The Life-Giving Word by Shaftesbury

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 2, 1902

The Life-Giving Word

By Shaftesbury

THEY now come and tell us that the Bible is effete; that it is worn out; that it can do nothing; and that we must now have some new influence, some new principle, by which to regenerate and guide man. Effete! I should like to know whether it is effete at this moment in India! Is it effete in the islands of the Pacific Ocean? Is it effete in Madagascar? The Bible, so far from being effete, manifests at this moment a greater force—a greater power of giving life—than in any antecedent period of its history.

I should like to know who are they that say it is effete. . . . Do the neologists themselves think it effete? If so, why do they pass their nights, why do they sweat and toil over the midnight lamp, for the sole purpose of destroying a book that is so effete, that, if left to itself, it would soon die, or become an object of general contempt. They do not think it effete. They know its power upon the heart and the conscience. They know that if left to itself, that good old Book must work its own way, and what they deny with their lips they confess with their fears. Effete! It is effete as Abraham was effete when he became the father of many nations, when there sprang “of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the seashore innumerable.” It is effete as eternity, past, present, and future, is effete. It is effete—and in no other sense—as God himself is effete, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.— Shaftesbury.