Audubon County Republican. [volume] (Audubon, Audubon Co., Iowa) 1885-1894, 1893-09-21

at bible history. The signs of the time
indicate that almost every fact of the
bible from lid to lid will find its
! confederation in ancient city olsen
tombed, or ancient wall, cleared
| from the dust of ages, or ancient docu-
ment unrolled by nrchaeologist. Be-
! fore the world rolls on as far into he
| twentieth century as it has already
| rolled into the nineteenth an infidel
/ will be man who does not believe
his own senses, and the volumes now
critical and denunciatory of the bible,
if not entirely devastated by the book
I worms will be taken down from the
shelf as curiosities of ignorance or
idiocy. All success to the p ckaxs and
| crow-bars and powder baso..< -
those apostles of archaeological ca
! ploration. | like the ringing defiance
| of the old Hugenots to the assailants
| of Christianity: Pound away, you
rebels! Your hammers break, vus rus
anvil of God s word stands" ness
wonderfully the old book hangs
| together. 1t is library made
up of sixty-six books and writ
ten by at least thirty-nine authors. 1t
is supernatural thing that they have
stuck together. Take the writings of
any other thirty-nine authors or any
ten authors, or any five authors and
put them together, and how long
would they stay together? 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 thirty nine
authors, has kept together for long
line of centuries when the natural
tendency would have been to fly apart
like loose sheets of paper when
gust of wind blows upon them? II is
because God stuck them together
and keeps them together. But for
that Joshua would have wandered off
in one direction, and Paul into
another, and Ezekiel into another,
and Luke into another, and Hab-
bakuk into another, and the
thirty nine authors into thirty
nine directions. Put the writings of
Shakespeare and Tennyson and Long
fellow, or any part Of them, together;
how long would they stay together?
No book bindery could keep them to-
gether. But the cannon of scripture
is loaded now with the same Hmmuni-
ton with which prophet and apostle
loaded it. Bring me all the bibles
of the earth into one pile, and blind
fold me so that | 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 it, 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
five hundred million bibles there
will be no exception, In other
words, the book gives me confidence
by its supernatural adhesion of writing
to writing, Even the stoutest ship
sometimes shifts its cargo, and that is
what made our peril the greater in the
ship Graece of the National liue when
the cyclone struck us off the coast of
Newfoundland, and the cargo of iron
! mad shifted as the ship swung from
larboard to starboard and from star
board to larboard. But thanks be to
God this old bible ship, though it has
been in thousands of years of tempest,
has kept it's cargo of gold and precious
stones compact and sure and in all the
centuries nothing about it has shifted.
There they stand, shoulder to shoulder,
David and Solomon and Isaiah and
jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel and
Hosea and Joel and Amos and Obadiah
and Jonah and Micah and Nahum and
Habbakuk and ,Iephaniab and Haggai
and /achariah and Malachi and Mat
thew and Mark and Luke and John
and Paul and Peter, all there, and
with certainty of being there until
| the heavens and the earth, the ere
alton of which is described in the first
| book of the bible, shall have collapsed,
and the white horse of the conqueror
described in the last book of the bible
shall paw the dust in universal de-
| molition. BY that tremendous fact
| my faith is reinforced. The discus
sion is abroad as to who wrote those
! books of the bible called the Penta-
I uch, whether Moses or Hilkiah or
! Ezra or Samuel or jeremiah or an
other group of ancients. None of
| them wrote it. God wrote the Penta-
touch, and in this Gay of stenography
! and typewriting that ought not to be
great merchants and lawyers and
editol. and business men of our towns
and citie, dictate nearly all their let
ter.s, they only sign them after they
are a. tated. The prophet and evan
gelist a ID apostle were Jehovah's
stenograp>. ers or typewriters They
put down onl. what God dictated: he
signed it afterward. He has been
writing his name upt.o it all through
the vicissitudes of centuries.
But ! come to the height of my sub
iect when ! say the way to reinforce
our faith is to pray for it. So the dis
ciples in my text got their aboVading
faith: Lord, increase our faith. .fomc
one suggests: '.Do you really think
that prayer amounts to anything?"
| might as well ask you is there line
of Geographic wires from New York
to Washington, is there a line of tele-
graph wires from Manchester to Lon
don, from Cologne to Berlin. All the
people who have sent and received
messages on those lines know of their
existence. So there are millions of
souls who have been in constant com
municatlon with the capital of
the Universe, with the Throne
of the Almighty, with the
great God himself for years
and years and years, There
has not been a day when supplications
did not flash up and blessings did not
flash down. win some ignoramus,
who has never received a telegram or
sent one, come and tell us that there
is no such thing as Geographic com
munication? viii some one who has
never offered prayer that was heard
and answered come and tell us that
there is nothing in prayer? 1t may
not come. as we expect it, but as sure
as an honest prayer goe up, merci-
full answer will come Gown. During
the blizzard of four or five years ago,
you know that many of the telegraph
wires were Frustrated, and / tele-
gra phed to Chicago by the way of Liv-
erpool, England, andt answer, after
while, came round by another
wide circuit, and so the prayer we
offer may come back in way we
never imagined, and il we ask to have
our faith increased, a though it may
come by widely different process than