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Which Shall It Be?

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Jul 15, 1908

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 34, No. 29.

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Which Shall It Be?

By Editor

WHICH shall it be, reader,—for you have the power to decide that for yourself,—the word of God or human conclusions?
The Bible is on trial in the house of its friends. Will you witness for it or against it?
In its behalf stand the centuries, filled with witness for the Old Book. Not an empire which has molded the world but is predicted in origin, career, and end, in its inspired pages. Call the roll. Let Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Tyre, Syria, Media, Persia, Grecia, Rome, America, answer. Each and all have borne witness to the truth of the Bible.
Written in black characters of hopeless doom on the pages of history are the names and fate of those who lifted puny hands against its mighty plans and precepts. Many of these names would have been lost in oblivion had they not been associated with opposition to truth; and now they live only in infamy. Where are Nimrod, and the Pharaohs, and Sennacherib, and Agag, and Belshazzar, and Alexander, and Antiochus, and Herod, and Judas Iscariot, and Pilate, and Nero, and Julian, and Constantine, and the Gregorys, and Voltaire, and Ingersoll? In some way or another all these, and many more, have set themselves against the Rock of the word, but the men are dead; the Rock stands.
On the contrary, there are thousands of mighty witnesses to the efficacy and power of the Book. Many of them did not have all the light; some of them but a few rays; yet the little or much light they had was dominant in their souls, and made them mighty in God. Call a few names from the long roll of the ages: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Hezekiah, Josiah, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, and Daniel, and Nehemiah, and John the Baptist, and JESUS OF NAZARETH, and Paul, and Peter, and John, and Huss, and Luther, and Wesley, and the millions of souls lifted from the sloughs of sin, and cleansed and washed and saved.
Take down the old geography; open to a world-map on Mercator's projection; trace with your finger the countries and zones where the Bible has had free course, and find them all of the best that life on a sick and dying world affords,—enlightenment, equality, beneficence, advancement in all that makes for better, higher living, in contrast with the nations and peoples whose darkness the light has not penetrated, or those other lands where human tradition is preferred to the open Bible. Behold the powers of the Book of God!
In these last days rationalism and "science falsely so-called" are undermining faith in the Old Book. Under the guise of Christian scholarship and higher criticism they are substituting in the minds of men human reason for faith, and human effort for the power of the Spirit of God. Protestantism is losing its power to protest against even the enemies within its ranks.
On the other hand, there are souls longing for something human and certain who are turning to ritualism, tradition, and thru these to Roman Catholicism, in which the word must needs be subverted to the yoke of human decree.
Better the latter than the former. We say it advisedly, better Rome with her consistent, awful creed than anarchy in the religious life, which teaches that God's word means anything or nothing; that the Christian life is the following of the lusts of the flesh, that man is in himself divine, and therefore in himself his own guide.
Thank God, we are left to the mercy of neither of the great human currents. We may reject the hoary tradition of the centuries, sanctioned by a hundred popes tho it be; or the rationalism of German skeptics, tho buttressed by great scholarship; and we may clasp our arms around some mighty crag of the word, pull ourselves from the swirling currents, and stand secure on the Rock of Ages. We may find in Jesus Christ its Giver a personal Saviour, ever near to save and succor, ever with us to the end.
O soul, stand by the Old Book.