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Title: The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible
Author: R. Heber Newton
Release Date: May 6, 2004 [EBook #12282]
Language: English
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The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible
By
R. Heber Newton.
"In it _is contained_ God's true Word."--_Homily on the Holy
Scriptures._
New York:
John W. Lovell Company,
14 & 16 Vesey Street.
Works by the Same Author.
The Morals. 1. Vol. 12mo, cloth, gilt, $1.00
Studies of Jesus. 1 vol. 12mo, cloth, gilt, 1.00
Womanhood. 1 vol. 12mo, cloth, gilt, 1.25
The above all will be sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of price, by
John W. Lovell Co.
14 and 16 Vesey St., New York.
Copyright, 1883
Contents.
I. The Unreal Bible.
II. The Real Bible.
III. The Wrong Uses of the Bible.
IV. The Wrong Uses of the Bible.
V. The Right Critical Use of the Bible.
VI. The Right Historical Use of the Bible.
VII. The Right Ethical and Spiritual Use of the Bible.
"The Gospel doth not so much consist _in verbis_ as _in virtute_."
_John Smith_.
"Liberty in prophesying, without prescribing authoritatively to other
men's consciences, and becoming lords and masters of their faith--a
necessity derived from the consideration of the difficulty of Scripture
in questions controverted, and the uncertainty of any internal medium
of interpretation."
_Jeremy Taylor_.
"To those who follow their reason in the interpretation of the
Scriptures, God will either give his grace for assistance to find the
truth, or His pardon if they miss it."
_Lord Falkland_.
[Rational Theology in England in the Seventeenth Century; John Tulloch,
D.D., II: 181, I:398, I:160]
Preface.
It has been my custom for several years to give occasionally a series of
sermons, having in view some systematic instruction of the people
committed to my care. Such a series of sermons on the Bible had been for
some time in my mind. With the recurrence of Bible-Sunday in our Church
year, this thought crystallized in the outline of a course that should
present the nature and uses of the Bible, both negatively and positively,
in a manner that should be at once reverent and rational. In the course of
this parochial ministration public attention was called to it in a way
that has rendered a complete report of my words desirable.
The views set forth in these sermons were not hastily reached or lightly
accepted. They represent a growth of years. Their essential thought was
stated in a sermon that was preached and published eight years ago. My
positions concerning certain books, etc., have been taken in deference to
what seems to me the weight of judgment among the master critics. They are
open to correction, as the young science of Biblical criticism gains new
light. The general view of the Bible herein set forth rests upon the
conclusions of no new criticism. In varying forms, it has been that of an
historical school of thought in the English Church and in its American
daughter. It is a view that has been recognized as a legitimate child of
the mother Church; and that has been given the freedom of our own
homestead, in the undogmatic language of the sixth of the Articles of
Religion of the Protestant Episcopal Church. It is distinctly enunciated
in the first sentence of the first sermon in the Book of Homilies, set
forth officially for the instruction of the people in both of these
Churches.
"Unto a Christian man there can be nothing more necessary or profitable
than the knowledge of holy scripture, forasmuch as _in it is contained
God's true word_, setting forth his glory, and also man's duty."
The whole controversy in Protestantism over the Bible may be summed into
the question whether the Bible _is_ God's word or _contains_ God's word.
On this question I stand with the Book of Homilies.
These sermons were meant for that large and rapidly growing body of men
who can no longer hold the traditional view of the Bible, but who yet
realize that within this view there is a real and profound truth; a truth
which we all need, if haply we can get it out from its archaic form
without destroying its life, and can clothe it anew in a shape that we can
intelligently grasp and sincerely hold. To such alone would I speak in
these pages, to help them hold the substance of their fathers' faith.
R. Heber Newton.
All Souls' Church, _March_ 1, 1883.
I.
The Unreal Bible.
"The Bible, and the reading of the Bible as an instrument of
instruction, may be said to have been begun on the sunrise of that day
when Ezra unrolled the parchment scroll of the Law. It was a new
thought that the Divine Will could be communicated by a dead literature
as well as by a living voice. In the impassioned welcome with which
this thought was received lay the germs of all the good and evil which
were afterwards to be developed out of it: on the one side, the
possibility of appeal in each successive age to the primitive, undying
document that should rectify the fluctuations of false tradition and
fleeting opinion; on the other hand, the temptation to pay to the
letter of the sacred book a worship as idolatrous and as profoundly
opposed to its spirit as once had been the veneration paid to the
sacred trees or the sacred stones of the consecrated groves or hills."
Dean Stanley: "History of the Jewish Church," iii. 158.
I.
The Unreal Bible
"Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerning
those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as they
delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eye-witnesses and
ministers of the word; it seemed good to me also, having traced the
course of all things accurately from the first, to write unto thee in
order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty
concerning the things which thou wast taught by word of mouth."--Luke
i. 1-4.
This day, in our Church year, calls us to think upon the influence of the
Bible on the advance of man into the Kingdom of God.[1]
Since the growth of written language great books have been the
well-springs of thought and feeling for mankind, from which successive
generations have drawn the water of life. Since the introduction of the
printing-press books have been, beyond all other agencies, the educators
of men. And of all books of which we have any knowledge, those together
constituting the Bible form incomparably the most potent factors in the
moral and religious progress of the western world; and as all other
progress is fed from moral and religious forces, I may add, in the
general advance of Christian civilization.
From these books the lisping lips of children have learned the tales of
beautiful goodness which have nourished all noble aspirations. Over these
charming stories of Hebrew heroism and holiness the imagination has caught
sight of the infinite mysteries amid which we walk on earth. Their touch
has quickened conscience into life. Through their voices the whispers of
the Eternal Power have thrilled the soul of youth, and men have learned to
worship, trust, and love the Father-God. These books have preserved for us
the story of the Life which earth could least afford to lose, the image of
the Man who, were his memory dropped from out our lives--our religion,
morals, philanthropy, laws and institutions would lose their highest
force. These books have taught statesmen the principles of government, and
students of social science the cardinal laws of civilization. The fairest
essays for a true social order which Europe and America have known have
laid their foundations on these books. They have fed art with its highest
visions, and have touched the lips of poesy that they have opened into
song. They have voiced the worship of Christendom for centuries, and have
cleared above progressive civilization the commanding ideals of Liberty,
Justice, Brotherhood. Men and women during fifty generations have heard
through these books the words proceeding from out the mouth of God, on
which they have lived. Amid the darkness of earth, the light which has
enabled our fathers to walk upright, strong for duty, panoplied against
temptation, patient in suffering, resigned in affliction, meeting even
death with no treacherous tremors, has shone from these pages. In their
words young men and maidens have plighted troth each to the other, fathers
and mothers have named their little ones, and by those children have been
laid away in the earth in hope of eternal life. All that is sweetest,
purest, finest, noblest in personal, domestic, social and civic life, has
been fed perennially from these books. The Bible is woven into our very
being. To tear it from our lives would be to unravel the fair tapestry of
civilization--to run out its golden threads and crumble its beautiful
pictures into chaos.
* * * * *
Yet we are threatened to-day with no less a loss than this. The Bible is
certainly not read as of old. It is not merely the distraction of our
busier lives, or the multiplicity of books upon our shelves, that turns
men and women away from these classics of our fathers. Men and women no
longer regard these books as did their fathers. They can no longer use
them as their parents did; they see no other way to use them, and so they
leave them unopened on their tables.
An intelligent lady said to me some time since: "My children don't know
anything about the Bible. I cannot read it to them, for I do not know what
to say when they ask me questions. I no longer believe as I was taught
about it: what, then, can I teach them?"
A confession which, if all parents were as frank, would have to be made in
many other households. Where it is still used in home readings, it is, in
hosts of houses, with the pain which mothers know when their children's
honest questions cannot be as honestly answered.
Such a state of things is sad and dangerous. Unless some way be found to
read these books without equivocation, they will gradually cease to be
used in home instruction, and the coming generations will grow up without
their holy influence. This state of things ought not to have been brought
upon us. The reverent reading of the Bible alone would never have led us
into such straits. It is the old story of all human reverence. That which
we revere, we exaggerate. Glamor gathers around it. The symbol is
identified with the spiritual reality. The image becomes an idol. The
wonderful thing becomes a fetish. So we end in an irrational reverence of
that which is worthy of a real and rational reverence. Then we have a
superstition. Superstition always results in destroying the rightful
belief of which it is the exaggeration and distortion.
This is the common story of superstition, from the totemism of savage
tribes and the image-worship of semi-civilized peoples on to the
heathenism of the Mass. Men who felt the reality of a mystic communion
with Christ, of which the Supper of the Lord was the symbol,--who felt the
strengthening of their characters as their thoughts fed upon the words and
life of Jesus,--naturally came to speak of the sacrament in terms of awe,
which magnified the mystery, until at last they bowed down before the
veritable body and blood of Christ, and trembled with fear as the tinkling
of the silver bell announced that the priest was bringing God down into a
wafer! They had really heard God speaking to them through the sacrament;
and this never could have done them harm. But when they tried to express
what they felt, they exaggerated and distorted the simple symbol of the
Infinite Presence, identified it with the spiritual reality, and set up a
Christian idol, a civilized fetish, which has done incalculable harm to
men. The spiritual truth became an intellectual lie, and in every Catholic
country superstition has eaten out faith, and reason refuses to reverence
the sacrament.
The Bible has repeated this common story. The spiritual influence felt
forth-flowing from it, the voice of God heard speaking through it, drew
man's natural reverence to it. In trying to express the reasons for this
reverence he has over-stated and mis-stated the nature of these books.
The symbol has been identified with the reality. The Bible has become an
idol, a fetish.
Bibliolatry, the worship of the Bible, is responsible for the lack of the
reasonable reverence these sacred writings merit. This reasonable
reverence can be recovered only by frankly putting away the unreasonable
reverence. We must exorcise a superstition to save a faith. We must part
with the unreal Bible if we would hold the real Bible. Iconoclasm is not
pleasant to any but the callow youth. It may be none the less needful; and
then the sober man must not shrink from shivering the most sacred shrine.
As runs the Hindu thought, the Destroyer is one of the forms of the Divine
Power. God is continually destroying worlds and creeds alike; but in order
to rebuild.
"Whose voice then shook the earth: but now he hath promised, saying,
yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven. And this
word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are
shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which
cannot be shaken may remain."
According to its root-meaning, "learning" is a "shaking." Every new
learning shakes society, now as in the days past. As the writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews saw, it is God who is shaking society in every such
new learning, to the end that "those things which cannot be shaken may
remain." Man need not fear to follow in the steps of God.
There is danger now in shaking men's faiths. There is danger, too, in
leaving men's faith unshaken--unless the Divine process of progress is
wrong. In the stress and storm of the tossing sea, Faith may go down in
the waters. It may also die of dry rot by the old wharves. There is danger
in rash utterance, but there is at least equal danger in timid silence.
The time never comes when a reconstruction does not imperil some great
interest. None the less the reconstruction must go on. Delay in pulling
down may make building up of the old structure impossible.
As the story of past civilizations sadly shows, the gulf between the
popular superstitions and the thoughts of scholars may widen until no
bridge can span it, and religion perishes in it. It seems to me that the
time has come when the pulpit must keep no longer silence. Its silence
will not seal the lips of other teachers. Books and papers are everywhere
forcing the issue upon our generation. Men's minds are torn asunder, their
souls are in the strife. It behoves the Churches to remember that great
word of Luther:
"It is never safe to do anything against the truth!"
When the venerable cathedral, in which our forefathers sought God and
found Him, grows dangerously unsound; when its columns have crumbled and
its arches have sprung, and its stout oaken timbers have dried into dust;
the guardians of the sacred pile must plan its restoration as best they
can. They must shore up its treacherous walls, take out its dead
materials, carve new heads for the saints in the niches of the doors,
build up the edifice anew, following faithfully as may be the old lines,
and striving for the old spirit. When the scaffolding comes down, we may
feel a shock of pain at the strange raw look of that which Time had
stained with sacredness. But the minster has been saved for our children;
and, when they shall gather within its historic walls, those walls will
have grown venerable again with age, and they will not feel the loss which
we have suffered, while as of old, they, too, shall hear the voice of God
and find His Holy Presence.
I propose to consider with you, carefully but frankly, the real nature and
the true uses of the Bible.
* * * * *
Let us examine to-day the traditional view of the Bible.
It is not easy to define the popular theory of the Bible. Like its kindred
theory of Papal Infallibility, it is a true chameleon, changing constantly
in different minds, always denying the absurdity of which it is made the
synonym, ever qualifying itself safely, yet never ceasing to take on a
vaguely miraculous character. Various theories are given in the books in
which theological students are mis-educated, all of which unite in
claiming that which they cannot agree in defining. The Westminster
Confession of Faith may be taken as the dogmatic petrifaction of the
notion which lies, more or less undeveloped and still living, in the other
Protestant Confessions.
This Confession opens with a chapter "Of the Holy Scriptures," which
affirms in this wise:
"The light of nature and the works of creation and Providence .... are
not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and of His will, which is
necessary to salvation.... The authority of the Holy Scripture....
dependeth.... wholly upon God, the Author thereof; and therefore it is
to be received, because it is the Word of God....
"....and the entire perfection thereof are arguments whereby it doth
abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God, and establish our
full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine
authority thereof.
"The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own
glory, man's salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down
in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from
Scripture, unto which nothing at any time is to be added by new
revelations of the Spirit.
"Being immediately inspired by God, and by His singular care and
providence kept pure in all ages.... in all controversies of religion
the Church is finally to appeal unto them."
The notion which the learned divines set forth so elaborately at
Westminster, art has expressed in forms much better "understanded of the
people." Mediæval illuminations picture the evangelists copying their
gospels from heavenly books which angels hold open above them.
A book let down out of the skies, immaculate, infallible, oracular--this
is the traditional view of the Bible.
Let me lay before you some of the many reasons why this theory of the
Bible is not to be received by us.
I.
_This theory has no sufficient sanction by the Church._
The Catholic or OEcumenical Creeds make no affirmation whatever concerning
the Bible. This theory is found alone, in formal official statement, in
the creeds of minor authority, the utterances of councils of particular
churches; as, for example, in the Tridentine Decrees and the Protestant
Confessions of Faith. There is no unanimity of statement among these
several Confessions. Some of the Protestant Confessions of the Reformation
era state this theory moderately. Some of them hold it implicitly, without
exact definition. One at least is wholly silent upon the subject. The
later creeds of Protestantism vary even more than the Reformation symbols.
Such important Churches as the Church of England, our own Protestant
Episcopal Church, and the Methodist Church have nothing whatever of this
theory in their official utterances. These three Churches unite in this
simple, practical, undogmatic statement (the sixth of the thirty-nine
articles):
"Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that
whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be
required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the
faith or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation."
II.
_The Bible nowhere makes any such claim of infallibility for itself._
The prophets did indeed use the habitual formula, "Thus saith the Lord."
So did the false prophets, as well as the true. It was the common formula
of prophetism, indeed, of the Easterns generally when delivering
themselves of messages that burned in their souls. The eastern mind
assigns directly to God actions and influences which we Westerns assign to
secondary causes. We are scientific, they are poetic. We reach truth by
reasonings, they by intuitions. No one can follow the processes of the
intuitions. To the mystic mind they are immediate illuminations from on
high, inspirations of the Spirit of God. In the realm of law we trace the
action of natural forces, and are apt to think there is nothing more. In
the realm of the unknown we feel the supernatural, and are apt to think it
all in all.
The great prophets themselves did not accept this language of other
prophets unquestioningly. They denied the claim unhesitatingly when
satisfied that the messages were not from on high. They distinguished
between those who came in the name of the Lord; and so must we. They tried
the spirits whether they were of God; bidding us therefore do the same.
Tried by the severest scrutiny of successive centuries, of different
races, the great prophets prove to have spoken truly when they declared,
of their ethical and spiritual messages, "Thus saith the Lord." If ever
messages from on high have come to men, if ever the Spirit of God has
spoken in the spirit of man, it was in the minds of these "men of the
spirit." But they made no claim to infallibility, or if they did, took
pains to disprove it. Every prophet who goes beyond ethical and religious
instruction, and ventures into predictions, makes mistakes, and leaves his
errors recorded for our warning. We must try even the inspired men, and
when, overstepping their limitations, they err, we must say, Thus saith
Isaiah, Thus saith Jeremiah.
No biblical writer shows any consciousness of such supernatural influences
upon him in his work as insured its infallibility. Nearly all these
authors begin and end their books without any reference to themselves or
their work. The writer of the Gospel according to Luke thus prefaces his
book:
"Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerning
those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as they
delivered them unto us which from the beginning were eye-witnesses and
ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having traced the
course of all things accurately from the first, to write unto thee in
order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty
concerning the things which thou wast taught by word of mouth."
This is the only personal preface to any of the Gospels, and it is
thoroughly human. There is not even such an invocation as introduces
Milton's great poem.
These writers at times, after the fashion of the older prophets, affirm
that they speak with divine authority; but they also as expressly disclaim
such authority in other places. St. Paul is sure, in one matter referred
to him, of the mind of God, and writes:
"Unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord," etc.[2]
Immediately after he writes, as having no such assurance:
"To the rest speak I, not the Lord."[3]
Later on in the same letter he is so uncertain as to add to his judgment:
"And I think also that I have the spirit of God."[4]
Again, in the same connection, being conscious of no divine authorization,
he gives his own opinion as such:
"Now, concerning virgins I have no commandment of the Lord, but I give
my judgment."[5]
Eighteen hundred years after he wrote, men insist that they know more
about St. Paul's inspirations than he did himself. Against his modest,
cautious discriminations, our doctors set up their theory of the Bible,
clothe all his utterances with the divine authority, and honor him with an
infallibility which he explicitly disclaims.
The New Testament writers use language which seems, to our
theory-spectacled eyes, to ascribe an infallible inspiration to the Old
Testament books. But the words have no such weight. The Epistle to the
Hebrews opens with the words:
"God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto
the fathers by the prophets," etc.[6]
The author of the Second Epistle of Peter writes:
"For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man; but holy men
of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost."[7]
Such passages as these command the instant assent of all who reverence an
ethical and spiritual inspiration in the prophets, and a real revelation
through them, and they command no other belief.
In the first Epistle General of Peter we read:
"Concerning which salvation the prophets sought and searched diligently
who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you; searching what
time or what manner of time the spirit of Christ which was in them did
point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and
the glories that should follow them."[8]
Any idea of a progressive revelation implies that there was a light
coming on into the world, which to them of olden time showed dimly a
mystery into which they strove to look further. A vision of ideal goodness
rose before them. It rested above the ideal Israel, chosen and called of
God for a holy work. It shadowed that righteous servant of God with
sorrow. The lot of the elect one was to be suffering. Thus the world was
to be saved to God. This the great Prophet of the Exile saw. Christ's
coming filled out this mystic vision, and it is fairly translated into the
terms the Epistle uses.
The prophets were, in such lofty visionings, under an influence beyond
their consciousness.
"The passive master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o'er him planned."
All other passages claimed in support of the notion of an infallible Bible
fail on the witness-stand.
There is positively nothing in the New Testament which lends a reasonable
countenance to such an amazing theory.
Even the stock argument, used when all other quotations failed, disappears
in the honesty of the Revised New Testament. People who know no Greek see
now that Paul did not write "All Scripture is given by inspiration of
God"; but
"Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching for
reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness."[9]
This is precisely the claim to be made for the Bible, as against the
exaggerated notions cherished about it. It is good for--all forms of
character-building. Its inspiration is ethical and spiritual. The test of
the inspiration of any writing in it is its efficacy to inspire life with
goodness.
III.
_The Bible carries the refutation of this claim upon the face of its
writings._
They thrust upon the attention of all who are not blind the traces of
human imperfection, of a kind and an extent which precludes any notion of
a clean copy of a perfect script let down from the skies.
The Old Testament historians contradict each other in facts and figures,
tell the same story in different ways, locate the same incident at
different periods, ascribe the same deeds to different men, quote
statistics which are plainly exaggerated, mistake poetic legend for sober
prose, report the marvellous tales of tradition as literal history, and
give us statements which cannot be read as scientific facts without
denying our latest and most authoritative knowledge. I shall not enumerate
these "mistakes of Moses," and of others. That is an ungracious task for
which I have no heart. It may be needful to remind the children of a
larger growth, who persist in believing a saintly mother's beliefs to be
final authority in their studies, that she is not infallible. But one does
not care to catalogue her mistakes and taunt her with them.
That which carries no such reproach in it, but is, when rightly read, an
honor to the Bible, may be pointed out, as the Biblical writers, indeed,
do for us themselves.
The marks of a patient and noble literary workmanship are in every
writing.
We can see this as our fathers could not see it, because the glasses
through which to read literature critically have been ground within our
century. Literary criticism is the study of literature by means of a
microscopic knowledge of the language in which a book is written, of its
growth from various roots, of its stages of development and the factors
influencing them, of its condition in the period of this particular
composition, of the writer's idiosyncrasies of thought and style in his
ripening periods, of the general history and literature of his race, and
of the special characteristics of his age and of his contemporary writers.
Every educated person knows something of the working of this criticism on
other books. You have read your Shakespeare with intelligence, and have
felt many misgivings as to the genuineness of a few plays, and of passages
in many plays. The brutalities and beastlinesses of Titus Andronicus
seemed impossible to the author of "The Tempest" and the "Midsummer
Night's Dream." The historic plays seemed to you often "padded." But there
was nothing more than guess-work in your conclusions, and, you suspected,
in the more pretentious opinions of others. You take up, however, the
lectures of Hudson or the charming study of Dowden, and you find that
criticism is becoming, not merely an art, depending on certain instincts
and tastes, but a science, building slowly a well-settled body of laws and
rules, and shaping already a well defined consensus of judgment. The
growth of the English language and literature, the characteristics of
society, of language and of literature in the Elizabethan era, the idioms
of Shakespeare's contemporaries, the manner of Shakespeare himself, in his
different periods, have all been so minutely studied as to form a distinct
specialty in knowledge. The Shakespearian scholar is a well differentiated
species of the genus scholar, and speaks with a substantial authority upon
what is now a real science. You can follow this teacher into Shakespeare's
work-shop, watch the building of his plays, distinguish the hands which
toiled over them and mark their journeyman's work, till quite sure where
the Master's own inimitable touch caressed them into noble form, and in
what period of his life he thus wrought. There is a new revelation of
Shakespeare to our age.
This criticism turned upon the great books of the ancients. Niebuhr led
the way in reconstructing the early history of the Romans. Dr. Arnold
predicted that a Niebuhr of Jewish literature would arise. He came duly.
His name was Ewald. Successors have followed in abundance. The principles
and processes of literary criticism were applied to the Hebrew writings.
In the present immature stage of this science of Biblical Criticism there
are, of course, plenty of speculations and guesses, of hasty
generalizations and crude opinions. Time will correct these. Meanwhile
there is already so much that may claim to be well established as to
constitute a new knowledge of these old books.
The historical books are seen to be the work of many hands in many ages.
They gather up the popular traditions of the race, carry down on their
slow streams fragments from such far back ages that we have almost lost
the clue to their story--glacial boulders that now lie strangely out of
place in the rich fields of later eras; songs of rude periods, nature
myths, legends of semi-fabulous heroes, folk lore of the tribes, scraps
from long-forgotten books, entries from ancient annals, pages torn from
the histories of other peoples to fill out the story; the whole worked
over many times by many hands in many generations.
Just as Thirlwall and Grote give us studies of Grecian history from the
standpoint of Monarchism and Republicanism, so in the Kings and
Chronicles we have studies of Hebrew history from a prophetic and priestly
point of view.
The legislation of the Pentateuch, supposed formerly to have been drawn up
by Moses, appears, as it now stands, to be a codification, made as late as
the period of the Babylonian exile, under the influence of the
hierarchical and ritual system, then crystallizing into the form familiar
to us all. This codification, like its famous parallel in Roman history,
the code of Justinian, collated the decisions and decrees already in
existence from various periods, and reissued them as one body of laws.
It brings together the "Judgments" of early days upon questions of civil
life--the decisions of tribal heads concerning the rights of person and
property, the counterparts of the "Dooms" of English history; the moral
rules of the local priests in a simple state of society; and the ritual
and discipline of a late ecclesiastical age. The compilation is not very
skilfully done, so that we pass from the minutiæ of a priest's _vade
mecum_ in a highly developed hierarchical period to the civil statutes of
a rude patriarchal society, whose very crimes are archaic.
The prophecies break up into fragmentary collections, in which the words
of many different and obscure prophets are grouped under the name of some
great prophet, as was quite natural in an uncritical age; the whole mass
being arranged with little chronological order.
The Psalter separates into several books of sacred song, dating from
different periods. They repeat the same Psalm, and divide one Psalm into
two and join two into one, on principles by no means apparent to us. Some
of these Psalms are of a highly artificial and mechanical structure. There
are acrostics, in which the couplets begin with the successive letters of
the Hebrew alphabet; double acrostics, and other refinements of literary
ingenuity; the sure signs of a flamboyant and decadent literature.
The other writings of the Old Testament and the books of the New Testament
have yielded similar general results to the touchstone of criticism;
concerning which it is needless to speak further.
Our critical glasses bring out, clear and strong, the fact of a human,
literary craft in these books, the signs on every hand of the labor of
brain and skill of pen through which the literature of a venerable nation,
and of the infant church born of it, took slow shape into our Bible. Such
a work needs must have in it the traces of human imperfection; and these
limitations of thought and knowledge, these mistakes of fallible writers,
are to be seen by every one, save those who will not see.
It is impossible after such a study to rest in the illusion of an
infallible book, of which, as a book, God can be said to be the "author."
IV.
_The growth of this theory is plain to us, and discredits its authority._
The explanation that Max Müller makes of the growth of superstitious
reverence for ancient traditions in Hindu history is suggestive on this
point.
"In an age when there was nothing corresponding to what we call
literature, every saying, every proverb, every story handed down from
father to son received very soon a kind of hallowed character. They became
sacred heir-looms, sacred because they came from an unknown source, from a
distant age. There was a stage in the development of human thought when
the distance that separated the living generation from their grandfathers
or great-grandfathers was as yet the nearest approach to a conception of
eternity, and when the name of grandfather and great-grandfather seemed
the nearest expression of God. Hence what had been said by these half
human, half divine ancestors, if it was preserved at all, was soon looked
upon as a more than human utterance. Some of these ancient sayings were
preserved because they were so true and so striking that they could not be
forgotten. They contained eternal truths, expressed for the first time in
human language. Of such oracles of truth it was said in India that they
had been heard, Sruta, and from it arose the word Sruti, the recognized
term for divine revelation in Sanskrit."[10]
How, in later times, the great writings of the Hebrews came to acquire the
same exaggerated sacredness, we can also observe. We read in one of the
historical books of the Jews that "Nehemiah founded a library and gathered
together the writings concerning the Kings, and of the prophets, and the
(songs) of David and epistles of Kings concerning temple gifts."[11] This
formation of a National Library was really the germ out of which grew the
Old Testament. It was a purely civic act by a layman, but it expressed the
honor in which the national writings were coming to be held. It is
coincident with this that we find a priestly movement to draw a sacred
line around the more important writings of the nation.
Tradition has credited Ezra, the priestly coadjutor of Nehemiah, with the
first formation of the Old Testament Canon. The two traditions express one
and the same fact from the secular and ecclesiastical points of view. In
the exile, the stricken nation came to value and honor its national
heritage as never before. Its literary sense was quickened by close
contact with the civilization of Babylonia, whose great library
constituted one of the chief treasures of the central city. It was natural
that on their return to their native land the Jews should gather their
race-writings and found a National Library.
The genius of Israel had always been religious. Its very literature was
pre-eminently religious. That their venerable writings should be received
as sacred was thus wholly natural. They were in reality sacred writings.
Moreover, a large part of these writings, and that part largely drawn from
very ancient times, was composed of judicial decisions, legislative codes,
etc., around which veneration properly gathered. This veneration was
heightened by the popular traditions which assigned to Moses the bulk of
their legislation, and traced it through him to Jehovah himself. During
the exile a remarkable priestly development, which had been running on
through two centuries, at least, culminated in a completely organized
hierarchy and an elaborate cultus.
In the process of this final development in Babylonia the legislation and
histories of the nation were worked over by priestly hands in the priestly
spirit. The law of Moses was now for the first time completely set before
the people, and on the restoration to Judea was made the law of the land.
It became, therefore, in a new sense sacred.
The fresh, free inspirations of the prophets--inspirations most real and
divine--died out in the exile, smothered partly by this priestly
development.[12]
When no living prophet arose to make men hear the voice of God, men had to
hearken for that voice in the words of the dead prophets. In the
synagogues or meeting-houses which developed during the exile, when the
holy temple was in ruins, and which, having been found useful, were
continued in the restoration, the writings of the prophets were read each
Sabbath. The true writings of the chief prophets had therefore to be
indicated. Thus came the canon of the prophets.
The freedom with which the author of the Chronicles used the material of
the older historians which had been taken up into the sacred writings,
shows that the sacredness attached to them had not isolated them into
extra-human writings even a century and a half after Ezra.
The process of exaltation was at work, however, and continued thenceforth
through the national history, increasing as the life of the nation ebbed.
It was the period immediately following the destruction of Jerusalem by
the Romans, which busied itself in closing the canon of Jewish Scriptures
Death bound up that Bible. No new chapters could be added, because there
was no more life left to write them. In its dotage this noble nation
became known, by its superstitious reverence for the law, as "the people
of the book." Learned doctors gravely taught their pupils that "God
himself studies the law for the first three hours of every day."
The superstitious exaltation of the sacred writings, coincident with the
lapsing life of the nation, was partially responsible for it, as it
discouraged the fresh inspirations of the soul, and suppressed all free
spiritual thought.
The genesis of the similar theory concerning the Christian Scriptures
repeats the story told above.
The formation of the Christian Church was a period of astonishing literary
productivity, commensurate in extent and worth with the importance of
Christianity. It was a creative epoch in history. The life and teachings
of Jesus stirred the minds and thrilled the souls of men. The higher
spheres brooded low upon our world. Spiritual influences of unparalleled
magnitude were working in society. The "Spirit of God moved upon the face
of the waters."
Writings of all sorts abounded. They carried such weight as their author's
name or their intrinsic worth imparted to them. Even the most valuable
were not so prized or guarded as to prevent some of them from being lost.
Paul's own letters suffered from this neglect. Had a few copies of these
inestimable letters been made by the churches to whom they were sent such
a fate could not have befallen any of them. These writings were quoted
freely by the early fathers, who rarely cared to give the exact language
even of the great apostle.
As the churches multiplied and organized, the need of selection from the
multitudinous literature of Christianity was felt. Genuine letters had to
be distinguished from spurious letters. Accurate knowledge of the life and
teachings of Christ had become a vital necessity. The growth of legend and
fable, in the Apocryphal Gospels, threatened to swallow up the memory of
the real Jesus. A sifting process went on in the churches, by which the
unimportant and objectionable writings were gradually winnowed out and the
wheat retained.
The Christian consciousness tried and tested every writing, accepting
those which approved themselves inspired by inspiring.
In the course of time this thoroughly vital process, through which public
opinion passed upon the Christian writings, was recorded officially in the
legislative action of councils, and thus, after many incertitudes and
vacillations, the selection of sacred writings was finished and the New
Testament canon was closed. It was closed, as in the case of the canon of
the Old Testament, by the gradual loss of free spiritual and literary
productivity; closed, as the visions fade and the tides fall within the
soul, and the period of criticism follows the period of creation.
These writings became rightly sacred as the mementoes of the Divine Man,
and the counsels of the great apostles; a shrine in which men drew near to
the supreme manifestation of God upon earth. But they became wrongly
sacred also, as the lengthening lapse of time isolated these precious
heirlooms of the Christian household into relics it was blasphemy to
criticise; as the falling waters of the river of life stranded high above
men's reach the thoughts and experiences of the inspired fisher-folk of
Galilee. In the Dark Ages, when to read was a sign of distinction, and to
write a schoolboy history like "Eginhard's Charlemagne" was a prodigy;
when to lead clean lives, and to labor as hosts are doing now for their
fellows made a man a saint; the literary and spiritual power of the
apostles was nothing less than preternatural.
In the Reformation the old story repeated itself.
In the days of fresh inspiration men surely did not fail to prize the
blessed books whence had come their new life. But the sense of the divine
life in their own spirits enabled them to judge of the inspiration of the
Apostles at once reverently and rationally. They did not hesitate to
criticise freely the sacred books. Erasmus wrote of the Revelation:
"I certainly can find no reason for believing that it was set forth by
the Holy Spirit.... Moreover, even were it a blessed thing to believe
what is contained in it, no man knows what that is.... But let every
man think of it as his spirit prompts him."[13]
Luther wrote of the Epistle of James,
"In comparison with the best books of the New Testament, it is a
downright strawy epistle."[14]
The ebbing tide again left the second generation critical and not
creative. After the sages and prophets of Protestantism came the scribes
and doctors, and they were concerned not so much with the manly religion
of free learning which Erasmus cherished, or the ethical and spiritual
religion which Luther roused, as with establishing Protestant_ism_ and
waging its doctrinal controversies. They wanted an authority for faith and
morals to set over against the authority of Rome. The age knew of no other
authority than external, extra-natural official authority, the king by
divine right in the realm of thought. In the place of the authority of the
Church rose the authority of the Bible; an oracular, infallible,
miraculous Book, instead of an oracular, infallible, miraculous Church.
Men could only sustain the elaborate speculative system they had spun out
of the New Testament letters, by insisting upon the authority of the
apostles in metaphysics as strongly as upon their authority in ethical
and spiritual principles. When dogma became divine, the books whence it
was drawn were deified.[15]
We simply enter into the heritage of the men who spent two and a half
years in elaborating the Westminster Confession, the first chapter of
which petrified this superstitious theory of the Bible. Profoundly as we
reverence these truly sacred books, for the real revelation they record as
coming in the spirits of holy men who spake as they were moved of the Holy
Ghost, and supremely in the person of the Son of Man; and rightly as we
recognize a Providential purpose in the preparation of these books for the
guidance of human life; the history of these same thoughts and feelings in
the past should warn us from renewing ancient exaggerations, injurious to
the best influence of the Bible.
V.
_This theory is incapable of a statement which is not self-stultifying._
To be an infallible authority upon all the matters upon which it treats, a
book must not only be guaranteed in its thought. Thought changes more or
less in finding an expression. No two statements of an idea or of a fact
can be exactly alike. There are no real synonyms. Interchangeable words
have each a special shade of meaning. The guarantee must cover the
phraseology of the original language in which the book is written. The
words must be dictated to amanuenses. The thorough-going verbal
inspirationists are the only logical defenders of infallibility.
But the guarantee would need to be pushed still further in the case of a
book written as was the Bible. The best stenographers make mistakes in
filling out their abbreviations and in distinguishing the similar signs
which stand for very dissimilar sounds. Early Hebrew was a language of
abbreviations. No vowels were used. Consonants stood alone, and their
conjunction, aided by memory, was expected to suggest the proper vowel
accompaniments. Vowel points were added to the written language centuries
after the last book of the Old Testament was written.[16] Their insertion
demanded a guarantee, if infallibility was to be secured.
This guarantee must then have followed every copyist in the original
tongues, every translation of the Hebrew and Greek into other tongues,
every copyist in modern tongues through the ages before the
printing-press, every printer, who, since Gutenberg, has issued a
Bible--if we are to be absolutely sure of having an oracular and an
infallible Book.
The Westminster Confession, indeed, seems to follow its theory through
most of these lengths, and a Protestant Council in Geneva in 1675, with a
magnificent courage of conviction, actually affirms this supernatural
direction of the translators of the Bible. But such notions are of the
same nature with the preposterous traditions of the Jews, as to the
translation of the Septuagint; according to which, seventy elders,
separated from each other, produced seventy versions, which, on
comparison, "agreed exactly"; whereby men knew that the Scriptures were
"translated by the inspiration of God." With such tales we must leave the
theory they seem necessary to authenticate in the lumber-loft of
superstitions.
VI.
_This theory of our Bible is, in our age, seen to be the same theory which
all peoples have entertained of their bibles._
For the first time in the history of Europe, Christian people have the
knowledge by which they can correct their ideas about the Bible, in what
may be called a comparative science of Bibliolatry. We know that nearly
every race has had its own Sacred Book. These Sacred Books are now within
the easy reach of all. Any one can examine for himself the Vedas, the
Zend-Avesta and the other Bibles of humanity. Every one can readily form a
just judgment of these Bibles. The light which lighteth every man that
cometh into the world shines from many pages in all of these books. There
are profound thoughts of God, noble ethical ideals, deep perceptions of
sin, yearning desires for human good, gleams of life beyond the grave.
There are prayers we could use here with a few verbal changes, and you
would not recognize their pagan source. There are songs of praise which
might be made our canticles. There are parables that the Master Himself
might have spoken. But the light which shines from heaven through these
books does not disguise their earthly character. Having no glamor of
tradition over our eyes, we can see them to be histories, poems,
philosophies, rituals, counsels of religion, hallowed by age into Sacred
Books.
Yet we find precisely the same notions current in each race about its
Bible that we have cherished concerning our own Bible. The Hindu talks of
his Vedas as the Christian talks of his Testaments. Nay, we find our
conceits quite outdone in the dogmas of these heathen. Mohammedan doctors
of divinity divided into fiercely contesting parties over the question
whether the Koran was created or uncreated; the latter theory, as most
highly magnifying their Sacred Book, of course, becoming the orthodox
doctrine. These learned orthodox divines assured men that the Koran was
verily eternal and uncreated, and of the very essence of God; that the
first transcript of it had been from everlasting by His throne; that a
copy, in one volume, on paper, was, by the hands of the angel Gabriel,
sent down to the lowest heaven in the month of Ramadan; from whence
Gabriel revealed it to Mohammed in instalments, giving him the privilege,
however, of beholding the heavenly volume, bound in silk and adorned with
gold and precious stones, once a year.
We cannot mistake the fact that thoroughly human writings have been
exaggerated into super-human scriptures by the deference rightly called
forth towards these venerable books, so influential in the histories of
nations, so potent in the lives of men; and we can study the phases
through which a wholesome reverence degenerated into a puerile
superstition.
Bibliolatry is pushed to a _reductio ad absurdum_ in these pagan worships
of their Sacred Books. Men will see their folly in the reflected light of
these kindred follies, and another superstition will disappear from
Christendom.
* * * * *
On these grounds, as on others, the unreal Bible must be expected to pass
away. The Church at large never properly authenticated it. The Bible
nowhere calls for such a view of itself. Scripture reveals to a critical
study manifest tokens of its human fallibility, its thoroughly literary
character. We can trace the growth of this theory, and account for it
naturally. As a theory it cannot be stated reasonably. It is a theory
which is shown to be a superstition in the bibliolatries of other peoples.
Our bibliolatry is disappearing none too fast. It has always wrought evil
as well as good on civilization Like all other anachronisms, its original
helpfulness to progress has now become a hindrance. The day when it was of
service is past for educated people, whose minds are open, and the evils
it has caused flow from it still.
It has bred a superstitious use of the Bible which has always made
mischief, though a mischief never realized as sensibly as now. It has
taught men to turn to these holy books and accept unquestioningly all
therein recorded as authoritative on our thought and life. It has barred
all research which even seemed to contradict its history or science, and
has held Europe in mental swaddling-bands, preventing normal growth. It
has taught Most Christian Kings to war with easy consciences, after the
fashion of the Israelites in Canaan, and priests to sing solemn _Te Deums_
over battle-fields where men lay weltering in one another's blood. It has
given slave-owners the coveted proof that the peculiar system was a divine
institution, and has founded the auction block for human cattle solidly
upon the laws of God. It has supplied Joseph Smith with a warrant for
polygamy in the social usages of the Arab sheiks three thousand years ago.
It has opened a sacred refuge for every lie and wrong; no wildest form of
which could fail to find some precedent within these Hebrew histories,
which tell the story of a people's upward growth from savagery. It has
furnished an arsenal stocked with proof texts, from which, through many
generations, priests and doctors have armed themselves to war with one
another; exhausting in ecclesiastical and theological strife the holy
energies of Christian enthusiasm, which might else have changed the face
of the earth. It has arrayed faith against reason, by the necessity it has
imposed of reconciling every new discovery with the cosmogony of Genesis,
or the metaphysics of Romans; putting asunder those whom God hath joined
together, in the needless conflict of science and religion.
It has driven away from the real revelation held in these sacred writings
increasing numbers, in the growing generations; deafening their ears by
its irrational clamor to the voice of the Living God which whispers in
these pages, through the holy men who spake as they were moved of the Holy
Ghost. It has fathered the doubt which to-day sits, cheerless and chill,
within the hearts and homes of thousands who once rejoiced in the warmth
and light of God, but who now accept the alternative their teachers
thrust upon them--"all or none"--and throw away the Blessed Book wherein
God of old revealed Himself to them.
It has made the sacred ark of Israel so vulnerable that its defenders dare
not challenge the great Goliath of the Philistines, who, year by year,
comes forth to strut before the armies of the saints in ridicule of that
they hold so dear; and thus it is to be held responsible for the loss of
the young men who throw away their ancestral faith and go over to the
apparently victorious side of Unbelief.
It has slid in a false bottom to men's faith; shoving in a supposititious
revelation of miracle above the real revelation which is in nature and in
man, and in the Christ as the ideal man; and thus holds back that
reconstruction of belief which Providence is forcing on, as It is shaking
all things, to settle faith upon the everlasting verities: whereon
religion, planting its feet on the solid rock, may lift its head into the
skies, and worship Him in whom we live, and move, and have our being, the
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, "Our Father who art in Heaven."
In the name of religion let it die!
Then there will be a resurrection, and the Bible will live again, clothed
in a higher form for our most rational reverence. All that ever made the
Bible a Sacred Book, lives on to-day and will live on while these books
exist. Holy men of old spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost. They
were most truly inspired. The Biblical writers recorded a real revelation.
These books hold for us the words of God. The Word of God speaks to us in
the person of Jesus Christ.
These spiritual realities, no criticism can touch. And these spiritual
realities make the Bible.
Book of our Fathers, venerable and sacred, speak still to our souls those
words proceeding from out the mouth of God on which man liveth!
II.
The Real Bible.
"Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old;
The litanies of nations came,
Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below,--
The canticles of love and woe.
* * * * *
The passive Master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o'er him planned.
* * * * *
Himself from God he could not free."
_The Problem._
The most original book in the world is the Bible.... The elevation of
this book may be measured by observing how certainly all observation of
thought clothes itself in the words and forms of speech of that
book.... Whatever is majestically thought in a great moral element
instantly approaches this old Sanscrit.... People imagine that the
place which the Bible holds in the world it owes to miracles. It owes
it simply to the fact that it came out of a profounder depth of thought
than any other book.--Emerson, _The Dial_, October, 1840.
II.
The Real Bible.
"Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost."--2 Peter,
i. 21.
"Men of the Scriptures" was the title assumed by the Karaites, a sect of
devout Jews, who, about the middle of the eighth century of our era, threw
aside tradition, and accepted as their sole authority the canonical
writings of the Old Testament. Seeing the good that the Bible has wrought
for man in the past, we may well emulate the reverence of these Karaites;
while, seeing the unreality of the traditional notion of the Bible that
they held, and the mischiefs it has bred, we may well disown their
superstitiousness. Can we gain a view of the Bible which, without
stultifying our intellectual nature, may satisfy our spiritual nature, and
leave us free to call ourselves men of the Scriptures? The only road to
such an end must be that which our age is opening so successfully through
every field of study; as, dismissing preconceptions, it builds with care
and candor, upon solid facts, the causeway to a certain knowledge.
Let us take up the Bible as we would any other collection of books, and
see if, without assuming anything concerning it, we cannot find our way to
a rational reverence for it, as real as that which our fathers had. The
lines of our inquiry have been projected by a hand you own as high
authority. The results of the survey are in the text. Real men wrote real
books; holy men wrote holy books; and, when we come to account for their
holy, human power, we can only say--The Divine Spirit stirred in them;
"holy men of old spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost."
The Bible is a collection of many writings, in many forms, by many hands,
from many ages. Genuine letters these, whether they be _belles-lettres_ or
not; by every mark and sign most human writings, whether they be holy
Scriptures or not; the product of honest toil of brain and hand. Whatever
more they are, these are _bona fide_ books, of men of like passions and
infirmities with ourselves.
What is there in these books which has led Christendom to assign to them
so high an honor?
I.
1. _These books have the venerableness which belongs to ancient writings._
With what interest and care we handle a very old book, and turn its
well-worn pages, thumb-marked and dog-eared by men of Oxford or of
Florence in the Middle Ages! Unless we are the baldest materialists, we
will not reserve for the parchment body of some old book the respect
called forth by its soul. The latest re-embodiment of an ancient writer,
fresh from the presses of Putnam or of Appleton, merits the honor
belonging to the book given to the world so many centuries ago, and fed
upon by successive generations. Thus I look at the Plato on my shelves.
How venerable these writings! Over their great words, on which I rest my
eyes, my fathers bent, as their fathers had done before them; generation
after generation finding inspiration where still it flows fresh and full
for me. Thus every reverently minded man ought to feel concerning the
Bible. The latest of these books is probably seventeen hundred years old,
and the earliest has been written twenty-seven hundred years; while in the
more ancient of these writings lie bedded some of the oldest fragments of
literature known to us. These books have been the constant companions of
men and women through two or three score of generations. The crawling
centuries have carried these books along with them--the solace and the
strength of myriad millions of our kind. Forms, now turning into dust,
holy in our memories, read these familiar pages. Men whose names carry us
back through English history knew and prized these writings; Cromwell,
Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the Great Alfred. When Rome was the seat of
empire, Constantine heard them in his churches. Aurelius informed himself
about them. In the lowly hamlet hidden away among the hills of Galilee,
the boy Jesus listened to these tales of Hebrew heroism and holiness from
His mother's lips. Judas, the hammerer, fired his valiant soul from them;
and, while wandering in the hill country of Judaea, David chanted, to his
harp's accompaniment these legends of the childhood of his race. The Bible
is hallowed by the reverent use of ages.
2. _These books form the literature of a noble race._
The Old Testament is a Library of Jewish Letters. The germ of the
collection was planted by Nehemiah when "he, founding a library, gathered
together the acts of the kings, and the prophets, and of David, and the
epistles of the kings concerning the holy gifts."[17] This germ grew
gradually into its present shape. The Apocrypha belongs to it, and is
rightly bound up in our Bibles, for reading in our churches. These books
of the Canonical and Apocryphal writings do not cover the whole literature
of the Hebrew nation. Many writings have been lost inadvertently. Many
have been dropped as unworthy of preservation. We have the garnered grain
of Hebrew literature in our Bible--a winnowed national library. It
includes histories, juridical codifications, dramas of love and destiny,
patriotic songs and state anthems, the hymnal of a people's worship,
philosophic writings of the sages, collections of proverbial sayings,
works of religious fiction, orations of statesmen, and oracles of mystic
seers.
The New Testament is the literature of the Christian Church in its
creative epoch; the work still, in the main, of Jewish hands, as Judaism
was blossoming into a universal religion. It is thus the literature of the
most important religious movement civilization has experienced; a movement
whose unspent forces we are feeling still, in the flooding tides of
progress. It, too, forms a winnowed library; the siftings of Sayings of
Jesus, lives of Christ, apostolical and other letters, visions and
romances; and holds the choicest mental products of this fertile era. In
it are gathered memoirs of the Founder of Christianity, doctrinal and
ethical treatises from the hand of the man who, under Christ, was the
chief factor in the early Church; similar essays, in the form of letters,
from other more or less important leaders, representing the various phases
of original Christianity; a fragmentary and free sketch of the apostolic
labors, and the last great effort of apocalyptic genius, in the Revelation
of St. John, the Divine.
3. _This literature of the Jewish nation and of the Christian Church is
intrinsically noble._
The Bible has lost much of its fresh charm for us, with whom its finest
sayings are household words.
We parsed Virgil and Homer in our boyhood until the aroma of poetry
exhaled from their hackneyed pages, and we can scarce think of them now
save as grammatical exercises. The Bible has thus palled upon our
imagination, through the uninspiring familiarity of early task-work. But
were it possible to read it in our manhood for the first time, how the
blood would beat and the nerves thrill over some of its pages. We should
then understand the sensations of a French _salon_ upon a certain
occasion. Our shrewd philosopher-minister Franklin, had previously heard
the _literati_ wont to gather there ridiculing the Bible, and had guessed
that they knew little of it. Upon this evening he observed that he would
much like to have the judgment of the assembly on a certain Eastern tale
he had lately come across, unknown probably to most of those there
present, though long ago translated into their own tongue. Whereupon,
drawing from his pocket a copy of the Bible, he had a Parisienne, let into
the secret, read in her sweet tones the book of Ruth. The company was
thrown into raptures over the charming tale, which lasted until they found
its name.
How fresh, with the crisp air of morning, are these tales of primitive
tradition! How _naif_ these simple stories of Hebrew heroes! What so fine
in religious poetry as some of the strains from the Jewish Hymnal? What a
noble drama is Job, the Hebrew Faust! How wise the proverbial sayings!
What pure passion and lofty imagination stir through the pages of the
greater prophets! Where are to be found letters like those of Paul? What
biographies have the artless simplicity of the Synoptic Gospels, or the
mystic spirituality of the Gospel according to St. John!
No critic of our age has finer literary feeling or more dispassionate
judgment than Matthew Arnold; and he has edited the second section of
Isaiah as a text book for the culture of the imagination in English
schools. In the introduction to this Primer he observes: "What a course of
eloquence and poetry is the Bible in our schools."
Goethe shared Arnold's love of the Bible, and was so constant a reader of
it that his friends reproached him for wasting his time over it. Burke
owned his indebtedness to the Bible for his unique eloquence. Webster
confessed that he owed to its habitual reading much of his power. Ruskin
looks back to the days when a pious aunt compelled him to learn by heart
whole chapters of the Bible, for his schooling in the craft of speech, in
which he stands unrivaled among living Englishmen.
Emerson writes:
"The most original book in the world is the Bible. This old collection
of the ejaculations of love and dread, of the supreme desires and
contritions of men, proceeding out of the region of the grand and
eternal seems ... the alphabet of the nations, and all posterior
writings, either the chronicles of facts under very inferior ideas, or
when it rises to sentiment, the combinations, analogies, or degradation
of this. The elevation of this book may be measured by observing how
certainly all observation of thought clothes itself in the words and
forms of speech of that book.... Whatever is majestically thought in a
great moral element, instantly approaches this old Sanscrit....
Shakspeare, the first literary genius of the world, the highest in whom
the moral is not the predominating element, leans on the Bible; his
poetry presupposes it. If we examine this brilliant
influence--Shakspeare--as it lies in our minds, we shall find it
reverent, not only of the letter of this book, but of the whole frame
of society which stood in Europe upon it, deeply indebted to the
traditional morality, in short, compared with the tone of the Prophets,
_secondary_.... People imagine that the place which the Bible holds in
the world, it owes to miracles. It owes it simply to the fact that it
came out of a profounder depth of thought than any other book."[18]
Even what seem to us valueless books turn out, when studied naturally,
most interesting and suggestive.
Jonah, that stone of stumbling and rock of offence to the modern youth,
becomes, when rightly read, a noble writing, full of the very spirit of
our age. Around the tradition of Jonah, the son of Amittai, a prophet of
whom we know nothing in other writings, some forgotten author has woven a
story, to point a lofty moral. Jonah feels himself called to go to Nineveh
and cry against it, because of its wickedness. Quite naturally he does not
relish such an errand.
The prospect of a poor Jew's reforming the gay and dissolute metropolis of
the earth, which sat as a queen among the nations, singing to herself, "I
will be a lady forever," was not brilliant enough to fascinate him; and
the prospect of the reward he would get from the luxurious people of
pleasure, whose well-opiated consciences he should rudely rouse by calling
their intrigues and carousals wickedness, was only too clear. Jonah fled
from his duty. In his flight occurs the marvelous experience with the big
fish, that has so troubled dear, pious people who have read as literal
history what is plainly legendary. After this fabulous episode, the story
takes up its ethical thread. Jonah finds that he cannot flee from the
presence of the Lord, that he cannot decline a mission imposed from on
high. He goes to Nineveh; cries out against its sins, as God had told him;
and, as God had not told him, predicts its overthrow in forty days, as a
judgment on its crimes. But, contrary to his expectations, the city is
stirred by his preaching; and King and court and people repent and amend
their ways. Whereupon the Divine forgiveness is extended at once to these
wicked Pagans, and the fate they had deserved is averted. But in this turn
of affairs Jonah's prediction failed, and so he was displeased and was
very angry, and took the Almighty to task quite roundly, for his lack of
vigour.
"Was not this my saying when I was yet in my country? Therefore, I fled
before unto Tarshish, for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and
merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness and repentest thee of
the evil."
What was to become of preachers if, after they had threatened destruction
upon evil-doers, the Most High went back upon them thus? The later breed
of Jonahs may profitably study the after scene, in which God is made to
rebuke the frightful selfishness and hardness which, rather than have
one's theories belied, would have a city damned.
"Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not labored
... and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more
than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right
hand and their left hand, and also much cattle?"
The moral marvel of Nineveh's general repentance on the preaching of an
obscure Jew is as unnatural as the physical marvel of the fish story.
Recognizing that the whole tale is a parable, which takes upon it purely
legendary drapery, and ridding ourselves thus of all the questions which
puzzle Sunday-school scholars and theologians, we are ready to read the
meaning of the parable. God is not the God of any one race or religion. He
cares for Gentile as for Jew. He sends a prophet of Israel to bid a pagan
city repent, that He may forgive it freely. These Pagans understand the
message of the Jew. The commands of conscience are owned and honored by
the heathen, even more quickly than by the people of God; whose own
Jerusalem never thus quickly obeyed a prophet's message. The city whence
had come Israel's woes is held up as a pattern to the sacred city
herself. All men, then, are brothers, partakers of the same moral and
religious nature; children of One Father, whose voice they hear in
different tongues, speaking to their souls the same messages of holy love.
Thus read, Jonah becomes the protest of liberal Judaism against the
narrow, exclusive tendencies of popular piety in Israel. It is the writing
of some genuine Broad-Churchman of the olden time, proclaiming the high
truths of Human Brotherhood under a Divine Fatherhood, breathing that
spirit of which, long after, another Jew dared say--
"And now abideth faith, hope and charity, but the greatest of these is
charity."
If such be the hidden value of one of the least attractive of these
writings, we may well say, with Milton,
"I shall wish I may deserve to be reckoned among those who admire and
dwell upon them."
4. _This literature has been very influential in the development of
progressive civilization._
When the writings of Greece and Rome had been buried in the ruins of the
Roman Empire, the literature of Israel was preserved by the pious care of
the Christian Church. The light of Athens went out, and the light of
Jerusalem alone illumined the dark ages. The only books known to the mass
of men through long centuries were these writings of the Hebrews and the
early Christians. Thought was kept alive by them, imagination was fed from
them, conscience was educated and vitalized through them. For a thousand
years there was practically but one book in Europe--the Bible. When the
long gestation of the middle ages was fulfilled, and the modern world was
born, while the educated classes read the exhumed classics of Greece, the
people still read the Bible. It gave, in the person of Luther, the impulse
that restored intellectual liberty and moral health to Europe. It has
continued the best read book of Western civilization; the only book much
read, until of late, by the mass of men; the one foreign and ancient
literature familiar alike to the plain people in Germany and France, in
England and America; the common well-spring of inspiration to thought and
imagination, to character and conduct.
It is the Magna Charta of our liberties; the revered companion and master
of the Pilgrims who sailed the wintry seas, and, on Plymouth Rock,
building wiser than they knew, founded a nation covenanting freedom of
conscience unto all men; a nation on whose Bell of Independence runs the
Bible legend, "Proclaim liberty to the inhabitants thereof."
Wherever society is found to-day in travail with a new and higher order,
the conception can be traced to the seminal words of the Bible. The
institutions and manners of progressive civilization are what they are
because in the heart of that civilization has lain the Bible.
My brothers, were these books nothing more to us than such ancient
writings, the literature of so noble a race, a literature intrinsically
fine, to which our civilization owes so much of mental and of moral
influence, they should win our reverence, and should shame the wantonness
of liberalism, falsely so called.
What if in these ancient writings there are ancient errors, the marvels
which a child age exaggerated into miracles, stories of savage cruelty and
brutal lust in rude, rough times, acts of superstition dark and dreadful,
utterances which to us are blasphemous ascribed to the Eternal and Holy
One? Such faults are inevitable in the literature that records a nation's
growth from barbarism. Were a man in the name of Liberty or in the name of
Truth to hunt through Homer, to rake together all the errors and
superstitions embalmed in these immortal sagas, to haul up from the
obscurity where sensible people leave them the lewdnesses suggested or
described, and then to fling these blemishes at the book in which the
children of Greece and England and America have read with tingling blood
the tales which stirred their souls, by what name would we call him? By
that name let him stand forth impaled upon the scorn of an age that has
not lost the grace of reverence, who, mindless of majestic age, the
dignity of letters, an influence unrivalled and benign, associations
tender and most holy, upon these venerable and sacred books spits his
shallow scepticism, spumes his spleenful sarcasm, and smuts them with his
own sensuality.
Let Irreverence stay her ribald tongue before these illustrious writings,
and Indecency vomit her own nastiness elsewhere than on our Bible.
II.
The Bible lays a yet deeper claim upon our reverence These books
constitute the literature of a people whose genius was religion, whose
mission was its evolution into universal forms, whose writings express the
moods and tenses of that development; whose history is the organic growth
which flowered in the life of Him who freed religion from every swathing
band, and gave the world its pure essential spirit; after Whom all races
are being drawn as one flock under one Shepherd.
1. _Israel's specialty in history was religion._
Every people finds laid upon it certain necessary activities, in most of
which all peoples find their common tasks. Every nation must cultivate
agriculture handicrafts, trade and commerce; must develop social,
political and religious institutions. Each people will, however, do some
one thing better than the rest of its tasks, better than it is done by
other peoples. Each great race has some commanding inspiration; some
ideal which masters every other aspiration and ambition, energizes its
efforts and shapes its destiny. It creates a specialty among the nations.
The real legacy of each great race lies in the works wrought in the line
of its highest aptitudes. Thus Rome developed a genius for civil
organization. She conquered the whole western world, united isolated
nations under one empire, cleared the Mediterranean for safe and free
communication, opened roads as arteries through the vast body politic,
established post communications for travellers and the mails, carried law
and order into every obscure hamlet, consolidated a polity which, by sheer
massiveness, lasted for generations after the soul of Rome had fled, and
left to posterity, in her institutes the basis for modern jurisprudence.
Thus Greece evolved a genius for art, developed architecture and sculpture
to the highest perfection the world has seen, made statues thicker than
men in Athens, made men more beautiful than statues, sighed even after
Virtue as the Becoming, the Perfect Beauty, left the world temples whose
ruins are inspirations, and marbles whose discovery dates the epochs of
culture. Israel essayed to do many things that other peoples achieved, and
promised success in more than one direction. At a certain period she bade
fair to develop into a martial empire, and to become a lesser Assyria or
Rome. A little later she seemed about to rival the Phenicians in
commerce. About the same time she
"advanced as far as the Greeks before Socrates towards producing an
independent science or philosophy."[19]
But she found herself content with none of these _rôles_. She had a higher
part assigned her in the drama of history, to which her secret instincts
resistlessly drew her. Her predominant characteristic was an intense
religiousness. Everything in the life of her people took on a serious and
devout tone. Patriotism was identified with piety. Her statesmen were
reformers, idealists, whose orations were sermons, like the speeches of
Gladstone in the Midlothian campaign, dealing with politics in the light
of eternal principles. Legislation was developed through the "judgments"
of priestly oracles. Poetry lighted her flames at the altar. Philosophy
busied itself with ethics. The Muse of History was the Spirit of Holiness.
The nation's ambitions were aspirations. Her heroes grew to be saints. The
divine became to her, not the true or the beautiful, but the good. She
evidently had, as Matthew Arnold said of John Wesley, "a genius for
godliness."
2. _Israel's literature became thus a religious literature._
Her histories were written for edification. They present the past of the
people in such light as to inculcate virtue and inspire piety. Her poems
are songs of pure love, like Canticles; or dramas whose plot lies in the
problem of evil, like Job; or hymns in which the soul seeks communion with
God. The Psalter is the hymnal of the temple choir at Jerusalem. The
prophets are preachers of righteousness, personal, social, political. Even
the writings of her sages or philosophers are almost wholly ethical and
religious. No other people's literature is so intensely and pervasively
religious. Other nations have religious writings as a part of their
general literature. Israel's whole literary life was sacred. There is
scarcely a book left by her to which we may not go to feed religion.[20]
3. _Israel's literature presents us, in the various moods and tenses of
her life, with the various phases of religion._
The glory of a truly National Church is that it takes up into itself every
form of spiritual and ethical consciousness within the nation, and
exhibits in each successive school of thought, in each movement for a
nobler social life, a phase of true religion. This is the glory of Israel.
Religion never separated itself into an institution apart from the State.
There was no Jewish Church, of which Dean Stanley wrote the history.
Church and State were one. Sacred and secular history flowed in one common
stream. The history of Israel was the history of Judaism. Its choicest
literature formed its sacred writings. Religion was never narrowed to a
theory, an institution, an "ism," a sect, a school. It was as generous and
as rich as the broad, free life of the nation. Every factor essential to a
noble religion was thus supplied from the sound and healthy life of the
people.
The inner life of the soul was voiced in the hymns of Israel, to which we
still turn for the inspiration of personal piety in our private devotions;
and which lift the public worship of the moderns as they swelled the souls
of the hosts who waited in the temple courts at Jerusalem, two thousand
years ago.
A cultus of character through ritual and discipline was elaborated by the
priesthood in that wonderful system which, rebaptized, does duty still in
the Catholic Church. The true outer sphere for personal religion, trained,
if need be, by an ecclesiastical cultus, was fashioned by the great
prophets, the men of the people; who poured their passion for
righteousness into aspirations for a true commonwealth, in which Justice
should be throned on law, and international relations be ruled, not by
Policy, but by Principle. Natural religion was nobly set forth by the
sages in Proverbs, The Wisdom of Jesus, and the other "Writings;" all of
which were characterized by a calm and rational philosophy, that
recognized the laws of life and fed the wisdom which obeys them. Even
Agnosticism, in so far as it is the confession of the inadequacy of every
interpretation of the universe, finds despondent yet still earnest
expression in Ecclesiastes, and humble, hopeful expression in Job; and the
silence of many of the noblest natures of our age, which the churches
brand as irreligious, finds place among the phases of religion in their
Sacred Book.[21]
Almost every form of strenuous ethical life, almost every answer that
earnest souls have found to the problem of life, is to be drawn from the
writings of this many-sided people. Thus their literature feeds a rich,
and rounded life of religion.
4. _Israel's literature presents us with the record of a continuous growth
of religion upward through its normal stages._
Religion grows like every form of human life with the growth of man
himself. It is coarse, crude and cruel while man is a savage, and as he
becomes civilized--by which I mean something more than wealthy--it becomes
intelligent, reasonable ethical and spiritual. The growth of Israel from
barbarism carried with this progress the growth of Israel's religion. In
the earliest times which we can historically reach the Israelites were
semi-nomadic tribes, slightly distinguishable from their kindred Semites.
The religion of the people appears to have been then a commingling of
fetichism, the worship of things that impressed the imagination, great
trees and huge boulders, with the worship of the various powers of nature,
the orbs of heaven, the reproductive force of the earth, etc., under the
usual savage and sensual symbolisms.
From such unpromising beginnings, through the successive stages of
polytheistic idolatries, religion was gradually led up, in the advance of
the general life of the people and through the inspirations of a series of
great men, to the recognition of One Eternal and infinite Being; the Lord
of nature and of man, the Father of all mankind, Holy, Just and Gracious;
whose truest worship is the aspirations of his children after goodness.
"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord," writes the
Deuteronomist; "and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine
heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might."
Malachi, looking round upon the manifold forms of worship of the various
nations, and discerning that through them all the soul of man was feeling
after one and the same Divine Being, makes God say:
"From the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my
name is great among the Gentiles; and in every place incense is offered
unto me and a pure offering; for my name is great among the heathen,
saith the Lord of Hosts."
Micah asks,
"What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy
and to walk humbly with thy God?"
Of this continuous growth of religion the Old Testament is the record.
5. _Israel's literature records the forcing forward of this growth of
religion, as by some Power back of man, shaping its ends, rough-hew them
as it might._
The Niebuhr of Hebrew history rightly pointed out this significant fact in
the introduction to his great work.
"The manifold changes and even confusions and perversities, which
manifest themselves in the long course of the threads of its history,
ultimately tend to the solution of this great problem."--Ewald: Intro.
A singular succession of great men arise to save and revive and reform
religion in every critical epoch. Moses, Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah,
Ezekiel, Ezra, Judas Maccabeus come upon the stage, one after the other,
perform their several parts with singular aptitude, and prepare the way
for the next movement when it comes due. The history of the people rightly
read becomes a mighty drama, in which the right man is never wanting at
the right time, and the action moves on steadily toward a climax.
The experiences of the people, even those most perplexing to the faith of
the nation at the time, fit singularly into this organic evolution of
religion. The rending of the Kingdom of David, that blighted the fair
prospect of a martial empire, turned the nation aside from the false
career on which it was entering. The overthrow of the Northern and then of
the Southern Kingdom, and the deportation of the people to Babylonia,
seemingly the ruin of the sister countries, threw them in upon their inner
life; and in the exile their religion found its highest reach of thought.
Even that hierarchical movement which so quickly followed upon this bloom
of prophetism, and which to the superficial look seems only the arrest of
life and the beginning of death, reveals a legitimate function in the
organic processes of the national religion. In this priestly organization
of institutional religion, all free prophetic inspiration did indeed die
out for over four centuries. But even this was a necessity for the right
flowering of religion. The age was not ready, politically or
intellectually, for the ripening of the thoughts of the prophets. Had they
ripened then, they would have fallen to the ground, as the untimely fruit
of a too-early spring. Four centuries were to be tided over before the
political and intellectual conditions were found for the blossoming of
this flower. This holding back of the normal evolution of Hebraism was the
function of the Priestly Reaction--a curious parallel to the function of
Catholicism in Mediæval Christianity.
Like the Catholic Church, the Jewish priesthood held society together
when, in the destruction of the political power, there was no other bond
of unity. As in the Catholic Church, the High Priest became a temporal
ruler, the Prince of Israel, as he was called; and kept the sacred city
still the seat of government. As in Catholicism the institutionalizing of
religion that followed the period of free prophetic life was an effort to
embody that life, to incrust and thus preserve it; and, in the one case as
in the other, though the crust of institutions choked the further growth
of spiritual religion, it yet did keep it sluggishly alive within this
hard bark, through times that else would have proved fatal to it. As in
Catholicism, this priestly cultus really drilled deep into the natures of
men the principles and laws and habitudes of ethical and spiritual
religion; and stored the force which, when its rigid routine and fettering
formalism became unbearable, burst through this crust and opened a new
world of fresh, free life.
Of this singular shaping of the nation's experiences to further the growth
of true religion, the Old Testament is the impressive record.
6. _Israel's literature thus presents the picture of a nation's patient,
insistent pressing forward, through long centuries, toward the fruition of
its ideal, the realization of true religion._
So continuous is Israel's movement toward the ideal of religion, so
straight the line of her advance that it seems as though the nation had a
conscious aim, seen afar and steadfastly pursued by generation after
generation, unwilling to stop short of attainment. It is the founder of
scientific Biblical criticism who thus expresses his sense of the
wonderfulness of this historic movement:
"This aim is Perfect Religion; a good which all aspiring nations of
antiquity made an attempt to attain; which some, the Indians and
Persians, for example, really labored to achieve with admirable
devotion of noble energies, but which this people alone clearly
discerned from the beginning, and then pursued for centuries through
all difficulties, and with the utmost firmness and consistency, until
they attained it, so far as among men and in ancient times attainment
was possible."[22]
7. _The literature of Christian Israel records the realization of this
long sought ideal, the fruition of this organic growth._
The nation found the times ripe at last for the final process of this
historic evolution; the dead cerements of Judaism fell apart, and thereout
bloomed that perfect flower of religion, the religion of the Christ,
simple, free, ethical, spiritual. The extant literature of this last
creative effort of Israel constitutes the New Testament. The Gospels tell
the story of the life of the Founder of Christianity, clearly enough in
the main outlines, and embalm many of the words and deeds of the Son of
Man. The other writings of the New Testament illustrate the working of the
thought and spirit of the Christ in the Church bodying around Him through
the growth of a century. In them we see that the long cherished ideal of
Israel, an Ethical and Universal Religion, had at last incarnated itself
in The Master whose plans laid the foundation of this new Order; into
which men were coming from the east and from the west, and from the north
and from the south, and were sitting down in the Kingdom of God.
The high-water mark of religion in human history is recorded in these
writings. To enter into the spirit of these writings is to feel the force
of the free, full tides of ethical and spiritual life which rose, as never
before nor since, in the dawning day of Christianity. The flow of such a
force within the individual soul and through society has been the power
of the New Testament in Christendom.
8. _This organic growth of a national religion into a catholic ideal, not
without parallels elsewhere, is, however unique in respect to the
conditions for a truly Universal Religion._
The scene of this evolution is not the heart of the East, as in Buddhism,
but the meeting point of East and West. Palestine is the race centre of
the earth. Camels unload in Jerusalem the goods laden upon them in the
seats of the most ancient empires; and on her pebbly beaches the
Mediterranean rolls, bearing the commerce of Europe. Behind Judea lies the
past, before it opens the future. Its Race-Man came at the epoch when,
first in history, the East and West were brought together under one empire
and opened to the free interchange of thought. And when we analyze the
religion of the Christ, grown in this central land and coming to the birth
in this central period, we find that it holds, alone on earth, the
elements of each race-religion in well proportioned combination.
No eastern religion, Buddhism not excepted, appears to contain conceptions
that satisfy the western mind. The religion of the Christ, however can be
shown to hold whatever ideas and ideals make vital the great
race-religions of the East. It is as many sided as humanity, and presents
a family face to every people. It takes up the ideas and ideals of other
religions, disengages and deposits whatever in them is temporal and
circumstantial, preserves whatever is essential and eternal in them,
combines these vital elements with the polar truths needful to their
wholesomeness, and crystallizes ethical and spiritual religion into
perfect forms, forms capable of translation into the idioms of every race
of earth. This religion of the Christ is the one religion which to-day
holds the promise and potency of further evolution, in the progressive
civilization of mankind on which it is enthroned.
9. _Of the literature of the people through whom came this organic
evolution of the keystoning religion of earth what can we say but that it
records a real revelation coming through genuine personal inspirations
from on high!_
Revelation is the opposite aspect of the mystery which we call discovery;
the uncovering of that which was hidden; the unveiling of that which was
not known; the coming on of truth into the light wherein man can see it.
"Discovery" expresses the human effort by which truth is thus uncovered
and found out. "Revelation" expresses the divine effort which lies back of
all human aspirations and endeavors; as the Spirit within man stirs him up
to seek for Truth, flashes in upon his mind strange hints of where and
how she is to be found, allures him onward with the mystic whispers of her
voice, until at length he stands upon the mount of vision whence her holy
form is seen, and cries--"I have found her!"
To him who believes in a Spirit of Truth, guiding men into all truth, the
growth of ethical and spiritual religion into perfect form in Jesus Christ
is a real revelation. It is the oncoming of the Light which lighteth every
man that is in the world; the dawning of the day of earth on the hills of
Judea, over which has risen the Sun of Righteousness with healing in His
wings.
This revelation came not to the mystic "man writ large" we call society,
direct from heaven in abstract form. It came to individual men, struggling
for larger light and nobler life, and breathing their higher spirit on
their fellows. Religion is always _life_, the experience of _souls_. We
can name the individuals through whom each important advance was made. The
greater souls who led the worship of the host welcoming the rising Light,
thrilled with the vibrations of a voice deeper and holier than the voice
of man. The lesser souls who formed the chorus of this anthem of The Dawn
thrilled each alike with this mystic sense of God. That which we must aver
of every truth discovered or revealed, of every knowledge needful to man
and won by man; that which we must affirm as the only rational
interpretation of the mysterious suggestions rising below the conscious
thoughts of man, and prompting to noblest benedictions on the race; that
we must, with deepened awe, say of the holiest truths shown to the human
soul,--Inspired!
With sincere and reverent confession we must say then in the words of Holy
Writ:
"Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." "Every
Scripture profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for
instruction in righteousness is God-inspired."[23]
The consciousness and experience of Israel could not have found fitter
expression than in the words of our great seer:
"I conceive a man as always spoken to from behind, and unable to turn
his head and see the speaker. In all the millions who have heard the
voice, none ever saw the face. That well-known voice speaks in all
languages, governs all men; and none ever caught a glimpse of its form.
If the man will exactly obey it, it will adopt him, so that he shall
not any longer separate it from himself in his thought; he shall seem
to be it, he shall be it. If he listen with insatiable ears, richer and
greater wisdom is taught him, the sound swells to a ravishing music, he
is borne away as with a flood, he is the fool of ideas, and leads a
heavenly life. But if his eye is set on the things to be done, and not
on the truth that is still-taught, and for the sake of which the things
are to be done, then the voice grows faint, and at last is but a
humming in his ears."[24]
We have thus seen in the Bible an ancient and noble literature, the
literature of a noble race, the literature supremely influencing and
enriching Christian civilization; demanding, therefore, our rational
reverence, as constituting a truly Sacred Book.
We have seen in the Old Testament the literature of the people of
religion, commissioned with its normal evolution; writings charged with
deep religiousness; the records of the various moods and tenses through
which religion grew continuously and insistently toward perfection, in an
organic process watched and directed by a Higher Power than man. We have
seen in the New Testament the record of the realization of this
long-sought aim of the people of religion; the story of the Divine Man,
who breathed religion out into perfection, and the writings that depict
the bodying around Him of the Universal Church, the Church in whose truth
and life is growing the religion of the future, "the Christ that is to
be."
The fuller knowledge of our age, in evanishing the unreal Bible restores
the real Bible. It is the record of the visioning and embodiment of the
Human Ideal, the Divine Image--The Christ. It is the Providentially
prepared Hand Book of religion in whose rich and varied phases of ethical
and spiritual thought all men may find the nourishment they need. It is
the spiritual reality our fathers rightly felt, but wrongly expressed,
when they called it as a whole The Word of God. It holds the words
proceeding from out of the mouth of God on which man liveth. It bodies in
"letters" The Word of God, embodied in the flesh in Jesus Christ the Lord.
It records a real revelation. This revelation, however, denies no other
revelation. It affirms the fact of the withdrawal of a veil in each new
knowledge won; the fact that man has felt in calling the new knowledge a
discovery; and it interprets this unveiling as Tennyson has learned of it
to do:
"And out of darkness come the hands
That reach through nature, moulding man."
These books are the products of a real inspiration. This inspiration,
however, denies no other inspiration. It interprets the sense of a higher
than human influence in the noblest searchers after truth, throughout the
world, in every action of the intellect. It affirms the validity of that
consciousness.[25]
The revelation in the Bible is the Light of God which streams through it,
making it a "lamp unto our feet." The inspiration in the Bible is the life
of God breathing through it into man, "and he becomes a living soul." The
book which, above all others, reveals God to man, he must call the supreme
revelation of God. The book which, above all others, inspires the life of
God in man, he must call the most inspired of God.
If, then, any one asks me how he may know that there is a revelation in
the Bible, I tell him to walk in its light, and see what it reveals. If
any one asks me how I know that the Bible is inspired I answer him in Mr.
Moody's words:
"I know that the Bible is inspired, because it 'inspires me.'"
III.
The wrong use of the Bible.
"God, then, is quite simple and true, both in word and deed; neither is
He changed Himself, nor does He deceive others--neither by visions, nor
discourses, nor the pomp of signs. * * * * When any one alleges such
things as these about the gods, we must show disapproval, and not grant
them the privilege of a chorus; neither should we suffer teachers to
employ them in the training of youth--if, at least, our guardians are
to be pious and divine men."
Plato: The Republic; Book II.
"This, it seems, is the modern method of coming to inquire of the
oracles of God; by this process they become a light to our feet, a lamp
to our path! Accept the book as a whole, and then treat all the
portions of it just as you like. Confess all its words to be the words
of the Lord, and then you may yourself be lords over them, and may
perform moral miracles by turning the bread of life into stones for
casting at your enemies."
Maurice: What is Revelation, p. 475.
III.
The wrong use of the Bible
Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for
reproof for correction, for instruction in righteousness.--2 Timothy,
III, 16.
The Unreal Bible is fading upon the vision of our age. You have probably
all perceived this more or less clearly. I have uttered the conviction
which many of you have held in secret with misgivings and self-reproaches,
and have shown you some of the many reasons why, as it seems to me, this
view can no longer be held by men of open minds. The Real Bible is as yet
vaguely seen, and, therefore, its power is feebly felt. According to their
natures men are indulging in flippant flings at a vanished superstition,
or grieving silently over the disappearance of the ancient light which
ruled the night of earth. I have sought to clear your vision of the new
moon rising upon us, the same holy light God set in the heavens of old,
though changed in the altered atmosphere of earth.
I propose now to translate the generalities of the previous sermons into
some practical applications. I want to-day to make more distinct certain
wrong uses of the Bible which grow out of the old view of it; wrong uses
from which great mischiefs have come to the cause of true religion, and
great trouble to individual souls; abuses which fall away in the light of
a more reasonable understanding of the Bible. The Bible viewed as a book
let down from heaven, whose real "author" is God, as the Westminster
Catechism affirmed; a book dictated to chosen penman and written out by
their amanuenses under a direction which secured them against error on
every subject of which they treated; a book thus given to the world to be
an authoratitive and infallible oracle for human information on all the
great problems of life--naturally calls for uses which, apart from this
theory, are gross and superstitious abuses.
I.
_It is a wrong use of the Bible to set it in its entirety before all
classes and all ages._
On the old view of the Bible no man might dare to omit portions of it in
public reading or home instruction. The horrible atrocities and brutal
lusts of the early Hebrews, and the coarsenesses of their later days, as
unbearable by modern ears as the rough talk of Shakespeare's ladies, had
all to be read to mixed assemblies of young men and maidens; and be read
with blushing face by the pure mother to the purer children at her knees.
For us, who see the Bible in its true light, there is no necessity for a
minister to offend against the taste of a refined age, or for a mother to
introduce the unsoiled soul of her child to evil, by reading straight
through the successive chapters of the Bible. It has been left for
Protestant piety to excel Romanists and Jews in superstition. The Church
of Rome, as you know, discourages the use of the Bible by her laity,
erring in the other extreme. The Jewish rabbis had a saying that no one
should read the Canticles before he was thirty years of age. If you follow
the public readings of the Bible in this church from your own Bibles, you
must often appreciate the relief this liberty of omission brings. Use the
Bible in this way with your children at home. Who would think of an
indiscriminate use of the original Shakespeare? Stage managers cut him so
freely for rendering before grown up folk as to have made another
Shakespeare. He who cares for his children's innocence will set before
them an expurgated edition like that of Rolfe. So we should use at home
such an expurgated edition of the Scriptures as "The Child's Bible,"
published by Cassel, Petter & Galpin, of London. No timid soul need fear
that imprecation in the last chapter of the Revelation:
If any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy
God shall take away his part out of the book of life.
That sounds like the ruling passion, strong in death, of the Son of
Thunder; who in youth asked if he should call down fire from heaven upon a
hamlet which did not welcome Jesus, and was well rebuked for his zeal by
the gracious Master. It is part of the human weakness through which the
voice of God speaks, taking its tone from the defects of the instrument.
This imprecation had reference, in all probability, solely to the
copyists, against whose carelessness the author sought to guard himself by
an awful threat. It certainly had reference to this book alone. Not until
long afterwards did the Church determine what books were to enter the
canon of the New Testament, and in what order they were to stand. That
order placed the Revelation as the last book in the canon, and thus made
this threat appear to cover the whole Bible.[26]
II.
_It is a wrong use of the Bible to accept its utterances indiscriminately
as the words of God, to quote every saying of every speaker in its pages,
or every deed of every actor in its histories as expressing to us the mind
of God._
Such use of the Bible is thoughtlessly common. Some time ago before going
into a church in whose service I was asked to participate, I ventured to
show some slight hesitancy in using certain Psalms which were set down in
the Psalter for the day. When asked, why, I mildly answered that I could
not request a Christian congregation to join with me in singing, after the
embittered Jews in Babylon:
Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom, in the day of Jerusalem. How
they said, "Down with It! down with it! even to the ground." Oh,
daughter of Babylon, who art to be wasted, Happy shall he be that
rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be that taketh
thy little ones and throweth them against the stones.
Nor could I ask the people to unite in praying:
Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb; yea, all their princes as Zeba
and Salmana.
I had in mind the fate of Oreb and Zeeb and of Zeba and Salmana,
splendidly brave fellows even in their death, as told in the seventh and
eighth chapters of Judges, where you can learn what sort of prayer was
this of those savage Jews. Naturally, as I thought, I objected to voicing
such heathen imprecations in the nineteenth century of the era of the
Prince of Peace. My good friend, with a look of amazement, replied, "Why,
these Psalms are in the Bible." That ended the question for him.
This incident is typical of a vast quantity of wrong uses of the Bible.
Thus our American slaveholder read that 'precious' word of the ancient
tradition, "Cursed be Ham," and smoothed his troubled conscience. He had
the sanction of the Bible for the curse plainly upon Africa. He was
fulfilling the Divine will in breeding black cattle for the auction block.
Piety and profit were one, and godliness had great gain, and some
contentment also. Thus the extermination of the Canaanites, for which the
Hebrews pleaded long after the Divine order, and for which they had
substantial warrant in Destiny's determination to rid the land of these
corrupting tribes and make room for the noble life Israel was to develop,
has been the stock argument of kings and soldiers for their bloody trade.
Thus poor human consciences have been sorely hurt and troubled as men have
read, in stories such as those of Jael and Sisera and Jacob and Esau, of
acts which their better nature instinctively condemned. They have felt
themselves arraigning the Bible and suspecting God.
If indeed the Bible is a book let down from the skies, of which God can be
called the 'author,' then all such uses of it may be correct enough, and
in those dark and savage words and deeds I may be obliged to find the
words of God and the deeds He holds up to our admiration and imitation;
though I do not see that such a use is a necessity, even on this theory.
Fancy a man quoting Shylock when he pleads for his bond, or Iago's
devilish innuendos against Desdemona's purity, as showing what Shakespeare
liked or what he would have us imitate! "These are the words of
Shakespeare!" Yes, but of Shakespeare's Shylock, Shakespeare's Iago.
If, however, the Old Testament is the national library of the Jews, I
must expect to find all sorts of early Jewish notions, in ethics and
religion, bodied in the words of the speakers they introduce, and the
deeds of the men of whom they tell the tales.
If the Bible is the record of a real revelation which came in the spirits
of ancient men, through the historic growth of conscience and reason; and
if these books are the literature embalming that growth of a people out of
ignorance and superstition into the light of pure ethics and spiritual
religion; then I must look to find all sorts of crudities and crassnesses
in the representation of God, and all phases of unmoral and immoral life,
as parts of the error and imperfection out of which they were educated.
These deeds and words are the milestones in the path of progress by which
Judaism reached Christianity. If the individual is to reproduce the story
of the race, as our wise men tell us, then these words and deeds are in
the Bible to carry us through the same course of education; to exercise
our consciences in discriminating right from wrong, and to lead us to grow
out of such conceptions and desires toward the spirit of Christ. In a
cruise last summer we dropped anchor in a lovely little out-of-the-way
harbor of Buzzard's Bay, which proved to be near Pocasset; where, not long
ago, a pious man, reading the Hebrew tradition of Abraham and Isaac, as a
real command of the Most High, and having this word of the Lord borne in
on his mind, as spoken to himself, murdered his child in sacrifice to
God--no angel interfering to stay his knife. He simply made a _reductio ad
absurdum_ of this use of the Bible.[27]
III.
_It is a wrong use of the Bible to accept everything recorded therein as
necessarily true._
If the historians were simply the amanuenses of the Infinite Spirit, then
of course they could not have erred in anything they recorded. If they
were ordinary writers, trying to tell the story of their peoples' growth;
searching court archives, state annals, old parchments of forgotten
writers, consulting the traditions of town and village, using their
material in the best way their abilities enabled them to do; using all to
teach virtue and religion, for which alone they were specially qualified
of God; then all questions of historical accuracy are beside the mark.
Nothing in their inspiration guarantees their historical accuracy; their
philological learning in using ancient poetic language, or their critical
judgment in detecting exaggerations. Are we to wait anxiously upon the
latest Assyrian tablets or the freshest Egyptian mummy to confirm our
faith that God has spoken to the spirit of man? Are we to quake in our
shoes when a few ciphers are cut off from the roll of Israel's impossible
armies? If much that we read as literal history turns out legend and myth,
are we to find a painful alternative between a blind credulity and as
blind a skepticism? We follow this same re-reading of Roman and Grecian
story untroubled, and see the heroes of our childhood turn into races and
sun-myths without calling the Muse of History a fraud.
Has it been such comfort to us to read the doings of Samson as actual
history, slaying a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass, tying
fire-brands to the tails of three hundred foxes, etc., that we should
resent the translation of this impossible hero into the Semitic Hercules,
a solar myth? Or if, perchance, the historian accepted from remote
antiquity the accounts of great deeds and striking events, as they were
told at the camp fires of the Hebrew nomads, or in the merry makings of
the Palestinian villages, with an ever growing nimbus of the marvelous
gathering around them; and if thus impossible marvels are reported to us
soberly, are we to be compelled to accept them uncritically or reject the
Bible altogether? The Bible itself points us to the interpretation of such
legends We have some histories written by the actors in the scenes
narrated. Nehemiah and Ezra, leaders in the most important movement of
Hebrew history after the migration led by Moses, left accounts of their
work from their own pens. In such a crucial epoch as that of the
restoration of the Jews to their native land, after the dispersion in
Babylonia, we might expect to find miraculous interpositions on behalf of
the chosen people, if they are to be found anywhere. But no tale of
miracle adorns their simple pages. No other old Testament history, written
by the actors in its scenes, tells of miracles. Such stories are found in
the traditions written down long after the events narrated, by men who
knew nothing of the facts at first hand. Exceptions to this rule occur
alone in such startling events as the mysterious calamity that befell
Sennacherib; which strongly impressed the imagination of the people and
naturally gave rise to exaggerations that we can no longer resolve.
Perhaps Elisha's iron axe head did swim upon the water. I am prepared to
believe almost anything after our spiritualistic mediums, and their
exposers. Whether it did or did not concerns me no whit. I shrug my
shoulders and read on. I cannot make out the historical fact which was at
the basis of the Red Sea deliverance; nor do I care much to make out this
or any other Old Testament miracle. If I felt obliged to accept literally
these stories, or to lose my faith in the voice of God which speaks
through the men of the Bible I should care greatly. In the true view of
the Bible I am delivered from solicitude about these traditions, and am
under no constraint of credulity. Those who can believe the story of
Elisha and the bears, or of Elijah's ascension into heaven, may; those who
cannot, need not; and both alike should reverently read their Bibles, not
for these tales of wonder, but for the still small voice of the eternal
spirit sounding through holy lives and holier aspirations, until He came
whose life was the Word of God, the Wonderful.[28]
IV.
_It is a wrong use of the Bible to consult it as a heathen oracle for the
determining of our judgments and the decision of our actions._
The pagans, even such grand old pagans as the Romans, before undertaking
any important action would solemnly consult the auspices. Men with reason
given them of God would stand anxiously around the steaming entrails of a
bird, to find out whether the fates were propitious to their undertaking.
Great generals would open or delay a campaign according to the intestinal
revelations of a goose. Intelligent people use the Bible in some such way.
When at a loss how to proceed, instead of calmly consulting their own
judgments and the judgments of their wisest friends, and then acting like
reasonable beings, men and women will open their Bibles at random, let
then-eyes rest on the first verse which arrests their attention, and
accept any possible bearing on the question in hand as the voice of God.
The journals of John Wesley and other eminent men contain examples of this
abuse of the Bible. I call it an abuse, for such action degrades the Bible
to the level of a heathen oracle. Isaiah, like all the great prophets,
habitually contrasted the true and the false communications of of the
Divine will by the test of the reasonableness of their manifestations. The
real prophet heard the voice of God, not so much in dreams and visions, in
the "peepings and chirpings" of the oracles, as in the calm and sober
working of his mind, illumined from on high. The oracle was the antithesis
of the prophet. The oracle represented unintelligent, unreasonable magical
means of getting at a desired knowledge. The prophet represented the
intelligent, reasoning, natural means of getting at that knowledge; the
lighting of that candle of the Lord which is the spirit of man. In the
profound double significance of the original, the _Logos_ is the Word or
the Reason. The Word of God which comes to man is the Divine Reason, of
which each human reason is a ray. To train and use that reason in all our
exigencies, humbly looking up to the Eternal Reason to let the light in us
be pure and clear, is the way to hear the Word of God.
To consult the reason of the holy men of old on themes whereon they were
qualified to speak is rational and right. To make of their writings a new
oracle whose mysterious meanings we are to guess, as the ancient Greeks
puzzled over the messages of the Delphic shrine, is to revive Paganism in
Christianity. "No prophecy is of any private interpretation." No passage
in the Bible was written, centuries ago, with reference to your private
affairs. All that is there written concerned men and affairs of distant
days. The principles there applied will help you now, if you will take the
trouble to search for them, since principles do not change with the
fashions.
V.
_It is a wrong use of the Bible to go to it, as the heathen went to their
oracles, for divination of the future._
The pagan oracles were the shrines of a Power sought for the forecasting
of events. The inspiration of an oracle was proven by the success of its
predictions. In the same way men have turned to the Bible as a sort of
sacred weather bureau, a book which, if we could only interpret its mystic
utterances, would tell us what things were going to happen upon the earth.
I remember an eloquent Irish divine who came to this country on a great
mission a number of years ago. His first sermon was on Ezekiel's vision by
the Chebar. He said that this was the age of science, and that such a
marvel as science could not have escaped the vision of the prophets. This
mystic creature which the prophet saw, with wheels, whose appearance was
like burning coals of fire, which turned not as it went, and so on,
was--the locomotive! This folly was only more undisguised than the mass of
the lucubrations called Prophetic Studies.
Let any political crisis occur, and some sage will write a book showing
how Daniel had foretold this issue of diplomacy. I have not forgotten the
learned tracts and essays called forth by the fascination Louis Napoleon
exercised upon the imaginations of half-educated people; all proving
beyond a doubt that he was the mystic man of sin, the Anti-Christ in whom
history was to culminate.
America, the restoration of the Jews to Palestine, and the Church of Rome
especially inspire, at present, these crazy conjectures. They ought all to
issue from Bedlam.
This mad and maddening use of what, rightly read, are noble and
instructive books, grows out of a misunderstanding of what were the
functions of Hebrew prophecy.
Prophecy has been taken as a synonyme for prediction. There is not much
verbal difference between foretelling and forthtelling, but there is a
vast difference for the purposes of religion. Taking prophecy as the
synonyme of foretelling, the essential function of the prophets became
predicting. They were supposed to have been busy in forecasting the things
which should come to pass in the far future. The success of these
long-range predictions was the demonstration of their being charged with
miraculous powers. The prophecies constituted the chief evidence for the
supernatural character of the Bible. Of course, with this theory in the
mind of the church, a predictive character would be read into everything
capable of bearing it; and the history of the Hebrews, the eloquent
orations of their great statesmen, the pious longings of their hymn
writers, became mystic anticipations of everything in the heavens above
and the earth beneath.
But Hebrew prophecy never was the synonyme for prediction. It meant
forth-telling. The prophets were "men of the spirit," whose pure nature
mirrored the supreme laws of earth, the moral laws; whose intuitions made
application of those laws to the policies of statecraft, and enabled them
to divine the issues of the stirring events amid which they lived. Their
glory is that they saw above the brute force of great empires the might of
right, and dared to vision its triumph, and that history has verified
their moral insight. But they chiefly spake, as the author of The
Revelation declares of his prophecy, "of things which must shortly come to
pass" upon the earth. Their horizon bounded a very nigh future the
approach of Syrian, Assyrian, Egyptian invaders the overthrow of
Jerusalem, etc.
In these predictions they were often mistaken; nearly as often in error as
in the right. We seldom hear of these unfulfilled prophecies, but they are
in your Bibles. They should teach you, that which the prophets tried so
hard to teach their own cotemporaries, that the essential distinction of
the true prophet was not that he predicted the future, for this they
scornfully left to the false prophets the oracles of the pagan Jews, but
that they forthtold the inner mind and will of God, read the 'laws mighty
and brazen' which constitute the essential nature of the Most High and
hold the supreme felicity of man. I believe I know of no one passage of
the prophets which can be certainly said to point to any event beyond the
near future of the writer. Only in so far as they spoke of the ideal
forces, of ethical victories, did they launch out upon the far future.
But you say, Do not the Old Testament prophets surely point on to Christ?
I answer both No, and Yes. Of any mere literal prediction of the events of
His life I know none. The many passages that have been made to read like
predictions of His miraculous birth, His sale for thirty pieces of silver,
and so on, refer to personages and experiences in the time of the writers.
Isaiah expressly says this about the Virgin--that is, the young bride--who
was to conceive and bear a son. Before he should be able to distinguish
right from wrong the relief of Jehovah to Israel would appear. The
passages which seem to our eyes, looking through orthodox spectacles, to
have this predictive character, lose it in a more exact translation.
It is doubtless true that the Gospels make many such applications of Old
Testament words, adding to their record of minute incidents--"That it
might be fulfilled which was spoken by ... saying." But the Gospels, as we
now possess them, have been slowly fashioned by the labor of many hands,
working over the tradition which gradually shaped itself out of the
reminiscences of multitudes of men and women. Pious Jews, trained in this
Rabbinical use of their Sacred Scriptures, delighting to make application
of ancient mystic sayings to the life of their adorable Messiah, read into
the Gospel narrative these fulfillments of prediction.
This use of the Old Testament has been pushed to absurdity in learned
books over which I have patiently toiled. "The Gospel of Leviticus," gave
me the Hebrew civic and ecclesiastic legislation mystified into 'sound
evangelical' symbols. "Christ in the Psalms" twisted every heathenish
imprecation of the Hebrew hymns into language which could be put upon the
lips of the dear Lord, and turned the bitterest curses into sweet and
gracious benedictions.
The culmination of this moon-struck exegesis, as far as my knowledge
reaches, is in the ancient and fantastic reading of the tradition of the
escape of the spies from Jericho, which gave a young and eloquent Bishop
of our church a favorite sermon; wherein he showed conclusively that the
scarlet cord by which Rahab let down her visitors over the city wall was a
type of the atoning blood of Christ!
This Chinese puzzle-book of predictions exists nowhere save in the
imagination of its readers.
There was, however, a most real and substantial typifying of Christ
through the Old Testament; but it was natural, organic, ethical and
spiritual; in those books as first in the lives of the people. The growth
of the nation onward toward the true Image of God, the true Human Ideal;
the travail of the nation with the Divine-Human Character which at the
last came to the birth in Jesus the Christ; this was a mystery of natural,
organic evolution, which 'must give us pause' in every shallow denial of
a supernatural involution in human history. This makes true rationalism
reverent before 'that Holy Thing' born not alone of Mary but of Mary's
race, begotten plainly of the overshadowings of some Holy Ghost, of whom
our best judgment is, now as of old,--"He shall be called the Son of the
Highest."
The whole history of Israel is a growth of The Christ, and that is the
abiding wonder of it.
In such a mystic evolution it may well be, in history as in nature, that
the organic processes type the oncoming form of life; but to trace these
rightly there is needed a finer criticism than that which has given us the
orthodox typology.[29]
* * * * *
Let us pause here for to-day. And let us take home, as the heart-thought
of the morning, an assurance which may comfort us as we stand under the
shadow of Christmas. If the dear Christ's throne stood on any such flimsy
basis of prophecy as men have built up beneath it, then, when the
underpinnings came tumbling out, as to-day they are doing, we might fear
that His authority was dropping in with them; that no longer we were to
call Him Master and King; that criticism had pronounced His _decheance_.
But His throne really rests on a nation's growth of the human Ideal and
Divine Image. And, since this nation's growth was on the same general
lines as the religious and ethical progress of other races, His throne
rests on no less secure a foundation than humanity's evolution of the
human Ideal and Divine Image. Man's best and noblest life aspires after an
ideal which is the Christly character. Man's best and noblest thoughts of
God fashion a vision which is the God revealed in Christ. He is Humanity's
"Master of Life."
IV.
The wrong use of the Bible
"The Scriptures will be more studied than they have been, and in a
different manner--not as a magazine of propositions and mere dialectic
entities, but as inspirations and poetic forms of life; requiring,
also, divine inbreathings and exaltations in us, that we may ascend
into their meaning. No false _precision,_ which the nature and
conditions of spiritual truth forbid, will, by cutting up the body of
truth into definite and dead morsels, throw us into states of excision
and division, equally manifold. We shall receive the truth of God in a
more organic and organific manner, as being itself an essentially vital
power."
Horace Bushnell. God in Christ; p. 93.
"But, further, the zealots for the Bible _as it is_, just because it
_is_, forget that, in their outcry in behalf of every existing book,
and paragraph, and sentence, and word in the present edition of it, as
'God's Word written,' they are simply begging the question, What _is_
'God's Word written'? What _is_, without any doubt, a genuine portion
of those writings which contain the message from God? The question is,
in no case, 'Will you part with any utterance of God's voice, whether
through apostle or evangelist?' but only, 'Is this particular word, or
sentence, or passage, truly such an utterance? Have we good grounds for
accepting it as such? Nay, have we not overwhelming grounds for
doubting it to be such?' We do right to hold fast 'the faith once
delivered to the saints,' but the more we are determined to be faithful
to this faith, just the more sedulous and more searching must be our
inquiry, Have we here this faith in its integrity?"
Thomas Griffith, late Prebendary of St. Paul's, London: The Gospel of
the Divine Life, p. 418.
IV.
The wrong use of the Bible.
"Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for
reproof for correction, for instruction in righteousness; that the man
of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works."--2
Tim. iii; 16-17.
"Use the world as not abusing it" was a great principle of the Apostle,
which has many special applications. One of these comes again before us
to-day: Use the Bible as not abusing it.
I proceed to point out some further wrong uses of the Bible:
I.
_It is a wrong use of the Bible to go to it as an authority in any sphere
save the spheres of theology and of religion._
In the traditional view it was an infallible authority upon every subject
of which it treated.
The Divine Being had prepared a book which answered off-hand the questions
man's mind naturally starts concerning the problems of existence; a book
which taught officially how the earth came into its present form, how life
arose upon it, how man was made, how sin entered, how the world was
peopled, how mankind was to fare upon the earth, how the present order was
to come to an end, and many things beside. To answer authoritatively these
questions was the _raison d'être_ of the Bible. It laid a solid foundation
for a science of life. With the passing away of the unreal Bible all
reference to it for such information should cease. These books, as actual
human writings, the studies of men of long past centuries, of men having
no guarantees of infallibility, cannot be expected to have anticipated the
solution of the great problems of knowledge, towards which the human
intellect has been laboriously working through the generations since they
were written; towards which it is still toilsomely striving, content, even
now, with the cold, grey light as of the dawning day.
Our truer idea of revelation--the evolution of nature and the historic
growth of man--forbids such a notion of any book. It has plainly pleased
the Most High that knowledge of these mysteries should come to man through
his patient, persevering effort after truth. Such continued endeavour wins
gradually better knowledge, and with it better life. This process of human
discovery is yet more truly a process of the Divine self-revealing. In
each and every real knowledge man is learning to know--God. Each truth of
science is a manifestation of somewhat in the Infinite Power in whom we
live and move and have our being. Had it pleased God to have given,
centuries ago, a super-natural answer to these problems of earth, He would
simply have dismissed His children from school, with-held from them that
noble education which lies in the discipline of study, and, while giving
them truth, have robbed them of that keenest joy of life, that benediction
richer even than the possession of truth--the search for it.
How indeed, even in the resources of omnipotence, could an answer to the
earth-problems have been framed, which, while coming down to the plane of
the age of Moses, should have kept level with the rise of human knowledge
through the climbing centuries? No, the Bible was not prepared as an
Encyclopedia of Knowledge for the successive generations of men. Its
writers may anticipate the thought of ages by profound intuitions,
pregnant imaginations, visions of the seer, as Plato does. Genius often
outstrips the plodding feet of generations. But genius must not put on the
airs of omniscience. It must submit its claims to trial by jury. They are
to stand, if stand they shall, not because they are in Genesis or the
Republic, but because they prove true.
When (_e.g._) the Biblical writers speak of the Creation, the Garden of
Eden, the Fall of Man, etc., they give us their thoughts, the thoughts of
their age, the thoughts of earlier ages, of greatly gifted minds in many
ages gathering into an imposing tradition; which, as we now see, came down
through successive generations of Hebrews, from a remote antiquity in
which this race had not been thrown off from the common Semitic stock. On
the baked clay tablets of Babylonia we read to-day the same stories. The
Hebrews worked them over, under the plastic power of their religious
genius, into the lofty ethical and theistic forms in which they stand in
Genesis; forms which, rightly read, are parables fresh and inspiring now,
as when, twenty-five hundred years ago, Jewish children listened to them
with awe beneath the willows by the water courses of Babylonia. That most
exquisite story of our weird Hawthorne, the Marble Faun, is a version of
the legend of the Garden of Eden. Commingled with these lofty truths we
find crude notions of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology How
could it be otherwise, since these sciences were embryotic then, or even
unborn? We hearken, reverently, thankfully, to the philosophy and poetry
of Hebrew, Chaldean and Accadian sages and seers, in these profound and
subtle parables of the mysteries which still fascinate us. We dismiss the
knowledge of nature set forth in these legends and myths as the
child-sciences of Israel and Chaldea and Accadia.
We go to our savans for knowledge of physical nature. We make no attempt
to reconcile Genesis with the Origin of Species. Genesis is no authority
in science, and The Origin of Species is no authority in philosophy,
poetry, theology or religion.
The accounts of man in the dim distance of pre-historic times, given in
Genesis, belong to the departments of the antiquarian, and the
philologist; and we trust their story, no matter how it collides with the
Hebrew traditions. So through every sphere of knowledge upon which the
Biblical writers enter, outside of their own special spheres, we follow
them as venerable guides, but as entirely fallible authorities, expressing
the knowledge of their age and race.
Thus, to take one example from later times, St. Paul, in the first epistle
to the Corinthians, condemns woman's participation in the exercises of
worship and instruction in the Christian assemblies of Corinth. This
judgment is accepted, by those who hold to the unreal Bible, as forclosing
the case of woman versus man in the vocation of the ministry, in this land
and age as in all lands and ages. We saw lately the action of this theory
over in Brooklyn. Though she had the gifts and graces of a Lucretia Mott,
though her preaching were blessed as that of a Miss Smiley, though woman's
temperament seems peculiarly fitted for the inspirational influences of
the pulpit, yet Nature's ordination must be disowned because Saul of
Tarsus thought it unseemly for a woman to speak in meeting! He thought it
unseemly also, as he tells us in the same letter, that woman should appear
unveiled in public assemblies; in which you do not seem to consider him an
authority. Why should you defer to him in the one opinion and disregard
him in the other? Both opinions formed part of his education as a Jew of
the first century of our era; as which he frankly confessed that he
regarded woman as inferior to man. We do not consider the Jewish
physiology and psychology of that age binding on us; and St. Paul's
opinion on such a matter falls to the ground with it.
II.
_It is a wrong use of the Bible, for the purposes of theology or religion,
to give its language any other meaning than that which similar language
would have under similar circumstances._
People of sound minds do not read poetic language in other books as though
it were prose. They do not take words thrown off at white heat; crowd
them, all molten with feeling, into the mould of a Gradgrind
understanding; force them to take the form of such matter-of-fact minds;
and then, when the emotion is cooled down, and the fluent fancies are
reduced to stiff, hard prose, say--"there, that is the exact meaning of
this language!" Fancy Shakespeare's impetuous, tumultuous riotous imagery
treated by such 'criticism!'
Yet that is the sort of treatment which many learned pedants call
'expounding the Bible!' It is with the greatest difficulty that the
Western mind can rightly read the Eastern's language. We miss the rich
aroma of their nectared speech, and find only the grounds left. And we
take these grounds for the true original beverage of the gods! Out of such
residuum of poetry, when the poesy has exhaled, we make our spiritual
food! Poetry petrified into prose--is the real explanation to be offered
of many an absurdity of Bible-reading.
A visitor to one of the Shaker communities describes the men and women as
engaging in the most preposterous play of making-believe; performing upon
imaginary instruments as they marched in procession; going through the
motions of washing their faces and hands as they surrounded an imaginary
fountain; and, finally, plunging bodily into this spiritual fountain, by
rolling over on the grass! To an exclamation of surprise at such childish
doings, answer was made that thus they were becoming as little children,
in order to enter the kingdom of heaven![30]
Luther sat disputing with Zwinglius the doctrine of trans-substantiation,
and to every argument of his rational opponent answered by laying his
sturdy finger on the words, "This _is_ my body." The most powerful Church
of Christendom bases itself upon this prosaic reading of a poetic saying.
Many a mysterious dogma would simplify itself at once by remembering that,
in the language of the imagination, "the letter killeth, but the spirit
giveth it life."[31]
We are not to rush from this extreme into the opposite error and turn into
mystical and marvellous meanings the plain sense of the Biblical writers.
Imagine the result of putting all sorts of mystic glosses on the
straight-forward accounts of men and things in ordinary writings. Such is
in reality the folly of turning the sober statements of Biblical prose
writers into allegories, parables, symbols, types; and of finding
underneath the plainest meanings a double, triple and quadruple sense.
In the hour of Christ's approaching arrest he warns his disciples, in His
usual figurative manner, that they must now learn to provide for
themselves; since he would shortly be taken from them. "He that hath a
purse let him take it; and he that hath no sword let him sell his garment
and buy one." And his disciples, being very unimaginative folk, or being
perhaps stupefied with wonder and anxiety by His strange words and actions
on that night of sad surprises said--"Lord, behold here are two swords."
The Master answered, with a weariness of their obtuseness that we can feel
in the curt reply, "It is enough." And the wisdom of the Roman Church sees
herein a type of the temporal and spiritual power of the Papacy!
I am solemnly warned against such learned puerilities every time I turn to
my shelves and encounter Swedenborg's "Arcana Coelestia." In ten goodly
volumes he interprets Scripture history after this fashion:
"'And Rebecca arose'--hereby is signified an elevation of the affection
of truth: 'And her damsels'--hereby are signified subservient
affections: 'And they rode upon camels'--hereby is signified the
intellectual principle elevated above natural scientifics."!
Of all this pious sort of folly we may say with the Master--"Enough."
It is the common mistake which gathers a nimbus of mystic sense around
every book excessively revered. Thus the Greeks fancied an inner and
mystical sense in Homer; and thus Italian professors expound the esoteric
significance of Dante.
The fantastic dream of mysterious meanings in the Bible must take wings
after its kindred fancies of Greeks and Italians, at the touch of a
ripening literary judgment. One rule holds of all human letters. Where
there is legend, myth, metaphor, or other clear form of poetic fancy,
language is to be read imaginatively. Otherwise, in the Bible, as out of
it, the ordinary meaning of words must be followed.
III.
_It is a wrong use of the Bible to construct a theology out of it, by the
mechanical system of proof texts in vogue in the churches._
With a preconceived system of thought in their minds, drawn from the most
highly evolved speculations of the New Testament, men have gone through
both Testaments; and whenever they have lighted upon a sentence which
seemed to coincide with this system, it has been torn bleeding from its
place in a living texture of thought, impaled on some one of the "Five
Points," and set up in the Theological Cabinet, duly labelled "Proof-Text
of Original Sin," or "Proof Text of Future Punishment."
What a monstrosity an ordinary Sunday School Scripture Catechism is, with
its statements of received doctrines, to which are appended proof-texts
drawn from Genesis and Isaiah and Paul; _i.e._, from some pre-historic
tradition, from a Hebrew states, man's oration and from a Christian
apostle's letter. It makes no difference what the character of the writing
from which the sentence is taken. Everything is grist for this mill. A
"judgment" or "doom" of the nomadic Hebrews, a burning metaphor from a
late poet and a metaphysical proposition from an Alexandrian philosopher
are jumbled together side by side, as co-equal proofs of the most awful
doctrines.
An ancient historian, gathering up the traditions of his primitive
fore-fathers, records the legend of the Flood, in which it is told that
"God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth,
And that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart
Was only evil continually."
The poet who wrote, out of the deep of some experience of shameful sin,
the pathetic penitential hymn, known as the Fifty-first Psalm, said, in
the course of his self-condemnings:--
"Behold I was shapen in wickedness,
And in sin hath my mother conceived me."
The poet who wrote his unrivaled prophecies amid the humiliation of the
national exile in Babylonia, cried out in one place:--
"We are all as an unclean thing,
And all our righteousness are as filthy rags."
And these mythic and poetic words, true to man's abiding sense of evil in
his deepest hours, stand to-day in the arsenal of theology as proof-texts
of the doctrines of original sin and total depravity!
Even this folly has been surpassed. Among the proverbial sayings of the
Jews was one to this effect;
"If the tree fall towards the South, or towards the North,
In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be."
The meaning of such a proverb is surely plain enough. Death's action is
irrevocable. As it meets a man it leaves him. His plans and schemes lie as
incapable of development as the fallen tree is incapable of new
sproutings. At the time the book of Ecclesiastes was written, the belief
in any life after death was little known in Israel. This book was the work
of a thorough pessimist, whose constant refrain was--Vanity of Vanities,
all is Vanity. It gives no hint of a second life; and in the absence of
this faith the present life is to the writer an insoluble problem. This
saying really expressed the popular belief that death ended everything. A
man falls like a tree, and, like a prostrate tree, as he falls he lies.
And lo! this Jewish proverb is the first proof-text generally quoted for
the dread doctrine that after death there is another life, but that its
character is fixed forever by the state of the man at death; the dogma of
everlasting conscious suffering in Hell!
What Midsummer Night's Dream reasoning, turning common-sense topsy-turvy,
and treating the words of God in the very reverse way from that in which
all sane people agree to treat the words of man!
IV.
_It is a wrong use of the Bible to disregard the chronological order of
its parts in constructing our theology._
We are not to read the Biblical writers as though they were all
cotemporaries. They are separated by vast tracts of time. The later
writers stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors and see further and
clearer. We are not to view the institutions or doctrines of the Bible as
though, no matter in what period of the development of the Hebrew Nation
or of the Christian Church they are found, they were equally authoritative
upon us. That would be to say that green apples are as good food for us as
ripe ones. The time-perspective is essential to set any Biblical
institution or dogma in the true light.
Romanists and our own Ritualists entrench their sacerdotalism behind the
priestly system of the Jews. As though, because that was once needful and
serviceable to an ignorant, half heathen people, it was still
indispensible to us. As though what providence once ordained, providence
perpetually imposed on humanity. Such a rule would keep us with our
primers always in our hands. Progress is marked by the debris of discarded
institutions, wholesome and necessary once, but incumbrances after a time.
The whole _rationale_ of sacerdotalism is exploded by this simple common
sense principle; and we see in its light the significance of Paul's
impatient sweeping away of the Law; of the entire ignoring of the
sacrifice and the priesthood in the life and teaching of Jesus himself.
"The hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain,
Nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. God is spirit;
And they that worship must worship him in spirit and in truth."
Dogmas also must be seen in historical perspective. Thus, for example, the
doctrine of the Second Advent, which still exercises the Christian mind,
is wholly cleared up as looked at through the time-vista.
We see the progress of the Messianic expectation through the centuries
immediately prior to the age of Christ, in our old Testament books and in
the Apocryphal writings. In these latter works we see it gradually
gathering round itself visions of the winding up of the present aeon, the
renovation of the earth, the judgment of the nations, the resurrection of
the pious dead, and the opening of a millenial era in which the Messiah
should rule the world from Jerusalem. It would appear to have even
developed the notion that the Messiah, after his appearance on earth,
would depart into the spirit-world, to consummate his preparation; and
would return thence to assume full power. This had became the popular
expectation by the Christian era.
When then the early Christians became satisfied that Jesus was the
Messiah, it followed of necessity that they should after his death, say to
themselves--"He has gone into the heavens to receive his institution into
the office he has won by his sinless life and suffering death. He will
come again in the clouds with power; the conquering Messiah."
This belief seems to have taken shape first in Paul's fervid mind. His
earlier epistles were full of it. His converts became unsettled by it, and
in their excited expectation of the return of the Messiah they neglected
their earthly duties; and Paul had to caution them against this impatience
and cool their heated minds.
This and other experiences sobered Paul's own mind. He found that as year
after year came round the Messiah did not return. In the rapid ripening of
thought which went on in the tropical climate of his soul, he grew into a
more spiritual apprehension of Christ. If you read his undoubted letters
in the order of their writing; First Thessalonians, First and Second
Corinthians, Galatians, Romans, etc., you will note a steady decrease of
reference to this topic, until it fades away into a vague vision of the
dawning day of God; the absolute assurance that Christ would conquer and
rule the earth, though it might be in the spirit and not in the flesh; the
certain conviction of a good time coming though beyond his ken. The later
light of the apostle corrected his earlier misapprehensions; and would
correct our crude and carnal notions of the second coming of Christ, if we
would only study Paul, as we study Turner or Shakespeare, in his ripening
'periods.'
Were this one principle followed, our popular theology would soon
reconstruct itself.
V.
_It is a wrong use of the Bible to cite its authors as of equal authority,
even in the spheres of theology and religion._
The teachings of any human writing come clothed with such authority as the
author's name lends to it or its intrinsic force wins for it.
If in the work of an obscure economic writer, of no perceptible ability,
you come upon the theory that the land of a people belongs to the people;
that its passing into the absolute ownership of private persons is the
basic evil of our civilization; that the nation must resume the
inalienable rights of the people at large, in the resources of all wealth,
and regulate the individual usufruct of land in the interests of the
entire body politic--you will probably toss the book contemptuously from
you as the crazy lucubration of a fool.
If in reading John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy you come
upon this theory, cautiously broached, you are constrained to treat it
with the consideration due an acknowledged master in this science. If
again in the first elaborate work of a new author, Progress and Poverty,
you meet this same theory, boldly laid down as the central theme of the
book, and contended for as the real solution of the persistent problem of
pauperism, you are disposed to pass it by unheeded. The author's name
carries to your mind no prestige of tradition. He speaks from no
time-honored university chair. No array of imposing titles hang upon the
plain 'Henry George,' of the title page. But you become interested in
these brilliant pages of genius and follow the author, with growing
sympathy, to the end.
You lay the book down, feeling as though a spell had been upon you, in
which you could form no sound judgment. You lay it by accordingly, to take
it up after some weeks, work over its positions, and find your first
impressions confirmed; to realize that here is a work of real, rare power;
an epoch-making book, which, if it does not carry your conviction,
commands your careful consideration.
Precisely so we are to be affected by the Biblical authors. There are
writings in the Bible by utterly unknown writers. A letter of an obscure
author cannot come with the weight of a letter from St. Paul. There are
writings of widely different mental force. Biblical authors varied in
personal power as much as other authors. Inspiration cannot do away with
the limitations of the human individuality. It must be modified by its
instrumentality. The saints are of various orders. Even the diamond books
which reflect the light of God so brilliantly may not be all of first
water. We must allow for the hues in the less perfect prisms. Were the
greatest musical genius in the world to sit before the key-boards he could
not draw from a harmonium the notes of a Lucerne organ. The impact of a
writing on our souls must be proportionate to the spiritual and ethical
force with which it is charged. Everyone recognizes this practically. None
of us, however orthodox, professes to be as much inspired by Esther as by
Job; by Chronicles as by Kings; by Daniel as by Isaiah; by Jude as by
Paul. That simply means that there is not as much inspiration in some
Biblical authors as in others. No author is always at his best. His work
differs. The second epistle to the Thessalonians is not level with the
epistle to the Romans. The third epistle of John, if it be of John, is
surely not as highly inspired as the first epistle of John. Inspiration is
plainly a matter of degrees.
The recognition of this common-sense principle, theoretically, would
remand the darker doctrines of Christianity to such authority as the lower
order of Biblical writings possess. The terrifying and torturing teachings
of the New Testament are from obscure authors, or from the masters in
their lower moods. The representations of a wrathful God, of an avenging
Christ, of a hell of horrors, are found in such epistles as Second
Thessalonians, whose authorship is uncertain; as Jude or Second Peter,
about whose authorship and date we have only the probability that no
apostle wrote them, and that they were written after the first, fresh
inspiration had passed from the church. Rabbinical speculations and Greek
superstitions show themselves at work in the Christian Church.[32] The
unquestioned letters of Paul are sunny and sweet. In them we see the
father of Christian Restorationism. If he knows anything of a dark side to
the resurrection, as he shows elsewhere that he does, he leaves it in its
own shadows; and in the height of this great argument of Corinthians
brings to the front only the resurrection to life and joy. "Knowing the
fear of the Lord we--persuade men."
The first epistle of John is true to its favorite symbol of the light.
There are no clouds in it. The God revealed in the greatest writings of
the greatest authors of the New Testament is Love. The Christ they picture
is _Christus Consolator_. The full breath of inspiration opens only the
upper register of notes. The voices of the soul are buoyant, joyous,
hopeful.
If you are willing to follow the most inspired writers, in their most
inspired moods, up into the heights whither the divine afflatus bore them,
you will mount above the cloud-level, and leave to those who lag after
feebler guides on the lower ranges of truth, the chill mists that eat into
the soul, while you rejoice in the light.
VI.
_It is a wrong use of the Bible to manufacture cut of it any one uniform,
system, of theology, as the fixed and final form of thought in which
religion is to live._
Let me define these contrasting terms, so commonly confounded. Religion
is man's perception of the Power in whom we live and move and have our
being, and his emotion towards this power. Theology is man's conception of
this Power, and his thought defined and formulated.
Religion is man's feeling after God; theology is man's grasp of God. The
two are necessarily connected. They are different forms of one and the
same force; the heat and the light which stream from God; but the heat and
the light are not always equal. A worthy thought of God ought to sustain
any worthy feeling towards Him. It generally does so. A heightened thought
of God may often be found back of a rising flow of feeling after Him. More
often the emotion precedes the conception; the vague, awed sense of God
travails till a new thought is born among men. This has been the order of
development in history. Men felt the Divine Power and Presence ages before
they had learned so much of theology as to say--God. The feeling of
God--religion--always keeps, in healthy natures, far ahead of
theology--the thought about Him. The deepest religion finds no word for
the mystery before which it bows. Its only thought may be that no thought
is sufficient.
"In that high hour thought was not."
Theology, then, as man's thought about God, is necessarily conditioned by
man's mind. It is under the general limitations of the human intellect,
and the special limitations of thought in each race and age and
individuality. It cannot escape these limitations, expand as they may. A
flooding of the mind from on high may overflow these embankments but they
still stand, shaping the flow of the fullest tides. The individuality of a
great writer asserts itself most strongly in his greatest works. His
deepest inspiration brings out most plainly his mental form, just as the
drawing of a full breath shows the real shape of a man. No possible theory
of inspiration should lead us to look for the submergences of the dykes of
thought cast up by race and age and individuality.
As a matter of fact, we find no uniformity in the theologies of the New
Testament writers. Men have tried hard to make it appear that there was
such a unity of thought. Never was more ingenious joiner-work done than in
the "harmonies" of the New Testament writers. But facts are stubborn
things, and in this case have resisted even the omnipotence of human
ingenuity; as open minds have seen, despite the doctors.
St. Paul's Epistles reveal a theology by no means as precise and fixed as
is popularly imagined, undergoing rapid changes, growing with his growth,
always suffused from the soul with emotions which struggled against the
prison bars of thought and speech. His intensely speculative mind had
furnished a system of thought into which he built such ideas as these: The
pre-existence of Christ, as, in some mystic, undefined way, the Head of
Humanity; the sacrificial nature of His death; the justification of the
sinner through faith; the life of Christ within the soul, as the Human
Ideal; the speedy return of Christ in person to reign on earth (at least
in the early part of his career); the resurrection of the pious dead; the
translation of living believers; the final victory of goodness over evil;
and the ending of the mediatorship of Christ, God then becoming all in
all.
This was the form which the mystery of God's relationship to man took in
the mind of this great genius, and around which the fiery passion of his
hunger after righteousness shaped itself.
In the Epistle of St. James, assuming the traditional authorship, how much
of this theology can you find? The incarnation is nowhere clearly stated.
The name of Christ occurs but twice. His atonement is scarcely mentioned.
The prophets are held up as examples of patience, under suffering without
any reference to Christ. Paul's especial doctrine of justification by
faith is explicitly denied. Of his fellowship with the Gentiles and his
broad human sympathies, there is nothing whatever. All is intensely
Jewish. If Paul's theology is orthodoxy, James is dreadfully unsound.[33]
"The fundamentals" are all lacking.
Both Paul and James differ very decidedly from the mystic soul who wrote
the First Epistle of John; and all three differ again, quite as much, from
the philosopher who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews. How little have
either the Apocalypse or Jude in common with Paul! We can no more make a
uniform theology out of the New Testament writers than we can out of
Calvinism, Arminianism Catholicism, and Unitarianism.
These various theologies can be traced to the elements making up the
individualities of the different writers. The idiosyncracies of Paul are
clearly marked. He was a man of strong speculative mind, of mystic piety,
of lofty enthusiasm for great ideals, a-hungered after righteousness. A
Jew and yet a Roman citizen, his education developed the two-fold
sympathies of an Israelite of the dispersion. At the feet of the liberal
rabbi, Gamaliel, he learned the curious and mystical lore of the rabbins,
while drinking in from his Master the spirit of freedom. Thrown from a
child in constant contact with the Gentiles of his native city, Tarsus,
race prejudices had been sapped unconsciously; while in youth or manhood
the wisdom and beauty of the Greek genius had apparently been opened to
him.
Paul's personality, fusing the materials of his education, and out of them
building a body of thought around The Christ, explains his theology. He
reproduces the conceptions of the rabbis, of the popular Jewish belief, of
Gamaliel, of Tarsus, of Athens; transfigured on the heights of thought to
which he climbed, in his intense musings over the problem of Jesus of
Nazareth, while buried away in Arabia.
The small amount of theology in the practical Epistle of James is quite as
plainly Jewish, of the school of the Sages, with a touch of Essenism. The
theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews shows throughout the influences of
the philosophy of Alexandria. The theology of the introduction to the
Gospel according to St. John is just as unquestionably this same
Alexandrian philosophy, still further developed.
These variant schools of Christian theology, so plainly revealing the
sources of their variations, deny the existence of any one uniform system
of thought in the New Testament writers, and pronounce the different
systems transient and not final forms.
Whatever the Church may offer us, the New Testament offers us no fixed and
final body of thought. In the Bible, Christian theology is still a soft
vase, plastic to the touch of each worker upon it. Had Paul's fine hand
played around it even another decade, how different the shape it might
have taken.
With the incoming of a more rational, ethical, and spiritual age, we may
surely expect a finer fashioning of the forms of thought blocked out in
the New Testament, under the first, fresh inspiration of the age of Jesus;
into whose larger patterns shall be taken up all the truths revealed
through the various sciences of these rich later ages; while all shall
still take on the shape of Him who is the image of the invisible God.
"The Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy word."
The true Biblical theology is--Christ himself. His thought of God, and not
even Paul's thoughts about Christ, are to mould our thinking. The Supreme
Son of Man must have had the truest thought of God. Two words formulate
his theology as bodied not in a creed, but in a prayer--"Our Father." The
earliest, simplest, deepest cry of the human after God, now by Him who
lived its spirit perfectly, the trusting, loving, holy Child of the
Father, made no longer a sigh, a dream, a vision, but a life. "The life
was the light of men."
That light is the sufficient clue to the dark labyrinth in which we wander
wearily.
I cannot always make out the face of a Father on the stern, harsh Power
in whom we live and move and have our being. Then I turn to my Divine
Brother, who, of all the children of men, saw deepest into the mystery,
and in his far-mirroring eyes I read the vision which satisfies me.
With poor dying Joe, I whisper to myself:
"'Our Father:' yes, that's werry good."
V.
The Right Critical Use of the Bible.
"I am convinced that the Bible becomes even more beautiful the more one
understands it; that is, the more one gets insight to see that every
word, which we take generally and make special application of to our
own wants, has had, in connection with certain circumstances, with
certain relations of time and place, a particular, directly individual
reference of its own."
Goethe: quoted by M. Arnold in "The Great Prophecy of Israel's
Restoration."
V.
The Right Critical Use of the Bible.
"God, who at many times and in many manners spake in time past to the
fathers, by the prophets."--Hebrews, i. 1.
The right use of the Bible grows out of the true view of the Bible.
The Old Testament is the literature of the people of religion, in whom
ethical and spiritual religion grew, through all moods and tenses, toward
perfection. The New Testament is the literature of the movement which grew
out of Israel, the literature of the Universal Church bodying around the
Son of Man, in whom religion came to perfect flower and fruit. The real
Bible is the record of this real revelation coming through real ethical
and spiritual inspirations; a revelation advancing with men's deepening
inspirations toward the Light which rose in the Life of Jesus Christ our
Lord.
God, who at many times and in many manners spake in time past to the
fathers by the prophets, hath at the last of these days spoken unto us
by a Son.
These speakings of the Divine Spirit in the souls of men, at many times
and in many manners, were articulated, as best was possible, in the
writings of many ages and of many forms. The Bible is the collection of
these writings. They require a critical study, as _bona fide_ "letters,"
before we can know the degree of their inspiration, and their place in the
progressive historic revelation; before we can thus deduce aright the
thoughts about God out of which we are to construct our theology.
Concerning this right critical use of the Bible, I propose now to offer
some practical suggestions. Next Sunday I purpose giving you a bird's-eye
view of the general course of the historic revelation which led up to the
Christ, the Word of God. After which I shall pass on to consider with you
the pre-eminently right use of the Bible, in which our souls humbly
hearken for its words proceeding from out the mouth of God, on which man
liveth; and on them feeding, grow toward a perfect manhood in Christ
Jesus.
I.
_Every aid of outward form should be used to make these books appear as
living "letters" to us._
The traditional form in which the Bible has been given to the people would
seem to have been devised with a design of robbing its writings of every
natural charm, as the best means of making men feel its supernatural
power. The fresh sense of "letters" disappears in this conventional form.
These many books of many ages have been bound up together, with the most
imperfect classification either as to period or character. A verse-making
machine has been driven through them all alike, chopping them up into
short, arbitrary, artificial sentences, formally numbered in the body of
the text. The larger divisions into chapters have been made in an equally
mechanical manner. By this twofold system an admirable provision has been
made for checking the flow of the writer's thought, and for effectually
preventing any easy grasp of the natural movement of the book. Poetry has
been printed as prose; thereby marring its rhythm, concealing its
structure, and blinding the reader to the dramatic character of immortal
works of genius. Through the whole mass of writings a system of
chapter-headings has been introduced that ingeniously insinuates into the
body of these sacred books, as seemingly an integral part thereof, a
scheme of interpretation which possesses now no pepsine power for
resolving their contents into spiritual nutriment, but rather positively
hinders our assimilation of many of these books.
Probably the greatest obstacle to the use of the Bible is the senseless
form in which custom persists in publishing it. I know few stronger
evidences of the intrinsic power of these books than their continued
influence, under conditions that would have remanded other books to the
topmost shelves of the most unused alcoves in our libraries.
We ought to have the different books, or groups of books, bound
separately; arranged paragraphically like other writings, with the present
verse divisions indicated, if need be, in the margin; and the poetic
structure properly indicated. These books should have brief, simple, lucid
notes; drawing from our best critics the needful information as to their
age, authorship, integrity, form, scope, obsolete words and idioms, local
customs historical allusions, etc.; with other readings throwing light
upon obscure passages. Each book should be thus provided with such a
popular critical apparatus as accompanies good editions of other classics,
and as Matthew Arnold has prepared for one book, in his primer entitled
"The Great Prophecy of Israel's Restoration;" which is the second section
of Isaiah, arranged as a "Bible-reading for schools."
This series of Bible-books should then be chronologically arranged, as far
as the conclusions of the higher criticism will allow; and should be bound
in uniform style and set in a Bible case, preserving thus the unity of the
whole. Such an edition of the Bible would stimulate a renewed resort to
it, in which men would re-discover a lost literature.
Until you can procure such an edition, provide yourselves with a paragraph
Bible, following the natural divisions of the writings and maintaining
their poetic form; and seek the information you may desire in some of the
manuals embodying the results of the higher criticism.
II.
_Each writing having an intrinsic unity should, by such aids, be studied
as a whole._
Every intelligent Christian ought to have a clear conception of the
general scope of thought in each great Bible-book. Whatever fragmentary
use of these books for direct devotional purposes may be made, he who
would count himself as one of "the men of the Bible," ought to know as
much about them as he knows about his favorite authors.
Who that pretends to be a lover of Shakespeare is content with a scrappy
reading of his immortal plays? To enjoy them fully, even in fragmentary
readings, he seeks to have a foundation of critical knowledge, such as
Shakespearian scholars place within the easy mastery of any one. After
such a study of a play he can pick it up in leisure hours and see new
beauties every time he reads it. How many Bible Christians know their
Bible thus?
What a revelation such a study makes! It is an alchemist's touch, turning
many a leaden book into finest gold.
The oldest book, as a whole, in the Bible, is the Song of Songs.
Attributed by later ages to Solomon, it was probably written by some
unknown author, anywhere from the tenth to the eighth century before
Christ.[34] The poem is dramatic in form, though imperfectly constructed
according to our canons. Its scenes shift, and its speakers change with
true dramatic movement. It is the closest approach to the drama preserved
to us in Hebrew literature, whose genius never favored this highly organic
form. There is needed but the usual indication of the _dramatis personæ_
to clear the movement of the plot, and to reveal the force and beauty of
the poem.
A maiden, her royal admirer, ladies of the court, the girl's brother and
her shepherd lover, appear and disappear in animated conversation. The
country maiden is wooed away from her shepherd lad by the allurements of a
royal admirer, who employs all the resources of fervid flattery and
passionate persuasion to win her as a new attraction for his harem. He is
foiled, however, by her simple, steadfast loyalty to her absent lover, to
whom she at length returns, triumphant in her virtue. In a corrected
version, the sensuousness of our English translation disappears in the
ordinary richness of Eastern imagery, and the poem becomes a pure picture
of loyal love. It reveals thus the healthy moral tone of Jewish society in
that early age. This sound domestic virtue of the people, which looked
with abhorrence on the licentiousness of the court, becomes all the more
striking in contrast with the polygamous customs of the surrounding
nations. We see the social foundation on which Israel builded such a noble
structure of ethical religion. The people whose literature opens with such
a laud of loyal love might well rise into the pure splendors of a Second
Isaiah.
Such a poem fitly introduces the canon of Scripture; since, into whatever
heights Religion aspires to lift the fabric of civilization, she must lay
its corner-stone in the marriage bond, and rear the church and the state
upon the family.
Perhaps we may also find in this Hebrew Song of Songs that mystic meaning,
not uncommon in Eastern love-songs, at least in later readings of them,
which Edwin Arnold has so vividly brought out in the Hindoo Song of Songs;
and may understand how the Church came to take it as a parable of the love
of the soul for its Heavenly Ideal, seen in the Christ.
Job, thus read, becomes a semi-dramatic poem, in which the problem of the
disconnection of goodness and good-fortune, the lack of any just ordering
of individual life, is discussed in the persons of an upright and sorely
afflicted patriarch and his three friends, who come to condole and counsel
with him. Through their interchanging colloquies, that bring up one after
another the stock theories of the age of the author, the argument moves
along without really getting on. No solution is found for the perplexing
puzzle, in which man's moral instincts beat vainly against the hard facts
of life. Once, for a moment, the thought of a future life flashes up, as
the true solution of the injustice of earth, in that thrilling cry of the
tortured soul:
I know that my Redeemer liveth,
And that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:
And though, after my skin, worms destroy this body,
Yet out of my flesh shall I see God;
Whom I shall see for myself,
And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.
But the vision fades upon an atmosphere unready for it, and the poet does
not return to follow this clue out into the sunshine.
All the light that he can discern is in Nature's manifestations of power
and order and wisdom. From a wide range of knowledge, the poet draws
together upon the stage the wonders of creation, which, with daring
freedom, he introduces God himself as describing; until at length Job
humbles himself in an awe not uncheered by trust:
Therefore have I uttered that I understood not.
Things too wonderful for me which I knew not.
* * * * *
I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear;
But now mine eye seeth Thee.
Wherefore I abhor myself,
And repent in dust and ashes.
By dropping out the episode of Elihu, as an insertion of some later hand,
the movement of the poem becomes sustained and progressive. The arguments
of the Jewish theology are cleverly presented, while the swift, sure sense
of justice in the sufferer pierces all sophisms, and riddles all pious
conventionalities. The descriptions of Nature are graphic and eloquent.
The _motif_ of the drama is one that voices the thought and feeling of our
far-off age, in which many men again vainly thresh the old arguments of
conventional theology, in trying to solve the "godless look of earth," and
take refuge anew in the manifestations of power and law in nature; not
without the ancient lesson, let us trust, of an awe which silences and
purifies, and leaves them in the light as of a mystery of meaning on the
sphynx's face, breaking into the dawning of a day which "uttereth speech."
Scientific agnosticism, in so far as it is an humble confession of human
ignorance, has its worship scored in this noble poem, ringing the changes
on the strain, at once plaint and praise:
Canst thou by searching find out God?
Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?
It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?
Deeper than hell; what canst thou know?
Curiously enough, as showing the power of conventionalism, the author
winds up with a prose epilogue of the genuine story-book fashion, in which
all things are set right by Job's restoration to his lost wealth, in
multiplied possessions. Pathetic persuasion of the poor human heart that
all things must come right in the end!
What the Epistle to the Romans, that affrighting _vade mecum_ of
theological disputants, becomes when read thus reasonably as a whole, with
critical discernment of its real aim, I will not try to tell you; but will
content myself with sending you where you may see it beautifully told,
with Paul's own upspringing inspiration of righteousness in Matthew
Arnold's "St. Paul and Protestantism."
III.
_Each great book should, as a whole, be read in its proper place in Hebrew
and Christian history._
The historical method is the true clue to the interpretation of a book. To
know it aright we must know the age in which it was produced. This is the
method by which such surprising light has been shed on many great works.
Who that has read Taine's graphic portraiture of the Elizabethan age can
fail ever thereafter to see Shakespeare stand forth vividly? What can we
make of Dante without some knowledge of Italy in the thirteenth century?
What new life is given to Milton's Samson after we have seen the blind old
poet of the fallen Protectorate in his dreary home! How can we rightly
estimate Rousseau's writings unless we know somewhat of the artificial and
luxurious age to which they came as a call back to nature? Taken out of
their true surroundings these writings lose their force and meaning.
In the same way we need to find the historical place of a Biblical
writing, and to read it in the light of its relation to the period.
The traditional view of Deuteronomy made it the last of the writings of
Moses, a Farewell Address of the Father of his Country; reciting to the
nation he had founded the story of its deliverance, repeating the laws
established for its welfare, and warning it against the dangers awaiting
it in the future. Such a view was attended with many difficulties, not
insuperable, however, to the critical knowledge of earlier generations.
Its real place in the history of Israel appears to have been found of
late.
The Prophetic Reformation of Religion, begun in the eighth century before
Christ, by the group of noble men of whom Isaiah was the most conspicuous
had, by the latter part of the seventh century before Christ, become ripe
for an organization of the institutions of religion. Jeremiah was the
central figure in this second period of the prophetic movement. Upon the
throne of Judah at that time was the good young king, Josiah--the Edward
the Sixth of Israel--in whom the hopes of the reformers centred. About the
year 625 B.C. occurred an event that decided the future of religion in
Judah; described in the twenty-second chapter of the second book of
Kings. The high-priest sent to the young king, saying:
I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.
This book of the law of Moses, according to tradition, had been lost; had
been lost so long that its provisions had dropped into disuse, into
oblivion; an oblivion so complete that the nation's religion ignored and
violated the whole system of that law; had been lost so long and so
thoroughly that the very existence of such a law had passed from the
memory of man.
This was the book that Hilkiah claimed to have re-discovered in the temple
archives. It was at once read to the excited king. It made a profound
impression upon him by its revelation of the apostasy in which the nation
was living, and by its solemn threatenings upon such apostasy.
It came to pass that when the king had heard the words of the book of
the law, that he rent his clothes.
For, said he:
Great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us, because our
fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book, to do according
unto all that which is written concerning us.
The devout young king threw himself into a thorough reformation of the
prevailing religion. All local altars were swept away, all idolatries were
cleared from the Jerusalem temple, the priesthood was centred in the
capital and more thoroughly organized; in short, as our fathers read the
story, Mosaism was re-established, after some seven centuries of partial
or total disuse.
Through processes which we cannot now follow, our later critics have, I
think, fairly established the proposition, that this book of The Law was
none other than the substance of our book of Deuteronomy, then for the
first time written. The plans of the prophetic reformers had contemplated
the sweeping changes described above, in the interests of an ethical and
spiritual religion. They felt that they were but carrying out the
principles of the nation's great Founder. Of his original conception of
religion, bodied in The Ten Words, their aspirations were the legitimate
historical development; as the leaf and bud are the growth of the far back
roots. This programme of the prophetic reformers, presented in its true
light as a development of the ideas of Moses, was, by the priest Hilkiah,
sent to the king as the law of the nation's Founder, with the results
sketched above.
Read in this light, the book takes on a fresh and fascinating interest. It
marks the organization of the movement toward a higher religion which had
been started by the great prophets of the preceding century. It becomes
the Augsburg Confession of the Jewish Reformation, from which dates the
gradual possession of the institutions of the nation by ethical and
spiritual religion.
The lofty character of this book, the "St. John of the Old Testament," as
Ewald called it, is thus rendered intelligible; as it stands for the
aspirations of the noblest movement in ancient Jewish history. It is the
issue of a long travail of soul to whose words we hearken in such a truth
as this:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
thy might.
Placed in this position, the book of Deuteronomy becomes the key to
Israel's history, by which criticism is reconstructing that story, on the
lines of the great laws of all life, with most significant consequences to
the cause of religion. The ideas and institutions known to us as The
Mosaic Law come forth now as the crown and culmination of a long historic
development. Israel's story is that of a slow and gradual education under
the divine hand; not a relapse, but a progress, not an apostasy but an
evolution. Israel takes its place in the general order of humanity's
movement. With it religion sweeps at once into the pathway of progress
which science has shown to be the order of nature; and the historic
revelation is seen to be, like the revelation in nature, a gradual,
progressive manifestation of Him "whose goings forth are as the
morning"--its orbit the sweep of the ascending sun.
With such mighty secrets does this little book grow luminous when placed
in the light of its real belongings.
The Book of Ezekiel, whose historic position was never disputed, becomes
of new value in the light of a fuller knowledge of its period. It presents
to the science of Biblical criticism the missing link in its theory of
Israel's development. It shows the process of transformation, out of which
issued during the exile the elaborate, hierarchical system known to us as
Mosaism. The new criticism seems to me to have reasonably established the
theorem, that the priestly cultus embodied in the legislation of the
Pentateuch was first systematized into the form it there presents during
the exile, and was first set up as the national system on the return to
Judea. It is not claimed that it was a new manufacture of that period. As
such it would be inconceivable.[35] It is simply claimed that it was a
thorough codification, for the first time, of the scattered and
conflicting codes of conduct and systems of worship of the various local
priesthoods of Israel, as handed down by tradition and in records from
ancient times; a codification animated by the centralizing and
hierarchical tendencies working in the nation; which tendencies were
themselves the result largely of the prophetic spirit, and its
aspirations for a nobler religion.[36] It is not difficult to account for
this remarkable priestly movement.
The institutional organization of religion that began under Josiah had
continued, with various fortunes, the aim of the higher spirits of the
nation down to the exile. The movement of life was in the direction of
uniformity and order. There was much in the circumstances of the exile to
stimulate this movement. The priests were left without their temple
worship, and, in the absence of outward interests, must have turned their
thought in upon their system itself, studying it as they had not done in
the midst of its actual operation. Like all wrongly lost possessions, it
became doubly dear. The Jews were placed in the midst of an ancient and
highly organized priestly system in Babylonia, whose benefits to culture
and religion they must have noted and pondered. In the national
humiliation and the personal sorrows of such a wholesale carrying away of
a people from their native land, a wide-spread awakening of the inner life
was experienced, a genuine revival of religion. A new wave of prophetic
enthusiasm rose in the strange land, lifting the soul of the nation to
heights of spiritual and ethical religion never reached before.
This revival was stamped with the impress of the intellectual influences
which were working upon the Jews in Babylonia. Some of the extant writings
of this period, alike in literary style, in moral tone and in religious
thought, mark a new era. Israel's genius flowered in this dark night--true
to the mystic character of the race. This highest effort of prophetic
thought and feeling appears to have quickly exhausted itself. In reality,
it followed the usual order of religious movements, and turned into a
priestly organization. The group of prophets around the first Isaiah
prepared the way for the priestly movement that followed a century later.
The group of prophets around the second Isaiah prepared the way for the
priestly movement that followed close in their steps. First comes always,
in religion, an epoch of inspiration, and then comes a period of
organization. The organization never bodies fully the spirit of the
inspiration. The ideal is not realizable in institutions. Institutional
religion is always a compromise, a mediation between the lofty conceptions
and impatient aspirations of the few who inspire the new life, and the low
notions and contented conventionalisms of the many whom they seek to
inspire. The compromise is necessarily of the nature of a reaction; but
the interplay of action and re-action is the law of ethical as of chemical
forces.
Israel really needed the conserving work of a great organization. The
prophetic religion was far in advance of the popular level. The high
thoughts and lofty ideas of the prophets needed to be wrought into a
cultus, which, while not breaking abruptly with the popular religion,
should imbue the conventional forms with deeper ethical and spiritual
meanings; should, through them, systematically train the people in ethical
habits and spiritual conceptions; and should thus gradually educate men
out of these forms themselves.
In the providence of God, and under the influences of His patient Spirit,
this needful system was developed in the exile: a system whose symbolism
was so charged with ethical and spiritual senses that it led on to Christ;
as the Epistle to the Hebrews rightly shows and as Paul distinctly
declares. As the first priestly period, following the first prophetic
epoch, bodied that double movement in a book--Deuteronomy; so the second
priestly period, following the second prophetic epoch, bodied this double
movement in a book, or group of books--the present form of the Pentateuch.
The traditions and histories and legislations of the past were worked over
into a connected series of writings, through which was woven the new
priestly system, in a historical form. On the restoration to Judea, this
institutional reorganization was set up as the law of the land, and
continued thenceforward in force--the providential instrumentality for the
_ad interim_ work of four centuries. Such a remarkable process of
development, so deepening in us a sense of the guiding hand of God, ought
to show some sign of its working, in the literature of the period. However
clear, from our general knowledge, the tendencies which were at work in
that period, we could not feel assured of our correct interpretation of
this most important epoch, in the absence of some such sign, in a writing
of that date.
The Book of Ezekiel supplies the missing link. The writer was a
prophet-priest, who went into the exile, and wrote in Babylonia. In the
earlier part of his life-work, recorded in the earlier portion of his
book, he was thoroughly prophetic, intensely ethical and spiritual,
breathing the very spirit of his great master, Jeremiah. In the latter
part of his career he was visited with dreams, such as are plainly
indicated to us in the remarkable vision occupying the concluding section
of his book. The fortieth chapter opens thus:
In the visions of God brought he me into the land of Israel, and set me
upon a very high mountain, upon which was as the frame of a city on the
south.
Then follows, through eighteen chapters, a sketch of the temple system in
the expected restoration. It is a thoroughly ideal sketch, a vision
destined to take on much simpler and humbler proportions in its
realization; a picture probably not intended for copying in actual
construction, but, like all ideal work, a powerful stimulus to the
aspirations it expressed.
It is a free sketch of the New Priestly System, on the easel, awaiting
correction and completion at the hands of Ezra and others. It reveals to
us the visions that were occupying the minds of the best men in the latter
part of the exile, and the work they were essaying. Thus we are prepared
for the final issue.
The Book of Daniel has been wrongly placed, traditionally, with most
serious consequences to the character of the book, and, through this
misconception to Christianity. Dated from the early part of the sixth
century before Christ, its story of Daniel's experiences read as literal
history, and its visions appear as actual predictions of long subsequent
events.
A high authority has declared--
There can be no doubt that it exercised a greater influence upon the
early Christian Church than any other writing of the Old Testament.[37]
That influence, owing to this misconception, is chiefly to be traced in
the growth of an apocalyptic literature, and in the fantastical and
material expectations of the Messianic Kingdom which they encouraged. It
has continued down to our own day turning heads as wise as Sir Isaac
Newton's, setting religion at conjuring with visions of monstrous beasts
and juggling with mystic figures until the name of Prophecy has become a
by-word.
This book appears to take its proper place, at least in its present form,
about a century and a half before Christ. That was a period of deep
depression for Israel. Under Antiochus Epiphanes the nation had been
sorely oppressed, its temple denied, and its religion well nigh crushed
out. Men's hearts were failing them for fear, and for looking for those
things that were coming to pass upon the earth. Pious souls turned back to
the ancient time of bitter humiliation, when Israel had been scattered in
a strange land, and recalled the bold word of faith spoken by Jeremiah,
which had stayed the spirits of their forefathers. The great prophet
promised that after seventy years the nation should be restored to its
native land, and should renew its prosperity gloriously. It had won back
its home, but in the old homestead it had grown poorer and feebler,
generation after generation. Had the ancient promise of prophecy failed?
Good men could not think so. To some devout soul came the suggestion that
the seventy years had meant seventy Sabbatical years, each of which
consisted of seven years; that is, four hundred and ninety years. One can
still feel the thrill that must have gone through him, as he saw that this
computation would place the defiling of the temple--that sign of God's
having forsaken his people--in the middle of the last week of years. It
was then only about three years to the destined end of the weary period
that Jeremiah had included in the term of Israel's humbling, after which
would come Jehovah's help. Fired with this thought, he set himself to
inspire his people with fresh hope and courage.
Around a traditional Daniel, famed for his wisdom and piety, and possibly
upon an earlier document containing some tales of this sage and saint, he
wove a story which should interpret Jeremiah's prophecy and Jehovah's
purpose. With charming grace he tells the tale of Daniel's constancy and
trust under the sorest trials, and of the divine deliverance that always
came to him. Into his mouth he placed predictions of what had already come
to pass in history, that thus his reputation as a prophet might be
established. Then he caused him to present a striking series of symbolical
visions, the clue to which was furnished for the writer's contemporaries
by certain clear allusions. These visions foretold deliverance as about to
come at the approaching end of the four hundred and ninety years of
Jeremiah. Other visions sketched the ushering in of the Messiah-Kingdom,
in glowing pictures of lofty religious tone.
In that dark night over Israel this book was as the morning star. It was
truly, as Dean Stanley called it, "the Gospel of the age." Its story
spread, and with it spread renewed patience and hope. It doubtless fed the
forces of that glorious revolt that shortly thereafter burst forth under
the heroic Maccabees. Thus it kept alive the vital spark in the nation,
through a crucial hour, that else might have gone out before it had given
birth to Christianity. Noble as the book of Daniel is in many ways,
especially as the real father of "the philosophy of history," it has a
still deeper interest to us Christians for its timely service to the
sinking nation through which came at last our Blessed Master.
The Acts of the Apostles, when studied in the light of the tendencies
known to have been working in the apostolic church, becomes of similar
importance in New Testament history to Deuteronomy in Old Testament
history.
The primitive Church was, as we well know, agitated by contending
factions. Two leading parties dominated all minor schools of thought; the
Jewish Christians, who naturally wanted to keep within the old religion,
and who would have made a reformed Judaism, and the Gentile Christians who
as naturally objected to being herded within Judaism, and who wanted to
make a new and universal society. The first party rallied under the name
of Peter, and the second used the name of Paul. There was imminent danger
that the new society would break apart, with fatal consequences to
posterity. Real and deep as were the differences between Peter and Paul,
they did not, in all probability, sunder these great natures as widely as
their followers imagined. There must have been meeting points between such
souls, in love with the one Master. To find these convergences and
construct out of them a peace-platform on which both wings of the new
society might stand, was the aim of The Acts. It embodied genuine journals
of a traveling companion of St. Paul, notes of his addresses in various
cities, traditions lost to us outside of this book, of Peter's
conciliatory attitude and utterances; and groups these historic fragments
into a sketch, in which the two apostles are shown as dividing equally the
labors of founding the Christian Church, as preaching the same views, and
acting in cordial harmony. This book is a sign of the disposition to draw
together which was gaining ground among the primitive churches, a
disposition fostered largely by this writing; out of which process of
comprehension and conciliation arose the Catholic Church, naming its great
cathedrals after St. Peter and St. Paul.
IV.
_The books which are of a composite character should be read in their
several parts, and traced to their proper places in history._
Thus, for example, in reading Isaiah uncritically we pass from the
fragment of history that forms our thirty-ninth chapter, to the
magnificent strain of impassioned imagination which opens with the
fortieth chapter, as though there were no hiatus; and we proceed straight
through this latter section of the book, taking it all as written in the
reign of Hezekiah, that is, in the latter part of the eighth century
before Christ. We thus view this second section of Isaiah from a wrong
standpoint. The panorama of its visions becomes blurred. We cannot focus
the glass upon the objects in its field. The real significance and beauty
of this noblest reach of prophetic imagination evanishes from our vision.
To see this second section of Isaiah aright, we must push it down the
stream of time nearly two hundred years. It is the work of a prophet, or
group of prophets, in the latter part of the exile, about the middle of
the sixth century before Christ. Watching the signs of the times, the
gifted and gracious spirit who led this chorus of hope saw tokens, as of
the dawning of day after the long, dark night. Rumors of the all
conquering Cyrus, the Medo-Persian king, made Babylon tremble with fear,
and Israel thrill with excited expectation. In the ethical and spiritual
religion of the advancing Persians, the Jews might look for a bond of
sympathy. It would be the policy of Cyrus to make friends of the foes of
Babylon, and to place the captive people in their own land on the borders
of his empire, as his grateful feudatories. The seer saw thus, in the
conquering hero, the Servant of God, raised up to restore the chosen
people to their native country. Prophecy kindled anew for its final flame,
and burst forth in the immortal strain of hope for the long-tried Israel:
Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,
Saith your God.
Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her,
That her warfare is accomplished,
That her iniquity is pardoned.
I never read this sublime chapter without a fresh thrill, as I hear the
voice of a crushed race, lifting amid its misery a cry of unconquerable
confidence in the Just and Holy One, who was ordering alike the embattled
armies of earth and the starry hosts of the skies, and through history, as
in nature, was sweeping on resistlessly to fulfill the good pleasure of
His Will. No wonder the matchless oratorio of the Messiah opens with this
aria, abruptly as the original words are spoken in Isaiah. They sound the
key-note of the good tidings of great joy which, growing as a hope in
men's souls through the centuries, became a faith, an assured conviction,
in the life of the Christus Consolator; in whom God is seen as "Our Father
which art in heaven."
Every gem of this second section of Isaiah takes on a new lustre in this
setting. It is the cry of the lost sheep in the wilderness, catching
sight of the Shepherd who they thought had forgotten them, that we hear in
the gracious strain:
He shall feed his flock like a Shepherd,
He shall gather the lambs with his arm,
And carry them in his bosom,
And shall gently lead those that are with young.
The vision of the Suffering, Righteous Servant of God grows clear and
pathetic in the true historic light. The chastened nation feels itself
called to a higher mission than that of political power. It is to teach
the other nations of the earth the knowledge of God. That knowledge it is
itself to learn in the school of sorrow. It is to save humanity through
the sacrifice of itself. Thus the secret of suffering is spelled out, not
for ancient Israel alone, but for all mankind; the secret which is
shrined, for ever sacred to us, in the story of our Lord Christ; from whom
you and I this day, through a simple symbol, are to learn anew that if we
sorrow it is that we may be made perfect through suffering, and thus be
fitted to lead our fellows up into the light and love of God.
V.
_These writings should be read critically, until we can decipher the
successive hands working upon them, and interpret them accordingly._
Few, if any, of the books of the Bible stand now as they came from their
original authors. Nearly all have been re-edited; most of them many
times. Some of them have been worked over by so many hands, and have
undergone such numerous and serious changes, that the original writer
would scarcely identify his work. The historical writings of the Old
Testament take up into them all sorts of materials, from all sorts of
sources. If the annals of the Venerable Bede, the father of English
history had been re-written again and again through the subsequent
centuries; abridged, enlarged, interpreted by each editor; the
accumulating knowledge and growing experience of the nation read into his
simple chronicles; we should appreciate the critical care needful in
studying our edition of Bede if we would know the real original. Very much
such care is necessary if we are to use the Old Testament histories aright
for information. It is as though there were several surfaces to the
parchment on which the histories were written, on each successive film of
which, in finest tracery, an older record was inscribed.
Genesis, for example, presents us, at every step of what seems a
consecutive story, with successive layers of tradition, through which we
must work our way most carefully if we would really understand the book.
We readily observe a twofold tradition of the Creation in the opening
chapters of Genesis, differing very materially: a sign to us, if we need
it, that there was no one authoritative account of the Creation current in
Israel. Little attention is required to note a double version of the
story of the flood, whose artless piecing together is the cause of the
confusions and contradictions that puzzle many readers. The deciphering of
this double tradition of the flood first started criticism upon the true
track of Biblical study. The frequently recurring phrase, "These are the
generations," or beginnings, indicates the insertion of fragments of a
work giving an account of the origin of the world, of the races of earth,
of language, of the Jewish people, etc.; a work called by the critics "The
Book of Origins." In the fourteenth chapter there is what seems to be a
very ancient non-Jewish fragment of history, torn possibly from some
Syrian writing, which gives a tale of Abraham's prowess in war.
And even in one and the same tale of tradition, we apparently find strata
of thought laid down by successive ages. There are extant to-day
parchments in which, for lack of other material, a writer has scratched
partially away an earlier manuscript, and written over it another book.
Such a palimpsest is Genesis. "A legend of civilization is written over a
solar-myth, and a tribal legend over the legend of civilization, and a
theocratic legend over the tribal."[38]
* * * * *
When such a mastery of the Bible-books is won, they are to be used in the
customary methods of critical study, with reference to their contents and
the significances thereof, under the same general laws of interpretation
that hold over other literature.
* * * * *
I think I hear some one saying--Is this the right use of the Bible, for
which I am asked to give up the dear, old, simple way of reading for my
soul's inspiration? Not at all, my friend. That blessed use of the Bible,
learned at your mother's knees, is still, and must always remain, the best
use possible to any one. Of this I shall speak hereafter. I am now
speaking, not of the right devotional use of the Bible, but of the right
critical use of it. It has been used critically in building our
theologies, but, to a large extent, amiss. Out of this wrong use of it has
come the misconceptions in theology which to-day perplex our minds and bar
the progress of religion. If we must use the Bible critically, let us by
all means try to employ a true and thorough criticism. Let us not think to
close every controversy by the phrase--The Bible says so. We shall be more
modest and less disputatious when we appreciate the study necessary before
any one can properly answer the question--What saith the Scriptures?
Again I hear a voice from the pews--Who then save a scholar is competent
for such a use of the Bible? I answer--No one, except a pupil of the
scholars. The scholars have placed within our reach the results of such a
critical study of the Bible. You can find the rational guidance you may
desire in the manuals which set forth the conclusions of these critical
processes; though you must painfully feel, as I do, the lack of the
religious tone in some of them. A crying need of our day is a Hand Book to
the Bible in which the new critical knowledge shall blend, as it may
blend, with the old spiritual reverence.
One should not rise from such a study of the Bible as we have made to-day,
in its merely literary aspects, without a new, strange sense of awe before
this mystic Book. It is the handiwork of no one man, of no group of men,
of no period. It is an organic product, the growth of a whole people the
coralline structure builded by a nation. Hands innumerable have toiled
over these pages. Voices indistinguishable now, in blended chorus from the
dawn of history, have joined in the cry of the human after God which
whispers upon us from this sacred phonograph.
Successive generations of men, struggling with sin, striving for purity,
searching after God, have exhaled their spirits into the essence of
religion, which is treasured in this costly vase. The moral forces of
centuries, devoted to righteousness, are stored in this exhaustless
reservoir of ethical energy. At such cost, my brothers, has Humanity
issued this sacred book. From such patience of preparation has
Providence laid this priceless gift before you. In such labor of
articulation--spelling out the syllables of the message from on high,
through multitudinous lives of men dutifully and devoutly walking with
their God--does the Spirit speak to you, O, soul of man. Say thou--
Speak Lord; thy servant heareth!
* * * * *
It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated the
only question is; Is it true in and for itself?
Hegel: "Philosophy of History," Part III.: Sec. III.: Ch. II.
With reference to things in the Bible, the question whether they are
genuine or spurious is odd enough. What is genuine but that which is
truly excellent, which stands in harmony with the purest nature and
reason, and which even now ministers to our highest development? What
is spurious but the absurd and the hollow, which brings no fruit--at
least, no good fruit.
Goethe: "Conversations," March 11,1832.
No article of faith is injured by allowing that there is no such
positive proof, when or by whom these and some other books of holy
Scripture were written, as to exclude all possibility of doubt and
cavil.
Watson's "Apology for the Bible," Letter IV.
VI.
The Right Historical Use of the Bible.
The principle of development involves also the existence of a latent
germ of being--a capacity or potentiality striving to realize
itself.... What Spirit really strives for is the realization of its
Ideal being.....
The profoundest thought is connected with the personality of
Christ--with the historical and external; and it is the very grandeur
of the Christian religion that, with all this profundity, it is easy of
comprehension by our consciousness in its outward aspect, while, at the
same time, it summons us to penetrate deeper.
Hegel: "Philosophy of History," pp. 57, 344. [Bohn.]
Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences go on
gaining in depth and breadth, and the human mind expand as it may, it
will never go beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity as
it glistens and shines forth in the gospel!
Goethe: "Conversations," March, 11,1832.
VI.
The Right Historical Use of the Bible.
"When the fulness of the time was come God sent forth His
Son."--Galatians, iv. 4.
St. Paul condensed the philosophy of Hebrew history into a metaphor.
Israel travailed in birth with Christianity. In the mind of the nation was
begotten, of the Most High, a conception of ethical religion, whose
gestation was a process of centuries. The period of parturition came, and
a universal religion was born into the world; bodied, as religion needs
must be, in a man, Jesus, the Christ.
"When the fulness of the time was come God sent forth His Son."
The sacred literature of Israel is the record and embodiment of this
organic growth of her religion, through its various moods and tenses,
toward its ideal in the Christ. The sacred literature of the Christian
Church is the picture of this flower of the soul of Israel, and of the new
growth springing up from its seeding down of humanity. The whole Bible
presents us with the growth of the religion of the Christ, below ground
and above ground; its rootings and its flowerings. The right historical
use of the Bible is, through a critical knowledge of the sacred literature
of Israel, to reproduce before our minds this process of the growth of the
Christ in Israel and of His new growth in humanity; with a view to our
intelligent perception of His true place in history, and of the
significance thereof. The heart of the Bible is Christ. That which our
fathers saw we need to see, that in Him all things stand together, as the
arch is holden by the key-stone. Rightly to read the secret of His life is
to find the secret of earth's problems. Therefore our fathers insisted so
strenuously on the Old Testament preparation for Christ. A tree's rootings
are proportionate to its size. In the gradual prefiguring of Christ
through Israel's story, they read the historic attestation of His
revelation. The picture of Israel's history that yielded them their vision
is dissolving before our eyes, at the touch of the new criticism, and men
are fearing that the secret of the Bible is escaping from our age. I
desire to-day to draw for you, in outline, the story of Israel's
development, as traced by our new masters; that you may see the old vision
re-emergent in truer, nobler forms. The re-construction of Hebrew history
makes real and certain an organic, natural development of the religion of
the Christ; a travail of the nation with the Son it bore to God.
The best method of studying any history is in its great epochs and
periods. The eras of Hebrew history group themselves clearly, in orderly
progression.
I.
_The Epoch of Moses:_ B.C. 1300(?)
Hebrew history properly begins with this era. The tribes of Israel when
first resolved by the glass of history, appear upon the Arabian border of
Egypt, as occupants of the rich pasture lands of Goshen. They were a
branch of a large Semitic family, which included Moab, Edom, Ammon and
other familiar tribes. Of the social, intellectual and religious status of
the Hebrews at this period we have little definite information. They would
seem to have been on the usual plane of races which have entered the
semi-nomadic stage, and which are gradually substituting agricultural
pursuits for a roving shepherd life. Oppressed by Egypt they revolt, and
begin a migration backward toward the north and east.
The soul of this movement was Moses; a real historic figure, worthy, as we
can see through the mists around him, of the imposing form which Michael
Angelo has given him. A great man is nearly always to be found at the core
of a great social growth, charging the latent tendencies of a race with
energy, and shaping their action upon the form of his mind. "An
institution is the lengthened shadow of a man," writes Emerson. Judaism
is the lengthened shadow of Moses. Whatever else Moses may have done, he
proved himself the architect of Israel, by laying the foundation that
determined the form and size of the later structure. He taught his simple
people to recognize Jehovah as their tribal God. What this name meant in
the conception of the people before his time is by no means clear to us
now. It appears to have stood for the personification of some one of the
forms of nature's forces, that arrest upon themselves the nomad's vague
sense of the Infinite and Divine in the world about him. Around the Power
felt in Saturn or the Sun, Moses threw the spell of an awe which is deeper
far than that awakened by the starry heavens above man--the awe aroused by
the moral law within man. He gave his rude children a noble moral code,
the original form of the Decalogue. These Ten Words were issued as the law
of Jehovah. Jehovah then was the source and authority of the laws which
the conscience owned. The moral law was his body of statutes. To keep this
law was the way to please Him. His commands reached through rites and
ordinances to conduct and character. His demands were not for sacrifices,
but for good lives. His worship was aspiration and endeavor after
goodness.
And this Power enjoining morality was none other than the Power which in
nature seemed so often unmoral and even immoral. Jehovah of the skies was
the God of the Ten Words.
This was a seminal thought, bodied in an institution. In begetting this
conception in the soul of Israel, Moses fathered the life which grew
through embryonic forms, during the slow gestation of the centuries,
shaping toward the ideal of religion. Whatever was vital and progressive
in the nation's thought and feeling sucked up its juices from the seed
deep-rooted in this basic institution. Rightly did legislators and
historians, through the after ages, look back and ascribe all their work
in the development of the national life to Moses. Even thus the rose, were
it conscious, might turn its crimson face upon the ground and whisper to
the seed at its roots--I am thy work. Even thus the son, in the pride and
power of manhood goes back to the old homestead, and looking into his
father's face confesses--All that I am you have made me.
II.
_The heroic age:_ B.C. 1300-1100.
After Moses there follows a period of at least two hundred years, of which
we have very imperfect accounts, and those plainly traditional and
commingled with legend. The Hebrew tribes appear to have gradually
gravitated upon Canaan; slowly settling into agricultural pursuits, and
winning from its previous occupants the land they coveted, inch by inch,
in bloody strife. They camped upon their hard-won fields for several
generations, maintaining their claims at the point of the sword, with
varying success; now mastering their foes, and again almost crushed by
them. The inter-relations of the several tribes during this period would
seem to have been of a very loose character. Each appears to have acted
for itself, except at critical moments, when common danger drew them
together in concerted action under leaders of commanding ability.
Tradition has preserved charming tales of some of these redoubtable
champions of the Hebrews, of whom we would gladly know much more. This was
the heroic age of Israel. Rude, rough times of constant alarm brought
forth little that was memorable save feats of courage. We have few
glimpses into the state of religion in this simple society, and upon what
is brought out into light the hues of later ages are reflected. Quite
clearly we may discern that the religion of the people in those days was
by no means that which we know as Mosaism. How could such a sublime
conception as that of Moses have ripened in a people at this stage of
their development? Like all founders of religion, he was far in advance of
his age. If a few higher natures, here and there, recognized and
appreciated the significance of the Ten Words of Jehovah, the mass of the
people could not have done so. And movement is determined toward the mass
in ethics as in physics. All that Moses could have hoped to do was to body
his seminal truth in an institution, that should keep it alive in the
nation until the proper conditions were found for its quickening and
growth. This he achieved in binding the tribes to the worship of Jehovah,
whose law was owned in the moral standards of the people. To this loyalty
to Jehovah, as _the_ God of Israel, Moses did securely bind the tribes.
They never wholly forswore Jehovah, and thus never lost the germ begotten
in the soul of the race, which held the promise and potency of the future.
But around Jehovah, as the supreme God of the race, the people still
continued to group their ancient divinities, and to worship them in the
old-time manner. The religion of a people in any stage of its history is
always a composite; a succession of layers that correspond to the
intellectual and moral classifications of society. But the proportion of
the true religion rises with a progressive civilization. In these
semi-civilized tribes the religion of the bulk of the people, in all
probability, corresponded with the ideas and forms of worship of other
peoples in the same stage of development In the lowest stratum fetichism
lingered on, the worship of any unusual thing that excited the wonder of a
simple people. Great trees of immemorial age, huge boulders standing
strangely in fertile valleys, continued the objects of superstitious awe.
Jehovahism took up these remnants of fetichism into its higher life, when
it found that they could not be dispossessed, just as Christianity did
long afterward with pagan customs, and gave them a higher significance in
connection with the worship of Jehovah.[39]
Higher strata of the people worshipped the various powers of nature, the
sun, the moon, the stars, after much the same fashion in vogue among their
kindred Semites.[40] Even the revolting rites of the surrounding
nature-worships were not lacking in Israel. While the gentle and gracious
warmth of the spring sun called forth the happy adoration of the people,
the scorching and consuming heat of the midsummer sun roused the fears of
the sufferers for their crops, their cattle, and their very lives. They
sought to propitiate this fierce Power, which was evidently hostile to
man, with offerings of the life it devoured so pitilessly. The choicest
lives--the first-born son, the fairest maiden of the village--were
sacrificed to glut its greed of death. Into the fiery arms of Moloch
parents laid the children of their love. Human sacrifices were
unquestionably a recognized form of worship during this period, at least
in times of deep distress.[41] The libertine longings of nature, the free
fecundities of mother-earth, imaged to the grosser people the Power
working round about them and within their very bodies; and men and women
gave free rein to their appetites and passions, in honor of divinities
like Ashera, the Syrian Venus.[42] The various tribes probably had
different rites.
The general picture we must fashion in our minds of this period is of a
polytheistic, idolatrous people, slightly distinguishable from the
surrounding Semites, save as they held, in their recognition of Jehovah
and his Ten Words, the germ of a higher thought and life.
III.
_The period of the monarchy, down to the epoch of the great prophets:_ B.
C. 1100-800.
The story of the making of England may interpret to us the development
that ensued in this third period of Israel's history. We know how the
petty realms of the Angles-land, under pressure from a common foe, learned
to act momentarily together, came for a summer under some commanding
leader, drew thus into closer affiliations grouped gradually around the
more powerful realms, and at length crystallized into England. In some
such way the Hebrew tribes were slowly knit together by the necessity of
war, until to organize a lasting victory they were forced into
consolidation and out of the loose confederation of tribes arose a nation,
Israel. Social tendencies generally throw a leader to the front. The man
is not wanting for the hour. The king-maker of Israel was Samuel. A man
combining in that simple state of society several functions--priest and
judge and leader--he had the prescience to divine the need of the age, and
the wisdom to point out the man to meet it. Saul was chosen King, in free
gathering of the hardy yeomanry, and proved his human election a divine
selection by rousing the nation to new efforts, which his genius led to
victory. Saul was followed by a brief period of national unity under David
and Solomon, in which the rapid and brilliant progress made in the spread
of the kingdom, in wealth and civilization, revealed the latent powers of
this gifted race.
The progress of political and commercial greatness was stayed by the
rending of the kingdom after Solomon. No great advances were possible amid
the chronic jealousies and frequent strife of the sister kingdoms, which
were unable to come together again in a unity that would have restored
their prestige, and were unable, apart, to achieve any signal success in
diplomacy or war.
The social state of the people underwent the changes usual in this stage
of a people's history. With peace came wealth, with wealth came luxury,
with luxury new social vices, fed from the court which grew around the
monarchy. But that the heart of the people continued sound amid these
organic changes we may see from several hints preserved by tradition.
The institution, or revival, of the Order of the Nazarites was a
religio-moral movement. It was a protest against the vice of drunkenness
that was increasing in the land, as, relieved from war's alarms and waxing
fat upon their fertile fields, the people gave themselves to pleasure. The
first Prohibition Society, of which we have record, was this Order of the
Nazarites. This Order appears also to have had a still deeper moral aim,
little noticed of old. It was a reaction from the social changes that were
going on in Israel, a protest against the new-fashioned ways of wealth,
an earnest effort to hold to the simplicities of earlier days, to the good
old plain living and high thinking. It was a counter-movement of Old
Israel, essaying to stem the mad rush for riches. A still more convincing
token of the healthy moral tone of the nation is to be found in the
earliest considerable work of literature preserved to us, the Song of
Songs. It holds up to scorn the licentiousness that Solomon had made
fashionable, and of which, in a just retribution, he had become the
abhorred type. The great king fails to corrupt the virtue of a simple
country maiden, despite of all his blandishments. Ewald assigns this poem
to the northern kingdom, which had separated itself from Judah chiefly in
reaction from the Solomonic innovations. It leads us into the homes of the
sturdy peasantry of the hill country, where burned the fires on the altars
of pure wedded love.
From a people thus sound at heart, amid the mellowing richness of
civilization, we may well expect great things in religion. Whatever the
outward forms of religion, its roots ran deep down into the moral law, and
must needs have borne in due time a noble fruitage. There was in fact a
striking development of religion in this period. It was coincident with
the secular development of the nation. This indeed is the general rule of
religious revival. Religion advances with the advancing life of man, each
new and true step forward opening a higher possibility of thought and
feeling concerning God. As Moses the Emancipator was the father of true
religion in Israel, so Samuel the king-maker was its early master. We
cannot now trace clearly his work, but we can see that he was a fresh
ethical and spiritual force, shaping religious life anew.
Prophets there had doubtless been before him, in Israel as out of it, but
they were unethical and unspiritual influences in religion; the frenzied
dervishes, the oracular seers, the wizards and necromancers who long
afterward claimed this name, and were denounced by the higher prophets.
Samuel's masterful work was to turn this semi-religious force into a
higher channel, and to direct it toward a moral aim. He was the creator of
the type which drew after him "the goodly fellowship of the prophets." The
traditions of Israel present him in the _rôle_ of fearless censor and
truthful mentor to the infant State; the _rôle_ which the great prophets
later on assumed toward the maturer nation. He criticized the King, guided
the people, and held the nation loyal to Jehovah. However little
perception the mass of the people had of the spiritual significance of the
State religion, however many gross forms of popular religion existed
around and within the tolerant institutions of Jehovahism, it was a vital
matter to preserve that State religion, and keep it well ahead of the
people's growth. Thus we can perceive the historic significance of the
work of the next great prophet after Samuel, Elijah; through the legendary
nimbus that gathered round his striking personality and dramatic action In
a critical hour, when the Jehovah-worship had well nigh disappeared, he
stood alone against the powers of the realm, and rallied the people once
more beneath the name of the god of their father. He plucked a victory
from defeat which decided the course of history. What if Jehovah was but a
name to the mass of the people? What if they continued to worship much as
before, only no longer at the altars of Baal? There are long periods in
the history of man when the future depends upon allegiance to an
institution little understood by those who shout most lustily for it. The
future may lie seeded down in a name which stores within it the forces of
a new and higher unfolding when the times come ripe. Thus it proved
through the crawling centuries in which Israel held hard by a name of God
which then meant little to it, but which ultimately evolved its ethical
significance and manifested unto men, The Eternal who loveth
righteousness. Thus may it prove with the child of Judaism. Liberals, who
are in such haste to drop the name of Christ, should pause long enough to
ask themselves the question whether, since it roots religion in a life of
such perfect goodness that it became to men the manifestation of God,
this sacred name may not in its turn hold the secret of our progress;
whether, from the treasured forces of the past that it gathers into
itself, when the spring time now setting in shall have fully come, it may
not blossom into the religion of the future? A civilization should not be
cut off from the historic seed which lies at the roots of its religion, if
it is to grow unto the harvest.
That in this fidelity to the tradition of their race the religion of the
people of Israel was in the vital processes of growth, through this long
period, we know assuredly from one conclusive fact. Out of this tedious
winter came, suddenly as it seems to us, a rich and beautiful spring. The
epoch of the great prophets, with a new life of thought and aspiration,
breaks in abruptly on this commingling of all sorts of religion within the
precincts of Jehovahism. Even in February the sap is softening and warming
in the veins which show no greening on the tips of the patient trees.
Israel was swelling toward the day that was sure to come, when, lo! the
spring!
IV.
_The era of the great prophets, before the exile:_ B.C. 800-586.
In the southern Pacific, where coral islands are slowly forming beneath
the surface of the sea, he who is curious to study the process of the
making of an island must send the divers down to bring up broken bits of
coral, snatched from the dark depths in a painful labor. After the ocean
mountain thrusts its top above the surface of the sea the work of
exploration is easy enough, and we may walk over hard ground as we study
the new formation in the sunlight. Hitherto, in our desire to learn the
secrets of the growth of Israel, we have been like men peering over the
sides of their tiny boats into the depths of a sea that covers fascinating
mysteries; watching the labors of the adepts who ever and anon bring up to
the light some fresh fragments of a buried world. In the epoch that we
have now reached Israel's growing life lifts itself above the level of
tradition, and stands forth as solid history, on whose firm ground we can
study for ourselves the making of a nation's religion.
Israel's literary period opens for us with the prophets. Literary
fragments float up to us from earlier days, but now, for the first time,
we have whole books about whose date and authorship we are reasonably
certain. The prophets introduced the literary craft. They wrote out, in
their later years, the substance of the messages which they had borne the
people. These brilliant pages teem with graphic descriptions of the actual
usages, social and religious, of their age, so that there is no difficulty
in reproducing with fair accuracy the salient features of the period.
The popular religion was that composite of heathenisms already sketched
in considering the previous period. The people continued to worship the
Power which all felt and owned, under the manifold forms which this Power
assumes in nature's processes. Sun and moon and stars still arrested the
awe which through them groped after God, and drew upon themselves the
worship of the imagination. The worship of Jehovah had a special honor as
the State religion, but it stood contentedly amid other forms of religion.
In the service of Jehovah local shrines developed special usages. The
"Uses" of Israel were as varied as the "Uses" of England before the
Reformation. No act of Uniformity was in operation in the realm. Idolatry
was not the exception but the rule. The most popular symbol of Jehovah was
an image of a bull. To the higher minds this bull was doubtless merely a
symbol, expressive of a striking phase of the sun's force, but to the mass
of men it was probably the actual object of their adorations. The
symbolism of the Jerusalem Temple was thoroughly idolatrous; as, for
example, the twelve oxen upholding the laver, and the horns of the altar,
symbols drawn from the prevalent bull-worship; the two columns in the
court, and the cherubs, or cloud-dragons in the most holy place; the
_chamanim_, or sun-images representing the rays of the sun in the shape of
a cone, and the chariots and horses of the sun, a very ancient symbol
familiar to us in Guido's Aurora.[43]
Nor did the allegiance to Jehovah bar private usages of an idolatrous
nature. The home of the average Israelite had its _teraphim_ and other
domestic divinities. The darker aspects of the popular religion still held
their ground against the growing light. Beneath the shadow of the Jehovah
of the Ten Words, stood, unmolested, the images fashioned by the appetites
and passions; and men and women surrendered themselves to drunken orgies
and sensual debauches, in honor of the deities of desire. As late as the
time of Jeremiah, after nearly two centuries of prophetic teaching, there
were in the sacred precincts of the temple the _asheras_, or tree-poles,
by which the priestesses of passion, as part of their religious offices,
sold themselves to the frequenters of Jehovah's house.[44] Below the holy
city, King Manasseh reared the image of Moloch, and human sacrifices were
offered to placate the wrath of the Power which they ignorantly
worshipped.
Where religion was so largely a worship of the physical powers of nature,
the life of the people would of necessity show an undeveloped ethical
state. Drunkenness and debauchery continued common, the marriage bond was
very elastic in the polite society of the capital, and selfishness
haughtily overrode all considerations of _meum_ and _tuum_ in the mad
chase of wealth.
Unsatisfactory as the morals of the influential classes of society were,
there is, however, no indication of any such "ooze and thaw of wrong" as
indicated a moribund condition in the nation.
We must not make the mistake, so common concerning reformers, and regard
the evils that were justly lashed by the prophets as prevailing throughout
society. Had this been the case, where would the ethical forces of a new
and higher life have risen? Single preachers of social righteousness might
have arisen, like Savonarola in Florence, under such conditions, but no
general reform could have developed. The steady growth of the movement
initiated by the great prophets shows that it sprang from no individuals,
but from society; that they merely led the reserve forces of virtue in the
nation. The heart of the nation was doubtless sound, and growing more
vigorously virtuous. Professor Thorold Rogers reminds us that the period
when a great outcry is heard against any social evil, is not that wherein
the evil is at its height, for then there would probably be no power of
protest, but rather that in which the recuperative forces of society are
rallying to throw off the disorder from the body politic. Morality was in
advance of religion at this time in Israel, and this interprets the
movement which ensued to place religion in its proper position at the head
of the march of progress.
It was amid such a state of affairs that the great prophets appeared upon
the stage of action, calling the nation to a higher religion. They were
not so much philosophers, reasoning out a lofty intellectual conception of
God, as preachers of righteousness, vitalizing from the moral nature the
sense of the purity and justice of the Power in whom men lived and moved
and had their being They turned the light of the inward law upon God, and
revealed Him as its author. They led Virtue into the Temple, touched her
lips with a live coal from off the altar, and from a tongue of fire men
heard, "Thus saith the Lord." They revived the true Mosaic priesthood,
which set apart conscience as the mediator between God and man. The seed
that Moses planted budded and swelled toward its bloom. The prophetic
writings show us men a-hungered after righteousness breathing out the
worship of Jehovah into the worship of the Eternal, who loveth
righteousness.
Isaiah carries this message from God:
To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me?
I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts.
And I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats.
When ye come to appear before me,
Who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts?
Bring no more vain oblations;
Incense is an abomination unto me;
The new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot endure;
It is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.
Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth;
They are a trouble unto me;
I am weary to bear them.
And when ye spread forth your hands,
I will hide mine eyes from you:
Yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear:
Your hands are full of blood.
Wash you, make you clean;
Put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes:
Cease to do evil; learn to do well:
Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed,
Judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.[45]
Micah voices the questions that men raised in his day, answering them with
the new thought:
Wherewithal shall I come before the Lord,
And bow myself before the high God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
With calves of a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
Or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my first born for my transgression,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He hath showed thee, O man, what is good,
And what doth the Lord require of thee,
But to do justly, and to love mercy,
And to walk humbly with thy God?[46]
Two features of the work of the prophets bring out clearly their ethical
inspiration. Israel was at this period being drawn, for the first time,
into the currents created by the strife of the mammoth empires of Assyria
and Egypt, in whose maelstrom she at length went down. Public affairs were
becoming matters of international relationship. The prophets threw
themselves heartily into the national politics, standing between the party
of Assyria and the party of Egypt, as independents concerned with the
interests of neither faction, but seeking to lift both sides above the
shifting sands of policy upon the firm ground of principle. They sought to
lead the nation to turn aside from its dazzling dream of a brilliant
foreign policy to the humbler tasks of internal reform; to induce the
State to busy itself with the labor of redressing civic disorders and of
building a community of sober, pure, and just citizens, cultivating peace
and equity with other peoples, and fearing God. They were preachers to the
corporate conscience of Israel, and dealt with subjects which the modern
pulpit effeminately shuns. In strains of pure and passionate patriotism,
they delighted to vision before the people the ideal State and its ideal
King; thus to lead the aspirations of the nation to a higher ambition
than martial prowess and diplomatic craft.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
The spirit of wisdom and understanding,
The spirit of counsel and might,
The spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord,
And shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord:
And he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes,
Neither reprove after the hearing of his ears:
But with righteousness shall he judge the poor,
And reprove with equity for the meek of the earth.
And he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth,
And with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.
And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins,
And faithfulness the girdle of his reins.[47]
These Hebrew prophets made the right administration of public affairs the
essentially religious service which their devout student Gladstone
declares them now to be. Because of this inspiration of civic life with
religiousness, their books have become, as Coleridge called them, the
Statesman's Manual.
At this period in Israel's history the social revolution attending the
progress of all peoples from a simple to a complex organization was
entailing its usual excesses, and alarming symptoms were showing
themselves in the commonwealth. In earlier days Israel's tenure of land
had been, like that of all peoples, communistic. Proprietorship of the
land was vested in the family, and then in the village community. There
were no private fortunes and no private poverty. Life was simple and
contented, and dull. Under the action of the usual social forces, this
system had been gradually breaking up, through many generations. Property
had mainly passed into personal possession Society had recrystallized
around the individual. Individualism had developed its customary
tendencies to inequality. The ancient equality of the free farmers of
Israel was already disappearing. Fortunes, undreamed of a couple of
centuries earlier, were becoming common. Greed was pushing men beyond
legitimate acquisition into respectable robbery. The old-time rights of
commonalty were disappearing in pasture, and farming land, and forest. The
village commons were being "enclosed" by local potentates. Monopolies of
the natural resources of all wealth, the inalienable dower of the people
at large, were working their inevitable consequences. Below the wealthy
class, which was rising to the top of society, there was forming at the
bottom a new and unheard-of social stratum, the settlings of the struggle
for existence; a deposit of the feebleness and ignorance and innocence of
the people. In the loss of the old sense of a commonwealth, the nation was
breaking up into classes, alienated, unsympathetic, hostile. Selfishness
was threatening ruin to the State.
In the midst of these dangerous social tendencies the prophets came
forward as "men of the people." Like brave Latimer at Paul's Cross, these
fearless preachers stood in the marketplaces to denounce monopoly and the
tyranny of capital. They were not affrighted by the hue and cry that, if
human nature was the same then as now, was raised against them, in the
name of the sacred rights of property. They were not beguiled by the
sophisms of those who doubtless proved conclusively that the best
interests of the people were being furthered by the fullest freedom of the
able and crafty to enrich themselves _ad libitum_. They could not have
stood an examination in political economy, but they knew the heart of the
whole matter, in a world whose core is the moral law. They saw, more or
less clearly, that there could be no lasting wealth in a society which was
not based upon a wide, deep common-wealth. They felt that the one clue to
follow in every social problem was held by conscience. So they struck
boldly at existing wrongs in the name of the Eternal Righteous One.
Woe unto them that join house to house,
That lay field to field
Till there be no place,
That they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!
* * * * *
The Lord will enter into judgment
With the ancients of his people and the princes thereof:
For ye have eaten up the vineyard;
The spoil of the poor is in your houses.
What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces,
And grind the faces of the poor?
Saith the Lord God of hosts.[48]
One word, constantly recurring through the prophets, reveals the secret of
their enthusiasm. They lifted above the people the august and holy form of
Justice, and called on men to follow her. They appealed to a force in men
mightier than selfishness. They kindled the passion which had been always
latent in Israel, since the day when Moses led forth the slaves of Egypt
to found a nation of freemen. A new and lofty ideal mastered the minds of
the better natures among the people. Over against the darkness of their
age there rose a vision of a good time coming, when Justice should be
throned on law, and selfishness be exorcised from the hearts of men who
had learned the secret
Of joy in widest commonalty spread.
And this they did in the name of Jehovah. From Him they came with these
messages concerning social obligations. The Eternal One who loved
righteousness could be served in no other way than in furthering justice.
Religion became social reform, aflame with the enthusiasm of holy ideals;
of ideals seen to be eternal realities, as the shadows cast by The Living
God, moving on to accomplish the good pleasure of His will.
To conserve the new spirit of brotherhood which they awakened, they
embodied in the book of the Law, that constituted the Magna Charta of the
Reformation, a development of a gracious usage of the people. From
immemorial antiquity there had been a recognized right of the populace to
the natural yield of the soil in every seventh year. This common law they
formally re-enacted, in the name of Jehovah, and added to it a provision
for the release of debtors in the sabbatical year.[49]
We shall see in the nest period the fruitage of this new religion of
social righteousness, in the remarkable legislation of the Restoration.
In these serious, strenuous secularities--so often neglected by the
religious, or even opposed as irreligious--which now were consecrated to
the service of Jehovah, religion found its true sphere, and developed its
latent forces. A new era opened. The abominations of religion in former
times became the exceptions rather than the rule, and gradually
disappeared from society. After Jeremiah we hear no more of impurities
hiding under the altar, or of savage superstition seeking to please
Jehovah by outraging the holiest instincts of human nature. Jehovah became
the name for a conception of Deity so spiritual, so holy, that henceforth
the student of Israel's history should substitute--God.
It is a most interesting study to place these great prophets in their
chronological order, and trace the development of this ethical religion.
As one after another they come upon the stage of action they take up the
great words of their masters and repeat them in their own way; take up the
great tasks of their predecessors and carry them on toward completion;
leading religion into an ever deepening spirituality. The prophets of the
eighth century group around Isaiah, under whose influence Hezekiah
attempted a partial reformation of the popular religion. The prophets of
the seventh century group around Jeremiah, the master-spirit in the more
thorough reformation carried out under Josiah. This second reformation
achieved an institutional organization of ethical religion, that came just
in time to create a body capable of holding the people together in loyalty
to the true God, amid the break up of the nation.
V.
_The Epoch of the Exile:_ B.C. 586-536.
The conquest of the two sister kingdoms, with the carrying away of the
influential portion of the people into exile, was a blessing in disguise.
Israel was taken out of its petty provincialisms, its race insularity, and
placed amid one of the most highly cultivated civilizations of the
ancient world. The fertile plain of Mesopotamia had been from immemorial
antiquity the seat of great enterprises. Civilization had developed there
when surrounding peoples had not emerged from semi-barbarism. Like the
Troy beneath Troy in the Ilium ruins, we find here successive
civilizations resting each upon the debris of an earlier order. The
descriptions of ancient historians, together with the explorations of late
years, make very vivid the scenes amid which the captive Israelites
walked.
Babylon was a city which might well astonish and captivate strangers. It
was of immense size, being surrounded by a wall forty, or possibly sixty,
miles in circumference. This wall was nearly three hundred feet high, and
was broad enough to allow a chariot with four horses to turn easily upon
it. The streets were wide and straight, crossing each other at right
angles, and were lined with houses several stories in height, painted in
all the colors of the rainbow. Trees and gardens were so plentiful as to
give the whole city the appearance of a park. The grounds of the imperial
palace covered an area of seven miles round, in the centre of the city.
The largest temple the world has ever seen rose in pyramidal form six
hundred feet in air. The broad and shaded streets were resplendent with
the pomp and pageantry of the court of a mighty empire, and were alive
with the bustle of the traffic of the known world.
Libraries and museums garnered the treasures of art and literature, of
science and philosophy, accumulated through centuries. On every hand were
the tokens of a refined and cultivated civilization, venerable with age.
In the temples a rich ritual celebrated an elaborate worship, while
learned priests waited to explain the profound philosophic and poetic
truths of the sacred symbols.
Transported to such surroundings, Israel received the mental shock which
an American of a generation past experienced on first visiting Europe. The
influence of this surprise was very marked. Israel's genius flowered in
this strange soil. Her literary life centres in Babylonia. The second
Isaiah wrote there his immortal pages. The unknown authors of the noble
histories, whose charm never stales, fashioned there the traditions and
records of the past into their present shape. There the great legal
codification was carried out, and the institutional system of Israel
perfected. A new circle of ideas show themselves at work in the mind of
the people while in exile. From Chaldean scholars the Israelites probably
learned the ancient legends of the Beginnings, which they worked over in
their profounder religious consciousness into the simple and spiritual
forms in which they stand in Genesis. From Persia they either received
bodily the system of angelology that thenceforth appears in their
writings, or they received the quickening influence of a kindred religion
upon the thoughts latent in their beliefs.[50]
These intellectual influences wrought directly upon the development of
Israel's religion. In the revelation of the prosperous life of these alien
peoples the chosen race saw herself but one member of the great world
family. Persia's ethical and spiritual religion discovered to the nobler
natures of Israel the very ideals which they and their fathers had long
been strenuously seeking. These heathen were worshipping the same source
and standard of goodness before which they themselves had been doing
homage. A new sense of human brotherhood stirred within the exclusive
race, and with it the perception that there is one Father of all men.
Religion threw off all lingering polytheistic notions and soared to the
vision of One God. Monotheism dates as a clear consciousness from this
era.[51] It was saved from becoming an abstract, philosophic conception,
merging good and evil in a common source, by the stern ethical dualism of
the Persians. Though there be but one God, who is ultimately to triumph
over all evil, yet, said these Persians, evil is a present power in
creation, organized and active, waging constant warfare with the powers of
goodness. Earth is the scene of the battle between light and darkness, in
which each man must play his part, for weal or for woe.
These high ethical and religious conceptions were nourished from the deeps
of sorrow out of which the people cried bitterly to God. Their nation was
crushed, their homes were broken up, and they themselves were captives in
a strange land. Israel might have said,
A deep distress hath humanized my soul.
All tender and gracious and holy humanities sprang forth from the hard
Hebrew nature under this deep distress. The national ideal changed wholly.
The old dream of a puissant king passed from the minds of the better men,
and we hear little of it thenceforth in the writings of the nation. In the
place of it arose the vision of the Righteous, Suffering, Servant of
God--the Nation trained in the school of sorrow for a sacrificial mission,
and charged to lead the peoples of the earth into the knowledge of the
Eternal, who loveth righteousness.
As the crown and consummation of religion, the holy hope of life beyond
the grave dawned in this night of suffering, gleaming toward the day of
Him who brought life and immortality to light.[52]
Around this deepening and enriching life the remarkable body of the
prophetic-priestly system was fashioned, as the law of the new nation when
it should gain once more the old home. It looked to the formation of a
holy people; through its minute direction of the daily life, its
sacrificial symbolism charged with spiritual significances, its sacred
books for the instruction of the people, its order of scribes devoted to
this new study, its synagogues or meeting-houses for oral teaching and for
prayer--now for the first time elevated into an act of public worship
co-ordinate in dignity with sacrifice.
True to its old instinct, Israel's religion, first seeking to build up
individual holiness, turned then to build up social righteousness. The
ideals of the great prophets, which had been long working in the minds and
hearts of the leaders of the people, were now embodied in the priestly
legislation. The traditional communal system of land-holding was
established as the legal basis for the new nation. The land of Israel was
nationalized, and its title vested in God, from whom individuals received
the right of limited usufruct. It could not be sold outright. No man could
gain a fee-simple proprietorship. The seventh year was continued as a year
of fallow when the poor were to have the right of pasturage and of such
growth as the land spontaneously brought forth. At the end of seven
sabbatical periods, in round numbers every fifty years, all purchases of
land were to lapse, and the soil return to the original possessors. At the
same time all debtors were to pass through a general act of bankruptcy and
go forth free men. Interest was not to be allowed on loans made between
brother Israelites. By these provisions both villeinage or land-serfdom
and the slavery of debtor classes to capital were to be prevented in the
new nation. This legislation of the restoration was "to the end that there
be no poor among you."[53]
To such impracticable ideals, for that age, did this exilic movement of
the new religion look, with sober, strenuous, systematic effort for their
realization; and therein may we see its intensity of moral life.
VI.
_The period of the Restoration, from_ B.C. 536.
The common notion is that this period of Israel's history was practically
a vacuum, and that through five centuries the nation experienced no
further development. In reality, it was an exceedingly active period,
characterized by most important developments. Politically it was a period
of constantly changing influences. Israel was scarcely ever really
independent during these centuries. Her changes were the changes from one
master to another. But this very subjection aided her intellectual
development, as she was thus brought under the direct action of foreign
ideas. Her rapid growth of population forced upon her a system of
emigration, that drew off her youth to the great centres of the world and
established large colonies in every leading city. Israel was never left to
settle down again into provincialism, but was stirred by the currents of
the great world of thought that poured in upon her from Greece and Egypt,
from Rome and the far East. "A cross-fertilization of ideas" was thus
carried on by Providence. The result of grafting the richest varieties of
thought upon such a sturdy stock could not fail of proving something rare
and rich. As was natural from such conditions, the thought of the nation
took on new forms. Calm study of nature and man, and rational speculation
on the great problems of life displaced impassioned and imaginative
thought. Prophecy gave way to philosophy. The sages became the teachers of
men. The third class of books in the Old Testament Canon, known by the
Jews as the Writings, belong to this period; Proverbs, Ecclesiastes,
Esther, Jonah, Daniel, etc. To this period also belongs the Apocrypha,
which contains some noble books. These varied writings show, when
critically studied, a direct bearing on the problems that we know were
occupying the mind of the nation during this period, and illustrate the
tendencies working among the people. We thus see, plainly, the growth of
the seeds of noble thought which were sown in the national consciousness
during the exile, and the growth of the rich germs wafted into Judea from
Greece and Egypt.
We can trace the development of the circle of ideas which, later on,
crystallized, under the ethical and spiritual force of Jesus into the
theology of Christianity. We watch the embryonic stages of this
thought-body, which at length awaited only the breathing within it of an
informing spirit to issue in a new and noble religion.
Nor was this period of the Restoration merely one of intellectual
development, else there would have been no such issue as came at length.
It was a period of quiet ethical and spiritual development. No prophet
arose, indeed, to quicken Israel, but the ancient prophets still spake
from the institutions into which they had breathed somewhat of their
spirit, and from the holy books which were read in every synagogue, and
learned in every home. The temple worship of this period retained the old
forms of sacrifice; but charged them with spiritual significances which
are difficult for us to associate with such bloody rites, did we not know
how easily the religious spirit adapts itself to any outward ceremonies,
and transforms them into its own life. The soul spurns the symbols to
which it yet will cling, and soars beyond the poor height to which the
laboring wings of ordinance and ritual can carry it. The profound
spiritual life which was awakened in the exile flooded these low forms
with supernal light. They spoke to men of better sacrifices than the
blood of bulls and lambs--of sins slaughtered and fleshly powers consumed,
of lives of men offered up in purity to God. They whispered to the soul of
the holiness of God, and of His forgiveness as well; and, in their
powerlessness to satisfy the spiritual needs suggested by them, they kept
men's eyes upon the future, looking for the Prophet greater than Moses,
who would surely come from behind the veil with a new word from God. Out
of such thoughts and feelings the temple worship drew upon itself a noble
service of song, of whose ethical and spiritual beauty we can judge from
the temple hymnal. You and I to-day have sung some of the very hymns which
those Jews chanted around their brazen altar. Through these psalms of many
ages, gathered into a hymnal of unrivalled nobleness, the worship of
Israel ascended in the aspirations of the people after purity and
righteousness. If the choirs sang of the Shepherd of Israel, it was not
merely in the praises of the providential care felt over the chosen
people, but in the thankfulness of souls, because of the assurance of His
spiritual guidance:
He shall convert my soul,
And bring me forth in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake.
If they chanted the glories of the House of God, it was because thither
the tribes came up, with this desire in the hearts of the worshippers:
Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks,
So longeth my soul after thee, O God.
My soul is athirst for God. Yea, even for the living God:
When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?
* * * * *
O send out thy light and thy truth:
Let them lead me;
Let them bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy tabernacles.
Then will I go up unto the altar of God,
Unto God, the gladness of my joy:
Yea, upon the harp will I praise thee,
O God, my God.
The temple, however, was but a part, and practically a small part, of the
institutionalism of religion in this period. This was the era of the
scribe rather than of the priest. Ezra came back to Jerusalem with a new
treasure, "The Law." Around this sacred book, which soon added to itself
the writings of the Prophets, the religious life of the nation really
crystallized. To read and expound it, now that "no vision came to the
prophets from The Eternal," became the highest office of religion, an
office purely ethical and spiritual. In every town of the land the
Meeting-house arose, opening its doors upon the Sabbath and on market
days, to the villagers, who gathered for a simple service of instruction
and devotion. The service began with a short prayer, which was followed by
the recitation of some portions of "The Law," setting forth the great
beliefs and duties of the Jewish religion--a confession of faith, in
other words. After this came the long prayer, which, in later times,
became liturgical; and then the reading of the lesson for the day from
"The Law," with its interpretation, when Hebrew had become a dead
language. Then followed a reading from the Prophecies, and a homily or
sermon based upon the passage read. In their synagogues the Jews
worshipped much as we are doing in this church to-day.
Through such a quiet deepening of the life of the people was the nation
preparing for its final development of religion.
True it is that in the latter part of this period the nation showed
unmistakable signs of being overtrained. The hedge made about the Law had
fenced men off from one thing after another until, to men who were anxious
not to offend, life became a weary burden. There was scarcely an action
that might not involve sin. The natural effect of externalizing the
commands of conscience followed; and the ethical aims which had been
sought were well nigh lost in the routine of form and ceremony, and in the
fine-spun distinctions of belief and conduct. A great-souled Jew found,
later on, as hosts of his fellow-countrymen had found before him, that by
the works of the Thorah (law or teaching) could no flesh be justified. The
very Book which had fed so deep a life had come to stand between the soul
and God, a barrier to the fresh, free inspirations from on high. Religion
had run out upon the surface, and was dying. But it was as the tassels
wither and whiten when the corn is ripe within the husk and ready to seed
down a new season.
Plainly, by every sign, Israel's long gestation of Religion was nearing
its appointed term. All the elements had been developed, one after
another, for a Universal Religion, and there was nothing more to be done
but to await the coming to the birth. As plainly, by every sign, the
world-conditions were at length found for a safe issue of the "holy thing"
which Israel so long had carried within her bosom. There was needed a man
to body these scattered elements, to fuse the forces of the nation into a
personality, to live the dreams which a race had visioned. Religion is
never a code nor a theory, it is always a life. The ideal religion awaited
the ideal man. He came! As the nation held the holy child Jesus in her
arms, joying that a MAN was born into the world, she might have been
overheard singing:
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,
According to thy word:
For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,
Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;
A light to lighten the Gentiles,
And the glory of thy people Israel.
The historical reality of Jesus is unquestionable. The essential features
of his life and thought are distinctly outlined through the mist of time,
and above the clouds of legend that hang low upon the horizon where he
disappeared. The threefold tradition preserves a clear-cut image of the
Son of Man. We see One in whom the ideals of Israel found a perfect
realization. He brought to the flower the conception of religion whose
germ lay seeded down in the Ten Words of Moses. In him worship and
aspiration were one. He lived the ethical and spiritual religion after
which the nation had patiently striven, through prophet and priest and
sage, through psalmist and through scribe. He _lived_ the vision of human
goodness which holy men of old had never succeeded in bringing down into
the flesh, beyond a blurred blocking in of the heavenly ideal. He _lived_
man's dream of goodness so gloriously that he became a more than man, in
whom was felt the coming nigh of the Eternal Holy One. The human form
divine, to which mankind aspired, took on its true and awful splendor, as
the image of the God whom the conscience worshipped. Every passing "I
would be," of the saints of old looked forth, transfigured from the face
of One who said "I AM."
True to Israel's ancient dream, around this righteous suffering servant of
the Eternal, the nations gathered, to be taught of God. The souls to whom
He gave power to become the sons of God became the family of the Heavenly
Father, in which there was "neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor
uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ was all
and in all." In this holy brotherhood of the children of the All-Father,
we moderns take our places round our elder brother; feeling sure that we
have found the spiritual band or religion wherein society is to be held
together, through each man's holding hard by the God who is the perfection
of His own highest dreams.
* * * * *
Such then being the fact of Israel's historic travail and such her issue,
our fathers' sense of the supreme significance of Christ in human history
takes on a new light in our new knowledge.
The problem of religion is to find such a knowledge of the Being in whom
we live and move and have our being, as shall lead men's awe before this
mysterious Power up into an awe of a Power whom we may rightly worship,
trust and love. To find the key to this problem is to hold the secret of
all the puzzles of our weary world. Before the Power "manifest in the
flesh" in Jesus Christ, our souls hush, in an awe which breathes within us
worship, trust and love. And if this Power be the very Power felt in
history and in nature, whose ways therein are so often baffling to the
moral sense, then all is well. But, if this be so, the holy Power who is
shrined in Christ must show the features of the Mind which tabernacles in
nature. There can be no contradiction. Unquestionably an essential
characteristic of the Mind in nature is the method of its action. There
is a reign of Law. The highest generalization of the methods of this law
which man has reached reveals this Power as acting, through every sphere,
in continuous progressive development. One word embodies this supreme
generalization--evolution. Christianity must fit into this universal
order. Otherwise it either denies that order, which denial cannot be
received; or it is denied by that order, which denial is very certain to
be increasingly received. God "cannot deny Himself!" "I change not."
Here is where Christianity's hold of the human mind hinges in our age. The
old reading of the history of the preparation for Christ separated "those
whom God hath joined together." The new reading of that preparation
restores the needful unity.
Christianity is no exception amid the general order of nature. It follows
that providential plan. It grows from seed to flower. Its beginnings were
in a simple conception of ethical religion begotten in a heathen people
through Moses. In the womb of the nation it lay dormant till the time for
quickening came. Thenceforward it slowly assimilated the vital forces and
nutritive elements of the organic life within which it grew, until the
hour arrived when it burst the maternal womb, a perfect birth.
Christianity is a genuine historic evolution.
When we have said this, have we accounted for it? To none save those who,
in mastering the methods of a process of evolution, fancy that they have
mastered its sources. To none save those who, familiarizing themselves
with the order of life, think that they have resolved its nature. The
wiser portion of mankind do not find in How a synonym for Whence. We still
ask whence? When we see the issue of a long and complicated plan, we
postulate a planning mind. When we trace, through the sketches and studies
in a studio, the gradual embodiment of a vision of loveliness, which at
length looks down upon us in its perfect grace from the canvas on the
wall, we cannot be persuaded out of our conviction that some artist has
lived and labored in this studio, patiently evolving his great dream. When
we see a new-born child we do not think that we have learned its parentage
in being told about its mother. We want to know who fathered it into
being.
What mind planned this process of a nation's growth into a universal
religion? What artist dreamed this ethical and spiritual ideal? Who begat
this "holy thing" conceived in Israel and born of her at length in
glorious beauty? If Moses was the human parent of this marvellous child,
who fathered the "essential Christ" in Moses? Who is the real father of
Jesus Christ?
Our only answer must be that given of old:
When the fulness of the time was come God sent forth His son.... The
true Light, which lighteth every man, was coming on into the world....
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory,
the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father) full of grace and
truth.
If this then be the true interpretation of the evolution of the Christ, we
hold, in the doctrine of the Incarnation, the secret of all evolution. We
must read the story of every development in the light of the highest life
of man, himself the highest life of nature. Nature is in travail with an
ideal which rose not in the molten suns, though perchance it did rise
through them.
The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the
manifestation of the sons of God.
Man is in travail with an ideal which rose not in the anthropoid apes,
though it may have risen through them. A finer, larger, nobler man is
growing within the man that is.
The Universal Man is now coming to be a real being in the individual
mind.
Mankind, which is one physically and mentally, is one morally and
spiritually. All varieties of man are built upon one ethical type. The
virtues are cosmopolitan. One human ideal looms above and before all
races, though refracted differently in the changing atmospheres of earth.
Within the saints one dream of goodness forms.
Over the seers and sages one vision of the source of human goodness
rises. Through the clouds of earth one Infinite and Eternal Form shapes
itself to the wise. As men rise they meet. The race-souls are strangely
alike. Socrates and Buddha are brothers. Humanity is in travail with one
Human Ideal and one Divine Image, and these twain are one. The great
Mother sings to herself:
But he, the man-child glorious,
Where tarries he the while?
The rainbow shines his harbinger,
The sunset gleams his smile.
My boreal lights leap upward,
Forth right my planets roll,
And still the man-child is not born,
The summit of the Whole.
I travail in pain for him,
My creatures travail and wait;
His couriers come by squadrons,
He comes not to the gate.
Will Humanity come to the birth with her beloved son? Who that reads the
story of the coming of the Hebrew Christ can doubt it? What miscarriage
can befall her who is nursed by Nature and tended by Providence? What will
the Coming Man be like? We have seen his face break through the flesh for
a moment. On the shoulders of the race will rest the head of Christ. What
shall be said when the morning stars sing together, and all the sons of
God shout for joy that MAN is born upon the earth?
The Holy Ghost hath come upon thee, Humanity, and the power of the
Highest hath overshadowed thee; therefore also, that holy thing which
is born of thee, shall be called the SON OF GOD.
This, at least, is my reading of nature and of history in the light of the
completed evolution of the Christ. The normal growth through history of
the Ideal Man, is the incarnation of the Divine Man. The mischievous
antithesis between the realms of the natural and the supernatural, that
kept the world's thought from crystallizing around the world's soul,
disappears in an Order which is at once natural in all its processes, and
supernatural in its source and plan and energy.
We hold the key to all earth's problems in the vision of God which,
gleaming through nature and through man, dawns in the face of Jesus
Christ. Over Him--in whom the Human Ideal becomes the Divine Image, and
the most perfect dream of human goodness is the revelation of earth's
God--the Eternal One breaks silence, whispering to our souls:
This is my Beloved Son: Hear Him!
VII.
The Right Ethical and Spiritual Use of the Bible.
It is impossible to forget the noble enthusiasm with which this
dangerous heretic, as he was regarded in England, grasped the small
Greek Testament which he had in his hand as we entered and said: "In
this little book is contained all the wisdom of the world."
Stanley: "History of the Jewish Church," III. x. [Reminiscence of a
visit to Ewald.]
Truth, not eloquence, is to be sought for in Holy Scripture. We should
rather search after our profit in the Scriptures, than subtilty of
speech..... Search not who spoke this or that, but mark what is spoken.
À Kempis: "Imitation of Christ," Ch. V.
Do not hear for any other end but to become better in your life, and to
be instructed in every good work, and to increase in the love and
service of God.
Jeremy Taylor: "Holy Living," Ch. IV. Sect. iv.
We search the world for truth: we cull
The good, the pure, the beautiful
From graven stone and written scroll,
From all old flower-fields of the soul;
And, weary seekers of the best,
We come back laden from our quest,
To find that all the sages said,
Is in the Book our mothers read.
Whittier: "Miriam."
VII.
The Right Ethical and Spiritual Use of the Bible.
"From a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to
make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ
Jesus."--2 Timothy, iii. 15.
The right use of the Bible is admirably stated by St. Paul. These books do
not make one learned in any knowledge--they make one wise in life. The
Jewish tradition concerning Solomon's choice expressed a deep truth.
Wisdom is the supreme benediction to be sought in life. Invaluable as is
knowledge, it is as a means to an end. Knowledge provides for man the
material out of which Wisdom, using "the best means to attain the best
ends," builds a noble life. To have the mind clear, the judgment just, the
conscience true, the will strong, so that we may sight the goal of life,
may learn the laws by which it is to be won, and may firmly seek it,
steadfast amid all seductions--this is wisdom.
Would that for one single day, we may have lived in this world as we
ought.
Thus prays the author of the Imitation of Christ; and in so praying he is
sighing after wisdom.
This culture of wisdom is the aim of the books which together form the
Bible. They reveal to our vision the best ends in life, and point us to
the best means of winning those high aims. They clear the atmosphere of
mists, disclose to us our bearings, and fill our souls with the afflatus
which wafts us toward "the haven where we would be." These books are
rightly called by Paul, the "Holy Scriptures," the scriptures of holiness,
the writings whose genius is goodness. Their charm is "the beauty of
holiness," the graciousness of Goodness as she unveils herself therein.
And this genius of gracious Goodness which irradiates the inner court of
this temple, lays such a spell upon the souls of men inasmuch as she is
seen to be the very daughter of God; according to the soliloquy overheard
by mortal ears, wherein Wisdom sings:
The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way,
Before His work of old.
* * * * *
Then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him,
And I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him.
Religion becomes the worship of the God who is the source and standard of
goodness, the love of the Eternal who loveth righteousness, the child's
crying out into the dark--O righteous Father.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.
The Bible is the choicest extant literature of the people of religion,
the record and embodiment of the evolution of ethical worship, through its
varied moods and tenses, into its perfect type in Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Bible-books form, therefore, the classics of the soul, in which we are
to study the nature and secret of goodness; the manual which every earnest
man and woman, intent on building character, should use habitually for
ethical culture, and for the ethical worship which is its inspiration.
This is the truest use of the Bible.
* * * * *
The intellectual use of the Bible, in critical and historical studies, is
legitimate and needful. Reason should lay the bases for faith. Knowledge
must rear the altar on which worship is to be lighted. Theology shapes
religion. It is all important, therefore, that the books which the
intellect chiefly uses to found and form its thoughts of God should be
rightly used, so as to give man right conceptions of the Divine Being, and
to waken right feelings toward Him. This intellectual use of the Bible is
not for scholars alone. There is no longer any isolated class of scholars.
All educated people are now taken into the confidence of the learned, in
every sphere of knowledge. The average man will reason about the great
mysteries quite as much as the scholar; perhaps more than the true
scholar, and with more insistent dogmatism. To the issue of that simpler,
nobler Religion of Christ which is struggling to the birth within the
womb of Christianity, in the travail throes that are upon our age, it is
of vital moment that all intelligent people should learn to use their
Bibles intelligently in a knowledge of the nature of its writings, and in
reasonable reasonings therefrom. Therefore I have spoken concerning the
critical and the historical uses of these sacred writings.
But, when this knowledge is won and duly employed in our theologizings,
the truest use of the Bible remains for us to make, to our highest
pleasure and profit. It is the book of religion, not of theology; save as
it records the one authoritative Epistle of Theology, the Word of God, the
Christ. It is not a body of divinity, it is the soul of divinity. To use
the Bible critically and historically for our theologizings, is, after
all, to use it, however rightly, for its secondary and not its primary
purpose. Religion--as the awed sense of the Eternal Power and Order
revealed in nature, the Infinite Goodness and Righteousness revealed in
man--is the art of the soul; its finest feelings, its loftiest
imaginations, its noblest enthusiasms its profoundest tragedies thrown out
into the cry of the human after God.
There is a science in the sculptor's art. It is doubtless needful that
this art should be studied for the sake of its science. Artists, however,
may be glad that Winckelmann has analyzed the Apollo Belvedere, and has
given them the laws of proportion deduced from this human form divine;
leaving them free to feast upon its beauty. For in the scientific study of
art, art itself may be lost. Some great figure-painters have been
unwilling that their pupils should study anatomy; fearing that the bones
would stick through the flesh in their paintings.
This danger shows itself plainly in all critical and historical uses of
the Bible, in the old-fashioned as in the new-fashioned study of the
Bible.
The international series of Sunday-school lessons burden the brief hours
of the Lord's Day with a mass of matter, which may or may not be true
knowledge about the Bible, but which certainly is not the true religion of
the Bible. A child may learn the tables of the Israelitish Kings, the
geography of the Holy Land, and the architect's plans of the temple of
Jerusalem, and may be learning nothing whatever of the real religion which
is shrined within the Bible. That is very simple:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
mind, and with all thy strength: And thy neighbor as thyself.
The time spent on these more or less interesting matters may rob the child
of his one weekly opportunity of learning to use the Holy Scriptures so as
to become wise unto salvation. To use their words of wise men, and their
tales of holy men, to inspire the love of goodness as the love of God,
this and this alone is to teach religion from the Bible. Bread that
consists of two-thirds bran and one-third white flour is eminently
laxative; but it is generally supposed that this age is lax enough in its
hold of truth. A little more wheat and a little less bran, ye good
doctors, might strengthen the constitutions of our children.
The new study of the Bible is perhaps even more in danger of missing its
real secret. An interest in the literature and history of Israel may
divert the mind from that which is, after all, the heart of these
"letters," and the core of this history.
Fear God and keep His commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.
Of this danger I think that I see signs, in some of the great masters to
whom we owe our new criticism, in some of the manuals which are
popularizing it, and in some of the gifted preachers who are
reconstructing theology around it. The science of religion is absorbing
too much of the life that should go into the art of religion; and we have
fine forms of thought, mantled with flabby flesh of feeling, in which no
red blood of holy passion pulses.
To read Homer with a view of understanding the fables of superstition, and
of interpreting the mythology of the ancients, may have been needful for
the later Greeks, who would preserve religion from the death that was
stealing over it, in the divorce of the educated and the popular thought
of the Grecian Bible. Such a use of Homer, however, must have missed the
essential charm of Homer--the immortal poetry of these heroic legends; the
breath of fresh, simple, wholesome human life which animates them, and
which through them inspired men to brave and noble being. Socrates saw
this in his day.
"I beseech you to tell me, Socrates," said Phaedrus, "do you believe
this tale?" "The wise are doubtful," answered Socrates, "and I should
not be singular if, like them, I also doubted. I might have a rational
explanation.... Now I have certainly not time for such inquiries; shall
I tell you why? I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription
says. To be curious about that which is not my business while I am
still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous."[54]
Wisely speaks the finest Biblical critic of England in our day:
No one knows the truth about the Bible who does not know how to enjoy
the Bible; and he who takes legend for history, and who imagines Moses,
or Isaiah, or David, or Paul, or Peter, or John, to have written
Bible-books which they did not write, but who knows how to enjoy the
Bible deeply, is nearer the truth about the Bible than the man who can
pick it all to pieces but who cannot enjoy it.... His work is to learn
to enjoy and turn to his benefit the Bible, as the Word of the
Eternal,[55]
The right use of the Bible is to feed religion.
Coleridge said:
Religion, in its widest sense, signifies the act and the habits of
reverencing the invisible, as the highest both in ours Ives and in
nature.[56]
The use of the Bible then is to ennoble our ideals, to quicken our
aspirations, to clear the illusions of the senses, to dissipate the glamor
of the world, to purify our passions, to bring our powers well in hand to
a firm will; and, through the mystic laws of nature and of conscience
which we thus endeavor to obey, to breathe within our souls a sacred sense
of the Presence of a Power, infinite and eternal and loving
righteousness--whom to know "is life eternal."
De Quincey classified all writings as belonging either to the literature
of knowledge, or the literature of power. There are books to which we go
for information. They give us facts and ideas. They constitute the
literature of knowledge. They teach us. There are books to which we go for
inspiration; to which we turn for joy and pleasure, for strength and
courage, for patience and endurance, for purity and peace. They constitute
the literature of power. They move us. Herbert Spencer's books belong to
the literature of knowledge The "Imitation of Christ" belongs to the
literature of power.
The literature of knowledge needs to be reissued every century or
generation or decade, corrected up to date. The literature of power is
immortal; fresh to-day though born milleniums ago. The problems of
character and conduct face us much as they faced the Romans and Greeks,
the Egyptians and Hindus. The invisible in nature and in man touches us
with the same feelings that it stirred in Persians, Chaldeans and
Akkadians Even though the Spirit's voice spake once in a language of the
intellect which has now become obsolete, its utterances are not therefore
obsolete. How archaic is much of the thought of the "Imitation of Christ;"
shot through and through as it is with the tissue of mediæval Catholicism!
But we forget these archaisms in the spell of a holy soul, in love with
wisdom, "intoxicated with God." No archaisms in Biblical thought destroy
its spiritual power over us. Nay, rather do they strengthen that power: as
in our devotions we naturally seek old and quaint forms, buildings unlike
other structures, music which sounds from out the past, words that are
mellow with the rich hues of age; as the archaisms of the language of our
English Bible hold a power that is lost in the raw correctness of the
revised version.
* * * * *
In the literature of power the Bible ranks first. Whatever in Christian
literature has most searching ethical and spiritual energy radiates the
reflected light of the Bible. Augustine's Confessions, The Imitation of
Christ, Fenelon's Spiritual Letters, The Saints' Rest, The Pilgrim's
Progress, in their most appealing tones echo the voices of the Bible. The
hymns that feed the inner life are aromatic with the rich thoughts and
feelings of this holy book. Our poets betray, in the passages which are
the favorites of earnest minds, the influence of these Scriptures. From
Paradise Lost to In Memoriam, from The Temple to the Christian Year, the
poems which the devout delight in are either Biblical paraphrases or
Biblical distillations. Our masters of fiction could not have written the
scenes which most rouse our moral nature, could not have conceived the
characters which most inspire our devotional nature, without the Bible.
Take the Bible out of Adam Bede and Dinah Morris, out of Robert Falconer
and M. Myriel the blessed Bishop of D., and what would be left of them?
The vibratory quality which most thrills our souls in the strains of
Christian literature is due to the Bible material in it. The Bible holds
stored the ethical electricity on which Christendom has drawn, through
centuries, exhaustless energy.
Outside of Christendom, while there are many books which we can thankfully
and reverently place by the side of the Bible, as ethical and spiritual
motors, there are none which any of us would think of substituting for it.
The Discourses and the Manual of Epictetus, the Thoughts of Marcus
Aurelius, the Dialogues of Plato, and the kindred words of wisdom of the
ancients, are indeed full of inspiration to earnest natures. To dip into
these writings for a few minutes, amid the duties of the day, is a soul
bath, most cleansing and invigorating. The Sacred Books of the East may
well be sacred to us Westerns. A sense of grateful awe steals over me as,
looking on these volumes, I think of the generations which they have fed
with spiritual sustenance and have guided in the way of life. The light
which lighteth every man that cometh into the world shines through these
pages. The All-Father has drawn nigh to the souls of His children, through
the holy men who spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost. It is an
inestimable privilege to have these Bibles of Humanity ranged along our
shelves, and to have their choicest words at hand upon our tables, in some
apt anthology. It would be well if their great sayings could be read in
our churches, in connection with our Old Testament lessons, as the voices
of the ethnic prophets of the Son of Man. But if we have allowed the
thought that any of these sacred books might become a substitute for our
fathers' Bible, we may correct our crude enthusiasms by the authority of
the greatest living master in Comparative Religion. In the preface to the
edition of the Sacred Books of the East that noble monument of our
generation's scholarship Max Müller, writes:
Readers who have been led to believe that the Vedas of the ancient
Brahmans, the Avesta of the Zoroastrians, the Tripitaka of the
Buddhists, the Kings of Confucius, or the Koran of Mohammed are books
full of primeval wisdom and religious enthusiasm or at least of sound
and simple moral teaching, will be disappointed on consulting these
volumes.... I cannot help calling attention to the real mischief that
has been done, and is still being done, by the enthusiasm of those
pioneers who have opened the first avenues through the bewildering
forest of the sacred literature of the East. They have raised
expectations that cannot be fulfilled, fears also that, as will be
easily seen, are unfounded.... I confess it has been for many years a
problem to me, aye, and to a great extent is so still, how the Sacred
Books of the East should, by the side of so much that is fresh,
natural, simple, beautiful and true, contain so much that is not only
unmeaning, artificial and silly, but even hideous and repellant.[57]
Our own Bible, as I have frankly owned, holds the truth as the gold is
held in the ore. Truth nowhere exists "native" in human writings; but the
proportions of the "mineralizer" are vastly greater in all other Bibles
than in our own. There is no book known that can take its place on the
lecterns in our churches, or on the tables by which, in quiet hours, we
seat ourselves, a-hungered for the bread of life.
The pre-eminent excellence of Israel's writings in the literature of
power, is natural and necessary. Israel had little originality in any
science or art save the science and art of the soul, the knowledge and the
love of God. Nature is economic in her dowries. She does not shower all
the gifts of the fairies on any one race. She dowered Israel with the
highest of human powers, conscience, in an unequalled measure. Providence
nurtured and trained this faculty. This little nation became as
pre-eminently the people of ethical and spiritual religion as the states
of Greece became the people of art. Because of the natural aptitudes of
Israel, and of her providential education, we should turn to her
literature for our highest inspirations in ethical culture and religion.
I.
Wherein lies this commanding rank of the Bible in the literature of
ethical and spiritual power?
Speaking generally, I should say that the superiority of the Bible lies in
the fact that it is at once a literature of ethical power and a literature
of spiritual power. We have books of high ethical power that are weak
religiously. We have books of high religious power that are weak ethically
The Bible is strong in both directions. Hence its power. Either ethical or
spiritual power alone is defective. Morality without spirituality is
principle without passion. Spirituality without morality is passion
without principle. Union supplements the defectiveness of each alone, and
develops its full forcefulness. The Bible marries morality and
spirituality, and these twain become one. The secularities become sacred,
and the sanctities become sound.
According to the Bible, he who keeps the Ten Words obeys God. The "merely
moral" man is a worshipper of God, though the worship may be silent. In
Kant's great saying, They are always in the service of God whose actions
are moral. Virtue becomes consciously religious, as she learns to
recognize what she is in love with in loving goodness. As the love of
goodness rises into a passion for the ideal forms of Justice, Purity and
Truth, it takes on a real religiousness. It may think to stop short in an
ethical culture, but it cannot. To feed its own aspirations it must
worship the Ideal Righteousness as a reality. Its desires become prayers,
its hopes become praises. Even though in mute longings, it pleads
O Lord, open thou our lips, and our mouth shall shew forth Thy praise.
Reversing the identification of religion with morality that is wrought by
the Bible, its influence is equally impressive. Religion is not the
emotion of man in the presence of the invisible in nature, unless that
invisible is felt to be essentially moral. Religion is not the finest of
feelings before the invisible in man, unless that unseen is also felt to
be ethical. The Natural Religion, however nobly stated, which accepts any
form of poetic ideals as religion, is very imperfect and not at all
Biblical. Shelley's feelings for the spirit of Beauty are exquisitely
fine, but under the light of the Bible they are seen to be only latently
religious. A more penetrating-vision will see in the Ideal Beauty a Moral
Form, and then æsthetics will translate itself into ethics. The unmoral
sentiment of a Shelley for Beauty may issue in another generation in the
immoral sentiment of a Swinburne. Even thus the vision of the Aphrodite
sank into the dream of a Venus. An Oscar Wilde's maunderings over an art
which has no reference to morality may possibly be poetry, but they
certainly are not religion according to the Bible, for all his blasphemous
apostrophes to Christ between his praises of licentious love. Hard as the
granitic core of earth is the core of religion in the Bible.
The "stern law-giver" of Israel was Duty. Her supreme authority, which
enjoined with absolute command the most unpleasant action, was--"I ought."
She saw that "laws mighty and brazen" bind man to a right, which he may
distort or deny, but cannot destroy--his Saviour or his Judge. Mystic in
its sacredness, Conscience sat shrined within the soul of the holy men who
spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost; her voice the very voice of
God. The Power in whom we live and move and have our being is revealed in
these books as the Eternal Righteousness. The moral law is seen to be the
throne of the Most High.
In Emerson's phrase:
Virtue is the adopting of this dictate of the Universal Mind by the
individual will.
"What do I love when I love Thee?" sighed Augustine. Israel might have
answered that question in Augustine's own words:
Not the beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the
brightness of the light so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of
varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers and ointments and
spices, not manna and honey. None of these do I love when I love my
God; and yet I love a kind of light, a kind of melody, a kind of
fragrance, a kind of food, when I love my God,--the light, the melody,
the fragrance, the food of the inner man. This it is which I love when
I love my God.[58]
But the Bible answer would be much more simple and pungent:
O ye that love the Lord, see that ye hate the thing which is evil....
If a man say I love God and hateth His brother he is a liar.
This is the fundamental secret of the power of the Bible. The love of
goodness and the love of God are one. Aspiration is unconscious worship,
and worship is aspiration conscious of its object.
Be ye perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
But this noble conception of the unity of ethical and spiritual life has
many aspects in the Bible. The Bible turns upon us every phase in which
Wisdom reveals herself to the sons of men, so that no ray of her light is
lost, and that every one, however he may stand related to her, receives
her heavenly beams.
1. _We have here the simple, homely, prudential aspects of virtue, which
have always been particularly powerful on certain ages and classes._
The maxims of a Poor Richard are anticipated here, as quaint, as terse,
and as sagacious in the ancient Jew as in the modern American. Our
scientific teachers would replace eloquent declamation concerning vices,
such as drunkenness and debauchery, by illustrated lectures upon the
physiological effects of violations of nature's laws. They would teach men
that the laws of health are found in the laws of temperance and purity.
The Hebrew sages had this vision of Wisdom. Their proverbial sayings
abound with graphic pen-pictures of the folly of vice. No illustration of
the physical consequences of debauchery could be more impressive than the
vivid sketch of the foolish young man, going after the strange woman as an
"ox goeth to the slaughter," knowing not that
Her house is the way to hell,
Going down to the chambers of death.
The favorite name for sin in these proverbs is Folly. Wisdom crieth to the
sons of men, in that noblest writing of the sages:
Blessed is the man that heareth me,
Watching daily at my gates,
Waiting at the posts of my doors.
For whoso findeth me findeth life,
And shall obtain favor of the Lord.
But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul.
All they that hate me love death.
2. _These laws of life that work for our health and wealth loom, however,
into mystic and sacred forms, as of the laws heavenly and eternal, whose
"seat is the bosom of God."_
When Crito urges his beloved master to escape from the death that had been
unjustly decreed for him, Socrates replies in a noble personification of
the Laws, as rebuking him for the thought of such an attempt to evade
them; and he must be dim-sighted, indeed, who does not see in the forms of
the State Laws, the shadows of the Eternal Laws, august and awful, whose
constraint was round about his will. That is the vision which we catch
through every form of law, sanitary, social, or ecclesiastical, in the
Bible. In the earliest code of the Hebrew statutes known to us, a
collection of tribal "Judgments" or "dooms," this high and mystic sense of
obligation steals over us. Amid the quaint enactments recorded in the Book
of Covenants, whose language carries us back to times of extreme
simplicity, we hear the words
Ye shall be holy men unto me.[59]
Our new critics may tell you that the late poet, who wrote that long-drawn
sigh of desire for the Law which is bodied in the One hundred and
nineteenth Psalm, was thinking of the "Thorah"--the ritual law of the
temple and the counsels of the priests. They are doubtless right, if so be
that they do not lead you to infer that this devout soul was thinking
_only_ of the ecclesiastical law. Through it, there was rising upon his
spirit the vision of the Law Eternal and Heavenly, the norm and pattern of
the law that on earth binds men to purity and righteousness.
Blessed are those that are undefiled in the way,
Who walk in the law of the Lord.
Make me to understand the way of thy commandments;
And so shall I talk of thy wondrous works.
Thy statutes have been my songs
In the house of my pilgrimage.
The earth, O Lord, is full of thy mercy:
O teach me thy statutes!
Thy hands have made me and fashioned me:
O give me understanding, that I may learn thy commandments.
Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven.
They continue this day, according to thy ordinances.
Thy righteousness is an everlasting righteousness,
And thy law is the truth.
Shew the light of thy countenance upon thy servant,
And teach me thy statutes.
This is none other than that law of which a far later ecclesiastic,
writing also of ecclesiastical law, discoursed in this wise:
There can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of
God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth
do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as
not exempted from her power: both angels and men and creatures of what
condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all,
with uniform consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and
joy.[60]
This law is none other than that holy form which a modern poet thus
apostrophizes:
Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face.
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.
3. _The Law thus mystic and sacred is seen to be both the law of nature
and the law of the human soul._
The Bible recognizes no duality of natural law and revealed law. All
divine law is natural, and, as such, is a revelation. Physical and moral
laws are but different forms of one and the same order. The same Power is
working in the world around man and in the world within man. The lower
forms of Its action are to be interpreted by Its higher forms. Nature is
to be resolved by Man. The Ten Words were given as the statutes of Jehovah
himself the personification of some form of nature's force. Out of this
simple germ grew, the noble thought which anticipated the knowledge of
our _savans_ and the intuitions of our seers; who unite in showing us one
order in the starry heavens and in the mysteries of mind. Thus it is that
the Bible feeds so richly, when read aright, that awe which steals upon us
as we face nature and see ourselves mirrored there in shadowy outline; and
realize the One in all things--God.
There is a beautiful illustration of this in a noble poem that our later
critics have handled with a strange lack of perceptiveness. The Nineteenth
Psalm opens with a lofty apostrophe to Nature, commencing:
The heavens declare the glory of God,
And the firmament sheweth His handywork.
At the seventh verse the Psalm abruptly passes to a eulogy of "The
Law"--the moral law shrined in the priestly Thorah:
The law of the Lord is an undefiled law,
Converting the soul;
The testimony of the Lord is sure,
And giveth wisdom unto the simple.
Here we have, say our learned critics, two psalms welded into one, a song
of nature and a song of the soul. As though nature and man did not form
one divine poem in two cantos! As though the system of the world around us
did not type the world within us! As though it were not always the most
instinctive action to pass from the sense of an Order in the starry
heavens, and the awe thus awakened, to the sense of an Order in the soul
of man, and the deeper awe thus roused!
We know that the Hindus and Egyptians made use, each, of one word to
express the law of nature and the law of conscience. The physical order
interpreted the sense of a moral order.
The Egyptian _maat_, derived like the Sanskrit _rita_, from merely
sensuous impressions, became the name for moral order and
righteousness.[61]
The Nineteenth Psalm is only the expression among the Hebrews of this
wide-spread instinct; an instinct which learned critics may lack, but
which the poet still inherits; as the Sphynx whispers to him of the double
life of nature and of man, that yet are
By one music enchanted,
One Deity stirred.
4. _The Bible leads us on to that sense of sin, in the presence of this
"Law," which no lower thought of law can quicken._
Violations of physiological law Nature stamps as folly. Offences against
social laws the State brands as crime. Transgressions of Ideal and Eternal
Law become sin. It is not only foolish or disgraceful to break the moral
law, it is wrong. This is the sense of guilt in disobedience that is
roused in each of us by the Bible, as by no other book; that has been
quickened in Europe, historically, by these sacred Scriptures, as by no
other writings. The Bible has given to humanity a new and intense ethical
perception of evil.
The strenuous moral earnestness of the Puritan and the Methodist is
vitalized from these books. The very type of saintship in Christendom is
unique. It is no mere ceremonial correctness for which the priestly
Ezekiel pleads with tender pathos:
Repent, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions whereby ye
have transgressed, and make you a clean heart and a new spirit; for why
will ye die, O house of Israel?
It is this intense sense of the exceeding sinfulness of sin which
oppressed the great-hearted Paul, and wrung from him the bitter cry:
O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this
death.
How vividly this sense of sin expresses itself in the Fifty-first Psalm!
There is here a plaint infinitely deeper than the chagrin and remorse of
the man who has committed an "indiscretion," or become entangled in an
"intrigue;" there is the cry of a soul that has betrayed its highest,
holiest fidelities, and lies low in the dust before the Heavenly purity:
Wash me throughly from my wickedness,
And cleanse me from my sin.
Cast me not away from Thy presence,
And take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.
To enter into the spirit of this sigh of penitence is a new knowledge of
the human heart. The Bible thus leads men to live as in the presence of an
awful Power of Holiness, which is searching through and through our
beings. We cannot understand the Biblical "salvation" unless we have
fathomed, at least, the shoaler experiences of these saintly souls of old,
and know some little of the depths of sin.
5. _The Bible wakens in the breast of man an ethical passion for the ideal
and eternal law, which, apart from early Buddhism, has no parallel in
history._
The prophets are aflame with the ardors of this sacred enthusiasm. The
ordinary passions of mankind are rivaled in intensity by the mystic
passion of their souls for the Heavenly Wisdom. They stand amid the wild
whirl of selfish strife in the society of their day, and lift on high the
holy forms of Justice and Brotherhood, as though expecting their
commonplace cotemporaries to turn aside from practical affairs, and seek
for them; and, so subtle and searching are the appeals of these heavenly
visions, men do actually turn from mammon to worship these impoverishing
divinities; and a great movement arises, looking to the bringing down of
these ideals upon the earth, as the ruling powers in the court and the
exchange. The regenerating force of Christendom has lain in the coming of
these prophets, generation after generation, to the children of men, to
lead them upon the mount where they should clearly see those lofty shapes,
commanding instant loyalty from honest souls. The ominous travail-throes
of society to-day await one stimulus to free the new order that is
struggling to the birth--the passion for ethical and social ideals, which
the Bible, rightly administered, would inspire.
The prophetic spirit is the vital force of the Bible. Its insistent power
reappears in Paul; a man consuming in the fires of this holy passion, and
kindling its ardors in the souls of untold myriads. His great letter to
the Romans, so strangely misread as a mere dogmatic treatise, breathes and
burns with this lofty enthusiasm. Its central thought, its threading
_motif_, heard anew in every critical movement of the argument,
is--Righteousness. The Master in whom the Bible centres, enriches earth
with a new benediction:
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.
This highest passion of mankind is wakened by the Bible as by no other
book. Through it, the mystic Forerunners reveal themselves to the human
soul most alluringly; enthralling it with their pure charms, dispelling
the illusions of the senses and the glamor of the world, in the light of
their holy loveliness. The Eternal Wisdom calls from out these pages to
the sons of men:
Hearken unto me ye that follow after righteousness.
6. _The Bible reveals these ethical ideals as no mere alluring visions,
but as the substantial realities of being._
Men say to those who speak of these high conceptions--"They are the dreams
of sentimentalists, the will-'o-the-wisp lights that beguile men away from
the _terra firma_; to be trusted and followed by no practical man."
"Idealist" is a term of reproach. And justly, from any other point of view
than that which the Bible, true to the most penetrating discernment of
humanity, opens to us. These ideal forms are not the empty conceits of
man's brain, bred from the fumes of his boundless egotism. They are not
the clouds that gather and form and break into airy unreality in the
atmosphere of earth. They are the shadows falling upon the soul of man
from the unseen Realities, which alone have substantial and abiding being.
The laws of nature are surely not the baseless fabric of a dream. These
ideals are simply those laws, transfigured into their spiritual
substances. Whatever in our blindness we may persuade ourselves
elsewhere, over the Bible we recognize the true character of the visions
which so strangely stir us. This is the power of the Bible. Christian
seemed to Mr. Worldly Wiseman a fool. But he saw the heavenly city, and
trudged along, sure that time would prove him in the right. Christian
carried in his hand this Book. With this Book in our hands, we, too, are
sure that the visions of Purity and Justice, which we dimly see afar, are
substantial and real, and that man will win at the last to the land where
they are the light thereof.
Whereupon I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.
7. _The Bible thus inspires a buoyancy and exhilaration which feed the
fresh forces of all noble life._
No poet is needed to tell us that
Virtue kindles at the touch of joy.
We know it in our own experience. We notice it in every great revival of
religion. We trace it through the history of Christianity. The story of
the early days of Jesus is, as Renan called it, "a delightful pastoral."
In the person of humanity's greatest idealist, the highest joy of the soul
was set in the framing of one of nature's brightest scenes. Even from the
shadows of the garden of Gethsemane, He bequeaths to his little flock the
legacy of his free spirit: My joy I leave with you. The Christian Society
entered into that bequest, and in its first exhilaration overflowed the
hard coast lines of property, and realized a happy brotherhood.
And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and
sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men as any man
had need. And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and
breaking bread at home did take their food with gladness.
The prophets were filled with a buoyancy of spirit that scarce would let
them keep down to the plodding steps of social progress; that constantly
rapt them away into the future, whence their voices echo back the gladness
of their visions. The good time is coming on the earth. The longings of
man's soul are to be realized. Crushed by no disappointments, wearied out
by no delays, the prophets maintain an indomitable hopefulness; their
voices the carollings of the birds that greet the dawn of day:
Sing, O Heavens; and be joyful, O earth;
And break forth into singing, O mountains.
For the Lord hath comforted his people;
And will have mercy upon his afflicted.
One treads here the upper zones, where the air is rare and every draught
an inspiration; where the Laws are seen majestically sweeping every force
into the measured movement which is making all things work together for
good to them that love God.
With a tact truer than any theory, our canon of scripture has been closed
in the Book of the Revelation; whose visions look beyond the break-up of
Jerusalem and shadow on the far horizon, where earth and heaven melt in
one, the fair form of the City of God, coming down from out the skies upon
the new world wherein dwelleth righteousness.
In these days, when "joy is withered from the sons of men," it is like
drinking from the Castalian springs to draw within our souls from the
Bible the sense of that kingdom of God which is joy in the Holy Ghost;
into which men are to come
With everlasting joy upon their heads:
They shall obtain joy and gladness
And sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
You learn the power of the Bible as you find how the joy of the Lord is
your strength.
8. _The Bible leads this sense of Law into that awful vision wherein
"Conscious Law is King of kings."_
The Laws appear substantial and real inasmuch as they are seen to be but
phases of the Infinite and Eternal Being, the Righteous Lord who loveth
righteousness. It is a conscious, intelligent, holy Being, whom Israel
worships through these ideal forms of goodness. However He transcended
their poor personalities, as transcend them they knew He must, God was yet
best expressed in the form of the human, conscious personality. Man, the
highest creature, must be, they said, most nearly in the form of God. As
man takes up the noblest characteristics of the life below him, so his own
noblest characteristics must be taken up into the Lord of Life. God cannot
be less than personal, however much more than personal He may be. He is to
be thought of by us, in lack of nobler imagination, as personal. Israel
thus grew into the conception of the Infinite Power, manifest in the order
of nature and in the order of conscience as conscious Power; One in whose
image man was made, the Father of the mystic "I"; whose nature is the law
of creation, whose purpose is its plan, whose will is its exhaustless
energy.
This is the secret which has kept the religions inspired by the Bible from
lapsing, as other religions have done, into lifelessness.
Egypt was the land of a religion which had won a high conception of the
Divine unity; a religion which was scientific in its forms of thought, and
earnestly moral in its spirit; but which failed to keep distinct in mind
the order of nature from the Being on whom it reposes, and thus sank into
the dreamy pantheism of its cultured classes, and the poetic polytheisms
of its people. Of this lapse, Renouf writes:
All gods were in fact but names of the One who resided in them all. But
this God is no other than Nature. Both individuals and entire nations
may long continue to hold this view, without drawing the inevitable
conclusion, that if there is no other God than this, the world is
really without a God. But the fate of a religion which involves such a
conclusion, and with that conclusion the loss of faith in immortality,
and even in the distinction of Right and Wrong, except so far as they
are connected with ritual prescriptions, is inevitably sealed.[62]
Neither Judaism, nor Mohammedanism, nor Christianity, the religions fed
directly or indirectly from the Bible, have run, or can well run into this
fatal error. The Divine Being who is mirrored in the Bible is the
Conscious Intelligence to whom alone of right belongs that ineffable
name--GOD. This is the thought and this is the word which hold the spell
of the Bible power over the human soul. Nowhere else is the sense of God
so alive, nowhere else does it so thrill the whole being of man. It was
this living God whom these holy men of old were seeking; not simply the
august ideals of the soul, but the Eternal Being who casts them as his
shadows upon man:
Unto Thee lift I up mine eyes,
O Thou that dwellest in the heavens.
* * * * *
My soul truly waiteth still upon God,
For of Him cometh my salvation.
* * * * *
Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks,
So longeth my soul after Thee, O God.
My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the Living God;
When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?
It is God whom these holy men find. The Ineffable Presence rejoices their
souls, and as we keep company with them rejoices our souls also:
Lord, Thou hast been our home
From one generation to another.
* * * * *
Whoso dwelleth in the secret-place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
* * * * *
O Lord, Thou hast searched me out and known me.
Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising;
Thou understandest my thoughts afar off.
Thou art about my path and about my bed,
And spiest out all my ways.
For lo, there is not a word in my tongue
But Thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether.
The inspirations which we feel from the Bible-words are the breathings of
the Eternal Spirit. The Divine whispers, which are too often inarticulate
in nature and even in our souls, are articulate in the great
Bible-words--the words proceeding from out of the mouth of God, on which
man liveth. The power of the Bible is that the deafest souls can therein
hear--GOD.
9. _God speaks in A MAN._
The Bible centres in the story of a life which was so filled with the Holy
Ghost that this Man became the symbol of the Most High, the sacrament of
His Being and Presence, the sacred shrine of Deity. As when the long-drawn
travail of instrumentation labors through the opening movements of the
ninth symphony, with a strain too fine for any voicing save by man, there
bursts at length upon the tumultuous storm of sound the clear, high, song
of joy from human lips; so from the mounting efforts of a nation's
insufficient utterance there rises at last a voice, which takes up every
groaning of the Spirit in humanity into the perfect beauty of a human life
divine.
And so the Word hath breath, and wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds,
In loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought.
The light of the Son of Man is the life of men; the light for our minds
and the warmth for our hearts. In the Power in whom we live and move and
have our being, we see "Our Father who art in Heaven." In the laws of life
we read the methods of His schooling of our souls. In the sorrows of life
we receive His disciplinings. In the sins that cling so hard upon us we
feel the evils of our imperfection, from which He is seeking to deliver us
through His training of our spirits. In the shame of sin we are conscious
of the guilt that His free forgiveness wipes away, when we turn saying,
Father, I have sinned. In death we face the door-way to some other room of
the Father's house, where, it may be, just beyond the threshold our dear
ones wait for us! In Christ himself we own our heaven-sent Teacher,
Master, Saviour, Friend; our elder Brother, who in our sinful flesh lives
our holy aspirations, and, smiling, beckons us to follow Him, whispering
in our ears--To them that receive me I give "power to become the sons of
God."
The power of the Bible is--CHRIST.
II.
When Sir Walter Scott lay in his last illness, he asked Lockhart one day
to read to him. "From what book shall I read?" said Lockhart. "There is
but one book," was Scott's answer. Those who have sought the "power to
become the sons of God" will understand this hyperbole of the most healthy
human mind in modern English literature. Tested by experience there is
indeed, in the wide range of the literature of power, no book to be
mentioned with the Bible for feeding the life of God in man. Our fathers
found this true, and their children cannot correct their judgment. The
substitute for the Bible, as an ethical and spiritual instructor, is not
out.
I speak to those who are in earnest in the building of a man. You need
this book, my brothers. Luther's higher life dated from his discovery of
the Bible. Have you discovered the Bible? Within the body of human
"letters" have you found out the divine soul of the Bible? Through the
chorus of human voices have you heard the voice of the Eternal Power? If
not, life holds one more rich "find" for you--a treasure hidden in the
field over which you have so lightly strayed.
Buy a Bible, my brothers! The current coin of the land, in the shops of
our best booksellers, may have failed to buy for you a real Bible. No
noble book is ever to be made your own in this easy fashion. Ruskin tells
us that the great picture will not give itself to us unless we give
ourselves to it. The Bible must have its price. The best comes dearest. If
you will not pay you cannot buy. Pay for the real Bible your costliest
offering of mind and heart. Spend upon it, day by day, your careful,
reverent study, until beneath your love the Book warms into life; and,
having proven well your loyalty, this teacher of the soul opens its soul
to you and whispers--Henceforth I call you not servant but friend. Wait in
these courts until the Eternal Wisdom, who walks within this temple, turns
her face upon you, "mystic, wonderful;" and the common places grow
refulgent with a new and heavenly beauty, and you humbly say--This is none
other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.
* * * * *
How shall we thus rightly read the Bible, for ethical and spiritual
upbuilding? Let me offer some plain and practical suggestions to this end.
(1.) _Read it daily._
Your soul needs its daily bread. Do not starve your soul. Do not try to
fatten it on chaff. Get the best soul-food, the long tried manna that
forms upon these pages day by day, for him who will be at pains to gather
it. He must be busy, indeed, who cannot find time to keep himself alive.
(2.) _Read it in the choicest moments of the day._
The best picture should have the best setting. Our fathers' symbol of the
opening of a new day was the opening of the Bible. Their symbol of the
closing of another day's duties was the closing of the Bible. Can we
improve upon their ritual? John Quincy Adams noted in his journal his
custom of reading in the Bible each morning, of which he well observed:
It seems to me the most suitable manner of beginning the day.
Pitch the day aright with this tuning-fork, and hush the babel-voices of
the world to its tones of peace at night.
(3.) _Read the Bible whenever you need some special influence of strength
or cheer, amid the temptations and trials of the day._
It holds the unfailing corrective for the manifold disorders of our busy
lives. To think its thoughts and breathe its desires, even for a few
moments, is to have the horizon of the senses open, the heavy atmosphere
of earth clear, the illusions of the world evanish, the fever of business
cool and calm, the tempting appetites and passions slink down shamed into
their kennels. It is to have the dark look of life lighten, the sting of
disappointment lose its venom, the weariness of sickness forget itself,
and the sorrow of the stricken heart sob itself asleep within the
everlasting arms of One who, like a mother, comforteth his children, and
who with his own hand wipes away the tears from our eyes.
A few days after one of the battles before Richmond a Southern soldier was
found unburied. His right hand still clasped a Bible, and his stiff
fingers pressed upon the words of the Twenty-third Psalm:
I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me;
Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.
(4.) _In the choice of these daily readings, follow the guidance of the
soul's sure instinct._
You need no critical knowledge to teach you what parts of the Bible are
the most highly inspired. The spiritual sense will appraise these books
aright. As the beasts are led instinctively to the herbs that hold healing
for their ailments so you shall find the tonic and the balm that you
need. You will naturally pasture for the most part in the Prophets, the
Psalms, the Gospels, the great Epistles of Paul, the First Epistle of
John, and kindred writings. You may, dip into these books as the bees dip
into the flowers, now burying themselves in the luscious honey-suckle and
now lingering on the rich rose, if so be that you only suck sweetness into
your soul.
(5.) _Wheresoever you read, read in the spirit._
"I was in the spirit on the Lord's day," wrote the seer. If he had been in
the understanding merely, he would not have had many visions. The Spirit
must interpret the Spirit's words. The Bible requires, as Bushnell wrote:
Divine inbreathings and exaltations in us, that we may asscend into
their meanings.[63]
In his last sickness Archbishop Usher was observed one day, sitting in his
wheel-chair, with a Bible in his lap, and moving his position as the sun
stole round to the westward, so as to let the light fall on the sacred
page. That is a symbol of the right use of the Bible.
I picked up lately the choice Bible which I selected for myself as a boy,
and on the fly-leaf, in my boyish hand, I read the words:
Open Thou mine eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy law.
I still find that the best commentator, for the ethical and spiritual use
of the Bible, is one Master Praying Always.
As the bard with the Muse, so the critic in the presence of Wisdom, must
forget his skill; "must be, with good intent, no more his, but hers:"
Must throw away his pen and paint,
Kneel with worshipers.
Then, perchance, a sunny ray,
From the heaven of fire,
His lost tools may overpay,
And better his desire.
Thus buying Bibles for yourselves, my friends, see that your children buy
themselves the Bible in the same good coin.
(a.) _Read with them the tales of its noble men._
Do not hesitate to read with them these stories of the ancients, because
there may be the commingling of legend with history, of myth with fact.
You do not hesitate to read them the story of William Tell, although there
are woven into it the elements of a very old and wide-spread sun-myth.
These mythic elements have been woven around some real historic hero, and
the spirit of his heroism breathes through every fold of the drapery. How
charmingly Kingsley tells the tales of the Grecian heroes! Through his
crystalline language we seem to inhale the crisp, clear air of the
morning of Greece, in which the simple souls of child-men thus shaped
their dreams of duty around their older dreams of nature. Conscience
fashioned these primitive fancies upon its form, and pulses through them
its quickening life; the touch of which makes our children buoyant with
aspiration, so that they mount on high, like Perseus of the winged feet.
Thus read the matchless stories of the Hebrews, mindless of legend or of
myth. The Spirit of Holiness breathing through these tales will inspire
the souls of the children, without restraint from the questions that the
reason may raise. Tell them no lies if they ask you questions. Read these
ancient stories _as_ stories, of good and noble men; stories written down
long ago, and told from father to son through longer ages before they were
thus written out. Leave the children to detect the legendary elements. I
find them quick enough at that work without parental help. The bright
child feels the unreal in the tales that he most loves; but he loves them
none the less, perhaps all the more, because of the spell upon his
imagination that he would not break; while through them, upon his open
soul, streams in the holy power of these sacred stories. Do you concern
yourselves with impressing the moral of these God-breathed tales.
Read with your children the stories of the dear Master, and make His life
grow real to them, till He shall draw them after Him, in the steps of His
most holy life.
(b.) _Form in the children the habit of daily reading in the Bible._
Say to each of them, in your own way, that which Sir Matthew Hale wrote to
his child:
Every morning read seriously and reverently a portion of the Holy
Scriptures. It is a book full of light and wisdom, and will make you
wise to eternal life.
(c.) _Cultivate in them a genuine interest in the Bible._
The aids to an intelligent interest in the Bible-books are now so
plentiful, and the human charm of them is so great, that it ought to be an
easy thing for a parent to awaken a real fondness for these immortal
writings. The best safeguard against bad taste in literature or life is
the formation of a good taste. These are books, to learn to love which is
the making of a man. Our children may not grow into the genius, but they
will grow into somewhat of the goodness of the illustrious and saintly
John Henry Newman, if, in after years, they can write the first lines of
their autobiographies in the words which open the biographical part of the
_Apologia Pro Vita Sua_:
I was brought up from a child to take great delight in reading the
Bible.
(d.) _Train the children to commit to memory the choicest passages of the
Bible._
John Ruskin doubtless, at the time, rebelled against the strict rule of
his good aunt, which kept him busy on the Sundays memorizing the
Scriptures; but he is thankful now, as he has owned, for the discipline
which stored his mind with their creative words. What a treasury of holy
thoughts and influences does he carry within him who has written on his
mind such passages as the nineteenth, twenty-third, ninety-first, one
hundred and third, and one hundred and thirty-ninth Psalms; the third and
eighth chapters of Proverbs; the fortieth chapter of Isaiah; the sermon on
the mount, the parable of the prodigal son, and the thirteenth chapter of
first Corinthians. Happy he who, like the palm tree in the desert, can
strike his roots below the arid surface of the world into fresh and living
waters, and thus keep life green amid the droughts of earth. The parable
of the temptation of Christ should teach us how to arm our children
against the wiles of the Evil One, whom they must surely meet: "And he
said, It is written." In the stress and strain of conflict, when the air
is dimmed with the dust of the contending forces and the vision grows
confused, it is a saving sound to hear the ringing call of Duty, from the
hills where One watcheth over the battlefield. When sore pressed by the
foe, it may prove our victory to fall back against the strong stone wall
of an external authority, that can hold our lines unbroken. It is no
wonder that the tempting sailors could do nothing with the cabin-boy who
was "chock full of the Bible."
(e.) _Teach your children, as you teach yourselves, to hearken through
these voices of the human writers to the voice of God._
Bother then with no theories of inspiration. Never deny nor conceal the
true human voices of these men who spake of old, but never fail to affirm
the true Divine breath in these men who spake as they were moved by the
Holy Ghost. And, since this is the power of the Bible, emphasize the
Divine speaking; make every God-breathed word sound to the children's
souls as the very voice of God; until, in simple faith and reverent
docility, they shall each answer--Speak, Lord: Thy servant heareth!
Thy word is a lamp unto my feet,
And a light unto my path.
Such is the holy office of the Bible: such be its blessed service to our
souls, and to the souls of our dear children! May we walk in its light
through life; that in the valley of the shadow of death that light may
still fall upon us.
It is not many months since I was called to the house where, in a ripe
and honored age, lay a warden of this church, stricken suddenly by death.
On the table in his room, as he had left it open after reading in it that
morning, I saw a Bible.
I can ask for my funeral no better symbol of the aim and effort of my poor
erring life, if so be it shame me not too much, than that which told the
story of an humble servant of the Lord. Upon his coffin, with the
book-mark between the pages where he last had read, was--his Bible!
* * * * *
Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our
learning; grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and
inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of Thy Holy Word, we
may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which
Thou has given us in our Saviour, Jesus Christ. _Amen._
The End.
Footnotes
[1] The Second Sunday in Advent.
[2] 1 Cor. vii. 10.
[3] 1 Cor. vii. 12.
[4] 1 Cor. vii. 40.
[5] 1 Cor. vii. 25.
[6] Hebrews i. 1.
[7] 2 Peter i. 21.
[8] 1 Peter i. 10, 11.
[9] 2 Timothy iii. 16.
[10] Sacred Books of the East, vol. i. p. xiii.
[11] 2 Maccabees, ii. 13.
[12] "The Jews and the priests have found it good that Simon shall be their
leader and high priest forever until there shall arise a trustworthy
prophet."--1 Macc. xiv. 41.
[13] Introduction to the New Testament. Samuel Davidson, I.:279.
[14] Introduction to the New Testament. Samuel Davidson, I.:384.
[15] The contrast between the fifteenth and sixteenth century Confessions
of Faith reveals this process, and explains the prevalent Protestant
theory.
[16] About 600 A.D.
[17] 2 Maccabees ii. 13.
[18] The Dial: October, 1840.
[19] Ewald: History of Israel, i. 4.
[20] Esther is the most notable apparent exception, but this it only
apparent.
[21] In speaking of the book of Esther, Dean Stanley observes that "it
never names the name of God from first to last," and remarks "It is
necessary for us that in the rest of the sacred volume the name of God
should constantly be brought before us, to show that He is all in all to
our moral perfection. But it is expedient for us no less that there should
be one book which omits it altogether, to prevent us from attaching to the
mere name a reverence which belongs only to the reality.... The name of
God is _not_ there, but the work of God _is_.... When Esther nerved
herself to enter, at the risk of her life, the presence of Ahasuerus--'I
will go in unto the king, and if I perish I perish'--when her patriotic
feeling vented itself in that noble cry, 'How can I endure to see the evil
that shall come unto my people? or can I endure to see the destruction of
my kindred?'--she expressed, although she never named the name of God, a
religious devotion as acceptable to Him as that of Moses and David, who,
no less sincerely, had the sacred name always on their lips."--_History of
the Jewish Church_, iii. 301.
[22] Ewald: History of Israel, i. 4.
[23] The Old Testament is a record of the growth of human intelligence in
relation to the Deity--of the revelation made by Spirit to spirit. When
therefore God is described as _speaking_ to man, he does so in the only
way in which He who is a Spirit can speak to one encompassed with flesh
and blood; not to the outward organs of sensation, but to that
intelligence which is kindred to Himself the great Fountain of
knowledge.--Davidson: _Introduction to the Old Testament_, i. 233.
[24] Emerson: Miscellanies, p. 200.
[25] "To hear people speak," said Goethe, "one would almost believe that
they were of opinion that God had withdrawn into silence since those old
times, and that man was now placed quite upon his own feet, and had to see
how he could get on without God and his daily invisible
breath."--Conversations, _March 11, 1832_.
[26] Our advancing knowledge of the early portions of the Bible is
clearing its offensive portions of the grossness which characterized them
as literal histories, by resolving them into nature-myths, or into social
traditions, symbolical stories of casuistry, "token-tales," whose original
meaning had been lost by the time they were committed to writing.
Every school-boy knows how the worst stories of the Greek gods and
goddesses lose their immorality as seen to be parables of nature's
processes, myths, whose poetry had exhaled in the course of time.
Goldziher's "Mythology Among the Hebrews," shows the mythic character of
many of these revolting Jewish stories, though his theory carries him off
his feet. Fenton's "Early Hebrew Life," brings out the social and
casuistical origin of many of these traditions as decisions, "Judgments,"
of the village elders and priests upon cases of conduct, thrown into the
form of imaginary stories to make them realistic and ensure their
preservation. "In this way, various dubious points of primitive morality
and politics were governed; and the stories which enshrine them stand to
primitive life in much the same relation as do collections of precedents
to modern lawyers, and dictionaries of cases of conscience to father
confessors." (p. 81)
But, as these aspects of such traditions as Lot and his daughters, Judah
and Tamar, &c., cannot be divined without interpretation, they should be
omitted from our children's Bibles.
My suggestion of an expurgated Bible, on which so many hard criticisms
have been passed, seemed to me innocent enough, since most sensible people
have been in the habit of expurgating the Bible for themselves in home
readings and in the readings in the churches. This is what Plato thought
of such stories in the sacred book of the Grecians:
"Whatever beautiful fable they may invent, we should select, and what is
not so, we should reject: and we are to prevail on nurses and mothers to
repeat to the children such fables as are selected, and fashion their
minds by fables * * * For though these things were true, yet I think they
should not be so readily told to the unwise and the young, but rather
concealed from them. As little ought we to describe in fables, the battles
of the giants and other many and various feuds, both of gods and heroes,
with their own kindred and relatives; but if we would persuade them that
never at all should one citizen hate another, and that it is not holy,
such things as these are rather to be told them in early childhood; and
the poets should be obliged to compose consistently with these views * * *
Young persons are not able to judge what is allegory and what is not, but
whatever opinions they receive at such an age are wont to be obliterated
with difficulty, and immovable. Hence one would think, we should of all
things endeavor, that what they should first hear be composed in the best
manner for exciting them to virtue."
"Republic," Book II.
[27] How then are we to know what words and deeds express the mind of God,
are words of the Lord, examples He presents for our imitation? By the mind
of God manifest in 'the express image of His person?' All morality and
religion is to be tried by 'the mind which was in Christ,' 'the spirit of
Christ which dwelleth in us.'
[28] In what is said above there la no positive denial intended of the Old
Testament miracles. We are in no position to deny them. The point is
simply that they are not bounden on us in any reasonable and reverent
recognition of a real historical revelation in the Old Testament, and need
trouble no one who cannot receive them. The miracles of Christ, when
reduced to the wonders reported by the conjoint testimony of the
synoptics,--_i.e._, to the common tradition of the early church, stand apart
from all other Scripture miracles; having a reasonable and natural
character as the powers of such a personality, and coming within the ken
of our visions of possibility. They are imaged In the well attested powers
of rare men. They appear as in no wise violations of law, but as the
manifestations of nature's laws and forces worked by the normal man,
having 'dominion' over the earth. "The wise soul expels disease."
[29] So judicious a commentator as Dean Alford, in his introduction to the
Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, discussing the vexed question of the
Daniel-like section in the third chapter, so wholly unlike Paul observes:
"If we have" (in any sense, God speaking in the Bible) "then, of all
passages, it is in these, which treat so confidently of futurity, that we
must recognize His voice; if we have it not in these passages, _then,
where are we to listen for it at all_?"--Greek Testament III:64.
[30] "History of American Socialisms,"--Noyes.--p. 608.
[31] "To understand that the language of the Bible is fluid, passing and
literary, not rigid, fixed and scientific, is the first step towards a
right understanding of the Bible."--_Literature and Dogma_.--p. xii.
[32] The revised version calls the attention of English readers to this
latter influence, in the marginal rendering of "_Tartarus_" for "Hell" in 2
Peter, 11: 4.
[33] Luther's strong sense detected his unevangelicalness.
[34] Ewald says the tenth century, and Kuenen the eighth century.
[35] Ask at Abel and at Dan whether the genuine old statutes of Israel
have lost their force?--2 Samuel, xx. 18. Restored by Ewald from the LXX.
[36] Such a late codification is no more inconceivable than Justinian's
codification of Roman law.
[37] Brook Foss Westcott. Smith's Bible Dictionary: article on Daniel.
[38] "The Bible of To-day," Chadwick, p. 50.
[39] Of this process we see hints in the various references to the
consecration of great trees and stones to Jehovah.
[40] The indications of this nature-worship lie scattered on the surface
of the Old Testament so plainly that no one can fail to notice them.
[41] "Among the Edomites, Ishmaelites, Ammonites and Moabites--the tribes
with which Israel felt itself most nearly related--the service of the
rigorous and destroying god was most prominent The very names for God
which are most common among them--Baal, El, Molech, Milcom, Chemosh--are
enough to show this. These names denote the mighty, violent, death-dealing
God." "The Religion of Israel," Knappert, p. 29. These names constantly
recur in the early history of Israel. Jephthah's vow is a familiar
instance of this abhorrent rite. Circumcision is supposed to mark a
merciful compromise with this blood-gift; in addition to its sanitary
character.
[42] We know from general history how among other people the homage paid
to the productive powers of nature led to systematized prostitution, in
the name of the personification of this force of nature. Tradition records
how early in this period the Midianites seduced Israel temporarily from
Jehovah, by the licentious pleasures of their worship of Baal-Peor. Later
on in history we find that it is these impure rites that especially
provoke the anger of the prophets.
[43] The sun symbols may not have been permanent features of the
Temple-worship at this period, though, from the probable identification of
the early Jehovah with the sun, it seems likely that their presence there
was no casual fact.
[44] 2 Kings, xxiii. 6, 7.
[45] Isaiah, i. 11-17.
[46] Micah, vi. 6-8.
[47] Isaiah, xi. 2-5.
[48] Isaiah, v. 8; iii. 14, 15.
[49] Cf. Exodus, xxiii, 10, 11 (the earliest code) with Deuteronomy, xv.
1-18.
[50] The latter seems the probable influence of Persia. At all events,
from this time Hebrew literature shows the gradual development of an
angelic hierarchy.
[51] The comparison of the earlier prophetic writings with the exilic
prophecies, and with the later writings, such as Jonah, Ecclesiastes, &c.,
will illustrate this change.
[52] Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones is the earliest
appearance of this thought in any writing of whose date we are certain.
[53] And thou shalt-number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times
seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto
thee forty and nine years. Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the
jubilee to sound on the tenth _day_ of the seventh month, in the day of
atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land. And ye
shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout _all_ the
land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and
ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every
man unto his family. A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be unto you: ye
shall not sow, neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather
_the grapes_ in it of the vine undressed. For it _is_ the jubilee; it
shall be holy unto you: ye shall eat the increase thereof out of the
field. In the year of this jubilee ye shall return every man unto his
possession. And if thou sell ought unto thy neighbor, or buyest _ought_ of
thy neighbor's hand, ye shall not oppress one another: According to the
number of years after the jubilee thou shalt buy of thy neighbor, _and_
according unto the number of years of the fruits he shall sell unto thee:
According to the multitude of years thou shalt increase the price thereof,
and according to the fewness of years thou shalt diminish the price of it:
for _according_ to the number _of the years_ of the fruits doth he sell
unto thee. Ye shall not therefore oppress one another; but thou shalt fear
thy God: for I _am_ the Lord your God.
* * * * *
The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land _is_ mine; for ye _are_
strangers and sojourners with me. And in all the land of your possession
ye shall grant a redemption for the land.
* * * * *
And if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee; then thou
shalt relieve him: _yea, though he be_ a stranger, or a sojourner; that he
may live with thee. Take thou no usury of him, or increase: but fear thy
God; that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him thy
money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase. I _am_ the Lord
your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, to give you
the land of Canaan, _and_ to be your God. And if thy brother _that
dwelleth_ by thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee; thou shalt not
compel him to serve as a bondservant: _But_ as an hired servant, _and_ as
a sojourner, he shall be with thee, _and_ shall serve thee unto the year
of jubilee: And _then_ shall he depart from thee, _both_ he and his
children with him, and shall return unto his own family, and unto the
possession of his fathers shall he return. For they _are_ my servants,
which I brought forth out of the land of Egypt: they shall not be sold as
bondmen. Thou shalt not rule over him with rigor; but shalt fear thy
God.--Leviticus xxv. 8 _et seq._
Fenton, "Early Hebrew Life," has, I think, given the clue through the
difficulties of the jubilee-year legislation. He traces the early communal
character of Hebrew society, its gradual break-up under the encroachments
of manorial lords, and the natural efforts of the people to regain their
communal rights. "But how remedy the evil? How restore to the communities
their old rights and privileges, without unduly trenching upon rights and
possessions that had since been acquired? The year of Jubilee is the
Hebrew solution of the problem," (p 71). It was a compromise; the old
seventh year communal right adjourned to seven times seven years, and
enlarged. Fenton quotes a curious survival, in the borough of
Newtown-upon-Ayr, of this very compromise between the old and the new
social systems--a Scottish Jubilee.
It is a queer sign of the disproportionate development of individual
religion in our current Christianity, that this social and economic
legislation should have been so spiritualized away as to leave no
consciousness of its original character in the minds of those who sing in
our prayer-meetings that "The year of Jubilee is come."
[54] The Dialogues of Plato: Jowett's edition, II. 106.
[55] Matthew Arnold in _Contemporary Review_, xxiv. 800; xxv. 508.
[56] The Friend: Essay x.
[57] Sacred Books of the East: I. ix. _et seq._
[58] Confessions of Augustine: Book X. § vi.
[59] Exodus, xx. 31.
[60] Richard Hooker: Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I., ch. xvi. § 8.
[61] Le Page Renouf: Hibbert Lectures, 1879, p. 250.
[62] Hibbert Lectures, 1879, p. 279.
[63] God in Christ, p. 93.
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