THE METHODIST NEW CONNEXION MAGAZINE DECEMBER, 1851. DISCOURSES, ESSAYS, &c. THE BIBLE IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. (Continued from page 505.) THE Exhibition must now be spoken of as a thing of the past. The dazzling vision has departed, the gorgeous spectacle is beheld no more! So passeth all human glory. But though to the eye it has disappeared, it has not all vanished. If removed from its local habitation in Hyde Park, it has found a more permanent home in innumerable minds, from which it will not be so easily dislodged. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." And this magnificent object will give a life-long pleasure in the remembrance of those who have witnessed it, and a tinge of its own peculiar brightness to their thoughts and imaginings, which will not be so fading and perishable as the material splendours. It will have a permanent existence, too, in its influence on society and the world, turning the thoughts of millions into fresh channels, giving a universal impulse to manufacturing improvement and artistic taste, shedding over the nations a measure of the peaceful and uniting spirit, and giving to the world's literature a fresh spirit and colouring, both beautiful and beneficial. The Exhibition is thus a great fact in the history, the mind and the civilization of our race; and a great and splendid fact in the moral influence which it will continue to exert long after the articles of which it was originally composed have been dispersed to the ends of the earth. We cannot, however, but cast a longing, lingering look behind to the glory which has departed; and indeed our object requires us, in imagination, to revisit and review, for a moment, the vanished spectacle. We are, then, beneath that bright roof once more! And as we can now shut out from observation all but what we wish to see, we are especially struck with the fact of its being a World's Exhibition. The nations of the civilized globe here sit side by side. Almost every European state is represented, from France to Russia, and from Greece to Norway and Sweden. Persia, and India, and China, with their barbaric splendours, are there in the name of the Eastern Continent. From the other side of the globe, Australia, with the isles of the vast Pacific, have found a place in this all-embracing building. Africa, although it has been treated as if it were an outcast from the world, is here represented with our common humanity by Egypt and Tunis, by Algeria and the Cape of Good Hope. The two great divisions of the Western World fill up their fit place; and to complete the circle of the globe, there are the British possessions in America, from the West India Islands to the North Pole. Now, the Bible, appearing in the midst of this congress of the human family, and speaking in the language of all these nations, asserts itself as the religion of the world. This is the real meaning of its presence there, whatever might be the views of the Commissioners in admitting it. To view it merely as a specimen of art would be to lose sight of its highest claims. As an exhibition of languages and dialects, many of them reduced into grammatical form solely by the translators of the Bible, and as specimens of almost the only book printed in some of those languages, they are of exceeding interest and importance. As examples of mental achievement, they will bear comparison with the most brilliant portions of the Exhibition; whilst their influence in promoting the civilization of barbarous tribes and enlarging the boundaries of scientific knowledge is incalculable. But whilst worthy of its place, and a more prominent one, on these grounds, still, if nothing more were intended, it would only be one interesting object amongst thousands; and its very appearance in all the important languages of the world would be unexplained. Why has it been thus translated, but on the very ground of its being the World's Book, the religion for all nations, and tribes, and tongues? If it be said that this only shows the opinion of its translators, we reply that that opinion is sustained by the whole tenor of the Bible itself. Look into the Old Testament pages, and you find the whole world contemplated as the theatre of the religion of God. Upon all other religions and their deities it pours measureless contempt, predicts their utter abolition, and declares that the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. The Messiah it foretells as the Desire of all nations, in whom all the nations of the earth are to be blessed, before whom all kings shall fall down, and whom all nations shall serve. His kingdom is to overthrow and supersede every antagonistic system, and its universal establishment is described with a confidence equalled only by the surpassing grandeur, the inspired sublimity of the prophetic strains in which it is celebrated. The claims put forth by Christ himself accord with these predictions. He was humility embodied. In him the lust of temporal dominion had no place. The promise of all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them, kindled in his breast not a spark of worldly ambition. And yet he claims universality for the religion he came to establish. It was not to be limited to an island, an empire, a continent; "the field is the world!" "This gospel shall be preached in the whole world." He asserts a universal authority, and gives a corresponding commission: "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." His parting words, just before the cloud receives him out of the sight of his disciples, are the promise of an agency adapted to the evangelization of the world: “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you; and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth." His own qualifications, as the foundation and corner-stone of his religion, correspond with his unlimited aims. "I am the light of the world." He is declared to be" the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." His atonement for sin, that unutterable blessing which the universal conscience of man requires, he declares to be as extensive as the guilt which needs it. "God so loved the world that he gave his onlybegotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life, that the world through him might be saved." "The bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me!" And his intercessory prayer, which, as "it closes, seems to bind in one chain of glory earth and heaven, himself, his Father and his people," though offered especially for believers, reflected its rays of infinite love upon the world, "that the world may know, that the world may believe, that thou hast sent me ;" and to believe is to be saved. Thus national boundaries do not limit the kingdom which Christ came to set up; the sceptre which he claims, and which he is supremely qualified to sway, is the sceptre of that monarchy his investment with which is thus sublimely predicted by Daniel: And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages should serve him his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed." 66 In keeping with the claims of the founder of Christianity, is the manner in which it was launched into the open world. The Feast of Pentecost was, at Jerusalem, what the Exhibition has been in London, a world gathering. "Parthians, Medes and Elamites, the dwellers in Mesopotamia, in Judea and Cappadocia, in Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and in the parts of Lybia about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians," were assembled on this great occasion. And it was in Jerusalem, at that time the centre of the world, its throbbing heart, when thus crowded with this influx from distant regions, that the apostles were to open their commission. Their first audience was the representative world! And He "who touched Isaiah's hallowed lips with fire" endowed those illiterate fishermen with the wondrous power of giving utterance to the truth in the world's diversified tongues, so that the people "were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galileans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?" This peculiar miracle was doubtless wrought, not merely that the three thousand might be converted, but to give currency to the truth of the gospel in all languages, and to diffuse it with electric speed and splendour to distant regions of the earth, to flash the glorious light of Christianity upon the eye of the world. The curse of confusion and division which fell upon it at Babel was for an instant reversed. What could more strikingly than this miracle proclaim its universal design? And what could more beautifully display its universal adaptation than the conversion, under those circumstances, of the three thousand? How brilliant a seal to the world-embracing claim of the gospel? The Bible in the Crystal Palace is the long-reverberated echo of the Pentecostal miracle, making every language vocal with the music of the gospel, appropriating every tongue as the channel of its message, and still proclaiming itself as the heaven-descended remedy for the world's disease. Christianity, then, claims to be the religion of man, irrespective of clime, colour, language, or national distinction. The angel flying through the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people, is its chosen symbol. Now this claim to universality is sustained by its actual qualifications. 66 First, its truths have a world-wide comprehensiveness. God, man and the universe are revealed here as in no other religion. It concentrates all the rays of moral and spiritual truth, which are scattered singly in other systems, into one gloricus focus, and its light is unmixed with darkness. Its teachings as to the origin and destiny of the world and man have been already considered, and we have space but for little additional illustration. What other religions have exhibited the Deity in a glory so transcendant, and yet so softly shaded, as this? Where else could we have learnt that God is love? Contrast the teachings of the Bible with those of all false religions, whether extinct or existing; in the latter the deity is represented as licentious, the image of human depravity-and cruel, the image of the destroyer of man; whilst in the Bible he appears clothed in all the attributes which are truly divine, in absolute perfection; and yet, although enthroned in all the grandeur of the Godhead, manifesting himself to his creatures in all the condescension and tenderness of a Father. What other religion has told us that God is a Spirit, requiring spiritual worship-a worship which depends not for its acceptance upon any locality, and yet shown the Godhead to us embodied in our own humanity; and whilst toiling, suffering, and dying as a man, yet exhibiting the purity and power, the love and glory of a God! Man asks to see God. Show me thy glory, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." In Christ this universal craving is met, "and God is scen by mortal eye," without being shorn of his proper glory. These are plainly the representations of the Godhead which are adapted for universal man, in opposition to the feeble, fickle, lustful, horrid, senseless deities of the heathen world. Contrast the Scripture doctrine of faith in Christ as the ground of acceptance with God, with the innumerable methods which man has employed to recommend himself to the divine favour, and, as superseding those methods (penance, pilgrimage, murder of offspring, self-murder, and other miserable plans), as being simple, efficacious, and universally practicable, it must appear infinitely worthy of God to prescribe and of man universally to embrace. To the heart of man in its depravity the commands of God are grievous; but the Bible reveals a principle by which this repugnance is overcome. "Love is the fulfilling of the law." Here is revealed the golden chain which links man to his fellow-man and to God, in bonds soft as the atmosphere, strong as omnipotence, and bright as heaven. What the sublime discovery of Newton was to the physical, this disclosure is to the moral universe, revealing the grand attractive principle by which countless millions of intelligent creatures are held in their orbits of joyful obedience, around the eternal throne of God. The Sermon on the Mount "includes, unconsciously, all theology and all morals." But the field is boundless, and we must quit it by just referring to the Saviour's teaching in reference to children: Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." In what other system of religion can be found that rich and precious consolation which these words are adapted to convey to the universal parental heart? "Never man spake like this man!" never religion shed truth upon the soul like this religion: it makes the most illiterate wise unto salvation, whilst it presents themes worthy of angelic study, |