A Sea of Wisdom Without Shore
Charles H. Spurgeon
I have heard persons rail at Calvinistic doctrine, who never in
their lives have read a word that Calvin wrote. If you were to
offer them a small treatise in which that noble system of divinity
should be vindicated, they would say, "Oh! it is no doubt
so dry, I should not be able to read it." Yet these learned
gentlemen know what is inside a book without opening it! They
are like some critics of whom I have heard, who, when they meet
with a new volume, take the knife and cut the first page, smell
it, and then condemn or praise. Many there are who do just the
same with the Bible. They have heard some verses of it once or
twice, they have got some idea of it, and straightway they are
wise. They take to themselves their own degree of Doctor of Divinity,
and they have much boldness in their unbelief. Now, of any man
who should denounce the system of truth which is taught in Scripture
as ridiculous and foolish, I can only say he has never taken the
trouble to search it out for himself. Have not the mightiest intellects
confessed that the truths of this book were infinitely above their
highest flights? Even Newton, who could thread the spheres, and
map the march of what else had seemed discordant planets, even
he said there were depths here which no mortal could fathom. "O
the depths of the wisdom of God!" This has been the exclamation
of some of the most glorious minds that have ever enlightened
the world. And I can say, and I know it to be a truth, that every
man who reads the Word of God, and studies the divinity therein
revealed—if he at first thinketh that he understandeth it,
when he reads again, finds that he has only begun to know; and
when he shall have searched year after year, and have become more
than usually prescient in the study of the things of God, he will
still say, "Now I begin to know my folly, now I began to
discover that God is above me and beneath me, but I cannot grasp
him, I cannot find out the Almighty to perfection, his words,
his works, his ways, herein revealed to the sons of men, are past
finding out." You wise fellows who turn upon your heels,
and sneer at things which have astonished minds infinitely vaster
than yours, prove your own folly when you call the things of God
folly. With regard to that particular form of divine truth which
we hold so dear, currently called Calvinistic doctrines—there
is no philosophy propounded by any sage, so profound as that philosophy.
There are no truths that were ever taught so wonderful, so worthy
of the profoundest research of the most expanded minds, as those
doctrines of the eternal love, the discriminating grace, and the
infinite power of God, co-working to produce the results which
his wisdom had decreed. When every other science shall have been
exhausted, when astronomy shall have no wonders left, when geology
shall have no secrets to unravel, when natural history and philosophy
shall have given up all their infinite treasures, there will still
remain a mine without a bottom, there will still remain a sea
of wisdom without a shore, in the doctrines of the gospel of the
grace of God.