Man's Tailoring

“Me?i make laws as tailors make garments — to fit the crooked bodies they serve for, to stilt the humours of the people who are to be governed by those laws This is man’s poor tailoring, and it betrays the sinfulness both of those who frame laws and of those for whom they are made: the Judge of all the earth acts on other principles. God has ordained his law according to the rule of perfect equity, and he will not adapt it to our prejudices and deformities. Some men treat the law and testimony of the Lord as if it were like plaster of Paris, to be poured over their features to take the cast of their own boasted loveliness. Religion is to them a matter of opinion and not of fact; they talk about their “views,” and their ideas, as if Christians were no longer believers but inventors, and no more disciples but masters. This cometh of evil, and leadeth on to worse consequences. Our sentiments are like a tree, which must be trained to the wall of Scripture; but too many go about to bow the wall to their tree, and cut and trim texts to shape them to their mind. Let us never be guilty of this. Reverence for the perfect word should prevent our altering even a syllable of it. “The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul”; let it convert us, but never let us try to pervert it. Our ideas must take the mould of Scripture — this is wisdom: to endeavour to mould Scripture to our ideas would be presumption.