Bible Self-Perpetuating
By Bishop Thompson
It has a self-perpetuating and multiplying power. Infidels have written books; where are they? Where is Porphyry, Julian? Fragments of them there are; but we are indebted even for this to Christian criticism. Where is Hume, Voltaire, Bolingbroke? It requires the world's reprieve to bring a copy out of the prison of their darkness. Where is the Bible? Wherever there is light. Speaking the language of heaven in sevenscore and three of the tongues of earth, and giving the Word of God by forty millions of voices to five times as many million ears, and in tongues spoken by six hundred millions of men, and having swept its path of storm through all time, it still walks triumphant, despite earth's dying malice and hell's eternal wrath; and like the apocalyptic angel, tho it wraps its mantle of cloud around it, calmly looks out upon the world with a face as it were the sun encircled with the rainbow.—Bishop Thompson.