1983 November/December issue Part 4

What the Bible meant to my father.

Today I had lunch in my mother’s kitchen, and as usual she had placed a few papers at my place, things she wanted to share with me. This time it was a copy of a commencement address given by my father (Philip E. Howard, Jr., editor of Sunday School Times, a weekly magazine published in Philadelphia for more than a hundred years). This was his closing paragraph, a challenge to men graduating from Faith Theological Seminary in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1941:

“The Bible is the bread of life that always satisfies; the staff that never breaks; the sword that finds the joints in the enemy’s armor and drive’s him off; the chart in which there is no error; the compass that never deviates and always points to Christ; a telescope that gives a view of the whole course of human history; the microscope that explains the mysteries of life; the balm that soothes our pain; the medicine that cures our ills; the cordial that changes our fainting spirits; the light that shines undimmed amid the darkness of this world and points the way to our Father’s house.