"In every heart that is won from the love of sin to the love of God, that is crushed in sorrow and strengthened in the presence of temptation by the writings of psalmists, prophets, and apostles, I find evidence that 'holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.'"-R. W. Dale, D. D. CHAPTER XII. THE BIBLE IN SPIRITUAL LIFE. A PERSONAL friend of Cardinal Manning has told us how, after long and eventful years of absence, duty brought him into the neighborhood of the lovely village in Sussex where he began his career as a minister in the Church of England. As he stood in silence beside the grave of his wife, who had died after a very few years of married life, it must have been difficult to recall the time when this great prince in the Roman Catholic Church had made for himself a happy home in the quiet English parish. His friend, in describing the visit, adds: “I accompanied him into the church and showed him a New Testament with the inscription 'H. E. Manning, 1845.' He laid his hand on the book, saying: 'Times change and men change, but this never changes.'" 1 So we come to speak of the Bible as the one continuous influence in the inner life of our race. Cardinal Manning was right, “This never changes." Who shall attempt to measure the influence, for example, of the life of Jesus as it is told by the evangelists? Dr. James Hamilton, 1 "Nineteenth Century,” 1892, p. 283. himself one of the saintliest of men, said on one occasion: "I have a great hankering to write the true Acta Sanctorum, the story of all the heroic and beautiful deeds which have been impelled by love to the Saviour." Peasants as inuch as princes for now five hundred years have walked with Jesus along the pages of our English Bible, and their hearts have burned within them as he talked with them by the way, and opened to them the Scriptures. Bidding the philosophers and schoolmen of his times return to the Great Biography, Erasmus said: "If the footprints of Christ are any where shown to us, we kneel down and adore. Why do we not rather venerate the living and breathing picture of him in these books? If the vesture of Christ be exhibited, where will we not go to kiss it? Yet were his whole wardrobe exhibited, nothing could represent Christ more vividly and truly than those evangelical writings. Were we to have seen him with our own eyes we should not have so intimate a knowledge as they give of Christ, speaking, healing, dying, rising again, as it were, in our own actual presence."1 1. Notice first, the power of the English Bible in kindling life in the soul. When, toward the close of his reign, Henry VIII. tells his subjects that he is "very sorry to know and hear how unreverently that most precious jewel, the word of God, is disputed, 1 Seebohm, "The Oxford Reformers of 1498," p. 257. rhymed, sung, and jangled in every ale-house and tavern," he unwittingly testifies to this power. Bitter and often purposeless as they have been, the theological conflicts which have so frequently raged in England remind us of it. Everything lives whither the river cometh. We hang the weapons of religious controversy in the temple of Scripture as witnesses to the quickening force of the Bible. Listening to the taunts with which polemics darkened the sun and poisoned the air in the English Reformation,"He is a Pharisee, he is a Gospeller, he is of the new sort, he is of the old faith, he is a newbroached brother, he is a good Catholic father, he is a papist, he is a heretic,"1—and mindful of their echoes in our own times, we have at all events this consolation: The Bible wakens the minds of men wherever its voice is heard. In the same reign to which we have just referred, English history furnishes many instances of this power, when the church was either supine or antagonistic. The parishioners of a Somersetshire village cursed with a curate who will not teach them or preach, giving his time rather "to dicing, carding, and bowling," apply to the rector of the next parish, who occasionally comes over and gives them a sermon and teaches them to read the 1 C. Hardwick, "A History of the Christian Church during the Reformation," p. 373. 1 New Testament. Suddenly, one Good Friday, their own priest enters the pulpit for the first time in many years, and harangues against the new order of things: "If any man will preach the New Testament, if I may hear him, I am ready to fight with him incontinent." "Indeed," the poor people add ruefully, "he applieth in such wise his school of fence so sore continually that he filleth with fear all his parishioners." The annalist of the Reformation, John Strype, has given a vivid picture of the eagerness with which England roused herself to the study of Coverdale's Bible. "Everybody that could, bought or busily read it, or got others to read it to them if they could not themselves; and divers more elderly people learned to read on purpose, and even little boys flocked among the rest to hear portions of the Holy Scriptures read." Before this general passion for the study of the Bible in their mother tongue, the people of England swept aside the affectation of the schoolmen-twenty doctors, as Tyndale put it, expounding one text twenty ways-and went straight to the simple meaning of each verse. Colet, who did more to restore the Bible to its true place than any other English Reformer, sitting alone during the winter vacation, in his chambers at Oxford, was visited by a priest who often attended his expository lectures. They drew 1 Stoughton, p. 146. 2 Ibid, p. 158. |