Adversity

There is certainly one thing in which adversity yields gain to godly men , since it calls away their affections from the earth and from earthly things , or even wrests them off while pertinaciously adhering to them . " It is expedient , doubtless , that they should experience hardships here , lest they should like this poor lodging as if it were their own home ." They should as if they are 'strangers and pilgrims upon earth ' , that they may more frequently and with more ardent longing , sigh for their fatherland , and very often repeat it , Home ! Dear Home ! Best Home ! For the sons and heirs of the kingdom must be weaned by this wormwood , lest , allured by the blandishments of the flesh , and the poisoned sweetness of the world , they barter away those true and pure joys of their blessed hope for these false , and foul and fatal joys ; and lest the heavenly soul , being subjugated should give way to pleasures and be overmastered by the flesh , the pernicious root of manifold miseries . In fine , we see how much vigour and vehemence adversity adds to prayer ; for the divine Psalmist , the deeper he has sunk , the more keenly he cries , "out of the depths have I cried ."  Robert Leighton

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God of my Fathers

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The Word of the Lord is tried. The Bible tested and triumphant B. B. Loomis, Ph. D. Look at some of the severe tests to which the Bible has been subjected, and by successfully meeting which it has vindicated its claims to a Divine origin, and to universal human acceptance. I. THE BIBLE HAS STOOD THE TEST OF TIME. Since the Sacred Canon closed, how many and how vast are the changes which have gone on among men. Hardly one of the ancient powers is today extant. How great have been the strides of human progress! Yet the science of salvation, as taught in the Bible, has needed no remodeling. The race does not outgrow the religion of the Bible. Compare the case of the Bible with the poems of Homer. The two works are, in a certain sense, contemporaneous; critics have denied to the Bible any higher inspiration than that of human genius; and Greek poetry held among that ancient people very much the same place as did the sacred Scriptures among the Jews. Three thousand years ago the two works s...
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