News and citizen. [volume] (Morrisville, Vt. ;) 1881-current, 1888-08-16
SUNDAYS SERMON.
ONE OF REV. DIR. TALMAGES
STERLING DISCOURSES.
Subject: "Is Orthodoxy Stale and
Unreasonable?' Preached at the
Chautauqua On. W Assembly
OF Religious Educators.

1cno1rP Z
che good 1cdy, AMI tralb therein, and ne sHul
|eft@ rest for your SoutS.-Jeremiah vi, Ii
a great London fog has come down 1pol
some or the ministers and some of tn
churches in the shape of what is called ''sd
Vanced thought in Biblical Interpretation
an OF them, and "ithout any exception
DENY the full inspiration of the Bible
denesis Is en- allegory, and there are many
myths IN the Bible, and they philosophiZt
ana guess and reason and evolute until they
iaha IN a great continent of mud, from
which, fear, for all eternity thew will MOI
be able to extricate themselves
:. Inc Bible is not only divinely inspired, bu'
IL Is dlvlnely protected in its present shane
You could as easily, without detection. take
from the writings of Shakespeare Hamlet
ana institute in place thereof Alexander
Smlths Drama as at any time during tht
last fifteen hundred years, a man could have
made any important change in the Bible
without immediate detection If there had
been an element of weakness, or of de.
GepElon, or OF disintegration, the
BOOK would long ago have fallen to
pieces Ii there had been one loose tfick or
tH"cked easement in this castel1ated truth.
surely the bombardrient of eight centuries
would have discovered and broken through
that lmperfection. The fact that the Bible
stands intact, notwithstanding all the furi-
GUS Gus assaults on al! sides upon it, is proof to
of God. Wv u
But" says some one, 'while we admi,
the Bible is of God, it has not been under
stood until our time" Ny answer is, that if
the Bible be letter from God, our Father, to
man, his child, Is it not strange that that
letter should have been written in such a
way that it should allow seventy genera.
tIons to pass away and be buried before the
letter could be understood! That would be
very brigh5 Father who should write a
letter for the guidance and intelligence of
nd -faA Arial.l In
a thousand years after they were buried and
forgotten While as the years roll Oh other
beauties and excelleneies will Unfold from the
Scriptures, that the Bible is such a dead
failure that all the Christian scholars for
1850 years were deceived in regard to
vast reaches OF its meaning is a demand
upon my credulity so great that if found
myself at all disposed to yield to it / should
tomorrow morning apply ct sofi1e insane
asylum as unfit to go alone
Who make up this precious group of ad-
vanced thinkers to whom God has made es-
peclal revelation in our time of that which
He tried to make known thousands Of wears
ago and failed to make ineligible? Are they
so distinguished for unworldliness. piety and
scholarship that 1t Is to be expected that they
would have been chosen to fix up the defec-
tive work of Moses and Isaiah and Paul
and Christ: Is it all possible? | won
der on what mountains these mod
ern exegetes were trans6gured?
wonder what star pointed down to their birth
place: Was it the North Star, or the Even
ing Star, or the Dipper' As they came
through and descended to our world did Mars
blush or Saturn lose one Of It's fings? When
| find these modern ..wiseacres attempting to
improve upon the work of the Almighty and
to inter'ard it with their wisdom and to sug-
gest prophetic and apostolic errata,
am filled with a disgust insufferabe
Advanced thought, which proposes to
tell the Lord what He ought to have
said thousands of years ago, and would have
said If He had been as wise as His nineteenth
century critics! All this comes of living
away back in the eternitjes instead of 1888. /
nave two wonders in regard to these men.
The first is how the Lord got along without
them before they We're born. The second
out them after they dead
tb;nI. but tba say srintr somef do you really
throughout Yes, either as history or
as guidance. Gibbon and Josephus and
Prescott record in their histories great
many things they did not approve of. When
George Bancroft puts upon his brilliant his
torical page the account of an Indian massa-
ere, does he approve of that massacre: There
are scores of things in the Bible which neither
God nor inspired men sanctioned. Either as
history or as guidance the entire Bible was
inspired of God,
But" says some one, "don't you think
that the copyists might have made mistakes
in transferring the divine words from one
manuscript o another.'' Yes no doubt there
were such mistakes; but they no more affect
the meaning of the Scriptures than the MS
spelling of a word or the ungrammatical
structure of a sentence in last will and
testament affect the validity or the meaning
of that will. All the mistakes male by the
copylStS in the Scriptures do not amount to
any more Importance than the difference be-
tween your spelling in document the word
forty, forty or fourty. This book is the last
Of III g
and it bequeaths everything in the right way,
although human hands may have damaged
the grammar or made unjustifable interpo-
latiOn.
These men who pride themselves in our
day on being advanced thinkers in Biblical
Interpretation will all of them end in athe-
ism if they live long enough, and l declare
here to-day they are doing more in the differ
ent denominations of Christians, and through.
out the world, for damaging Christianity
and hindering the cause of the worlds
betterment than five thousand Robert
!ngersolls could do. That man who stands
inside castle is far more dangerous if he can
be an enemy than five thousand enemies out
side the castle. Robert G. Ingersoll assails
the castle from the outside. These men who
pretend to be advanced thinkers in all the
denominations are fighting the truth from
bolts and swing open the gates
Now, am in favor of the greater freedom
of religious thought and discussion. Iwould
have as much liberty for heterodoxy as for
orthodoxy. If should change my theories
of religion l should preach them out and out,
put not IN the building where 1 am accus-
toned to preach, for that was erected bv
people who believe in an entire Bible, and it
would be dishonest for me to promugate sem
tlmentS different from thoss for which tn at
building was put up. When we enter any
denomination as ministers of religion we take
n S0lnn1n hot will IL
ments OF that denomination. If we change
our theories, as we have a right to change
them, then there is a world several thousand
miles IN circumference, and there are hun
dreds or halls and hundreds of academies of
music where we can ventilate our sentiments
L remember that in all our cities, in time
of political agitation, there are the Republi-
can headquarters and the Democratic head
quarters. Suppose l should go into one of
these headquarters pretending to be in SYM
pathy with their work, at the same time
electloneering for the opposite party. l would
soon find that the centrifugal force was
greater than the centripetall Now, if a
man enters demo nination of Christians,
taking solemn oath, as we all do, that we
Will promulgate the theories of that denom-
nation, aHd then the man shall proclaim
some other theory. he has broken his oath,
and he is an out-and out perjurer. Never
,heless, | declare for largest liberty in re-
1gious discussion. | would no more have
,he attempt to rear a monument to Thomas
Paine interfered with than would have in.
erfered with the lifting of the splendid mon
lment to Washington Largest liberty for
'he body, largest liberty for the mind, largest
liberty for the soul.
Now, want to show you, as matter of
advocacy for what l believe to be the right,
5he splendors of orthodoxy. Many have sup
posed that its disciples are people of fiat
kulls, and no reading, and behind the
lge, and the victims of gullibi ity. 1 shall
how you that the word orthodoxy
tands for the greatest splendors
outside of heaven. Behold the splendors of
is achievements. All the missionaries of the
Gospel the world round are men who be-
ieve in an entire Bible Call the roll of all
,he missionaries who are today enduring
sacrifices in the ends of the earth for the
cause of religion and the worlds
oetterment, and they all believe in
missionary begins to doubt whether there
,ver was Garden of Eden, or whether there
S any such thing as future punishment he
comes right home from Beyrout or Madras
md goes into the insurance business All
he missionary societies this day are Differed
~ Orthodox men, and are supported by
Orthodox churches.
Orthodoxy, beginning with the Sandwich
Stands, has captured vast regions of bar
Iarism for civilization, while heterdoxy has
% capture the first square inch. Blatant for
many years in Great Britain and the United
states, and strutting about with peacocl1ian
,raggadocio it has yet to capture the
irst continent the first state, the
irst township, the first ward, the first space
# ground as blg as you could cover with the
mall end of a sharp pin. Ninety nine out
If every hundred of the Protestant churches
If America were built by people who
believed in an entire Bible. The pull
,it now may preach some other Gospel,