p. 12 | The Bible in the Home

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 7, 1903

The Bible in the Home

You are wrong in allowing any book to take a place in your heart before the Bible. If you find yourself beginning to love any pleasure better than your prayers, any book better than the Bible, any person better than Christ, take alarm; you are in profound danger.

Not long ago several highly cultivated but skeptical men were conversing concerning literature, and the question was asked, “If you had to be limited to one book for a period of time, which one would you choose for your companion?” One said Shakespeare, another Goethe, but the rest unhesitatingly declared in favor of the Bible, giving as their reason that its sources were inexhaustible, its stories entertaining, its literary finish perfect.

Some books win popularity by alluring to evil; the Bible wins by its moral splendor. My advice to all is to give the Bible the place in the home it ought to occupy—upon the throne. Those who let the daily newspaper, or popular magazine, or works by standard authors come between them and the daily reading of God’s Word, are on the downward path, and their moral fiber is weakening.

Ruskin says: “My mother established my soul in life by making me learn accurately several chapters of the Bible. I open my oldest Bible just now—yellow with age and flexible, but not unclean, except that the lower corners of the pages of some chapters are worn thin and dark. Truly, though I have picked up the elements of a little further knowledge in mathematics and the like in after life, and owe not a little to the teaching of many people, still this installation of my mind in the Bible truths I count more confidently as the most precious, and, on the whole, the one essential part of my education. The chapters became protective to me, and conclusive in all modes of thought, and shielded me from all fear and doubt. The command I was made to repeat oftenest is still dearest to me: ‘Let not mercy and truth forsake thee.’”

I am new-fashioned enough and old-fashioned enough to believe that the Bible is the writing of the living God; that though Moses wrote the histories, God guided the pen; David sang sweet melodies to the sorrowing and doubtful in his psalms, still God moved his fingers over the living strings of his harp. Solomon preached a grand sermon, but God directed his lips. I can read John, Peter, Jude, and hear their voices as they tell of the story of Christ, but behind it I hear God speaking—the Invisible, the Almighty, the Eternal. I believe God speaks to-day through many lips and from many pages, but by none does he reach the heart of men so eternally as in his Book which we call the Bible. When I write the words, “Give the Bible the first place in the home,” I mean by that, not on the table in your parlor, but in your heart and mind.—Sunday Strand.