THE power of the Word of God is shown in the changed lives of the drunkard, the harlot, the thief, and of men and women previously sunk in the most debasing forms of vice and crime: witness its power over savages of the very lowest type, as for instance among the Terra del Fuegans and the cannibals of the New Hebrides, eighteen thousand of whom have been converted to Christianity through its teachings within a single generation. Witness its wonderful power of sustaining heart and mind in the midst of the sorest trials and when face to face with death even in the most terrible form, while at the same time multitudes of the noblest, the purest, the most cultured of men and women have found inexpressible delight in perusing its pages and meditating upon its sublime truths.
Consider these things and say why it is that this ancient Book is able to do what no other book in all the world has done or can do: what is the secret of its mighty power? There is but one answer: there is a Power behind the Book manifesting Himself in the Book and through the Book, and that Power is God, the Author of the Book. If you believe not this, reader, try to account for it in some other way. You may be told that it is the “religious instinct in man” that accounts for it but it is an undeniable fact that no “religion” in the world except the Christian religion has ever withstood the fire and the sword and still survived the flames of prolonged persecution. No, the Bible in its very existence, in its wonderful history and Divine power, stands absolutely alone, in sublime isolation as manifestly the very Word of God.
The Bible reveals truths so deep and high that the mightiest intellects on earth cannot comprehend them, yet the way of salvation is made so plain that “the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein,” and the most ignorant and uneducated can drink as deeply of its spiritual joys as the most enlightened and cultured. Scholars and peasants, civilized and barbarians, when converted through its truths, have each and all found in it the fullest satisfaction for their soul’s intensest desires. In it we hear, as it were, two voices, as “deep calleth unto deep,” and as we listen with reverent attitude we hear the voice of God speaking to man, and the voice of man speaking to God.