The Bible and Life

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ts slumbers. He is his own friend, and his own enemy. Omar Khayyám declares that he is his own heaven and his own hell. There is a story of a farmer who said that when he climbed to the roof of his barn and looked about, he always found that he himself was the center of the world. The roof of the sky at all points was equ

they are hidden. The moral literature of the race always emphasizes the difficulty of self-revelation. Its cry is, "Who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults." It has a yet deeper desire: t

ts and in the New Commandment "thou" is the recurring word. Personal address is prominent everywhere. Indeed, the whole Book is a kind of prophet coming into the court of each soul and saying, "Thou art the man." Sometimes the approach is an accusation, sometimes an approbation; in any case the note is intensely in

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self is small if you do not know what the self is after you give it the new place! The revelation

stress divine sovereignty, while insisting on human obedience and reverence. It does call for humility on the part of man. We may well admit that it is possible to overdo the call to humility. That good mood may easily pass over into a false mood. Occasionally men, in an effort to be humble, speak untruth concerning their own souls. It is just here that the "worm-of-the-dust" theory gets its chance. That phrase was a biblical one, used by a character in his moment of self-abasement. Yet the Concordance will prove that this lowly estimate of man is by no means the staple of teaching, as well as that much of the cheap preaching of human nature is

ploy that doctrine as a vast slur on humanity, we shall insist that the length of the fall must be the length of the possible rise! In harmony with this idea a great preacher has given the world a sermon on "The Dignity of Humanity as Evidenced by its Ruins." Much of the glory of the Coliseum at Rome has departed, but even its ruins are a testimony to its greatness. Seeing its gaunt grandeur in the sunlight, or viewing its impressive shadows in the moonlight, the tourist gets the shock of its glory. The simple truth is that a doct

cause they wait for the age of peace that can issue only from the hearts of men. The coin rolls into dust and shadow and is lost; we do not blame the coin. The sheep wanders into desert and darkness and is lost; we do not blame the sheep. The son goes off into the swine field and is lost; and we do blame the son. The coin and the sheep have no communings with self, no sense of guilt, no road of repentant return; but the son has all these. The Bible does utter its vigorous charge against man's sin; it is the ever-open court room in

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le and have fairly penetrated the moral consciousness of the race. No o

allegory, or history, its meaning for this special point is the same. The climax of the creation is man. God is represented as changing chaos into cosmos, separating waters and land, fixing sun and moon in their places, bringing verdure to the surface of the earth, assign

of that fact; it must needs give it double emphasis. "So God created man in his own image"-that would seem simple and strong enough. But the statement is strengthened by repetition, "In the image of God created he him." These twice-re

ries which show how lightly human life was regarded by the Romans. Those dreadful scenes in the arena, where thumbs so often declined to turn down as a sign of mercy, are dire mysteries to men who have gotten the biblical standpoint. We are distant from that heartless mood because we are near to the Bible. The Book and the gladiator could not live together in peace. The Book at once began to call men from the tiers of bloody pleasure. With the conversion of Constantine, superficial as it may have been, the change began. The emperor ordered many splendid copies of the Bible for the churches of his capital. He himself came under the spell of its human doctrine. Zealous Christian teache

ent. Their harsh and negative quality is softened into gentleness. They guard the goods of man-his property, his wife and children, his body, his good name. It would be possible to regard the Decalogue as a series of prohibitions in which the word "not" occurs with forbidding frequency. In this case the appropriate accompaniment is thunder and lightning, and the appropriate scroll for the writing is sto

es are a marked tribute to potential man. Beyond the disturbed present they see the peaceful future. Beyond the clash of swords and the swish of spears they see the mild and productive era of the plowshare and the pruning hook. Beyond the unreal altars they see the incense of true worship arising to God. The prophets were, in the best sense, optimists, and they were optimists because they believed that all men would some day yield to the Lord. They beheld the whole earth filled with righteousness

s coming, and he is counseled to go into the temple and cling to the altar for protection. Once more self-respect comes to the rescue; the reply is, "Should such a man as I flee? and who is there, that, being as I am, would go into the temple to save his life? I will not go in." Here the potential man, foretold by the prophet, was the actual man. He had reached such a high doctrine of his own

ng of moon and stars in the far heights, the workmanship of the Lord in the vast universe-all this makes the psalmist feel that he is a mere speck in the scheme. Tried by those celestial measurements, he drops into insignificance. He is rescued from self-contempt only by a return to the message of Genesis. His despairing cry issues in a shout of personal triumph. "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?" If materialism should conquer the Bible there is but one answer. The psalmist is saved by the Scripture, "Thou hast made him a little lower than God, and hast crowned him with glory and honor

ought the lowliest and the worst among men and women. He ate with the publican and gave his choicest lesson to the harlot. He was willing to exchange his social reputation for the privilege of associating with the humblest people. For a woman with a dark past he delocalized worship. From another he

the fall of sparrows, though they brought small price in the market place, and then, speaking to ordinary men and women, nearly all of them ignorant and more than half of them slaves, he said, "Are ye not much bette

of the care of God. At last he put man on one side of the scale and the whole world on the other side, and he affirmed that man outweighed the world. Men may barter themselves for half a township; but Jesus declared that it would be a disastrous barg

he shewbread was consecrated, but he approved the taking of it to satisfy human hunger. The Sabbath day was holy,

It is said that some ancient religionists were accustomed to debate whether or not a child had a soul. Jesus would have scorned such a debate. He made the child the model of the kingdom. Human life unspoiled was lifted up as an example. To offend a little one w

e his representatives. The righteous had so far overlooked this fact, that they were forgetful of any ministry to him; and what had been the unconscious glory of the righteous was the unconscious tragedy of the wicked. The judgment

e whole life of Jesus was lived for man. He himself said, "For their sakes I sanctify myself." All those sacrificial phrases that describe the purpose of his coming add glory to human life. The joy that was set before him was the goal of a redeemed humanity. His living for men was simply his teaching about men, made over into concrete terms. In the Parable of t

estimate of man. God's sense of values must be preserved. He did not send his Son to die for worms of the dust. That idea may fit an extreme mood of spiritual abasement. We may grant all possible condescension in the atoning act of God, but we cannot grant a condescension that dedicates infinite worth to finite worthlessness. Jesus died for men just because men were far more than worms of the dust. If we are to keep that theory of atonement that has long held the heart of the church, we are driven to affirm that the Cross gives us a di

makes its incalculable addition to the doctrine of man. There is a story, for which the writer c

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im to "think too much" of himself, unless he indulges in comparison of himself with others. An argument for immortality does not fall within the scope of this lecture; but the bearing of immortality, as declared in the Holy Scriptures, on the view that men

again, we come upon a reason based on the divine sense of values. God will not provide an Eternal Home that is any better than the Eternal Beings for whom he makes it ready. The gem is to be better than the setting. In a certain sense, therefore, jasper walls and pearl gates and gold streets, as seen in the descriptions of heaven, are tributes to human souls. The Bible tells us that "greater than the house is he that built it," and the Bible would tell us, also, that the occupant of the house is greater t

ng all possible offsets, the residuum of instruction tending to glorify human nature is significant. We need not wonder that some thoughtful men have affirmed that the chief characteristic

longer an event; he is only an episode, or perhaps an incident. We pass him on the dense street, and we do not notice him at all. There are so many of him that, unless we are heedful, we shall come to regard him lightly just because he is hidden by the crowd. When factories grow so huge that men are known, not by their names, but by their numbers, only the scriptural emphasis upon men as such can save human beings from being deemed "hands" rather than souls. If the sin of the countryside is an excessive soc

mate pride should be destroyed. Andrews Norton once wrote to his son, Charles Eliot Norton, who was about to go abroad for an important service, telling the young man that his family and friends recognized that he had special powers for doing large and worthy things. Then he added that "this ought not to make one vain. On the contrary, their true tendency is to

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ing prophecies of the future are declarations of his coming power, that his worship is the symbol of his partnership with the Most High, that the incarnation is in his interest, that the Infinite Teacher brought him matchless tributes, that the Cross of Calvary is an expression of his own valuation, that immortal life is his destiny, and that a glorious heaven is the fitting place for his final dwel

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at he shall be, he sees the vision of the Elder Brother and so purifies himself even as he is pure.