LII.
THE HOLY BIBLE.
I heard a minister say the other day that a mother had not necessarily done much for her boy because she had bought him a nice Bible and put it in his trunk, when he was about to leave home to seek his fortune in the world. I think it wrong for anybody—minister or what not—to indulge in such loose and flippant talk. The effect is bad—always bad, and no hair splitting, and no higher criticism, and no curiously ingenious explanations can mend the matter. As for me, give me the old-fashioned mother who sends her son out into the world with a Bible in his trunk, and give me the old-fashioned boy who reads that Bible every night with tears in his eyes, as he thinks of the old folks at home and of their simple lives devoted to Jesus Christ. Give me the man, woman or child, whose hands touch the Bible reverently, instead of slinging it about as a dictionary or some common dime novel. Give me the plain old fellow who quickly takes leave of that circle in which critics are proceeding to ably explain away certain chapters of the Bible.
As for me, I want no new theories about the Bible—no new versions—no new criticisms. No man has a right to weaken the faith of others. No man has a right to knock away the staff that supports the crippled wayfarer. And no man has a right to tell an aged mother that it does no good to give her boy a Bible unless he can suggest a better substitute. Destroy the old-fashioned idea concerning the Bible, and we shall have a nation of infidels defying God, defying the law, and repeating the licentiousness and horrors of the French Revolution. We should make the Bible first in all things. Make the Bible first in the family, in the Sunday-school and church, make it first in state and society, and we shall have a Republic that will grow brighter and brighter as the years come and go, and then we “shall go out with joy, and be lead forth with peace: and the mountains and the hills shall break forth before us into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.”