Faith and Duty: Sermons on Free Texts, with Reference to the Church-YearBuchheimer, L. B. (Louis Balthaser)
Religion
Faith and Duty: Sermons on Free Texts, with Reference to the Church-Year
Buchheimer, L. B. (Louis Balthaser)
Church year sermons; Lutheran Church -- Sermons; Sermons, American
When speaking of science, it must be observed at the outset that
true science and the Revelation of God are not at variance. How
can they be? The Book of Nature and the Book of Religion have been
written by one and the same Hand, and cannot contradict each other.
What man by investigation can find out in nature cannot be of a
character to make him doubt or deny the truthfulness of religion
as laid down in the Bible. But this is what some of the men of
supposed higher learning are doing. They look askance at religion.
They shake their wise heads, and, putting on their eye-glasses,
superciliously state that the Bible is not what people think it is.
They are willing to admit that it is a book of much good history,
a book of sublime poetry, a book of excellent moral precepts, a
book which admirably describes human nature, a book from which all
men may gather a great deal of practical wisdom and comforting
promise, but many of its texts are spurious or faulty, it is not
altogether up to date in their opinion. The geologist has bored
into the earth, and found that the various compositions must make
it much older than Moses seems to say. The astronomer has put his
telescope into the heavens and finding our planet, the earth, the
smallest among heavenly bodies, considers it too insignificant to
be the object of all that divine concern the Bible speaks about.
The anatomist has examined the skulls of dead men, and comparing
the one with the other, questions whether they have all proceeded
from one human pair. The natural historian has never found a race of
snakes with power of speech, and so he puts down the account of the
serpent in Eden as a myth. The people of the earth speak hundreds
of languages, and hence it must be a mere dream that there was once
a time when "the whole earth was of one language and one speech."
Miracles, they say, are so contrary to the general experience of
mankind that they must be rejected as falsehood and fiction, and
thus might we continue to give the objections of these wiseacres,
called scientists, who are looked up to with undisguised admiration
by numbers. It would lead us too far, though nothing might afford
us greater pleasure to examine these objections in their true
light.--We will only ask, How do these wise people know what length
of time it took the almighty God to form the various strata which
compose the crust of the earth? How can they tell that this world of
ours is too small to engage Jehovah so deeply for its welfare? How
can they prove that the human race and language do not extend back
to one common stock? How dare they deny the credibility of miracles
in the face of the many wonders which are spread about them every
day, and appear every season in their sight? What authority have
they for their high-sounding, but hollow assertions? They think
themselves wise, but in fact they are but babes in these matters,
and those who follow them are their senseless dupes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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