THE KI NG ' S BUSI NESS
12
January, 1939
consider in support of any claim of divine origin. Has any one of us ever heard of a reason which would convince any rationally skep tical man that the Koran or the Book of Mormon, for instance, or the book written by Mrs. Mary B. Eddy, are to be regarded as anything more than normal or subnor mal productions? Could not everything to be found in any of these books be readily duplicated and bettered? Is there known a single indubitably supernatural thing about them? Mohammed declared that he was God’s inspired prophet in giving the world the Koran, If a man believed him, often with a sword at his throat to convince him, he became a Mohammedan. A shred of proof was never offered. If any one found him self able to “swallow” the story Joseph Smith told of his finding the golden plates from which he wrote his bible, he became a Mormon. Smith never proved his assertion. A man or woman who is not firmly "rooted and grounded” in “the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints” and who has never found the all-sufficient peace and power to meet life’s sorrows and vicissi tudes to be found in the “apostles’ doc trine,” in which is every good thing to be found in Christian Science with no admix ture of its pagan pantheism, may become, as a matter of pure credulity and bewilder ment, a "Christian Scientist.” Not so with the Christian. He is offered “many infallible proofs”—proofs such as would stand in a court of law. Paul him self adjures us not to let any one fool us, to "prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” And to prove the truth of the gospel facts and the unmistakable super naturalness of the Bible is the very thing that any Christian instructed in the "evi dences” longs for a chance to do for any unbelieving friend who will attend to this matter. And good it is to reflect that the one religion that has any proofs has all conceivable proofs, and that it is the reli gion which offers and promises the most which is the one and only religion which, while received by faith, is proved by evi dence and logic which has led such great lawyers as those mentioned to declare it conclusive. Everlasting life, in an environ ment beautiful beyond conception, “joys inexpressible” in degree and eternal in dura tion, to be had as a free gift accompanied by the unswerving and unfathomable love of the eternal Son of God who, disguised as a Man, submitted Himself to the tor turous death of a condemned felon to pro cure this eternal life for us—such is what Christianity offers us. Supernatural and stupendous events, es tablished by historical evidence which Greenleaf, in common with every other lawyer who has carefully studied the record, declares impregnable, and a stand ing miracle increasing in marvelousness as we now look upon it—such are samples of the proofs attesting the solid reality of the offer and the accompanying warning of un endurable but eternal woe if it is not availed of in time. The Miracle of Prophecy Fulfilled Now to deal with the two samples of Christian proofs above mentioned, in in verse order:
However, Christianity does not rely up on authority for its support, but upon “many infallible proofs” which it offers afresh to each inquirer and asks that each weigh for himself. Why This Theme is Neglected But in this day of fast motion and hur ried thinking, there is a widespread belief that religion is something which from its nature no one can know enough about to make worth while the effort to arrive at a well-founded decision in regard to it. In the words of one writer, furthermore, the falsity of the supernatural claims of Chris tianity is presented as “a matter of agree ment among all persons of discernment.” And the President of the American Associa tion for the Advancement of Atheism has put a popular argument against Christianity succinctly and well when he writes: “There are twenty-two bibles in the world: the Christian rejects twenty-one of them. The atheist rejects only one more than the Christian does,” the persuasive inference being that since the Christian agrees with the atheist that twenty-one of these bibles are false, the only reasonable thing to do is to reject the twenty-second also. And a popular “conclusion of the whole matter” is that “it makes no difference what you believe, just so you are sincere.” Yet the one who relies on this theory has to admit that, if this rule operates in spiritual mat ters of eternal importance, it certainly does not here and in this life, where sincerity in mistaking, for instance, mercuric for mer curous chloride (corrosive sublimate for calomel) has never been known to prevent or mitigate the deadly effects of the error. The Bible tells us that there is one, ,and only one way to escape eternal death and secure eternal life: "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved” (Rom. 10:9). The way of salvation is many times declared, but always to the same effect. If the Bible is God’s inspired, infallible Word, all who trust any other way of escape from God’s eternal prison house are lost. So the most important ques tion in the world for every man of us to settle as quickly as possible is: Is this twenty-second Bible, the “Holy Bible,” God’s one revelation of Himself and His covenant to men? But since men are con fronted, as Mr. Smith tells us, with twenty- two bibles all making the same claim, what reason is there to justify a lawyer or any other rational man in rejecting utterly twenty-one of these bibles and accepting the twenty-second? Twenty-One Bibles And now, first, to “clear the decks” of the twenty-one false bibles, whose claims to divine inspiration are presented by the infi del as reducing to absurdity a claim for inspiration for any bible, let us invoke the rule of law and logic that puts the bur den of proof upon any plaintiff or pro ponent of establishing his contention by sufficient evidence; and when we do so, we find at once that not one of the twenty-one alleged bibles presents even a "scintilla of proof” such as a law-trained man would
Keeping in mind the fact that neither the Koran nor any other false bible, as far as I know, has ever attempted to foretell the future at all and that even the Pope of Rome, though claiming divine inspiration when speaking on matters of faith and doc trine, has never ventured on such an un mistakable test or proof of supernatural knowledge, when we open the Holy Bible we find on almost every page future events in multiplied and varied detail spoken of as if as good as already done. And then when we read history, we find accomplished and being accomplished before our eyes the very things centuries ago foretold. As surely as only God knows in advance what numerous free agents will do in a world where uncontrollable natural forces and un predictable combinations of events make the happenings of the next moment uncertain, the men who wrote the Old Testament over two thousand years ago (to claim for it only the antiquity of the Septuagint Version which was translated from the Hebrew into the Greek in 285 B.C., by orders of Ptolemy Philadelphus) wrote "as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” in foretelling with ab solute precision the things which have sub sequently come to pass, and many of which are happening before our eyes. Can any man rationally ignore such a phenomenon as is presented by the corre spondence between historical facts and the words of the prophet Ezekiel foretelling that, while Sidon’s streets should run with blood (Ezek. 28:22, 23), though the city should not be ended, Tyre should have the very dust scraped from off of her (Ezek. 26:4, 5)—as Alexander the Great literally did to the city—that she should be merely a top of a bare rock in the midst of the sea, and a place for the spreading of nets and nevermore be rebuilt (Ezek. 26:14), ex actly according to her fate and condition as illustrated in a photograph published in a recent number of the Geographical Mag azine? Can any one logically disregard the words of Daniel—which no one claims were written later than 150 B.C.—that Babylon, Persia, and Greece should be fol lowed by a kingdom as much stronger than the others as iron is than gold, silver, or brass, which should obliterate the lines of previous kingdoms, divide into two parts (in fulfillment, the eastern and western em pires of Rome), and finally into ten toes or kingdoms of Europe whose governments are characterized today as foretold, on the one hand by the incohesiveness of clayey democracies and Communism and on the other by the iron rule of the Fascism which originated with Mussolini in the capital of the ancient iron Roman Empire. And, to leave out of account all reference to the scores of other millenniums-old prophecies giving names, exact dates and places and compound events, can any man read with out amazement and awe the newspaper ac counts of what is happening to the Jews in Germany, Poland, Roumania, Austria, South America, and practically all over the world at this time, and then consider the words of Moses to be found in this at least two-thousand-year-old Book in telling the Jews he was then leading into Palestine what would happen to them as a result of their forsaking the law and worship of their God: f Continued on page 45]
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