to--a choice that was no mere assent to a creed that had been fought
for and established by previous generations of believers. It was the
man's own proving of things unseen and his own preference of those
against the crowd and a system of things seen, palpable, and very
powerful in their attraction for the senses of humanity. But we are
not to suppose that the rival deities, from which this man turned to
the unseen God, were to his mind or to the mind of his day the heap
of dead and ugly idols which we know them to be. They were not dead
things that he could kick away with his feet that these believers had
to reject when they sought the living God, but things which he and his
contemporaries felt to be alive and powerful; powerful alike in their
seduction and in their vengeance. They were believed to be identical,
as you know, with the forces of nature; they were supposed to be
indispensable to the welfare of the individual and of society, and
they were fanatically supported at the time by the mass of this man's
own countrymen; so that to break from them in those days meant to
abandon ancient opinions and habits, to resist many pleasant and
natural temptations and to incur the hostility, as was believed, of
the powers of nature, to break with customs and with rites that had
fortified and consoled the individual heart for generations and been
the support and sanction of society and of the state as well. Yet this
man did it. From all that living crowd and system, from all those
visible temptations and terrors he turned to the unseen, fully
conscious of his danger, for he opens his Psalm with a great cry,
"Preserve me, preserve me, O God!" but yet deliberately, and with all
his heart: "I have said unto the Lord, Thou art my Lord." I have no
goodness, no happiness, that is outside Thee or outside the saints
that are in the land, "the excellent in whom is all my delight." Here
we touch another great characteristic of all true faith which is full
of example to ourselves. It is remarkable how, when a man really turns
to God, he turns to God's people as well, and how he includes them in
the loyalty and in the devotion which he feels toward his Redeemer.
His confidence and the sensitiveness of his faith in and toward God
become almost an equal confidence and an equal sensitiveness toward
his fellow believers. So it is throughout Scripture; you remember that
other psalmist who tells us how he had been tempted to doubt God's
providence and God's power to help the good man--"does God know and is
there knowledge in the Most High? Verily I have cleansed my heart in
vain and washed my hands in innocency." The psalmist immediately adds:
"If I had spoken thus, behold I had dealt treacherously with the
generation of God's children." If I had spoken thus, denying God,
I had dealt treacherously with the generation of God's children.
Unbelief toward God meant to him treason toward God's people; and the
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews affirms the same double character
of true faith when he emphasizes just these two points in the faith
of Moses: "choosing to suffer affliction with the people of God," and
"enduring as seeing Him who is invisible," and God Himself through
Jesus Christ has accepted this partnership of His people in our
loyalty--"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these
my brethren ye have done it unto me." I do not believe in the full
faith of any man who does not extend the loyalty he professes to
God to God's people as well, who does not feel as sensitive to his
brethren on earth as he does to his Father in heaven, who does not
practise piety toward the Church as he does toward her Head, or find
in her fellowship and her service a joy and a gladness which is one
with his deep joy in God, his Redeemer. Nay, is it not just in loving
people who are still imperfect, often disappointing, and far from
their ideal it may be, that in our relations to them we are to find
the greater proof and test of our religious faith? In these days such
a duty is unfortunately more complicated than with the psalmist. The
lines between God's Church and the world is not so clear as it was to
him, and the Church is divided into many and often hostile factions.
All the more it becomes the test of our religion if our hearts feel
and rejoice in the fellowship of God's simpler and more needy and more
devoted believers, however unattractive they may otherwise be.
Consider the way in which the psalmist reached this pure faith in God
and in His people. A factor in the process was distaste for the ugly
rites of idolatry--"Their drink-offerings of blood will I not offer."
Idolatry always develops a loathsome ritual. Sometimes it is cruel
and sometimes it is horribly unclean, but it always debases the
worshiper's mind, confuses his conscience, and hampers his freedom and
energy by the burdensome ceremonies it imposes upon them. Standing
afar off from them as we do, and knowing that there is no heathen
religion but has something good in it, we are apt to think that it
does not in the least matter how crude or how material a nation's
faith be if only it be faith in something more powerful than
themselves, if it satisfy their consciences and have some influence in
disciplining society and helping the individual to control himself.
But you have only to see idolatry at work, and at work with the
habits of ages upon it, to recognize how terrible it can be in its
identification of sheer filth and cruelty with the interests of
religion, and how it at once demoralizes and paralyzes its adherents.
To see it thus is to understand the passionate horror of these words:
"Their drink-offering of blood will I not offer."
It is, however, no mere recoil from the immoral which started the
spring of this psalmists's faith in God. That faith was formed on
personal experience of God Himself. In simple but pregnant phrases the
psalmist tells us how sure he has become, first, of God's providence
in his life; secondly, of God's intimate communion with his soul. God,
he says, had been everything in his life. One does not know whether
the psalmist was a prosperous man or a poor one; the inference that he
was prosperous and rich has sometimes been drawn, but wrongly drawn,
from one of the verses of the Psalm. His indifference to that is
clear, but what he did have he knew he had from God. God, he says, is
all his happiness and all his strength--"The Lord is the portion of
mine inheritance and of my cup; thou maintainest my lot." Whether poor
or prosperous he could say: "The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant
places; yea, I have a goodly heritage." Now that assurance of divine
leading is not analyzable, but we know that it does grow up solid and
sure in the experience of simple men who have put their trust in God,
who have felt life to be a commission from Him and who have done their
duty obeying His call. With such men "all things work together for
good." Tho life about them shake and darken, they feel their own
solidity and have light enough to read the future. Tho stript
and stark, they feel the Lord Himself to be the portion of their
inheritance and of their cup. The portion of my inheritance the Lord
is, i.e., the little bit of land that fell to each Israelite as his
share in the promised inheritance of the nation. "The Lord is the
portion of mine inheritance," as we might say in our Scotch language,
"The Lord is my croft and my cup," so they find in Him all the
ground and the freedom they need to do their work, fulfil their
relationships, and develop their manhood.
It is, however, with the psalmist's second reason for his faith we
have most to do. "I will bless the Lord, who hath given me counsel:
my reins also instruct me in the night seasons." This man held close
communion with God. Is it not great to find the testimony of a brother
man coming down all through those ages, from that dim and distant
past, clear and sure as to this, that he had God's counsel and that
God kept communion with him? God had spoken to this man and shown
him His will. Yes, he had received what we call inspiration and
revelation, and had proved the truth of these in his life. They had
led and they had lifted him. Nor had they come to him as many men
falsely suppose revelation and inspiration exclusively have come to
mankind, by means, namely, that were extraordinary and miraculous. The
psalmist tells us of no vision of angels, of no voice from heaven. The
Lord had not appeared to him in dreams nor by any marvelous signs; on
the other hand, he tells us simply that the divine counsel of which
he was so sure, and which he passes on to us, came to him through the
workings of his inner spiritual life. That is what he means by the
emphatic statement "yea, my reins instruct me in the night seasons,"
which he adds parallel with the thought, "I will bless the Lord, who
hath given me counsel." According to the primitive physiology of
this man's nation and times, the reins of a man fulfil the same
intellectual function which we, with our larger knowledge, know are
discharged by the brain. This was how God's revelation came to this
brother of ours, through the working of his mind and conscience, but
it was in the night seasons that they worked, not in the day and in
the sunshine, but in the night when a man is left to himself with
only this advantage to his thought: that like the blind he is yet
undistracted by the influences which are seen. When he lies down he
thinks soberly and quietly about himself and about life and about God,
and about the great hidden future that is waiting for him. He
was communing with God, who had made his brain and used it as an
instrument of revelation. In these thoughts God was communing with man
through his reason and through his conscience. You and I are always
contrasting God's providence and His grace. We are always attempting
to oppose reason and revelation; to this man they were one. God's
great grace had come to him through God's own providence, and God's
revelation was ministered to him through the reason with which he had
endowed the creature He had made in His own image. This psalmist's
chief and practical help to us men and women today is that he became
sure of God not because of any miracle or supernatural sign, on his
report of which we might be content indolently to rest our faith, but
in God's own providence in his life and in God's quiet communion with
him through the organs God Himself has created in every one of us. For
all time, whether before or after Christ, these are the chief
grounds and foundations of faith in God. So it was in the Old
Testament--"stand in awe and sin not," "commune with your own heart
upon your bed and be still," "be still and know that I am God." So
with Christ, "for the kingdom of heaven cometh not with observation,
but the kingdom of heaven is within you," and so with Paul, "the
Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the
children of God, and if children then heirs, heirs of God and joint
heirs with Christ." "For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ, ... that he would grant you according to the
riches of his glory to be strengthened with might by his spirit in the
inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, to the end
that ye being rooted and grounded in love may come to apprehend with
all saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height and to
know the love of Christ."
God's guidance of his life, first of all, produces in a man a great
sense of stability. "I have set the Lord always before me: because he
is at my right hand I shall not be moved." He who has found God so
careful of him, he whom God hath regarded as worth speaking to and
counseling and disciplining, will be certain that he shall endure,
provided he is sure of his own loyalty. The life so loved of God, so
provided for, and in such close communion with the Eternal is not, can
not be the creature of the day, and this assurance stands firm in face
of even death and the horrible corruption of the body. The psalmist
refuses to believe that he is to dwell in the horrible under-world
forever--either himself or any of God's believers. "Thou must not,
thou wilt not leave my soul in sheol, thou must not, thou wilt not
suffer thy loved ones to see the pit." To this man it is incredible,
and our hearts bear witness to the truth if we have had any experience
of God's blessing and guidance. To this man it is incredible that the
life God has cared for and guided and spoken to and brought into such
intimate communion with himself can find its end in death. Those whom
God has loyally loved and who have loyally loved God--for this
word badly translated "holy" in the psalms really has that actual
significance--those whom God has loyally loved and who have loyally
loved God shall never die. As He lives so shall they; they shall never
be absent from His presence. Be the future unknown and unknowable,
be we ourselves incapable of conceiving the processes by which this
mortal shall put on immortality, or where heaven is, or what eternity
can possibly be to those who have never lived outside time, yet that
future is secure and its immortal character is indubitable--where God
is there shall His servants be, and because He is there their life
shall be peace and joy, and because He is eternal it shall last
forevermore. That thought is the whole of the hope and argument. We
are assured of the future life because we have known God, and as we
have found Him to be true to us and proved ourselves true to Him.
GUNSAULUS
THE BIBLE VS. INFIDELITY
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Frank Wakely Gunsaulus was born at Chesterville, Ohio, in 1856. He
graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1875. For some years he was
pastor of Plymouth Church, Chicago, and since 1899 pastor of Central
Church, Chicago. He is also president of the Armour Institute of
Technology. He is a fascinating speaker, having a clear, resonant
voice, and a dignified presence. His mind is a storehouse of the best
literature, and his English style is noteworthy for its purity and
richness. He is the author of several books and is in popular demand
as a lecturer.
GUNSAULUS
Born in 1856
THE BIBLE VS. INFIDELITY[1]
[Footnote 1: Preached as an impromptu reply to R.G. Ingersoll. Printed
from an unrevised stenographic report.]
_There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none
of them is without signification_.--I Cor. xiv., 10.
Ours is a voiceful era. Perhaps, as the ages come and go and man's
life grows richer, its questions more restless for answer, its
moral supports called upon to bear heavier interests of faith, its
enterprises more often and searchingly compelled to defend themselves,
the voices of time will be increasingly potent and worthy of his
attention. A singularly suggestive collection of messages fills the
air today, and all of these voices speak of one theme--the Bible.
Anarchy, which is always atheistic, holds its converse in the places
of evil which this book's message would close forever; the foes of
that civilization builded on its laws and stimulated by its hopes asks
us to condemn it as worthy only of caricature, vituperation, and hate.
Let us find a path of duty today, not refusing to listen to any of
these voices, but asking that other voices also may help us to the
truth.
The preacher's message is a book called the Bible. That is only the
literary form of his message--telling its history. Even that form,
which is much less divine as paper and ink are less lofty in the
scale than humanity, has worked wonders. To-day, the Bible offers the
nineteenth-century infidel as testimony of the influence it has. It
has force enough to make infidelity preach tearfully and well about
man, woman, and child. Skepticism did not do so well until the Bible
came. The Bible has furnished the eloquence of infidelity with such
a man as Shakespeare to talk about; no student of literature could
imagine Shakespeare without the Bible and the Bible's influence upon
him as he created his dreams. It furnished an Abraham Lincoln for an
orator to compare favorably with incomplete ideas of Almighty God; but
it seems to have been unable to show the critic that Christian ideas
of Almighty God made Lincoln so love the Lord's Prayer that he wanted
a church builded with this as its creed. It would seem that any
general denunciation or humorous caricature of a book which has
worked such an amazing effect in literature as has the Bible would
be tempered by some recognition of the fact that these other
minds--poets, orators, sages, and scientists--have found illumination
and help in its pages. Liberal Christianity will be intellectually
broad. Certainly the greatest of modern pagans, Goethe, will not be
accused of favoritism toward the Bible, yet he said: "I esteem the
gospels to be thoroughly genuine, for there shines forth from them the
reflected splendor of a sublimity, proceeding from the person of
Jesus Christ, of so divine a kind as only the divine could ever have
manifested upon earth." The Earl of Rochester saw that the only
liberalism which objects to the Bible, in its true uses, is the
liberalism of licentiousness; and he left this saying: "A bad heart
is the great argument against this holy book." And Faraday, weeping,
said: "Why will people go astray when they have this blest book to
guide them?"
If we turn to literature we encounter many such liberal thinkers as
Theodore Parker, who calmly informs us: "This collection of books has
taken such a hold upon the world as has no other. The literature of
Greece, which goes up like incense from that land of temples and
heroic deeds, has not half the influence of this book. 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." That is the voice of the liberalism which includes rather
than excludes.
These were men not of the band of evangelical Christian preachers, who
are roughly classed as a set of persons unable to tell the truth about
the Bible, for fear they may lose their means of subsistence; these
are men who know the true mission of the Bible. It is not to furnish
a picture of life in the time of Moses such as life ought to be, a
portrait of a David for the imitation of men, a statue of a warrior
in a time of barbarism who shall command my obedience to his commands
now, an idea of God wrought out in ignorance and darkness, which has
no self-development within it. The mission of the Bible is to furnish
a humanly written account of a people, just as human as we, in whom,
by divine inspiration, the soul of truth so lived and worked as to
develop, in gradual course, by laws, by hopes, by loves, by life, a
living, and, at last, perfectly authoritative ideal of righteousness,
but more than all a gradual growth of such moral power as would be
commanding in the redeeming self-sacrifice and love of Jesus Christ.
Every page of the Old Testament was only preparatory, as the thorny
bush is preparatory for the rose. Christ is the end of the long, weary
human history that leads to Him. If the laws of Sinai had been enough,
there never would have been a Calvary. No one for a moment dreams that
the God of nature could have brought forth such a fruit as the life
and ideas of Jesus without a tree of such a history, a tree rooted in
the ground, storm-twisted, gnarled, and valuable only for its fruit.
We are not asked to eat the roots and bark and branches; only the
fruit has an appeal to us. Its appeal is to our hunger, its authority
lies in the fact that it satisfies our hunger.
It has satisfied the hunger of men whose liberalism came from their
being made liberally. Large and capacious souls of mighty yearnings
are they. They stand in contrast with the puny critics who assert
that the Bible fails to feed them, because they have never tasted its
nourishment.
Liberal Christianity, separating itself from the dogmatism which would
make Christianity a book religion, worshiping a literary idol rather
than loving a human revelation of the divine, knows it is not an
ignorant lot of men and women who have received most from the Bible
and spoken most gratefully of its message. When we think of sending
the Bible to barbarism, with the hope of creating in its stead
civilization, we can look into the face of John Selden, one of the
most illustrious of English lawyers, when he says: "I have surveyed
most of the learning that is among the sons of men, yet at this moment
I can recall nothing in them on which to rest my soul, save one from
the sacred Scriptures, which rises much on my mind. It is this: 'The
grace of God, which bringeth salvation, hath appeared unto all men,
teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live
soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world, looking for
that blest hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our
Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us that he might redeem
us unto himself, a peculiar people zealous of good works.'" Liberal
religion must include Selden. We will not be deterred from giving the
Bible to heathenism of any kind when we remember that Sir William
Jones has left these words: "The Scriptures contain more true
sublimity, more exquisite beauty, and finer strains of poetry and
eloquence than could be collected from all other books that were ever
composed in any age or in any idiom." Liberal religion must be as
broad as Sir William Jones.
This is a very needy world, and many are the institutions of evil that
need to be changed for institutions of goodness. If we are to believe
the eloquence of hopeless unbelief, we ourselves will only be the
slaves of a fatalism which says that man is but a result of forces;
that what we call crime is but a part of the necessary course of
things, and that there is no such thing as moral responsibility. This
makes all reform or efforts at staying the tide of evil useless.
Oftentimes the heart of the man who has ceased to read his Bible gets
the victory over this dreadful philosophy, and it is not remarkable
that the skeptic becomes the exponent of freedom, charging like a host
of war upon all institutions of slavery. Liberal theology puts its one
hand on the dogmatist who tells him to accept literal infallibility,
and its other on the sincere lover of men who has lost his Bible
entirely. And liberalism says: It is in just such moments that we
trust our Bible the most, and we remember that William Wilberforce,
who lifted the chains from the bondmen, has said: "I never knew
happiness until I found Christ as a Savior. Read the Bible! Bead the
Bible! Through all my perplexities and distresses I never read any
other book, I never knew the want of any other." We are certainly not
despising the science which is worthy of a name, nor are we forgetting
any proposition which has found a place in the world's thought, if we
look into the face of Sir John Herschel, who tells us that "all human
discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more
and more strongly the truths contained in the holy Scriptures." It is
truly no part of wisdom for us to conclude that for scientific reasons
we ought to forsake our Bible when Professor Dana avers: "The grand
old book of God still stands; and this old earth, the more its leaves
are turned and pondered, the more will it sustain and illustrate the
sacred Word."
Surely it is not the hour dogmatically to withdraw this book, which
has proved the basis of civilization. Professor Lyell, the great
English geologist, tells us: "In the year 1806 the French Institute
enumerated no less than eighty geological theories which were hostile
to the Scriptures, but not one of these theories is held today."
Bacon's remark is still true: "There never was found in any age of the
world either religion or law that did so highly exalt the public good
as the Bible." And John Marshall and Prince Bismarck agree with Daniel
Webster when he says: "If we abide by the principles taught in the
Bible our country will go on prospering and to prosper; but if we and
our posterity neglect its instructions and authority no man can tell
how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in
profound obscurity." There is not an anarchist in America who does not
clap his hands when he hears a Bible with the Ten Commandments and the
Sermon on the Mount denounced. Indeed, the civilization in which we
stand, as compared with the barbarism out of which we have been led
by the Bible, would make William Henry Seward's assertion only a mild
statement of the truth when he says: "The whole hope of human progress
is suspended on the ever-growing influence of the Bible." I prefer
lawyers like these to lead American public opinion. Part of the
service of these men has been that they have shown theology that the
Bible is not a set of texts on a dead level of authority and equal
value, but the revealing, slow and sure, of an inspiration obeyed by a
certain people in the realm of morals like that inspiration obeyed by
another people in the realm of art, and its test is: Does the Bible's
ultimate message, its crowning commandment of Christ's life and love,
produce goodness in morals? just as the test of the long revelation
of beauty in his ancestors and the Greek is, does its ultimate
commandment produce goodness in art.
Christianity does not ask: "What think ye of the Bible?" It asks:
"What think ye of Christ?" There the throne is set, and so majestic is
His glory that the moment we come into His presence we are judged. The
Judge of the earth has taken His place in thought, history and hope.
He is not on trial, and He asks no question as to what man thinks of
the book which has enthroned Him in literature. The test is placed in
my conduct and yours; each may say with Michael Bruce, who left these
words on the fly-leaf of his Bible:
'Tis very vain of me to boast
How small a price this Bible cost;
The day of judgment will make clear
'Twas very cheap or very dear.
Shall we go forward with our Bible or backward without it? Infidelity
has always forgotten that, so far as it has an eye for liberty and
humanity, the Christianity not of sects but of the Bible has furnished
it and trained it. The liberalism which puts its Bible aside will
acknowledge that a Christless humanity culminated in Rome. Skepticism
is often eloquent when it tries to show how much "fragments of Roman
art" had to do with the making of modern civilization. Now, as Rome
marks the height to which humanity without a Bible ascended, it would
seem that this would be just the point where free and untrammeled
thought and the fullest intellectual liberty would be found. Right
there, where a Christless race was supreme, ought to be the place
where the liberty abounded which the religion of Christ is said to
destroy.