can liberals accept? Hoarse is the cry: The Bible is to be cast out.
We look and behold men who have these opinions sitting on the throne
of the Caesars. Now, one would suppose the intellect of that whole
realm would have fair play. There was no Bible there to fetter or to
annoy. This ought to be the halcyon age for "the liberty of man, woman
and child." These rulers have the same dignified abhorrence for all
kinds of religion. The skeptic Lucretius says: "The fear of the lower
world must be sent headlong forth. It poisons life to its lowest
depths; it spreads over all things the blackness of death; it leaves
no pleasure unalloyed." I match the Roman with the phrase of a recent
orator of this school who spoke of the soldiers dead, as now "sleeping
beneath the shadows of the clouds, careless alike of sunshine or of
storm, each in the windowless palace of rest." There was no window in
the grave when more illustrious and original skeptics talked about it.
Modern infidelity has many expressions on the future after death which
sound like the old Roman distich, "I was not, and became; I was, and
am no more."
Its orator, bending over the body of his dear brother, said nothing
more touching than did Tacitus over the grave of Agricola, as he
wrote: "If there is a place for the spirits of the pious; if, as the
wise suppose, great souls do not become extinct with their bodies;
if"--oh, that age of "if" ought to have been an age when every brain
was free and no thought or sentiment were a chain. The Bible of
Christianity was not powerful enough to throttle anybody. Its pages
were not all written; its authors were hunted and outcast. Morals,
too, ought to have been all right, for we are told that they are
independent of God and Christ.
But what is the fact? Strangely enough, in that age, when nearly every
monarch, or poet, or philosopher was a humorous skeptic and they had
no Christian religion to "bind their hands," in an age when nothing
but this sort of infidelity was supreme, Seneca, to whom connoisseurs
in ethics blandly turn when they grow weary of the strenuous Paul or
the pensive John, Seneca, while he wrote a book on poverty, has a
fortune of $15,000,000, with a house full of citrus tables made of
veined wood brought from Mount Atlas. While he framed moral precepts
which we are besought to substitute for the Sermon on the Mount, he
was openly accused of constant and shameless iniquity, and was leading
his distinguished and tender pupil, Nero, into those practises and
preparing him for those atrocities which Seneca himself had upon his
own soul while he wrote his book on clemency. At that hour the Bible
Christianity offered to the world's heart and aspiration, not a book,
not a theorist of morals, but a man for the leadership of humanity,
and, of that Man the literary and calm French skeptic says: "Jesus
will never be surpassed." In the age of Rome, when people were not
burdened by churches or Bibles, Lucian says: "If any one loves wealth
and is dazed by gold; if any one measures happiness by purple and
power; if any one brought up among flatterers and slaves has never had
a conception of liberty, frankness and truth; if any one has wholly
surrendered himself to pleasure, full tables, carousals, lewdness,
sorcery, and deceit, let him go to Rome." There was no Bible either
to preach against it or to interfere with it. These things were the
product then, as they are now, of infidelity. Whenever the world
wishes a civilization so barbarous as that, the reviler of the Bible
must create it, for they have the applause of evil and the good-will
of crime. In the age of Rome, when this skepticism was the creed of
the State, Nero got tired of the goddess Astarte, and murdered his own
brother, his wife, and his mother, and the senate was so affected with
the same opinion that they heard his justification and proceeded to
heap new honors upon him. He threw the preacher Paul into jail, but
there Paul wrought out the impulse of Europe. In the age when the
great Livy said that "neglect of gods" had come, Caligula let loose
his imperial frenzy, and every stream of blood that could be sent
toward the sea carried its red tide. In that age when, like later
eloquent critics, Ennius said that he did not believe that the gods
thought of human beings, "for if the gods concerned themselves about
the human race the good would prosper and the bad suffer," the
courtesan was kept for pleasure and the wife for domestic slavery. In
that happy age of unbelief, when Menander sung "the gods do not care
for men," "the homes were," according to Juvenal, "broken up before
the nuptial garland faded"; and according to Tertullian, "they married
only to be divorced." Friends exchanged wives; infanticide and other
hellish crimes were common. This is what that spirit, in its purity,
did for the home, when there was no Bible to read at its hearthstone
and no New Testament to put into the hands of young lovers departing
to make a new rooftree.
Labor will some day be too liberal to give up its Bible. In that age,
when "God was dead"; in that age, when "the gods had abdicated";
they said, "the mechanic's occupation is degrading. A workshop is
incompatible with anything noble." The curse of slavery had blotted
the name of labor, and they agreed that "a purchased laborer is better
than a hired one," and thousands of prison-like dwellings rose to
conceal the myriads of slaves. In that age Nero, who had the same
opinion about God which the vaunting spirit which calls itself liberal
has today, had a "golden house" as large as a city, with colonnades a
mile long, and within it a statue of Nero 120 feet high. That is what
the theory of infidelity did for labor and the working man when it
was on the throne. Do you wonder that from that day to this the
"carpenter's son" of the Bible has been scoffed at by this infidelity?
In that age, when the theories of infidelity ruled, the gladiators
made wet with their blood the great enclosure of the arena. The women
and timid girls of Rome gave lightly the sign of death. The crowd
shook the building with applause as the palpitating body was dragged
by a hook into the death-chamber, and slaves turned up the bloody soil
and covered the blood-dabbled earth with sand that the awful amusement
might go on. All this was allowed by infidelity in its purity, before
it had been influenced by the Christian's Bible into believing that
such things are atrocious.
Oh, when I hear infidelity prate of the horrors of slavery and defend
a Godless theory of the State, I remember that those who had it in its
purity did not regard the slave as a man. When I read the story of
slavery and hear an exponent of free thought say, "The doctrine that
woman is a slave or serf of man--whether it comes from hell or heaven,
from God or demon, from the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, or
the very Sodom of perdition--is savagery pure and simple," I say,
"That is so, but just that was the ruling idea when infidelity was on
the throne of Rome." And only where the Bible has gone and triumphed
has woman the privileges which are thus praised.
When I hear it said: "Slavery includes all other crimes. It is the
joint product of the kidnaper, pirate, thief, murderer, and hypocrite.
It degrades labor and corrupts leisure. To lacerate the naked back, to
sell wives, to steal babes, to debauch your soul--this is slavery," I
answer: "That is so," and I add that all these and a thousand other
damnable features of slavery were seen in Rome when the whole Roman
people felt and spoke about the message of the Bible just as your type
of liberalism does today.
To all this wretched state of man what offers came from Seneca, whom
skepticism quotes as a moralist? Why, he said: "Admire only thyself";
and when he saw that a man must get out of himself, he said: "Give
thyself to philosophy." Not philosophy, but the power of the Bible's
Christ has lifted man upward to his highest life.
If ever anti-Christianity had a chance to show its beauty, it was when
it was at its supreme strength, and when Christianity was a babe in
the manger; and these are only suggestions of the hell it dug for man
at Rome. You say that it was not what skepticism is at the present
day, and I acknowledge that it is so. Why? Because nineteen centuries
have rolled like waves of light between, and Christ has improved it
in spite of itself. Never had the world so good a chance to see what
almost absolute skepticism and unbelief could and would do for the
liberty of the human soul as then. But when the thrones of Rome were
occupied with men who held the same opinion of the Bible as he does
today, what was the freedom of the race?
The scene all comes back. Here is a little, obscure set of poor people
who follow the words and life of the son of a carpenter. They are
powerful in nothing that Rome calls power. But Rome says that they
shall not think that way. Celsus, from whom our less scholarly
skepticism is ready to borrow arguments, was not enough for the new
thought in the arena of debate, and they cried for another arena. Let
us remember that unbelief, in its purity at that date, was so offended
at nothing as at the fact that the Church said: "Christian justice
makes all equal who bear the name of man," and that Paul said: "There
is neither bond nor free, but ye are all one in Christ Jesus." Nothing
so offended the representative of free thought in that period as
the fact that a rich Roman, in the time of Trajan, having become a
Christian, presented freedom to his 1,250 slaves on an Easter day.
And, in all that time, when poor Christians with the funds of the
Church were privately buying the freedom of slaves, I do not find
that a base liberalism believed in liberty. Neither did it believe in
freedom of thought. It is the blossom of egotism; it has nothing to
which it bows; it beholds no majesty to which it can look up. It is
sublime self-conceit, and it has no hesitancy in telling the whole
human race that at its grandest moments it has been wrong. This
egotism dared to become active in Rome, and it asked the Christians,
in the person of the Emperor, to worship him, and to strew incense
about him. "I will honor the Emperor," said Theophilus, "not by
worshiping him, but by praying for him." Such men as that infidelity
kindly put to death. Around their quivering limbs the infidelity of
that day made the fagots to flame, and it taught the red tongues of
cruel death to creep about their smoking bodies.
Men who believed that the Bible's influence was what infidelity says
it is, made the funeral pyre for Polycarp, the populace bringing fuel
for the fire, and while the flames made a glory of their lambent
glare, he cried out: "Six and eighty years have I served him and he
has done me nothing but good, and how could I curse him, my Lord
and Savior. If you would know what I am, I tell you frankly, I am a
Christian." He did his own thinking, and was brave enough to avow his
opinion, for which hate of Christianity duly burned him. This was the
way infidelity treated free speech. In that way it unchained the soul
of Polycarp. Infidelity's idea of Christianity sent the martyrs of
Numidia and Paulus out of the world while they were praying for their
murderers. Who believed in freedom then? Infidelity's idea of the
message of the Bible followed the Christian like a wild beast, and
in the catacomb of Calixtus drew from the pursued soul the pathetic
exclamation: "Oh, sorrowful times, when we can not even in caves
escape our foes!" And all this was true, because they said,
"Recompense to no man evil for evil"; "Pray for them that despitefully
use you and persecute you."
This spirit of hate has had at least one holiday at the expense of
Christian faith. On the night of the 18th of July, 64, Rome was swept
with fire. Six days and nights it raged. Ruined was the world's
metropolis and excited were the wo-stricken people. Nero, whose
opinions of Christianity, by the way, were wonderfully like the
orator's, was king, and the people suspected that this royal monster
did it. Men told of how he exulted over the sea of flame as he watched
it from the tower of Maecenas; and whatever the truth of this may be,
it is certain that for the rage of the people Nero must have a victim,
and Tacitus tells us that he charged the Christians with the crime.
Then opened in Rome the awful carnival of bloodshed that the orator
never mentions, in which horrible modes of torture and excruciating
methods of producing pain vied with each other in satisfying the
demands of death. Women bound to raging bulls and dragged to death
were not without the companionship of others who, in the evening, in
Nero's garden, were coated with pitch, covered with tar, bound to
stakes of pine, lighted with fire, and sent to run aflame with the
hatred of Christianity. Through the crowd of sufferers a gentleman,
who was ultra-liberal as the orator, drove about, fantastically
attired as a charioteer, and the people were wild with delight.
Domitian had the same ideas, and severe were his persecutions of the
new heresy. This was the day on which infidelity was so full of the
love of freedom that it cried: "The Christians to the lions!"
And so I might recount to you how for hundreds of years the Church
found out how early and unchristianized infidelity loved freedom of
thought. To a type of liberals, it has for years seemed a joy to go
to the places in the old world and note how intolerant the Church has
been. Now I suggest to any one that he go and visit some of the places
where men who thought of Christianity as negativism thinks showed
their faith and its fruits. Let him go to the Colosseum and ask the
winds that moan over its ruins what they know of the history
of infidelity. The winds will hush in that wreck of stupendous
magnificence, and with an eloquence gathered from seventeen centuries
they will tell him a story that will cause a flow of tears, for much
of infidelity is of noble heart. They will tell him how the marble
seats were crowded with thousands; again will sweep upward the shout
of the excited throng; before him there will lie a half-dead Christian
martyr, and near that pool of blood will stand a lion who has satiated
his horrid thirst.
They will tell him how infidelity made that splendid place a temple
of the furies, how it laughed and yelled and applauded, as it amused
itself with that spectacle of horror. They will tell him how the
underground passages served to keep and cage wild beasts, and how
those who then hated Christianity starved the fierce lion until his
eyes rolled in hot hunger and his teeth were sharpened with its agony.
They will tell him how the infidelity of that day put balls of fire
on the backs of the lions, and how the madness of their passion was
increased by scattering hated colors about, tearing the beasts with
iron hooks and beating them with cruel whips. They will tell how the
Christian was made to fight these infuriated beasts without weapons,
while infidelity was frantic with applause. It said "no" to the torn
body yonder, that was mangled and supplicating in blood for life. I
would have him stand there until, in after years, in a nobler strain
than that of Byron, he could say:
And thou didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon
All this, and cast a wide and tender light,
Which softened down the hoar austerity
Of rugged desolation.
* * * * *
Till the place
Became religion, and the heart ran o'er
With silent worship of the great of old!
The dead but sceptered sovereigns who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.
So long as I know what this book has been and done, so long as man's
history will not allow me to risk the interests of society with the
infidelity which has so often demoralized it, so long will I yearn to
get the Bible and its message to all men. It has been our world's best
book. With this book as inspiration and resource, William Tyndale
and Miles Coverdale were so to continue and complete the task of The
Venerable Bede and John Wyclif as to make an epoch in the history of
that language to be used by Shakespeare and Burke--an era as distinct
as that which Luther's Bible so soon should mark in the history of a
language to be such a potent instrument in the hands of Goethe and
Hegel. For this very act of heresy, Tyndale was to be called "a
full-grown Wyclif," and Luther "the redeemer of his mother-tongue."
With the Bible, Calvin was to conceive republics at Geneva, and
Holbein to paint, in spite of the iconoclasm of the Reformation, the
faces of Holy Mother and Saint, and in spite of the cruelty of the
Church, scripturally conceived satires illustrating the sale of
indulgences. With that book Gustavus Vasa was to protect and nurture
the freedom of the land of flowing splendors, while Angelo was
transcribing sacred scenes upon the Sistine vault or fixing them in
stone. Reading this book, More was to die with a smile; Latimer,
Cranmer, and Ridley to perish while illuminating with living torches,
and the Anabaptist to arouse the sympathies of Christendom by his
agonies. With this book in hand, Shakespeare was to write his plays;
Raleigh was to die, knight, discoverer, thinker, statesman, martyr;
Bacon to lay the foundation of modern scientific research--three stars
in the majestic constellation about Henry's daughter. With this Bible
open before them the English nation would behold the Spanish Armada
dashed to pieces upon the rocks, while Edmund Spenser mingled his
delicious notes with the tumult of that awful wreck.
This book was to produce the edict of Nantes, while John of Barneveld
would give new life to the command of William the Silent--"Level
the dikes; give Holland back to the ocean, if need be," thus making
preparation for the visit of the Mayflower pilgrims to Leyden or
Delfthaven. Their eyes resting upon its pages, Selden and Pym were to
go to prison, while Grotius dreamed of the rights of man in peace and
war, and Guido and Rubens were painting the joys of the manger or the
sorrows of Calvary. His hand resting upon this book, Oliver Cromwell
would consolidate the hopes and convictions of Puritanism into a sword
which should conquer at Nasby, Marston Moor and Dunbar, leave to the
throne of Charles I, a headless corpse, and create, if only for an
hour's prophecy, a commonwealth of unbending righteousness. With that
volume in their homes, the Swede and the Huguenot, the Scotch-Irishman
and the Quaker, the Dutchman and the freedom-loving cavalier, were to
plan pilgrimages to the West, and establish new homes in America. With
that book in the cabin of the _Mayflower_, venerated and obeyed by
sea-tossed exiles, was to be born a compact from which should spring
a constitution and a government for the life of which all these
nationalities should willingly bleed and struggle, under a conqueror
who should rise from the soil of the cavaliers, and unsheath his sword
in the colony of the Puritans.
Out of that Bible were to come the "Petition of Right," the national
anthem of 1628, the "Grand Remonstrance," and "Paradise Lost." With
it, Blake and Pascal should voyage heroically in diverse seas. In its
influence Jeremy Taylor should write his "Liberty of Prophesying,"
Sir Matthew Hale his fearless replies, while Rembrandt was placing on
canvas little Dutch children, with wooden shoes, crowding to the feet
of a Jewish Messiah.
Its lines, breathing life, order, and freedom, would inspire
John Bunyan's dream, Algernon Sidney's fatal republicanism, and
Puffendorf's judicature. With them, William Penn would meet the
Indian of the forest, and Fénelon, the philosopher, in his meditative
solitude. Locke and Newton and Leibnitz would carry it with them in
pathless fields of speculation, while Peter the Great was smiting
an arrogant priest in Russia, and William was ascending the English
throne. From its poetry Cowper, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning
would catch the divine afflatus; from its statesmanship Burke,
Romilly, and Bright would learn how to create and redeem institutions;
from its melodies Handel, Bach, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven would write
oratorios, masses, and symphonies; from its declaration of divine
sympathy Wilberforce, Howard, and Florence Nightingale were to
emancipate slaves, reform prisons, and mitigate the cruelties of war;
from its prophecies Dante's hope of a united Italy was to be realized
by Cavour, Garibaldi, and Victor Emmanuel. Looking upon the family
Bible as he was dying, Andrew Jackson said: "That book, sir, is the
rock on which the Republic rests"; and with her hand upon that book,
Victoria, England's queen, was to sum up her history as a power
amid the nations of the earth, when, replying to the question of an
ambassador: "What is the secret of England's superiority among the
nations?" she would say: "Go tell your prince that this is the secret
of England's political greatness,"
Beloved friends, when spurious liberalism, with all her literature,
produces such a roll-call as this; when out of her pages I may see
coming a nobler set of forces for the making of manhood, then, and
only then, will I give up my Bible; then, and only then, will I cease
to pray and labor that it may be given to all the world.
HILLIS
GOD THE UNWEARIED GUIDE
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Newell Dwight Hillis was born at Magnolia, Iowa, in 1858. He first
became known as a preacher of the first rank during his pastorate over
the large Presbyterian church in Evanston, Illinois. This reputation
led to his being called to the Central Church, Chicago, in which he
succeeded Dr. David Swing, and where from the first he attracted
audiences completely filling one of the largest auditoriums in
Chicago. In 1899 he was called to Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, to
succeed Dr. Lyman Abbott in the pulpit made famous by the ministry
of Henry Ward Beecher. By his strong personality and mental gifts he
draws to his church a large and eager following. His best known books
are "A Man's Value to Society," and "The Investment of Influence."
HILLIS
Born in 1858
GOD THE UNWEARIED GUIDE[1]
[Footnote 1: By permission of the _Brooklyn Daily Eagle_. Copyright,
1905.]
_Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God, &c._--Isaiah xl.,
1-31. _He shall not fail, nor be discouraged_.--xliv., 4.
This is an epic of the unwearied God, and the fainting strength of
man. For splendor of imagery, for majesty and elevation, it is one
of the supreme things in literature. Perhaps no other Scripture has
exerted so profound an influence upon the world's leaders. Luther read
it in the fortress of Salzburg, John Brown read it in the prison
at Harper's Ferry. Webster made it the model of his eloquence,
Wordsworth, Carlyle and a score of others refer to its influence upon
their literary style, their thought and life. Like all the supreme
things in eloquence, this chapter is a spark struck out of the fires
of war and persecution. Its author was not simply an exile--he was a
slave who had known the dungeon and the fetter. Bondage is hard, even
for savages, naked, ignorant, and newly drawn from the jungle, but
slavery is doubly hard for scholars and prophets, for Hebrew merchants
and rulers.
This outburst of eloquence took its rise in a war of invasion. When
the northern host swept southward, and overwhelmed Jerusalem, the
onrushing wave was fretted with fire; later, when the wave of war
retreated, it carried back the detritus of a ruined civilization. The
story of the siege of Jerusalem, the assault upon its gates, the fall
of the walls, all the horrors of famine and of pestilence, are given
in the earlier chapters of this wonderful book. The homeward march
of the Persian army was a kind of triumphal procession in which the
Hebrew princes and leaders walked as captives. The king marched in the
guise of a slave, with his eyes put out, followed by sullen princes,
with bound hands, and unsubdued hearts. As slaves the Hebrews crossed
the Euphrates at the very point where Xenophon crossed with his
immortal ten thousand. In the land of bondage the exiles were planted,
not in military prisons, but in gangs, working now in the fields, now
in the streets of the city, and always under the scourge of soldiers.
When thirty years had passed the forty thousand captives were
scattered among the people, one brother in the palace, and another a
slave in the fields. Soon their religion became only a memory, their
language was all but forgotten, their old customs and manner of life
were utterly gone. But God raised up two gifted souls for just such an
emergency as this. One youth, through sheer force of genius, climbed
to the position of prime minister, while a young girl through her
loveliness came to the king's palace. One day an emancipation
proclamation went forth, from a king who had come to believe in the
unseen God who loved justice, and would overwhelm oppression and
wrong. The good news went forth on wings of the wind. Making ready
for their return to their homeland, all the captives gathered on the
outskirts of the desert. It was a piteous spectacle. The people were
broken in health, their beauty marred, their weapon a staff, their
garments the leather coat, their provisions pieces of moldy bread, and
their path fifteen hundred miles of sands, across the desert. To such
an end had come a disobedient and sinful generation!