The Bible Above the Invention of the Human Intellect
We maintain that the Bible is an effect superior to any human cause. The first thought by which this position may be substantiated, is the intellectual character of this most remarkable volume.
To say nothing now of its moral characteristics, as a production of intellect it is altogether above the invention of the human mind. It is not the style and outward dress in which its thoughts are clothed, of which we speak; though in these, large portions of it stand above all other writings. Rich and splendid as is its external attire, its heavenly origin is to be sought for rather in the originality, the comprehensiveness, the richness of the thoughts it utters. From beginning to end it is, in this respect, a book containing wondrous things.” So that the more we consider the highest efforts of the human understanding, the more shall we perceive of its feebleness, and the narrow limits which confine it; and the more also shall we perceive with increasing evidence, that the Scriptures are the word of God, and not of man.
* Rise of Polytheism and Pantheism. By James Douglass.
1. In illastrating this general observation, we begin with the remark, that the views which the Scriptures give of the Deity himself xc altogether beyond the reach of any uninspired mind. Although pure Atheism, or the absolute denial of an intelligent First Cause, finds no support either in the internal constitution of the human mind, or the abundant indications of design in the exterior universe; yet is the knowledge of the only living and true God to be found only in the Sacred Writings. There is nothing which the writers upon Natural Religion have demonstrated more clearly, than the insufficiency, the absurdity even, of those results to which the lights of nature and reason have actually brought men as to the character of the Deity. If the views of those portions and ages of the world which have been destitute of the Bible, may be fairly ascertained from the writings of their philosophers, the enactments of their laws, or their religious rites and usages; not only were their opinions of the Deity loose and undefined, but misshapen and preposterous, and to the last degree stupid. The Bible is the only book which furnishes any definite and satisfactory account of the great First Cause. This great thought, everywhere else so obscure that both the popular and philosophic theology of the pagan world divested the Deity of those properties which are essential to his nature, is the one which gives to the Bible all its meaning, and imparts beauty and power to all its revelations. On opening this Book, you are carried back to those undiscovered asjes where
I’l’S INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 47
the eternal Deity existed alone; existed everywhere, and in the possession of all those attributes which constitute him what he is. The image of God is never veiled here: the Book itself is full of God. His character and claims have here a place which no human composition ever assigned to them; his very existence and supremacy have a place, which is in vain looked for in the conceptions of uninspired men. We know not whether the views of God which are here revealed, are to be the more admired or revered: admired for their beauty and loveliness, or revered for their greatness and majesty. Heathen poets and philosophers have alternately charmed and instructed the world on other themes; on this they reasoned and sung not like poets, or philosophers.
There are three thoughts which relate to the Divine nature, to which the mind of man could never have attained. The one is the pure spiyituality of the Godhead; another is his omnipresence; the third, his incomprehensible and mysteiious Trinity,
There is nothing in man himself, there is nothing in the visible universe, by which he can make any approximation to the idea of pure spirituality. The Divine existence is in this respect altogether peculiar to itself, and such as man cannot adequately conceive. The human faculties do not enable us to form anything like an adequate conception of the spirituality of the Divine nature, now that it is revealed; much less could they have originated this conception. The same may be said of the omnipresence of God. The Scriptmes tell us that he fills all space, penetrates all substanceSj pervades all minds, and is equally present with each of his creatures, and with all of them at the same time. Now what human intellect could have revealed this truth — a truth so perfectly incomprehensible? What human intellect, unaided by heavenly wisdom, ever penned that sublime passage, “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say. Surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee!”
And what less can be said of the Trinity of the Divine existence? It is a conception that never found its counterpart in the invention of creatures. The human mind actually cowers before it. Not a few, even with the Bible in their hands, are scandalized by this great truth on account of its mysteriousness. Yet, so important is it in the system of truth contained in the Scriptures, that it not only envelopes all its hopes, and enwraps within it all its salvation, but without it the Scriptures are an incoherent system, and absolutely without meaning. Pagan lands know no such Deity; nor is the archetype miy where to be found in the history of human thought.
2. There are, in the next place, views presented in the Scriptures of the Divine purposes Vvhich it is impossible for any uninspired mind to have revealed.
There is the most perfect simplicity in the designs of God, as they are here disclosed; yet is there a comprehensiveness, a grandeur, an elevation, which are not only worthy of the Infinite mind, but which none but the Infinite mind could originate.
Tradition, taking its rise in a supernatural revelation, gave some obscure intimations of wisdom in the government of the world; but its teachings degenerated to absolute absurdity. Philosophy spake of a fatalism, which extends its dark and monotonous decree over all things, and gives to blind contingency a sort of universal dominion; and such conceptions may well be supposed to have men for their authors. The Scriptures disclose those eternal and unchanging counsels of the uncreated Deity, which delineate beforehand all his dispensations, mark out the course and progress of all his operations and government, and trace his entire work from one stage of it to another; which, from the beginning, comprised whatsoever comes to pass in his proposed universe; and which, in their progressive fulfilment, constitute the counterpart of the matchless wisdom that formed them before ever the world was. This is the starting point, if I may so speak, of all the operations of the Divine mind; the threshold of the temple to which the Scriptures introduce us, and where their strong and steady light begins to shine.
In their developement of these comprehensive
Bible not of Man. Q purposes they conduct us not only through the successive ages of this lower world, but, leaving these great and measured epochs of time, penetrate indefinitely and interminably into the vast future. They do not fully draw aside the curtain, and tell us what these purposes are; nor do they, save in part, disclose to us the particular reasons of very many of the Divine counsels; yet do they explicitly instruct us that they all cooperate in securing ends with which Infinite wisdom and goodness are satisfied.
Pagan writers knew nothing of such a range of thought as this: the human mind knows nothing of it. It is utterly beyond man’s invention; it is a system, an outline of procedure which human thoughts never would have compassed; nor would it ever have been known but for a revelation from Heaven. No creature could thus enter into the deep retirement of God’s eternity, penetrate into the mind of God. and tell the world his secret counsels. Search the speculations of all pagan philosophy, inquire at all its oracles, and they speak not, think not of those all-comprehensive counsels, with which the Sacred Writings are so familiar. These counsels have a. vastness of extent, a coherency and symmetry, an all-presiding intelligence, which defy the utmost efi’orts of the human mind. Not only were they a sealed book, the contents of which are unknown to mortals, but no mortal could have known that a scheme so vast had a place in the Eternal mind.
3. The same indications of a Divine intelligence are also discernible in the account the Scriptures give of the work of creation. On this topic the Bible speaks with a definiteness and precision unknown to pagan writers, and compared with which the systems of pagan cosmogony are the wildest conjecture, and as impure and corrupting as they are unintelligible. Human reason has never been able to instruct men how this world came into existence. More than one system of philosophy has sprung up in the world, which endeavored to show that it could exist, and even how it could be made, without God. Strange as it may seem, all the ancient philosophers discarded the idea of creation in the sense in which it is generally understood by Christians. They held it to be impossible; it was a received axiom with them, that nothing can be produced out of nothing. On this principle, all that they allowed to the Divine agency was ‘^ the arrangement of preexisting materials, and the moulding of an external, material substance, into the form which it now exhibits in the visible universe.” Nor is there any certain relief from this, and other such like metaphysical jargon, but in the simple narrative of the creation as given in the Scriptures. No uninspired pen ever recorded the sentence, ‘^ In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It was a progressive work, and was finished in exact accordance with the plan of its Author. Its progress too was in exact coincidence with those laws of matter which have been found to exist throughout the material universe; the laws then enstamped upon it govern it still. They are “ordinances of heaven;” nor in all the progress of natural science have any discoveries been made, which are inconsistent with the simple and beautiful narrative given by Moses.
The creation of which the Bible speaks is unique and perfect; it has no disjoined and irrelevant parts; there is a place for everything, and everything is in its place; the less is made subservient to the greater, the material to the animal, the animal to the moral, and all to God. In a moral view, it possesses a beauty and glory which would never have suggested themselves to a created mind. It has its world of probation, and its worlds of retribution and recompense: the former, this material visible system, which is destined to come to an end; the two latter, the abode of those spiritual and immortal existences, never to pass away. These three worlds constitute a moral systerrij the numberless and various parts of which, while they exhibit strong points of contrast, are yet so related and combined, that each part exerts a reciprocal agency and influence, and all form one great whole. The first chapter in the Book of Genesis is truly a wonderful composition. ‘• The very first verse is impressed with the stamp of its Divine Original: the reception of it alone would have overturned all the fundamental errors which perplexed the phi- !osophy of Greece, and not of Greece only, but of all countries not enlightened by revelation.”^
Let any one read the Chaldean account of the creation, as given by Berosus; the Phoenician, by
* Douglass on the rise of Polytheism and Pantheism.
Sanchoniathon; the Egyptian, by Diodorus Siculus; and the Grecian, by Hesiod, and he will be convinced that it is not too much to say, what Dr. Scott has said in his preface to his Commentary, that “in the first page of this sacred Book, a child may learn in one hour more than all the philosophers in the world learned without it in a thousand years.”
4. From the work of creation, let us advert, in the next place, to the account which the Scriptures furnish of the works of Providence, There are indications here of intellect that is more than human. There are some remarkable features in the arrangements of Divine Providence, as here disclosed, of which the pagan world was itself ignorant, and which no uninspired mind could have known. There is, for example, a general providence, as expressed in the established laws of nature; so that men in the ordinary affairs of human life may count on these well-known principles of the Divine government, and form their plans with hope and confidence. And there is a special providence, in which the Most High, who ruleth among the children of men, may and does, in perfect consistency with the laws of a general providence, countervail the designs of his creatures by accomplishing his own, and thus maintain and demonstrate his perfect supremacy over all the affairs of men. There is “a wheel within a wheel;” a seeming complexness, yet the most perfect simplicity; for ‘^ the Spirit of the Living One is in the wheels.”
There are also the two departments of Equity and Sovereignty, of Moral influence and Royal prerogative: — this, giving God the throne, and securing the fulfilment of all his purposes; that, securing the rights of moral government, and rendering them harmonious with a Divine supremacy the most absolute. The claims of sovereignty never interfere with those of equity, while the claims of equity never jostle the throne. Equity and sovereignty run in different, yet in parallel lines, each standing abreast of the other; both indicating the ways of God to man — both the adornment, the strength of the Divine empire. Growing out of these obvious and beautiful principles, is the truth everywhere taught in the Scriptures, that men are dependent, yet free; acting, yet acted upon; fulfilling the Divine purposes, yet responsible. In these revealed features of God’s government there is wonderful wisdom — wisdom altogether above the wisdom of creatures; and we may well say concerning them, ^’ Who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been his counsellor?^’ A late Scottish writer, in a review of the character and writings of the German philosopher Leibnitz, remarks, that ^- this combination of freedom with Divine and dependent agency includes something without the limits of the human faculties.” And the substance of this acknowledgment has been made by some of the most powerful minds that have written upon this vexed question. These balance-wheels in the moral machinery were invented by a Divine Architect, and are too nicely adjusted to be any other workmanship than his. Thus to reconcile the apparent inequalities, and seeming incongruities in the Divine government, is not a device of creatures; it is an arrangement which bespeaks a master mind — the Master Mind of the universe. What the wisdom of man has never been able to harmonize by all the speculations of philosophy, the Bible harmonizes. Truths which have ever been paradoxical, and which have shrouded the highest created intellects in darkness — like the seeming incongruous elements which compose the atmosphere — are here adjusted with a simplicity, a skill, that indicate ‘^ihe unsearchable wisdom of God.”
Nor is the fact to be overlooked, that in the method of God’s providence, as disclosed in the Scriptures, very many of the reasons of it are held in abeyance. It is the glory of God to conceal, as well as to disclose: he dwelleth in the thick darkness; his judgments are a great deep; his pavilion are dark waters, and thick clouds of the skies. “It were difficult to say, whether his wisdom appears more in what he unfolds, or in what he conceals. The unveiled lustre of his throne would obscure the dim vision of creatures.” To creatures of yesterday, he makes darkness his dwelling-place, if for no other reason than that he dwells in light that is inaccessible and full of glory. Such is not the manner of man. Of all these features of an all-governing Providence, may it not be safely affirmed that no human pencil ever delineated them? This blending of apparently contradictory principles in the Divine government, this temperature of mingled light and obscurity,”
all so wonderfully fitted to produce in the minds of fallen creatures the most suitable impressions of the Divine greatness and excellencCj is the work of God alone. It is just like God. It is assimilated to the revelations he has made of himself elsewhere; it is one of the characteristics of his Word which elevates it above the reach of human invention.
5. But if the Scriptural accounts of these subordinate truths give the Sacred Writings this high preeminence, much more do they claim it from the view they present of the still greater and greatest truth they reveal — the redemption of man. In the centre of the system which this Book reveals, stands forth this great work of redeeming mercy, as the ^’ mystery which was hid from ages,” as the wonder and admiration of all intelligent beings. The Scriptures represent this as the great work of God; the work to which all the works of creation and Provivjdence are subservient; the work to which the past looked forward with eager anticipation, which the present surveys with wonder, which the future will look back upon with overwhelming astonishment. It was not an after-thought, growing out of the disappointed expectation of the Creator in the formation of man; nor was it a thought incidental to the government which he had established over a world of fallen and still responsible creatures. It was the great forethought of the Divine mind; it is the one great thought revealed in his Word.
There are several strong features of peculiarity in this redemption, which remove it altogether beyond the limits of human invention. We do not say that it is impossible, or even improbable, that the human mind might have thought of some method of recovery; but never would it have thought of such a method as that revealed in the Scriptures. It would have been a method of arbitrary mercy, without any satisfaction to the violated law; it would have extended itself to one man as well as another, and comprised the entire race. It would have unfolded no such features, either of the Divine justice or sovereignty, as are unfolded in the Gospel of the Son of God. Had men devised this restoring economy, it had been human like themselves. Philosophy would have theorized about it; it would have been sanctioned by the wisdom of this world; but it would never have been that high and wonderful arrangement which extorts the exclamation, ^’ O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!’’ The proposal of a method of recovery for fallen men, to the exclusion of fallen angels, was itself a novelty in the history of the Divine government. Human reason would scarcely have passed by those immortal princes of the Divine kingdom, those once pure and incorporeal spirits of his heavenly court, whose only employment had been to adore, love, and praise his sovereign greatness and goodness.
The facts and principles embodied in this redemption are indeed welcome, but they are altogether singular; they are glad tidings of great joy, but they were new and unexpected. They reveal high
Bible not of Man. 3# and marvellous ends — ends that would have been overlooked by meUj and especially by impostors.
And we say, almost without the fear of contradiction from infidels themselves, that the means by which this redemption was accomplished, were too marvellous ever to have been the subject of the remotest, the most faint conjecture, by the wisest and best of our race. They were strange, they were mysterious means, and comprised truths which could have originated only in the counsels of Heaven. The union of the Divine and human natures in the Redeemer’s person, is a fact which would never have been thought of by men. Even now that it is revealed, it cannot be brought within the sphere of human comprehension, and questions may be propounded concerning it which human reason cannot answer. God becomes man; the Creator becomes a creature; the great Lawgiver becomes a subject; the injured, insulted Majesty of heaven, himself becomes the incarnate Saviour!
The manner too in which he became incarnate, is not merely mysterious, but has no example, and never can have any imitation. He united himself with that unequalled individual of our race, who was born of a Virgin; he was made of a woman,” yet a woman of virgin purity. There is no greater miracle than his immaculate conception; and it is a sort of miracle which mocks the invention of an impostor. It was the miraculous creation of the human nature of Christ in the womb of the Virgin Mary. I ask infidels themselves, pvhether such a fact as this — a fact so far beyond the uniform laws of nature, that the thought would never once have floated in the impure imagination of man — was not a phenomenon, which it is in the last degree puerile to suppose ever formed a part of fictitious story?
Pagan mythology does indeed speak of incarnate deities; while their fabulous and grossly polluted, and polluting notions of deities incarnate, evince their utter incompetency to have invented the miraculous conception of Mary’s child. Every classical scholar knows that it was not thus that pagan deities became incarnate. Their notions of incarnate gods were probably derived from those traditions of which the Scriptures are the origin; but they fashioned them according to their own vile minds.
Nor is this all. The incarnate gods of the heathen were infinitely unlike the man Christ Jesus. He was spotless and pure; a Lamb without blemish, from the cradle to the grave. His vile betrayer, though admitted to all the faniliarities of unembarrassed friendship, could not impeach his sinless integrity. Even in the eye of Infinite purity was he without sin. Heathen writers have described no such character; history has none like it; tradition has none; fancy has none; and deception and imposture have none. Poetry and romance, with all their inventive powers, have never been able to portray a character like that which the evangelists so simply, and so true to nature, have given of the Virgin’s Son.
Nor need we stop here. If from the birth and go THE BIBLE NOT OF MAN.
life of JesuSj we advert to the catastrophe of his cross, our convictions are confirmed that it is no human tale of woe. This incarnate One, so holy and harmless, came not to reign, not to be worshipped, but to suffer — to die: to lay the foundation of his kingdom in his own sufferings and death. The fabulous gods and goddesses of the pagan world, have united themselves with men for the purposes of loyalty and dominion; for the tranquillity of pastoral joys, and effeminate luxury; but never to suffer and die.
Nor was it simply to suffer and die, that he became thus incarnate. It was to die, the just in the place of the unjust — the sinless for the sinful — the substitution of the innocent for the guilty. To save the law of God harmless, he submitted himself to the penalty which man had incurred, and ^’ bare our sins in his own body on the tree.” Now I ask, if in all this there be not the most emphatic indications of profound and unsearchable wisdom? Is not this, from beginning to end, altogether a procedure so remote from the apprehensions of men, as to forbid the possibility that it was of human fabrication?
We make the appeal to reason, to common sense, whether it is possible for the human mind to conceive that such a redemption is the design of man. Taking all the objects and parts of it together, is there any greater absurdity than to suppose it of human origin? Is not this a region of thought where the foot of man never trod? Would not the brightest minds the world has seen, and the brightest ages that have dawned upon it, have been baffled, exhausted, annihilated, in the attempt at such a discovery? Would they not have lived, and toiled, and suffered, and died without it, as the pagan did live, and toil, and suffer, and die?
6. Take another thought. The Bible is a whole; it contains no isolated event, no isolated truth is revealed in its sacred pages. From the creation of the world of angelic beings and the formation of man, to the entire apostacy of the one, and the partial apostacy of the other; from the early revelation of the promise in Eden, to the winding up of this great remedial economy; everything forms a part of one great whole, the interest of which is perpetually increasing as the stupendous plan advances to its close. In the progress of this amazing procedure, the glories of creation and Providence are more and more concentrated in the greater glories of this redemption — itself never once deviating from its most prominent and important place in the system of God’s administrations. The sufferer of Calvary is ever the master-spirit of the whole; the all-pervading Deity, everywhere and always directing and governing, for the purposes for which he suffered and died. The cross of Christ is ever the centre, from the beginning of time to its close; from the song of the morning stars at the birth of this lower creation, to the voice of the archangel and the trump of God, when this lower creation shall pass away. So that the three worlds of which we have spoken, thus created, thus governed, and one of them thus redeemed, compose, if I may so speak, the materials of a vast moral drama; the issues of which, though gradually developing, are to be fully developed only at that great crisis when time ends, and eternity begins. In this vast drama, the three glorious Persons in the ever-blessed Trinity — angels, fallen and unfallen — and men fallen and redeemed, are both the actors and the witnesses. The interests involved in it are the highest interests of every immortal being; its conflicts the great moral conflict of the universe; its triumphs the triumphs of truth and goodness. In its progress darkness and error, sin and misery, are gradually retiring and being subdued; death is annihilated, while light, truth, holiness and happiness, become more and more triumphant, up to the time when ‘’ the mystery of God is perfected,” and the redeemed and unfallen universe commences a new and eternal era of obedience and praise.
The single fact of the resurrection of the body that heavy clog and incumbrance of the soul, which the religion of nature and the writings of human reason consign to the dust, which sense locks up in the dark sepulchre, and which natural science scatters to the winds, ingulfs in the waters, sees rarefied into smoke and vapor, and in a thousand combinations entering into and forming a part of the vegetable and animal tribes — is itself a thought too wonderful for the human mind ever to have originated. No wonder that the learned men of Greece scoffed and mocked when Paul announced it in the Areopagus of Athens. Yet the Scriptures tell us, that at ITS INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. b3
the sounding of the last trumpet, all the bodies of countless generations, all over the earth and from the depths of the sea, shall come forth. Next to Deity assuming his form of humanity, this is the wonder of all wonders.
What scenes will be disclosed when the curtain is drawn upon the opening ages of the coming eternity! The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood; the stars shall fade, and the frame of this lower world be dissolved. The dead shall be summoned from their graves, and a risen world brought forth from the sepulchre of ages, to appear at his bar who expired on the cross.
The attending universe shall stand spectators of scenes, in which they themselves have been and are the actors; the Redeeming God shall be glorified in his saints, and admired in all them that believe; and then the end shall come — the final, the unalterable eternity. The earth shall be burnt up and the heavens dissolved. The wicked shall go away into everlasting punishment, and the righteous into life eternal.
O what events are these, to have taken rise in the narrow conceptions of men! What a range of thought is here! Can the Book, which reveals such things as these, be the work of man? Does not the disclosure of such realities carry home to our bosoms the firm and solid conviction, that it is from the revealing Spirit who ‘^ searcheth all things, even the deep things of God?” Does it not defy the utmost efforts of our limited faculties? And if human minds and human pens were employed to make such disclosures, is it not obvious that they were minds and pens ‘^ moved by the Holy Ghost?”
7. Another thought which illustrates the position on which we are dwelling, is the inexhaustible fal- 7iess of the Sacred Writings. We can furnish bat a bare suggestion on this rich and varied topic, to be traced out and amplified, as it may present itself in different lights and forms to different minds. The Bible is, in this respect, a most wonderful volume. There is nothing like it in the wide world; no such source of intellectual wealth: itself never exhausted, yet exhausting the brightest, strongest, and most potent minds, A candid mind, that has been prepossessed against it, needs but to read it, in order to confess with shame that it has disappointed its prejudices, and that it is enriched with thoughts altogether beyond any other volume.
There are thoughts in this sacred Book, which though perfectly obvious when seen, are not seen on the first or the second inspection, even though that inspection be ever so full. Instances of this kind so frequently occur, that they are continually sources of surprise and admiration even to the most reflecting minds. It is wonderful to observe, what new trains of thought of prodigious interest are often suggested by a single sentence, a single fact recorded in the Bible; a word, a date, not before observed, or not understood, or viewed in some new aspect. The Bible seems, in this respect, almost like enchanted ground; or rather, like the embowered precincts of some unearthly world. As we pass over its luxuriant plains, and tread its wide and accustomed avenues, we unexpectedly discover a thousand less frequented paths that open views — views of indescribable richness and beauty — that are new and immeasurable. It is difficult if not impossible to resist the impression, that the light which shines upon us is from no earthly source, but beams from the Infinite Intelligence above us. The mind is never weary in tracing out these opening vistas of truth, except from its own infirmity; and even when thus wearied, may always recover and refresh itself at unwasting fountains, scattered by the wayside, and everywhere overhung by the dense shadow of the Tree of Life.
We do not find it so with any other book. This is one of the great peculiarities of the Bible; it is an exhaustless volume. Viewed as a whole, it is like the full-orbed sun; which though it may have spots on its disk, dazzles by its splendor; and the more we gaze upon it, and the more its light emanates and is difi*used, the more do its resources appear unwasting. Portions of this Book seem deep and unfathomable *, but even its deepest recesses are neither empty nor dark. It is a vast profound, which lies open to the day; where, though reason’s lamp alone were darkness, yet the deeper it descends, it not only encounters no noxious vapors, but, as in a mine of jewels, in every discovered gem it receives back the reflected light of heaven. There is no other book which a few careful readings of a sound and retentive mind will not exhaust. Yet men there are, who have made this volume the object of their study for half a century; who have examined every paragraph it j contains with repeated and closest scrutiny, and with every fresh perusal have discovered new thoughts, and new causes for wonder and joy. The more deeply they have become absorbed in its pages, the more deep and thorough has been their conviction of its illimitable resources — a conviction uniformly strengthened by their growing acquaintance with its instructions, and by all the effort and honesty the humility and prayer, they have been-enabled to bring to their researches.
There was an humble fisherman on the lakes of Palestine, who wrote a short treatise, so replete with heavenly truth, that Archbishop Leighton, whom Dr. Doddridge calls “that wonderful man,” employed years of intense and delighted labor in illustrating the rich and heart-aifecting lessons it contains — lessons, which furnished even the splendid mind of Coleridge with many of those aphorisms “which form the bases of his far-famed ^- Aids to Reflection.” Nor do the Epistles of Peter stand alone as exhibitions of intellectual vigor and richness, to which m.inds unaided by the Holy Spirit never aspired. There is no book in any age, in any country, which can, in this respect, be compared with the Bible. It has very little in common with other books: aside from some of its genealogical records, it lias borrowed nothing from them; while it is the iiiexhausted, inexhaustible source from which everything that is truly valuable, on the great subjects of which it treats, is derived.
8. There is one general remark which should be carried along in the mind of the reader, with all the preceding considerations. It relates to the intellecttual character of the writers and of the age in which the Bible was written. It was written, for the most part, by men of no extraordinary talents or learning. With a few distinguished exceptions, they were plain shepherds, and humble, illiterate fishermen. But they wrote as never man wrote, on themes of boundless extent, illimitable grandeur, thrilling interest, ‘and never fall below their lofty theme.’’ They use the language of men, because they are men to whom they address themselves; and because Infinite wisdom and goodness are wont to stoop thus low, do they condescend to all the varieties of human want and degradation, and in so doing seem, to a superficial reader, occasionally to descend to instructions that are unworthy of their elevated objects. Those very portions of their writings with which infidels have so often made themselves merry, were most wisely suited to the exigences of the times and people to whom they were addressed. And moreover, the books which contain them form the first and earliest literary productions in the world. Nor is it a circumstance to be overlooked, that although thus written in the very infancy of letters, and standing alone as they do at the close of the first fifteen centuries after the creation, they should, by the common (^.onsent of literary men, hold the acknowledged preeminence. Moses, their author, and whom we affirm to have been divinely inspired, died about fourteen hundred and forty years before Christ; nor are there any human writings known to us until long after his time. Yet Assyria, Phoenicia, and Egypt were not without science and the arts, and the latter not without hieroglyphical writing. Between the time of Moses and David, there is, I believe, but a single author without the pale of the Israelitish prophets. I refer to Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician historian, who flourished about the time that Gideon was the Judge in Israel. These facts are not, we confess, convincing evidence of themselves that the five books of Moses are of divine origin; while, taken in connection with the subject matter of these books, their immeasurable superiority to the acknowledged writings of men, and the fact that they claim to be of more than mere human authority, they are of consequence to the argument in favor of their inspiration.
With regard to other portions of these writings, the learned reader will bear in mind a remark of a difl’erent kind. The greater part of those which are subsequent to the five books of Moses, were written during those periods of the world when men of gigantic intellect, and high literary fame, appeared in pagan lands. They were men who claim the admiration of succeeding ages, and whose works have come down to our own times. Homer flourished in the days of Solomon; Hesiod not far from the time of Joel, Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah; Sappho during the time of Habakkuk and Daniel; Solon and Anac” reon during the life of Ezekiel; Pindar in the days of Haggai and Zechariah; Eschylus Socrates, Zeno and Herodotus in the age of Haggai, T^^Qh.- ariah and Ezra. The splendid writers of the Periclean age of Greece, and the Augustan age of Rome, all flourished between the period of the later minor prophets and the close of the first century of the Christian era.
There are high embellishments of taste, and unwonted inventions of a creative imagination, in the writings of some of the pagan poets; there are indeed bewitching fascinations; but they are not the fascinations of thought of truth. Compared with the riches of truth, the luxury of thought, which are to be found in the writings of their contemporaries in the sacred volume, or even with the descriptive powers that are there developed, the Greek and Roman classics are but highly-wrought fables.
But we need not pursue these reflections. The benevolent Creator has endued man with large powers of thought and achievement; yet are there deeds he cannot perform, and thoughts to which his aspiring mind is unequal. They are not human thoughts, nor do they come under the range of human powers, that are revealed in the Bible. It is not the light of any created intellect which thus developes and brings out the works and ways of God, from the dawn of time down to the setting sun of this earthly sphere. Books multiply, and libraries accumulate through his capacity and toil; yet is there this one Book, which transcends the highest efforts of his giant intellect. His severest toil has never penetrated so deep, his loftiest powers have never soared so high, as these illimitable boundaries of uncreated thought. The works of men bear no more comparison to this great work of Infinite IntelligencCj than a particle of vapor does to the ocean, or the flight of a moment to eternity. It is at such a vast remove frota all the conceptions of created wisdom, that the credulity is not to be envied which looks upon it as a book of imposture, or the invention of uninspired men, or in any other view than as exhibiting the permanent and fixed impression of the wondrous Deity.
In the order of time, we take then our first stand here; and claim for this Book, the tribute due to more than human intelligence. We ask the mightiest intellects of earth to spread it before them, and tell us when and Vvhere it has been equalled, and if it partakes not of the infinite character of Him that inhabiteth eternity, and of that eternity which it reveals? We ask them, as they travel over the rich and variegated domain of science and philosophy, if they anywhere find such intellectual riches; and if there be not here heights and depths, plains, fountains, and oceans of thought, the wonders of which mem cannot find terms to express, while his highest conceptions of them leave these wonders unexplored?