ly lives and holier aspirations, until He came
whose life was the Word of God, the Wonderful.[28]

IV.

_It is a wrong use of the Bible to consult it as a heathen oracle for the
determining of our judgments and the decision of our actions._

The pagans, even such grand old pagans as the Romans, before undertaking
any important action would solemnly consult the auspices. Men with reason
given them of God would stand anxiously around the steaming entrails of a
bird, to find out whether the fates were propitious to their undertaking.
Great generals would open or delay a campaign according to the intestinal
revelations of a goose. Intelligent people use the Bible in some such way.
When at a loss how to proceed, instead of calmly consulting their own
judgments and the judgments of their wisest friends, and then acting like
reasonable beings, men and women will open their Bibles at random, let
then-eyes rest on the first verse which arrests their attention, and
accept any possible bearing on the question in hand as the voice of God.
The journals of John Wesley and other eminent men contain examples of this
abuse of the Bible. I call it an abuse, for such action degrades the Bible
to the level of a heathen oracle. Isaiah, like all the great prophets,
habitually contrasted the true and the false communications of of the
Divine will by the test of the reasonableness of their manifestations. The
real prophet heard the voice of God, not so much in dreams and visions, in
the "peepings and chirpings" of the oracles, as in the calm and sober
working of his mind, illumined from on high. The oracle was the antithesis
of the prophet. The oracle represented unintelligent, unreasonable magical
means of getting at a desired knowledge. The prophet represented the
intelligent, reasoning, natural means of getting at that knowledge; the
lighting of that candle of the Lord which is the spirit of man. In the
profound double significance of the original, the _Logos_ is the Word or
the Reason. The Word of God which comes to man is the Divine Reason, of
which each human reason is a ray. To train and use that reason in all our
exigencies, humbly looking up to the Eternal Reason to let the light in us
be pure and clear, is the way to hear the Word of God.

To consult the reason of the holy men of old on themes whereon they were
qualified to speak is rational and right. To make of their writings a new
oracle whose mysterious meanings we ar