The Bible by Rev. Robert Collyer

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 18, 1868

The Bible.

By Rev. Robert Collyer

I for one, love the Bible supremely. In all the world I have found no book to set beside it. Other books I love well. Milton, Taylor, Tennyson, Emerson, Spencer, and many a noble name besides in this great brotherhood, is so dear to me that there are few sacrifices I could not gladly make rather than lose their companionship. But when I am in any great strait—when I want to find words other than my own to rebuke some crying sin, to stay some desperate sinner, to whisper to the soul at the parting of the worlds, to read, as I sit with them that weep beside their dust, words that I know will go to the right place as surely as corn dropped into good soil on a gleaming May day—then I put aside all books but one—the book out of which my mother read to me, and over which she sang to me, as far back as I can remember. And it is those springs that never give out in the dryest, and never freeze in the hardest winter, because they reach so directly into the great warm fountains hidden under the surface—it never fails me.

But have we not all noticed the curious fact that men go to the Bible for what they want to find, rather than for what they ought to find? that those who profess the most absolute submission to its authority offer generally the finest possible illustration of the supremacy of the soul over the Bible in the way they contrive to make it serve their turn? and that it is by no means impossible to find duplicates of the good Scotch woman's minister, of whom she said—“if there's a cross text in the Bible, he is sure to find it and take it for a sermon?” The truth is, the Bible is like a great pasture, into which you turn all manner of feeders. The horse takes what he wants; so does the cow. The sheep is true to its instinct; so is the goat. And then, last of all, the ass rolls the thistle, like a sweet morsel, under his tongue.—So when a man with a large, sweet nature, comes to the Bible, he crops, by a sure instinct, of all the large, sweet passages. The hopeful man finds the hopeful things; the sad man the sorrowful things; the hard man, the gritty things, and every man the things that satisfy his craving, though they may in no way make for his peace.—Rev. Robert Collyer.