The Book that Bad Men Hate by Dr. Chas. H. Parkhurst

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 28, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 33.

The Book that Bad Men Hate.

By Dr. Chas. H. Parkhurst

ONE reason why we believe that the Bible is the work of God, is the extraordinary and indefatigable pains taken by men of obscure integrity to get rid of it. The things that bad men hate, it will, as a rule, be safe for good men to believe in. Men's hearts stain through on to their philosophy. It never ceases to be true that every one that "doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved." Light always shows the spots. Bad men congregate under the shadows. Men like to have the Bible vilified, because it eases a little the pressure on their conscience. It is always possible to gather an audience to listen to an unbeliever. Men do not want to believe, and are glad to hear the man that will meet them at the level of their wish. If they did not consciously stand beneath the Bible's reproof, they would hardly have an interest in hearing it maligned.

And we should win wondrous confidence in these staunch, sturdy Scriptures of God, if we could, for a moment, see this one volume stand up in all the serenity of its celestial powers, begirt by all the thousands upon thousands of panoplied books that have been sent out to beat it down. The strength of a champion is measured by the strength of the men that are needed to overmaster him. And yet, there was never a time when the Bible stood more evidently sovereign of the field and sovereign of human hearts than to-day. The Bible has taken no detriment. The rents its enemies have made are hardly such as to reward the pains of their valor.

And then these destroyers of the Bible give us nothing in its place. They belabor the poor Hebrews and scant fishermen who composed for us the law and the gospel, but never go about throwing their better wit and finer genius into the work of making a gospel that is superior. It was a motto of Napoleon, "To replace is to conquer." These antagonists of the Bible will have to give us something in place of it before they can break its power. And if they have the courage to crush the fulcrum on which civilization has pivoted for forty centuries, what is the meaning of their modest hesitancy in setting up something that shall make the abstraction good?

When a certain missionary had hewn down the sacred oak worshiped by the savages in the forests of Germany, he did not stop with destroying it, but when it was felled, built out of its fallen and splintered fragments a Christian chapel, and in the room of the worship of Thor, the thunderer, established the worship of Christ, the crucified. "To replace is to conquer," and the theology of the forests fled back abashed before the theology of the cross.

And so with these destructionists; let them show themselves constructionists as well. Out of the ruins of the old, let them build us a comfortable little chapel of the new. It is but just; it is but honest; it is but the rendering of an equivalent. Removing old support, let them give us something in its place that heart and mind can lean upon; something that will go forward, beautifying the home, purifying society, cultivating kindly relations among nations, holding men in proper relations with men, developing character, repressing the baser passions, stimulating the finer ones, creating in men peace and joy, robbing the death chamber of its gloom, and the grave of its shadow, and suffusing life with that beauteous serenity with which the word of God has been for three thousand years so triumphantly demonstrating its power. And so I believe the Bible is the word of God, because bad men are so bad as to hate it, and brilliant wickedness is incompetent to offer anything in its stead.—Dr. Chas. H. Parkhurst.