The Spirit the Only Guide.
THE Christian Union having printed several articles on "What to Believe about the Bible," a correspondent, who says that for thirty years he lived a skeptic, and believed in the infallibility of human reason as a guide in religious matters, gives his testimony as follows. We think he has the right idea of the matter:— Do not Christian teachers sometimes undertake the work which alone belongs to the Spirit, in trying to prove the divine origin of the Bible and the plan of salvation to people ruled alone by "human reason," and by so doing place "a stumbling-block" in their path? It seems to me that teachers too often ignore the work that the Holy Spirit must perform on a person before he can understand or believe the truths taught in the Bible, and thus are led into controversies that are positively injurious to the cause of Christ. The Bible and my own experience teach me that the carnal mind, which is the natural mind guided by "human reason," cannot understand the spiritual teachings of the Bible. I believe thousands of honest skeptics have gone down to the grave unbelievers because the teachers of Christ's mission have failed to impress the truth upon the minds of their hearers that it is through the agency of the Holy Spirit above that they can understand the Scriptures. It makes no difference how learned a man may be, how perfect his reasoning powers the Bible, with all its saving truths, will remain a sealed book to him except he will become "as a little child," in order to receive the Spirit, "which only can guide him in the way of all truth," "which will teach him all things." "For no man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost." "The natural man cannot receive the things of the Spirit." "They are foolishness to him." To me one of the greatest as most unanswerable proofs of the truth of the Bible, and that the plan of salvation is of divine origin, is that, from the fall of Adam to the establishment of the Kingdom on the day of Pentecost, it is in almost every particular directly contrary to any plan that human reason unguided by the divine Spirit could have devised, and therefore the Bible is not a reasonable Book to any one that has not been "born again." It seems to me that Christ's interview with Nicodemus should be carefully studied by Christians before they attempt a controversy with skeptics.