2 Timothy 3

2 Timothy 3:1

FOLLY AND SIN 2 Timothy 3:1-7. THE truth seems to be, and statistics gathered from the most aggressive churches of the country would demonstrate it, that for some years past wherever a virile Gospel has been preached the number of men converted to Christ is beyond that of women. In the ministry of A. C. Dixon in Chicago, in one year the proportion of men to women was seven to one; and in the evangelistic work of Gipsy Smith, for three years, it is reported, the proportion was five to one. It was this fact that led Gipsy Smith to make his remark, “Women are as tough as nails,” a remark that demands corroboration and explanation. The corroboration will not be discovered by the minister who has a well-beaten path between his home and his church, and knows little outside that; but if he take a few afternoons off at the matinee hour, or if he consult the society page of the daily newspaper, or if he spend some evenings looking into dance halls, not to speak of the darker and more damnable institutions to which these lead, he will cease his platitudes about an improving world, and give over his theory that increase in education effects a corresponding improvement in all conduct and character. In fact, if he push this study to any considerable extent, he will learn that the New Testament Apostles were also Prophets, and that when Paul wrote to Timothy,“This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall Come. “For men shall he lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, “Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, “Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; “Having a form of Godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away. “For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, “Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the Truth”. he had as clear a vision of the social conditions of our age as any man who has sought to make himself familiar with them; and the capability of picturing those as much beyond that of any living reformer as the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is beyond the unaided human intellect.A proper interpretation of this text, then, is a proper understanding of some of our social perils and responsibilities.It deals withTHE TIMES AND THE “This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come”. If there be any Divine authority in the Apostle’s pen portraits then Perilous times shall mark the last days. The man who disputes this proposition not only takes issue with Paul but with Jesus as well. On one occasion Jesus said to Pharisees and Sadducees, “When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather; for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowering * * ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times” (Matthew 16:2-3), and the blindness of the Pharisees of Israel has fallen upon the average preacher of the modern church, and he has put the same upon his people.The cry of the century is, “Peace, Peace; when there is no peace”. And, “Improvement! Improvement!” when there is an evident down-grade; and of a “Conquering Church!” at the very time of flagrant apostasy.

I do not belong to the company of those who feel competent to mark the exact progress of the ages and tell just what perils are at hand, just when the tribulation will take place, and the sign of the Son of Man will be seen in the heaven. I know, as everyone who gives himself to history ought to know, that every age since Jesus has had in it some of the signs of the last days; and every good student of the Book for well nigh twenty centuries has been compelled to feel that they might be well nigh at hand.Charles Kingsley in “Hypatia” depicts the fifth century, and yet in that time he sends the young monk, Philammon, away from the presence of the attractive female philosopher, tossed with anxiety and uncertainty, conscious that he has gotten himself adrift and is on the great stream.

And Kingsley says, “Whither would it lead him? Well—was it not the great stream? Had not all mankind, for all the ages, been floating on it? Or, was it but a desert-river, dwindling away beneath the fiery sun, destined to lose itself a few miles on, among the arid sands? Were Arsenius and the faith of his childhood right? And was the Old World coming speedily to its death-throe, and the Kingdom of God at hand? Or, was Cyril right, and the Church of today appointed to spread, and conquer, and destroy, and rebuild, till the kingdoms of this world had become the Kingdoms of God and of His Christ! If so, what use is this old knowledge which he craved?

And yet, if the day of the destruction of all things were at hand, and the times destined to become worse and not better, till the end—how could that be?”And yet that must be or both Lord and Apostle were false teachers. It was Jesus who said,“But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the Coming of the Son of Man be. “For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, “And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the Coming of the Son of Man be. “Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. “Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left. “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come. “But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up. “Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh” (Matthew 24:37-44). Peter also, writing by inspiration, said,“This second Epistle, beloved, I now write unto you; in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance: “That ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy Prophets, and of the commandment of us the Apostles of the Lord and Saviour: “Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, “And saying, Where is the promise of His Coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. “For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the Word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: “Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: “But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men” (2 Peter 3:1-7). Paul, in the very chapter from which we bring our text, reminds those who would live Godly in Christ Jesus, that they shall see the time come when “evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Timothy 3:13). One of the tricks of the adversary is to blind men to the signs of the times, that the Church of God may not be aroused to the sense of responsibility and that sinners may not be startled into repentance.Godless men shall characterize the same.“For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, “Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, “Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; “Having a form of Godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away” (2 Timothy 3:2-5). This word-painting presents an interesting study—“lovers of their own selves”, how true! “Covetous”—when was the world ever so money-mad? “Boasters”—how rare the man who has none of that spirit. “Proud”—how numerous his kind. “Blasphemers”— the roar of human voices is in our ears. “Disobedient to parents”—it is the latest indictment against the children of this century. “Unthankful”—the goodness of God is forgotten in the sense of self-sufficiency. “Unholy”—the reason we do not tell the truth is that society will not stand for an expo-se of what is coming to pass. “Without natural affection”— flirtation is approved by a college president; free love is advocated by magazines with some extensive circulation; affinities have entered the philosophy of some of our most noted University instructors; companionate-marriage is now advocated and even Sodomy is laying hold upon the land; while slander, non-self-control, fierce temper, betrayal, and love of pleasure, hold a mixed carnival.You say, It is a dark picture! You say, It is a dyspeptic utterance! Do not forget against whom you bring the indictment. It is not mine; it is the language of an inspired Apostle; it is a painting in which the Holy Ghost had part; and when the world philosopher has uttered his last smooth lie with a smile, the speech of the Spirit, who moved holy men of old, will remain, as true as God Himself is true. Oh, we know how the ease-loving world hates such teaching; and we all understand how an ease-loving church repudiates it, and cries, “Pessimist,” as if to utter that word were the discharge of its whole duty; and to preach a pleasing prospect were the very evangel itself. This also came under the vision of the Prophet.

Old Isaiah, with his eyes upon the people of his day—types of those of my time—described them as “lying children, children that will not hear the Law of the Lord: which say to the seers, See not; and to the Prophets; Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits” (Isaiah 30:9-10). Paul, writing to Timothy, said, “The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the Truth, and shall be turned unto fables” (2 Timothy 4:3-4).

And in penning his Epistle to the Romans, he spoke of such “as serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple” (Romans 16:18). No true prophet’s work is palatable.When Dwight Hillis was once in Italy he wrote to a friend in New York telling the story of the fall of Campanile in Venice: “Two days ago I left Venice. Now comes the news of the great disaster—the Campanile has fallen. The morning’s dispatches say that all the shops in Venice are closed and the whole city is in mourning. The morning papers came out in black borders. All last week I was in and around the tower. St. Mark’s square never seemed so perfect in its art and architecture.

I saw the old architect in whose care the Campanile has been for thirty years going over the tower, but I knew nothing of his fears. Two months ago he telegraphed the committee in Rome that the tower was in peril. The second time he was reprimanded and later cashiered. On Saturday last he took his son to the tower, and told him it was even then falling. At noon he took a train and left Venice, saying his heart was broken and that it would kill him to witness the final fall. In less than forty-eight hours there was only a heap of ruins.

Now that it is too late, the old man has been recalled, but he has indignantly refused to come.”The warning of God’s Prophet is not appreciated. But that warning has its occasion; hence the Apostle’s speech, regarding godless men, “From such turn away”.But someone asks, What relation has this discussion of the times and the tempter to the folly and unfaithfulness of women?

It has a direct relation. Listen while Paul states it. “For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts”.THE SILLY AND THE SINFUL are here depicted. Silly women are the easy subjects of captivity. The age to which we belong is not famed for sober thinking and circumspect living. Its philosophy has gone awry, and foolish conduct follows. Dr. G. Stanley Hall, former President of Clark University, Boston, once made himself famous—or infamous—by advising flirtation on the part of the girls of the land. His speech was a work of supererogation.

They did not need his advice; they were fully engaged in the business before his foolish speech was uttered.Smoking is now an approved custom with the weaker sex. Elite Boston, the very spot where the saving Evangel of Culture has had its opportunity, was shocked years ago when some social purity workers put in the hours between seven and eleven thirty p. m. one evening visiting hotels and restaurants and making a careful count of the women present, and of those that were engaged in drinking intoxicating liquor in some form.There were 755 counted, 521 of whom were sipping the intoxicating cup. Twenty years ago a brewer gave $10,000.00 to a Southern exposition, and afterwards said it was money well spent, for in that Southern exposition women acquired the habit of drinking beer in public without apology.Add to these facts a truthful presentation of attendants by women upon the salacious theaters, low picture shows and dance halls and we have described the conditions under which the first steps to sin are being taken; and we have also pictured gay and festive femininity crowding the toboggan slide that shall speedily land them in deeper sin; for, as the Apostle suggests.Silly women soon become sinful women. Those that “take captive silly women” shortly find them “laden with sins”. I have been giving a bit of study to local methods of accomplishing this degradation. Recent discussions, from platform and through the press, have excited in the minds of Minneapolitans no small interest in social problems, and recent newspaper reports have led some to hope that our mayor has started in to clean up the town, and that it is time for all good citizens to fall in line and help to make his endeavors effective.

I want to be counted in. There is sore need!

The dance hall has been left to its own sweet way with too little discussion, and the low theaters and their like, to their scurrilous and sinful ways with too little examination. Concerning these low theaters I have only this to say, that if there is any virile morality in Minneapolis in the person of the mayor, or his most important or humble fellow-citizens, the methods of these institutions will change. Whenever a stage becomes the scene of the most vulgar presentation possible, and the platform for speech as vulgar as the expose exciting it; the gathering place of prurient youth and utterly debased men, attracted by an exhibition of women, who, before they have quit their teens, have lost the ability to blush at their own shame or to be in the least startled by the suggestion of the blackest sin, then either public morality will assert itself or furnish a coroner’s certificate that it is dead.If the management of these places consider my indictment false I invite them to compel me to go to court and prove it, for the above descriptions are not adequate without additional words. Whenever theaters introduce into such scenes of unblushing shame as these present, the holy religion of Jesus Christ, involving the sacred marriage ceremony, and the very phrases that have been wont to express piety, that both alike might be made the subject of lustful suggestion and profane speech, the mayor who will permit its continuance, is unfit for his office; and the people who live in a beautiful city and voice no protest are unworthy their citizenship.And what shall one say of the dance halls where thousands gather every week? Shall we say that they have police present to watch their conduct? Yes, but we have not been informed who watches the police.

Shall we say that it has provided professional “introducers,” so that young men and women may get acquainted without the violation of the social code? Yes, but we should not be unmindful of the fact that that is a much quicker and easier way than when the social code demanding an introduction is violated.

The result is a flock of thousands of girls—women frequent these places. The young men who meet them there are supposed to be over twenty-one years of age, but in many cases the supposition is strained. Many of these young men are evidently from good families. More of them are young men working in the city, who have a good salary and can afford this expense. Each of them has the opportunity of being passed from one girl to another until he finds the one who is easy, if such is his desire. It is sometimes said that no drunken persons are allowed in these halls and that the number of known scarlet women who are in attendance is small by proportion.

Yes, but in the very admission we remind ourselves of the fact that we are dealing with a custom which since its birth, more than a hundred years ago, has created more scarlet women than any other institution on top of the ground. Let me say that since human nature is the same whether clothed in silks or cotton, appears in full dress or a business suit, and whether the music is provided by a cheap orchestra or an expensive one, and the scene is an elegant parlor in a veritable palace, or a well-oiled floor in a Dreamland hall, the temptations of the dance are the same in kind and character.

It is only a question of extent conditioned by circumstances, and I cannot as a Christian man, even much less as a minister, of the Gospel, speak a word that would put approval upon it, whether it appear in High School Building, in our State University, in a civic dance hall, in a public Dreamland, or the lowest dive.If you want to know the real character of the theater get a convert from the boards and let him talk; if one wants to know the awful fruits of the round dance, lead the dancing master to Jesus Christ, and then turn him loose to tell the tale. In other words let Faulkner speak in his volume, “From the Ball Room to Hell,” and be informed by the man who has had years of observation, at first hand, and who is not a minister. It is little wonder to me that the church is losing its power with women, and that women are losing their hold upon the church, while their brothers and husbands are engaged in the strenuous battle of money making incident to high living. Many of them render living more expensive still by sitting before the footlights of the afternoon matinee, the morals of which are low enough; and when the evening hour is come, with those same husbands and brothers—and more often with the brothers and husbands of others—they are either in attendance upon the theater, where domestic life is put in false perspective and venial sins are veneered; or else in the swing of the round dance where women forget the injunction of the Apostle to “be in subjection to their own husbands”. The result is inevitable: the Church of God no longer attracts, and the Christ of God, instead of appearing as a Saviour from sin becomes an inconvenient meddler in our social pastimes.Now what is the trouble? Paul makes mention of it: “led away by divers lusts” they are never able to come to aK OF THE TRUTH What truth? The truth regarding sin. Men and women do not know that now, nor do many of them want to hear it. A man in high political life, speaking to me a few days since, voiced his sore disappointment in the teacher who hinted that God was angry with sin. And yet a God that was not angry with sin the heavens would not retain, and holiness would not be His character. The judge on the bench who is not angry with sin is not fitted for his office. The husband who is not angry with sin does not love his wife as he ought; nor does the father who is not angry with sin properly appreciate the interests of his children. “Sin is the transgression of the Law”. Sin is a blot in the face of God.

Sin is the surrender of the soul to Satan. Sin is the toboggan slide to death. Sin is the fuel for the fires of hell. Let us be done with our soft terms and come to a knowledge of the truth—“The soul that sinneth, it shall die”.And then, in the interest of sinners, let us come to the knowledge of additional truth, namely, that,There is a way of salvation. The great Dr. Dale, in his classical book on “The Atonement”, makes mention of the most anxious question that has ever escaped the lips of mortal man, namely, Is the remission of sins possible? Can God be just and yet the justifier of the wicked?That is the question that Jesus came from Heaven to earth to answer. And praise be His Name, He did it.

Listen to His direction, “The Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins”. Hear Him as He stands in the presence of the man palsied, having first mercifully healed him, “Thy sins he forgiven thee”. Give audience as He speaks to the woman who in sorrow and shame crept to His side and washed His feet with her tears, and He answers the question that is breaking her heart, “Thy sins are forgiven * * Go in peace”. Let Him tell His disciples also how it was all brought about when He says that His Blood was shed for the remission of sins; and after His resurrection, attend, while He opens their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures, and say unto them, “Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day: and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His Name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem”. And forget not the fact that those of us who are ministers at His hands are commissioned to do two things—to preach repentance for sin and the remission of sins.Oh, it is a great truth and if you know the Truth the Truth shall make you free.What Truth? That Jesus Christ is both able and willing to save, and that God, the Father, in His infinite love gave Him that it might be done.

As the compassion of the Father fails not so the compassion of the Son is suggested. Creep then to His feet and call upon Him.

And if you are not willing to do that for your own sake, run not away from Him for He seeks that He might save thee. “The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost”. How wondrous! How unspeakable His compassion! How perfect His salvation!Somewhere I fell upon the story of the little child, who with its mother waited in a railway station in New Jersey, and saw in that station a poor, manacled prisoner, sitting sullenly between two policemen waiting the time when he should be borne away to go behind the iron bars. The little tot, looking intently into his face, stole up to him and said, “Oh, man, I am so sorry for you.” It made him mad and with angry words he pushed her away. Her mother bade her keep away but the train delayed its arrival and when the mother was not watching, the little one crept to him again and said to him with tears in her eyes, “Oh, man, Jesus is sorry for you.” The effect was electrical.

There were no angry words that time, but with head bowed he burst into tears. The train swept into the station and the officers hurried him on board, and the little drama seemed to be over.

But not at all. That day the prisoner yielded his heart to Christ, and now he is a devoted evangelist, and for years he has been telling how the love of Jesus broke his hard heart and brought him to Christ.Even when earthly sympathy and love fails the love of God is unchanged. Listen tonight man, it is my concluding word; give audience my sister, it is my last sentence—“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the Truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness”.

2 Timothy 3:2-7

IS SOCIETY ROTTING? 2 Timothy 3:1-7. THIS Question, however startling, is not in the least strange. It is asked more often today, by thinking men, than is any other single one. This suggests two facts: First, the subject relates itself to every feature of the human life, and if it must be answered in the affirmative, it envelops the future with fears and forebodings.Again, this question is being asked because the signs of the times necessitate the same. They are not reassuring!To the student of prophecy this startling question is not surprising even. Prophecy is history Divinely pre-written. What further proof need we of Paul’s inspiration? If he were writing about society today, could he more accurately describe its essential features than they were formulated in this prophetic utterance two thousand years ago? Let us take a look at this Scripture text, then a look at the state of Twentieth Century society and see if they answer not one to the other, point by point.THE PRESENT STATE OF SOCIETY What is the present state of society, and how far does it conform to this factual prophecy?The answer is in three remarks: Its putrid condition is commonly conceded; its foulness is fast fulfilling prophecy, and the present holds no prospect of improvement.Its putrid condition is commonly conceded!Some years ago we brought from the press the first edition of “Inspiration vs. Evolution”. At that time we called attention to the fact that newspapers of the most evangelical type, like “The Alliance Weekly” of New York, united with those of a mediating position, like “The Christian Herald”, and those of the most secular character, like the publication of a trust company, in admitting that “the world was rapidly ripening for judgment”, “the age was money mad and pleasure polluted,” or as one of the most secular of them said, “The wolves of license, greed and materialism, in all its forms, are leaping at civilization’s throat—at mankind’s moral self.”Have we marked improvement in the ten years since that publication? Only those who have the desire to be known as “optimists” or those who are playing politics, by shutting their eyes to the most sinful and sensuous facts, would say that we have.Dr. Cadman, president of that falsely pretentious organization known as “The Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America,” ardent advocate of the evolutionary hypothesis, and theological modernist, recently admitted that there were shadows on the outlook, saying that the “old pieties have been forsaken at a crisis when mechanical and materialistic elements assert themselves on every side, with the result that much shallowness and cynicism mar the zest of life, and youthful, but prematurely stale souls, become inert and useless before their fight has well begun. Neurosis, depression, crime, and even suicide ravage youth, unfortified by domestic religion and its faith in a righteous and loving God.”Certainly, no one will charge Dr.

Cadmati with an uncertified orthodoxy, or with intellectual hysteria. His language is extremely calm throughout, when it is compared with much that has been written in recent months concerning the breaking down of morals everywhere, the materialistic philosophy that grows increasingly popular and the rotting state of society that gives concern to all thoughtful men.According to John E.

Brown, the great evangelist, Dr. Smith of Washington and Lee University, recently startled an Atlanta audience with the following declaration:“America might just as well face facts. The facts are that side by side with universal education America today has all but universal crime.”But the language of this educator is not sufficiently strong to comport with the plain facts of society or the prophetic utterance of this Scripture. It requires stronger sentences. We venture this:The foulness of present society is fast fulfilling prophecy. Paul’s words, in the future tense, “Perilous times shall come”, must be converted into what is sometimes called pluperfect, for “perilous times” have come; men are “lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of Godliness, but denying the power thereof”.It is true that men are “lovers of their own selves”, that they are “covetous, boasters, proud”; it is because they are not “lovers of God” that they become “blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good”; it is because of the combined selfishness and the increasing skepticism that they are made “traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God”.I thank God daily for the atmosphere of my church.

Its quiet Christian life is like an eddy in a terrible torrent, and I am very happy to return to it as a resting place from the deluging, destroying current of society itself, which rages and foams and tears, and takes little account of the will of God or the interests of men.I seldom touch the business world without finding that I have tarred myself. A few days since, after wrestling with the problem of meeting with some promptness and accuracy my personal financial obligations, in view of the fact that a number of people who had even more binding ones due me, disregarded almost to a man their verbal pledges and written agreements, and dismissed them without apparently the least sense of obligation or even desire to redeem, I thanked God that I was in a profession rather than in the whirlpool, which sometimes seems little better than a cesspool, of so-called business.This is not to say that there are no honest men left.

God forbid! But it is to say that the world drives in the direction of selfishness, covetousness, truce-breaking and pleasure loving. It is pathetic to have to add this after-remark, but facts demand it:The present holds no prospect of improvement! The last ten years have not reduced iniquity. To be sure the legalized liquor traffic is gone, but the unlegalized liquor traffic lives and thrives; and, in the last ten years, demoralization has taken heavy toll upon many of our social customs. It has converted former social games into gambling devices; it has changed over the waltz and the schottische into the most lascivious movements possible to the embracing bodies of men and women; it has taken the low theater and made it more low and lewd than ever in modern history, if it does not exceed anything that Babylon, Greece and Rome ever saw.

It has changed woman’s dress from a most ungainly and uncleanly and foolish sweep to skirts that know little limitations upon abbreviation. It has made the ordinary murderer into a butchering monster.

It has multiplied the highwayman into hundreds, and changed his method from the individual hold-up into wholesale robbery of men of means and plethoric institutions; in fact, the deeds of Loeb, Leopold, Hickman and Shepperd indicate that there is now a diligent search for some more novel and terrible form of crime than the world has ever known to be committed.This social state demands explanation. I want therefore to present in order some of thePOWERFUL SOURCES OF SOCIAL POISON I shall not be at all able to mention them all within the limits of this sermon; but there are three or four that are so effectual for evil that they cannot be ignored. These at least should be mentioned—the murderous potency of the moving picture, the utter putridity of the low and lewd theater, the sensuous appeal of exceeding prosperity, and the demoralizing effect of college philosophy.First, let us think of the murderous potency of the moving picture! I am not an enemy of the moving picture, in itself. I have never been among those ministers that railed against it as born of the devil, and fit only for hell. I look upon this discovery as one that is capable of marvelous educational advantages. I believe it has features that could be made to instruct the intellect, and even inspire the soul, and I am not attacking all picture shows, nor the principle of the cinema; but the most amazing thing to me is this fact, that the two outstanding men, whose profession of religious faith is known to every living American, at the head of the censorship of this new and popular institution, should let absurd, suggestive and sinful productions get by, and be permitted to do their destructive work.There can be little doubt that the Wild West shows, so called, taking moving-picture form, and the dime-novel that has been thus dramatized, in which the hero is so often a successful killer of his fellows, has put the thought of murder into the minds of thousands of American youth, and that the hold-ups and bank robberies and jealousy killings that have been thus visualized, are back of the wide-spread banditry that has come so recently to characterize and curse the male children of our blessed land.

The “Associated Press” recently carried an article from Hollywood, stating that the most remunerative picture shows of the past year have been those in which mystery murders played a prominent part. Productions of such character are nothing short of criminal.It is frightful to put before the vision of a fourteen, sixteen or eighteen year old boy, not to speak of those of more tender youth, the suggestion and the method of robbing, killing and mutilating one’s fellows.

It is doubtful if there is a single exception to this rule, that the boys who are engaged in banditry are frequenters of picture show houses. Let Hickman’s confession furnish the latest illustration.Then to the show-house we must add another thing: the utter putridity of the low and lewd theater! Here again I am using exact language. I am not describing all theaters, nor declaiming against all plays; but I am describing the low and lewd one, and I employ the term “putridity” with occasion. The moving picture is a factor that is murderous in its influence; the low theater feeds the fires of lust. There is scarce a city in America, our own Minneapolis not excepted, that is not now the location of one or more theaters of the Gaiety sort.

They are not schools of art. They present no great literary productions in dramatic form; they provide no music of an uplifting or inspiring character.

They have apparently but one objective, and that is to appeal to lust. Their performers are mostly women, nine-tenths of whom make no claim to character.They are selected on one basis only, and that is one of physical proportions; and they strip and disport themselves in such a way as to smut the minds of all onlookers and corrupt the hearts of all patrons.Tolstoi in his volume, “What is Art?”, takes the French artists to task for having painted women’s nudity in various forms, but American show-houses are not content to leave this appeal to the dead, though salaciously presented, forms of the canvas. In the interest of filthy lucre, they have taken the passion that God put into men and women for the purpose of making righteous love the highest of human joys, and also the basis of a continued race, and they have degraded it to the level of abominable desire and beastly conduct. So they pervert the finest feature of physical existence. If the average “Gaiety Theater” is permitted to continue in America, the destiny of Babylon, Rome and Greece will be ours; our moral gangrene has set in already, and our disease will prove to be incurable. It is both rotten and rotting!As to the sensuous appeal of exceeding prosperity, I need not abide for discussion.

It is uniformly admitted that the present generation is suffering through the prosperity of their living and dead sires. Oppulence is in itself a temptation.

Hardship has ever made for righteousness; the pinch of poverty is the unappreciated friend of youth, while increased riches constitute his best loved but most deadly enemy. The personal ownership of a high powered car, the custom of living on father’s income without useful occupation, the inheritance of fine clothes and the possession of abundant cash without any sweat of the brow— these are the things that are blighting our boys and girls alike, leaving them with little other necessary occupation than planning the next pleasure.But in the judgment of this speaker, the most banal of all evil sources remains to be mentioned, namely, the demoralizing effect of college philosophy. Dr. Smith of Washington and Lee University, said, in view of the fact that side by side with universal education America, today, has all but universal crime, “Something is wrong with our present system of education.” Every day in the year emphasizes and illustrates the truthfulness of that statement. The prisons of America are being more and more filled with young men and women, who are either yet at school, or were out but yesterday. The age of the criminal drops annually; the juvenile courts are crowded increasingly.

The city jailer, in a city of more than a million population, recently reported that seventy-five per cent, of his jail inmates were under twenty years of age. New York State has incarcerated, for the most nameless crimes, men in tenderest youth to the number of increasing hundreds per annum.What is wrong with the present-day college?

Its philosophy of life! The “Literary Digest”, commenting on Dr. Cadman’s recent address on this subject, said, “The old Biblical formulas are not accepted by modern youth; secularism has had some sort of triumph; materialism has been over-strest; the attainments of science have been used too much to promote physical welfare and comfort, and the new learning and much of current literature are too much devoted to inculcating an individualistic philosophy of life.”Is it any wonder that these students are casting aside all restraints when college professors are constantly telling them that there is no God, that the universe originated itself and that all life is the product of a nonsentient principle known as “Evolution”? Is it any wonder, when conventions are held and such professors as Albert Parker Fitch, the late head of religion in Carleton College, are sent to tell young men and women that the Bible is non-dependable, that “no great mind ever believed that Christ was God,” and that the doctrine of the Atonement is “a dogma to be rejected,” and when such professors as Harry Emerson Fosdick reduce the birth of Jesus to the level with the mythologies of heathen people, and such atheists as Dr. Wakefield Slaton should have charge of the religious teaching in a professedly orthodox college, that our young people come out of these institutions intellectual anemics and moral derelicts?Is it any wonder that Minnesota feels the effect of this beastly and false philosophy when such text-books as Chapin’s, “Social Evolution”, deride alike the authority and authenticity of the Ten Commandments; Parmelee’s “Criminology” is in nature and character a defense of crime itself; Ross’ “Social Psychology” is an open attack on Divine revelation, and Ellwood’s “Sociology and Modern Social Problems” perverts the Truth and practically destroys the same; that the state should feel the effect of such teaching and reap the widespread harvest of having the same scattered throughout our entire school system by those instructed in such godless and crime-producing texts.Is it any wonder that we have constant reports emanating from grades and high schools in Minneapolis of moral degenerates when Burch and Patterson are employed as instructors in “American Social Problems”; and, when that text-book grows so unpopular that it is no longer endured by parents and preachers, it is put aside, and Harte introduced, with his clear declaration of atheism?Moral breakdown in America today is constantly attributed by our school men to the failure of fathers and mothers, but it is only the natural fruit of the Darwin doctrine applied to every branch of learning, reducing each in turn to the beastly basis, justifying lust, rapine, murder and every other conceivable outrage, on the basis of “the struggle for existence,” and the survival of the unfittest”.Only a little while ago a leading paper of Montana, a paper that had backed the State University many years, came but in an editorial of two full columns, denouncing as vile, unfit for the ears of living men or the eyes of decent readers, the teaching that one professor, Fox, had been giving to the students in the mixed classes on the subject of sex, and demanded that a publication which was unfit for the mails, should be no longer permitted immature students. Thereupon, the president of the institution, in perfect conformity with the average president’s practice, defended, and by subterfuge said they were not responsible for the publication (although it bore the name of the University, had the University seal upon it, and its affairs were directed by a board selected by the faculty), and that the difficulty was not with the professor, but with the general public, who had not yet been educated up to his—Fox’s—ideals and philosophy of life.

How interesting!It is little wonder that Dr. Edward Steiner of Grinnell College said, “Under guise of art our children are allowed to see and read smut.

Besides the movies, and some of the movies are good, we have a mass of magazines catering to the sex motive—erotic in nature. I become disgusted with the movies and when I pass a news stand and look at it I want to touch a match to the whole thing.” He declared that “ninety per cent, of the students are at school for a good time,” and “lack even the energy to challenge the statements of professors,” and said, “I could stand in my class and tell my students that the moon is made of green cheese and they would write it down in their notes and never question me,” and added, “Our colleges have now become places for the prolongation of the period of indecision for four more years.”Little wonder that students are committing suicide as a result of such teaching, Rigby Wile of New York saying, “Life is pointless and futile,” and Alfred Kehoe of Brooklyn, “I am passing out of the picture in my own little peculiar way;” Cassels W. Noe, University of Wisconsin, sending back a message, “I go out to solve the riddle of life and death.”It is absolutely certain that they are not finding the riddle solved by the skeptical professor of the present day. The recollections received from his teaching are ephemeral and are worthless tomorrow, but the sad part of it is that the skepticism imparted abides to curse.The Southern Methodist recently carried the letter of a gifted girl who, under a pretender of a Bible teacher, in a Methodist College, had suffered every conceivable blow against her faith. She wrote to her parents, “You will never know what I was up against. The Professor would sit and pick out contradiction after contradiction and give the very references so that we could see the contradictions right before our eyes.

I was not afraid to stick to what I believed, but when he stuck those things before me and asked how I could believe that the Bible was literally inspired, when I could see for myself the errors, I just did not know what to think. He told us that we could blindly go on believing the Bible was absolutely infallible and just shut our eyes to the errors, or else we could face things as they stand and have a religion that can stand all tests.

With it all he was so earnest and sincere and seemed to be such a true, consecrated Christian, that he had me up the air. I was just about gone, when Mr.— (an evangelist) saved me and gave me absolute proof of some things that the Professor had hooted at and said were impossible. Oh, mother and father, for goodness’ sake, don’t send the boys to that school!” Am I pleading against education? God forbid! I believe in it, and live for it; but I candidly believe that of all the influences that are at work today that have fruited in crime, no one is comparable to the beastly philosophy of evolution, now basal to every study at most of the universities. It has first wrought havoc with the faith of the professor himself, and today it is destroying the morale of the entire land, and when the day of final reckoning is on, it will be found that more potent than murderous picture shows, more putrid than low and lewd theaters, more ruinous than the temptation of riches, has been the Darwin doctrine, the philosophy of atheism that lifts itself against God and smites the faith of the land.But we turn from description to prescription. Is there any antidote to these evils? Is there any way out of this quagmire unto which men have come?

Is there any salvation from this corrupt state of Society?Yes! No Prophet or Apostle ever so presents a subject as to leave the student in pessimism. Inspired men were not blind to the facts about them; neither were they faithless concerning the future, and Paul has his remedy and plainly states it.It isTHE ONE AND ONLY A knowledge of God is the one and only cure of souls; that knowledge comes from a study of the Holy Scripture. Its truths suffice to morally redeem and establish men.The knowledge of God is the one and only cure of souls. There is but one “Name under Heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved”. Paul had put his trust in that Name, and he pleads with Timothy, his junior, to continue in the things which he had learned of him, and chief among them was belief in God.Edgar Guest, America’s first poet (when the appeal is to the heart), writing a while ago on “What My Religion Means to Me,” said: “I want Bud, my boy, to know this. The sooner any young man discovers that belief in God and belief in his own Divine purpose are vital to his career, the better it will be for him. I would rather die leaving nothing to my boy but his religion, than to die leaving him a fortune, with no religion.

If I can but impress upon him, as my mother impressed upon me, the fact that God has given him a soul to be his for all eternity; that he has been blessed with Divine powers to beautify and glorify that soul; if I can give to him the sure belief in a Supreme Being, I shall not need to worry about his future. He will be safe against temptation.

He will be able to see crooks and liars and cheats win temporarily, and still retain his own honor. With that faith he can be manly, self-reliant, independent, humor-loving, artistic, athletic, friendly and whatsoever he wills to be. The boy who has faith in God will have faith in himself.”And the boy or the man or the woman who has no faith in God has no faith in his fellows. The most sinister company that I know in America, today—the company that has the least respect for their fellowmen, are the American atheists. I have had much contact with them in debates over the subject of evolution, for they are evolutionists everyone, and I say without hesitation that for superficiality and scorn and sinister expression they are without peers; and I also say they are without success in life.I believe with my favorite American poet, Edgar Guest, that “all great men of nearly all the ages have known God.”That knowledge comes from a study of the Holy Scriptures. Paul refers to this fact and tells Timothy that “from a child” he had “known the Holy Scriptures” and through them had come to a faith that saved.

I would not say that a man is never saved without the Scriptures; in fact, I believe on the authority of the New Testament itself, that some men have been saved without them, as Peter said of Cornelius, “God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteousness, is acceptable with Him”; but I am confident that the Bible is God’s usual, and practically, His only medium of revealing Himself clearly to the minds of men.Nature makes a certain revelation, but it is partial and incomplete.The Book makes a perfect revelation. It presents Him as the Creator in Genesis, it reveals Him as the Father of our spirits in both the Old and New Testaments.

It tells of “His power”, of “His grace”, of “His love”. It presents Christ, an incarnation of them all, and then it points to Him as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And, in that, it stands alone!Mr. Shepherd, who, some time ago, was writing a series of articles in “Collier’s Weekly”, while admitting that he was not a churchman, expressed his conviction that the present-day breakdown in morality and the failure of society was due to the neglect of certain fundamental teachings found nowhere except in the Word of God; and he called attention to the fact that when men started in to drive sectarianism out of the schools they ended up by “driving the Bible out and produced a far-reaching havoc mentally and morally and spiritually.” And then John Brown, who quotes him, adds: “I have worked through states where the Bible is read and where prayer is offered at every chapel service, and I have worked through states where the Bible has been legislated from the school-room as though it were a consuming plague. And the difference in the atmosphere of the schoolrooms of these states was so apparent that only a man blind to facts and dead to holy convictions could do other than admit that the difference was there.”The reason is not far to seek. The Bible, and the Bible alone, lights the way to God, and without Him the world stumbles in darkness, continues in sin, and grovels in increasing depths of degradation.Modernism has made its attack upon the Bible, and in so far as it has been successful, has undermined society itself.

Dr. William Powick, at one time an ardent modernist, confesses the failure of the men who have come to question the authority and integrity of the Book.

He says, “They have failed signally to bring to our struggling world either vision or courage for its salvation. Fundamentalism at its best, for example, in some of the work of the Salvation Army, has to its credit the dramatic healing of sick souls. Who ever heard similar tales of ‘twice born men’ as proofs of the living power of the Modernist’s word?”No wonder! If men are to be saved it will be through a knowledge of and faith in the plain teaching of the Word of God.It is enheartening to know that that Word lives and thrives, and that every year sees a larger number of this volume sold than in the preceding year, or than any book or collection of books, that the world ever knew besides. There is a reason for this. You can fool some people all the time; you can fool all people some of the time; but, as the great Lincoln said, “You can’t fool all the people all the time,” and the volume that has held its way in the world from two thousand to thirty-five hundred years, ever increasing in favor with thoughtful men, must have merit, and must bring them a hope that is not found elsewhere; and present a prospect nowhere equalled, or it would not persist.One likes to think of the Gideons, who, according to the January 14, 1928, “Literary Digest”, have placed 883,000 Bibles in hotel rooms, and expect to finish the distribution of one million by June.

One likes to dwell upon the fact that the New York Bible Society has placed 100,000 in hotel rooms during the last ten years. To know that the American Bible Society in 1926 issued 9,907,361 Bibles, or parts of Bibles, and is sending the same to every nook and cranny of the world; and during the 111 years of the society’s existence has distributed 184,028,960 volumes of the Holy Book.Why this persistence and this ever-increasing output?

Solely because men have found there the Way of Life. I read the other day a statement from dear old David James Burrell, the man who made Westminster Church, this city, as few other pastors ever imparted power to it. You know he only recently passed away after a notable work in the Marble Collegiate Church, New York City. He tells how, when he was a student at Yale, he was caught up in the conflicting winds of controversy, and how, little by little, his faith in the old-time religion vanished until all was gone. “When I had finished at Yale I went back to my western home and was met by my dear mother at the gate. She threw her arms about me, kissed me on both cheeks, and said, ‘Now, my boy, my dream is coming true. You are going to be a minister of Christ,’ It was like a blow in the face.

I loved my mother devotedly, but my plans were made. What could I do?

For three days I wrestled with the problem. How could I enter the ministry, when my faith was gone? I had lost even the power of prayer. I was resolved not to enter the ministry unless I could honestly assume its solemn vows. I tried most earnestly to recover my faith. I resolved to try an experiment. I would take a year’s course in theology and abide by the result. So I entered a liberal institution in Chicago where, by a kind providence, I roomed in old Farwell Hall, which was Mr.

Moody’s headquarters. I cannot thank God sufficiently for my association with that devoted man. But the lectures in the Seminary gave me no help. I returned to my room after each hour in the classroom, and the only prayer I could make was, ‘Lord, help Thou mine unbelief.’ Still I did not abandon my purpose. A second year in Union Theological Seminary served me no better. One day as I sat in my room there was a knock at my door, and one of my newsboys entered with his heart in his throat and his hair on end. He asked me to come quickly. His father was dying and I was the only minister he knew.

I followed him down the avenue and climbed the rickety stairs to an attic room where his father lay dying. As I sat by his bed he looked at me and said, ‘You are pretty young to tell an old man like me how to die.’ I shall never forget that night! The old man began by asking me if I thought God would have mercy on an old sinner like him. I answered by quoting Wesley’s lines,’Betwixt the saddle and the ground, Mercy sought is mercy founds “‘How do you know that?’ I replied, that Christ had said so! ‘How do you know Christ said so?’ I referred to the Bible as my authority. He said, ‘Do you believe the Bible?’ What could I answer? I lied to him, saying that I did. He asked me, ‘Do you believe Jesus died for a low down sinner like me?’ I lied again, and said that I did. ‘How do you know that?’ Again I referred to the Bible as authority. ‘How do you know the Bible is true?’ I did my best to explain—insincerely. But what could I do? The dying man shot questions at me all night, thrusting me, metaphorically, from one corner of the room to another, and keeping his filming eyes on me as I sought to answer him.

Oh, that dreary, momentous night! I had never seen a man die before. At last the old man, who had been bred in a Highland home by Christian parents, began to remember, and presently he was murmuring to himself the Scottish version of the Shepherd Psalm:‘The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want; He makes me down to lie; In pastures green He leadeth me, The quiet waters by. Yea, though I walk through death’s dark vale, Yet will I fear no ill, For Thou art with me and Thy rod And staff me comfort still.’ “The past was coming up before him. Presently he said, ‘Pray with me.’ I fell on my knees by his bedside and poured out my soul in the first real prayer I had offered in years. When I rose from my knees the old Scotchman had gone; the morning was dawning and I had reason to thank God that in trying to teach a sinner how to die, I had myself learned how to live. My faith had come back to me! I had discovered that henceforth there was no middle-of-the-road for me. I must believe or disbelieve.

Since then, thank God, 1 have never wavered.“I am entering on my eighty-second year. For nearly half a century I have served in the ministry of Christ, and the memory of that night in a tenement house on Eleventh Avenue, always abides with me. And the Lord who has been my faithful keeper, will keep me to the end.” This testimony of that grand man, David James Burrell, has its lesson for minister and layman alike; its lesson for the menaced, and for the formal professor of Christianity. It is this: the revealed truths of the Bible are the only truths that can save and establish a man in righteousness!

2 Timothy 3:15

KNOWING THE 2 Timothy 3:15. TIMOTHY was a child of peerless future. He was not born unto money, to tread the earth with the air of one who feels his superiority over his superiors because his father was rich. So far as we know, he was not nobly born in the sense that his parents were among the titled, or even of the most honorable of names. He had not whereof to boast as Paul did, that he was from pure stock, of an honored tribe, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, for we read that he was the child of one of those mixed marriages against which God had spoken and the strictest Jews always protested, and do, until this day. Timothy’s father was a Greek, while his mother was a Jewess; and, from what we know of her instruction as a mother, she seems to have kept her faith and to have been zealous in her attention to the Holy Scriptures.Such a mother is the rarest bit of good fortune that ever blessed the youthful years of any man’s life. Better a humble home, an obscure name, scant comforts, with pious parents, than a mansion, full coffers, great titles, profusion of luxuries, without them.But not every boy, bred under the tender hand of a good mother, receives from her life as much as Timothy brought from the home where Eunice was queen. There are many tender, loving, solicitous mothers who neglect the Scriptures themselves partially or wholly, and send out their children into the tempestuous sea of life, at last, without the infallible compass, the invaluable chart of God’s Word hid in their hearts. Such children enjoy not the better fortune they should have brought from the dear old home, and such run greater risks of eventual and eternal shipwreck than any father or mother ought to be willing to impose upon the precious, priceless souls of the same.It ought to be remembered also that the father and mother of this age have a better Bible from which to teach their little ones than Eunice ever enjoyed. The Holy Scriptures in which Timothy was learned, were the Old Testament only. To be sure, it was God’s Word, as certainly inspired as the New, if Paul is authority, or Jesus may be believed.

But while its truth was great enough to make a man “wise unto salvation” and lead him to Christ, it was related to the finished Bible as the dawn is to the hour of noon.The mother of this day has a perfect Bible in which to instruct her own and by which to guide them, while Timothy’s mother had a truthful yet an unfinished, an incomplete one. That fact must be considered in the application of our text to the people and the time in which we live.But these thoughts lead us to specific lessons which this text would teach.First, this text suggests to parentsA GRAVE AND GREAT Youth is the time of all times in which to begin the study of God’s Word, and parents are the teachers of all teachers who must inspire the little ones to read the Scriptures and stimulate them to something like earnest study of the same.The father and mother—most often the mother— determine not only what shall engage the hands of the children, but also what will occupy their minds and fill their hearts in the first few years of life. The clay in the potter’s hand is scarce more subject to his will and plastic for his work than tender youth is capable of impressions from a mother’s thought and life. If the potter is careful to put into the senseless clay the ingredients that will make it valuable when it is fired, and fixed in hardness at last, how much more solicitous the parent should be to introduce into young people’s lives those things that tend to develop stable character. Search the world as you please. Descend into the depths; ascend into the heavens; take the wings of the morning and search the sea and land, and in them all you will find no other such an ingredient for formative character, as the Holy Scriptures. That parent, then, who allows his own to grow up to young manhood and womanhood without a knowledge of the Word is not, cannot be guiltless in the sight of the Lord.The estimate that children set on the Scriptures is determined largely by the emphasis that the parents have laid on the necessity of knowing them.

No wonder that Timothy knew them. They were the daily meat and drink of his devout mother’s soul.

Timothy would not have been surprised to have gone into the house and found the Bible on his mother’s knee.The times upon which we have fallen know more about the Word than they do of the Word. There are not a few teachers now that talk of it and teach about it, instead of talking from it and instructing people out of it; and there are not a few homes where the eight dollar Book has been a centerpiece for many summers, to be dusted once a week, and read only when religious company appeared.Let no one think that these things are unobserved by the children. A Christian father was telling me a few days since, how, when he asked the blessing on the food which some friends were about to enjoy with him, his little four-year-old looked from his plate as he finished and remarked, “Papa prays longer when company comes.”They make note of our actions, and they decide with accuracy what interest the parents take in the Word by the emphasis they see laid on its study.Dr. Kerr B. Tupper once wrote to our Baptist Young People’s Union relating the tradition of the siege of Troy of three thousand years ago, when the conquering Greeks permitted the subjugated inhabitants to save each one that single article of property that was most dear to him. Ӕ ?neas, hearing this proclamation, took his household gods and bore them away with triumphant joy. Tupper says, “Were that tradition to repeat itself in history today and the privilege be granted every genuine believer to save one thing most highly prized by him, both because of its intrinsic value and its immortal influence, the truest wisdom would dictate a peculiar choice—not gold, nor silver, nor civic honor, nor military fame, nor matchless eloquence, nor profound learning, but a certain little Book—a Book ancient and artless, elevating and ennobling, durable and Divine, even the infallible Word of God.”Tupper was right!

But isn’t there a better thing to do with the Bible than to preserve it? We need feel no solicitude about its loss.

It can’t be destroyed. Fire and water and the elements of earth and air have all been employed in the effort to stamp it out of the world, but the history of that attempt is the record of ignominious failure.What we need to do is not to preserve it, but to use it; to thumb its pages until they are stained and worn, but their lessons are learned for self and taught to others. At present that is the way for you to treat God’s Word. If Eunice’s Bible had been preserved as new after twenty years, Timothy had gone out from that home at last as ignorant of its precious and eternal truths as many a son of today is because his father has left it untouched and his mother has only dusted its lids with a superstitious care.It is doubtful if parents can ever find a better stimulus to their children’s study of the Bible than that of example. Every tiny boy wants to do what he sees his big father about. Every little girl delights to attempt her mother’s method of work or play.

This inborn disposition to imitate is one of the potent factors of education which our wise Creator has nicely arranged. Parents can’t afford to refuse or fail to recognize this fact and turn it to profitable account.

Under its inspiration, children can be had to do many things that they refuse to commence in later years. It is that faculty that urges the small boy to cut wood, carry coal, milk the cows, harness the horses and do a hundred things that a man does not enjoy at all; that stimulates a girl to sew and sweep and wipe dishes and engage in general housekeeping before she is old enough to discover that it isn’t play for the grown up women that have it to do. If by taking advantage of that inborn disposition, we set before them examples in these things that will become valuable accomplishments before they seem arduous in the least, how dare we neglect to set before the same imitators an example of studying God’s Word, an accomplishment diviner than them all?It would be a difficult thing to find a home where father and mother loved God’s Word, but the children refused to look into it. The story is told that during the war Robert E. Lee was at home for a few days in mid-winter. He was dressed in his military suit, having on his great military boots and walking in the early morning to his barn, when he heard a little voice behind him saying, “Papa, take shorter steps.” Glancing back, he saw his second edition, stretching his little legs to the utmost to put down his tiny foot just where his father’s had left, in the snow, the larger print.It is so in life!

The children strain themselves to step as father did, where mother did. If we want a great Sunday School in this church we can have it.

God is willing and waiting to give. But fathers and mothers, the best way in the wide world to fill up the infant class and the Junior, Intermediate and Young People’s departments, is the way of example. If the Adult department in our school is full of fathers and mothers who study the Word with interest and willing regularity here, the other departments will overflow. If Lois and Eunice, mother and grandmother, are in this room, Timothy and all his little? brothers and sisters will be in there. Forget not the stimulus to Scripture study in example.This text points out to allTHE STUDY If it were so, that no one would ever be influenced to study the Scriptures by example, still the wisdom in God’s Word is such that no soul can dispense with it.It is the one thing without which education is always incomplete. This is an age of education. Men on every side are threading the mazes of history, attempting to sound the depths of science, and hoping to explore the whole field of philosophy and bring in a final report. But there is no such history as this which relates how God has created, ruled and redeemed a world; no such history as that which records how God and man have gotten on together, and all of this is in the Word.As for science, it must start out with God as creator of the material and spiritual universe, and keep within these limits set by His eternal Truth.The philosophy of all philosophies is the plan of salvation by faith in Christ, as set forth in this same sacred text. The Bible is the Book of books, and its study indispensable to the progress of the soul.Dr. Lorimer seldom said a more eloquent thing than when in his “Isms Old and New”, he affirmed of this Book, “All others are as stars in comparison with the sun, as the cold luster of the pole in comparison with the brilliancy of the tropics; as the opaque whiteness of the pearl in comparison with the transparent beauty of the diamond.

Rosseau acknowledges its moral power; Goethe confesses its unparalleled spiritual excellence; Theodore Parker magnifies it as the purest fertilizing stream that ever flowed through our desert world; Huxley and Amberley extol it beyond any other work existing among men. From these considerations it is reasonable to conclude that He who upholds all things by the Word of His power also has conferred on us a revelation to lighten our darkness, and that in its supreme and perfected form, it is contained in the Holy Scriptures.”All education needs a knowledge of them as the key note to its music, as the final touch without which its work is unsatisfactory and incomplete.

No wonder Paul’s note to Timothy, Study the Word! “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of Truth”. No wonder he wrote again, “Preach the Word”. He knew it to be indispensable.It is the one Book in which we may become more proficient daily, yet never perfect. Some people have objected to it on that ground. They say that they don’t like a book that you can’t complete and leave for something higher. But why is it that we left our primer and went to the spelling book and the reader? Only because the primer was so imperfect a book. It had only the simplest tasks it fit, and only the most shallow thoughts.

If its wisdom had been more extended, we might have remained in its study longer, and if it had contained all wisdom and learning, we would have had no need for more advanced books. That explains why we can never finish our study of the Bible. No man has sounded its depths of wisdom; no man has attained unto the heights of its instruction; no soul has explored its limitless fields of knowledge; no man ever will, because they are infinite. When any man does, then we will need a new Bible, not sooner. When any man shows how it could be improved, then God will bring out a new edition, but we need look for no changes until that time.That Massachusetts man voiced the Christian thought of the Bible when upon being urged to read some infidel publications, he said, “If you have anything better than the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the prodigal son and that of the good Samaritan; or if you have any better code of morals than the Ten Commandments, or anything more consoling and beautiful than the 23rd Psalm, or on the whole, anything that will make this dark world more bright than the Bible, anything that will throw more light on the future, and reveal to me a Father more merciful and kind than does the New Testament, please send it along.”The Christian world has had this Bible in custody for 1900 years, and for 1900 years the Christians have been the scholars of the world, and have studied this Book more than any other, and yet no Christian claims to have learned the hundredth part of its wisdom. Many of them are proficient in it, but would be as far from claiming a perfect acquaintance with all its truth as Timothy was.Thank God for a Book that opens to men the heights and depths of infinite wisdom.

Who can afford to be untaught in such a Book?Such a Book is entitled to intelligent treatment and earnest study. No man can be an intelligent student of the Word who does not bring to it a sympathetic soul.

One who refuses its wisdom can easily wrench its words to his own hurt. You have heard the story of the infidel who quoted the text from Scripture, “There is no God”, without knowing that just back of that stood the explanatory sentence, “The fool hath said in his heart”! But infidels are not the only men who study texts to justify their preferred positions, and tear them away from explanatory contexts to make them excuse our faults and salve our consciences. Let us remember that proficiency in Bible study depends as much upon one’s familiarity with the whole circle of truth, as the solution of geometric problems depends on an acquaintance with foregoing theorems.Again, we would be better students of God’s Word if we put into our Scripture research the same energy that characterizes our work in other branches of wisdom. The custom is too universal of reading God’s Word with indifferent haste, and passing every difficult place as a part that is too deep for us, and hence unnecessary to be known. The same treatment of spelling books and readers and arithmetics would soon land us in pitiable ignorance.

We can never be Biblical scholars unless we are willing to reread and read again hard passages, and halt before them with inquiring mind until they open their bosoms and communicate to us their deeper meaning. There are many people who leave whole sections of God’s Word wholly unread and say in excuse, “I can’t understand it, and I don’t bother my brain with such things!” Well, one can have a brain that does not bother itself with hard things, but it is a weak, sickly nerve mass and one that any head might be ashamed to carry about the world.The most difficult passages of Holy Writ will repay any soul for all the study given to them, and many of those that seem hard to understand are rich in suggestion when you come to question them from an honest heart.

Dr. Broadus has told a story in one of his sermons that well illustrates this truth. He said, “Years ago when my family included servants, I used to try very hard to get the servants and the children interested in family worship. I tried the parables. I tried the life of our Lord. I tried many other parts of the Bible. Sometimes they were interested and sometimes not, and at length it occurred to me. Now I will see if they will be interested in the Revelation.

That contains so much beautiful imagery. So I began and I found that the servants and children were very much interested for several days. I tried to explain a little and I could do that very well for the first few chapters, about the Churches, etc. Then we got on into the opening of the seals and the sounding of trumpets and I stopped explaining for a reason that you can perhaps conjecture. At length after many days, I was reading some of that solemn, splendid imagery in the middle of Revelation, like the unrolling of a panorama, scene after scene of wonder and power, and struggle and conflict, and hope and promise, and one day as I was reading I looked up through my tears and all the circle from the aged grandmother down to the little child, were in tears, too. You say, we didn’t exactly know what it was about.

Yes, we did. It was about God—about God looking down on this world of ours, about the sorrows and struggles of this human life, and the fact that God sees it all, is watching and controlling it all.” Brethren, let us have a care how we treat parts of God’s Word.

A verse in our immediate context says, “ALL Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable”, and God wouldn’t have said “all” if He had meant only a part.In this text we find,THE ABLE TO BRING MEN TO A SAVING OF CHRIST Everywhere in the Bible Christ is presented as the one and only hope of life and salvation, and the Scripture student will find, upon greater familiarity with this Word, that its every Book directs him to that one great fact,—Christ a Saviour from sin. The sooner we understand that fact the better for us and for our use of the Word. To some men the Bible is only a system of truth, subject to possible dissection. But as someone has said, “It is too much alive to admit of that,” and again, if it were inanimate, it is too valuable to be put to the knife of criticism and cold examination. He would be a foolish examiner indeed who should take his compass to pieces, to study its mechanism, when at mid-sea and liable any moment to encounter a storm, or tear up his chart to learn if the material on which its lines “were laid was sheep-skin or paper. It is so in our treatment of this Word of God.

After we are safely on Canaan’s shore, and all the storms of life are past we may take God’s Word up and study its mechanism as an intellectual curiosity, but while we are driven to and fro with the storms that sweep the sea of this life, we must preserve this chart with care, and scan its lines with eager hearts, that from it we may ever look toward the Christ, the only hope of coming into the eternal haven of rest. No man who reads God’s Word to follow its direction is doomed to eventual disappointment.

It will lead him to the Lamb, the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world. Frederick W. Farrar wrote as truthfully as eloquently when of the Bible he said, “There may be mingled voices, but clear and loud among them all are heard the utterances of eternal wisdom. Other books may make you eloquent or learned or subtle; this Book alone can make you wise unto salvation. Other books may fascinate the intellect; by this alone can you cleanse the heart. In other literatures may trickle here and there some shallow runnels from the “unemptiable fountain” of wisdom, and even these alas, turbid too often with human passions, fretted with human obstacles, and choked at last in morass or sand—but in this Book majestic and fathomless, flows the river of the water itself proceeding out of the throne of God and the Lamb.”But the man who discovers the Way of Life, set forth in this Book must look for it with the clarified vision of faith.

God has hidden this highway from the eyes of those who, in the world’s judgment, are the wise and prudent, and revealed them to the babes of faith. Many men who judge themselves most competent to understand and interpret this Word, are living in a spiritual gloom that converts its simplest letters into strange and misleading characters.

You remember Hawthorne’s pen-picture of Richard Digby who despised the love of sweet Mary Goff, and in his indifference to her pleas, opened his Bible and sought to forget her presence by his studies therein. But Hawthorne says, “The shadow had now grown so deep, where he was sitting, that he made continual mistakes in what he read, converting all that was gracious and merciful to denunciations of vengeance and unutterable woe.” It is often so with the men who read it in the thick shadows of their unbelief. The Word of God tormented the French infidel, Voltaire, and made his last hours an awful agony. But that same Word led a little French girl into the light and enabled her to do a work that moved Heaven to gladness, and one that will live, lending glory to Christ after “the sun has gone out from heaven like a spark smitten from the anvil and all of the stars are dead.” This child got a Testament at Grand Ligne school. Her parents were Romanists, and for twelve years she dared not take the precious Book from her trunk lest they should find her at its study. Then she married, and, in the freedom of her own home, fished it up and commenced the study. In 1866 her brother said of that Testament’s effect, “Through that little Testament given to Julia at school thirty-five years ago, and in answer to the prayers of Madame Feller that followed it, our families, numbering eighty-five souls in all, are in the light.” Brethren and friends, shall we not give more study to the Word that opens the Way of Life?