Imperishable by Dr. Nevin

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 20, 1863

Imperishable.

By Dr. Nevin

God's word shall endure forever. Other things may perish, but it shall never die nor decay.

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 the ruins; the serpent hisses in the cabinet where he planned his empire, and echo is startled by the foot which breaks the silence that has reigned for ages in his hall of feast and song. Yet, notwithstanding all this desolation, the stream of truth, 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. Numerous foes have risen up against it—Pagans who have aimed to destroy it, 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 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. Infidelity has fought against it with relentless malignity; but it has successfully resisted all its potency, passing unhurt through the hands of Julians, Celsuses, and Porphyrys, and defying all the sophistries of Hume, the eloquence of Gibbon, the innuendoes of Rousseau, 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. Thus has the word of the Lord lived and triumphed, while its adversaries, one after another, have been blasted.—Dr. Nevin.