MY DEAR A----: I had supposed my last letter would end our
correspondence. Your kind reply has gratified me more than I can
express. Without further words, let me take up at once the question
that you put, I am sure, sincerely. You ask, "What _is_ 'the way of
settlement that the Bible opens to the great questions that press
us?'"
The questions of supreme interest are few and simple. Is there a
God? Is there a future existence for us? How can that existence be
made a safe and satisfying one? If you are willing to allow any
authority to the Bible at all, there can be no doubt as to the first
two questions. There is a God by whom we were created and to whom we
are responsible; there is a future existence. Those two questions are
settled, if the Bible can settle anything. And they are settled,
let me add, in harmony with the profoundest instincts and the most
imperative demands of our nature. Whatever a few souls in their
struggling dissatisfaction and sad unrest may persuade themselves,
the great yearning heart of humanity will quiet itself on nothing
less than God and immortality. Even your former guide, Mr. ---- (let
me hope I may speak of him now as only your _former_ guide), cries
out in the presence of the dead and before the awful silence of the
grave, "_Immortality_ is a word that hope through all the ages has
been whispering to love. All wish for happiness beyond this life; all
hope to meet again the loved and lost." Yes, there are hours when
the most hopeless are glad to turn to the hope that the Bible alone
gives, when the bitterest rejecters of God and his word long for the
consolation that only the rejected word affords.
Let us turn to the other question. If, when we are through with this
life--as we soon shall be through with it--we are not through with
existence--if there is a life beyond the present not measured by
years or ages,--how can it be made worth having? Is there any way
in which our immortality can be assured to us as an immortal good?
After all the doubts and darkness, the mystery and suffering, the
bitterness and disappointment, of this life, may it in any way be
found a great and a good thing, after all, that we have lived? To
answer these questions we must come back to the old truth--the truth
of your childhood. The "advanced thought" of our day has discovered
nothing to change the fact that men are out of the way, they are not
what they should be. Every man knows this. The Bible expresses it
in a very plain way by saying _they are sinners_. As such it deals
with them; to such alone it opens its door of hope. The Bible is of
no use to you unless you are a sinner. If you call this cant, I am
sorry for it, but I cannot help it; I cannot change it. The only men
for whom God is dealing here for good, for whom he is making possible
an immortality of honor and happiness, are the sinful. And is not
this well for us? Does it not at once bring hope to you--a hope as
great as it is mysterious? You know that life has not been to you
an unstained thing any more than it has been to any of us. To know
this is to know sin, the one appalling fact of the universe, the one
unspeakable woe of our being.
In the simplest way, then, my dear A----, let me say that the first
step in your coming right with God, and so right with the future, is
to know and to feel that you are wrong. The Bible closes the door of
hope for ever on the man who comes claiming the brightness and the
good of a life beyond the grave because he is worthy of it. These
words were once familiar to you: "By the deeds of the law there shall
no flesh be justified." Rom. iii. 20.
Can he who is wrong make himself right? Can he be all he ought to be?
Can he do all he ought to do? Can you set right all the wrong and all
the failure of the past? Can you make the future without error? To
ask these questions is to answer them to every honest conscience.
For one who is wrong there must be the consequences of wrong,
and these must be as fearful and as far-reaching as sin itself.
"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap," and evermore
and everywhere the harvest is greater than the seed. The coming
tribulation and anguish of the unsaved souls that do evil is a law
of nature as well as of revelation. The wages of sin is death. You
know this. You have felt it in its measure. You have seen it in the
unhappiness, the misery, the woe, the despair and death with which
sin reigns everywhere around us. Take the brightest view of life
that you can, and the darkness in which it ends is terrible. To
go out of it without God is to go out without hope. Am I wrong in
believing that you need no argument here, that no conviction is more
sorrowfully intense with you than this?
Will you go now a step farther? Standing in your wrong and your
weakness and your unrest, with the heavy shadows of the future
falling upon you, are you willing to draw near to the open portal of
a better life? Are you willing to look up and read over it--"God so
loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever
believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life"? John
iii. 16. Are you willing to submit your faith to the mystery--beyond
all depth except the love of God--that the Son of God in our nature
has borne our sins in his own body on the tree--that he has died
for us, the Just for the unjust? In other words, are you willing to
receive the kingdom of heaven as a little child--to be saved, if
saved you may be, in God's own way?
In a former letter I spoke of the testimony of Webster to the reality
of the Christian religion; and, though it is true that Christianity
does not depend upon the patronage of any man, it is well to know
that greater intellects than those that would persuade you to reject
it have bowed before it and found their supreme hope in it. Let me
give you, then, another testimony from this greatest of American
statesmen and jurists. It was his last night on earth; that life of
extraordinary influence and honor was closing. As his family and
friends stood around his bed his physician repeated the immortal hymn
of Cowper:
"There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel's veins,
And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains."