What the Bible Does Not Say.
The Bible is a book with a single purpose; and that purpose is to reveal the sinfulness of the human family, and a method of salvation from that sinfulness. And of course a book that has only one end in view must necessarily be silent with reference to a thousand other subjects. A few years ago a man was galloping on horseback, as if he had seen a specter, down the bank of a New England river in the dead of night. His mission was to inform the sleeping dwellers in a number of manufacturing towns farther down the stream that the great dam farther up the river was about to burst its barriers. The horseman, as he sped along, trampled myriads of flowers under foot, but he had nothing to say of botany. He rushed by hundreds of projecting rocks, rich in stories of prehistoric ages, but he had nothing to say on the subject of geology. Over his head the starry hosts were marshaled as they had been since the foundation of the world, but he had nothing to say on the subject of astronomy. He had just one mission,—to inform the sleeping toilers of their danger, and how they might escape it,—and he had no time to devote to the consideration of any other subject, however important, or however fascinating to other minds. So it is with God's word. Its single object is to tell us of sin and its cure. On this subject it is full and explicit, and infallible.—Selected.