Chapter III: Part 3

In the very nature of the case, then, full redemption requires that the body of every Christian shall be delivered from the grave, and that every Christian, whether living or dead, shall be clothed finally with an immortal body.

This is the great objective of salvation--not just to save men from vice and immorality here; not just to fit them with an antidote against the poison of sin; or give them an impetus to holiness and truth for a few brief years in this mortal body, then let them die under various circumstances of suffering and pain and be carried away to heaven to live there as attenuated, invisible ghosts forever!

O no! it is not that!

It is true men are to be saved here and now in such moral and spiritual fashion as that each saved person should make the world sweeter and better and nearer to God for living in it. All that is true, but it is only a part of the glorious truth. The supreme objective--the _ultima thule_ of redemption--is--

_Immortality_--the Christian eternally and incorruptibly embodied.

And this immortality, this eternal embodiment, is to be accomplished for every Christian. The fact that death has been abolished officially as a penalty for the Christian is a demonstration that abolition of death means abolition for the whole Christian; as a whole or complete Christian must have a body, then the abolition of death for the Christian means abolition of death from the body. The abolition of death from the body is immortality; by virtue, then, of the abolition of death, immortality is assured to every Christian.

Not one will be forgotten even though centuries may have broken into dust above his grave.

This immortality will be brought to pass by him who is the Resurrection and the Life.

It will be brought to pass at the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

He is coming to this world again. By every law of necessity he _must_ come. He is coming to complete redemption, to bring on the capstone amid shoutings of "grace, grace unto it."

He will raise the dead who have fallen asleep in his name. He will change the living ones who are his at his coming. He will make the body of each incorruptible, deathless, immortal, like unto his own glorious body, as it is written:

"We shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." (1 John 3:2.)

And again it is written:

"We are citizens of a country which is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change the body of our humiliation, that it may be fashioned like unto the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself." (Philippians 3:20, 21.)

At the last he will regenerate the earth. He will make it over. He will make all things new. He will set this race of redeemed immortals within it. Perfectly recovered from the spoliation of sin and death, they shall inhabit it forever. God shall get his own world again.

Paradise lost shall become paradise regained, and God's purpose to make man his constitutional, governmental, moral and spiritual image shall be fulfilled. Man shall be God incarnate, and incarnation shall be seen to be the beginning and the ending of the purpose of God.

This is the consummation to which Christianity leads us--a perfect race of immortal beings in a perfect world, a perfect world in which no man shall say, "I am sick"; where sin is unknown; where the funeral bell does not toll, and a grave is never dug. Where God is all in all.

This is the hope and the ultimate Christianity sets before us. Not once in all its record does it offer us heaven or bid us prepare for it as the ultimate, but always it exhorts us to look for and wait patiently for immortality and glory at the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the Christianity of the primitive centuries.

This is the Christianity of the New Testament.

It is the Christianity that fully met the needs of men.

It met the needs of men who gave themselves up to unrestrained passion, to the gluttony of every appetite; who lounged away their day in cool marble halls, or leaned half drunken from the cushioned seats of the amphitheatre, while the sands of the arena were reddened with human blood to give them a holiday. Look at them there. They passed their unsatisfying hours in idle jest, wreathed themselves with freshly plucked, but swiftly fading flowers, drowned their senses from moment to moment, still deeper in the spiced and maddening wines, gave unbridled freedom to their lust; and then, at close of day, in the splendor of the sinking sun, went forth to cool their fevered brows in the Campagna's freshening but deadly air, and drove with furious pace and brutal laughter along the Appian way between rows of monumental tombs whose chiselled epitaphs told the hopeless end of human life; then back again they drove with still more reckless haste to spend the night in wild debauch and meet the gray dawning of another day with its mocking routine and disgust. Loathing their very joys, revolting at their own gratification, these men asked: "Is there nothing better than this, that we drain the cup of pleasure to the dregs, open our veins, watch the life blood ebb away, and laugh, and mingle our laughter with curses that so cheap and easy an ending should have cost so much to reach?"

O the woe, the horror, the emptiness, and the crying, agonizing need of lives like these.

And Christianity fully and richly met the need of lives like these.

It met the needs of men who in the midst of an environment of the flesh, with the wild beast of appetite struggling within, now and then had longings for a power that should enable them to put their feet upon the neck of passion.

It met the needs of men who, standing above their dead, asked again the old and oft-repeated question of Job, "If a man die, shall he live again?"

Christianity met all these needs.

Through crowded streets of populous towns and lonely lanes of silent villages, in lordly palace and before straw-thatched hovels, to listening throngs and wayside hearers, it rang forth its wondrous proclamation.

It told men that a man had been here who had proven himself stronger than death and mightier than the grave; a man who had burst the bars of death asunder, spurned the sepulchre wherein human hands had laid his body, had ascended up on high, and now, from heaven's throne, had power to impart to men a life that hated sin, rejoiced in virtue, could make each moment of earth's existence worth while, and carried within it the assurance and prophecy of eternal felicity.

Far and wide, over land and sea, it rang the tidings that this perfect life might be had by king or cotter, by freeman or slave, without money and without price, for so simple a thing as genuine faith in, and open confession of, him who had died and risen again.

With rich, exultant note it announced that he who as very God had clothed himself with a new and distinct humanity, who had loved men unto death and died for them, had not forgotten the earth wherein he had suffered, his own grave from whence he had so triumphantly risen, nor yet the graves of those who had confessed his name; but, on the contrary, was coming back in personal glory and with limitless power to raise the dead, transfigure the living, make them immortal, and so change this earth that it should no longer be a swinging cemetery of the hopeless dead, but the abiding home of the eternally living sons of God.

Men held like Laocoon in the winding coils of sinuous and persistent sin, and who vainly sought to escape from its slowly crushing embrace, heard the good news and turned their faces towards the rising hope of present deliverance.

Men standing in the shadow of the tombs and waiting their turn smiled until their smiles turned into joyous laughter as they said: "If we die, we shall live again--the grave shall not always win its victory over us."

Do you wonder the world stopped, listened, and that multitudes turned and followed after?

Do you wonder that this Christianity of the primitive centuries triumphed so phenomenally?

This is the Christianity we need to preach today.

It is full of a great body of doctrine.

It is full of the supernatural.

Miracle and miraculous are woven into its texture from beginning to end. You cannot touch it, or handle it, or look at it from any angle of vision that it does not suggest the miraculous. The moment the miracle is out of it it is no longer the Christianity of the first century, it is not the Christianity of the New Testament--the Christianity that has a miraculous Christ for its centre and the miracle of an infinite God for its environment.

A Christianity of doctrine!

A Christianity of miracle!

And why not?

It is as superior to the Christianity, so called, that sets aside miracle and doctrine, turns its back on the hereafter, makes its appeal in behalf of the present alone, and grounds its claim to authority, not on a "thus saith the Lord," but on a "thus saith science and reason"; a Christianity that owns the law of evolution as its present force and defining motive; it is as superior to that sort of Christianity and as high above it as the heavens are above the earth.

One night this summer I stood upon a mountain ridge and watched the revelation of the starry sky. The great constellations, like silver squadrons, were sailing slowly and majestically to their appointed havens; from north to south and from south to north again, the Milky Way swept upward from its double horizon to the zenith like a highway paved and set with diamonds--a highway over which the wheels of the king's chariot had sped, leaving behind that cloud of dust in which every gleaming particle was a burnished sun. I gazed spellbound until it was as the vision of an unfathomed sea, an ocean tide of light, where the shimmering foam was the rise and fall of single and multiple systems, the surf beat breaking on the shores of converging universes. I gazed on this wealth and congeries of far -flung worlds, in which some that appeared the most insignificant and twinkled and trembled as though each glimmer would be the last, were actually so great that beside them our own poor little world was but as a mole hill to earth's Himalayas; as I gazed I thought of the distance from world to world--measured as light travels--till the count of years fell away, and there were no more numbers with which to count, and I knew that at the end of this calculation I had but entered the suburbs of that realm for which we have but one word, whose inadequacy we all confess--the Infinite. I listened, the silence seemed to utter forth majesty and might and honor and omnipotence, the air had in it the breath of sacred and adoring things, and unwittingly I cried out, alone in the night there, "The heavens, O God, declare thy glory and the firmament showeth thy handiwork."

And when I look at this Christianity set forth in the New Testament, and anticipated in the Old, the constellations of doctrine, this Via Lactea of truth in which every statement is a sun of splendor; when I begin to get the sweep of the divine purpose coming up from the opening pages of Genesis and culminating in the book of the Revelation; when I see that Christianity is the presentation to us of the ways and means whereby the original thought of incarnation (and this was the very first thought stamped upon the first pages of the Genesis record of the creation of man; for incarnation is conceived in Eden before it is brought to the birth in Bethlehem)-- when I see this original thought of incarnation, in spite of sin and failure, and the world's captivity to the Devil and his angels; when I see this high purpose of God at last realized, and realized so completely that each redeemed soul is in final terms the glorious enthronement of God in humanity, and that God in Christ and in the Christian, gets his own world again, I cry out with full tribute of heart and intellect: "O Lord, this is the Christianity which thou hast wrought, thy name is written in every doctrine, every line justifies, as it proclaims thee, the infinite and gracious author."

This is the Christianity to preach.

Let the preacher preach a Christianity of doctrine.

There are three important things every preacher should preach. The first thing is doctrine. The second thing is doctrine. The third and pre-eminent thing is doctrine. The church is starving to death for the want of it, the preachers are becoming emasculated apologists for lack of it, and the world, looking on, is laughing at a limp, genuflecting thing calling itself modern Christianity and for want of vertebrate strength, unable to stand alone.

It was doctrine believed in and preached which sustained the martyrs and gave courage to missionaries. He who believed in the sovereignty of a redeeming God, the certainty that God would get his elect, the Coming of Christ, the millennial triumph, and a rebel world surrendered at the feet of God, could endure the agony of the stake, the privation of the wilderness, and all the discomforts and all the discouragements of fields of endeavor well sowed but scantily reaped.

Let the preacher preach the supernatural--the things that are miraculous, and be unafraid.

He need not be afraid. The world wants that sort of preaching. It is growing tired at heart of mere machinery and this eternally running up against a formula of the laboratory or a mathematical calculation and analyzed force, as explanatory of everything in heaven and in earth. It would like, if it were possible, to believe in something a little beyond the length of its eyelashes and the touch of its finger tips; something that cannot be summed up always in avoirdupois; something, indeed, beyond the ability of man.

Let the church get back to the old-fashioned doctrinal, supernatural, miraculous Christianity that underwrites itself with the name of God. Let it be boldly proclaimed that Christianity is miraculous, because it is, first and last, the Christianity of that God who is himself--the eternal miracle.

The very salvation of the church as a church depends upon this retrograde.

If the church hesitates, compromises, seeks to accommodate its formulas to modern nomenclature. If it is willing to carry its baggage at half weight; if it is willing to make its proclamation a continual denial of all that it has heretofore professed as fundamental; if it believes the twentieth century has the call on the first, and that modernism outranks primitivism; if, in short, it looks upon primitive and apostolic Christianity as the feeble hint which the modern thinker has known how to modify and improve, then, as already suggested, the days of its spiritual and moral bankruptcy are in sight, and the sooner good business arrangements are made to hire out its meeting houses for ethical and social culture the better.

Let the church persevere in turning its back upon the hereafter; let it continue the folly of ignoring the eschatological emphasis of Christianity; let it keep on giving to men the anodynes of mere moral maxims; let it direct all its energies to improving and perfecting a society which God has already judged and condemned at its best, and presently these drugged and befooled people will awake, the drugs will no longer be effective, and they will turn in indignation upon a Christianity which began by professing to be a revelation from God and ends by confessing to be nothing more than an evolution from man.

It is time for preachers to arouse if they would have the hearing, and not the indifferent ears.

Let them refuse to apologize or defend.

Let them have the courage of divine conviction.

Let them refuse to admit into their fellowship men who are willing that a bar-sinister shall be stained across the birth hour of the Christ; who are ready to smile away such a title as "the Blessed Virgin"; who can read no deeper meaning in the cross than a brutal murder, and who do not yet know that in the garden of Arimathea there is still an empty tomb. Let them refuse ministerial ordination and partnership with men who, bearing the university brand, claim the authority of a self-elected scholarship to make the Word of God secondary to the word of man. Let them go forth and proclaim to the world with the voice of assurance which permits of no debate and will accept no recall, the Christianity that is summed up, is perfectly defined and holds inclusively all its splendor of doctrine in the three immense facts which its Gospel proclaims:

The abolition of death, the gift of a new and spiritual life, and the guaranty to every believer of a resplendent immortality like unto his who sits on yonder throne--both eternal God and immortal man--Coming Bridegroom and Triumphant King.

Let them preach this. Let them tell the guilty sinner that the blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ meets his case and can make the foulest clean; let them tell the slave-bound sinner that in a moment, in the flash of an eye glance, a risen Saviour can deliver him and set him free; let them tell the dying that death has lost its sting, and at death a convoy of heaven's host shall bear him away from his home in this mortal body to be at home in heaven with his ascended Lord; let them cry above every Christian grave, louder than the sound of any falling tear: "Jesus is coming to raise your dead and change the living and clothe each saint with immortal beauty"; let them look abroad upon a world full of the storm of sin, the tumult of high passion and long rebellion against our God, and shout aloud that victory cometh in the end; that Christ is God as well as man; that the days of his glory are at hand, when the "God of the whole earth" shall he be called; and when all beneath a perfect heaven in a perfect world shall know him as Lord and God from the least to the greatest. Let them preach this, and with unbroken confidence repeat the exultant words of Holy Writ, the words which shall warrant all their speech, that "our Saviour Jesus Christ hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel"; and it will be this Gospel echoing forth with all the music of its joyful tidings that shall answer infallibly and beyond all dispute the question of the hour--"_What is Christianity?_"

The Bible

THE WORD OF GOD

"When ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of man, but as it is in truth, the word of God." (1 Thessalonians 2:13.)

THE Apostle here testifies that he believes himself to be the bearer of a revelation direct from God; that the words he speaks and the words he writes are not the words of man, but the Word of God, warm with his breath, filled with his thoughts, and stamped with his will.

In this same epistle he writes:

"For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord." (1 Thessalonians 4:15.)

The preposition "by" is the dative of investiture as well as means, and is Paul's declaration that what he is writing to the Thessalonians are not his ideas, clothed in his own language, but ideas and thoughts whose investiture, whose very clothing, is no less than the word of the ascended Lord--he who is none other than the "Word of God."

Writing to the Corinthians he says:

"Which things we speak, _not in the words_ which man's wisdom teacheth, _but_ (and grammar requires us to understand) _in the words_ which the Holy Ghost teacheth." (1 Corinthians 2:13.)

According to Paul's testimony, therefore, the fourteen epistles which he wrote to the churches are not letters written by a mortal man, giving expression to the ideas and thoughts of man, but are the very words of the infinite God, giving utterance by the Holy Ghost to the thoughts of God.

An examination of the other epistles of the New Testament will show the same high and unqualified pretension. The apostles write (all of them) not as men who are giving an opinion of their own, but as men who know themselves under the domination of the Spirit, and as giving authoritative expression to the mind and will of God.

Nor is this peculiar to the writers of the New Testament.

Constantly, the writers of the Old Testament introduce their message with the tremendous sentence: "Thus saith the Lord." Again and again they declare the Lord has spoken "by" them. David says: "The words of the Lord were in my tongue." Jeremiah says the Word of the Lord came to him and the Lord said: "Take a roll of a book and write therein all the words that I have spoken to thee." Then we are told that "Jeremiah called Baruch, the son of Neriah; and Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the Lord, which he had spoken unto him, upon a roll of a book."

After these words had been read to the princes of Israel, they asked Baruch, saying, "Tell us now, how didst thou write all these words at his mouth?" Then Baruch answered them, "He pronounced all these words unto me with his mouth, and I wrote them with ink in the book."

The process is clear enough. The Lord spake his words in Jeremiah. Jeremiah received the words direct from the Lord, dictated them word for word to Baruch, Baruch wrote them as they were pronounced in a book; and when written, the words were the written words of God.

Ezekiel declares when the Lord commanded him to speak to the children of Israel, he said to him: "Speak with _my words_ unto them." Ezekiel not only speaks them, he writes them in the book of his prophecy. Ezekiel gives an account of how the Lord spake to him and inspired the book which bears his name. He says: "The Spirit entered into me when he spoke to me; . . . the spirit entered into me and spake with me." The Spirit said unto him: "When I speak with thee, I will open thy mouth, and thou shalt say unto them, thus saith the Lord."

The Apostle Paul, speaking in commendation of Timothy because from a child he had known the Holy Scriptures (and by Holy Scriptures the Apostle meant the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi--these were the Scriptures Timothy as well as every Jew knew as such), tells him that all Scripture (and of course any decent exegesis of the passage with its weight of context would recognize that the Apostle was referring to the Scriptures Timothy had known from childhood, the Scriptures as we have them to-day from Genesis to Malachi)--Paul tells Timothy in the most precise terms that all these writings are inspired of God.

The Apostle Peter, corroboratively speaking of these very Scriptures of the Old Testament, says they came not "by the will of man, but holy men of old spake as they were moved (literally, carried along) by the Holy Ghost."

Thus, this book we call the Bible comes to us with the enormous and uncompromising claim that it is not a man-made book, but a book whose real and sole author is the living and eternal God.

This claim stands face to face with human need.

Here we are from birth to death, pilgrims on the highway of time, not knowing whence we come, nor whither we go. We need a guide to lead us, a light to shine when we stand at that parting of the ways --where eternity becomes the end of time.

This book meets us and claims to be all that--a guide through time, a light to shine upon the road that leads to God and to be, in every line and accent, the inspired, incorruptible, infallible Word of God.

How may we know it is all it claims to be?

Never more than now did we need to know it.

Voices in the air are crying that we have been deceived; that this book upon which our fathers pillowed their heads when at the end of life's journey, they laid them down to die; this book we have held as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path is, after all, at its best, only the word of man and not the Word of God at all.

Every now and then resounding blows are heard as they strike against the old foundation. Those who pretend to be working in the interest of the truth bid us stand aside, lest we and our hopes be buried in the impending ruin.

We need to know at any cost whether this splendid and sustaining faith has deceived us; whether this book we have looked upon as holy and divine is nothing more than the word of man, spoken with his stammering tongue and written with his stumbling pen.

We must know, and know for a certainty that will leave no peradventure to arise as a troubling after-ghost, whether this Bible is, as Paul says it is, in truth, the Word of God; and the question will insistently repeat itself:

"How may we know the Bible _is_ the Word of God?"

The question need not make us tremble.

The answers are at hand.

The evidence is so great, its very wealth is an embarrassment.

That evidence stated, detailed, analyzed and elaborated, would require--not a few pages--but whole libraries.

One broad and general proposition may be laid down.

It is this:

The Bible is proved to BE the Word of God when it is shown to be NOT the word of man; and it is proved to be not the word of man when it is shown to be--not such a book as a man WOULD write if he COULD; nor such a book as a man COULD write if he WOULD.

That it is not the word of man--not such a book as a man _would_ write if he could, is made clear enough by the picture it paints of the natural man.

This picture is so sharply drawn, the figures stand out in such living and apt delineation, that no one can mistake the import.

According to the Bible, man came direct from the hand of God. God created him body, soul and spirit--a tripartite being. The soul was the person, the seat of appetite and passions. The spirit was the seat of the mind, the centre of reflection. Spirit and body were the distinct agents of the soul. The spirit, the agent to connect the soul with God--the body, the medium of the soul's manifestation or materialization in this world, and the instrument for its use and enjoyment. The mind, seated in the spirit, was intended, under the influence of the spirit, to be the governor and regulator of the soul--enabling the soul rightly to use its appetite and legitimately to satisfy its passions.

Thus organized, God set man up in the world to be his constitutional, moral, spiritual and governmental image--his likeness morally--his image (his representative) administratively.

Man turned his back on God, listened to the appetite of his soul, and surrendered to the demands of sensual hunger.

The soul, at once, sank down into the environment of the body. The mind sank down into the environment of the soul and became, henceforth, not a spiritual mind, but a mind "sensual," "devilish," a mind continually suggesting to the soul fresh and unlimited gratification of its desires. With the breakdown of soul and mind, the spirit lost its vital relationship to God, lost its function as a connecting link with, and a transmitter of, the mind and will of God; so that it could no longer enable man to know and understand God; and feeling the influence of the mind, instead of influencing it, followed it in its downward course into the environment of the soul.

Out of this dislocation the soul came forth dominant over mind and spirit. Soul appetite and soul desires became supreme; the body, the willing and active agent thereof. From this period on, man was no longer a possible spiritual being, but a "natural" man. The word "natural" is "soulical." In Scripture it is twice translated "sensual." The much-used word "psychological" is a derivation of it. In the Bible sense of the word, a psychological person is just the opposite of a pneumatical or spiritual person.

Man was now psychological, soulical, sensual. He had been transformed into a being no better than an _intellectual_ animal, and the slave of his physical functions. Instead of being the master of his appetites, he was mastered by them. His passions intended, under right use, to be blessings, became curses; instead of angels, they became as demons. Instead of dwelling in the midst of his endowment in harmony with it and able to direct it, he found himself at its mercy, incessantly smitten by it and suffering his own equipment. Repudiating faith, walking by sight, talking of reason and governed by his senses, he threw himself open to invasion by the world, the flesh and the Devil.

As a result of his fall, man has become a degenerate, full of the germs of evil, "every imagination of the thoughts of the heart only evil continually"--an incurable self-corrupter.

In him there is not one thing that commends him to a holy God; and even should he succeed in living a life of perfect morality, his best righteousness in the sight of God would be no better than a bundle of filthy and contagious rags.

There is no power within him by which he can change the essential character and determined trend of his life. Men do not gather grapes of thorns, nor figs of thistles. All the effort that the most devoted and laborious of men might give to the culture of a hedgerow of thorns would not succeed in producing one grape. Though men spent life and fortune in cultivating a field of thistles, they would not gather a single fig. No sooner (says the Bible) can the natural man bring forth the fruit of righteousness unto God. The Ethiopian may change his skin, the leopard his spots, before a natural man can change himself into a spiritual man. "The carnal mind is enmity with God; for it is not subject to the law of God, _neither indeed can be_." "The natural man (the word 'natural' is psuchikos, soulical) receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: _neither can he know them_, because they are spiritually (pneumatikos, _pneumatically_) discerned." "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" meaning thereby that God alone can sound the depths of its measureless capacity for sin and iniquity; therefore, he says: "I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins."

The end of man is to die.

Such an end is not natural.

It is unnatural.

It is violent.

It is penal.

It is an appointed punishment: as it is written: "It is _appointed_ unto men once to die." "By _one_ man sin entered into the world, and death _by sin_; and _so_ death _passed_ (literally, passed _through, pierced_ man;" the seeds of death entered him for himself and all his posterity). When he dies, therefore, be he never so moral and upright, his death is judicial, his taking off is the execution of a criminal.

He is to be raised from the dead as to his body (in the meantime, his soul is "dragged" downward to the prison of the underworld, where in conscious suffering he awaits the second resurrection and the judgment hour), he will be raised, judged, found guilty and cast forth into the lake of fire (which is the second death), from whence there will be no resurrection of the body (the body will perish in the fire--for an immortal body belongs only to the sons of God--the participants in the First Resurrection); then, as a disembodied spirit--a ghost--he will go forth with an inward, deathless worm, and an inward, quenchless fire, to be like "a wandering star unto whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever," an exile from God, outside the orbit of divine grace, love and life--a hopeless, an eternally hopeless--human derelict, upon the measureless sea of night and space.

That is the Bible picture of the natural man.

Is that the picture the natural man paints of himself?

I trow not!

Man looks upon himself as a son of God by nature, having in himself all the elements of divinity, and all the forces necessary to shape his life aright. He is proud of himself, and talks of the dignity of human nature. He describes himself in panegyric, magnifies his virtue and minimizes his vice.

He flatters himself in his own eyes.

The two concepts--that of the Bible and that of the natural man--are as far apart from each other as the heavens are from the earth.

To man, the Bible concept is false, belittling, wholly disastrous and degrading, the death knell to any possible inspiration for human effort and attainment. It is a concept against which he revolts with all the nature in him, and hates with an exceeding great hatred.

In the very nature of the case, then, the Bible concept of man is not due to man; it is not such a concept that he _would_ write if he _could_.

The picture which the Bible paints of sin is not such a picture as the natural man has ever painted.

The Bible declares that sin is something more than fever or disease or weakness, it is high treason against Jehovah, it is a blow at his integrity, a rebellion against his government, a discord to his being and a movement whose final tendency would be to dislodge him from his throne.

The Bible hates sin and has no mercy for it.

The very leaves of the book seem to curl and grow crisp under the fire of its hatred. So fearful is its denunciation that the sinner shivers and hastens to turn away from a book whose lightest denunciation of sin has in it the menace of eternal judgment. Like a great fiery eye it looks into the very recesses of the heart and reveals its intents and purposes. It sees lust hiding there in all its lecherous deformity and says, he who exercises it solely in his mind is as guilty in God's sight as though he had committed the act. It looks into the heart and sees hate crouching there with its tiger-like fangs and readiness to spring, and says that he who hates his brother is already a murderer.

The Bible has no forgiveness for sin until it has been fully and fearfully punished. In this it simply echoes the law stamped and steeped in nature. Nature never forgives its violated law until it has punished it. The Bible demands satisfaction, complete and absolute, before it offers even the hint of forgiveness. It takes the guilty sinner to the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ and shows him God's hatred of sin to be so great, that the moment his holy and spotless Son representatively takes the sinner's place, he smites him and pours out upon him a tidal sweep of wrath in a terror of relentless judgment and indignation so immense, that the earth quivers like an aspen, rocks to and fro, reels in its orbit till the sun of day refuses to shine, and the moon of night hangs in the startled heavens like a great clot of human blood.

The Bible declares that forgiveness of sin can come to the sinner only by way of the anguish and punishment of the cross; and that no sinner can be forgiven till he has accepted the downpour of the wrath of God on the cross and the substitutional agony of the Son of God as the punishment he himself so justly deserves.

The Bible teaches that in the awful cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" the sinner should hear the echo of his own agony, as of one forsaken of God and swept out of his presence forever; and that the only ground of approach to this righteous God is the atoning blood of his crucified Son; that he who would approach God, find forgiveness and justification, must claim that crucified Son of God as his sin-offering, his vicarious sacrifice, his personal substitute. By the hell of the cross alone can he find the heaven of forgiveness and peace.

Is this man's attitude to, and definition of, forgiveness and peace?

It is not.

Man does not hate sin. He loves it. He rolls it as a sweet morsel under his tongue. He condones it in its worst form. To him it is genital weakness or an overplus of animal life--an exuberance of the spirit. It is a racial inheritance and not an individual fault. It is temperamental and not criminal.

The Bible concept and the natural concept of sin contradict each other; both, therefore, cannot have the same author.

The Bible concept of holiness is not the concept of the natural man.

In the Bible, holiness is not goodness and kindness, nor even morality. Holiness as the Bible sets it before us is the correspondence of the soul with God, the soul reflecting the intent, desire and innermost character of God; so that, were God to enter into the soul, he should find himself as much at home as upon his own exalted throne.

Such a definition as that makes human perfection and all its claims to holiness seem no better than a painted wanton dressed in the garb of purity and mouthing the words of virtue and chastity.

Whence comes this wisdom of holiness which makes the loftiest ideal of man no higher than the dust of the roadway, his best righteousness criticizable goodness and altogether a negligible quantity?

If it is from man, it must arise from two sources--human experience or human imagination.

It cannot come from human experience! no natural man in the past has experienced it--none today experience it.

It cannot come from imagination; for a man cannot imagine what he has not seen, known or experienced. As he has not experienced holiness he cannot imagine it.

In the nature of the case--the Bible concept of holiness did not originate with man, and that much of the Bible, evidently, is not of man.

That the Bible is not the word of man is shown by its statements of accurate science, written before men became scientific, and while as yet natural science did not exist.

The record of creation is given in the opening verses of Genesis.

Whence came the wisdom which enabled the writer in a pre-scientific age to set forth a cosmogony in such a fashion that it does not contradict the latest findings of the geologist?

The Bible says the earth was without form and void.

Science says the same thing. Over a hot granite crust, an ocean of fire, and beyond that an impenetrable atmosphere loaded with carbonic acid gas.

Cuvier, the founder of paleontology, says in his discourse on the revolutions of the globe, "Moses has left us a cosmogony, the exactitude of which is most wonderfully confirmed every day."

Quensted says, "Moses was a great geologist, wherever he may have obtained his knowledge." Again he says, "The venerable Moses, who makes the plants appear first, has not yet been proven at fault; for there are marine plants in the very lowest deposit."

Dana, of Yale College, has said that the record of creation given by Moses and that written in the rocks are the same in all general features.

Whence came the wisdom which kept Moses from hopelessly blundering?

Moses places the account of the original creation in the first verse. In the second, he states the earth fell into chaos. "It _became_ (not _was_) without form, and void."

Isaiah, the prophet, declares definitely that God did not create the earth without form and void--God never was the author of chaos--he made the earth habitable from the beginning.

The first verse of Genesis records the creation of this original and habitable earth. The second verse shows, as the result of some mighty cataclysm, that the original earth fell into a state of chaos. The second verse, and the verses following, are the record of the making over of the earth after it had fallen into a state of chaos.

Whence the wisdom which taught Moses what science in our day is only beginning to spell out, that the present earth is not an original creation, but a remaking; that the original creation goes back beyond the time of shifted crust, of tilted rock, of ice and fire and mist and formless chaos?

Whence came the wisdom and knowledge which led Job to say that it is impossible to count the stars for number, when it _was_ possible in his day, and is equally possible in our day, to count them with the naked eye?

How did he know, what the telescope alone reveals, that the number of the stars as flashed forth in the field of these telescopes is utterly beyond our computation; and that in the attempt to number them, figures break, fall into dust, and are swept away as the chaff of the summer's threshing floor.

How did he, looking up with that naked eye of his, how did he know that in the Milky Way there are countless thousands of suns--and these the centres of other systems? How did he know that world -on-world ranges in the upper spaces of the silent sky, so multitudinously that each increase of the power of the telescope only adds unaccountable myriads until, looking from the rim of those nightly searchers, the eye beholds reach on reach of luminous clouds, and learns with awe profound, that these clouds are stars, are suns and systems--but so far away from us and from one another that they cannot be separated and distinguished by the most powerful glasses; and that these clouds, if we really could separate them and bring them within the field of our particular vision, would reveal themselves as suns and systems so numerous, that only, the Creator himself could number them?

How did Job know all this in that far day when he sat at his tent door in the beauty of the cloudless sky and without a telescope? How did he know all this so that he could tell us with absolute certainty what we now know only by the aid of modern science--that the stars _cannot_ be counted for number?

How did he know what only the modern telescope reveals, that the North is stretched out over the empty place? How did he know that there in the Northern sky there is a space where no star does shine --a dark abyss of fathomless night--as if, suddenly, the universe of worlds had come to an end?

How did he know, at the moment when the wise men of his day were saying that the earth was supported on the shoulders of a giant, that the giant stood on a platform made of the backs of elephants; that the elephants stood on the back of a mighty tortoise, but where the tortoise stood none of them said; how did he dare at that time to write that God hangeth the earth on nothing?

How did Isaiah know that the world is round? How did he learn to speak of "the circle of the earth," at the time when the scientific men of his day said that it was four square and flat?

How did he know of that imponderable ether in which the stellar universe is said to float? Who taught him to say that God spread out the heavens as "thinness," when the wise men of that hour were teaching they were a solid vault? How is it that he made use of the most scientific term when he speaks of the heavens as "thinness"? It is true in our English version he is made to say that God spread out the heavens as a "tent"; but the word "tent" in the Hebrew is (doq) and its root meaning signifies a thing that has been beaten out or stretched into thinness--an elastic thinness; it is a word accurately describing the ether which scientific men tell us is so thin that a teacup full of it may be blown out into a transparent bubble as large as the earth, and, even then, its attenuation would seem no greater than at the beginning.

How did Isaiah know all this?

Evidently his knowledge and wisdom did not come from the knowledge and wisdom of his day.

That the Bible did not come from man is seen in the fact of fulfilled prohpecy.

Page after page of this book is filled with prophetic announcements.

History and human experience record their amazing fulfilment.

The prophet Daniel gives the history of four great world empires, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome.

The rise and fall of these empires are foretold centuries ahead.

The total ruin and perpetual desolation of Babylon were announced when the city shone forth in the zenith of its splendor.

Daniel writes an account of Alexander the Great two hundred and fifty years before he is born, calls him the first king of Greece, describes his march for the conquest of the East, the battle of the Grannicus, his sudden death at Babylon, and the division of the empire among his four generals.

At the hour when Rome was practically passing through her travail pains of national birth, Daniel foretold its ascension to power, and described it as a wild beast, trampling down the nations, absorbing into itself the three kingdoms which preceded it, occupying the territory once possessed by them, and becoming the supreme governmental power of the earth. Centuries before it took place he foretold the division of the Roman Empire into two equal parts. He announced, also, that it should be the last universal political power till Christ the Lord should come to set up his worldwide kingdom. Centuries have passed since Rome ruled the world. From that day to this it has remained the last supreme world-power. The territory once ruled by it is filled with mighty nations--not one of them, great as it may be, is a universal world-power.

Where did Daniel get the foresight which enabled him to look on down through two thousand years of human history and, in the face of battle, intrigue and change, declare, what so far has come to pass, that Rome should be the last universal empire till Christ came?

Ezekiel, the prophet, said that the great and populous city of Tyre should be taken, cast down, and never rebuilt; and that the Lord would make it to be like the top of a scraped rock to spread nets upon.

The city was taken and destroyed. The people moved to an island just off the mainland and there built a new city. Two hundred and fifty years after Ezekiel made his prophecy, Alexander came, besieged the new city; and, in order to take it, built a causeway from the mainland. In doing this he tore down and utterly demolished the ruins of the old city; took its stones and timber and cast them into the sea; and then, actually, set his soldiers to work to scrape the very dust that he might empty it into the waters. From the hour when it was overthrown to this, the city has never been rebuilt; and for centuries it has been, and is to-day, like _the top of a scraped rock_--a place where _fishermen spread their nets_.

Where did Ezekiel get this knowledge?

Certainly not from man.

It will not do to say he guessed it!

Egypt was a land of cities and temples. The cities were populous, the temples and monuments colossal. Avenues of gigantic sphynx led to gateways whose immense thresholds opened into pillared halls, where the carved columns seemed like a forest of stone. Pyramids rose as mountains, and their alabaster-covered sides flashed back the splendor of the cloudless skies. The land bloomed as a garden. The papyrus grew by the banks of the Nile. The fisheries of the mighty river filled the treasury of kings with a ceaseless income. Art, literature, knowledge and culture were enthroned supreme--yet was it a land of false gods and a people given over to their worship.

Speaking in the name of God the prophet announced the coming desolation of Egypt. It should be cast down. Its fisheries should be destroyed, its papyrus withered, its cities and temples overthrown and the ruins scattered over the plain, no native prince should ever again sit upon its throne, it should become the basest of kingdoms.

It has become such.

Its cities are destroyed. Its temples are roofless, its columns fallen, the statues of its kings lie face downward in the dust, the pyramids, stripped and bare, stand scarred and silent in the sun. The singing Memnon are as songless from their chiselled lips as the tongueless Sphynx half buried in the yellow sand. The fisheries are gone, the papyrus has withered; for centuries no native prince has been seated on the throne. It is a land of the dead. The dead are everywhere. At every step you stumble over a mummy, the mummy of a dead cat, a dead dog, or a dead and shrivelled Pharaoh. Its greatest asset is its departed glory, and every grain of sand blown from the mighty desert, and every wave of reflected light flung back from the Lybian hills, proclaims the terrific fulfilment of the prophet's words.

The prophets foretold the final siege and destruction of Jerusalem. It should be trodden down of the Gentiles. The people should be carried away captive and sold into all lands. They should be scattered from one end of the earth to the other. All nations should despise them. They should become a by-word, a hissing and a scorn. They should be hunted, hounded and persecuted. Their sufferings should be unparalleled, horrible, unspeakable. The sound of a shaken leaf should startle them. They were to become the people of the trembling heart and the wandering foot.

The prophecies have been singularly fulfilled.

Jerusalem was besieged by the Romans. The city was taken. The city and temple were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands perished by famine, by fever, by fire and by sword. Titus, the Roman conqueror, drove a ploughshare over its smoking ruins. The people who remained alive after the general slaughter were carried away captive. They were scattered from one end of the earth to the other. They have found their dwelling place among all nations. They dwell everywhere and are at home nowhere. They have been a by-word, a hissing and a scorn. Every hand has been turned against them. They have been hunted on the mountains. They have been chased through the valleys. They have been walled up in the narrow and filthy ghettos of cities. Their goods have been stolen. Their wives and daughters have been ravished. They have been whipped and racked and tortured. They have been broken on the wheel, burned at the stake, buried alive, and sent to sea, thousands of them, in sinking ships. Every cruelty that the ingenuity of man and the inspiration of fiends could suggest has been practised upon them, until the heart revolts and the soul sickens at the mere recital of their blood and woe; and to this hour, through twenty long centuries, Jerusalem, as announced, has been trodden down of the Gentiles; all nations have tramped through her streets, overridden her people and torn down her walls.

The prophets said God would make a full end of the nation which persecuted them; but he would not make a full end of them, he would preserve and multiply them.

The promises have been kept.