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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/12282-0.txt b/12282-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3c5c458 --- /dev/null +++ b/12282-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6582 @@ +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12282 *** + +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. + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible +by R. Heber Newton + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12282 *** diff --git a/12282-h/12282-h.htm b/12282-h/12282-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..842101c --- /dev/null +++ b/12282-h/12282-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,6901 @@ +<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> +<!DOCTYPE html + PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" + "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> + +<html> + +<head> +<title>The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible, by R. 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Heber Newton.</h2> + +<blockquote class="epi"><p>"In it <i>is contained</i> God's true Word."—<i>Homily on the Holy +Scriptures.</i></p></blockquote> + +<h3>New York:<br /> +John W. Lovell Company,<br /> +14 & 16 Vesey Street.</h3> +</div> + + +<div id="verso"> +<h2>Works by the Same Author.</h2> + +<table summary="Works by the Same Author"> +<tr><td>The Morals. 1. Vol. 12mo, cloth, gilt,</td><td class="decimal"> $1.00</td></tr> +<tr><td>Studies of Jesus. 1 vol. 12mo, cloth, gilt,</td><td class="decimal"> 1.00</td></tr> +<tr><td>Womanhood. 1 vol. 12mo, cloth, gilt,</td><td class="decimal"> 1.25</td></tr> +</table> + +<p>The above all will be sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of price, by</p> + +<h4>John W. Lovell Co.<br /> +14 and 16 Vesey St., New York.</h4> + +<h5>Copyright, 1883</h5> +</div> + + +<div id="toc"> +<h2>Contents.</h2> + +<p><a href="#preface">Preface</a></p> + +<ol> + <li><a href="#ch01">The Unreal Bible.</a> + <ol> + <li><a href="#ch01-1">This theory has no sufficient sanction by the Church.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch01-2">The Bible nowhere makes any such claim of infallibility for itself.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch01-3">The Bible carries the refutation of this claim upon the face of its writings.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch01-4">The growth of this theory is plain to us, and discredits its authority.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch01-5">This theory is incapable of a statement which is not self-stultifying.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch01-6">This theory of our Bible is, in our age, seen to be the same theory which +all peoples have entertained of their bibles.</a></li> + </ol> + </li> + <li><a href="#ch02">The Real Bible.</a> + <ol> + <li> + <ol> + <li><a href="#ch02-1-1">These books have the venerableness which belongs to ancient writings.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-1-2">These books form the literature of a noble race.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-1-3">This literature of the Jewish nation and of the Christian Church is intrinsically noble.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-1-4">This literature has been very influential in the development of progressive civilization.</a></li> + </ol> + </li> + <li> + <ol> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-1">Israel's specialty in history was religion.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-2">Israel's literature became thus a religious literature.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-3">Israel's literature presents us, in the various moods and tenses of +her life, with the various phases of religion.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-4">Israel's literature presents us with the record of a continuous growth +of religion upward through its normal stages.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-5">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-6">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-7">The literature of Christian Israel records the realization of this +long sought ideal, the fruition of this organic growth.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-8">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-9">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!.</a></li> + </ol> + </li> + </ol> + </li> + <li><a href="#ch03">The Wrong Uses of the Bible.</a> + <ol> + <li><a href="#ch03-1">It is a wrong use of the Bible to set it in its entirety before all +classes and all ages.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch03-2">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch03-3">It is a wrong use of the Bible to accept everything recorded therein as +necessarily true.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch03-4">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch03-5">It is a wrong use of the Bible to go to it, as the heathen went to their +oracles, for divination of the future.</a></li> + </ol> + </li> + <li><a href="#ch04">The Wrong Uses of the Bible.</a> + <ol> + <li><a href="#ch04-1">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch04-2">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch04-3">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch04-4">It is a wrong use of the Bible to disregard the chronological order of +its parts in constructing our theology.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch04-5">It is a wrong use of the Bible to cite its authors as of equal authority, +even in the spheres of theology and religion.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch04-6">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.</a></li> + </ol> + </li> + <li><a href="#ch05">The Right Critical Use of the Bible.</a> + <ol> + <li><a href="#ch05-1">Every aid of outward form should be used to make these books appear as +living "letters" to us.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch05-2">Each writing having an intrinsic unity should, by such aids, be studied +as a whole.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch05-3">Each great book should, as a whole, be read in its proper place in Hebrew +and Christian history.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch05-4">The books which are of a composite character should be read in their +several parts, and traced to their proper places in history.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch05-5">These writings should be read critically, until we can decipher the +successive hands working upon them, and interpret them accordingly.</a></li> + </ol> + </li> + <li><a href="#ch06">The Right Historical Use of the Bible.</a> + <ol> + <li><a href="#ch06-1"><i>The Epoch of Moses:</i> B.C. 1300(?).</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch06-2"><i>The heroic age:</i> B.C. 1300-1100..</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch06-3"><i>The period of the monarchy, down to the epoch of the great prophets:</i> B. +C. 1100-800..</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch06-4"><i>The era of the great prophets, before the exile:</i> B.C. 800-586..</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch06-5"><i>The Epoch of the Exile:</i> B.C. 586-536..</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch06-6"><i>The period of the Restoration, from</i> B.C. 536..</a></li> + </ol> + </li> + <li><a href="#ch07">The Right Ethical and Spiritual Use of the Bible.</a> + <ol> + <li> + <ol> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-1">We have here the simple, homely, prudential aspects of virtue, which +have always been particularly powerful on certain ages and classes.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-2">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."</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-3">The Law thus mystic and sacred is seen to be both the law of nature +and the law of the human soul.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-4">The Bible leads us on to that sense of sin, in the presence of this +"Law," which no lower thought of law can quicken.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-5">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-6">The Bible reveals these ethical ideals as no mere alluring visions, +but as the substantial realities of being.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-7">The Bible thus inspires a buoyancy and exhilaration which feed the +fresh forces of all noble life.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-8">The Bible leads this sense of Law into that awful vision wherein +"Conscious Law is King of kings."</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-9">God speaks in <span class="smallcaps">a man</span>.</a></li> + </ol> + </li> + <li><a href="#ch07-2">"When Sir Walter Scott lay in his last illness..."</a></li> + </ol> + </li> +</ol></div> + + +<div class="epigraphs"> +<blockquote><p>"The Gospel doth not so much consist <i>in verbis</i> as <i>in virtute</i>."</p> + +<p> <i>John Smith</i>.</p></blockquote> + + +<blockquote><p> "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."</p> + +<p> <i>Jeremy Taylor</i>.</p></blockquote> + + +<blockquote><p> "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."</p> + +<p> <i>Lord Falkland</i>.</p></blockquote> + +<p>[Rational Theology in England in the Seventeenth Century; John Tulloch, +D.D., II: 181, I:398, I:160]</p> +</div> + + +<div class="chapter" id="preface"> +<h2>Preface.</h2> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"Unto a Christian man there can be nothing more necessary or profitable + than the knowledge of holy scripture, forasmuch as <i>in it is contained + God's true word</i>, setting forth his glory, and also man's duty."</p></blockquote> + +<p>The whole controversy in Protestantism over the Bible may be summed into +the question whether the Bible <i>is</i> God's word or <i>contains</i> God's word. +On this question I stand with the Book of Homilies.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>R. Heber Newton.</p> + +<p>All Souls' Church, <i>March</i> 1, 1883.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="chapter" id="ch01"> +<h2>I.</h2> + +<h3>The Unreal Bible.</h3> + + +<div class="epigraphs"> +<blockquote><p>"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."</p> + +<p> Dean Stanley: "History of the Jewish Church," iii. 158.</p></blockquote> +</div> + + + +<h2>I.</h2> + +<h3>The Unreal Bible</h3> + + + +<blockquote class="epi"><p>"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.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn1">1</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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?"</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"It is never safe to do anything against the truth!"</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>I propose to consider with you, carefully but frankly, the real nature and +the true uses of the Bible.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>Let us examine to-day the traditional view of the Bible.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>This Confession opens with a chapter "Of the Holy Scriptures," which +affirms in this wise:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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....</p> + +<p> "....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.</p> + +<p> "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.</p> + +<p> "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."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>A book let down out of the skies, immaculate, infallible, oracular—this +is the traditional view of the Bible.</p> + +<p>Let me lay before you some of the many reasons why this theory of the +Bible is not to be received by us.</p> + + + +<div class="sec" id="ch01-1"> +<h4>I.</h4> + +<h5><i>This theory has no sufficient sanction by the Church.</i></h5> + + + +<p>The Catholic or Œcumenical 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):</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."</p></blockquote> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch01-2"> +<h4>II.</h4> + +<h5><i>The Bible nowhere makes any such claim of infallibility for itself.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"Unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord," etc.<sup><a href="#fn2">2</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>Immediately after he writes, as having no such assurance:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"To the rest speak I, not to the Lord."<sup><a href="#fn3">3</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>Later on in the same letter he is so uncertain as to add to his judgment:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"And I think also that I have the spirit of God."<sup><a href="#fn4">4</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>Again, in the same connection, being conscious of no divine authorization, +he gives his own opinion as such:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"Now, concerning virgins I have no commandment of the Lord, but I give + my judgment."<sup><a href="#fn5">5</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto + the fathers by the prophets," etc.<sup><a href="#fn6">6</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>The author of the Second Epistle of Peter writes:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."<sup><a href="#fn7">7</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>In the first Epistle General of Peter we read:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."<sup><a href="#fn8">8</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The prophets were, in such lofty visionings, under an influence beyond +their consciousness.</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"The passive master lent his hand<br /></span> +<span class="line">To the vast soul that o'er him planned."</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>All other passages claimed in support of the notion of an infallible Bible +fail on the witness-stand.</p> + +<p>There is positively nothing in the New Testament which lends a reasonable +countenance to such an amazing theory.</p> + +<p>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</p> + +<blockquote><p>"Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching for + reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness."<sup><a href="#fn9">9</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch01-3"> +<h4>III.</h4> + +<h5><i>The Bible carries the refutation of this claim upon the face of its +writings.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The marks of a patient and noble literary workmanship are in every +writing.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>vade +mecum</i> in a highly developed hierarchical period to the civil statutes of +a rude patriarchal society, whose very crimes are archaic.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch01-4"> +<h4>IV.</h4> + +<h5><i>The growth of this theory is plain to us, and discredits its authority.</i></h5> + + + +<p>The explanation that Max Müller makes of the growth of superstitious +reverence for ancient traditions in Hindu history is suggestive on this +point.</p> + +<p>"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."<sup><a href="#fn10">10</a></sup></p> + +<p>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."<sup><a href="#fn11">11</a></sup> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The fresh, free inspirations of the prophets—inspirations most real and +divine—died out in the exile, smothered partly by this priestly +development.<sup><a href="#fn12">12</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The genesis of the similar theory concerning the Christian Scriptures +repeats the story told above.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The Christian consciousness tried and tested every writing, accepting +those which approved themselves inspired by inspiring.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>In the Reformation the old story repeated itself.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."<sup><a href="#fn13">13</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>Luther wrote of the Epistle of James,</p> + +<blockquote><p>"In comparison with the best books of the New Testament, it is a + downright strawy epistle."<sup><a href="#fn14">14</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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<i>ism</i> 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.<sup><a href="#fn15">15</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch01-5"> +<h4>V.</h4> + +<h5><i>This theory is incapable of a statement which is not self-stultifying.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn16">16</a></sup> Their insertion +demanded a guarantee, if infallibility was to be secured.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch01-6"> +<h4>VI.</h4> + +<h5><i>This theory of our Bible is, in our age, seen to be the same theory which +all peoples have entertained of their bibles.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Bibliolatry is pushed to a <i>reductio ad absurdum</i> 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.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Te Deums</i> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>In the name of religion let it die!</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>These spiritual realities, no criticism can touch. And these spiritual +realities make the Bible.</p> + +<p>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!</p> +</div></div> + + +<div class="chapter" id="ch02"> +<h2>II.</h2> + +<h3>The Real Bible.</h3> + + + +<div class="epigraphs"> +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"Out from the heart of nature rolled<br /></span> +<span class="line">The burdens of the Bible old;<br /></span> +<span class="line">The litanies of nations came,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Like the volcano's tongue of flame,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Up from the burning core below,—<br /></span> +<span class="line">The canticles of love and woe.</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">The passive Master lent his hand<br /></span> +<span class="line">To the vast soul that o'er him planned.</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">Himself from God he could not free."</span></p> + +<p><i>The Problem.</i></p> +</blockquote> + +<blockquote><p>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, <i>The Dial</i>, October, 1840.</p></blockquote> +</div> + + + +<h2>II.</h2> + +<h3>The Real Bible.</h3> + + + + +<blockquote class="epi"><p>"Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost."—2 Peter, + i. 21.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>"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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>The Bible is a collection of many writings, in many forms, by many hands, +from many ages. Genuine letters these, whether they be <i>belles-lettres</i> 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 <i>bona fide</i> books, of men of like passions and +infirmities with ourselves.</p> + +<p>What is there in these books which has led Christendom to assign to them +so high an honor?</p> + + + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-1"> +<h4>I.</h4> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-1-1"> +<h5>1. <i>These books have the venerableness which belongs to ancient writings.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-1-2"> +<h5>2. <i>These books form the literature of a noble race.</i></h5> + + +<p>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."<sup><a href="#fn17">17</a></sup> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-1-3"> +<h5>3. <i>This literature of the Jewish nation and of the Christian Church is +intrinsically noble.</i></h5> + + +<p>The Bible has lost much of its fresh charm for us, with whom its finest +sayings are household words.</p> + +<p>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 <i>salon</i> upon a certain +occasion. Our shrewd philosopher-minister Franklin, had previously heard +the <i>literati</i> 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.</p> + +<p>How fresh, with the crisp air of morning, are these tales of primitive +tradition! How <i>naif</i> 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!</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Emerson writes:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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, + <i>secondary</i>.... 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."<sup><a href="#fn18">18</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>Even what seem to us valueless books turn out, when studied naturally, +most interesting and suggestive.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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?"</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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—</p> + +<blockquote><p>"And now abideth faith, hope and charity, but the greatest of these is + charity."</p></blockquote> + +<p>If such be the hidden value of one of the least attractive of these +writings, we may well say, with Milton,</p> + +<blockquote><p>"I shall wish I may deserve to be reckoned among those who admire and + dwell upon them."</p></blockquote> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-1-4"> +<h5>4. <i>This literature has been very influential in the development of +progressive civilization.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Let Irreverence stay her ribald tongue before these illustrious writings, +and Indecency vomit her own nastiness elsewhere than on our Bible.</p> +</div></div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2"> +<h4>II.</h4> + + + +<p>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.</p> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-1"> +<h5>1. <i>Israel's specialty in history was religion.</i></h5> + + +<p>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</p> + +<blockquote><p>"advanced as far as the Greeks before Socrates towards producing an + independent science or philosophy."<sup><a href="#fn19">19</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>But she found herself content with none of these <i>rôles</i>. 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."</p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-2"> +<h5>2. <i>Israel's literature became thus a religious literature.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn20">20</a></sup></p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-3"> +<h5>3. <i>Israel's literature presents us, in the various moods and tenses of +her life, with the various phases of religion.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn21">21</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-4"> +<h5>4. <i>Israel's literature presents us with the record of a continuous growth +of religion upward through its normal stages.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."</p></blockquote> + +<p>Micah asks,</p> + +<blockquote><p>"What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy + and to walk humbly with thy God?"</p></blockquote> + +<p>Of this continuous growth of religion the Old Testament is the record.</p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-5"> +<h5>5. <i>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.</i></h5> + + +<p>The Niebuhr of Hebrew history rightly pointed out this significant fact in +the introduction to his great work.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Of this singular shaping of the nation's experiences to further the growth +of true religion, the Old Testament is the impressive record.</p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-6"> +<h5>6. <i>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.</i></h5> + + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."<sup><a href="#fn22">22</a></sup></p></blockquote> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-7"> +<h5>7. <i>The literature of Christian Israel records the realization of this +long sought ideal, the fruition of this organic growth.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-8"> +<h5>8. <i>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.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-9"> +<h5>9. <i>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!</i></h5> + +<p>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!"</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>life</i>, the experience of <i>souls</i>. 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!</p> + +<p>With sincere and reverent confession we must say then in the words of Holy +Writ:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."<sup><a href="#fn23">23</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>The consciousness and experience of Israel could not have found fitter +expression than in the words of our great seer:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."<sup><a href="#fn24">24</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"And out of darkness come the hands<br /></span> +<span class="line">That reach through nature, moulding man."</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn25">25</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"I know that the Bible is inspired, because it 'inspires me.'"</span></p> +</blockquote> +</div></div></div> + + + +<div class="chapter" id="ch03"> +<h2>III.</h2> + +<h3>The wrong use of the Bible.</h3> + + + +<div class="epigraphs"> +<blockquote><p>"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."</p> + +<p> Plato: The Republic; Book II.</p></blockquote> + + +<blockquote><p> "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."</p> + +<p> Maurice: What is Revelation, p. 475.</p></blockquote> +</div> + + + +<h2>III.</h2> + +<h3>The wrong use of the Bible</h3> + + + + +<blockquote class="epi"><p>Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for + reproof for correction, for instruction in righteousness.—2 Timothy, + III, 16.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + + +<div class="sec" id="ch03-1"> +<h4>I.</h4> + +<h5><i>It is a wrong use of the Bible to set it in its entirety before all +classes and all ages.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn26">26</a></sup></p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch03-2"> +<h4>II.</h4> + +<h5><i>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.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>Nor could I ask the people to unite in praying:</p> + +<blockquote><p>Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb; yea, all their princes as Zeba + and Salmana.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>reductio ad +absurdum</i> of this use of the Bible.<sup><a href="#fn27">27</a></sup></p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch03-3"> +<h4>III.</h4> + +<h5><i>It is a wrong use of the Bible to accept everything recorded therein as +necessarily true.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn28">28</a></sup></p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch03-4"> +<h4>IV.</h4> + +<h5><i>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.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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 <i>Logos</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch03-5"> +<h4>V.</h4> + +<h5><i>It is a wrong use of the Bible to go to it, as the heathen went to their +oracles, for divination of the future.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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!</p> + +<p>This Chinese puzzle-book of predictions exists nowhere save in the +imagination of its readers.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>The whole history of Israel is a growth of The Christ, and that is the +abiding wonder of it.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn29">29</a></sup></p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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 <i>decheance</i>. +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."</p> +</div></div> + + +<div class="chapter" id="ch04"> +<h2>IV.</h2> + +<h3>The wrong use of the Bible</h3> + + + +<div class="epigraphs"> +<blockquote><p>"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 <i>precision,</i> 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."</p> + +<p> Horace Bushnell. God in Christ; p. 93.</p></blockquote> + + +<blockquote><p> "But, further, the zealots for the Bible <i>as it is</i>, just because it + <i>is</i>, 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 <i>is</i> + 'God's Word written'? What <i>is</i>, 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?"</p> + +<p> Thomas Griffith, late Prebendary of St. Paul's, London: The Gospel of + the Divine Life, p. 418.</p></blockquote> +</div> + + + +<h2>IV.</h2> + +<h3>The wrong use of the Bible.</h3> + + + +<blockquote class="epi"><p>"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.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>"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.</p> + +<p>I proceed to point out some further wrong uses of the Bible:</p> + + + +<div class="sec" id="ch04-1"> +<h4>I.</h4> + +<h5><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.</i></h5> + + + +<p>In the traditional view it was an infallible authority upon every subject +of which it treated.</p> + +<p>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 <i>raison d'être</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>When (<i>e.g.</i>) 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch04-2"> +<h4>II.</h4> + +<h5><i>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.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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!'</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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!<sup><a href="#fn30">30</a></sup></p> + +<p>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 <i>is</i> my body." The most powerful Church +of Christendom bases itself upon this prosaic reading of a poetic saying.</p> + +<p>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."<sup><a href="#fn31">31</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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!</p> + +<p>I am solemnly warned against such learned puerilities every time I turn to +my shelves and encounter Swedenborg's "Arcana Cœlestia." In ten goodly +volumes he interprets Scripture history after this fashion:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"'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."!</p></blockquote> + +<p>Of all this pious sort of folly we may say with the Master—"Enough."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch04-3"> +<h4>III.</h4> + +<h5><i>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.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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>i.e.</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>An ancient historian, gathering up the traditions of his primitive +fore-fathers, records the legend of the Flood, in which it is told that</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart<br /></span> +<span class="line">Was only evil continually."</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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:—</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"Behold I was shapen in wickedness,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And in sin hath my mother conceived me."</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>The poet who wrote his unrivaled prophecies amid the humiliation of the +national exile in Babylonia, cried out in one place:—</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"We are all as an unclean thing,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And all our righteousness are as filthy rags."</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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!</p> + +<p>Even this folly has been surpassed. Among the proverbial sayings of the +Jews was one to this effect;</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"If the tree fall towards the South, or towards the North,<br /></span> +<span class="line">In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be."</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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!</p> + +<p>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!</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch04-4"> +<h4>IV.</h4> + +<h5><i>It is a wrong use of the Bible to disregard the chronological order of +its parts in constructing our theology.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>rationale</i> 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.</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"The hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. God is spirit;<br /></span> +<span class="line">And they that worship must worship him in spirit and in truth."</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.'</p> + +<p>Were this one principle followed, our popular theology would soon +reconstruct itself.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch04-5"> +<h4>V.</h4> + +<h5><i>It is a wrong use of the Bible to cite its authors as of equal authority, +even in the spheres of theology and religion.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn32">32</a></sup> 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."</p> + +<p>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 <i>Christus Consolator</i>. The full breath of inspiration opens only the +upper register of notes. The voices of the soul are buoyant, joyous, +hopeful.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch04-6"> +<h4>VI.</h4> + +<h5><i>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.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"In that high hour thought was not."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn33">33</a></sup> +"The fundamentals" are all lacking.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"The Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy word."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>That light is the sufficient clue to the dark labyrinth in which we wander +wearily.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>With poor dying Joe, I whisper to myself:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"'Our Father:' yes, that's werry good."</p></blockquote> +</div></div> + + + +<div class="chapter" id="ch05"> +<h2>V.</h2> + +<h3>The Right Critical Use of the Bible.</h3> + + + +<div class="epigraphs"> +<blockquote><p>"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."</p> + +<p> Goethe: quoted by M. Arnold in "The Great Prophecy of Israel's + Restoration."</p></blockquote> +</div> + + + +<h2>V.</h2> + +<h3>The Right Critical Use of the Bible.</h3> + + + + +<blockquote class="epi"><p>"God, who at many times and in many manners spake in time past to the + fathers, by the prophets."—Hebrews, i. 1.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>The right use of the Bible grows out of the true view of the Bible.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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 <i>bona fide</i> "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.</p> + + + +<div class="sec" id="ch05-1"> +<h4>I.</h4> + +<h5><i>Every aid of outward form should be used to make these books appear as +living "letters" to us.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch05-2"> +<h4>II.</h4> + +<h5><i>Each writing having an intrinsic unity should, by such aids, be studied +as a whole.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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?</p> + +<p>What a revelation such a study makes! It is an alchemist's touch, turning +many a leaden book into finest gold.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn34">34</a></sup> 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 <i>dramatis personæ</i> +to clear the movement of the plot, and to reveal the force and beauty of +the poem.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">I know that my Redeemer liveth,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:<br /></span> +<span class="line">And though, after my skin, worms destroy this body,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Yet out of my flesh shall I see God;<br /></span> +<span class="line">Whom I shall see for myself,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>But the vision fades upon an atmosphere unready for it, and the poet does +not return to follow this clue out into the sunshine.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Therefore have I uttered that I understood not.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Things too wonderful for me which I knew not.</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear;<br /></span> +<span class="line">But now mine eye seeth Thee.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Wherefore I abhor myself,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And repent in dust and ashes.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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 <i>motif</i> 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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Canst thou by searching find out God?<br /></span> +<span class="line">Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?<br /></span> +<span class="line">It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?<br /></span> +<span class="line">Deeper than hell; what canst thou know?</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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!</p> + +<p>What the Epistle to the Romans, that affrighting <i>vade mecum</i> 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."</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch05-3"> +<h4>III.</h4> + +<h5><i>Each great book should, as a whole, be read in its proper place in Hebrew +and Christian history.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>It came to pass that when the king had heard the words of the book of + the law, that he rent his clothes.</p></blockquote> + +<p>For, said he:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>With such mighty secrets does this little book grow luminous when placed +in the light of its real belongings.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn35">35</a></sup> 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.<sup><a href="#fn36">36</a></sup> It is not difficult to account for +this remarkable priestly movement.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<i>ad interim</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>A high authority has declared—</p> + +<blockquote><p>There can be no doubt that it exercised a greater influence upon the + early Christian Church than any other writing of the Old Testament.<sup><a href="#fn37">37</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch05-4"> +<h4>IV.</h4> + +<h5><i>The books which are of a composite character should be read in their +several parts, and traced to their proper places in history.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Saith your God.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her,<br /></span> +<span class="line">That her warfare is accomplished,<br /></span> +<span class="line">That her iniquity is pardoned.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">He shall feed his flock like a Shepherd,<br /></span> +<span class="line">He shall gather the lambs with his arm,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And carry them in his bosom,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And shall gently lead those that are with young.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch05-5"> +<h4>V.</h4> + +<h5><i>These writings should be read critically, until we can decipher the +successive hands working upon them, and interpret them accordingly.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."<sup><a href="#fn38">38</a></sup></p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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?</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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—</p> + +<blockquote><p>Speak Lord; thy servant heareth!</p></blockquote> + +<hr /> + +<blockquote><p>It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated the + only question is; Is it true in and for itself?</p> + +<p> Hegel: "Philosophy of History," Part III.: Sec. III.: Ch. II.</p></blockquote> + + +<blockquote><p> 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.</p> + +<p> Goethe: "Conversations," March 11,1832.</p></blockquote> + + +<blockquote><p> 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.</p> + +<p> Watson's "Apology for the Bible," Letter IV.</p></blockquote> +</div></div> + + + +<div class="chapter" id="ch06"> +<h2>VI.</h2> + +<h3>The Right Historical Use of the Bible.</h3> + + + +<div class="epigraph"> +<blockquote><p>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.....</p> + +<p> 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.</p> + +<p> Hegel: "Philosophy of History," pp. 57, 344. [Bohn.]</p></blockquote> + + +<blockquote><p> 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!</p> + +<p> Goethe: "Conversations," March, 11,1832.</p></blockquote> +</div> + + + +<h2>VI.</h2> + +<h3>The Right Historical Use of the Bible.</h3> + + + + +<blockquote class="epi"><p>"When the fulness of the time was come God sent forth His + Son."—Galatians, iv. 4.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"When the fulness of the time was come God sent forth His Son."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + + +<div class="sec" id="ch06-1"> +<h4>I.</h4> + +<h5><i>The Epoch of Moses:</i> B.C. 1300(?)</h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch06-2"> +<h4>II.</h4> + +<h5><i>The heroic age:</i> B.C. 1300-1100.</h5> + + + +<p>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 <i>the</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn39">39</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn40">40</a></sup> 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.<sup><a href="#fn41">41</a></sup> 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.<sup><a href="#fn42">42</a></sup> The various tribes probably had +different rites.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch06-3"> +<h4>III.</h4> + +<h5><i>The period of the monarchy, down to the epoch of the great prophets:</i> B. +C. 1100-800.</h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>rôle</i> of fearless censor and +truthful mentor to the infant State; the <i>rôle</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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!</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch06-4"> +<h4>IV.</h4> + +<h5><i>The era of the great prophets, before the exile:</i> B.C. 800-586.</h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<i>chamanim</i>, 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.<sup><a href="#fn43">43</a></sup></p> + +<p>Nor did the allegiance to Jehovah bar private usages of an idolatrous +nature. The home of the average Israelite had its <i>teraphim</i> 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 <i>asheras</i>, or tree-poles, +by which the priestesses of passion, as part of their religious offices, +sold themselves to the frequenters of Jehovah's house.<sup><a href="#fn44">44</a></sup> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>meum</i> and <i>tuum</i> in the mad +chase of wealth.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Isaiah carries this message from God:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me?<br /></span> +<span class="line">I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts.<br /></span> +<span class="line">And I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats.<br /></span> +<span class="line">When ye come to appear before me,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts?<br /></span> +<span class="line">Bring no more vain oblations;<br /></span> +<span class="line">Incense is an abomination unto me;<br /></span> +<span class="line">The new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot endure;<br /></span> +<span class="line">It is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth;<br /></span> +<span class="line">They are a trouble unto me;<br /></span> +<span class="line">I am weary to bear them.<br /></span> +<span class="line">And when ye spread forth your hands,<br /></span> +<span class="line">I will hide mine eyes from you:<br /></span> +<span class="line">Yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear:<br /></span> +<span class="line">Your hands are full of blood.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Wash you, make you clean;<br /></span> +<span class="line">Put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes:<br /></span> +<span class="line">Cease to do evil; learn to do well:<br /></span> +<span class="line">Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.<sup><a href="#fn45">45</a></sup></span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>Micah voices the questions that men raised in his day, answering them with +the new thought:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Wherewithal shall I come before the Lord,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And bow myself before the high God?<br /></span> +<span class="line">Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,<br /></span> +<span class="line">With calves of a year old?<br /></span> +<span class="line">Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?<br /></span> +<span class="line">Shall I give my first born for my transgression,<br /></span> +<span class="line">The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?<br /></span> +<span class="line">He hath showed thee, O man, what is good,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And what doth the Lord require of thee,<br /></span> +<span class="line">But to do justly, and to love mercy,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And to walk humbly with thy God?<sup><a href="#fn46">46</a></sup></span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,<br /></span> +<span class="line">The spirit of wisdom and understanding,<br /></span> +<span class="line">The spirit of counsel and might,<br /></span> +<span class="line">The spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord:<br /></span> +<span class="line">And he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Neither reprove after the hearing of his ears:<br /></span> +<span class="line">But with righteousness shall he judge the poor,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And reprove with equity for the meek of the earth.<br /></span> +<span class="line">And he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.<br /></span> +<span class="line">And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And faithfulness the girdle of his reins.<sup><a href="#fn47">47</a></sup></span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>ad libitum</i>. 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.</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Woe unto them that join house to house,<br /></span> +<span class="line">That lay field to field<br /></span> +<span class="line">Till there be no place,<br /></span> +<span class="line">That they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">The Lord will enter into judgment<br /></span> +<span class="line">With the ancients of his people and the princes thereof:<br /></span> +<span class="line">For ye have eaten up the vineyard;<br /></span> +<span class="line">The spoil of the poor is in your houses.<br /></span> +<span class="line">What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And grind the faces of the poor?<br /></span> +<span class="line">Saith the Lord God of hosts.<sup><a href="#fn48">48</a></sup></span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Of joy in widest commonalty spread.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn49">49</a></sup></p> + +<p>We shall see in the nest period the fruitage of this new religion of +social righteousness, in the remarkable legislation of the Restoration.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch06-5"> +<h4>V.</h4> + +<h5><i>The Epoch of the Exile:</i> B.C. 586-536.</h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn50">50</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn51">51</a></sup> 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.</p> + +<p>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,</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">A deep distress hath humanized my soul.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn52">52</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."<sup><a href="#fn53">53</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch06-6"> +<h4>VI.</h4> + +<h5><i>The period of the Restoration, from</i> B.C. 536.</h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">He shall convert my soul,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And bring me forth in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks,<br /></span> +<span class="line">So longeth my soul after thee, O God.<br /></span> +<span class="line">My soul is athirst for God. Yea, even for the living God:<br /></span> +<span class="line">When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">O send out thy light and thy truth:<br /></span> +<span class="line">Let them lead me;<br /></span> +<span class="line">Let them bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy tabernacles.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Then will I go up unto the altar of God,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Unto God, the gladness of my joy:<br /></span> +<span class="line">Yea, upon the harp will I praise thee,<br /></span> +<span class="line">O God, my God.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Through such a quiet deepening of the life of the people was the nation +preparing for its final development of religion.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,<br /></span> +<span class="line">According to thy word:<br /></span> +<span class="line">For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;<br /></span> +<span class="line">A light to lighten the Gentiles,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And the glory of thy people Israel.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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 <i>lived</i> 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 <i>lived</i> +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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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?</p> + +<p>Our only answer must be that given of old:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>The Universal Man is now coming to be a real being in the individual + mind.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">But he, the man-child glorious,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> Where tarries he the while?<br /></span> +<span class="line">The rainbow shines his harbinger,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> The sunset gleams his smile.</span></p> + +<p><span class="line">My boreal lights leap upward,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> Forth right my planets roll,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And still the man-child is not born,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> The summit of the Whole.</span></p> + +<p><span class="line">I travail in pain for him,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> My creatures travail and wait;<br /></span> +<span class="line">His couriers come by squadrons,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> He comes not to the gate.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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?</p> + +<blockquote><p>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 <span class="smallcaps">Son of God</span>.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>This is my Beloved Son: Hear Him!</p></blockquote> +</div></div> + + + +<div class="chapter" id="ch07"> +<h2>VII.</h2> + +<h3>The Right Ethical and Spiritual Use of the Bible.</h3> + + + +<div class="epigraphs"> +<blockquote><p>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."</p> + +<p> Stanley: "History of the Jewish Church," III. x. [Reminiscence of a + visit to Ewald.]</p> + + +<p> 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.</p> + +<p> À Kempis: "Imitation of Christ," Ch. V.</p> + + +<p> 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.</p> + +<p> Jeremy Taylor: "Holy Living," Ch. IV. Sect. iv.</p></blockquote> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">We search the world for truth: we cull<br /></span> +<span class="line">The good, the pure, the beautiful<br /></span> +<span class="line">From graven stone and written scroll,<br /></span> +<span class="line">From all old flower-fields of the soul;<br /></span> +<span class="line">And, weary seekers of the best,<br /></span> +<span class="line">We come back laden from our quest,<br /></span> +<span class="line">To find that all the sages said,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Is in the Book our mothers read.</span></p> + +<p class="cite">Whittier: "Miriam."</p> +</blockquote> +</div> + + + +<h2>VII.</h2> + +<h3>The Right Ethical and Spiritual Use of the Bible.</h3> + + + + +<blockquote class="epi"><p>"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.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>Would that for one single day, we may have lived in this world as we + ought.</p></blockquote> + +<p>Thus prays the author of the Imitation of Christ; and in so praying he is +sighing after wisdom.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Before His work of old.</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">Then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>Fear God and keep His commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."<sup><a href="#fn54">54</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>Wisely speaks the finest Biblical critic of England in our day:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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,<sup><a href="#fn55">55</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>The right use of the Bible is to feed religion.</p> + +<p>Coleridge said:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.<sup><a href="#fn56">56</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.<sup><a href="#fn57">57</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1"> +<h4>I.</h4> + + + +<p>Wherein lies this commanding rank of the Bible in the literature of +ethical and spiritual power?</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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</p> + +<blockquote><p>O Lord, open thou our lips, and our mouth shall shew forth Thy praise.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>In Emerson's phrase:</p> + +<blockquote><p>Virtue is the adopting of this dictate of the Universal Mind by the + individual will.</p></blockquote> + +<p>"What do I love when I love Thee?" sighed Augustine. Israel might have +answered that question in Augustine's own words:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.<sup><a href="#fn58">58</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>But the Bible answer would be much more simple and pungent:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>Be ye perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-1"> +<h5>1. <i>We have here the simple, homely, prudential aspects of virtue, which +have always been particularly powerful on certain ages and classes.</i></h5> + + +<p>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</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Her house is the way to hell,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Going down to the chambers of death.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>The favorite name for sin in these proverbs is Folly. Wisdom crieth to the +sons of men, in that noblest writing of the sages:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Blessed is the man that heareth me,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Watching daily at my gates,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Waiting at the posts of my doors.<br /></span> +<span class="line">For whoso findeth me findeth life,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And shall obtain favor of the Lord.<br /></span> +<span class="line">But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul.<br /></span> +<span class="line">All they that hate me love death.</span></p> +</blockquote> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-2"> +<h5>2. <i>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."</i></h5> + + +<p>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</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Ye shall be holy men unto me.<sup><a href="#fn59">59</a></sup></span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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 +<i>only</i> 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.</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Blessed are those that are undefiled in the way,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Who walk in the law of the Lord.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Make me to understand the way of thy commandments;<br /></span> +<span class="line">And so shall I talk of thy wondrous works.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Thy statutes have been my songs<br /></span> +<span class="line">In the house of my pilgrimage.<br /></span> +<span class="line">The earth, O Lord, is full of thy mercy:<br /></span> +<span class="line">O teach me thy statutes!<br /></span> +<span class="line">Thy hands have made me and fashioned me:<br /></span> +<span class="line">O give me understanding, that I may learn thy commandments.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven.<br /></span> +<span class="line">They continue this day, according to thy ordinances.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Thy righteousness is an everlasting righteousness,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And thy law is the truth.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Shew the light of thy countenance upon thy servant,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And teach me thy statutes.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>This is none other than that law of which a far later ecclesiastic, +writing also of ecclesiastical law, discoursed in this wise:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.<sup><a href="#fn60">60</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>This law is none other than that holy form which a modern poet thus +apostrophizes:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"><p> +<span class="line"> Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear<br /></span> +<span class="line"> The godhead's most benignant grace;<br /></span> +<span class="line"> Nor know we anything so fair<br /></span> +<span class="line"> As is the smile upon thy face.<br /></span> +<span class="line"> Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> And fragrance in thy footing treads;<br /></span> +<span class="line">Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;<br /></span> +<span class="line">And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.</span></p> +</blockquote> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-3"> +<h5>3. <i>The Law thus mystic and sacred is seen to be both the law of nature +and the law of the human soul.</i></h5> + + +<p>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 <i>savans</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">The heavens declare the glory of God,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And the firmament sheweth His handywork.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>At the seventh verse the Psalm abruptly passes to a eulogy of "The +Law"—the moral law shrined in the priestly Thorah:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">The law of the Lord is an undefiled law,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Converting the soul;<br /></span> +<span class="line">The testimony of the Lord is sure,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And giveth wisdom unto the simple.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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!</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>The Egyptian <i>maat</i>, derived like the Sanskrit <i>rita</i>, from merely + sensuous impressions, became the name for moral order and + righteousness.<sup><a href="#fn61">61</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">By one music enchanted,<br /></span> +<span class="line">One Deity stirred.</span></p> +</blockquote> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-4"> +<h5>4. <i>The Bible leads us on to that sense of sin, in the presence of this +"Law," which no lower thought of law can quicken.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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?</p></blockquote> + +<p>It is this intense sense of the exceeding sinfulness of sin which +oppressed the great-hearted Paul, and wrung from him the bitter cry:</p> + +<blockquote><p>O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this + death.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Wash me throughly from my wickedness,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And cleanse me from my sin.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Cast me not away from Thy presence,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-5"> +<h5>5. <i>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.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<i>motif</i>, heard anew in every critical movement of the argument, +is—Righteousness. The Master in whom the Bible centres, enriches earth +with a new benediction:</p> + +<blockquote><p>Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>Hearken unto me ye that follow after righteousness.</p></blockquote> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-6"> +<h5>6. <i>The Bible reveals these ethical ideals as no mere alluring visions, +but as the substantial realities of being.</i></h5> + + +<p>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 <i>terra firma</i>; 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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>Whereupon I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.</p></blockquote> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-7"> +<h5>7. <i>The Bible thus inspires a buoyancy and exhilaration which feed the +fresh forces of all noble life.</i></h5> + + +<p>No poet is needed to tell us that</p> + +<blockquote><p>Virtue kindles at the touch of joy.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Sing, O Heavens; and be joyful, O earth;<br /></span> +<span class="line">And break forth into singing, O mountains.<br /></span> +<span class="line">For the Lord hath comforted his people;<br /></span> +<span class="line">And will have mercy upon his afflicted.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">With everlasting joy upon their heads:<br /></span> +<span class="line">They shall obtain joy and gladness<br /></span> +<span class="line">And sorrow and sighing shall flee away.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>You learn the power of the Bible as you find how the joy of the Lord is +your strength.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-8"> +<h5>8. <i>The Bible leads this sense of Law into that awful vision wherein +"Conscious Law is King of kings."</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>This is the secret which has kept the religions inspired by the Bible from +lapsing, as other religions have done, into lifelessness.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.<sup><a href="#fn62">62</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Unto Thee lift I up mine eyes,<br /></span> +<span class="line">O Thou that dwellest in the heavens.</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">My soul truly waiteth still upon God,<br /></span> +<span class="line">For of Him cometh my salvation.</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks,<br /></span> +<span class="line">So longeth my soul after Thee, O God.<br /></span> +<span class="line">My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the Living God;<br /></span> +<span class="line">When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Lord, Thou hast been our home<br /></span> +<span class="line">From one generation to another.</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">Whoso dwelleth in the secret-place of the Most High<br /></span> +<span class="line">Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">O Lord, Thou hast searched me out and known me.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising;<br /></span> +<span class="line">Thou understandest my thoughts afar off.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Thou art about my path and about my bed,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And spiest out all my ways.<br /></span> +<span class="line">For lo, there is not a word in my tongue<br /></span> +<span class="line">But Thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-9"> +<h5>9. <i>God speaks in</i> <span class="smallcaps">a man</span>.</h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">And so the Word hath breath, and wrought<br /></span> +<span class="line"> With human hands the creed of creeds,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> In loveliness of perfect deeds,<br /></span> +<span class="line">More strong than all poetic thought.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>The power of the Bible is—<span class="smallcaps">Christ</span>.</p> +</div></div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-2"> +<h4>II.</h4> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>How shall we thus rightly read the Bible, for ethical and spiritual +upbuilding? Let me offer some plain and practical suggestions to this end.</p> + + +<p>(1.) <i>Read it daily.</i></p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<p>(2.) <i>Read it in the choicest moments of the day.</i></p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>It seems to me the most suitable manner of beginning the day.</p></blockquote> + +<p>Pitch the day aright with this tuning-fork, and hush the babel-voices of +the world to its tones of peace at night.</p> + + +<p>(3.) <i>Read the Bible whenever you need some special influence of strength +or cheer, amid the temptations and trials of the day.</i></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me;<br /></span> +<span class="line">Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.</span></p> +</blockquote> + + +<p>(4.) <i>In the choice of these daily readings, follow the guidance of the +soul's sure instinct.</i></p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<p>(5.) <i>Wheresoever you read, read in the spirit.</i></p> + +<p>"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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>Divine inbreathings and exaltations in us, that we may asscend into + their meanings.[63]</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>Open Thou mine eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy law.</p></blockquote> + +<p>I still find that the best commentator, for the ethical and spiritual use +of the Bible, is one Master Praying Always.</p> + +<p>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:"</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Must throw away his pen and paint,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> Kneel with worshipers.</span></p> + +<p><span class="line">Then, perchance, a sunny ray,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> From the heaven of fire,<br /></span> +<span class="line">His lost tools may overpay,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> And better his desire.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>Thus buying Bibles for yourselves, my friends, see that your children buy +themselves the Bible in the same good coin.</p> + + +<p>(a.) <i>Read with them the tales of its noble men.</i></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>as</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<p>(b.) <i>Form in the children the habit of daily reading in the Bible.</i></p> + +<p>Say to each of them, in your own way, that which Sir Matthew Hale wrote to +his child:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>(c.) <i>Cultivate in them a genuine interest in the Bible.</i></p> + +<p>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 +<i>Apologia Pro Vita Sua</i>:</p> + +<blockquote><p>I was brought up from a child to take great delight in reading the + Bible.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>(d.) <i>Train the children to commit to memory the choicest passages of the +Bible.</i></p> + +<p>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."</p> + + +<p>(e.) <i>Teach your children, as you teach yourselves, to hearken through +these voices of the human writers to the voice of God.</i></p> + +<p>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!</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Thy word is a lamp unto my feet,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And a light unto my path.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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!</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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. <i>Amen.</i></p> + + + + +<h4>The End.</h4> +</div></div> + + +<div class="chapter" id="footnotes"> +<h2>Footnotes</h2> + + +<div class="footnote" id="fn1"><p><strong>1.</strong> The Second Sunday in Advent.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn2"><p><strong>2.</strong> 1 Cor. vii. 10.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn3"><p><strong>3.</strong> 1 Cor. vii. 12.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn4"><p><strong>4.</strong> 1 Cor. vii. 40.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn5"><p><strong>5.</strong> 1 Cor. vii. 25.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn6"><p><strong>6.</strong> Hebrews i. 1.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn7"><p><strong>7.</strong> 2 Peter i. 21.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn8"><p><strong>8.</strong> 1 Peter i. 10, 11.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn9"><p><strong>9.</strong> 2 Timothy iii. 16.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn10"><p><strong>10.</strong> Sacred Books of the East, vol. i. p. xiii.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn11"><p><strong>11.</strong> 2 Maccabees, ii. 13.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn12"><p><strong>12.</strong> "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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn13"><p><strong>13.</strong> Introduction to the New Testament. Samuel Davidson, I.:279.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn14"><p><strong>14.</strong> Introduction to the New Testament. Samuel Davidson, I.:384.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn15"><p><strong>15.</strong> The contrast between the fifteenth and sixteenth century Confessions +of Faith reveals this process, and explains the prevalent Protestant +theory.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn16"><p><strong>16.</strong> About 600 A.D.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn17"><p><strong>17.</strong> 2 Maccabees ii. 13.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn18"><p><strong>18.</strong> The Dial: October, 1840.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn19"><p><strong>19.</strong> Ewald: History of Israel, i. 4.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn20"><p><strong>20.</strong> Esther is the most notable apparent exception, but this it only +apparent.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn21"><p><strong>21.</strong> 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 <i>not</i> there, but the work of God <i>is</i>.... 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."—<i>History of +the Jewish Church</i>, iii. 301.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn22"><p><strong>22.</strong> Ewald: History of Israel, i. 4.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn23"><p><strong>23.</strong> 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 <i>speaking</i> 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: <i>Introduction to the Old Testament</i>, i. 233.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn24"><p><strong>24.</strong> Emerson: Miscellanies, p. 200.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn25"><p><strong>25.</strong> "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, <i>March 11, 1832</i>.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn26"><p><strong>26.</strong> 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.</p> + +<p>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)</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<p>"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."</p> + +<p>"Republic," Book II.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn27"><p><strong>27.</strong> 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.'</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn28"><p><strong>28.</strong> 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>i.e.</i>, 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."</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn29"><p><strong>29.</strong> 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:</p> + +<p>"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, <i>then, +where are we to listen for it at all</i>?"—Greek Testament III:64.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn30"><p><strong>30.</strong> "History of American Socialisms,"—Noyes.—p. 608.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn31"><p><strong>31.</strong> "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."—<i>Literature and Dogma</i>.—p. xii.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn32"><p><strong>32.</strong> The revised version calls the attention of English readers to this +latter influence, in the marginal rendering of "<i>Tartarus</i>" for "Hell" in 2 +Peter, 11: 4.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn33"><p><strong>33.</strong> Luther's strong sense detected his unevangelicalness.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn34"><p><strong>34.</strong> Ewald says the tenth century, and Kuenen the eighth century.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn35"><p><strong>35.</strong> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn36"><p><strong>36.</strong> Such a late codification is no more inconceivable than Justinian's +codification of Roman law.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn37"><p><strong>37.</strong> Brook Foss Westcott. Smith's Bible Dictionary: article on Daniel.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn38"><p><strong>38.</strong> "The Bible of To-day," Chadwick, p. 50.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn39"><p><strong>39.</strong> Of this process we see hints in the various references to the +consecration of great trees and stones to Jehovah.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn40"><p><strong>40.</strong> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn41"><p><strong>41.</strong> "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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn42"><p><strong>42.</strong> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn43"><p><strong>43.</strong> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn44"><p><strong>44.</strong> 2 Kings, xxiii. 6, 7.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn45"><p><strong>45.</strong> Isaiah, i. 11-17.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn46"><p><strong>46.</strong> Micah, vi. 6-8.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn47"><p><strong>47.</strong> Isaiah, xi. 2-5.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn48"><p><strong>48.</strong> Isaiah, v. 8; iii. 14, 15.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn49"><p><strong>49.</strong> Cf. Exodus, xxiii, 10, 11 (the earliest code) with Deuteronomy, xv. +1-18.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn50"><p><strong>50.</strong> The latter seems the probable influence of Persia. At all events, +from this time Hebrew literature shows the gradual development of an +angelic hierarchy.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn51"><p><strong>51.</strong> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn52"><p><strong>52.</strong> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn53"><p><strong>53.</strong> 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 <i>day</i> 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 <i>all</i> 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 +<i>the grapes</i> in it of the vine undressed. For it <i>is</i> 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 <i>ought</i> 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, <i>and</i> +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 <i>according</i> to the number <i>of the years</i> of the fruits doth he sell +unto thee. Ye shall not therefore oppress one another; but thou shalt fear +thy God: for I <i>am</i> the Lord your God.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land <i>is</i> mine; for ye <i>are</i> +strangers and sojourners with me. And in all the land of your possession +ye shall grant a redemption for the land.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>And if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee; then thou +shalt relieve him: <i>yea, though he be</i> 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 <i>am</i> the Lord +your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, to give you +the land of Canaan, <i>and</i> to be your God. And if thy brother <i>that +dwelleth</i> by thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee; thou shalt not +compel him to serve as a bondservant: <i>But</i> as an hired servant, <i>and</i> as +a sojourner, he shall be with thee, <i>and</i> shall serve thee unto the year +of jubilee: And <i>then</i> shall he depart from thee, <i>both</i> 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 <i>are</i> 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 <i>et seq.</i></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn54"><p><strong>54.</strong> The Dialogues of Plato: Jowett's edition, II. 106.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn55"><p><strong>55.</strong> Matthew Arnold in <i>Contemporary Review</i>, xxiv. 800; xxv. 508.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn56"><p><strong>56.</strong> The Friend: Essay x.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn57"><p><strong>57.</strong> Sacred Books of the East: I. ix. <i>et seq.</i></p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn58"><p><strong>58.</strong> Confessions of Augustine: Book X. § vi.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn59"><p><strong>59.</strong> Exodus, xx. 31.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn60"><p><strong>60.</strong> Richard Hooker: Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I., ch. xvi. § 8.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn61"><p><strong>61.</strong> Le Page Renouf: Hibbert Lectures, 1879, p. 250.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn62"><p><strong>62.</strong> Hibbert Lectures, 1879, p. 279.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn63"><p><strong>63.</strong> God in Christ, p. 93.</p></div> +</div> + +<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12282 ***</div> +</body> +</html> + diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..01ca4fc --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #12282 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12282) diff --git a/old/12282-8.txt b/old/12282-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..56fe6bc --- /dev/null +++ b/old/12282-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,7001 @@ +Project Gutenberg's The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible, by R. Heber Newton + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible + +Author: R. Heber Newton + +Release Date: May 6, 2004 [EBook #12282] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK USES OF THE BIBLE *** + + + + +Produced by Distributed Proofreaders + + + + + +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. + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible +by R. 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Heber Newton + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible + +Author: R. Heber Newton + +Release Date: May 6, 2004 [EBook #12282] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: UTF-8 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK USES OF THE BIBLE *** + + + + +Produced by Distributed Proofreaders + + + + + +</pre> + + + +<div class="tp"> +<h1 class="title">The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible</h1> + +<p class="byline">By</p> + +<h2 class="author">R. Heber Newton.</h2> + +<blockquote class="epi"><p>"In it <i>is contained</i> God's true Word."—<i>Homily on the Holy +Scriptures.</i></p></blockquote> + +<h3>New York:<br /> +John W. Lovell Company,<br /> +14 & 16 Vesey Street.</h3> +</div> + + +<div id="verso"> +<h2>Works by the Same Author.</h2> + +<table summary="Works by the Same Author"> +<tr><td>The Morals. 1. Vol. 12mo, cloth, gilt,</td><td class="decimal"> $1.00</td></tr> +<tr><td>Studies of Jesus. 1 vol. 12mo, cloth, gilt,</td><td class="decimal"> 1.00</td></tr> +<tr><td>Womanhood. 1 vol. 12mo, cloth, gilt,</td><td class="decimal"> 1.25</td></tr> +</table> + +<p>The above all will be sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of price, by</p> + +<h4>John W. Lovell Co.<br /> +14 and 16 Vesey St., New York.</h4> + +<h5>Copyright, 1883</h5> +</div> + + +<div id="toc"> +<h2>Contents.</h2> + +<p><a href="#preface">Preface</a></p> + +<ol> + <li><a href="#ch01">The Unreal Bible.</a> + <ol> + <li><a href="#ch01-1">This theory has no sufficient sanction by the Church.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch01-2">The Bible nowhere makes any such claim of infallibility for itself.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch01-3">The Bible carries the refutation of this claim upon the face of its writings.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch01-4">The growth of this theory is plain to us, and discredits its authority.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch01-5">This theory is incapable of a statement which is not self-stultifying.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch01-6">This theory of our Bible is, in our age, seen to be the same theory which +all peoples have entertained of their bibles.</a></li> + </ol> + </li> + <li><a href="#ch02">The Real Bible.</a> + <ol> + <li> + <ol> + <li><a href="#ch02-1-1">These books have the venerableness which belongs to ancient writings.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-1-2">These books form the literature of a noble race.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-1-3">This literature of the Jewish nation and of the Christian Church is intrinsically noble.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-1-4">This literature has been very influential in the development of progressive civilization.</a></li> + </ol> + </li> + <li> + <ol> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-1">Israel's specialty in history was religion.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-2">Israel's literature became thus a religious literature.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-3">Israel's literature presents us, in the various moods and tenses of +her life, with the various phases of religion.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-4">Israel's literature presents us with the record of a continuous growth +of religion upward through its normal stages.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-5">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-6">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-7">The literature of Christian Israel records the realization of this +long sought ideal, the fruition of this organic growth.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-8">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch02-2-9">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!.</a></li> + </ol> + </li> + </ol> + </li> + <li><a href="#ch03">The Wrong Uses of the Bible.</a> + <ol> + <li><a href="#ch03-1">It is a wrong use of the Bible to set it in its entirety before all +classes and all ages.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch03-2">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch03-3">It is a wrong use of the Bible to accept everything recorded therein as +necessarily true.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch03-4">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch03-5">It is a wrong use of the Bible to go to it, as the heathen went to their +oracles, for divination of the future.</a></li> + </ol> + </li> + <li><a href="#ch04">The Wrong Uses of the Bible.</a> + <ol> + <li><a href="#ch04-1">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch04-2">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch04-3">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch04-4">It is a wrong use of the Bible to disregard the chronological order of +its parts in constructing our theology.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch04-5">It is a wrong use of the Bible to cite its authors as of equal authority, +even in the spheres of theology and religion.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch04-6">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.</a></li> + </ol> + </li> + <li><a href="#ch05">The Right Critical Use of the Bible.</a> + <ol> + <li><a href="#ch05-1">Every aid of outward form should be used to make these books appear as +living "letters" to us.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch05-2">Each writing having an intrinsic unity should, by such aids, be studied +as a whole.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch05-3">Each great book should, as a whole, be read in its proper place in Hebrew +and Christian history.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch05-4">The books which are of a composite character should be read in their +several parts, and traced to their proper places in history.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch05-5">These writings should be read critically, until we can decipher the +successive hands working upon them, and interpret them accordingly.</a></li> + </ol> + </li> + <li><a href="#ch06">The Right Historical Use of the Bible.</a> + <ol> + <li><a href="#ch06-1"><i>The Epoch of Moses:</i> B.C. 1300(?).</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch06-2"><i>The heroic age:</i> B.C. 1300-1100..</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch06-3"><i>The period of the monarchy, down to the epoch of the great prophets:</i> B. +C. 1100-800..</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch06-4"><i>The era of the great prophets, before the exile:</i> B.C. 800-586..</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch06-5"><i>The Epoch of the Exile:</i> B.C. 586-536..</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch06-6"><i>The period of the Restoration, from</i> B.C. 536..</a></li> + </ol> + </li> + <li><a href="#ch07">The Right Ethical and Spiritual Use of the Bible.</a> + <ol> + <li> + <ol> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-1">We have here the simple, homely, prudential aspects of virtue, which +have always been particularly powerful on certain ages and classes.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-2">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."</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-3">The Law thus mystic and sacred is seen to be both the law of nature +and the law of the human soul.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-4">The Bible leads us on to that sense of sin, in the presence of this +"Law," which no lower thought of law can quicken.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-5">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.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-6">The Bible reveals these ethical ideals as no mere alluring visions, +but as the substantial realities of being.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-7">The Bible thus inspires a buoyancy and exhilaration which feed the +fresh forces of all noble life.</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-8">The Bible leads this sense of Law into that awful vision wherein +"Conscious Law is King of kings."</a></li> + <li><a href="#ch07-1-9">God speaks in <span class="smallcaps">a man</span>.</a></li> + </ol> + </li> + <li><a href="#ch07-2">"When Sir Walter Scott lay in his last illness..."</a></li> + </ol> + </li> +</ol></div> + + +<div class="epigraphs"> +<blockquote><p>"The Gospel doth not so much consist <i>in verbis</i> as <i>in virtute</i>."</p> + +<p> <i>John Smith</i>.</p></blockquote> + + +<blockquote><p> "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."</p> + +<p> <i>Jeremy Taylor</i>.</p></blockquote> + + +<blockquote><p> "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."</p> + +<p> <i>Lord Falkland</i>.</p></blockquote> + +<p>[Rational Theology in England in the Seventeenth Century; John Tulloch, +D.D., II: 181, I:398, I:160]</p> +</div> + + +<div class="chapter" id="preface"> +<h2>Preface.</h2> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"Unto a Christian man there can be nothing more necessary or profitable + than the knowledge of holy scripture, forasmuch as <i>in it is contained + God's true word</i>, setting forth his glory, and also man's duty."</p></blockquote> + +<p>The whole controversy in Protestantism over the Bible may be summed into +the question whether the Bible <i>is</i> God's word or <i>contains</i> God's word. +On this question I stand with the Book of Homilies.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>R. Heber Newton.</p> + +<p>All Souls' Church, <i>March</i> 1, 1883.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="chapter" id="ch01"> +<h2>I.</h2> + +<h3>The Unreal Bible.</h3> + + +<div class="epigraphs"> +<blockquote><p>"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."</p> + +<p> Dean Stanley: "History of the Jewish Church," iii. 158.</p></blockquote> +</div> + + + +<h2>I.</h2> + +<h3>The Unreal Bible</h3> + + + +<blockquote class="epi"><p>"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.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn1">1</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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?"</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"It is never safe to do anything against the truth!"</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>I propose to consider with you, carefully but frankly, the real nature and +the true uses of the Bible.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>Let us examine to-day the traditional view of the Bible.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>This Confession opens with a chapter "Of the Holy Scriptures," which +affirms in this wise:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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....</p> + +<p> "....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.</p> + +<p> "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.</p> + +<p> "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."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>A book let down out of the skies, immaculate, infallible, oracular—this +is the traditional view of the Bible.</p> + +<p>Let me lay before you some of the many reasons why this theory of the +Bible is not to be received by us.</p> + + + +<div class="sec" id="ch01-1"> +<h4>I.</h4> + +<h5><i>This theory has no sufficient sanction by the Church.</i></h5> + + + +<p>The Catholic or Œcumenical 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):</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."</p></blockquote> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch01-2"> +<h4>II.</h4> + +<h5><i>The Bible nowhere makes any such claim of infallibility for itself.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"Unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord," etc.<sup><a href="#fn2">2</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>Immediately after he writes, as having no such assurance:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"To the rest speak I, not to the Lord."<sup><a href="#fn3">3</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>Later on in the same letter he is so uncertain as to add to his judgment:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"And I think also that I have the spirit of God."<sup><a href="#fn4">4</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>Again, in the same connection, being conscious of no divine authorization, +he gives his own opinion as such:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"Now, concerning virgins I have no commandment of the Lord, but I give + my judgment."<sup><a href="#fn5">5</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto + the fathers by the prophets," etc.<sup><a href="#fn6">6</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>The author of the Second Epistle of Peter writes:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."<sup><a href="#fn7">7</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>In the first Epistle General of Peter we read:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."<sup><a href="#fn8">8</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The prophets were, in such lofty visionings, under an influence beyond +their consciousness.</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"The passive master lent his hand<br /></span> +<span class="line">To the vast soul that o'er him planned."</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>All other passages claimed in support of the notion of an infallible Bible +fail on the witness-stand.</p> + +<p>There is positively nothing in the New Testament which lends a reasonable +countenance to such an amazing theory.</p> + +<p>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</p> + +<blockquote><p>"Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching for + reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness."<sup><a href="#fn9">9</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch01-3"> +<h4>III.</h4> + +<h5><i>The Bible carries the refutation of this claim upon the face of its +writings.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The marks of a patient and noble literary workmanship are in every +writing.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>vade +mecum</i> in a highly developed hierarchical period to the civil statutes of +a rude patriarchal society, whose very crimes are archaic.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch01-4"> +<h4>IV.</h4> + +<h5><i>The growth of this theory is plain to us, and discredits its authority.</i></h5> + + + +<p>The explanation that Max Müller makes of the growth of superstitious +reverence for ancient traditions in Hindu history is suggestive on this +point.</p> + +<p>"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."<sup><a href="#fn10">10</a></sup></p> + +<p>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."<sup><a href="#fn11">11</a></sup> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The fresh, free inspirations of the prophets—inspirations most real and +divine—died out in the exile, smothered partly by this priestly +development.<sup><a href="#fn12">12</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The genesis of the similar theory concerning the Christian Scriptures +repeats the story told above.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The Christian consciousness tried and tested every writing, accepting +those which approved themselves inspired by inspiring.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>In the Reformation the old story repeated itself.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."<sup><a href="#fn13">13</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>Luther wrote of the Epistle of James,</p> + +<blockquote><p>"In comparison with the best books of the New Testament, it is a + downright strawy epistle."<sup><a href="#fn14">14</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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<i>ism</i> 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.<sup><a href="#fn15">15</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch01-5"> +<h4>V.</h4> + +<h5><i>This theory is incapable of a statement which is not self-stultifying.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn16">16</a></sup> Their insertion +demanded a guarantee, if infallibility was to be secured.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch01-6"> +<h4>VI.</h4> + +<h5><i>This theory of our Bible is, in our age, seen to be the same theory which +all peoples have entertained of their bibles.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Bibliolatry is pushed to a <i>reductio ad absurdum</i> 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.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Te Deums</i> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>In the name of religion let it die!</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>These spiritual realities, no criticism can touch. And these spiritual +realities make the Bible.</p> + +<p>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!</p> +</div></div> + + +<div class="chapter" id="ch02"> +<h2>II.</h2> + +<h3>The Real Bible.</h3> + + + +<div class="epigraphs"> +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"Out from the heart of nature rolled<br /></span> +<span class="line">The burdens of the Bible old;<br /></span> +<span class="line">The litanies of nations came,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Like the volcano's tongue of flame,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Up from the burning core below,—<br /></span> +<span class="line">The canticles of love and woe.</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">The passive Master lent his hand<br /></span> +<span class="line">To the vast soul that o'er him planned.</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">Himself from God he could not free."</span></p> + +<p><i>The Problem.</i></p> +</blockquote> + +<blockquote><p>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, <i>The Dial</i>, October, 1840.</p></blockquote> +</div> + + + +<h2>II.</h2> + +<h3>The Real Bible.</h3> + + + + +<blockquote class="epi"><p>"Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost."—2 Peter, + i. 21.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>"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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>The Bible is a collection of many writings, in many forms, by many hands, +from many ages. Genuine letters these, whether they be <i>belles-lettres</i> 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 <i>bona fide</i> books, of men of like passions and +infirmities with ourselves.</p> + +<p>What is there in these books which has led Christendom to assign to them +so high an honor?</p> + + + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-1"> +<h4>I.</h4> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-1-1"> +<h5>1. <i>These books have the venerableness which belongs to ancient writings.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-1-2"> +<h5>2. <i>These books form the literature of a noble race.</i></h5> + + +<p>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."<sup><a href="#fn17">17</a></sup> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-1-3"> +<h5>3. <i>This literature of the Jewish nation and of the Christian Church is +intrinsically noble.</i></h5> + + +<p>The Bible has lost much of its fresh charm for us, with whom its finest +sayings are household words.</p> + +<p>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 <i>salon</i> upon a certain +occasion. Our shrewd philosopher-minister Franklin, had previously heard +the <i>literati</i> 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.</p> + +<p>How fresh, with the crisp air of morning, are these tales of primitive +tradition! How <i>naif</i> 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!</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Emerson writes:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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, + <i>secondary</i>.... 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."<sup><a href="#fn18">18</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>Even what seem to us valueless books turn out, when studied naturally, +most interesting and suggestive.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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?"</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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—</p> + +<blockquote><p>"And now abideth faith, hope and charity, but the greatest of these is + charity."</p></blockquote> + +<p>If such be the hidden value of one of the least attractive of these +writings, we may well say, with Milton,</p> + +<blockquote><p>"I shall wish I may deserve to be reckoned among those who admire and + dwell upon them."</p></blockquote> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-1-4"> +<h5>4. <i>This literature has been very influential in the development of +progressive civilization.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Let Irreverence stay her ribald tongue before these illustrious writings, +and Indecency vomit her own nastiness elsewhere than on our Bible.</p> +</div></div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2"> +<h4>II.</h4> + + + +<p>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.</p> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-1"> +<h5>1. <i>Israel's specialty in history was religion.</i></h5> + + +<p>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</p> + +<blockquote><p>"advanced as far as the Greeks before Socrates towards producing an + independent science or philosophy."<sup><a href="#fn19">19</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>But she found herself content with none of these <i>rôles</i>. 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."</p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-2"> +<h5>2. <i>Israel's literature became thus a religious literature.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn20">20</a></sup></p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-3"> +<h5>3. <i>Israel's literature presents us, in the various moods and tenses of +her life, with the various phases of religion.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn21">21</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-4"> +<h5>4. <i>Israel's literature presents us with the record of a continuous growth +of religion upward through its normal stages.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."</p></blockquote> + +<p>Micah asks,</p> + +<blockquote><p>"What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy + and to walk humbly with thy God?"</p></blockquote> + +<p>Of this continuous growth of religion the Old Testament is the record.</p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-5"> +<h5>5. <i>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.</i></h5> + + +<p>The Niebuhr of Hebrew history rightly pointed out this significant fact in +the introduction to his great work.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Of this singular shaping of the nation's experiences to further the growth +of true religion, the Old Testament is the impressive record.</p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-6"> +<h5>6. <i>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.</i></h5> + + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."<sup><a href="#fn22">22</a></sup></p></blockquote> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-7"> +<h5>7. <i>The literature of Christian Israel records the realization of this +long sought ideal, the fruition of this organic growth.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-8"> +<h5>8. <i>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.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + +<div class="sec" id="ch02-2-9"> +<h5>9. <i>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!</i></h5> + +<p>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!"</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>life</i>, the experience of <i>souls</i>. 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!</p> + +<p>With sincere and reverent confession we must say then in the words of Holy +Writ:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."<sup><a href="#fn23">23</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>The consciousness and experience of Israel could not have found fitter +expression than in the words of our great seer:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."<sup><a href="#fn24">24</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"And out of darkness come the hands<br /></span> +<span class="line">That reach through nature, moulding man."</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn25">25</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"I know that the Bible is inspired, because it 'inspires me.'"</span></p> +</blockquote> +</div></div></div> + + + +<div class="chapter" id="ch03"> +<h2>III.</h2> + +<h3>The wrong use of the Bible.</h3> + + + +<div class="epigraphs"> +<blockquote><p>"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."</p> + +<p> Plato: The Republic; Book II.</p></blockquote> + + +<blockquote><p> "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."</p> + +<p> Maurice: What is Revelation, p. 475.</p></blockquote> +</div> + + + +<h2>III.</h2> + +<h3>The wrong use of the Bible</h3> + + + + +<blockquote class="epi"><p>Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for + reproof for correction, for instruction in righteousness.—2 Timothy, + III, 16.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + + +<div class="sec" id="ch03-1"> +<h4>I.</h4> + +<h5><i>It is a wrong use of the Bible to set it in its entirety before all +classes and all ages.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn26">26</a></sup></p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch03-2"> +<h4>II.</h4> + +<h5><i>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.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>Nor could I ask the people to unite in praying:</p> + +<blockquote><p>Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb; yea, all their princes as Zeba + and Salmana.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>reductio ad +absurdum</i> of this use of the Bible.<sup><a href="#fn27">27</a></sup></p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch03-3"> +<h4>III.</h4> + +<h5><i>It is a wrong use of the Bible to accept everything recorded therein as +necessarily true.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn28">28</a></sup></p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch03-4"> +<h4>IV.</h4> + +<h5><i>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.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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 <i>Logos</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch03-5"> +<h4>V.</h4> + +<h5><i>It is a wrong use of the Bible to go to it, as the heathen went to their +oracles, for divination of the future.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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!</p> + +<p>This Chinese puzzle-book of predictions exists nowhere save in the +imagination of its readers.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>The whole history of Israel is a growth of The Christ, and that is the +abiding wonder of it.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn29">29</a></sup></p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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 <i>decheance</i>. +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."</p> +</div></div> + + +<div class="chapter" id="ch04"> +<h2>IV.</h2> + +<h3>The wrong use of the Bible</h3> + + + +<div class="epigraphs"> +<blockquote><p>"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 <i>precision,</i> 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."</p> + +<p> Horace Bushnell. God in Christ; p. 93.</p></blockquote> + + +<blockquote><p> "But, further, the zealots for the Bible <i>as it is</i>, just because it + <i>is</i>, 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 <i>is</i> + 'God's Word written'? What <i>is</i>, 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?"</p> + +<p> Thomas Griffith, late Prebendary of St. Paul's, London: The Gospel of + the Divine Life, p. 418.</p></blockquote> +</div> + + + +<h2>IV.</h2> + +<h3>The wrong use of the Bible.</h3> + + + +<blockquote class="epi"><p>"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.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>"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.</p> + +<p>I proceed to point out some further wrong uses of the Bible:</p> + + + +<div class="sec" id="ch04-1"> +<h4>I.</h4> + +<h5><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.</i></h5> + + + +<p>In the traditional view it was an infallible authority upon every subject +of which it treated.</p> + +<p>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 <i>raison d'être</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>When (<i>e.g.</i>) 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch04-2"> +<h4>II.</h4> + +<h5><i>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.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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!'</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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!<sup><a href="#fn30">30</a></sup></p> + +<p>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 <i>is</i> my body." The most powerful Church +of Christendom bases itself upon this prosaic reading of a poetic saying.</p> + +<p>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."<sup><a href="#fn31">31</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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!</p> + +<p>I am solemnly warned against such learned puerilities every time I turn to +my shelves and encounter Swedenborg's "Arcana Cœlestia." In ten goodly +volumes he interprets Scripture history after this fashion:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"'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."!</p></blockquote> + +<p>Of all this pious sort of folly we may say with the Master—"Enough."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch04-3"> +<h4>III.</h4> + +<h5><i>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.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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>i.e.</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>An ancient historian, gathering up the traditions of his primitive +fore-fathers, records the legend of the Flood, in which it is told that</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart<br /></span> +<span class="line">Was only evil continually."</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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:—</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"Behold I was shapen in wickedness,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And in sin hath my mother conceived me."</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>The poet who wrote his unrivaled prophecies amid the humiliation of the +national exile in Babylonia, cried out in one place:—</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"We are all as an unclean thing,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And all our righteousness are as filthy rags."</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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!</p> + +<p>Even this folly has been surpassed. Among the proverbial sayings of the +Jews was one to this effect;</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"If the tree fall towards the South, or towards the North,<br /></span> +<span class="line">In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be."</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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!</p> + +<p>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!</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch04-4"> +<h4>IV.</h4> + +<h5><i>It is a wrong use of the Bible to disregard the chronological order of +its parts in constructing our theology.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>rationale</i> 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.</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">"The hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. God is spirit;<br /></span> +<span class="line">And they that worship must worship him in spirit and in truth."</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.'</p> + +<p>Were this one principle followed, our popular theology would soon +reconstruct itself.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch04-5"> +<h4>V.</h4> + +<h5><i>It is a wrong use of the Bible to cite its authors as of equal authority, +even in the spheres of theology and religion.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn32">32</a></sup> 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."</p> + +<p>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 <i>Christus Consolator</i>. The full breath of inspiration opens only the +upper register of notes. The voices of the soul are buoyant, joyous, +hopeful.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch04-6"> +<h4>VI.</h4> + +<h5><i>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.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"In that high hour thought was not."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn33">33</a></sup> +"The fundamentals" are all lacking.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"The Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy word."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>That light is the sufficient clue to the dark labyrinth in which we wander +wearily.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>With poor dying Joe, I whisper to myself:</p> + +<blockquote><p>"'Our Father:' yes, that's werry good."</p></blockquote> +</div></div> + + + +<div class="chapter" id="ch05"> +<h2>V.</h2> + +<h3>The Right Critical Use of the Bible.</h3> + + + +<div class="epigraphs"> +<blockquote><p>"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."</p> + +<p> Goethe: quoted by M. Arnold in "The Great Prophecy of Israel's + Restoration."</p></blockquote> +</div> + + + +<h2>V.</h2> + +<h3>The Right Critical Use of the Bible.</h3> + + + + +<blockquote class="epi"><p>"God, who at many times and in many manners spake in time past to the + fathers, by the prophets."—Hebrews, i. 1.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>The right use of the Bible grows out of the true view of the Bible.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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 <i>bona fide</i> "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.</p> + + + +<div class="sec" id="ch05-1"> +<h4>I.</h4> + +<h5><i>Every aid of outward form should be used to make these books appear as +living "letters" to us.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch05-2"> +<h4>II.</h4> + +<h5><i>Each writing having an intrinsic unity should, by such aids, be studied +as a whole.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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?</p> + +<p>What a revelation such a study makes! It is an alchemist's touch, turning +many a leaden book into finest gold.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn34">34</a></sup> 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 <i>dramatis personæ</i> +to clear the movement of the plot, and to reveal the force and beauty of +the poem.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">I know that my Redeemer liveth,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:<br /></span> +<span class="line">And though, after my skin, worms destroy this body,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Yet out of my flesh shall I see God;<br /></span> +<span class="line">Whom I shall see for myself,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>But the vision fades upon an atmosphere unready for it, and the poet does +not return to follow this clue out into the sunshine.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Therefore have I uttered that I understood not.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Things too wonderful for me which I knew not.</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear;<br /></span> +<span class="line">But now mine eye seeth Thee.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Wherefore I abhor myself,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And repent in dust and ashes.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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 <i>motif</i> 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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Canst thou by searching find out God?<br /></span> +<span class="line">Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?<br /></span> +<span class="line">It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?<br /></span> +<span class="line">Deeper than hell; what canst thou know?</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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!</p> + +<p>What the Epistle to the Romans, that affrighting <i>vade mecum</i> 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."</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch05-3"> +<h4>III.</h4> + +<h5><i>Each great book should, as a whole, be read in its proper place in Hebrew +and Christian history.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>It came to pass that when the king had heard the words of the book of + the law, that he rent his clothes.</p></blockquote> + +<p>For, said he:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>With such mighty secrets does this little book grow luminous when placed +in the light of its real belongings.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn35">35</a></sup> 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.<sup><a href="#fn36">36</a></sup> It is not difficult to account for +this remarkable priestly movement.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<i>ad interim</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>A high authority has declared—</p> + +<blockquote><p>There can be no doubt that it exercised a greater influence upon the + early Christian Church than any other writing of the Old Testament.<sup><a href="#fn37">37</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch05-4"> +<h4>IV.</h4> + +<h5><i>The books which are of a composite character should be read in their +several parts, and traced to their proper places in history.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Saith your God.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her,<br /></span> +<span class="line">That her warfare is accomplished,<br /></span> +<span class="line">That her iniquity is pardoned.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">He shall feed his flock like a Shepherd,<br /></span> +<span class="line">He shall gather the lambs with his arm,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And carry them in his bosom,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And shall gently lead those that are with young.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch05-5"> +<h4>V.</h4> + +<h5><i>These writings should be read critically, until we can decipher the +successive hands working upon them, and interpret them accordingly.</i></h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."<sup><a href="#fn38">38</a></sup></p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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?</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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—</p> + +<blockquote><p>Speak Lord; thy servant heareth!</p></blockquote> + +<hr /> + +<blockquote><p>It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated the + only question is; Is it true in and for itself?</p> + +<p> Hegel: "Philosophy of History," Part III.: Sec. III.: Ch. II.</p></blockquote> + + +<blockquote><p> 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.</p> + +<p> Goethe: "Conversations," March 11,1832.</p></blockquote> + + +<blockquote><p> 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.</p> + +<p> Watson's "Apology for the Bible," Letter IV.</p></blockquote> +</div></div> + + + +<div class="chapter" id="ch06"> +<h2>VI.</h2> + +<h3>The Right Historical Use of the Bible.</h3> + + + +<div class="epigraph"> +<blockquote><p>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.....</p> + +<p> 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.</p> + +<p> Hegel: "Philosophy of History," pp. 57, 344. [Bohn.]</p></blockquote> + + +<blockquote><p> 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!</p> + +<p> Goethe: "Conversations," March, 11,1832.</p></blockquote> +</div> + + + +<h2>VI.</h2> + +<h3>The Right Historical Use of the Bible.</h3> + + + + +<blockquote class="epi"><p>"When the fulness of the time was come God sent forth His + Son."—Galatians, iv. 4.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"When the fulness of the time was come God sent forth His Son."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + + +<div class="sec" id="ch06-1"> +<h4>I.</h4> + +<h5><i>The Epoch of Moses:</i> B.C. 1300(?)</h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch06-2"> +<h4>II.</h4> + +<h5><i>The heroic age:</i> B.C. 1300-1100.</h5> + + + +<p>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 <i>the</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn39">39</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn40">40</a></sup> 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.<sup><a href="#fn41">41</a></sup> 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.<sup><a href="#fn42">42</a></sup> The various tribes probably had +different rites.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch06-3"> +<h4>III.</h4> + +<h5><i>The period of the monarchy, down to the epoch of the great prophets:</i> B. +C. 1100-800.</h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>rôle</i> of fearless censor and +truthful mentor to the infant State; the <i>rôle</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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!</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch06-4"> +<h4>IV.</h4> + +<h5><i>The era of the great prophets, before the exile:</i> B.C. 800-586.</h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<i>chamanim</i>, 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.<sup><a href="#fn43">43</a></sup></p> + +<p>Nor did the allegiance to Jehovah bar private usages of an idolatrous +nature. The home of the average Israelite had its <i>teraphim</i> 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 <i>asheras</i>, or tree-poles, +by which the priestesses of passion, as part of their religious offices, +sold themselves to the frequenters of Jehovah's house.<sup><a href="#fn44">44</a></sup> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>meum</i> and <i>tuum</i> in the mad +chase of wealth.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Isaiah carries this message from God:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me?<br /></span> +<span class="line">I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts.<br /></span> +<span class="line">And I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats.<br /></span> +<span class="line">When ye come to appear before me,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts?<br /></span> +<span class="line">Bring no more vain oblations;<br /></span> +<span class="line">Incense is an abomination unto me;<br /></span> +<span class="line">The new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot endure;<br /></span> +<span class="line">It is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth;<br /></span> +<span class="line">They are a trouble unto me;<br /></span> +<span class="line">I am weary to bear them.<br /></span> +<span class="line">And when ye spread forth your hands,<br /></span> +<span class="line">I will hide mine eyes from you:<br /></span> +<span class="line">Yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear:<br /></span> +<span class="line">Your hands are full of blood.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Wash you, make you clean;<br /></span> +<span class="line">Put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes:<br /></span> +<span class="line">Cease to do evil; learn to do well:<br /></span> +<span class="line">Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.<sup><a href="#fn45">45</a></sup></span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>Micah voices the questions that men raised in his day, answering them with +the new thought:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Wherewithal shall I come before the Lord,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And bow myself before the high God?<br /></span> +<span class="line">Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,<br /></span> +<span class="line">With calves of a year old?<br /></span> +<span class="line">Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?<br /></span> +<span class="line">Shall I give my first born for my transgression,<br /></span> +<span class="line">The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?<br /></span> +<span class="line">He hath showed thee, O man, what is good,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And what doth the Lord require of thee,<br /></span> +<span class="line">But to do justly, and to love mercy,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And to walk humbly with thy God?<sup><a href="#fn46">46</a></sup></span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,<br /></span> +<span class="line">The spirit of wisdom and understanding,<br /></span> +<span class="line">The spirit of counsel and might,<br /></span> +<span class="line">The spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord:<br /></span> +<span class="line">And he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Neither reprove after the hearing of his ears:<br /></span> +<span class="line">But with righteousness shall he judge the poor,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And reprove with equity for the meek of the earth.<br /></span> +<span class="line">And he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.<br /></span> +<span class="line">And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And faithfulness the girdle of his reins.<sup><a href="#fn47">47</a></sup></span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>ad libitum</i>. 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.</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Woe unto them that join house to house,<br /></span> +<span class="line">That lay field to field<br /></span> +<span class="line">Till there be no place,<br /></span> +<span class="line">That they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">The Lord will enter into judgment<br /></span> +<span class="line">With the ancients of his people and the princes thereof:<br /></span> +<span class="line">For ye have eaten up the vineyard;<br /></span> +<span class="line">The spoil of the poor is in your houses.<br /></span> +<span class="line">What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And grind the faces of the poor?<br /></span> +<span class="line">Saith the Lord God of hosts.<sup><a href="#fn48">48</a></sup></span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Of joy in widest commonalty spread.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn49">49</a></sup></p> + +<p>We shall see in the nest period the fruitage of this new religion of +social righteousness, in the remarkable legislation of the Restoration.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch06-5"> +<h4>V.</h4> + +<h5><i>The Epoch of the Exile:</i> B.C. 586-536.</h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn50">50</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn51">51</a></sup> 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.</p> + +<p>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,</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">A deep distress hath humanized my soul.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<sup><a href="#fn52">52</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."<sup><a href="#fn53">53</a></sup></p> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch06-6"> +<h4>VI.</h4> + +<h5><i>The period of the Restoration, from</i> B.C. 536.</h5> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">He shall convert my soul,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And bring me forth in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks,<br /></span> +<span class="line">So longeth my soul after thee, O God.<br /></span> +<span class="line">My soul is athirst for God. Yea, even for the living God:<br /></span> +<span class="line">When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">O send out thy light and thy truth:<br /></span> +<span class="line">Let them lead me;<br /></span> +<span class="line">Let them bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy tabernacles.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Then will I go up unto the altar of God,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Unto God, the gladness of my joy:<br /></span> +<span class="line">Yea, upon the harp will I praise thee,<br /></span> +<span class="line">O God, my God.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Through such a quiet deepening of the life of the people was the nation +preparing for its final development of religion.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,<br /></span> +<span class="line">According to thy word:<br /></span> +<span class="line">For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;<br /></span> +<span class="line">A light to lighten the Gentiles,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And the glory of thy people Israel.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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 <i>lived</i> 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 <i>lived</i> +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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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?</p> + +<p>Our only answer must be that given of old:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>The Universal Man is now coming to be a real being in the individual + mind.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">But he, the man-child glorious,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> Where tarries he the while?<br /></span> +<span class="line">The rainbow shines his harbinger,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> The sunset gleams his smile.</span></p> + +<p><span class="line">My boreal lights leap upward,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> Forth right my planets roll,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And still the man-child is not born,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> The summit of the Whole.</span></p> + +<p><span class="line">I travail in pain for him,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> My creatures travail and wait;<br /></span> +<span class="line">His couriers come by squadrons,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> He comes not to the gate.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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?</p> + +<blockquote><p>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 <span class="smallcaps">Son of God</span>.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>This is my Beloved Son: Hear Him!</p></blockquote> +</div></div> + + + +<div class="chapter" id="ch07"> +<h2>VII.</h2> + +<h3>The Right Ethical and Spiritual Use of the Bible.</h3> + + + +<div class="epigraphs"> +<blockquote><p>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."</p> + +<p> Stanley: "History of the Jewish Church," III. x. [Reminiscence of a + visit to Ewald.]</p> + + +<p> 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.</p> + +<p> À Kempis: "Imitation of Christ," Ch. V.</p> + + +<p> 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.</p> + +<p> Jeremy Taylor: "Holy Living," Ch. IV. Sect. iv.</p></blockquote> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">We search the world for truth: we cull<br /></span> +<span class="line">The good, the pure, the beautiful<br /></span> +<span class="line">From graven stone and written scroll,<br /></span> +<span class="line">From all old flower-fields of the soul;<br /></span> +<span class="line">And, weary seekers of the best,<br /></span> +<span class="line">We come back laden from our quest,<br /></span> +<span class="line">To find that all the sages said,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Is in the Book our mothers read.</span></p> + +<p class="cite">Whittier: "Miriam."</p> +</blockquote> +</div> + + + +<h2>VII.</h2> + +<h3>The Right Ethical and Spiritual Use of the Bible.</h3> + + + + +<blockquote class="epi"><p>"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.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>Would that for one single day, we may have lived in this world as we + ought.</p></blockquote> + +<p>Thus prays the author of the Imitation of Christ; and in so praying he is +sighing after wisdom.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Before His work of old.</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">Then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>Fear God and keep His commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>"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."<sup><a href="#fn54">54</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>Wisely speaks the finest Biblical critic of England in our day:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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,<sup><a href="#fn55">55</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>The right use of the Bible is to feed religion.</p> + +<p>Coleridge said:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.<sup><a href="#fn56">56</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.<sup><a href="#fn57">57</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1"> +<h4>I.</h4> + + + +<p>Wherein lies this commanding rank of the Bible in the literature of +ethical and spiritual power?</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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</p> + +<blockquote><p>O Lord, open thou our lips, and our mouth shall shew forth Thy praise.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>In Emerson's phrase:</p> + +<blockquote><p>Virtue is the adopting of this dictate of the Universal Mind by the + individual will.</p></blockquote> + +<p>"What do I love when I love Thee?" sighed Augustine. Israel might have +answered that question in Augustine's own words:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.<sup><a href="#fn58">58</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>But the Bible answer would be much more simple and pungent:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>Be ye perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-1"> +<h5>1. <i>We have here the simple, homely, prudential aspects of virtue, which +have always been particularly powerful on certain ages and classes.</i></h5> + + +<p>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</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Her house is the way to hell,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Going down to the chambers of death.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>The favorite name for sin in these proverbs is Folly. Wisdom crieth to the +sons of men, in that noblest writing of the sages:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Blessed is the man that heareth me,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Watching daily at my gates,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Waiting at the posts of my doors.<br /></span> +<span class="line">For whoso findeth me findeth life,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And shall obtain favor of the Lord.<br /></span> +<span class="line">But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul.<br /></span> +<span class="line">All they that hate me love death.</span></p> +</blockquote> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-2"> +<h5>2. <i>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."</i></h5> + + +<p>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</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Ye shall be holy men unto me.<sup><a href="#fn59">59</a></sup></span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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 +<i>only</i> 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.</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Blessed are those that are undefiled in the way,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Who walk in the law of the Lord.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Make me to understand the way of thy commandments;<br /></span> +<span class="line">And so shall I talk of thy wondrous works.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Thy statutes have been my songs<br /></span> +<span class="line">In the house of my pilgrimage.<br /></span> +<span class="line">The earth, O Lord, is full of thy mercy:<br /></span> +<span class="line">O teach me thy statutes!<br /></span> +<span class="line">Thy hands have made me and fashioned me:<br /></span> +<span class="line">O give me understanding, that I may learn thy commandments.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven.<br /></span> +<span class="line">They continue this day, according to thy ordinances.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Thy righteousness is an everlasting righteousness,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And thy law is the truth.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Shew the light of thy countenance upon thy servant,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And teach me thy statutes.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>This is none other than that law of which a far later ecclesiastic, +writing also of ecclesiastical law, discoursed in this wise:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.<sup><a href="#fn60">60</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>This law is none other than that holy form which a modern poet thus +apostrophizes:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"><p> +<span class="line"> Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear<br /></span> +<span class="line"> The godhead's most benignant grace;<br /></span> +<span class="line"> Nor know we anything so fair<br /></span> +<span class="line"> As is the smile upon thy face.<br /></span> +<span class="line"> Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> And fragrance in thy footing treads;<br /></span> +<span class="line">Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;<br /></span> +<span class="line">And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.</span></p> +</blockquote> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-3"> +<h5>3. <i>The Law thus mystic and sacred is seen to be both the law of nature +and the law of the human soul.</i></h5> + + +<p>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 <i>savans</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">The heavens declare the glory of God,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And the firmament sheweth His handywork.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>At the seventh verse the Psalm abruptly passes to a eulogy of "The +Law"—the moral law shrined in the priestly Thorah:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">The law of the Lord is an undefiled law,<br /></span> +<span class="line">Converting the soul;<br /></span> +<span class="line">The testimony of the Lord is sure,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And giveth wisdom unto the simple.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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!</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>The Egyptian <i>maat</i>, derived like the Sanskrit <i>rita</i>, from merely + sensuous impressions, became the name for moral order and + righteousness.<sup><a href="#fn61">61</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">By one music enchanted,<br /></span> +<span class="line">One Deity stirred.</span></p> +</blockquote> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-4"> +<h5>4. <i>The Bible leads us on to that sense of sin, in the presence of this +"Law," which no lower thought of law can quicken.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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?</p></blockquote> + +<p>It is this intense sense of the exceeding sinfulness of sin which +oppressed the great-hearted Paul, and wrung from him the bitter cry:</p> + +<blockquote><p>O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this + death.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Wash me throughly from my wickedness,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And cleanse me from my sin.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Cast me not away from Thy presence,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-5"> +<h5>5. <i>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.</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<i>motif</i>, heard anew in every critical movement of the argument, +is—Righteousness. The Master in whom the Bible centres, enriches earth +with a new benediction:</p> + +<blockquote><p>Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>Hearken unto me ye that follow after righteousness.</p></blockquote> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-6"> +<h5>6. <i>The Bible reveals these ethical ideals as no mere alluring visions, +but as the substantial realities of being.</i></h5> + + +<p>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 <i>terra firma</i>; 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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>Whereupon I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.</p></blockquote> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-7"> +<h5>7. <i>The Bible thus inspires a buoyancy and exhilaration which feed the +fresh forces of all noble life.</i></h5> + + +<p>No poet is needed to tell us that</p> + +<blockquote><p>Virtue kindles at the touch of joy.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Sing, O Heavens; and be joyful, O earth;<br /></span> +<span class="line">And break forth into singing, O mountains.<br /></span> +<span class="line">For the Lord hath comforted his people;<br /></span> +<span class="line">And will have mercy upon his afflicted.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">With everlasting joy upon their heads:<br /></span> +<span class="line">They shall obtain joy and gladness<br /></span> +<span class="line">And sorrow and sighing shall flee away.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>You learn the power of the Bible as you find how the joy of the Lord is +your strength.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-8"> +<h5>8. <i>The Bible leads this sense of Law into that awful vision wherein +"Conscious Law is King of kings."</i></h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>This is the secret which has kept the religions inspired by the Bible from +lapsing, as other religions have done, into lifelessness.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.<sup><a href="#fn62">62</a></sup></p></blockquote> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Unto Thee lift I up mine eyes,<br /></span> +<span class="line">O Thou that dwellest in the heavens.</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">My soul truly waiteth still upon God,<br /></span> +<span class="line">For of Him cometh my salvation.</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks,<br /></span> +<span class="line">So longeth my soul after Thee, O God.<br /></span> +<span class="line">My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the Living God;<br /></span> +<span class="line">When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Lord, Thou hast been our home<br /></span> +<span class="line">From one generation to another.</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">Whoso dwelleth in the secret-place of the Most High<br /></span> +<span class="line">Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.</span></p> + +<hr /> + +<p><span class="line">O Lord, Thou hast searched me out and known me.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising;<br /></span> +<span class="line">Thou understandest my thoughts afar off.<br /></span> +<span class="line">Thou art about my path and about my bed,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And spiest out all my ways.<br /></span> +<span class="line">For lo, there is not a word in my tongue<br /></span> +<span class="line">But Thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> +</div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-1-9"> +<h5>9. <i>God speaks in</i> <span class="smallcaps">a man</span>.</h5> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">And so the Word hath breath, and wrought<br /></span> +<span class="line"> With human hands the creed of creeds,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> In loveliness of perfect deeds,<br /></span> +<span class="line">More strong than all poetic thought.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>The power of the Bible is—<span class="smallcaps">Christ</span>.</p> +</div></div> + + +<div class="sec" id="ch07-2"> +<h4>II.</h4> + + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>How shall we thus rightly read the Bible, for ethical and spiritual +upbuilding? Let me offer some plain and practical suggestions to this end.</p> + + +<p>(1.) <i>Read it daily.</i></p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<p>(2.) <i>Read it in the choicest moments of the day.</i></p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>It seems to me the most suitable manner of beginning the day.</p></blockquote> + +<p>Pitch the day aright with this tuning-fork, and hush the babel-voices of +the world to its tones of peace at night.</p> + + +<p>(3.) <i>Read the Bible whenever you need some special influence of strength +or cheer, amid the temptations and trials of the day.</i></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me;<br /></span> +<span class="line">Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.</span></p> +</blockquote> + + +<p>(4.) <i>In the choice of these daily readings, follow the guidance of the +soul's sure instinct.</i></p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<p>(5.) <i>Wheresoever you read, read in the spirit.</i></p> + +<p>"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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>Divine inbreathings and exaltations in us, that we may asscend into + their meanings.[63]</p></blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<blockquote><p>Open Thou mine eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy law.</p></blockquote> + +<p>I still find that the best commentator, for the ethical and spiritual use +of the Bible, is one Master Praying Always.</p> + +<p>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:"</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Must throw away his pen and paint,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> Kneel with worshipers.</span></p> + +<p><span class="line">Then, perchance, a sunny ray,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> From the heaven of fire,<br /></span> +<span class="line">His lost tools may overpay,<br /></span> +<span class="line"> And better his desire.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>Thus buying Bibles for yourselves, my friends, see that your children buy +themselves the Bible in the same good coin.</p> + + +<p>(a.) <i>Read with them the tales of its noble men.</i></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>as</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<p>(b.) <i>Form in the children the habit of daily reading in the Bible.</i></p> + +<p>Say to each of them, in your own way, that which Sir Matthew Hale wrote to +his child:</p> + +<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>(c.) <i>Cultivate in them a genuine interest in the Bible.</i></p> + +<p>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 +<i>Apologia Pro Vita Sua</i>:</p> + +<blockquote><p>I was brought up from a child to take great delight in reading the + Bible.</p></blockquote> + + +<p>(d.) <i>Train the children to commit to memory the choicest passages of the +Bible.</i></p> + +<p>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."</p> + + +<p>(e.) <i>Teach your children, as you teach yourselves, to hearken through +these voices of the human writers to the voice of God.</i></p> + +<p>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!</p> + +<blockquote class="poem"> +<p><span class="line">Thy word is a lamp unto my feet,<br /></span> +<span class="line">And a light unto my path.</span></p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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!</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>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. <i>Amen.</i></p> + + + + +<h4>The End.</h4> +</div></div> + + +<div class="chapter" id="footnotes"> +<h2>Footnotes</h2> + + +<div class="footnote" id="fn1"><p><strong>1.</strong> The Second Sunday in Advent.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn2"><p><strong>2.</strong> 1 Cor. vii. 10.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn3"><p><strong>3.</strong> 1 Cor. vii. 12.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn4"><p><strong>4.</strong> 1 Cor. vii. 40.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn5"><p><strong>5.</strong> 1 Cor. vii. 25.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn6"><p><strong>6.</strong> Hebrews i. 1.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn7"><p><strong>7.</strong> 2 Peter i. 21.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn8"><p><strong>8.</strong> 1 Peter i. 10, 11.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn9"><p><strong>9.</strong> 2 Timothy iii. 16.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn10"><p><strong>10.</strong> Sacred Books of the East, vol. i. p. xiii.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn11"><p><strong>11.</strong> 2 Maccabees, ii. 13.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn12"><p><strong>12.</strong> "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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn13"><p><strong>13.</strong> Introduction to the New Testament. Samuel Davidson, I.:279.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn14"><p><strong>14.</strong> Introduction to the New Testament. Samuel Davidson, I.:384.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn15"><p><strong>15.</strong> The contrast between the fifteenth and sixteenth century Confessions +of Faith reveals this process, and explains the prevalent Protestant +theory.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn16"><p><strong>16.</strong> About 600 A.D.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn17"><p><strong>17.</strong> 2 Maccabees ii. 13.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn18"><p><strong>18.</strong> The Dial: October, 1840.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn19"><p><strong>19.</strong> Ewald: History of Israel, i. 4.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn20"><p><strong>20.</strong> Esther is the most notable apparent exception, but this it only +apparent.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn21"><p><strong>21.</strong> 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 <i>not</i> there, but the work of God <i>is</i>.... 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."—<i>History of +the Jewish Church</i>, iii. 301.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn22"><p><strong>22.</strong> Ewald: History of Israel, i. 4.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn23"><p><strong>23.</strong> 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 <i>speaking</i> 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: <i>Introduction to the Old Testament</i>, i. 233.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn24"><p><strong>24.</strong> Emerson: Miscellanies, p. 200.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn25"><p><strong>25.</strong> "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, <i>March 11, 1832</i>.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn26"><p><strong>26.</strong> 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.</p> + +<p>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)</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<p>"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."</p> + +<p>"Republic," Book II.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn27"><p><strong>27.</strong> 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.'</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn28"><p><strong>28.</strong> 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>i.e.</i>, 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."</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn29"><p><strong>29.</strong> 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:</p> + +<p>"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, <i>then, +where are we to listen for it at all</i>?"—Greek Testament III:64.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn30"><p><strong>30.</strong> "History of American Socialisms,"—Noyes.—p. 608.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn31"><p><strong>31.</strong> "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."—<i>Literature and Dogma</i>.—p. xii.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn32"><p><strong>32.</strong> The revised version calls the attention of English readers to this +latter influence, in the marginal rendering of "<i>Tartarus</i>" for "Hell" in 2 +Peter, 11: 4.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn33"><p><strong>33.</strong> Luther's strong sense detected his unevangelicalness.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn34"><p><strong>34.</strong> Ewald says the tenth century, and Kuenen the eighth century.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn35"><p><strong>35.</strong> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn36"><p><strong>36.</strong> Such a late codification is no more inconceivable than Justinian's +codification of Roman law.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn37"><p><strong>37.</strong> Brook Foss Westcott. Smith's Bible Dictionary: article on Daniel.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn38"><p><strong>38.</strong> "The Bible of To-day," Chadwick, p. 50.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn39"><p><strong>39.</strong> Of this process we see hints in the various references to the +consecration of great trees and stones to Jehovah.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn40"><p><strong>40.</strong> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn41"><p><strong>41.</strong> "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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn42"><p><strong>42.</strong> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn43"><p><strong>43.</strong> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn44"><p><strong>44.</strong> 2 Kings, xxiii. 6, 7.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn45"><p><strong>45.</strong> Isaiah, i. 11-17.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn46"><p><strong>46.</strong> Micah, vi. 6-8.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn47"><p><strong>47.</strong> Isaiah, xi. 2-5.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn48"><p><strong>48.</strong> Isaiah, v. 8; iii. 14, 15.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn49"><p><strong>49.</strong> Cf. Exodus, xxiii, 10, 11 (the earliest code) with Deuteronomy, xv. +1-18.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn50"><p><strong>50.</strong> The latter seems the probable influence of Persia. At all events, +from this time Hebrew literature shows the gradual development of an +angelic hierarchy.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn51"><p><strong>51.</strong> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn52"><p><strong>52.</strong> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn53"><p><strong>53.</strong> 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 <i>day</i> 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 <i>all</i> 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 +<i>the grapes</i> in it of the vine undressed. For it <i>is</i> 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 <i>ought</i> 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, <i>and</i> +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 <i>according</i> to the number <i>of the years</i> of the fruits doth he sell +unto thee. Ye shall not therefore oppress one another; but thou shalt fear +thy God: for I <i>am</i> the Lord your God.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land <i>is</i> mine; for ye <i>are</i> +strangers and sojourners with me. And in all the land of your possession +ye shall grant a redemption for the land.</p> + +<hr /> + +<p>And if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee; then thou +shalt relieve him: <i>yea, though he be</i> 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 <i>am</i> the Lord +your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, to give you +the land of Canaan, <i>and</i> to be your God. And if thy brother <i>that +dwelleth</i> by thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee; thou shalt not +compel him to serve as a bondservant: <i>But</i> as an hired servant, <i>and</i> as +a sojourner, he shall be with thee, <i>and</i> shall serve thee unto the year +of jubilee: And <i>then</i> shall he depart from thee, <i>both</i> 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 <i>are</i> 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 <i>et seq.</i></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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."</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn54"><p><strong>54.</strong> The Dialogues of Plato: Jowett's edition, II. 106.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn55"><p><strong>55.</strong> Matthew Arnold in <i>Contemporary Review</i>, xxiv. 800; xxv. 508.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn56"><p><strong>56.</strong> The Friend: Essay x.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn57"><p><strong>57.</strong> Sacred Books of the East: I. ix. <i>et seq.</i></p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn58"><p><strong>58.</strong> Confessions of Augustine: Book X. § vi.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn59"><p><strong>59.</strong> Exodus, xx. 31.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn60"><p><strong>60.</strong> Richard Hooker: Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I., ch. xvi. § 8.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn61"><p><strong>61.</strong> Le Page Renouf: Hibbert Lectures, 1879, p. 250.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn62"><p><strong>62.</strong> Hibbert Lectures, 1879, p. 279.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote" id="fn63"><p><strong>63.</strong> God in Christ, p. 93.</p></div> +</div> + + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible +by R. 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Heber Newton + +Release Date: May 6, 2004 [EBook #12282] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK USES OF THE BIBLE *** + + + + +Produced by Distributed Proofreaders + + + + + +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." Mediaeval 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 minutiae 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 Mueller 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 _roles_. 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 Mediaeval 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'etre_ 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 personae_ +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 _role_ of fearless censor and +truthful mentor to the infant State; the _role_ 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. + + A 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 mediaeval 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 Mueller, 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 aesthetics 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. Sec. vi. + +[59] Exodus, xx. 31. + +[60] Richard Hooker: Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I., ch. xvi. Sec. 8. + +[61] Le Page Renouf: Hibbert Lectures, 1879, p. 250. + +[62] Hibbert Lectures, 1879, p. 279. + +[63] God in Christ, p. 93. + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible +by R. Heber Newton + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK USES OF THE BIBLE *** + +***** This file should be named 12282.txt or 12282.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/2/8/12282/ + +Produced by Distributed Proofreaders + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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