HAT unchangeable home is for you and for me, The King of all kingdoms forever is He, And He holdeth our crowns in His hands. "Oh, how sweet it will be in that beautiful land, With songs on our lips and with harps in our hands ITS HOPE. A GREAT many persons imagine that anything said about heaven is only a matter of speculation. They talk about heaven like the air. Now there would not have been so much in Scripture on this subject if God had wanted to leave the human race in darkness about it. All Scripture, we are told, is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect-thoroughly furnished unto all good works. What the Bible says about heaven, is just as true as what it says about everything else. It is inspired. What we are taught about heaven could not have come to us in any other way but by inspiration. No one knew anything about it but God, and so if we want to find out anything about it, we have to turn to His Word. Dr. Hodge, of Princeton, says that the best evidence of the Bible being the word of God, is to be found between its own two covers. It proves itself. In this respect it is like Christ, whose character proclaimed the divinity of His person. Christ showed Himself more than man by what he did. The Bible shows itself more than a human book by what it says. It is not, however, because the Bible is written with more than human skill, far surpassing Shakspeare or any other human author, and that its knowledge of character and the eloquence it contains are beyond the powers of man; that we believe it to be inspired. Men's ideas differ about the extent that human skill can go; but the reason why we believe the Bible is inspired, is so simple that the humblest child of God can comprehend it. If the proof of its divine origin lay in its wisdom alone, a simple and uneducated man might not be able to believe it. We believe it is inspired, because there is nothing in it that could not have come from God. God is wise, and God is good. There is nothing in the Bible that is not wise, and there is nothing in it that is not good. If the Bible had anything in it that was opposed to reason, or to our sense of right, then, perhaps, we might think that it was like all the books in the world that are written merely by men. Books that are just human books, like merely human lives, have in them a great deal that is foolish and a great deal that is wrong. The life of Christ alone was perfect, being both human and divine. Not one of the other volumes, like the Koran, that claim divinity of origin, agree with common sense. There is nothing at all in the Bible that does not conform to common sense. What it tells us about the world having been destroyed by a deluge, and Nosh and his family alone being saved, is no more wonderful than what is being taught in the schools, that all of the earth we see now, and everything upon it, came out of a ball of fire. It is a great deal easier to believe that man was made after the image of God, than it is to believe, as some young men and wom n are being taught now, that he was once a monkey. Like all the other wonderful works of God, this Book bears the sure stamp of its author. It is like Him. Though man plants the seeds, God makes the flowers, and they are perfect and beautiful like Himself. Men wrote what is in the Bible, but the work is God's. The more refined, as a rule, people are, the fonder they are of the flowers, and the better they are, as a rule, the more they love the Bible. |