In the closet and in the streets, amid temptation and trials, this is man's most faithful attendant and his strongest shield. It is our lamp through the dark valley, and the radiator of our best light from the solemn and unseen future. Stand before it as before a mirror, and you will see there not only your good traits, but your errors, follies, and sins, which you did not imagine were until you thus examined yourself. If you desire to make constant improvement, go to the Bible. It not only shows the way of all progress, but it incites you to go forward. It opens before you a path leading up and still onward, along which good angels will cheer you, and all that is good will lend you a helping hand.
There is no book so well adapted to improve both the head and the heart as the Bible. It is a tried book. Its utility is demonstrated by experience; its necessity is confessed by all who have studied the wants of human nature; it has wrung reluctant praise even from the lips of its foes. Other books bespeak their own age; the Bible was made for all ages. Uninspired authors speculate upon truths before made known, and often upon delusive imaginations; the Bible reveals truths before unknown, and otherwise unknowable. It is distinguished for its exact and universal truth. Time and criticism only illustrate and confirm its pages. Successive ages reveal nothing to change the Bible representations of God, nothing to correct the Bible representation of human nature. Passing events fulfill its prophecies, but fail to impeach its allegations.
The Scriptures teach us the best way of living, the noblest way of suffering, and the most comfortable way of dying. A mind rightly disposed will easily discover the image of God's wisdom in the depths of its mysteries, the image of God's sovereignty in the commanding majesty of its style, the image of his unity in the wonderful harmony and symmetry of all its parts, the image of his holiness in the unspotted purity of its precepts, and the image of his goodness in the wonderful tendency of the whole to the welfare of mankind in both worlds. We should use the Scriptures not as an arsenal, to be resorted to only for arms and weapons, but as a matchless temple where we delight to contemplate the beauty, the symmetry, and the magnificence of the structure, and to increase our awe and excite our devotion to the Deity there proclaimed.
The cheerless gloom which broods over the understandings of men had never been chased away but for the beams of a supernatural revelation. Men may look with an unfriendly eye on that system of truth which reproves and condemns them; but they little know the loss the world would sustain by subverting its foundations. We have tried paganism, we have tried Mohammedanism, we have tried Deism and philosophy, and we can not look upon them even with respect. The Scriptures contain the only system of truth which is left us. If we give up these, we have no others to which we can repair.
Future Life
There are two questions, one of which is the most important, the other the most interesting that can be proposed in language: Are we to live after death? and if we are, in what state? These are questions confined to no climate, creed, or community. The savage is as deeply interested in them as the sage, and they are of equal import under every meridian where there are men.
Among the most effectual and most beautiful modes of reasoning that the universe affords for the hope that is within us of a life beyond the tomb there is none more beautiful or exquisite than that derived from the change of the seasons, from the second life that bursts forth in Spring in objects apparently dead, and from the shadowing forth in the renovation of every thing around us of that destiny which divine revelation calls upon our faith to believe shall be ours. The trees that have faded and remained dark and gray through the long, dreary life of Winter clothe themselves again with green in the Spring sunshine, and every hue speaks of life. The buds that were trampled down and faded burst forth once more in freshness and beauty, the streams break from the icy chains that held them, and the glorious sun himself comes wandering from his far-off journey, giving warmth to the atmosphere and renewed beauty and grace to every thing around, and every thing we see rekindles into life.