Various

“ They prudently call themselves skeptics, but imprudently carry their opposition to the Bible, beyond all the bounds embraced in their own definitions of skepticism. A skeptic can only doubt, never oppugn the gospel. He becomes an atheist, or an infidel, bold and dogmatic, as soon as he opens his mouth against the Bible.
Were we philosophically to class society as it now exists in this country in reference to the gospel, we should have believers, unbelievers, and skeptics. ”

“ Our free school and Sunday-school systems are making the rising generation better acquainted with both science and the Bible, and a thorough acquaintance with both is the one thing most needed in order to a better future in religion, as well as in every other human interest. The time is come when men will no longer be content to listen to grave errors and keep silence. Every truth is being put to the test of logic, as well as fact. It is natural to abhor a contradiction, and it is right. All truth is harmonious. I am glad that harmony is demanded in religious teaching ”

“ You can trace the path of the Bible across the world, from the day of Pentecost to this day. As a river springs up in the heart of a sandy continent, having its father in the skies; as the stream rolls on, making in that arid waste a belt of verdure wherever it turns its way; creating palm groves and fertile plains, where the smoke of the cottage curls up at eventide, and marble cities send the gleam of their splendor far into die sky—such has been the course of the bible on earth.”—Theodore Parker. ”

“ What is the difference between the spirit of God being partial to communities—going into one and converting a great many persons and passing others by—and God Himself being partial? And why does the Spirit not convert all the unwilling sinners in the community where it does convert sinners? These are questions that have been asked in a great many hearts before they yielded themselves up to skepticism and infidelity. ”

“ No man, deserving the name of a philosopher, can ever appear among the crusading forces of pamphleteers and declaimers against the faith of Christians, for two of the best reasons in the world; he has nothing better to substitute for the motives, the restraining fears to the wicked, and the animating hopes to the righteous, which the gospel tenders; and he has nothing to oppose to its claims but the weakness and uncertainty of his doubts. Franklin was a philosopher, but Paine was a madman. ”

“ Neither can men be regarded as transgressing a covenant, in the sense of an agreement, unless they have first placed themselves under its obligations. So, if these men are right in their definition of the Old Covenant, they are wrong in trying to fasten its conditions upon all mankind. Their logic also excludes, from all the promises of the covenant, all those who were incapable of making an agreement. Hence, infants were left to the uncovenanted mercies of God. And as for the wicked, who never agreed to keep those commandments, poor souls! ”

“ But the vagueness and uncertainty of the doctrinal speculations of infidelity, and the looseness and immorality of its rules of life, are not the only objections to it. Its tendency, wherever it has been introduced in the history of our world, has been evil, and only evil. France, at the commencement of her revolution in 1789, was an infidel nation. The profligacy of the Catholic priesthood, and the demoralizing example of the Regent, Duke of Orleans, and the infidel publications of Voltaire and his associates, had produced a contempt for religion through every rank of society. ”

“ Prosperity grew with the growth of our country, and the standard of education was elevated. The free-school system took the place of the old-fashioned subscription schools, which were worth twelve dollars per month to the whole community, and the brave thinkers continued stirring up thought in religion, and giving the fathers and mothers trouble about this thing of confounding religion with passion, and our country is now fairly at sea in an Intellectual period. Religion is now a thing to be learned and lived—to be done. ”

“ Infidelity proposes to break down the altars of prayer, take away our Bibles and our days of worship, shut up the doors against all our Sunday-schools and turn more than a million of children into the streets, away from sweet song and moralizing influences, and the pure morals of the gospel of Christ. ”

“ The object of law is to regulate the exemplification of principles. Some principle is exemplified in every act that man performs. And one principle may be in a great variety of acts. The principle of hatred is exemplified in a great many different actions; and the principle of love to God is manifested, or exemplified, in every act of obedience to God. So the spiritual may be brought out under different dispensations, and by different laws, while it remains always the same. Indeed, principles are unchangeable; they belong to the nature of things. ”

“ The Father of Spirits made us with the power of choice—gave us the liberty to choose—and we all may have, in the future, just such a state as we will. The Father loved all; the Son died for all; and the Spirit says to all, come! ”

“ Our cities, villages and public places of resort are thronged with swarms of these Lilliputian volunteers in the cause of skepticism. Apprenticed striplings, and sprigs of law and physic, whose whole reading of standard authors on general [pg 177] science, religion, or morality, in ordinary duodecimo, equals not the years of their unfinished, or just completed minority, imagine that they have got far in advance of the vulgar herd, and are both philosophers and gentlemen if they have learned at second hand, a few scoffs and sneers at the Bible, from Paine, Voltaire, Bolingbroke, or Hume. ”

“ The political history of the children of Jacob begins at Sinai with their beginning as a nation among the surrounding nations. The law given at Sinai was a political law, for it was addressed to a community, pertained to a community, and was accepted by a community.
Such is a political law in the strictest sense of the term. This law was given to the Jews, the decendants of Jacob. Moses said, “The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. The Lord made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day.” ”

“ In the present stage of critical investigation it is well for all preachers to remember that there is but one question involving [pg 195] this whole matter of conversion and pardon, and that is the question coupled with the Judgment; it is not, How much did the Heavenly Father love me? He loved all men. It is not, How much did Jesus do for me? He tasted death for every man. It is not, How much has the Spirit done for me? It gave the gospel to all nations, as the power of God unto salvation to every man that believeth. ”

“ Modesty is the legitimate daughter of true philosophy; but dogmatism, unless the offspring of infallible authority, is the ill-bred child of ignorance and arrogance. Every man, then, who seeks to make proselytes to his skepticism by converting his doubts into arguments, is anything but a philosopher or a philanthropist.
One of the most alarming signs of this age is the ignorance and recklessness of the youthful assailants of the Bible. ”

“ If there are any Gentile Christians upon the earth who think it is essential to know that it was the Lord that sanctified the children of Israel, set them apart from the surrounding nations, I would say to such, It is sufficient to your salvation that you know the Lord, as manifested in the flesh in the person of Christ Jesus, and that you love and obey him. I can not see that the seventh-day Sabbath, as a sign upon a Gentile, would tell the truth, for the Lord never sanctified the Gentiles in the sense of setting them apart from the surrounding nations. ”

“ The apostle Paul says we are the children of a covenant, which he denominates “The free woman.” “She is the mother of us all.” But, according to Sabbatarian logic, they are the children of two covenants, or women. How is this? One good mother is sufficient. When they tell you that the old covenant, which was done away, was the people's agreement to keep the ten commandments, remember that they, by their own showing, set up the same old covenant by agreeing to keep the ten commandments. ”

“ The lusts and passions of man were set free from the restraints of Christianity, and the bloody history of that nation, in its devotion to infidelity, should convince every man that infidelity only “unchained the tiger”! It did France no good, but much evil. In this state of things France needed revolution, as America did, and had she engaged in it, with as pious reliance upon God, “and with the hearts of her people deeply imbued with the morality of the Bible, the scion of liberty, carried in the honored Lafayette from this country,” would have taken deep root, and spread forth its branches ”

“ Christianity is right thinking and doing; all that is to be attained in the religion of Christ is enjoyed in an upright life. Every theory that conflicts with this grand sentiment is smoked with the darkness of the dark ages. ”

“ Justification turns no longer upon the ancient law, and the sacrificial and typical system of blood is no longer the means of pardon. The law contained a shadow of good things to come, but the body was of Christ. He that believeth on Him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. ”

“ The negative use of law is to restrain the evil; and the affirmative is to bring out the good, the spiritual. So, without any interference with the spiritual of any law that ever was, either divine or human, we have a better covenant, or testament, than the old testament ”

“ It is a better law, for us, because its precepts are not limited to our neighbor. The following is a part, at least, of the contrast:
the decalogue given to israel.
“Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbor. Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbor's wife. Neither shalt thou covet thy neighbor's house, his field, or his man-servant, or his maid-servant, his ox or his ass, or anything that is thy neighbor's. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not kill.”
the law of christ bound upon the world.
“Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer. ”

“ The men who stir the world with thought, and give intellectual cast to the age in which we live, are to be met with thought, met with reason, met with truths tried in the crucible.
Christianity has nothing to fear in the great struggle that is being carried on for the truth's sake. ”

“ The great struggle that is now going on between Christianity and unbelief is accomplishing two good things: First, it is making it hard for professors of religion to hold their errors, or cover up hypocrisy; and second, it is making it hard for infidels and skeptics to hold on to their flimsy objections to the Christian religion. ”

“ Intellect belongs to our higher nature, and emotion belongs to our lower. Intelligence is always at a discount where the emotional nature governs—it is subordinated to passion. When the intellect governs, the emotional is subjected to thought ”

“ Lord Herbert and the Earl of Shaftesbury thought that the light of nature would teach all men, without the aid of revelation, to observe the morality of the Bible. Spinosa and Hobbes, one believing in a God, and the other an Atheist, agreed that there was nothing that was either right or wrong in its own nature ”

“ The Lord said of Israel, “I will also cause all her mirth to cease, her feast days, her new moons, and her Sabbaths, and all her solemn feasts.” Hosea, ii, 11. No man is threatened, by Christ or any of his apostles, on account of Sabbath-breaking, or any of those things which are peculiar to the Jews. But men are threatened for disobedience to the [pg 174] Gospel of Christ. The New Testament is of Christ. Its religion is not “the Jews' religion,” but Christ's. There was much in the Old Testament that is in the New, but it is there by the authority of Christ. ”

“ Ingersoll says, “Upon the head of his father, God had never poured the divine petroleum of authority.” So much the better for the race. What would infidels do if they had the authority? “Hume is called a model man, a man as nearly perfect as the nature of human frailty will permit.” He maintained that pleasure or profit is the test of morals; that “the lack of honesty is of a piece with the lack of strength of body;” that “suicide is lawful and commendable;” that “female infidelity, when known, is a small thing; when unknown, nothing;” ”

“ It was reserved for Christianity to present to the world an ideal character, which through all the changes of eighteen centuries has filled the hearts of men with an impassioned love, and has shown itself capable of acting on all ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions; has not only been the highest pattern of virtue, but the highest incentive of practice: amid all the sins and failing ”

“ It is essentially preliminary to a clear and forcible display of the reasonableness and certainty of our faith in Jesus Christ as the author of immortality to man, that we ascertain the proper ground on which the modern skeptic, of whatever creed, stands when he avows his opposition to the gospel. ”

“ So the moral objective of every law is the same, viz., to bring out and develop the spiritual in man. To accomplish this great end it is necessary that the evil principles of a carnal, or fleshly nature, should be restrained by the penal sanctions of law, and the principles of man's higher nature brought out by its motives of good. Such being the nature of principles, and the facts of law, Paul says, “We know that the law is spiritual.” ”