The Biblical World Author:William Rainey Harper Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE RELIGIOUS VALUE OF THE FIGURE OF SAMSON A MEDITATION ON JUDGES 15 :13-15 PROFESSOR AMBROSE W. VERNON, PH.D Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Conn. How ... more »wide a range of sympathy is demanded from those who hold the Bible sacred! How motley a company is that of the heroes of the Lord! Saul lying naked on the earth, David dancing before the ark, Jael with the tent-pin in her hand, Gideon with the pitcher and the lamps, Jacob with his craft and guile, Abraham binding his son on the carefully heaped wood to burn him; and gladly following them, Amos the righteous, Hosea the loving, Isaiah the creator of faith, Jeremiah the martyr, Judas the Maccabee, Jesus, and Paul. Religion may be a parlor affair, indulged in by the scrupulously correct and the over-refined; it may be the attempt of bigots to force the wide- hearted into a stereotyped and artificial living; it may stunt and warp and narrow humanity. But the religion of the Bible, if it be indeed the religion of the whole Bible, is not a manufactured product and is not meant for a lady's boudoir. To appreciate it, we must live in the desert as well as in the sitting-room, with savages as well as psalmists. Our religion is not a creation of students or of merchants or of ministers or of society women or of well-bred folk; it is not intended for men divided into classes or divided into civilizations or centuries; our religion is for man wherever he is found, it is a creation of all sorts and conditions of men; it does not depend upon customs, upon passing systems of thought; the soil from which it sprang is not even a code of morality so fundamental and sublime as the Ten Commandments; religion, our Bible religion, is the result of the holiest aspirations of thousands of generations, their most splendid deeds, their strongest pas...« less