And mark you—when Christ goes out of the Bible as God—God goes out of the Bible. The deity which has preserved it, the power which has made it living and unchangeable in the midst of change and death, will have been dethroned.
Without Christ as God you are without any sane and satisfying knowledge of God.
Where will you turn to find God and know him to your comfort? You might as well look into the bottomless pit as into your own heart.
No more satisfactory will it be to look into the heart of others. We are all built on the same plan.
The difference is only in degree or extension.
The basilar fact is, God cannot be found in any natural man.
You cannot find or know him to your heart’s content in nature.
What kind of a God does nature reveal to you?
I will answer for you—a God who puts you in this world and does not tell you whence you come, whether from the all mud or the Almighty, from an angel or a devil, from jelly or genius, from the heights of heaven or the depths of hell. A God who puts you here and fills you with questions he alone can answer and—refuses so to do. A God who calls you into the world and gives you eyes to see everything but yourself. A God who hides you from yourself, so that you do not know whether you are a function or a soul; whether you are matter or spirit; whether you are a personality or a cellular part of a general whole—called man. A God who gave you mind with seemingly infinite possibilities in thought, and gave you a body that is finite and temporary in construction. A God who gives you an intellect which grasps after eternity, and is always saying on the summit of any endeavor achieved, “What next?” and yet is limited to a few inconsequent years. A God who sets you face to face with the imminency of death, and never allows you to know at what moment you must go, and gives you no hint of the beyond—or whether there is a beyond.
In France they do not tell the man who is to be guillotined till a few moments before the fatal hour. He is sleeping on his couch. He is dreaming of pleasant fields, of running streams, of boyhood’s days, of to-morrows that shall be better—a heavy hand is laid on his shoulder—he starts up in bed—the gray light of early morning is filtering in through the barred window of his cell—stern-faced men are standing before him—they say, “Your hour is come; follow us.”