The Right and Wrong Uses of the BibleNewton, Richard Heber
Religion
The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible
Newton, Richard Heber
Bible -- Study and teaching; Sermons, American
The inspirations which we feel from the Bible-words are the breathings of
the Eternal Spirit. The Divine whispers, which are too often inarticulate
in nature and even in our souls, are articulate in the great
Bible-words--the words proceeding from out of the mouth of God, on which
man liveth. The power of the Bible is that the deafest souls can therein
hear--GOD.
9. _God speaks in A MAN._
The Bible centres in the story of a life which was so filled with the Holy
Ghost that this Man became the symbol of the Most High, the sacrament of
His Being and Presence, the sacred shrine of Deity. As when the long-drawn
travail of instrumentation labors through the opening movements of the
ninth symphony, with a strain too fine for any voicing save by man, there
bursts at length upon the tumultuous storm of sound the clear, high, song
of joy from human lips; so from the mounting efforts of a nation's
insufficient utterance there rises at last a voice, which takes up every
groaning of the Spirit in humanity into the perfect beauty of a human life
divine.
And so the Word hath breath, and wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds,
In loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought.
The light of the Son of Man is the life of men; the light for our minds
and the warmth for our hearts. In the Power in whom we live and move and
have our being, we see "Our Father who art in Heaven." In the laws of life
we read the methods of His schooling of our souls. In the sorrows of life
we receive His disciplinings. In the sins that cling so hard upon us we
feel the evils of our imperfection, from which He is seeking to deliver us
through His training of our spirits. In the shame of sin we are conscious
of the guilt that His free forgiveness wipes away, when we turn saying,
Father, I have sinned. In death we face the door-way to some other room of
the Father's house, where, it may be, just beyond the threshold our dear
ones wait for us! In Christ himself we own our heaven-sent Teacher,
Master, Saviour, Friend; our elder Brother, who in our sinful flesh lives
our holy aspirations, and, smiling, beckons us to follow Him, whispering
in our ears--To them that receive me I give "power to become the sons of
God."
The power of the Bible is--CHRIST.
II.
When Sir Walter Scott lay in his last illness, he asked Lockhart one day
to read to him. "From what book shall I read?" said Lockhart. "There is
but one book," was Scott's answer. Those who have sought the "power to
become the sons of God" will understand this hyperbole of the most healthy
human mind in modern English literature. Tested by experience there is
indeed, in the wide range of the literature of power, no book to be
mentioned with the Bible for feeding the life of God in man. Our fathers
found this true, and their children cannot correct their judgment. The
substitute for the Bible, as an ethical and spiritual instructor, is not
out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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