Modern Discovery and the Bible
By Dr. J. Hamilton
LIEUTENANT LYNCH has floated down the Jordan, and explored the Dead Sea; and his sounding-line has fetched up from the deep physical confirmation of the catastrophe which destroyed the cities of the plain. Robinson, and Wilson, and Bartlett, and Bonar, have taken pleasure in the very dust and rubbish of Zion; and they come back declaring that the Bible is written on the very face of the Holy Land. Since Laborde opened up the lost wonders of Petra, its stones have cried aloud, and many a verse of Jehovah's Word stands graven there with a pen of iron in the rock forever. Skepticism was wont to sneer, and ask, Where is Nineveh, that great city of three days' journey? But since Botta and Layard have shown its sixty miles of enclosing wall, skepticism sneers no longer. Hidden in the sands of Egypt, many of God's witnesses eluded human search till within the last few years; but now, when Bibles increase, and are running to and fro through the earth, and when fresh confirmations are timely, God gives the word, and there is a resurrection of these witnesses; and from their sphinx-guarded sepulchres old Pharaohs totter into court, and testify how true was the tale which Moses wrote three thousand years ago. "In my youth," said Caviglia, when Lord Lindsay found him in the East, "I read Jean Jacques and Diderot, and believed myself a philosopher. I came to Egypt, and the Scriptures and the pyramids converted me." And even so, a visit to Palestine, the reading of Keith's "Fulfilment of Prophecy"—nay, the mere sight of the Assyrian antiquities, has given faith to many a doubter; just as we could scarcely imagine any one reading Dr. Stroud on the "Physical Cause of Christ's Death," or Mr. Smith on the "Shipwreck of St. Paul," without carrying away the firmest conviction of these historical facts, and, consequently, of all those vital truths which the facts by implication involve.—Dr. J. Hamilton.