第50章

Another fact that has helped to give the Bible its great influence is the power of the preaching it has inspired.The periods of greatest preaching have always been the periods of freest access to the Bible.No one can overlook the immense power of the sermons of history.There have been poor, inept, banal expositors, doubtless; but even they turned men's minds to the Bible.Reading the Bible makes men thinkers, and so makes preachers inevitably.Witness the Scotch.James was raised in Scotland and believed in the power of preaching.At one time he wanted to settle endowments for the maintenance of preaching under government control.But Archbishop Whitgift convinced him that much preaching was "an innovation and dangerous," since it is quite impossible to control a man's mouth once it is given a public chance.Under Charles I.the sermon wasmighty in the service of the Puritans until it was suppressed or restricted.Then men became lecturers and expounded the Bible or taught religious truth in public or private.Rich men engaged private chaplains since public meetings could not be held.Somehow they taught the Bible still.Archbishop Laud forbade both.Yet the leaven worked the more for its restriction.At least one good cook I know says that if you want your dough to rise and the yeast to work, you must cover it.Laud did not want it to rise, but he made the mistake of covering it.

There has never been a book which has provoked such incessant preaching and discussion as has the Bible.The believers in the Koran teach it as it is, word for word.Believers in the Bible have never stopped with that.They have always tried to come together and hear it expounded.Such gatherings and such constant pressure of the Book on groups of hearers would inevitably give the Bible great influence.When it is remembered that in America alone there are each week approximately four hundred thousand gatherings of people which have for their avowed purpose instruction or inspiration in religion, and that the instruction and inspiration are professedly and openly drawn from the Bible, that more than three hundred thousand sermons are preached every week from it and passages of it read in all the gatherings, it appears that the Bible had and still has such a chance to influence life as no other book has had.President Schurman traces a large part of our own stronger American life to the educative power of our Sundays.But central in the education of those days is now, and has been from the first of our national history, the English Bible.

The influence of the Bible comes also from the fact that it makes its chief appeal to the deeper elements in life."Human history in its real character is not an account of kings and of wars; it is the unfolding of the moral, the political, the artistic, the social, and the spiritual progress of the human family.The time will yet come when the names of dynasties and of battles shall not form the titles of its chapters.The truths revealed in the Bible have been the touchstone which has tried men's spirits."[1]

[1] H.B.Smith, Faith and Philosophy, p.54.

Those words go to the heart of the fact.The influence of the EnglishBible on English- speaking history for the last three hundred years is only the influence of its fundamental truths.It has moved with tremendous impact on the wills of men.It has made the great human ideals clear and definite; it has made them beautiful and attractive; but that has not been enough.It has reached also the springs of action.It has given men a sense of need and also a sense of strength, a sense of outrage and a sense of power to correct the wrong.There it has differed from most books.Frederick Robertson said that he read only books with iron in them, and, as he read, their atoms of iron entered the blood, and it ran more red for them.There is iron in this Book, and it has entered the blood of the human race.Where it has entered most freely, the red has deepened; and nowhere has it deepened more than in our English-speaking races.The iron of our blood is from this King James version.

Bismarck explained the victories of the Germans over the French by the fact that from childhood the Germans had been trained in the sense of duty, as the French had not been trained, and as soldiers had learned to feel that nothing could escape the Eye which ever watched their course.They learned that, Bismarck said, from the religion which they had been taught.There is no mistaking the power of religion in rousing and sharpening the sense of duty.Webster spoke for the English-speaking races, and found his phrases in the Bible, when he said that this sense "pursues us ever.It is omnipresent like the Deity.If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us for our happiness or our misery.If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light our obligations are yet with us.We cannot escape from their power or fly from their presence." It is religion which makes that sense of duty keen; and, whatever religion has done among English-speaking races, the English Bible has done, for it has been the text-book and the final authority of those races in the moving things of their faith.

It would be easiest in making the argument to single out here and there the striking events in which the Bible has figured and let them stand for the whole.There are many such events, and they are attractive.