Westminster Sermons: with a PrefaceKingsley, Charles
Religion
Westminster Sermons: with a Preface
Kingsley, Charles
Sermons, English -- 19th century
Yes. He was not of course a man of science, in the modern sense of the
word, this old Psalmist. But this I know, that he was a man of science
in the soundest and deepest sense; an inspired philosopher, as well as an
inspired poet; and had the highest of all sciences, which is the science
and knowledge of the living God. For he saw God in everything and
everything in God.
But--he says--the trees of the Lord are full of sap; even the cedars of
Lebanon which He hath planted. Why should he say that specially of the
cedars? Did not God make all trees? Does He not plant all wild trees,
and every flower and seed? My dear friends, happy are you if you believe
that in spirit and in truth. But let me tell you that I think you would
not have believed that, unless the Psalmist, and others who wrote the
Holy Scriptures, had told you about trees of God, and rivers of God, and
winds of God, and had taught you that the earth is the Lord's and the
fulness thereof. You do not know--none of us can know--how much we owe
to the Bible for just and rational, as well as orthodox and Christian,
notions of the world around us. We, and--thank God--our forefathers for
hundreds of years, have drunk in Bible thoughts, as it were, with our
mother's milk; till much that we have really learnt from the Bible we
take as a matter of course, as self-evident truths which we have found
out for ourselves by common sense.
And yet, so far from that being the case, if it had not been for the
Bible, we might be believing at this moment, that one god made one tree,
and another another; that one tree was sacred to one god, and another
flower to another goddess, as the old Greeks believed; and that the wheat
and barley were the gift, and therefore the property, of some special
deity; and be crying now in fear and trembling to the sun-god, or the
rain-god, or some other deified power of nature, because we fancied that
they were angry with us, and had therefore sent us too much rain and a
short harvest.
It is difficult, now-a-days, to make even cultivated people understand
the follies of those who, like the heathen round the Jews, worshipped
many gods: and all the more because our modern folly runs in a different
channel; because we are tempted, not to believe in many gods, but in no
God at all; to believe not that one god made one thing and another
another, but that all things have made themselves.
When Hiram, king of Tyre, sent down timber cut from the cedars of
Lebanon, to build the temple of God for Solomon; his heathen workmen,
probably, were angry and terrified at what they were doing. They said
among themselves--"These cedars belong to Baal, or to Melkart, the gods
of Tyre. Our king has no right to send them to build the temple of
Jehovah, the God of the Jews. It is a robbery, and a sacrilege; and Baal
will be angry with us; and curse us with drought and blight."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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