There was a lady who had a fortune, but alas, she had a craze, and the craze was the tearing up of silk. She could afford to indulge her fancy because she had a fortune, and it was a fine thing for a silk mercer. Nothing pleased this lady more than to take the most expensive silk that was ever spun on the looms of earth and rend it, and she spent all day in doing so. Piles of silk were taken to her, and she tore them, until at last she tore herself into a lunatic asylum.
It seems to me today there is a kind of theological unrest, a kind of insane dealing with the Word of God, just for the pleasure of tearing it. The Pentateuch, tear it up; the Book of Job, break it up. Bring it out in four colors, and such verses as “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” and other similar verses that tell of the hope of the church, put them into footnotes as being too pronounced to be true, too far advanced in New Testament conception to be honestly literal.
Ah, beloved, you young man, God pity you, the day of trial is at hand, and the Word of God is being wounded in the house of its friends. Inspiration is like a tenantless house a drug, on the market. It is being flung out of the conceptions of our students of theology, at the bidding of the men who ought to know better, and they are all removing, all flitting, and the generation that is to come will only see the folly of it when it is too late.
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J. Robertson