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There are many flowers of time, we know, which cannot be transplanted; but "love never faileth," love is the true immortelle. And whatever changes death may bring, those who have been our nearest here shall be our nearest there. And though, as I say, we can quote no "proof-text," our faith may find its guarantee in the great word of Jesus: "If it were not so, I would have told you."
Browning's death her husband wrote these lines from Dante in her Testament: "Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is, that from this life I shall pass to another better, there, where that lady lives, of whom my soul was enamoured." Will Christ counter-sign a hope like this? I do not know any "proof-text" that can be quoted, yet it were profanation to think otherwise.
I was startled at the small number of texts, for instance, which his criticism left to support the doctrine of "the personality of the Holy Spirit." I remember saying to him in the class one day, when he had removed another prop, another proof-text: "But this is one of the two or three passages that are left to establish the doctrine." His answer was: "Is not one declaration of God enough?
And lo! this Jewish proverb is the first proof-text generally quoted for the dread doctrine that after death there is another life, but that its character is fixed forever by the state of the man at death; the dogma of everlasting conscious suffering in Hell!
When we remember that a proof-text bearing on the mighty question of the future life, words of supreme significance, uttered as they were in the last hour, and by the lips to which we listen as to none other, that this text depends for its interpretation on the position of a single comma, we can readily see what wrong may be done by the unintentional blunder of the most conscientious reporter.
At any rate after affirming the infallibility of the text Protestantism has turned back to the text for the proof of its teaching and so built up its really very great interrelated system in which, as has already been said, the power of religion over the life of its followers and the reality of religion in the experiences of its followers locked up on just such things as these: First, the experiences of conversions; second, conversion secured through the processes of Protestant indoctrination, backed up by the fervent appeal of the Protestant ministry and the pressure of Protestant Church life; and third, all this supported by an appeal to the authority of the Bible with a proof-text for every statement.
When we remember that a proof-text bearing on the mighty question of the future life, words of supreme significance, uttered as they were in the last hour, and by the lips to which we listen as to none other, that this text depends for its interpretation on the position of a single comma, we can readily see what wrong may be done by the unintentional blunder of the most conscientious reporter.
With a preconceived system of thought in their minds, drawn from the most highly evolved speculations of the New Testament, men have gone through both Testaments; and whenever they have lighted upon a sentence which seemed to coincide with this system, it has been torn bleeding from its place in a living texture of thought, impaled on some one of the "Five Points," and set up in the Theological Cabinet, duly labelled "Proof-Text of Original Sin," or "Proof Text of Future Punishment."
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