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THE SUNNY SOUTH, ATLANTA. GEORGIA. SEPTEMBER 23 189*.
11
Tie Great Brooklyn
iiiktioivLVN, i’“- 1 <•—In bis sermon at
the Brooklyn Tabernacle this forenoon
Rev. I)r. be Witt Talmage preached to a
vast audience on the subject of “Re-en
forcement,” tlie text being Luke xvii, 5,
"Lord, increase our faith.”
“What a pity he is going there,” said my
friend, a most distinguished general of the
army, when he was told that the reason
for my not being present on a celebrated
day in Brooklyn was that on that day I had
sailed for the Holy Land. “Why do you
say that?” inquired some one. My mili
tary friend replied, “Oh, he will be disillu
sioned when lie gets amid the squalor and
commonplace scenes of Palestine, and his
faith will be shaken in Christianity, for
that is often the result.” The great gen
eral misjudged the case.
I went to the Holy Land for the one pur
pose of having my faith strengthened, and
that was the result which came of it. In
all our journeying, in all our reading, in
all our associations, in all our plans, aug
mentation, rather than thedepletion of our
faith, should be our chief desire. It is easy
enough to have our faith destroyed. I can
give you a recipe for its obliteration. Read
infidel books, have long and frequent con
versations with skeptics, attend the lec
tures of those antagonistic to religion, give
full swing to some bad habit, and your
faith will be so completely gone that you
will laugh at the idea that you ever had
any. If you want to ruin your faith, you
can do it more easily than you can do any
thing else.
After believing the Bible all my life ]
can see a plain way by which in six weeks
1 could enlist my voice and pen and heart
and head and entire nature in the bom
bardment of the Scriptures, and the church,
and all 1 now hold sacred. That it is easy
to banish soon and forever all respect for
the Bible I prove by the fact that so many
have done it. They were not particularly
brainy nor had especial force of will, but
they so thoroughly accomplished the over
throw of their faith that they have no more
idea that the Bible is true or that Chris
tianity amounts to anything than they
have in the truth of the “Arabian Mights’
Entertainments” or the existence, of Don
Quixote’s “windmills.” They have de
stroyed their faith so thoroughly that they
never will have a return of it.
Fifty revivals of religion may sweep over
the city, the town, the neighborhood, where
they live, and they will feel nothing but a
silent or expressed disgust. There are per
sons in this house today who 20 years ago
gave up their faith, and they' will never re
sume it. The black and deep toned bell of
doom hangs over their head, and I take the
hammer of that bell, and I strike it three
times with all my might, and it sounds,
It oe! woe! woe!” But my wish, and the
wish of most of you, is the prayer expressed
by the disciples to Jesus Christ, in the
words of my text, “Lord, increase our
faith.”
8TUDY THE BIBLE.
Ihe first mode of accomplishing thi
to study the Bible itself. I do not beli
1 an tnfidel now alive who has r
the Bible through. But as so importar
oeumeut needs to be read at least tv
rough in order that it may be thoroug
understood, and read in course, I now o
B n re ' van * to any infidel who has read
Bible through twice and read it in cou
ut 1 cannot take such a man’s own w
or ll > there is no foundation for ini
r*ty except the Bible, and the man whe
Jeets the source of truth, how can I acc
his truthfulness?
1 must have another witness in
case before I give the reward. I musth
,. testimony of some one who has s
him read it all through twice. Infidels
in this Bible for incoherencies and con
let ions and absurdities, and if you 1
nr Bible you will see interlineation:
e book of Jonah and some of the cl
ters of that unfortunate prophet net
w oru out by much use, and some parti
H Samuel or I Kings you will find <
with linger marks, but the pages wl
contain the Ten Commandments, and
psalms of David, and the sermon on
mount, and the book of John the E\
gelist will not have a single lead pe
shnwf mar gin nor any finger ma
showing frequent perusal.
° f 0Ue presidents of
ViuWiLDtttgi ^8# a pronounced infidel
knew It when many years ago x accepted
his invitation to spend the night in his
home. Just before retiring at night he said
in a jocose way, “I suppose you are accus
tomed to read the Bible before going to
bed, and here is my Bible from which to
read.” He then told me what portions he
would like to have me read, and he only
asked for those portions on which he could
easily be facetious.
You know you can make fun about any
thing. I suppose you could take the last
letter your father or mother ever wrote and
find something in the grammar, or the spell
ing, or the tremor of the penmanship about
which to be derisively critical. The inter
nal evidence of the truthfulness of the Bi
ble is so mighty that no one man out of the
1,600,000,000 of the world’s present popula
tion, or the vaster millions of the past ever
read the Bible in course and read it prayer
fully and carefully, but was led to believe it.
John Murray, the famous book publisher
of Edinburgh and the intimate friend of
Southey, Coleridge, Walter Scott, Canning
and Washington Irving, bought of Moore,
the poet, the “Memoirs of Lord Byron,”
and they were to be published after Byron’s
death. But they were not fit to be pub
lished, although Murray had paid for them
$10,000. That was a solemn conclave when
eight of the prominent literary people of
those times assembled in Albemarle street
after Byron’s death to decide what should
be done with the “Memoirs,” which were
charged and surcharged with defamations
and indelicacies. The “Memoirs” were
read and pondered, and the decision came
that they must be burned, and not until
the last word of those “Memoirs” went to
ashes did the literary company separate.
But suppose now all the best spirits of
all ages were assembled to decide the fate
of the Bible, which is the last will and
testament of our heavenly Father, and
these memoirs of our Lord Jesus, what
would be the verdict? Shall they burn,
o? shall they live? The unanimous ver
dict of all is, “Let them live, though all
else burn. ’ ’ Then put together on the other
hand all the debauchees and profligates
and assassins of the ages, and their unani
mous verdict concerning the Bible would
be, “Let it burn.”
Mind you, I do not say that all infidels
are immoral, but I do say that all the scape
graces and scoundrels of the universe agree
with them about the Bible. Let me vote
with those who believe in the Holy Scrip
tures. Men believe other things with half
van eraence required to believe the Bible.
The distinguished Abner Kneeland rejected
the Scriptures and then put all his money
into an enterprise for the recovery of that
hocus pocus, “Captain Kidd’s treasures,”
Kneeland’s faith for doing so being found
ed on a man’s statement that he could tell
where those treasures were buried from the
looks of a glass of water dipped from the
Hudson river.
The internal evidence of the authenticity
of the Scriptures is so exact and so vivid
that no man honest and sane can thor
oughly and continuously and prayerfully
read them without entering their disciple-
ship. So I put that internal evidence para
mount. How are you led to believe in a
letter you receive from husband or wife or
child or friend? You knov; the handwrit
ing. You know the style. You recognize
the sentiment. When the letter comes,
you do not summon the postmaster who
stamped it, and the postmaster who re
ceived it, and the letter carrier who brought
it to your door to prove that it is a genuine
letter. The internal evidence settles it, and
by the same process you can forever settle
the fact that the Bible is the handwriting
and communication of the infinite God.
WEIGHTY TESTIMONY.
Furthermore, as I have already intimated,
we may increase our faith by the testimony
of others. Perhaps we of lesser brain may
have been overcome by superstition or ca
joled into an acceptance of a hollow pre
tension. So I will this morning turn this
house into a courtroom and summon wit
nesses, and you shall be the jury, and I
now impanel you for that purpose, and I
will put upon the witness stand men whom
all the world acknowledge to be strong in
tellectually and whose evidence in any
other courtroom would be incontrovertible.
I will not call to the witness stand any min
ister of the gospel, for he might be preju
diced.
There are two ways of taking an oath in
a courtroom. One is by putting the lips to
the Bible, and the other is by holding up the
right hand toward heaven. Now, a3 in
this case it is the Bible that is on trial, we
will not ask the witness to put the book to
his lips, for that would imply that the
sanctity and divinity of the book are settled,
and that would be begging the question.
So I shall ask each witness to lift his hand
toward heaven in affirmation.
Salmon P. Chase, chief justice of the su
preme court of the United States, appoint
ed by President Lincoln, will take the wit
ness stand. “Chief Justice Chase, upon
your oath, please to state what you have to
say about the book commonly called the
Bible.” The witness replies: “There came
a time in my life when I doubted the divin
ity of the Scriptures, and I resolved as a
lawyer and judge I would try the book as
I would try anything in the courtroom,
taking evidence for and against. It was a
long and serious and profound study, and
using the same principles of evidence in
this religious matter as I always do in sec
ular matters I have come to the decision
that the Bible is a supernatural book, that
it has come from God, and that the only
safety for the human race is to follow its
teachings.” “Judge, that will do. Go back
again to your pillow of dust on the banks
of the Ohio.”
Next I put upon the witness stand a
president of the U nited States—John
Quincy Adams. “President Adams, what
have you to say about the Bible and Chris
tianity?” The president replies: “I have
fcjrjynqy piada it £racti$s.tQ. read
enrough the Bible once a year. My custom
is to read four or five chapters every morn
ing immediately after rising from my bed.
It employs about an hour of my time and
seems to me the most suitable manner of
beginning the day. In what light soever
we regard the Bible, whether with refer
ence to revelation, to history or to morality,
it is an invaluable and inexhaustible mine
of knowledge and virtue.”
Next I put upon the witness stand Sir
Isaac Newton, the author of the “Principia”
and the greatest natural philosopher the
world has ever seen. “Sir Isaac, what have
you to say concerning the Bible?” The
philosopher’s reply is, “We account the
Scriptures of God to be the most sublime
philosophy.”
Next I put upon the witness stand the
enchantment of letters, Sir Walter Scott,
and when I ask him what he thinks of the
place that our great book ought to take
among other books he replies, “There is but
one book, and that is the Bible.-”
Next I put upon the stand the most fa
mous geologist of all time, Hugh Miller, an
elder of Dr. Guthrie’s Presbyterian church
in Edinburgh, and Faraday and Keppler,
and they all testify to the same thing. They
all say the Bible is from God, and that the
mightiest influence for good that ever
touched our world is Christianity.
“Chancellor Kent, what do you think of
the Bible?” Answer: “No other book ever
addressed itself so authoritatively and so
pathetically to the judgment and moral
sense of mankind.”
“Edmund Burke, what do you think of
the Bible?” Answer: “I have read the Bi
ble morning, noon and night, and have ever
since been the happier and the better man
for such reading.”
Next I put upon the stand William E.
Gladstone, the head of the English govern
ment, and I hear him saying what he said
to me in January of 1890, when, in reply to
his telegram, “Pray come to Hawarden to
morrow,” I visited him. Then and there I
asked him as to whether, in the passage of
years, his faith in the Holy Scriptures and
Christianity was on the increase or decrease,
and he turned upon me with an emphasis
and enthusiasm such as no one who has not
conversed with him can fully appreciate
and expressed by voice and gesture and
illumined countenance his ever increasing
faith in God and the Bible and Christianity
as the only hope of our ruined world.
“This is all, Mr. Gladstone, we will take of
your time now, for from the reports of
what is going on in England just now I
think you are very busy.”
The next man I put upon the witness
stand is the late Earl of Kintore, and I ask
him what he thinks of Christianity, and he
replies: “Why do you ask me that? Did
you not hear me preach Christ in the ‘Mid
night Mission’ of London? “Oh, yesl I
remember!” But I see many witnesses
present today in the courtroom, and I call
you to the witness stand, but I have only a
second of time for any one of you. As
you pass along just give one sentence
in regard to Christianity. “Under God
it has changed my entire nature,”
says one. “It brought me from drunk
enness and poverty to sobriety and
a good home,” says another. “It solaced
me when I lost my child,” says another.
“It gave me a hope of future treasures
when my property was swept off by the
last panic,” says another. “It has given
me a peace and a satisfaction more to me
than all the world beside,” says another.
“It has been to me light and music and
fragrance and radiant anticipation,” says
another. Ah, stop the procession of wit
nesses. Enough! Enough! All those voices
of the past and the present have mightily
increased our faith.
THE EVIDENCE OF SCIENCE.
Again our belief is re-enforced by archaeo
logical exploration. We must confess ihrjr
good men at one time were afraid of ge4-
ogist’s hammer and chemist's crucible and
archaeologist’s investigation, but now in
telligent Christians are receiving and still
expecting nothing but confirmation from
all such sources. What supports the Pal
estine Exploration society? Contributions
from churches and Christian benefactors.
I saw the marks of the shovels of that
exploring society amid the ruins of ancient
Jericho, and all up and down from the
Dead sea to Caesarea Philippi. “Dig away!”
says the church of God, “and the deeper
you dig the better I like.”
The discovered monuments of Egypt have
chiseled on them the story of the sufferings
of the Israelites in Egyptian bondage, as
we find it in the Bible; there, in imperish
able stone, representations of the slave, of
the whips and of the taskmasters who
compelled the making of bricks without
straw. Exhumed Nineveh and Babylon,
with their dusty lips, declare the Bible
true. Napoleon’s soldiers in the Egyptian
campaign pried up a stone, which you may
find in a British museum, a stone, as I re
member it, presenting perhaps two feet of
lettered surface. It contains words in three
languages. That stone was the key that
unlocked the meaning of all the hiero
glyphics of tombs and obelisks and tells
over and over again the same events which
Moses recorded.
The sulphurous graves of Sodom and
Gomorrah have been identified. The re
mains of the tower of Babel have been
found. Assyrian documents lifted from
the sand and Behistun inscription, hun
dreds of feet high up on the rock, echo and
re-echo the truth of Bible history. The
signs of the time indicate that almost every
fact of the Bible from lid to lid will find its
corroboration in ancient city disentombed,
or ancient wall cleared from the dust of
ages, or ancient document unrolled by ar
cheologist.
Before the world rolls on as far Into the
twentieth century as it has already rolled
into the nineteenth, an infidel will be a man
who does not believe his own senses, and
the volumes now critical and denunciatory
qf thl Bible, if not entirely devastated by
the booKworms, will be taken down from
the shelf as curiosities of ignorance or idio
cy. All success to the pickaxes and crow
bars and powder blasting of those apostles
of archaeological exploration. I like the
ringing defiance of the old Huguenots to
the assailants of Christianity: “Pound
away, you rebels! Your hammers break,
but the anvil of God’s word stands.”
How wonderfully the old book hangs to
gether! It is a library made up of 66 books
and written by at least 39 authors. It is a
supernatural thing that they have stuck
together. Take the writings of any other
39 authors, or any 10 authors, or any 5
authors and put them together, and how
long would they stay together? Books of
“elegant extracts” compiled from many
authors are proverbially short lived. I
never knew one such book, which, to use
the publisher’s phrase, “had life in it” for
five years.
Why is it that the Bible, made up of the
writings of at least 39 authors, has kept to
gether for a long line of centuries when
the natural tendency would have been to
fly apart like loose sheets of paper when a
gust of wind blows upon them ? It is be
cause God stuck them together and keeps
them together. But for that Joshua would
have wandered off in one direction, and
Paul into another, and Ezekiel into another,
and Luke into another, and Habakkuk in
to another, and the 39 authors into 39 direc
tions. Put the writings of Shakespeare
and Tennyson and Longfellow, or any part
of them, together. How long would they
stay together? No book bindery could keep
them together.
But the cannon of Scripture is loaded
now with the same ammunition with which
prophet and apostle loaded it. Bring me
all the Bibles of the earth into one pile
and blindfold me so that I cannot tell the
difference between day and night, and put
into my hand any one of all that Alpine
mountain of sacred books, and put my fin
ger on the last page of Genesis, and let me
know it, and I can tell you what is on the
next page—namely, the first chapter of Ex
odus. or while thus blindfolded, put my
finger on the last chapter of Matthew, and
let me know it, and I will tell you what is
on the next page—namely, the first chapter
of Mark. In the pile of 500,000,000 Bibles
there will be no exception.
In other words, the book gives me confi
dence by its supernatural adhesion of
writing to writing. Even the stoutest ship
sometimes ships its cargo, and that is what
made our peril the greater in the ship
Greece of the National line when the cy
clone struck us off the coast of Newfound
land and the cargo of iron had shifted as
the ship swung from larboard to starboard
and from starboard to larboard. But,
thanks be to God, this old Bible ship,
though it has been in thousands of years of
tempest, has kept its cargo of gold and
precious stones compact and sure, and in
all the centuries nothing about it has
shifted. There they stand, shoulder
to shoulder, David and Solomon and
Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and
Daniel and Hosea and Joel and Amos
and Obadiah and Jonah and Micha and
Nahum and Habakkuk andZephaniah and
Haggai and Zechariah and Malachi and
Matthew and Mark and Luke and John
and Paul and Peter, all there, and
with a certainty of being there until
the heavens and the earth, the creation
of which is described in the first book of
the Bible, shall,, have collapsed, and the
white horse of the Conqueror described in
the last book of the Bible shall paw the
dust in universal demolition. By that
tremendous fact my faith is re-enforceu.
The discussion is abroad as to who wrote
those books of the Bible called the Penta
teuch, whether Moses or Hilkiah or Ezra
or Samuel or Jeremiah or another group of
ancients. None of them wrote it. God
wrote the Pentateuch, and in this day of
stenography and typewriting that ought
not to be a difficult thing to understand.
The great merchants and lawyers and ed
itors and business men of our towns and
cities dictate nearly all their letters; they
only sign them after they are dictated. The
prophet and evangelist and apostle were
Jehovah’s stenographers or typewriters.
They put down only what God dictated; he
signed it afterward. He has been writing
his name upon it all through the vicissi
tudes of centuries.
THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER.
But I come to the height of my subject
when I say the way to re-enforce our faith
is to pray for it. So the disciples in my
text got their abounding faith, “Lord, in
crease our faith.” Some one suggests, “Do
you really think that prayer amounts to
anything?” I might as well ask you is
there a line of telegraphic poles from New
York to Washington; is there a line of tele
graphic wires from Manchester to London,
from Cologne to Berlin. All the people
who have sent and received messages on
those lines know of their existence. So
there are millions of souls who have been
in constant communication with the capi
tal of the universe, with the throne of the
Almighty, with the great God himself, for
years and years and years.
There has not been a day when supplica
tions did not flash up and blessings did not
flash down. Will some ignoramus who
has never received a telegram or sent one
come and tell us that there is no such thing
as telegraphic communication? Will some
one who has never offered a prayer that
was heard and answered come and tell us
that there is nothing in prayer? It may not
come as we expect it, but as sure as an
honest prayer goes up a merciful answer
will come down.
During the blizzard of four or five years
ago you know that many of the telegraph
wires were prostrated, and I telegraphed to
Chicago by the way of Liverpool, and the
answer after awhile came around by an
other wide circuit, and the prayer we offer
may come back in a way we never imag
ined. and if we ask to have our faith, in
creased, although it may come by a widely
different process from that which we ex
pected, our confidence will surely be aug
mented.
Oh, put it in every prayer you ever make
between your next breath and your last
gasp, “Lord, increase our faith”—faith in
Christ as our personal ransom from pres
ent guilt and eternal catastrophe; faith
in the omnipotent Holy Ghost; faith in the
Bible, the truest volume ever dictated or
written or printed or read; faith in adverse
providences, harmonized for our best wel
fare; faith in a judgment day that will set
all things right which have for ages been
wrong.
Increase our faith, not by fragile addition,
but by an infinitude of recuperation. Let
us do it as we saw it done in the country
while we were yet in our teens, at the old
farmhouse, after a long drought, and the
well had been dried, and the cattle moaned
with thirst at the bars, and the meadow
brook had ceased to run, and the grass
withered, and the corn was shriveled up,
and one day there was a growl of thunder,
and then a congregation of clouds on the
sky, and then a startling flash, and then a
drenching rain, and father and mother put
barrels under every spout at the corners of
the house and set pails and buckets and
tubs and pans and pitchers to catch as much
as they could of the shower, for in many
of our souls there has been a long drought
of confidence and in many no faith at all.
Let us set out all our affections, all our
hopes, all our contemplations, all our pray
ers, to catch a mighty shower. “Lord, in
crease our faith.”
I like the way that the minister’s widow
did in Elisha’s time, when, after the family
being very unfortunate, her two sons were
about to be sold for debt, and she had noth
ing in the house but a pot of oil, and at
Elisha’s direction she borrowed from her
neighbors all the vessels she could borrow
and then began to pour out the oil into
those vessels and kept on pouring until
they were all full, and she became an oil
merchant, with more assets than liabilities,
. and when she cried, “Bring me yet a ves
sel,’Hhe answer came, “There is not a ves
sel more.” So let us take what oil of faith
we have and use it until the supply shall
be miraculously multiplied. Bring on your
empty vessels, aud by the power of the
Lord God of Elisha they shall be filled until
they can hold no more of jubilant, all in
spiring and triumphant faith.
LESSONS OF THE STORM.
What a frightful time we had a few days
ago down on the coast of Long Island,
where I had been stopping! That archangel
of tempest which, with its awful wings,
swept the Atlantic coast from Florida to
Newfoundland did not spare our region.
A few miles away, at Southampton, I saw
the bodies of four men whom the storm had
slain and the sea had cast up. As I stood
there among the dead bodies I said to my
self, and I said aloud: “These men repre
sent homes. What will mot-her and father
and wife and children say when they know J*
this?”
Some of th e victims were unknown. Only
the first name of two of them was found
out—Charley and William. I wondered
then and I wonder now if they will remain
unknown and if some kindred far away
may be waiting for their coming and never
hear of the rough way of their going. I
saw also one of the three who had come in
alive, but more dead than alive. The ship
had become helpless six miles out, and as
one wave swept the deck and went down
the furnaces till they hissed and went out
the cry was, “Oh, my God, we are lost!”
Then the crew put on life preservers, one of
the sailors saying to the other, “We will
meet again on the shore, and if not, well,
we must all go sometime.”
Of the 23 men who put on the life pre
servers, only 3 lived to reach the beach.
But what a scene it was as the good and
kind people of Southampton, led on by Dr.
Thomas, the great and good surgeon of
New York, stood watching the sailors
struggling in the breakers. “Are you still
alive?” shouted Dr. Thomas to one of them
out in the breakers, and he signaled yes
and then went into unconsciousness. Who
should do the most for the poor fellows
and how to resuscitate them were the
questions that rau up and down the beach
at Southampton.
How the men and women on the shore
stood wringing their hands impatiently
waiting for the sufferers to come within
reach, and then they were lifted up and
carried indoors and waited on with as much
kindness and wrapped as warmly as though
they had been the princes of the earth. “Are
they alive?” “Are they breathing?” “Do
you think they will live?” “What can we
do for them?” were the rapid and intense
questions asked, and so much money was
sent' for the clothing and equipment of the
unfortunates that Dr. Thomas had to make
a proclamation that no more money was
needed. In other words, all that day it
was resuscitation.
And that is the appropriate word for ns
this morning as we stand and look off upon
this awful sea of doubt and unbelief on
which hundreds are this moment being
wrecked. Some of them were launched by
Christian parentage on smooth seas and
with promise for prosperous voyage, but a
Voltaire cyclone struck them on one side,
and a Tom Paine cyclone struck them on
the other side, and a bad habit cyclone
struck them on all sides, and they have
foundered far away from shore, far away
from God, and they have gone down or are
washed ashore with no spiritual life left in
them.
But, thank God, there are many here to
day with enough faith left to encourage us
in the effort at resuscitation. All hands
to the beach! With a confidence in God
that takes no denial, let us lay hold of
them! Fetch them out of the breakers!
Bring gospel warmth and gospel stimulus
and gospel life to their freezing souls! Re-
auscitation! Resuscitation!