feed their hopes upon the study of the succession of events which, each as it happened, foreshadowed His redemption, and made the heart, sick with the spectacle of contemporary degeneracy, look forward to the establishment of the Kingdom of God, to His sweet sovereign sway over the spirits and lives of all men!
And since His coming and His return to Heaven, how earnestly do His followers the whole world over bathe their souls in the light of that everlasting glory into which He has entered to prepare us a place, and the ravishing perspectives of which lift man heavenward and enable him to bear every most bitter trial, to undertake the most arduous labor, and to fulfil the most painful sacrifices in view of the eternal reward and of the Infinite Love which bestows it!
In the immense Christian family, spread all over the earth, there is not a household in which “the words of eternal life” (St. John vi. 69) do not thus furnish sweetest food to the souls of young and old. For it is most sweet for enlightened and pious Christian parents to select from the Prophetical Books of the Old Testament the passages in which, so many centuries in advance, the Holy Spirit had prompted the inspired writers to describe the manner of Christ’s coming, His sacred person, the labors, persecutions and death by which He was to redeem the world; His miracles, His wisdom, and the immortal society He was to found. It is still, as it ever has been, most sweet to contemplate in the mighty events recorded in the Historical Books, the types of the great realities to be accomplished in the life of Christ, or in that of His church. Even the personages whose characters and deeds are recorded therein, when viewed with the eye of faith, all seem to point to Christ, whom they resemble in many wondrous ways, while still preserving their own identity, their own littlenesses and weaknesses.
Nor is it less delightful and refreshing to the soul to take up any one of the merely didactic or moral Books. Job still teaches the world and stirs the soul of every reader from amid the ruins of his home and the utter wreck of all his greatness and prosperity. Solomon still instructs princes and peoples, the highest and the lowliest, in the pregnant works which reflect his wisdom, and contain the manifold lessons of his long experience, of his days of innocence and wide-spread earthly dominion, and of his maturer years obscured by ingratitude to God, by boundless sensuality, and that worship of self which so easily leads to the worst forms of heathenish idolatry.
The author of Ecclesiasticus, Jesus, the son of Sirach, sings a hymn in praise of all the virtues, private and public, most dear to the heart of God, and sets before us, in succession, the images of the godlike men, who, since Adam, have glorified the Creator of mankind as well as human nature itself.
But sweeter than all the other inspired writers of the Old Law is the King-Prophet, David, the ancestor of Mary and her Divine Son, “the sweet singer of Israel.” The church, spread all over the earth, uses his Psalms of prayer and praise in her solemn offices; and her children, in their private devotions, ever find in these heart-cries of the much-tried David the very sentiments and words most suited to their needs in good and ill fortune, in trial and in temptation.
And so has the word of God, coming to us through the inspired books of the Old Testament, borne to every household, and to every soul within it, both during our darkest and during our sunniest days, comfort and peace, light, and warmth, and unfailing strength from the all-loving heart of our Father in Heaven!
But, oh, what shall we say of the books of the New Testament? Of the Gospels, which set before us the simple and soul-stirring narrative of Christ’s incarnation, birth, labors, miracles, sufferings and death? Of the Acts of the Apostles, relating the birth of Christ’s Church, and the struggles, sufferings, labors and triumphs of His two chief apostles, Peter and Paul? And finally, of the other divinely beautiful instructions left to the Christian world by these same Apostles, its glorious parents under God, the fathers of the new “people of God,” to be made up of all the tribes of earth gathered together and held in the bonds of a true brotherhood by the one faith in Christ and the all-pervading love of the Father?
Do we not all remember, we children of Christian parents, how we hung in childhood and youth on the lips of father and mother as they read to us the sublime story of Christ’s life and death? how we fancied ourselves to be kneeling with the Shepherds around His crib, or travelling with Him and His parents across the desert to Egypt and back again to Nazareth? How we loved to behold Him in imagination as He grew up in the carpenter’s shop—the lovely child, the graceful and modest youth, the son lovingly obedient to Mary and Joseph during all these years of obscure toil and patient preparation for His great missionary work? And then how we followed the Mighty Teacher, during the three years of His public life, as He ran His giant race—preaching, healing, enlightening the whole land as with the steady, but brief splendors of a heaven-sent meteor, till the young life was quenched amid the dark and shameful scenes of Calvary?
Have we not, in our turn, read to our dear parents in their hour of darkness and trial—in poverty, or sickness, or when the shadow of death was over the home—some one sweet passage, more pregnant with heavenly light and consolation than the others, which made once more sunshine in their souls, which lifted up the fainting heart, which filled the spirit of our sorely-tried dear ones with renewed hopes and strength to do and to endure, which enabled them to bear the bitter pang of present losses in view of the eternal reward—or which made the passage from this life to the next bright, lightsome, joyous and exultant, like the blessed bridals of the children of God?
And see how wonderfully that all-wise Providence, which clearly seeing things from end to end ordereth all things sweetly and surely, has taken means for preserving these sacred writings amid the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires, amid the revolutions, the destruction and the decay, which lift one hitherto obscure or barbarous race into power and long rule, while other races, till then prosperous, irresistible and enlightened, disappear forever from history.
Here we have, at this very moment, the same Hebrew descendants of Abraham, to whom Moses committed, with the Tables of the Law delivered on Sinai, the Pentateuch or five volumes written by himself, subsisting in our midst, clinging to their ancient faith with heroic tenacity, and cherishing not only the five books of Moses, but what they conceive to be the original Hebrew Scriptures with a religious fervor that will tolerate no change in substance or in letter.
Have we often reflected on the miraculous co-existence, side by side, and in every part of the globe, of the children of the Synagogue and of those of the Church—the former bearing undying testimony to the divinity of the Old Testament Scriptures—the latter vouching for the authority of the New? Only think of the singular phenomenon which the presence of Abrahamite Hebrews amid the peoples of Christendom offers to the historian and philosopher! They remain distinct from all other peoples while living among them; mingling with Europeans, Africans, Asiatics and Americans in every walk of life and field of industry, and yet preserving their own national characteristics and physical type as clearly and persistently as they preserve their ancient religious faith and time-honored customs. In the tents of the Mohammedan Bedaween they protest against the monstrous reveries of the Coran and the pretensions of the Arabian visionary; amid the crowded cities of China and India they uphold, as against idolatry, the doctrine of the one living God; and in our midst, in the temple of Christian civilization, they bear witness unceasingly to the divinity of the Old Testament Scriptures
