R. H. Stevens' "Breeches" Bible

1895

A well preserved edition of the "Breeches" Bible, published in 1586, by Christopher Barker, printer to Queen Elizabeth, is in the possession of R. H. Stevens of 44 Clinton place, this city. The volume has come down through successive generations from his ancestor.

This celebrated translation of the Bible owes its name to the use of the word "breeches," instead of "aprons," in the seventh verse of the third chapter of the book of Genesis. The work is printed in old English black letter type and is still in its ancient binding, with brass bound corners. In addition to the Old and New Testament, with references and foot notes, it contains a calendar, printed in red and black, a complete prayer book, summary, catechism, "two right profitable concordances," dated 1578, and all the Psalms set to music.

The music for the Psalms was composed by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins. The staff notation was printed in a primitive way. The "Solefaying" system is referred to in an introduction to the Psalms as "a system intended for the more perfect reading and rendering of music." — New York Herald.


Pyrophone

A musical instrument, the pyrophone, has been invented, which extracts all the tones of the scale from gas flames.

A New Book – The Bible

There are dark and mysterious things in the Bible now, but when you begin to trust Christ your eyes will be opened, and the Bible will be a new book to you. It will become the Book of books to you. — MOODY.

While the works of once famous skeptics are left to rot on book shelves, every year sees the Bible translated into some new tongue, acquire a greater influence, and receive a wider circulation. — GUTHRIE.

I haven't found the first man who ever read the Bible from back to back carefully who remained an infidel. My friends, the Bible of our mothers and fathers is true. — MOODY.

In the waters of life, the Divine Scriptures, there are shallows and there are deeps; shallows where the lamb may wade, and deeps where the elephant may swim. — HALL.

Peruse the works of our philosophers with all their pomp of diction; how contemptible they are, compared with the Scriptures! — J. J. ROUSSEAU.

If God is a reality, and the soul is a reality, and you are an immortal being, what are you doing with your Bible shut? — HERRICK JOHNSON.

There are over two hundred passages in the Old Testament which prophesied about Christ, and every one of them has come true. — MOODY.

Time can take nothing from the Bible. Like the sun, it is the same in its light and influence to man this day which it was ages ago. — CECIL.

The Bible is the most thought-suggesting book in the world. No other deals with such grand themes. — HERRICK JOHNSON.

No crisis has ever yet appeared when Christ's Word was not ready to take the van of human movement. — KER.

The Bible is a window in this prison-world through which we may look into eternity. — TIMOTHY DWIGHT.

One gem from that ocean is worth all the pebbles from earthly streams. — ROBERT McCHEYNE.

We count the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy. — SIR ISAAC NEWTON.

Liberty without the Bible is either dead or delirious. — GUTHRIE.

The Bible

What can botanists tell you of the Lily of the Valley? You must study this book for that. What can geologists tell you of the Rock of Ages, or mere astronomers about the Bright Morning Star? In those pages we find all knowledge unto salvation; here we read of the ruin of man by nature, redemption by the blood, and regeneration by the Holy Ghost. These three things run all through and through them. — MOODY.

Now, I am no prophet nor the son of a prophet, but one thing I can predict: That every one of our new converts who goes to studying his Bible, and loves this book above every other book, is sure to hold out. The world will have no charm for him; he will get the world under his feet, because in this book he will find something better than the world can give him. — MOODY.

Give the Bible the place in your families to which it is entitled; and then, through the unsearchable riches of Christ, many a household among you may hereafter realize that most blessed consummation, and appear a whole family in Heaven. — H. A. BOARDMAN.

Few books can stand three readings. But the word of God is solid; it will stand a thousand readings, and the man who has gone over it the most frequently and the most carefully is the surest of finding new wonders there. — HAMILTON.

It is the wonderful property of the Bible, though the authorship is spread over a long list of centuries, that it never withdraws any truth once advanced, and never adds new without giving fresh force to the old. — MELVILL.

The answer to the Shastas is India; the answer to Confucianism is China; the answer to the Koran is Turkey; the answer to the Bible is the Christian civilization of Protestant Europe and America. — WENDELL PHILLIPS.

Do you know a book that you are willing to put under your head for a pillow when you lie dying? Very well; that is the book you want to study while you are living. There is but one such book in the world. — JOSEPH COOK.

Scholars and the Bible

The new movement for the study of the Bible, as the finest of English classics, introducing it into colleges and seminaries of the highest grade, is full of possibilities for Christian progress and development. The marvel is that Christian scholars should ever have permitted the heathen classics to outrank the psalms of David, the visions of Isaiah and the wonderful philosophy of the four Gospels. — FRANCES E. WILLARD.

Something That Was Not a Mistake

When the modern critics, in the church and out of it, are enlarging upon the "Mistakes of Moses" and upon the historical childishness of the Bible, they should not forget to tell us that there ran through the whole Bible period a something that was no mistake, a something whose history rises up before us as real as the earth itself and as beautiful as its four seasons, as magnificent as its June. That something was worship!

Theology came and went; the laws of Moses were passed and obeyed and repealed; fables were told and forgotten; Paul and Apollos differed; James and John were unlike but in worship all seemed to meet, and the Jacob who saw angels on the night-ladder is beautifully akin to St. John and Paul. All are wonderfully akin to our age, which sings the one hymn of the whole race, "Nearer, My God, to Thee." — SWING.

New Testament Better Than the Old

"Well, after all, is the New Testament brighter than the Old? Had not the Old Testament saints a grip of something tangible and real? Had not they an advantage that we have not? Oh, if there were only an Elijah living! If there were only an Elisha living today!"

Ah, my friends, we are living, after all, under a greater dispensation. Elisha was compelled to say: "The Lord hath hid it from me." He had to confess limitation; and, says the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, these great prophets, these great priests, these great mediators of a by-gone age, were not suffered to continue by reason of death. Out of that he works the argument which I am seeking to apply now to you — the greater blessing that has come to us in our heavenly, although invisible, Prophet and Priest, the Lord Jesus Christ.

When I read this about Elisha — "the Lord hath not told it me" — I feel inclined to say to him: "Good-bye, Elisha. Great and all as you are, you will not serve my turn. Great and all as you are, I need one, after all, from whom nothing is hid — from whom nothing can be hid. Goodbye, Elisha. You are a wonderful man. You could do wonderful things; but I can bid you good-bye without a tear. I can bear to see you disappear from the stage of time, because He has come from whom nothing is hid; who is mightier than all Elijahs and Elishas and prophets put together." "Consider the Apostle and Priest of our profession."

Think of Him who stands, it may be, unknown, unperceived today in the midst of this assembly; for mole-eyed men and women, groping down in the earth, do not see Him and do not know Him. The Lord of Life and Glory, Jesus Christ, stands with us; and When we see Him, even Elisha's glory begins to dim and fade away. — McNEILL.

The Bible a Westminster Abbey

Heroism is indeed the beautiful in the soul. It is the old image of God coming to the surface again, as when, in scraping off a dingy wall in Florence, the workmen came upon the portrait of Dante. Often there come men who throw aside the rags of self, the tattered vestments of beggars, and let out the image of God within.

Into no institution of man, into no philosophy, into no school of art, has there entered such a band of heroes as is seen filing down into this book of God. It seems perfectly wonderful that each page of the Christian's book should have been composed by one of these children of heroism. The Bible is a Westminster Abbey, where none but the great sleep. — SWING.

The Four Gospels

Why was this Gospel told four times over? A good story is none the worse, perhaps, for being twice told; but it is a great deal the worse for being three times told, while it is often utterly mangled and murdered the fourth time. You know what a risk is run by this repetition. Have not critics in all ages said: "Yet that is what spoils it; that is where we get hold of it and tear it to pieces? If it had only been told once, a very large amount of critical strife and contention would have been removed; but in telling it four times, a great many discrepancies arise, and so we are able to cast doubt upon the whole thing."

Now, I think it was told four times because it was told every time by the best story-teller that ever tried it. John wanted to write a composition upon this key-note — the essential Godhead and Divinity of that Man from Nazareth. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made ..... And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory." Not that John believed this more, and others less, but that was a side of Jesus that fascinated John. "I handled God; here is the head that leaned upon the bosom of Omnipotence." And like every true musician, he ends on the key-note with which he started: "These things are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that, believing, ye might have life through His name." — McNEILL.

The Book of Job

I propose to say something of the nature of this extraordinary book — a book of which it is to say little to call it unequaled of its kind, and which will one day, perhaps, when it is allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen towering up alone, far away above all the poetry of the world. How it found its way into the canon, smiting as it does through and through the most deeply seated Jewish prejudices, is the chief difficulty about it now; to be explained only by a traditional acceptance among the sacred books, dating back from the old times of the national greatness, when the minds of the people were hewn in a larger type than was to be found among the Pharisees of the great synagogue. But its authorship, its date, and its history are alike a mystery to us. It existed at the time when the canon was composed, and this is all that we know beyond what we can gather out of the language and contents of the poem itself. — FROUDE.

The Bible a Chart

We sail upon an ocean whose farther bounds are far beyond our sight. The Bible gives every soul a course to sail by.

Follow this course, it says, and you will reach harbor; follow any other, and you will come to shipwreck. But what that harbor is, and what possibilities of rescue at the last from shipwreck there may be, it tells not. The wise father neither promises nor threatens. He leaves His children to understand that obedience brings happiness; disobedience, suffering. God governs His children as a wise father, and to all our questionings — "What pay for doing right?" "What penalty for doing wrong?" — keeps a silence that is more eloquent than speech.

The Bible contains no clear revelation respecting the nature of either eternal life or eternal death. It discloses nothing to curiosity. We can gather from its intimations some probable conclusions; but every kind of dogmatism respecting the eternal future is unscriptural. — LYMAN ABBOTT.

Importance of Studying the Bible

One thing I have noticed in studying the Word of God, and that is, when a man is filled with the Spirit he deals largely with the Word of God; whereas, the man who is filled with his own ideas refers rarely to the Word of God.

He gets along without it, and you seldom see it mentioned in his discourses. A great many use it only as a text-book. They get their text from the Bible, and go on without any further allusion to it; they ignore it. But when a man is filled with the Word, as Stephen was, he can not help speaking Scripture. You will find that Moses was constantly repeating the commandments. You will find, too, that Joshua, when he came across the Jordan with his people, stood with them while the law of the Lord was read to them; and you will find all through Scripture the men of God dealing much with His Word. Why, you will find Christ constantly referring to them, and saying: "Thus saith the Scriptures."

Now, as old Dr. Bonar of Glasgow said: "The Lord didn't tell Joshua how to use the sword, but He told him how he should meditate on the Lord day and night, and then he would have good success." When we find a man meditating on the words of God, my friends, that man is full of boldness and is successful. And the reason why we have so little success in our teaching is because we know so little of the Word of God. You must know it and have it in your heart. — MOODY.

Morality of the Bible

The morality of the Bible goes down to every root and fiber of life. In offering a salutation, in opening a door, in uttering a wish, in writing a letter, in using titles of deference, in every possible exercise of human thought and power, the moral element is present.

Phebe was to be received by the Christians at Rome "as becometh saints." A New Testament injunction is: "Be courteous." Charity itself is courteous, graceful, savored with the highest degree of refinement, and expressive of the completest reach of dignity. We have passed from the letter to the spirit; God has put within us a clean heart, so that we are no longer true, or kind, or noble, merely because of a literal direction which is guarded by solemn penalties, but because the Holy Ghost has sanctified us, made our hearts his dwelling place. Our prayer should continually be: "Create in me a clean heart, O God." — JOSEPH PARKER.

Humaneness of the Bible

Who can undervalue a Bible which speaks in a tone like this? The proverb, "Every man must take care of himself," has no place in the Book of God.

We must take care of one another. "Whoso hath this world's goods, and seeth his brother have need and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?" We hold our knowledge for the benefit of the ignorant; we are trustees of our strength that we may save the weak from oppression.

It is a coward's trick to close the eyes whilst wrong is being done, in order that we may not see it.

Christianity means nothing if it does not mean the unity of the human race, the common rights of humanity. — JOSEPH PARKER.

One Way to Study the Bible

A favorite way to study the Bible with me is, first, to take up one expression, and run through the different places where they are found. Take the "I ams" of John: "I am the bread of life"; "I am the water of life"; "I am the way, the truth and the life"; "I am the resurrection"; "I am all, and in all."

God gives to His children a blank, and on it they can write whatever they most want, and He will fill the bill. And then the promises. A Scotchman found out thirty-one thousand distinct promises in the Word of God. There is not a despondent soul but God has a promise just to suit him. — MOODY.

Heroes of the Bible

The heroes of the Bible make up such a group of pearls as never before in history were strung upon one string. Christianity is the only queen that ever wore such a collection of gems. But she wears them right along, and has thus been unapproachable for thousands of years. And she will remain matchless in the quality of soul that lay beneath her thought.

It does not seem possible that earth can ever reproduce a St. Paul or a St. John. And now, when to these beings you have added just one more, whom I need not so much as name, a being who emptied an ocean of love and hope upon the world, and who has transformed the earth, making it roll out of darkness into light, you will conclude that here in the Christian records mighty souls have passed in a strange vision before us. Here are tremendous foundations — broad, deep, vast.

And as though man might come some day in the vanity of the subsequent centuries and mock at the impulse or character of these men, they all died heroic deaths, that the feeble critics of the nineteenth century might feel their own littleness when they should behold the thrilling ending of these lives. Paul was put to death in Rome. John was tortured and sent to die an exile. James was hurled from a battlement in Jerusalem and crushed to death. Simon Zelotes was put to death in Persia, where also Jude was tortured to the death. Matthew was slain by a mob in Abyssinia. Thomas was killed in Coromandel. Philip was hanged upon a pillar in Hierapolis. Andrew was crucified at Patraca, and James the Less in Asia.

As for the one Name towering above all, He was crucified on Mount Calvary between two thieves. Into such holy hearts did God pour the truths, the hopes, the joys and sorrows of our religion. — SWING.

Advice In His Answers

1901

The Rev. John McNeill was holding a revival service at Cardiff, Wales, and announced that he would answer any question about the Bible. At once a note was sent up to him reading as follows:

"Dear Mr. McNeill — If you are seeking to help young men, kindly tell me who was Cain's wife."

That seemed a poser, and the audience waited with intense interest, tempered with amusement, to see how the good man would extricate himself. After a pause he said:

"I love young men, especially young inquirers for light, and I would give this young man a word of advice. It is this: Don't lose your soul's salvation looking after other people's wives."

The Assurance of God's Word

Now, I find a great many people who want some evidence that they have accepted the Son of God. My friends, if you want any evidence, take God's word for it. You can't find better evidence than that. You know that when the Angel Gabriel came down and told Zachariah he should have a son he wanted a further token than the angel's word. He asked Gabriel for it, and he answered: "I am Gabriel, who stands in the presence of the Lord." He had never been doubted, and he thundered out this to Zachariah. But he wanted a further token, and Gabriel said: "You shall have a token; you shall be dumb till your son shall be given you."—MOODY.

Affliction Endears the Promises

We never prize the precious words of promise till we are placed in conditions in which their suitability and sweetness are manifested. We all of us value those golden words: "When thou walkest through the fire thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee." But few if any of us have read them with the delight of the martyr, Bilney, to whom this passage was a stay while he was in prison, awaiting his execution at the stake. His Bible, still preserved in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, has the passage marked with a pen in the margin. Perhaps, if all were known, every promise in the Bible has borne a special message to some one saint; and so the whole volume might be scored in the margin with mementos of Christian experience, every one appropriate to the very letter. — SPURGEON.

The First Church

1900

The People's Forum

Where was the first church set up? By whom, and when? — T. J. W., Glouster, O.

There seems more or less confusion on this subject. Christians in those troublous times met in small bands from house to house, and while collectively they might be called the Church of Jerusalem, or of Antioch, or the Seven Churches in Asia, it is doubtful if it is possible to give any exact information as to priority. It is clearly stated that the disciples were called Christians first at Antioch. On the other hand, if our subscriber will read St. John, the fourth chapter, he will receive some valuable information on this subject in Christ's own words to the woman of Samaria. She says: "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship." Christ replied: "The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for the Father seeketh such to worship him." This would seem to answer our correspondent. It was here at Jacob's well that Christ set up a universal church, not bounded by brick and mortar, but united by those unbreakable ties of spiritual communion with the Father of all. The members of this church were called "worshippers." Its creed was, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ." It was founded on Christ and Christ alone. Its gospel was the gospel proclaimed by Christ. Nineteen hundred years have passed away and with all the progress which has been made the words of Christ to the woman of Samaria are hardly yet comprehended.

—The Ram's Horn, March 17, 1900, p. 8.

Spiritual Stirring in South America

1900

South America is usually considered such congenial soil for the cultivation of papal institutions, that few of us realize the immense strides which the nations of the Southern continent have made in the direction of emancipation from Roman oppression. In the Argentine Republic, for instance, a recent army order releases soldiers from the obligation of attending Roman Catholic worship. The minister of education has proposed the reading of the Bible in public schools. A public educator of considerable distinction has boldly recommended attendance at Protestant services. Religious gatherings in the open air are now permitted on the principal squares of the capital. Free speech and an open Bible are not congenial to the growth of papal influence, and it is reasonable to expect a diminution of that baneful power and a growth of evangelical faith in Argentine and throughout all the South American nations where a similar spirit of liberty is encouraged.

What has been done in South America in the direction of introducing the Bible into public schools puts us to shame. We have so weakly surrendered to the demands of Romanists and Infidelity that we have practically divorced not only religion and state but religion and education. There are few places where any pretense is now made at giving religious instruction in public schools. So far has the pendulum swung in the other direction that it is almost with apology that we even read literature which contains any reference to God.

In the public schools of New York the other day a child was asked to copy a sentence from Longfellow which contained some casual mention of God and His creation. The teacher found that the child had omitted that passage and stubbornly refused to insert it on the ground that his father had instructed him never to write that name since there was no such Being and it was a falsehood or pretense to speak of His existence. It would not be strange if the teacher was called upon by the official board to send an abject letter of apology to the irate parent.

The nation will some day, and that soon, if we are not mistaken, come to a lively sense of the danger of omitting to make the essentials of morals and religion a part of youthful instruction. The Educational Union of Chicago has done a wise and patriotic thing in preparing a special book of sacred selections from the Bible wholly removed from sectarian reference. It is edited by a committee representing several denominations and has met with most hearty acceptance on all sides. It has not yet secured entrance to public schools of Chicago, but it is being used elsewhere in places where the Jesuit activity in the form of political influence is not so widespread as it is in this and other large cities.

—The Ram's Horn, March 17, 1900, p. 4.