Of Jesus' sacrifice—have been beat upon—
The noise of falling blows was heard—
The anvil is unharmed—the hammers are all gone."
Julian the apostate was a hammer. Gone! Voltaire, Renan, hammers. Gone! In Germany, Goethe, Strauss, Schleiermacher—gone. In England, Mill, Hume, Hobbes, Darwin, Huxley and Spencer—the anvil remains; the hammer is gone. In America, Thomas Paine, Parker, Ingersoll, gone. The anvil remains.
Listen. In France a hundred years ago or more they were printing and circulating infidel literature at the expense of $4,500,000 a year. What was the result? God was denied, the Bible sneered at and ridiculed, and between 1792 and 1795 one million twenty thousand and fifty-one hundred people were brought to death. The Word of God stood unshaken amidst it all. Josh Billings said: "I would rather be an idiot than an infidel; because if I am an infidel I made myself so, but if I am an idiot somebody else did it." Oh, the wreckers' lights on the dangerous coasts that try to allure and drag us away from God have all gone out, but God's words shine on.
The vital truths of the Bible are more believed in the world today than at any other time. When a man becomes so intelligent that he can not accept the Bible, too progressive to be a Christian, that man's influence for good, in society, in business or as a companion, is at an end. Some think that being a doubter is an evidence of superior intellect. No!
I've never found a dozen men in my life who disbelieved in the Bible but what they were hugging some secret sin. When you are willing to give up that pet sin you will find it easy to believe in the Bible.
It explains to me why Saul of Tarsus, the murderer, was changed to Paul, the apostle. It explains to me why David Livingstone left his Highland home to go to darkest Africa. It explains to me why the Earl of Shaftesbury was made from a drunkard into a power for God in London for sixty-five years. It explains why missionaries leave home and friends to go into unknown lands and preach Jesus Christ, and perhaps to die at the hands of the natives.
I can see in this book God revealed to man and when I do and accept, I am satisfied. It is just what you need to be satisfied. God knows your every need.
This explains to me why Jesus Christ has such influence on men and women in the world today. No man ever had such influence to teach men and women virtue and goodness as Christ. This influence has been in the world from 2,000 years ago to the present time. The human heart is to Jesus like a great piano. First he plays the sad melodies of repentance and then the joyful hallelujahs.