The Richmond palladium and sun-telegram., 1922-04-21

Matthew, 4th chapter, 35th verse.
Nuts for Skepties" was the subject
of Rev. w. A. Sundays sermon Thurs
day night. He said:
When Tom Paine was about to
publish his famous book entitled ''The
Age. of Reason" he sent the manu-
script to Benjamin Franklin, who at
that time was a doubter regarding I
some of the essential beliefs of Orth- |
odox Christiaity, and Benjamin Frank, |
lin returned to Tom Paine the man.
uscript with this appended advice:
Burn it. I would advise you new
er to attempt to unchain that tiger |
upon the people"
If the world is so bad with Jesus |
Christ, what would it be without
Him? sa
The Bible is not difficult book to
understand. 1t was written by men
of common sense, and by the appli-
cation of common sense to its teach
ings you will understand most of it.
il not all of it. The disciples them
selves did not fully understand all
of the Bible until Jesus, after His
resurrection explained to them the
things that were written in the
Psalms of the prophets concerning
Himself, and l am not surprised toI
find people reading the Bible for their
own instruction today.
Bible Leads All
Books for Morals
You go to all the books from all
the libraries of all the nations of all
ages and you Gull out of all these
books all. that's good and noble and
pure and inspiring. And you go and
CLEAN from the fields of geology and
botany and astronomy and science
and then you embody your results into
one book, and I defy and challenge
you that you cannot produce a book
that would touch the hem of the gar
ment of the bible, if you took the
best out Of all the books Of all ages
in the world.
So the atheists and agnostics and
the materialists must confess that
they ought to be able to make bet
,ter book, but they have tried time
and again, only to fall back hope
1essly with despair.
There are a few people who make
no pretensions of understanding the
Bible Why? For the simple rea-
son they are too darn lazy to study
it, so far as l can figure it out. You
can't hope to master science or math-
ematics, you can't master the history
Of the world or the literature of the
world, without scanning, reviewing.
comparing ,analyzing history from
period to period. And the contem-
poraneous history of the period you
will study. And if you want to un-
derstand the divine problem as it un-
folds itself from the divine mind, you
have to study, for God put no pre-
MUM on laziness. But thank God,
the only truth you need to know is
summed up in John 3:16:
For God so loved the world that
He gave His only begotten Son that
whosoever believeth on Him should
not perish, but have everlasting life"
That's all you need to know; you
needn't know about the miracles of
God or anything of that sort.
His Opinion
About Atheists
"In the beginning God"-GO-D,
not plural, one-"created the heaven
and the earth' Some races of man
kind believe in two gods. The Per-
slams in particular have a sort of a
good-Lord- rd-good-devil religion. They
believe in a god that will make you
laugh and cry, god that will give
you pain and god that will make
you WELL And so they have a god
for everything in the world. And
some isolated thinkers whose natural
instructive Impressions have been dis
turbed by that verse, say there is nc
god. They are atheists. "The fool
hath said in his heart, there is nc
god" and l am not an atheist sbe
cause l am not a fool.
And some people believe that
though there is a God that we car
know nothing about that god, thai
God never reveals Himself to US
They swell up and call themselves
apostles. They say they don't be
lieve what I can't understand
Then you are fool, and If you only
believe what you can understand
you will be dumbfounded to discover
how little you really know.
Can you explain how it is tha
when a horse eats food, it goes t.
hair; when a sheep eats it, it goes
to wool; when a chicken eats it, /
goes to feathers; when hog eats 1t
il will go to bristles? Can you ex
plain that,-certainly you cannot!
Can you explain this to me, tina
when you plant beans they will climl
the bean-pole from right to left ant
when you plant hops they will climl
the pole from left to right? Do yoI
know why? Mo-
Can you tell me why 1t is that
black COW can eat green grass ant
give white milk?
We don't observe even the com
mon things of life, let alone the un
common A friend of mine was talk
ig with q company of men and won
en- who gave as their reason for no
being Christians the fact that the,
couldn't believe in the Bible. On
said "How many legs has fly,
and another said: Three" anothe
sFive," and another Seven" On
Of them caught fly to settle tn
question.
If l should ask this audience hoy
many legs a fly has, it would be fifty
fifty as to whether you could tell me
II you don't know how many legs
fly has, how am | supposed to knoV
that you know anything about it
narvelously constructed feet?
There are a thousand hollow hair
opening into the pad of each tin
foot of fly, and by means of mi
eilage-like secretion they can craw
on a pane of glass as easily as
squirrel can climb a tree; they ca
roost on the ceiling bottom-side III
and never fall off.
Oh, wait a minute! If you don
G1,s IL L,