The preservation of the Bible.
By A. N.
WITH what wonder should we gaze upon a fortress that had withstood the assaults of successive generations for thousands of years! And with what strange interest should we look at a man who, during a life of many centuries, had often been cast into the sea without being drowned, and drugged with prussic acid without being poisoned, and riddled with bullets without being numbered with the slain! Thus has it been with the Word of God during all its history. Men have made it their enemy by their bad lives, and then have become its enemies, and hated it, and sought to destroy it. Jehoiakim, as we read, cut to pieces the Divine Roll, and threw it into the fire. About 170 years before Christ, Antiochus caused all the copies of the Jewish Scripture to be burnt. Three hundred and three years after, Dioclesian, by an edict, ordered all the Scriptures to be committed to the flames; and Eusebius the historian tells us he saw large heaps of them burning in the market-place. Nor has this spirit ever failed to show itself. The Bible has, all along its course, had to struggle against opposition, visible and latent, artful and violent. It has had to contend with the prevalence of error, the tyranny of passion, and the cruelty of persecution. Numerous foes have risen up against it—pagans who have aimed to destroy it, and Papists who have striven to monopolize it, and ungodly men who have hated it for its purity and penalties. But from all these assaults it has been preserved. Though cast into the fire, it has risen triumphantly from its ashes; though crushed, yet, like the diamond, every part of which when broken exhibits the beauty and perfection of the whole, it has proved its indestructibility, and though sunk in the waters, it has come up again studded with the costliest pearls. It has survived the shocks of all its enemies, and withstood the ravages of time. Like the fabled pillars of Seth, which are said to have bid defiance to the deluge, it has stood unmoved in the midst of that flood which sweeps away men, with their labors, into oblivion. Oh what wreck and ruin meet the eye as it glances at the past! Thrones have crumbled, empires have fallen, and philosophers and their systems have vanished away. The very monuments of man's power have been converted into the mockery of his weakness. His eternal cities moulder in their ruins, and the serpent hisses in the cabinet where he planned his empire, and echo itself is startled by the foot which breaks the silence that has reigned for ages in the hall of feast and song. Yet notwithstanding all this desolation, the stream which first bubbled up at the foot of the Eternal Throne has continued to roll on with silent majesty and might, bearing down each opposing barrier, and declaring to perishing multitudes on its brink, that while "all flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass, the word of the Lord endureth forever." No weapon that has ever been formed against the Bible has prospered. It has survived the power of secret treachery and open violence. The time has been when to read it was death. Infidelity has fought against it with relentless malignity, but it has successfully resisted all its potency, passing unhurt through the hands of Julians, and Celsuses, and Porphyrys, and defying all the sophistries of Hume, and the eloquence of Gibbon, and the innuendoes of Rousseau, and the blasphemy of Paine, and the vituperations of Voltaire. The identical press, indeed, which was employed by Voltaire and the French Institute to disseminate their attacks upon the Bible, has since been used to print the very volume they so vainly sought to destroy. Nor is this all. Not only has the Bible not been destroyed, it has not been diluted by the lapse of ages. It has not been ruined by the sapping of its foundations, nor by the incorporation of any new element with it, which has marred its integrity, or vitiated its purity. With it, like God its author, there has been no variableness or shadow of a change. The world has suffered its boasted classics to be contaminated and blurred, but the church can rejoice over the fair page of her precious books, assured that the far descent of these venerable treasures has neither altered their character nor changed their identity. "Those Oracles, written amidst such strange diversity of time, place, and condition—among the sands and cliffs of Arabia, the fields and hills of Palestine, in the palaces of Babylon, and in the dungeons of Rome, have come down to us in such unimpaired fullness and accuracy that we are placed as advantageously towards them as the generation which gazed upon that book of the law to which Moses had been adding chronicles and statutes for forty years; or those crowds which hung on the lips of Jesus as he recited a parable on the shore of the Galilean lake; or those churches which received from Paul or Peter one of their epistles of warning or exposition." A. N.—[Sabbath Recorder.