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+Project Gutenberg's Christ, Christianity and the Bible, by I. M. Haldeman
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Christ, Christianity and the Bible
+
+Author: I. M. Haldeman
+
+Release Date: October 2, 2009 [EBook #30160]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRIST, CHRISTIANITY AND THE BIBLE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Keith G. Richardson
+
+
+
+
+Christ, Christianity and the Bible
+
+
+BY
+
+I. M. HALDEMAN, D.D.
+
+Pastor First Baptist Church, New York City
+
+
+_Author of_
+
+How to Study the Bible, The Coming of Christ, The Signs of the
+Times, Christian Science in the Light of Holy Scripture, etc., etc.
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+CHARLES C. COOK
+
+150 Nassau Street
+
+
+Copyright, 1912,
+
+By Charles C. Cook
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+Christ
+
+Christianity
+
+The Bible
+
+
+
+Christ
+
+
+IF NOT GOD--NOT GOOD
+
+
+BY I. M. HALDEMAN, D.D.
+
+
+"Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is God"
+(Matthew 9:17).
+
+
+THE world has accepted Jesus Christ as a good man.
+
+The evidences of his goodness are manifold.
+
+He was full of compassion.
+
+He never looked upon the people as a crowd. He never thought of them
+as a mass. He saw them always as individuals. His heart went out to
+them. All his impulses were to pity them, sympathize with, and help
+them.
+
+He went among them. He entered into all conditions, accepted all
+situations. He was present at a wedding, he ate with publicans and
+sinners and, anon, was guest at a rich man's table.
+
+He saw the ravages of disease, the shame of sin, the tragedies in
+life.
+
+He knew there was torture in body and anguish in spirit.
+
+He took the mystery of pain and laid it upon his heart, until tears
+were his meat and his drink, by day and by night. He became a man of
+sorrows and an expert in grief. He took upon him the woes of the
+world till he was bowed and bent, as with the weight of years. The
+tears of sympathy grooved his cheeks, as when streams carve their
+way down mountain sides. Because of this men looked at him and saw
+neither form nor comeliness; neither was there any beauty in him
+that they should desire him.
+
+He was a beneficent man.
+
+Multitudes of men are benevolent, but not beneficent.
+
+Benevolence is well wishing. Beneficence is well doing. He was
+always well doing, giving sight to the blind, healing the sick,
+cleansing the leper, feeding the hungry, raising the dead, unloosing
+the bonds of Satan--unwinding the serpent's coil.
+
+He was absolutely unselfish.
+
+He emptied himself and made room in his soul for other lives. He had
+no office hours and never interposed secretaries or major-domos
+between himself and the people. He received all who came unto him--
+ministering without money and without price.
+
+There is one scene that might well be painted by a master hand.
+
+It is evening. The western sky is all aglow with the glory of the
+setting sun. Far up in the dome of the infinite blue, the evening
+star swings golden, like a slow descending lamp let down by
+invisible hands. The street is in half-tone. It is packed by the
+strangest of throngs, by the blind, the lame, the halt, the
+paralyzed and the leper-derelicts of humanity--borne thither on a
+surging tide of life in which every wave is an accent of pain; they
+are driven and piled up in great, quivering heaps against a door
+which is partly shut, as in self-defence, by the sweltering crowd
+within.
+
+Jesus of Nazareth is in that house.
+
+He is healing the sick. He is giving health, and strength, and peace
+to all who seek him. He turns no one away. Compassion, sympathy,
+beneficence, the tenderness of a mother for her helpless babe--these
+are the characteristics which his daily ministry revealed.
+
+No one ever brought a charge of evil doing or evil speaking against
+him.
+
+The people who followed him said, "He hath done all things well."
+
+Police officers sent to arrest him as a disturber of the peace found
+him in the midst of the people, speaking words that hushed their
+tumult, quieted their murmurings and gave them rest; and the
+officers returning to them who sent them, said, "Never man spake
+like this man."
+
+Pilate's wife dreamed a troubled dream of him, and sent word to her
+husband not to lay hands on him--seeing that he was a just man.
+Thrice before heaven and earth--in a testimony that still echoes
+through infinite spaces, and is heard by listening worlds--Pilate
+himself proclaimed, "I find no fault in this man."
+
+He lifted up his voice against sin and unrighteousness.
+
+Against nothing did he so much speak as against religious hypocrisy.
+Nowhere, in any record, is language so terrible, so penetrating, so
+hot, so full of the flame of fire and scorching analysis, scorching
+and burning in its denunciation of those who on the outside (in
+their religious profession) were like whitened sepulchres, but on
+the inside (in their actual lives) were full of dead men's bones and
+corruption--nowhere, outside the twenty-third chapter of Matthew,
+does language fall with such tremendous vibration of thunderous
+indignation, and the accent of aroused and fully angered justice.
+"Ye serpents," "ye generation of vipers," are some of the phrases;
+and the words, "fools," "blind hypocrites," mingle again and again
+with the far-sounding, judicial menace, "Woe, woe unto you."
+
+He seemed to be dominated and controlled by one idea--the idea of
+God. The God thought held and moved him. He could not go anywhere,
+or see anything, or utter the shortest discourse, that he did not,
+in some fashion, connect it with the infinite Father. Was a sower
+sowing seed, he saw in that incident an illustration of the fact
+that the true seed is the Word of God, and the true sower he who
+casts it into the mightier ground of the human heart. Did a flock of
+sheep lie at rest upon the hillside, guarded by a shepherd's care,
+at once he would unfold the shepherding of a Father's love. A tiny
+sparrow, flying an unnoticed speck in the distant sky, or falling
+ground-ward with its weary flight, was a winged witness that the
+Father knew and saw even the smallest details of human life. A lily
+in its lowliness, and yet a lily in its beauty shaming a king's
+array, a lily, toiling not, but upward growing, furnished him a text
+from which to preach the providence of God; and a wandering beggar
+boy far away from home and kindred, stained with sin and dark with
+sorrow, gave occasion for the wondrous story of the Prodigal Son and
+a father's changeless and tender love.
+
+God! God! God! this was the supreme note of his life.
+
+On the cross he gave utterance to words which reveal the inner
+character of his soul.
+
+When a man has been lied about, falsified, his good evil spoken of
+and his reputation assailed (as was his before the Sanhedrin--in the
+mock trial given him there), when such a man has been hounded from
+one end of the town to the other, spit upon and jibed at and,
+finally, nailed through hands and feet to a torturing cross; when
+such a man with his heart bursting (because of the impeded
+circulation, driving the surging, tumultuous blood back upon it),
+with the sun scorching his bare temples, a crown of thorns stabbing
+him at every helpless turn of his restless head; when such a man,
+under such circumstances, can rise above the wickedness, cowardice
+and cheap treason that have nailed him to the cross, and pray (and
+pray sincerely) that his guilty murderers, villainous detractors and
+unscrupulous slanderers may be forgiven, that man bears witness that
+he has, at least, a heart of good.
+
+And it was just such a prayer which came from the parched, dry,
+cracked lips of this man of Nazareth as he hung upon the cross and
+cried out,
+
+"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
+
+Again he spoke from the cross.
+
+There was standing near, a woman who had been chosen of God to give
+him birth. She was sobbing convulsively. She was realizing what had
+been foretold of her more than thirty years before--"a sword shall
+pierce through thy own soul, also." Mary, the mother of Jesus, stood
+there, brokenhearted. Jesus turned his head and looked at John, his
+cousin, bidding him take that weeping mother to his home, his heart
+and care, and be unto her henceforth a loving son.
+
+O the man who, in the hour of his own agony, shall remember his
+mother, and crown her, make her the queen of his life, and ordain
+that others shall love and reverence her, proclaims for himself the
+lustre of a manhood without spot.
+
+Once more he spoke from the place of anguish--that moment on the
+edge of death. There his soul, rising from the depths of the
+overwhelming waves of agony, cries:
+
+"Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit."
+
+He who in the hour and article of death can face God and eternity,
+and commit himself to the hand of supreme justice as a confident
+child to the arms of a loving father, bears witness that in his soul
+there is no ghastly memory of sin, no sharp, remembered pang, no
+fear of offended law. Such a confidence and such a committal of
+triumphant calm bear witness that the heart is at rest with God, and
+is conscious of its own good.
+
+For two thousand years the world, without a dissenting voice, has
+borne witness that he is the one man who came into the earth and
+walked through it superlatively good.
+
+Among the voices in the common consent of the world that Jesus
+Christ was a good man, there are those who with equal insistence
+deny that he was Almighty God.
+
+They agree that he had the spirit of God; that he had it in measure
+such as no other man before or since. They announce their belief
+that he is the mightiest advance on humanity ever known; that all
+other religious teachers pale before him as the stars before the
+sun. They speak of his spotless life with fervent admiration, and
+draw special attention to his discourses as models of exhortation to
+righteousness and truth. To them the sermon on the mount is a _chef
+d'oeuvre_. Out of that sermon they take the maxim about doing unto
+others as you would they should do unto you. They take that maxim
+and frame it about and make it the "Golden Rule" of human life. They
+exalt Jesus as the perfect example, telling us that if we shall
+govern our life by him, make him our constant copy, imitate him, we
+shall fill our daily existence with righteousness and truth. In
+fact, if we seek a panegyric on the humanity of Christ; if we desire
+to see his goodness exalted to the heavens, and his humanity put
+beyond compare with the sons of men--we must needs go to the
+Socinian, the Arian and the Unitarian--those who deny the deity of
+Christ. But this exaltation of the human Christ is simply setting up
+a man of straw that with one blow of deific discount he may be
+knocked down again. He is set up as man that he may be cast down as
+God.
+
+They will not accept him as God.
+
+God Almighty (we are told) cannot be confined or shut up in any one
+man. Man as man and, therefore, every individual man in his part, is
+the avatar of God. Each man is in some sense the incarnation of God.
+God is more or less enthroned in all men. God is to be found in all
+men as he is to be found in all nature.
+
+A good man--call Jesus a good man--set him up as high as you please,
+build as lofty a pedestal for him as you will, but Almighty God--
+_Never!_
+
+Over against this exaltation of Christ as a merely good man, and the
+persistent denial that he was God, stands the unmistakable claim
+which Jesus Christ himself made--that he was God.
+
+He made that claim in many ways.
+
+He claimed it by declaring his power and authority to forgive sin.
+
+That was a striking moment when he proclaimed it for the first time.
+Four men had brought a paralytic to the house where he was
+preaching. When they could not get in because of the crowd, they
+climbed up on the roof, took off some of the tiling, and by means of
+ropes or corners of the mattress let the man down to the very feet
+of Jesus. When he saw _their_ faith, he turned to the sick man and
+said, "Son (son of Abraham), thy sins are forgiven thee."
+
+At once there was an uproar. The leading men, sitting round and
+watching him, burst out with a protest, charging him with blasphemy,
+saying that God only could forgive sin.
+
+And they were right.
+
+No mere man can forgive sin. Again and again the Scriptures teach us
+that forgiveness is with God that he may be feared.
+
+In announcing the man's sins forgiven, Jesus clearly claimed the
+prerogative, power and authority, which belong to God.
+
+He claimed this equality by declaring himself to be the Son of God.
+To the Jews, "Son of God" was equivalent to "God the Son." It meant
+to them, the moment he styled himself by that name, an unqualified
+claim to essential equality with the Father. Because of this they
+raged against him and would have killed him, crying out that he had
+made himself equal with God.
+
+He made this claim in terms which admit of no misunderstanding. He
+said:
+
+"I and my Father are one."
+
+When Philip said, "Shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us," he
+answered and said:
+
+"Hast thou been with me so long time and hast thou not known me,
+Philip? From henceforth ye know him and have seen him."
+
+To Philip he had also said:
+
+"I am the way and the truth and the life--no man cometh unto the
+Father but by me."
+
+By this statement he deliberately shut out all other men as the
+ground and means of approach to God. He declares that God, the
+Father, can be found in and through him alone; that he is the
+supreme way, the very truth and the very life; not that he knows
+some truth and has a measure of life in common with men, but that he
+is _the_ truth--the _absolute_ life. Such attitude, such claimed
+rights, privileges and powers, belong alone to God.
+
+But he goes beyond this.
+
+He testifies that he has been from all eternity the manifestation of
+the very selfhood of the Father. Hear what he says:
+
+"And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self, with the
+glory which I had with thee before the world was."
+
+He traces his personality backward beyond the hour when the world
+was launched into space, before the stellar systems were created. He
+goes beyond time, he takes us into eternity, and in that unbegun and
+measureless distance declares with all the calm assurance of
+accustomed truthfulness that he had the glory, the visibility, the
+outward manifestation and splendor of the Father's own essential
+selfhood; that his relation to him was that of one who was from all
+eternity his determination, definition and utterance.
+
+Such claims as these are the claims of one who declares himself to
+be, and without restraint, nothing less than Almighty God.
+
+On one occasion when talking to the Jews he said that Abraham had
+rejoiced to see his day, had seen it and was glad. They turned upon
+him and reminded him that he was not yet fifty years old, how then
+could he have seen Abraham, or Abraham him--that Abraham who had
+been dead nearly two thousand years?
+
+He faced them and said:
+
+"Verily, verily I say unto you, before Abraham was, I am."
+
+The striking thing in the statement is not the claim of pre
+-existence--great as that is--not that he claimed to have been in
+existence already--not fifty years merely, but two thousand--no! all
+these utterances are remarkable enough, but these are not the
+astounding thing he said. The astounding, the unspeakably
+extraordinary thing he said is found in just two words:
+
+"I am."
+
+There is one place in Holy Scripture where this phrase is supremely
+used. In the third chapter of the book of Exodus it is recorded that
+God manifested himself to Moses at the burning bush, and there
+declared himself to be the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the
+God of Jacob. He commanded Moses to return to Egypt, appear before
+Pharaoh and demand the release of the Children of Israel from their
+cruel bondage; and when Moses inquired by what name he should speak
+to the people, he answered:
+
+"Say unto them, I AM hath sent me unto you."
+
+"I AM."
+
+To the Jew these two words set forth the supreme name and title of
+the eternal God.
+
+In saying, therefore, "Before Abraham was--I AM," Jesus announced
+himself to be the eternal, self-centred, supreme being, Almighty
+God. When he said this, and because they understood him, because
+they knew exactly what he meant by these words, the Jews took up
+stones to stone him.
+
+If I were seeking to demonstrate by object lesson, and in a fashion
+that would admit of no reply, that Jesus claimed to be Almighty God,
+I would summon the mightiest and most masterful artist the world
+knows to come and paint for me the scene which takes place a little
+later as a consequence of that moment when he emphasizes his claim
+by saying:
+
+"I and my Father are ONE."
+
+The picture would represent a great crowd of scowling, fierce, angry
+Jews, their hands filled with stones--some of them drawn back, the
+whole figure intense with readiness to cast the fatal stone--and
+Jesus, standing a little distance apart, looking calmly on.
+
+Underneath the picture I would have written in great golden letters
+(letters so artistic, so startling, so wonderful in form, that at
+the risk of art itself--almost at the risk of minimizing the picture
+at the first glance, subordinating it to interest in the letters and
+dividing the mind of the onlooker between the actual scene and the
+letters themselves)--I would have written in letters that should
+smite the eye and the innermost thinking of the beholder, the words
+recorded in the tenth chapter of John's Gospel, given by the Jews in
+reply to the demand of Jesus when, speaking with amazement, he asks,
+"For what good work do ye stone me?" I would have every gazer at the
+picture read these words till they rose up in vastness against him,
+smiting his attention as the very stones in the hands of the Jews--
+these words:
+
+"For a good work we stone thee not but for blasphemy; and because
+that thou BEING A MAN MAKEST THYSELF GOD."
+
+The Jews were not deceived.
+
+They knew what he had done.
+
+They knew that he claimed to be no less than very God himself.
+
+There can be no doubt that he claimed to be God.
+
+There need be, really, no discussion about it.
+
+The New Testament records the claim.
+
+I am not making any issue as to whether the New Testament is true,
+or reliable. I am saying thus far, only, that the New Testament (the
+Gospels of the New Testament), in language concerning which there
+can be no possible mistake or even ground for misinterpretation,
+records the fact that Jesus Christ did claim to be Almighty God.
+
+If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God (as he claimed to be) he was
+not a good man (as it is said he was).
+
+The proposition ought to be self-evident.
+
+No mere man can claim to be God and be good.
+
+He who, as mere man, claims to be God, robs God of the glory that is
+exclusively his.
+
+He who thus claims to be God, and bids men go into eternity trusting
+him as God, is a deceiver.
+
+No man who robs God of equality, and who deceives men into believing
+that he is God, can be good--he is a wicked and blasphemous
+deceiver.
+
+There is only one way in which the character of Jesus Christ can be
+saved on this claim of his to be God--if that claim were not true.
+
+It can be saved only by assuming that he was self-deceived; that he
+sincerely believed himself to be God, but was blinded and held fast
+by his own mistaken concept.
+
+But the man who claims to be Almighty God, and claims it as he did,
+can be self-deceived only when he is a mental weakling, unbalanced
+in mind, or absolutely insane.
+
+None of these things can be predicated of Jesus Christ.
+
+On the contrary, he was the most intellectual man the world has ever
+known.
+
+Mark how he met the wisdom and the genius of the men who surrounded
+him. Again and again they came to him with crafty and perplexing
+questions. With a word he solved their problems, flashed truth into
+their shame-smitten faces, and silenced them. In all the universe
+there is no soul meaner, more contemptible, more cowardly, and
+utterly lost to every sense of decent manhood than the man who, for
+the sake of entangling a good man in his speech, asks him questions
+in public, before an audience ready at every turn to misquote and
+misinterpret his slightest utterance; and that is what they did.
+They came to him, not with the desire to know the truth, but to
+confound him, cast him down and destroy his prestige with the
+people. To every question he gave an answer having in it spiritual
+truth, but bearing the unmistakable stamp of rare wisdom and
+intellectual superiority.
+
+His words, the simple speech he used in the midst of them, or alone
+with his disciples, have been the impulse of the mightiest
+intellectual activity the world has ever known. Out of his words
+have grown systems of theology that may well call for all there is
+of brain power and capacity in those who study them. Here are to be
+found the keenest speculations and the farthest outreach of
+metaphysical suggestion and the most detailed analysis of which the
+human mind is capable. Book after book, treatise after treatise,
+discourse after discourse, have been produced out of the simplest
+and most detached things he said. No man can read his speeches and
+not find the mind stimulated, shocked, quickened and impelled
+forward even upon the most daring lines of thought.
+
+It would be easy to call the roll of the princes and kings in the
+realm of intellect, men whose thoughts burn and flame like great
+quenchless lights; men whose minds are the storehouses of knowledge,
+and whose utterances by word and pen have moved the quickest and
+most forceful lives in the world. It would be easy to call the long
+roll of these names shining like stars and constellations in the
+firmament of thought--princes and kings of intellect who acknowledge
+that Jesus Christ is not only superior to them morally and
+spiritually, but intellectually.
+
+What man is there to-day with any degree of mental self-respect who
+would dare to stand up and assert himself the equal of Jesus Christ
+intellectually?
+
+Without necessity of demonstration, it ought to be a truth beyond
+question that Jesus Christ was the most intellectual man the world
+has ever known.
+
+Such a man as that could not be self-deceived.
+
+If he were not Almighty God he knew it.
+
+He knew it as well as these good Unitarians, and these wondrously
+advanced scholars who cannot get beyond the glamour of his humanity.
+
+He knew it at first hands.
+
+If he were not Almighty God--if he were only a man--he knew it, knew
+it through and through, in every fibre of his being.
+
+There is no possibility then whatever for him to have been deceived.
+
+If he were not deceived, if he knew he was not God, then--
+
+HE WAS NOT A GOOD MAN.
+
+This is his own argument:
+
+A young man came to him and said, "Good Master, what good thing
+shall I do, that I may inherit eternal life? and he said unto him,
+Why callest thou me good? there is none good _but one, that is
+God_."
+
+The argument is simple enough.
+
+"You call me good. God alone is good. If I am not God, I am not
+good."
+
+Not good!
+
+Nay! If he were not God, he was the most wantonly wicked man of whom
+I ever heard.
+
+If he were not God, not only does disaster fall upon himself in the
+total destruction of his character, and in the consequent and final
+driving of him from the suffrage and consideration of men, but the
+disaster falls upon all who have put their faith in him.
+
+If Jesus Christ were not God, then he never forgave the sins of a
+single soul, and all those throughout the two thousand years who
+have gone into eternity trusting in his name have gone into that
+eternity unforgiven and unshrived of God.
+
+If Jesus Christ were not God, then he has not forgiven the sin of a
+single human being alive to-day.
+
+You had sinned! There were memories of the sins you had committed.
+They allowed you no rest. They gave you anguish of mind. Others
+could not forgive you. You could not forgive yourself. The
+consciousness that you stood naked before the all-seeing eye of a
+holy God; that he knew the circumstances and every detail thereof,
+down to the very intents and purposes lying behind your deeds, and
+even your thoughts; that he looked into and saw all that was in your
+heart; in the consciousness growing clearer and stronger and more
+terrible each day that you had no excuse, no place that you could
+hold for a moment; that if he summoned you to his presence, you
+would stand in the white light of his unmixed holiness, and the
+inexorable and unrelenting wrath of his essential antagonism and
+just hatred against sin; all this consciousness taking voice in you
+and through you, cried out in your soul, "I am guilty and undone."
+And this filled you with a horror of great darkness and the utter
+blackness of a hopeless despair. Then you heard the voice of Jesus
+Christ saying, "Come unto me." "Him that cometh unto me I will in no
+wise cast out." You came. You fell at his feet. You owned his death
+as your atoning sacrifice. You claimed him as your substitute. You
+claimed forgiveness through his blood. He said to you, as he said to
+the paralytic, "Thy sins are forgiven thee." You rose and went away
+as when one is released from a galling chain; as when a burden that
+was crushing to earth has been lifted from the sore, bleeding
+shoulder; as when one who has been tossed on a midnight sea enters
+the haven while the dawn is breaking, casts anchor and touches
+shore. For years you have had peace. The memory of your sins are
+there (for though God when he forgives forgets them, you cannot).
+Like David, perhaps, you cry, "My sin is ever before me!" The sin
+marks are there as the nail holes in the wall, but you have been
+able to look at them and have peace because you have said to
+yourself, "I am not an unwhipped of justice, my sins have been
+punished in my substitute; they have been fully answered for in his
+blood. He has forgiven me and justified me and made me clean. In him
+I stand clothed in the very 'righteousness of God.' I hate my sin
+and despise it for what it is in itself, for what it made him, my
+redeemer, to endure, but I have peace because he has fully satisfied
+in my behalf. I have actually satisfied in him and am delivered
+before God's court of holiness both from the guilt and the demerit
+of sin. I have, in short, _gone through the judgment with Christ on
+the cross_. He has pronounced forgiveness--absolution--upon me, and
+he has done so by virtue of his power and authority as the living
+one in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the godhead bodily--as my
+saviour and my God he has forgiven me and I am at peace."
+
+All this you have said within yourself and testified.
+
+But I ask you now to face the terrible fact--if Jesus Christ were
+not God--this terrible fact--that you have been deceived.
+
+You have had a false peace.
+
+You have been living in a fool's paradise.
+
+You are before God an unpardoned and as yet unpunished criminal
+awaiting your doom. All this is absolutely your state--
+
+IF--
+
+If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God.
+
+If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God, he had no authority nor power
+to forgive your sins. NO! And if Jesus Christ were not God I know
+not where to bid you turn. You must carry the load of your sins all
+your days; and when you die, go into eternity and face a holy God
+who tells you by every law and fact of nature that he never forgives
+in a single case till he has first punished the sin and with it the
+sinner.
+
+If Jesus Christ were not God, his death was not an atonement.
+
+And this surely should be plain enough.
+
+Only God can atone to God.
+
+Only an infinite being can satisfy an infinite being.
+
+If Jesus Christ were not God he could not make an atonement.
+
+If he did not make an atonement, then the world has never been
+reconciled to God nor brought up on mercy ground. Instead of being
+lifted up to the plane of grace and mercy, the world is still under
+the condemnation and judgment of God, no longer under a suspended
+sentence, but sheer and defenceless, with nothing to hinder the
+crash of doom at any moment.
+
+There is no hope. There is no daysman. There is no one to offer unto
+God what he demands, and unto man what he needs. There is no
+mediator between a holy God and a sinful man.
+
+If Jesus Christ were not God, then he did not rise from the dead. He
+did not bring life and immortality to light, and, as for me, the
+preacher, I have no light to hold out to you in the all-embracing
+gloom and night of death.
+
+There is no hope.
+
+If a man shall tell me there is no hereafter, that death ends all, I
+shall take up the law of induction and argue him to a standstill
+along the line of unfathomable mysteries and inexplicable
+psychological phenomena in the constitution of man, and the
+inexplicable absence of the phenomena in the state of death,
+inexplicable upon any known materialistic ground, and I shall laugh
+at his inability to maintain his thesis beyond the poor shred of a
+hypothesis. If a man shall tell me as the result of pure reasoning
+that he concludes for the endless existence of the soul after death,
+and shall do this even upon the plane of induction, I shall turn and
+tell him that all his argument is based upon inference and not fact,
+finding its largest emphasis in the region of the unknowable and
+guessable--in the things he cannot explain, where certain
+conclusions can neither be successfully affirmed, nor successfully
+denied, and where, by consequence, he may console himself, if he
+wish, with his side of the guess; and I shall feel a keen sense of
+sorrow at his inability to hold his premise in the final region of
+the sure.
+
+And what does all this mean?
+
+Is it playing fast and loose with the mind? Am I turning in upon
+myself and playing the mere harlequin in the arena of mental
+gymnastics?
+
+No! there is sane meaning to this double method--it is this: _as
+much may be said along one line of reasoning as the other_. Each is
+a _non-sequitur_ to the other. Each negatives the other and leaves
+us with reason's torch inverted--the light out, the darkness deeper
+than ever; and standing on the threshold of the grave we are forced
+to cry out in the sharp agony of a continual self-smiting
+perplexity:
+
+"To be or not to be--_that is the question_."
+
+Question it is--always a question--always coming back from the side
+of every dead body--always coming back from the clod-filled grave--
+coming down from age to age, coming back a question no man, not the
+wisest mere man who ever lived, could answer, or any living wise man
+can answer to-day.
+
+If Jesus Christ were not God it cannot be answered; for if Jesus
+Christ were not God, he did not rise from the dead and by divine
+power carry himself out of the region of death forever.
+
+If Jesus Christ were not God, you may go and sit by the tomb of your
+dead and weep bitter (because hopeless) tears.
+
+If Jesus Christ were not God, then he was not a redeemer and
+saviour. All the beautiful things that have been taught about him as
+such are false. All the hopes of heaven, the beauty of the celestial
+city, the tree of life, the river of crystal, the company of the
+saints, the arch-angelic song, the meeting and the knowing of those
+who long ago have left us--none of these things are so.
+
+If he were not God, then it is not true that he sits upon the
+throne, high and lifted up, listening to the plaints of the weakest
+heart that shall trust him, and hearing the sound of every falling
+tear.
+
+If Jesus Christ be not God, then the whole system of Christianity
+built upon his person and work falls to the ground, is broken into
+fragments, and like wind-swept dust can never be gathered.
+
+If Jesus Christ be not God, the New Testament record of him is
+untrue. The New Testament impeached in its prime particular becomes
+a worthless book--a book full of exhortations to holiness and truth,
+in the name of him who is proven to be (if he ever lived at all) a
+blasphemer, a deceiver of men and the concrete of human wickedness.
+If the New Testament is not true, neither is the Old; for the Old
+Testament finds its meaning and value only in the Christ of the New
+Testament. Take Jesus Christ out of the Old Testament (which you
+must do if you set aside the New; for he alone fulfils the types,
+the symbols and the prophecies of the Old Testament; he alone makes
+its testimony and history intelligible; he alone gives unity,
+harmony and authoritative meaning to its exhortations)--take Christ
+out of the Old Testament and you take away its one and only key.
+
+And mark you--when _Christ goes out of the Bible as God--God goes
+out of the Bible_. The deity which has preserved it, the power which
+has made it living and unchangeable in the midst of change and
+death, will have been dethroned.
+
+Without Christ as God you are without any sane and satisfying
+knowledge of God.
+
+Where will you turn to find God and know him to your comfort? You
+might as well look into the bottomless pit as into your own heart.
+
+No more satisfactory will it be to look into the heart of others. We
+are all built on the same plan.
+
+The difference is only in degree or extension.
+
+The basilar fact is, God cannot be found in any natural man.
+
+You cannot find or know him to your heart's content in nature.
+
+What kind of a God does nature reveal to you?
+
+I will answer for you--a God who puts you in this world and does not
+tell you whence you come, whether from the all mud or the Almighty,
+from an angel or a devil, from jelly or genius, from the heights of
+heaven or the depths of hell. A God who puts you here and fills you
+with questions he alone can answer and--refuses so to do. A God who
+calls you into the world and gives you eyes to see everything but
+yourself. A God who hides you from yourself, so that you do not know
+whether you are a function or a soul; whether you are matter or
+spirit; whether you are a personality or a cellular part of a
+general whole--called man. A God who gave you mind with seemingly
+infinite possibilities in thought, and gave you a body that is
+finite and temporary in construction. A God who gives you an
+intellect which grasps after eternity, and is always saying on the
+summit of any endeavor achieved, "What next?" and yet is limited to
+a few inconsequent years. A God who sets you face to face with the
+imminency of death, and never allows you to know at what moment you
+must go, and gives you no hint of the beyond--or whether there is a
+beyond.
+
+In France they do not tell the man who is to be guillotined till a
+few moments before the fatal hour. He is sleeping on his couch. He
+is dreaming of pleasant fields, of running streams, of boyhood's
+days, of to-morrows that shall be better--a heavy hand is laid on
+his shoulder--he starts up in bed--the gray light of early morning
+is filtering in through the barred window of his cell--stern-faced
+men are standing before him--they say, "Your hour is come; follow
+us."
+
+It is terrific.
+
+But this is the case of every human being.
+
+No one can tell when the summons may come--or where.
+
+A man was sitting in his room at close of day. It had been (so he
+said) the best day of his life. He had said to his wife that he
+never loved her more than he did then (and they had been married
+many years), never did he feel more content that they had chosen to
+walk together through life than then. He was full of plans for
+himself and for her (saying with great earnestness that their last
+days should be their best days). She answered back that she was glad
+with a great gladness that it was so. She turned away for a moment
+to glance in another direction, still speaking to him. When she
+looked back he was gone--gone while the love words and the hope
+words were still on his lips--the finger of death had touched his
+heart--a voice had whispered in his ear, "Come." There was only a
+lifeless bit of clay where a moment before had been a body pulsing
+with life, with love, with hope.
+
+It is terrific--doomed--and not knowing how soon the bolt will
+strike. What sort of a God is this who laces your body with a
+network of laws, the breaking of the slightest of which--all unknown
+to you--may send you forth upon a path of diseased and tortured
+existence--in which the body from whence you cannot escape shall be
+to you as a chamber of horrors--a place of the thumbscrew, the rack
+and the fagot. What kind of a God is that who allows the aged to
+linger out in a miserable prolongation of wretched days, a burden to
+themselves, a burden to others, and takes away the widow's only son
+--her only support? Who is the God who creates one man with all the
+equipment for life, and another man with all the lack of it? What
+kind of a God is this who looks down out of the heaven of day and
+the heavens of night, and sees all the sorrow, the anguish, the
+pain, the unspeakable tragedies, and sends no wing of angel to
+cleave the pitiless sky, no voice out of the silence to console, no
+hand to help?
+
+What man is there of you, if he had the power, would not banish
+sickness, sorrow, pain and death?
+
+What man is there of you who, if he could, would not make every
+human being well and happy?
+
+What then? What is the conclusion of the matter concerning you?
+Simple enough--you have _the heart to do it, but not the power_.
+
+What is the conclusion concerning this God of nature? _He has the
+power--but does not manifest the heart_.
+
+What will you say of this God of nature in such a scheme?
+
+What can you say but that your heart is better than the heart of the
+God which nature reveals?
+
+Can you hear, understand and love a God like that?
+
+Can you climb through nature up to nature's God and say, "I have
+found him, I know him?"
+
+You can climb up, but where will you find him?
+
+You will find him wrapped in the black thundercloud or girded with
+the robe of the lightnings: You will find him the God who splits the
+earth in twain with the earthquake's riving blow, loosens the bands
+of the sea, sends tidal waves in surges of destruction, pours out
+the lava streams from the volcano's cone, as kings pour wine from an
+earthen cup, spilling the wine and breaking the cup; the God who
+turns an earthly paradise (like Messina) into a fire-smitten desert,
+and a city of the living into a cemetery of the unburied dead.
+
+When your heart aches, will such a God care for you? Will his
+thunders console you? When your soul is dark, will his lightnings
+illumine it? When you yearn for love, will his inexorable law supply
+it?
+
+Ah, sirs, without Christ you are without a God whom you can love,
+whom you can trust, to whom you can go, and in whose strength you
+can lie down and--at last--be folded in peace.
+
+If Jesus Christ is not God, if the only God to whom you can go is
+the God of nature, then you might as well fall down in the sand at
+the base of the far Egyptian sphinx, open your eyes for a moment to
+the blue sky that spreads away to the horizon before its staring
+face, its cold, chiselled, inscrutable smile, and the next moment
+shut your eyes against the pelting dust the idle winds blow thither.
+
+Ah! Nature is a sand-dune--and the God of nature is a Sphynx.
+
+Do you care to kneel and worship there?
+
+If Jesus Christ be not God the disaster is not alone to him, but to
+you--to me.
+
+If he were not God, then we are in a world where the very day is no
+better or brighter than a starless midnight.
+
+If Jesus Christ were a good man, a supremely good man and a
+supremely intellectual man, then he was and is (as he claimed)
+Almighty God.
+
+The New Testament says he was a supremely good, and a supremely
+intellectual man.
+
+For two thousand years the most brilliant men in the world have
+corroborated this record by freely testifying that Jesus Christ was
+a supremely good and a supremely intellectual man; all this being
+so, I change the conditional form of the proposition to the
+indicative and declarative and now say:
+
+Since Jesus Christ was a supremely good and a supremely intellectual
+man, he was, therefore (as he claimed), Almighty God.
+
+He could not be a supremely good and a supremely intellectual man
+and claim to be God unless he were God.
+
+Since he claimed to be God, therefore, he was God.
+
+Yes; he was God.
+
+The evidences are manifold.
+
+He was _sinless_.
+
+He said:
+
+"Which of you convinceth me of sin?"
+
+For two thousand years he has been in the concentrated light of a
+hostile world's merciless investigation. The light has been turned
+on the land in which he lived. Every rod of ground over which he
+travelled has been dug up, or surveyed, or trodden. His words have
+been weighed, balanced to a nicety against any probability of error,
+mistake, imagination, fancy or misquotation. His words have been
+split open as men break open rocks. All the contents of his words
+have been put in the crucible of criticism. Every thought has been
+insistently and unsentimentally assayed for, even, the suspicion or
+the slightest hint of an alloy. His teachings have been chemically
+dissolved and turned into their component parts. The saline base of
+truth has been sought for at any risk to the compounded speech he
+made.
+
+And after all! not one self-respecting, authoritative lip has
+uttered a charge against him.
+
+In the hush of a world that cannot even murmur, he steps forward and
+once more rings down his challenge:
+
+"Which of you convinceth me of sin?"
+
+He stands out among his fellows as a white shaft under a starless
+midnight. He rises above the passions of men as an unshaken rock in
+the midst of a wild, lashed sea. He is to man's best character as
+harmony is to discord, as a smile is to a frown, as love is to hate,
+as blessing is to cursing, as a garden of lilies to a desert of
+sand, as heaven is to earth, as holiness is to sin and as life to
+death.
+
+If he were sinless, he was _absolutely holy_; he was so holy that
+his very presence brought out the sin in others. Sinful men and
+women fell at his feet and confessed their sins. At sight of him
+demons tore their way out of the bodies they possessed and fled as
+clouds of darkness before the sun, crying as they fled, "Thou art
+the holy one of God--hast thou come to torment us before the time?"
+Tormented as they were even then, as sin always is when confronted
+by holiness; as vice is before virtue; as a lie is before the truth.
+
+He was sinless.
+
+He was holy.
+
+His sinlessness and holiness cannot be accounted for on natural
+grounds.
+
+All his natural ancestry were sinful.
+
+His sinlessness cannot be accounted for unless he were God; for,
+sinlessness and holiness come alone from God and, as essential
+qualities, take their rise alone in God.
+
+His power over nature proved him God.
+
+His look changed water into wine, his word gave sight to the blind,
+healing to the deaf, speech to the dumb. At his word the lame man
+leaped as a hart, the leper was cleansed. He said, "Peace, be
+still," and the wild tempest of the sea was hushed, and there was a
+great calm, a calm like unto the stillness of the unruffled rest of
+God.
+
+For two thousand years his regenerative power in a world of sin has
+been the proof that he was God.
+
+For two thousand years, in every age, in every clime, among all
+classes of men, from the refined infidel to the vilest sinner, from
+the cold atheist to the brutal idolater, men have been changed--
+transformed. Men who have been the bond slaves of passion, whose
+daily lives have been the output of iniquity, whose deeds have been
+for destruction, whose words have been poison, and whose inmost
+thoughts have been as the vapors of miasma--these all--have been
+transformed into fountains of purity, into angels of mercy, or as
+illuminated missals have been written full of the name and the glory
+of God; men whose every fibre was as the coarse and tangled threads
+of a brutal unrefinement have become men whose every line of
+character was as the woven gold of Ophir--and the speech that once
+smote with discord the ears that heard it has become as the sound of
+singing across silent waters and under listening stars. And you ask
+these transfigured human beings, as you find them travelling along
+the highway of twenty noteful centuries, what it was that so changed
+them, put such new force and impetus in them, making them to be as
+men new created, and they will tell you that Jesus Christ came along
+that way, they saw in his face the stain of blood, the marks of
+nails were in his hands and feet, he had the appearance of one who
+had been cruelly slain. He stopped, looked at them and said: "Come
+unto me." They obeyed, they fell at his feet. He touched them, a
+strange, keen sense thrilled through them. He said to them, "Arise."
+They arose and found themselves new men--men _twice begotten_.
+
+Ask the drunkard who tried to be sober, broke every pledge and drank
+in his cup the very life blood of those he loved and who loved him--
+how at last he found strength to say a final "no," turn from the
+accursed thing, and enter a world all new in which to live, a
+freeman and no more a slave--he will tell you, "Jesus Christ did it
+all."
+
+Ask any of the bond slaves of passion, men who have been gripped by
+every form of human desire, and whiplashed, and stung, and tortured
+by their gratification, and driven to fresh and maddening excess by
+the never satisfied and always burning lust within (ever crying like
+the horseleach's daughter, "Give, give"); ask them how it is that
+to-day they are freemen and walk as kings, and they will tell you
+that Jesus Christ laid hold of them, and by the might of his power,
+the tenderness of his love, and the wealth of his grace, made them
+free.
+
+And this has been going on for two thousand years.
+
+The story has recently been told of a great thinker lecturing one
+day before a large audience of medical students--some eighteen
+hundred men who pressed in to hear him. He took from his desk a
+letter, and holding it up before him, said something to this effect:
+
+"Gentlemen! I have here a letter from one of your number, in which
+he tells the story of his life--a record of shame, of sinful
+indulgence, that makes me shudder even to look at the letter. At the
+close of this fearful confession he asks, 'Can your God save such an
+one as I am?'"
+
+Stopping for a moment and surveying his audience, the speaker said:
+"When I came to the city this afternoon (it was the city of
+Edinburgh) there was a beautiful, fleecy cloud spreading itself like
+a thing of glory in the upper sky, and I said, 'O cloud, where do
+you come from?' and the cloud answered me and said, 'come from the
+slums and the low, vile places of the city. The sun of heaven
+reached down and lifted me up and transfigured me with his
+shining.'"
+
+Looking about upon the now deeply impressed throng, the speaker,
+after a solemn pause, said:
+
+"I do not know whether this young man is here or not, but if he is,
+I can say to him that my Saviour and my Master, Jesus Christ, he who
+is our great God and Saviour, he can reach down from the highest
+heaven to the lowest depths into which a human soul can sink, and
+can lift you, and lift you up and up, till he shines in you and
+through you, and transfigures you with the light of his love and
+glory."
+
+He can.
+
+He does.
+
+He is doing it now.
+
+And who is he who can do this but the living God alone?
+
+That Jesus Christ was God is the testimony of the men who lived in
+intimate communion with him and knew him best.
+
+John leaned on his breast at supper. John heard and knew the beating
+of the Master's heart, and John says:
+
+"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
+Word was God (God was the Word). The same was in the beginning with
+God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything
+made that was made. . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt
+among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten
+of the Father) full of grace and truth."
+
+Again this same John writes:
+
+"Jesus Christ . . . THIS IS THE TRUE GOD."
+
+Writing to the Philippians, Paul declares, that Jesus Christ was in
+the "form of God," laid aside his glory as such, took upon him the
+"form" of sinful man, became obedient unto death, even the death of
+the cross, carried his humanity through hades and the grave, rose
+out from among the dead, and took that humanity to the throne of the
+highest. There God the Father reclothed him with the unbegun and
+uncreated glory which he had laid aside, gave him a name which is
+above every name, even the name of Jesus, and has highly and
+eternally ordained that every knee in the wide extended universe
+shall bow, and every tongue confess, that he is Lord to the glory of
+God the Father.
+
+In his epistle to the Colossians, the Apostle Paul announces that
+this "same Jesus" is the "image of the invisible God; by him were
+all things created that are in heaven, and that are in earth,
+visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions, or
+principalities or powers; _all things were created by him_, and for
+him."
+
+To the same Colossians he further writes:
+
+"In him dwelleth all the fulness of the _Godhead bodily_."
+
+To the Hebrews he says: "He is the brightness of the Father's glory,
+and the _express image of his person_" (the word "image" is
+charakter and signifies an "engraving," the very engraving of God in
+the flesh, _the engraving of God in humanity_) and upholding all
+things by the word of his power. "Upholding all things!" this earth
+in its orbit about the sun; the sun in its orbit about some other
+sun; all suns and systems in their orbits of splendor, whirling
+onward in ever-widening distances over highways of infinite spaces,
+through extensions that are measureless, and where time does not
+count. In that unmeasured expansion where the points of the compass
+are lost and "dimension" is a meaningless term; in that
+incomprehensible and indefinable vastness, filled with the might and
+the majesty of form, of weight, of motion and limitless power--all
+things--are hanging on his word and obeying his will.
+
+Not only does the New Testament proclaim him God--the Old Testament
+does likewise, and with unmistakable speech.
+
+The prophet Isaiah says:
+
+"Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government
+shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful,
+Counsellor, _the mighty God, the everlasting Father_."
+
+Micah, the prophet, glorifies the little town of Bethlehem, least as
+it is among the thousands of Judah, and foretells that he who shall
+be born there, and is to be ruler in Israel, is he "_whose goings
+forth have been from old, from everlasting_." He who has been the
+outgoing and the forth-putting of the invisible God; and who is, and
+who alone can be, the _visibility of God_.
+
+When we turn to the New Testament once more, we are given a vision
+of him, in Patmos, where he appears to that beloved John who had
+leaned so heavily on his heart in the days of the earthly
+pilgrimage. It is a vision of wonder, of glory, and divine splendor.
+He is seen as a man--as one who had _become_ dead, who was now
+alive, who had conquered both death and the grave. His face shone
+with the light of the noonday sun, his eye glances were as a flame
+of fire, and when he spoke, his voice was as the sound of many
+waters; and this is what he said for himself:
+
+"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord,
+which is, and which was, and which is to come, _the Almighty_."
+
+This is the climax.
+
+He claimed to be Almighty God while on earth.
+
+He claims it from heaven.
+
+He says I am God--he says that because he declares himself as
+embracing the whole extent of being.
+
+Listen:
+
+"I am he that _is_"--that is to say, the self-existing one; for the
+statement is the cognate of that, "I am that I am," which is the
+pre-eminent appelative of deity.
+
+"I am he which _was_"--and this extends being into the past; that
+past he himself defines. He does not say I am in the beginning, but
+I am _the_ beginning--_beginning itself_--the _origin_ of things
+and, therefore, himself unbegun, eternal, from _everlasting_. It is
+the echo of that far-flung phrase of old: Even "_from everlasting to
+everlasting thou art God_."
+
+"I am he which is _to come_"--this includes eternity future--the
+unendingness which stretches without a horizon beyond the present.
+
+Here is fulness--and the fulness of the Godhead _bodily_.
+
+In saying these words upon Patmos, then, our Lord Jesus Christ says:
+
+"I am God--I am Almighty God."
+
+Nor is this a mere conclusion from the premise here!
+
+He says it directly, plainly and squarely himself.
+
+He says not only that he _is_, and _was_, and _is to come_--but he
+says--
+
+"I AM THE ALMIGHTY."
+
+And Paul, the special apostle of the Church, unites with Thomas (the
+believing, but material evidence demanding representative of the
+elect remnant in Israel) in proclaiming the deity of God's Christ.
+
+Thomas falls at his feet and cries:
+
+"My Lord and _My God_."
+
+Paul bows his head in adoration before him and writes:
+
+"_Our great God_ and Saviour--_Jesus Christ_."
+
+Upon the august throne of the universe he is seated.
+
+He who lay a babe upon a woman's breast; who, although he was
+infinite, became an infant; who being in the form of God, did not
+hesitate to put off the divine glory and put on mortal humanity that
+(as an infinite person) he might, through the "prepared" body of his
+mortality, offer an infinite sacrifice for men; who died under a
+malefactor's doom, but with his nailed hands, in the hour of his
+agony, saved a thief from hell--opening to him the gates of
+Paradise; he who refused the deliverance of angels when they bent
+above his cross, that by his cross he might give to men the
+deliverance angels could not give; lie who was buried in a borrowed
+grave; who rose as an immortal man, ascended as the _Second Adam_--
+the _New Head of Humanity_--the _Life Giver_ to a world, and took
+his seat on the _Father's_ throne, as witness of redemption achieved
+and salvation secured--he sits there now, and having taken to
+himself the glory which he had with the Father before all worlds
+were, having clothed his _immortal_ humanity with that "_form of
+God_" which ever was his, now sits the centre of a world's adoration
+and heaven's amaze, as the GOD MAN--the highest form of God and the
+ultimate form of man; the proclamation that man in Christ is the
+archetype of God and God in Christ the archetype of man.
+
+As we thus gaze upon him in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the
+Godhead bodily; as we meditate upon him, seek to reason about him,
+are touched by his love, held by his power, and filled with his
+life, we say with the inspired apostle: "Without controversy, great
+is the mystery of godliness: _God was manifest in the flesh_."
+
+"_Our great God_," repeats Paul, and he adds, to balance the wonder
+of it, "and _our Saviour Jesus Christ_;" he who, in some glad day
+nearer than we think, is coming back to this old, sin-stained,
+grave-digged world--to be owned and saluted by all nations, peoples,
+kindred and tongues as--
+
+"THE GOD OF THE WHOLE EARTH."
+
+With all this glory and this wonder he is, as the angels said, (who
+spoke of his ascension, session and Second Coming), "THIS SAME
+JESUS," full of tender mercy, and loving compassion; by virtue of
+his perfect sacrifice able to save unto the uttermost all who come
+unto God the Father by him; saying from heaven as he once said on
+earth: "Him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out"; but
+saying at the same time, and with unfailing faithfulness: "No man
+cometh into the Father _but by me_"; saying it faithfully because,
+of a truth, only in the _Son_ can the _Father_ be found.
+
+Let me exhort all who may read these lines, if you have not already
+done so, to fall down at his pierced feet, and with deep contrition
+for all your transgressions and for your very _nature_ of sin which
+helped to nail him to the accursed tree, say with voice of unfailing
+love and unfaltering faith:
+
+"My _Saviour_ and my _God_."
+
+If you have already owned him as your Saviour, then, as Thomas of
+old, with the voice of deep devotion say:
+
+"My _Lord_ and my _God_."
+
+To those of you (if there be such) who still deny his deity and
+persist in calling him good, he, himself, is asking you from heaven
+as he asked it aforetime upon earth:
+
+"_Why_ callest thou me _good?_"
+
+In asking you that he is putting upon you the responsibility of the
+terrible conclusion of your own premise:
+
+IF NOT GOD--NOT GOOD!
+
+Are you willing to face him in eternity with that inexorable
+alternative:
+
+"IF NOT GOD--NOT GOOD?"
+
+
+
+Christianity
+
+
+WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY?
+
+
+WHAT is Christianity?
+
+The question seems a belated one.
+
+It never was more pertinent than now. Its pertinency rests upon two
+facts.
+
+First: the modern drift in Christianity and its absolute failure.
+
+Second: the phenomenal triumph of primitive Christianity.
+
+The modern drift is antagonistic to doctrine and repudiates the
+miraculous.
+
+It sets aside the virgin birth, has no toleration for atonement by
+sacrificial death, and positively refuses to accept the bodily
+resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
+
+It holds that God is the Father of all men. Each man is inherently a
+son of God. He has in him all the elements of the divine lineage.
+Exercise and culture are alone needed to reveal these elements and
+demonstrate this lineage. Salvation is not the redemption of a child
+of the Devil, but recovery of a child of God from the hands of the
+Devil. Salvation is the restoration of the individual to the
+consciousness of this relationship; but salvation is effectively
+individual only as it is primarily social. The time has passed (so
+we are told) when the individual may be discussed and his social
+condition ignored. To seek out an individual here and there and
+endeavor to redeem or recover him while the environment remains
+unchanged, is a waste of force: as foolish as it would be to spend
+millions on remedies for people sick with malaria in a pestilential
+and malarial district, and ignore the condition of the district.
+True wisdom would demand first of all that the district be purged,
+the environment made healthy, the cause of malaria destroyed.
+
+Human beings are neither sinning nor suffering because a possible
+first man away back somewhere ate forbidden fruit at the insistent
+appeal of his too persistent wife. Men are sinning and suffering
+because social conditions are all wrong. These wrong conditions fill
+the multitude with discouragement and depression. They are unable to
+breathe an inspiring life force. They cannot obtain sufficient
+impulse to live above low levels. The laws, the customs, the
+inequalities of life, hedge them like brutes in a corral. This
+corralling and hedging of humanity _en masse_, while the few pull
+away from the crowd and create an environment satisfactory to
+themselves at the expense of the crowd, is the _raison d'etre_ for
+all evil conditions. Let us have right legislation. Let us make
+right laws. The moment the social condition enables a man to
+discover the divine things in him, he will live right by preference.
+We are no longer to spend eloquence, prayer and time on revivals,
+and now and then, here and there, get an individual to live fairly
+right in spite of hindering conditions. The sermon of the preacher
+should appeal to the law-maker rather than to the law-breaker; it
+should arouse men, not to the danger of a hell far off, but to a
+hell near at hand, the hell of unjust laws, of sanitary neglect, of
+oppression of man by man.
+
+Social redemption! that is the watchword.
+
+Social salvation! that is the crying need.
+
+All this (we are told) is to be accomplished by appealing to the
+divine in man, to his hitherto ignored resources. This appeal can be
+made of avail only by setting up some human figure in which this
+divine life has been fully proved and clearly portrayed. In the
+nature of the case, for a modernist Christian, such a person is to
+be found alone in our Lord Jesus Christ. By such he is now hailed,
+and continually announced, as the advanced man, the quintessent
+demonstration of evolution as applied to humanity, the way-shower,
+the exemplar and true copy. He is incarnate altruism. His whole life
+was self-denial. His daily interest was in social conditions. To him
+society was the objective, the individual an incident. His
+teachings, when fairly construed, involve the overthrow of the old,
+and the bringing in of a radically new society, in which the divine
+life in man may have an opportunity to unfold. His doctrines, when
+analyzed, are explosive; if practically carried out would be
+revolutionary. He is, in short, the true socialist. If we follow him
+as such, if we work out his intent, we shall have individual
+salvation, but we shall have it as a consequent of social
+redemption.
+
+There may be shining worlds beyond this. There may be holy cities
+with golden streets. There may be robes of righteousness and trees
+of life. What we need to do, as Christians, is to take care of the
+world in which we now live, build first-class holy cities here, see
+that the streets are well paved, and the sewers in order, put fit
+clothing on the backs of the poor, fill the mouths of the hungry
+with actual bread, make the hours of labor minimum, and the hours of
+personal culture maximum, and thus weave a garment of civic, social
+and individual righteousness that shall stand the test of this world
+or any other. In other words, we are to live the life that now is--
+and let that which is to come take care of itself.
+
+This is the trend of the modern drift.
+
+It is an endeavor to bring the church down out of the clouds, place
+it on the level of human experience, meet present human needs in
+practical ways, and establish a system of natural, rational and
+universal ethics.
+
+And yet--in spite of this widely heralded liberalism; in spite of
+the effort to accommodate itself to the rationalism, the unbelief
+and downright infidelity of the hour; in spite of the determination
+to cut loose from the primaries of the first century and ally itself
+with the fast-going advance of the twentieth, this movement in the
+name of Christianity has not succeeded in winning and holding the
+multitude either to a personal and modified Christ, or to a
+reorganized and elastic church.
+
+The churches in which it flourishes; the churches which have
+renounced faith in the supernatural and miraculous; the churches
+which have swung the doors wide open on the hinges of worldly wisdom
+and easy tolerance; the churches which have substituted natural
+generation for supernatural regeneration, evolution instead of
+revolution, the working out of human life, instead of the coming in
+of divine life; the churches which teach that man is to go up and
+take hold of God, instead of God coming down to take hold on man;
+the churches which are broad enough to allow men of all faiths, and
+men of no faith at all, to occupy their pulpits, are not
+overcrowded, nor have righteousness and holiness extraordinarily
+increased in their neighborhood.
+
+On the contrary, in face of every effort to conciliate the
+naturalism in man, men look upon these churches, and the
+Christianity they advocate, with suspicion. They see these churches
+have their goods still marked with the words, "supernatural,"
+"miraculous." It is true, these churches may practically put such
+goods out of sight; even then, men will not be attracted beyond the
+expression of a condescending tolerance; and while admitting, as
+they will, that the church is earnestly endeavoring to get rid of
+its ancient incubus of theology, free its hands and take hold of the
+plow handle of progress, ready, if needs be, to drive a furrow deep
+enough to bury all memories of primitive faith, yet will they turn
+away from that kind of a church and that sort of Christianity, with
+the feeling that all this action on the part of the church is but
+another feeble effort at competitive morality. They will turn from
+it and seek their own organizations wherein no issue of the
+supernatural has ever been raised; where the quasi personality and
+questionable existence of an unseen God are not at all discussed;
+and where man and his present life are the only subjects deemed
+worthy of consideration.
+
+If this drift as thus indicated shall continue another ten years,
+and enlist the support and open advocacy of leading and
+representative thinkers in the church; if the theological seminaries
+shall continue to turn out on graduation day, with their all too
+mechanical regularity, men who do not believe in the virgin birth,
+who find no real reason why our Lord Jesus Christ should have died
+at all, except the fatality of his genius that he was too far ahead
+of his time and was "caught by the whirling wheel of the world's
+evil and torn in pieces"; if the repudiation of the Bible as the
+final and inerrant revelation of God for this age shall continue so
+short a space as a decade, by that time, at the present rate of
+development, we shall have not only a very modern Christianity, a
+Christianity without miracles, without even a hint of the
+supernatural, but a Christianity without spiritual power or moral
+authority, standing as a delinquent on the street corners, and amid
+the hurry and rush of more vital things, begging permission simply
+to exist.
+
+Over against this modern drift and its amplitude of failure stands
+the phenomenal success of original and primitive Christianity.
+
+And yet, the conditions which confronted this nascent faith were
+appalling.
+
+It was the era of materialism. Force was the prime minister, self
+-gratification the supreme legislator. Exaggerated superstition was
+balanced by decaying faith. It was a time of coordinately high
+mental activity, an intellectuality that cynically rejoiced at its
+own failure to solve the riddle of the universe, maliciously
+suggested new difficulties, raised barriers against its own
+research, and prostrating itself in the name of mere brutism,
+worshipped nature as the ready panderer to its worst passions, while
+owning it as a cruelly smiling and pitiless sphinx.
+
+The one hundred and twenty men and women who faced the Roman world
+with the determination to impinge their faith upon it, seemed the
+most audaciously unwise of all forlorn and hopeless fanatics. They
+had neither wealth nor social standing. Their culture was at zero,
+their knowledge indifferent. Localism and tradition environed them,
+and the story they had to tell was not only an affront to the course
+of nature, but a direct repudiation of old faiths and cherished
+religions. Itself a _religio illicita_, Christianity challenged
+governmental law and invoked, logically, the keenest persecution.
+The mountains which surrounded Jerusalem were not so high, nor so
+difficult of ascent, as the prejudice far and near over which they
+needs must climb, even if they would gain but a tolerated hearing.
+
+Yet they went forth! and so preached, that they not only saved and
+transfigured individuals, but so molded and transformed society,
+that in its every-day achievements, Christianity itself seemed like
+a miracle to astonished and silenced onlookers.
+
+Startlingly enough this moulding of society, this overturning of old
+conditions--this bringing in of the radically new, so that their
+enemies said of them they had "turned the world upside down"; this
+repudiation of brutality and the exaltation of unselfishness; this
+building up of a condition in which a community now judged itself by
+the standards of chastity, righteousness and neighborly kindness;
+this renovation of whole centres of life till the erstwhile deserts
+wherein not a flower of gentleness had bloomed, now blossomed as
+gardens of delight, watered with never-ceasing streams of brotherly
+love--were produced, not by an appeal to society itself, not by
+denunciation of laws and customs, however bad, but by laying hold of
+a human soul, estimating it in value by the weight of a whole world,
+and changing the individual life.
+
+This was the triumph of original and primitive Christianity.
+
+In view of such a triumph and the unqualified failure of the modern
+drift which claims the name of Christianity, it should seem a
+perfectly legitimate and altogether pertinent question to ask,
+
+"What is Christianity?"
+
+The answer is given by the apostle Paul in his second letter to
+Timothy, his son in the faith, the preacher of his own ordination.
+He says:
+
+"Our Saviour Jesus Christ . . . has abolished death and brought life
+and immortality to light through the Gospel." (2 Timothy 1:10.)
+
+According to this declaration, the Gospel is the good news that our
+Lord Jesus Christ came into the world to accomplish three things--
+abolish death, bring in a new life and reveal immortality. As the
+Gospel is the heart beat of Christianity, then the three things
+which proclaim its constituent and objective characteristic are:
+
+The abolition of death.
+
+The gift of a new life.
+
+Immortality.
+
+First--The abolition of death.
+
+Death is a black fact. It is the shadow the sun never penetrates,
+the robber who steals the treasure more precious than gold, the
+guest who never waits to be invited, the intruder who feels at home
+whether in palace or in cot, has no respect of persons, and lays his
+hand with equal familiarity on the king upon his throne, or the
+tramp by the wayside, saying "come" to the sick, "tarry not" to the
+well, is sure of the old, and revels like a reaper in the harvest of
+the young. It breaks the plans and disorganizes the relations of
+life; and then, like a coarse comedian or a heartless satirist,
+compels those who survive to turn away from the memory of their
+dead, reorganize their lives and live on as though those who once
+lived with them and formed an intimate part of their daily
+experience had never existed.
+
+Unless God himself shall intervene, death is the certain end of the
+longest life.
+
+Side by side with the certainty of death are two things which give
+it emphasis: the brevity of life and its uncertainty.
+
+How brief it is! what are sixty or seventy years as measured by
+hopes and fears, by splendor of genius, by forecasts that outreach
+the ages, by thoughts that climb and climb with ease to the
+infinite, by energy of mind, which, rising superior to the combined
+hindrances of every day, is always peering beyond the last endeavor,
+and stretching itself towards unbroken continuance, cries, "What
+next?" Extract from the allotted time of three score years and ten,
+the puling days of infancy, the immature years of youth, the hours
+of indecision as to the route to take, the right profession to
+follow; take the hours given to eating and drinking (that eating and
+drinking which in spite of the glamor we throw about it is simply
+repairing the mechanical waste and renewing the chemical energy that
+will enable us to go on a little while and a little way farther);
+take out the time spent in sleep--in practical nonentity--and the
+remainder is a pitiful handful of years, so few, that to number them
+seems like a mathematical mockery, like numerical trifling.
+
+And the uncertainty of life! What man is he who can assure himself
+of ten days? In that time he may die, be buried and be forgotten by
+the world that scarcely heard the tolling of his funeral bell, and
+had no time to stay and hear the falling of the grave clods upon the
+coffin lid.
+
+This emphasis of brevity and uncertainty has affected men more or
+less from the beginning. In the hour when Christianity was born it
+affected them well nigh unto delirium. So brief was the vision of
+life, so tumultuous its incidents, so conscious were men of its
+uncertainty, that they played with it as gamblers throw dice. It
+became cheap, cheaper than the ground in which their bodies were so
+soon to be laid; and in derision of its cheapness they built great
+monuments to hold their scattered dust, monuments that should
+outlast by centuries their latest breath; with light laughter they
+rode past these chiselled tombs and scorned themselves as the
+builders of a longevity their own being could never know.
+
+This fact of death is impressing men now.
+
+In proportion as life increases in knowledge; in proportion as men
+become masters of nature's forces; in proportion as they measure the
+universe, make daily incursions therein, and bring back always some
+conquered thing, some new discovery as a tribute to the
+limitlessness of mind, in this proportion the unequal brevity and
+the disintegrating uncertainty of life, lead men to ask with more
+and more insistence, whether, after all, it is worth while. Is it
+worth while to carry burdens which force us to look down into the
+dust of the highway, and not up and out to the wider landscape? Is
+it worth while to put so much force of soul and spirit, brain and
+heart into things from which we may be summoned without a moment's
+notice? Is it worth while to live, and then go to pieces through the
+effort at living, live on day after day like a machine out of gear
+(held together oftentimes only by the surgeon's skill), then break
+down completely, give a final sigh and be hurried away to add a lot
+of useless fragments to the already accumulated scrap heap of the
+still more useless graveyard?
+
+Into this emphasis of brevity and uncertainty, there enters another
+element which increasingly raises the question--"Is it worth while?"
+
+That added element is the silence of the grave.
+
+The grave is terribly silent.
+
+You can hear the gravel rattling out of the grave digger's shovel
+with a thud upon the coffin lid; or, you can hear the crunching,
+jarring sound as the casket is slid into its place in the receiving
+vault, and you can hear the turn of the key and the snap of the bolt
+as the gate or door of the sepulchre is shut and locked.
+
+You may stand above the simple mound of the churchyard, in front of
+some monumental shaft, or before the sculptured urn; it may be the
+dust of a king, a scholar, or some nameless beggar which is heaped
+within--the silence will be unbroken--except by the sound of your
+own voice as you ask:
+
+"Where are they? What are they? ARE they?"
+
+Although the sun may be shining in full splendor over row after row
+of graves, no light will be there in which to read the answer to
+your questions.
+
+Instead of light there will be thick darkness upon the graves, and
+gross darkness within.
+
+Men peer into this darkness. There is no vision--no speech--and they
+ask: "Is it worth while to toil, to labor, to accumulate, to make
+great advance in knowledge, to build higher every day the conning
+towers of science, and then leaving these high points of
+achievement, enter into that realm where no surveyor's chain has
+ever measured the extent, where no geographer has ever named a
+headland, and where the one supreme fact that meets us on the
+threshold is ignorance--a black, blinding, all-pervading ignorance
+as to the next moment after death; so that at the end of our
+reasoning, deduction and amplification, the one thing remaining to
+the scholar and the fool alike concerning death is a guess, a guess
+in which the wish of existence is father to the thought, but where
+the hope of to-morrow is, easily, the despair of to-day."
+
+With life so brief, so uncertain, and ending in the starless night
+of silence, men in one form of utterance or another are, in
+substance, calling to each other and saying, "Let us eat and drink--
+for to-morrow we die."
+
+Thus the contemplation of death and its impartial and unprejudiced
+analysis leads to a belief in materialism and a greater or less
+surrender to mere sensualism; for, if men cannot go up they will go
+down; if they cannot live in the spirit, they will grovel in the
+flesh.
+
+What then shall we say concerning this fact of death?
+
+Shall we say it is a part of nature's economy--as legitimate as
+birth? Because we know nothing of any pre-existent state and are
+content to go forward in life, shall we now balk and hesitate to
+discharge our functions or meet our opportunities, because we have
+no evidence of an after existence?
+
+Is death really natural?
+
+Absolutely it is not!
+
+The whole being of man revolts against it, morally, intellectually
+and organically. Every law of nature in man is against it. Pain and
+suffering are its protest. To say that it is as natural as birth is
+to be guilty of pure bathos; even the worm crushed and quivering
+denies the sentiment. Schwann, the author of the cellular theory,
+says: "I really do not know why we die."
+
+There is no reason in nature.
+
+The process which renews the body every seven years--so far as any
+law in nature shows--might go on indefinitely; there is no reason in
+itself why it should cease, and the soul within is never conscious
+of the added years. No one ever thinks of asking, "Why do we live?"
+Always, and involuntarily, we ask, "Why do we die?" Always we are
+seeking to continue life, inventing something to make it immune from
+death. To live, therefore, is natural. Not to live is unnatural.
+Being unnatural, it is an interference with nature. An interference
+with nature is superior to nature. That which is an interference of
+and superior to nature is a direct imposition upon nature. An
+imposition upon nature could not be possible without the permission
+and will of God. If God allows and wills it, then the imposition is
+for cause; being such, it is a judicial act, a judgment, and
+becomes, necessarily, a penalty. Penalty stands for violated law.
+Violated law is transgression. Transgression is sin. Sin, in final
+analysis, is lawlessness, and lawlessness is treason against
+Jehovah. Death is, therefore, an imposition of God, and is his
+penalty against the treason of sin.
+
+This, then, is the explanation of death--it is the penalty of sin.
+
+This is the definition which Christianity gives--as it is written:
+"By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so
+death passed upon all men." (Romans 5:12.)
+
+Again it is written:
+
+"It is _appointed_ unto men once to die." (Hebrews 9:27.)
+
+In thus determining and defining death, Christianity reveals both
+its essence and its mission; for, through its Gospel, Christianity
+brings the good news that the issue of sin and death as between God
+and man has been settled by our Lord Jesus Christ; that he has
+settled it perfectly and forever according to the terms of divine
+righteousness by dying as a sacrifice for sin and as a substitute
+for sinners.
+
+In order to be a substitute it was necessary that our Lord Jesus
+Christ should be a sinless man; otherwise, his death would be only
+his own execution under the penalty of sin, and could not avail
+either for himself or others. None of Adam's race is sinless; a
+sinless person must be of another race. To be of another race and be
+human would require a new creation and would be a new and distinct
+humanity.
+
+Our Lord Jesus Christ was sinless. He was, therefore, of a new and
+distinct humanity. In incarnation, God did not take the humanity of
+Adam into union with himself, the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ
+was the repudiation of the humanity of Adam. By that incarnation God
+was saying: "I have tried the old humanity. I find nothing in it
+that responds to my claims. At its best it is sinful, only sinful
+and fit for judgment--the end of all flesh is come before me--and
+that end is death."
+
+The humanity of Christ is, therefore, not an evolution, but a new
+creation; it is not an invitation to the natural man, but a
+condemnation of him. It does not say to him, "Follow me, imitate me
+and you will be like me"; it says: "I am from above, ye are from
+below. I am from heaven and God--ye are from the earth. My humanity
+is as distinct from yours as the heavens are from the earth."
+
+Such a man is not an example, a copy to be set before men.
+
+And never, not once, do the apostles so set him before the natural
+man. Always they set him before the natural man as the man who came
+into the world--not to live as an example--but to die as a sacrifice
+for men; as one who was fit to die because he was free from the
+stain and penalty of sin.
+
+But in order that the death of Christ should be of infinite value,
+he must himself be an infinite person. The value of a deed depends
+upon the person who does it. The quality resides not alone in the
+act, but in the actor. The value of the death of our Lord Jesus
+Christ is not to be measured by its duration, but by himself--by
+what he was in himself; it does not depend upon the length of time
+in which as a substitute he suffered the punishment of those whose
+place he was taking, but the essential quality of his person. Did
+our Lord suffer but a moment of time on the cross, the value of his
+suffering as a satisfaction to the law, government and being of God
+would be infinite.
+
+An infinite person is God.
+
+Always as such do the apostles present our Lord Jesus Christ. Their
+testimony to his deity rings out like the blast of far-sounding
+trumpets. In terms that are precise, and so strong and clear that he
+who runs may read, they proclaim that he is God of God, very God of
+very God.
+
+As God the Son, in co-operation with God the Father and God the
+Spirit, he who is presented to us as the Lord Jesus Christ, took a
+cell from the substance of the virgin Mary, made it a mould and with
+generating power wrought from it a real humanity--a new and distinct
+humanity--and united it to his eternal personality; so that he
+stands forth as the eternal God endowed with a human nature--with
+two natures, human and divine, in one body and one person forever--
+the infinite God-man.
+
+Never do the apostles present him as a mere man. They present his
+humanity as the background for his deity. His humanity in its most
+literal revelation is always declared by them to be the revelation
+and the manifestation of God. Never do the apostles attempt to
+reason about the incarnation, with superb affirmation and sublime
+dignity they declare, "Without controversy, great is the mystery of
+godliness; God was manifest in the flesh."
+
+And it is this God whom Christianity presents as coming down from
+the heaven of glory, and clothing himself with a new, a distinct,
+but a mortal humanity in which to die as an infinite substitute for
+guilty men, that through death, he might abolish death for men.
+
+Having died as a sacrificial substitute, death considered as a
+penalty, and the guilt and demerit of sin which induced the penalty,
+have been set aside for all for whom his substitution avails.
+
+Nor does Christianity leave us long in doubt as to those for whom
+the substitution obtains. In full and precise statement of doctrine
+it tells us that this substitution is on the behalf of, and for, all
+who individually claim our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross as a
+personal sacrifice for sin, and who by faith offer him to God as the
+sacrifice and sin offering which God himself has provided.
+
+Thus it follows, that for every believer--death as a penalty has
+been abolished, brought to nought.
+
+This is the first great and joyous proclamation of Christianity,
+_Death has been abolished as a penalty for every believer_.
+
+It has been abolished _de jure_, not yet _de facto_.
+
+The Christian still dies, but his death is no longer penal, it is
+providential and provisional.
+
+In the hour of death the Christian is not seized as a culprit and
+hurried away to execution. On the contrary, when the hour of death
+sounds for him, a voice inspired from heaven assures him that he has
+reached the threshold of the "far better"; he arises and "departs,"
+that he may be "absent from his home in this body and present at his
+home with the Lord." His death is not a defeat, but a begun victory,
+and, inasmuch as both soul and spirit are delivered from the
+underworld and the shades of death, he has the assurance that the
+penalty will yet be completely abolished concerning his body: it is
+both the assurance and the prophecy of it.
+
+Christianity is, then, primarily, the good news, and the doctrinal
+demonstration, that death as a judicial sentence has been abolished
+for the Christian.
+
+But Christianity is something more than the abolition of death--it
+is--
+
+Second--The bringing in and revelation of life.
+
+Through the Gospel, we are told, life has been brought to light.
+
+In the nature of the case this cannot mean natural life.
+
+There was no necessity that it should be brought into light.
+
+It has never been in darkness.
+
+It is manifest everywhere. Light and life are synonymous.
+
+There is not a condition in which in some form or other it does not
+exist. While one class of life may not live in a certain
+environment, there are other forms to which this environment would
+be as a hotbed for their production. Life is, indeed, universal, and
+may be said to be omnipresent. You will find it in the deepest
+depths of earth, and in the highest reaches of air. It expands on
+the mountain top, it dwells in the sea; it is organized in the
+infusoria, it exists in the infinitesimal, and reveals itself at
+last, in the beauty of woman and the strength of man.
+
+As natural life has always thus been in evidence; as it has never
+been in the dark at all, then the life which our Lord Jesus Christ
+has brought to light is not natural life--it is new life--a life
+unknown to the world before.
+
+It does not come from the natural man. It is not produced by natural
+generation. It comes from our Lord Jesus Christ and by supernatural
+generation. It did not come from him while he walked the earth. At
+no time during his earthly career did a human being receive it. The
+disciples who followed him--he who leaned upon his breast at supper
+and was the disciple whom Jesus loved--knew nothing of it. This new
+and unique life was brought into the light only when that light
+shone from his empty grave. He gave it forth and communicated it to
+men only when, as the risen man, he ascended up on high. It comes
+from him as the second man, as the last Adam, that Adam to whom the
+first was only as the clay model to the completed statue, as concept
+is to consummation. It comes from him who is both God and man, in
+one body and one person forever; and who, as such, is the head and
+beginning of the new creation of God.
+
+By him it is communicated to those who own him as their atoning
+sacrifice.
+
+The instrument is the word of the Gospel.
+
+The agent is the Holy Spirit.
+
+The Word is preached--it falls into the heart of the believer as
+seed into the ground.
+
+The Spirit quickens it--the new life is germinated.
+
+That new life is the life and nature of the risen one, our great God
+and Saviour Jesus Christ, the man in the glory; it is the mind of
+him who is called Christ, and it is, therefore, in final term--"the
+mind of Christ."
+
+It is wrought, not in the soul, but in the spirit of the believer.
+
+By no slow process does it enter--this life of the risen Lord--but
+by absolute fiat--the fiat of him who said--"Lazarus, come forth."
+
+It is fiat life.
+
+Its entrance into a human being is as light flashes into darkness.
+
+It is as instantaneous as when God of old said, "Let there be
+light," and light burst over a world cataclysmically fallen into
+chaos.
+
+It is as transforming as when morning awakens the sleeping earth and
+hill and dale, river and sea, shine forth in their beauty.
+
+It is as startling as when Lazarus himself, obeying the voice of his
+Lord, rose from the dead and came forth.
+
+Behold the illustration of it.
+
+Here is a man who grovelled in the lowest animalism.
+
+He was a husband and father. What a husband! and what a father!
+
+She who was his wife fled oftentimes at the very sound of his
+footsteps, shivering with the same fear, as though he who had
+solemnly sworn to love and protect her, were a mad brute intent on
+gratifying his own fierce lust, and ready with unchecked sensualism
+to trample her in the mire of his bestiality. A father, whose very
+name made the cheeks of the children grow white and their pulses
+almost to cease with terror. A drunkard, who drowned in his cup, not
+only wife and children and home and all outward decency, but every
+characteristic of truth and honesty and manhood of his own soul. A
+man, who through self-indulgence and the incessant yielding to
+unspeakable desires, had become little better than a human sewer,
+through whom the slime and indescribable filth of fallen and
+degraded humanity found its unhindered course. A human being, who
+had become a lazar spot, a walking pest, whose inmost thought rotted
+and putrified his own mind; and whose words without license were a
+poison and contagion to every one whose ears caught their unwelcome
+sound.
+
+Mark the change in that man!
+
+The wife now watches at the door with a gladsome smile to greet his
+return. The children, who once in their rags trembled with fear, now
+clean and wholesomely clad, and gay with laughter, gather at his
+knee, the moment he enters his home. He is himself well dressed. He
+holds his head erect, his eyes, no longer bloodshot, meet your gaze
+with frank and open glance. His tones are soft and modulated, his
+speech gentle. The Bible, the one book he always hated, is his
+constant study. His mouth once filled with cursings that might well
+have chilled the blood to hear, now give utterance to the voice of
+prayer and earnest thanksgiving. The church he never entered and
+always avoided has become the centre around which the best
+activities of his life are continuously moving. He who was once
+shunned, despised and feared, is now honored and respected of all.
+
+The man has been transformed.
+
+Those who saw him in former days and see him now might in all reason
+ask, "Is this he, or some other man?"
+
+It is both he and yet another man. The same person, but possessing
+another character.
+
+What is the secret of it all?
+
+Let the answer be graven on every heart. He has received a new life,
+a new, a pure, a holy and spiritual life. He has received that life
+from above, from the second Adam, the Lord in heaven. He is now a
+twice-begotten man.
+
+And herein is the glorious, distinctive feature of Christianity in
+so far as it touches a human soul.
+
+To that soul it brings the good news that a new generation is
+possible; the good news that any human being may start over. The
+good news that, no matter how much you may be handicapped by your
+original genesis; no matter what the terrific law of heredity may
+have transmitted to you, you may be generated again. In a moment, in
+the twinkling of an eye, you may have a genealogy that shall carry
+your name above the proudest of earth; a genealogy by the side of
+which the bluest blood of most ancient kings shall be as the palest
+and poorest of plebeian stuff. This Gospel of Christianity brings
+the good news that you may receive from the throne of God life from
+God, as directly as did Adam when God breathed into his nostrils the
+breath of life and man became a living soul. In an instant you may
+be recreated morally and spiritually, and have in you all the assets
+which, when fully capitalized by the grace of God, shall insure your
+sonship with God here, making you master over every disturbing and
+disquieting passion, and guaranteeing to you an eternal entrance
+into the endless inheritance of God, wherein you shall be, indeed,
+the heir of God and joint heir with our Lord Jesus Christ. In short,
+you may have the bequeathed ability to glorify God and enjoy him
+forever.
+
+This is the life which our Lord Jesus Christ has brought to light.
+
+The Gospel is the good news of this life of which the life giver
+himself has said, "I came that ye might have life, and that ye might
+have it more abundantly." That is to say: "I came that ye might have
+this spiritual life and have it without limit here."
+
+And this Gospel of the new life brought to light by and through the
+death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ is one of the
+elemental facts and forces which definitely answers the question--
+"What is Christianity?"
+
+But Christianity is something more than the abolition of death as a
+penalty and the bringing in of a new and spiritual life.
+Christianity is through its Gospel--the good news that--
+
+Third--Immortality has been brought to light.
+
+The word here translated "immortality" is "incorruption"; but it
+signifies in final terms the fact of immortality; for, as mortality
+is identified with corruption and is its consequent, so immortality,
+which is the opposite of mortality, is the consequence of
+incorruption and is inseparable from it.
+
+This word "immortality" is greatly misunderstood, and almost always
+misapplied.
+
+It is continually applied to the soul. It is a common thing to hear
+or read the expression, "immortal soul."
+
+The truth is, that phrase cannot be found in Holy Scripture. The
+terms are misleading--their conjunction is false. Applied to the
+soul, the word "immortal" is a misnomer. Throughout Scripture the
+original word and idea relate to the body--never otherwise. The word
+"mortal" is never used of the soul; you never read in Scripture the
+expression, "mortal soul." You will find the words "mortal body." A
+mortal body has for its opposite an "immortal body." A mortal body
+is subject to corruption and death. An immortal body is
+incorruptible and not subject to death--an immortal body can never
+die.
+
+The mortal body is the scandal of the race and the open label of
+sin. A mortal body puts us in the category of condemned criminals
+awaiting execution. The scandal is not only moral, but organic. To
+be filled with disease, with pestilence, with fever, and then die
+and the body turned back to its component parts--this is a scandal
+in construction; as much a scandal as when a house not properly
+built falls down; a dead body, whether of man or dog, is the most
+shameful blot on the face of the earth, and with the gaping mouth of
+the graveyard, justifies the estimate and the declaration of the
+living God, that death is an "_enemy_," not a welcome thing like
+birth and life--_but an enemy_. Such a scandal is it, indeed, that
+when our Lord Jesus Christ came to the grave of Lazarus, he was
+himself moved with indignation; for the words, "groaning within
+himself," miss the true force. The Greek verb used signifies that he
+was inwardly filled with indignation and a sense of outrage at the
+sight of the grave and the announcement that the body of Lazarus was
+already corrupt. Whatever groaning came from his lips and whatever
+tears fell from his eyes as he wept--these were his protests against
+death and the grave; for he recognized this dead body not only as
+due to the penalty of sin, but as the work of him "who had the power
+of death, that is, the devil." (Hebrews 2:14.)
+
+Even though the Christian as to soul and spirit be delivered from
+death; even though he does not go down to Hades, but at death is
+safely housed and at home with God in heaven--yet the fact that this
+body, which was not only the dwelling place of his soul, but the
+temple and shrine of the Holy Spirit, should become a banquet for
+worms, a thing of repulsive decay, a residuum of forgotten dust, is
+a scandal, even to the Christian, and gives emphasis to the shame of
+death.
+
+The Son of God came into the world to remove this scandal.
+
+He died and rose again, not only that he might have power and
+authority to give a new and spiritual life to men, a character
+befitting them for the high things of God, he died and rose again
+that he might have power and authority to give an immortal body to
+all who would receive from him this new and spiritual life.
+
+He brought this immortality to light when he rose from the dead.
+
+He brought it to light by rising from the dead in the body in which
+he had died.
+
+If our Lord Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead in the body in
+which he died, then immortality in the New Testament sense of the
+word has never been brought to light.
+
+But he did so rise.
+
+He made that clear on the first Sunday night after his resurrection.
+
+The disciples were gathered together in the room.
+
+The supper table was spread.
+
+No one cared to eat.
+
+The story had been going all day that Jesus had risen.
+
+The women said so. They persisted that they had seen and talked with
+him.
+
+Two men claimed, also, to have seen him, walked, talked and broken
+bread with him, that very afternoon.
+
+The disciples did not believe it.
+
+They were afraid to believe it lest it should prove to be untrue.
+
+Then, suddenly, he stood in the midst.
+
+They thought it was his ghost.
+
+This was a proof to them that he had not risen; for a ghost is a
+disembodied thing.
+
+He was a ghost--he was disembodied--therefore he had not risen.
+
+So they felt--each one of them.
+
+They did not say it--but they thought it.
+
+He knew their thoughts.
+
+He asks them why these thoughts arise in their hearts. He upbraids
+them for their unbelief.
+
+He tells them plainly, a ghost does not have flesh and bones.
+
+He says, "I have flesh and bones."
+
+They are still silent.
+
+Then he stretches out his hands towards them. He shows them his
+feet.
+
+There are great marks in them--there is around these marks as the
+stain of blood, or of wounds whence blood had flowed.
+
+Still they do not speak. They are afraid to believe; it is too good
+to be true.
+
+He says to them, "Handle me and see--take hold of my feet--feel me--
+examine me for yourselves."
+
+They are as immovable and speechless as men changed into stone.
+
+He turns upon them quickly and says, "Have you anything to eat?"
+
+They point to the untasted supper.
+
+Then comes the climax.
+
+He goes to the table.
+
+He sits down.
+
+He eats before them.
+
+It is of record that he did eat _broiled fish_ and an _honeycomb_.
+
+Either this is the worst fable ever palmed off on the church of
+Christ--on the credulity of aching human hearts--or it is the truth
+of God.
+
+Call it the truth of God--then the body in which our Lord Jesus
+Christ rose was the body in which he died.
+
+That body, stamped and sealed with the stigmata of the cross, is the
+living, quivering definition, and indisputable demonstration of
+immortality. Immortality is the living again in a body which was
+dead and dieth no more; or, it is the change of the body in which we
+now live into an incorruptible, glorious body which shall never die.
+
+In that body which he raised from the dead, and which never saw
+corruption, our Lord Jesus Christ now sitteth at the right hand of
+God.
+
+He is there as the vision and standard of immortality.
+
+He is there as the forerunner, the prototype, the sample and
+prophecy of immortality for the Christian.
+
+Until the Christian is made immortal his redemption is not complete.
+
+The Christian who dies is transported to heaven.
+
+His estate there as compared to this is "far better."
+
+But "far better" is not the "best." It is only a comparative.
+
+The superlative requires that the Christian shall have a body.
+Without a body the Christian is neither a complete human being nor a
+perfect son of God.
+
+The divine ordination is "_spirit, soul, and body_."
+
+Unless the Christian receives an immortal body the victory of our
+Lord Jesus Christ over death and over him who has the power of death
+(that is the Devil) is not complete.
+
+Satan as the strong man armed holds the goods and keeps them secure
+within his house.
+
+The instrument with which he is armed is the law. That law which
+requires that it shall be "appointed unto men once to die." The
+goods are the bodies of the saints, and the house is the dark and
+dismal grave.
+
+O the pitifulness of it! that our Lord Jesus Christ should possess
+the Christian as a ghost in heaven, and the Devil hold his blood
+-bought and spirit-sealed body in the grave.
+
+A risen Christ in an immortal body, surrounded by disembodied
+Christian ghosts in heaven forever--that is a concept too hideously
+grotesque to consider.
+
+An immortal Christ who redeemed his own body from the power of the
+grave, but is unable to deliver the bodies of those for whom he
+died--to think it is blasphemy! to believe it--impossible!
+
+If the Devil be the strong man armed, the risen Lord is the one
+"stronger than he," who has met and equalled all the demands of the
+law, and by his death nullified its ultimate power over the bodies
+of those for whom he died.
+
+In the very nature of the case, then, full redemption requires that
+the body of every Christian shall be delivered from the grave, and
+that every Christian, whether living or dead, shall be clothed
+finally with an immortal body.
+
+This is the great objective of salvation--not just to save men from
+vice and immorality here; not just to fit them with an antidote
+against the poison of sin; or give them an impetus to holiness and
+truth for a few brief years in this mortal body, then let them die
+under various circumstances of suffering and pain and be carried
+away to heaven to live there as attenuated, invisible ghosts
+forever!
+
+O no! it is not that!
+
+It is true men are to be saved here and now in such moral and
+spiritual fashion as that each saved person should make the world
+sweeter and better and nearer to God for living in it. All that is
+true, but it is only a part of the glorious truth. The supreme
+objective--the _ultima thule_ of redemption--is--
+
+_Immortality_--the Christian eternally and incorruptibly embodied.
+
+And this immortality, this eternal embodiment, is to be accomplished
+for every Christian. The fact that death has been abolished
+officially as a penalty for the Christian is a demonstration that
+abolition of death means abolition for the whole Christian; as a
+whole or complete Christian must have a body, then the abolition of
+death for the Christian means abolition of death from the body. The
+abolition of death from the body is immortality; by virtue, then, of
+the abolition of death, immortality is assured to every Christian.
+
+Not one will be forgotten even though centuries may have broken into
+dust above his grave.
+
+This immortality will be brought to pass by him who is the
+Resurrection and the Life.
+
+It will be brought to pass at the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
+
+He is coming to this world again. By every law of necessity he
+_must_ come. He is coming to complete redemption, to bring on the
+capstone amid shoutings of "grace, grace unto it."
+
+He will raise the dead who have fallen asleep in his name. He will
+change the living ones who are his at his coming. He will make the
+body of each incorruptible, deathless, immortal, like unto his own
+glorious body, as it is written:
+
+"We shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." (1 John 3:2.)
+
+And again it is written:
+
+"We are citizens of a country which is in heaven; from whence also
+we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change the
+body of our humiliation, that it may be fashioned like unto the body
+of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to
+subdue all things unto himself." (Philippians 3:20, 21.)
+
+At the last he will regenerate the earth. He will make it over. He
+will make all things new. He will set this race of redeemed
+immortals within it. Perfectly recovered from the spoliation of sin
+and death, they shall inhabit it forever. God shall get his own
+world again.
+
+Paradise lost shall become paradise regained, and God's purpose to
+make man his constitutional, governmental, moral and spiritual image
+shall be fulfilled. Man shall be God incarnate, and incarnation
+shall be seen to be the beginning and the ending of the purpose of
+God.
+
+This is the consummation to which Christianity leads us--a perfect
+race of immortal beings in a perfect world, a perfect world in which
+no man shall say, "I am sick"; where sin is unknown; where the
+funeral bell does not toll, and a grave is never dug. Where God is
+all in all.
+
+This is the hope and the ultimate Christianity sets before us. Not
+once in all its record does it offer us heaven or bid us prepare for
+it as the ultimate, but always it exhorts us to look for and wait
+patiently for immortality and glory at the Coming of our Lord Jesus
+Christ.
+
+This is the Christianity of the primitive centuries.
+
+This is the Christianity of the New Testament.
+
+It is the Christianity that fully met the needs of men.
+
+It met the needs of men who gave themselves up to unrestrained
+passion, to the gluttony of every appetite; who lounged away their
+day in cool marble halls, or leaned half drunken from the cushioned
+seats of the amphitheatre, while the sands of the arena were
+reddened with human blood to give them a holiday. Look at them
+there. They passed their unsatisfying hours in idle jest, wreathed
+themselves with freshly plucked, but swiftly fading flowers, drowned
+their senses from moment to moment, still deeper in the spiced and
+maddening wines, gave unbridled freedom to their lust; and then, at
+close of day, in the splendor of the sinking sun, went forth to cool
+their fevered brows in the Campagna's freshening but deadly air, and
+drove with furious pace and brutal laughter along the Appian way
+between rows of monumental tombs whose chiselled epitaphs told the
+hopeless end of human life; then back again they drove with still
+more reckless haste to spend the night in wild debauch and meet the
+gray dawning of another day with its mocking routine and disgust.
+Loathing their very joys, revolting at their own gratification,
+these men asked: "Is there nothing better than this, that we drain
+the cup of pleasure to the dregs, open our veins, watch the life
+blood ebb away, and laugh, and mingle our laughter with curses that
+so cheap and easy an ending should have cost so much to reach?"
+
+O the woe, the horror, the emptiness, and the crying, agonizing need
+of lives like these.
+
+And Christianity fully and richly met the need of lives like these.
+
+It met the needs of men who in the midst of an environment of the
+flesh, with the wild beast of appetite struggling within, now and
+then had longings for a power that should enable them to put their
+feet upon the neck of passion.
+
+It met the needs of men who, standing above their dead, asked again
+the old and oft-repeated question of Job, "If a man die, shall he
+live again?"
+
+Christianity met all these needs.
+
+Through crowded streets of populous towns and lonely lanes of silent
+villages, in lordly palace and before straw-thatched hovels, to
+listening throngs and wayside hearers, it rang forth its wondrous
+proclamation.
+
+It told men that a man had been here who had proven himself stronger
+than death and mightier than the grave; a man who had burst the bars
+of death asunder, spurned the sepulchre wherein human hands had laid
+his body, had ascended up on high, and now, from heaven's throne,
+had power to impart to men a life that hated sin, rejoiced in
+virtue, could make each moment of earth's existence worth while, and
+carried within it the assurance and prophecy of eternal felicity.
+
+Far and wide, over land and sea, it rang the tidings that this
+perfect life might be had by king or cotter, by freeman or slave,
+without money and without price, for so simple a thing as genuine
+faith in, and open confession of, him who had died and risen again.
+
+With rich, exultant note it announced that he who as very God had
+clothed himself with a new and distinct humanity, who had loved men
+unto death and died for them, had not forgotten the earth wherein he
+had suffered, his own grave from whence he had so triumphantly
+risen, nor yet the graves of those who had confessed his name; but,
+on the contrary, was coming back in personal glory and with
+limitless power to raise the dead, transfigure the living, make them
+immortal, and so change this earth that it should no longer be a
+swinging cemetery of the hopeless dead, but the abiding home of the
+eternally living sons of God.
+
+Men held like Laocoon in the winding coils of sinuous and persistent
+sin, and who vainly sought to escape from its slowly crushing
+embrace, heard the good news and turned their faces towards the
+rising hope of present deliverance.
+
+Men standing in the shadow of the tombs and waiting their turn
+smiled until their smiles turned into joyous laughter as they said:
+"If we die, we shall live again--the grave shall not always win its
+victory over us."
+
+Do you wonder the world stopped, listened, and that multitudes
+turned and followed after?
+
+Do you wonder that this Christianity of the primitive centuries
+triumphed so phenomenally?
+
+This is the Christianity we need to preach today.
+
+It is full of a great body of doctrine.
+
+It is full of the supernatural.
+
+Miracle and miraculous are woven into its texture from beginning to
+end. You cannot touch it, or handle it, or look at it from any angle
+of vision that it does not suggest the miraculous. The moment the
+miracle is out of it it is no longer the Christianity of the first
+century, it is not the Christianity of the New Testament--the
+Christianity that has a miraculous Christ for its centre and the
+miracle of an infinite God for its environment.
+
+A Christianity of doctrine!
+
+A Christianity of miracle!
+
+And why not?
+
+It is as superior to the Christianity, so called, that sets aside
+miracle and doctrine, turns its back on the hereafter, makes its
+appeal in behalf of the present alone, and grounds its claim to
+authority, not on a "thus saith the Lord," but on a "thus saith
+science and reason"; a Christianity that owns the law of evolution
+as its present force and defining motive; it is as superior to that
+sort of Christianity and as high above it as the heavens are above
+the earth.
+
+One night this summer I stood upon a mountain ridge and watched the
+revelation of the starry sky. The great constellations, like silver
+squadrons, were sailing slowly and majestically to their appointed
+havens; from north to south and from south to north again, the Milky
+Way swept upward from its double horizon to the zenith like a
+highway paved and set with diamonds--a highway over which the wheels
+of the king's chariot had sped, leaving behind that cloud of dust in
+which every gleaming particle was a burnished sun. I gazed
+spellbound until it was as the vision of an unfathomed sea, an ocean
+tide of light, where the shimmering foam was the rise and fall of
+single and multiple systems, the surf beat breaking on the shores of
+converging universes. I gazed on this wealth and congeries of far
+-flung worlds, in which some that appeared the most insignificant and
+twinkled and trembled as though each glimmer would be the last, were
+actually so great that beside them our own poor little world was but
+as a mole hill to earth's Himalayas; as I gazed I thought of the
+distance from world to world--measured as light travels--till the
+count of years fell away, and there were no more numbers with which
+to count, and I knew that at the end of this calculation I had but
+entered the suburbs of that realm for which we have but one word,
+whose inadequacy we all confess--the Infinite. I listened, the
+silence seemed to utter forth majesty and might and honor and
+omnipotence, the air had in it the breath of sacred and adoring
+things, and unwittingly I cried out, alone in the night there, "The
+heavens, O God, declare thy glory and the firmament showeth thy
+handiwork."
+
+And when I look at this Christianity set forth in the New Testament,
+and anticipated in the Old, the constellations of doctrine, this Via
+Lactea of truth in which every statement is a sun of splendor; when
+I begin to get the sweep of the divine purpose coming up from the
+opening pages of Genesis and culminating in the book of the
+Revelation; when I see that Christianity is the presentation to us
+of the ways and means whereby the original thought of incarnation
+(and this was the very first thought stamped upon the first pages of
+the Genesis record of the creation of man; for incarnation is
+conceived in Eden before it is brought to the birth in Bethlehem)--
+when I see this original thought of incarnation, in spite of sin and
+failure, and the world's captivity to the Devil and his angels; when
+I see this high purpose of God at last realized, and realized so
+completely that each redeemed soul is in final terms the glorious
+enthronement of God in humanity, and that God in Christ and in the
+Christian, gets his own world again, I cry out with full tribute of
+heart and intellect: "O Lord, this is the Christianity which thou
+hast wrought, thy name is written in every doctrine, every line
+justifies, as it proclaims thee, the infinite and gracious author."
+
+This is the Christianity to preach.
+
+Let the preacher preach a Christianity of doctrine.
+
+There are three important things every preacher should preach. The
+first thing is doctrine. The second thing is doctrine. The third and
+pre-eminent thing is doctrine. The church is starving to death for
+the want of it, the preachers are becoming emasculated apologists
+for lack of it, and the world, looking on, is laughing at a limp,
+genuflecting thing calling itself modern Christianity and for want
+of vertebrate strength, unable to stand alone.
+
+It was doctrine believed in and preached which sustained the martyrs
+and gave courage to missionaries. He who believed in the sovereignty
+of a redeeming God, the certainty that God would get his elect, the
+Coming of Christ, the millennial triumph, and a rebel world
+surrendered at the feet of God, could endure the agony of the stake,
+the privation of the wilderness, and all the discomforts and all the
+discouragements of fields of endeavor well sowed but scantily
+reaped.
+
+Let the preacher preach the supernatural--the things that are
+miraculous, and be unafraid.
+
+He need not be afraid. The world wants that sort of preaching. It is
+growing tired at heart of mere machinery and this eternally running
+up against a formula of the laboratory or a mathematical calculation
+and analyzed force, as explanatory of everything in heaven and in
+earth. It would like, if it were possible, to believe in something a
+little beyond the length of its eyelashes and the touch of its
+finger tips; something that cannot be summed up always in
+avoirdupois; something, indeed, beyond the ability of man.
+
+Let the church get back to the old-fashioned doctrinal,
+supernatural, miraculous Christianity that underwrites itself with
+the name of God. Let it be boldly proclaimed that Christianity is
+miraculous, because it is, first and last, the Christianity of that
+God who is himself--the eternal miracle.
+
+The very salvation of the church as a church depends upon this
+retrograde.
+
+If the church hesitates, compromises, seeks to accommodate its
+formulas to modern nomenclature. If it is willing to carry its
+baggage at half weight; if it is willing to make its proclamation a
+continual denial of all that it has heretofore professed as
+fundamental; if it believes the twentieth century has the call on
+the first, and that modernism outranks primitivism; if, in short, it
+looks upon primitive and apostolic Christianity as the feeble hint
+which the modern thinker has known how to modify and improve, then,
+as already suggested, the days of its spiritual and moral bankruptcy
+are in sight, and the sooner good business arrangements are made to
+hire out its meeting houses for ethical and social culture the
+better.
+
+Let the church persevere in turning its back upon the hereafter; let
+it continue the folly of ignoring the eschatological emphasis of
+Christianity; let it keep on giving to men the anodynes of mere
+moral maxims; let it direct all its energies to improving and
+perfecting a society which God has already judged and condemned at
+its best, and presently these drugged and befooled people will
+awake, the drugs will no longer be effective, and they will turn in
+indignation upon a Christianity which began by professing to be a
+revelation from God and ends by confessing to be nothing more than
+an evolution from man.
+
+It is time for preachers to arouse if they would have the hearing,
+and not the indifferent ears.
+
+Let them refuse to apologize or defend.
+
+Let them have the courage of divine conviction.
+
+Let them refuse to admit into their fellowship men who are willing
+that a bar-sinister shall be stained across the birth hour of the
+Christ; who are ready to smile away such a title as "the Blessed
+Virgin"; who can read no deeper meaning in the cross than a brutal
+murder, and who do not yet know that in the garden of Arimathea
+there is still an empty tomb. Let them refuse ministerial ordination
+and partnership with men who, bearing the university brand, claim
+the authority of a self-elected scholarship to make the Word of God
+secondary to the word of man. Let them go forth and proclaim to the
+world with the voice of assurance which permits of no debate and
+will accept no recall, the Christianity that is summed up, is
+perfectly defined and holds inclusively all its splendor of doctrine
+in the three immense facts which its Gospel proclaims:
+
+The abolition of death, the gift of a new and spiritual life, and
+the guaranty to every believer of a resplendent immortality like
+unto his who sits on yonder throne--both eternal God and immortal
+man--Coming Bridegroom and Triumphant King.
+
+Let them preach this. Let them tell the guilty sinner that the blood
+of Our Lord Jesus Christ meets his case and can make the foulest
+clean; let them tell the slave-bound sinner that in a moment, in the
+flash of an eye glance, a risen Saviour can deliver him and set him
+free; let them tell the dying that death has lost its sting, and at
+death a convoy of heaven's host shall bear him away from his home in
+this mortal body to be at home in heaven with his ascended Lord; let
+them cry above every Christian grave, louder than the sound of any
+falling tear: "Jesus is coming to raise your dead and change the
+living and clothe each saint with immortal beauty"; let them look
+abroad upon a world full of the storm of sin, the tumult of high
+passion and long rebellion against our God, and shout aloud that
+victory cometh in the end; that Christ is God as well as man; that
+the days of his glory are at hand, when the "God of the whole earth"
+shall he be called; and when all beneath a perfect heaven in a
+perfect world shall know him as Lord and God from the least to the
+greatest. Let them preach this, and with unbroken confidence repeat
+the exultant words of Holy Writ, the words which shall warrant all
+their speech, that "our Saviour Jesus Christ hath abolished death,
+and hath brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel";
+and it will be this Gospel echoing forth with all the music of its
+joyful tidings that shall answer infallibly and beyond all dispute
+the question of the hour--"_What is Christianity?_"
+
+
+
+The Bible
+
+
+THE WORD OF GOD
+
+
+"When ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received
+it not as the word of man, but as it is in truth, the word of God."
+(1 Thessalonians 2:13.)
+
+
+THE Apostle here testifies that he believes himself to be the bearer
+of a revelation direct from God; that the words he speaks and the
+words he writes are not the words of man, but the Word of God, warm
+with his breath, filled with his thoughts, and stamped with his
+will.
+
+In this same epistle he writes:
+
+"For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord." (1 Thessalonians
+4:15.)
+
+The preposition "by" is the dative of investiture as well as means,
+and is Paul's declaration that what he is writing to the
+Thessalonians are not his ideas, clothed in his own language, but
+ideas and thoughts whose investiture, whose very clothing, is no
+less than the word of the ascended Lord--he who is none other than
+the "Word of God."
+
+Writing to the Corinthians he says:
+
+"Which things we speak, _not in the words_ which man's wisdom
+teacheth, _but_ (and grammar requires us to understand) _in the
+words_ which the Holy Ghost teacheth." (1 Corinthians 2:13.)
+
+According to Paul's testimony, therefore, the fourteen epistles
+which he wrote to the churches are not letters written by a mortal
+man, giving expression to the ideas and thoughts of man, but are the
+very words of the infinite God, giving utterance by the Holy Ghost
+to the thoughts of God.
+
+An examination of the other epistles of the New Testament will show
+the same high and unqualified pretension. The apostles write (all of
+them) not as men who are giving an opinion of their own, but as men
+who know themselves under the domination of the Spirit, and as
+giving authoritative expression to the mind and will of God.
+
+Nor is this peculiar to the writers of the New Testament.
+
+Constantly, the writers of the Old Testament introduce their message
+with the tremendous sentence: "Thus saith the Lord." Again and again
+they declare the Lord has spoken "by" them. David says: "The words
+of the Lord were in my tongue." Jeremiah says the Word of the Lord
+came to him and the Lord said: "Take a roll of a book and write
+therein all the words that I have spoken to thee." Then we are told
+that "Jeremiah called Baruch, the son of Neriah; and Baruch wrote
+from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the Lord, which he had
+spoken unto him, upon a roll of a book."
+
+After these words had been read to the princes of Israel, they asked
+Baruch, saying, "Tell us now, how didst thou write all these words
+at his mouth?" Then Baruch answered them, "He pronounced all these
+words unto me with his mouth, and I wrote them with ink in the
+book."
+
+The process is clear enough. The Lord spake his words in Jeremiah.
+Jeremiah received the words direct from the Lord, dictated them word
+for word to Baruch, Baruch wrote them as they were pronounced in a
+book; and when written, the words were the written words of God.
+
+Ezekiel declares when the Lord commanded him to speak to the
+children of Israel, he said to him: "Speak with _my words_ unto
+them." Ezekiel not only speaks them, he writes them in the book of
+his prophecy. Ezekiel gives an account of how the Lord spake to him
+and inspired the book which bears his name. He says: "The Spirit
+entered into me when he spoke to me; . . . the spirit entered into
+me and spake with me." The Spirit said unto him: "When I speak with
+thee, I will open thy mouth, and thou shalt say unto them, thus
+saith the Lord."
+
+The Apostle Paul, speaking in commendation of Timothy because from a
+child he had known the Holy Scriptures (and by Holy Scriptures the
+Apostle meant the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi--these were
+the Scriptures Timothy as well as every Jew knew as such), tells him
+that all Scripture (and of course any decent exegesis of the passage
+with its weight of context would recognize that the Apostle was
+referring to the Scriptures Timothy had known from childhood, the
+Scriptures as we have them to-day from Genesis to Malachi)--Paul
+tells Timothy in the most precise terms that all these writings are
+inspired of God.
+
+The Apostle Peter, corroboratively speaking of these very Scriptures
+of the Old Testament, says they came not "by the will of man, but
+holy men of old spake as they were moved (literally, carried along)
+by the Holy Ghost."
+
+Thus, this book we call the Bible comes to us with the enormous and
+uncompromising claim that it is not a man-made book, but a book
+whose real and sole author is the living and eternal God.
+
+This claim stands face to face with human need.
+
+Here we are from birth to death, pilgrims on the highway of time,
+not knowing whence we come, nor whither we go. We need a guide to
+lead us, a light to shine when we stand at that parting of the ways
+--where eternity becomes the end of time.
+
+This book meets us and claims to be all that--a guide through time,
+a light to shine upon the road that leads to God and to be, in every
+line and accent, the inspired, incorruptible, infallible Word of
+God.
+
+How may we know it is all it claims to be?
+
+Never more than now did we need to know it.
+
+Voices in the air are crying that we have been deceived; that this
+book upon which our fathers pillowed their heads when at the end of
+life's journey, they laid them down to die; this book we have held
+as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path is, after all, at its
+best, only the word of man and not the Word of God at all.
+
+Every now and then resounding blows are heard as they strike against
+the old foundation. Those who pretend to be working in the interest
+of the truth bid us stand aside, lest we and our hopes be buried in
+the impending ruin.
+
+We need to know at any cost whether this splendid and sustaining
+faith has deceived us; whether this book we have looked upon as holy
+and divine is nothing more than the word of man, spoken with his
+stammering tongue and written with his stumbling pen.
+
+We must know, and know for a certainty that will leave no
+peradventure to arise as a troubling after-ghost, whether this Bible
+is, as Paul says it is, in truth, the Word of God; and the question
+will insistently repeat itself:
+
+"How may we know the Bible _is_ the Word of God?"
+
+The question need not make us tremble.
+
+The answers are at hand.
+
+The evidence is so great, its very wealth is an embarrassment.
+
+That evidence stated, detailed, analyzed and elaborated, would
+require--not a few pages--but whole libraries.
+
+One broad and general proposition may be laid down.
+
+It is this:
+
+The Bible is proved to BE the Word of God when it is shown to be NOT
+the word of man; and it is proved to be not the word of man when it
+is shown to be--not such a book as a man WOULD write if he COULD;
+nor such a book as a man COULD write if he WOULD.
+
+That it is not the word of man--not such a book as a man _would_
+write if he could, is made clear enough by the picture it paints of
+the natural man.
+
+This picture is so sharply drawn, the figures stand out in such
+living and apt delineation, that no one can mistake the import.
+
+According to the Bible, man came direct from the hand of God. God
+created him body, soul and spirit--a tripartite being. The soul was
+the person, the seat of appetite and passions. The spirit was the
+seat of the mind, the centre of reflection. Spirit and body were the
+distinct agents of the soul. The spirit, the agent to connect the
+soul with God--the body, the medium of the soul's manifestation or
+materialization in this world, and the instrument for its use and
+enjoyment. The mind, seated in the spirit, was intended, under the
+influence of the spirit, to be the governor and regulator of the
+soul--enabling the soul rightly to use its appetite and legitimately
+to satisfy its passions.
+
+Thus organized, God set man up in the world to be his
+constitutional, moral, spiritual and governmental image--his
+likeness morally--his image (his representative) administratively.
+
+Man turned his back on God, listened to the appetite of his soul,
+and surrendered to the demands of sensual hunger.
+
+The soul, at once, sank down into the environment of the body. The
+mind sank down into the environment of the soul and became,
+henceforth, not a spiritual mind, but a mind "sensual," "devilish,"
+a mind continually suggesting to the soul fresh and unlimited
+gratification of its desires. With the breakdown of soul and mind,
+the spirit lost its vital relationship to God, lost its function as
+a connecting link with, and a transmitter of, the mind and will of
+God; so that it could no longer enable man to know and understand
+God; and feeling the influence of the mind, instead of influencing
+it, followed it in its downward course into the environment of the
+soul.
+
+Out of this dislocation the soul came forth dominant over mind and
+spirit. Soul appetite and soul desires became supreme; the body, the
+willing and active agent thereof. From this period on, man was no
+longer a possible spiritual being, but a "natural" man. The word
+"natural" is "soulical." In Scripture it is twice translated
+"sensual." The much-used word "psychological" is a derivation of it.
+In the Bible sense of the word, a psychological person is just the
+opposite of a pneumatical or spiritual person.
+
+Man was now psychological, soulical, sensual. He had been
+transformed into a being no better than an _intellectual_ animal,
+and the slave of his physical functions. Instead of being the master
+of his appetites, he was mastered by them. His passions intended,
+under right use, to be blessings, became curses; instead of angels,
+they became as demons. Instead of dwelling in the midst of his
+endowment in harmony with it and able to direct it, he found himself
+at its mercy, incessantly smitten by it and suffering his own
+equipment. Repudiating faith, walking by sight, talking of reason
+and governed by his senses, he threw himself open to invasion by the
+world, the flesh and the Devil.
+
+As a result of his fall, man has become a degenerate, full of the
+germs of evil, "every imagination of the thoughts of the heart only
+evil continually"--an incurable self-corrupter.
+
+In him there is not one thing that commends him to a holy God; and
+even should he succeed in living a life of perfect morality, his
+best righteousness in the sight of God would be no better than a
+bundle of filthy and contagious rags.
+
+There is no power within him by which he can change the essential
+character and determined trend of his life. Men do not gather grapes
+of thorns, nor figs of thistles. All the effort that the most
+devoted and laborious of men might give to the culture of a hedgerow
+of thorns would not succeed in producing one grape. Though men spent
+life and fortune in cultivating a field of thistles, they would not
+gather a single fig. No sooner (says the Bible) can the natural man
+bring forth the fruit of righteousness unto God. The Ethiopian may
+change his skin, the leopard his spots, before a natural man can
+change himself into a spiritual man. "The carnal mind is enmity with
+God; for it is not subject to the law of God, _neither indeed can
+be_." "The natural man (the word 'natural' is psuchikos, soulical)
+receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are
+foolishness unto him: _neither can he know them_, because they are
+spiritually (pneumatikos, _pneumatically_) discerned." "The heart is
+deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know
+it?" meaning thereby that God alone can sound the depths of its
+measureless capacity for sin and iniquity; therefore, he says: "I
+the Lord search the heart, I try the reins."
+
+The end of man is to die.
+
+Such an end is not natural.
+
+It is unnatural.
+
+It is violent.
+
+It is penal.
+
+It is an appointed punishment: as it is written: "It is _appointed_
+unto men once to die." "By _one_ man sin entered into the world, and
+death _by sin_; and _so_ death _passed_ (literally, passed _through,
+pierced_ man;" the seeds of death entered him for himself and all
+his posterity). When he dies, therefore, be he never so moral and
+upright, his death is judicial, his taking off is the execution of a
+criminal.
+
+He is to be raised from the dead as to his body (in the meantime,
+his soul is "dragged" downward to the prison of the underworld,
+where in conscious suffering he awaits the second resurrection and
+the judgment hour), he will be raised, judged, found guilty and cast
+forth into the lake of fire (which is the second death), from whence
+there will be no resurrection of the body (the body will perish in
+the fire--for an immortal body belongs only to the sons of God--the
+participants in the First Resurrection); then, as a disembodied
+spirit--a ghost--he will go forth with an inward, deathless worm,
+and an inward, quenchless fire, to be like "a wandering star unto
+whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever," an exile from
+God, outside the orbit of divine grace, love and life--a hopeless,
+an eternally hopeless--human derelict, upon the measureless sea of
+night and space.
+
+That is the Bible picture of the natural man.
+
+Is that the picture the natural man paints of himself?
+
+I trow not!
+
+Man looks upon himself as a son of God by nature, having in himself
+all the elements of divinity, and all the forces necessary to shape
+his life aright. He is proud of himself, and talks of the dignity of
+human nature. He describes himself in panegyric, magnifies his
+virtue and minimizes his vice.
+
+He flatters himself in his own eyes.
+
+The two concepts--that of the Bible and that of the natural man--are
+as far apart from each other as the heavens are from the earth.
+
+To man, the Bible concept is false, belittling, wholly disastrous
+and degrading, the death knell to any possible inspiration for human
+effort and attainment. It is a concept against which he revolts with
+all the nature in him, and hates with an exceeding great hatred.
+
+In the very nature of the case, then, the Bible concept of man is
+not due to man; it is not such a concept that he _would_ write if he
+_could_.
+
+The picture which the Bible paints of sin is not such a picture as
+the natural man has ever painted.
+
+The Bible declares that sin is something more than fever or disease
+or weakness, it is high treason against Jehovah, it is a blow at his
+integrity, a rebellion against his government, a discord to his
+being and a movement whose final tendency would be to dislodge him
+from his throne.
+
+The Bible hates sin and has no mercy for it.
+
+The very leaves of the book seem to curl and grow crisp under the
+fire of its hatred. So fearful is its denunciation that the sinner
+shivers and hastens to turn away from a book whose lightest
+denunciation of sin has in it the menace of eternal judgment. Like a
+great fiery eye it looks into the very recesses of the heart and
+reveals its intents and purposes. It sees lust hiding there in all
+its lecherous deformity and says, he who exercises it solely in his
+mind is as guilty in God's sight as though he had committed the act.
+It looks into the heart and sees hate crouching there with its
+tiger-like fangs and readiness to spring, and says that he who hates
+his brother is already a murderer.
+
+The Bible has no forgiveness for sin until it has been fully and
+fearfully punished. In this it simply echoes the law stamped and
+steeped in nature. Nature never forgives its violated law until it
+has punished it. The Bible demands satisfaction, complete and
+absolute, before it offers even the hint of forgiveness. It takes
+the guilty sinner to the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ and shows
+him God's hatred of sin to be so great, that the moment his holy and
+spotless Son representatively takes the sinner's place, he smites
+him and pours out upon him a tidal sweep of wrath in a terror of
+relentless judgment and indignation so immense, that the earth
+quivers like an aspen, rocks to and fro, reels in its orbit till the
+sun of day refuses to shine, and the moon of night hangs in the
+startled heavens like a great clot of human blood.
+
+The Bible declares that forgiveness of sin can come to the sinner
+only by way of the anguish and punishment of the cross; and that no
+sinner can be forgiven till he has accepted the downpour of the
+wrath of God on the cross and the substitutional agony of the Son of
+God as the punishment he himself so justly deserves.
+
+The Bible teaches that in the awful cry, "My God, my God, why hast
+thou forsaken me?" the sinner should hear the echo of his own agony,
+as of one forsaken of God and swept out of his presence forever; and
+that the only ground of approach to this righteous God is the
+atoning blood of his crucified Son; that he who would approach God,
+find forgiveness and justification, must claim that crucified Son of
+God as his sin-offering, his vicarious sacrifice, his personal
+substitute. By the hell of the cross alone can he find the heaven of
+forgiveness and peace.
+
+Is this man's attitude to, and definition of, forgiveness and peace?
+
+It is not.
+
+Man does not hate sin. He loves it. He rolls it as a sweet morsel
+under his tongue. He condones it in its worst form. To him it is
+genital weakness or an overplus of animal life--an exuberance of the
+spirit. It is a racial inheritance and not an individual fault. It
+is temperamental and not criminal.
+
+The Bible concept and the natural concept of sin contradict each
+other; both, therefore, cannot have the same author.
+
+The Bible concept of holiness is not the concept of the natural man.
+
+In the Bible, holiness is not goodness and kindness, nor even
+morality. Holiness as the Bible sets it before us is the
+correspondence of the soul with God, the soul reflecting the intent,
+desire and innermost character of God; so that, were God to enter
+into the soul, he should find himself as much at home as upon his
+own exalted throne.
+
+Such a definition as that makes human perfection and all its claims
+to holiness seem no better than a painted wanton dressed in the garb
+of purity and mouthing the words of virtue and chastity.
+
+Whence comes this wisdom of holiness which makes the loftiest ideal
+of man no higher than the dust of the roadway, his best
+righteousness criticizable goodness and altogether a negligible
+quantity?
+
+If it is from man, it must arise from two sources--human experience
+or human imagination.
+
+It cannot come from human experience! no natural man in the past has
+experienced it--none today experience it.
+
+It cannot come from imagination; for a man cannot imagine what he
+has not seen, known or experienced. As he has not experienced
+holiness he cannot imagine it.
+
+In the nature of the case--the Bible concept of holiness did not
+originate with man, and that much of the Bible, evidently, is not of
+man.
+
+That the Bible is not the word of man is shown by its statements of
+accurate science, written before men became scientific, and while as
+yet natural science did not exist.
+
+The record of creation is given in the opening verses of Genesis.
+
+Whence came the wisdom which enabled the writer in a pre-scientific
+age to set forth a cosmogony in such a fashion that it does not
+contradict the latest findings of the geologist?
+
+The Bible says the earth was without form and void.
+
+Science says the same thing. Over a hot granite crust, an ocean of
+fire, and beyond that an impenetrable atmosphere loaded with
+carbonic acid gas.
+
+Cuvier, the founder of paleontology, says in his discourse on the
+revolutions of the globe, "Moses has left us a cosmogony, the
+exactitude of which is most wonderfully confirmed every day."
+
+Quensted says, "Moses was a great geologist, wherever he may have
+obtained his knowledge." Again he says, "The venerable Moses, who
+makes the plants appear first, has not yet been proven at fault; for
+there are marine plants in the very lowest deposit."
+
+Dana, of Yale College, has said that the record of creation given by
+Moses and that written in the rocks are the same in all general
+features.
+
+Whence came the wisdom which kept Moses from hopelessly blundering?
+
+Moses places the account of the original creation in the first
+verse. In the second, he states the earth fell into chaos. "It
+_became_ (not _was_) without form, and void."
+
+Isaiah, the prophet, declares definitely that God did not create the
+earth without form and void--God never was the author of chaos--he
+made the earth habitable from the beginning.
+
+The first verse of Genesis records the creation of this original and
+habitable earth. The second verse shows, as the result of some
+mighty cataclysm, that the original earth fell into a state of
+chaos. The second verse, and the verses following, are the record of
+the making over of the earth after it had fallen into a state of
+chaos.
+
+Whence the wisdom which taught Moses what science in our day is only
+beginning to spell out, that the present earth is not an original
+creation, but a remaking; that the original creation goes back
+beyond the time of shifted crust, of tilted rock, of ice and fire
+and mist and formless chaos?
+
+Whence came the wisdom and knowledge which led Job to say that it is
+impossible to count the stars for number, when it _was_ possible in
+his day, and is equally possible in our day, to count them with the
+naked eye?
+
+How did he know, what the telescope alone reveals, that the number
+of the stars as flashed forth in the field of these telescopes is
+utterly beyond our computation; and that in the attempt to number
+them, figures break, fall into dust, and are swept away as the chaff
+of the summer's threshing floor.
+
+How did he, looking up with that naked eye of his, how did he know
+that in the Milky Way there are countless thousands of suns--and
+these the centres of other systems? How did he know that world
+-on-world ranges in the upper spaces of the silent sky, so
+multitudinously that each increase of the power of the telescope
+only adds unaccountable myriads until, looking from the rim of those
+nightly searchers, the eye beholds reach on reach of luminous
+clouds, and learns with awe profound, that these clouds are stars,
+are suns and systems--but so far away from us and from one another
+that they cannot be separated and distinguished by the most powerful
+glasses; and that these clouds, if we really could separate them and
+bring them within the field of our particular vision, would reveal
+themselves as suns and systems so numerous, that only, the Creator
+himself could number them?
+
+How did Job know all this in that far day when he sat at his tent
+door in the beauty of the cloudless sky and without a telescope? How
+did he know all this so that he could tell us with absolute
+certainty what we now know only by the aid of modern science--that
+the stars _cannot_ be counted for number?
+
+How did he know what only the modern telescope reveals, that the
+North is stretched out over the empty place? How did he know that
+there in the Northern sky there is a space where no star does shine
+--a dark abyss of fathomless night--as if, suddenly, the universe of
+worlds had come to an end?
+
+How did he know, at the moment when the wise men of his day were
+saying that the earth was supported on the shoulders of a giant,
+that the giant stood on a platform made of the backs of elephants;
+that the elephants stood on the back of a mighty tortoise, but where
+the tortoise stood none of them said; how did he dare at that time
+to write that God hangeth the earth on nothing?
+
+How did Isaiah know that the world is round? How did he learn to
+speak of "the circle of the earth," at the time when the scientific
+men of his day said that it was four square and flat?
+
+How did he know of that imponderable ether in which the stellar
+universe is said to float? Who taught him to say that God spread out
+the heavens as "thinness," when the wise men of that hour were
+teaching they were a solid vault? How is it that he made use of the
+most scientific term when he speaks of the heavens as "thinness"? It
+is true in our English version he is made to say that God spread out
+the heavens as a "tent"; but the word "tent" in the Hebrew is (doq)
+and its root meaning signifies a thing that has been beaten out or
+stretched into thinness--an elastic thinness; it is a word
+accurately describing the ether which scientific men tell us is so
+thin that a teacup full of it may be blown out into a transparent
+bubble as large as the earth, and, even then, its attenuation would
+seem no greater than at the beginning.
+
+How did Isaiah know all this?
+
+Evidently his knowledge and wisdom did not come from the knowledge
+and wisdom of his day.
+
+That the Bible did not come from man is seen in the fact of
+fulfilled prohpecy.
+
+Page after page of this book is filled with prophetic announcements.
+
+History and human experience record their amazing fulfilment.
+
+The prophet Daniel gives the history of four great world empires,
+Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome.
+
+The rise and fall of these empires are foretold centuries ahead.
+
+The total ruin and perpetual desolation of Babylon were announced
+when the city shone forth in the zenith of its splendor.
+
+Daniel writes an account of Alexander the Great two hundred and
+fifty years before he is born, calls him the first king of Greece,
+describes his march for the conquest of the East, the battle of the
+Grannicus, his sudden death at Babylon, and the division of the
+empire among his four generals.
+
+At the hour when Rome was practically passing through her travail
+pains of national birth, Daniel foretold its ascension to power, and
+described it as a wild beast, trampling down the nations, absorbing
+into itself the three kingdoms which preceded it, occupying the
+territory once possessed by them, and becoming the supreme
+governmental power of the earth. Centuries before it took place he
+foretold the division of the Roman Empire into two equal parts. He
+announced, also, that it should be the last universal political
+power till Christ the Lord should come to set up his worldwide
+kingdom. Centuries have passed since Rome ruled the world. From that
+day to this it has remained the last supreme world-power. The
+territory once ruled by it is filled with mighty nations--not one of
+them, great as it may be, is a universal world-power.
+
+Where did Daniel get the foresight which enabled him to look on down
+through two thousand years of human history and, in the face of
+battle, intrigue and change, declare, what so far has come to pass,
+that Rome should be the last universal empire till Christ came?
+
+Ezekiel, the prophet, said that the great and populous city of Tyre
+should be taken, cast down, and never rebuilt; and that the Lord
+would make it to be like the top of a scraped rock to spread nets
+upon.
+
+The city was taken and destroyed. The people moved to an island just
+off the mainland and there built a new city. Two hundred and fifty
+years after Ezekiel made his prophecy, Alexander came, besieged the
+new city; and, in order to take it, built a causeway from the
+mainland. In doing this he tore down and utterly demolished the
+ruins of the old city; took its stones and timber and cast them into
+the sea; and then, actually, set his soldiers to work to scrape the
+very dust that he might empty it into the waters. From the hour when
+it was overthrown to this, the city has never been rebuilt; and for
+centuries it has been, and is to-day, like _the top of a scraped
+rock_--a place where _fishermen spread their nets_.
+
+Where did Ezekiel get this knowledge?
+
+Certainly not from man.
+
+It will not do to say he guessed it!
+
+Egypt was a land of cities and temples. The cities were populous,
+the temples and monuments colossal. Avenues of gigantic sphynx led
+to gateways whose immense thresholds opened into pillared halls,
+where the carved columns seemed like a forest of stone. Pyramids
+rose as mountains, and their alabaster-covered sides flashed back
+the splendor of the cloudless skies. The land bloomed as a garden.
+The papyrus grew by the banks of the Nile. The fisheries of the
+mighty river filled the treasury of kings with a ceaseless income.
+Art, literature, knowledge and culture were enthroned supreme--yet
+was it a land of false gods and a people given over to their
+worship.
+
+Speaking in the name of God the prophet announced the coming
+desolation of Egypt. It should be cast down. Its fisheries should be
+destroyed, its papyrus withered, its cities and temples overthrown
+and the ruins scattered over the plain, no native prince should ever
+again sit upon its throne, it should become the basest of kingdoms.
+
+It has become such.
+
+Its cities are destroyed. Its temples are roofless, its columns
+fallen, the statues of its kings lie face downward in the dust, the
+pyramids, stripped and bare, stand scarred and silent in the sun.
+The singing Memnon are as songless from their chiselled lips as the
+tongueless Sphynx half buried in the yellow sand. The fisheries are
+gone, the papyrus has withered; for centuries no native prince has
+been seated on the throne. It is a land of the dead. The dead are
+everywhere. At every step you stumble over a mummy, the mummy of a
+dead cat, a dead dog, or a dead and shrivelled Pharaoh. Its greatest
+asset is its departed glory, and every grain of sand blown from the
+mighty desert, and every wave of reflected light flung back from the
+Lybian hills, proclaims the terrific fulfilment of the prophet's
+words.
+
+The prophets foretold the final siege and destruction of Jerusalem.
+It should be trodden down of the Gentiles. The people should be
+carried away captive and sold into all lands. They should be
+scattered from one end of the earth to the other. All nations should
+despise them. They should become a by-word, a hissing and a scorn.
+They should be hunted, hounded and persecuted. Their sufferings
+should be unparalleled, horrible, unspeakable. The sound of a shaken
+leaf should startle them. They were to become the people of the
+trembling heart and the wandering foot.
+
+The prophecies have been singularly fulfilled.
+
+Jerusalem was besieged by the Romans. The city was taken. The city
+and temple were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands perished by famine,
+by fever, by fire and by sword. Titus, the Roman conqueror, drove a
+ploughshare over its smoking ruins. The people who remained alive
+after the general slaughter were carried away captive. They were
+scattered from one end of the earth to the other. They have found
+their dwelling place among all nations. They dwell everywhere and
+are at home nowhere. They have been a by-word, a hissing and a
+scorn. Every hand has been turned against them. They have been
+hunted on the mountains. They have been chased through the valleys.
+They have been walled up in the narrow and filthy ghettos of cities.
+Their goods have been stolen. Their wives and daughters have been
+ravished. They have been whipped and racked and tortured. They have
+been broken on the wheel, burned at the stake, buried alive, and
+sent to sea, thousands of them, in sinking ships. Every cruelty that
+the ingenuity of man and the inspiration of fiends could suggest has
+been practised upon them, until the heart revolts and the soul
+sickens at the mere recital of their blood and woe; and to this
+hour, through twenty long centuries, Jerusalem, as announced, has
+been trodden down of the Gentiles; all nations have tramped through
+her streets, overridden her people and torn down her walls.
+
+The prophets said God would make a full end of the nation which
+persecuted them; but he would not make a full end of them, he would
+preserve and multiply them.
+
+The promises have been kept.
+
+Rome has become a past tense. With thoughtful steps we pause amid
+her ruins, painfully locate the palace of her kings, the arenas of
+her pleasure, the abodes of her vice; on fallen column or broken
+tablet, we read the story of her past victories, her mighty
+conquests, and standing beneath a crumbling triumphal arch, gaze on
+the sculptured figures of Jewish captives who once followed in an
+emperor's triumphal train, more enduring to-day with their stony
+faces than the ruined city which lies prostrate at their feet; for
+while Rome has passed away, the Jew still lives, he has been
+preserved and has multiplied. The Jews to-day number twelve millions
+of people; and these represent but two tribes out of the twelve; so
+that the two are four times as numerous as the whole nation when it
+came out of Egypt under Moses. Their vitality is phenomenal--it is
+miraculous--their multiplication is against all the laws and
+precedents of history. Persecution and trial have but increased
+their fecundity. Like the burning bush ever burning but never
+consumed, they continue to exist; and when you draw nigh and
+consider their strange story, out of the midst, as of old out of the
+bush, the voice of him who is the "I am, that I am" is heard saying
+--"These are my disobedient but covenant people, whom I have sworn
+shall be to me as the 'apple of mine eye'"; saying, "Whosoever
+toucheth them toucheth me."
+
+It was foretold that in the closing hours of this age and as a
+prelude to their final restoration, they should bud and blossom and
+fill the face of the whole world with fruit.
+
+If to-day you seek a representative person in every department of
+human genius and achievement, you will find that representative in a
+Jew.
+
+The Bible testifies, and testified it centuries ago, that in the
+closing hours of this age, the Jews should turn their faces towards
+Palestine and ask (or plead) their way to Zion.
+
+The prophecy has been, and is being, fulfilled to the letter. The
+faces of thousands of Jews are being turned towards Palestine;
+thousands of Jews are asking how is it possible to return to Zion.
+Zionism has passed from the realm of dreams to the solid ground of
+fact. Everywhere over the earth societies are formed among the Jews
+to emphasize the return to Zion and the setting up of the Jewish
+State.
+
+It was further foretold that many should return thither in radical
+unbelief and open materialism; that at the entering in of the gates
+of Jerusalem land should be bought and sold and speculation become
+rife.
+
+To-day there are more Jews in Palestine than at any time since the
+return from Babylon. Land is bought and sold at the gates of the
+city, and speculation in real estate values is running high. There
+is the hum of expectation in the sacred city. Palestine is being
+colonized by Jews. The Turkish government has taken off the ban, the
+Jew is owned as a citizen and may become a representative in its
+administration. The deserted cities are being occupied. Millions of
+Mulberry trees are being planted, the desert and the waste places
+cultivated. The lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep are heard
+once more. In Jerusalem, the wailing place of the Jews is more
+crowded than ever. The penitential psalms are recited, tears are
+shed and the cry goes up with keener lamentation that the city,
+beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, has become the
+prey of the Gentiles; that the walls are broken down, the holy
+places laid waste, "our holy and beautiful house," they cry, "where
+our fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire: and all our
+pleasant things are laid waste. Wilt thou refrain thyself for these
+things, O Lord? Wilt thou hold thy peace, and afflict us very sore?"
+And the prayer ascends with ever-increasing supplication that
+Jehovah will again make bare his arm in the sight of the Gentiles,
+build up the place of the holy assemblies, beautify Jerusalem and
+establish his people. Synagogues are built within the shadow of the
+sacred rock, the one-time threshing floor of Ornan, which David
+bought and whereon the holy temple stood. The latter as well as the
+former rains are falling. Everywhere it is evident that the land is
+reviving, and the thought of Judah as a kingdom and power among
+nations, finding utterance on the lips--both of Gentile and Jew.
+
+And all this activity and Zionward movement taking place with the
+Jew in a condition of spiritual blindness, unbelief and godless
+materialism--as foretold. The very leaders of Zionism (some of them)
+the most outspoken in their repudiation of our Lord Jesus Christ as
+Messiah of Israel.
+
+The Bible foretold that the Jews as a people would never receive the
+Gospel: "As concerning the gospel they are enemies for your sakes"
+(the Gentiles). On the other hand, it was announced that the
+Gentiles, who despise the Jews, should receive the Gospel, accept a
+rejected and crucified Jew as Israel's king, and own and acknowledge
+him as the redeemer and saviour provided for themselves.
+
+This prophecy has been fulfilled.
+
+For nineteen hundred years the Jew--as a Jew--has steadily rejected
+a crucified Christ. Here and there an individual, paying the penalty
+of scorn and contumely from his own people, has believed the Gospel
+and owned the crucified and despised man of Nazareth as his very
+Lord and God. He has done so according to that election of grace
+which the Bible foretells (an elect remnant is seen through all the
+ages, under one dispensation or another, responding to the call of
+God--like the seven thousand who would not bow the knee to Baal; and
+belonging to that election of grace the believing Jew stands out
+marked and sealed of God) but the Jew as a nation with unbroken
+solidarity refuses to-day the only Jew who can establish him in the
+land of his fathers and fulfil the covenant promises.
+
+Equally fulfilled is the other side of the prophecy.
+
+The Gentiles, who, racially considered, despise the Jew and
+everything of the Jew, to-day own and accept this rejected and
+crucified Jew of Calvary, not only as Israel's Messiah and king, but
+as the redeemer and saviour provided of God for Gentiles; so that
+the Gentile world now worships and adores him as very God, holding
+up the cross of his shame and death as the symbol of highest honor
+and most radiant glory.
+
+The Bible has predicted the final characteristics of the present age
+in terms precise and clear.
+
+By type, figure and direct prophecy it announces that the last
+_form_ of government among the nations just previous to the Coming
+of our Lord Jesus Christ will be _democracy_--the rule of the
+people: "The government of the people, by the people, and for the
+people."
+
+That prophecy practically has been fulfilled.
+
+Democracy is, nearly, the universal mode of government. England in
+some respects is more democratic than the United States. France,
+Portugal and Switzerland are republics. Spain, Italy and Greece are
+constitutional monarchies; that is to say, the people are recognized
+as the ultimate authority. The Northern nations, Norway, Sweden,
+Denmark, Holland and Belgium, are liberal kingdoms. The monarchy is
+simply a fashion--the people are the rulers. Germany is a military
+nation. The Kaiser, speaking at times as the war lord, gives the
+impression that he is absolute emperor. He is far from it. The
+socialists count their votes by millions, and while the German
+people accept the empire, they do so because it is the most
+satisfactory agent for their business and prosperity. The German
+people behind the throne are the absolute power; and the voice of
+democracy makes no more radical utterance and demand than in the
+German _kaiserreich_. Recently, in a public interview, the Kaiser is
+reported to have said, he expected his son to be the last emperor of
+Germany, as within fifty years the whole world would become
+democratic. Austria is still more or less under the influence of
+Caesarism, but beneath the surface, the various peoples and
+nationalities constituting that empire are restless, feverish, and
+full of democratic ideas. Turkey has been shaken by a revolt of "The
+Young Turks," and the demand for more popular government. Japan has
+broken loose from the customs and traditions of centuries--her flag
+is the symbol of the rising sun, and indicates that she is seeking
+to take her place in the new dawn of popular sovereignty. China, the
+oldest civilization and the mightiest population, has become a
+republic, her young men returning from the universities of Europe
+and America having sown broadcast the seed of democracy and the
+claim of the people. Russia, alone, remains absolute in name, but
+the absolute has been shattered even there--it is supported only by
+bayonets and drawn swords. Every now and then a sullen sound is
+heard, dying away to be renewed in deeper tones; it is the voice of
+the people, in spite of the knout, the prison and Siberian exile,
+calling for what they claim to be their "rights."
+
+Everywhere the evidence is manifest that the prophecy of Daniel
+announcing the rise of the "_clay_" (Daniel's symbol of the people)
+and the warning of Isaiah that "the nations should rush like the
+rushing of many waters," and "make a noise like the noise of the
+seas," are being fulfilled.
+
+After "Clay," or Democracy, there remains only anarchy, or power in
+the hands of an absolute ruler. That absolute, world-wide ruler is
+declared by all the prophets to be the Son of God, and his kingdom
+is symbolized by a _stone_--a stone is the very opposite of clay.
+
+THE CLAY IS HERE!
+
+Centuries ago the Bible declared that in the closing hours of this
+age the whole world would be under arms, preparing for a gigantic
+and final war; that each nation would turn itself into a vast army,
+and that the whole earth would become a military camp and field of
+manoeuvre.
+
+This prophecy is being fulfilled.
+
+A universal preparation for war is going on with maddening haste.
+Nations are seeking to outdo each other in their colossal
+preparation for the approaching strife. Armies are no longer mere
+levies or hired cohorts, every man in the nation capable of bearing
+arms or in any wise doing military duty is enrolled, and must take
+his place as a soldier. During the summer immense armies move out of
+their barracks and play seriously the game of war. Each nation has
+its field manoeuvres and theme of attack and defence. On every side
+is heard the tramp of marching feet, the sound of bugle call, the
+rumble of artillery, the sharp word of command.
+
+Nations are vying with each other in the endeavor to cover the sea
+with the swiftest and most powerful battleships. Millions are being
+put into guns and ammunition. The money of the people is being
+poured out like water to obtain war material. Forges and foundries
+are working to turn out the most destructive implements. The
+arsenals are being gorged with cannon, with shot and shell. Enormous
+sums of money in gold are stored away in impregnable fortresses
+that, as the sinew of war, it may be ready to respond at a moment's
+notice. Never before in the history of the world has there been such
+a spectacle.
+
+On land and sea men are silently, ceaselessly preparing for the
+irrepressible and impending conflict. Each nation feels its
+existence is at stake; not a thinking statesman who does not feel
+assured that, sooner or later, the clash will come. All feel it will
+be fierce, titanic, fateful and final.
+
+The Bible foretold the great apostasy as manifested in the Roman
+Catholic Church, the rise of Protestantism, its ultimate breakdown
+in rationalism and open infidelity (that condition of which it
+should be said, "they will not endure sound doctrine"). It foretold
+the rising again of Romanism into the place of power and authority
+(as we see it to-day in the United States, where it holds the
+balance of political power and is fast becoming a social triumph).
+
+Who would have had the hardihood to prophesy in the hour when
+Protestantism was delivering its terrible blows against Romanism,
+overturning the tables of the priests, who sold their infamous wares
+of papal indulgences, breaking idols and images in the churches, and
+driving the church of the priesthood, the mass and auricular
+confession swiftly downwards to the waters of the Mediterranean and,
+while it was repudiating this apostate church (which set up saints
+and images in the place of the Son of God, exalted works of merit
+instead of the cleansing power of the blood) continually cried aloud
+the glorious doctrine of justification by faith, and whose supreme
+watchword was--"The Bible and nothing but the Bible"; who, under
+such conditions as these, would have had the courage to proclaim
+that in the closing hours of this age, this aggressive and biblical
+Protestantism should break up by self-division, become fragmentary,
+its leading thinkers and teachers repudiating the Bible as the
+infallible Word of God? Who would have dared to say that Rome would
+come back, ascend into the place of authority, sit upon the throne
+of the world's respect and receive its honors? Who would have said
+that this church which has set itself up above the Bible, claimed
+the right to change times and seasons in defiance of a "thus saith
+the Lord," and has burned men at the stake for their love and
+devotion to this very Bible, should, at the last, by reason of the
+infidelity of Protestantism, its recognition of divorce and its
+indifference to a "thus saith the Lord," come forth as the defender
+of the Bible, the champion of the home and the guardian of the
+sacredness of marriage, concentrating all its thunders against the
+shame and indecency of divorce?
+
+Yet these prophecies are written on page after page of this book,
+and their complete and amazing fulfilment looks us in the face.
+
+What a picture is painted for us in the words that follow:
+
+"This know, also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.
+For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters,
+proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
+without natural affection, truce breakers, false accusers,
+incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors,
+heady, high minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God,
+having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof."
+
+"The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine: but
+after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having
+itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth,
+and shall be turned to fables."
+
+It is a picture which finds its counterpart in the Protestantism of
+to-day--a Protestantism full of worldliness, having a form of
+godliness, a great religious profession, but denying its only power
+(the Holy Ghost), repudiating doctrine and listening to every fable
+of rationalistic philosophy sooner than to the truth of God.
+
+In the letter to the church at Thyatira it is written:
+
+"That woman Jezebel which calleth herself a prophetess (a teacher)
+to teach and seduce my servants to commit fornication (fornication
+in the book of Revelation signifies idolatry--image worship and,
+also, union with the principles and ways of the world) and to eat
+things sacrificed unto idols."
+
+Jezebel was the Pagan wife of Ahab, king of Israel. Jezebel stands
+for the union of Paganism and Judaism. But Jezebel here represents a
+professed church of Christ. In Jezebel, therefore, you have a
+professed church of Christ in which there is a combination of
+Paganism and Judaism. This symbolic Jezebel teaches the servants of
+Christ to commit fornication--that is, not only identification with
+the world, but idolatry (image worship).
+
+In its full detail, then, we have a professed church of Christ in
+which may be found a mixture of Paganism and Judaism. A church where
+the professed followers of Christ are taught to worship by means of
+images.
+
+Could you find a better, more accurate delineation of the apostate
+Church of Rome--a Church which borrows the priesthood of Judaism and
+the idolatry and image worship of Paganism?
+
+In this book of the Revelation there is still another picture.
+
+In the seventeenth chapter a woman is seen seated upon a scarlet
+colored beast. She is arrayed in purple and scarlet. She is decked
+with precious stones and pearls, and in her hand holds a golden cup
+full of the abomination and filthiness of her fornication
+(idolatry). She is seen to be drunken with the blood of the martyrs
+of Jesus. The woman is, also, said to be seated on seven mountains
+and is, finally, spoken of as that great city which rules over the
+kings (nations) of the earth.
+
+The woman is called "MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF
+HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH."
+
+In the twenty-fifth chapter of the book, the BRIDE OF THE LAMB, the
+true church of Christ, is symbolized by a city--THE NEW JERUSALEM.
+Babylon and Jerusalem stand always opposed to each other. Babylon is
+the centre of Satanic power and testimony--its name signifies
+mixture, confusion. Jerusalem is the centre of God's dealings and
+testimony--it signifies peace and righteousness. If, therefore, the
+city of New Jerusalem is a symbol of the true church of Christ and
+the church of Christ is called a "mystery," then this woman called
+Babylon, said to be a City and also called a "mystery," is a symbol
+of the _false_ church of Christ; and, being a harlot, and the mother
+of harlots, or churches like herself (and thus the _Mother Church_),
+and harlot signifying fornication, and fornication, idolatry--image
+worship--then a professed Church of Christ, which teaches and
+practises image worship.
+
+The great city ruling over the kings of the earth in John's day and
+situated on seven mountains, or "mounts," is ROME; as the city
+represents the woman Babylon who is the symbol of the false Church
+of Christ, then you have a false church of Christ seated (and
+remember, the word is "_seated_") in Rome. A Church seated in Rome
+is a _Roman Church_; and as the city rules over the earth, over the
+world; and a world-wide rule is a universal rule; and the word for
+universal, worldwide, is, also, "catholic," you have a catholic
+church; and, _seated_ in Rome (Rome its capital centre), THE ROMAN
+CATHOLIC CHURCH.
+
+This Church is said to be drunken with the blood of the martyrs of
+Jesus; and the pages of history glued together with the blood of
+these same martyrs, and the burning, blistering record of the "Holy
+Inquisition," affirm that the astounding picture is true in all its
+crimson and scarlet details.
+
+But the striking feature in the picture, and the one that is first
+presented to us, is that the woman (the Church) is carried by a
+beast. This beast is a symbol of government and teaches that the
+Church "rules" over the governments of the world, is sustained by
+the State, has attained to "temporal power." As the picture occurs
+in the _third division_ of the book, and that division relates to
+things still future, we have here a distinct prophecy that this
+Apostate Roman Church shall again attain to temporal power, become a
+State Church, supported and carried officially by the nations of the
+earth.
+
+The exactitude with which the picture has been painted, and that,
+too, at a time when Rome had not yet come into the place of full
+-blown apostasy and power; the startling way in which, step by step,
+the prophetic outlines have been fulfilled even in our day, are
+tremendously suggestive concerning the possibility of its complete
+and final fulfilment; and bid us ask most earnestly--whence came the
+mental eyesight which enabled the writer of the book to sketch out
+for us centuries ahead of time, that which the page of after history
+reveals to us as facts?
+
+The social, financial, governmental, religious and moral condition
+of the present time have been portrayed in the book we call the
+Bible. The coming of a special class called "rich" men as a
+particular characteristic of this age, the revolt of labor, and its
+cry against the wrongs of capital, were all set forth in the epistle
+of James, nigh two thousand years ago, with an accuracy that is not
+to be explained on natural grounds. So absolutely unnatural is it,
+that it is perfectly safe to say--these things are not such as a man
+_could_ write if he _would_.
+
+That the book is not to be explained on natural grounds is evident
+from the fact that it is not a CONSTRUCTION, but a GROWTH; not an
+ORGANIZATION, but an ORGANISM, growing up from Genesis to Revelation
+like a tree from root through trunk and branch to leaf and fruit.
+
+Each book of the Bible will be found on examination to stand related
+organically to one another; and that each occupies its necessary and
+sequential order.
+
+In _Genesis_, you have the beginning of things, the germ and outline
+of everything afterwards revealed.
+
+_Exodus_ gives the redemption by blood of a people foreseen and
+covenanted in Genesis, their deliverance by the hand of God from the
+power of the king and the dangers of the land.
+
+In _Leviticus_, the redeemed people draw nigh to God by virtue of
+the blood of sacrifice and find access to the presence of God
+through the intercession of a priest.
+
+In _Numbers_, this blood-redeemed people are seen on their journey
+to the better land; we read of their trials, their temptations,
+their unbelief, their backslidings and continual moral failure by
+the way, and the never-failing grace and love of a covenant-keeping
+God who leads them in a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night.
+
+In _Deuteronomy_, the people have the way over which they have come,
+and the dealings of God, rehearsed to them, and are instructed and
+prepared for the land whither they go.
+
+In _Joshua_, the _second_ generation (which stands always for
+regeneration) gets into the promised land.
+
+_Judges_ tells how, after being blessed with all covenant blessings
+in the covenant land, the people fell into a state where every man
+did that which was right "in his own eyes."
+
+_Ruth_, the Gentile woman, becomes the bride of a Hebrew Lord; and
+the covenant promise of God concerning Israel goes straightway down
+from a Gentile mother and a Hebrew father towards the throne which
+is set up in David and owned of God as the throne of Christ.
+
+The books of _Samuel, Kings_ and _Chronicles_, take up the story of
+the kingdom, and the Old Testament leads us on through symbol,
+figure and open prophecy, to a Coming Messiah and a glorious kingdom
+till, when we reach the last verse in Malachi, we lean across four
+centuries of prophetic silence, waiting to greet that promised
+Christ who shall be born in Bethlehem; and who is to be called the
+Son of the Highest; who is to sit on the throne of his father David,
+"to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice,
+from henceforth even forever."
+
+We listen for the angelic song and the salutation to men of good
+will; and we are expecting, later on, to see Zion's king riding up
+the slopes to the Holy City and all the people coming forth to cry,
+"Hosanna to the Son of David," and "Blessed be he that cometh in the
+name of the Lord."
+
+When you open the New Testament you find four books--Matthew, Mark,
+Luke and John.
+
+The order of these books is fixed--it cannot be changed.
+
+If _Mark_ be substituted for _Matthew_, then the New Testament
+begins without an account of the birth or genealogy of our Lord
+Jesus Christ; no intimation is given that he is born king of the
+Jews, and is the expected Messiah.
+
+If _Luke_ be given the place of _Matthew_, little mention will be
+found of the Jewish kingdom of heaven; and our Lord will be seen
+with a leaning towards the Gentiles.
+
+If the Gospel of _John_ begin the New Testament instead of
+_Matthew_, then we shall read of him who is Son of God rather than
+King of the Jews, and the expectation raised by Malachi will seem
+unfulfilled.
+
+But the moment the order named is followed all is perfect, all is
+harmony.
+
+_Matthew_ presents our Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of _Abraham_ and
+Son of _David_; heir of the covenant _land_, and the covenant
+_throne_, and at once links the New Testament with the Old.
+
+_Mark_ announces that this King of the Jews came into the world to
+be the _Servant_ of God and a blessing in his service to men.
+
+_Luke_, although he announces our Lord Jesus Christ as King, sets
+him forth pre-eminently as _The Man_, going among men, eating and
+drinking with them, and speaking in such plain and simple terms that
+the "common people heard him gladly."
+
+In _John_, this Jewish King, this Servant of God and men, this Man
+among men, who received sinners and ate with them, is revealed as
+the Mighty God, the eternal _Word_, the Holy One of Israel, who came
+down to visit his people, was made flesh and "tabernacled" among
+them, as of old he dwelt in the tabernacle of the wilderness in the
+Shekinal glory above the Mercy Seat and between the outstretched
+wings of the golden Cherubim.
+
+Take away the book of _Acts_, and nothing can be known of the origin
+of the church and its apostolic history. Without the book of Acts
+the epistles are wholly unintelligible when they refer to the
+Church.
+
+Do without the _Second_ epistle to the _Corinthians_, and you have
+no revelation of the state of the Christian dead either as to their
+location or condition.
+
+Without the _Second_ epistle to the _Thessalonians_ you cannot fix
+the identity of the Antichrist.
+
+Leave out the epistle to the _Hebrews_ and there is no key to
+_Leviticus_.
+
+Without the book of _Daniel_ it is impossible fully to understand
+the book of _Revelation_.
+
+No matter at what period the book of _Revelation_ may have been
+written, it can have but one place in the Bible, and that the last.
+It must have this place because it shows us the foreview of Genesis
+fulfilled: the seed of the woman has bruised the serpent's head,
+Satan has been bound and Paradise is regained.
+
+The Old and New Testaments stand related to each other as the two
+halves of a perfect whole. In the Old Testament the New is
+_concealed_; in the New Testament the Old is _revealed_.
+
+_Genesis_ finds its key in the first chapter of _John's_ Gospel, and
+identifies the creator of heaven and earth with him who was made
+flesh and dwelt among us as the Son of God.
+
+_Exodus_ is explained by the _First_ epistle to the _Corinthians_,
+in which we learn that "Christ" is the "Passover sacrificed for us."
+
+_Leviticus_ is expounded by the epistle to the _Hebrews_.
+
+_Numbers_ has its correspondence in the book of _Acts_.
+
+In Numbers you have the experience of the Children of Israel in
+their journey through the wilderness. In Acts we get the story of
+the Church in its pilgrimage through the world.
+
+_Deuteronomy_ is to be read with _Colossians_.
+
+In Deuteronomy the people of Israel are being prepared for an
+earthly inheritance. In Colossians the Church is being prepared for
+a heavenly inheritance.
+
+_Joshua_ stands over against _Ephesians_.
+
+In Joshua the redeemed people have to fight with flesh and blood in
+order to possess the covenant land. In Ephesians "we wrestle not
+against flesh and blood, but against wicked spirits in the heavenly
+places."
+
+_Judges_ may be understood by reading the _first_ chapter of the
+_first_ epistle, and the _twelfth_ chapter of the _second_ epistle
+to the _Corinthians_.
+
+The book of _Ruth_ is illuminated by the _third_ and _fifth_
+chapters of the _Ephesians_.
+
+In Ruth you have the Gentile bride of a Hebrew Lord, the kinsman,
+redeemer and advocate; who presents his bride to himself in the gate
+before all the assembled judges.
+
+In Ephesians, the Gentile Bride is seen to be the Church, the
+kinsman, redeemer and advocate, our Lord Jesus Christ, who, having
+loved the Church and given himself for it, will "present it to
+himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such
+thing."
+
+The books of _Samuel_, _Kings_ and _Chronicles_, may be read with
+the four _Gospels_ and the book of _Revelation_.
+
+In Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, you have the story of David, the
+anointed king, man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, triumphant
+warrior, exalted king--Solomon, prince of peace, ruling over the
+established kingdom and the queen of Sheba coming from the uttermost
+parts of the earth to own and celebrate his glory.
+
+In the Gospels we get the story of our Lord Jesus Christ as anointed
+king and man of sorrows. In Revelation he is seen coming forth at
+the head of the armies of heaven, a mighty warrior, a triumphant
+king and, at the last, as Prince of Peace ruling in splendor over
+his established kingdom; while the Gentiles, coming from the
+uttermost parts of the earth to Jerusalem, bow the knee before him
+and acknowledge his glory.
+
+_Ezra_ may be read with the latter half of the _second_ chapter of
+the _Ephesians_.
+
+In Ezra you have the building of the material temple. In Ephesus the
+building of the spiritual temple.
+
+_Nehemiah_ can be read with the twenty-first chapter of the
+_Revelation_.
+
+Nehemiah gives us Jerusalem below. Revelation, Jerusalem above.
+
+In the book of _Esther_ the name of God is not once mentioned; but
+it shows us the unseen God acting in his secret providence to
+deliver his covenant people, the Jews, from the hand of the Gentile
+oppressor, and setting them in the place of authority and power over
+the Gentiles.
+
+The _eleventh_ chapter of the _Romans_ explains the book of Esther.
+
+In the eleventh chapter Paul shows that God has not forgotten the
+people whom he foreknew. The nation as such has been set aside. It
+is now, as Hosea says, _Lo Ammi_, _"not my people,"_ not the people
+of God.
+
+An election according to grace is going on among the Jews. These are
+being called into the Church and will form a part of the Body and
+Bride. The Gentiles have come dispensationally into the place of
+Israel, and God is sending his Gospel among them--calling out those
+whom he has foreseen and known among the Gentiles. The nation as
+such would seem to be cast aside. The people are walking in darkness
+and the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their true God and only
+Saviour, is not owned among them; but while the Lord is thus denied
+by them, he has not forgotten them. His providences are round about
+them in their preservation and multiplication, and in his judgment
+of the nations which persecute them. Their present condition
+nationally is temporary. Paul warns the Gentiles that the Jews have
+been cut off and set aside because of unbelief. The Gentiles have
+been brought in, and stand alone by faith. It is well for them not
+to be "high-minded," but "to fear"; for so surely as God spared not
+the nation and set it aside because of unbelief, just so surely will
+he deal with the Gentiles if the Gentiles fall into unbelief.
+
+The Gentiles must not be wise in their own conceits. The blindness
+and the setting aside of Israel will last only till the "fulness of
+the Gentiles be come in," that is, till the election among them is
+complete; then the Lord will take up Israel as a nation again, and
+precisely as he delivered Mordecai and the Jews of Esther's and
+Ahasuerus' time and made them to be accepted and feared, so, it is
+written, the Lord himself will come forth in behalf of his ancient
+people. "There shall come out of (unto) Sion the Deliverer," and,
+"so all Israel shall be saved."
+
+The book of Esther read in the light of the eleventh chapter of the
+Romans is illuminating as to the unchanging faithfulness of God and
+his unceasing love for the nation and people of his choice.
+
+Thus book after book of the Bible may be studied; and the more they
+are examined and studied, the more manifest will be the intimate
+relation and marvellous correspondence between the Old and the New
+Testaments.
+
+When you realize the fact that these Old and New Testament books, so
+remarkably related and inter-explanatory of each other, have been
+written by different authors, without possibility of collusion or
+agreed plan; that each part fits into the other; that it cannot have
+one book less or one book more; that to take from it would destroy
+the completeness, to add would mar the harmony; that it is perfect
+in itself, having the key of each book hung up at the entrance; that
+it gives but never borrows light; that it cannot be explained or
+interpreted outside of itself; that to him who diligently searches
+it, it will reveal itself and make him wise both for this world and
+for that which is to come; when all these facts are faced, it ought
+to be evident that in the Bible we have a living thing and not a
+mere handiwork wrought by man; that man can no more claim to be the
+actual author of it than of the mountains that are round about
+Jerusalem or the heavens that are high above them.
+
+The unity of a book demands unity of objective.
+
+This book has a great objective--a supreme theme.
+
+That theme is not Israel--although two-thirds of the book considered
+as a whole are taken up with the history of that people. The great
+theme is not the Church of Christ--although the Church in this age
+is the supreme thing in the sight of God. The one great theme, the
+one immense objective of this book towards which it moves through
+history and prophecy, through figure and symbol, through self
+-sustained prose and musical song--the one great objective is--
+
+OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST.
+
+It seeks to present him in his person, his work, his present office
+and coming glories.
+
+It sets him before us as,
+
+The Child born.
+
+The Son given.
+
+The Counsellor.
+
+The Mighty God.
+
+The Prince of Peace.
+
+The Everlasting Father.
+
+The Lily of the valleys.
+
+The Rose of Sharon.
+
+The Branch.
+
+The Lord our Righteousness.
+
+The Lord's Fellow.
+
+The Man of God's Right hand.
+
+He whose Goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.
+
+The Burnt Offering.
+
+The Meat Offering.
+
+The Peace Offering.
+
+The Sin Offering.
+
+The Trespass Offering.
+
+The Sum of God's Thoughts.
+
+The Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief.
+
+Son of Abraham.
+
+Son of David.
+
+Son of Mary.
+
+Son of Man.
+
+God the Son.
+
+King of the Jews.
+
+King of Israel.
+
+King of Kings.
+
+Lord of Lords.
+
+God the Creator.
+
+God manifest in the flesh.
+
+The Second Man.
+
+The Last Adam.
+
+The First and the Last.
+
+The Beginning and the Ending.
+
+The Way, the Truth, the Life.
+
+The Light of the world.
+
+The Bread of life.
+
+The Good Shepherd, who lays down his life for the sheep.
+
+The Great Shepherd who came again from the dead.
+
+The Chief Shepherd, who shall appear with his flock in glory.
+
+The Sin-bearer.
+
+The Rock.
+
+Our Great God and Saviour Jesus Christ.
+
+He who is.
+
+He who was.
+
+He who is to come.
+
+He who before Abraham was, is, by his own announcement, the "I am."
+
+The Almighty.
+
+THIS SAME JESUS.
+
+And to these might be added more than five hundred other names and
+titles, together with their cognates, to say nothing of the various
+characteristics assigned him, the things predicated of him, until it
+is found that he is the very warp and woof of the book.
+
+To proclaim him, exalt him, make him known, set him forth in his
+many roles, his functions, his offices and his covenant glories,
+prophets recite their visions, a Psalmist sings his rarest songs,
+and apostles unfold their matchless doctrines.
+
+When you contemplate the fact of this one objective; this tremendous
+unity of intention in the book, you have an overwhelming
+demonstration of the unity of its inspiration. Whether the
+inspiration be a true or a false one, it is beyond all question one
+inspiration. A book whose construction extends over centuries,
+written by men separated by time and distance from each other, with
+no possibility of personal or mental relation to each other--all
+writing to one objective--and that to set forth the Christ of God in
+his varied relations--a book with such a unity of purpose
+demonstrates in the most self-evident fashion that the writers were
+moved by a common impulse and, therefore, a common inspiration.
+
+And this unity of objective and inspiration coordinates with the
+wonderful fact that the book has but ONE KEY.
+
+The key which can alone open this book and make every line
+intelligible from Genesis to Revelation is Our Lord Jesus Christ.
+
+Take Christ out of the Bible and it is a harp without a player, a
+song without a singer, a palace with all the doors locked, a
+labyrinth with no Ariadne thread to guide.
+
+Put Christ into the Bible, and the harp strings will be smitten as
+with a master's hand.
+
+Put Christ into the Bible, and the voice of song is heard as when a
+lark from the midst of dew-wet grasses sings, as it soars aloft to
+greet the coming dawn.
+
+Put Christ into the Bible, and all the doors of the palace are swung
+open and you may pass from room to room, down all the ivory
+galleries of the King, beholding portrait and landscape, vista of
+beauty and heaped-up treasures of truth, of infinite love and royal
+grace.
+
+Put Christ into the Bible, and you will have a scarlet thread--the
+crimson of the blood--that will lead you through all the winding
+ways of redemption and glory.
+
+Put Christ into Genesis, into the verses of the first chapter, and
+it will chime like silver bells in harmony with the wondrous notes
+in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, and tell you that he who
+created the heavens and the earth is he who in the beginning was the
+eternal Word, the voice of the infinite silence, and who, creating
+for himself a human nature, and clad in mortal flesh, walked on
+earth among the sons of men as Jesus of Nazareth.
+
+Put Christ into the twenty-second, the twenty-third and the twenty
+-fourth chapters of Genesis, and you will have placed before you in
+perfect type the birth of Christ, the sacrifice, the resurrection on
+the morning of the third day, the setting aside of the Jewish nation
+as the first wife, the coming of the Holy Spirit in the name of the
+Father and the Son to find a Bride for the Son, the calling out of
+the church, the endowment of the church with the gifts sent from the
+Father in the name of the Son, the pilgrimage of the church under
+the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the Second Coming of Christ, the
+Rapture and meeting of Christ and the church in the "field" of the
+air, and the marriage of the Son.
+
+Put Christ into the dryest and dullest page of the book of Kings and
+Chronicles, and it will bloom with light and glory; and if you watch
+in faith, you will see the King's chariot go by, and catch a vision
+of the King himself in his beauty.
+
+Put Christ into the Tabernacle, and it will cast its treasures like
+a king's largess at your feet.
+
+You will see the brazen altar to be the cross, the brazen laver, the
+bath of regeneration, even the Word of God. In the Holy Place the
+table of shew bread will speak of him who once said, "I am the bread
+of life." The golden candlestick will remind you that he said: "I am
+the light of the world." The golden altar and the priest with his
+swinging censer of burning incense standing thereat will proclaim
+him as the great high priest. The beautiful veil of fine linen
+embroidered with figures of the cherubim in blue, purple and scarlet
+color is (according to a direct Scripture) the symbol of his flesh,
+his mortal humanity while on earth. Every board and bar, every cord
+and pin, the coverings, the curtains, the blue, the purple and the
+scarlet color, the golden vessels as well as the furniture, each and
+all, proclaim him, illustrate and illuminate him in his person, his
+work, his present office and coming glories.
+
+All these are analogies, types, pictures, are so related to Christ
+that he alone explains them; the explanation is filled with such
+perfection of harmony in every detail, the relation between them and
+our Lord Jesus Christ as the Antitype is so strikingly self-evident,
+that any discussion of it would be useless.
+
+When you find a key and lock which fit each other, you conclude they
+were intended for each other.
+
+In the light of facts already cited, what other conclusion can be
+drawn than that Christ and the Bible were intended for each other?
+
+And when you see this Bible coming together part by part,
+foretelling the Christ and explained alone by him, what sane
+conclusion is possible other than the book which is opened and
+explained by him who is not only the Christ but the Personal Word of
+God, _must be_, and _is_, THE WRITTEN WORD OF GOD!
+
+Let your mind dwell for a moment on the style of the book.
+
+It is so simple that a child may understand it; so profound, that
+the mightiest intellect cannot go beyond its depths. It is so
+essentially rich that it turns every language into which it is
+translated into a classic. At one moment it is plain narration; at
+another, it is all drama and tragedy, in which cataclysmic climax
+crashes against climax.
+
+It records the birth of a babe, the flight of an angel, the death of
+a king, the overthrow of an empire or the fall of a sparrow. It
+notes the hyssop that groweth out of the wall and speaks of the
+cedars of Lebanon. It shows us so pastoral a thing as a man sitting
+at his tent door in the cool of the day, and then paints for us a
+city in heaven with jasper walls, with golden streets, and where
+each several gate that leadeth into the city is one vast and shining
+pearl.
+
+It is full of outlines--outlines as large and bare as mountain
+peaks, and then it is crowded with details as minute as the sands of
+the sea. There are times when clouds and darkness float across its
+pages and we hear from within like unto the voice of him who
+inhabiteth eternity; in another moment the lines blaze with light,
+the revelation they give is high noon--and all the shadows are under
+the feet.
+
+It is terrible in its analysis and cold and emotionless in the hard
+impact of its synthesis. It describes moments of passion in
+passionless words, and states infinite conclusions without the hint
+of an emphasis. It shows us a man in hell (hades) and, although it
+describes sufferings more awful than mortal flesh can know, causing
+the soul to shudder at the simple reading of it, it takes on no
+quickened pulse, no feverish rush of added speech.
+
+In a few colorless lines it recounts the creation of the heavens and
+the earth. In language utterly barren of excitement it describes the
+most exciting and soul-moving event that can occupy the imagination
+--that moment when the heavens shall be on fire, the elements melted
+with fervent heat, the earth and the works therein burned up, and a
+new heaven and a new earth brought into view.
+
+It is a book of prose and yet a book of sublimest poetry.
+
+The book of Job is a poem by the side of which the hexameters of
+Horace, the drama of Shakespeare, the imagination of Milton, are not
+to be compared.
+
+In all literature the book of Job alone introduces a spirit into the
+scene and reports its speech without utterly breaking down into the
+disaster of the commonplace.
+
+Listen to the account which Eliphaz the Temanite gives. He says:
+
+"In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth
+on men, Fear came upon me, and trembling which made all my bones to
+shake."
+
+Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up;
+It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof; an image
+was before mine eyes; there was silence, and I heard a voice,
+saying, "Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall man be more
+pure than his Maker?"
+
+Here is the threshold of the unseen. Before he sees or hears
+anything, the Temanite has the sense of fear--the fear of something
+more than human. The unknown weighs upon him and presses him down,
+all the life and energy in him are at low ebb--he feels as though
+the tides of life were running out. A spirit passes before his face.
+It is like a breath of scarcely moving air out of the night. The
+hair of his flesh (mark the psychological and physiological fact),
+the hair of his flesh stood up. It was as if a current of
+electricity had passed through him. Then the spirit stands still. It
+is as though this breath of air out of the night were no longer
+moving. He cannot discern any form. There is nothing fixed or stable
+enough for him to perceive. An image is before his eyes. He makes no
+vulgar attempt to describe it--it is indescribable. There is a great
+silence; then, as the margin has it, he heard a still small voice--
+not a loud and jarring voice--but a voice low, soft, still; and yet!
+the utterance of that voice! what immensity of self-conscious power
+what authority and dignity--the dignity of infinite integrity:
+"Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall man be more pure than
+his Maker?"
+
+How the night is full of a sudden law of proportion. Mortal man and
+eternal God. You feel the distance widening and widening between
+them there in the stillness of the night. The justice of man! man!
+the unjust--the law breaker; man, who is of yesterday and is gone
+to-morrow--mortal man, more just than he of whom it is said,
+"Justice and judgment are the habitation of his throne." Fallen man,
+man full of iniquity, shall he be more pure than he who made him; he
+who breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and made him a
+living soul; he whose name is holiness and righteousness and very
+truth? As the question lingers man shrivels and sinks into the dust,
+and the whole night is filled with stillness--with the stillness and
+immensity of the all-pervading and holy God.
+
+Read the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth chapters.
+
+They record the highest reaches of human language, so great that our
+own version cannot dim their splendor. Nothing ever written
+surpasses them, not only in the felicity of expression, but in the
+sense of deity pervading them. Each succeeding verse sustains the
+other and, at the last, you feel that God, very God, indeed, has
+spoken.
+
+The Almighty answers the complaining Job.
+
+He answers him, not out of the midst of a deep, unbroken calm, but
+out of the whirlwind; and yet, from the centre of that mighty vortex
+of unlimited force and energy and power, the voice comes forth with
+the calmness of one who knows himself superior to the whirlwind and
+the storm.
+
+"Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?"
+
+This is the abrupt and sudden question. It is the fitting question
+of him who knoweth the end from the beginning. In the very asking of
+it all the boasted knowledge, the attainment, the self-consciousness
+and vanity of man fade away, and man himself is as nothing--God
+alone remains upon the vision--all knowing--all wise--supreme.
+
+This Bible is a book of history.
+
+It will spend page after page in describing the doings of a
+rebellious king, and then compress the story of twenty-five hundred
+years into a few dozen lines, but will do this in such a way, by
+means of exact symbols, that the twenty-five centuries thus
+compressed will reveal a clearer outline and fuller vista than
+thousands of ordinary volumes could set forth in detail.
+
+Mark the providence that has guarded the book.
+
+Kings and potentates have sought to destroy it. It has been thrown
+into the flames. Volume after volume has been burned. But always,
+and at the critical moment, some copy has been preserved--here in
+the cottage of a devoted peasant at the risk of his life, hidden in
+the crevice of a rock from the inquisitor's search, or cast aside by
+a careless hand and forgotten amid a pile of swept up dust in a
+neglected corner of some impregnable castle; from whence it has come
+forth to be copied by slow and painful, yet loving, toil, passed
+from house to house secretly as a priceless treasure, then printed
+on concealed presses and at last cast forth as living and fruitful
+seed.
+
+Men have denounced it and demonstrated that it is false both in
+history and science; then, unexpectedly, the stroke of a pick or the
+turn of a shovel uncovers some startling witness of its exact truth
+and the excuseless folly of those who deny it.
+
+The fourteenth chapter of Genesis has been set aside by the critics
+as historically worthless. The excavations in Babylon have brought
+to light a tablet with the name of Arioch, the fourth king mentioned
+in that chapter, stamped upon it.
+
+The statement in Exodus that Pharaoh forced the Children of Israel
+while building his treasure cities to make bricks without straw, has
+been treated as a fable. The treasure chambers themselves have been
+found, the rooms divided by brick partitions eight to ten feet
+thick--and great quantities of these bricks _made without straw_.
+
+Luke says that Sergius Paulus was pro-consul of Cyprus. The critics
+denied it and proved thereby the fallibility of the New Testament.
+
+The homely but truth-telling spade, and without consulting the
+critic, dug up some coins in the island of Cyprus itself, and on the
+coins were stamped both the image and the name of Sergius Paulus.
+
+Luke declares that Lysannius was tetrarch of Abilene; and again the
+critics denied it and more than ever discounted Luke as an
+historian.
+
+Renan, the plausible and analytical infidel, read the record carved
+on the stones of Baalbeck, and announced, openly, that Luke is
+correct.
+
+From the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, Tyre and Sidon; from the
+trenches of Tel el Armana; by the key words of the Rosetta stone and
+the black but speaking face of the Moabite stone; from newly
+discovered papyri and parchment, and the mystic page of cracked and
+crumpled palimpsest; from the rocks of earth, the depths of the sea
+and the heights of heaven--and from the latest discoveries of
+science, there arise amazing witnesses, which speak in tones that
+cannot be hushed, with facts that cannot be denied, and bear
+testimony beyond all possibility of dispute to the truth and
+accuracy of the book; so much so, indeed, that such an one as Sir
+John Herschell, the great astronomer, has said: "All human
+discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more
+and more strongly the truths contained in the Sacred Scriptures."
+
+Consider the vitality of the book.
+
+In less than ten years a text-book is out of date, a cyclopedia
+worthless, and a library a cemetery of dead books and dead ideas;
+but this book keeps living right on--keeps abreast of the times, has
+a testimony for every day, and every day borrows its youth afresh as
+from the womb of the morning.
+
+Science has laughed it out of court. Two hundred and fifty years ago
+Voltaire said: "Fifty years from now the world will hear no more of
+the Bible." Self-elected scholarship has pronounced it out of date
+and dead. Again and again its funeral services are held. Kind and
+condescending eulogiums are uttered over its past history and its
+good intent. With considerate hands it is lowered into its grave.
+The _resquiescat in pace_ is solemnly pronounced and lo! before the
+critical mourners have returned to their homes it has risen from the
+dead, passed with surprising speed the funeral coaches, and is
+found--as of yore--in the busy centres of life, thundering against
+evil, revealing the secrets of the heart, offering consolation to
+the sorrowing, hope to the dying, and flashing forth from its
+quivering, vital pages the wonders of coming glory.
+
+While copies of the classics--Virgil, Zenophon, Caesar, Sophocles,
+Pindar and Martial--are to be counted by a few thousands, and are
+cast aside by students as soon as they have graduated, and are
+forgotten in a twelvemonth, this Bible goes on printing every year
+millions of copies in all languages and dialects of earth; so far
+from casting it aside, when once read, men take it up and read it
+again and again, study it through life, dig into it as for hid
+treasure, and make it the pillow on which to lay their dying head.
+
+With each succeeding year the demand for it increases and voices are
+continually crying--give us _The Book_.
+
+It is the supreme book.
+
+It is the book we need when the fire of sin gleams in our eye and
+its poison burns in our veins. It is the book we need when the heart
+is sore, when our soul is troubled, and when peace is no longer a
+guest in our home.
+
+It is the book we need; for from its pages alone do we behold the
+light which shines from a Saviour's empty grave; from its pages
+alone do we receive assurance of the resurrection of the dead, of
+immortality and the life to come; and from its pages alone do we
+hear the tender and welcoming words which seek to greet us and to
+comfort us while we struggle here ofttimes beneath the burden's
+growing weight, those words of heavenly music: "Come unto me all ye
+that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest."
+
+What author on earth would think his book dead and out of date if
+year after year the publication of it taxed the printing presses of
+the world? What author would deem his book out of date when the
+voices of everywhere proclaimed it the book of books, and multitudes
+unnumbered confessed that from its pages alone they found the way of
+life and peace?
+
+Such a book is neither out of date nor dead; and its throbbing
+vitality tells of a life impulse and inspiration that are not of
+man.
+
+And, finally,
+
+This book inspires men for God.
+
+Every year books on morality and essays on conduct are written and
+published. They get as far as a first edition and are never heard of
+again; but this book, which binds all its parts about the person,
+the work, the office and the glories of Christ, changes the life,
+the character, the time and the eternity of men.
+
+Place this book in the midst of the vilest and most abandoned
+community of desperate and devilish men and, sooner or later, you
+will hear a cry coming from the depths of sin and shame, bitter
+cries of repentance and yearnings after God; and by and by that
+community will be transformed, men will no longer be demon filled,
+but possessed with a spirit of truth and love; and God will be found
+to reign and rule in the midst.
+
+Whatever there is of sweetness and truth and righteousness in the
+world to-day; whatever there is that gives hope and comfort on earth
+and holds men back from very madness and despair, is due directly
+and indirectly to this book.
+
+Take up a map and find the lands where sin and vice skulk in the
+darkness; where virtue is honored and purity enthroned; go mark on
+the map the lands where the men are the most manly and the women the
+most womanly, and you will find it in those lands where the Bible is
+exalted, not as the word of man, but, in deed and truth, as the Word
+of God.
+
+Find the men and women who know most of God, who have the deepest
+consciousness of him in the soul, and who walk every day with the
+assurance of his _real presence_--to whom the unseen becomes from
+hour to hour the thing that is alone real--and who live as kings
+above their prostrate passions--and they will be those who make this
+book the supreme authority in their daily lives; who hear it when it
+speaks to them as the very voice of God.
+
+A book which thus inspires men _for_ God is, indeed, a book which,
+by every law of logic, must have been inspired _by_ God.
+
+From the evidence cited two things are apparent:
+
+1. The Bible is not such a book as a man _would_ write if he
+_could_.
+
+2. The Bible is not such a book as a man _could_ write if he
+_would_.
+
+By these conclusions, therefore, the Bible is shown to be _not of
+man_.
+
+As the book is thus shown to be not of man--either by inclination or
+ability; and as from the beginning to the end its object is to
+glorify the unseen God in the revelation of his incarnate Son, then
+this book _is of God_; and being the utterance of his mind and will,
+is his Word; so that the statement of the apostle concerning it is
+justified. It is to be received as he says: "Not as the word of man,
+but as it is in truth, THE WORD OF GOD."
+
+To him who so approaches it--who puts his shoes from off his feet as
+on holy ground, and with the silence of expectant faith listens and
+looks, it will disclose itself, speak to him, and so lay hold of the
+inner recesses of the heart that he shall know he has been face to
+face with God, has had glimpses of the delectable mountains and the
+city foursquare that lies beyond; from henceforth he shall walk, not
+as one in a vain show or in the mixing of darkness and light, but
+where the night shineth as the day; where the road is no longer
+paved with the stumbling stones of doubt, nor the signboards filled
+with a guess, but where the way leadeth on and up--shining more and
+more bright unto the perfect day.
+
+Take up this book, O friend. Do not read it with a hurried glance.
+Let thine eyes rest a while upon some single word, and if thou art
+patient, it will bud and blossom and bloom and grow unto thee as a
+tree of life; and the leaves shall be as medicine for the healing of
+thy hurt. Take it into thy mouth and learn a lesson from the meadow
+kine who chew the tender grasses, and turn them over, and chew them
+again, till they have extracted sweetness and life therefrom. Chew
+the words of this book over and over again (it is impossible to do
+so with any other book), meditate upon the words (to meditate, to
+reflect, are highest functions), mediate upon their meaning--upon
+their direct and cognate meanings; let the thoughts they suggest
+find full and free reaction in thy soul, and from some simple word
+or phrase thou shalt draw the sweetness of divine love, and more and
+more the consciousness that thou hast received into thine innermost
+being very spirit and very life.
+
+Read it on bended knee. Take up the words and breathe on them with
+the warm breath of sincere desire to know their intent, and music
+will come forth as from the fabled horn of old--music that shall
+have in it all the hallelujahs and hosannas of the heavenly host.
+
+If you will take this book to your heart, you will find it bread
+such as kings' ovens never baked, water more crystal than that which
+bursts from mountain springs, wine the like of which was never
+pressed from purple grapes, meat which cattle on a thousand hills
+never furnished, and fruit no man ever gathered in royal gardens--
+the fruit of the Spirit. You will find it a lamp unto your feet and
+a light unto your path, a hammer for breaking the flinty rocks by
+the way, a fire that will burn out the stain of sin, and warm
+benumbed fingers for quickened service in His Name.
+
+Give it the first place in your life. You will want to hear from it
+as the last thing when you go hence. The words of loved ones will be
+sweet in your ear as you leave these mortal shores (if our Lord
+Jesus Christ should not hasten his coming, you must go), but you
+will want to hear its utterance above all the tones, even of those
+you love, speaking the final word of hope and cheer to you.
+
+Be very patient with it. It has great things to say to you--and you
+will not always be fit to hear them. You will not always--at the
+first--be able to understand them; but if you do not understand to
+-day, to-morrow, or other morrows after that, it will speak to you
+and you shall fully know. Perhaps it will wait till the unshed tears
+are in your heart, and the moan the common ear has never heard--then
+it will speak--and the words will fall into the sore place of the
+soul, as though angel lips had touched it; it will wait, perhaps,
+till the storm is high, and your frail craft (life's poor, frail
+craft) is tossed as though it would go down in the whelming waters
+(and the shore so far away), and then it will speak and say, "Peace
+--be still," and in that driven life of yours shall be a great and
+holy calm.
+
+Do not attempt to cross-question it as though you hesitated to
+believe all it said. To accept some parts and reject others will be
+fatal to you. God does not reveal himself to those who doubt him. He
+that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is the
+rewarder of all them that diligently seek him. So must you approach
+this book--with reverence and submissive faith; for this book, O
+friend! is not the word of man, but in very truth--THE WORD OF GOD.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Christ, Christianity and the Bible, by 
+I. M. Haldeman
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