to Balak _the worst
text in the Bible_. But is it? Is it good, is it fair, is it honest to
strike out the real answer and to insert in its place an adopted one? I
wish to ask the lady in the Scottish church--and the people who prepared
the placard--two pertinent questions.

My _first_ question is this. Is the deleted text--the worst text in the
Bible--true? That is extremely important. _Does_ God require that man
should do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with Himself? Is it not a
fact that heaven _does_ insist on equity and charity and piety? Can
there, indeed, be any true religion without these things? Do they not
represent the irreducible minimum? If this be so, is it not as well for
that Scottish minister to preach on that terrible text, after all? And,
if this be so, would not the original answer to the question be the best
answer for the placard?

My _second_ question is this. Even from the standpoint of 'a stern lady
who is provokingly evangelical,' is it not well for the minister to
preach on that objectionable text? The lady is anxious, and commendably
anxious, that the pulpit of her church should sound forth the
magnificent verities of the Christian evangel. But will a man desire the
salvation which the New Testament reveals unless he has first recognized
his inability to meet heaven's just demands? In a notable fragment of
autobiography, Paul declares that, but for the law, he would never have
known the meaning of sin. It was when he heard how much he owed to the
divine justice that he discovered the hopelessness of his bankruptcy. It
was when he listened to the _Thou shalts_ and the _Thou shalt nots_ that
he cried, 'O wretched man that I am: who shall deliver me?' It was Sinai
that drove him to Calvary. The law, with its stern, imperative demands,
was, he says, the schoolmaster that led him to Christ. The best way of
showing that a stick is crooked is to lay a straight one beside it. This
being so, the lady in the Scottish church, and the compilers of Matthew
Arnold's placard, must consider whether, in the interests of that very
evangelism for which they are so justly jealous, they can afford to
supersede the stately passages that make men feel their desperate need
of a Saviour.

This, at any rate, is the way in which Micah used the story of the
conversation between Balak and Balaam. By means of it he sought to
reduce the people to despair. And then, when they had fallen upon their
faces and covered th