THE EXCELLENCY OF THE BIBLE

You will be struck, in the first place, at finding in the Bible, written by authors, many in number, and separated from each other by intervening centuries, a marvellous connexion and unity. You will see the plan of revelation gradually unfolding itself with revolving ages, and exhibiting the most evident marks of oneness of design, and of its emanation from one common author. Who can this author be, but God alone? What other mind could comprehend fifteen centuries at a glance? You will then think it as incredible that the Bible should be the work of man, as that a perfect picture should be formed by fifty painters, who should pass in succession before the canvas, and each give a stroke with his pencil in passing.

You will afterwards be delighted to see what light the Bible sheds on subjects the most useful and the most profound. You will find, respecting God, his law, and his government, notions as new as they are instinct with truth. You will learn to know yourself so well, that you will be constrained to confess, that He who made the Bible made also the heart of man. You will find the solution of these grand problems, which have ever reduced philosophy to despair — the origin of evil; the disorders of society; the contradictions which are observable in man. You will rest convinced that the Bible cannot be explained without God, as you will acknowledge that the world cannot be explained without the Bible.

You will be strengthened in this conviction by comparing the instructions of this book with the contemporary lessons of human wisdom. Look at the Jews, among whom reason had done comparatively nothing. Look at the Greeks, among whom it had worked prodigies. How is it, that while the first possessed the most sublime views of religion, the other had only vague conjectures among their philosophers, and superstitions among the multitude? Whilst a few Galilean fishermen trace the only picture of perfect holiness that the world ever saw; whilst they announce oneGod, just, wise, and merciful; whilst they reveal a blissful eternity, and show the way by which it may be attained; all is confused, abandoned, and disordered in Rome and Greece.

Moses, who published the Decalogue, that everlasting code of the purest morality, the foundation of all laws and of all society, was contemporary with Orpheus: and the Greeks wept over the adventures of Eurydice, while the Jews listened with terror to the proclamation of the law from Mount Sinai. Abraham, who understood the value of faith, and the necessity of implicit obedience to the commands of God — Joseph, who when pressed to commit an action which was regarded as a trivial fault among the heathen, cried, “How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” — correspond to Inachus, Cadmus, Cecrops — to the most profound moral darkness. So strong a light, on the one hand, such total obscurity on the other; and the light among a people deemed barbarous, and the darkness among the most civilized; who can explain this, if the Bible be not the book of God? How wonderful a people are the Jews! Before the coming of Christ, and when they alone read the prophetic writings, they were, in their knowledge of God, unequalled among the nations of the earth; and hardly had the gospel extended to the Greeks and Romans, than these same Jews fell as much below as they had formerly surpassed them! And yet, men cannot perceive that they owed their former superiority to their possession of the Old Testament, and their subsequent inferiority to their rejection of the New!

You will find all this in religion, sir; but you will find greater things than these. You will find doctrines perfectly adapted to your moral necessities. You will find in Jesus Christ the God of man; the God of sinners; your God.

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