Thomas S. Childs

“ Is there any way in which our immortality can be assured to us as an immortal good? After all the doubts and darkness, the mystery and suffering, the bitterness and disappointment, of this life, may it in any way be found a great and a good thing, after all, that we have lived? To answer these questions we must come back to the old truth—the truth of your childhood. The "advanced thought" of our day has discovered nothing to change the fact that men are out of the way, they are not what they should be. Every man knows this. The Bible expresses it in a very plain way by saying they are sinners. ”

“ Parental faiths count for little. The beliefs of childhood, the teachings of the sainted dead, the hopes that once brightened the darkness and mysteries and griefs of life with the light of a cloudless future, are to multitudes no more. "The eclipse of faith" has come, and souls are [64] drifting out upon the starless, shoreless sea of unbelief. They see "the spring sun shining out of an empty heaven to light up a soulless earth." They take up the wail of despair: "We are all to be swept away in the final ruin of the earth." ”

“ Even your former guide, Mr. —— (let me hope I may speak of him now as only your former guide) , cries out in the presence of the dead and before the awful silence of the grave, "Immortality is a word that hope through all the ages has been whispering to love. All wish for happiness beyond this life; all hope to meet again the loved and lost." Yes, there are hours when the most hopeless are glad to turn to the hope that the Bible alone gives, when the bitterest rejecters of God and his word long for the consolation that only the rejected word affords. ”

“ Are you willing to submit your faith to the mystery—beyond all depth except the love of God—that the Son of God in our nature has borne our sins in his own body on the tree—that he has died for us, the Just for the unjust? In other words, are you willing to receive the kingdom of heaven as a little child—to be saved, if saved you may be, in God's own way? ”

“ The evidence of nineteen centuries from millions of honest and intelligent witnesses, of all ranks and conditions, living and dying, to the power of this faith to sustain in the most solemn crises of life, when flesh and heart are failing, and when the darkness and anguish and mystery of death are rocking the soul to its foundations, cannot wisely be dismissed as a delusion: there must be a reality behind it. ”

“ They say that you are a great man—that you are a famous man—and you can't tell how delighted I am when I hear such things. But, Daniel, the time is short; you will not stay here long: I want to ask you one important question. You may be a great man: are you a good man? Are you a Christian man? Do you love the Lord Jesus Christ? That is the only question that is worth asking or answering? Are you a Christian? You know, Daniel, what I have been: I have been one of the wickedest of men. ”

“ If a man now affirms the Bible to be false, wholly or in part, it rests upon him in all fairness to prove his position, and his evidence must be stronger than that which supports the book. For three thousand years a growing mass of testimony to the truth of the Bible has been rolling up in the face of every objection that ingenuity, learning and the bitterest hostility could present. ”

“ No one knows better than you that if the Bible is true you have a long and dark account against you—if not of open and flagrant sin, yet to the Mind that makes no mistakes of that which is perhaps far worse, of calm, deliberate, persistent rejection of Christ and of his Spirit. It would be faithlessness and cruelty to hide the fact that by all the verities of God you are in peril—in fearful peril. ”

“ Is there a God? Is there a future state of existence? To these questions the best answer Mr. —— has to give is, "We do not know." He seems confident that there is no personal God, and "we cannot say whether death is a wall or a door, the beginning or the end of a day, the spreading of pinions to soar or the folding for ever of wings, the rise or the set of a sun." With all this uncertainty, he is absolutely sure that there is no future state of suffering for evil-doers. He does not know whether there is any future at all, but he does know that there is no future of sorrow. ”

“ You can lose nothing; you may gain everything. The fact is as remarkable as it is familiar that no man in the last hour here—the hour, often, of supernal light—ever wanted to take back or to change his faith in the Man of Nazareth as the Son of God and the Saviour of men. When the shadows are melting in the great realities, and the mysteries of life are about to be finished and the verities of the future [42] are to be proved, no man has yet been found to mourn that in the face of all difficulty and doubt and denial here he was a Christian. ”

“ Has life anything real? Is it worth living? When the little play is over, and the hour's music is ended, and the lights are out, and we go forth into the darkness of the final night—what then? Is it darkness for ever? ”

“ You have seen it in the unhappiness, the misery, the woe, the despair and death with which sin reigns everywhere around us. Take the brightest view of life that you can, and the darkness in which it ends is terrible. To go out of it without God is to go out without hope. ”

“ And if there are thousands and tens of thousands as intelligent men and women as the world has ever seen who are as ready to testify that they have felt the power and experienced the reality of the Christian religion as you are to testify that you have felt the power and know the sweetness of music, are you wise to dismiss its claims because you have not felt the force of them? ”

“ Can he do all he ought to do? Can you set right all the wrong and all the failure of the past? Can you make the future [47] without error? To ask these questions is to answer them to every honest conscience.
For one who is wrong there must be the consequences of wrong, and these must be as fearful and as far-reaching as sin itself. "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap," and evermore and everywhere the harvest is greater than the seed. The coming tribulation and anguish of the unsaved souls that do evil is a law of nature as well as of revelation. The wages of sin is death. ”

“ I am as certain as I am of my own existence that if you will give yourself up to the guidance of these you will be satisfied and you will be saved. If you will only take the Bible and follow it, you will find an assurance of its truth that cannot be shaken; you will find rest, for you will find Christ. And surely it is not too much to ask that in a matter of such infinite importance you make a fair, honest and thorough trial of that which no man ever yet made trial of to be disappointed. ”

“ Standing in your wrong and your weakness and your unrest, [48] with the heavy shadows of the future falling upon you, are you willing to draw near to the open portal of a better life? Are you willing to look up and read over it—"God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life"? ”

“ We are here in a world of suffering. How came we here? and how did suffering come here? If we came without a God, who will prove that without a God we may not go elsewhere, and that [24] suffering may not go with us? Here we are—by natural law, by evolution, by chance—as part and particle of the one eternal unity; however it may be, we are here, and we suffer. ”

“ There is a God by whom we were created and to whom we are responsible; there is a future existence. Those two questions are settled, if the Bible can settle [44] anything. And they are settled, let me add, in harmony with the profoundest instincts and the most imperative demands of our nature. Whatever a few souls in their struggling dissatisfaction and sad unrest may persuade themselves, the great yearning heart of humanity will quiet itself on nothing less than God and immortality. ”

“ It is, I admit, a fearful thing to fall unprepared into the hands of the living God; but if I must choose, give me that, a thousand times, rather than the terrific possibilities that overhang us all if we are to be eternally at the disposal of a blind, inexorable, soulless, merciless "Nature." ”

“ In testing at this time some of the difficulties of the Bible by the accepted rules of evidence, hardly more can be done than to present a few of these rules as applicable to these difficulties. But the rules are of the widest application; the solution of one difficulty by them is the solution of a hundred.
Looking upon the Bible as a whole, we may refer for a moment to the familiar precept that every man is to be presumed innocent until he is proved guilty. This is emphatically true of a man of good general reputation. The rule would seem as applicable to a book as to a man. ”

“ There is nothing so dark and terrible in all the woes of the Bible as the possibilities that Mr. —— offers us in his gospel; and there is this difference: the Bible opens wide a door of hope for all who care to enter it; Mr. —— leads us out into the outer darkness and leaves us there. Is it worth while for any man to spend his life in persuading us to make this exchange of despair? ”

“ You ask, "What is 'the way of settlement that the Bible opens to the great questions that press us?'"
The questions of supreme interest are few and simple. Is there a God? Is there a future existence for us? How can that existence be made a safe and satisfying one? If you are willing to allow any authority to the Bible at all, there can be no doubt as to the first two questions. ”

“ We know what pain of body and pain of mind are. We have felt the sting of death, and no law of nature, no power of evolution, has ever lighted up for us the darkness of the grave. Now, the question we want answered is this: If "Nature" has brought us into this state where there is so much of what we call sin, and so much bound with it that we call suffering, how do we know that the same "Nature" may not continue the same facts hereafter? Nay, what assurance can Mr. —— give us that "Nature" is not a power that may in some future frenzy cast us into a state far worse than the present? ”

“ At all events, this is the only ground of a safe immortality that the Bible holds out, and beyond the Bible there is no ground. If you ever settle safely the solemn questions of the future, you will settle them here. ”

“ Some of the most pathetic cases of the spiritual unrest and skepticism of the day are found among the children of Christian parents. They have been brought up to believe the Bible, but under the influences that have met them as they have gone out from the old home into the world their early faith has been shaken, and not unfrequently destroyed. To such as these, and, beyond these, to all who have come to believe that our age has passed beyond the Bible, it is hoped that the incidents and arguments of this little book may be of service. ”

“ If I live as if there were one and it should happen that there is not, I am safe; I lose nothing. But if I live as if there were no God and it should come to pass at last that there is, where am I? Of two untraveled paths, it is wisest to take that which is known to be safe. ”

“ In a former letter I spoke of the testimony of Webster to the reality of the Christian religion; and, though it is true that Christianity does not depend upon the patronage of any man, it is well to know that greater intellects than those that would persuade you to reject it have bowed before it and found their supreme hope in it. ”

“ The Judge of all the earth will do right; at the worst we shall receive no more at his hands than we deserve; but no created being can tell us what we shall receive at the hands of an irresponsible, pitiless "Nature" though she be "the mother of us all." ”

“ The lights that have gone out from your own home and heart you were right in believing have "not gone out in darkness," but you will not forget that as they went into purer light they went with Him who has brought life and immortality to light, who is the Resurrection and the Life, in whom believing, though we were dead, yet shall we live. ”

“ Spiritual self-destruction is quite possible through the word of life itself. At the same time, no man has a right to put needless difficulties in the Bible or to make difficulties where none exist. More than this, every man is bound to deal as fairly at least with the Bible as he deals with his fellow-men in the ordinary relations of life. That which would give him no trouble as a judge upon the bench or a juror in the box ought not to be urged as a fatal objection to the Scriptures. ”

“ To it, therefore, we find the most intense thought of thoughtful men converging. That from this there should emerge questions not easily solved is not to be wondered at: they emerge in every inquiry of human thought. The only thing to be asked is that these questions be dealt with candidly and fairly.
To many minds the Bible is still on trial; it is only just that in its trial those rules and principles shall be observed which men everywhere expect and demand shall be observed for themselves when they or their interests are to be tried. ”