DO WE NEED THE BIBLE?

The only creed consistent with the rejection of the Gospel of Christ is an eternal tomb, with the heart-shivering inscription, "Death is an eternal sleep." Americans who reject the Scriptures are as uncertain about the future as the poor heathen of other lands. Some of our unbelievers have gathered the information from heathen oracles that the future consists in being a poor, empty, shivering, table-rapping spirit, flying to and fro over the country in response to the sigh of some silly waiting-girl, or at the bidding of some brazen-faced, unscrupulous "free lover." And this, "O, ye gods!" is all that ever shall be of the noblest spirits that ever left human flesh! Others, to gain rest from this horrible and unsatisfying fate, fly to the theory of everlasting silence, as a result of the idea that mind is simply brain action, and ceases to exist when the brain ceases to act. Their appropriate motto is, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." It has been said that even this brute philosophy is reasonable compared with the dogma of a large portion of unbelievers, to wit., that blasphemers, thieves, profane swearers, murderers and adulterers, will all go straight to heaven when they die; that men with their hearts steeped in blood will sit down with Abraham and Isaac in the kingdom of God. But Spiritualists, Pantheists, Atheists, and Deists inform us that an external revelation is useless. Their common exposition of the sentiment is too well known to need comment. We hear them saying, "You need say nothing about the Bible to me; I know my duty well enough without it; and as for miracles, they will never prove anything to me. Can thunder, repeated daily through centuries, make God's laws and his wisdom and goodness more God-like? No! I am grown, perchance, to manhood, and do not need the thunder and terror. I am not to be scared. It is not fear, but reverence, that shall lead me! Revelation! Inspiration! And thy own God-like spirit; is not that a revelation?" See Carlyle's "Past and Present," page 307.

Now, if Mr. Carlyle was in no need of the fear of God, somebody else may be in a different mental and moral condition. There is nothing in which men differ more. If one man is above the weakness of fearing God (?) all men are not. Say what we may of fear, it is nevertheless true that we are greatly influenced by fear. We are greatly indebted to the fear of sickness for health, to the fear of poverty for wealth, and to the fear of death for life. Fear is to caution what knowledge is to a wise choice. Where there is no fear there is no caution. The love of life and bliss is natural, therefore we fear sickness, poverty and death. Why say with your lips, "I am above fear," while away down in your heart you know it to be a lie?

Love and fear, like the Siamese twins, live and perish together. Do we not need "revelation?" Where is the shadow, and where is the sunshine? May we not contrast them? The very wisest of heathen legislators approved of vice in some of its most heinous forms. The Carthaginian law required human sacrifices. When Agathoclas besieged Carthage two hundred children of the most noted families were put to death by command of the Senate, and three hundred citizens sacrificed themselves to Saturn. See Diodorus Siculus, b. 20, ch. 14. The laws of Sparta required theft and the death of unhealthy children. The laws of Rome allowed parents to kill their child, if they pleased to do it. At the headquarters of heathen literature it was recommended that maimed infants should be killed or exposed to death. Aristotle's Political Library, 7, chapter 17. In Plato's Republic we discover an advance of society, but a community of wives continues, and what was termed woman's rights was maintained upon the condition that the women were trained to war. In war times the children were led out to look upon the struggle, and become accustomed and hardened to blood. The teachings of the best minds were immoral. "He may lie," says Plato, "who knows how to do it." Profane swearing was enjoined by the example of their best writers. Oaths are of common occurrence in the writings of Seneca and Plato. Aristippus taught that adultery and theft were commendable in a wise man, and Cicero plead for the last dreadful tragedy—suicide. Such immoralities are eulogised in the writings of Virgil, Horace and Ovid. When Rome was in her glory and greatness, Trajan had ten thousand men to hew each other to pieces to amuse the Romans. In the face of all these facts, modern Spiritualists advance along with Deists, Atheists and Pantheists, and gravely inform us that we have no need of any external revelation—that men are wise enough without it.

They argue, that as we have physical senses to take hold of earth's material blessings and appropriate them; so we have intellectual faculties to take hold of all else that is necessary to supply our mental and moral wants. It is most certainly true that we have physical senses and intellectual faculties. I can not tell how it is with all the infidels of our country, but I do know persons having physical senses who are in great need of some of the substantials of life. I have also known persons who have destroyed their physical senses to such an extent as to be miserable objects of pity and compassion, needing some external help as well an internal. Now, if, in spite of physical senses, men and women do starve in this world on account of want, it is certainly allowable that persons may fail of the enjoyment of needed mental and moral culture in spite of intellectual faculties. And if it is a matter of charity for men to put forth their hands and assist their fellow men when they are in want of material blessings, surely it is a matter of love, the love of God, to present to weary, burthened souls mental and spiritual blessings which correlate with man's spiritual wants. Do you deny the existence of such wants?

Tyndal said there is a place in man's soul-nature for religion. This fact is acknowledged by all leading writers in unbelief. He who calls it in question experiences the fact. Why say it is not true against the testimony of your own conscience?

"Tell me," said a rich Hindoo who had given all his wealth to the Brahmans surrounding his dying bed that they might obtain pardon for his sins, "tell me what will become of my soul when I die?" "Your soul will go into the body of a holy cow." "And after that?" "It will pass into the body of a divine peacock." "And after that?" "It will pass into a flower." "Tell me, oh! tell me," cried the dying man, "where will it go last of all?" "Where will it go last of all? Aye, that is the question reason can not answer," said the poor Brahmans.

Where there is no vision the people perish. "Life and immortality was brought to light through the Gospel." Without a revelation from God, men know neither how to live or die. Our ancestors trusted to the powers of magic, to incantations, for health, for success in tilling the ground, for finding lost articles, for preventing accidents, etc. They superstitiously regarded certain days of the week. If an infant was born upon a certain day it would live; if upon another it would live, but be sickly.

Do you unceremoniously reject the Gospel of the Christ? "Yes," you say, "if it depends on Jesus it is not eternally true, and therefore is not true at all." But, I ask in all candor, is eternally true and sufficiently revealed one and the same? Are we under no obligations to the man who first informed us of vaccination as a preventive of small-pox, simply because it would always have prevented it? Are we under no obligations to men on account of scientific discoveries, just because the truths discovered are eternal truths? Nonsense! You know it is nonsense. Then we may be under lasting obligations to the Christ for the revelation of the Gospel, with its sublime precepts and principles, consolations and promises, which fill up the human spirit with undying love and the hope of eternal glory.

Let parents look well to this question. Let infidels set themselves to work and get up some law of man capable of regenerating the hearts of those men who, at their bidding, renounce the law of God and his authority, and also with it all human authority. Will they do it? Can they do it? Oh! There are no means outside of the sanctions of religion by which the heart may be reached and purified from the love and practice of sin.

What right, says the Pantheist, the Atheist, the Deist, and Spiritualist, have you to command me?

The rejectors of the Bible made an experiment, an attempt, in trying to govern France without religion. Shall the scenes of Paris and Lyons be repeated, re-enacted in our own beloved America? No, we don't want it, and we do not think we shall experience it, for the framers of our Declaration of Independence laid the rights of God in the bed-rock of our republic, believing that the rights of God are the basis of human rights. "All men are born free and equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, etc."

Nations destitute of the Bible ever were, and are, ignorant and wicked. There are peoples in the world decently clad, well fed, and living in comfortable mansions, with well tilled lands, who make powerful streams turn powerful wheels and run great machinery; who yoke the iron horse to the market train and drive their floating palaces against the floods; who erect churches in every village, and make their children more learned than the priests of Egypt, or the philosophers of Greece; even many of their criminals are more decent and upright than were the sages, philosophers and heroes of lands destitute of the Bible. These peoples have that wonderful book; and they claim that it contains a revelation from God to man; and that it teaches us how to live, and how to die.

"Every tree is known by its own fruits."

"The fool hath said in his heart there is no God." He claims, however, that something without life or intelligence produced organic nature. That blind, dead, something is the fool's God.