8 THE LIGHT OF GOD'S WORD
historical faith in the Bible and said : He will not make me glad, but He shall not find me, therefore, swerve from following Him. I will do His holy will so far as I can, I will serve Him as well as I can, though not perhaps so well as others to whom the joy of the Lord gives strength. I will be content to do without these inward rewards, but with or without such wages I will do my best work for the Master. With this resolve, arrived at after years of weary strife, rest began for me, and deepened afterwards into peace, and heightened eventually into joy, and now from year to year, almost from week to week, an ever greatening blessedness." ^
II.
The Eight Use of the Bible.
1. If the Bible, then, is to do its work, we must be careful to N act upon each truth which it teaches us as we learn it. For there is one great difference between moral or religious knowledge on the one hand and purely secular knowledge on the other, a difference which we cannot lay too closely to heart. It is that, while secular knowledge is, as a rule, remembered until the memory decays, moral and religious knowledge is soon forgotten if it is not acted on. The reason for this is that in the one case the will is interested, and in the other it is not. The will is interested in our losing sight, as soon as may be, of a precept which we disobey, or of a doctrine which we have professed, but which we feel condemns us; and so the will exerts a steady, secret pressure upon the intellect, a pressure which anticipates the ordinary decomposition and failure of memory, and extrudes the unwelcome precept or doctrine, gradually but surely, from among the subjects which are present to thought.
^ When the Duke of Wellington accepted the commission to form a Government in 1834, it was resolved to prorogue Parlia- ment, and Lord Lyndhurst was desired by the King to go to Lord Grey and tell him such was his pleasure. Lyndhurst forgot it ! In after-times, those who write the history of these days will probably discuss the conduct of the great actors, and it will not fail to be matter of surprise that such an obvious expedient was not resorted to in order to suspend violent discussions. Among
* A. M. Stoddart, Life and Letters of EanrMh E. Pipe, 119.
PSALM cxix. 105 9
the various reasons that will be imagined and suggested, I doubt if it will occur to anybody that the real reason was that it was forgotten}
2. The many-sidedness of the Bible, its immense resources, the great diversity of its contents and character, its relations with ages 80 wide apart as are the age of Moses and the age of St. Paul, its vast stores of purely antiquarian lore, its intimate bear- ings upon the histories of great peoples in antiquity, of which independently we know not a little, such as the Egyptians and the Assyrians, the splendour and the pathos of its sublime poetry — all these bristle with interest for an educated man, whether he be a good man or not. The Bible is a storehouse of literary beauties, of historical problems, of materials for refined scholarship and the scientific treatment of language, of dififerent aspects of social theories or of the philosophy of life. A man may easily occupy himself with one of these subjects for a whole lifetime and never approach the one subject* which makes the Bible what it is. And, indeed, much of the modern literature about the Bible is no more distinctly related to religion than if it had been written about Homer, or Herodotus, or Shakespeare. It deals only with those elements of the Bible which the Bible has in common with other and purely human literature ; it treats the Bible as literature simply, and not as the vehicle of something which distinguishes it altogether from all merely human books. And, therefore, a serious effort is needed to set these lower aspects and interests of the Bible sufficiently aside in order to study its true and deepest meaning — the message which it conveys from God to the soul of man.
^ There is a story told of a man crossing a mountain in Carnar- vonshire one stormy night. It was so cold that in order to shelter his hands from the biting wind, he put the lantern under his cloak, and as the moon shone dimly through the clouds he thought he could trace his way without the lantern. All at once a gust of wind blew aside his cloak ; the light shone forth, and suddenly revealed the edge of a large slate quarry, over which, in another moment, he would have fallen and have been dashed to pieces. He soon retraced his steps, but he did not hide the lantern under his cloak that night again. There are many who think that they
* The Greville Memoirs, iii. 50.
10 THE LIGHT OF GOD'S WORD
can go through life — dark and dangerous as the way often is — without this lamp of God's truth ; they therefore hide it out of sight, or neglect to trim it by constant and prayerful study. In many instances they do not find out their mistake and folly until it is too late. Others have had this light unexpectedly cast upon their path, to reveal to them some great danger ; thus their steps have been suddenly arrested, and they have learnt never to try to do without that light again.^