A FRIEND has sent us a little work containing the following extracts on this subject. We are glad to see that the honorable place which prophecy holds in the sacred writings, is acknowledged, and its importance appreciated. A fulfillment of prophecy clearly shown, is an irrefutable evidence of the divine origin of the book containing such prophecy. How many, after listening to the clear expositions of prophecy given in these days relative to the doctrine of the second coming of Christ, have been able to say, for the first time in their lives, Now we have evidence which we cannot gainsay, that the Bible is the book of God. Push on the work of spreading light on the fulfillment of the prophecies. It is the best weapon against infidelity that can be placed in the hands of the defenders of the Bible. The thoughts presented below are well worthy of being read with care, and pondered well. “Read slow, and think.”
Infidelity is now growing and spreading to an extent the blindness of the church does not suspect. There are many thousands more in our land now growing up in the darkest unbelief, than is known or suspected. And more: Is not the age of infidelity approaching, along with the time of terrible judgments?
In a great part of Catholic Europe, are not large masses of the population almost total atheists?
In Great Britain, do not multitudes of the11people openly renounce God’s holy volume? Is not our own nation walking down the same track? —Nelson on Infidelity.
Romanism is compassing sea and land to make its proselytes, even from our Protestant communities and our missionary settlements. And, on the other hand, infidelity is fearfully at work to corrupt all private morals, to overturn the social system, and to destroy the best hopes of man.—Extract from a Brief View of the British and Foreign Bible Society, June 1, 1869.
Infidelity is ignorance, ignorance is darkness, knowledge is light. Knowledge by reading and thinking must be won. It cannot be explained from father to son.
Give attendance to reading. A wise man will read, and will increase learning; but fools despise wisdom and instruction. Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom, and with all thy getting, get understanding. The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.—Proverbs.
Christianity is not the offspring of fraud or of fiction. To show that it cannot possibly be derived from human wisdom, or human imposture, is a work, I think, attended with no great difficulty, and requiring no extraordinary abilities. Prophecies are permanent miracles, whose authority is sufficiently confirmed by their completion, and are therefore solid proofs of the supernatural origin of a religion whose truth they were intended to testify.—S. Tenny.
Prophecy is one of the strongest proofs of divine revelation. I consider the prophecies relative to the destruction of the Jewish nation, if there were nothing else to support Christianity, as absolutely irresistible.—Lord Erskine.
No volume deserves more attentive perusal than the Bible. Our belief in the truth of the Bible must rest upon evidence, not only of the convictions of others, but the facts themselves of which truth is the summary. While millions of learned volumes, which promised immortality to their authors, have sunk into oblivion, the Bible has survived even against opposition, such as no other book ever had. The loftiest pretensions to learning, science, and philosophy; the most malignant arts of wit, satire, and scurrility, have been employed against the Bible in vain. Thousands of times it has been condemned, banished, burned. Still it survives, and will survive the dissolution of worlds. In 1274, the price of a Bible, with a commentary fairly written, was 30 pounds! That precious volume may now be obtained by most laborers for less than a single day’s pay. How great are the privileges of modern Christians! How great must be their guilt if they neglect them!—Amos Binney.
A perusal of the most noted Bible Dictionaries, Concordances, and Commentaries, if used in due subordination, are extremely useful to obtain an acquaintance with the truths of the Bible. The argument for the truth of Christianity, derived from prophecy, and its accomplishment, is one of the most striking that can be employed in its defense. Prophecy is a miracle of knowledge, a declaration of something future, beyond the power of human sagacity to calculate.—A. Binney.
We may give the testimony of God, but we cannot give faith to believe it.
To enter minutely into an account of prophecies of Scripture, and their accomplishment, would fill volumes. The Bible contains prophecies of events which occurred centuries afterward, and which related to times, places, and persons, as to which fraud was impossible. The prophecies of Moses and others respecting the Jews, have been fulfilled to the letter, and are being fulfilled to this hour. The prophecies respecting Nineveh, Babylon, Tyre, Egypt, and the prophecies of our Lord concerning the destruction of Jerusalem; the rise, reign, and decline, of the Man of Sin, and some parts of the book of Daniel and Revelation, are still in process of fulfillment, and are all clearly predicted by the prophets. The life, character, work, and claims, of the Lord Jesus, and the progress of Christianity to the present time, are fulfillments of prophecies delivered many centuries before Christ was born, and have all been exactly fulfilled. All this together constitutes a mass of evidence, increasing as ages roll on, in proof of the divine authority of the Bible. And whoever will seriously consider the immense distance of time between some of them and the events they foretell, the uninterrupted chain by which they are connected for thousands of years, how exactly they correspond with those events, and how totally inapplicable they are to all others in the history of mankind,—I say, whoever considers these circumstances will scarcely be persuaded to believe that they can be productions of preceding artifice, or posterior application, or can entertain the least doubt of their being derived from supernatural inspiration. The immense body of evidence for the truth of the Bible which pours in upon the mind from every quarter, impresses the mind with a powerful conviction that God is its author.
If it should appear that the copies of the Bible now in the world have suffered from the injuries of time, and the carelessness of transcribers and printers, so that inaccuracies and discrepancies of unessential importance might be detected; still, if the substance of the book, if the grand system of truth or duty revealed, is evidently, as a whole, the result of such divine inspiration, it is to be received, and may be entirely credited as an inspired book.
Several books mentioned in Scripture, as Jasher, of the wars of the Lord, and the annals of the kings of Israel and Judah, and a few more, are now lost; but they never had more than human authority.
To read the Bible merely, consenting and assenting to all things from a lazy indifference to their truth or spiritual value, is a very different matter from reading the Scriptures with the aid of all the lights that prophecy, history, science, learning, philosophy, and good strong common-sense, are ready to furnish if sought for.
Books on the evidences of Christianity are little read; for few of them are in circulation. Inquire in an ordinary village for ten such authors, and you will not be able to find them. We will here name some who have written on the evidences of Christianity. It is strangely true that these books are not known to many Christians. (Men love darkness rather than light, fables more than the evidences of Christianity.) The few that are in circulation are scattered and invisible. The following books are a few out of the many which are more than worth the cost of possession: Grotius’s, LeClerc’s, West’s, Douglas’s, Leslie’s, Lardner’s, Paley’s, Locke’s, Addison’s, Campbell’s, Sherlock’s, Lyttleton’s, Porter’s, Beattie’s, Soame Jenyns’, Jones’ and Burnett’s Evidences of Christianity; Faber’s Difficulties of Infidelity; Newton on Prophecies; Stackhouse’s History of the Bible; Scott’s Family Bible; Horne’s Introduction; Watson’s Apology; Jew’s Letters to Voltaire; Prideaux’s Connections; Shuckford’s Connections; Nelson on infidelity; Read’s God in History; Findley’s Vindication of the Sacred Books from the Misrepresentations and Cavils of Voltaire; Horne’s Letters on Infidelity; Campbell on the Miracles of Christ; Scott’s Answer to Paine’s Age of Reason; Simpson’s Essay on the Authenticity of the New Testament; Jones’ New and Full Method of Settling the Canonical Authority of the New Testament; Butler’s Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and course of Nature; a work well adapted to give satisfaction to inquiring minds upon the most important of all subjects, religion. Doddridge’s Three Sermons on the Evidences of Christianity, seem better suited to the understanding of common readers than almost any other. Edwards on the Authority, Style, and Perfection of Scripture, is very valuable. Gildon’s Deist’s Manual; Hartly on the Truth of the Christian Religion; Bryant’s Treatise on the Authenticity of the Scriptures; Jortin’s Discourse Concerning the Truth of the Scriptures; Pascal’s Thoughts on Religion; Young’s Night Thoughts, and Centaur, not Fabulous; Ditton’s Cure of Deism; Foster’s Usefulness, Truth, and Excellency, of the Christian Revelation; Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity; Clarke’s Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation; Sharpe’s two Arguments in Defense of Christianity; Priestley’s Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, and Evidences of Revealed Religion; Bishop Berkeley’s Minute Philosopher; Randolph’s View of our Saviour’s Ministry; Leland’s Deistical Writers; Bishop Taylor’s Moral Demonstration that the Religion of Jesus is from God; Kitto’s Bible History; Binney’s Theological Compend; Watt’s Scripture History; Stratham’s Key to the Holy Scriptures; Jacobus’ Notes on the New Testament; Barnes’ Notes on the New Testament; Knox’s Christian Philosophy; Dr. D. Jennings’ Truth of Scriptures; Dick’s Christian Philosopher; Simpson’s Plea for the Sacred Writings, Addressed to the Disciples of Thomas Paine; Clarke’s Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation. Many others have written upon the same subject. Writings on these subjects of such universal importance are very numerous. It may be much questioned whether any objection whatever has been made to the great truths of religion and the sacred writings, which has not been fairly and honestly answered in one and another of the above authors. But no author has taken so much pains to state and answer objections to the Scriptures as Mr. Stackhouse, in his New History of the Holy Bible. West, Jennings, Lyttleton, Pringle, Nelson, and others, were all at one time unbelievers; all undertook, like wise men, to examine the grounds of their infidelity; were all convinced that they had been dangerously mistaken; all became converts to the religion of the Son of God, and all died, declaring their belief in him. I show you that Christianity has, in fact, a convincing evidence. Not only that it may be, but that it certainly is, true. It is certain the Bible, as now in your hands, is genuine; and with great evidence it may be argued from thence that the gospel is a revelation from God. It is very easy to find proofs, but difficult to range and dispose them in such order as best to illustrate and to confirm each other. The truth of the gospel evidently follows from the certainty of the facts, and is much confirmed by what has happened in the world since the first publication of it.
Extraordinary events, which no human prudence could have foreseen, and which have happened many years since the publication of that book, are so clearly foretold that I cannot but look on that part of Scripture as an invaluable evidence of Christianity. The truth of prophecy admits not only the clear illustration of history, but the evidence of daily experience and common observation. The present hour bears witness to its divine origin, as well as the generations that are passed. Our observation on these predictions and events which are already past, afford us much instruction and help in respect to our calculations on the future.
The subjects of prophecy are various and extensive; indeed, so much so, as has been shown by Bishop Newton, that they form a chain of predictions from the beginning to the end of the Bible and the world. *Though the evidence of prophecy be but small, from the completion of any one prophecy taken separately, yet, that evidence, being always something, the amount of the whole evidence resulting from a great number of prophecies, all relative to the same design, may be considered like many scattered rays, which, though each be weak in itself, yet, concentrated into one point, shall form a strong light, and strike the sense very powerfully. Still more, this evidence is not simply a growing evidence; but it is indeed multiplied upon us, from the number of reflected lights which the several component parts of such a system reciprocally throw upon each, till, at length, the conviction rises unto a high degree of moral certainty.—From Hurd’s Sermons on Prophecy.
In all theories, subjects, speculations, and morals, that occupy the thoughts, ideas, impressions, and investigations, of mental faculties, whether of philosophy, politics, or the arts, sciences, mechanism, or of law, government, medicine, or religion, there is a false, as well as a true, principle existing, calculated either to mislead mankind in irretrievable error, or to direct him by the eternal light of truth to the accomplishment of his most ardent wishes.
Books on the evidences of Christianity are needed, to awaken the attention of men in general. Such books present striking facts to the indifferent and skeptical, and are witnesses that the Bible is a work of inspiration.
Truth, surrounded as it is with so many errors and falsehoods, robed in the counterfeit presentments of glittering deception, can only be established on the basis of indisputable facts. Though infidelity is making its way rapidly among the nations, and among all orders of men, yet is the cause of the gospel by no means desperate. The Europeans in the East Indies are said to be almost universally infidels. The state of France is too well known. The same spirit is running through Germany, Great Britain, and America. But, though every possible effort is making to establish the reign of infidelity, there are equal efforts by good men for the propagation of evangelical truth.
“Let every man that is on the Lord’s side come forward, in opposition to all the powers of earth and hell.”
Read the Bible every day, if possible, and fear nothing but God.—Rev. 14: 6, 7.
“Men shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.—Christ.”
The wise shall understand.—Daniel.
Life, here, is but a preparation for the life beyond, to which we are all hastening; but alas! how seldom is it considered as such! Man lives and breathes a careless being, as regardless and unconcerned for the welfare of his soul, as though there were no God, no Heaven to win, no hell to shun. Missionaries have preached, and the Bible is spread throughout earth’s kingdoms (See Matt. 24: 14); yet we still hear of murders, massacres, and the most revolting scenes of crime, cruelty, and war, in this nineteenth century of the world’s civilization. The dark ages pretended to nothing at learning, refinement, or religion; but the world now skilled in the arts and sciences, and mighty in inventions, discoveries, and evidences of the Christian religion, wraps itself in the mantle of fashion and hypocrisy, and wears the pretense of innocence.—F. E. Pollick, 1869.