"If I had come to a gathering like this a year ago," began the speaker, "it would have been as a mocker or a spy. But how different are things with me to-day! I am now one of yourselves, a total abstainer upon principle, an unfeigned believer in the Bible, and a loyal though very unworthy disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. I have good cause to remember these old ruins, as you all know; but you do not many of you know how I used to spend Sabbath after Sabbath here in gambling; and yet the good Lord bore with me. And it is not long since that he gave me a wonderful deliverance, not far from the spot where I now stand. But I am not going to refer any more to that, except to say, let by-gones be by-gones. I bear no ill-will to those who have shown themselves my enemies. What I want to do now, for the few minutes that I shall stand here, is just to give you my experience about the Bible. "When I was professedly an unbeliever, I thought I knew a great deal about the Bible, and I used to lay down the law, and talk very big about this inconsistency and that inconsistency in the Scriptures, and I just read those books which supplied me with weapons of attack. But I was in utter ignorance of what the Bible really was; and had I read it from beginning to end a thousand times over,--which I never did, nor even once,--it would have been all the same, for I should not have read it in a candid spirit--I should not have wanted to know what it had to tell me. "It's just perfectly natural. I remember that two of our men went up to London some time ago, and they strolled together into the Kensington Museum. When they came back, we asked them what they had seen there, and what they liked best. One of them had seen a great number of rich and curiously inlaid cabinets, but he could call to mind nothing else, though he had spent hours in the place, and had been all over it upstairs and downstairs. As for the other man, he couldn't for the life of him remember anything, but he could tell you all about the dinner they had together at a chop-house afterwards,--what meat, what vegetables, what liquor they had, and how much it cost to a penny. You see it was what their mind was set on that really engrossed their attention. "And so it is in going through the Bible: you'll not get a word of instruction from it, if you go in at Genesis and come out at Revelation, if you go in with an unteachable mind. God would have us ask him humbly, but not dictate to him. Or you may notice in the Bible just such things as you want to notice, and not see anything else, though it's as plain as daylight. So it was with me, and so it has been and will be with thousands of sceptics. I just looked into a Bible now and then to find occasion for cavilling and scoffing, and I found what I wanted. But I missed all the love, and the mercy, and the promises, and the holy counsel, and never so much as knew they were there, though my eyes passed over them continually.