car. CHAPTER II. IS THE BIBLE TRUE? YOU believe in the Bible, I presume?" said a You man to his fellow-passenger in the railway "Certainly I do," was the instant reply. "I presume you believe in it because of your mother's teaching?" said the first man, in a sneering tone. "Precisely so," was the answer; I do believe in the Bible for that among other good reasons." “I don't see," was the reply, "how that can be a good reason. Suppose your mother had been born a Hottentot: you would then have believed in idolatry; or if she had been an Indian woman, you would have had faith in Juggernaut." "I probably should," replied the other. "I am surprised to hear you own it. Nine-tenths of the people who believe in the Bible have no better reason for their faith than just this: their fathers taught it to them and their mothers made them say their prayers, and so they believe in religion. I am independent. I don't mean to believe anything because somebody clse does so." "Stop," said the other; "stop right there, and hear me a moment. I was taught the Bible by my mother, by her life as well as her lips. The Bible made my mother the best, the sweetest, the noblest woman I ever knew. It was her strength in life, her comfort in sickness, her all in death. I saw what it did for her, and I started with every presumption in its favour. I have other, and perhaps to you they would be stronger, reasons for believing in my Bible. But let me tell you that for myself, the strongest of all reasons is that my mother, and she was such a mother, taught me its truths. I had a Christian home. I have travelled some, and I know that there is not a Christian home on the continent of Africa, there is not one in Asia, aside from what this religion of the Bible has done within a few years just past. In the hut of a Hottentot, or in the tent of a Bedouin Arab, I should have been taught in another religion, exactly as I should have been taught in another kind of astronomy, and natural philosophy and geology. What then? Shall I think less of the true system of astronomy, because I was educated to believe it in Christian New England, or doubt the facts of natural history because Agassiz taught them to me in America? Shall I believe less firmly the facts of science because I learned them under circumstances most advantageous, in places where they could best be learned, and from the best of teachers? And as for you, sir," turning to the other, "let me say just this; either you had or did not have an early Christian home. If you had a pious father and a praying mother, and were taught the biblical truths, and now have turned away from the Holy Book, you are, I am certain, For you have not far less of a man morally for it. the sanctions of that book, when you do right; nor its warnings when tempted to do wrong. You are not so pure, so strong in principle. Right and wrong, good and evil, are not words with so much meaning as they would have had if you had read your Bible and striven to shape your life by its directions. Or, if you had no Christian home, if your parents were not devout people, then you started in life under a terrible disadvantage, a disadvantage to your moral nature as great as it would have been to your physical nature if you had been born without feet or without hands. And instead of you reproaching me for my mother's religion, I am the one who should pity you for the terrible |