BARDS OF THE BIBLE

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 4, 1860

BARDS OF THE BIBLE.

The following passages occur in "Gilfilland's Bards of the Bible."

The Bible is a mass of beautiful figures; its words and its thoughts are alike poetical; it has gathered around its central truths all natural beauty and interest; it is a temple with one altar and one God, illuminated by a thousand varied lights, and studded with a thousand ornaments. It has substantially but one declaration to make, but it utters it in the voices of the creation.

Shining forth from the excellent glory, its light has been reflected on a myriad of intervening objects, till it has become at length attempered for our earthly vision. It now beams upon us at once from the heart of man and the countenance of nature. It has arrayed itself in the charms of fiction. It has gathered new beauties from the works of creation, and new warmth and new power from the very passions of clay. It has pressed into its service the animals of the forest, the flowers of the field, the stars of heaven,—all the elements of nature. The lion spurring the sands of the desert, the wild roe leaping over the mountains, the lamb led in silence to the slaughter, the goat speeding to the wilderness, the rose blossoming in Sharon, the lilly drooping in the valley, the apple-tree bowing under its fruit, the great rock shadowing a weary land, the river gladdening a dry place, the moon and the morning star, Carmel by the sea, and Tabor in the mountains, the dew from the womb of the morning, the rain upon the mown grass, the rainbow encompassing a dark place, the light God's shadow, the thunder his voice, the wind and the earthquake his footsteps,—all such varied objects are made as if naturally designed from their creation, to represent him to whom the book and all its emblems point. Thus the spirit of the book has ransacked creation to lay its treasures on Jehovah's altar, united the innumerable rays of a far streaming glory on the little hill of Calvary, and woven a garland for the bleeding brow of Immanuel, the flowers of which have been culled from the garden of a universe. The power of the Bible over man has been long and obstinately resisted; but resisted in vain. For ages has this artless, loosely piled little book been exposed to the fire of the keenest investigations, a fire meanwhile which has consumed contemptuously the mythology of the Iliad, the husbandry of the Georgics, the historical truth of Livy, the fables of the Shaster, the Talmud and the Koran, the artistic merit of many a popular poem, the authority of many a work of philosophy and science. And yet there the Bible lies unhurt, untouched with not one of its pages singed, with not even the smell of fire having passed upon it. Many an attempt has been made to scare away this fiery pillar of our wanderings, to prove it a mere natural product of the wilderness; but still night after night rises, like one of the sure and ever shining stars in the vanguard of the great march of man, the old column gliding slow, but guiding certainly to future lands of promise, both in the life that is, and that which cometh hereafter.

While other books are planets shining with reflected radiance, this book like the sun, shines with ancient and unborrowed rays.

Other books, after shining their little seasons, may perish in flames fiercer than those which destroyed the Alexandrian library; this must in essence remain fine as gold, but inconsumable as asbestos in the general conflagration.