October 17 Daily Devotional

Build on the past; reach to the future

There is no reason that is so frequently adduced today for the rejection of the gospel as the fact that it is so old ... such an attitude is utterly unreasonable, and is nothing but the manifestation of sheer prejudice ... what is important when we are discussing truth, is not the age of truth, but its veracity.... If I say that that alone can be true which is new and modern ... then clearly my whole idea of truth is changed, and I have set up a standard which is become more important than truth itself—namely, modernity....

What is the truly scientific method of research? It is almost invariably something like this. A young man who is given a piece of scientific research work is generally placed under the care ... of an older man.... What has the old man to say to the young man? Does he tell him to start by burning and destroying every book that has ever been written on the subject in the past? No, he does the exact opposite. He advises the young man, before he makes a single experiment, to go to the library, and to read and study all the past literature on the subject, to understand it, grasp it, make full use of it.... The truly scientific method is not one which turns its back upon the past It is one which starts with the past, studies it, and builds upon it.... There is nothing which is more thoroughly unscientific than the way in which the average person today dismisses the Bible, and the whole of the Christian gospel and the Christian Church, without ever reading the Bible, without being familiar with the case for the gospel, without reading the history of the Church. Whatever else may be claimed for the method of such an individual, it stands convicted as the very antithesis of the truly scientific one.

Truth Unchanged, Unchanging, pp. 99–106