THE K I N G ' S B U S I NE S S while the Bible just lives on. In Paris there is a literary morgue where scien tific theories, which had their day, now dead, are laid out for inspection. I was charmed, when in college, with the atomic theory. The old professor in chemistry would sit there with his big glasses on and talk about atoms as if he had seem atoms all his life; and if you asked him, if he ever saw an atom, he would have to tell you “No.” Did anybody ever see an atom? Any micro scope strong enough to reveal an atom? No; and yet he would give us the most intricate formulae about atoms that would make our heads ache as we went into the examination room. Now my son, who has recently come out of the university, tells me that my atomic theory is in the morgue. There was an other theory that simply fascinated me. We called it the “ Nebular Hypothesis” . It was a wonderful theory. Away back in the distant past, Kant said, all the material world was in a rarified, gas eous, homogeneous state, so thin that it took a million cubic miles to weigh a grain. My! didn’t that get thin? Can you think of anything thinner than that? The very thinness of it fasci nated me, and held me spellbound; but now, my son tells me, that dear old ‘‘nebular hypothesis” is dead and in the morgue. Something else has come in to take its place. Well, while other books and theories are born, live, die and get into the morgue, this old Bible lives right on (Amen). While men try to put it into the morgue, it puts them in. Voltaire said he would have it in the morgue in less than one hundred years; Voltaire is in the morgue, while the Bible lives on. The Inquisition said they would have it in the morgue; the Inquisition is in the morgue, while the Bible lives on. All the men and all the institutions that have tried to put it in the morgue are themselves in the morgue, while the Bible lives and will live forever.
446 he is nothing. Just show me a man that really believes nothing, and you have nothing on two feet with two eyes and two hands and a mouth walking around. He is something just in pro portion as he believes something; and, if he has no creed, he has no character. (2) Profitable for “ reproof” . There is no thought of rebuke in that word. You get your bricks for your wall of creed out of the Bible, and then you can take the Bible as a plumb line and drop it down beside the wall to see whether or not your wall of creed is straight. (3) Profitable for “ correction” . The plumbline may show that the wall is crooked, but cannot straighten it. But the word “ correction” has in it the thought of straightening the wall, when it finds it to be crooked. The Bible not only shows that your creed is crooked but straightens it. There are good things in creeds written by uninspired men, but correct your creed by the standard Book. Get what God has said and work that into the wall of your creed; then try it by the plumb line of revelation, and whenever you see that the wall is crooked, straighten it by the Word of God. (4) Profitable for “ instruction in righteousness” . There is instruction in history, in poetry, in science, but the Bible’s specialty is righteousness. The only book that is up-to-date and beyond date on all subjects is the Bible. The critics told us thirty years ago that the Bible was mistaken when it said Sargon was king of Assyria, no such person in history. But within the last 25 years the spade and the shovel have brought to lights tablets of the biography and record of the reign of Sargon.' So you see the Bible was 2000 years ahead of the professors in the universities. It took them 2000 years to catch up with it. And I have been surprised to no tice books that in their day were stan dard works have died and are buried,
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