REJECTED BECAUSE NOT UNDERSTOOD.
By L. Gaussen, D. D.
You do not, it seems, comprehend the divinity, the propriety, the wisdom, the utility of such or such a passage of the Scriptures; and on that account, you deny their inspiration! Is this an argument that can have any real value, we do not say in our eyes, but in yours? Who are you? "Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God," feeble child of man, "and be more ready to hear, than to give the sacrifice of fools; for they consider not that they do evil. Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter anything before God; for God is in Heaven, and thou upon earth." Eccl. 5:1, 2. Who art thou, then, who wouldst judge the oracles of God? Hath not the Scripture itself told us beforehand that it would be to some a stumbling-block, and to others foolishness (1 Cor. 1:23); that the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, and that he even cannot do so, and that they are spiritually discerned (1 Cor. 2:14)? Ought you not, therefore, to expect to feel at first some repugnance in mind, in heart, in conscience, even to its first teachings? Man must first return to his place as a weak, ignorant, and demoralized creature! He cannot comprehend God until he has humbled himself. Let him go and cast himself upon his knees in his closet; let him pray, and he will comprehend what it means! An argument is ill-grounded because you do not seize its scope! A doctrine is a prejudice because you do not admit it! A quotation is not to the point because its true meaning has escaped you! What would remain in the world were God to leave nothing there but what you could explain? The emperors of Rome, incapable of understanding either the lives or the faith of our martyrs, threw them to the wild beasts in the amphitheater, and had their bodies dragged to the Tiber. It is thus that people strike their own defective knowledge, like an impure hook, into the word of God, and drag to the public dung-hill whatever they have been unable to understand, and have condemned! While tracing these lines, we are reminded of a teacher of divinity, in other respects an honorable man, but imbued with the wisdom of his own age, who set himself to prove that the reasonings of St. Paul are not inspired. Now, how went he about to demonstrate this? Why, he quoted as a convincing example a passage (Gal. 3:16) in which St. Paul proposes, not to prove (mark this well—the whole solution lies here), not to prove, but to AFFIRM that the promise made by God to Abraham and his posterity regarded not all his posterities (since it was evident enough that his posterities by Agar, by Keturah, by Esau, were rejected), but one special, elected, and personal posterity. And what think you the professor did to establish his thesis on this passage? Why, he palmed on the apostle an argument so puerile that the merest child among the Galatians might have reproved him for it! St. Paul, according to him, instead of doing no more than affirm a fact, meant to argue from the singular of a collective noun that such a word could designate no more than a single person! Absurd as it is for us, said he, this argument might be good for the Jews, or for the gross-minded Gauls of Asia Minor. We give this example; a hundred more of the same value might easily be produced. May the author venture here to refer to his own experience? He recollects, with no less humiliation than gratitude, his earliest and his latest impressions on the epistles of St. Paul. He was enabled, from his earliest years, to come to the conviction that the Bible was from God; but he did not yet understand the doctrines which it taught. He wished to respect the apostle's pages, because he saw, through other marks, that the not-to-be-counterfeited seals of the most high God are suspended there; but in reading them he was agitated with a secret uneasiness, which drove him to other books. St. Paul appeared to him to reason wrong—not to go straight to his point; to discourse in a roundabout and embarrassed manner; to wind about his subject in long, spiral turnings, and to say the things that were attributed to him quite differently from what one himself would have wished to have done. In a word, he felt, in reading them, somewhat of the painful discomfort of a tenderly affectionate son as he waits on a declining parent whose memory is beginning to fail, and who stammers in his attempts to speak. Oh, how anxiously would he conceal from others, and dissemble to himself, that his venerated father totters, and seems no longer to be himself! But no sooner had divine grace revealed to us that doctrine of the righteousness of faith, which is the burning and shining flame of the Scriptures, than every word became light, harmony, and life; the apostle's reasonings seemed limpid as the water that flows from the rock; his thoughts, profound and practical; all his epistles, a power of God unto salvation for those who believe. We saw abundant proofs of divinity shine forth from those very parts of the Scriptures which had long given us such uneasiness; and we could say, with the joy of one who has made a discovery, and with the gratitude of a tender adoration, as we felt inimitable, and until then silent, chords vibrate within us, in unison with the word of God, "Yes, my God, all the Scriptures are divinely inspired!"—L. Gaussen, D. D.