John 5:31-40 If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true.… It was a glorious hour in England when the Bible was unchained, when every man could hear and read in his own tongue, wherein he was born, the history it told of the doings of God with man. Freedom sprang to light whenever the book went, and at its touch imagination stirred and awoke to life. A fresh world of thought and feeling, the world of the Oriental heart, opened out its riches to the poet and the philosopher. New blood streamed through the veins of English literature. Not only intellectual, but political freedom deepened wherever its words were heard and its principles received. It gave new force to the struggle against tyranny. It gave fresh impulse to political progress. It made cruelty, injustice, the oppression of the weak, the corruption of the great and the small, more hateful and intolerable. It initiated reform; it was the standard of all noble revolution. Our civil freedom — accelerating as it goes — has always taken much of its impulse from the book of true liberty, true fraternity, true equality. And it is not only intellectual freedom or political freedom which have gained their living force from this book. Higher than the imagination of the poet, the intellect of the philosopher, and the patriotism of the citizen, is the immortal spirit which abides in man. The spiritual being of man lay crippled and unmoved in England, like the lame beggar of old at the beautiful gate of the temple. When the Bible was put into the hands of every man in the country, it came, like Peter and John of old, to the heart of England, and proclaimed the gospel of Christ Jesus. Straightway the soul of England received strength, and entered into the temple of spiritual freedom, walking, and leaping, and praising God. Far and wide the book penetrated into the homes of England, and the fetters which had been bound on the spirits of men mouldered into the dust from whence they came. Religious freedom was the Bible's child. (S. A. Brooke, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true. |
    |