THE BIBLE: IS IT READ?

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 305, 3 February 1910, Page 5

THE BIBLE: IS IT READ?

REV. OSBORNE EXPRESSES lIIS DOUBTS. Speaking at a meeting of the British and Foreign Bible Society last nigfit, the Rev. S. S. Osborne, after detailing the work done in the local depot, asked the pertinent questions: "What becomes of the Bibles we. sell? Are they read? Are they studiedh' If they were not being so read, then he thought it better not to sell them at all. Were these volumes going to save the people, or to condemn them? They must do one .v the other? He quoted the following paragraph from the current issue of the "Daily News," published from the po 1 •of our Stratford correspondent: "Surely the writer of the Scriptures in the days i of Moses must have looked into the future 'anil fixed Taranaki in his dream of a future paradise for the children of Tsrael. I am not surprised the Maori settled here. Thoy are surely a part '/• the family of Ham—one of the lost tribes!" He had been a little tickled ,>y the par, he said, and surprised by it. too, for he understood thnt the writer was a man of considerable erudition and scholarly attainments. TTe honed, lm.vover, that none of his hearers boliewd that Ham was one of the lost tribe* of Israel. He marvelled that such a pari graph should have been passed, as li>» supposed it had, by the editor or subeditor of a newspaper in these da vs. Jt really didn't seem that the Bibie was read and studied as it should be. The Bible, he said, was an inspired book, an errand containing the Word of God, and as sueh Tt demanded more attentive study and serious consideration than was being given by the average mail of ■to-day. He doubted whether the people were treating the Bible as a direct message from the great God and our Saviour, an dhe expressed lii« opinion that he would rather stand at the bar of God as the heathen savage who had never heard the word of God than as the so-called Christian who had bean treating the Lord's Book with confemnt, refusing to- study it and to attempt to. live his life in conformity with its teaching. .. X '