Will The Old Book Stand?
By H. L. Hastings
Chapter 1
WHAT are we to do with the Bible? How are we to regard it? Is it the best book in the world, or the worst? Is it a true book, or is it a false book? Is it God’s book, or is it man’s book?
We find men on all sides of the question. There are persons who tell us this book is a good book; but then, there are others just as good. The Bible is inspired, and so was Plato inspired, so was Socrates, and so is the almanac inspired; in fact, everything is inspired—the Book of Mormon, the Koran of Mahomet, the sacred books of the Hindus and the Chinese; they have their Bibles, you have yours; all are good, and one is about as good as the other. Shakespeare was inspired, Milton was inspired, Thomas Paine was inspired, and everything and everybody is inspired.
It is not worth while to waste time on false issues. When I open Shakespeare’s plays, I do not read at the commencement, “Thus saith the Lord God of hosts;” when I turn to Plato’s writings, I do not read, “Hear ye the word of the Lord;” when I peruse the almanac, I do not read, “The word of the Lord came unto me.” Hence you see that this book must be judged by a standard different from all other books. Over and over again this book says, “Hear ye the word of the Lord.” Now, the message is the word of the Lord, or it is a lie. It is the word of the Lord, as it professes to be, or it is a cheat, a swindle, a humbug, a fraud.
To illustrate: A man tells me that Jesus of Nazareth was a good man; but then, there were other men just as good. He was a spiritual medium; but there are other mediums equally powerful in these days; To be sure, I do not remember any spiritual medium giving a public dinner, for nothing, to five thousand hungry people! You may have heard of such a “manifestation,” but it has not fallen under my notice. I have not heard of a spiritual medium hushing the winds or calming a storm at sea. I have heard of dancing tables and similar operations. I prefer to have my tables stand still!
But while you say, “Christ was simply one of many remark
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-able men,” He says, “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” He says, “0 Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.”
Now do you say He was a good man, and yet He told lies? What is your idea of a good man? I do not believe that a good man lies; and I do not believe that a man who lies is a good man. Perhaps you do, but if so, you were brought up in a different way from that in which my father brought me up. So I do not believe that a book packed with lies from one end to the other is a good book; and I do not want any one to come and tell me that Jesus Christ was a good man, and the Bible is a good book, but neither of them tells the truth. I join issue there. This book is what it professes to be, or it is a swindle; Jesus of Nazareth was what He professed to be, or He was an impostor.
A Remarkable Book
The Bible is a book which has been refuted, demolished, overthrown, and exploded more times than any other book you ever heard of. Every little while somebody starts up and upsets this book; and it is like upsetting a solid cube of granite. It is just as big one way as the other; and when you have upset it, it is right side up. Every little while somebody blows up the Bible; but when it comes down, it always lights on its feet, and runs faster than ever through the world. For a book that has been exploded so many times, this book still shows signs of considerable life.
In 1900 some learned men, after working for a number of years on the revision of the New Testament, finished their work. Having inserted a few modern words instead of others which had become obsolete, made some slight corrections of errors in translation, and rectified from ancient manuscripts some little errors that had been made by copyists in transcribing the New Testament, at last the book was announced as ready to be issued on a certain day. What was the result? Why, men offered five hundred dollars to get a copy of that book a little in advance of its publication; and the morning it was published, the streets of New York were blockaded with express wagons backed up and waiting for copies of that book which had been refuted, exploded,
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and dead and buried for so many years. Millions of copies of that book were sold as fast as they could be delivered. They telegraphed that book, from the first of Matthew to the end of Romans, from New York to Chicago, about 118,000 words,—the longest message ever wired,—for the sake of getting it there twenty-four hours sooner than steam could carry it, to print in the Sunday newspapers.
A dead book, is it? They would not pay for telegraphing the greatest infidel speech ever delivered in this country. This old book seems to show some signs of life yet. It is like Aaron’s rod that budded and blossomed, and it is being scattered all over the world.
This book outlives its foes. If you could gather all the books written against it, you could build a pyramid higher than the loftiest spire. Now and then a man goes to work to refute the Bible; and every time it is done it has to be done over again the next day or the next year. And then, after its enemies have done their worst, some of its professed friends torture and twist and mystify and misrepresent it. Surely it is no fool of a book if it lives through all that. Infidels have been at work nearly eighteen hundred years, firing away at it, and making about as much impression on it as you would shooting boiled peas at Gibraltar.
The Book That Has Come to Stay
The fact is, this book has come into the world, and it seems to have come to stay. It is in the world, and I do not know how you are to get it out. One hundred years ago you might have found that book in twenty or thirty translations; but now you can find it in more than a thousand different versions, most of which have been made in this last progressive, intellectual century. All over the globe it goes; touch any shore, and you will find that book there before you.
And it is a curious fact that most of our skeptical friends contrive to keep very close to where its shadow falls. It does not take a great while to get out of sight of the Bible. You can go, in a very few days, where there are no churches, Sunday schools, Young Men’s Christian Associations, preachers, deacons, or anything else of the kind. There is little difficulty in getting beyond the reach of the Bible. But the infidel, while finding fault with the Bible,
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usually takes good care to stay where the Bible is. ‘Why is this? Every one knows that where this book has influence it makes things safe. Why is this? If it were a bad book, we should expect to find it in the hands of the worst men. In New York there is a kind of rogues’ museum,—a place where they have all kinds of skeleton keys, jimmies, brass knuckles, dirks, pistols, and implements of mischief, which they have taken away from roughs and criminals. Do you suppose there is a single New Testament in the whole kit? Why not? If it were a bad book, you would expect a rogue to have a revolver in one pocket and a New Testament tucked away in another.
All countries without the Bible are good countries to move away from. Countries where the Bible is read and obeyed are good countries to move into. Those who study and love the Bible will know the reason why. Those who hate the Bible can easily find some countries where it is not read. Why do they not move there, and see how they like it?
Do you suppose that if the Bible had been written by some learned doctor, revised by a committee of eminent divines, and published by some great religious society, we should ever have heard of Noah’s drunkenness, of Abraham’s deception, of Lot’s disgrace, of Jacob’s cheating, of Paul and Barnabas’ quarreling, or of Peter’s lying, cursing, or dissembling? Not at all. The good men, when they came to such an incident, would have said, “There is no use in saying anything about that. It is all past and gone; it will not help anything, and it will only hurt the cause.”
If a committee of such divines had prepared the Bible, you would have had a biography of men whose characters were patterns of piety and propriety, instead of poor sinners, as they were.
Sometimes a man writes his own diary, and happens to leave it for some one to print after he is dead; but he leaves out all the mean tricks he ever did, and puts in all the good acts he can think of; and you read the pages, filled with astonishment, and think, “What a wonderfully good man he was!” But when the Almighty writes a man’s life, He tells the truth about him; and there are not many persons who would want their lives printed if The Almighty wrote them.
You find a man who will tell the truth about kings, warriors, princes, and rulers today, and you may be quite sure that he has
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within him the power of the Holy Ghost. And a book which tells the faults of those who write it, and which tells you that “there is none righteous, no, not one,” bears in it the marks of a true book; for we all know that men have faults, and failings, and sins;• and among all the men whose lives are recorded in that book, each man has some defect, some blot, except one, and that is “the man Christ Jesus.”
Attempting to Prove the Bible Untrue
Men say there are difficulties, and absurdities, and errors, and contradictions in the Bible. You have all heard such assertions. After I had been speaking once in the city of Boston, an ex-minister came to me and told me that the Bible was not true, for there was that story which Moses told about the quails. Israel lusted after flesh, and the Lord sent them quails to eat, and they fell by the camp a day’s journey on each side, or over a territory forty miles across, and they were two cubits deep on the ground, and the Israelites ate them for a full month. I have in my possession an infidel paper which was published in Boston, in which there is about a column of arguments and figures on this “quail story,” giving an estimate of the number of bushels of quails that were piled up over the country, and showing that when they were divided among the host of Israelites, each one would have 2,888,643 bushels of quails, which they were to eat during the month; giving each poor Israelite 69,620 bushels of quails to eat at each meal for thirty days, and therefore the Bible was not true! That is the sort of food our skeptical friends love to eat. That is the meat on which these Caesars grow so wondrous great.
I said to this gentleman, “The Bible does not say any such thing!” He replied that it certainly did.
“Well,” said I, “find it!” Arid when you ask an infidel to find anything in the Bible, you generally have him. He could not find the place; so I turned over to the eleventh chapter of Numbers, and there read that instead of the birds’ being packed like cord-wood on the ground, three feet deep, the account says that the Lord brought the quails from the sea, and let them fall by the camp, as it were “two cubits high,” or about three feet high upon, or above; the face of the earth. That is, instead of flying overhead and out of reach, they were brought in about three feet high,
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where any one could take as many, as he chose. This skeptical friend had got the birds packed solid, three feet deep, over a territory forty miles across. As if I should say that a flock of wild geese flew as high as a church spire, and some one should insist that they were packed solid from the ground up, a hundred feet high! This is a sample of the kind of arguments infidels bring to prove that the Bible is not true!
The Book, to my mind, bears the marks of inspiration in the foresight which it exhibits. This book foretells things. You cannot do that. You cannot tell what will be next year, or next week. “The spirits” cannot tell who will be the next president, or governor, or emperor. They may tell a great many things which are past. They may tell you who your grandmother was, and may copy the inscription on your grandfather’s gravestone, and may tell things which are written in the family record. They may reveal many things in the past, for the devil knows about the past,—but they cannot foretell the future.
Again, I conclude that this book has in it The very Breath of God, from the effect that it produces upon men. There are men who study philosophy, astronomy, geology, geography, and mathematics; but did you ever hear a man say, “I was an outcast, a wretched inebriate, a disgrace to my race, and a nuisance in the world, until I began to study mathematics, and learned the multiplication table, and then turned my attention to geology, got me a little hammer, and knocked off the corners of the rocks and studied the formation of the earth, and since that time I have been happy as the day is long; I feel like singing all the time; my soul is full of triumph and peace; and health and blessing have come to my desolate home once more”? Did you ever hear a man ascribe his redemption and salvation from intemperance and sin and vice to the science of mathematics or geology?
Hopeless Until I heard the Words of the Book
But I can bring you, not one man, or two, or ten, but men by the thousand who will tell you, “I was wretched; I was lost; I broke my poor old mother’s heart; I beggared my family; my wife was heart-stricken and dejected; my children fled from the sound of their father’s footsteps; I was ruined, reckless, helpless, homeless, until I heard the words of that Book!”
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And he will tell you the very word which fastened on his soul. It may be it was, “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest;” perhaps it was, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world;” it may have been, “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” He can tell you the very word that saved his soul. And since that word entered his heart, he will tell you that hope has dawned upon his vision, that joy has inspired his heart, and that his mouth is filled with grateful song. He will tell you that the blush of health has come back to his poor wife’s faded cheek; that the old hats have vanished from the windows of his desolate home; that his rags have been exchanged for good clothes; that his children run to meet him when he comes; that there is bread on his table, fire on his hearth, and comfort in his dwelling. He will tell you all that, and he will tell you that this book has wrought the change.
Now this book is working just such miracles, and is doing it every day. If you have any other book that will do such work as this, bring it along.
The Great Plan and Purpose of God Revealed
God’s word declares the end from the beginning. It is not only the chart which guides each weary wanderer to his own eternal rest, but it is the record of the great plan and purpose of the Almighty concerning the world which He has made and the church which He has redeemed. It unfolds Cod’s everlasting purpose, as manifested in Jesus Christ; and if one will read three chapters at the beginning of the Bible and three at the end, he will be struck with the correspondence which there exists.
At the beginning of the Bible we find a new world: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” At the end of the Bible we find a new world: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.” At the beginning, we find Satan entering to deceive and destroy; at the end, we find Satan cast out, “that he should deceive the nations no more.” At the beginning, sin and pain and sorrow and sighing and death find entrance to the world; at the end, there shall be no more pain nor sorrow nor sighing, and no more death.
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At the beginning, the earth, for man’s transgression, is cursed with thorns and thistles; at the end, “there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it.” At the beginning, we find the tree of life in Paradise, from which the sinner is shut away by a flaming sword, lest he eat and live forever; at the end, we find the tree of life again “in the midst of the Paradise of God,” and the blessed and the blood-washed ones have a right to the tree of life, and “enter in through the gates into the city.” At the beginning, man was brought beneath the dominion of death and the grave; at the end, “the dead, small and great, stand before God,” the sea gives up its dead, and death and hell are cast into the lake of fire. At the beginning, the first Adam lost his dominion over earth, and was driven out of the Garden of Eden in shame and sorrow; at the end, we find the second Adam, victorious over sin and death and hell, enthroned as King and Lord of all, and reigning in triumph and glory forever.
Now, when you get the plan of this book, you find that it is something more than a book of detached sentences, good maxims, and comforting words. It is a book which unfolds the divine purpose, and not only reveals the way of salvation, but marks the pathway of the people of God through this wilderness, and fore-shows the destiny of the world which He has made and the church which He has redeemed.
When we look at these facts, we see that this is no man’s book. When Columbus saw the river Orinoco, some one said he had discovered an island. He replied, “No such river as that flows from an island. That mighty torrent must drain the waters of a continent.” So this book comes, not from the empty hearts of impostors, liars, and deceivers; it springs from the eternal depths of divine wisdom, love, and grace. It is the transcript of the divine mind, the unfolding of the divine purpose, the revelation of the divine will. God help us to receive it, to believe it, and be saved through Christ our Lord.
Chapter 2
THE “MISTAKES OF MOSES”
“The Mistakes of Moses” have long been the subject of skeptical investigation and discussion. But why the mistakes of Moses? Do not other people make mistakes? Why do not skeptics discuss the mistakes of Pharaoh, of Nebuchadnezzar, of Alexander, of Napoleon, or of any of the great men of past or present times? Why is Moses singled out for criticism? Not because Moses claimed to be a prophet, for Mohammed claimed that; Joseph Smith, the Mormon, made that claim; but what critic spends his time pointing out their mistakes? It looks as if Moses must have been a good deal of a man, if his “mistakes” are of so much consequence. Possibly it may be worth our while to inquire and learn what manner of man this Moses was, and what were some of the “mistakes” he made.
1. Moses led the first emancipation movement the world ever saw, liberating three million slaves, without an army, a navy, a treasury, or even a printing press to print paper money or government bonds.
2. Moses, educated in a king’s palace, organized this horde of bondmen into the world’s first republic, the United States of Israel, with local self-government citizen soldiery, popular and compulsory education, elective judiciary, primary and appellate courts, courts of last resort, and most of the varied advantages of which modern republics boast.
3. Moses, reared in despotic Egypt, legislated in advance for the first constitutional monarchy known to history; a government of laws and not of men, where kings and rulers as well as people were amenable to law.
4. Moses made every Israelite a landholder, with inalienable rights; introduced homestead exemption; canceled debts after six years; gave every weary toiler a weekly rest; legislated for the protection of the poor; made the person of every Israelite sacred; guarded captives from outrage and abuse; protected bondmen from bodily injury, and limited their terms of servitude; prohibited
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usury; forbade cruelty to animals; and ordained a system of legislation mote humane than any other the world has known.
5. Moses organized the world’s first total abstinence society, with stringent rules and an ironclad pledge.
6. Moses introduced a sanitary system so wise and salutary that the science of the present day has only begun to appreciate its advantages.
7. Moses organized a new nation; and after more than thirty stormy centuries, during which time the empires, nations, and races of his day have perished, decayed, and rotted down through their own vices and their sins, this people, with their faith in one God, their healthful family life, and their obedience to sanitary law, have outlived the races that have oppressed and conquered them, and are today the healthiest, purest-blooded, and most law- abiding people on the earth, their death rate, even in the United States of America, being only about half the death rate of the people at large. The legislators and statesmen of antiquity are forgotten; their literature and laws are lost in oblivion; but the laws of Moses have been translated into more languages, read in more lands, and have influenced more people than all the laws of ancient monarchs and legislators combined. Are these some of the mistakes of Moses?
Moses Proclaimed the Glory of One God
Moses was reared in a land of magnificent temples devoted to base and obscene idolatries; where the highest culture of the age bowed in adoration before sacred serpents, holy hawks, blessed beetles, consecrated crocodiles, and divine bulls; where men erected obelisks and adored monkeys, built pyramids and worshiped cats! Yet, notwithstanding such an environment, he proclaimed the glory of one eternal God, and led out of Egypt the one nation which worshiped this one supreme Creator; and who, in the midst of the gods of Edom, Philistia, Moab, Babylon, and Phoenicia, have as a nation held fast the law He gave, and the truth which they still proclaim, saying, “Hear, 0 Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”
Doubtless the wise men of Egypt pronounced this the great mistake of Moses’ lifetime. But where are the gods of Egypt and
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of those nations today? They and moles, mutilated, battered, crushed, and buried in the ruins of their own temples, or gathered as curiosities to the British Museum, and put down cellar because they are unfit to be seen by daylight. Of all the gods of all those, lands there is not today one who is worshiped by any mortal man; while the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, proclaimed by Moses and worshiped by Israel, is known in every quarter of the earth, and reverenced by millions of devout worshipers.
Our skeptical friends believe in the survival of the fittest; 1 believe the fittest has survived: the only God worshiped then and worshiped now, and to whom, in many lands and among the purest and noblest peoples, every day from that time to this, has ascended praise, thanksgiving and supplication is the God of Israel. His fame is spread abroad among the Gentiles. From the rising of the sun to the going down thereof, His name is exalted and praised. I think we may conclude that Moses was not mistaken when he testified to the glory of that one God, and “endured, as seeing Him who is invisible.”
Moses Declared That God Made the World
Moses said, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” But it is alleged that God did no such thing; that there is no God; and that the world made itself, and never was created; and that Moses was mistaken in his assertion.
But who did make the world? It is here, and it bears marks of creative power. It is a manufactured article. It could not have made itself. No man was strong enough or wise enough to make it. Who did make the world? Or let us first raise another question, who invented the world?
This world is an invention. It must have been planned and contrived. Many men can build steam engines who never could have invented one. Invention precedes creation or construction. Here is a magnificent building, the work of many hands; but one man saw it before a timber was prepared or a stone was laid. He planned it in advance; knew just how the completed structure would look; and made a picture of it before it was commenced. Now it requires more wisdom to invent than it does to build, and the first question is, Who invented all these things?
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Go any starry night at midnight and stand under the open sky and fix your gaze upon a certain star directly above you. Go again just one year from that moment to the same place, and look in the same direction, and you will find the same star in the same position.
Go again after ten years, or twenty years, or five hundred years, and you will find the same star shining in the same place. It has not been there all these years—its position has been changing every moment; but once a year the star comes around to the same place, for all the stars in the sky are moving in an orderly course, and with mathematical exactness. They ate parts of one magnificent timepiece, whose radiant pointers shine on the blue dial of the sky and mark not only hours and days, but years and centuries and eternities in their course. We regulate our watches by the time at Washington every noon, and they get that time fresh from the stars! Star time is the best time; and the celestial timepiece keeps star time.
Who invented that timepiece? Who constructed it? Who started it? Who keeps it in motion? The lack of a cog ruins the watch, the lack of a single star might unbalance the universe. The position of unknown stars has been detected by their influence upon stars which were known. No man has ever numbered the stars, but some Being has counted them, and some great Mathematician invented that mighty timepiece.
Talk about such a universe being run by chance! You could not run a freight train on a branch railway by chance. And while all these mighty orbs that gem the skies are flying through the universe from age to age, never colliding and never tailing to be on time, skeptics wish us to believe that this universe is run by chance, with no time-table, on the go-as-you-please plan. No man has credulity enough to believe such teaching as that. Some intelligent Power controls this world, some Almighty Being created it; some one who could think, and know and count, and reckon, and contrive, invented it. Who has done it? Moses said that “in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” and I am not yet convinced that Moses was mistaken about it.
The fact is, no man on earth knows how this world was made, and for this one simple reason, among many, no man knows what this world is made of.
What are the substances that are condensed in the awful depths
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beneath us? Science knows nothing about them, science never can know, and most scientific men are well aware of the fact. They simply guess; but what is their guesswork worth?
The Origin of All Life
The world is peopled with living, breathing, acting forms. Moses said that God made them; but Moses, we are told, was mistaken. Whence, then, did they come? The theory has been advanced that life was generated spontaneously. A barrel of water, set in the sun, is soon teeming with life. But it has been proved by experiment that when you extinguish all traces of life in the water and exclude the floating germs from the atmosphere around, there will be no spontaneous generation. God has filled this world full of life, and earth and air and sea are flooded with its germs; but when you extinguish the life which He has lighted, then it is beyond human power to rekindle it. Life comes only from life.
There have been many plans of creation devised, but none of them will work without a God. Yet still men will guess and guess again, and call their guesswork a “hypothesis,” and then skeptics will swallow it as an indisputable fact. For we are told by skeptics that this style of guesswork is scientific truth; but that these
- changes require millions of ages, and are brought about by a process of “natural selection” with no one to do the selecting; by a ‘variation of species” with nobody to guide the variations; in short, by means of evolution, a word which nobody defines.
And so people sit in open-mouthed wonder at the wisdom of men who roll off large words which they do not define, and thus conceal their ignorance of things which they can neither understand nor explain.
A Supreme Power Guiding in the Perpetuation of All Things
But notwithstanding all the mistiness of big words, the facts still remain that supreme power and intelligence guided not only in the origin, but in the reproduction - and perpetuation of all living things. Nothing is left to blind chance or unintelligent law. The same mathematical mind that numbers the leaves upon the plants, numbers the bones in the body, the muscles, the feathers of the wing, and all these show the intelligence of their Creator.
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Moses declares that God made man in His own image; but we are told that Moses was mistaken; and some of the skeptical scientists of today, who are confident in proportion as they are uninformed, and who know for certain things which scientific men only guess at, claim that they are descended from monkeys, or from some lost species of that noble fraternity.
Here we are treading on delicate ground. I prefer to be looking for the link that shall bind me to the throne of God my Maker. I prefer that my genealogical table shall end as it now does, with “Cainan, which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God,” rather than invent one which reads, “Which was the son of skeptic, which was the son of monkey, which was the son of oyster, which was the son of monad, which was the son of mud!”
The Infidel’s Claim
The most eloquent infidel in America has said, “The monad is said to be the simplest form of animal life that has yet been found. It has been described as ‘an organism without organs.’ It is a kind of structureless structure; a little mass of transparent jelly, that can flatten itself out, and can expand and contract around its food. It can feed without a mouth, digest without a stomach, walk without feet, and reproduce itself by simple division. By taking this monad as the commencement of animal life, or rather as the first animal, it is easy to follow the development of the organic structure, through all forms of life to man himself.”
This is a most luminous statement of the scientific skeptic’s genealogy. Here is the beginning of his ancestral line. The first living creature was a “structureless structure,” an organism without organs;” and the description given is composed of words without sense. It is as if a teacher should tell a pupil, “Go to the blackboard, and on an uneven plane surface, draw a curved right line, describing a semicircular triangle, in the form of a globular cube.” These are all good dictionary words. We can read them and speak them, but we cannot think them or do them. There is no such thing as a “curved right line,” “an uneven plane surface,” “a semicircular triangle,” or “a globular cube.” And there is no such thing as “a structureless structure,” or an “organism without organs.” But it is astonishing how wise a foolish thing sounds
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when someone describes it in “great swelling words of vanity.’
According to this “scientific” gentleman, all life started from a germ, “a lump of transparent jelly,” perhaps so small that it might take a microscope to see it. Moses says, “In the beginning God;” the skeptic says, “In the beginning a speck of protoplasm,” an atom of “transparent jelly,” “a monad,” barely visible under a microscope. From this were developed oysters, fishes, frogs, monkeys, men, infidels, nations, governments, peoples, and tongues. It must have been a wonderful “mass of transparent jelly” to accomplish all that.
“From nothing, nothing comes;” and this “monad” seems as near “the little end of nothing whittled out” as anything which we can imagine. Nevertheless this “organism without organs,” this “structureless structure,” is the infidel’s little first cause. So the infidel has a first cause, one which he calls a “monad,” which “can eat without a mouth, digest without a stomach, and walk without feet;” and if this creature be the originator of all living things, he is certainly capable of doing an immense business on a very small capital. And this is the infidel’s science! O skeptic, great is thy faith!
Life Must Come from Life
But with all his faith and ingenuity, and his wandering back into the mists of millions of ages past, the skeptic has not helped matters at all; he is not yet rid of God. Who made that monad? Who had the wisdom, the skill, and the power to invent that speck of protoplasm, that “structureless structure,” with such amazing capabilities? All life must come from life. Nothing can come out of the monad which was not in this “structureless structure.” The infidel says that all life comes from the living monad, the pinhead of transparent jelly; Moses says all life comes from the living God, the Maker of heaven and earth. Was Moses mistaken?
We are told that there is a regular gradation from the lowest to the highest organized forms. So there may be a regular gradation from a teakettle up to an ocean steam boiler, but that does not prove that a teakettle will ever develop into a steam boiler. There is a regular gradation from a gill cup to a gallon measure, but the gill cup will never grow to hold a gallon. The pint will always be a pint, and the gallon a gallon.
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It is intimated that as the rich varieties of apples are developed from the worthless crab, and as grains are developed horn grasses, therefore men are developed from monkeys or from some inferior species. But these claims take for granted the idea that the wild crabs or the wild grasses are primitive forms; but this is pure assumption. It may be true that the culture of the wild crab will result in a luscious apple; but have we any better culture for it than it had when God “planted a garden eastward in Eden,” and in it placed all manner of trees, and set man to care for and dress the garden? Thousands of years of neglect and hard usage, in a world that is cursed with sin and filled with thorns and briars, may well have stunted and dwarfed and degraded these products of the soil, which yet show something of their native excellence when, under culture, they come back to a semblance of their original perfection.
The law of degradation is quite as effectual as the law of evolution or elevation. An infant stolen and suckled by wolves, becomes wolfish in its nature, and never rises to the proper dignity of a human being; and there is quite as much reason to believe that a monkey is a degenerate man, as that man is a superfine monkey with a few modern improvements.
Doubtless there are brutal elements and tendencies in mankind. And the apostle Peter sharply contrasts two classes of men, one composed of those who “have obtained like precious faith with us through the righteousness of God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;” to whom are given “exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust;” and another class described “as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed,” who “speak evil of the things that they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption.” 2 Peter 1:1,4; 2:12.
Progression vs. the Gospel of Christ
But the difference between these two classes is wrought, not by the slow methods of progression and evolution, but by the speedier processes of regeneration and salvation. Centuries of ‘progression” have produced the cruel savage, the blood-smeared cannibal; but the gospel of Christ in a single lifetime, yea, in a single year, makes that same savage cannibal as gentle as a lamb,
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he “being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever.”
The vast and varied misinformation of a portion of the skeptical fraternity is well illustrated by their assertions that “all men believe” this and that; and that “all scientific men” accept their atheistic theories. Of course there are scientific men who are not Christians, who know not God and obey not the gospel, and who accept the theories and guesswork of a few leaders, most of whom disagree among themselves. But there are other men, equally scientific and equally logical, who see nothing but folly in these “oppositions of science falsely so called.”
On the first day of August, 1885, Dr. George E. Post, of the Syrian Mission, a gentleman of superior scientific attainments, visited the great British Museum, which, with its vast collection of specimens, would probably be the best place in all the world to find the “missing links” and note the “origin of species,” as written in the rocky records of the universe. There he found Mr. Etheridge, one of the foremost of British experts. After Mr. Etheridge had examined and named certain fossils which Dr. Post had brought, and shown him the wonders of the great collection, Dr. Post says, in a letter to a former colleague, since printed in the New York Evangelist:
“I asked him whether, after all, this was not the working out of mind and Providence. He turned to me with a clear, honest look into my eyes, and replied, ‘In all this great museum there is not a particle of evidence of the transmutation of species. Nine tenths of the talk of evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by fact. Men adopt a theory, and then strain their facts to support it. I read all their books, but they make no impression on my belief in the stability of species. Moreover, the talk of the great antiquity of man is of the same value. There is no such thing as a fossil man. Men are ready to regard you as a fool if you will not go with them in all their vagaries. But this museum is full of proofs of the utter falsity of their views.’”
Theories Remain Unproved
On the whole, we may conclude that the fine-spun theories of evolution and development are not proved. Much as the wise
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men of this world suppose themselves to be in advance of Moses, their theories are impracticable, their premises are assumed, and their conclusions are unwarranted
No uninspired mortal could describe the creation, for no man witnessed it. Heathen cosmogonies are puerile, fabulous, and absurd. Moses gives the only account which scientific men have accepted; and which even heathen writers have cited as an example of the sublime! Details are omitted.
On the whole it seems simplest and safest to conclude that Moses was gifted with a divine wisdom, which enabled him to hold his tongue while others were babbling; and that his simple statement, “In the beginning Cod created the heaven and the earth,” stands the test of all investigation criticism, and research. He stated the fact, and so, “through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God.”
Chapter 3
THE WONDERFUL LAW
An. theories which deny divine authority and moral responsibility tend directly to barbarism; nor can any true civilization be found outside the influence of the law of Moses and the gospel of Christ. The infidel world may be defied to find a place on this planet ten miles square, where a decent man can live in decency, comfort, and security, supporting and educating his children unspoiled and unpolluted, enjoying the comforts of family life and the advantages of respectable society,—a place where age is reverenced, infancy protected, manhood respected, womanhood honored, and human life held in due regard; where the revelation of the God of Abraham has not gone before and cleared the way, and laid the foundations of society, and made civilization, decency, and security possible. And as no decent society can be found where the law of God is unknown, so no such society can be perpetuated where God’s law is discarded and disregarded. Persons who, under the influence of divine revelation, have been trained to the practice of virtue and piety in early life, may not always cast off its restraints under the influence of skepticism in later years. But let the influence of such training die out, and the practice of infidelity will soon prove the ruin of society.
Let us, then, calmly consider a few of the objections which are continually being made against the authority of the books of Moses, and so against the authority of the entire Scriptures. And first let us inquire, Is the Bible a vile book?
First, we are told that the Bible is a bad book, obscene, indelicate, and unfit to be read. Before this grave charge can be established, we must consider that the Bible was written in a different age and country from our own. Customs differ in different countries; and what is improper in one country may give no offense in another. So there may be simplicity, or even a barbarism, of language, which though indelicate to our ears, may have been entirely consistent with purity and propriety at the time and in the countries where it was written; as there may also be delicacy
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of speech joined with prurient thought and corrupt behavior. Again, the words which appear to us indelicate in the Bible
are not the words written by Moses or the prophets, but they are English words used by the translators; and they are words which were used in respectable society when the Bible was translated in 1611, that is, in the time of Shakespeare.
The objection lies, not against the Bible, but against the English language, which grows purer as the Bible is circulated among English-speaking peoples. The Bible was translated into the purest English then known. No book of that age will compare with it in purity, and the influence of the Bible and Christianity has elevated the language and the taste of the people till men object to language which in 1611 was deemed unobjectionable.
Moreover, Moses gave to Israel a law; and a law must describe and specify the crimes which it prohibits. Not only the statute laws, but the standard medical treatises of every civilized country, contain expressions which might be counted inappropriate for promiscuous reading. The Law of Moses deals not only with crimes, but with the public health. If it forbids crime, it must describe crime; and it must do it, not in the delicate euphemisms by which French writers convey the vilest thoughts in the politest words, but in plain, honest phrases that can be understood by the common people.
What Is Wrong with the Bible?
Surely, if the Bible is an obscene book, it would be taken up and circulated by the followers and supporters of the publishers of obscene literature. There is one reason why they will never do this. While a famous infidel asserts that “few books have been published containing more moral filth than this inspired word of God,” he spoils the circulation of the book among his friends by adding that “these stories are not redeemed by a single dash of wit or humor. They never rise above the dull details of stupid vice.”
Here is the trouble with the Bible. If it treated sin as a joke; if its pages were punctuated, like the lectures of this blasphemer, with “laughter,” “applause,” and “great laughter;” if it made clowns roar over crimes, and jested at infamies which the laws of every civilized and decent country condemn and punish, it would then be much more acceptable to him and his followers.
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But the Bible does not deal with sin in this way; neither do the laws of the land. The statutes against vice are not enlivened “by a single flash of wit or humor.” Sin is no joke, and no matter for joking. The laws promulgated, the sins condemned, and the punishments recorded, do not furnish amusing reading for infidels. They are not enlivened with flashes of “wit and humor.” They deal with stern and awful realities, and warn men to turn away from sin, that they may escape ruin in this world, and perdition in the world to come.
The Humanity of a “Cruel Law”
It is claimed that the Law of Moses was an exceedingly cruel law, full of wrath, vengeance, and bloodshed; that it established a terrible tyranny, and was oppressive in the extreme. What are the facts in the case?
In the Jewish law, corporal punishment was, sometimes inflicted, but under rigid restrictions. It is not long since the practice of flogging was abolished in the armies and navies of some of the foremost nations of modem civilization. Any one who has read accounts of persons’ being flogged in modern times, one, two, three, four, or five hundred lashes with the cat-o’-nine-tails; of sailors’ being “flogged through the fleet;” or who has read the accounts of the flogging inflicted with the knout and other instruments of torture, will perhaps be prepared to appreciate the “barbarity” of the law of Moses, which said, “It shall be, if the wicked man be worthy to be beaten, that the judge shall cause him to lie down, and to be beaten before his face, according to his fault, by a certain number. Forty stripes he may give him, and not exceed.” Deuteronomy 25: 2, 3.
Modern law takes men from their families and friends, leaving their wives to toil and their children to suffer, and politely ushers them into prison, keeping them in a gloomy cell for months, making honest men work to pay taxes for their support, turning them out at last, possibly finished rogues, perhaps broken in health and crushed in spirit, but bearing the brand of crime and imprisonment upon them.
The penalties of the law of Moses, without jails, prisons, or penitentiaries, settled the whole matter at once with an infliction of less than forty stripes, and the man went about his business and
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supported his family; his back got well, and he learned to obey the laws. This was Jewish law. Are we certain that the laws of modern civilization are greatly superior these ordinances? And to what country can infidelity point as a n example of humanity, that has not been for generations under the influence of this same Mosaic law?
By H. L. Hastings
Chapter 1
WHAT are we to do with the Bible? How are we to regard it? Is it the best book in the world, or the worst? Is it a true book, or is it a false book? Is it God’s book, or is it man’s book?
We find men on all sides of the question. There are persons who tell us this book is a good book; but then, there are others just as good. The Bible is inspired, and so was Plato inspired, so was Socrates, and so is the almanac inspired; in fact, everything is inspired—the Book of Mormon, the Koran of Mahomet, the sacred books of the Hindus and the Chinese; they have their Bibles, you have yours; all are good, and one is about as good as the other. Shakespeare was inspired, Milton was inspired, Thomas Paine was inspired, and everything and everybody is inspired.
It is not worth while to waste time on false issues. When I open Shakespeare’s plays, I do not read at the commencement, “Thus saith the Lord God of hosts;” when I turn to Plato’s writings, I do not read, “Hear ye the word of the Lord;” when I peruse the almanac, I do not read, “The word of the Lord came unto me.” Hence you see that this book must be judged by a standard different from all other books. Over and over again this book says, “Hear ye the word of the Lord.” Now, the message is the word of the Lord, or it is a lie. It is the word of the Lord, as it professes to be, or it is a cheat, a swindle, a humbug, a fraud.
To illustrate: A man tells me that Jesus of Nazareth was a good man; but then, there were other men just as good. He was a spiritual medium; but there are other mediums equally powerful in these days; To be sure, I do not remember any spiritual medium giving a public dinner, for nothing, to five thousand hungry people! You may have heard of such a “manifestation,” but it has not fallen under my notice. I have not heard of a spiritual medium hushing the winds or calming a storm at sea. I have heard of dancing tables and similar operations. I prefer to have my tables stand still!
But while you say, “Christ was simply one of many remark
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-able men,” He says, “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” He says, “0 Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.”
Now do you say He was a good man, and yet He told lies? What is your idea of a good man? I do not believe that a good man lies; and I do not believe that a man who lies is a good man. Perhaps you do, but if so, you were brought up in a different way from that in which my father brought me up. So I do not believe that a book packed with lies from one end to the other is a good book; and I do not want any one to come and tell me that Jesus Christ was a good man, and the Bible is a good book, but neither of them tells the truth. I join issue there. This book is what it professes to be, or it is a swindle; Jesus of Nazareth was what He professed to be, or He was an impostor.
A Remarkable Book
The Bible is a book which has been refuted, demolished, overthrown, and exploded more times than any other book you ever heard of. Every little while somebody starts up and upsets this book; and it is like upsetting a solid cube of granite. It is just as big one way as the other; and when you have upset it, it is right side up. Every little while somebody blows up the Bible; but when it comes down, it always lights on its feet, and runs faster than ever through the world. For a book that has been exploded so many times, this book still shows signs of considerable life.
In 1900 some learned men, after working for a number of years on the revision of the New Testament, finished their work. Having inserted a few modern words instead of others which had become obsolete, made some slight corrections of errors in translation, and rectified from ancient manuscripts some little errors that had been made by copyists in transcribing the New Testament, at last the book was announced as ready to be issued on a certain day. What was the result? Why, men offered five hundred dollars to get a copy of that book a little in advance of its publication; and the morning it was published, the streets of New York were blockaded with express wagons backed up and waiting for copies of that book which had been refuted, exploded,
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and dead and buried for so many years. Millions of copies of that book were sold as fast as they could be delivered. They telegraphed that book, from the first of Matthew to the end of Romans, from New York to Chicago, about 118,000 words,—the longest message ever wired,—for the sake of getting it there twenty-four hours sooner than steam could carry it, to print in the Sunday newspapers.
A dead book, is it? They would not pay for telegraphing the greatest infidel speech ever delivered in this country. This old book seems to show some signs of life yet. It is like Aaron’s rod that budded and blossomed, and it is being scattered all over the world.
This book outlives its foes. If you could gather all the books written against it, you could build a pyramid higher than the loftiest spire. Now and then a man goes to work to refute the Bible; and every time it is done it has to be done over again the next day or the next year. And then, after its enemies have done their worst, some of its professed friends torture and twist and mystify and misrepresent it. Surely it is no fool of a book if it lives through all that. Infidels have been at work nearly eighteen hundred years, firing away at it, and making about as much impression on it as you would shooting boiled peas at Gibraltar.
The Book That Has Come to Stay
The fact is, this book has come into the world, and it seems to have come to stay. It is in the world, and I do not know how you are to get it out. One hundred years ago you might have found that book in twenty or thirty translations; but now you can find it in more than a thousand different versions, most of which have been made in this last progressive, intellectual century. All over the globe it goes; touch any shore, and you will find that book there before you.
And it is a curious fact that most of our skeptical friends contrive to keep very close to where its shadow falls. It does not take a great while to get out of sight of the Bible. You can go, in a very few days, where there are no churches, Sunday schools, Young Men’s Christian Associations, preachers, deacons, or anything else of the kind. There is little difficulty in getting beyond the reach of the Bible. But the infidel, while finding fault with the Bible,
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usually takes good care to stay where the Bible is. ‘Why is this? Every one knows that where this book has influence it makes things safe. Why is this? If it were a bad book, we should expect to find it in the hands of the worst men. In New York there is a kind of rogues’ museum,—a place where they have all kinds of skeleton keys, jimmies, brass knuckles, dirks, pistols, and implements of mischief, which they have taken away from roughs and criminals. Do you suppose there is a single New Testament in the whole kit? Why not? If it were a bad book, you would expect a rogue to have a revolver in one pocket and a New Testament tucked away in another.
All countries without the Bible are good countries to move away from. Countries where the Bible is read and obeyed are good countries to move into. Those who study and love the Bible will know the reason why. Those who hate the Bible can easily find some countries where it is not read. Why do they not move there, and see how they like it?
Do you suppose that if the Bible had been written by some learned doctor, revised by a committee of eminent divines, and published by some great religious society, we should ever have heard of Noah’s drunkenness, of Abraham’s deception, of Lot’s disgrace, of Jacob’s cheating, of Paul and Barnabas’ quarreling, or of Peter’s lying, cursing, or dissembling? Not at all. The good men, when they came to such an incident, would have said, “There is no use in saying anything about that. It is all past and gone; it will not help anything, and it will only hurt the cause.”
If a committee of such divines had prepared the Bible, you would have had a biography of men whose characters were patterns of piety and propriety, instead of poor sinners, as they were.
Sometimes a man writes his own diary, and happens to leave it for some one to print after he is dead; but he leaves out all the mean tricks he ever did, and puts in all the good acts he can think of; and you read the pages, filled with astonishment, and think, “What a wonderfully good man he was!” But when the Almighty writes a man’s life, He tells the truth about him; and there are not many persons who would want their lives printed if The Almighty wrote them.
You find a man who will tell the truth about kings, warriors, princes, and rulers today, and you may be quite sure that he has
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within him the power of the Holy Ghost. And a book which tells the faults of those who write it, and which tells you that “there is none righteous, no, not one,” bears in it the marks of a true book; for we all know that men have faults, and failings, and sins;• and among all the men whose lives are recorded in that book, each man has some defect, some blot, except one, and that is “the man Christ Jesus.”
Attempting to Prove the Bible Untrue
Men say there are difficulties, and absurdities, and errors, and contradictions in the Bible. You have all heard such assertions. After I had been speaking once in the city of Boston, an ex-minister came to me and told me that the Bible was not true, for there was that story which Moses told about the quails. Israel lusted after flesh, and the Lord sent them quails to eat, and they fell by the camp a day’s journey on each side, or over a territory forty miles across, and they were two cubits deep on the ground, and the Israelites ate them for a full month. I have in my possession an infidel paper which was published in Boston, in which there is about a column of arguments and figures on this “quail story,” giving an estimate of the number of bushels of quails that were piled up over the country, and showing that when they were divided among the host of Israelites, each one would have 2,888,643 bushels of quails, which they were to eat during the month; giving each poor Israelite 69,620 bushels of quails to eat at each meal for thirty days, and therefore the Bible was not true! That is the sort of food our skeptical friends love to eat. That is the meat on which these Caesars grow so wondrous great.
I said to this gentleman, “The Bible does not say any such thing!” He replied that it certainly did.
“Well,” said I, “find it!” Arid when you ask an infidel to find anything in the Bible, you generally have him. He could not find the place; so I turned over to the eleventh chapter of Numbers, and there read that instead of the birds’ being packed like cord-wood on the ground, three feet deep, the account says that the Lord brought the quails from the sea, and let them fall by the camp, as it were “two cubits high,” or about three feet high upon, or above; the face of the earth. That is, instead of flying overhead and out of reach, they were brought in about three feet high,
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where any one could take as many, as he chose. This skeptical friend had got the birds packed solid, three feet deep, over a territory forty miles across. As if I should say that a flock of wild geese flew as high as a church spire, and some one should insist that they were packed solid from the ground up, a hundred feet high! This is a sample of the kind of arguments infidels bring to prove that the Bible is not true!
The Book, to my mind, bears the marks of inspiration in the foresight which it exhibits. This book foretells things. You cannot do that. You cannot tell what will be next year, or next week. “The spirits” cannot tell who will be the next president, or governor, or emperor. They may tell a great many things which are past. They may tell you who your grandmother was, and may copy the inscription on your grandfather’s gravestone, and may tell things which are written in the family record. They may reveal many things in the past, for the devil knows about the past,—but they cannot foretell the future.
Again, I conclude that this book has in it The very Breath of God, from the effect that it produces upon men. There are men who study philosophy, astronomy, geology, geography, and mathematics; but did you ever hear a man say, “I was an outcast, a wretched inebriate, a disgrace to my race, and a nuisance in the world, until I began to study mathematics, and learned the multiplication table, and then turned my attention to geology, got me a little hammer, and knocked off the corners of the rocks and studied the formation of the earth, and since that time I have been happy as the day is long; I feel like singing all the time; my soul is full of triumph and peace; and health and blessing have come to my desolate home once more”? Did you ever hear a man ascribe his redemption and salvation from intemperance and sin and vice to the science of mathematics or geology?
Hopeless Until I heard the Words of the Book
But I can bring you, not one man, or two, or ten, but men by the thousand who will tell you, “I was wretched; I was lost; I broke my poor old mother’s heart; I beggared my family; my wife was heart-stricken and dejected; my children fled from the sound of their father’s footsteps; I was ruined, reckless, helpless, homeless, until I heard the words of that Book!”
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And he will tell you the very word which fastened on his soul. It may be it was, “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest;” perhaps it was, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world;” it may have been, “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” He can tell you the very word that saved his soul. And since that word entered his heart, he will tell you that hope has dawned upon his vision, that joy has inspired his heart, and that his mouth is filled with grateful song. He will tell you that the blush of health has come back to his poor wife’s faded cheek; that the old hats have vanished from the windows of his desolate home; that his rags have been exchanged for good clothes; that his children run to meet him when he comes; that there is bread on his table, fire on his hearth, and comfort in his dwelling. He will tell you all that, and he will tell you that this book has wrought the change.
Now this book is working just such miracles, and is doing it every day. If you have any other book that will do such work as this, bring it along.
The Great Plan and Purpose of God Revealed
God’s word declares the end from the beginning. It is not only the chart which guides each weary wanderer to his own eternal rest, but it is the record of the great plan and purpose of the Almighty concerning the world which He has made and the church which He has redeemed. It unfolds Cod’s everlasting purpose, as manifested in Jesus Christ; and if one will read three chapters at the beginning of the Bible and three at the end, he will be struck with the correspondence which there exists.
At the beginning of the Bible we find a new world: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” At the end of the Bible we find a new world: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.” At the beginning, we find Satan entering to deceive and destroy; at the end, we find Satan cast out, “that he should deceive the nations no more.” At the beginning, sin and pain and sorrow and sighing and death find entrance to the world; at the end, there shall be no more pain nor sorrow nor sighing, and no more death.
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At the beginning, the earth, for man’s transgression, is cursed with thorns and thistles; at the end, “there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it.” At the beginning, we find the tree of life in Paradise, from which the sinner is shut away by a flaming sword, lest he eat and live forever; at the end, we find the tree of life again “in the midst of the Paradise of God,” and the blessed and the blood-washed ones have a right to the tree of life, and “enter in through the gates into the city.” At the beginning, man was brought beneath the dominion of death and the grave; at the end, “the dead, small and great, stand before God,” the sea gives up its dead, and death and hell are cast into the lake of fire. At the beginning, the first Adam lost his dominion over earth, and was driven out of the Garden of Eden in shame and sorrow; at the end, we find the second Adam, victorious over sin and death and hell, enthroned as King and Lord of all, and reigning in triumph and glory forever.
Now, when you get the plan of this book, you find that it is something more than a book of detached sentences, good maxims, and comforting words. It is a book which unfolds the divine purpose, and not only reveals the way of salvation, but marks the pathway of the people of God through this wilderness, and fore-shows the destiny of the world which He has made and the church which He has redeemed.
When we look at these facts, we see that this is no man’s book. When Columbus saw the river Orinoco, some one said he had discovered an island. He replied, “No such river as that flows from an island. That mighty torrent must drain the waters of a continent.” So this book comes, not from the empty hearts of impostors, liars, and deceivers; it springs from the eternal depths of divine wisdom, love, and grace. It is the transcript of the divine mind, the unfolding of the divine purpose, the revelation of the divine will. God help us to receive it, to believe it, and be saved through Christ our Lord.
Chapter 2
THE “MISTAKES OF MOSES”
“The Mistakes of Moses” have long been the subject of skeptical investigation and discussion. But why the mistakes of Moses? Do not other people make mistakes? Why do not skeptics discuss the mistakes of Pharaoh, of Nebuchadnezzar, of Alexander, of Napoleon, or of any of the great men of past or present times? Why is Moses singled out for criticism? Not because Moses claimed to be a prophet, for Mohammed claimed that; Joseph Smith, the Mormon, made that claim; but what critic spends his time pointing out their mistakes? It looks as if Moses must have been a good deal of a man, if his “mistakes” are of so much consequence. Possibly it may be worth our while to inquire and learn what manner of man this Moses was, and what were some of the “mistakes” he made.
1. Moses led the first emancipation movement the world ever saw, liberating three million slaves, without an army, a navy, a treasury, or even a printing press to print paper money or government bonds.
2. Moses, educated in a king’s palace, organized this horde of bondmen into the world’s first republic, the United States of Israel, with local self-government citizen soldiery, popular and compulsory education, elective judiciary, primary and appellate courts, courts of last resort, and most of the varied advantages of which modern republics boast.
3. Moses, reared in despotic Egypt, legislated in advance for the first constitutional monarchy known to history; a government of laws and not of men, where kings and rulers as well as people were amenable to law.
4. Moses made every Israelite a landholder, with inalienable rights; introduced homestead exemption; canceled debts after six years; gave every weary toiler a weekly rest; legislated for the protection of the poor; made the person of every Israelite sacred; guarded captives from outrage and abuse; protected bondmen from bodily injury, and limited their terms of servitude; prohibited
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usury; forbade cruelty to animals; and ordained a system of legislation mote humane than any other the world has known.
5. Moses organized the world’s first total abstinence society, with stringent rules and an ironclad pledge.
6. Moses introduced a sanitary system so wise and salutary that the science of the present day has only begun to appreciate its advantages.
7. Moses organized a new nation; and after more than thirty stormy centuries, during which time the empires, nations, and races of his day have perished, decayed, and rotted down through their own vices and their sins, this people, with their faith in one God, their healthful family life, and their obedience to sanitary law, have outlived the races that have oppressed and conquered them, and are today the healthiest, purest-blooded, and most law- abiding people on the earth, their death rate, even in the United States of America, being only about half the death rate of the people at large. The legislators and statesmen of antiquity are forgotten; their literature and laws are lost in oblivion; but the laws of Moses have been translated into more languages, read in more lands, and have influenced more people than all the laws of ancient monarchs and legislators combined. Are these some of the mistakes of Moses?
Moses Proclaimed the Glory of One God
Moses was reared in a land of magnificent temples devoted to base and obscene idolatries; where the highest culture of the age bowed in adoration before sacred serpents, holy hawks, blessed beetles, consecrated crocodiles, and divine bulls; where men erected obelisks and adored monkeys, built pyramids and worshiped cats! Yet, notwithstanding such an environment, he proclaimed the glory of one eternal God, and led out of Egypt the one nation which worshiped this one supreme Creator; and who, in the midst of the gods of Edom, Philistia, Moab, Babylon, and Phoenicia, have as a nation held fast the law He gave, and the truth which they still proclaim, saying, “Hear, 0 Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”
Doubtless the wise men of Egypt pronounced this the great mistake of Moses’ lifetime. But where are the gods of Egypt and
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of those nations today? They and moles, mutilated, battered, crushed, and buried in the ruins of their own temples, or gathered as curiosities to the British Museum, and put down cellar because they are unfit to be seen by daylight. Of all the gods of all those, lands there is not today one who is worshiped by any mortal man; while the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, proclaimed by Moses and worshiped by Israel, is known in every quarter of the earth, and reverenced by millions of devout worshipers.
Our skeptical friends believe in the survival of the fittest; 1 believe the fittest has survived: the only God worshiped then and worshiped now, and to whom, in many lands and among the purest and noblest peoples, every day from that time to this, has ascended praise, thanksgiving and supplication is the God of Israel. His fame is spread abroad among the Gentiles. From the rising of the sun to the going down thereof, His name is exalted and praised. I think we may conclude that Moses was not mistaken when he testified to the glory of that one God, and “endured, as seeing Him who is invisible.”
Moses Declared That God Made the World
Moses said, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” But it is alleged that God did no such thing; that there is no God; and that the world made itself, and never was created; and that Moses was mistaken in his assertion.
But who did make the world? It is here, and it bears marks of creative power. It is a manufactured article. It could not have made itself. No man was strong enough or wise enough to make it. Who did make the world? Or let us first raise another question, who invented the world?
This world is an invention. It must have been planned and contrived. Many men can build steam engines who never could have invented one. Invention precedes creation or construction. Here is a magnificent building, the work of many hands; but one man saw it before a timber was prepared or a stone was laid. He planned it in advance; knew just how the completed structure would look; and made a picture of it before it was commenced. Now it requires more wisdom to invent than it does to build, and the first question is, Who invented all these things?
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Go any starry night at midnight and stand under the open sky and fix your gaze upon a certain star directly above you. Go again just one year from that moment to the same place, and look in the same direction, and you will find the same star in the same position.
Go again after ten years, or twenty years, or five hundred years, and you will find the same star shining in the same place. It has not been there all these years—its position has been changing every moment; but once a year the star comes around to the same place, for all the stars in the sky are moving in an orderly course, and with mathematical exactness. They ate parts of one magnificent timepiece, whose radiant pointers shine on the blue dial of the sky and mark not only hours and days, but years and centuries and eternities in their course. We regulate our watches by the time at Washington every noon, and they get that time fresh from the stars! Star time is the best time; and the celestial timepiece keeps star time.
Who invented that timepiece? Who constructed it? Who started it? Who keeps it in motion? The lack of a cog ruins the watch, the lack of a single star might unbalance the universe. The position of unknown stars has been detected by their influence upon stars which were known. No man has ever numbered the stars, but some Being has counted them, and some great Mathematician invented that mighty timepiece.
Talk about such a universe being run by chance! You could not run a freight train on a branch railway by chance. And while all these mighty orbs that gem the skies are flying through the universe from age to age, never colliding and never tailing to be on time, skeptics wish us to believe that this universe is run by chance, with no time-table, on the go-as-you-please plan. No man has credulity enough to believe such teaching as that. Some intelligent Power controls this world, some Almighty Being created it; some one who could think, and know and count, and reckon, and contrive, invented it. Who has done it? Moses said that “in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” and I am not yet convinced that Moses was mistaken about it.
The fact is, no man on earth knows how this world was made, and for this one simple reason, among many, no man knows what this world is made of.
What are the substances that are condensed in the awful depths
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beneath us? Science knows nothing about them, science never can know, and most scientific men are well aware of the fact. They simply guess; but what is their guesswork worth?
The Origin of All Life
The world is peopled with living, breathing, acting forms. Moses said that God made them; but Moses, we are told, was mistaken. Whence, then, did they come? The theory has been advanced that life was generated spontaneously. A barrel of water, set in the sun, is soon teeming with life. But it has been proved by experiment that when you extinguish all traces of life in the water and exclude the floating germs from the atmosphere around, there will be no spontaneous generation. God has filled this world full of life, and earth and air and sea are flooded with its germs; but when you extinguish the life which He has lighted, then it is beyond human power to rekindle it. Life comes only from life.
There have been many plans of creation devised, but none of them will work without a God. Yet still men will guess and guess again, and call their guesswork a “hypothesis,” and then skeptics will swallow it as an indisputable fact. For we are told by skeptics that this style of guesswork is scientific truth; but that these
- changes require millions of ages, and are brought about by a process of “natural selection” with no one to do the selecting; by a ‘variation of species” with nobody to guide the variations; in short, by means of evolution, a word which nobody defines.
And so people sit in open-mouthed wonder at the wisdom of men who roll off large words which they do not define, and thus conceal their ignorance of things which they can neither understand nor explain.
A Supreme Power Guiding in the Perpetuation of All Things
But notwithstanding all the mistiness of big words, the facts still remain that supreme power and intelligence guided not only in the origin, but in the reproduction - and perpetuation of all living things. Nothing is left to blind chance or unintelligent law. The same mathematical mind that numbers the leaves upon the plants, numbers the bones in the body, the muscles, the feathers of the wing, and all these show the intelligence of their Creator.
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Moses declares that God made man in His own image; but we are told that Moses was mistaken; and some of the skeptical scientists of today, who are confident in proportion as they are uninformed, and who know for certain things which scientific men only guess at, claim that they are descended from monkeys, or from some lost species of that noble fraternity.
Here we are treading on delicate ground. I prefer to be looking for the link that shall bind me to the throne of God my Maker. I prefer that my genealogical table shall end as it now does, with “Cainan, which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God,” rather than invent one which reads, “Which was the son of skeptic, which was the son of monkey, which was the son of oyster, which was the son of monad, which was the son of mud!”
The Infidel’s Claim
The most eloquent infidel in America has said, “The monad is said to be the simplest form of animal life that has yet been found. It has been described as ‘an organism without organs.’ It is a kind of structureless structure; a little mass of transparent jelly, that can flatten itself out, and can expand and contract around its food. It can feed without a mouth, digest without a stomach, walk without feet, and reproduce itself by simple division. By taking this monad as the commencement of animal life, or rather as the first animal, it is easy to follow the development of the organic structure, through all forms of life to man himself.”
This is a most luminous statement of the scientific skeptic’s genealogy. Here is the beginning of his ancestral line. The first living creature was a “structureless structure,” an organism without organs;” and the description given is composed of words without sense. It is as if a teacher should tell a pupil, “Go to the blackboard, and on an uneven plane surface, draw a curved right line, describing a semicircular triangle, in the form of a globular cube.” These are all good dictionary words. We can read them and speak them, but we cannot think them or do them. There is no such thing as a “curved right line,” “an uneven plane surface,” “a semicircular triangle,” or “a globular cube.” And there is no such thing as “a structureless structure,” or an “organism without organs.” But it is astonishing how wise a foolish thing sounds
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when someone describes it in “great swelling words of vanity.’
According to this “scientific” gentleman, all life started from a germ, “a lump of transparent jelly,” perhaps so small that it might take a microscope to see it. Moses says, “In the beginning God;” the skeptic says, “In the beginning a speck of protoplasm,” an atom of “transparent jelly,” “a monad,” barely visible under a microscope. From this were developed oysters, fishes, frogs, monkeys, men, infidels, nations, governments, peoples, and tongues. It must have been a wonderful “mass of transparent jelly” to accomplish all that.
“From nothing, nothing comes;” and this “monad” seems as near “the little end of nothing whittled out” as anything which we can imagine. Nevertheless this “organism without organs,” this “structureless structure,” is the infidel’s little first cause. So the infidel has a first cause, one which he calls a “monad,” which “can eat without a mouth, digest without a stomach, and walk without feet;” and if this creature be the originator of all living things, he is certainly capable of doing an immense business on a very small capital. And this is the infidel’s science! O skeptic, great is thy faith!
Life Must Come from Life
But with all his faith and ingenuity, and his wandering back into the mists of millions of ages past, the skeptic has not helped matters at all; he is not yet rid of God. Who made that monad? Who had the wisdom, the skill, and the power to invent that speck of protoplasm, that “structureless structure,” with such amazing capabilities? All life must come from life. Nothing can come out of the monad which was not in this “structureless structure.” The infidel says that all life comes from the living monad, the pinhead of transparent jelly; Moses says all life comes from the living God, the Maker of heaven and earth. Was Moses mistaken?
We are told that there is a regular gradation from the lowest to the highest organized forms. So there may be a regular gradation from a teakettle up to an ocean steam boiler, but that does not prove that a teakettle will ever develop into a steam boiler. There is a regular gradation from a gill cup to a gallon measure, but the gill cup will never grow to hold a gallon. The pint will always be a pint, and the gallon a gallon.
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It is intimated that as the rich varieties of apples are developed from the worthless crab, and as grains are developed horn grasses, therefore men are developed from monkeys or from some inferior species. But these claims take for granted the idea that the wild crabs or the wild grasses are primitive forms; but this is pure assumption. It may be true that the culture of the wild crab will result in a luscious apple; but have we any better culture for it than it had when God “planted a garden eastward in Eden,” and in it placed all manner of trees, and set man to care for and dress the garden? Thousands of years of neglect and hard usage, in a world that is cursed with sin and filled with thorns and briars, may well have stunted and dwarfed and degraded these products of the soil, which yet show something of their native excellence when, under culture, they come back to a semblance of their original perfection.
The law of degradation is quite as effectual as the law of evolution or elevation. An infant stolen and suckled by wolves, becomes wolfish in its nature, and never rises to the proper dignity of a human being; and there is quite as much reason to believe that a monkey is a degenerate man, as that man is a superfine monkey with a few modern improvements.
Doubtless there are brutal elements and tendencies in mankind. And the apostle Peter sharply contrasts two classes of men, one composed of those who “have obtained like precious faith with us through the righteousness of God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;” to whom are given “exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust;” and another class described “as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed,” who “speak evil of the things that they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption.” 2 Peter 1:1,4; 2:12.
Progression vs. the Gospel of Christ
But the difference between these two classes is wrought, not by the slow methods of progression and evolution, but by the speedier processes of regeneration and salvation. Centuries of ‘progression” have produced the cruel savage, the blood-smeared cannibal; but the gospel of Christ in a single lifetime, yea, in a single year, makes that same savage cannibal as gentle as a lamb,
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he “being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever.”
The vast and varied misinformation of a portion of the skeptical fraternity is well illustrated by their assertions that “all men believe” this and that; and that “all scientific men” accept their atheistic theories. Of course there are scientific men who are not Christians, who know not God and obey not the gospel, and who accept the theories and guesswork of a few leaders, most of whom disagree among themselves. But there are other men, equally scientific and equally logical, who see nothing but folly in these “oppositions of science falsely so called.”
On the first day of August, 1885, Dr. George E. Post, of the Syrian Mission, a gentleman of superior scientific attainments, visited the great British Museum, which, with its vast collection of specimens, would probably be the best place in all the world to find the “missing links” and note the “origin of species,” as written in the rocky records of the universe. There he found Mr. Etheridge, one of the foremost of British experts. After Mr. Etheridge had examined and named certain fossils which Dr. Post had brought, and shown him the wonders of the great collection, Dr. Post says, in a letter to a former colleague, since printed in the New York Evangelist:
“I asked him whether, after all, this was not the working out of mind and Providence. He turned to me with a clear, honest look into my eyes, and replied, ‘In all this great museum there is not a particle of evidence of the transmutation of species. Nine tenths of the talk of evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by fact. Men adopt a theory, and then strain their facts to support it. I read all their books, but they make no impression on my belief in the stability of species. Moreover, the talk of the great antiquity of man is of the same value. There is no such thing as a fossil man. Men are ready to regard you as a fool if you will not go with them in all their vagaries. But this museum is full of proofs of the utter falsity of their views.’”
Theories Remain Unproved
On the whole, we may conclude that the fine-spun theories of evolution and development are not proved. Much as the wise
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men of this world suppose themselves to be in advance of Moses, their theories are impracticable, their premises are assumed, and their conclusions are unwarranted
No uninspired mortal could describe the creation, for no man witnessed it. Heathen cosmogonies are puerile, fabulous, and absurd. Moses gives the only account which scientific men have accepted; and which even heathen writers have cited as an example of the sublime! Details are omitted.
On the whole it seems simplest and safest to conclude that Moses was gifted with a divine wisdom, which enabled him to hold his tongue while others were babbling; and that his simple statement, “In the beginning Cod created the heaven and the earth,” stands the test of all investigation criticism, and research. He stated the fact, and so, “through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God.”
Chapter 3
THE WONDERFUL LAW
An. theories which deny divine authority and moral responsibility tend directly to barbarism; nor can any true civilization be found outside the influence of the law of Moses and the gospel of Christ. The infidel world may be defied to find a place on this planet ten miles square, where a decent man can live in decency, comfort, and security, supporting and educating his children unspoiled and unpolluted, enjoying the comforts of family life and the advantages of respectable society,—a place where age is reverenced, infancy protected, manhood respected, womanhood honored, and human life held in due regard; where the revelation of the God of Abraham has not gone before and cleared the way, and laid the foundations of society, and made civilization, decency, and security possible. And as no decent society can be found where the law of God is unknown, so no such society can be perpetuated where God’s law is discarded and disregarded. Persons who, under the influence of divine revelation, have been trained to the practice of virtue and piety in early life, may not always cast off its restraints under the influence of skepticism in later years. But let the influence of such training die out, and the practice of infidelity will soon prove the ruin of society.
Let us, then, calmly consider a few of the objections which are continually being made against the authority of the books of Moses, and so against the authority of the entire Scriptures. And first let us inquire, Is the Bible a vile book?
First, we are told that the Bible is a bad book, obscene, indelicate, and unfit to be read. Before this grave charge can be established, we must consider that the Bible was written in a different age and country from our own. Customs differ in different countries; and what is improper in one country may give no offense in another. So there may be simplicity, or even a barbarism, of language, which though indelicate to our ears, may have been entirely consistent with purity and propriety at the time and in the countries where it was written; as there may also be delicacy
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of speech joined with prurient thought and corrupt behavior. Again, the words which appear to us indelicate in the Bible
are not the words written by Moses or the prophets, but they are English words used by the translators; and they are words which were used in respectable society when the Bible was translated in 1611, that is, in the time of Shakespeare.
The objection lies, not against the Bible, but against the English language, which grows purer as the Bible is circulated among English-speaking peoples. The Bible was translated into the purest English then known. No book of that age will compare with it in purity, and the influence of the Bible and Christianity has elevated the language and the taste of the people till men object to language which in 1611 was deemed unobjectionable.
Moreover, Moses gave to Israel a law; and a law must describe and specify the crimes which it prohibits. Not only the statute laws, but the standard medical treatises of every civilized country, contain expressions which might be counted inappropriate for promiscuous reading. The Law of Moses deals not only with crimes, but with the public health. If it forbids crime, it must describe crime; and it must do it, not in the delicate euphemisms by which French writers convey the vilest thoughts in the politest words, but in plain, honest phrases that can be understood by the common people.
What Is Wrong with the Bible?
Surely, if the Bible is an obscene book, it would be taken up and circulated by the followers and supporters of the publishers of obscene literature. There is one reason why they will never do this. While a famous infidel asserts that “few books have been published containing more moral filth than this inspired word of God,” he spoils the circulation of the book among his friends by adding that “these stories are not redeemed by a single dash of wit or humor. They never rise above the dull details of stupid vice.”
Here is the trouble with the Bible. If it treated sin as a joke; if its pages were punctuated, like the lectures of this blasphemer, with “laughter,” “applause,” and “great laughter;” if it made clowns roar over crimes, and jested at infamies which the laws of every civilized and decent country condemn and punish, it would then be much more acceptable to him and his followers.
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But the Bible does not deal with sin in this way; neither do the laws of the land. The statutes against vice are not enlivened “by a single flash of wit or humor.” Sin is no joke, and no matter for joking. The laws promulgated, the sins condemned, and the punishments recorded, do not furnish amusing reading for infidels. They are not enlivened with flashes of “wit and humor.” They deal with stern and awful realities, and warn men to turn away from sin, that they may escape ruin in this world, and perdition in the world to come.
The Humanity of a “Cruel Law”
It is claimed that the Law of Moses was an exceedingly cruel law, full of wrath, vengeance, and bloodshed; that it established a terrible tyranny, and was oppressive in the extreme. What are the facts in the case?
In the Jewish law, corporal punishment was, sometimes inflicted, but under rigid restrictions. It is not long since the practice of flogging was abolished in the armies and navies of some of the foremost nations of modem civilization. Any one who has read accounts of persons’ being flogged in modern times, one, two, three, four, or five hundred lashes with the cat-o’-nine-tails; of sailors’ being “flogged through the fleet;” or who has read the accounts of the flogging inflicted with the knout and other instruments of torture, will perhaps be prepared to appreciate the “barbarity” of the law of Moses, which said, “It shall be, if the wicked man be worthy to be beaten, that the judge shall cause him to lie down, and to be beaten before his face, according to his fault, by a certain number. Forty stripes he may give him, and not exceed.” Deuteronomy 25: 2, 3.
Modern law takes men from their families and friends, leaving their wives to toil and their children to suffer, and politely ushers them into prison, keeping them in a gloomy cell for months, making honest men work to pay taxes for their support, turning them out at last, possibly finished rogues, perhaps broken in health and crushed in spirit, but bearing the brand of crime and imprisonment upon them.
The penalties of the law of Moses, without jails, prisons, or penitentiaries, settled the whole matter at once with an infliction of less than forty stripes, and the man went about his business and
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supported his family; his back got well, and he learned to obey the laws. This was Jewish law. Are we certain that the laws of modern civilization are greatly superior these ordinances? And to what country can infidelity point as a n example of humanity, that has not been for generations under the influence of this same Mosaic law?
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