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SERMON

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PORTLAND, MAINE

APRIL 27, 1879,

REV. JOHN H. BARROWS.

PORTLAND, ME.:
STEPHEN BEERY, PRINTEK.
1879.

THE PERFECTION OF THE BIBLE.

A SERMON

PREACHED in the

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PORTLAND, MAINE,

APRIL 27, 1879.

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REV. JOHN H. BARROWS,
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Pastor of the Eliot Congregational Church, Lawrence, Mass.

PORTLAND, ME.:
STEPHEN BERRY, PRINTEK.
1879.

CORRESPONDENCE.

Portland, May 7, 1879.
Rev. John H. Barrows :
Dear Sir : — Having been deeply interested in a discourse, delivered by you
at the Payson Memorial Church, from the text, " The law of the Lord is per
fect," &c, we take the liberty of requesting a copy for publication, believing
its circulation will be productive of great good at the present time.
Very truly yours,
MRS. W. W. THOMAS,
MRS. S. W. LARRABEE,
MRS. GEO. BROCK,
and many others.

Lawrence, Mass., May 20, 1879.
Mrs. W. W. Thomas and others :
Dear Friends: — Your kind note is received. I send you herewith the dis
course which I had the pleasure of delivering in Portland. It is one of a
series of sermons on the Bible which I have recently preached to my own
people with no thought of publication. Separated from connection with
what was said in preparation for it, this sermon may justly be considered in
complete. But I send it to you, in the prayerful hope that even a very im
perfect setting forth of the excellence of the Bible may result in strengthen
ing the faith of some troubled mind.
I remain, with much esteem, most cordially yours,
JOHN H. BARROWS.

SERMON

Ps. xix, 7. — " The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the
soul." The eulogy here pronounced on the revelation of truth
and duty made to Moses, may rightly be employed as an
expression of the general Christian faith about the whole
Bible. The doctrine or teaching of Jehovah contained in
the Scriptures, is perfectly adapted to its supreme object of
refreshing or re-animating the soul of man. It has not only
quickened and fed the higher intellectual life, it has also
reinforced the moral nature and satisfied the cravings, the
deepest and most spiritual, of our sad-voiced and sick-
hearted humanity. Incorporated into the life of nations, it
has wrought beneficent marvels, changing the tone and
structure of human society.
The most radiant and productive period in the literary
history of England, the century of Shakspeare and Spenser,
of Hooker and Bacon, of Raleigh and Milton, was that
wherein, according to the latest and best of English histo
rians, the people became the people of one book, and that
book, the Bible. Puritanism was nurtured into heroic power
by the Word of God, and to the Puritan effort to get that
word enshrined in social habit and national law, are due the
liberty and purity of the Anglo-Saxon race. Conservative
Oxford, from her chair of history, now says that England's

progress for two hundred years, on its moral and spiritual
sides, has been due to Puritanism.
The Bible, as Coleridge affirmed, finds man deeper than
any other book. It shows that, below everything else, is
the longing for pardon, for release from sin, for a clear vision
of Our Father, for a firm hope in immortality. A heathen
student, on reading the Bible, confidently said, " He who
made that book made me." The Spirit that inspired those
pages is the Spirit that created man and searches all the
deeps of his heart. Therefore the supreme purpose of Rev
elation is to show man his Savior, who, while revealing
human sin, offers forgiveness, discloses the Father, and leads,
through the mystery of death, into the certainty of life
eternal. He who is named the Alpha and the Omega, is the
beginning and the end of Revelation. He is the Jehovah of
the Old Testament and the Jesus of the New. He is the bur
den of prophecy and the Spirit of it. He made the significance
of Jewish temple and altar and sacrifice. The Bible is named
the Word of God. He is named the Word of God. The
life-blood of the Scriptures is the blood of the Lamb. It
was a rash mistake in Theodore Parker to assert that the
different portions of the Bible were "united by no common
tie but the lids of the book-binder." Christ is the unifying
principle in this multiplex volume, and, from Abel's altar to
the coronation of the Lamb as King of Kings and Lord of
Lords, there is a sure, gradual and divinely glorious progress
of revelation.
It is this disclosure of God's nature and purpose that lifts
the Bible above all human literatures and accounts for its
power in the world. All great books are surrounded in
time with veneration, and kindle a noble enthusiasm. Clas
sical' literature has had its devotees and its martyrs. Virgil
was the object of Dante's fervent devotion. St. Chrysostom
slept with the comedies of Aristophanes under his pillow.
Petrarch searched sea and laud for ancient manuscripts, and

wept because he could not read Homer in the original.
Lady Jane Gray, as Macaulay loved to mention, sat in the
lonely oriel, fixed to Plato's story of the death of Socrates,
unmindful of the blowing horn and rushing steed without.
Byron died for Greek liberty from devotion to Greek litera
ture, with the name of Greece upon his lips. But such
instances are over-matched a hundred fold by Christian
zeal for the Bible. The sob of the great Italian senti
mentalist, because he could not read Homer in Greek, is
meaningless beside the moan of the slave girl, sorrowing
that she could not read the words of Jesus in her own
tongue. Thousands have endured martyrdom for the veri
ties of this book. The earth is rich with the blood of those
who would not sell this truth for their lives. Time and
again has our skeptical age witnessed scenes like that where
an American missionary, leaving his friends on the shore,
stood and gave his farewells from the deck, holding before
their sorrowing gaze an open Bible, as if to say, " This rec
onciles me to the pangs of separation ; this shall cheer me
in the solitudes of heathendom," and there he remained
till the vessel became a black dot on the horizon's verge.
The position which the Bible now holds in Christian faith
is depicted in Kaul bach's Cartoon of the Era of the Reforma
tion. Gathered in an ample portico, are the chief men of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the theologians, the
poets, the artists, the philosophers, the discoverers, a noble
group in the greatest age of Christian history ; but in the
centre of them all stands the German monk of Wittenberg,
Martin Luther, with arms raised, and holding the opened
volume of God's word, whose pages seem to be the light
illuminating the illustrious assembly. Thank God, that
light has not been put out by unbelief or priestcraft. It
never shone so brightly as to-day. Unquestionably, men's
ideas of the Bible have been enlarged by the growth of
modern knowledge, It is more rationally interpreted since

" The thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns."
But growing civilization has made us more earnest
that this book should be placed in every man's house,
whether he dwells by the banks of the Mississippi or the
shores of Lake Victoria Nyanza.
Never before has the study of the Bible been so general
or more intense. That Christian philosopher, Bronson Al-
cott, loves to relate that in the town of Jacksonville, Illinois,
for the last score of years, a company of twenty persons
have met, every two weeks, to read Plato. But in that
same western State, in this same period, a thousand compa
nies, hundreds in each, have gathered every Lord's Day to
read the words of Moses and Isaiah, of Paul and John.
And, on every side of us, many who have read and re-read
this book, finding little therein, not discerning wondrous
things in the divine law — have had their eyes opened, and
what was a wilderness has become a garden of delights ;
what was a valley of darkness has been purged of its mists
and beautified into a landscape with deeper vistas of golden
outlook than Claude Lorraine ever painted, and they have
been able to say with the Psalmist, " The law of the Lord
is perfect, converting the soul."
But doubtless to some of you these expressions of zealous
belief in the excellence of the Bible appear unwarranted.
In the church and out of it we are beset not only with the
sorrowful cries of bewildered faith, but by the sturdy clam
ors of denial. Hence it becomes us, in holding forth some
of the evidences of the perfection of the Scriptures, to con
sider carefully and charitably these varied objections and
difficulties. In the first place, I remark that it is only as a religious
guide that the Bible claims to be without imperfection. It
does not say of itself what the Caliph Omar foolishly said
of the Koran, " Burn all the libraries of the world, for they
are all contained in this book." All truth is not contained

in the Bible. It is not a treatise on geology or astronomy.
You do not go to it to master the science of numbers or the
principles of graphic art. You can not learn from it the
laws of Kepler concerning the planetary motions, or the laws
of chemistry relating to the combinations of elements. The
Bible was not intended for a cyclopaedia in which you may
find every ascertained fact, nor for a university where you
may traverse every department of science. You keep the
Bible in your houses, but you send your children to the
public schools, and wisely. For, while I have no question
that a great deal more of Scripture, put into our education,
would make of us a stronger and better nation, and might
well be substituted for much laboriously acquired secular
knowledge, still, God's word was never intended to take
the place of those studies into which men are led by their
physical, social and intellectual needs. The Holy Scrip
tures were given to be the religious hand-book of mankind.
They are profitable for instruction in righteousness, but not
necessarily for instruction in the nebular hypothesis. Hence
it happens that, even if you could prove that the writers
of this book, being men, were inaccurate in details, that
they had made mistakes in zoology and chronology, you
would not destroy the supreme value of the Bible. A sign
board that points the traveler, with unerring certainty,
toward virtue and heaven, is the most precious thing on
this earth, even should you discover that it had been erected
by unscientific hands and painted by unskilled fingers.
Much of the misconception about the Bible springs from
the unscriptural claims that have been made for it. Its per
fection as a spiritual guide may be maintained without
asking the world to look upon it as a depository of all
knowledge. And is not this very incompleteness, when
considered as a cyclopaedia of all truth, one evidence of its
divinity ? Would it be like God to relieve the human mind
from the necessity of prolonged intellectual research, by

furnishing at first hand all required knowledge ? Is not the
glory of man his arduous effort to discover the secrets of
nature ? Is not the progress of each mind conditioned on this
vast region of the unknown which lies before it for explora
tion. A wise and good God would reveal what men could not
discover themselves, if this were essential to their well-being.
But he could not possibly dwarf the powers of humanity
and thwart its development by taking away the stimulus to
energetic work which is furnished by the exhaustless domain
of unexplored truth. The Bible is all the more the Word
of God by not coming in to cripple those faculties whose
life is in their activity. We might question a book, which,
when all nature was saying to man " Examine, explore,
search, conquer," lifted up its voice and said, " Vain and
needless labor ! Open my pages. All truth is here." But
what does this volume say? " The fear of the Lord is the
beginning of wisdom, and to depart from evil is understand
ing." The Bible is a witness to this fundamental truth,
and, while its store is so rich that the poet, and statesman,
and philosopher may find in its golden treasury much that is
of priceless worth, still, the Word of God is primarily a
book of religion. It reaches down far below and rises up
far above all other knowledge. It appeals to the innermost
nature of man, and when human wisdom has confessed, as
Solomon did, and as Goethe has done, that all is vanity and
vexation of spirit, it enters into the heart like a torch into
a darkened cavern. " The entrance of thy word giveth
light." By it men are brought back to the supreme truth
around which, like the wandering globes around the sun, all
other truths revolve. " The law of the Lord is perfect,
restoring the soul."
But, secondly, another, and I think more common misap
prehension about the Scriptures is this : It is said that the
Bible is not a plain book, and therefore it is far from per
fect. It contains so much that is difficult and dark, that it

is hard to think of it as in any sense the revelation of a God
who was anxious to reveal to us even spiritual truth. It
may be said in reply, that if the Bible did not contain diffi
culties it would not be true. What did Peter say of the
epistles of Paul, which he, like us, had wrestled with some
times in vain ? In them, he says, " are some things hard
to be understood, which they that are unlearned and un
stable wrest (that is, distort, pervert from their real mean
ing) as they do the other Scriptures unto their own destruc
tion." There should be comfort in this passage to many of
us. Remembering how Paul's involved sentences, his pro
longed and difficult arguments, and his frequent parentheses,
diverting the channel of his thought, have worried and per
plexed us, there is an innocent, though half mischievous
pleasure in thinking that Peter was worried in the same
way. His ardent, undisciplined mind, even when divinely
illuminated, could not see quite through all which his be
loved brother had written. Paul had long been a sort of
stumbling block to him, and he acknowledges that some
things in his epistles are hard to be understood. But only
the ignorant and vacillating, he adds in effect, would pervert
these difficulties and lose their souls on account of them.
Other Scriptures, as well as Paul's, are difficult, and the
Bible warns its readers not to destroy themselves against
these stones of offense. It is sad to remember how often
,this warning is unheeded. Many have made shipwreck of
their faith, by always steering their craft against every rock
on the coast of this ocean of truth. Wise navigators prefer
a safe channel, an open sea, but restless, impracticable and
willful minds often covet a dangerous shore. They go
through the Bible, not like a traveler who keeps the safe
highway, but like wayward children who climb over the rocks
and sport along the stony hedges, until, foot-sore and bleed
ing, they ask "Is this the way of life?" The wayfaring
man, though a fool, need not err, if he seek from this book
2

10
chiefly a safe, practical direction in the path of duty ; but
the wayfaring man may be a prodigy of learning and meta
physical acuteness, and wander far off from the truth, if he
is seeking chiefly to solve all difficulties, and explore the
heart of every mystery.
Let it be understood, then, that this Word of God is not
a field all blazing with sunlight. Clouds hover over it, for,
even with this book in our hands, the Apostle tells us we
know in part. Shadows fall on its pages — the shadows of
the Infinite. It is impossible that we should comprehend
G-od. We may apprehend him — that is, lay hold of his
nature, touch the shining hem of his garment and the soft
hand of his grace, but who shall grasp the fullness or meas
ure the altitude of his being and comprehend the circumfer
ence of his truth ? An easy Bible, one having no mystery
and no difficulty, might please for a time, but it would soon be
exhausted, and soon would fail to lure and lift the soul
toward the heavenly heights. It would not be like God.
It has become an accepted principle in the best modern art,
largely through the teaching of Ruskin, that in order to
attain to sublimity of style in representations of natural
scenery, there must always be an element of mystery, a
sense that all has not been said and cannot be said, an en
trancing suggestion of greater things beyond the magic
of the painter's pencil to express. Nature is not a great
crystal, with light dancing in every sparkling atom. She is
a boundless sea, over which the sun-beams and the shadows
tremble with alternating pulse, while vague horizons allure
the imagination into dreams of eternity. And our precious
Word has on it the same stamp of divinity. It is open, aud
full of light. It is also vast, and full of mystery. Those who
study it longest are like the naturalists, who, as they sharpen
their vision and look with microscopic insight into the
simplest objects of the material world, discover new realms
ever revealing themselves in that which seemed so familiar

11
as to be common. An old saint, once the pastor of Abraham
Lincoln, said to me, « I have been studying the Gospel of
John fifty years, but it keeps ahead of me all the time."
When unbelief assaults this book with the spear called diffi
culty, faith wrests the spear from the enemy's hand and
turns it into a weapon of defence. A Bible without that
which is hard to be understood might be the production, of
man alone.
But again — and I speak now from painful experience as
a believer — how many of our troubles about God's word
are the revelations of our own conceit and moral crudeness,
which, in the discipline and development of life, we have
finally outgrown. We approached the Scriptures with
theories and fancies furnished by our reading and specula
tion — and comparing these with God's word, they did not
fully agree. We were distressed and could not read some
parts of the divine revelation with any comfort and satisfac
tion. It seemed to us that we included the Bible, and more
too ; but later in our lives we discovered that the Bible
comprehended us, and much besides. It recognized our
truth and other truths equally important, which our one-
sidedness did not grasp. Many a child has the same experi
ence with its mother. It sees one thing and craves that,
and thinks it the only thing needful, and is angry that the
mother does not altogether sympathize with this state of
mind. But years later, the child, grown to manhood, real
izes how much broader was the maternal wisdom than his
own, and thus we come to reverence what once only fretted
us. /
There may be some here this morning who confront great
difficulties in this book. Can you not believe that the diffi
culties in you are greater still ? Is it hard to find comfort
in the word of God ? Are you troubled by the Scriptural
representations of sin and its consequences? Are you an
noyed by the exacting demands of the Bible, that you deny

your selfishness daily ? May not a humbler mind and a
fuller revelation of your own hearts bring peace to your
unresting nature, and justify the ways of God? Honestly
confronting the facts of this fleeting life, and learning that
you are rich only as you store up treasures in heaven, may
you not, as you forsake the worldliness of your spirit, find
comfort in the " other-worldliness " of the Scriptures?
Said that noble English churchman, Frederick D. Mau
rice, " I cannot understand the difficulties of the Bible, but
they help me to understand myself." So, many of us have
gained the preciousness of self-knowledge in the twilight of
things hard to be understood. We have learned humility,
as Job did, after he had been confounded by the sublime
mysteries of creation. We have learned self-distrust, as
Peter did, after he had doubted the Word which his own
sin verified. We have learned to seek for divine illu
mination through prayer, as multitudes in every Christian
generation have done, who, studying God's Word as the
blessed Fra Angelico painted his pictures — on bended knees
— have seen the mists removed, or rather glorified, even as
the telescope of the astronomer resolves the hazy nebulae
of the Milky Way into shining stars, eternal and serene.
" The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul."
But, thirdly, it is time to consider what is perhaps a more
common objection to this declaration. A prevailing mis
apprehension puts its doubt in this questioning way: "Is
the Bible perfect all through, equally good in every part?
We confess the glory of the Gospels, but what do you say
of the early books of the Old Testament ? Is the whole
Bible the word of God, or is not the word of God in the
Bible, to be eliminated from it like the kernel from the
shell? " The time has been when many Christians believed
in the Scriptures as a sacred charm or rosary, where each
bead was as holy and beneficent as any of the rest. And
occasionally you will hear such wild assertions made as that

13
we could not dispense with any biblical book, or verse even,
without destroying the whole revelation. Some people
have supposed that it was as edifying to study the story of
Joshua as the story of Jesus, and that " a leaf from any
part of the Scriptures blown at random to a savage island,"
as Phillips Brooks once said, had in it the power of salvation.
But the truth is that the Bible is an organic growth, like the
human body. All parts are essential to perfection, but all
are not essential to the continuance of vitality. There is
life and blood in the nail of your finger, but your existence
does not depend upon this. It is one thing to sever the
hand from the arm, and quite another to strike a knife to
the heart or send a bullet into the brain. You may mutilate
the perfection of this book by removing its least important
members, but you have not destroyed the Bible until you
have taken out of it the life-blood of redemption ; for as the
supreme vitality of the body is in the heart and the brain,
so the supreme vitality of the Scriptures is in the love and
purpose of God.
Hence questions about the perfection of different portions
of revelation are like questions about the perfection of dif
ferent members of the body, and, more still, like questions
about the perfection of different stages in the same growth.
It cannot be denied that a man of fifty is a completer revela
tion of humanity than a boy of ten. But the boy may be
as perfect for that stage of development as the man for his
period of growth. Without doubt, the child is a more per
fect representation of the first decade of human life, than he
would be if weighted down with the experience of half a
century. So the books of Moses may be considered the
childhood of revelation, and they are as perfect for their
stage in the progress of the Scriptures as the New Testa
ment is for the latest disclosures of God. Nay, more, they
were better adapted to the schooling of the Jewish people
than would have been the more spiritual Gospels themselves.

14
They were the great foundation stones, which must be laid
solid and deep, before the splendid superstructure could lift
its crystal walls and shining pinnacles towards the sky.
What hard discipline was required to teach fundamental
truths concerning the divine nature, the obligation to spirit
ual worship, the necessity of personal righteousness. God
took Israel in hand, and by the hand. He is revealed in
signs and terrible wonders. He is made real by anthro
pomorphism — or representations under human forms and
with human feelings. These representations, figurative,
bold, passionate and poetical, have misled both the unim
aginative theologian, and the burlesquing unbeliever ; but
because they are passionate and not coldly scientific, bold and
not guarded, these descriptions made enduring impressions
on the hard hearts of Israel. To save his people from the
idolatrous corruptions to which they were continually in
clined, and to engrave everlastingly on their minds the
legend of his unity and spirituality, God ordered the de
struction of the abominable nations inhabiting the Promised
Land. Knowing how dull and gross were the souls of his
people, he gave them constant picture lessons in tabernacle
and bleeding altar, in temple and solemn feasts — so that his
nature and his laws were visibly displayed before them.
What better schooling for Israel could have been devised
than this revelation?
We stand among the flowering orchards of the New
Testament, and their blossoms make us glad. But we must
not forget the roots and boughs and stems out of which
they sprung and on which they depend. The world needs
the whole Bible, which, in its " total impression," is the
word of God. The earlier revelation is necessary to the
support and explanation of the later. Christ and his dis
ciples made the Old Testament the ground-work and largely
the substance of their preaching. " The Scriptures testify
of me," said the Son of God. If Christ be not in the Hebrew

15
Bible, then Christ is a deceiver. If he is there, the Old
Testament is transfigured in the light of Bethlehem and
Olivet, of Hermon aud Calvary. " The New Testament,"
it has often been said, " canonizes the Old," and the deeper
we study them both, the stronger will be the conviction
that this book, in its entirety, is God's word, and that to
divide it into fragments is to diminish its power. " The
law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul."
But I remark, in the fourth place, that the Bible was
meant to be a practical spiritual guide, and that for all per
sons and nations, through all time ; and out of this glorious
fact spring those objections to the Word of God that are
allied to fastidiousness, indolence and narrowness.
Matthew Arnold estimates that what we call conduct oc
cupies three-fourths of our earthly existence. As the Bible
was made for man, it is fitted to help him in that which
consumes most of his hours and most of his energies, and
relates to most of his difficulties. Now in human life there
are many things common, ugly and terrible. The scenes
which the world presents to our view are not arranged with
the elegant luxury of a French salon, where every object at
tracts and pleases the sensitive and critical eye. In order
to describe the man who frivolously seeks after the agreeable
and the amusing, we have come to use the Italian word
dilettante. The dilettante is greatly pained by anything ugly
obtruding on his gaze. And he dislikes the vulgarity of the
man who goes into the filthy stables of life, a Christian
Hercules, resolved to clear them out. But it happens that
this world is not a dilettante world, aud hence the Holy
Scriptures are not a dilettante's book. The Bible faces
things as they are, in a " world gone wrong," where war and
brutality and passion have been tearing, like wolves, the meek
flock of those heavenly virtues which God is pasturing on
these bleak hill-sides. Such being human life, the Bible uses
plain language, the straight-forward speech of the simpler

16
ages of mankind. It aims not to flatter the drawing-room
fastidiousness, which cares for words rather than for things,
and is more shocked by a breach of conventional etiquette
than by a breaking of the statutes of Mount Sinai. Hamer-
ton, the prince of art critics, speaking of those works which
are vulgarly called coarse, says : " The combination of the
highest mental refinement with some roughness of material
accompaniment is as natural as that other very common
combination of perfect visible finish with low intellectual
culture." We perceive the truth of this in our observations
of men. It is true in literature, as witness Shakespeare. It
is true in the Bible, whose refinement is not a superficial
polish, but the inner light of holiness. The Bible is an
honest book — reflecting the ages when it was written, and
recording the crimes of its own heroes. If it is compelled
to paint the vices of men, it makes them appear unlovely.
It does not set out, like Hogarth, to depict the sins of man
kind, but when sins are painted they are brought out in
honest Hogarth's way, so as to repel and never to attract.
Akin to the objections of fastidiousness are those of indo
lence. The Bible is a complex and checkered volume, and
is not always as smooth and easy reading as the latest novel.
The lazy man cannot enter into all its riches. " Why," asks
one, " are the spiritual teachings of the Holy Scriptures in
volved and tangled with so much of the geography of a
distant country and with the manners of Eastern nations? "
In reply, it may be said that this book has been attacked on
every side, its credibility even has been assailed, and God
has left on the rocks of Palestine, and in the stereotyped
habits of the Orient, perpetual witnesses of his truth. Facts
are stubborn things, and, as Dean Stanley says, " geo
graphical facts happily the most stubborn of all." The
Bible always proves the best hand-book for the traveler in
Holy Land, and the sinking faith of many a disciple has
been revived as he has traversed the Syrian fields and noted

17
the correspondences between the book and the region where
its great events occurred. Even Renan confessed that he
found this to be a fifth gospel. He says, " The striking
accord between the texts and tlie places, the marvelous
harmony of the evangelical picture, with the country which
served as its frame-work, were to me a revelation." Unbe
lievers are not eagerly organizing expeditions to explore
Palestine. For one, I would not have the Bible any less a
book of geography, for when men are silent in its defense or
praise, the very stones cry out. The configuration of the
Holy Land, its immense variations of natural scene^, its
vast range of climate, tell a wonderful story. In that little
realm of sacred history, scarcely larger than New Hamp
shire, you will discover an epitome of the whole wrrld.
The region where the writers of this book lived and wrote
is no Arabian desert, like that from which the Koran came
forth, though deserts fringe its eastern and southern bor
ders. It reflects the scenery of the entire globe, and indi
cates that God's Word is to meet the wants of ail mankind.
The Bible is full of the imagery of the sea, and is fitted to
be the companion of those who do business in great waters.
Cowper's cottager reads it on a quiet English shore, and
the sailor in the storm thinks of Paul on the Mediterranean,
and of Him who calmed the Galilean waves. The Bible is
full of pastoral imagery, and the multitudes who live by
tending tlieir flocks on Scottish Highlands or western prai
ries find it pre-eminently tlie shepherd's book. But the
Bible is warm with the breath and brilliant with' the light
of the eastern clime. It tells of gardens and spices and
pomegranates, of roses and lilies and jewels and palms. Its
imagery is oriental in its richness, and is it not the book for
the teeming millions who dwell beneath a tropic sun? But
it is also a book of mountains and snows and ice. The
hoar frost of Lebanon is on it. The snowy splendor of
Hermon casts a cold light on its pages; and is it not the
3

18
book for the Alpine herdsmen, and even for the far-off
tribes who watch the unsetting sun amid the white and
ghastly solitudes of the north? Such a Bible maj' not be
captivating to human indolence, but is it not fitted to human
need ?
And, finally, what shall we say of the narrowness of spirit
which would prefer a Bible adapted to the taste or experi
ence of one individual ? God's ways are not as our ways.
The divine revelation was to reflect, not only the outer life
of tlie world, but the whole inner life of humanity. It was
to be colored by the prismatic hues of many minds. Accord
ingly, we find it not the product of one generation, but of
nearly fifty ; not in one language but in two, the simple and
fervent Hebrew for the Old Testament, the literary and
philosophical Greek for the New. God would reach all men,
and accordingly he speaks through shepherds and fishermen
and rabbis and kings, through the statesman-like Moses,
the visionary Isaiah, the practical Peter, the argumentative
Paul, the mystical John. He speaks for children and for
the aged, for women and for men, for the rich and the
humble, for the sovereign and the subject, for magistrate and
criminal, for the exile, the sorrow-laden and the dying. He
speaks through narrative and poetry, through parable and
history, through the proverbs of Solomon and the drama of
Job. He appeals to gratitude and hope, to fear and love.
Hence the Word of God has become the word of humanity.
Said one who denied its divine origin, "It goes equally to
the cottage of the plain man and the palace of the king. It
is woven into the literature of the scholar and colors the
talk of the street. It blesses us when we are born ; gives
names to half Christendom ; rejoices with us ; has sympathy,
with our mourning; tempers our grief to finer issues."
Above all, it tells the story of One who was carpenter and
king, peasant and Redeemer, child and youth and man and
the Son of God, the story which charms your evening fire-

19
side and consoles the heart of the dying believer. It is the
name of Jesus that the Christian slave murmurs in his soli
tude, and when Charlemagne, the Emperor, is called to
leave the earth which he had ruled and blessed, he exclaims
in the words of his Master, " Into thy hands I commend
mj spirit."
Such are the marvels of this book ; and when a thousand
years are gone, and freedom and knowledge and peace
shall have clothed the world with the garments of heaven,
the word of the Lord will be as life-giving in that better
age as now. The voices of devotion and experience com
bine to rebuke the superciliousness and the ignorance that
crave a different revelation from that which God has given.
Through this book pours the life-blood of redeeming love,
and who will recklessly assail it? When you attempt to
bring disrepute on the Word of God, you trample on man's
best hope ; for where, outside of this volume, will you find
any such disclosure of divine mercy, as that which is made
real to us by the cross of Calvary? Why do you grope so
blindly after the fire-flies of truth which can never warm
you? Why attempt to tear out the crimson pages of God's
Word, when from your choicest literatures you can bring
nothing so comforting to man's heart ? Can you repose your
aching heart on anything more gracious than the pierced hand
of Jesus ? Destroy, if you may, human faith in the Word of
God, but where shall the guilty turn for peace and the dying
for hope ? The deep of science says, " They are not with me."
The sea of philosophy moans, " They are not with me." The
bending heavens and. the burning stars cry out, " They are
not with us," and all the while the human heart will be
yearning and listening for some strong voice in the wilder
ness of doubt, exclaiming, " Behold the Lamb of God, that
taketh away the sin of the world." But I fear no eclipse
of faith. The Word of God enters too helpfully into the
life of man to be easily uprooted. And when we come to

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see that about this volume is clasped the Almighty Hand
that made the worlds, how impotent appears the sharp wit
of an Illinois attorney, to tear it in pieces !
And now, dear friends, there is one way of testing God's
Word that is infallible. Put it into practice. It offers to
restore your soul. You are to take the divine prescription,
not merely to analyze it. He that doeth the will of God
shall know of the doctrine. You are not merely to ask,
"What is repentance?" you are to repent. You are not
merely to seek a definition of faith, you are to put your lov
ing confidence in the Son of God. Let this word enter
your heart in the pleading tones of him who is the soul of
the Bible, saying " Come unto me," and you shall take your
places amid the shining ranks of those who, here amid the
noise of battle, and there amid the angelic throng, repeat
with equal assurance the old acclaim, "The law of the
Lord is perfect, converting the soul."
" This is the armory of light,
Let constant use but keep it bright.
You'll find it yields
To holy hands and humble hearts
More swords and shields
Than sin hath snares or hell hath darts.''
And the reverent study of this book shall bind your soul
unto Him who was the Word made flesh, and in the life
beyond the grave, with all the prophets and those who have
kept the sayings of this book, you shall stand arrayed in white
before him whom John saw with vesture dipped in blood,
whose name is called the Word of God.