THE ETERNAL WORD | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 8, 1878

THE ETERNAL WORD.

When Tom Paine wrote the “Age of Reason,” and Voltaire boasted that the “wretch was crushed,” there were men both in Europe and America who predicted that, in half a century more, the last Bible would have been sold and read. In less than fifty years from the date of that prophecy the great British and American Bible Societies had been formed to circulate the Bible in all the languages of the earth, and the great missionary societies of every denomination were busily engaged in sending the gospel to the heathen. The last Bible! Indeed!

The British and Foreign Bible Society has been in existence seventy-three years; during that period it has issued the grand total of seventy-nine million one hundred and three thousand four hundred and sixty-five copies of the Holy Scriptures, at an expenditure of $40,755,000. This society, and other kindred societies throughout the world, have, during the present century, distributed about one hundred and fifty million copies of the Sacred Scriptures. What a magnificent work, and how vast and incalculable the results! What an overwhelming rebuke to the bigoted foes of the Bible! Its triumph is certain. “The owls may hoot at the rising sun, but the sunshine creeps on notwithstanding. Tribes may perish, priests may die, altars may crumble into ruin; but this blessed book advances at a pace that never ceases; and if it ever retreats it is to cover its retreat with a greater glory than its advance.” Like its Author, it changes not. Sir George Mivart, an eminent naturalist, says that for a while he accepted Darwin’s theory; but he has been compelled to give it up, for scientific reasons. It is plausible, but not true; and so it goes. In what is called Natural Science, nothing is fixed so securely that it may not be superseded by new discoveries to-morrow. Only the word of the Lord “liveth and abideth forever.”

In the eloquent language of the late Dr. Duff, “It has survived the fires and the horrors of the infernal Inquisition, the terrible confederacy of the Jesuits, the blight and mildew of British infidelity, the impious socialism and atheism of France, the terrible pantheism and rationalism of Germany; ay, and it has survived in the midst of innumerable changes that have subverted once powerful dynasties, and scattered to the winds of heaven every memorial of human glory. And it will still survive the shock of nations and the corruptions of human depravity. It will go on flourishing, too, when the Koran of the Mussulman, the Talmud of the Rabbinist, the Zendavesta of the Parsee, the Vedas of the Brahmin, and the demoralized dogmas of the Socialist and Materialist, the infamous, blasphemous dogmata of the Pantheist, the lying legends of the Papist, the truth-perverting traditions of the Romanizing Ritualist, are all consigned in indistinguishable dishonor to a common grave, with no one to act the part of chief mourner at the funeral. It will survive when all the kingdoms of this world, all the lordly hierarchies of idolatry and superstition, are forever swallowed up amid the overpowering glories of Messiah’s reign.” —Protestant Standard.