"Thank God I have broken the ice, she will not lose her reason. She is mine already."
That evening a special service was announced for the Church of the United Brethren. Their former pastor was to preach a sermon. There had not yet been a new pastor engaged, but there was no hope of getting again this man who, after a rebaptism of zeal, had been consecrated as a missionary to the Indians.
The people of the town flocked to the church to hear what he had to say. With shining face the ardent and still young apostle stood in the pulpit. "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature," was his theme, and he presented to his hearers the most sublime conception of duty, of love, and of service for others. Sound, zealous, rooted in the faith,—what a career was spread before him! The old people wiped their eyes, and the young ones winked away surreptitious tears. Surely life was worth living with such an inspiration as this.
"Christ who died for us, who lives for us,—our great Pattern and Redeemer,—take him with you," exhorted the preacher, "and before all, above all, with all, a change of heart,—the removal of the stony heart, the planting of the tender one alive with love for the brethren, forgiveness for sinners, pity for the fallen. Pity, pity, always pity,—unlimited, full, free!
"When your pastor, I preached to you the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the sublime morals of the Christ. But the Bible to me was not wholly a revelation from God. The book of Genesis was a revision of ancient myths adopted by the superstitious descendants of Abraham. The flood was one of the historic fictions commonly afloat among the nations of antiquity. Abraham's call and the supernatural in his life were begotten in the heated imagination of one of his descendants, a true Eastern hero-worshipper. The book of Jonah was a myth produced by a man of an imaginative temperament. Job was a grand epic,—a poem of the patriarchical age. Solomon's Song was sickly, Oriental sentimentality. Isaiah was the work of more than one author.
"The miracles of the New Testament came from the mythical lore of the Orient; the Revelation was a vision of a poet and a religious fanatic seen while in the reverie of a prolonged trance. In a word, the Scriptures were an admixture of truth and error, and it was the work of the Higher Criticism to separate the one from the other.
"But, thanks be to God, I now know that the light that was then in me was darkness; my natural man did not discern the things of the Spirit; they were foolishness unto me. Now I am spiritual, and I discern all things, yea the deep things of God,—the substitution of the innocent for the guilty, regeneration by the Spirit, the way of life through Christ, living in Christ, for Christ, and thus for others,—the only genuine altruism in the world.
"This is life from the dead,—life eternal. Now all the books of the Bible are a symmetrical whole,—God's revealed will to man.
"And, with our great President Abraham Lincoln, I accept all,—what of it I can by reason, and the balance by faith.
"Enlightened scholars will weed out any errors that may have crept in by successive transcriptions, and help us in parts difficult of interpretation; but they must leave to us the grand old Bible, defended by its own internal evidence, and by the evidence internal to all in whom is the new light,—the new life. To all such 'it will be the Impregnable Rock of the Holy Scriptures.'