I want a certainty of what God is, to answer the need of my soul. I know what He is by the revelation of Himself in Christ. There I find perfect love to me as a poor sinner, and thus have the possibility of truthfulness and honesty in a sin-conscious soul. There I find a love which is consistent with God's maintaining that absolute righteousness and hatred of sin which my soul has learned He ought, and which my heart (now renewed in knowledge) desires Him, to maintain. In Christ I am (I will not say restored to Him, but) brought to know Him in perfect peace, as nothing else could make me know Him, love Him, walk with Him, as a known God who loves me.
Would I exchange this for the rationalist's [modernist's] aspirations and thoughts of God? Can he give me this? Doubts he can give me (this is easy work), difficulties in Scripture doubtless, uncertainty as to everything I supposed to be truth. Philosophers think they can prove that what has made my heart divinely happy, has made me bless God, because of a goodness I never dreamed of till I knew it in Him; that what has consecrated the lives and hearts of thousands, and changed, where the heart was not consecrated, the whole condition of the world—they think, I say, that all this has been done by a fable, an imposture. Poor human nature!
But perhaps the age is enlightened. Be it so, though in philosophy and moral apprehension it may perhaps be doubted. Millions in previous ages have believed in a revelation—in the revelation which the infidel rejects—enlightened men too, philosophers even.
But why am I to think we are arrived, just in our day, at the perfection of the human mind, so that we are exactly right now? I am told that they were superstitious ages. The age in which Christianity was introduced, or made progress among the Gentiles, was very far otherwise. Witness the various forms of mind, the Philos, the Celsuses, the Porphyries, the Alexandrian School of the Neo-Platonists, the Lucian, and others, whose reputation is publicly known, to say nothing of earlier Grecian philosophy which led the way. But suppose it was superstition; what does that prove but this, that the theory that man's mind is the measure of revelation of what God ought to be, makes truth and error, and the very character which God ought to have, depend on the age a man lives in.
But men, and men of able intellectual minds, have received the revelation which the infidel rejects as being unworthy of God. They have thought it very worthy of Him—have adored the God revealed there as alone worthy of adoration, as supremely worthy. I am not now seeking to prove that they were right. But the fact cannot be denied. They had minds enlarged by stores of knowledge; they were of a philosophical turn of thought; they had considered all, or almost all, the objections of modern infidelity; and in spite of all, they have bowed before the God of the Bible as supremely good, supremely just and wise. The infidel, applying his mind as the measure of it, thinks it all utterly unworthy of the God which his mind has pictured itself-for what other has he?