. Every Christian has within himself the proof of the transforming power of Christ, and can repeat the blind man's syllogism: Why herein is the marvel that ye know not whence He is, and yet He opened my eyes. "Spirits are not touched to fine issues who are not finely touched." "Shall we trust," demands an eloquent reasoner, "the touch of our fingers, the sight of our eyes, the hearing of our ears, and not trust our deepest consciousness of our higher nature-the answer of conscience, the flower of spiritual gladness, the glow of spiritual love? To deny that spiritual experience is as real as physical experience is to slander the noblest faculties of our nature. It is to say that one half of our nature tells the truth, and the other half utters lies. The proposition that facts in the spiritual region are less real than facts in the physical realm contradicts all philosophy." The transformed hearts of Christians, registering themselves "in gentle tempers, in noble motives, in lives visibly lived under the empire of great aspirations"-these are the ever-present proofs of the divinity of the Person from whom their inspiration is drawn. The supreme proof to every Christian of the deity of his Lord is then his own inner experience of the transforming power of his Lord upon the heart and life. Not more surely does he who feels the present warmth of the sun know that the sun exists, than he who has experienced the re-creative power of the Lord know Him to be his Lord and his God. Here is, perhaps we may say the proper, certainly we must say the most convincing, proof to every Christian of the deity of Christ; a proof which he cannot escape, and to which, whether he is capable of analyzing it or drawing it out in logical statement or not, he cannot fail to yield his sincere and unassailable conviction. Whatever else he may or may not be assured of, he knows that his Redeemer lives. Because He lives, we shall live also-that was the Lord's own assurance. Because we live, He lives also-that is the ineradicable conviction of every Christian heart. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 85: - THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF CHRIST ======================================================================== The Virgin Birth of Christ By Professor James Orr, D. D. United Free Church College, Glasgow, Scotland It is well known that the last ten or twenty years have been marked by a determined assault upon the truth of the Virgin birth of Christ. In the year 1892 a great controversy broke out in Germany, owing to the refusal of a pastor named Schrempf to use the Apostles' Creed in baptism because of disbelief in this and other articles. Schrempf was deposed, and an agitation commenced against the doctrine of the Virgin birth which has grown in volume ever since. Other tendencies, especially the rise of an extremely radical school of historical criticism, added force to the negative movement. The attack is not confined, indeed, to the article of the Virgin birth. It affects the whole supernatural estimate of Christ-His life, His claims, His sinlessness, His miracles, His resurrection from the dead. But the Virgin birth is assailed with special vehemence, because it is supposed that the evidence for this miracle is more easily got rid of than the evidence for public facts, such as the resurrection. The result is that in very many quarters the Virgin birth of Christ is openly treated as a fable. Belief in it is scouted as unworthy of the twentieth century intelligence. The methods of the oldest opponents of Christianity are revived, and it is likened to the Greek and Roman stories, coarse and vile, of heroes who had gods for their fathers. A special point is made of the silence of Paul, and of the other writings of the New Testament, on this alleged wonder. The Unhappiest Feature It is not only, however, in the circles of unbelief that the Virgin birth is discredited; in the church itself the habit is spreading of casting doubt upon the fact, or at least of regarding it as no essential part of Christian faith. This is the unhappiest feature in this unhappy controversy. Till recently no one dreamed of denying that, in the sincere profession of Christianity, this article, which has stood from the beginning in the forefront of all the great creeds of Christendom, was included. Now it is different. The truth and value of the article of the Virgin birth are challenged. The article, it is affirmed, did not belong to the earliest Christian tradition, and the evidence for it is not strong. Therefore, let it drop. The Company It Keeps From the side of criticism, science, mythology, history and comparative religion, assault is thus made on the article long so dear to the hearts of Christians and rightly deemed by them so vital to their faith For loud as is the voice of denial, one fact must strike every careful observer of the conflict. Among those who reject the Virgin birth of the Lord few will be found-I do not know any-who take in other respects an adequate view of the Person and work of the Saviour. It is surprising how clearly the line of division here reveals itself. My statement publicly made and printed has never been confuted, that those who accept a full doctrine of the incarnation . . . that is, of a true entrance of the eternal Son of God into our nature for the purposes of man's salvation-with hardly an exception accept with it the doctrine of the Virgin birth of Christ, while those who repudiate or deny this article of faith either hold a lowered view of Christ's Person, or, more commonly, reject His supernatural claims altogether. It will not be questioned, at any rate, that the great bulk of the opponents of the Virgin birth-those who are conspicuous by writing against it-are in the latter class. A Cavil Answered This really is an answer to the cavil often heard that, whether true or not, the Virgin birth is not of essential importance. It is not essential, it is urged, to Christ's sinlessness, for that would have been secured equally though Christ had been born of two parents. And it is not essential to the incarnation. A hazardous thing, surely, for erring mortals to judge of what was and was not essential in so stupendous an event as the bringing in of the "first-begotten" into the world! But the Christian instinct has ever penetrated deeper. Rejection of the Virgin birth seldom, if ever, goes by itself. As the late Prof. A. B. Bruce said, with denial of the Virgin birth is apt to go denial of the virgin life. The incarnation is felt by those who think seriously to involve a miracle in Christ's earthly origin. This will become clearer as we advance. The Case Stated It is the object of this paper to show that those who take the lines of denial on the Virgin birth just sketched do great injustice to the evidence and importance of the doctrine they reject. The evidence, if not of the same public kind as that for the resurrection, is far stronger than the objector allows, and the fact denied enters far more vitally into the essence of the Christian faith than he supposes. Placed in its right setting among the other truths of the Christian religion, it is not only no stumbling-block to faith, but is felt to fit in with self-evidencing power into the connection of these other truths, and to furnish the very explanation that is needed of Christ's holy and supernatural Person. The ordinary Christian is a witness here. In reading the Gospels, he feels no incongruity in passing from the narratives of the Virgin birth to the wonderful story of Christ's life in the chapters that follow, then from these to the pictures of Christ's divine dignity given in John and Paul. The whole is of one piece: the Virgin birth is as natural at the beginning of the life of such an One-the divine Son-as the resurrection is at the end. And the more closely the matter is considered, the stronger does this impression grow. It is only when the scriptural conception of Christ is parted with that various difficulties and doubts come in. A Superficial View It is, in truth, a very superficial way of speaking or thinking of the Virgin birth to say that nothing depends on this belief for our estimate of Christ. Who that reflects on the subject carefully can fail to see that if Christ was virgin born-if He was truly "conceived," as the creed says, "by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary"-there must of necessity enter a supernatural element into His Person; while, if Christ was sinless, much more, if He was the very Word of God incarnate, there must have been a miracle-the most stupendous miracle in the universe-in His origin? If Christ was, as John and Paul affirm and His church has ever believed, the Son of God made flesh, the second Adam, the new redeeming Head of the race, a miracle was to be expected in His earthly origin; without a miracle such a Person could never have been. Why then cavil at the narratives which declare the fact of such a miracle? Who does not see that the Gospel history would have been incomplete without them? Inspiration here only gives to faith what faith on its own grounds imperatively demands for its perfect satisfaction. The Historical Setting It is time now to come to the Scripture itself, and to look at the fact of the Virgin birth in its historical setting, and its relation with other truths of the Gospel. As preceding the examination of the historical evidence, a little may be said, first, on the Old Testament preparation. Was there any such preparation? Some would say there was not, but this is not God's way, and we may look with confidence for at least some indications which point in the direction of the New Testament event. The First Promise One's mind turns first to that oldest of all evangelical promises, that the seed of the woman would bruise the head of the serpent. "I will put enmity," says Jehovah to the serpent-tempter, "between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel" (Genesis 3:15. R.V.). It is a forceless weakening of this first word of Gospel in the Bible to explain it of a lasting feud between the race of men and the brood of serpents. The serpent, as even Dr. Driver attests, is "the representative of the power of evil"-in later Scripture, "he that is called the Devil and Satan" (Revelation 12:9)-and the defeat he sustains from the woman's seed is a moral and spiritual victory. The "seed" who should destroy him is described emphatically as the woman's seed. It was the woman through whom sin had entered the race; by the seed of the woman would salvation come. The early church Writers often pressed this analogy between Eve and the Virgin Mary. We may reject any element of overexaltation of Mary they connected with it, but it remains significant that this peculiar phrase should be chosen to designate the future deliverer. I cannot believe the choice to be of accident. The promise to Abraham was that in his seed the families of the earth would be blessed; there the male is emphasized, but here it is the woman the woman distinctively. There is, perhaps, as good scholars have thought, an allusion to this promise in 1 Timothy 2:15, where, with allusion to Adam and Eve, it is said, "But she shall be saved through her (or the) child-bearing" (R. V.). The Immanuel Prophecy The idea of the Messiah, gradually gathering to itself the attributes of a divine King, reaches one of its clearest expressions in the great Immanuel prophecy, extending from Isaiah 7 to 9:7, and centering in the declaration: "The Lord Himself will give you [the unbelieving Ahaz] a sign; behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel" (Isaiah 7:14; Isaiah 8:8; Isaiah 8:10). This is none other than the child of wonder extolled in Isaiah 9:6-7 : "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, [Father of Eternity], The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom," etc. This is the prophecy quoted as fulfilled in Christ's birth in Matthew 1:23, and it seems also alluded to in the glowing promises to Mary in Luke 1:32-33. It is pointed out in objection that the term rendered "virgin" in Isaiah does not necessarily bear this meaning; it denotes properly only a young unmarried woman. The context, however, seems clearly to lay an emphasis on the unmarried state, and the translators of the Greek version of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) plainly so understood it when they rendered it by parthenos, a word which does mean "virgin." The tendency in many quarters now is to admit this (Dr. Cheyne, etc.), and even to seek an explanation of it in alleged Babylonian beliefs in a virgin birth. This last, however, is quite illusory.* [* For the evidence, see my volume on "The Virgin Birth," Lecture VII.] It is, on the other hand, singular that the Jews themselves do not seem to have applied this prophecy at any time to the Messiah-a fact which disproves the theory that it was this text which suggested the story of a Virgin birth to the early disciples. Echoes in Other Scriptures It was, indeed, when one thinks of it, only on the supposition that there was to be something exceptional and extraordinary in the birth of this child called Immanuel that it could have afforded to Ahaz a sign of the perpetuity of the throne of David on the scale of magnitude proposed ("Ask it either in the depth, or in the height above." Ver. 10). We look, therefore, with interest to see if there are any echoes or suggestions of the idea of this passage in other prophetic scriptures. They are naturally not many, but they do not seem to be altogether wanting. There is, first, the remarkable Bethlehem prophecy in Micah 5:2-3 -also quoted as fulfilled in the nativity (Matthew 2:5-6)-connected with the saying: "Therefore will he give them up, until the time that she who travaileth hath brought forth" ("The King from Bethlehem," says Delitzsch, "who has a nameless one as mother, and of whose father there is no mention"). Micah was Isaiah's contemporary, and when the close relation between the two is considered (Cf. Isaiah 2:2-4, with Micah 4:1-3), it is difficult not to recognize in his oracle an expansion of Isaiah's. In the same line would seem to lie the enigmatic utterance in Jeremiah 31:22 : "For Jehovah hath created a new thing in the earth: a woman shall encompass a man" (thus Delitzsch, etc.). Testimony of the Gospel The germs now indicated in prophetic scriptures had apparently borne no fruit in Jewish expectations of the Messiah, when the event took place which to Christian minds made them luminous with predictive import. In Bethlehem of Judea, as Micah had foretold, was born of a virgin mother He whose "goings forth" were "from of old, from everlasting" (Micah 5:2; Matthew 2:6). Matthew, who quotes the first part of the verse, can hardly have been ignorant of the hint of pre-existence it contained. This brings us to the testimony to the miraculous birth of Christ in our first and third Gospels-the only Gospels which record the circumstances of Christ's birth at all. By general consent the narratives in Matthew (chapters 1,2) and in Luke (chapters 1,2) are independent-that is, they are not derived one from the other-yet they both affirm, in detailed story, that Jesus, conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, was born of a pure virgin, Mary of Nazareth, espoused to Joseph, whose wife she afterwards became. The birth took place at Bethlehem, whither Joseph and Mary had gone for enrollment in a census that was being taken. The announcement was made to Mary beforehand by an angel, and the birth was preceded, attended, and followed by remarkable events that are narrated (birth of the Baptist, with annunciations, angelic vision to the shepherds, visit of wise men from the east, etc.). The narratives should be carefully read at length to understand the comments that follow. The Testimony Tested There is no doubt, therefore, about the testimony to the Virgin birth, and the question which now arises is-What is the value of these parts of the Gospels as evidence? Are they genuine parts of the Gospels? Or are they late and untrustworthy additions? From what sources may they be presumed to be derived? It is on the truth of the narratives that our belief in the Virgin birth depends. Can they be trusted? Or are they mere fables, inventions, legends, to which no credit can be attached? The answer to several of these questions can be given in very brief form. The narratives of the nativity in Matthew and Luke are undoubtedly genuine parts of their respective Gospels. They have been there since ever the Gospels themselves had an existence. The proof of this is convincing. The chapters in question are found in every manuscript and version of the Gospels known to exist. There are hundreds of manuscripts, some of them very old, belonging to different parts of the world, and many versions in different languages (Latin, Syrian, Egyptian, etc.), but these narratives of the Virgin birth are found in all. We know, indeed, that a section of the early Jewish Christians-the Ebionites, as they are commonly called-possessed a Gospel based on Matthew from which the chapters on the nativity were absent. But this was not the real Gospel of Matthew: it was at best a mutilated and corrupted form of it. The genuine Gospel, as the manuscripts attest, always had these chapters. Next, as to the Gospels themselves, they were not of late and non-apostolic origin; but were written by apostolic men, and were from the first accepted and circulated in the church as trustworthy embodiments of sound apostolic tradition. Luke's Gospel was from Luke's own pen-its genuineness has recently received a powerful vindication from Prof. Harnack, of Berlin-and Matthew's Gospel, while some dubiety still rests on its original language (Aramaic or Greek), passed without challenge in the early church as the genuine Gospel of the Apostle Matthew. Criticism has more recently raised the question whether it is only the "groundwork" of the discourses (the "Logia") that comes directly from, Matthew. However this may be settled, it is certain that the Gospel in its Greek form always passed as Matthew's. It must, therefore, if not written by him, have had his immediate authority. The narratives come to us, accordingly, with high apostolic sanction. Sources of the Narratives As to the sources of the narratives, not a little can he gleaned from the study of their internal character. Here two facts reveal themselves. The first is that the narrative of Luke is based on some old, archaic, highly original Aramaic writing. Its Aramaic character gleams through its every part. In style, tone, conception, it is highly primitive-emanates, apparently, from that circle of devout people in Jerusalem to whom its own pages introduce us (Luke 2:25; Luke 2:36-38). It has, therefore, the highest claim to credit. The second fact is even more important. A perusal of the narratives shows clearly-what might have been expected that the information they convey was derived from no lower source than Joseph and Mary themselves. This is a marked feature of contrast in the narratives-that Matthew's narrative is all told from Joseph's point of view, and Luke's is all told from Mary's. The signs of this are unmistakable. Matthew tells about Joseph's difficulties and action, and says little or nothing about Mary's thoughts and feelings. Luke tells much about Mary-even her inmost thoughts-but says next to nothing directly about Joseph. The narratives, in short, are not, as some would have it, contradictory, but are independent and complementary. The one supplements and completes the other. Both together are needed to give the whole story. They bear in themselves the stamp of truth, honesty, and purity, and are worthy of all acceptation, as they were evidently held to be in the early church. Unfounded Objections Against the acceptance of these early, well-attested narratives, what, now, have the objectors to allege? I pass by the attempts to show, by critical elimination (expurging Luke 1:35, and some other clauses), that Luke's narrative was not a narrative of a Virgin birth at all. This is a vain attempt in face of the testimony of manuscript authorities. Neither need I dwell on the alleged "discrepancies" in the genealogies and narratives. These are not serious, when the independence and different standpoints of the narratives are acknowledged. The genealogies, tracing the descent of Christ from David along different lines, present problems which exercise the minds of scholars, but they do not touch the central fact of the belief of both Evangelists in the birth of Jesus from a virgin. Even in a Syriac manuscript which contains the certainly wrong reading, "Joseph begat Jesus," the narrative goes on, as usual, to recount the Virgin birth. It is not a contradiction, if Matthew is silent on the earlier residence in Nazareth, which Luke's object led him fully to describe. Silence of Mark and John The objection on which most stress is laid (apart from what is called the evidently "mythical" character of the narratives) is the silence on the Virgin birth in the remaining Gospels, and other parts of the New Testament. This, it is held, conclusively proves that the Virgin birth was not known in the earliest Christian circles, and was a legend of later origin. As respects the Gospels-Mark and John-the objection would only apply if it was the design of these Gospels to narrate, as the others do, the circumstances of the nativity. But this was evidently not their design. Both Mark and John knew that Jesus had a human birth-an infancy and early life-and that His mother was called Mary, but of deliberate purpose they tell us nothing about it. Mark begins his Gospel with Christ's entrance on His public ministry, and says nothing of the period before, especially of how Jesus came to be called "the Son of God" (Mark 1:1). John traces the divine descent of Jesus, and tells us that the "Word became flesh" (John 1:14); but how this miracle of becoming flesh was wrought he does not say. It did not lie within his plan. He knew the church tradition on the subject: he had the Gospels narrating the birth of Jesus from the Virgin in his hands: and he takes the knowledge of their teaching for granted. To speak of contradiction in a case like this is out of the question. Silence of Paul How far Paul was acquainted with the facts of Christ's earthly origin it is not easy to say. To a certain extent these facts would always be regarded as among the privacies of the innermost Christian circles so long at least as Mary lived-and the details may not have been fully known till the Gospels were published. Paul admittedly did not base his preaching of his Gospel on these private, interior matters, but on the broad, public facts of Christ's ministry, death, and resurrection. It would be going too far, however, to infer from this that Paul had no knowledge of the miracle of Christ's birth. Luke was Paul's companion, and doubtless shared with Paul all the knowledge which he himself had gathered on this and other subjects. One thing certain is, that Paul could not have believed in the divine dignity, the pre-existence, the sinless perfection, and redeeming headship, of Jesus as he did, and not have been convinced that His entrance into humanity was no ordinary event of nature, but implied an unparalleled miracle of some kind. This Son of God, who "emptied" Himself, who was "born of a woman, born under the law," who "knew no sin" (Php_2:7-8; Galatians 4:4; 2 Corinthians 5:21), was not, and could not be, a simple product of nature. God must have wrought creatively in His human origin. The Virgin birth would be to Paul the most reasonable and credible of events. So also to John, who held the same high view of Christ's dignity and holiness. Christ's Sinlessness a Proof It is sometimes argued that a Virgin birth is no aid to the explanation of Christ's sinlessness. Mary being herself sinful in nature, it is held the taint of corruption would be conveyed by one parent as really as by two. It is overlooked that the whole fact is not expressed by saying that Jesus was born of a virgin mother. There is the other factor-"conceived by the Holy Ghost." What happened was a divine, creative miracle wrought in the production of this new humanity which secured, from its earliest germinal beginnings, freedom from the slightest taint of sin. Paternal generation in such an origin is superfluous. The birth of Jesus was not, as in ordinary births, the creation of a new personality. It was a divine Person-already existing-entering on this new mode of existence. Miracle could alone effect such a wonder. Because His human nature had this miraculous origin Christ was the "holy" One from the commencement (Luke 1:35). Sinless He was, as His whole life demonstrated; but when, in all time, did natural generation give birth to a sinless personality? The Early Church a Witness The history of the early church is occasionally appealed to in witness that the doctrine of the Virgin birth was not primitive. No assertion could be more futile. The early church, so far as we can trace it back, in all its branches, held this doctrine. No Christian sect is known that denied it, save the Jewish Ebionites formerly alluded to. The general body of the Jewish Christians-the Nazarenes as they are called-accepted it. Even the greater Gnostic sects in their own way admitted it. Those Gnostics who denied it were repelled with all the force of the church's greatest teachers. The Apostle John is related to have vehemently opposed Cerinthus, the earliest teacher with whom this denial is connected. Discredited Vagaries What more remains to be said? It would be waste of space to follow the objectors into their various theories of a mythical origin of this belief. One by one the speculations advanced have broken down, and given place to others all equally baseless. The newest of the theories seeks an origin of the belief in ancient Babylonia, and supposes the Jews to have possessed the notion in pre-Christian times. This is not only opposed to all real evidence, but is the giving up of the contention that the idea had its origin in late Christian circles, and was unknown to earlier apostles. The Real Christ Doctrinally, it must be repeated that the belief in the Virgin birth of Christ is of the highest value for the right apprehension of Christ's unique and sinless personality. Here is One, as Paul brings out in Romans 5:12 ff., who, free from sin Himself, and not involved in the Adamic liabilities of the race, reverses the curse of sin and death brought in by the first Adam, and establishes the reign of righteousness and life. Had Christ been naturally born, not one of these things could be affirmed of Him. As one of Adam's race, not an entrant from a higher sphere, He would have shared in Adam's corruption and doom-would Himself have required to be redeemed. Through God's infinite mercy, He came from above, inherited no guilt, needed no regeneration or sanctification, but became Himself the Redeemer, Regenerator, Sanctifier, for all who receive Him. "Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable gift" (2 Corinthians 9:15). ======================================================================== CHAPTER 86: - THE GOD-MAN ======================================================================== The God-Man By the Late John Stock The God-Man* [* Abbreviated and published by permission of the American Baptist Publication Society.] Jesus of Nazareth was not mere man, excelling others in purity of life and conduct and in sincerity of purpose, simply distinguished from other teachers by the fullness of His knowledge. He is the God-man. Such view of the person of Messiah is the assured foundation of the entire Scriptural testimony to Him, and it is to be irresistibly inferred from the style and strain in which He habitually spake of Himself. Of this inferential argument of the Saviour we can give here the salient points only in briefest presentation. 1. Jesus claimed to be the Son of God. We meet with this title in the Book of Daniel. It was used by Nebuchadnezzar to describe that fourth wonderful personage who walked with the three Hebrew confessors in the fire (3:25), and who was, doubtless, the Lord Jesus Christ revealing Himself in an assumed bodily form to His heroic servants. This majestic title is repeatedly appropriated to Himself by our Master. (See John 5:25; John 9:35; John 11:4, etc.) In His interview with Nicodemus He designated Himself, "The Only Begotten Son of God" (John 3:18). When confronted with the Sanhedrim, Jesus was closely questioned about His use of this title; and He pleaded guilty to the indictment. (See Matthew 26:63-64; Matthew 27:43; cf. Luke 22:70-71, and John 19:7). It is clear from the narrative that the Jews understood this glorious name in the lips of Jesus to be a blasphemous assertion of divine attributes for Himself. They understood Jesus to thus claim equality with God (see John 5:18); and to make Himself God. (See John 10:33). Did they understand Him? Did they overestimate the significance of this title as claimed by our Lord? How easy it would have been for Him to set them right. How imperative were His obligations to do so, not merely to Himself, but to these unhappy men who were thirsting for His blood under a misapprehension. Did not every principle of philanthropy require Him to save them from the perpetration of the terrible murder which He knew they were contemplating? Yes, if they were mistaken, it was a heinous crime in our Lord not to undeceive them. But not a word did He say to soften down the offensiveness of His claim. He allowed it to stand in all its repulsiveness to the Jewish mind, and died without making any sign that He had been misapprehended. He thus accepted the Jewish interpretation of His meaning, and sealed that sense of the title, Son of God, with His heart's blood. Nothing can be clearer, then, than the fact that Jesus died without a protest for claiming equality with God, and thus making Himself God. We dare not trust ourselves to write what we must think of Him under Such circumstances, if He were a mere man. 2. Jesus, on several occasions, claimed a divine supremacy in both worlds. Take for example His description of the final judgment: "The Son of man shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity: and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth" (Matthew 13:41). The kingdom is His, and all the angels of God are His obedient servants. He declared in the plainest terms that He will preside as the Universal Judge at the last great day, and that His wisdom and authority will award to every man his appropriate doom. "When the Son of man shall come in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then shall He sit upon the throne of His glory; and before Him shall be gathered all nations; and He shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats; and He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left" (Matthew 25:31-33). His voice will utter the cheering words, "Come, ye blessed," and the awful sentence, "Depart, ye cursed" (Matthew 25:31-46). Without hesitation, equivocation, or compromise Jesus of Nazareth repeatedly assumed the right and the ability to discriminate the moral character and desserts of all mankind from Adam to the day of doom. His sublime consciousness of universal supremacy relieved the claim of everything like audacity, and only made it the natural sequence of His incarnate God-head. "All power," He said, "is given unto Me in heaven and in earth" (Matthew 28:18). This idea germinated in the minds of His followers and apostles. The vivid picture recorded in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew gave a coloring to all their subsequent thoughts about their divine Master. They ever after spake of Him as "ordained to be the Judge of the quick and the dead" (Acts 10:42; Acts 17:31). They testified that: "We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad" (2 Corinthians 5:10; Romans 14:10). Thus the mind of John the Apostle was prepared for the subsequent revelations of Patmos, when he heard his glorified Lord claim to "have the keys of hell and of death" (Revelation 1:18), and saw the vision of the "great white throne, and Him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away" (Revelation 20:11). But who is this that claims to grasp and wield the thunderbolts of eternal retribution; who professes to be able to scrutinize the secret purposes and motives, as well as the words and deeds, of every man that has been born, from the first dawn of personal responsibility to the day of death? Can anything short of indwelling omniscience qualify Him for such an intricate and complicated and vast investigation? If He could not search "the reins and the hearts" (to use His own words to John), how could He give to every one of us according to his works? (Revelation 2:23). The brain reels when we think of the tremendous transactions of the last day, and the momentous interests then to be decided forever and ever; and reason tells us, that if the Judge who is to preside over these solemnities be a man, He must be a God-man. If Jesus is to be the universal and absolute Judge of our race a Judge from whose decisions there will be no appeal, He must be "God manifest in the flesh." But what can we think of Him, if in setting up this claim He mislead us? 3. Jesus always claimed absolute and indisputable power in dealing with every question of moral duty and destiny. To quote Mr. Newman, the mere deist, "I find Jesus Himself to set up oracular claims. I find an assumption of pre-eminence and unapproachable moral wisdom to pervade every discourse from end to end of the Gospels. If I may not believe that Jesus assumed an oracular manner, I do not know what moral peculiarity in Him I am permitted to believe."* There is no possibility of denying the truth of these words. Jesus claimed to be absolute Lord in the whole region of morals. He settled the meaning and force of old laws, and instituted new ones by His own authority. Take the Sermon on the Mount as an illustration. With what a self-possessed peremptoriness does He define the existing legislation of God, and enlarge its limits! With what conscious dignity does He decide every question in the whole range of human duty with the simple-"But I say unto you!" Seven times in one chapter does he use this formula. (See Matthew 5:20; Matthew 5:22; Matthew 5:28; Matthew 5:32; Matthew 5:34; Matthew 5:39; Matthew 5:44). And in the application of the sermon He declared Him only to be the wise man and built upon solid rock, who hears His sayings and does them. (Matthew 7:24). Well might the people be astonished at His doctrine; for verily "He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes" (Matthew 7:28-29). But the tone which pervades the Sermon on the Mount runs through the whole of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. He ever speaks as if He were the Author and Giver of the law; as if He had the power to modify any of its provisions according to His own ideas of fitness; and as if He were the Supreme Lord of human consciences. His style is utterly unlike that of any inspired teacher before or after Him. They appealed to the law and to the testimony. (See Isaiah 8:20). But Jesus claimed an inherent power to modify and to alter both. [* In "Phases of Faith," by Francis William Newman, M. A., page 150.] The Sabbath was the symbol of the entire covenant made by God with Israel through the ministry of Moses. (See Exodus 31:12-17). But Jesus asserted His complete supremacy over this divine institution. These were His emphatic words: "For the Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath day" (Matthew 12:8; Mark 2:28; Luke 6:5). He could, of His own will, relax the terrors of the Jewish Sabbath, and even supersede it altogether by the Christian "Lord's Day." He was Lord of all divine institutions. And in the Church He claims the right to regulate her doctrines and her ordinances according to His will. The apostles He commissioned to baptize in His name, and charged them to teach their converts to observe all things whatsoever He had commanded them. (Matthew 28:19-20). Thus John was prepared for the sublime vision of the Son of man as "He that holdeth the seven stars in His right hand, who walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks" (Revelation 2:1); and as "He that hath the key of David, He that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth" (Revelation 3:7). And the authority which Jesus claimed extends into heaven, and to the final state of things. He affirmed that He would ascend to share His Father's dominion, and to sit in the throne of His glory. (See Matthew 19:28). The counterpart to which announcement is found in His declaration to John in Patmos: "to him that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with My Father in His throne" (Revelation 3:21). The manner in which the Lord spake of Himself in connection with the heavenly state bore much fruit in the hearts and sentiments of His disciples. To them this life was being "absent from the Lord" as to His visible presence: and their one beautiful idea of heaven was that it was being "present with the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:6; 2 Corinthians 5:8). He had taught them to regard Him as their "all in all," even in their eternal state; and with unquestioning faith they cherished the one blessed hope of being forever with the Lord. All other ideas of the celestial world were lost sight of in comparison with this absorbing anticipation. The very mansions which they were to occupy in the Eternal Father's house, Jesus said, He would assign to them (John 14:2). He asserted His right to give away the crowns and glories of immortal blessedness as if they were His by indisputable right. He wills it, and it is done. He constantly reminded His disciples of rewards which He would give to every servant whom, at His coming, He found to be faithful. (Compare Matthew 24:44 with Matthew 24:45-47; Matthew 25:14-46, etc.) It is true Jesus will give these honors only to those for whom they are prepared by His Father; for, in their designs of mercy, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one. Still He will, of right, dispense the blessing to all who receive it. For these were our Lord's true words: "To sit on My right hand, and on My left, is not Mine to give, but [or, except] it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of My Father" (Matthew 20:23). The language logically implies our Lord's absolute right to give the crowns; but only to such as are appointed to these honors by the Father. These ideas are repeated in vision to John. Jesus gives "right to the tree of life" (Revelation 2:7). In the praises of the redeemed host, as described in that marvelous Apocalypse, they ever ascribe their salvation and glory to Jesus, and the sinless angels swell the chorus of Immanuel's praises, while the universe, from its myriad worlds, echoes the strain. (Revelation 5:8-14). In the description of the final state of things-a state which shall be subsequent to the millennium (whatever that may be)-(Revelation 20:1-10), and also to the final judgment of both righteous and wicked (Revelation 20:11-15), and to the act of homage and fealty described in 1 Corinthians 15:24-28, we find the Lamb still and forever on the throne. The Church is still "the bride, the Lamb's wife" (Revelation 21:9). In that consummated state of all things, "The Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it" (Revelation 21:22), the glory of God lightens it, "and the Lamb is the light thereof" (Revelation 21:23), the pure river of water of life still flows from beneath the throne of God and of the Lamb (Revelation 22:1), "the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and His servants shall serve Him: and they shall see His face; and His name shall be in their foreheads" (Revelation 22:3-4). Throughout the Apocalypse we never find Jesus among the worshippers, He is there the worshipped One on the throne, and with that picture the majestic vision closes. The inspired apostles had imbibed these ideas from the personal teaching of their Lord, and subsequent revelations did but expand in their minds the seed-thoughts which He had dropped there from His own sacred lips. Paul nobly expressed the sentiments of all his brethren when he wrote, "Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day; and not to me only, but unto all them also that love His appearing" (2 Timothy 4:8). But surely He who claims supremacy, absolute and indisputable, in morals, in divine institutions, in the Church on earth, in heaven, and in a consummated universe forever, must be Lord of all, manifest in human form. If he were not, what must He have been to advance such assumptions, and what must the book be which enforces them? 4. Jesus asserted His full possession of the power to forgive sins. The moral instincts of the Jews were right when they put the question, "Who can forgive sins but God only?" (Mark 2:7). We do not wonder that, with their ideas of Christ, they asked in amazement, "Who is this that forgiveth Sins also?" (Luke 7:49), or that they exclaimed, in reference to such a claim, from such a quarter, "This man blasphemeth" (Matthew 9:3). And yet Christ declared most emphatically, on more than one occasion, His possession of this divine prerogative, and healed the palsied man in professed attestation of the fact (Luke 5:24). Those who would eliminate the miraculous element from the second narrative altogether, must admit that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all relate most circumstantially that Jesus did at least profess to work a miracle in support of His claim to possess power to forgive sins. If He wrought the miracle, His claim is established; and if He did not work it, but cheated the people, then away with Him forever as an arrant impostor! But if He wrought it?, and proved His claim, He must be equal with His Father; for the Jews were right, and no one "can forgive sins but God only." Could a mere man cancel with a word the sin of a creature against his Maker? The very thought is a blasphemy. 5. Jesus claimed the power to raise His own body pore the grave, to quicken the souls of men into spiritual life, and to raise all the dead at the last great day. Jesus likened His body to a temple which the Jews should destroy, and which He would raise up again in three days. (John 2:19-21). He affirmed that He had power to lay down His life, and power to take it up again. (John 10:18). He declared that the spiritually dead for the physical resurrection is spoken of afterward as a distinct topic should hear His voice and live. (John 5:25). And then He tells us not to wonder at this, for the day is coming when, by His omnificent fiat, all the generations of the dead "shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation" (John 5:28-29). But if Jesus were not, in some mysterious sense, the Lord of His own life, what power had He to dispose of it as He pleased? And how could He recall it when gone? And how could he communicate spiritual life, if He were not its Divine Fountain? And how could He raise the dead from their graves, if He were not the Almighty Creator? All these claims, if genuine, necessitate faith in the Godhead of Jesus. 6. Jesus declared that He had the ability to do all His Father's works. The Saviour had healed the impotent man at the pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath day. When accused by the Jews of sin for this act, our Lord justified Himself by the ever-memorable words, "My Father worketh hitherto [that is, on the Sabbath day in sustaining and blessing the worlds], and I work"-on the same day, therefore, in healing the sick,-thus indirectly asserting His right to do all that His Father did, and, as the Jews put it, claiming such a Sonship as made Him "equal with God." But our Lord did not abate one iota of His claim. True, He admitted that, as the Incarnate Mediator, He had received His authority from the Father, but He declared that "What things soever the Father doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise" (John 5:17-19). Now, no language can overestimate the sublimity of this claim. Christ affirmed that He possessed full right and ability to do all that the Eternal Father had the right and ability to do. Was such language ever used by the most inspired or the most daring of mere mortals? We do not forget that our Lord was careful to declare that the Father had committed all judgment to Him (John 5:22), but had He not Himself been a partaker of the Godhead how could He, as the Incarnate One, have been qualified to be armed with the prerogative so vast? He who cart do all the works of God must be God! 7. Jesus spake of Himself as the greatest gift of infinite mercy even. In His conversation with Nicodemus. Christ spake of Himself in these terms: "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him, should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16), by which our Lord evidently meant to convey the idea that the gift of the Son was the richest gift of divine love. And this idea proved powerfully germinant in the minds of the apostles. They elaborated the argument. By the gift of Christ above all others, they taught us: "God commended His love towards us" (Romans 5:8; see, too, John 4:10). They reasoned thus, having learned their logic from the lips of their Lord, "He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?" (Romans 8:32). The argument of the apostle is from the greater to the less. It assumes that Christ Jesus is greater than all things. It would have no force on any other principle. More than this, it assumes that Christ is infinitely greater than all things, so that all the other expressions of divine goodness to our race dwindle into insignificance when compared with the gift of Christ. But can such representations as these be harmonized with the notion that Christ is merely a gifted man? Would they not deserve to be called hyperbole run mad on such art hypothesis? And imagine a mere man to stand forward and proclaim himself the choicest gift of God's love to our race. What a monstrous exaggeration and egotism! If Christ be greater than all other divine gifts combined, must He not be the God-man? On the evangelical hypothesis such representations are seen to be neither bombast nor rhetorical exaggerati we can say with the seraphic Paul, without reserve: "Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable gift" (2 Corinthians 9:15). 8. Jesus announced Himself as the center of rest for the human soul. Who has not thrilled under the mighty spell of those mighty words: "Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light" (Matthew 11:28-30). In this invitation our Lord proclaims Himself to be everything to the soul. We are to come to Him, to take His yoke upon us, and to learn of Him. In receiving Him we shall find rest unto our souls, for He will give us rest. Now, God alone is the resting-place of the human spirit. In Him, and in Him only, can we find assured peace. But Jesus claims to be our rest. Must He not, then, be God Incarnate? And very noticeable is the fact that, in the same breath in which He speaks of Himself in these august terms, He says: "I am meek and lowly in heart." But where were His meekness and lowliness in making such a claim, if He were simply a man like ourselves? In the same spirit are those memorable passages in which this wonderful personage speaks of Himself as our peace. "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you" (John 14:27). "These words have I spoken unto you, that in Me ye might have peace" (John 16:33). Thus ever does the Lord concentrate our thoughts upon Himself. But what must He be to be worthy of such supreme attention? 9. Jesus permitted Thomas to adore Him as his Lord and his God, and pronounced an eulogium upon the faith thus displayed. (John 20:28). On this fact we quote the admirable comment of Dean Alford: "The Socinian view, that these words, "my Lord and my God," are merely an exclamation, is refuted, * (1) By the fact that no such exclamations were in use among the Jews. * (2) By the eipen autô (he said to Him, that is, Christ). * (3) By the impossibility of referring ho kyrios mou, my Lord, to another than Jesus. (See verse 13). * (4) By the New Testament usage of expressing the vocative by the nominative with an article. * (5) By the utter psychological absurdity of such a supposition; that one just convinced of the presence of Him whom he deeply loved, should, instead of addressing Him, break out into an irrelevant cry. * (6) By the further absurdity of supposing that if such were the case, the Apostle John, who, of all the sacred writers, most constantly keeps in mind the object for which he is writing, should have recorded anything so beside that object. * (7) By the intimate connection of pepisteukas, thou hast believed. (See next verse). "Dismissing it, therefore, we observe that this is the highest confession of faith which has yet been made; and that it shows that (though not yet fully) the meaning of the previous confessions of His being 'the Son of God' was understood. Thus John, in the very close of his Gospel iterates the testimony with which he began it-to the Godhead of the Word who became flesh, and, by this closing confession, shows how the testimony of Jesus to Himself had gradually deepened and exalted the apostles' conviction, from the time when they knew Him only as ho huios tou Iôséph (1:46), 'the son of Joseph,' till now, when He is acknowledged as their Lord and their God." (Alford's Greek New Testament, on the passage). These judicious remarks leave nothing to be added as to the real application of the words, "my Lord and my God." But how did the Saviour receive this act of adoration? He commended it, and held it up for the imitation of the coming ages "Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed" (29). He thus most emphatically declared His Lordship and Godhead. But how fearful was His crime in so doing, if He was only a Socinian Christ! This conversation produced a deep impression upon the apostolical mind, and upon the early Church. Stephen invoked Jesus in prayer with his dying breath. (Acts 7:59). Paul thrice besought the Lord (Jesus) in supplication, that this thorn in the flesh might be taken from him, and received an answer from the Lord. (2 Corinthians 12:8, compared with the next verse, the 9th). The prayer was offered to Jesus, and was responded to by Jesus, as the context demonstrates. The primitive disciples are thus described: "All that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours" (1 Corinthians 1:2). Every convert was, by Christ's orders, baptized in His name conjointly with that of the Father and the Holy Spirit; and thus the whole Church was taught to adore Him as equal with God at the solemn hour of religious profession. (Matthew 28:19). The apostolical benediction invokes Jesus in prayer with God and the Holy Ghost (2 Corinthians 13:14), and the entire sacred record closes with a solemn litany to the Son: "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen" (Revelation 22:21). Again we ask, Who is this if He be not the God-man? 10. Jesus indirectly compared Himself with God. He did so in these words: "No man knoweth the Son [Luke gives it, "Who the Son is"], but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father [Luke gives it, "Who the Father is"], save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him" (See Matthew 11:27 and Luke 10:22). These statements are, perhaps, the most remarkable that fell even from the lips of Jesus. In them He asserted the Son to be as great a mystery as the Father, and consequently as difficult to know. This was in effect claiming equality with God. Nothing less can be made of it. Then, too, the Lord professed such a knowledge of God as can only be possessed by God. He indeed asserted that He knew the Father as well as the Father knew Him. Altogether, no language can well be more shockingly familiar and profane than these words of the Saviour were, if He were no more than a man. Let the reader well ponder them in the version both of Matthew and Luke. On one occasion our Lord declared, "My Father is greater than all" (John 10:29); and on another, "My Father is greater than I" (John 14:28). But if our Lord was only a man, what need was there that He should tell us this? What should we think of any mere mortal who should stand up in our midst, and deliberately tell us that the Eternal Father is greater than he? Should we not question his sanity? Or should we not look upon the very comparison as a blasphemy? For what can justify a creature in such a virtual likening of himself to God? We are compelled to the conclusion that there must have been some other element in our Lord's nature, besides the human, which warranted Him in making so remarkable a statement. What danger was there that we should fail to recognize the superiority of the Eternal Father to the man Christ Jesus, if the latter was no more than a man? These words, generally supposed to be a stronghold of Unitarianism, are, in truth, an indirect testimony to the orthodox faith. For what comparison can there be between the Creator and a mere creature, between Infinity and one who is "less than nothing and vanity"? 11. Jesus demands of us an unhesitating and unlimited faith in Himself; such faith, in short, as we should only exercise in God. We are to believe in Him for the salvation of our entire being; not merely as pointing out to us the way to heaven, but as being Himself the way. He puts faith in Him in the same category as faith in the Father. (John 14:1). The spirit of His teaching about the faith to be reposed in Him is given in His words to the woman of Samaria: "If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith unto thee, Give me to drink, thou wouldest have asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water." "Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4:10-14). Unless we exercise faith in His person and work, figuratively called eating His flesh and drinking His blood, we have no life in us (John 6:53); but if any man eat of this bread; he shall live forever (51). Those who have given themselves up into the arms of Christ by faith receive eternal life from Him, and shall never perish. (John 10:28). They are as much in the arms of Jesus as in the arms of the Father; and their safety is as much secured by one as by the other (compare 28,29,30). In fact, in this gracious transaction the Son and the Father are one (30). Well might the Jews, with their views of His origin, take up stones to stone Him for these claims, saying as they did it, "We stone Thee for blasphemy, because that Thou, being a man, makest Thyself God" (33). Our Lord's vindication of Himself, by a reference to the language of Psalms 82:6, is an illustration of the argument from the less to the greater. If in any sense the Jewish rulers might be called gods, how much more properly might He, the only begotten Son of the Father, be so designated? "Without Me ye can do nothing," is in short the essence of the Saviour's teaching about Himself. (See John 15:1-5). This is the sum of the Gospel message: Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and ye shall be saved. It was a demand repeatedly and earnestly pressed by the Saviour, and inculcated by His apostles; and we say deliberately, that to exercise such a faith in Jesus as He required and the Gospel enforces, would, with Socinian views, be to expose ourselves to the terrible anathema: "Cursed is the man that trusteth in man, and that maketh flesh in his arm" (Jeremiah 17:5). How could my soul be safe in the arms of a mere man? How dare I trust my eternal redemption to the care of such a Christ? And on what principle did Paul say: "I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me" (Php_4:13). And how can Jesus be "All in all" to true believers of every nation? (Colossians 3:11). 12. The affection and devotion to His glory, which Jesus demands, are such as can be properly yielded only to God. As we are to trust Christ for everything, so we are to give up everything for Him, should He demand the sacrifice. This was a doctrine which the Lord repeatedly taught. Let our readers study Matthew 10:37-39, and the parallel passage, Luke 14:26-27, and they will see at once how uncompromising is the Saviour's demand. Father, mother, son, daughter, wife, and even life itself are all to be sacrificed, if devotion to Christ necessitates the surrender. All creatures, and all things, and our very lives are to be to us as nothing when compared with Christ. God Himself demands no less of us, and no more. What more could the Eternal Creator require? The moral law says: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and Him only shalt thou serve." But Christ bids us love Him thus, and demands of us the homage and sacrifice of our whole being; now, if He be not the Author of our being, what right has He to urge such a demand upon us? I could not love Christ as He requires to be loved, if I did not believe in Him as the Incarnate God. To do so with Socinian views would be idolatry. Yet the motives which reigned in the hearts of inspired apostles are summed up in this one: "The love of Christ constraineth us," and they laid down the law, that all men are henceforth to live "not to themselves, but to Him who died for them and rose again" (2 Corinthians 5:14-15). And Jesus declared that our eternal destiny will take its character from our compliance or noncompliance with His demands: "Whosoever therefore shall confess Me before men, him will I confess also before My Father who is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before My Father who is in heaven" (Matthew 10:32-33; Matthew 10:38-42, cf. Matthew 25:45-46), and the sentiment is echoed in apostolical teaching, the language of which is, "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha" (1 Corinthians 16:22). But clearly the suspension of such tremendous issues on the decree of our love for the person of a mere creature, is an idea utterly revolting to our moral sense. He must be the God-man. 13. Jesus set Himself forth as the appropriate end of our lives and of all divine providences. He requires us to live for Him, and for His glory. As we have seen, life is to be sacrificed, if fidelity to Him shall so require. The sickness of Lazarus, He taught, was ordered, "that the Son of God might be glorified thereby" (John 11:4). He expounded the scope of the Holy Spirit's mission in one pregnant sentence: "He shall glorify Me" (John 16:14; John 15:26). This Messianic reading of all things proved wonderfully suggestive. It is amplified in the apostolical Epistles. Thus, Christ is "Lord both of the dead and the living" (Romans 14:9). The great object of apostolic desire was, that Christ might be magnified in their bodies, whether by life or by death. (Php_1:20). The early Church's one idea of the present state was: "For to me to live is Christ" (Php_1:21). And they looked forward to the final Epiphany, because Christ would then "come to be glorified in His saints, and to be admired in all them that believe," and because His name will then be "glorified in you" (2 Thessalonians 1:10-12). Under Him, as the Universal Head, all things are finally to be gathered, and towards this consummation all things are now working. (See Ephesians 1:10). Now, such a presentation of Christ by Christ, and by His apostles inspired by Himself and His Spirit, we cannot harmonize with Socinian views. For surely He, for whose glory we are to live, and the whole universe exists, must be the Lord of all, God over all, blessed for evermore. What right has our Lord to be the supreme End of life, if He be not its Source, its Preserver, in short, its God? 14. Very suggestive, too, are those passages in which Jesus promised His continued presence to His disciples after His ascension. Beautiful are the words: "Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:20). One of the last promises of our Lord was, "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world" (Matthew 28:20). No perverse criticism can explain away these assurances; they guarantee the perpetual, personal presence of Jesus with all His disciples to the end of time. And this idea had a wonderful influence over the thoughts and actions of the men whom Jesus inspired. They lived as those who were perpetually under their Lord's eye. Thus one speaks in the name of all: "Wherefore we labor, that, whether present or absent [from Christ as to his bodily presence, see 6 and 8], we may be accepted of Him [Christ]" (2 Corinthians 5:9). Though denied His bodily presence, His divine they knew to be ever with them?; hence they labored to please Him, and the best wish they could breathe for each other was, "The Lord Jesus Christ be with thy spirit" (2 Timothy 4:22). And John saw Him in vision ever holding the ministerial stars in His right hand, and walking in the midst of the golden lamps-the churches. (Revelation 2:1). But how can we explain such representations as these, if Messiah be possessed of but one nature-the human, which must of necessity be local and limited as to its presence? Who is this that is always with His disciples in all countries at the same moment, but the Infinite One in a human form? We feel His presence; we know He is with us; and in this fact we have evidence that He is more than a man. The line of argument we have been pursuing is by no means exhausted, but our space is filled. Every time we read the New Testament through, we detect new illustrations of the force of the testimony illustrated in this paper. Let the reader re-peruse for himself the sacred record with an eye to the hints which we have thrown out. Let him weigh again the old familiar phrases in which the Lord speaks, or is spoken of, and ask himself how he can explain them on any other principle than the orthodox view of our Lord's person and work, and he will be astonished to find how this view is woven into the very texture of the whole Gospel. Jesus Christ was neither the Holy One, nor the Just One, if He were not the God-man. (See Acts 3:14; Acts 2:27; Acts 7:52). In short, we must tear up our Bibles and wait for a new Christ, if He of Nazareth be not what all His teachings compel us to believe He was, God Incarnate. A Socinian may well ask: "Whence hath this man this wisdom, and these mighty works?" (Matthew 13:54); but to us that question is forever answered by the assurance that "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). The argument is cumulative, and must be looked at as a whole as well as in detail. To us it appears irresistible. Let no Unitarian seek to evade its force by taking refuge in those passages which affirm Christ's inferiority, as man and mediator, to His Father; such as Mark 13:32; John 10:29, and John 14:28. Such passages as these are not to the purpose. No one denies that, as man and mediator, our Lord was inferior to His Father. But to prove that He was inferior in one sense, does not disprove that He was equal in another sense. When you have demonstrated that He was a man, you have not shaken, or even touched, the evidence that He was God. The Saviour had a human soul with its natural limitation of knowledge, and a human body with exposure to death. This is admitted on all sides. The orthodox believe it as truly as their Unitarian friends. But the Gospel testimony teaches us something more. It reveals the Godhood of Jesus of Nazareth, and tells us that He thought it no robbery to claim equality with His Father. It is, therefore, disingenuous, or, at least, illogical, to quote testimonies to the humanity of the Christ in reply to the proof of His possession of a divine nature as well. The two questions are quite distinct. It is a non sequitur to affirm that Jesus is not God because He was a man. The point to be demonstrated is that He was not both. There are two classes of Scriptures relating to our Lord: the first, affirming His possession of a human nature, with all its innocent frailties and limitations; the second, ascribing to Him a divine nature, possessed of the attributes of Godhood, performing divine works, and worthy of supreme honor and worship. Unitarians can only fairly explain one of these classes of Scriptures, the former; but Trinitarians can accept both classes, and expound them in their integrity and fullness. We are not stumbled by evidences that Jesus was "bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh." We rejoice in Him as in one "touched with a feeling of our infirmities;" but we have no need to refine away, by a subtle and unfair criticism, the ascription to His person of divine perfections and works. We gladly recognize the learning and the talents of many of the prominent Unitarian divines. We know that by the side of some of them we are but babes in intellect and attainment. But we remember that there was a time when "Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes" (Matthew 11:25). The times demand of us a vigorous re-assertion of the old truths, which are the very foundations of the Gospel system. Humanity needs a Christ whom all can worship and adore. The mythical account of Strauss' "Leben Jesu"; the unreal and romantic Christ of Renan's "Vie de Jesus"; and even the merely human Christ of "Ecce Homo," can never work any deliverance in the earth. Such a Messiah does not meet the yearnings of fallen human nature. It does not answer the pressing query, "How shall man be just with God?" It supplies no effective or sufficient agency for the regeneration of man's moral powers. It does not bring God down to us in our nature. Such a Christ we may criticise and admire, as we would Socrates, or Plato, or Milton, or Shakespeare; but we cannot trust Him with our salvation; we cannot love Him with all our hearts; we cannot pour forth at His feet the homage of our whole being; for to do so would be idolatry. A so-called Saviour, whose only power to save lies in the excellent moral precepts that He gave, and the pure life that He lived; who is no longer the God-man, but the mere man; whose blood had no sacrificial atoning or propitiatory power in the moral government of Jehovah, but was simply a martyr's witness to a superior system of ethics-is not the Saviour of the four Gospels, or of Paul, or Peter, or John. It is not under the banners of such a Messiah that the Church of God has achieved its triumphs. The Christ of the New Testament, of the early Church, of universal Christendom; the Christ, the power of whose name has revolutionized the world and raised it to its present level, and under whose guidance the sacramental host of God's redeemed are advancing and shall advance to yet greater victories over superstition and sin, is Immanuel, God with us, in our nature, whose blood "cleanseth us from all sin," and who is "able to save, even to the uttermost, all that come unto God through Him." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 87: - THE PERSON AND WORK OF JESUS CHRIST ======================================================================== The Person and Work of Jesus Christ By John L. Nuelsen, D. D., Methodist Episcopal Church, Omaha, Nebraska From "Some Recent Phases of German Theology"*. [* Copyright by Jennings & Graham, and published by permission.] Every Old Testament problem becomes in course of time a New Testament question. Every Biblical question places us after a while face to face with Him who is the center of the whole Bible, with Jesus Christ. In the present discussion over the person and Gospel of Jesus Christ, I shall confine myself to pointing out briefly some of the most interesting and important features of this subject. Was Jesus a Real, Historical Person? In the closing years of the eighteenth century the thought was advanced by a number of rationalistic theologians that the doctrines held by the Church and formulated in her creeds were the joint product of New Testament religion and Greek philosophy. This thought was taken up by Professor Harnack of Berlin, and in his great work, "History of the Christian Doctrine," he disclosed the complicated process by which the Church in developing her doctrines became Hellenized; thus it was made incumbent upon the student of Church history to extricate, by a process of careful analysis and comparison, the genuinely Christian elements from the meshes of foreign thought. Harnack, it is true, applied this principle only to post apostolic times, but since the appearance of his book investigation has proceeded along the same lines and is now covering the Biblical writings as well. Old Testament scholars and Semitists as Gunkel, Meyer, Meinhold, Gressmann, Winckler, Simmern, Jensen—followed the traces of Babylonian influences down through the period of later Judaism to New Testament times; New Testament scholars—as Schurer, Baldensperger, Bousset, Pfleiderer, Schmiedel, Holtzman, Weinel, Wernle, Wrede—studied Greek and Jewish thought in its influence upon the early Christian writings. They deemed it necessary to eliminate first the whole of Johannine theology as a foreign substance; then they threw overboard the Apostle Paul as the great perverter of the simple teachings of Christ; next they cleared the Synoptical Gospels of all Babylonian, Egyptian, Phrygian, Jewish, Greek and other foreign matter. They have just about finished this arduous work of purifying and simplifying the Gospels by this double process of "religions-geschichtliche" analysis and comparison, in order to discover the real, historical Christ; they meet at the feet of this Christ, to see Him as He really is; but behold, He is no morel Not a trace of Him is left. Trait after trait, feature after feature, has been analyzed and compared, until neither manger nor cross nor grave, not even His garments, are left. A few years ago we had, by the grace of the most advanced scholarship, at least a plain Galilean peasant with a very good heart. Even if His mind was rather too simple, we were allowed to believe in a kind-hearted carpenter's son, who went about doing good, and to whom at least eight rather inoffensive sayings could be historically traced; as, for example, the saying; "It is more blessed to give than to receive;" but even this peasant has evaporated, or rather, the great Babylonian flood which the mighty Bel caused to drown all mankind has completely swallowed up the little that was left of Jesus of Nazareth. I beg pardon for this tone of levity. The whole matter would be very serious if it were not so utterly absurd. But the fact is that German theology is just now confronted with the question, was Jesus Christ a real, historical person, or is He nothing but a literary hero? From two very different quarters the question as to the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth has been raised. At first blush we may think it is ridiculous to raise the question at all. And so it is. But the very fact that scholars do raise the question and mean to be taken seriously, is the necessary result of tendencies in theology which have been fostered until they have reached this culmination point. This fact will, I trust, open the eyes of many in Germany, and in America as well, who are in the habit of intrusting themselves to the guidance of brilliant and charming leaders without realizing at the start whither they were going. Was Christ a Product of Babylonian Mythology? The first avenue which led to the negation of the historicity of Jesus Christ is the "religionsgeschichtliche" comparison. The religionsgeschichtliche study of the New Testament aims, as Professor Bousett puts it, "to understand the origin and development of Christianity by means of an investigation of the whole environment of primitive Christianity." Applying this principle to the person and work of Christ, Professor Pfleiderer of Berlin, in his "Early Conceptions of Christ," finds that the Christ of the Church has been formed out of those myths and legends which are the common property of religion all over the world. The elements of the figure are roughly separable into five groups. There is Christ, the Son of God; Christ the Conqueror; Christ the Wonder-worker; Christ the Conqueror of death and the Life-giver; Christ the King of kings and Lord of lords. The materials for each of these conceptions were taken from various sources. They came from Judaism, from Hellenism, from Mithraism, and the Greco-Egyptian religion, from Zoroastrianism, and even from Buddhism. They came gradually, and gradually the conception took shape. The specific contribution of Babylonian mythology, to the picture of Christ, as depicted in the Gospels, consists, according to Professor Zimmern, of the following points: (1) "The conception of Christ as a pre-mundane, heavenly, Divine being, who is at the same time the Creator of the world; (2) The accounts of the miraculous birth of Christ, of the homage offered to the new-born child, and of the persecutions; (3) The conception of Christ as the Saviour of the world, and as ushering in a new period of time, appearing as He does in the fullness of time; (4) The conception of Christ as being sent into the world by the Father; (5) The doctrinal aspects of the suffering and death of Christ, apart from the historic facts; (6) The doctrine of the descent of Christ into Hades; (7) The doctrine of the resurrection of Christ on the third day after His death; (8) The doctrine of His ascension after forty days; (9) The doctrine of Christ's glory, sitting at the right hand of God and reigning with the Father; (10) The belief in the coming again of Christ at the end of days in kingly glory, and also of the last conflict with the powers of evil; (11) The idea of the marriage of Christ with His Bride at the beginning of the new time, of the new heaven, and the new earth." While Professor Zimmern advances these thoughts very carefully and guardedly, Professor Jensen, of the University of Marburg, affirms most positively that the whole life of Christ is essentially a Jewish version of the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epos. His book appeared February, 1907, is a large volume of over one thousand pages, and bears the title, "The Epics of Gilgamesh in the World Literature. The Origins of the Old Testament Patriarch, Prophet, and Redeemer Legends, and of the New Testament Jesus Legend." The main contention of the book is stated by the author himself in the following words: "That practically all of the Gospel narrative is purely legendary, and that there is no reason at all to consider anything that is told of Jesus as historical. The Jesus legend is an Israelitish Gilgamesh legend.—As a Gilgamesh legend the Jesus legend is a sister legend to numerous, particularly to most of the Old Testament, legends." In his concluding chapter Professor Jensen writes: "Jesus of Nazareth, in whom, as in the Son of God and the Saviour of the world, Christianity has believed for nearly two thousands years, and who is regarded, even by the most advanced scholarship of our own day, as a good and great man who lived and died the sublime pattern of the ideal ethical life—this Jesus has never lived upon earth; neither has He died, because He is nothing but an Israelitish Gilgamesh. We, the children of a much lauded time of progress and achievements, we who look down upon the superstitions of the past with a forbearing smile, we worship in our cathedrals and churches, in our meetinghouses and schools, in palaces and shanties, a Babylonian deity." There was a time when critical analysis of the Biblical texts ran wild. Professor Jensen's book is comparison run mad. I should not have taken the time to quote from Jensen, but should have dismissed his book with a forbearing smile, if he were not taken seriously by a number of scholars. To my amazement I noticed that as careful and sane a scholar as Professor Zimmern wrote an extended review of the book approving it almost without qualification, and saying: "Jensen will hardly succeed at once in seeing his ideas accepted. But truth is not depending upon immediate success, and will in this case, even as in others, be victorious, though not without great trouble, and only slowly. The weight of facts which this book adduces is too immense." The other reason why I referred to this book is to show that the logical and unavoidable result of explaining everything distinctively Christian in the Bible by applying the principle of comparison, or, in other words, that the strict and unhampered following of the "religionsgeschichtliche" method, as it is in vogue at present, must lead to absurdities. The Myth of Theodore Roosevelt Allow me a digression. I wish to apply these same principles of analysis and comparison to a modern personality, following strictly the methods of Professor Jensen. Suppose Lord McCauley's famous New Zealander, whom he pictures as standing upon a broken arch of London Bridge, in the midst of a vast solitude, to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's should come over to America and dig in the sand-hills covering the Congressional Library in Washington. He finds a great pile of literature which originated in the first few years of the twentieth century. In the very learned book which our New Zealand scholar publishes he refers to the fact that at the beginning of the twentieth century the head of the great American nation was supposed to be a strong and influential man by the name of Theodore Roosevelt. His name has gone down in history, but our scholar proves that Theodore Roosevelt was no historical person at all. He never lived; he is merely the personification of tendencies and mythological traits then dominant in the American nation. For instance, this legendary hero is commonly pictured with a big stick. Now, this is plainly a mythological trait, borrowed from the Greeks and Romans, and represents really the thunderbolt of Jupiter. He is pictured as wearing a broad brimmed hat and large eye-glasses. This mythological feature is borrowed from old Norse mythology, and represents Woden endeavoring to pierce through the heavy clouds of fog covering his head. A great many pictures show the legendary hero smiling and displaying his teeth. This is a very interesting feature, showing the strong African influences in American civilization. Many contradictory legends are told about this man. He was a great hunter; he was a rough rider; but he was also a scholar and author of a number of learned books. He lived in the mountains, on the prairie, and in a large city. He was a leader in war, but also a peacemaker. It is said that he was appealed to by antagonizing factions, even by warring nations, to arbitrate. It is self-evident that we have here simply the personification of prominent character traits of the American people at various stages of their historical development. They loved to hunt, to ride, to war; reaching a higher stage of civilization, they turned to studying, writing books, making peace; and all these contradictory traits were, in course of time, used to draw the picture of this legendary national hero. Some mythological features have not yet been fully cleared up; for instance, that he is often represented in the shape of a bear or accompanied by bears. For a while these "Teddy Bears" were in nearly every house, and it seems as if they even were worshipped, at least by the children. There is no doubt that some remote astral conception lies at the root of this rather puzzling feature. But two reasons are conclusive to establish the legendary thesis: (1) The American nation, at the beginning of the twentieth century, had hardly emerged from the crudity of fetishism and witchcraft. Many traces of fortune-telling, charms, sorcery, and other forms of superstition can be found by studying the daily papers. Even this hero Roosevelt was given to some such superstition. Whenever he desired to bring any one under his spell and charm him, he took him by the hand and pronounced a certain magical word. As far as I can discover it spells something like "dee-lighted." (2) The other conclusive proof is the name. Theodore is taken from the language of a people representing the southern part of Europe and means "Gift of God;" Roosevelt is taken from the language of a people representing the northern part of Europe, and means "Field of Roses." The idea is evident. This hero personifies the union of the two European races which laid the foundations of early American civilization—the Romanic and the Teutonic races; and the Americans imagined that a man who united in himself all those wonderful traits of character must necessarily be a miraculous "Gift of God," and furthermore they thought that if a man personifying their ideals really had full sway, their country would be changed to a "Field of Roses." This explanation is strictly scientific. No doubt a good many machine politicians and heads of trusts would be delighted to awake some morning and find out that Theodore Roosevelt is nothing but a mythological figure. But, he is not. He is a living fact and tremendous power in the life of our nation. And so is Jesus Christ. The Christ of Liberal Theology The other avenue which led to the negation of the historicity of Jesus Christ is the well-known modernization and reduction of the life and work of Jesus which liberal theologians have accomplished by means of literary and historical criticism. The history of the critical investigation of the life of Jesus during the last hundred and fifty years is an intensely interesting and instructive study. It has recently been summarized by Dr. A. Schweitzer in his book, "From Reimarus to Wrede." (Reimarus, the contemporary of Lessing, whose "Wolfenbuttler Fragmente" mark the beginning of modern critical research in the life of Christ; Professor William Wrede, who died in November, 1906, was one of the most prominent liberal theologians). A more popular presentation of the subject, covering the latest phases, is given by Professor Grutzmacher in his booklet, "Is the Liberal Picture of Jesus Modern?" Without going into the history of this investigation, I merely state that the life of Christ as it is presented now by all liberal theologians—like Harnack, Bousset, Weinel, Wrede, Holtzmann, Julicher, Wernle—as the established result of critical scientific research, is gained, not from an examination of the whole New Testament material, but by means of a complicated process of finding the alleged true sources from which this life may be construed. The oldest portions of the New Testament literature, the Pauline writings, are not to be considered as genuine sources, because, as Professor Wernle states, "Jesus knew nothing of that which to St. Paul is everything. That Jesus regarded Himself as an object of worship must be doubted; that He ascribed any meritorious atonement to His death is altogether improbable. Paul is not a disciple of Jesus. He is a new phenomenon. Paul is much further removed from Jesus in his teaching than he would seem to be when regarded only chronologically." We turn now to the four Gospels, but of these "the Gospel of John can in no wise be considered a historical source," says Harnack; and he is seconded in this assertion by all liberals. Says Wernle: "St. John must retire in favor of the Synoptic Gospels as source of the life of Christ. Jesus was as the Synoptics represent Him, not as St. John depicts Him." And again: "In the first Gospels there is nothing taught concerning redemption, atonement, regeneration, reception of the Holy Spirit. An altogether different picture is presented by the greater part of the other New Testament writings, especially by the writings of Paul and John." But even the Synoptic Gospels have to be critically analyzed in order to find the true portrait of Christ. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke, especially in their accounts of the infancy and of the death of Jesus and of the events that took place after His death, and in many other instances as well, are rather a portraiture of the crude beliefs of the early Christian churches than a historically trustworthy account of the real facts. Even in the Gospel of Mark, which is considered the oldest and purest, we find, according to Professor Wernle, that "the historic portrait of Jesus is quite obscured; His person is placed in a grotesquely fantastic light." Thus analytical criticism is compelled to search for the sources of the Gospels. and it claims to have found principally two of them; namely, the older Mark document, the source of the present Gospel of St. Mark, and the Logia, or collection of sayings of Jesus, the supposed source of the Gospel of St. Matthew. It is probably true that our present Gospels are based upon previous sources; but, in the absence of fixed data, it is impossible to determine with any degree of certainty just what those sources contained. But critical acumen cannot rest satisfied even with those sources. Says Wernle: "They are not free from the possibility of modification and adulteration. They represent the belief of the Christians as it developed in the course of four decades." It is therefore needful to distinguish between genuine elements and later additions in those sources. This is an exceedingly difficult and delicate task, especially since we do not know, for a certainty, the form nor the substance of those sources. How is it accomplished? We have noted an "inner consciousness" of many textual critics. I am reminded of this when I hear Harnack blandly say: "Whoever has a good eye for the vital and a true sense of the really great must be able to see it, and distinguish between the kernel and the transitory husk;" or when I hear Professor Pfleiderer speak of "healthy eyes;" or see how Bousset finds the proofs of genuineness in the fact that "it is psychologically comprehensible," or Mehlhorn in the fact that "?it could not have been invented." It is with a sense of relief that we read Professor Bousset's refreshingly naive concession that where we find the sources too meager "we may occasionally make use of our imagination." Unfortunately our imagination is not a safer guide in historical and scientific matters than is our inner consciousness, and the eyesight of no two men is exactly alike. A few years ago there was in Berlin an exhibition of paintings representing scenes from the life of Christ. Hundreds of paintings were exhibited; they were very interesting to look at, but they did not contribute anything to our knowledge of the real appearance of Jesus Christ. They were nothing but the portraitures of the conceptions which the various artists entertained as to the features of Christ. Each artist portrayed his own ideal of Jesus. Some of the portraits looked so strange that no one would have thought it a picture of Jesus Christ if it had not been labeled as such. This is precisely the case with all these modern attempts to write a life of Jesus Christ minus St. Paul, minus St. John, minus Matthew, Luke and Mark. If you examine the character of this Jesus closely, you will find that He is really a portraiture of what the author considers his ideal of a pure and holy life, clothed in the garb of an Oriental peasant two thousands years ago. We cannot here reproduce the details of this twentieth-century ideal in its strange and ancient environments; it is a picture of a man from whom every supernatural, miraculous, mysterious trait has been erased. "Jesus has nowhere overstepped the limits of the purely human," says Bousset; and again: "We do no longer start with the thought that Jesus was absolutely different from us; that He was from above, we from below. And consequently we do no longer speak of the divinity of Christ." Doubts and fears, joys and grief's, moments of ecstasy and of utter dejection, all the changing moods of a poor human heart, may be found in His life. "He was a poor, disquieted man, at times shouting with joy, at times woefully despondent," writes Gustave Frenssen, and adds: "Sometimes He was treading upon the very borderland of exalted insanity." On the whole, Jesus was the personification of faith in God, brotherly love, and faith in immortality; at times He seems to have taken Himself as the Messiah of His people; in everything He was subject to the limitations of mankind. There is only one difference between this modern view and the old rationalistic view. While the old rationalists, by all sorts of exegetical jugglery, vainly attempted to show that their human and purely naturalistic view of Jesus was really contained in the New Testament records, the modern rationalists are outspoken in their assertion that their own view is radically different from that of the New Testament writers. They do not in the least try to bridge over this chasm, but state emphatically as Julicher does: "Where even the first apostles have totally misunderstood Jesus we must try to understand Him better." This is the picture of Christ which the leading liberal theologians of today have scattered broadcast in tens of thousands of copies of cheap pamphlets, which is described Sunday after Sunday in thousands of pulpits both in Germany, and, somewhat modified and as yet retouched, also in America. But again a reaction has set in, the sweep of which can not as yet be wholly comprehended. The Verdict of Infidelity A pupil of modern liberal theologians, the former pastor Gustav Frenssen, who is a novel-writer of great force, wrote a novel, "Hilligenlei" (Holy Land), of which hundreds of thousands of copies were sold. The hero of this novel, Kai Jans, is, as is generally admitted, a true reproduction of the picture of Christ as painted by the liberal theologians. This book, as well as some other recent publications, gave rise to a number of reviews of the "modern Christ" by eminent literary men and by philosophers who do not claim to be Christians, but are known and desire to be known as leaders of free thought. Some of them were formerly theologians, but have lost their faith in the fundamental truths of Christianity. Of these writers I mention Adolph Bartels, editor of the "Kunstwart," Leo Berg, Eduard yon Hartmann, A. Drews, W. Von Schnehen, C. A. Bernoulli, Dr. Kalthoff, the President of the League of Monists, and also two physicians, Doctors De Loosten and E. Rasmussen. What do these men say? The two physicians claim that the only rational explanation of this Christ is to consider Him as one of the great pathological figures in the world's history; that means, in other words, that He was partially insane. The others say exactly what conservative theologians—as B. Weiss, Ihmels, Kahler, Zahm, Haussleiter, Grutzmacher, Lemme, and others—always have said against this naturalistic representation of Jesus, and what was ignored by liberal theologians. But here are men who were trained in the methods of Pfleiderer, Bousset, and their kin; men who possess as much critical acumen and philosophic penetration as do the liberal leaders; men whose thinking is in no wise lettered by dogmatic prejudices,—and their almost unanimous verdict is really remarkable. All of them say that this picture of Christ is both unscientific and unhistorical. It is unscientific, because the methods applied are purely subjective. Says Dr. Kalthoff, after analyzing the Jesus of a number of modern theologians: "Every scholar leaves of the words of Christ only what he can make use of according to his preconceived notions of what is historically possible. Lacking every historical definiteness, the name of Jesus has become an empty vessel into which every theologian pours his own thoughts and ideas." Eduard yon Hartmann shows that the only results which this method of analytical criticism has arrived at are negative results. "The historic Christ remains a problematical figure which is of no religious value at all." W. von Schnehen quotes the liberal Professor Steck, who says: "A strict application of these principles of research will show that there is not one solitary word of Jesus of which we know for certain that it was spoken thus and not otherwise by Jesus," and uses this assertion to prove that all pictures of Christ are admittedly uncertain, and consequently unscientific. But another argument which is of much greater import is advanced. Kalthoff, yon Schnehen and yon Hartmann reason thus: If the liberal theologians admit that their picture of Christ is different from that which was believed by the Church during all the centuries of her existence—different from that of St. Paul, of St. John, of the Synoptic Gospels, of the sources of the Synoptic Gospels; if, as Professor Pfleiderer says, "Jewish prophecy, rabbinical teachings, Oriental gnosis, and Greek philosophy had already put the colors on the palette from which the picture of Christ was painted in the New Testament writings;" if, as is admitted, the Church was built, from the very beginning, not upon the Galilean peasant Jesus, but upon the Christ, the Son of God; and if this Christ is nothing but the creation of speculative theologians, as Paul and John—then there is no need at all of a historic Christ. It is not necessary at all that a man Jesus of Nazareth should ever have lived in order to explain the fact of Christianity. Even from the point of view of present religious needs of human nature this Jesus of liberal theology is unnecessary. Orthodox theology is Christ centric; liberal theology is God-centric. "Back to Christ," exclaims Professor Wernle, "but only as a means to return to God the Father. God the Father is to regain that supremacy over our lives which Jesus had intended to give Him, but of which theological dogma has deprived Him." The modern thinkers mentioned above can not see the need of any human mediator between God and man. They want a living, present God, and a constant present communion with Him, if they want a God at all. Neither a Catholic saint nor a dead Jew is to stand between their own lives and God. Says Professor Drews: "The belief in the personal grandeur and the beauty of character of the man Jesus has nothing to do with religion." W. von Schnehen writes still more explicitly: "Even if God should have revealed Himself in the personality of the man Jesus of Nazareth, it is utterly useless to me, unless God reveals Himself to me likewise. If He does reveal Himself to me, then His revelation to Jesus is of no more import to me than is His revelation to any good man or His revelation in nature. The exemplary moral and religious perfection of Jesus is of no benefit whatever to any one except he has in his being the same moral and religious forces which were in Jesus. But if these powers are inherent in him and can be developed in his life, then it makes no difference by whom they become energized, by Jesus or by some one else." Quite pathetic are the words of Professor Drews, showing, as they do, the restlessness of an honest but irreligious mind and the dissatisfaction with substitutes in religion: "We are consumed by a burning desire for salvation and we should be satisfied with this fabric of the theologians, this picture of the historic Christ, who changes His features under the hands of every professor of theology who works at it. We need the presence of God, and not His past." And Dr. Kalthoff writes quite correctly: "A God in whom we must believe because scholars say that two thousand years ago the son of a Jewish carpenter believed in Him, is not worth the printer's ink that is being squandered about Him." The Christ of the New Testament the Only Christ I will come to a close. Why have I asked you to read all these quotations? For two reasons: In the first place, I desired to show that the modern method of subjective analysis of the sources and of the "religionsgeschichtliche" comparison leads, and as a matter of fact did lead, to a complete negation of the historicity of the person of Christ. In the second place, I wished to point out that the modern, liberal conception of Christ, which strips Him of all distinctively divine elements and makes a pure man of Him, be He ever so good and holy, be He ever so sublime a pattern of a perfect life, be He ever so trustworthy a guide to God, does not and can not satisfy the modern man. He repudiates this man-made Jesus, and even accuses his makers of lack of scientific spirit and of dishonesty. Says von Schnehen: "Christianity is not belief in the man Jesus, but faith in Christ the Saviour and Son of God. Not the man Jesus, the lovable preacher and teacher of morals, who did not shrink back from death in obedience to what was His conviction, has conquered the world, but Christ the Son of God, who died upon the cross in order to redeem a lost world. This is the Christ of the Gospels and of the Church. It is dishonest to call this modern view of Jesus and of His religion Christian or evangelical." It has ever been the mistake of rationalism to try to make Christianity acceptable to the average man by taking off the edges of its supernaturalism. It has ever been a failure, and ever will be so. The testimonies of these modern men show that the portrait of Christ painted by liberal theologians of our own day is an utter failure. They prove that the modern man, as well as man centuries ago, needs and wants exactly the Christ of the Church and the Gospels or no Christ at all. The only true, historically and scientifically true, picture of the life and work and Gospel of Christ is the one which is given in the New Testament as a whole. The modern historians and philosophers tell the modern liberal theologians in very plain language to be honest and quit calling themselves preachers of the Gospel of Christ if they do not believe in the Christ of the Gospels, and quit calling their congregations churches of Christ if they do not believe in the Christ of the Church. Modern man is opposed to all shams and insincerities. He has no patience with men who, while using the old phraseology, cleverly substitute their self-made Jesus for the God-given Christ. The Christ can not be changed. He is the same yesterday, today and forevermore. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 88: - THE CERTAINTY AND IMPORTANCE OF THE PHYS... ======================================================================== The Certainty and Importance of the Physical Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the Dead By Rev. R. A. Torrey, D.D. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the corner-stone of Christian doctrine. It is mentioned directly one hundred and four or more times in the New Testament. It was the most prominent and cardinal point in the apostolic testimony. When the apostolic company, after the apostasy of Judas Iscariot, felt it necessary to complete their number again by the addition of one to take the place Of Judas Iscariot, it was in order that he might "be a witness with us of His resurrection" (Acts 1:21-22). The resurrection of Jesus Christ was the one point that Peter emphasized in his great sermon on the Day of Pentecost. His whole sermon centered in that fact. Its key-note was, "This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses" (Acts 2:32, cf. vs. Acts 2:24-31). When the Apostles were filled again with the Holy Spirit some days later, the one central result was that "with great power gave the Apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus." The central doctrine that the Apostle Paul preached to the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers on Mars Hill was Jesus and the resurrection. (Acts 17:18, cf. Acts 23:6; 1 Corinthians 15:15). The resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of the two fundamental truths of the Gospel, the other being His atoning death. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:1; 1 Corinthians 15:3-4."Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the Gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; And that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures." This was the glad tidings, first, that Christ died for our sins and made atonement; and second, that He rose again. The crucifixion loses its meaning without the resurrection. Without the resurrection, the death of Christ was only the heroic death of a noble martyr. With the resurrection, it is the atoning death of the Son of God. It shows that death to be of sufficient value to cover all our sins, for it was the sacrifice of the Son of God. In it we have an all-sufficient ground for knowing that the blackest sin is atoned for. Disprove the resurrection of Jesus Christ and Christian faith is vain. "If Christ be not risen," cries Paul, "then is our preaching vain and your faith is also vain" (1 Corinthians 15:14). And later he adds, "If Christ be not risen, your faith is vain. You are yet in your sins." Paul, as the context clearly shows, is talking about the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. The doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the one doctrine that has power to save any one who believes it with the heart. As we read in Romans 10:9, "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." To know the power of Christ's resurrection is one of the highest ambitions of the intelligent believer, to attain which he sacrifices all things and counts them but refuse (Php_3:8-10 R. V.). While the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is the corner-stone of Christian doctrine, it is also the Gibraltar of Christian evidence, and the Waterloo of infidelity and rationalism. If the Scriptural assertions of Christ's resurrection can be established as historic certainties, the claims and doctrines Of Christianity rest upon an impregnable foundation. On the other hand, if the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead cannot be established, Christianity must go. It was a true instinct that led a leading and brilliant agnostic in England to say, that there is no use wasting time discussing the other miracles. The essential question is, Did Jesus Christ rise from the dead? adding, that if He did, it was easy enough to believe the other miracles; but, if not, the other miracles must go. Are the statements contained in the four Gospels regarding the resurrection of Jesus Christ statements of fact or are they fiction, fables, myths? There are three separate lines of proof that the statements contained in the four Gospels regarding the resurrection of Jesus Christ are exact statements of historic fact. 1. The External Evidence of the Authenticity and Truthfulness of the Gospel Narratives This is an altogether satisfactory argument. The external proofs of the authenticity and truthfulness of the Gospel narratives are overwhelming, but the argument is long and intricate and it would take a volume to discuss it satisfactorily. The other arguments are so completely sufficient and overwhelming and convincing to a candid mind that we can do without this, good as it is in its place. The next argument is from- 2. The Internal Proofs of the Truthfulness of the Gospel Records This argument is thoroughly conclusive, and we shall state it briefly in the pages which follow. We shall not assume anything whatever. We shall not assume that the four Gospel records are true history; we shall not assume that the four Gospels were written by the men whose names they bear, though it could be easily proven that they were; we shall not even assume that they were written in the century in which Jesus is alleged to have lived and died and risen again, nor in the next century, nor in the next. We will assume absolutely nothing. We will start out with a fact which we all know to be a fact, namely, that we have the four Gospels today, whoever wrote them and whenever they were written. We shall place these four Gospels side by side, and see if we can discern in them the marks of truth or of fiction. 1. The first thing that strikes us as we compare these Gospels one with another is that they are four separate and independent accounts. This appears plainly from the apparent discrepancies in the four different accounts. These apparent discrepancies are marked and many. It would have been impossible for these four accounts to have been made up in collusion with one another, or to have been derived from One another and so many and so marked discrepancies to be found in them. There is harmony between the four accounts, but the harmony does not lie upon the surface; it comes out only by protracted and thorough study. It is precisely such a harmony as would exist between accounts written or related by several different persons, each looking at the events recorded from his own standpoint. It is precisely such a harmony as would not exist in four accounts manufactured in collusion, or derived one from the other. In four accounts manufactured in collusion, whatever of harmony there might be would appear on the surface. Whatever discrepancy there might be would only come out by minute and careful study. But with the four Gospels the case is just the opposite. Harmony comes cut by minute and careful study, and the apparent discrepancy lies upon the surface. Whether true or false, these four accounts are separate and independent from one another. (The four accounts also supplement one another, the third account sometimes reconciling apparent discrepancies between two). These accounts must be either a record of facts that actually occurred or else fictions. If fictions, they must have been fabricated in one of two ways-either independently of one another, or in collusion with one another. They cannot have been fabricated independently of one another; the agreements are too marked and too many. It is absolutely incredible that four persons sitting down to write an account of what never occurred independently of one another should have made their stories agree to the extent that these do. On the other hand, they cannot have been made up, as we have already seen, in collusion with one another; the apparent discrepancies are too numerous and too noticeable. It is proven they were not made up independently of one another; it is proven they were not made up in collusion with one another, so we are driven to the conclusion that they were not made up at all, that they are a true relation of facts as they actually occurred. We might rest the argument here and reasonably call the case settled, but we will go on still further: 2. The next thing we notice is that each of these accounts bears striking indications of having been derived from eye witnesses. The account of an eye-witness is readily distinguishable from the account of one who is merely retailing what others have told him. Any one who is accustomed to weigh evidence in court or in historical study soon learns how to distinguish the report of an eye witness from mere hearsay evidence. Any careful student of the Gospel records of the resurrection will readily detect many marks of the eye witness. Some years ago when lecturing at an American university, a gentleman was introduced to me as being a skeptic. I asked him, "What line of study are you pursuing?" He replied that he was pursuing a post graduate course in history with a view to a professorship in history. I said, "Then you know that the account of an eye witness differs in marked respects from the account of one who is simply telling what he has heard from others?" "Yes," he replied. I next asked, "Have you carefully read the four Gospel accounts of the resurrection of Christ?" He replied, "I have." "Tell me, have you not noticed clear indications that they were derived from eye witnesses?" "Yes." he replied, "I have been greatly struck by this in reading the accounts." Any one who carefully and intelligently reads them will be struck with the same fact. 3. The third thing that we notice about these Gospel narratives is their naturalness, straightforwardness, artlessness and simplicity. The accounts, it is true, have to do with the supernatural, but the accounts themselves are most natural. There is a remarkable absence of all attempt at coloring and effect. There is nothing but the simple, straightforward telling of facts as they actually occurred. It frequently happens that when a witness is on the witness stand, the story he tells is so artless, so straightforward, so natural, there is such an entire absence of any attempt at coloring or effect that his testimony bears weight independently of anything we may know of the character or previous history of the witness. As we listen to his story, we say to ourselves, "This man is telling the truth." The weight of this kind of evidence is greatly increased and reaches practical certainty when we have several independent witnesses of this sort, all bearing testimony to the same essential facts, but with varieties of detail, one omitting what another tells, and the third unconsciously reconciling apparent discrepancies between the two. This is the precise case with the four Gospel narratives of the resurrection of Christ. The Gospel writers do not seem to have reflected at all upon the meaning or bearing of many of the facts which they relate. They simply tell right out what they saw in all simplicity and straightforwardness, leaving the philosophizing to others. Dr. William Furness, the great Unitarian scholar and critic, who certainly was not over-much disposed in favor of the supernatural, says, "Nothing can exceed in artlessness and simplicity? the four accounts of the first appearance of Jesus after His crucifixion. If these qualities are not discernible here, we must despair of ever being able to discern them anywhere." Suppose we should find four accounts of the battle of Monmouth. Suppose, furthermore, that nothing decisive was known as to the authorship of these four accounts, but, when we laid them side by side, we found that they were manifestly independent accounts. We found, furthermore, striking indications that they were from eye witnesses. We found them all marked by that artlessness, straightforwardness and simplicity that always carries conviction; we found that, while apparently disagreeing in minor details, they agreed substantially in their account of the battle-even though we had no knowledge of the authorship or date of these accounts, would we not, in the absence of any other accounts, say, "Here is a true account of the battle of Monmouth?" Now this is exactly the case with the four Gospel narratives. Manifestly separate and independent from one another, bearing the clear marks of having been derived from eye witnesses, characterized by an unparalleled artlessness, simplicity and straightforwardness, apparently disagreeing in minor details, but in perfect agreement as to the great central facts related. If we are fair and honest, if we follow the canons of evidence followed in court, if we follow any sound and sane law of literary and historical criticism, are we not logically driven to say, "Here is a true account of the resurrection of Jesus." Here again we might rest our case and call the resurrection of Jesus from the dead proven, but we go on still further: 4. The next thing we notice is the unintentional evidence of words, phrases, and accidental details. It oftentimes happens that when a witness is on the stand, the unintentional evidence that he bears by words and phrases which he uses, and by accidental details which he introduces, is more convincing than his direct testimony, because it is not the testimony of the witness, but a testimony of the truth to itself. The Gospel accounts abound in evidence of this sort. Take, as the first instance, the fact that in all the Gospel records of the resurrection, we are given to understand that Jesus was not at first recognized by His disciples when He appeared to them after His resurrection, e.g., Luke 24:16; John 21:4. We are not told why this was so, but if we will think awhile over it, we will soon discover why it was so. But the Gospel narratives simply record the fact without attempting to explain it. If the stories were fictitious, they certainly would never have been made up in this way, for the writer would have seen at once the objection that would arise in the minds of those who did not wish to believe in His resurrection, that is, that it was not really Jesus Whom the disciples saw. Why, then, is the story told in this way? For the self-evident reason that the evangelists were not making up a story for effect, but simply recording events precisely as they occurred. This is the way in which it occurred, therefore this is the way in which they told it. It is not a fabrication of imaginary incidents, but an exact record of facts carefully observed and accurately recorded. Take a second instance: In all the Gospel records of the appearances of Jesus after His resurrection, there is not a single recorded appearance to an enemy or opponent of Christ. All His appearances were to those who were already believers. Why this was so we can easily see by a little thought, but nowhere in the Gospels are we told why it was so. If the stories had been fabricated, they certainly would never have been made up in this way. If the Gospels were, as some would have us believe, fabrications constructed one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred years after the alleged events recorded, when all the actors were dead and gone and no one could gainsay any lies told, Jesus would have been represented as appearing to Caiaphas, and Annas, and Pilate, and Herod, and confounding them by His re-appearance from the dead. But there is no suggestion even of anything of this kind in the Gospel stories. Every appearance is to one who is already a believer. Why is this so? For the self-evident reason that this was the way that things occurred, and the Gospel narratives are not concerned with producing a story for effect, but simply with recording events precisely as they occurred and as they were observed. We find still another instance in the fact that the recorded appearances of Jesus after His resurrection were only occasional. He would appear in the midst of His disciples and disappear, and not be seen again perhaps for several days. Why this was so, we can easily think out for ourselves-He was evidently seeking to wean His disciples from their old-time communion with Him in the body, and to prepare them for the communion with Himself in the Spirit that was to follow in the days that were to come. We are not, however, told this in the Gospel narratives. We are left to discover it for ourselves, and this is all the more significant for that reason. It is doubtful if the disciples themselves realized the meaning of the facts. If they had been making up the story to produce effect, they would have represented Jesus as being with them constantly, as living with them, eating and drinking with them, day after day. Why then is the story told as recorded in the four Gospels? Because this is the way in which it had all occurred. The Gospel writers are simply concerned with giving the exact representation of the facts as witnessed by themselves and others. We find another very striking instance in what is recorded concerning the words of Jesus to Mary at their first meeting. (John 20:17). Jesus is recorded as saying to Mary, "Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to My Father." We are not told why Jesus said this to Mary. We are left to discover the reason for it if we can, and the commentators have had a great deal of trouble in discovering it. Their explanations vary widely one from another. I have a reason of my own which I have never seen in any commentary, but which I am persuaded is the true reason, but it would probably be difficult to persuade others that it was the true reason. Why then is this little utterance of Jesus put in the Gospel record without a word of explanation, and which it has taken eighteen centuries to explain, and which is not altogether satisfactorily explained yet? Certainly a writer making up a story would not put in a little detail like that without apparent meaning and without an attempt at an explanation of it. Stories that are made up are made up for a purpose; details that are inserted are inserted for a purpose, a purpose more or less evident, but eighteen centuries of study have not been able to find out the purpose why this was inserted. Why then do we find it here? Because this is exactly what happened. This is what Jesus said; this is what Mary heard Jesus say; this is what Mary told, and therefore this is what John recorded. We cannot have a fiction here, but an accurate record of words spoken by Jesus after His resurrection. We find still another instance in John 20:4-6 : "So they ran both together; and the other disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulcher. And he, stooping down and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet went he not in. Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulcher, and seeth the linen Clothes lie." This is all in striking keeping with what we know of the men from other sources. Mary, returning hurriedly from the tomb, bursts in upon the two disciples and cries, "They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulcher, and we know not where they have laid Him." John and Peter sprang to their feet and ran at the top of their speed to the tomb. John, the younger of the two disciples (it is all the more striking that the narrative does not tell us here that he was the younger of the two disciples), was fleeter of foot and outran Peter and reached the tomb first, but man of retiring and reverent disposition that he was (we are not told this here but we know it from a study of his personality as revealed elsewhere) he did not enter the tomb, but simply stooped down and looked in. Impetuous but older Peter comes stumbling on behind as fast as he can, but when once he reaches the tomb, he never waits a moment outside but plunges headlong in. Is this made up, or, is it life? He was indeed a literary artist of consummate ability who had the skill to make this up if it did not occur just so. There is incidentally a touch of local coloring in the report. When one visits today the tomb which scholars now accept as the real burial place of Jesus, he will find himself unconsciously obliged to stoop down in order to look in. Still another instance is found in John 21:7 : "Therefore, that disciple whom Jesus loved saith to Peter, It is the Lord. Now when Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he girt his fisher's coat unto him, (for he was naked,) and did cast himself into the sea." Here again we have the unmistakable marks of truth and life. The Apostles had gone at Jesus' command into Galilee to meet Him there, but Jesus does nor at once appear. Simon Peter, with the fisherman's passion still stirring in his bosom says, "I go a-fishing." The others replied, "We also go with thee." They fished all night, and, with characteristic fishermen's luck, caught nothing. In the early dawn Jesus stands upon the shore, but the disciples did not recognize Him in the dim light. Jesus calls to them, "Children, have ye any meat?" And they answer, "No." He bids them cast the net on the right side of the ship and they will find. When the cast was made, they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fishes. In an instant, John, the man of quick spiritual perception, says, "It is the Lord." No sooner does Peter, the man of impulsive action, hear it than he grasps his fisher's coat, casts it about his naked form and throws himself overboard and strikes out for shore to reach his Lord. Is this made up, or, is it life? This is not fiction. If some unknown author of the fourth Gospel made this up, he is the master literary artist of the ages, and we should take down every other name from our literary pantheon and place him above them all. We find a still more touching instance in John 20:15 : "Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing Him to be the gardener, saith unto Him, Sir, if thou hast borne Him hence, tell me where thou hast laid Him, and I will take Him away." Here is surely a touch that surpasses the art of any man of that day or any other day. Mary had gone into the city and notified John and Peter that she had found the sepulcher empty. They start on a run for the sepulcher. As Mary has already made the journey twice, they easily far outstrip her, but with heavy heart and slow and weary feet, she makes her way back to the tomb. Peter and John have long gone when she reaches it, broken-hearted, thinking that not only has her beloved Lord been slain, but that His tomb has been desecrated. She stands without weeping. There are two angels sitting in the tomb, one at the head and the other at the feet where the body of Jesus had lain. But the grief-stricken woman has no eye for angels. They say unto her, "Woman, why weepest thou?" She replies, "Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him." A rustle in the leaves at her back and she turns around to see who is coming. She sees Jesus standing there, but, blinded by tears and despair, she does not recognize her Lord. Jesus also says to her, "Why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?" She, supposing it to be the gardener who is talking to her, says, "Sir, if thou hast borne Him hence, tell me where thou hast laid Him and I will take Him away." Now remember who it is that makes the offer, and what she offers to do; a weak woman offers to carry a full grown man away. Of course, she could not do it, but how true to a woman's love that always forgets its weakness and never stops at impossibilities. There is something to be done and she says, "I will do it," "Tell me where thou hast laid Him, and I will take Him away." Is this made up? Never! This is life; this is reality; this is truth. We find another instance in Mark 16:7 : "But go your way, tell His disciples and Peter that He goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see Him, as He said unto you," What I would have you notice here are the two words, "and Peter." Why "and Peter?" Was not Peter one of the disciples? Surely he was, the very head of the apostolic company. Why then, "and Peter?" No explanation is given in the text, but reflection shows it was the utterance of love toward the despondent, despairing disciple who had thrice denied his Lord. If the message had been simply to the disciples Peter would have said, "Yes, I was once a disciple, but I can no longer be counted such. I thrice denied my Lord on that awful night with oaths and curses. It does not mean me." But our tender compassionate Lord through His angelic messenger sends the message, "Go tell His disciples, and whoever you tell, be sure you tell poor, weak, faltering, backslidden, broken-hearted Peter." Is this made up, or is this a real picture of our Lord? I pity the man who is so dull that he can imagine this is fiction. Incidentally let it be noted that this is recorded only in the Gospel of Mark, which, as is well known, is Peter's Gospel. As Peter dictated to Mark one day what he should record, with tearful eyes and grateful heart he would turn to him and say, "Mark, be sure you put that in, "Tell His disciples and Peter." Take still another instance in John 20:27-29 : "Then saith He to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold My hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into My side; and be not faithless but believing. And Thomas answered and said unto Him, My Lord and my God. Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." Note here two things; the action of Thomas and the rebuke of Jesus. Each is too characteristic to be attributed to the art of some master of fiction. Thomas had not been with the disciples at the first appearance of our Lord. A week had passed by. Another Lord's Day had come. This time Thomas makes sure of being present; if the Lord is to appear, he will be there. If he had been like some of our modern doubters, he would have taken pains to be away, but, doubter though he was, he was an honest doubter and wanted to know. Suddenly Jesus stands in the midst. He says to Thomas, "Reach hither thy finger, and behold My hands, and reach thither thy hand; and thrust it into My side: and be not faithless but believing." At last Thomas? eyes are opened. His faith long dammed back bursts every barrier and sweeping onward carries Thomas to a higher height than any other disciple had as yet reached-exultingly and adoringly he cries, as he looks up into the face of Jesus, "My Lord and My God!" Then Jesus tenderly, but searchingly, rebukes him. "Thomas," He says, "because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they [who are so eager to find and so quick to see, and so ready to accept the truth, that they do not wait for actual visible demonstration but are ready to take truth on sufficient testimony] that have not seen and yet have believed." Is this made up, or is this life? Is it a record of facts as they occurred, or a fictitious production of some master artist? Take still another instance: In John 21:15-17 we read: "So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto Him, Yea, Lord; Thou knowest that I love Thee. He saith unto him, Feed My lambs. He saith unto him again the second time, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou Me? He saith unto Him, Yea, Lord, Thou knowest that I love Thee. He saith unto him, Feed My sheep. He saith unto him the third time, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou Me? Peter was grieved because He said unto him the third time, Lovest thou Me? And he said unto Him, Lord, Thou knowest all things; Thou knowest that I love Thee. Jesus saith unto him, Feed My sheep." Note especially here the words, "Peter was grieved because He said unto him the third time, Lovest thou Me?" Why did Jesus ask Peter three times, "Lovest thou Me?" And why was Peter grieved because Jesus did ask him three times? We are not told in the text, but, if we read it in the light of Peter's thrice repeated denial of his Lord, we will understand it. As Peter had denied his Lord thrice, Jesus three times gave Peter an opportunity to reassert his love. But this, tender as it was, brings back to Peter that awful night when in the courtyard of Annas and Caiaphas, he thrice denied his Lord, and "Peter was grieved because He said unto him the third time, Lovest thou Me." Is this made up? Did the writer make it up with this fact in view? If he did, he surely would have mentioned it. It cannot have been made up. It is not fiction. It is simply reporting what actually occurred. The accurate truthfulness of the record comes out even more strikingly in the Greek than in the English version. Two different words are used for "love." Jesus, in asking Peter, "Lovest thou Me?" uses a strong word denoting the higher form of love. Peter, replying, "Lord, Thou knowest that I love Thee," uses a weaker word, but one denoting a more tender form of love. Jesus, the second time uses the stronger word, and the second time in his reply Peter uses the weaker word. In His third question, Jesus comes down to Peter's level and uses the weaker word that Peter had used from the beginning. Then Peter replies, "Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love Thee," using the same weaker word. This cannot be fiction. It is accurately reported fact. Take still another instance: In John 20:16 we read, "Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself and saith unto Him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master." What a delicate touch of nature we have here! Mary is standing outside the tomb overcome with grief. She has not recognized her Lord, though He has spoken to her. She has mistaken Him for the gardener: She has said, "Sir, if thou hast borne Him hence, tell me where thou hast laid Him, and I will take Him away." Then Jesus utters just one word. He says, "Mary." As that name came trembling on the morning air, uttered with the old familiar tone, spoken as no one else had ever spoken it but He, in an instant her eyes were opened. She falls at His feet and tries to clasp them, and looks up into His face, and cries, "Rabboni, my Master." Is this made up? Impossible! This is life. This is Jesus, and this is the woman who loved Him. No unknown author of the second, third, or fourth century, could have produced such a masterpiece as this. We stand here unquestionably face to face with reality, with life, with Jesus and Mary as they actually were. One more important illustration: In John 20:7 we read, "And the napkin, that was about His head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself." How strange that such a little detail as this should be added to the story with absolutely no attempt at explaining. But how deeply significant this little unexplained detail is. Recall the circumstances. Jesus is dead. For three days and three nights his body is lying cold and silent in the sepulcher, as truly dead as any body was ever dead, but at last the appointed hour has come, the breath of God sweeps through the sleeping and silent clay, and in that supreme moment of His own earthly life, that supreme moment of human history, when Jesus rises triumphant over death and grave and Satan, there is no excitement upon His part, but with that same majestic self-composure and serenity that marked His whole career, that same Divine calm that He displayed upon storm-tossed Galilee, when His affrighted disciples shook Him from His slumbers and said, "Lord, carest thou not that we perish?" and He arose serenely on the deck of the tossing vessel and said to the wild, tempestuous waves and winds, "Be still," and there was a great calm: so now again in this sublime, this awful moment, He does not excitedly tear the napkin from His face and fling it aside, but absolutely without human haste or flurry, or disorder, He unties it calmly from His head, rolls it up and lays it away in an orderly manner in a place by itself. Was that made up? Never! We do not behold here an exquisite masterpiece of the romancer's art; we read here the simple narrative of a matchless detail in a unique life that was actually lived here upon earth, a life so beautiful that one cannot read it with an honest and open mind without feeling the tears coming into his eyes. But someone will say, all these are little things. True, and it is from that very fact that they gain much of their significance. It is just in such little things that fiction would disclose itself. Fiction displays itself different from fact in the minute; in the great outstanding outlines you can make fiction look like truth, but when you come to examine it minutely and microscopically, you will soon detect that it is not reality but fabrication. But the more microscopically we examine the Gospel narratives, the more we become impressed with their truthfulness. There is an artlessness and naturalness and self-evident truthfulness in the narratives, down to the minutest detail, that surpasses all the possibilities of art. The third line of proof that the statements contained in the four Gospels regarding the resurrection of Jesus Christ are exact statements of historic fact, is: 3. The Circumstantial Evidence for the Resurrection of Christ There are certain proven and admitted facts that demand the resurrection of Christ to account for them. 1. Beyond a question, the foundation truth preached in the early years of the Church's history was the resurrection. This was the one doctrine upon which the Apostles were ever ringing the changes. Whether Jesus did actually rise from the dead or not, it is certain that the one thing that the Apostles constantly proclaimed was that He had risen. Why should the Apostles use this as the very corner-stone of their creed, if not well attested and firmly believed? But this is not all: They laid down their lives for this doctrine. Men never lay down their lives for a doctrine which they do not firmly believe. They stated that they had seen Jesus after His resurrection, and rather than give up their statement, they laid down their lives for it. Of course, men may die for error and often have, but it was for error that they firmly believed. In this case they would have known whether they had seen Jesus or not, and they would not merely have been dying for error but dying for a statement which they knew to be false. This is not only incredible but impossible. Furthermore, if the Apostles really firmly believed, as is admitted, that Jesus rose from the dead, they had some facts upon which they founded their belief. These would have been the facts that they would have related in recounting the story. They certainly would not have made up a story out of imaginary incidents when they had real facts upon which they founded their belief. But if the facts were as recounted in the Gospels, there is no possible escaping the conclusion that Jesus actually arose. Still further, if Jesus had not arisen, there would have been evidence that He had not. His enemies would have sought and found this evidence, but the Apostles went up and down the very city where He had been crucified and proclaimed right to the faces of His slayers that He had been raised and no one could produce evidence to the contrary. The very best they could do was to say the guards went to sleep and the disciples stole the body while the guards slept. Men who bear evidence of what happens while they are asleep are not usually regarded as credible witnesses. Further still, if the Apostles had stolen the body, they would have known it themselves and would not have been ready to die for what they knew to be a fraud. 2. Another known fact is the change in the day of rest. The early church came from among the Jews. From time immemorial the Jews had celebrated the seventh day of the week as their day of rest and worship, but we find the early Christians in the Acts of the Apostles, and also in early Christian writings, assembling on the first day of the week. Nothing is more difficult of accomplishment than the change in a holy day that has been celebrated for centuries and is one of the most cherished customs of the people. What is especially significant about the change is that it was changed by no express decree but by general consent. Something tremendous must have occurred that led to this change. The Apostles asserted that what had occurred on that day was the resurrection of Christ from the dead, and that is the most rational explanation. In fact it is the only reasonable explanation of the change. 3. But the most significant fact of all is the change in the disciples themselves, the moral transformation. At the time of the crucifixion of Christ, we find the whole apostolic company filled with blank and utter despair. We see Peter, the leader of the apostolic company, denying his Lord three times with oaths and cursings, but a few days later we see this same man, filled with a courage that nothing could shake. We see him standing before the council that had condemned Jesus to death and saying to them, "Be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by Him doth this man stand before you whole" (Acts 4:10). A little further on when commanded by the council not to speak at all nor teach in the name of Jesus, we hear Peter and John answering, "Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye. For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard" (Acts 4:19-20). A little later still after arrest and imprisonment, in peril of death, when sternly arraigned by the council, we hear Peter and the Apostles answering their demand that they should be silent regarding Jesus, with the words, "We ought to obey God rather than man. The God of our fathers raised up Jesus whom ye slew and hanged on a tree. Him hath God exalted with His right hand to be a Prince and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins. And we are His witnesses of these things" (Acts 5:29-32). Something tremendous must have occurred to account for such a radical and astounding moral transformation as this. Nothing short of the fact of the resurrection and of their having seen the risen Lord will explain it. These unquestionable facts are so impressive and so conclusive that even infidel and Jewish scholars now admit that the Apostles believed that Jesus rose from the dead. Even Ferdinand Baur, father of the Tubigen School, admitted this. Even David Strauss, who wrote the most masterly "Life of Jesus" from the rationalistic standpoint that was ever written, said, "Only this much need be acknowledged that the Apostles firmly believed that Jesus had arisen." Strauss evidently did not wish to admit any more than he had to but he felt compelled to admit this much. Schenkel went even further and said, "It is an indisputable fact that in the early morning of the first day of the week following the crucifixion, the grave of Jesus was found empty. It is a second fact that the disciples and-other members of the apostolic communion were convinced that Jesus was seen after the crucifixion." These admissions are fatal to the rationalists who make them. The question at once arises, "Whence these convictions and belief?" Renan attempted an answer by saying that "the passion of a hallucinated woman (Mary) gives to the world a resurrected God." (Renan's "Life of Jesus," page 357). By this, Renan means that Mary was in love with Jesus; that after His crucifixion, brooding over it, in the passion of her love, she dreamed herself into a condition where she had a hallucination that she had seen Jesus risen from the dead. She reported her dream as a fact, and thus the passion of a hallucinated woman gave to the world a resurrected God. But the reply to all this is self-evident, namely, the passion of a hallucinated woman was not competent to this task. Remember the make-up of the apostolic company; in the apostolic company were a Matthew and a Thomas to be convinced, outside was a Saul of Tarsus to be converted. The passion of a hallucinated woman will not convince a stubborn unbeliever like Thomas, nor a Jewish tax-gatherer like Matthew. Whoever heard of a taxgatherer, and most of all of a Jewish tax-gatherer, who could be imposed upon by the passion of a hallucinated woman? Neither will the passion of a hallucinated woman convince a fierce and conscientious enemy like Saul of Tarsus. We must look for some saner explanation than this. Strauss tried to account for it by inquiring whether the appearance might not have been visionary. Strauss has had, and still has, many followers in this theory. But to this we reply, first of all, there was no subjective starting point for such visions. The Apostles, so far from expecting to see the Lord, would scarcely believe their own eyes when they did see Him. Furthermore, whoever heard of eleven men having the same vision at the same time, to say nothing of five hundred men (1 Corinthians 15:6) having the same vision at the same time. Strauss demands of us that we give up one reasonable miracle and substitute five hundred impossible miracles in its place. Nothing can surpass the credulity of unbelief. The third attempt at an explanation is that Jesus was not really dead when they took Him from the cross, that His friends worked over Him and brought Him back to life, and what was supposed to be the appearance of the raised Lord was the appearance of one who never had been really dead and was now merely resuscitated. This theory of Paulus has been brought forward and revamped by various rationalistic writers in our own time and seems to be a favorite theory of those who today would deny the reality of our Lord's resurrection. To sustain this view, appeal has been made to the short time Jesus hung upon the cross and to the fact that history tells us of one in the time of Josephus taken down from the cross and nursed back to life. But to this we answer: (1). Remember the events preceding the crucifixion; the agony in the garden of Gethsemane; the awful ordeal of the four trials; the scourging and the consequent physical condition in which all this left Jesus. Remember too the water and the blood that. poured from His pierced side. (2). In the second place, we reply, His enemies would have taken, and did take, all necessary precautions against such a thing as this happening. (John 19:34). (3). We reply, in the third place, if Jesus had been merely resuscitated, He would have been so weak, such an utter physical wreck, that His reappearance would have been measured at its real value, and the moral transformation in the disciples, for which we are trying to account, would still remain unaccounted for. The officer in the time of Josephus, who is cited in proof, though brought back to life, was an utter physical wreck. (4). We reply in the fourth place, if brought back to life, the Apostles and friends of Jesus, who are the ones who are supposed to have brought Him back to life, would have known how they brought Him back to life, and that it was not a case of resurrection but of resuscitation, and the main fact to be accounted for, namely, the change in themselves would remain unaccounted for. The attempted explanation is an explanation that does not explain. (5). In the fifth place, we reply, that the moral difficulty is the greatest of all, for if it was really a case of resuscitation, then Jesus tried to palm Himself off as one risen from the dead, when in reality He was nothing of the sort. In that case, He would be an arch-impostor, and the whole Christian system rests on a fraud as its ultimate foundation. Is it possible to believe that such a system of religion as that of Jesus Christ, embodying such exalted principles and precepts of truth, purity and love, "originated in a sincere heart is not cankered by fraud and trickery can believe Jesus to have been an impostor, and His religion to have been founded upon fraud. A leader of the rationalistic forces in England has recently tried to prove the theory that Jesus was only apparently dead by appealing to the fact that when the side of Jesus was pierced blood came forth and asks, "Can a dead man bleed?" To this the sufficient reply is that when a man dies of What is called in popular language, a broken heart, the blood escapes into the pericardium, and after standing there for a short time it separates into serum (the water) and clot (the red corpuscles, blood), and thus if a man were dead, if his side were pierced by a spear, and the point of the spear entered the pericardium, "blood and water" would flow out just as the record states it did, and what is brought forth as a proof that Jesus was not really dead, is in reality a proof that He was, and an illustration of the minute accuracy of the story. It could not have been made up in this way, if it were not actual fact. We have eliminated all other possible suppositions. We have but one left, namely, Jesus really was raised from the dead the third day as recorded in the four Gospels. The desperate straits to which those who attempt to deny it are driven are themselves proof of the fact. We have then several independent lines of argument pointing decisively and conclusively to the resurrection of Christ from the dead. Some of them taken separately prove the fact, but taken together they constitute an argument that makes doubt of the resurrection of Christ impossible to the candid mind. Of course, if one is determined not to believe, no amount of proof will convince him. Such a man must be left to his own deliberate choice of error and falsehood; but any man who really desires to know the truth and is willing to obey it at any cost must accept the resurrection of Christ as an historically proven fact. A brilliant lawyer in New York City some time ago spoke to a prominent minister of that city asking him if he really believed that Christ rose from the dead. The minister replied that he did, and asked the privilege of presenting the proof to the lawyer. The lawyer took the material offered in proof away and studied it. He returned to the minister, and said, "I am convinced that Jesus really did rise from the dead. But," he then added, "I am no nearer being a Christian than I was before. I thought that the difficulty was with my head. I find that it is really with my heart." There is really but one weighty objection to the doctrine that Jesus arose from the dead, and that is, "There is no conclusive evidence that any other ever arose." To this a sufficient answer would be, even if it were certain that no other ever arose, it would not at all prove that Jesus did not arise, for the life of Jesus was unique, His nature was unique, His character was unique, His mission was unique, His history was unique, and it is not to be wondered at, but rather to be expected, that the issue of such a life should also be unique. However, all this objection is simply David Hume's exploded argument against the possibility of the miraculous revamped. According to this argument, no amount of evidence can prove a miracle, because miracles are contrary to all experience. But are miracles contrary to all experience? To start out by saying that they are is to beg the very question at issue. They may be outside of your experience and mine, they may be outside the experience of this entire generation, but your experience and mine and the experience of this entire generation is not "all experience." Every student of geology and astronomy knows that things have occurred in the past which are entirely outside of the experience of the present generation. Things have occurred within the last ten years that are entirely outside of the experience of the fifty years preceding it. True science does not start with an a priori hypothesis that certain things are impossible, but simply examines the evidence to find out what has actually occurred. It does not twist its observed facts to make them accord with a priori theories, but seeks to make its theories accord with the facts as observed. To say that miracles are impossible, and that no amount of evidence can prove a miracle, is to be supremely unscientific. Within the past few years, in the domain of chemistry for example, discoveries have been made regarding radium which seemed to run counter to all previous observations regarding chemical elements and to well established chemical theories. But the scientist has not therefore said that these discoveries about radium cannot be true; he has rather gone to work to find out where the trouble was in his previous theories. The observed and recorded facts in the case before us prove to a demonstration that Jesus rose from the dead, and true science must accept this conclusion and conform its theories to this observed fact. The fact of the actual and literal resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead cannot be denied by any man who Will study the evidence in the case with a candid desire to find what the fact is, and not merely to support an a priori theory. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 89: - THE PERSONALITY AND DEITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT ======================================================================== The Personality and Deity of the Holy Spirit By Rev. R. A. Torrey, D.D. Importance of the Doctrine One of the most characteristic and distinctive doctrines of the Christian faith is that of the personality and deity of the Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the personality of the Holy Spirit is of the highest importance from the standpoint of worship. If the Holy Spirit is a divine person, worthy to receive our adoration, our faith and our love, and we do not know and recognize Him as such, then we are robbing a divine Being of the adoration and love and confidence which are His due. The doctrine of the personality of the Holy Spirit is also of the highest importance from the practical standpoint. If we think of the Holy Spirit only as an impersonal power or influence, then our thought will constantly be, how can I get hold of and use the Holy Spirit; but if we think of Him in the Biblical way as a divine Person, infinitely wise, infinitely holy, infinitely tender, then our thought will constantly be, "How can the Holy Spirit get hold of and use me?" Is there no difference between the thought of the worm using God to thrash the mountain, or God using the worm to thrash the mountain? The former conception is low and heathenish, not differing essentially from the thought of the African fetich worshipper who uses his god to do his will. The latter conception is lofty and Christian. If we think of the Holy Spirit merely as a power or influence, our thought will be, "How can I get more of the Holy Spirit?"; but if we think of Him as a divine Person, our thought will be, "How can the Holy Spirit get more of me?" The former conception leads to self-exaltation; the latter conception to self-humiliation, self-emptyings and self-renunciation. If we think of the Holy Spirit merely as a Divine power or influence and then imagine that we have received the Holy Spirit, there will be the temptation to feel as if we belonged to a superior order of Christians. A woman once came to me to ask a question and began by saying, "Before I ask the question, I want you to understand that I am a Holy Ghost woman." The words and the manner of uttering them made me shudder. I could not believe that they were true. But if we think of the Holy Spirit in the Biblical way as a divine Being of infinite majesty, condescending to dwell in our hearts and take possession of our lives, it will put us in the dust, and make us walk very softly before God. It is of the highest importance from an experimental standpoint that we know the Holy Spirit as a person. Many can testify of the blessing that has come into their own lives from coming to know the Holy Spirit, as an ever-present, livings divine Friend and Helper. There are four lines of proof in the Bible that the Holy Spirit is a person. Characteristics of the Holy Spirit 1. All the distinctive characteristics of personality are ascribed to the Holy Spirit in the Bible. What are the distinctive characteristics or marks of personality? Knowledge, feeling and will. Any being who knows and feels and wills is a person. When you say that the Holy Spirit is a person, some understand you to mean that the Holy Spirit has hands and feet and eyes and nose, and so on, but these are the marks, not of personality, but of corporeity, When we say that the Holy Spirit is a person, we mean that He is not a mere influence or power that God sends into our lives but that He is a Being who knows and feels and wills, These three characteristics of personality, knowledge, feeling and will, are ascribed to the Holy Spirit over and over again in the Scriptures. Knowledge In 1 Corinthians 2:10-11 we read, "But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God." Here "knowledge" is ascribed to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not merely an illumination that comes into our minds, but He is a Being who Himself knows the deep things of God and who teaches us what He Himself knows. Will We read again in 1 Corinthians 12:11, R.V., "But all these worketh the one and the same Spirit, dividing to each one severally as He will." Here "will" is ascribed to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not a mere influence or power which we are to use according to our wills, but a Divine Person who uses us according to His will. This is a thought of fundamental importance in getting into right relations with the Holy Spirit. Many a Christian misses entirely the fullness of blessing that there is for him because he is trying to get the Holy Spirit to use Him according to his own foolish will, instead of surrendering himself to the Holy Spirit to be used according to His infinitely wise will. I rejoice that there is no divine power that can get hold of and use according to my ignorant will. But how greatly do I rejoice that there is a Being of infinite wisdom who is willing to come into my heart and take possession of my life and use me according to His infinitely wise will. Mind We read in Romans 8:27, "And He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because He maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God." Here "mind" is ascribed to the Holy Spirit. The word here translated "mind" is a comprehensive word, including the ideas of thought, feeling and purpose. It is the same word used in Romans 8:7, where we read, "The carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God. neither indeed can be." So then, in the passage quoted we have personality in the fullest sense ascribed to the Holy Spirit. Love We read still further in Romans 15:30, "Now I beseech you, brethren, for the Lord Jesus Christ's sake and for the love of the Spirit, that ye strive together with me in your prayers to God for me." Here "love" is ascribed to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not a mere blind, unfeeling influence or power that comes into our lives. The Holy Spirit is a person who loves as tenderly as God, the Father, or Jesus Christ, the Son. Very few of us meditate as we ought upon the love of the Spirit. Every day of our lives we think of the love of God, the Father, and the love of Christ, the Son, but weeks and months go by, with some of us, without our thinking of the love of the Holy Spirit. Every day of our lives we kneel down and look up into the face of God, the Father and say, "I thank Thee, Father, for Thy great love that led Thee to send Thy only begotten Son down into this world to die an atoning sacrifice upon the cross of Calvary for me." Every day of our lives we kneel down and look up into the face of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, and say, "I thank Thee, Thou blessed Son of God, for that great love of Thine that led Thee to turn Thy back upon all the glory of heaven and to come down to all the shame and suffering of earth to bear my sins in Thine own body upon the cross." But how often do we kneel down and say to the Spirit, "I thank Thee, Thou infinite and eternal Spirit of God for Thy great love that led Thee in obedience to the Father and the Son to come into this world and seek me out in my lost estate, and to follow me day after day and week after week and year after year until Thou hadst brought me to see my need of a Saviour, and hadst revealed to me Jesus Christ as just the Saviour I needed, and hadst brought me to a saving knowledge of Him." Yet we owe our salvation just as truly to the love of the Spirit as we do to the love of the Father and the love of the Son. If it had not been for the love of God, the Father, looking down upon me in my lost condition, yes, anticipating my fall and ruin, and sending His only begotten Son to make full atonement for my sin, I should have been a lost man today. If it had not been for the love of the eternal Word of God, coming down into this world in obedience to the Father's commandment and laying down His life as an atoning sacrifice for my sin on the cross of Calvary, I should have been a lost man today. But just as truly, if it had not been for the love of the Holy Spirit, coming into this world in obedience to the Father and the Son and seeking me out in all my ruin and following me with never-wearying patience and love day after day and week after week and month after month and year after year, following me into places that it must have been agony for Him to go, wooing me though I resisted Him and insulted Him and persistently turned my back upon Him, following me and never giving me up until at last He had opened my eyes to see that I was utterly lost and then revealed Jesus Christ to me as an all-sufficient Saviour, and then imparted to me power to make this Saviour mine; if it had not been for this long-suffering, patient, never-wearying, yearning and unspeakably tender love of the Spirit to me, I should have been a lost man today. Intelligence and Goodness Again we read in Nehemiah 9:20, R. V., "Thou gavest also Thy good Spirit to instruct them, and withheldest not Thy manna from their mouth, and gavest them water for their thirst." Here "intelligence" and "goodness" are ascribed to the Holy Spirit. This does not add any new thought to the passages already considered, but we bring it in here because it is from the Old Testament. There are those who tell us that the personality of the Holy Spirit is not found in the Old Testament. This passage of itself, to say nothing of others, shows us that this is a mistake. While the truth of the personality of the Holy Spirit naturally is not as fully developed in the Old Testament as in the New, none the less the thought is there and distinctly there. Grief We read again in Ephesians 4:30, "And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption." In this passage "grief" is ascribed to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not a mere impersonal influence or power that God sends into our lives. He is a person who comes to dwell in our hearts, observing all that we do and say and think. And if there is anything in act or word or thought, or fleeting imagination that is impure, unkind, selfish, or evil in any way, He is deeply grieved by it. This thought once fully comprehended becomes one of the mightiest motives to a holy life and a careful walk. How many a young man, who has gone from a holy, Christian home to the great city with its many temptations, has been kept back from doing things that he would otherwise do by the thought that if he did them his mother might hear of it and that it would grieve her beyond description. But there is One who dwells in our hearts, if we are believers in Christ, who goes with us wherever we go, sees everything that we do, hears everything that we say, observes every thought, even the most fleeting fancy, and this One is purer than the holiest mother that ever lived, more sensitive against sin, One who recoils from the slightest sin as the purest woman who ever lived upon this earth never recoiled from sin in its most hideous forms; and, if there is anything in act, or word, or thought, that has the slightest taint of evil in it, He is grieved beyond description How often some evil thought is suggested to us and we are about to give entertainment to it and then the thought, "The Holy Spirit sees that and is deeply grieved by it," leads us to banish it forever from our mind. The Acts of the Spirit 2. The second line of proof in the Bible of the personality of the Holy Spirit is that many acts that only a person can perform are ascribed to the Holy Spirit. Searching, Speaking and Praying For example, we read in 1 Corinthians 2:10 that the Holy Spirit searcheth the deep things of God. Here He is represented not merely as an illumination that enables us to understand the deep things of God, but a person who Himself searches into the deep things of God and reveals to us the things which He discovers. In Revelation 2:7 and many other passages, the Holy Spirit is represented as speaking. In Galatians 4:6, He is represented as crying out. In Romans 8:26, R. V., we read, "And in like manner the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity: for we know not how to pray as we ought; but the Spirit Himself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered." Here the Holy Spirit is represented to us as praying, not merely as an influence that leads us to pray, or an illumination that teaches us how to pray, but as a Person Who Himself prays in and through us. There is immeasurable comfort in the thought that every regenerate man or woman has two Divine Persons praying for him, Jesus Christ, the Son of God at the right hand of the Father praying for us (Hebrews 7:25; 1 John 2:1); and the Holy Spirit praying through us down here. How secure and how blessed is the position of the believer with these two Divine Persons, whom the Father always hears, praying for him. Teaching and Guiding In John 15:26-27, we read, "But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, He shall testify of me: And ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning." Here the Holy Spirit is very definitely set forth as a Person giving testimony, and a clear distinction is drawn between His testimony and the testimony which those in whom He dwells give. Again in John 14:26 we read, "But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you." And again in John 16:12-14, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth: for He shall not speak of Himself; but whatsoever He shall hear, that shall He speak: and He will show you things to come. He shall glorify me: for He shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you." (cf. also Nehemiah 9:20). In these passages, the Holy Spirit is set forth as a teacher of the truth, not merely an illumination that enables our mind to see the truth, but One who personally comes to us and teaches us the truth. It is the privilege of the humblest believer to have a divine person as his daily teacher of the truth of God. (cf. 1 John 2:20; 1 John 2:27). In Romans 8:14 ("For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God") the Holy Spirit is represented as our personal guide, directing us what to do, taking us by the hand, as it were, and leading us into that line of action that is well-pleasing to God. In Acts 16:6-7 we read these deeply significant words, "Now when they had gone throughout Phrygia and the region of Galatia, and were forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the word in Asia, after they were come to Mysia, they assayed to go into Bithynia: But the Spirit suffered them not." Here the Holy Spirit is represented as taking command of the life and conduct of a servant of Jesus Christ. In Acts 13:22 and Acts 20:28, we see the Holy Spirit calling men to work and appointing them to office. Over and over again in the Scriptures actions are ascribed to the Holy Spirit which only a person could perform. The Office of the Spirit 3. The third line of proof of the personality of the Holy Spirit is that an office is predicated to the Holy Spirit that could only be predicated of a person. "Another Comforter" We read in John 14:16-17, "And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you forever; even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him: but ye know Him; for He dwelleth with you, and shall be in you." Here we are told it is the office of the Holy Spirit to be "another Comforter" to take the place of our absent Saviour. Our Lord Jesus was about to leave His disciples. When He announced His departure to them, sorrow had filled their hearts (John 16:6). Jesus spoke words to comfort them. He told them that in the world to which He was going there was plenty of room for them also (John 14:2). He told them further that He was going to prepare that place for them (John 14:3) and that when He had thus prepared it, He was coming back for them; but He told them further that even during His absence, while He was preparing heaven for them, He would not leave them orphaned (John 14:18), but that He would pray the Father and the Father would send to them another Comforter to take His place. Is it possible that Jesus should have said this if that One Who was going to take His place after all was not a person, but only an influence or power, no matter how beneficent and divine? Still further, is inconceivable that He should have said what He does say in John 16:7, "Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but, if I depart, I will send Him unto you," if this other Comforter that was coming to take His place was only an influence or power? One at Our Side This becomes clearer still when we bear in mind that the word translated "Comforter" means comforter plus a great deal more beside. The revisers found a great deal of difficulty in translating the Greek word. They have suggested "advocate," "helper" and a mere transference of the Greek word "Paraclete" into the English. The word so translated is Parakleatos, the same word that is translated "advocate" in 1 John 2:1; but "advocate" does not give the full force and significance of the word etymologically. Advocate means about the same as Parakleatos, but the word in usage has obtained restricted sense. "Advocate" is Latin; Parakleatos is Greek. The exact Latin word is "advocatus," which means one called to another. (That is, to help him or take his part or represent him). Parakleatos means one called alongside, that is, one who constantly stands by your side as your helper, counsellor, comforter, friend. It is very nearly the thought expressed in the familiar hymn, "Ever present, truest friend." Up to the time that Jesus had uttered these words, He Himself had been the Parakleatos to the disciples, the Friend at hand, the Friend who stood by their side. When they got into any trouble, they turned to Him. On one occasion they desired to know how to pray and they turned to Jesus and said, "Lord, teach us to pray" (Luke 11:1). On another occasion Peter was sinking in the waves of Galilee and he cried, saying, "Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus stretched forth His hand, and caught him," and saved him (Matthew 14:30-31). In every extremity they turned to Him. Just so now that Jesus has gone to be with the Father, while we are awaiting His return, we have another Person just as divine as He, just as wise, just as strong, just as able to help, just as loving, always by our side and ready at any moment that we look to Him, to counsel us, to teach us, to help us, to give us victory, to take the entire control of our lives. A Cure for Loneliness This is one of the most comforting thoughts in the New Testament for the present dispensation. Many of us, as we have read the story of how Jesus walked and talked with His disciples, have wished that we might have been there; but today we have a Person just as divine as Jesus, just as worthy of our confidence and our trust, right by our side to supply every need of our life. If this wonderful truth of the Bible once gets into our hearts and remains there, it will save us from all anxiety and worry. It is a cure for loneliness. Why need we ever be lonely, even though separated from the best of earthly friends, if we realize that a divine Friend is always by our side? It is a cure for breaking hearts. Many of us have been called upon to part with those earthly ones whom we most loved, and their going has left an aching void that it seemed no one and no thing could ever fill; but there is a divine Friend dwelling in the heart of the believer, who can, and who, if we look to Him to do it, will fill every nook and corner and every aching place in our hearts. It is a: cure from the fear of darkness and of danger. No matter how dark the night and how many foes we may fear are lurking on every hand, there is a divine One who walks by our side and who can and will protect us from every danger. He can make the darkest night bright by the glory of His presence. But it is in our service for Christ that this thought of the Holy Spirit comes to us with greatest helpfulness. Many of us do what service we do for the Master with fear and trembling. We are always afraid that we may say or do the wrong thing; and so we have no joy or liberty in our service. When we stand up to preach, there is an awful sense of responsibility upon us. We tremble with the thought that we are not competent to do the work that we are called to do, and there is the constant fear that we shall not do it as it ought to be done. But if we can only remember that the responsibility is not really upon us but upon another, the Holy Spirit, and that He knows just what ought to be done and just what ought to be said, and then if we will get just as far back out of sight as possible and let Him do the work which He is so perfectly competent to do, our fears and our cares will vanish. All sense of constraint will go and the proclamation of God's truth will become a joy unspeakable, not a worrying care. Personal Testimony Perhaps a word of personal testimony would be pardonable at this point. I entered the ministry because I was obliged to. My conversion turned upon my preaching. For years I refused to be a Christian because I was determined that I would not preach. The night I was converted, I did not say, "I will accept Christ," or anything of that sort. I said, "I will preach." But if any man was never fitted by natural temperament to preach, it was I. I was abnormally timid. I never even spoke in a public prayer meeting until after I had entered the theological seminary. My first attempt to do so was an agonizing experience. In my early ministry I wrote my sermons out and committed them to memory, and when the evening service would close and I had uttered the last word of the sermon, I would sink back with a sense of great relief that that was over for another week. Preaching was torture. But the glad day came when I got hold of the thought, and the thought got hold of me, that when I stood up to preach another stood by my side, and though the audience saw me, the responsibility was really upon Him and that He was perfectly competent to bear it, and all I had to do was to stand back and get as far out of sight as possible and let Him do the work which the Father sent Him to do. From that day preaching has not been a burden nor a duty but a glad privilege. I have no anxiety nor care. I know that He is conducting the service and doing it just as it ought to be done, and even though things sometimes may not seem to go just as I think they ought, I know they have gone right. Often times when I get up to preach and the thought takes possession of me that He is there to do it all, such a joy fills my heart that I feel like shouting for very ecstasy. Treatment of the Holy Spirit 4. The fourth line of proof of the personality of the Holy Spirit is: a treatment is predicated of the Holy Spirit that could only be predicated of a person. We read in Isaiah 63:10, R. V., "But they rebelled and grieved His Holy Spirit: therefore he was turned to be their enemy, and Himself fought against them." Here we see that the Holy Spirit is rebelled against and grieved. (Cf. Ephesians 4:30). You cannot rebel against a mere influence or power. You can only rebel against and grieve a person. Still further we read in Hebrews 10:29, "Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant wherewith He was sanctified, all unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?" Here we are told that the Holy Spirit is "done despite unto," that is "treated with contumely." (Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament). You cannot "treat with contumely" an influence or power, only a person. Whenever a truth is presented to our thought, it is the Holy Spirit who presents it. If we refuse to listen to that truth, then we turn our backs deliberately upon that divine Person who presents it; we insult Him. Perhaps, at this present time, the Holy Spirit is trying to bring to the mind of the reader of these lines some truth that the reader is unwilling to accept and you are refusing to listen. Perhaps you are treating that truth, which in the bottom of your heart you know to be true, with contempt, speaking scornfully of it. If so, you are not merely treating abstract truth with contempt, you are scorning and insulting a Person, a divine Person. Lying to the Holy Spirit In Acts 5:3, we read, "But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land?" Here we are taught that the Holy Spirit can be lied to. You cannot tell lies to a blind, impersonal influence or power, only to a person. Not every lie is a lie to the Holy Spirit. It was a peculiar kind of lie that Ananias told. From the context we see that Ananias was making a profession of an entire consecration of everything. (See ch. 4:36 to 5:11). As Barnabas had laid all at the apostles? feet for the use of Christ and His cause, so Ananias pretended to do the same, but in reality he kept back part; the pretended full consecration was only partial. Real consecration is under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The profession of full consecration was to Him and the profession was false. Ananias lied to the Holy Spirit. How often in our consecration meetings today we profess a full consecration, when in reality there is something that we have held back. In doing this, we lie to the Holy Spirit. Blasphemy Against the Holy Spirit In Matthew 12:31-32, we read, "Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come." Here we are told that the Holy Spirit may be blasphemed. It is impossible to blaspheme an influence or power; only a Person can be blasphemed. We are still further told that the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is a more serious and decisive sin than even the blasphemy of the Son of Man Himself. Could anything make more clear that the Holy Spirit is a person and a divine person? Summary To sum it all up, THE HOLY SPIRIT IS A PERSON. The Scriptures make this plain beyond a question to any one who candidly goes to the Scriptures to find out what they really teach. Theoretically, most of us believe this, but do we in our real thought of Him, in our practical attitude toward Him, treat Him as a Person? Do we regard Him as indeed as real a Person as Jesus Christ, as loving, as wise, as strong, as worthy of our confidence and love and surrender as He? The Holy Spirit came into this world to be to the disciples and to us what Jesus Christ had been to them during the days of His personal companionship with them. (John 14:16-17). Is He that to us? Do we walk in conscious fellowship with Him? Do we realize that He walks by our side every day and hour? Yes, and better than that, that He dwells in our hearts and is ready to fill them and take complete possession of our lives? Do we know the "communion of the Holy Ghost?" (2 Corinthians 13:14). Communion means fellowship, partnership, comradeship. Do we know this personal fellowship, this partnership, this comradeship, this intimate friendship, of the Holy Spirit? Herein lies the secret of a real Christian life, a life of liberty and joy and power and fullness. To have as one's ever-present Friend, and to be conscious that one has as his ever-present Friend, the Holy Spirit, and to surrender one's life in all its departments entirely to His control, this is true Christian living. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 90: - THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE SONS OF GOD ======================================================================== The Holy Spirit and the Sons of God By Rev. W. J. Erdman, D. D., Germantown, Pennsylvania It is evident from many tracts and treatises on the Baptism of the Holy Spirit that due importance has not been given to the peculiar characteristic of the Pentecost gift in its relation to the sonship of believers. Before considering this theme a few brief statements may be made concerning the personality and deity of the Holy Spirit and His relation to the people of God in the dispensations and times preceding the Day of Pentecost. 1. The Holy Spirit, the Comforter, another Person, but not a different Being. In general it may be said, He is not an "influence" or a sum and series of "influences," but a personal Being with names and affections, words and acts, interchanged with those of God. He is God as Creator. (Genesis 1:2; Psalms 104:30; Job 26:13; Luke 1:35). He is one with God as Jehovah (Lord) in providential leading and care, and susceptible of grief on account of the unholiness of His chosen people. We cannot grieve an "influence," but only a person, and a person, too, who loves us. (Psalms 78:40; Ephesians 4:30). He is one with God as Adonai (Lord), whose glory Isaiah beheld and John rehearses, who commissioned the prophet and sent forth the apostle. (Isaiah 6:1-10; John 12:37-41; Acts 13:2; Acts 20:15-18). In these Scriptures one and the same act is that of Jehovah and of Jesus and of the Holy Spirit. Besides the clear evidence of personality and equality in the baptismal words and in the benediction (Matthew 28:19; 2 Corinthians 13:14), the promise of Jesus affirms the presence and the abiding of the Spirit to be one with His own and with the Father's in this Word. "If a man love Me he will keep My words, and My Father will love him, and we will come unto him and make our abode with him" (John 16:23). Above all, the name "another Comforter" (Paraclete) suggests a Person who would do for the disciples what Jesus the other Comforter (Luke 2:25) had been doing for them. He speaks, testifies, teaches, reminds, reproves, convicts, warns, commands, loves, consoles, beseeches, prays, intercedes, (often the word is "paracletes"); in brief, all these and other acts and dealings are not those of an impersonal medium or influence, but of a person, and One who in the nature of the case cannot be less than God in wisdom, love and power, and who is one with the Father and the Son; another Person indeed, but not a different Being. 2. The spiritual, Divine life in the people of God is the same in kind in every age and dispensation, but the relation to God in which the life was developed of old was different from that which now exists between believers as sons and God as Father, and in accordance with that relationship the Holy Spirit acted. He was of old the Author and Nourisher of all spiritual life and power in righteous men and women of past ages, in patriarch and friend of God, in Israelites as minors and servants, in pious kings and adoring psalmists, in consecrated priests and faithful prophets; and whatever truth had been revealed, He employed to develop the Divine life He had imparted. From the beginning, He used promise and precept, law and type, Psalm and ritual to instruct, quicken, convince, teach, lead, warn, comfort and to do all for the growth and establishment of the people of God. The Psalms run through the gamut of the spiritual experience possible for those, who while waiting for the consolation of Israel and the future outpouring of the Holy Spirit, were "apart from us" not to be "made perfect" as sons and as "worshipers." More than one prayed, "Teach me to do Thy will, for Thou art my God; let Thy good Spirit lead me into the land of uprightness" (Psalms 143:10). But there was then still lacking among men the consummate Reality and perfect Illustration of a Son of God. When at last, all righteousness and holy virtues appeared in a Life of filial love and obedience, even in Christ "the first-born of many brethren," then the Mold and Image of the spiritual life of the saints of the old covenant, who were waiting for sonship, was seen perfect and complete. It was pre-eminently the life of a Son of God and not only of a righteous man; of a Son ever rejoicing before the Father, His whole being filled with filial love and obedience, peace and joy. In ways God-ward and man-ward, in self-denial and in full surrender to His Father's will, in hatred of sin and in grace to sinners, in purity of heart and forgiveness of injuries, in gentleness and all condescension, in restful yet ceaseless service, in unity of purpose and faultless obedience-in a word, in all excellencies and graces, in all virtues and beauties of the Spirit, in light and in love, the Lord Jesus set forth. the mold and substance of the life spiritual, divine, eternal. 3. Redemption must precede both the sonship and the gift of the Spirit. This is very clearly seen in the Apostle's argument on the great subject: "God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that He might redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father" (Galatians 4:4-6). The word "adoption" signifies the placing in the state and relation of a son. It is found in Romans 9:4; Romans 13:15; Romans 13:23; Galatians 4:5; Ephesians 1:5. In the writings of John believers are never called sons, but "children" ("born ones"), a word indicating nature, kinship. Sonship relates not to nature, but to legal standing; it comes not through regeneration, but by redemption. The disciples of Jesus had to wait until the Son of God had redeemed them; and then on the redeemed disciples the Spirit of God was poured at Pentecost, not to make believers sons, but because they had become sons through redemption. In brief, sonship, though ever since redemption inseparable from justification, does in the order of salvation succeed justification. Justification in Romans 5:1 precedes the "grace" of sonship in 5:2. This "access" or "introduction" is of the justified into the presence of God as Father; and it is through Christ and by the Spirit. (Ephesians 2:18; Ephesians 3:12). We were "predestined" to be sons of God, and to be "conformed to the image of His Son" (Ephesians 1:5; Romans 8:29). In Ephesians 1:5 the "sonship" is rather corporate; all believers are viewed as one "son," one "body," just as Jehovah said of Israel, "My son," "My first born." This corporate ness is really to be understood in Galatians 3:28, which may read, "Ye are all one son in Christ Jesus," instead of "one man." (See also Ephesians 4:13; 1 Corinthians 12:12). And this image is His as glorified, so that until we have been conformed to His body of glory, our "adoption" or sonship is not complete nor our experience of redemption finished. (Romans 8:23). And special emphasis should be laid upon the truth that sins were before God only pretermitted until the atonement was made; "propitiation for the pretermission [passing over] of sins that are past" (Romans 3:25); "for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament" (Hebrews 9:15). Remission came through the great offering for sin, just as sonship came through this redemption; and as the Spirit was given because believers had become sons, so also He could be given because believers had received the remission of their sins. This is the invariable order; faith in Christ, remission of sins, gift of the Holy Spirit. Yea, more, as without the gracious power of the Spirit of God the new birth would be impossible, so without the redeeming blood of Christ the estate of sonship would have been unattainable; the Spirit and the blood are equally necessary to the full accomplishment of the eternal purpose of God. In brief, through redemption the new dignity of sonship was conferred, the new name "sons" was given to them as a new name "Father" had been declared of Him; a new name was given to the life in this new relation, "the life eternal," and a new name, "Spirit of His Son," was given to the Holy Spirit, who henceforth, with new truth and a new commandment, would nourish and develop this life and illumine and lead believers into all the privileges and duties of the sons of God. These facts are then all related to and dependent upon each other; Jesus must first lay the ground of the forgiveness of sins of past and future times in His work of redemption and reconciliation; as risen and glorified, not before, He is "the first-born of many brethren," to whose image they are predestined to be conformed; as the Son, He declared to them the name of God as Father, the crowning name of God corresponding to their highest name, sons of God. As His "brethren" in this high and peculiar sense, He did not call them until He had first suffered, died, and risen again from the dead, but that name is the first word He spoke of them on the morning of resurrection, as if it were the chiefest joy of His soul to name and greet them as His brethren, and sons of God, being in and with Him "sons of the resurrection;" and because they were sons, the Father, through the Son, sent forth the Spirit of His Son into their hearts, crying, "Abba, Father!" It is the marvelous dignity of a sonship in glory, like that of our Lord Jesus, with all its attendant blessings and privileges, service and rewards, suffering and glories, to which the gift of the Holy Spirit is related in this present dispensation. Accordingly, when the disciples were baptized with the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost they were not only endued with ministering power, but they also then entered into the experience of sonship. Then they knew as they could not have known before, though the Book of the Acts records but little of their inner life, that through the heaven-descended Spirit the sons of God are forever united with the heaven-ascended, glorified Son of God. Whether they at first fully realized this fact or not, it is seen as in the Gospel of John, they were in Him and He in them. Was Jesus begotten of the Spirit, so were they; was He not of the world as to origin and nature, neither were they; was He loved of the Father, so were they, and with the same love; was He sanctified and sent into the world to bear witness to the truth, so likewise He sent them; did He receive the Spirit as the seal of God to His Sonship, so were they sealed; was He anointed with power and light to serve, so they received the unction from Him; did He begin to serve when there came the attesting Spirit and confirming word of the Father, so they began to serve when the Spirit of the Son, the Witness, was sent forth into their hearts, saying Abba, Father; was He, after service and suffering, received up in glory, so shall they obtain His glory when He comes again to receive them unto Himself. Verily, "we are as He is in this world." (1 John 4:17; John 10:36; John 17:1-26; Romans 5:5). In view of these truths of Divine revelation how foolish the wisdom of the natural man and how sadly misleading the doctrine which makes the "fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man," which are by nature and creation, identical and co-extensive with that which is by grace and redemption; for not only does the imperative word, "Ye must be born again," sweep away all the merit and glory of man as he is by the first birth, but also, the predestination to a sonship like that of the Son of God in glory lifts the "twice-born" to a height and dignity never conceived of by the natural man. 4. In the gift of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost all gifts, for believers in Christ were contained and were related to them as Sons of God both individually and corporatively as the Church the Body of Christ. In kind, as can be seen on comparison, there was no difference in His gifts and acts before and after that day, but the new Gift was now to dwell in the hearts of men as sons of God and with more abundant life and varied manifestations of power and wisdom. But by the Spirit the one Body was formed and all gifts are due to His perpetual presence. (1 Corinthians 12:14). Also, it is to be understood that such a word of Jesus, "If ye then being evil know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him," could not have been fulfilled until a later hour, for repeating His promise at another time it is said of Jesus, "But this spake He of the Spirit which they that believed on Him should receive, for the Holy Ghost was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified" (John 3:7-39) These are some of the anticipative sayings of our Lord, not to be made good until He had died and risen again. The good things could not be given until "transgression had been forgiven and sin covered." The water could not pour forth until the Rock had been smitten. And as to the use of the words, "baptize" and "pour," they afterwards, in later Scriptures, imply the original incorporating act. It is significant that after Pentecost only the words, "filled with the Spirit," are used. Nothing is said of an individual receiving a new or fresh "baptism of the Spirit." It would imply that the baptism is one for the whole Body until all the members are incorporated; one the outpouring, many the fillings; one fountain, many the hearts to drink, to have in turn a well of water springing up within them. The disciples were indeed endued with power for service according to promise; on that especially their eyes and hearts had been fixed; that was the chief thing for them; but in the light of later Scriptures it is seen that the chief thing with God was not only to attest the glory of Jesus by the gift of the Spirit, but also "in one Spirit to baptize into one body" the "children of God," who until then were looked upon as "scattered abroad," as unincorporated members. (1 Corinthians 12:13; John 11:52; Galatians 3:27-28). And the Gift, whether to the Body or to the individual member, is once for all. As the Christian is Once for all in Christ, so the Holy Spirit is once for all in the Christian; but the intent of the presence of the Spirit is often but feebly met by the believer, just as his knowledge of what it is to be "in Christ" is often most defective. 5. The Holy Spirit is given at once on the remission of sins to them that believe in Christ Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. It is, however, to be observed that as the Spirit acts according to the truth known, or believed and obeyed, an interval unspiritual or unfruitful may come between the remission of sins and the marked manifestation of the Spirit, either in relation to holiness of life, or to power for service, or to patience in trials. It certainly is the divine ideal of a holy life, that the presence of the Spirit should at once be made manifest on the forgiveness of sins, and continue in increasing light and power to the end. (Romans 5:1-5; Titus 3:4-7). And this steady onward progress more and more unto the perfect day has been and is true of many, who from early childhood, or from the day of conversion, in the case of adults, were led continuously by the Spirit and never came to one great crisis. With others it is not so, for it is the confession of a large number of men and women, afterward eminent for holiness, devotion, endurance, that their life previous to such crisis had been hardly worth the name of Christian. Whatever explanation or "philosophy" of such experience may be given, the following is true of the majority. The full truth of the sonship and salvation of believers may not have been taught them when they first believed; the life may have begun under a yoke of legal bondage; the freedom of filial access may have been doubted, even though their hearts often burned within them because of the presence of the unknown Spirit; and thus weary, ineffective years passed, attended with but little growth in grace or fruitful service, or patient resignation, until a point was reached in various ways, and through providences often unexpected and most marvelous, when at last the Holy Spirit made Himself manifest in the fulness of His love and power. That there is with God an interval between justification and the giving of the Spirit (an interval such as certain theories contend for), cannot be proved. The unsatisfactory experience of the ignorant Christian may lead him to think he never had the Spirit. There are, however, certain intervals recorded in the New Testament which should be considered. The one between the ascension and Pentecost Was for a peculiar preparation through prayer and waiting on the Lord; that of the forty days between the resurrection and the ascension was a continuation of the presence of Jesus the other Comforter, and of whom it is written, "He opened their understanding that they understand the Scriptures," so doing what His Holy Spirit was to do when He came; and during the previous days of His public ministry not only did Jesus teach, but as attested at the confession of Peter, also the Father was revealing truth to men: "Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father who is in heaven." In the light of this word to Peter it may be said that up to Pentecost the Spirit of God was at work in the world in the modes of the old dispensation, but that when the Day of Pentecost came His peculiar work began in relation to believers as sons of God. Even the breathing of Christ upon the disciples on the evening of the day of His resurrection was, in accordance with the many symbolic acts and sayings recorded in the Gospel of John, symbolic of the Mighty Breath of Pentecost, for both the symbol and the reality were associated with the enduement of power for the service which began at Pentecost. Besides, they were told forty days later to tarry in Jerusalem for such enduement. They could not already have received it and yet be told to wait for it. And Thomas was not present on the evening of that breathing. As to other intervals; that in case of the converts on the Day of Pentecost was doubtless for the confirmation of the apostolic authority; that of the Samaritans when Philip preached may be accounted for by remembering the religious feud between Jew and Samaritan which now must be settled for all time and the unity of the Church established. Also seeing "salvation is from the Jews," the authority of Jewish apostles must be affirmed, for to them Christ had committed the founding of the Church. (Acts 8:14-17). In regard to Paul, it is evident from the narrative, he knew not the full import of the appearing of Jesus, until Ananias came. The recovery of sight, the forgiveness of sins, the filling of the Holy Spirit, all took place during this interview. He received the Spirit, as was befitting the Apostle to the Gentiles, in a Gentile city, far away from the other apostles, for his apostleship was to be "not from men, neither through a man" (Acts 9:10-19; Acts 22:6-16). But the case of Cornelius proves that no interval at all need exist, for the moment Peter spoke this word, received by faith by Cornelius and those present, the Holy Spirit who knew their hearts fell on them: "To Him give all the prophets witness that through His name whosoever believeth in Him shall receive the remission of sins." Peter intended to say more, but God showed by the sudden outpouring of the Spirit that Peter had said enough, for from Peter's report to the church in Jerusalem we learn that he intended to say more, and not only say more but probably do more, so making an interval even as in the case of the Samaritans through baptism, prayer and laying on of his hands that they might receive the Holy Ghost. (Acts 8:14-17; Acts 10:43-44; Acts 11:15-16). It is especially to be noted in this connection that the text of Ephesians 1:13, so often quoted as proving a long interval between faith in Christ and "the sealing of the Spirit," "In whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise," lends no authority for such long interval of time, for the word "after" implies more than the Greek participle warrants, and accordingly the Revision reads, "In whom having also believed, ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise;" but the very same participle, "having believed," used by Paul in Ephesians, is used by Peter in the Acts in rehearsing the interview with Cornelius, who received the Spirit immediately. (Acts 2:17). Neither does the remaining instance of the twelve disciples of John the Baptist whom Paul found in Ephesus, prove that such an interval is necessary or inevitable today; for they had not even heard that Jesus had come, and that redemption had been accomplished, and the Spirit given; but as soon as remission of sins in the name of Jesus was preached to them, they believed, were baptized, and through prayer and the laying on of Paul's hands, received the Holy Spirit. (Acts 19:1-6). The question Paul addressed to them, "Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?" (or in the Revision, "Did ye receive the Holy Ghost when ye believed?") has been most strangely applied in these days to Christians, whereas it was pertinent to these disciples of John only. To address it to Christians now is to deny a finished redemption, the sonship of believers and the once-for-all out-pouring of the Holy Spirit. And it is implied in the case of Cornelius [Ac 10] with which the Apostle Peter had nothing to do except to preach the word, that when the apostles had passed away the mold of experience common for all succeeding centuries would be that of these Gentile converts wherever in Christendom or heathendom the Gospel of Christ might be preached. 6. The conditions of the manifestation of the presence and power of the Spirit are the same, at conversion or at any later, deeper experience of the believer, whether in relation to fuller knowledge of Christ, or to more effective service, or to more patient endurance of ill, or to growth in likeness to Christ. The experience, in each case, is run in the same mold; each part, each word or fact of Christ, must be received in the same attitude and condition of mind as the first, when He was seen as the Bearer of our sins, even by faith alone. Negatively, it may be said that the conditions are confessed weakness and inability to help oneself; the end of nature's wisdom, power, righteousness has been reached; utter despair of there being any good thing "in the flesh" settles over the soul, a willingness to look to God alone for help begins to stir in the heart. Convictions of unfaithfulness and self-seeking mingle with a hunger and thirst for righteousness and a life worthy of the name of Christian. It is not, however, as consciously sinless in themselves that the Spirit is given to them who "seek the blessing," but to them as sinless "in Christ." Believers in Christ begin their life in the very standing of the Son of God Himself. Neither do the Scriptures teach, as implied or expressed in certain theories, that there is an interval between the remission of sins and "the sealing of the Spirit," and that "justified" believers may die during such interval having never been "sealed," and so never been "in Christ," and never been attested sons of God. Such belief contradicts the very grace of God and implies that sonship depends upon the gift of the Spirit and not upon redemption and the remission of sins, and would read, "Because ye have the Spirit ye are sons," instead of, "And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father." It also follows that such justified ones devoid of the Spirit are not Christ's nor Christians, for it is plainly written, "But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His;" and also, "No man can say, Jesus is Lord, but in the Holy Spirit." And as to the proof of the presence of the Spirit at such times, whatever emotions or high raptures may attend the discoveries of the love and power of God in the case of some, they are not to be the tests and measures for all. Conversions are not alike in all, neither are the manifestations of the Spirit. He may come like the sun at high noon through rifted clouds or like a slowly deepening dawn; like a shower or like the dew; like a great tide of air or like a gentle breathing; but "all these worketh the one and self-same Spirit." But more than all, the proof is seen in growth in holiness, in selfdenials for Christ's sake, in the manifold graces and abiding fruit of the Spirit. As in the apostolic day so now the desire exists for the manifestation of the Spirit in marvelous ways; but a life sober, righteous, holy, lived in the hope of the glory to come, is the more excellent way of the Spirit's manifestation and undeniable proof of His indwelling. Positively, the requirements or inseparable accompaniments of the manifestation of the indwelling Spirit, whether for holy living or faithful service, must be drawn from the example of the Son of God our Lord Jesus. And they are prayer, obedience, faith, and above all a desire and purpose to glorify Christ. All, indeed, may be summed up in one condition, and that is, to let God have His own will and way with us. If, then, it is to believers as sons of God, to whom and in whom and through whom the Holy Spirit manifests His presence and power, it would follow that whatever Jesus did in order to fulfil His mission in the power of the Spirit, believers must do; and we find His life to have been a life of prayer for all the gifts and helps of God, a life of obedience, always doing the things that pleased the Father; and so, never left alone, a life of faith in the present power of God, a life of devotion to the glory of God, so that at its close He, through the eternal Spirit, offered Himself without blemish unto God. But the chief and all-including condition and proof is the desire and purpose to glorify Christ. The prayer should not be so much for this or that gift, or this or that result, as for Christ Himself to be made manifest to us and through us. The Apostle who was most filled with the Spirit sums all up in that one great word, "For me to live is Christ." As Jesus the Son of God glorified the Father, so the sons of God are to glorify Christ. The Spirit cannot be where Christ is denied as Redeemer, Life and Lord of all. Christ is "the Truth," and the Spirit is "the Spirit of the Truth;" all is personal, not ideal, for the sum and substance of material wherewith the Spirit works is Christ The Spirit cannot be teaching if Christ is not seen in "the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms," as well as in the Gospels, or if Christ is not acknowledged to have continued "to do and to teach" in the Acts and in the Epistles what He began in the Gospels. If Christ is indeed the wisdom of God unto salvation, the Holy Spirit alone can demonstrate it unto the minds and hearts of men; and He has no mission in the world separable from Christ and His work of redemption. The outer work of Christ and the inner work of the Spirit go together. The work for us by Christ is through the blood, the work in us by the Spirit is through the truth; the latter rests upon the former; and without the Spirit, substitutes for the Spirit and His work will be accompanied by substitutes for Christ and His work. The importance, therefore, of the presence and work of the Holy Spirit should be estimated according to that far-reaching and all-touching word of Christ, "He shall glorify Me" (John 16:13-15). To glorify Christ is to manifest Him as supremely excellent; to blind the eyes of men to that glory is the purpose of the god of this world; therefore, which spirit is at work in a man or in a church can easily be told. 7. In conclusion, the sum of all His mission is to perfect in saints the good work He began, and He molds it all according to this reality of a high and holy sonship: He establishes the saints in and for Christ. (2 Corinthians 1:21). According to this reality their life and walk partake of thoughts and desires, hopes and objects, unworldly and heavenly. Born of God and from above, knowing whence they came and whither they are going, they live and move and have their being in a world not realized by flesh and blood. Their life is hid with Christ in God; their work of faith is wrought out in the unseen abode of the Spirit; their labor of love is prompted by a loyal obedience to their Lord, who is absent in "a far country" to which both He and they belong; their sufferings are not their own but His, who, from out of the Glory could ask, "Why persecutest thou Me?" Their worship is of the Father "in spirit and in truth" before the mercy seat, "in the light which no man can approach unto;" their peace is "the peace of God," which can never be disturbed by any fear or trouble which eternal ages might disclose; their joy is "joy in the Lord," its spring is in God and ever deepening in its perpetual flow; their hope is the coming of the Son of God from heaven and the vision of the King in His beauty amidst the unspeakable splendors of His Father's house; and through all the way, "thorn and flower," by which they are journeying to the heavenly country; it is the good Spirit who is leading them. (Isaiah 63:7-14). ======================================================================== CHAPTER 91: - OBSERVATIONS ON THE CONVERSION AND APOS... ======================================================================== Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of Paul By Lord Lyttelton. Analyzed And Condensed By J. L. Campbell, D. D., Cambridge, Mass. The object of this paper is to present in an abbreviated form the famous argument of Lord Lyttelton in defense of Christianity based on the conversion of the Apostle Paul. A few words about the man himself and about the interesting circumstances in which this treatise was written will properly introduce the subject. George Lyttelton was born at Hagley, Worcestershire, England, January 17, 1709, and died on Tuesday morning, August 22, 1773, aged sixty-four years. He belonged to a distinguished "family of long descent and gentle blood, dwelling for centuries on the same spot." Educated at Eton and Oxford, he soon afterwards entered Parliament, "and for many years the name of George Lyttelton was seen in every account of every debate in the House of Commons." From this, he advanced successively to the position of lord commissioner of the treasury, and of chancellor of the exchequer, after which he was raised to the peerage. He was also a man of letters and his closing years were devoted almost wholly to literary pursuits. He was a writer of verse as well as prose and Dr. Samuel Johnson has furnished us with his biography in his "Lives of the Poets." Outside of his books, which comprise nine octavo volumes, his Memoirs and Correspondence make two additional volumes that were compiled and edited by Robert Phillimore in 1845. The eighteenth century was the darkest period religiously in the history of England since the time of the Reformation. It was the age of the great deists, agnostics, rationalists and unbelievers, when "all men of rank are [were] thought to be infidels." Like so many of the literary men of his time, George Lyttelton and his friend Gilbert West were led at first to reject the Christian religion. On the Sabbath forenoon before he died, in an interview with Dr. Johnson, Lyttelton said, "When I first set out in the world I had friends who endeavored to shake my belief in the Christian religion. I saw difficulties which staggered me," etc. In his biography of Lord Lyttelton, Dr. Johnson adds, "He had, in the pride of juvenile confidence, with the help of corrupt conversation, entertained doubts of the truth of Christianity." His intimacy with Bolingbroke, Chesterfield, Pope and others of the same kind had no doubt influenced him in this direction. T. T. Biddolph tells us that both Lyttelton and West, "men of acknowledged talents, had imbibed the principles of infidelity. Fully persuaded that the Bible was an imposture, they were determined to expose the cheat. Lord Lyttelton chose the Conversion of Paul and Mr. West the Resurrection of Christ for the subject of hostile criticism. Both sat down to their respective tasks full of prejudice; but the result of their separate attempts was, that they were both converted by their efforts to overthrow the truth of Christianity. They came together, not as they expected, to exult over an imposture exposed to ridicule, but to lament over their own folly and to felicitate each other on their joint conviction that the Bible was the word of God. Their able inquiries have furnished two of the most valuable treatises in favor of revelation, one entitled 'Observations on the Conversion of St. Paul' and the other 'Observations on the Resurrection of Christ.'" West's book was the first published. Lyttelton's work appeared at first anonymously in 1747, when he was thirty-eight years of age. The edition which lies before me contains seventy-eight compact pages. It is addressed in the form of a letter to Gilbert West. In the opening paragraph he says, "The conversion and apostleship of St. Paul alone, duly considered, was of itself a demonstration sufficient to prove Christianity to be a divine revelation." Dr. Johnson remarked that it is a treatise "to which infidelity had never been able to fabricate a specious answer." Dr. Philip Doddridge, who became Lyttelton's most intimate religious friend, speaks of it as "masterly," and, "as perfect in its kind as any our age has produced." Testimonials of this kind might be multiplied indefinitely. Let us now turn to an examination of the book itself. Lyttelton naturally begins by bringing before us all the facts that we have in the New Testament regarding the conversion of St. Paul; the three accounts given in the Acts; what we have in Galatians, Philippians, Timothy, Corinthians, Colossians and in other places. (Acts 9:22-26; Galatians 1:11-16; Php_3:4-8; 1 Timothy 1:12-13; 1 Corinthians 15:8; 2 Corinthians 1:1; Colossians 1:1, etc.) Then he lays down four propositions which he considers exhaust all the possibilities in the case. 1. Either Paul was "an impostor who said what he knew to be false, with an intent to deceive;" or 2. He was an enthusiast who imposed on himself by the force of "an overheated imagination;" or 3. He was "deceived by the fraud of others;" or, finally, 4. What he declared to be the cause of his conversion did all really happen; "and, therefore the Christian religion is a divine revelation." 1. Paul Not An Impostor More than half his argument (about forty pages) is devoted to the first of these propositions, which is really the key to the whole situation. Is this story of Paul's conversion so often repeated in Acts and Epistles a fabrication, put forth by a designing man with the deliberate purpose and intention of deceiving? Lyttelton at once raises the question of motive. What could have induced him while on his way to Damascus, filled with implacable hatred against this whole sect, to turn around and become a disciple of Christ? 1. Was it wealth? No, all the wealth was in the keeping of those whom he had forsaken; the poverty was on the side of those with whom he now identified himself. So poor had they been, that those among them possessed of any little property sold whatever belonged to them in order to provide for the dire necessities of the rest. Indeed, one of the burdens afterwards laid upon Paul was to collect means for those who were threatened with starvation. Such was the humble condition of these early Christians, that he often refused to take anything from them even for the bare necessities of life, but labored himself to provide for his scanty needs. To the Corinthians, he writes, "Even unto this present hour we both hunger, and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no certain dwelling place; and we toil working with our hands." (1 Corinthians 4:11-12. See also 2 Corinthians 12:14; 1 Thessalonians 2:4-9; 2 Thessalonians 3:8, etc.) In his farewell to the elders of Ephesus, he appeals to them as knowing it to be true that, "I coveted no man's silver or gold or apparel. Ye yourselves know that these hands ministered unto my necessities, and to them that were with me" (Acts 20:33-34). He forsook the great Jewish hierarchy with its gorgeous temple and its overflowing treasuries, where his zeal in putting down the hated sect of the Nazarene would have been almost certainly rewarded with a fortune. He cast in his lot among the poverty-stricken disciples of Jesus Christ, among whom it was his ambition to be poor. Near the end of his life he presents to us the picture of an old man shivering in a Roman dungeon and pathetically asking for a cloak to be sent him to cover his naked and suffering limbs during the severity of an Italian winter. 2. Was it reputation? No; those with whom he united were held in universal contempt; their Leader had been put to death as a criminal among thieves; the chiefs of the cause that he had espoused were illiterate men. On the other hand, the wisest and the greatest men in all the land indignantly rejected the teachings of this new sect. The preaching of Christ crucified was to the Jew a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness. There was no reputation for the great disciple of Gamaliel in parting with his splendid honors and identifying himself with a lot of ignorant fishermen. He would only be execrated as a deserter and betrayer of the Jewish cause, and he might rest assured that the same bloody knife that slew the Shepherd of the scattered flock would soon be unsheathed against himself. All the reputation that he had so zealously built up was gone the hour that he went over to the new religion, and from that day on contempt was his portion. He was accounted as the filth of the world and the offscouring of all things. (1 Corinthians 4:13). 3. Was it power he was after? We know what men have done to get into positions of prominence and dominion over their fellows. Mahomet, the popes, and many others, put forth spiritual claims so as to promote thereby their own temporal ends. How was it with Paul? His whole career was marked by a complete absence of all self-seeking. He had no eve to worldly ambitions. He interfered with nothing, "in government or civil affairs; he meddled not with legislation; he formed no commonwealths; he raised no seditions; he affected no temporal power." He assumed no pre-eminence over other Christians. He regarded himself as not worthy to be called an apostle, as less than the least of all saints, as the chief of sinners. Those engaged in like work he called "fellow-laborers" and "fellow-servants." Even if the truth was spread by those hostile to him, through "envy and strife," so long as Christ was proclaimed, "therein I rejoice, yea, and will rejoice" (Php_1:18). He did not lord it over the churches, even over those that he himself had founded. To the Pauline party in Corinth he exclaims, "Was Paul crucified for you? or were ye baptized in the name of Paul?" (1 Corinthians 1:13). "We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake" (2 Corinthians 4:5). Those who, from selfish motives seek for influence over people pander to them and flatter them [as, e.g. did Absalom]. There was nothing of this with Paul. He rebuked the churches unsparingly for their sins, and did not hesitate, if need be, to incur their displeasure. Disclaiming all pre-eminence and position and power, he preached Christ and Him crucified as the head, and hid and buried self behind the cross. Earth to him was nothing. His eye was fixed on "the recompense of reward" (Hebrews 11:26). 4. Was his motive the gratification of any other passion? Impostors have pretended to receive divine revelations as a pretext in order that they might indulge in loose conduct. Was it so here? No; for all Paul's teachings were in the most absolute antagonism to any such purpose. "His writings breathe nothing but the strictest morality, obedience to magistrates, order, and government, with the utmost abhorrence of all licentiousness, idleness, or loose behavior under the cloak of religion." Writing to the Thessalonians, he utters the challenge, "Ye are witnesses, and God also, how holily and righteously and unblameably we behaved ourselves toward you that believe" (1 Thessalonians 2:10). "We wronged no man, we corrupted no man, we took advantage of no man" (2 Corinthians 7:2). The whole teaching of the Apostle is in the sternest and most uncompromising hostility to everything but the highest and holiest ideals. 5. Was it a pious fraud? That is to say, did Paul pretend to receive a divine revelation in order to give him prestige in advancing the teachings of Christianity? But Christianity was the one thing he had set out to destroy. To become a Christian was to incur the hatred, the contempt, the torments and the violent deaths suffered by Christians in that day. Why then this sudden change in Paul's own views regarding the unpopular teachings of the Nazarene? Would he have endured "the loss of all things" and exulted over it, for what he knew was a fraud? Would he have spent a life of the most arduous toil to induce others to make every earthly sacrifice while he knew that behind it all he was practising a delusion? It would be an imposture as unprofitable as it was perilous, both to himself the deceiver and to the others whom he deceived. The theory confutes itself. Only the sternest conviction that he had received a divine revelation could have induced Paul to pass through what he himself had suffered, or to have asked others to do the same. "If we have only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most pitiable" (1 Corinthians 15:19). But had he practiced a deception, he could not have successfully carried it out. Men sometimes act capriciously. Suppose that Paul "just did it" without any motive that can be imagined; then he must have ignominiously failed in his attempt to perpetuate such a fraud. How could he, e.g., have become such an adept in the mysteries and secrets of the new religion as to be an authority and an apostle of it, if he had to depend for his special knowledge on information received from men who knew well by bitter experience that he was their capital enemy? It must have come in another way, and his own account makes it plain. "For neither did I receive it (the Gospel) from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ" (Galatians 1:12). Had he fabricated the story of his conversion he would certainly have located it in a place so remote or hidden that there could be no witnesses to refute. [Joe Smith, e.g., and the golden plates of the Book of Mormon]. Instead of that the miracle of Paul's conversion, with its great light from heaven exceeding the brightness of the sun, is placed in the public highway near Damascus; at noonday, when their senses could not be deceived, and when all the accompanying soldiers and commissioners were with him on the spot. Had there been a shadow of disproof, how promptly the Jews in Damascus would have nipped the falsehood in the bud by the testimony of the witnesses who were present with Paul at the time. Or, when the Apostle stood on the castle stairs in Jerusalem and told the whole story, why did not the Jewish authorities silence him at once and forever by showing that nothing of the kind had ever taken place, and proved it by the abundant evidence of the competent witnesses who were with him-if it were not true? It was an event that took place before the eyes of the world, and would be made at once a matter of the strictest scrutiny. And the truth of the fact was so incontestably established that it had become a matter of common knowledge. The Jews said the utmost they could against Paul before the Roman court, and yet Paul appealed directly to King Agrippa in presence of Festus as to his own personal knowledge of the truth of the story. "For the king knoweth of these things, unto whom also I speak freely; for I am persuaded that none of these things is hidden from him; for this hath not been done in a corner" (Acts 26:26)-"a very remarkable proof both of the notoriety of the fact, and the integrity of the man, who, with so fearless a confidence, could call upon a king to give testimony by him, even while he was sitting in judgment upon him." Moreover, how came it that Ananias went to meet such an enemy in Damascus, if the story of his conversion was made up? If Paul was an impostor, then all his miracles were simply tricks or sleight-of-hand. Nevertheless, he, a despised and hated Jew, set himself to the appalling task of converting the Gentile world-teaching doctrines that shocked every prejudice and at which they were wont to mock in derision. Arrayed against him were the magistrates with their policy and power, the priests with their interests and craft, the people with their prejudice and passions, the philosophers with their pride and wisdom. Could he by feats of jugglery in presence of a shrewd, hostile people strike Elymas the sorcerer, blind; heal a cripple at Lystra; restore the pythoness at Philippi; shake open with a prayer the doors of a prison; raise the dead to life, etc., So that thousands were converted and great pure churches renouncing all sin and dishonesty, established throughout the Roman world? Our author shows that this would be impossible without divine help and therefore he concludes that he has proven (1) that Paul was not a cheat telling a trumped-up story about his conversion, and (2) if he were, he could not have succeeded. 2. Paul Not an Enthusiast Who Imposed on Himself This second argument covers twenty pages. Was Paul a deluded enthusiast whose overheated imagination imposed on him so that he imagined to be true that which had never really taken place? Lord Lyttelton makes an analysis of the elements that enter into the make-up of a man of this type. He finds these to be five. (1) Great heat of temper. While Paul had intense fervor, like all great men, yet it was everywhere governed by discretion and reason. His zeal was his servant, not the master of his judgment. He possessed consummate tact which proves self-control. In indifferent matters he became "all things to all men;" to the Jews he became a Jew, to them that are without law as without law, to the weak he became weak-all, that he might gain some. (1 Corinthians 9:19-23). "His zeal was eager and warm, but tempered with prudence, and even with the civilities and decorums of life, as appears by his behavior to Agrippa, Festus and Felix; not the blind, inconsiderate, indecent zeal of an enthusiast." (2) Melancholy. He regards this as a prominent mark of misguided zeal. He finds nothing of it in Paul. There is great sorrow over his former ignorant persecution of the church, but there are no gloomy self-imposed penances such as melancholy fanatics inflict upon themselves. He had a desire to depart and be with Christ, but there was nothing morbid about it. It was all based on the revelation that he already had of the rewards that awaited him in the life to come, He tactfully met the Athenians adroitly claiming to be the interpreter of "The unknown god" whose altar they themselves had erected. He never hesitated to avert injustice by claiming his privileges as a Roman citizen He was the very antithesis of gloominess. In whatever state he was, he had learned to be content. Neither his actions, nor his writings, nor his interested greeting and salutations, show the slightest tincture of melancholia. (3) Ignorance. This charge could not be laid up against the Apostle. Brought up at the feet of the great Gamaliel, he appeared to be master not only of Jewish, but also of Greek (and Roman) learning. (4) Credulity. As a resident of Jerusalem, Paul could not be a stranger to the fame of the miracles wrought by Jesus. He had the facts of the resurrection of our Lord, of Pentecost and all the miracles wrought by the Apostles up till the death of Stephen. Far from being credulous, he had barred his mind against every proof and refused to believe. "Nothing less than the irresistible evidence of his own senses, clear from all possibility of doubt, could have overcome his unbelief." (5) Vanity or self-conceit. Vanity and fanaticism usually go together. Men of this type flatter themselves that on account of their superior worth they are the recipients of extraordinary favors and gifts from God, and of these they make their boast. There is not one word in his Epistles, nor one act recorded in his life, in which the slightest mark of this appears. When compelled to vindicate his apostolic claim from wanton attack he does it effectively, but in the briefest way and with many apologies for being compelled to speak thus of himself. (2 Corinthians 11:1-30). When he had a vision of heaven, he modestly withheld his own name and covered it up in the third person. For fourteen years he observed absolute silence in regard to this special mark of the divine favor. (2 Corinthians 12:1-12). Would this be the way a vain man would act? Neither is Paul that planteth, nor Apollos that watereth, anything, but God who gives the increase. (1 Corinthians 3:4-7). Instead of self-conceit, he writes of himself in terms of the most complete abnegation. Everywhere it is "not I, but the grace of God that was with me." (1 Corinthians 15:10). His modesty appears on every page. (6) But now suppose that in some way wholly unaccountable, Paul had actually been swept away by enthusiasm at the time, and imposed on himself, by imagining the events that took place. Lyttelton's reply is that such a thing was impossible. He here uses the argument that has since been employed so effectively to dispose of Renan's vision theory of the resurrection of our Lord. In such circumstances men always see what they expect to see. An imagined vision will be in accord with the opinions already imprinted on one's mind. Paul's purpose was clearly fixed. At his own request he had been clothed with authority to persecute the Christians, and he was now on his way from Jerusalem to Damascus on this very errand. He looked upon Christ as an impostor and a blasphemer who had justly been put to death. All his passions were inflamed to the highest degree against His followers. He started on his northward journey "breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord" (Acts 9:1). "And being exceedingly mad against them. I persecuted them even unto foreign cities" (Acts 26:11) "There was the pride of supporting a part he had voluntarily engaged in, and the credit he found it procured him among the chief priests and rulers, whose commission he bore." In these circumstances a wild enthusiast might indeed imagine he saw a vision, but it would be one urging him onward to do the thing which he had started out to accomplish. With nothing having happened to change his opinions or alter the bent of his mind, it would be as impossible for him, in a moment, to have imagined the complete revolution that is recorded in the New Testament as it would be for a rapid river to "carry a boat against the current of its own stream." We might add, as well expect the mighty rushing river itself, without any cause to stop in its course and rush violently backward up a steep mountain side, as to expect the whole current of Paul's thought and feeling and imagination and purpose to be instantly reversed without any cause. It could not take place. And it would have been just as impossible for all those who were with him to have experienced the same delusion, for they also saw the light above the brightness of the noonday sun and they heard the voice from heaven, although they understood not the words. But suppose it were a meteor that burst upon them? How then account for the words that Paul heard speaking in the Hebrew tongue and the dialogue which followed? How account for his going to a certain spot in Damascus, in accordance with instructions here received? How account for the knowledge that Ananias had, and that led to their interview? How account for the miracle after three days whereby Paul's blindness was healed? And how account for the mighty works and wonders afterward wrought by Paul, all consequent on this first revelation? [Following the suggestion of, perhaps, Krenkel, a New England professor is credited with teaching that at his conversion Paul had simply an epileptic attack. But, had all the company that were with him a like attack at the same instant, for they all saw something? And, moreover, no disorder of this or any other kind can account for the facts in the case. Paul's marvelous life-work revolutionized the history of his age, and his influence is powerfully felt yet, after nearly two thousand years, all over the world. One is almost tempted to say that if such is the result of an attack of epilepsy, what a pity that such a professor as this had not a similar attack. Then possibly he, too, might yet be heard from in the world]. 3. Paul Was Not Deceived by Others This third possible solution Lyttelton dismisses with a single page. The fraud of others could not have deceived him; for, (1) It was morally impossible that the disciples of Christ could have thought of such a fraud at the instant of Paul's greatest fury against them. (2) It was physically impossible for them to do it. Could they produce a light brighter than the midday sun; cause him to hear a voice speaking out of that light; make him blind for three days and then return his sight at a word, etc.? There were no Christians around when the miracle of his conversion took place. (3) No fraud could have produced those subsequent miracles which he himself actively wrought and to which he so confidently appealed in proof of his divine mission. 4. Christianity a Divine Revelation Our author considers that he has furnished sufficient evidence to show (1) that Paul was not an impostor deliberately proclaiming what he knew to be false with intent to deceive; (2) that he was not imposed upon by an overheated imagination, and (3) that he was not deceived by the fraud of others. Unless, therefore, we are prepared to lay aside the use of our understanding and all the rules of evidence by which facts are determined, we must accept the whole story of Paul's conversion as literally and historically true. We have therefore the supernatural, and the Christian religion is proved to be a revelation from God. Endeavoring as closely as possible to follow the original and yet considerably in my own language, I have sought to give the essence of Lord Lyttelton's matchless argument which has been blessed to thousands of doubting souls. May this outline lead to candid examination, as such an examination should inevitably lead to Him whom Paul saw in the midst of the glory near the gate of Damascus. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 92: - CHRISTIANITY IS NO FABLE ======================================================================== Christianity Is No Fable By Rev. Thomas Whitelaw, M. A., D. D., Kilmarnock, Scotland I. The first mark of the truthfulness of Christianity is to be found in Its Supreme Excellence as a Religious System. The unapproachable beauty and resistless charm of its conception, and the unique character of the means by which it seeks to carry out its aims, are not reconcilable with the notion of Fable. If, however, notwithstanding, Christianity is a Fable, then it is the Divinest Fable ever clothed in human speech. Nothing like it can be found in the literature of the world. Paul only spoke the unvarnished truth when he declared that eye had not seen nor ear heard, neither had the mind of man conceived the things which God had revealed to men in the Gospel. Not Of Human Origin 1. The very conception of the Gospel as a scheme for rescuing a lost world from the guilt and power of Sin, for transforming men into servants of righteousness, followers of Christ, and children of God, each one resembling Himself and partaking of His nature, and for eventually lifting them up into a state of holy and blessed immortality like that in which He Himself dwells—that conception never took its rise in the brains of a human fable monger, and least of all in that of a crafty priest or political deceiver—no, not even in that of the best and most brilliantly endowed thinker, poet, prophet or philosopher that ever lived. Men do not write novels and compose fictions in order to redeem their fellows from guilt and sin, to comfort and support them in death, and to prepare them for immortality. Even those who regard Christianity as being based on delusions and deceptions do not assert that the object of its instructors was anything so lofty and spiritual, but rather that its fabricators Sought thereby to enrich themselves by imposing on their credulous fellows, blinding them to the truth by setting before them fictions as if they were facts, frightening them with ghostly terrors and so securing a hold upon their services or their means. The latest sensation provided by German speculation as to the origin of Christianity is that it was manufactured in Rome in the time of Trajan, i.e., about the beginning of the second century, in order to help on a great liberation movement amongst the Jewish slave proletariat against their tyrannical masters, and that in fact it was an imaginary compound of Roman Socialism, Greek Philosophy and Jewish Messiahism. Neither of these, however, is the account furnished by Christianity itself in its accredited documents, of its aim, which, as already stated, is to deliver men from sin and death. The very grandeur of this aim proves that Christianity has not emanated from the mind of man, but must have proceeded from the heart of God. And it may be safely contended that Infinite Wisdom and Love makes no use of fables and deceptions, legends and fictions to further its purposes and realize its aims. 2. If, in addition, the details of the Christian Scheme be considered, that is to say, the particular means by which it proposes to effect its aim, it will further appear that the idea of fiction and fable must be laid aside and that of reality and truth set in its place. It will not be seriously questioned that the details of the Christian Scheme are substantially and briefly these: (1) that God in infinite love and out of pure grace, from eternity purposed to provide salvation for the fallen race of man; (2) that in order to carry out that purpose He sent His own Son, only begotten and well-beloved, the brightness of His Glory and the express image of His Person, into this world in the likeness of sinful flesh, to die for men's sins, thereby rendering satisfaction for the same, and to rise again from the dead, thereby showing that God had accepted the Sacrifice and could on the ground of it be just and the justifier of the ungodly, as well as bringing life and immortality to light; and (3) that on the ground of this atoning work Salvation is offered to all on the sole condition of faith. This being so, can any one for a moment believe that forgers and fable-mongers would or could have invented so divine a tale? All experience certifies the contrary. Whensoever men have attempted to construct schemes of Salvation, they have not sought the origin of these schemes in God but in themselves. Human schemes have always been plans by which men might be able to save themselves, with such salvation as they have supposed themselves to need—not always a Salvation from sin and death; more frequently a salvation from material poverty, bodily discomfort, mental ignorance and generally temporal needs. Nor have they ever dreamt of a salvation that should come to them through the mediation of another, and certainly not of God Himself in the Person of His Son; but always of a salvation through their own efforts. Never of a Salvation by grace through faith and therefore free; but always of a Salvation by works and through merit and therefore as a debt a Salvation by outward forms and magical rites, or by education and culture. Who Invented It? 3. Then, it may be added: If the Christian Scheme is a fable, who invented the idea of an Incarnation? For to Jewish minds at any rate such an idea was foreign, being forbidden by their strong monotheism. Who put together the picture of Jesus as it appears in the Gospels? Who conceived the notion of making it that of a sinless man, and doing it so successfully that all subsequent generations of beholders, with a few exceptions at most, have regarded Him as sinless? Yet a sinless man had never been seen before nor has ever been beheld since His appearance. Who supplied this Jesus with the superhuman power that performed works only possible to God, and with the superhuman wisdom that fell from His lips, if such wisdom was never spoken but only imagined? It is universally allowed that the power and wisdom of Jesus have never been surpassed or even equalled. Whose was the daring genius that struck out the notion not merely of making atonement for Sin, but of doing this by Christ's giving His life a ransom for many and demonstrating its reality through His rising from the dead? These conceptions were so incredible to His followers at the first and have been so unacceptable to natural man since that it is hard to believe any fable-monger would have selected them for his work, even though they had occurred to him. And who suggested the doctrine of a general resurrection at the end of time?—a doctrine to which unaided human science or philosophy has never been able to attain. The impartial reasoner must perceive that in all these themes we are dealing not with purely human thoughts but with thoughts that are divine and that it is idle to talk of them as fabulous or untrue. "God is not a man that He should lie." He is neither a tyrant that He should seek to oppress men, nor a false priest that He should want to cheat men, nor a novel writer that He should study to amuse men, but a Father whose dearest interest is to save men, who is Light and in Him is no darkness at all, and whose words are like Himself, the same yesterday, today and forever. II. The second mark of truthfulness in the Christian Scheme is . . . ? Its Perfect Adaptation to the end for which it was designed. 1. Assuming for the moment that the Christian System is entirely a product of the human mind, or a pure fabrication, the question to be considered is, Whether it is at all likely that it would perfectly answer the end for which it was intended. If that end was to deceive men in order to enslave and degrade them, then its concocters have signally outwitted themselves; for no sooner does a man accept Christianity than he finds that if he is deceived thereby, it is a blessed deception which makes it impossible to keep him in subjection or degradation, since it illuminates his understanding, purifies his heart, cleanses his imagination, quickens his conscience, strengthens his will and ennobles his whole nature. "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free," said Christ. On the other hand if its end was to do this very thing, then undoubtedly its end has been reached; but the mere fact that it has been reached shows that the Scheme has not proceeded from the human mind as a work of fiction, but from the heart of God as a Scripture of truth. 2. If there be one thing more characteristic of man's works than another, it is imperfection. Magnificent as some of man's inventions have been, few of them are absolutely free from defects, and those that are freest have been brought to their present state of excellence only by slow and short stages and after repeated modifications and improvements—witness the printing press, the steam engine, telegraphy, electrical power and lighting, musical instruments, aeroplanes, etc. And what is more, however perfect any human invention may appear to be at the present moment, there is no guarantee that it will not be in time superseded by something more adapted to the end it has in view. The case, however, is different with God's works which like Himself, are all perfect; and if it shall turn out on examination that the Christian System is perfectly adapted to the end it has in view, viz., Salvation, and has never needed to be changed, modified or improved, then the inference will be unavoidable that it is God's work and not man?s, and as a consequence not a fiction but a fact, not fable but truth. I am aware that at the present moment there are those who declare that Christianity is played out, that it has served its day, that it has lost its hold on men's minds and will require to give place to some other panacea for the ills of life. But for the most part that is the cry of those who have not themselves tried Christianity and hardly understand what it means. And in any case no effective substitute for Christianity has ever been put forward by its opponents or critics. Nor has any attempt to modify or improve Christianity as a system of religious doctrine ever been successful. Perhaps one of the most strenuous efforts in this direction has been that of so-called liberal (alias rationalistic) theology which seeks to divest Christianity of all its supernatural elements, and in particular of its divine-human Jesus by reducing Him to the dimensions of an ordinary man in which case it is obvious, the whole superstructure of Christianity would fall to the ground. Yet a contributor to the Hibbart Journal (Jan. 1910) who himself does not accept orthodox Christianity writes of "The Collapse of Liberal Christianity," and frankly confesses that "the simple Jesus of Liberal Christianity cannot be found," which amounts to an admission that the picture of Jesus in the Gospels as a Divine Man, a supernatural Christ, is no fiction but a Sublime truth. 3. A detailed examination of the Christian Scheme shows that means better fitted to secure its ends could not have been devised. a. It will not be denied that part of the aim of Christianity is to restore mankind in general and individuals in particular to the favor and fellowship of God, out of which they have been cast by sin. Whether the Bible is right in its explanation of the origin of sin need not now be argued. Common observation as well as individual conscience testifies to the fact of sin; and the disastrous condition of the race induced by sin Christianity proposes to remedy—not by telling men that sin is only a figment of the imagination (which men know better than believe); or, if a reality, so trifling a matter that God will overlook it (which men in their best moments doubt); and certainly not by asking men to save themselves (which they soon discover they cannot do); but by first setting forth sin in all its moral loathsomeness and legal guiltiness, and then announcing that God Himself had provided a lamb for a burnt-offering, even His own Son, upon whom He has laid the iniquity of us all, and that now He is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing unto men their trespasses. b. A second thing proposed by Christianity is to make men holy, to free them from the love and practice of sin, to conform them in the love and practice of truth and righteousness; and this it seeks to do by giving man a new heart and a right spirit, by changing his nature, implanting in it holy principles and putting it under the government of the divine and eternal spirit. That the means are adequate has been proved by the experience of the past nineteen centuries, in which millions of human souls have been translated out of darkness into light and turned from the service of Satan to the service of the Living God. And what is more, other methods have been tried without effecting any permanent transformation of either hearts or lives. Magical incantations, meaningless mummeries, laborious ceremonies, painful penances, legislations, education, philanthropy, have in turn been resorted to, but in vain. Never once has the Gospel method been fairly tried and proved inefficient. c. A third thing Christianity engages to do, is to confer on those who accept it a blessed immortality to support them when they come to die, to cheer them with the prospect of a happy existence while their bodies are in the grave, to bring those bodies forth again and in the end to bestow on their whole personality a glorious unending life beneath a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. And Christianity does this by first securing its adherents a title to eternal life through the obedience unto death of Christ, next by making them meet for the inheritance through the indwelling and operation of Christ's spirit, then by opening for them the gates of immortality through Christ's resurrection, and finally by Christ's coming for them at the end of the age. Now can anything more complete be thought of as a Scheme of Salvation? Is there any part of it that is not exactly fitted to its place and suited to its end? So far is this from being the case that not a single pin can be removed from the building without bringing down the whole superstructure. Abstract from Christianity the Incarnation, or the Atonement, or the Resurrection, or the Exaltation, or the Future coming, and its framework is shattered. Take away Pardon or Purity or Peace or Sonship or Heaven, and its value as a system of religion is gone. But these are not assertions that will hold good of fables and fictions, myths and legends, which might all be tampered with, taken from or added to, without endangering their worth. Hence, it is fair to argue, that a scheme so admirably adjusted in all its parts, so complete in its provisions and so exquisitely adapted to its design, could only have emanated from the mind of Him who is wonderful in counsel and excellent in working, who is the true God and the Eternal Life. III. A third mark of truthfulness in the Christian system is Its Conspicuous Success in effecting the end for which it was designed. Had Christianity been a baseless imagination, or a superstitious legend, is there reason to suppose either that it would have lived so long or that it would have achieved the wonders it has done during the past nineteen centuries—either upon individuals or upon the world at large? It is true that mere length of time in which a religion has prevailed when considered by itself, is no sufficient guarantee of the truth of that religion, else Buddhism would possess a higher certificate of truthfulness than Christianity; but when viewed in connection with the beneficial results in elevating mankind, both individually and collectively, which have followed from a religion, the length of time during which it has continued is no small testimony to its truth. Still the practical effects of a religion upon individuals and upon the world at large, as has been said, forms an argument in its favor which cannot easily be set aside. 1. As to the INDIVIDUAL. Had the facts upon which Christianity is based been purely fictitious, had the story of the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of Jesus been only a legend, and had the promise of pardon, purity and peace, of everlasting life and glory which Christianity holds out to men been a deception instead of a verity, does any one imagine it would have effected the transformations it has wrought on individual hearts and lives? I remember that the first lie told by the devil in Eden plunged the whole race of mankind into spiritual death. I have yet to learn that a lie hatched by even good people can save men from perdition and lift them to heaven, can bless them with inward happiness and assure them of divine favor, can comfort them in sorrow, strengthen them in weakness, sustain them in death and fit them for eternity. And yet that is what Christianity can do has done in past ages to millions who have tried it, and is doing today to thousands who are trying it. It will take more than has been said by critics and scoffers to persuade me that these things have been done by a fable. I have heard of fables and fictions, legends and superstitions amusing men and women, diverting them when wearied, occupying them when idle, taking their thoughts off serious matters, and even helping them to shut their eyes against death's approach; I never heard of their bringing souls to God, assuring them of His favor, cleansing them from sin, blessing them with peace, preparing them for eternity. But these again are what Christianity can do and does; and so I reason it is not a fable, but a fact, not a legend but a history, not an imaginary tale, but a solid truth. 2. And when to this I add what it has done on the BROAD THEATRE OF THE WORLD, my faith in its truth is confirmed. Nineteen centuries ago Christianity started out on its conquering career. It had neither wealth nor power, nor learning, nor social influence, nor imperial patronage upon its side. It was despised by the great ones of the earth as a superstition. It was looked upon by Jew and Gentile as subversive of religion and morals. Its adherents were collected from the dregs of the population, from the poor and the ignorant (at least in the world's estimation); and its apostles were a humble band, mostly of fishermen—though they soon had their ranks enlarged by the accession of one (Paul) whose mental force and religious earnestness were worth to Christianity whole battalions of common disciples or of average preachers. But what was one, even though he was an intellectual and spiritual giant, to the mighty task set before it of conquering the world and making all nations obedient to the Faith? Yet that task was immediately taken in hand and with what success the annals of the past centuries declare. In the first century, which may be called the Apostolic Age, it practically defeated Judaism, by establishing itself as an organized religion, not in Palestine alone, but in Asia Minor, and in some of the chief cities of Europe. To this it was no doubt helped by the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 by the armies of Titus; but the undermining of Judaism was being gradually brought about by the spread of the Christian Faith. In the next two centuries, which may be called the Age of the Fathers, it overcame paganism, substituting in wide circles the worship of Jesus for the worship of heathen divinities and of the Roman Emperor. Not without passing through fierce tribulation in the long succession of persecutions with which it was assailed did it achieve the victory, but in its experience was repeated the experience of Israel in Egypt—"the more it was afflicted the more it multiplied and grew," so that by the end of the third and the beginning of the fourth century it had within its pale about a fifth of the Roman Empire. From that time on Christianity applied itself to the task of making nominal Christians into real ones; and but for the mercy of God at the Reformation it might have been defeated But God's Spirit brooded upon the moral and spiritual waste as erst He did upon the material in the beginning, and God's Word said "Let there be light!" and there was light. Luther in Germany, Calvin in Geneva, and Knox in Scotland, with others in different parts arose as champions of the Truth and recalled men's thoughts to the simplicities and certainties of the Gospel; and a great awakening overspread the nominally Christian world. Thereafter Christianity took a forward step among the nations; and is now doing for the world what no other religion has done or can do—neither Buddhism, nor Confucianism, nor Mohammedanism—what no modern substitute for Christianity can do whether materialism, or agnosticism, or spiritism, or socialism; and just because of this we may rest assured that Christianity is no cunningly devised fable but a divinely revealed truth—that it alone contains hope for the world, as a whole, and for generation after generation as it passes, and that the day will yet come when it will fill the globe. In short, when one remembers that Christianity has built up the Christian church and that the Christian church has been the most powerful factor in creating modern civilization. It becomes an impossibility to credit the allegation or even to harbor the suspicion, that it is founded on a lie. By its fruits it may be tested. Notwithstanding the imperfections that adhere to the Christian church, so far as it is a human institution, few will deny that its existence in the world has been productive of preponderatingly good results; and on that certificate alone it may be claimed that the Christianity of which the church is a concrete and living embodiment is no "cunningly devised fable" but a "Scripture of Truth." ======================================================================== CHAPTER 93: - THE BIBLICAL CONCEPTION OF SIN ======================================================================== The Biblical Conception of Sin By Thomas Whitelaw, M. A., D. D., Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland Holy Scripture undertakes no demonstration of the reality of sin. In all its statements concerning sin, sin is presupposed as a fact which can neither be controverted nor denied, neither challenged nor obscured. It is true that some reasoners, through false philosophy and materialistic science, refuse to admit the existence of sin, but their endeavors to explain it away by their respective theories is sufficient proof that sin is no figment of the imagination but a solid reality. Others who are not thinkers may sink so far beneath the power of sin as to lose all sense of its actuality, their moral and spiritual natures becoming so hardened and fossilized as to be "past feeling," in which case conviction of sin is no more possible, or at least so deteriorated and unimpressible that only a tremendous upheaval within their souls, occasioned perhaps by severe affliction, but brought about by the inward operation of the Spirit of God, will break up the hard crust of moral numbness and religious torpor in which their spirits are encased. A third class of persons, by simply declining to think about sin, may come in course of time to conclude that whether sin be a reality or not, it does not stand in any relation to them and does not concern them-in which case once more they are merely deceiving themselves. The truth is that it is extremely doubtful whether any intelligent person whose moral intuitions have not been completely destroyed and whose mental perceptions have not been largely blunted by indulgence in wickedness, can successfully persuade himself, at least permanently, that sin is a myth, an illusion of the mind, a creature of the imagination, and not a grim reality. Most men know that sin is in themselves a fact of consciousness they cannot deny, and in others a fact of observation they cannot overlook. As Chesterton expresses it, the fact of sin any one may see in the street: the Bible assumes that any man will discover it who looks into his own heart. Accordingly, the Bible devotes its efforts to imparting to mankind reliable knowledge about the nature and universality, the origin and culpability, but also and especially about the removableness of sin; and to set forth these in succession will be the object of the present paper. 1. The Nature of Sin It scarcely requires stating that modern ideas about sin receive no countenance from Scripture, which never speaks about sin as "good in the making," as "the shadow east by man's immaturity," as "a necessity determined by heredity and environment," as "a stage in the upward development of a finite being," as a "taint adhering to man's corporeal frame," as a "physical disease," "a mental infirmity," "a constitutional weakness," and least of all "as a figment of the imperfectly enlightened, or theologically perverted, imagination," but always as the free act of an intelligent, moral and responsible being asserting himself against the will of his Maker, the supreme Ruler of the universe. That will the Bible takes for granted every person may learn, either from the law written on his own heart (Romans 1:15); or from the revelation furnished by God to mankind, first to the Hebrew Church in the Old Testament Scriptures, and afterwards to the Christian Church and through it to the whole world in the New Testament Gospels and Epistles. Hence, sin is usually described in the Sacred Volume by terms that indicate with perfect clearness its relation to the Divine will or law, and leaves no uncertainty as to its essential character. In the Old Testament (Exodus 34:5-6; Psalms 32:1-2) three words are used to supply a full definition of sin. (1) "Transgression" (pesha'h) or a falling away from God and therefore a violation of His commandments; with which exposition John agrees when he says that "sin is a transgression of the law" (1 John 3:4), and Paul when he writes (Romans 4:15), "Where no law is, there is no transgression." (2) "Sin" (chataah) or a missing of the mark, a coming short of one's duty, a failure to do what one ought, for which reason the term is fittingly applied to sins of omission; with which again John agrees when he states (1 John 5:17) that "all unrighteousness [or defect in righteousness] is sin," or Paul when he affirms (Romans 3:23), that "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God," and Christ when He charges the Scribes and Pharisees with "leaving undone the things they ought to have done" (Matthew 23:23; Luke 11:42). (3) "Iniquity" ('avon) or a turning aside from the straight path, curving like an arrow, hence perversity, depravity and inequality-a conception which finds an echo in the words of a later psalmist (Psalms 78:5) who complained that Israel had "turned aside from Jehovah like a deceitful bow," and in those of the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 53:6) who confessed that "all we like sheep have gone astray, and have turned every one unto his own way," and in those of his countryman Hosea (Hosea 7:16) who lamented that Israel "like a deceitful bow had returned, but not to the Most High." The words employed in the New Testament to designate sin are not much, if at all, different in meaning-hamartia, a failure, fall, a false step, a blunder; and anomia, or lawlessness. Hence the Biblical conception of sin may be fairly summed up in the words of the Westminster Confession: "Sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God;" or in those of Melancthon: "Pecatum recte definitur anomia, seu discrepantia a lege Dei, h. e. defectus naturae et actionum pugnans cum lege Dei." 2. The Universality of Sin According to the Bible, sin is not a quality or condition of soul that has revealed itself only in exceptional individuals like notorious offenders-prodigals, profligates, criminals, and vicious persons generally; or in exceptional circumstances, as for instance in the early ages of man's existence on the earth, or among half developed races, or in lands where the arts and sciences are unknown, or in civilized communities where the local environment is prejudicial to morality; but different from this sin is a quality or condition of soul which exists in every child of woman born, and not merely at isolated times but at all times, and at every stage of his career, though not always manifesting itself in the same forms of thought, feeling, word and action in every individual or even in the same individual. It has affected extensively the whole, race of man in every age from the beginning of the world downward, in every land beneath the sun, in every race into which mankind has been divided, in every situation in which the individual has found himself placed; and intensively in every individual in every department and faculty of his nature, from the circumference to the center, or from the center to the circumference of his being. Scripture utters no uncertain sound on the world-embracing character of moral corruption, saying in the pre-diluvian age of the world that "all flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth" (Genesis 6:12); in David's generation, that all mankind had "gone aside and become filthy," so that "there was none that did good, no, not one" (Psalms 14:3); in Isaiah's time, that "all we like sheep had gone astray and turned every one to his own way" (53:6); in the opening of the Christian era, that "all had sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23); and generally Solomon's verdict holds goods of every day, "There is no man that sinneth not" (1 Kings 8:46), not even the best of men who have been born again by the Spirit and the incorruptible seed of the Word of God, renewed in their minds and created anew in Christ Jesus. Even of these one writer says: "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us" (1 John 1:8); while another counsels Christians to mortify the deeds of the body, and to put off the old man which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts of the flesh (Romans 7:13; Colossians 3:5-10); and a third asserts that "in many things we all offend" (James 3:2). How true this is may be learned from the fact that Scripture mentions only one person in whom there was no sin, viz., Jesus of Nazareth, who not only challenged His contemporaries (in particular His enemies) to convict Him of sin, but of whom those who knew Him most intimately (His disciples) testified that He "did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth" (1 Peter 2:22; 1 John 3:5). Of this exception of course the explanation was and is that He was "God manifest in the flesh" (1 Timothy 3:16). But besides Him not a single person figures on the page of Holy Writ of whom it is said or indeed could have been said that he was sinless. Neither Enoch nor Noah in the ante-diluvian age; neither Abraham nor Isaac in patriarchal times; neither Moses nor Aaron in the years of the Israelitish wanderings; neither David nor Jonathan in the days of the undivided monarchy; neither Peter nor John, neither Barnabas nor Paul, in the Apostolic age, could have claimed such a distinction, and these were some of the best men that have ever appeared on this planet. Nor is it merely extensively that the reign of sin over the human family is universal, but intensively as well. It is not a malady which has affected only one part of man's complex constitution: every part thereof has felt its baleful influence. It has darkened his understanding and made him unable, without supernatural illumination, to apprehend and appreciate spiritual things. "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (1 Corinthians 2:14); and again, "The Gentiles walk in the vanity of their minds, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their hearts" (Ephesians 4:17-18). It defiles the heart, so that if left to itself, it becomes deceitful above all things and desperately wicked" (Jeremiah 17:9), so "full of evil" (Ecclesiastes 9:3) and "only evil continually" (Genesis 6:5), that out of it proceed "evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications and such like" (Matthew 15:19), thus proving it to be a veritable cage of unclean birds. It paralyzes the will, if not wholly, at least partially, in every case, so that even regenerated souls have often to complain like Paul that when they would do good evil is present with them, that they are carnal sold under sin, that what they would they do not, and what they hate they do, that in their flesh, i.e., their sinpolluted natures, dwelleth no good thing, and that while to will is present with them, how to perform that which is good they know not (Romans 7:14-25). It dulls the conscience, that vicegerent of God in the soul, renders it less quick to detect the approach of evil, less prompt to sound a warning against it and sometimes so dead as to be past feeling about it (Ephesians 4:19). In short there is not a faculty of the soul that is not injured by it. "Sin when it is finished bringeth forth death" (James 1:5). 3. The Origin of Sin How a pure being, possessed of those intellectual capacities and moral intuitions which were needful to make him justly responsible to Divine law, could and did lapse from his primitive innocence and fall into sin is one of those dark problems which philosophers and theologians have vainly endeavored to solve. No more reliable explanation of sin's entrance into the universe in general and into this world in particular has ever been given than that which is furnished by Scripture. According to Scripture sin first made its appearance in the angelic race, though nothing more is recorded than the simple fact that the angels sinned (2 Peter 2:4) and kept not their first estate (or principality) but left their own (or proper) habitation (Jude 1:6), their motive or reason for doing so being passed over in silence. The obvious deduction is that the sin of these fallen spirits was a free act on their part, dictated by dissatisfaction with the place which had been assigned to them in the hierarchy of heaven and by ambition to secure for themselves a loftier station than that in which they had been placed. Yet this does not answer the question how such dissatisfaction and ambition could arise in beings that must be presumed to have been created sinless. And inasmuch as external influence in the shape of temptation from without, by intelligences other than themselves, is by the supposition excluded, it does not appear that other answer is possible than that in the creation of a finite personality endowed with freedom of will, there is necessarily involved the possibility of making a wrong, in the sense of a sinful, choice. In the case of man, however, sin's entrance into the world receives a somewhat different explanation from the sacred writers. With one accord they ascribe the sinful actions, words, feelings and thoughts of each individual to his own deliberate free choice, so that he is thereby with perfect justice held responsible for his deviation from the path of moral rectitude; but some Of the inspired penmen make it clear that the entrance of sin into this world was effected through the disobedience of the first man who stood and acted as the representative and surety of his whole natural posterity (Romans 5:12), and that the first man's fall was brought about by temptation from without, by the seductive influence of Satan, the lord of the fallen spirits already mentioned, the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience (Genesis 2:1-6; John 8:44; 2 Corinthians 11:3; Ephesians 2:2). Whatever view may be taken of the origin and authorship, literary form and documentary source of the Genesis story of the fall (on these points this paper does not enter) its teaching unmistakably is, to this effect: That the first man's lapse from a state of innocence entailed disastrous consequences upon himself and his descendants. Upon himself it wrought immediate disturbance of his whole nature (as already explained), implanting in it the seeds of degeneration, bodily, mental, moral and spiritual, filling him with fear of his Maker, laying upon his conscience a burden of guilt, darkening his perceptions of right and wrong, (as was seen in his unmanly attempt to excuse himself by blaming his wife,) and interrupting the hitherto peaceful relations which had subsisted between himself and the Author of his being. Upon his descendants it opened the floodgates of corruption by which their natures even from birth fell beneath the power of evil, as was soon witnessed in the dark tragedy of fratricide with which the tale of human history began, and in the rapid spread of violence through the pre-diluvian world. This is what theologians call the doctrine of "Original Sin," by which they mean that the results of Adam's sin, both legal and moral, have been transmitted to Adam's posterity, so that now each individual comes into the world, not like his first father, in a state of moral equilibrium-"born good," as Lord Palmerston of England used to say, or in the words of Pelagius-"born without virtue and without vice, but capable of both" (capaces utriusque rei, non pleni nascimur, et sine virtute ita et sine vitio procreamur), but as the inheritor of a nature that has been disempowered by sin. That this doctrine, though frequently opposed, has a basis in science and philosophy, as well as in Scripture, is becoming every day more apparent. The scientific law of heredity by which not only physical but mental and moral characteristics are transmitted from parent to child seems to justify the Scripture statement, that "by one man's disobedience sin entered into the world and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, because that all have sinned" (Romans 5:12). The following words of the late Principal Fairbairn in his monumental work, "The Philosophy of Religion" (p. 165), go to support the Scriptural position: "Man is to God a whole, a colossal individual, whose days are centuries, whose organs are races, whose being as corporate endures immortal amid the immortality (mortality?) of its constituent units. . . .Hence there must be a Divine judgment of the race as a race, as well as of the individual as an individual." But in any case, whether confirmed or contradicted by modern thought, the doctrine of Scripture shines like a sunbeam, that man is "conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity" (Psalms 51:5), that children are "estranged from the womb and go astray" (Psalms 58:3), that all are by nature "children of wrath" (Ephesians 2:3), that "the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth" (Genesis 8:21), and that everyone requires to have "a new heart" created in him (Psalms 51:10), since "that which is born of the flesh is flesh" (John 3:6), and "no man can bring a clean thing out of an unclean" (Job 15:14). If these passages do not show that the Bible teaches the doctrine of original, or transmitted and inherited, sin, it is difficult to see in what clearer or more emphatic language the doctrine could have been taught. The truth of the doctrine may be challenged by those who repudiate the authority of Scripture; that it is a doctrine of Scripture can hardly be denied. 4. The Culpability of Sin By this is meant not merely the blameworthiness of sin as an act, inexcusable on the part of its perpetrator, who, being such a personality as he is, endowed with such faculties as are his, placed under a law so good and holy, just and spiritual, simple and easy as that prescribed by God, and having such motives and inducements to keep it as were offered to him-to the first man and also to his posterity,-ought never to have committed it; nor only the heinousness of it, as an act done against light and love bestowed upon the doer of it, and in flagrant opposition to the holiness and majesty of the Lawgiver so that He, the Lawgiver, cannot but regard it with abhorrence as an act abominable in His sight, and repel from His presence as well as extrude from His favor the individual who has become chargeable with it; but over and above these representations of sin which are all Scriptural, by the culpability of sin is intended its exposure to the penalty affixed by Divine justice to transgression. That a penalty was affixed by God in the first instance when man was created, the Eden narrative in Genesis declares: "The Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Genesis 2:16); and that this penalty still overhangs the impenitent is not only distinctly implied in our Saviour's language, that apart from His redeeming work the world, i.e., every individual therein, was in danger of perishing and was indeed already condemned (John 3:16-18); but it is expressly declared by John who says, that "the wrath of God abideth" on the unbeliever (John 3:16), and by Paul who asserts that "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23). Without entering on the vexed question as to how far Adam's posterity are legally responsible for Adam's sin, in the sense that apart from their own transgressions they would be adjudged to spiritual and eternal death, it is manifest that Scripture includes in the just punishment of sin more than the death of the body. That this does form part of sin's penalty can hardly be disputed by a careful reader of the Bible; but equally that that penalty includes what theologians call spiritual and eternal death, Scripture unmistakably implies. When it affirms that men are naturally "dead in trespasses and in sins," it obviously purposes to convey the idea that until the soul is quickened by Divine grace it is incapable, not of thinking upon the subject of religion, or reading the Word of God, or of praying, or of exercising faith, but of doing anything spiritually good or religiously saving, of securing their legal justification before a Holy God, or of bringing about their spiritual regeneration. When Scripture further asserts that the unbeliever shall not see life (John 3:36), and that the wicked shall go away into everlasting punishment (Matthew 25:46), it assuredly does not suggest that on entering the other world the unsaved on earth will have another opportunity of accepting salvation (Second Probation), or that extinction of being will be their lot (Annihilation), or that all mankind will eventually attain salvation (Universalism). (On these three modern substitutes for the doctrine of future punishment see next section). Meanwhile it suffices to observe that the words just quoted seem to teach that the penalty of sin continues beyond the grave. Granting that the words of Christ about the worm that never dies and the fire that shall not be quenched are figurative, they unquestionably signify that the figures stand for some terrible calamity,-on the one hand, loss of happiness, separation from the source of life, exclusion from blessedness, and, on the other, access of misery, suffering, wretchedness, woe, which will be realized by the wicked as the due reward of their impenitent and disobedient lives, and which no revolving years will relieve. The pendulum of the great clock of eternity, as it swings through the ages, will seem to be ever saying: "He that is unjust, let him be unjust still, and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still; he that is righteous, let him be righteous still, and he that is holy, let him be holy still." 5. The Removal of Sin Heinous and culpable as sin is, it is not left in Scripture for the contemplation of readers in all the nakedness of its loathsome character in God's sight, and in all the heaviness of its guilt before the law, without hope of remedy for either; but in a cheering and comforting light it is set forth as an offence that may be forgiven and a defilement that will or may be ultimately cleansed. As for the pardonableness of sin, that indeed constitutes the pith and marrow of the "Good News" for the publication of which the Bible was written. From the first page in Genesis to the last in Revelation an undertone, swelling out as the end approaches into clear and joyous accents of love and mercy, proclaiming that the God of heaven, while Himself holy and just, of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, and unable to clear the guilty, is nevertheless merciful and gracious, long-suffering and slow to wrath, abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin (Exodus 34:6); announcing that He has made full provision for harmonizing the claims of mercy and justice in His own character by laying help upon One that is mighty, (Psalms 89:19), even His only begotten and well-beloved Son, upon whom He had laid the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6), that He might once for all, as the Lamb of God, take away the sins of the world (John 1:29), intimating that the whole work necessary for enabling sinful men to be forgiven has been accomplished by Christ's death and resurrection, and that now God is in Him "reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing unto men their trespasses" (2 Corinthians 5:19), inviting men everywhere to repent and be converted, that their sins may be blotted out (Acts 3:19); telling men that nothing more is required of them in order to be freely and fully justified from all their transgressions than faith in the propitiation of the cross (Romans 3:25); and declaring that nothing will shut a sinner out from forgiveness except refusal to believe in the great redemption and accept the freely offered forgiveness-though that will, since it is written that he who believeth not on the Son of God "shall not see life" (John 3:36). The ultimate removal of sin from the souls of the believing and pardoned is left by Scripture in no uncertainty. It was foretold in the name given to the Saviour at His birth: "Thou shalt call His name Jesus, because He shall save His people from ["out of," not "in"] their sins." It was implied in the object contemplated by His incarnation: "He was manifested to take away our sins." It is declared to have been the purpose of His death upon the cross: "He gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto Himself a peculiar people zealous of good works." It is held up before the Christian as his final destiny "to be conformed to the image of His [God's] Son," to be presented "faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy," and to be a dweller in the heavenly city "into which there can enter nothing that defileth." Whether sin will be ultimately extirpated if not from the universe, then from the family of man, is a different question, upon which the pronouncement of Scripture is thought by some to be less explicit. Its complete and permanent removal from the race is considered by Certain interpreters to be taught in Scripture. That texts can be cited which seem to lend support to the theories of Annihilation, Second Probation, and Universal Salvation need not be denied; but a close examination of the passages in question will show that the support derived from them is exceedingly precarious. That those who depart this life in impenitence and unbelief will be annihilated either at death or after the resurrection is deemed a legitimate deduction from the use of the word death as the punishment of sin. But as "applied to man death does not necessarily mean extinction of being." Bishop Butler long ago drew attention to the fact that various organs of the body might be removed without extinguishing the indwelling spirit, and argued that it was at least probable that the immaterial part of man would not be destroyed though the entire material frame were reduced to dust; and only recently Sir Oliver Lodge from the presidential chair told the British Association that the best science warranted belief in the continuity of existence after death. Solely on the assumption that mind is merely a function of matter can the dissolution of the body be regarded as the extinction of being. Such an assumption is foreign to Scripture. In the Old Testament David expected to "dwell in the house of the Lord forever;" Asaph at the end of life hoped to be "received into glory;" and Solomon wrote: "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return to God who gave it." In the New Testament Christ took for granted that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, though long dead were still living, and in His parable assumed that Dives and Lazarus still existed in the unseen world, although their bodies were in the grave. He also assured the dying robber that when the anguish of the cross was over they would pass together into Paradise, and counselled men generally to be afraid of "him who could destroy both soul and body in hell." Paul, too, had no hesitation in writing that to be "absent from the body" meant to be present with the Lord," nor had Stephen any doubt in praying as he closed his eyes in death: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." None of these citations suggest that the soul is simply a function of the body, or that it ceases to be when the body dies. But now, conceding that the souls of the impenitent are not annihilated at or after death, may it not be that another opportunity of accepting the Gospel will be afforded them, and that in this way sin may be removed even from them. This theory of a Second Probation, is commonly thought to derive countenance from two passages of Scripture of doubtful interpretation- 1 Peter 3:19; 1 Peter 4:6. Were the best scholars agreed as to the exact import of the two statements that Christ "by the Spirit went and preached to the spirits in prison" and that "the Gospel was preached also to them that are dead," it might be possible to make these texts the basis of a theological doctrine. But scholars are not agreed; and well informed students of the Bible are aware that both statements can be explained in such a way as to render them useless as a basis for the doctrine of a second probation. In judging concerning this, therefore, dependence must be placed on texts which admit of no dubiety as to their meaning. Such texts are Matthew 12:32 : "Whosoever speaketh a word against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come"-no second chance in this case. Matthew 25:48 : "These shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal." Not much hope here of the ultimate destruction of sin through a second probation. Every attempt to find room for the idea shatters itself on the unchallengeable fact that the words "everlasting" and "eternal" are the same in Greek (aionion) and indicate that the punishment of the wicked and the blessedness of the righteous are of equal duration. 2 Corinthians 6:2 : "Behold, now is the day of salvation"-not hereafter in a future state of existence, but here in this world. Nor is it merely that the doctrine of a second probation is devoid of support from Scripture, but, contrary to all experience, it takes for granted that every unsaved soul would accept the second offer of salvation, which is more than any one can certainly affirm; and, if all did not, sin would still remain. It may be argued that all would accept because of the fuller light they would then have as to the paramount importance of salvation, or because of the stronger influences that will then be brought to bear upon them; but on this hypothesis a reflection would almost seem to be cast on God for not having done all He might have done to save men while they lived, a reflection good men will be slow to make. The third theory for banishing sin from the human family if not from the universe is that of Universalism, by which is signified that through reformatory discipline hereafter the souls of all will be brought into subjection to Jesus Christ. That the universal headship of Christ is taught in Scripture is true: Paul declares that all things will yet be subdued unto Christ (1 Corinthians 15:28) and that it was God's purpose in the fulness of the times "to gather all things into one in Christ" (Ephesians 1:10). But these statements do not necessarily demand the inference that all will surrender in willing subjection to Christ. Subject to Him must every power and authority be, human and angelic, hostile and friendly, believing and unbelieving. "He must reign till all His enemies have been placed beneath His feet"-not taken to His heart, received into His love and employed in His service. This does not look like universal salvation and the complete extinction of moral evil or sin in the universe. Solemn and sad as the thought is that sin should remain, if not in many, yet in some of God's creatures, it is the teaching of Scripture. In the resurrection at the last day, it is written, "All who are in their graves shall come forth, they that have done good unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation," or "judgment" (R. V.) (John 5:29). A dark and insoluble mystery was the coming of sin into God's universe at the first: as dark a mystery is its remaining in a race that was from eternity the object of God's love and in time was redeemed by the blood of God's Son, and graciously acted on by God's Spirit. Happily we are not required to understand all mysteries: we can leave this one confidently in the Divine Father's hand. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 94: - PAUL'S TESTIMONY TO THE DOCTRINE OF SIN ======================================================================== Paul's Testimony to the Doctrine of Sin By Professor Charles B. Williams, B. D., PH.D., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas Theodore Parker once said: "I seldom use the word sin. The Christian doctrine of sin is the devil's own. I hate it utterly". His view of sin shaped his views as to the person of Christ, atonement, and salvation. In fact, the sin question is back of one's theology, soteriology, sociology, evangelism, and ethics. One cannot hold a Scriptural view of God and the plan of salvation without having a Scriptural idea of sin. One cannot proclaim a true theory of society unless he sees the heinousness of sin and its relation to all social ills and disorders. No man can be a successful New Testament evangelist publishing the Gospel as "the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth", unless he has an adequate conception of the enormity of sin. Nor can a man hold a consistent theory of ethics or live up to the highest standard of morality, unless he is gripped with a keen sense of sin's seductive nature. Sin a Fact in Human History Paul has an extensive vocabulary of terms denoting sin or sins. In the Epistle to the Romans, where he elaborates his doctrine of sin, he uses ten general terms for sin: 1. hamartia (hamartia), 58 times in all, 43 in Romans, missing of the mark, sin as a principle. 2. hamartêma (hamarteema), twice, sin as an act. 3. parabasis (parabasis), five times, transgression, literally walking along by the line but not exactly according to it. 4. paraptôma (paraptoma), 15 times, literally a falling, lapse, deviation from truth and uprightness (Thayer), translated "trespass" in R.V. 5. adikia (adikia), 12 times, unrighteousness. 6. asebeia (asebeia), four times, ungodliness, lack of reverence for God. 7. anomia (anomia), lawlessness, six times. 8. akatharsia (akatharsia), nine times, uncleanness, lack of purity. 9. parakoô (parakoee), twice, disobedience. 10. planê (planee), four times, wandering, error. Besides these general terms for sin Paul uses many specific terms for various sins, 21 of these being found in the category of Romans 1:29-31. Twenty-one equals three times seven and seems to express the idea of completeness in sin reached by the Gentiles. It is literally true that Paul uses scores of terms denoting and describing various personal sins, sensual, social, ethical, and religious. Is this not an unmistakable lexical evidence that the Apostle to the Gentiles believed in sin as a fact in human history? Again, in all Paul's leading epistles he deals with sin in the abstract or with sins in the concrete. In Romans 1:18-3:20, he discusses the failure of both Jews and Gentiles to attain righteousness. These chapters constitute the most graphic and comprehensive description of sin found in Biblical, Greek, Roman, or any, literature. It is so true to the facts in heathen life today that modern heathen often accuse Christian missionaries of writing it after they have had personal knowledge of their life and conduct. In 1 Corinthians, gross sins are dealt with-envy, strife, divisions, incest, litigation, adultery, fornication, drunkenness, covetousness, idolatry, etc. In 2 Corinthians, some of the same sins are condemned. In Galatians, he implies the failure of man to attain righteousness in maintaining the thesis that no man is justified by the deeds of the law, but any man may be justified by simple faith in Christ Jesus (Galatians 2:14 ff), and mentions the works of the flesh, "fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry," etc. (Ephesians 5:19). In Ephesians, he recognizes that his readers were "once dead in trespasses and sins" (Ephesians 2:1), and exhorts them to lay aside certain sins (Ephesians 4:25 ff). In Colossians, he does the same. In Philippians, he says less about sin, or sins, but in Php_3:3-9 he tells his experience of failure to attain righteousness with all his advantages of birth, training, culture, and circumstances. In the pastoral epistles, he rebukes certain sins with no uncertain voice. Paul's Experience the Psychological Proof to Him of His Doctrine of Sin Paul was a Pharisee. Righteousness, or right relation with God, was his religious goal. As a Pharisee he felt that he could and must, in himself, achieve righteousness by keeping the whole written and oral law. This kind of (supposable) righteousness he afterwards describes and repudiates. "For we are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God, and glory in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh: though I myself might have confidence even in the flesh: circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as touching zeal, persecuting the church; as touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless. Howbeit, what things were gain to me, these have I counted loss for Christ. Yea, verily, and I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord; for whom I suffered the loss of all things and do count them but refuse, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of mine own, even that which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith" (Php_3:3-9, American Standard Version ). His experience as a Pharisee in trying to work out a righteousness of his own showed him to be a moral and religious failure. This experience he reflected in Romans 7:7-25 (So Origen, Tertullian, Chrysostom, Theodoret, and most modern New Testament scholars, though Augustine and a few modern New Testament scholars think the passage refers to the experience of a Christian). "Sin, finding occasion through the commandment, beguiled me and through it slew me... that through the commandment sin might become" (be shown to be) "exceeding sinful. For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do I know not; for not what I would, that do I practise; but what I hate, that I do... Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord". So we see that Paul by his experience with the law was led to see that "in him, that is, in his flesh, dwelt no good thing;" that in his members is the sin principle enslaving him so that he "is sold under sin", that is, under the sway of this sin principle. He thought the law could help him to be righteous. All it could do was to show him his helplessness as a sinner and drive him in his despair to Christ as his only Rescuer "out of the body of this death". All the righteousness he could achieve was insufficient. Only God's own righteousness, given through faith in Christ Jesus, could satisfy the conscience of the awakened sinner or be acceptable to God. The Origin of Sin The apostle does not discuss the larger problem, the origin of sin in God's moral universe. Whence and how did sin originally enter the moral universe? Paul does not undertake to solve this problem. Only the relative and temporal origin of sin, its entrance into the human race on earth, not its absolute and ultimate source, engages the thought of Paul. But what is his testimony as to how and when sin entered the human race? The classic passage on the source of human sin is Romans 5:12-21. Let us consider it. Paul testifies that sin entered our race in and through the disobedience of Adam. "As through one man sin hamartia, hamartia, the sin principle] entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned as through one trespass the judgment came unto all men to condemnation... for as through the one man's disobedience many were made sinners" (Romans 5:12; Romans 5:18-19). In this parallelism between Adam and Christ, Paul is seeking to show, by contrast, the excellence of grace and the transcendent blessedness of the justified man in Christ. He is not primarily discussing the origin of human sin. But that does not depreciate his testimony. The fact that it is an incidental and not a studied testimony makes it all the more trustworthy and convincing. Nor is Paul here simply voicing the thought of his uninspired fellowcountrymen as to the entrance of sin into our race. Dr. Edersheim says: "So far as their opinions can be gathered from their writings, the great doctrines of original sin and the sinfulness of our whole nature were not held by the ancient Rabbis". ["Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah," I. 165.] Weber thus summarized the Jewish view as expressed in the Talmud: "By the Fall man came under a curse, is guilty of death, and his right relation to God is rendered difficult. More than this cannot he said. Sin, to which the bent and leaning had already been planted by creation, had become a fact, 'the evil impulse' (cor malignum, 4 Es. 3:21) gained the mastery over mankind, who can only resist it by the greatest efforts; before the Fall it had power over him, but no such ascendency". [Altsyn. Theol., p. 216.] The reader is referred to Wisd. 2:23ff, Ecclus. 25:24 (33), 4 Es. 3:7, 21ff, Apoc. Baruch 17:3; 54:15,19, as expressions of the Jewish view of the entrance of sin into the world and the relation of Adam to the race in the transmission of guilt. One of these passages, Ecclus. 25:24 (33) the sin of the race is traced back to Eve: "from a woman was the beginning of sin". Observe that Paul goes beyond the statement of any uninspired Jewish writers: 1. In asserting that Adam and not Eve is the one through whom sin entered into the race. 2. That, in some sense, when Adam sinned, "all sinned", and in his sinning "all were... made" (katestathêsan, stood down or constituted) "sinners"... (Romans 5:19). The apostle here means, doubtless, that all... the race was seminally in Adam as its progenitor, and that Adam by the process of heredity handed down to his descendants a depraved nature. He can scarcely mean that each individual was actually in person in Adam. If Adam had not sinned and thus depraved and corrupted the fountain head of the race, the race itself would not have been the heir of sin and the reaper of its fruits, sorrow, pain, and death. 3. That in the introduction of sin into the race by its progenitor the race itself was rendered helpless to extricate itself from sin and death. This the apostle asserts over and over again and has already demonstrated before he reaches the parallelism between Adam and Christ. "That every mouth may be stopped and all the world brought under the judgment of God"; "because by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified in His sight" (Romans 3:19-20). The Essence and Nature of Sin This brings us to ask, What constituted the essence or core of sin, as Paul saw it? Modern evolutionists emphasize the upward tendency of all things, and so sin is regarded by them as merely a step in the upward progress of the race; that is, sin is "good in the making". Christian Scientists go still farther and regard all pain and evil as merely imaginary creations of abnormal minds. [See "Science and Health."] There is no actual evil, no real pain, say they. Does either of these views find endorsement in Paul? It must be noted that Paul nowhere gives a formal definition of sin. But by studying the terms mostly on his pen we can determine his idea of sin. He uses mostly the nounhamartia (hamartia), 58 times, from the verb hamartanô (hamartano), to miss the mark, to sin. To miss what mark? In classical Greek it means "to miss an aim", "to err in judgment or opinion". With Paul to sin is to miss the mark ETHICALLY and RELIGIOUSLY. Two other words used by Paul show us what the mark missed is: adikia (adikia), unrighteousness, lack of conformity to the will of God; anomia (anomia), lawlessness, failure to act or live according to the standard of God's law. So the mark missed is the Divine law. Parabasis (parabasis), transgression, emphasizes the same idea, failure to measure up to the line of righteousness laid down in the law. On the other hand, sin is not merely a negation. It is a positive quality. It is a "fall" (Paraptôma, 15 times). This is graphically illustrated by Paul in his description of the Gentile world's idolatry, sensuality, and immorality (Romans 1:18-32). First, they knew God, for He taught them about Himself in nature and in conscience (Romans 1:19-20). Secondly, they refused to worship Him as God, or to give thanks to Him as the Giver of all good things (Romans 1:21). Thirdly, they began to worship the creature rather than the Creator, then gave themselves up to idolatry in a descending scale, worshipping first human images, then those of birds, then those of beasts and reptiles (Romans 1:22-25). Fourthly, this wrong idea of God and false relation to Him degraded them into the grossest sensuality and blackest immorality (Romans 1:26-32). Is this progress of the race? If so, it is progress in the unfolding of sin's cumulative power, and that where human philosophy and culture were doing their utmost to stem the tide of vice and contribute to the advancement of human government, thought, art, and ethics-in the Roman Empire where flourished Hellenistic culture. But Paul was convinced from his own experience and his observation of society, illumined and led as he was by the Divine Spirit, that the sin principle in men was not an upward but a downward tendency, and that in spite of all the philosophies, and all culture and ethics, to train men in the upward way, intellectually, aesthetically, socially, and morally, still they were carried on down deeper and deeper in vice as they forgot God and followed out the trend of their own thoughts and desires. That is, if sin is a link in the chain of man's evolution, Paul would say it was a downward and not an upward step in the long road of man's development. Let us look at another term used by Paul to express God's attitude toward sin. This is the term "wrath" (orgê), occurring 20 times in Paul's epistles. [This count follows Moulton and Geden, Concordance to the Greek Testament, and excludes Hebrews from Paul's epistles.] Thayer defines this term thus: "That in God which stands opposed to man's disobedience, obduracy, and sin, and manifests itself in punishing the same." [Greek English Lexicon to New Testament.] That is, sin is diametrically opposite to the element of holiness and righteousness in God's character, and so God's righteous character revolts at sin in man and manifests this revulsion by punishing sin. This manifestation of the Divine displeasure at sin is not spasmodic or arbitrary. It is the natural expression of a character that loves right and goodness. Because he does approve and love right and goodness, He must disapprove and hate unrighteousness and evil. The spontaneous expression of this attitude of God's character toward sin is "wrath". How heinous and enormous sin must be, if the loving and gracious God, in whom Paul believes, thus hates and punishes it! Its nature must be the opposite of those highest attributes of God, holiness, righteousness, love. Take another term used by Paul, hupodikos (hupodikos), guilty (Romans 3:19). Thayer thus defines this term: "Under judgment, one who has lost his suit; with a dative of person, debtor to one, owing satisfaction". [Greek English Lexicon to New Testament.] In this passage it is used with the dative of God (theô) and so "all the world" is declared by Paul to be "under judgment of God, having lost its suit with God, owing satisfaction to God" (and, it being implied, not able to render satisfaction to Him). This passage implies that the essence of sin is "guilt". Man by sin is "under judgment", "under sentence". He has come into court with God, is found to have broken God's law, and so is guilty and liable to punishment. A secondary element in sin is implied in this term, the helplessness of man in sin, "owing satisfaction to God", but not able to render it. It must be noted that Paul thinks of this guilt as having DIFFERENT DECREES according to the light against which the sinner sins (Romans 2:12-14). The Gentile sins without the law, that is, without knowing the requirements of the written law, and so he perishes without the law, that is, without the severity specially provided for the transgressor in the written law. But the Jew, who sins against the superior light of written revelation, shall receive the more severe penalty prescribed in the written law. All men are guilty of breaking God's law, but the different realms of law afford different degrees of light, and so the various transgressors are guilty in varying degrees, just as there are different degrees of murder and manslaughter, according to the circumstances and motives of those guilty. Paul uses the term sin to express three phases of sin: First, the sin principle, or sin in the abstract. He uses the term more often in this sense than in any other. He often personifies the sin principle, doubtless because he believes in the personal Satan. Secondly, by implication he teaches that man is in a state of sin. (Romans 5:18-19). "All men unto condemnation" means that men are in a state of condemnation-guilty of breaking God's law, and therefore worthy of punishment. "Made sinners" signifies that man's nature is essentially sinful, and so man may be said to be under the sin principle, or in the state of sin (though this phrase, "in the state of sin," does not occur in Paul, but first in theologians of a later age). Thirdly, Paul uses several terms for sin which signify acts of sin. Here he views it in the concrete. Men forget God, hate God, lie, steal, kill, commit adultery, hate parents, love self, etc., etc. In this sense he sees the stream of human conduct which is only the expression of the sin principle. Relation of the Law to Sin Does the law produce sin? Is the law sinful in that it causes men to sin? Not at all, asserts Paul. "What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Howbeit, I had not known sin, except through the law: for I had not known coveting, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet; but sin, finding occasion, wrought in me through the commandment all manner of coveting; for apart from the law sin is dead", etc., etc. (Romans 7:7-14, R. V.) ... The following points seem clearly expressed in this passage: 1. The law is not the real cause of man's sin. Not even its severest demands can be charged with causing man's sin. 2. This is true, because the law is essentially "holy, righteous, good"; holy in the double sense of being a separate order of being and conduct ordained by God and also requiring holiness, or the following of this separate order of being and conduct; righteous in the sense of being the expression of God's will and the standard of man's thoughts and actions; good in the sense that it is ordained for benevolent ends. It is also called "spiritual" in the sense that it was given through God's Spirit and conduces to spirituality if obeyed from the right motive. 3. But this holy and righteous, good and spiritual, law became "THE OCCASION" of sinning. This Paul illustrates with the tenth commandment. He would not have coveted if the law had not said, Thou shalt not covet. The Greek word for "occasion" (aphormê) means literally "a base of operations" (Thayer). The sin principle makes the command of God its headquarters for a life-long campaign of struggle in man, urging him to evil actions and deterring him from good ones. There is something in man which revolts from doing the thing demanded and inclines him to do the thing forbidden. Hence, the sin principle, using this tendency in man, and so making the law the base of its operations, becomes the "occasion" to sinning. 4. The law shows the sinfulness of sin-shows it to be heinous in its nature and deadly in its consequences. This is what Paul intimated in Romans 5:20, when he said, "the law came in besides that the trespass might abound". The law sows men that they are failures in the matter of achieving righteousness. 5. The law thus NEGATIVELY prepares the way for leading men to Christ as their only Rescuer. "Wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me out of the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 7:24-25). The apostle was driven to despair as he plunged headlong into persecution and its enormous sins, but when he reached the end of his own strength he looked up and accepted deliverance from the risen Christ. Relation of the Flesh to Sin Paul often uses the term "flesh" (sarx) in contrast with the term spirit. In this sense flesh, according to Thayer, means "mere human nature, the earthly nature of man apart from Divine influence, and therefore prone to sin and opposed to God". He regards the flesh (occurring 84 times) as the seat of the sin principle. "In me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing" (Romans 7:18). He does not mean to deny that sin as a guilty act rests on the human will. He always takes for granted human freedom to choose. Yet he regards the lower nature of man (his sarx) as the element of weakness and corruption in man, which furnishes a field for the operation of the sin principle. The law is the "BASE of operations" (occasion), but the flesh is the open FIELD where the sin principle operates. This sin principle drags the higher man (called "the inner man", Romans 7:22, "the mind, or reason," nous, 7:25, or more usually, the spirit) down into the realm of the flesh and through the passions, appetites, etc. (Galatians 5:16; Ephesians 2:3), leads the whole man into thoughts, acts, and courses of sin. But we must hasten to say that Paul does not adopt the Platonic view that matter is evil per se. Paul does not think of man's physical structure as being in itself sinful and his spirit, or soul, in itself as holy. He merely emphasizes the serfdom of man under the sway of the sin principle on account of the weakness of human flesh. Nor does Paul claim that human reason is free from sin because it approves the law of God. His expression (Romans 7:25) "I of myself with the mind [reason] indeed serve [am slave to] the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin", only emphasizes the fact of struggle in man; that the higher nature does approve the requirements of God's law, though it cannot meet those demands because of the slavery of his lower nature (flesh) to the sin principle. The Consequences of Sin This point needs no prolonged discussion. Paul thinks of death, with its train of antecedents, sorrow, pain and all kinds of suffering, as the consequence of sin. This means physical as well as spiritual death, and the latter (separation of man from fellowship with God) is of prime import to Paul. We need not bring Paul into conflict With the claims of modern natural scientists, that man would have suffered physical death had Adam never sinned. The only man that scientists know is the mortal man descended from Adam who sinned. Therefore they cannot logically assert that man would have died had Adam not sinned. Nor need we say that Paul's cosmic view of sin, namely, that the entrance of the sin principle into human life by Adam vitiated the whole cosmos, that because of sin "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain until now" (Romans 7:22), is unscientific. He here merely asserted the great fact that all cosmic life, plant, animal, and human, has been made to suffer because of the presence of sin in man. Who can doubt it? See Romans 5:12-14; Romans 5:21; Romans 6:21; Romans 7:10; Romans 8:19-25; Ephesians 2:1, etc. The Universality of Sin Paul regards every man as a guilty sinner, however great may be his natural or cultural advantages. He felt that he had the greatest advantages "in the flesh" to attain righteousness (Php_3:3-9), but he had miserably failed (Romans 7:24). Therefore all men have failed (Romans 1:18-2:29). But he is not satisfied with a mere experiential demonstration of the universality of sin. He likewise bases it on the dictum of Scripture (Romans 3:9-20). More than that he studied the facts of human life, both Jewish and Gentile, and so by the inductive method is led by the Spirit to declare "by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified in His sight" (Romans 3:20); "All have sinned and are coming short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). The Persistence of the Sin Principle In Galatians 5:17-18, Paul tells the Galatian Christians that "the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other, that ye may not do the things that ye would". Lightfoot says: "It is an appeal to their own consciousness: Have you not evidence of these two opposing principles in your own hearts?" ("Commentary on Galatians." in loco.) The Galatian Christians are exhorted to "walk in the Spirit" and let not the sin principle, which is not utterly vanquished in the flesh at regeneration, prevail and cover them in defeat and shame. This same persistence of the sin principle is described in Romans 8:5-9, where he surely is describing the experience of believers. Then in Php_3:12-14, he alludes to his own Christian experience thus: "I count not that I have already obtained; or am already made perfect; but I press on if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Christ Jesus. Brethren, I count not myself yet to have laid hold.... I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus". Paul knew by experience that the old sin principle still pursued him and that on account of the weakness of the flesh he had not reached the "goal" of practical righteousness. Even in his old age (1 Timothy 1:15) he breaks forth in the consciousness of his own enormous inherent sinfulness: "Faithful is the saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief". Every Greek scholar knows that in the last clause, "I am", both pronoun and verb being expressed and their order inverted, is emphatic. Sin pursued the great and consecrated apostle even down to gray hairs. Sin is a Napoleon conducting his disturbing, destructive, and death bringing campaigns even in the Christian's life. We may, by the grace of God and the help of the Spirit, make him prisoner on Elba, but he will escape and continue till life's latest breath to distract our minds and defeat our holiest ambitions. But this Napoleon in the realm of our religious experience, like the Napoleon in the experience of European kings and nations, shall meet his Waterloo. Sin Finally Vanquished in Christ Jesus Paul has this thought of conquest in mind in that unique passage, Romans 5:12-21. The conquest of sin by grace in Christ Jesus far transcends the demolishing power of sin handed down by Adam to his posterity. "But where sin abounded, grace abounded more exceedingly, that as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord". This is the apostle's paean of triumph as he draws the last pen stroke in describing the blessedness of the justified man. The first historic conquest of sin in Christ was His conception without sin; though born of a sinful woman, her sinful nature was not handed down to Him. Then followed victory after victory-in those thirty silent years in which He never yielded to a single sinful impulse; in the wilderness struggle when in that supreme moment He said, Get thee hence, Satan; on Calvary when He meekly submitted to the sufferings of human sin, in which submission He showed Himself above sin; in the resurrection when death was defeated and driven from his own battle field, the grave, while He as the Son of God arose in triumph and in forty days? afterward sat down on the right hand of the Father, to send to men the Spirit to apply and enforce His mediatorial work. Then this conquest of sin is personalized in each believer. At regeneration the sin principle is subdued by the Spirit in Christ and the Divine nature so implanted, as to guarantee the complete conquest of sin. In the life of consecration and service the sin principle goes down in defeat step by step, until in death whose sting is sin, the believer triumphs in Christ on the last field; he feels no sting and knows the strife with the sin monster is forever passed, and in exultation he receives "an abundant entrance" to the kingdom of glory, as Paul triumphantly received it. (Php_1:21; Php_1:23; 2 Timothy 4:6-8). ======================================================================== CHAPTER 95: - SIN AND JUDGMENT TO COME ======================================================================== Sin and Judgment to Come By Sir Robert Anderson, K. C. B., L.L. D., London, England The Book of Judges records that in evil days when civil war was raging in Israel, the tribe of Benjamin boasted of having 700 men who "could sling stones at a hair breadth and not miss." Nearly two hundred times the Hebrew word chatha, here translated "miss," is rendered "sin" in our English Bible; and this striking fact may teach us that while "all unrighteousness is sin," the root-thought of sin is far deeper. Man is a sinner because, like a clock that does not tell the time, he fails to fulfill the purpose of his being. And that purpose is (as the Westminster divines admirably state it), "to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." Our Maker intended that "we should be to the praise of His glory." But we utterly fail of this; we "come short of the glory of God." Man is a sinner not merely because of what he does, but by reason of what he is. Man a Failure That man is a failure is denied by none save the sort of people who say in their heart, "There is no God." For, are we not conscious of baffled aspirations, and unsatisfied longings after the infinite? Some there are, indeed, we are told, who have no such aspirations. There are seeming exceptions, no doubt-Mr. A. J. Balfour instances "street arabs and advanced thinkers"-but such exceptions can be explained. And these aspirations and longings-these cravings of our higher being-are quite distinct from the groan of the lower creation. How, then, can we account for them? The atheistical evolution which has superseded Darwinism can tell us nothing here. They are a part of the mass of proof that man is by nature a religious being; and that indisputable fact points to the further fact that he is God's creature. People who are endowed with an abnormal capacity for "simple faith" may possibly attribute the intellectual and aesthetical phenomena of man's being to the great "primordial germ," a germ which was not created at all, but (according to the philosophy of one of Mark Twain's amusing stories), "only just happened." But most of us are so dull-witted that we cannot rise to belief in an effect without an adequate cause; and if we accepted the almighty germ hypothesis we should regard it as a more amazing display of creative power than the "Mosaic cosmogony" described. Why a Failure? But all this, which is so clear to every free and fearless thinker, gives rise to a difficulty of the first magnitude. If man be a failure, how can he be a creature of a God who is infinite in wisdom and goodness and power? He is like a bird with a broken wing, and God does not make birds with broken wings. If a bird cannot fly, the merest baby concludes that something must have happened to it. And by an equally simple process of reasoning we conclude that some evil has happened to our race. And here the Eden Fall affords an adequate explanation of the strange anomalies of our being, and no other explanation of them is forthcoming. Certain it is, then, that man is God's creature, and no less certain is it that he is a fallen creature. Even if Scripture were silent here, the patent facts would lead us to infer that some disaster such as that which Genesis records must have befallen the human race. Man Without Excuse But, while this avails to solve one difficulty, it suggests another. The dogma of the moral depravity of man, and irremediable, cannot be reconciled with divine justice in punishing sin. If by the law of his fallen nature man were incapable of doing right, it would be clearly inequitable to punish him for doing wrong. If the Fall had made him crooked-backed, to punish him for not standing upright, would be worthy of an unscrupulous and cruel tyrant. But we must distinguish between theological dogma and divine truth. That man is without excuse is the clear testimony of Holy Writ. This, moreover, is asserted emphatically of the heathen; and its truth is fully established by the fact that even heathendom has produced some clean, upright lives. Such cases, no doubt, are few and far between; but that in no way affects the principle of the argument; for, what some have done all might do. True it is that in the antediluvian age the entire race was sunk in vice; and such was also the condition of the Canaanites in later times. But the divine judgments that fell on them are proof that their condition was not solely an inevitable consequence of the Fall. For, in that case the judgments would have been a display, not of divine justice, but of ruthless vengeance. Depravity in Religious Nature And, further, if this dogma were true, all unregenerate men would be equally degraded, whereas, in fact, the unconverted religionist can maintain as high a standard of morality as the spiritual Christian. In this respect the life of Saul the Pharisee was as perfect as that of Paul the Apostle of the Lord. His own testimony to this is unequivocal. (Acts 26:4-5; Php_3:4-6). No less so is his confession that, notwithstanding his life of blameless morality, he was a persecuting blasphemer and the chief of sinners. (1 Timothy 1:13). The solution of this seeming enigma is to be found in the fact so plainly declared in the Scripture, that it is not in the moral, but in the religious or the spiritual sphere, that man is hopelessly depraved and lost. Hence the terrible word as true of those who stand on a pinnacle of high morality as of those who wallow in filthy sin-"they that are in the flesh cannot please God." "The ox knows his owner, and the ass his master's crib." But, as for us, we have gone astray like lost sheep. The natural man does not know his God. Man A Sinner in Character While then sin has many aspects, man is a sinner, I repeat, primarily and essentially, not because of what he does but because of what he is. And this brings into prominence the obvious truth that sin is to be judged from the divine, and not from the human, standpoint. It relates to God's requirements and not to man's estimate of himself. And this applies to all the many aspects in which sin may be regarded. "It may be contemplated as the missing of a mark or aim; it is then hamartia or hamartêma: the overpassing or transgressing of a line; it is then parabasis: the disobedience to a voice; in which case it is parakoê: the falling where one should have stood upright; this will be paraptôma: ignorance of what one ought to have known; this will be agnoêma: diminishing of that which should have been rendered in full measure which is hêttêma: nonobservance of a law, which is anomia or paranomia: a discord, and then it is plêmmeleia and in other ways almost out of number." This well known passage from Archbishop Trench's "Synonyms" must not be taken as a theological statement of doctrine. As Dr. Trench notices on a later page, the word hamartia has a far wider scope than "the missing of a mark or aim." It is used in the New Testament as the generic term for sin. And anomia has a far deeper significance than the "non-observance of a law." Hamartia estin hê anomia we read in 1 John 3:4; and "sin is lawlessness" is the revisers? admirable rendering of the apostle's words. What anarchy is in another sphere, anomia is in this-not mere nonobservance of a law, but a revolt against, and defiance of law. "Original sin" may sometimes find expression in "I cannot;" but "I will not" is at the back of all actual sin; its root principle is the assertion of a will that is not subject to the will of God. The Carnal Mind Spiritual truths are spiritually discerned; but when the Apostle Paul declares that "the carnal mind," that is, the unenlightened mind of the natural man, "is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God" (Romans 8:7), he is stating what is a fact in the experience of all thoughtful men. It is not that men by nature prefer evil to good; that betokens a condition due to vicious practices. "Given up to a reprobate mind" is the apostle's description of those who are thus depraved by the indulgence of "shameful passions." The subject is a delicate and unsavory one; but all who have experience of criminals can testify that the practice of unnatural vices destroys all power of appreciating the natural virtues. As the first chapter of Romans tells us, the slaves of such vices sink to the degradations, not only of "doing such things," but of "taking pleasure in them that do them" (Romans 1:24-32). All power of recovery is gone there is nothing in them to which appeal can be made.* [*I cannot refrain from saying that if I can intelligently "justify the ways of God" in destroying the cities of the plain, and decreeing the extermination of the Canaanites, I owe it to knowledge gained in police work in London, for unnatural vice seems to be hereditary] But this is abnormal. Notwithstanding indulgence in "natural" vice, there is in man a latent sense of self-respect which may be invoked. Even a great criminal is not insensible to such an appeal. For, although his powers of self-control may be almost paralyzed, he does not call evil good, but acknowledges it to be evil. And thus to borrow the apostle's words, he "consents to the law that it is good." But, if he does so, it is because he recognizes it to be the law of his own better nature. He is thinking of what is due to himself. Speak to him of what is due to God, and the latent enmity of the "carnal mind" is at once aroused. In the case of one who has had a religious training, the manifestations of that enmity may be modified or restrained; but he is conscious of it none the less. Thoughtful men of the world, I repeat, do not share the doubts which some theologians entertain as to the truth of Scriptural teaching on this subject. For, every waking hour brings proof "that the relationship between man and his Maker has become obscured, and that even when he knows the will of God there is something in his nature which prompts him to rebel against it." Such a state of things, moreover, is obviously abnormal, and if the divine account of it be rejected, it must remain a mystery unsolved and unsoluble. The Eden Fall explains it, and no other explanation can be offered. The Root of Sin It might be argued that an unpremeditated sin-a sin in which mind and will have no part-is a contradiction in terms. But this we need not discuss, for it is enough for the present purpose to notice the obvious fact that with unfallen beings such a sin would be impossible. As the Epistle of James declares, every sin is the outcome of an evil desire. And eating the forbidden fruit was the result of a desire excited by yielding to the tempter's wiles. When a woman harbors the thought of breaking her marriage vow she ceases to be pure; and once our parents lent a willing ear to Satan's gospel, "Ye shall not surely die," "Ye shall be as gods knowing good and evil," their fall was an accomplished fact. The overt act of disobedience, which followed as of course, was but the outward manifestation of it. And, as their ruin was accomplished, not by the corruption of their morals, but by the undermining of their faith in God, it is not, I repeat, in the moral, but in the spiritual sphere, that the ruin is complete and hopeless. Reconciliation the Great Need Therefore also is it that while "patient continuance in well doing" is within the human capacity, Romans 2:6-11 applies to all whether with or without a divine revelation; but of course the test and standard would be different with the Jew and the heathen, and the denial of this not only supplies an adequate apology for a life of sin, but impugns the justice of the divine. judgment which awaits it no amount of success, no measure of attainment, in this sphere can avail to put us right with God. If my house be in darkness owing to the electric current having been cut off, no amount of care bestowed upon my plant and fittings will restore the light. My first need is to have the current renewed. And so here; man by nature is "alienated from the life of God," and his first need is to be reconciled to God. And apart from redemption reconciliation is impossible. Neo-Christianism A discussion of the sin question apart from God's remedy for sin would present the truth in a perspective so wholly false as to suggest positive error. But before passing on to speak of the remedy something more needs to be said about the disease. For the loose thoughts so prevalent today respecting the atonement are largely due to an utterly inadequate appreciation of sin; and this again depends on ignorance of God. Sin in every respect of it has, of course, a relation to a savage; and as man is God's creature the standard is, again of course, divine perfection. But the God of the neo-Christianism of the day-we must not call it Christianity-is a weak and gentle human "Jesus" who has supplanted the God of both nature and revelation. The element of the folly in religious heresies affords material for an interesting psychological study. If the Gospels be not authentic, then, so far as the teaching of Christ is concerned, intelligent agnosticism will be the attitude of every one who is not a superstitious religionist. But if the records of the ministry be trustworthy, it is certain, first, that the Hebrew Scriptures were the foundation of the Lord's teaching; and secondly, that His warnings of divine judgment upon sin were more terrible than even the thunders of Sinai. During all the age in which the echoes of those thunders mingled with the worship of His people, the prophetic spirit could discern the advent of a future day of full redemption. And it was in the calm and sunshine of the dawning of that long promised day that He spoke of a doom more terrible than that which engulfed the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah, for all who saw His works and heard His words, and yet repented not. The Perfect Standard And here we may get hold of a great principle which will help us to reconcile seemingly conflicting statements of Scripture, and to silence some of the cavils of unbelief. The thoughtful will recognise that in divine judgment the standard must be perfection. And when thus tested, both the proud religionist Christendom "exalted to heaven" like Capernaum by outward privilege and blessing, and the typical savage of a degraded heathendom, must stand together. If God accepted a lower standard than perfect righteousness He would declare Himself unrighteous; and the great problem of redemption is not how He can be just in condemning, but how He can be just in forgiving. In a criminal court "guilty or not guilty" is the first question to be dealt with in every case, and this levels all distinctions; and so it is here; all men "come short," and therefore "all the world" is brought in "guilty before God." But after verdict comes the sentence and at this stage the question of degrees of guilt demands consideration. And at "the Great Assize" that question will be decided with perfect equity. For some there will be many stripes, for others there will be few. In the vision given us of that awful scene we read that "the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works" (Revelation 20:12). And this will be the scope and purpose of the judgment of the Great Day. The transcendent question of the ultimate fate of men must be settled before the advent of that day; for the resurrection will declare it and the resurrection precedes the judgment. For there is a "resurrection unto life," and a "resurrection unto judgment" (John 5:29). While the redeemed, we are expressly told, will be "raised in glory"-and "we know that we shall be like Him," with bodies "fashioned like unto His glorious body" (Php_3:21)-the lost will be raised in bodies; but here I pause, for Scripture is almost silent on this subject, and conjecture is unsafe, it may be that just as criminals leave a prison in garb like that they wore on entering it, so the doomed may reappear in bodies akin to those that were the instruments of their vices and sins on earth. If the saved are to be raised in glory and honor and incorruption, (1 Corinthians 15:42-44), may not the lost be recalled to bodily life in corruption, dishonor and shame? Judgment to Come But though the supreme issue of the destiny of men does not await that awful inquest, "judgment to come" is a reality for all. For it is of the people of God that the Word declares "we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ," and "every one of us shall give account of himself to God" (Romans 14:10; Romans 14:12). And that judgment will bring reward to some and loss to others. Incalculable harm results from that sort of teaching which dins into the ears of the unconverted that they have no power to live a pure and decent life, and which deludes the Christian into thinking that at death he will forfeit his personality by losing all knowledge of the past, and that heaven is a fool's paradise where waters of Lethe will wipe out our memories of earth. "We must all be made manifest before the judgment-seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad" (2 Corinthians 5:10). But this judgment of "the bema of Christ" has only an incidental bearing on the theme of the present article, and it must not be confounded with the judgment of the "great white throne." From judgment in that sense the believer has absolute immunity: "he cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life" (John 4:26), is the Lord's explicit declaration. He gives the "right to become children of God" "to them that believe on His Name" (John 1:12); and it is not by recourse to a criminal court that we deal with the lapses and misdeeds of our children. Degrees of Rewards and Punishments We have seen then that man is a sinner in virtue both of what he is and what he does. We do what we ought not, and leave undone what we ought to do. For sin may be due to ignorance or carelessness, as well as to evil passions which incite to acts that stifle conscience and outrage law. And we have seen also that every sin gives rise to two great questions which need to be distinguished, though they are in a sense inseparable. The one finds expression in the formula, "guilty or not guilty," and in respect of this no element of limitation or degree is possible. But after verdict, sentence; and when punishment is in question, degrees of guilt are infinite. It has been said that no two of the redeemed will have the same heaven; and in that sense no two of the lost will have the same hell. This is not a concession to popular heresies on this subject. For the figment of a hell of limited duration either traduces the character of God, or practically denies the work of Christ. If the extinction of being were the fate of the impenitent, to keep them in suffering for an aeon or a century would savor of the cruelty of a tyrant who, having decreed a criminal's death, deferred the execution of the sentence in order to torture him. Far worse indeed than this, for, ex hypothesi, the resurrection of the unjust could have no other purpose than to increase their capacity for suffering. Or, if we adopt the alternative heresy-that hell is a punitive and purgatorial discipline through which the sinner will pass to heaven-we disparage the atonement and undermine the truth of grace. If the prisoner gains his discharge by serving out his sentence, where does grace come in? And if the sinner's sufferings can expiate his sin, the most that can be said for the death of Christ is that it opened a short and easy way to the same goal that could be reached by a tedious and painful journey. But further, unless the sinner is to be made righteous and holy before he enters hell-and in that case, why not let him enter heaven at once? he will continue unceasingly to sin; and as every fresh sin will involve a fresh penalty, his punishment can never end. False Argument Every treatise in support of these heresies relies on the argument that the words in our English Version, which connote endless duration, represent words in the original text which have no significance. But this argument is exploded by the fact that the critic would be compelled to use these very words if he were set the task of retranslating our version into Greek. For that language has no other terminology to express the thought. And yet it is by trading on ad captandum arguments of this kind, and by the prejudices which are naturally excited by partial or exaggerated statements of truth, that these heresies win their way. Attention is thus diverted from the insuperable difficulties which beset them, and from their bearing on the truth of the atonement. But Christianity sweeps away all these errors. The God of Sinai has not repented of His thunders, but He has fully revealed Himself in Christ. And the wonder of the revelation is not punishment but pardon. The great mystery of the Gospel is how God can be just and yet the justifier of sinful men. And the Scriptures which reveal that mystery make it clear as light that this is possible only through redemption: "not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 2:2). Redemption is only and altogether by the death of Christ. "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16). To bring in limitations here is to limit God. The Cross of Christ In the wisdom of God the full revelation of "eternal judgment" and the doom of the lost, awaited the supreme manifestation of divine grace and love in the Gospel of Christ; and when these awful themes are separated from the Gospel, truth is presented in such a false perspective that it seems to savor of error. For not even the divine law and the penalties of disobedience will enable us to realize aright the gravity and heinousness of sin. This we can learn only at the Cross of Christ. Our estimate of sin will be proportionate to our appreciation of the cost of our redemption. Not "silver and gold"-human standards of value are useless here-but "the precious blood of Christ." Seemingly more unbelievable than the wildest superstitions of human cults is the Gospel of our salvation. That He who was "Son of God" in all which that title signifies God manifest in the flesh; for "all things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made"-came down to earth, and having lived in rejection and contempt, died a death of shame, and that in virtue of his death He is the propitiation for the world. (1 John 2:2, R. V.) Here, and only here, can we know the true character and depths of human sin, and here alone can we know, so far as the finite mind can ever know it, the wonders of a divine love that passes, knowledge. And the benefit is to "whosoever believeth." It was by unbelief that man first turned away from God; how fitting, then, it is that our return to Him should be by faith. If this Gospel is true-and how few there are who really believe it to be true!-who can dare to impugn the justice of "everlasting punishment"? For Christ has opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers; the way to God is free, and whosoever will may come. There is no artifice in this and grace is not a cloak to cover favoritism. Unsolved mysteries there are in Holy Writ, but when we read of "God our Saviour," who willeth that all men should be saved; and of "Christ Jesus who gave Himself a ransom for all" (1 Timothy 2:3-6), we are standing in the full clear light of day. This much is as clear as words can make it-and nothing more than this concerns us-that the consequences of accepting or rejecting Christ are final and eternal. But who are they who shall be held guilty of rejecting? What of those who, though living in Christendom, have never heard the Gospel aright? And what of the heathen who have never heard at all? No one can claim to solve these problems without seeming profanely to assume the role of umpire between God and men. We know, and it is our joy to know, that the decision of all such questions rests with a God of perfect justice and infinite love. And let this be our answer to those who demand a solution of them. Unhesitating faith is our right attitude in presence of divine revelation, but where Scripture is silent let us keep silence.* [* The scope of this article is limited not only by exigencies of space but by the nature of the subject. Therefore it contains no special reference to the work of the Holy Spirit.] ======================================================================== CHAPTER 96: - PREFACE TO THE E-SWORD EDITION ======================================================================== Preface to the e-Sword Edition When I first discovered the amazing power of e-Sword, I was connected to the internet with a 56k fax modem. My enthusiasm for the program and its plethora of resources motivated me to stay up all night downloading its riches. I spent the next several days exploring the amazing variety of study material. As a busy pastor, I've tried to assemble a classic research library. As a busy pastor of a small church, I've tried to inexpensively assemble a classic research library. E-Sword immediately added many valuable assets that I hadn't yet purchased; and those resources that e-Sword duplicated were much easier and faster to use than the paper versions. Since that wonderful first week, I've discovered many more treasures through Google searches. Then one day I realized that I owed a debt. I made a contribution to Rick Meyers (Rick - you are the modern day Gutenberg; should the Lord not return in the near future like I believe He will, you will do for Bible study the next 100 years what Gutenberg did in the 1500's), and then started looking for public domain resources to convert to .topx files. And so my personal journey has come full circle: from the excitement of discovering e-Sword to the excitement of creating .topx files for others. Like Rick quotes from Matthew 10:8, "freely ye have received, freely give." Thank you, Michelle, Jeremiah, Isaiah & Micah, for understanding my debt and graciously tolerating my near compulsive computer use for hours on end. My thanks to the creator of e-Sword, Rick Meyers - www.e-sword.net("www.e-sword.net"). Thank you, R.A. Torrey, for converting your studies to eternal print. And of course - most importantly - my thanks to the Lord Jesus who saved my soul for all eternity. This Edition There have been no changes to Torrey's work, except for the following: Scripture references have been converted to Scripture hyperlinks using the "Format Scripture ToolTip." A few obvious Scripture reference errors have been corrected, as well as some obvious spelling errors. The copy and paste process has unfortunately removed most of the italicized print. While the words have not been changed, some of Torrey's emphasis may be missing. It is with regret that I have not taken the time to correct this. The sense is still accurate. [By the way - would you understand this paragraph without italics? Of course!] Also, the italicizing of the foreign words have been lost. It is my hope that the reader will be able to follow the flow regardless of these flaws. They - the flaws - are mine, not Torrey's. I am quite sure my edition of Torrey's work is rather imperfect. I pray that, nonetheless, it will be productively useful in the study of God's Word. Finally Feel free to contact me with comments. You can reach me via e-mail at dm5thomason@bigfoot.com Also, if you convert a classic resource to e-Sword .topx file (or .dctx, .cmtx, etc.), send me your work! I'd love to utilize it! If you haven't joined the e-Sword Users group, visit www.e-sword-users.org("www.e-sword-users.org") and check it out. This is a free group, with lots of third-party resources (like this one!) and help from other e-Sword users. May the Lord bless you as study His word. Dr. David S. Thomason Florida, USA ======================================================================== Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/the-fundamentals-of-the-christian-faith-volumes-1-4-unabridged/ ========================================================================