A VENERABLE gentleman in Kentucky, who signs himself "An Old Man," sends us the following:
'In addition to your regular workmen, it is likely that, like myself, there may be some volunteers, and amongst us, visionary wild ones. Visionary hair-splitters will bring the Times into disrepute. I remember, many years since, a wealthy man died. His son, his executor, wrote to his brother, an eminent jurist, to look at the will and write to him as to its import in certain particulars. The jurist wrote back to him, "Read the will to your wife, and to brother Richard's wife, and they will tell you what it all imports." Wills are to be interpreted according to the most simple, common acceptation of the language in which they are written. Common minds, with common sense, will ascertain their true meaning, when hair-splitters will doubt. What are prophecies but the will of God? Let us then receive it in its most plain and simple acceptation, and we will not run wild.'
"An Old Man" has spoken eloquently and to the point. We have repeatedly said, that one of the strangest things in the world is the manner in which some people read the Bible. It would almost seem as if they turned it upside down, and read it backward. "Eyes have they but they see not." They praise it, and hold it in holy regard, and insist that everybody ought to have it; yet they look into it only as some recondite volume, which is a good text-book for preachers, but quite beyond the reach of their understanding. Many seem to view it as a very sacred book of mysteries and sublime riddles, rather than a plain piece of information and advice given by a Father to his inexperienced and exposed children. And many who sit down to write commentaries upon it appear to be continually haunted with the idea that there is something mystical in every word, or that the real mind of the Spirit is not to be found in the plain import of the letter, but in some abstruse or latent analogy which it is their business to dig after.
We hold that the Bible is a book for everybody, that the prophecies in it are for everybody, that everywhere in it God speaks for the purpose of being understood by everybody, that its language is conformed to the ordinary uses of speech, and that it is to be interpreted in the same homely way in which we would interpret the will of a deceased parent or ascertain the meaning of a serious letter on important business. And we fully agree with our correspondent, that, if we will receive it in its most plain and simple acceptation, we will not run wild. Or, if this hyperspiritualistic and rationalistic age should call us "wild," God will himself in due time attest the wisdom of our course.