(December 29, 1809–May 19, 1898), was an author and British Prime Minister four different times during Queen Victoria’s reign. He asserted:
I have known ninety-five of the world’s great men in my time, and of these eighty-seven were followers of the Bible. The Bible is stamped with a Specialty of Origin, and an immeasurable distance separates it from all competitors.2415
Most men at the head of great movements are Christian men. During the many years in the Cabinet I was brought in contact with some sixty master minds, and not more than perhaps three or four of whom were in sympathy with the skeptical movements of the day.2416
In his book, The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, the Right Honorable W.E. Gladstone wrote:
They lead upward and onwards to the idea that the Scriptures are well called Holy Scriptures;
and that, though assailed by camp, by battery, and by mine, they are, nevertheless, an house built upon a rock, and that rock impregnable;
that the weapon of offense which shall impair their efficiency for aiding in the redemption of mankind has not yet been forged;
that the Sacred Canon, which it took (perhaps) two thousand years from the accumulations of Moses down to the acceptance of the Apocalypse to construct, is like to wear out the storms and the sunshine of the world, and all the wayward aberrations of humanity, not merely for a term as long, but until time shall be no more.2417
The Christian faith and the Holy Scriptures arm us with the means of neutralizing and repelling the assaults of evil in and from ourselves. Mist may rest upon the surrounding landscape, but our own path is visible from hour to hour, from day to day.
“I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me."
Our Saviour astonished the people because, instead of being lost in the mazes of arbitrary and vicious excrescences that darkened the face of religion, He taught them “with authority,” and “not as the scribes.”
If God has given us a revelation of His will, whether in the laws of our nature, or in the kingdom of grace, that revelation not only illuminates, but binds. Like the credentials of an earthly ambassador, it is just and necessary that the credentials of that revelation should be tested.
But if it be found genuine, if we have proofs of its being genuine, equal to those of which, in ordinary concerns of life, reason acknowledges the obligatory character, then we find ourselves to be not independent beings, engaged in an optional inquiry, but the servants of a Master, the pupils of a Teacher, the children of a Father, and each of us already bound with the bonds which those relations imply.2418