Part 17 (2/2)

the utterance of that voice! what immensity of self-conscious power what authority and dignity--the dignity of infinite integrity: ”Shall mortal man be more just than G.o.d? Shall man be more pure than his Maker?”

How the night is full of a sudden law of proportion. Mortal man and eternal G.o.d. You feel the distance widening and widening between them there in the stillness of the night. The justice of man! man!

the unjust--the law breaker; man, who is of yesterday and is gone to-morrow--mortal man, more just than he of whom it is said, ”Justice and judgment are the habitation of his throne.” Fallen man, man full of iniquity, shall he be more pure than he who made him; he who breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and made him a living soul; he whose name is holiness and righteousness and very truth? As the question lingers man shrivels and sinks into the dust, and the whole night is filled with stillness--with the stillness and immensity of the all-pervading and holy G.o.d.

Read the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth chapters.

They record the highest reaches of human language, so great that our own version cannot dim their splendor. Nothing ever written surpa.s.ses them, not only in the felicity of expression, but in the sense of deity pervading them. Each succeeding verse sustains the other and, at the last, you feel that G.o.d, very G.o.d, indeed, has spoken.

The Almighty answers the complaining Job.

He answers him, not out of the midst of a deep, unbroken calm, but out of the whirlwind; and yet, from the centre of that mighty vortex of unlimited force and energy and power, the voice comes forth with the calmness of one who knows himself superior to the whirlwind and the storm.

”Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?”

This is the abrupt and sudden question. It is the fitting question of him who knoweth the end from the beginning. In the very asking of it all the boasted knowledge, the attainment, the self-consciousness and vanity of man fade away, and man himself is as nothing--G.o.d alone remains upon the vision--all knowing--all wise--supreme.

This Bible is a book of history.

It will spend page after page in describing the doings of a rebellious king, and then compress the story of twenty-five hundred years into a few dozen lines, but will do this in such a way, by means of exact symbols, that the twenty-five centuries thus compressed will reveal a clearer outline and fuller vista than thousands of ordinary volumes could set forth in detail.

Mark the providence that has guarded the book.

Kings and potentates have sought to destroy it. It has been thrown into the flames. Volume after volume has been burned. But always, and at the critical moment, some copy has been preserved--here in the cottage of a devoted peasant at the risk of his life, hidden in the crevice of a rock from the inquisitor's search, or cast aside by a careless hand and forgotten amid a pile of swept up dust in a neglected corner of some impregnable castle; from whence it has come forth to be copied by slow and painful, yet loving, toil, pa.s.sed from house to house secretly as a priceless treasure, then printed on concealed presses and at last cast forth as living and fruitful seed.

Men have denounced it and demonstrated that it is false both in history and science; then, unexpectedly, the stroke of a pick or the turn of a shovel uncovers some startling witness of its exact truth and the excuseless folly of those who deny it.

The fourteenth chapter of Genesis has been set aside by the critics as historically worthless. The excavations in Babylon have brought to light a tablet with the name of Arioch, the fourth king mentioned in that chapter, stamped upon it.

The statement in Exodus that Pharaoh forced the Children of Israel while building his treasure cities to make bricks without straw, has been treated as a fable. The treasure chambers themselves have been found, the rooms divided by brick part.i.tions eight to ten feet thick--and great quant.i.ties of these bricks _made without straw_.

Luke says that Sergius Paulus was pro-consul of Cyprus. The critics denied it and proved thereby the fallibility of the New Testament.

The homely but truth-telling spade, and without consulting the critic, dug up some coins in the island of Cyprus itself, and on the coins were stamped both the image and the name of Sergius Paulus.

Luke declares that Lysannius was tetrarch of Abilene; and again the critics denied it and more than ever discounted Luke as an historian.

Renan, the plausible and a.n.a.lytical infidel, read the record carved on the stones of Baalbeck, and announced, openly, that Luke is correct.

From the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, Tyre and Sidon; from the trenches of Tel el Armana; by the key words of the Rosetta stone and the black but speaking face of the Moabite stone; from newly discovered papyri and parchment, and the mystic page of cracked and crumpled palimpsest; from the rocks of earth, the depths of the sea and the heights of heaven--and from the latest discoveries of science, there arise amazing witnesses, which speak in tones that cannot be hushed, with facts that cannot be denied, and bear testimony beyond all possibility of dispute to the truth and accuracy of the book; so much so, indeed, that such an one as Sir John Hersch.e.l.l, the great astronomer, has said: ”All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more and more strongly the truths contained in the Sacred Scriptures.”

Consider the vitality of the book.

In less than ten years a text-book is out of date, a cyclopedia worthless, and a library a cemetery of dead books and dead ideas; but this book keeps living right on--keeps abreast of the times, has a testimony for every day, and every day borrows its youth afresh as from the womb of the morning.

Science has laughed it out of court. Two hundred and fifty years ago Voltaire said: ”Fifty years from now the world will hear no more of the Bible.” Self-elected scholars.h.i.+p has p.r.o.nounced it out of date and dead. Again and again its funeral services are held. Kind and condescending eulogiums are uttered over its past history and its good intent. With considerate hands it is lowered into its grave.

The _resquiescat in pace_ is solemnly p.r.o.nounced and lo! before the critical mourners have returned to their homes it has risen from the dead, pa.s.sed with surprising speed the funeral coaches, and is found--as of yore--in the busy centres of life, thundering against evil, revealing the secrets of the heart, offering consolation to the sorrowing, hope to the dying, and flas.h.i.+ng forth from its quivering, vital pages the wonders of coming glory.

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