My Dear A——: I had supposed my last letter would end our correspondence. Your kind reply has gratified me more than I can express. Without further words, let me take up at once the question that you put, I am sure, sincerely. You ask, "What is 'the way of settlement that the Bible opens to the great questions that press us?'"
The questions of supreme interest are few and simple. Is there a God? Is there a future existence for us? How can that existence be made a safe and satisfying one? If you are willing to allow any authority to the Bible at all, there can be no doubt as to the first two questions. There is a God by whom we were created and to whom we are responsible; there is a future existence. Those two questions are settled, if the Bible can settle anything. And they are settled, let me add, in harmony with the profoundest instincts and the most imperative demands of our nature. Whatever a few souls in their struggling dissatisfaction and sad unrest may persuade themselves, the great yearning heart of humanity will quiet itself on nothing less than God and immortality. Even your former guide, Mr. —— (let me hope I may speak of him now as only your former guide), cries out in the presence of the dead and before the awful silence of the grave, "Immortality is a word that hope through all the ages has been whispering to love. All wish for happiness beyond this life; all hope to meet again the loved and lost." Yes, there are hours when the most hopeless are glad to turn to the hope that the Bible alone gives, when the bitterest rejecters of God and his word long for the consolation that only the rejected word affords.
Let us turn to the other question. If, when we are through with this life—as we soon shall be through with it—we are not through with existence—if there is a life beyond the present not measured by years or ages,—how can it be made worth having? Is there any way in which our immortality can be assured to us as an immortal good? After all the doubts and darkness, the mystery and suffering, the bitterness and disappointment, of this life, may it in any way be found a great and a good thing, after all, that we have lived? To answer these questions we must come back to the old truth—the truth of your childhood. The "advanced thought" of our day has discovered nothing to change the fact that men are out of the way, they are not what they should be. Every man knows this. The Bible expresses it in a very plain way by saying they are sinners. As such it deals with them; to such alone it opens its door of hope. The Bible is of no use to you unless you are a sinner. If you call this cant, I am sorry for it, but I cannot help it; I cannot change it. The only men for whom God is dealing here for good, for whom he is making possible an immortality of honor and happiness, are the sinful. And is not this well for us? Does it not at once bring hope to you—a hope as great as it is mysterious? You know that life has not been to you an unstained thing any more than it has been to any of us. To know this is to know sin, the one appalling fact of the universe, the one unspeakable woe of our being.
In the simplest way, then, my dear A——, let me say that the first step in your coming right with God, and so right with the future, is to know and to feel that you are wrong. The Bible closes the door of hope for ever on the man who comes claiming the brightness and the good of a life beyond the grave because he is worthy of it. These words were once familiar to you: "By the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified." Rom. iii. 20.
Can he who is wrong make himself right? Can he be all he ought to be? Can he do all he ought to do? Can you set right all the wrong and all the failure of the past? Can you make the future without error? To ask these questions is to answer them to every honest conscience.
For one who is wrong there must be the consequences of wrong, and these must be as fearful and as far-reaching as sin itself. "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap," and evermore and everywhere the harvest is greater than the seed. The coming tribulation and anguish of the unsaved souls that do evil is a law of nature as well as of revelation. The wages of sin is death. You know this. You have felt it in its measure. You have seen it in the unhappiness, the misery, the woe, the despair and death with which sin reigns everywhere around us. Take the brightest view of life that you can, and the darkness in which it ends is terrible. To go out of it without God is to go out without hope. Am I wrong in believing that you need no argument here, that no conviction is more sorrowfully intense with you than this?
Will you go now a step farther? Standing in your wrong and your weakness and your unrest, with the heavy shadows of the future falling upon you, are you willing to draw near to the open portal of a better life? Are you willing to look up and read over it—"God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life"? John iii. 16. Are you willing to submit your faith to the mystery—beyond all depth except the love of God—that the Son of God in our nature has borne our sins in his own body on the tree—that he has died for us, the Just for the unjust? In other words, are you willing to receive the kingdom of heaven as a little child—to be saved, if saved you may be, in God's own way?
In a former letter I spoke of the testimony of Webster to the reality of the Christian religion; and, though it is true that Christianity does not depend upon the patronage of any man, it is well to know that greater intellects than those that would persuade you to reject it have bowed before it and found their supreme hope in it. Let me give you, then, another testimony from this greatest of American statesmen and jurists. It was his last night on earth; that life of extraordinary influence and honor was closing. As his family and friends stood around his bed his physician repeated the immortal hymn of Cowper:
"There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel's veins,
And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains."
As upon the night-air died away the final stanza—