Bad Use of the Bible by W. S. Foote

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 9, 1864

Bad Use of the Bible.

By W. S. Foote

Not long since I saw a woman beat one of her children over the head with a small Bible, for some slight fault, and the thought immediately suggested itself that her rod was a good one, provided she would only use it the right way.

But there is another way of using it, which is, if possible, even worse. By referring to the N. Y. Tribune of Oct. 31, there may be found a speech by H. W. Beecher, delivered at Manchester, England, before an audience of thousands, where he remarked that "When Moses wrote his laws, delivered by the Highest, he wrote them on tables of stone." It reads very different in Exodus xxxi, 18: "And he gave unto Moses, when He had made an end of communing with him upon mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God."

A smaller man than Mr. B., in course of a funeral sermon, delivered in our neighborhood, said, "Man is a supernatural being, walking upon the face of the earth, and, as the Bible says, he was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death, &c." Some of his audience might think that they understood him, but I could not. Some one has said, that if by "the foolishness of preaching," mentioned in 1 Cor. i, 21, the apostle meant foolish preaching, the world ought to have been converted long ago. There is such a place as "the city of confusion," which is soon to be destroyed.

W. S. FOOTE.

Pendleton, O.