" It is also most efficient
in freeing mind and heart from those erroneous views that are
opposed to its teachings; and actual trial developed a richness and
fulness of practical adaptation to the work that astonished even
those who already knew something of its value. Its precepts and
instructions were also clothed with power: requirements and counsels
which from the missionary had only awakened opposition, coming from
the Bible were received as messages from heaven. Said a Nestorian to
a missionary who had been speaking to him the words of God, "His
words grew very beautiful while we were talking." In reference to
every suspicious novelty or distasteful duty, the Bible was the
ultimate appeal. The missionary could say to them as Paul did to an
early church, "When ye received the word of God, which ye heard of
us, ye received it not as the word of man, but, as it is in truth,
the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that
believe." Besides, those thus educated were to teach others, and
needed to be thoroughly furnished from the divine oracles with the
truths they were to impart. It is not strange, then, that in the
Seminary the Bible was studied both doctrinally and historically;
that they had a system of theology and tables of Scripture
chronology; that biblical biography and geography were regular
studies; that different portions of Scripture occupied different
years; and that, instead of Butler's Analogy and Wayland's Moral
Science, were the Epistles to the Romans and Hebrews studied with
all the accurate analysis and thoroughness bestowed elsewhere upon
the classics.
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