The Russellville Democrat., 1888-08-16
TALMAGE'S SERMON.
People Who Believe tho Bible in
 Spots Only.

Orthodoxy Neither Stale Nor Unreason-
 ablo = Freedom of Thought-Two
 Death-Iscd dscencs-I,.porssnt
 Ques..SS..~ answered..
 Rev. T. Dewitt Talm age took the sub feet of .sOrthodoxy" for recent sermon, which we give herewith. His text was:
 Ask for the old paths, where is the good way and walk therein, and ye shah find rest for your souls.--Jeremiah, Fi.s i6
 And answered the questions: "Is ortho- doxy stale and unreasonable"
 A great London fog has come down upon some of the ministers and some of the churches in the shape of what is called .advanced thought" In Biblical interpretation. All of them, and without any exception, deny the full inspiration of the Bible Genesis is an allegory, and there are many myths in the Bible, and they philosophize and guess and reason and evolute until they land in a great continent of mud, from which, I fear, for all eternity they will not be able to extri- cate themselves.
 The Bible is not only diyinely inspired, but it is divinely protected in its present shape. You could as easily, without de- tection, take from the writings ofShakes- peare's Hamlet and institute in place thereof Alexander Smiths drama, as at any time during the last fifteen hundred years 0 man could have made any impor- tant change ln the Bible without imme- diate detection. If there has been an element of weakness, or of deception, or of disintegration, the Book would long ago have fallen to pieces. If there had been one loose brick or cracked easement in this castellated truth, surely the bom- bardment of eight centuries would have discovered and brok,s, through that im- perfection. The fado.Nthat the Bible stands intact notwithc o.,sding all the furious assaults on allkeV- a,s upon it, is proof to me that it is miracle, and every miracle is of God. M f8a a
 ..Butr says some one, s'while we ad- nit inc Bible is of God, it has not been understood until our time" My answer is, that if the Bible is a letter from God, our Father. to man, His child, is it not strange that that letter should have been written in such way that it should al- low seventy generations to pass away and be buried before the letter could be un- derstood? That would be @ very bright father who should write a letter for the guidance and intelligence of his children not understandable until thous and years after they were buried and forgotten. While, as the years roll on, other beauties and excelences will unfold from the Scriptures, that the Bible is such dead failure that all the Christian scholars for eighteen hundred years were deceived in regard to vast reaches of its meaning, is demand upon my credulitv so great that if found myself at all disposed to yield to It, I should tomorrow morning apply at some insane asylum as unfit to gO alone. tast ,g s
 Who make up this precious group of ad- vanced thinkers to whom God has made especial revelation in our time of that which He tried to make known thousands of years ago, and failed to make intellf- gible? Are they so distinguished for un- worldliness, piety and scholarship that it is to be expected that they would have been chosen to fix up the defective work of Moses, and Isaiah, and Paul, and Christi Is it at all possible? wonder on what mountain these modern axeg etes were transigured? I wonder what star pointed down to their birthplace? Was il the north star, or the evening star, or the dipper? As they came through and descended to our world did Mars blush or Saturn lose one of its rings9 When | find these modern wiseacres attempting to improve upon the work of the Almighty and to interlard 1t with their wls- dom and to suggest prophetic and apos- tolic errata, am filled with 6 disgust in- sufferable. Advanced thought, which pro- poses 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 eterni- ties instead Of 1SSS have two wonders in regard to these men,, The first one is how the Lord got along without them be- fore they were born. The second wonder is how the Lord will got along without them after they are dead.
 But" say some, ''do you really think the Scriptures are inspired throughout?' Yes, either as history or as guidance. uibbon and Josephus and Prescott record ln 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 massacre, does he approve of that mas sacre? There al scores of things in the Bible which neither God nor inspired men sanctioned. Either as history or as
 
 of God.
 'But,n says some one, "don't you think that the copyists might have made mis- takes in transferring the Divine words from one manuscript to another" Yes, no doubt there were such mistakes; but they no more affect the ssisaning of the Scriptures than the misspeling of n word or the ungrammatical structure of 0 sentence in a last will and tes tament af- feet the validity or the meaning of that will. All the mistakes made by the copyists in the Scriptures do not amount to any more importance than the diff er- ence between your spelling in docu- ment the word forty or fourty. This book is the last will and testament of God to our lost world, and it bequeaths every thing in the right way, although human hands may have damaged the grammar or made unjustifiable inter- polation.
 These men who pride themselves in our day on being advanced thinkers in Biblic- al interpretation will all of them end in atheism If they live long enough, and l declare here to day, they are doing more in the different denominations of Chris l tians, and throughout the world, for dam- aging Christianity and hindering the | tdtSt oI Ailc WOElQ S pClbCih thou AN O l thousand Robert Ingersolls could do. That man who stands inside a castle is | far more dangerous if he be an enemy than five thousand enemies outside the castle Robert G. Ingersoll assails the castle from the outside. These men who | pretend to be advanced thinkers in all denominations are fighting the truth from the inside, and trying to shove back the bolts and swing open the gates.
 Now, 1 am in favor of the greatest free dom of religious thought and discussion. l would have as much liberty for hetero- | doxy as for orthodoxy. If should change my theories of religion should preach them out and out but not in the building where am accustomedto preach, for thai was erected by people who believe in an entire Bible, and it would be dishonest for me to promulgate sentiments diff | ferent frsm those for which that building ! was put up. When we enter any denom- ination as ministers of religion, we take solemn VOW that we will preach the