Dodge City times. [volume] (Dodge City, Kan.) 1876-1892, 1888-08-09
ORTHODOXY.
Dr.. Talmage breaches on the In
SEPARATION of the Bible.
1he Bible Surely Of God-"Advanced
Thinkers" NEUTRALITY-SUSPICIOUS. of Or
fhodcxy Depicted dts Great Leaders
An Appeal For the Church.

mage took his text from the book of Jere-
miah, chapter vi. verse 16: "Ask for the
old paths, where is the good way, and walk
therein, and We shall find rest for your
SOULS, and answ sred the question: SIS
orthodoxy stale and unreasonable" He
said:
A great London fog has come down on
some OF the ministers and some Of the
b churches in the shape of what is called
advanced Thought" in Biblical interpre-
tation. All of them. and without excep-
ton, deny the full inspiration of the Bible.
Genesis is an allegory and there are many
myths in the Bible, and they PHILOSOPHERS
and guess the reason and evolve until they
land In great continent of mud from
which, l fecr, for all eternity they shall
not be able to extricate themselves.
The Bible is not only divipely inspired,
but it is divinely protected in its present
shape. You could as easily without de-
lection, take from the writing of Shakes
peare Hamlet and institute in place there
Of Alexander Smiths drama as at any
time during the last fifteen hundred years
man could have made any important
change in the Bible without immediate de-
lection.
If there had been an element of weak
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 bombardment of eight
centuries would have discovered and
broken through that imperfection. The
fact that the Bible stands intact, notwith-
standing all the furious assaults on all
sides upon it, is proof to me that it is a
miracle, and every miracle is of God.
"But," says some one. .'while we admit
the Bible is of God, il has not been under
stood until our time" AEy answer is that
II the Bible be a 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
generations to pass away and he buried
before that letter could be understood:
That would be a very bright father who
should write a letter for the guidance and
intelligence of his children not ur derstand-
able until a thousand years after they were
buried and forgotten. While as the years
roll ON other beauties and excellences will
unfold from the Scriptures, that the Bible
10 such q dead failures that all the Christian
scholars for 1,Sc0 years were deceived in
Ssgard to vast reaches of its meaning, is a
frnandupon my credulity so great that If
pund myself at all disposed to yield to
should tomorrow morning apply at
he insane asylum as unfit to go alone.
Who make up this precious group of adj
anced thinkers to whom God has made
especial revelation in our time of that
Mich He tried to make known thousands
Eears ago and failed to make intelligi-
Are they SO distinguished for I'M
siness, piety and scholarship that it
~ to be expected that they would have
I. fen chosen to fix up the defective work
!, Moses and Isaiah and Paul and Christ!
it at all possible: / wonder on what
= Mountain these modern eXegetes were
I; Sansfigured. l wonder what star pointed
-SGDwn to their birthplace: Was it the
North star, the evening star, or the Dipper!
As they came through and descended to
our world did Mars blush or Saturn lose
one of its rings: When l find these
modern wiseacres attempting to i'm
prove upon the work of the AL
smighty and to interlard it with their wis
2om and to suggest prophetic and apostolic
serrata, / am filed with disgust insuffera-
{ble. 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 nine
teenth century critics! All this comes of
living away back in the eternities instead
Of 1883. have two wonders in regard to
these men. The first one is how the Lord
got along without them before they were
Aborn. The second wonder is how the Lord
viii get along without them after they are
dead. "But," say some, ''do you really
think the Scriptures are inspired through
outs" Yes, either as history or as guild
ance. Gibbon and Josephus and Prescott
record in their histories a great many
things they do not approve of. When
George Bancroft puts upon his brilliant
historical page the account of an Indian
massacre, does he approve of that mas
sacre?
There are scores of things in the Bible
which neither God nor inspired men sane
toned. Either as history or 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 to another" Yes, no doubt
there were such mistakes: but they no
more affect the meaning of the Scriptures
than the misspelling of word or the un-
grammatical structure of a sentence in q
iast will and testament affect the validity
Or the meaning of that will. All the mis-
takes made by the copyists in the Scrip
lures do not amount to any more impor-
lance than the difference between your
spelling in q document the word forty,
forty or fourty. This book is the last will
and testament of Gcd to our lost world,
and it bequeaths every thing in the right
way, although human hands may have
damaged the grammar or made unjustifia-
BILE Interpolation.
The men who pride themselves in our
day on being advanced thinkers in Biblical
Interpretation will all of them end in athe-
ism, il they live long enough and declare
here to-day they are doing more in the
different denominations of Christians, and
throughout the world. for damaging
Christianity and hindering the cause Of
the worlds betterment than five thousand
Robert Ingersolls coulddo That man who
stands inside a castle is far more danger
Gus if he be an enemy than five thousand
enemies outside the castle. Robert &.
Ingersol, assails the castle from the out
side. These men who pretend to be ad.
vanced thinkers in all the denominations
are fighting the truth from the inside, and
irving to shove back the bolts and swing
omen the gates.
Now, am in favor of the greatest free
dom Of religious thought and discussion.
vculd have as much liberty for hetero-
:doxy as for orthodoxy. If should change
NV theories of religion l should preach
them out and out, but not in the building
vhere am accustomed to preach, for that
80 erected by people VINO believe in the
i - L.. .l.-l,x - g..