Give up the Bible! shall we make a sacrifice like this?
Shall we forsake our earthly stay, our guide to heavenly bliss?
And pluck from life’s bewildering maze, where we but wanderers are,
The light that on our pathway shines – a never-fading star?
Give up the Bible! must we yield to erring man the right
To place himself between our gaze and Heaven’s eternal light?
To wrest from us the gift of God, our blessing and our guide,
For which the just in every age have nobly bled and died?
Give up the Bible! Hark! there comes a voice from every age,
And thunder tones are breaking now from peasant and from sage:
They bid us bind it to our hearts, and keep it as they kept,
E’en though the storms be fiercer now than those which round them swept.
Give up the Bible! can we yield our staff of pilgrimage –
The truths that in God’s living light beam on its every page –
The records of a Savior’s death – the lessons which he gave –
The only light that points the way to life beyond the grave –
Give up the Bible! force from us what other right ye may,
Bring desolation on our homes, and take the loved away –
Bring wo for joy – rend tender ties – and scatter death abroad,
But leave us in our wretchedness the sacred word of God!
Give up the Bible! God forbid that we should recreant prove
To all the sterling deeds of those whose memory we love.
They kept the Bible, and shall we be faithless to our trust,
And give our heritage away upon our fathers’ dust?
Give up the Bible! NO! and now we send abroad our cry;
The Bible! by its truths we live, and for them we will die!
We hold it now, and we would tread the paths the just have trod,
Nor sacrifice, to man and Earth, the oracles of God!
by A.D.F. Randolph
The American Protestant Magazine Vol. 1.1, June 1845, p28