^ I grant you that the Bible will have no power over my life 1 T. H. Huxley.
PSALM cxix. 105 13
if ever it ceases to command my conscience, or appeal to my judgment. It may contain passages of transcendent beauty that touch my aesthetic sense. It may arouse my curiosity by the light it sheds on the customs of strange people in the far-distant past. It may even start the tears, like the memories aroused by the sweet echoes of the prayer of a child. But its grip on my life will be gone. Of what use is a " lamp unto my feet " that goes out on the edge of the first precipice I meet ? If the Bible deserves to be called " the Word of God," ought not its message to be so plain, and clear, and reliable, that all honest and earnest men who turn to its pages shall be in substantial agreement as to its teachings ? I answer that it ought. I say more, it is. In all ages men have been in substantial agreement that in the pages of the Bible, if read with discrimination, we can find the true ideal of human life and character. I do not know one critic who would deny the power of its pages to quicken faith, to renew hope, to start the impulses of prayer, to thaw the frozen fountains of the affections, and to help the man of God to be " furnished unto every good work." But when men have gone to it to discover an authoritative account of the making of the mountains and the birth of the stars ; when men have gone to it to cover a complete and infallible system of church polity that would lock up the Kingdom of God in a first-century mausoleum ; when men have gone to it to mine out proof-texts, to bolster up a system of metaphysics and settle for ever the question between nominalism and realism, between evolution and transcendence — then they have been in a hopeless tangle of disagreement and strife.^
3. The lamp spoken of in the text has often been found fault with. Complaint has been made of its shape, of the media through which the light shines, of the materials of which the reflectors are made, and of the manner in which the hght is supplied. The answer that the lamp gives is to shine. No \/ modem invention has caused this lamp to be cast aside among old lumber. It is sometimes covered over with dust, but its light is so great that it pierces every obstruction, and is always sufficient to guide heavenward. An American writer tells us that, going , two miles to read to a company, and at the close being about to return through a narrow path in the woods where paths diverged, he was provided with a torch of light wood or pitch pine. He objected that it was too small, weighing not over half a pound.
^ G. H. Ferris, in The Eomiletic Review, Ix. 237.
14 THE LIGHT OF GOD'S WORD
" It will light you home," answered the host. And to all objections came, " It will light you home." So if the Bible be taken, it will be found sufficient to light us home. Some may object to this part of the Bible and others to another part ; but the answer of the Bible to all objectors is, " It will light you home." This is our practical, everyday need — a light to guide us home. The stars are sublime, meteors are dazzling ; but a lamp shining in a dark place is close to our practical needs. Such is the Word of God.
^ It is the darkness which makes the lantern so welcome. And it is the darkness of the sick-room or the house of mourning in which this " Night-lamp " emits such a soft and heavenly radiance. You will find it so. Fond as you are of books, there is only one that you will value at last ; with your head on the pillow you will hardly care to be told that a new history is published, or a marvellous epic. " No ; read me the Twenty-third Psalm. Let me hear the fourteenth of John." When your strength sinks yet lower it will for a moment rally the worn faculties to hear the whisper, " My flesh and my heart faileth : but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever." " Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil : for thou art with me ; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." ^
^ However mingled with mystery which we are not required to unravel, or difficulties which we should be insolent in desiring to solve, the Bible contains plain teaching for men of every rank of soul and state in life, which so far as they honestly and implicitly obey, they will be happy and innocent to the utmost powers of their nature, and capable of victory over all adversities, whether of temptation or pain. Indeed, the Psalter alone, which practically was the service book of the Church for many ages, contains merely in the first half of it the sum of personal and social wisdom. The 1st, 8th, 12th, 14th, 15th, 19th, 23rd, and 24th psalms, well learned and believed, are enough for all personal guidance ; the 48th, 72nd, and 75th have in them the law and prophecy of all righteous government; and every real triumph of natural science is anticipated in the 104th. For the contents of the entire volume, consider what other group of historic and didactic literaiture has a range comparable with it. There are —