Bible CharactersTalmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Religion
Bible Characters
Talmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Bible -- Biography
Paul was a logician; he was a metaphysician; he was an all-conquering
orator; he was a poet of the highest type. He had a nature that could
swamp the leading men of his own day, and, hurled against the Sanhedrim,
he made it tremble.
Paul learned all he could get in the school of his immediate vicinity;
then he went to a higher school, and there mastered the Greek and the
Hebrew, and also perfected himself in belles-lettres, until in after
years he astonished the Cretans, the Corinthians and the Athenians by
quotations from their own authors.
I have never found any thing in Carlyle or Goethe or Herbert Spencer
that could compare in strength or in beauty with Paul’s Epistles. I do
not think there is any thing in the writings of Sir William Hamilton
that shows such mental discipline as you find in Paul’s argument about
justification and the resurrection. I have not found any thing in Milton
finer in the way of imagination than I can find in Paul’s illustrations
drawn from the amphitheater.
There was nothing in Robert Emmet pleading for his life, or in Edmund
Burke arraigning Warren Hastings in Westminster Hall, that compared with
the scene in the court room when, before robed officials, Paul bowed and
began his speech, saying: “I think myself happy, King Agrippa, because I
shall answer for myself this day.”
I repeat the assertion that a religion that can capture such a man as
that must have some power in it. It is time people stopped talking as
though all the brains of the world were opposed to Christianity. Where
Paul leads we can afford to follow.
I am glad to know that Christ has in the different ages of the world
had in His discipleship a Mozart and a Handel in music; a Raphael and a
Reynolds in painting; an Angelo and a Canova in sculpture; a Rush and
a Harvey in medicine; a Grotius and a Washington in statesmanship; a
Blackstone, a Marshall and a Kent in law.
The time will come when the religion of Christ will conquer all the
observatories and universities, and then, through her telescope
Philosophy will behold the morning star of Jesus, and in her laboratory
see that “all things work together for good,” and with her geological
hammer discover the “Rock of Ages.”
Instead of cowering and shivering when the skeptic stands before you and
talks of religion as though it were a pusillanimous thing, take your New
Testament from your pocket and show him the picture of the intellectual
giant of all the ages, prostrated on the road to Damascus, while his
horse is flying wildly away. Then ask the skeptic what it was that
frightened the one and threw the other.
Oh, no! It is no weak Gospel. It is a most glorious Gospel. It is an
all-conquering Gospel. It is an omnipotent Gospel. It is the power of God
and the wisdom of God unto salvation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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