This revelation from the sacred pages of the devotion of woman is
reflected in universal history and experience. It is needless to give
examples. Suffice it to say that when Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tell
us of this devotion, we simply answer: yes, this has been ever true in
all countries and in every age. We have learned it not only from history
but from our own experience in all the affairs of life, extending from
the cradle to the grave. The night of sorrow never grows so dark that a
mother's love will not irradiate the gloom. The criminal guilt of a
wayward son can never become so black that her arms will not be found
about him. If we pass from loving loyalty to the individual, to
patriotic devotion to the causes of the nations, woman's fidelity is
still undying. The women of France are said to have paid the German war
debt. The message of the Spartan mother to her soldier son is too well
known to be repeated. When the legions of Scipio engirdled the walls of
Carthage and desperation seized the inhabitants of the Punic city,
Carthaginian women cut their long black hair to furnish bowstrings to
the Carthaginian archers. Illustrations might be multiplied; but these
will suffice to show that Mary and Martha and Salome, the women of the
Gospels, are simply types of the consecrated women of the world.
When we come to summarize, we are led to declare that if the Gospel
historians be not worthy of belief we are without foundation for
rational faith in the secular annals of the human race. No other
literature bears historic scrutiny so well as the New Testament
biographies. Not by a single chain, but by three great chains can we
link our Bible of to-day with the Apostolic Bible. The great
manuscripts: the Vatican, the Alexandrian, and the Sinaitic, dating from
the middle of the fourth and fifth centuries, must have been copies of
originals, or at least of first copies. The Bible is complete in these
manuscripts to-day.
The Versions, translations of the original Scriptures from the language
in which they were first written into other languages, form a perfect
connection between the days of the Apostles and our own. The Vulgate,
the celebrated Latin version of St. Jerome, was completed A.D. 385. In
making this translation the great scholar has himself said that he used
"ancient (Greek) copies." Manuscripts that were ancient, A.D. 385, must
have been the original writings, or, at least, first copies. The
Vulgate, then, is alone a perfect historic connection between the Bible
that we read to-day and that studied by the first Christians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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