Testimony of the Scriptures to Themselves 51 On the original parchment. Men may destroy that parch- ment. Time may destroy it. To say that the membranes have suffered in the hands of men, is but to say that everything Divine must suffer, as the pattern Tabernacle Suffered, when committed to our hands. To say, however, that the writing has suffered—t he words and letters—is to say that Jehovah has failed. The writing remains. Like that of a palimpsest, it will survive and reappear, no matter what circumstances, what changes, come in to scatter, obscure, disfigure, or blot it away. Not even one lonely t h e o s * writ large by the Spirit of God on the Great Uncial “C” as, with my own eyes I have seen it— plain, vivid, glittering, outstarting from behind the pale and overlying ink of Ephraim the Syrian—-can be buried. Like Banquo’s ghost, it will rise; and God Himself replace it, and, with a hammer-stroke, beat down deleting hands. The parch- ments, the membranes, decay; the writings, the words, are eternal as God. Strip off the plaister from Belshazzar’s pal- ace, yet Mene! Mene! Tekel! Upharsin! remain. They remain. Let us go through them, and from the beginning, and see what the Scriptures say of themselves. One thing; they say that God spake, “anciently and all the way down, in the prophets.” One may make if he pleases the “en” instrumental—as it is more often instrumental—i. e., “by” the prophets; but in either case, in them or by them, the Speaker was God. Again; the Scriptures say that the laws the writers promul- gated, the doctrines they taught, the stories they recorded— above all, their prophecies of Christ—were not their own; were not originated, nor conceived by them from any outside sources—were not what they had any means before of know- ing, or of comprehending, but were immediately from God; *God was manifest in the flesh (1 Tim. 3:16).
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