Nations destitute of the Bible ever were, and are, ignorant and wicked. There are peoples in the world decently clad, well fed, and living in comfortable mansions, with well tilled lands, who make powerful streams turn powerful wheels and run great machinery; who yoke the iron horse to the market train and drive their floating palaces against the floods; who erect churches in every village, and make their children more learned than the priests of Egypt, or the philosophers of Greece; even many of their criminals are more decent and upright than were the sages, philosophers and heroes of lands destitute of the Bible. These peoples have that wonderful book; and they claim that it contains a revelation from God to man; and that it teaches us how to live, and how to die.
"Every tree is known by its own fruits."
"The fool hath said in his heart there is no God." He claims, however, that something without life or intelligence produced organic nature. That blind, dead, something is the fool's God.
THE WAY INFIDELS TREAT THE LANGUAGE OF THE BIBLE.
The unreasonableness and unfairness of infidels, or otherwise their ignorance, is manifested in their unwillingness to interpret the literature of religion as they do the language of the sciences. In scientific literature we speak of the earth as a sphere, and infidels never think of objecting that it is "pitted with hollows deep as ocean's bottom," and "crusted with protuberances high as the Himalaya," in every imaginable form. "There is not an acre of absolutely level ground" known on the face of the earth, and yet when we speak of land, saying it is level, no infidel demurs. The waters pile themselves in waves and dash in breakers, yet we say, "Level as the ocean," and none object.
The smallest formations present the same regular irregularities of form. Crystals approach the nearest to mathematical figures, but they break with compound irregular fractures at their bases of attachment. Nature gives no perfect mathematical figures; they only approximate mathematical perfection. Infidels do not trouble themselves with science on this account. "The utter absence of any regularity or assimilation to the spheroidal figure, either in meridianal, equatorial or parallel lines, mountain ranges, sea beaches or courses of rivers, is fatal to mathematical accuracy in the more extended measurements. It is only by taking the mean of a great many measurements that an approximate accuracy can be obtained. Where this is not possible, as in the measurement of high mountains, the truth remains undetermined by hundreds of feet; or as in the case of the earth's spheroidal axis, Bessel's measurement differs from Newton's by fully eleven miles." See Humboldt's Cosmos, vol. 1, p. 7, 156. "The smaller measures are proportionally inaccurate." All these irregularities and imperfections in science are overlooked, considered not in the least objections to the use of language which would, upon the most rigid application, cut them out as fables on the one hand or destroy science upon the other; but no sensible man thinks of either as a matter allowable.
On the other side, Infidels are "eternally" mouthing about irregularities in the lives of the ancient men of the Bible, which are exceptions to the general rule, just as though religious persons could live lives of absolute perfection. The language, also, of the Bible, which, like the language of science, takes no notice of irregularities that must be expected in the lives of the very best men upon the earth, is by them abused. For instance, "Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect," is construed to mean that God is a man God, clothed with human imperfections, or, otherwise, man is imperatively required to be absolutely perfect. All such abuse of language is contemptible. Many other examples might be adduced—such as the irregularities in the words employed by the witnesses of the resurrection of Christ, which do not affect the evidence of the fact to be established in the least degree, and which are just such irregularities as are witnessed in evidence given in court rooms almost daily, and passed without so much as being noticed. For example, one witness says Mary Magdalene "came very early to the sepulchre," and another says she came "about sunrise." If all Christians were to treat the literature of science, and science itself, as these would-be wise Infidels treat the literature of religion, and religion itself, it would be surprising to run over the absurdities as well as irregularities of scientific history. There are irregularities in nature, and their name is legion; they all belong to that wonderfully boasted harmony of nature so much talked of in our day. As for the mistakes made in religion since the days of the apostles of the Christ, they are many; but what have they to do with the genuine?