Practical Religion: Being Plain Papers on the Daily Duties, Experience, Dangers, and Privileges of Professing ChristiansRyle, J. C. (John Charles)
Religion
Practical Religion: Being Plain Papers on the Daily Duties, Experience, Dangers, and Privileges of Professing Christians
Ryle, J. C. (John Charles)
Christian life -- Anglican authors
You have doubtless heard of Atheists. An Atheist is one who professes to
believe that there is no God, no Creator, no First Cause, and that all
things came together in this world by mere chance.--Now shall we listen
to such a doctrine as this? Go, take an Atheist to one of the excellent
surgical schools of our land, and ask him to study the wonderful
structure of the human body. Show him the matchless skill with which
every joint, and vein, and valve, and muscle, and sinew, and nerve, and
bone, and limb, has been formed. Show him the perfect adaptation of
every part of the human frame to the purpose which it serves. Show him
the thousand delicate contrivances for meeting wear and tear, and
supplying daily waste of vigour. And then ask this man who denies the
being of a God, and a great First Cause, if all this wonderful mechanism
is the result of chance? Ask him if it came together at first by luck
and accident? Ask him if he so thinks about the watch he looks at, the
bread he eats, or the coat he wears? Oh, no! Design is an insuperable
difficulty in the Atheist's way. _There is a God._
You have doubtless heard of Deists. A Deist is one who professes to
believe that there is a God, who made the world and all things therein.
But He does not believe the Bible. "A God, but no Bible!--a Creator, but
no Christianity!" This is the Deist's creed.--Now, shall we listen to
this doctrine? Go again, I say, and take a Deist to an hospital, and
show him some of the awful handiwork of disease. Take him to the bed
where lies some tender child, scarce knowing good from evil, with an
incurable cancer. Send him to the ward where there is a loving mother of
a large family in the last stage of some excruciating disease. Show him
some of the racking pains and agonies to which flesh is heir, and ask
him to account for them. Ask this man, who believes there is a great
and wise God who made the world, but cannot believe the Bible,--ask him
how he accounts for these traces of disorder and imperfection in his
God's creation. Ask this man, who sneers at Christian theology and is
too wise to believe the fall of Adam,--ask him upon his theory to
explain the universal prevalence of pain and disease in the world. You
may ask in vain! You will get no satisfactory answer. Sickness and
suffering are insuperable difficulties in the Deist's way. _Man has
sinned, and therefore man suffers._ Adam fell from his first estate, and
therefore Adam's children sicken and die.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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