The Pulaski citizen. [volume] (Pulaski, Tenn.) 1866-current, 1888-08-09
ORTHODOXY.
REV. r. DE WITT TALMAGE AT
CHAUTAUQUA.

CHAUTAUQUA.
The Celebrated Brooklyn Divine Answers
the Question, 'Ts Orthodoxy Stale and
Unreasonable?''--TheB Bible Divinely In
spired and Divinely Protected.
CHAUTAUoUA, N. Y, Aug. 5.-The
Rev. T. De Witt Talmage, D. D., of
Brooklyn, is present for the twelfth time
at the national meeting of religious edu-
Gators and students held yearly in this
place. His sermon today, which was
delivered to an audience imposing in
numbers and intelligence, was from the
following text, in tie book of Jeremiah
vi, IS: '.Ask for tie old paths, where
is the good way, and walk therein, and
ye shall find rest for your SOULS" and
answered the question: ''Is Orthodoxy
Stale and Unreasonable" Following is
a verbatim report of it:
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 interpre-
tation 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 great
continent of mud, from which, | fear,
for all Eternity they will not be able to
extricate themselves.
The Bible is not only divinely inspired,
but it is divinely protected in its present
oh w Il
lection, take from the writings of Shake
spear Hamlet, +" and institute in place
thereof Alexander Smiths drama, as at
any time during the last fifteen hundred
years q man could have made any i'm
portant change in the Bibleswithout i'm
mediate detection. If there had 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 bonn
bardment of eight centuries would have
discovered and broken through that i'm
perfection. The fact that the Bible
stands intact, Notwithstanding 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, it has not been un-
derstood until our time" My 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 sew
enty generations to pass away and be
buried before the letter could be under
stood? That would be very bright ia
ther who should write letter for the
guidance and intelligence of his children,
not understandable until a thousand
years after they were buried and forgot
ten! While as the years roll on other
beauties and excellencies will unfold from
the Scriptures, that the Bible is such a
dead failure that all the ChristiaN scholars
for eighteen hundred 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 l should tomorrow morning
apply at some insane asylum as unfit to
go alone.
Who make up this precious group of
| advanced thinkers to whom God has
made especial revelation in our time of
| that which he tried to make known thou
sands of years ago and failed to make in
| telligible? Are they SO distinguished for
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 possible2 wonder on what
mountain these modern exegetes were
| transfgured2 | wonder what star
| pointed down to their birthplace? Was
| it the North star, or the evening star, or
| the Dipper2 AS they came through and
descended to our world did Mars blush
or Saturn lose one of its rings2 When l
| find these modern wiseacres attempt
ING to improve upon the work of the AL
mighty and to interlard it with their
wisdom and TO suggest prophetic and
! apostolic errata, am filled with a dis
gust msufferable. 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
eternities instead of 1888. l have two
wonders in regard to these men. The
first one is how the Lord got along with
out them before they were born. The
second wonder is how the Lord will gel
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
Gibbon and Josephus and Prescott RECORD
in their histories great many thing
they did not approve of. When Georg'
Bancroft puts upon his brilliant hlstor
ical page the account of an Indian mas
sacre, does he approve of that massacre
There are scores of things in the Bibl'
which neither God nor inspired me,
sanctioned. Either as history or a
guidance the entire Bible was inspired O
God.
''But," says some one, "don't yol
think that the copyists might have mad
mistakes in transferring the divine word
from one manuscript to another?" Yes
no doubt there were such mistakes; bu
they no more affect the meaning of tn
Scriptures than the misspelling of a wore
or the upgrammatical structure of {
sentence in last will and testament eff
feet the validity or the meaning of tina
will All the mistakes made by tn
copyists in the Scriptures do not ameun
to any more Importance than the differ
ence between your spelling in docu
ment the word forty, forty or fourty
This book is the last will and testamen
of God to our lost world, and it be
queaths everything in the right way
although human hands may have dam
aged the grammar or made unjustifiabl
Interpolation.
These men who pride themselves il
our day on being advanced thinkers il
Biblical Interpretation will all of then
end in atheism, if they live long enough
and declare here today they are doin,
more in the different denominations o
Christians, and throughout the world
Cor damaging Christianity and hinderin
t.s cause Of the worlds betterment thai
five thousand Robert Ingersolls could dc