The Christian world is agreed, that of all the past has bequeathed to the present, and of all the present is privileged to bestow upon the future, the Bible is preeminent, holding, as it ever has and does, priceless blessings for the generations of mankind following each other adown the ages,—a veritable storehouse of the most vital truths touching their well-being.
While it might be difficult, in view of the differing degrees of progress from sense to Soul, to say which of the mighty statements of truth in the Bible is most pregnant with immediate helpfulness to the individual, yet there is one which, in its rebuke to mortal procrastination, in its sharp reproof to the persistence of error, speaks to one and all when it says, in the prophetic words of Isaiah, "Unto me every knee shall bow." Here is announced with majestic presence, as it were, the deific prerogative of the Supreme Ruler of the universe, and with sufficient emphasis, it would seem, to make plain the futility of longer deferring the turning of one's steps Godward, the folly of further postponing the conquest of everything unlike God, good, if we would escape present and future punishment for sin. If every knee must, sooner or later, bow before the universal sovereignty of God, before the universality and permanence of good; if God has this absolute claim of allegiance upon us, which no one can really doubt,—then it is both a present and continuing claim, nothing less than a law of our being, escape from which, or from the penalty, here and now, of its evasion, is obviously impossible.
Yet, in the face of the certainty of error's chastisement, mortals but slowly give up its beaten path, and tardily respond to the demand of Truth's all-presence and sovereignty. Defer it, however, as we may, postponement will never alter the fact that the one way of escape from sin's distressful conditions is in bowing the knee of transgression and coming under the rule of Him "whose right it is" to reign; in coming under God's government, the reign of good.
