Connecticut western news., 1893-09-21

| ScSoe11o church of God, "and the deeper you dig the better I like" The discovered monuments of Egypt
 have chiseled on them the story of the sufferings of the Israelites in Egyptian
 bondage, as we find 1t in the Bible there, in imperishable stone, representa- tions of the slave, of the whips and | of the taskmasters who compelled the | making of bricks without straw. Ex- humed Nineveh and Babylon. with their | dusty lips, declare the Bible true Ma | poleon's soldiers in the Egyptian cam paign pried up stone, which you may | find in the British museum, & stone, as I remember 1t, presenting perhaps two | feet of lettered surface. It contains words
 in three languages. That stone was the key that unlocked the meaning of all | the hieroglyphics of tombs and obelisks
 and tells over and over again the same events which Moses recorded.
 The sulphurous graves of Sodom and | Gomorrah have been identified. The re- mains of the tower of Babel have been | found. Assyrian documents lifted from | the sand and Behistun inscription hun dreds of feet high up on the rock echo and re-echo the truth of Bible history. | The signs of the time indicate that al
 most every fact of the Bible from lid to | lid will find it's corroboration in ancient city disentombed, or ancient wall cleared from the dust of ages, or ancient document unrolled by archeologist. Before the world rolls on as far into the twentieth century as it has already o1 will be man who does not believe his own senses, and the volumes now crit
 ical and denunciatory of the Bible, if
 not entirely devastated by the book
 worms, will be taken down from the
 shelf as curiosities of ignorance or idioey.
 All success to the pickaxes and crow bars and powder blasting of those apos- ties of archaeological exploration. I. like the ringing defiance of the old Huguenots to the assailants of Christianity: Pound
 away, you rebels! Your hammers break, but the anvil of Gods word stands." How wonderfully the old book hangs together It is library made up of 88
 books and written by at least 89 authors.
 It is supernatural thing that they have stuck together. Take the writings of any
 other 89 authors, or any 10 authors, or any authors, and put them together, and
 how long would they stay togetherf
 Books of elegant extracts" compiled from many authors are proverbially short lived. never knew one such book which, to use the publishers phrase,
 "had life in it" for five years.
 Why is it that the Bible, made up of the writings of at least 80 authors, has
 kept together for long line of centu-
 ries when the natural tendency would
 have been to fly apart like loose sheets of paper when gust of wind blows upon them? It is because God stuck them to-
 gether and keeps them together. But for that Joshua would have wandered off in
 one direction, and Paul into another, and Ezekiel into another, and Habakkuk into
 another, and the 39 authors into 89 direc- tions.
 Put the writings of Shakespeare and
 Tennyson and Longfellow, or any part
 of them, together. How long would they stay togetherp No book bindery could
 keep them together. But the cannon of Scripture is loaded now with the same ammunition with which prophet and apostle loaded it.
 Bring me all the Bibles of the earth
 into one pile, and blindfold me so that l
 cannot tell the difference between day and night, and put into my hand any
 one of all that Alpine mountain of sacred books, and put my finger on the last page of Genesis and let me know 1t, and can tell you what Is on the next page namely, the first chapter of Exodus; or
 while thus blindfolded put my finger on the last chapter of Matthew and let me know it, and will tell you what is on
 the next page-namely, the first chapter of Mark. In the pile of 00,000, ,000 Bibles there will be no exception. In other words, the book gives me conf dence by It's supernatural adhesion of writing to writing.
 Even the stoutest shipsometimes shifts its cargo, and that is what made our peril the greater in the ship Greece of the National line when the cyclone struck us off the coast of Newfoundland, and the cargo of iron had shifted as the ship swung from larboard to star board, and from starboard to larboard. But, thanks be to God, this old Bible ship, though it has been in thousands of years of tempest, has kept its cargo of gold and precious stones compact and sure and in all the centuries nothing about l it has shifted. There they stand shoulder to shoulder, David and Solo mon and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel and Hosea and Joel
 and Amos and Obadiah and Jonah and Micah and Nahum and Habakkuk and Zephaniah and Haggai and Zechariah and Malachi and Matthew and Mark and Luke and JohnAnd Paul and Peter, | all there, and with 8 certainty of being | there until the heavens and the earth, | the creation of which is described in the | first book of the Bible, shall have Col
 lapsed, and the white horse of the con- queror, described in the last book of the | Bible, shall paw the dust in universal de- | molition. By that tremendous fact my faith is re-enforced.
 The discussion is abroad as to who wrote those books of the Bible called | the Pentateuch, whether Moses or Hilkiah or Ezra or Samuel or Jeremiah | or another group of ancients. None of
 them wrote 1t. God wrote the Penta- teuch, and in this day of stenogaphy and typewriting that ought not to be a difficult thing to understand. The great merchants and lawyers and editors and business men of our towns and cities dictate nearly all their letters; they only | sign them after they are dictated. The | prophet and evangelist and apostle were Jehovah's stenographers or typewriters. They put down only what God dictated; | he signed 1t afterward. He has been
 writing his name upon 1t all through the vicissitudes of centuries.
 | THE PRAYER OF FAITH.
 But I come to the height of my sub- l ject when say the way to re-enforce
 our faith Is to pray for 1t. So the disci- pies in my text got their abounding
 faith. "Lord, increase our faith" Some
 one suggests, Do you really think that | prayer amounts to anything2" I might