LET us look at the charges brought against the Bible. 1. To prove that the Bible is impure, its enemies read portions of Scripture which they say are unfit for the eye and ear of the family circle. They read Solomon’s Song, and put upon it their own interpretations, and then fling down the book, denouncing it as a polluted volume. Is the Bible impure? I lay it down as a principle that an impure book will have impure results. No man will deny that proposition. Now of all your friends, how many have had their purity of soul stained, tarnished, or despoiled by Bible-reading!
Two hundred million copies of an impure book scattered through Christendom! There must be a great many victims. Show me a thousand victims. Show me five hundred victims. Show me a hundred. Show me fifty. Show me ten. Show me one victim. Is that exorbitant? I do not care what the specimen is, whether man, woman, or child; white, black, or copper-colored; American, European, Asiatic, or African. Two hundred millions of books, in each of which skeptics say there is the leprosy of impurity!
Show me one victim. I do not confine you to our own times. Range through all the four thousand years that have passed, and show me one soul whose chastity and purity have been despoiled and ruined by Bible perusal. I challenge all earth and hell for one victim. Your charge collapses and dies in the presence of every frank-minded man. So far from the Bible being an impure book, you know very well that it is only where the Bible reigns that the family institution is regarded.
The only difference between Sodom, and Constantinople, and Pekin, and Madras, on the one side, and our American cities on the other, in regard to the status of purity and impurity, is the difference between Bible and no Bible. If the Bible be an impure book, I am only asking of you a fair thing when I ask that after two hundred million copies have been doing their work you show me one victim.
2. Charge the second: The Bible is cruel. To prove this, the enemies of the Bible give us the stories of the ancient wars, passages in the story of David and Joshua, and the extermination of the Canaanites, and then declare that the Bible approves of laceration and man-slaughter. You have known a great many people who had this “cruel” book in their hands. Was the effect of this “cruel” book upon them to send them toward vivisection, toward maltreatment, toward mauling? Did your friends come out and practically say, “I have been reading about the extermination of the Canaanites, and now mean to cut, stab, bruise, and beat to pieces everybody I meet?”
As your children have studied the Bible, have they had more and more of a tendency to pull off the wings of flies, and to pin grass-hoppers, and to rob birds’ nests? If the Bible is cruel, why does it not show its cruelty in that direction? So far from its being true, all the asylums and institutions of mercy in this country have been founded by Bible believers.
When did this bloody book, so called by some, implant cruelty in the heart of George Peabody, of Miss Dix, of Florence Nightingale, of John Howard, of John Frederick Oberlin, of Abbott Lawrence?
Look at those twenty Christian women in a hospital. They are washing wounds, they are administering cordials, they are taking the last message of the expiring. Those Christian women have been reading this book all their lives, and now they are reading it to the sick and the dying. At what point does the cruelty of this book crop out in the life of that ministering angel of the hospital? Do you find it in the gentleness of her step, or in the soft cadence of her voice, or in her prayer for the dying, “Lord Jesus, receive his spirit”?
When you can make a rose leaf pierce like a bayonet, when you can make icicles out of the south wind, when you can poison the tongue with honey made from blossoming buckwheat—then you can find people practicing cruelty learned from the Bible.—Talmage.