426. Re-Enforcement

Re-Enforcement

Luk_17:5 : ’93Lord, Increase our faith.’94

’93What a pity he is going there,’94 said my friend, a most distinguished general of the army, when he was told that the reason for my not being present on a celebrated day in Brooklyn was that on that day I had sailed for the Holy Land. ’93Why do you say that?’94 inquired some one. My military friend replied: ’93Oh, he will be disillusioned when he gets amid the squalor and commonplace scenes of Palestine, and his faith will be shaken in Christianity, for that is often the result.’94 The great general misjudged the case. I went to the Holy Land for the one purpose of having my faith strengthened, and that was the result which came of it. In all our journeying, in all our reading, in all our associations, in all our plans, augmentation, rather than the depletion of our faith, should be our chief desire. It is easy enough to have our faith destroyed. I can give you a recipe for its obliteration. Read infidel books, have long and frequent conversations with skeptics, attend the lectures of those antagonistic to religion, give full swing to some bad habit, and your faith will be so completely gone that you will laugh at the idea that you ever had any. If you want to ruin your faith, you can do it more easily than you can do anything else. After believing the Bible all my life, I can see a plain way by which, in six weeks, I could enlist my voice and pen and heart and head and entire nature in the bombardment of the Scriptures and the Church and all I now hold sacred.

That it is easy to banish soon and forever all respect for the Bible, I prove by the fact that so many have done it. They were not particularly brainy, nor had especial force of will, but they so thoroughly accomplished the overthrow of their faith that they have no more idea that the Bible is true, or that Christianity amounts to anything, than they have in the truth of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, or the existence of Don Quixote’92s ’93windmills.’94 They have destroyed their faith so thoroughly that they never will have a return of it. Fifty revivals of religion may sweep over the city, the town, the neighborhood where they live, and they will feel nothing but a silent or expressed disgust. There are persons in this house today, who, twenty years ago, gave up their faith and they will never resume it. The black and deep-toned bell of doom hangs over their head, and I take the hammer of that bell, and I strike it three times with all my might, and it sounds, Woe! Woe! Woe! But my wish, and the wish of most of you, is the prayer expressed by the disciples to Jesus Christ, in the words of my text: ’93Lord, increase our faith.’94

The first mode of accomplishing this is to study the Bible itself. Few infidels have ever read the Bible through. They fish in this Bible for incoherencies and contradictions and absurdities, and if you find their Bible, you will see interlineations in the Book of Jonah and some of the chapters of that unfortunate prophet nearly worn out by much use, and some part of Second Samuel or First Kings, you will find dim with fingermarks, but the pages which contain the Ten Commandments and the Psalms of David and the Sermon on the Mount and the book of John the Evangelist, will not have a single lead-pencil stroke in the margin, nor any fingermarks showing frequent perusal. The father of one of the Presidents of the United States was a pronounced infidel. I knew it when many years ago I accepted his invitation to spend the night in his home. Just before retiring at night, he said, in a jocose way: ’93I suppose you are accustomed to read the Bible before going to bed, and here is my Bible from which to read.’94 He then told me what portions he would like to have me read, and he only asked for those portions on which he could easily be facetious.

You know you can make fun about anything. I suppose you could take the last letter your father or mother ever wrote and find something in the grammar or the spelling or the tremor of the penmanship about which to be derisively critical. The internal evidence of the truthfulness of the Bible is so mighty that no one man out of the sixteen hundred millions of the world’92s present population, or the vaster millions of the past ever read the Bible in course, and read it prayerfully and carefully but was led to believe it. John Murray, the famous book publisher of Edinburgh and the intimate friend of Southey, Coleridge, Walter Scott, Canning, and Washington Irving, bought of Moore, the poet, the Memoirs of Lord Byron, and they were to be published after Byron’92s death. But they were not fit to be published, although Murray had paid for them ten thousand dollars. That was a solemn conclave when eight of the prominent literary people of those times assembled in Albemarle Street after Byron’92s death to decide what should be done with the Memoirs which were charged and surcharged with defamations and indelicacies. The Memoirs were read and pondered, and the decision came that they must be burned, and not until the last word of those Memoirs went to ashes did the literary company separate. But, suppose now all the best spirits of all ages were assembled to decide the fate of the Bible, which is the last Will and Testament of our Heavenly Father, and these Memoirs of our Lord Jesus, what would be the verdict? Shall they burn or shall they live? The unanimous verdict of all is, ’93Let it live, though all else burn.’94 Then put together on the other hand all the debauchees and profligates and assassins of the ages, and their unanimous verdict concerning the Bible would be, ’93Let it burn.’94

Mind you, I do not say that all infidels are immoral, but I do say that all the scapegraces and scoundrels of the universe agree with them about the Bible. Let me vote with those who believe in the Holy Scriptures. Men believe other things with half the evidence required to believe the Bible. The distinguished Abner Kneeland rejected the Scriptures, and then put all his money into an enterprise for the recovery of that hocus-pocus ’93Captain Kidd’92s Treasures,’94 Kneeland’92s faith for doing so being founded on a man’92s statement that he could tell where those treasures were buried from the looks of a glass of water dipped from the Hudson river. The internal evidence of the authenticity of the Scriptures is so exact and so vivid that no man, honest and sane, can thoroughly and continuously and prayerfully read them without entering their discipleship. So I put that internal evidence paramount. How are you led to believe in a letter you receive from husband or wife or child or friend? You know the handwriting. You know the style. You recognize the sentiment. When the letter comes you do not summon the postmaster who stamped it and the postmaster who received it and the letter-carrier who brought it to your door to prove that it is a genuine letter. The internal evidence settles it, and by the same process you can forever settle the fact that the Bible is the handwriting and communication of the infinite God.

Furthermore, as I have already intimated, we may increase our faith by the testimony of others. Perhaps we of lesser brain may have been overcome by superstition or cajoled into an acceptance of a hollow pretension. So I will, this morning, turn this house into a courtroom and summon witnesses, and you shall be the jury, and I now empanel you for that purpose, and I will put upon the witness-stand men whom all the world acknowledge to be strong intellectually and whose evidence in any other courtroom would be incontrovertible. I will not call to the witness-stand any minister of the Gospel, for he might be prejudiced. There are two ways of taking an oath in a courtroom. One is by putting the lips to the Bible and the other is by holding up the right hand toward heaven. Now, as in this case, it is the Bible that is on trial, we will not ask the witness to put the book to his lips, for that would imply that the sanctity and divinity of the book is settled, and that would be begging the question. So I shall ask each witness to lift his hand toward heaven in affirmation.

Salmon P. Chase, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, appointed by President Lincoln, will take the witness-stand. ’93Chief Justice Chase, upon your oath, please to state what you have to say about the book commonly called the Bible.’94 The witness replies: ’93There came a time in my life when I doubted the divinity of the Scriptures, and I resolved, as a lawyer and judge, I would try the book as I would try anything in the courtroom, taking evidence for and against. It was a long and serious and profound study, and using the same principles of evidence in these religious matters as I always do in secular matters, I have come to the decision that the Bible is a supernatural book, that it has come from God, and that the only safety for the human race is to follow its teachings.’94 ’93Judge, that will do. Go back again to your pillow of dust on the banks of the Ohio.’94

Next I put upon the witness-stand a President of the United States’97John Quincy Adams. ’93President Adams, what have you to say about the Bible and Christianity?’94 The President replies: ’93I have for many years made it a practise to read through the Bible once a year. My custom is to read four or five chapters every morning immediately after arising from my bed. It employs about an hour of my time and seems to me the most suitable manner of beginning the day. In what light soever we regard the Bible, whether with reference to revelation, to history or to morality, it is an invaluable and inexhaustible mine of knowledge and virtue.’94

Next I put upon the witness-stand Sir Isaac Newton, the author of the Principia and the greatest natural philosopher the world has ever seen. ’93Sir Isaac, what have you to say concerning the Bible?’94 The philosopher’92s reply is: ’93We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy.’94 Next I put upon the witness-stand the enchantment of letters, Sir Walter Scott; and when I ask him what he thinks of the place that our great book ought to take among other books he replies: ’93There is but one book and that is the Bible.’94 Next I put upon the stand the most famous geologist of all time, Hugh Miller, an elder of Dr. Guthrie’92s Presbyterian Church, in Edinburgh, and Faraday and Keppler, and they all testify to the same thing. They all say the Bible is from God and that the mightiest influence for good that ever touched our world is Christianity. ’93Chancellor Kent! What do you think of the Bible?’94 Answer: ’93No other book ever addressed itself so authoritatively and so pathetically to the judgment and moral sense of mankind.’94 ’93Edmund Burke! What do you think of the Bible?’94 Answer: ’93I have read the Bible morning, noon, and night, and have ever since been the happier and the better man for such reading.’94 Next I put upon the stand William E. Gladstone, for many years the head of the English Government, and I hear him saying what he said to me in January of 1890, when, in reply to his telegram, ’93Pray come to Hawarden to-morrow,’94 I visited him. Then and there I asked him as to whether, in the passage of years, his faith in the Holy Scriptures and Christianity was on the increase or decrease and he turned upon me with an emphasis and enthusiasm such as no one who has not conversed with him can fully appreciate, and expressed by voice and gesture and illumined countenance his ever-increasing faith in God and the Bible and Christianity as the only hope of our ruined world. ’93That is all, Mr. Gladstone, we will take of your time now, for, from the reports of what is going on in England just now, I think you are very busy.’94 The next man I put upon the witness-stand is the late Earl of Kintore, and I ask him what he thinks of Christianity, and he replies: ’93Why do you ask me that? Did you not hear me preach Christ in the ’91Midnight Mission’92 of London?’94 ’93Oh, yes! I remember!’94

But I see many witnesses present today in the courtroom, and I call you to the witness-stand, but I have only a second of time for any one of you. As you pass along just give one sentence in regard to Christianity. ’93Under God it has changed my entire nature,’94 says one. ’93It brought me from drunkenness and poverty to sobriety and a good home,’94 says another. ’93It solaced me when I lost my child,’94 says another. ’93It gave me a hope of future treasures when my property was swept off by the last panic,’94 says another. ’93It has given me a peace and a satisfaction more to me than all the world beside,’94 says another. ’93It has been to me, light and music and fragrance and radiant anticipation,’94 says another. Ah! stop the procession of witnesses. Enough! Enough! All those voices of the past and the present have mightily increased our faith.

Again, our belief is re-enforced by arch’e6ological exploration. We must confess that good men at one time were afraid of geologist’92s hammer and chemist’92s crucible and arch’e6ologist’92s investigation, but now intelligent Christians are receiving and still expecting nothing but confirmation from all such sources. What supports the ’93Palestine Exploration Society’94? Contributions from churches and Christian benefactors. I saw the marks of the shovels of that Exploring Society amid the ruins of ancient Jericho, and all up and down from the Dead Sea to C’e6sarea Philippi. ’93Dig away!’94 says the Church of God, ’93and the deeper you dig the better I like.’94 The discovered monuments of Egypt have chiseled on them the story of the sufferings of the Israelites in Egyptian bondage, as we find it in the Bible; there, in imperishable stone, representations of the slave, of the whips, and of the taskmasters who compelled the making of bricks without straw. Exhumed Nineveh and Babylon, with their dusty lips, declare the Bible true. Napoleon’92s soldiers in the Egyptian campaign pried up a stone, which you may find in the British Museum, a stone, as I remember it, presenting perhaps two feet of lettered surface. It contains words in three languages. That stone was the key that unlocked the meaning of all the hieroglyphics of tombs and obelisks, and enabled us to read over and over again the same events which Moses recorded. The sulphurous graves of Sodom and Gomorrah have been identified. The remains of the tower of Babel have been found. Assyrian documents lifted from the sands and Behistun inscriptions hundreds of feet high upon the rocks, echo and re-echo the truth of Bible history.

The signs of the time indicate that almost every fact of the Bible from lid to lid will find its corroboration in ancient city disentombed or ancient wall cleared from the dust of ages or ancient document unrolled by arch’e6ologist. Before the world rolls on as far into the twentieth century as it has already rolled into the nineteenth an infidel will be a man who does not believe his own senses, and the volumes now critical and denunciatory of the Bible, if not entirely devastated by the bookworms, will be taken down from the shelf as curiosities of ignorance or idiocy. All success to the pickaxes and crow-bars and powder-blasting of those apostles of arch’e6ological exploration. I like the ringing defiance of the old Huguenots to the assailants of Christianity: ’93Pound away, you rebels! Your hammers break, but the anvil of God’92s Word stands.’94 How wonderfully the old book hangs together. It is a library made up of sixty-six books and written by at least thirty-nine authors. It is a supernatural thing that they have stuck together. Take the writings of any other thirty-nine authors or any ten authors or any five authors and put them together, and how long would they stay together? Books of ’93elegant extracts’94 compiled from many authors are proverbially short-lived. I never knew one such book, which, to use the publisher’92s phrase, ’93Had life in it’94 for five years. Why is it that the Bible, made up of the writings of at least thirty-nine authors, has kept together for a long line of centuries when the natural tendency would have been to fly apart like loose sheets of paper when a gust of wind blows upon them? It is because God stuck them together and keeps them together. But for that Joshua would have wandered off in one direction and Paul in another and Ezekiel in another and Habakkuk in another, and the thirty-nine authors in thirty-nine directions.

Put the writings of Shakespeare and Tennyson and Longfellow, or any part of them together. How long would they stay together? But the cannon of Scripture is loaded now with the same ammunition with which prophet and apostle loaded it. Bring me all the Bibles of the earth into one pile, and blindfold me so that I cannot tell the difference between day and night, and put into my hand any one of all that Alpine mountain of sacred books, and put my finger on the last page of Genesis, and let me know it, and I can tell you what is on the next page, namely, the first chapter of Exodus, or while thus blindfolded, put my finger on the last chapter of Matthew, and let me know it, and I will tell you what is on the next page, namely, the first chapter of Mark. In the pile of five hundred million Bibles there will be no exception. In other words, the book gives me confidence by its supernatural adhesion of writing to writing. Even the stoutest ship sometimes shifts its cargo, and that is what made our peril the greater in the ship Greece of the National Line when the cyclone struck us off the coast of Newfoundland, and the cargo of iron had shifted as the ship swung from larboard to starboard and from starboard to larboard. But thanks be to God this old Bible ship, though it has been in thousands of years of tempest, has kept its cargo of gold and precious stones compact and sure and in all the centuries nothing about it has shifted. There they stand, shoulder to shoulder, David and Solomon and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel and Hosea and Joel and Amos and Obadiah and Jonah and Micah and Nahum and Habakkuk and Zephaniah and Haggai and Zechariah and Malachi and Matthew and Mark and Luke and John and Paul and Peter, all there, and with a certainty of being there until the heavens and the earth, the creation of which is described in the first book of the Bible, shall have collapsed, and the white horse of the Conqueror described in the last book of the Bible shall paw the dust in universal demolition. By that tremendous fact my faith is re-enforced.

The discussion is abroad as to who wrote those books of the Bible called the Pentateuch, whether Moses or Hilkiah or Ezra or Samuel or Jeremiah or another group of ancients. None of them wrote it. God wrote the Pentateuch, and in this day of stenography and typewriting that ought not to be a difficult thing to understand. The great merchants and lawyers and editors and business men of our towns and cities dictate nearly all their letters, they only sign them after they are dictated. The prophet and evangelist and apostle were Jehovah’92s stenographers or typewriters. They put down only what God dictated; he signed it afterward. He has been writing his name upon it all through the vicissitudes of centuries.

But I come to the height of my subject when I say the way to re-enforce our faith is to pray for it. So the disciples in my text got their abounding faith: ’93Lord, increase our faith.’94 Some one suggests: ’93Do you really think that prayer amounts to anything?’94 I might as well ask you is there a line of telegraphic poles from New York to Washington, is there a line of telegraphic wires from Manchester to London, from Cologne to Berlin. All the people who have sent and received messages on those lines know of their existence. So there are millions of souls who have been in constant communication with the Capital of the Universe, with the Throne of the Almighty, with the Great God himself, for years and years and years. There has not been a day when supplications did not flash up and blessings did not flash down. Will some ignoramus, who has never received a telegram or sent one, come and tell us that there is no such thing as telegraphic communication? Will some one who has never offered a prayer that was heard and answered come and tell us that there is nothing in prayer? It may not come as we expect it, but as sure as an honest prayer goes up, a merciful answer will come down. During the blizzard of four or five years ago, you know that many of the telegraph wires were prostrated, and I telegraphed to Chicago by the way of Liverpool, England, and the answer, after a while, came round by another wide circuit, and so the prayer we offer may come back in a way we never imagined; and if we ask to have our faith increased, although it may come by a widely different process than that which we expected, our confidence will surely be augmented. Oh! put it in every prayer you ever make between your next breath and your last gasp: ’93Lord, increase our faith’94’97faith in Christ as our personal ransom from present guilt and eternal catastrophe; faith in the Omnipotent Holy Ghost; faith in the Bible, the truest volume ever dictated or written or printed or read; faith in adverse providences, harmonized for our best welfare; faith in a Judgment Day that will set all things right which have for ages been wrong. Increase our faith, not by a fragile addition, but by infinitude of recuperation.

Let us do as we saw it done in the country, while we were yet in our teens at the old farmhouse after a long drought, and the well had been dried and the cattle moaned with thirst at the bars and the meadow brook had ceased to run and the grass withered and the corn was shriveled up, and one day there was a growl of thunder and then a congregation of clouds on the sky and then a startling flash and then a drenching rain, and father and mother put barrels under every spout at the corners of the house and set pails and buckets and tubs and pans and pitchers to catch as much as they could of the shower. For in many of car souls there has been a long drought of confidence and in many no faith at all. Let us set out all our affections, all our hopes, all our contemplations, all our prayers, to catch a mighty shower. The Lord increases our faith. I like the way that the minister’92s widow did in Elisha’92s time, when, after the family being very unfortunate, her two sons were about to be sold for debt, and she had nothing in the house but a pot of oil, and at Elisha’92s direction she borrowed from her neighbors all the vessels she could borrow, and then began to pour out the oil into those vessels and kept on pouring until they were all full, and she became an oil merchant with more assets than liabilities, and when she cried, ’93Bring me yet a vessel,’94 the answer came: ’93There is not a vessel more.’94 So let us take what oil of faith we have and use it until the supply shall be miraculously multiplied. Bring on your empty vessels, and by the power of the Lord God of Elisha they shall be filled until they can hold no more of jubilant, all-inspiring, and triumphant faith.

What a frightful time we had a few days ago down on the coast of Long Island, where I had been staying. That archangel of tempest, which, with its awful wings, swept the Atlantic coast from Florida to Newfoundland, did not spare our region. A few miles away, at Southampton, I saw the bodies of four men, whom the storm had slain and the sea had cast up. As I stood there among the dead bodies, I said to myself, and I said aloud: ’93These men represent homes. What will mother and father and wife and children say when they know this?’94 Some of the victims were unknown, only the first name of two of them was found out’97Charley and William. I wondered then and I wonder now if they will remain unknown, and if some kindred far away may be waiting for their coming and never hear of the rough way of their going. I saw also one of the three who had come in alive, but more dead than alive. The ship had become helpless six miles out, and as one wave swept the deck and went down on the furnaces till they hissed and went out, the cry was: ’93Oh! my God, we are lost.’94 Then the crew put on life-preservers, one of the sailors saying to the other, ’93We will meet again on the shore, and, if not, well, we must all go sometime.’94 Of the twenty-three men who put on the life-preservers, only three lived to reach the beach. But what a scene it was as the good and kind people of Southampton, led on by Dr. Thomas, the great and good surgeon of New York, stood watching the sailors struggling in the breakers. ’93Are you still alive?’94 shouted Dr. Thomas to one of them out in the breakers, and he signaled yes, and then went into unconsciousness. Who should do the most for the poor fellows and how to resuscitate them, were the questions that ran up and down the beach at Southampton. How the men and women on the shore stood wringing their hands impatiently waiting for the sufferers to come within reach, and then they were lifted up and carried indoors and waited on with as much kindness and wrapped as warmly as though they had been the princes of the earth. ’93Are they alive?’94 ’93Are they breathing?’94 ’93Do you think they will live?’94 ’93What can we do for them?’94 were the rapid and intense questions asked, and so much money was sent for the clothing and equipment of the unfortunates that Dr. Thomas had to make a proclamation that no more money was needed. In other words, all that day it was resuscitation. And that is the appropriate word for us this morning, as we stand and look off upon this awful sea of doubt and unbelief on which hundreds are this moment being wrecked. Some of them were launched by Christian parentage on smooth seas and with promise for prosperous voyage, but a Voltaire cyclone struck them on one side and a Tom Paine cyclone struck them on the other side, and a bad-habit cyclone struck them on all sides, and they have foundered far away from shore, far away from God, and they have gone down or are washed ashore with no spiritual life left in them. But, thank God, there are many here today with enough faith left to encourage us in the effort at their resuscitation. All hands to the beach! With a confidence in God that takes no denial, let us lay hold of them! Fetch them out of the breakers! Bring Gospel warmth and Gospel stimulus and Gospel life to their freezing souls! Resuscitation! Resuscitation!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage