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THE KING’S BUSINESS
the world for God. We are not disparag ing' scholarship ; we need it, and the more consecrated scholarship we hatlé the better for the interests of the Bible and Chris tianity. Ho premium should be put upon ignorance. The principal authors of the Old and New Testaments ,Moses and Paul, were scholars. What we do assert is that Christianity is not dependent upon scholar ship (1 Corinthians 1:24-26). We need not fear the increase in thé knowledge of the sciences, Voltaire said that the Bible would not survive a century after the.law of gravitation had been dis covered. Yet we know that the discoverer of that law, Sir Isaac Newton, was a hum ble Christian man; and Christianity still .survives, "even though the law of gravita tion is ' an acknowledged scientific fact. Strauss, the sceptic, maintained that the Copernican system would give the death blow to Christianity and the Bible; but who is there today who feels that his faith in Christianity is even shaken because he believes that the earth revolves around the sun, and not, as the anciehts believed, the opposite? When geology made its proud boast that the earth is older than six thous and years, some good people trembled for the survival of Genesis, but whose faith in Christ or in God is shaken today by thè suggestion that the “days” of Genesis may be periods of time rather than days of twenty-four hours? The Bible has nothing to fear from the pick-axe of the geologist, from the telescope of the astronomer, from the skull of the anthropologist, from the instrument of the chemist, or from the pen of the scientific writer.
sition, the Church of Christ today has more members, builds more churches, cir culates more Bibles, and makes her influ ence felt all over the world more than ever in all her previous history. We should not, therefore, fear that Christianity and the Bible are going to pieces because it is asserted that the scholars of the day, are against it. Of course, it is not true that the scholars of the world are arrayed against the Bible.- Professor Tait of Edinburgh, a distin guished representative of physical science, in the International Review, denied such a statement. He asked who were the advanced, best, ablest thinkers of the past, or of that time. He then showed that, with a few exceptions, the scholars were on the side of the Bible and orthodoxy. The late George C. Romanes, who, after a long eclipse of the faith, died a believer, in addressing the students of Cambridge University, said that all the most illustrious names were listed on the side of ortho doxy; Sir W. Thompson, Sir George Stokes, Professors Tait, Adams, Clark, Maxwell, and Bailey—and the conditions are practically unchanged today. But if it were true that scholarship is arrayed against the Bible, that fact would not predict or spell defeat or failure. Scholarship has never saved the Church or brought it back from its backslidings to warmth or spiritual fervor. Philoso phy and science never have, never can save a soul. We are saved by faith, not by scholarship. Jesus Christ did not choose a company of university men to be his dis ciples and apostles, to go forth and win
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