Daily globe. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1878-1884, 1881-06-26
BETWEEN OURSELVES.

The letter is memorable as berg the most
wonderful tumble of scripture, and bears the
signature of both parents.
One can read between the lines the hardness
for which all this biblical quotation is no
emOllient.
The son was wild and came or was sent to
America to begin new life of reform, and the
sequel was suicide in hotel in strange land.
If the father meant the letter for any comfort,
it failed signally.
One touch of nature amid so many spiritual
excerpts would have relieved the awful spell
of the old Scotchman's valedictory.
The only personal reference is in the lines
"We freely forgive you all. Never again shall
we mention your past history. You have a
new field before you" Verify he had, poor
fellow, and his history is most absolutely past.
A letter of this sort would make anyone low
spirited even if he didn't tamper with his
throat Such q massing of texts, and such
use of them as projectiles at this dissipated
young man is peryersion of the whole spirit
of the Book. 1t Is enough to make any sin
ner sturdy or limp, either recalcitrant, or
suicidal.
It is a process of reconstruction unwarrant-
ed by any examples in the gospel. In dealing
with offenders it was mostly tender word or
two-a touch of grace which wrought the
change-not citations of the law nor much
reminder of the penalties.
From the woman about to be stoned, to the
remorseful thief on the cross, the
| wondrous words of divine pity and
MI QnH
| But the Bible in promiscuous hands becomes
| any vehicle for personal Interpretation. 1t
may be a warrant for individual prejudice, and
| for fierce ratification of ones own cratic
views of right and wrong.
| There is really nothing in the heart OF man
which cannot be justified and denounced out
of this unique volume, over which theolo-
gians puzzle and wrangle, reject partially OR
wholly, then revise and squabble afresh about
the revision.
Now this book is the commonest thing in
the world. 1t is ubiquitous. In every situa-
ton of American life it is to be found, and it
is rarely treated with much respect by the So
called evangelical.
| Not long ago in a railway train the writer
took one of the Bible society deposits from its
ornate receptacle and it was outrageously
pencilled over with all sorts of irrelevant
and even obscene interpretations,
while the blank leaves of the record were filled
with nameless suggestions. Bad as all such
| indecencies are, the perversion of the text is
worse where it is forced to strengthen the
feuds, the fanaticism, the vengefullness, and
all the other unamiable infatuations of man
kind.
Balfour of Burley, with the combinations
of Almighty wrath forever on his lips, and this
severe Scotchman whose parental theory is
fatally reinforced by his adaptation of biblical
sentences, were both probably buoyed with the
notion that they understood the Word as ap-
plicable to their individual feeling, with a
clearer insight than could be vouchsafed to
other mortals.
| Yet the messages that conveyed such prom
Use to the belief of the suicides father were to
him only a hopeless confirmation of pater-
nal arrangement and remoteness which
Indirectly mastered his doom. A
little less Bible, and more father
was what the wretched young man really need
ed. The one might have included the other,
in the spirit rather than the letter, which is
seldom consolatory in such cases.
The perceptible working inference from
these scriptnral utterances, is more cogent
with the right-minded, than all thu. text-sling
ing in the land, for generally where there is
an ostentatious show of it, there is little else,
at least where tits a business to exhibit this
proficiency with scriptural verbiage.
| II L.
before the legislature last winter, where all
the virtues possible to humanity were inven-
toried, and fixed up in groups and job lots,
for teachers to wrestle with in conjunction
with the RS and their exaeting ramifcations.
It would make any one, however perverted,
amenable to such high sounding curricu-
lum of the nominal moralties. Alas, it's
lamentable that such good schemes are not
communicable like vaccination, and that the
result cannot be made as tangible and salts
factory through virtuous virus in the au-
thorized manipulation of righteous experts.
This is a compelling of virtue through it's
letter,-when we must 60 behind that,-and
perhaps lower yet, to question of natal con-
ditions.
| A young woman whose education was neg
lected, and her photography defective, was told
to geta dictionary. "That wouldn't help me-"
quoth she, "for don't always know the first
correct three letters of word.''
So, if the elementary basis be awry, where is
this glorious platform of grandiloquent good
ness to be squarely planted? The first three
letters must be right, and then you can make
some Roadway.
In dealing with the Bible it is generally
safer to read it with the. heart rather than with
the head, and where there is q combination
of the two in its study, the result is a
tolerably satisfactory understanding for those
who must read it as a mat er of respectable
duty.
Besides, it is the heart which influenced all
the consolatory episodes and passages IN the
new testament. IT'S pity, and mercy, and
forgiveness, and reparation, which make its
pages sweet to all the generations of men
since the Divine Nazarene lived and illustrated
his gospel.
The heart will not lead one very far astray
in biblical nterpretation-whilet the head often
gets away with the Intellectually arrogant,
and strands them like Colenso, Miller, and a
host of others.
The middle-men of mind look complacently