MEN HAVE LOVED DARKNESS
RATHER THAN LIGHT.
By Nelson.
We have endeavored to hold up to view that strange tendency and natural leaning towards falsehood (in matters of religion) which we possess without being aware of it. We will endeavor to illustrate this same truth by another process. It should be presented in another attitude. We think the weakness of props on which opposers rest gives full exhibition of this truth. If men base a fabric of their eternal expectations on decayed weeds, whilst an enduring rock is close at hand, there is some strange reason for such a choice. There is something defective in his heart or in his head, who is content to cast away the Book of God, and venture all the terrors of the judgment day upon some feeble cavil, which is annihilated as soon as a few facts are presented.
Out of many we must select a few, and such as we have heard urged most frequently.
Case 1.— An amiable lawyer, after urging his toilsome but successful course for many years, at last won a seat in Congress. On his way to the meeting of that assembly he was taken with a disease which at first did not seem alarming. A physician, with whom he was on terms of intimacy, went to see him. This physician was one who thought the soul of great value. He believed the disease one of those which flatter but destroy. He felt impelled to tell his friend so, and to ask as to his preparation for crossing the river of death. The lawyer answered him that he could not believe in Christianity. The doctor asked if he had ever investigated the matter. He replied that he had read such and such books on the subject (naming over some five or six infidel authors), and that he deemed this a sufficient research. Being asked if he had ever read anything on the other side, he confessed he never had. His friend told him that he deemed this a strange investigation, but would wish to hear the argument of his strongest confidence, that on which his hope leaned with the most quiet security. His answer was substantially as follows: “I can never believe in the darkness said to prevail over the land at the crucifixion of Christ. The strange silence of all writers, except the evangelists, disproves this statement: the elder Pliny particularly, who devoted a whole chapter to the enumeration of eclipses and strange, things, would surely have told us of this occurrence had it been true.” his friend the physician answered him with the following facts:
“My dear friend, permit me to tell you where you obtained that statement concerning the silence of contemporary authors, and the chapter of Pliny devoted to eclipses. Yet read it in the second volume of Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.’ There would be some degree of force in the statement, were it not for one individual circumstance; that is, it is not true! A tree painted on paper may resemble an oak, but it is not an oak. There is not a word of truth in Mr. Gibbon’s account, although the falsehood is polished. That which he calls a distinct chapter of Pliny devoted to eclipses seems to have taken your full credence. Pliny has no such chapter! It is only a sentence, an incidental remark as it were. It consists of eighteen words. I will repeat them to you, if you wish to hear them. The import of the remark is, that eclipses are some times very long, like that after Caesar’s death, when the sun was pale almost a year. A man hears of many things of which he does not write. Pliny does not mention the darkness, but Crlsus does, and so do Thallus and Phlegon, Origen, Eusebius, Tertullian, and others, some of them Christians and some of them Patrons.” (The reader can see Horne’s introduction, 1st volume, chapter 20. “I am sorry you took the word of that author, splendid as were his talents, for he sometimes penned falsehood without scruple, if religion was his topic.”
The sick man was silent; fell into a long, deep reverie; after a few days he said to a relative, “If what I read in youth gave my mind a wrong bias, I suppose I must abide by the consequences, for I can not investigate now.” He fell into convulsions and died.
Reflections. Poor man! The truths of the gospel and the evidences of Christianity were presented to him, and he turned away. He read a statement against the Bible, made by a modern historian who hated Christianity, and he received it at once, without asking further. He took hold on a falsehood without a moment’s delay or hesitation, relied upon it, and continued to believe it for twenty years, never asking after further testimony. Surely men love darkness rather than light. Ten thousand fruitful facts were before him and around him, on the page of history; they favored Christianity, and he did not observe or remember them. The first historic lie he met satisfied him. It seemed opposed to revelation.
Case 2.— Several physicians of Virginia declared to each other that the Bible could not be true, because the doctrine of the resurrection was taught there, and this they deemed impossible. They mentioned the case of a man whose body was carried in fragments to different parts of the earth, and asked, with exulting laughter, how he was to recover his body after it had been dissolved, mingled with earth, grown again into vegetables, then again forming a part of other animals and other bodies, age after age? Hundreds and thousands make this the strongest prop of their system of unbelief, but physicians are mentioned here because they are familiar with facts which would utterly forbid any one being influenced a moment by such reasoning, unless he had a strong appetite for falsehood, and a full disrelish for the truth. That men of science have trusted in the hope that the resurrection could not take place, because part of the same body may have belonged to different men and different animals, exhibits so glaringly and undeniably the love for darkness, that we must take some time and some space to review the fabric of their confidence. We must encounter some toil, and exercise some patience, to make that perfectly plain to the youthful, or the unlettered, which is so readily understood by the anatomist. We must and will expose, if we can, that which has led the scientific to propose a difficulty in the doctrine of the resurrection. Let enlightened readers then bear with us, whilst we explain things well known to them, for the sake of the uncultivated. The inferences will be of equal importance to all. The application is profitable to each one of us.
Let the following facts be noted and impressed on the memory:
First fact.— God tells the righteous that their bodies, although made out of the materials belonging to their present frames on earth, will shine and be very splendid. (See 15th chapter 1st Corinthians.) God can make very durable, and very glorious things out of materials the very opposite of firmness or of brilliancy. He has done this. Of all the substances with which we are acquainted, we esteem diamond the hardest, and the most glittering. Charcoal is as black and as crumbling, as any other body known to us; yet, these two bodies are the same. The learned know, the ploughboy does not, that the difference between the charcoal and diamond is, that the Creator has ordered a different arrangement of particles. The same materials are differently placed, that is all. If any are wishing for a body more beautiful than they now have, they may be assured that God can, if he chooses, take a part of our present fragile, corruptible forms of clay, and make out of it something exceedingly glorious. “It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory.” Out of a certain spot of earth a flower arose, which waved in splendor; the soil from which it grew was very black.
Second fact.— God has not told us how much of our present body goes into the composition of the new, on the morning of the resurrection.
The figure used as an illustration by the inspired writer„ to make his instructions plain on this subject, is the grain which is sown in the earth, decays, and out of which springs the new grain. It is perhaps a twentieth or thirtieth part of a grain of wheat, which springs up and forms a part of the new grain; the rest rots and stays in the ground. It is not needed in the new body which God gives the wheat, and is not called forth again. Whether it will be a tenth, a twentieth, or an hundredth part of our present body, which is to enter into the formation of the new, God has not chosen to tell us, and, we need not care, for the work will be well done, and we shall know enough after a time.
Third fact.— The man who has lived here seventy years, has had very many bodies: perhaps less, perhaps more than seventy. God has not condescended to tell us out of which of these bodies he will take the new, or whether a portion of each will be used.
Here let the young reader be very careful to note and remember, the body he has now is not the same body he had last year. Our bodies change continually. The man who is kept from food in any way, no longer than one week, finds at the end of that time, he has not as much body by many pounds, as he had seven days before. In this way, how fast the body wastes, is not yet accurately agreed on. Our food is only supplying this continued waste. The bones change also, but not so fast as the softer parts of our frames. How the body can waste, and be again renewed, is singular and interesting; but not easily understood without close thinking. It will be worth while to take some pains, and drop anatomical style, or physiological style, and speak in a way understood by all. The young reader may be led to admire the wonderful works of God, whilst preparing to comprehend a fact connected with his own resurrection. Every little boy knows what a vein is. He is also capable of understanding what is meant by a vein forking, or branching again and again, until it becomes exceedingly small, like those he has seen running over the eye when it is inflamed. Then again, he can fancy that if one of these small veins shall divide into a thousand branches, in running a short distance, they must become so small that they can not, be seen by the eye alone. And if thousands of these branch a thousand times, they will lay over each other finer and more plentiful than the hair of the head. These small veins physicians call vessels, blood vessels. Running through and along with these, are other vessels, as small and as numerous, that are not called blood vessels. If we place a small pebble in a leathern tube, and contract our fingers behind the pebble, we may push it from one end of the tube to the other. In this way, and through these countless millions of vessels, our food is conducted to every part of the body where it is needed. We call that which is so much smaller than a dust of flour that we can not see it, a particle. When any of the body, which we now have, shall have remained long enough where it is, so as to become too old, and need changing, it is taken up by particles into these hair-like vessels; the vessel contracts behind the particle and pushes it on to the skin, and much of the body is lost in one day by what is called insensible perspiration. Others of these vessels lead in a different direction, and take up particle after particle of the old body, it is thrown upon the bowels, and so passes off. But where these particles are taken from there is left a vacancy of course, and if not supplied, the man is said to be falling away, or declining in flesh. Our food, day after day, is taken into the stomach, there prepared, taken up in particles by these small vessels, conducted to every part of the body and deposited in these vacancies. Thus we think that any one can understand the necessity of daily food, and the wonderful process by which our sinking flesh is constantly sustained. But the inquiring mind sometimes demands, “If my body is thus totally changed, and so often, how is it that I look as I formerly did, or retain my shape in any way?” Answer.— This you shall understand if you are willing to think industriously. Take a plate and cover it with apples: On the top of this first layer of apples place a second, and on these a third, and so continue; after a time you will have a pyramid, and one to crown the top alone. Then suppose one man approaches the plate, takes up an apple and throws it to a distance. Another man by, immediately drops another apple as large into its place, your pyramid is still there and retains its shape. The first man takes up apple after apple in swift succession, casting them to a distance, whilst the second man drops an apple into each vacuum as fast as they are made; your plate of apples may be changed a thousand times, and the pyramid is still there in full shape. Thus your body is changed and renewed by particles. The shape remains, although there is nothing about you (soul excepted) which was there in former years. It is a man’s immortal part which constitutes his real identity. Blessed be God, the soul does not waste, and glory to his name, the body does; thus leading us to remember our dependence on our heavenly Father.
Fourth fact.— We never had a body, a part of which did not come from every corner of the world. The rice of which that man is eating grew in Georgia or the East Indies. The waterfowl once swam on the surface of a northern lake. That sugar came from Jamaica, and that fish once floated on the Newfoundland surges. Young reader, do you expect to live a few months longer? If you do, you must have a new body, and where is it to come from? It is probable that you will eat bread; but the wheat from which this is to be made is now growing in your father’s field, or in that of a neighbor. How is the growth of this wheat to be continued? Plants are sustained and nourished much from the air that floats past them; it enters into the pores, the leaves drink it up, and it forms a part of their substance. But the air of the earth is always changing and streaming in torrents from one part of the earth to the other. This incessant motion is necessary to preserve its purity. The air which is to help to sustain that grain on which you are to feed is not near it now; it is on the other side of the earth. Vegetation is fed by the showers of heaven. Water forms a part of the wheat, an indispensable portion. But that water is not over the field now. The clouds come from a distance. The process of evaporation will proceed on the surface of distant oceans, if the atmosphere is made heavy with the showers that nourish that which is to nourish you. You never partook of any food part of which had not been collected from distant lands and oceans all over the earth.
Application.— Here is a man who is acquainted with all these facts. He knows that the body which he is to have, if he lives, is now diffused and commingled through all the elements of earth, air, and water; but his belief is, that when he dies, if his body should go back into these elements, and be scattered abroad once more, God can not collect it again.
Well might heaven mourn, earth be astonished, and hell rejoice. I never could have believed this if I had not seen and heard it. That scientific man is fully aware that for the twentieth time he has had a body gathered from the corners of the world; but his prop for eternity is, God can not do this once more on the morning of the resurrection. The fabric of his everlasting expectations rests on the creed, or the hope, that the Creator, who has given this other man fifty new bodies, will fail in the fifty first effort, should he endeavor out of all these bodies to gather one new frame.
If this system or religious creed, is not the result of man’s disrelish for truth, and his love for darkness, then there is no such thing as cause and result. My dear friend, I do not envy you your tower of refuge. Be not angry with me if I prefer the Rock of Ages for my security when the world reels.
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