There can be no Christian Association that is not founded on the Bible. Everything that is properly styled Christian owes its existence to the belief in the divine origin and authority of that book; for although there were Christians and a Christian church before the completion of the book, since it was completed all Christian faith depends upon it. No one is entitled to membership in such an association who does not espouse this belief; yet in a Young Men's Christian Association of our day it is scarcely possible that questioning in regard to the origin and authority of the Bible do not frequently arise. You who are members of the Association which I now have the honor of addressing, have doubtless heard it said that the earlier books of the Old Testament, instead of being such as our fathers have taught us to believe them, were written by J., and E., and D., and P., and R., of whom this is about all that we know. They were written so long after the events which they record, and by men with sources of information so unreliable, that we can depend upon the truth of very little that they say. Indeed, it is more than hinted that they did not hesitate to perpetrate pious frauds--a kind of fraud never perpetrated by a pious man--when these were necessary to any special [1] purpose which they had in view. As to the historical books of the New Testament, they also were written, you have been told, by men who lived at too late a day to be well informed, so that their writings must be carefully sifted before we can determine what in them is true and what is to be referred to misinformation, to myth, and to legend.

      In opposition to all this you and I have been taught to regard the writer of every book entitled to a place in this sacred collection as having been controlled in the selection of his matter and guided in the composition of it by God's Holy Spirit. We have learned, in other words, to believe Paul when he says: "Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, and which entered not into the heart of man, whatsoever things God hath prepared for them that love him. But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit.   *   *   *   Which things also we speak, not in words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth; combining spiritual things with spiritual." (I. Cor. ii. 9-13).

      These statements present the main issue between belief and unbelief as regards the books which we style, collectively, the word of God. From among the many lines of argumentation along which the discussion of this issue has taken its course, I have selected a single one for the subject of this address; and as the question is of vital importance to the existence of your Association, I am sure that I shall have your undivided attention while I attempt to discuss it.

      Again and again, almost from time immemorial, it has been argued that if the Spirit of God had guided the sacred penmen after the manner affirmed by Paul, all the books would have been written in one style instead of being marked as they are by all the varieties of style and [2] diction which naturally distinguished their respective writers. To this it has been as often answered, that the infinite Spirit of God could as easily guide a number of writers along the course of their own respective styles and within the limits of their own previously acquired knowledge of words, as in any other way. This seems to be a satisfactory answer. But still it must be conceded that if the Spirit of God exercised any direction over the selection by these men of their words, their modes of expression, or the matter of their narrations, it is but natural to suppose that we may find traces of the fact in characteristics which the writings would not otherwise possess--characteristics by which they may be distinguished as inspired writings. I believe that such characteristics can be pointed out, and that, when properly considered, they furnish conclusive proof of the inspiration in question. I shall confine myself, for the sake of brevity and concentration, to the historical writings of the New Testament, and to their matter rather than their style.

      We invite your attention, first of all, to a peculiarity of the historical writers of the New Testament, which has often elicited wondering comment, the unexampled impartiality with which they set forth the sins and follies of friends and foes alike. There is no attempt at concealment of their own sins; there is no toning down, no apology. They are described without hesitation, and with the same fullness of detail, as are the worst deeds of their enemies. The proposal of James and John to call down fire from heaven on an offending village, is as bluntly recorded as the murder of the innocents of Bethlehem by Herod; the dispute among the apostles as to who should be greatest, is as plainly set forth as the dissensions among the Pharisees concerning Jesus; and although, when the Gospels were written, Peter was the [3] most prominent and the most honored man in the whole church, they every one describe his cowardly denial of his Lord with as much fullness of detail as they do the dastardly betrayal by Judas. They offer no apologies for Peter; and they have no word of reproach for Judas. What writers since the world began, describing events in which their deepest feelings and their dearest interests were involved, have approached these writers in this particular? If they were guided by the impartial Spirit of God, this accounts for it; but who shall account for it on any other hypothesis?

      In the second place, you can scarcely fail to have observed the imperturbable calmness with which they describe all events alike--the most wonderful as the most common-place, the most touching as the most indifferent. The most astounding miracles are described by them with no more manifestations of excitement in their manner than the most trivial everyday events. They betray no more feeling when they speak of the murder of John the Baptist, than when they speak of his voice crying in the wilderness. They are as calm and self-possessed when describing the agony in the garden and the overwhelming scenes of Calvary, as when they tell of Jesus passing through the fields on the Sabbath, or taking His seat at Jacob's well. They use no word of exultation when Jesus arose from the dead, or when He ascended on high; and their tones betray no trembling or tearfulness amid His outcries on the cross, no tenderness as His mangled form is quietly laid in the tomb. Yet these are the very men of whom it is said, that they were mourning and weeping when the first announcement of the resurrection broke upon their ears (Mark, xvi. 10). Who can account for this--for this elevation of these plain men above all the emotions which [4] characterize other men when writing of scene in which their tenderest sympathies and dearest hopes are involved? The experience is superhuman. It is accounted for only when we know that they were restrained by the Spirit of Him,

      In the third place we invite attention to the unexampled brevity of the New Testament narratives; and first, to their brevity as whole books. Never since time began were a set of writers burdened with a theme so momentous in their own estimation, or so momentous in reality. Never were writers so oppressed, when they thought of brevity, by the multitude of wondrous details before them, and the difficulty of determining what to insert and what to omit, when the eternal well-being of a world depended on what they should write. One of them shows how keenly he felt this sense of oppression, when he exclaims with startling hyperbole: "If they should be written, every one, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that should be written" (John, xxi. 25). What, then, could have induced these four evangelists, thus weighted down by the abundance of their materials, overwhelmed with a sense of the importance of their theme, and burning with a desire to vindicate the fame of their adored Master, to compress their accounts into thirty-six pages each of this little book which I hold in my hand? What, but some restraining and irresistible power, guided by superhuman judgment? As to the book of Acts, the argument is the same in kind, and perhaps greater in force; for this writer had to deal with the widespread and ever-varying [5] fortunes of the church through a period of thirty years, the most eventful and thrillingly interesting period of its whole history to the present day; and yet he condenses the story into nearly the same narrow limits.

      When, secondly, we study this brevity with respect to the accounts given of single incidents, the wonder remains the same. Out of the many examples we select a few. Few scenes have ever been witnessed on earth of deeper interest from several points of view than that of the baptism of our Lord. There was the humble yet lofty mien of him who came to be baptized; the surprising demeanor of the great preacher as he confessed his unworthiness to baptize such a person; the solemn act of the baptism itself; the still deeper solemnity of the prayer on the river's bank; the startling voice which was heard from heaven--the voice of Jehovah--which had not thus broken the silence of the skies since it thundered from the summit of Mount Sinai; the graceful descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove; and the oracle, big with the fate of a lost world, in which God confessed his own beloved Son. What man with a writer's instinct could have stopped short of many pages in describing the scene so as to do it justice. But the sublime story is disposed of by the first Evangelist in twelve short lines, in six each by the second and third; and in a mere allusion quoted from the lips of another person by the fourth. Again, the one event which, above all others, these four writers felt themselves obliged to set forth with overwhelming proof, was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, the event, as they confessed, on which their own pretensions and their eternal hopes depended; yet of the twelve appearances of Jesus after his resurrection, only two are mentioned by the first Evangelist, only three by the second, only three by the third, and only four by the fourth. [6] We wonder and wonder why every one did not give all the evidence and press it home upon the reader by many words of comment. In the book of Acts the same surprise confronts us. Never did a writer have a more prolific theme, or one on which he would be more delighted to dwell than that wild commingling of prayers and maledictions, lamentations and silent despair, which filled every street of Jerusalem, when Saul made havoc of the Church, entering into every house and dragging to prison both men and women, until the ten thousand saints were driven to the four winds, and the Church in Jerusalem, the only Church then in existence, was dispersed and apparently destroyed. A whole volume would scarcely have sufficed to describe all the harrowing scenes; and the writer to whom we owe what we know of it was a companion of the principal actor in it for many years; yet some irresistible constraining power shriveled his account of it into four short lines! Next to this event in the history of the young Church, with respect to those tragic elements in which historians love to revel, stands the death by martyrdom of James, the son of Zebedee. The death of Stephen was tragical and heartrending, but that of the Apostle James, about eight years later, was far more so, both because he was one of the original twelve on whose labors the future of the whole Church seemed to depend, and because it was a cold-blooded murder by a descendant of the tyrant who had butchered all the infants of Bethlehem in the vain effort to murder the Son of God. How you and I would love to know the exact motive of this murder! How we should be strengthened to know something of the brave or of the forgiving words which James uttered with his last breath--to know, in a word, how the first apostle who fell a martyr to his faith met the grim monster! And how it would have delighted any [7] Christian who knew the facts to tell them to his brethren, and hand them down to posterity! But this New Testament writer was allowed only a sentence of seven words in the Greek for the whole story, and they are represented by only eleven in our English version. Truly, if it were said of Jesus, " Never man spake like this man," we must say, never man wrote like these men; and the logical inference is that they wrote as he spoke under the restraining power of the Spirit of God.

      But this argument from the brevity of the narratives is not seen in its full force until it is considered in connection with the omissions of remarkable events by which it was chiefly brought about. What sketch of a great man's career was ever written which told only of the last three years of his life, if the previous part were known to the writer? What biographer would consider himself at liberty to omit from even a brief sketch all that was known of the boyhood and early manhood of his hero? Yet two of these three Gospel writers, though they must have known the whole story, have not a word to say of the first thirty years of the life of Jesus; and the other two furnish us within that period nothing but a few glimpses of his unconscious infancy and a single adventure of his boyhood. Uninspired writers have not been content with this; for the Protevangelium, an apocryphal work of the second century, devotes twenty-five chapters to the period between the imaginary announcement of the birth of Mary and the slaughter of the babes of Bethlehem, while another, styled the Gospel of the Infancy, has fifty chapters, drawn from a very feeble imagination, on the first twelve years of the life of Jesus. This may help us to imagine what our Gospels would have been had they come from the pens of uninspired men of the second century, as some rationalists have affirmed. [8]

      The synoptists omit from their narratives four intensely interesting visits of Jesus to Jerusalem; while John omits all of the Galilean ministry, except the single miracle of feeding the five thousand and a conversation which grew out of it. This last writer, the one who was so oppressed by a sense of the vastness of his material as to say that if all were written even the world itself would not contain the books, makes the most surprising omissions of them all. He skips in perfect silence one whole year between his fifth and sixth chapters, a half year between his sixth and seventh, and three months in the midst of his tenth. And what is more surprising still, though the events which he records cover from first to last a period of three and a half years, all of them up to the time of the public entry into Jerusalem, represent only about thirty separate days. Go through his Gospel, counting one by one the days on which its recorded events took place, and this is the number which you will count, although between the first and the last there were 1,270 days of the busy life which he is depicting. One day in forty supplies all that he makes us even partially acquainted with. I am told that in the cotton presses now used in the South men can place a common bale of cotton three or four feet square by five or six feet in length, which is already nearly as solid as wood, and compress it into the space of a cubic foot. Some such compressure of a mental kind must have acted upon the mind of John to bring his narrative within such limits.

      The same restraining power was felt by the author of Acts, else how could he have omitted nearly all of the labors of ten of the apostles, and from the career of Paul, which occupies his chief attention, how could he have omitted many of its most thrilling incidents--those for example which are enumerated but not described in the [9] eleventh and twelfth chapters of Second Corinthians? And what mortal man, unconstrained by some high power, could have given us the account of the voyage from Cæsarea to Rome, and left us without a word respecting Paul's trial before Nero? Compared with this trial those before Felix, Festus and Agrippa appear to us of minor importance; and its wondrous significance has so excited the imagination of a modern writer as to bring forth, in Farrar's graphic delineation of the Life of Paul, one of the finest specimens of word painting in the English language. Who persuaded Luke to leave it out?

      Let us come to a different class of specifications. Who that was an eye witness of the splendid scene of the transfiguration, in which representatives from heaven, earth and hades came together, arrayed in divine glory, and conversed together for a time on the most momentous theme which ever till then had occupied the thoughts of men or angels, could have omitted it from an account of the career of Jesus? And who that has a heart to feel could have omitted the agonies of Gethsemane? Yet John, who witnessed both, and whose tenderness of feeling is beyond all question, says nothing of either. Again, who that saw the calling of Lazarus out of the tomb, with all the heart-breaking scenes which preceded and attended it, could have been persuaded by all the friends he had on earth to omit it from a narrative in which the divine power of Jesus was to be set forth; yet neither Matthew, Mark nor Luke has a word to say of it. Were these men made of wood that they could not feel? Did they have hearts of stone? Were their minds absolutely bereft of imagination? Were they totally unlike all the other men who have taken pen in hand? So they must have been if they were not overruled and constrained as to the matter of their narratives by that mysterious being whose [10] thoughts are not our thoughts, nor his ways our ways. This alone can solve the amazing problem.

      We now advance to another source of argument, the angelology of these writers; and under this head we shall have reference to the writers of the Old Testament as well as to those of the New. Among men of all nations and among all classes of writers, from the rudest to the most cultivated, there has been a fondness for depicting invisible beings; hence the demi-gods, fairies, genii, sylphs and satyrs of ancient and modern story. Nearly all of these are either grotesque, capricious, impure, or malicious. In contrast with them the angels of the whole Bible are holy, mighty, humble, compassionate, self-poised, and in every way worthy to be the messengers of Jehovah. These characteristics are everywhere maintained when angels appear in the sacred narratives. "Ever unlike men, they are always like themselves." Nothing like them ever originated in the brains of men. On no other pages, except when copied from these, can their likeness be found. They are beings who, though far different from ourselves, are objects to us mortals of profound admiration and tender affection. Though their forms are but dimly outlined, we see them; and though they are strangers to us, it is one of our most delightful thoughts that we shall yet dwell among them forever. They are so far above all the creations of human genius that human fancy has not permitted the divine picture to remain as it was, but even Christian poets and painters have persistently given them the form of woman. The Biblical delineation of these heavenly beings must be accounted for. It is found in the writings of shepherds, fishermen, herdsmen and publicans, composed in the early and dark ages of the world, and the writers all belonged to just one race of people, and that not the most imaginative. [11] Surely here is something supernatural; the divine inspiration of the writers can alone account for this--creation, I was about to say--but revelation is the word.

      We invite attention next to the air of infallibility which the writers of both Testaments everywhere assume. Though they speak on some themes which have baffled the powers of all thinkers, such as the nature of God, his eternal purposes, his present will, angels, disembodied human spirits, the introduction of sin, the forgiveness and punishment of sin, the future of this earth, and the eternal destiny of us all; on all subjects and on all occasions they speak with a confidence which knows no hesitation, and which admits no possibility of a mistake. Was this the result of stupidity and of overweening self-consciousness? The fact that they are still the teachers of the world on these themes forbids the supposition. Was it the result of a profundity of learning never equaled, or of native powers of insight never approached by the genius of other men? Their positions in society and their want of favorable opportunities forbid this supposition, and our opponents themselves are quick to reject it. What then shall we claim as the cause of it? Grant their miraculous inspiration, and all is plain. There is no other rational hypothesis. They were the most arrogant of men, next to Jesus himself, in whom the characteristic of which we speak was pre-eminent, if they were not inspired.

      Finally, we cite the inherent power of the New Testament writings to convince men of their own divine origin, and to move them to holy living. That they should possess such power was the expectation of the writers, one of whom expressly declares his purpose in writing to be, that his readers might believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that believing, they might [12] have life through His name. That there is inherent in them a self-evidencing power, is the testimony of a vast multitude who have been turned by it from unbelief to a triumphant faith; and their power to move in the direction of holy living, is attested by the whole host of the believers in every Christian age and country. I may be permitted to cite as an individual example of this, one of the most eminent men by whom the history of your own State of Missouri has been adorned. All of the older men in the audience remember Gen. A. W. Doniphan, a conspicuous officer in the Mexican war, an eminent lawyer, and for many years the leader of the Whig party in this State. Until he was about sixty years or age he was indifferent to all creeds, and he had never become a believer in Jesus Christ; but while in attendance on the circuit court away from home, he dropped into a church on the Lord's day to hear a sermon. As he stated afterward, in telling the story, there was nothing in the sermon to especially interest him, but he found his attention drawn to the manifest earnestness of the speaker, an earnestness and an air of sincerity which proved him to be a profound believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. As he reflected on this, the question came into his mind, if this plain man, with moderate intellectual powers, has found evidence to so thoroughly convince him of the claims of Jesus, may not the same evidence be within my reach also, and may I not be guilty of a serious neglect in not paying attention to it? The thought took possession of him, and he resolved, that on returning home he would take the New Testament in hand and examine it carefully, to see if it sets forth a case in favor of Jesus of Nazareth, which he as a lawyer, desiring to keep up his reputation as such, would undertake to defend in a court of justice. He did so; and he said that before he had gone through the [13] Gospel of Matthew he was forced to exclaim, "The case is a good one." Within a few weeks afterward he was baptized, and the remnant of his life was devoted to the service of God. He is but one of a countless host whose experiences have been in effect the same. How can this be accounted for? It is not true in the same way or to the same extent of any other book in the world. If the spirit of infinite wisdom is its responsible author, then it is easy to see that He who made the human soul and who, therefore, knows all of its secret springs, so guided the construction of this book as to adapt it to the soul for whose redemption it was intended, adapted it to the conviction and to the spiritual moulding of that soul: but who can suggest another cause of this wondrous fact? It is not in the nature of error, of superstition, or of falsehood, to work changes so beneficent in the characters of men; these are the product of truth alone; and herein is a final and conclusive evidence that the human authors of this sacred volume wrote as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.

      I think that we may now draw the conclusion that, while the sacred writers preserve each his own native literary style, so that each may be clearly distinguished from every other, yet there are, belonging to them all, certain characteristics which set them off in a class by themselves, distinguishing their writings from those of all other men. They are characteristics which can be accounted for only by the fact that these books were written under the guidance and restraining power of the Spirit of God, acting directly upon their minds, and causing them to write as God himself willed that his book should be written. If this conclusion is correct, there is a good foundation on which to build a Christian Association of young men. Not only so, but there is broad and solid [14] ground on which to build the Church of the living God, an association of both young men and old, of every clime and kindred on the whole earth. I would advise the young men of this Association then to cling to their Bibles, and to so study the foundations on which the "Impregnable Rock of the Scripture" reposes, that no man shall be able to deceive them, but that they themselves may be teachers of others, and may do battle for the truth against every foe. If the "grand old man," who now bears the burden of State in the empire on which the sun never sets, has found time during the constant strain of a life of marvelous industry in other callings to make himself master of the Bible and of the evidences which support its claims, so that he dares to enter the field of debate with the ablest of its enemies, why should not some of you--why should not all of you--equip yourselves for upholding in your narrower sphere, against every antagonist whom you may meet, the book on which your Association depends for its existence, and on which you individually depend for that which you hold dearest and best? The intellectual training which is imparted to you in this well equipped seat of learning, supplemented by the spiritual culture for which you find opportunities both here and everywhere in our favored land, should make you heroes in the battle for truth and right; but remember that your most effective weapon will always be "the sword of the Spirit," which is the inspired word of God. [15]

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