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God's Word

MAN'S LIGHT AND GUIDE.

A COURSE OF

Lectures on the Bible,

BEFORE THE

New York Sunday School Association,

BY

REV.DRS. TA YLOR, BRIGGS, STORRS, CROSBY, BOOTH,

PORTER, BOARDMAN, WASHBURN, AND

SIMPSON.

AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY,

ISO NASSAU STREET, NENA/ VORK.

I9JI

COPYRIGHT, 1877,
BY AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY.

PREFACE

The Course of Lectures comprising this volume was
given before the New York Sunday-School Association,
during the past winter, \^'j6-'j. At the commencement
no thought of their publication was entertained ; it be-
came apparent, however, very early in the course, that
the interest awakened by them could not be satisfied by
their delivery only : and in answer to the frequent and
urgent requests of the Sunday-school public, application
was made to the authors for their manuscripts for publi-
cation. The result is seen in the present volume, which
is put forth with the confident expectation that not only
many who were unable to hear the lectures, but a large
number of those who did, will desire to preserve this vol-
ume among their choice reading.

It should be stated, in justice to those whose names
are annexed to the lectures, that each is held responsible
only for the opinions expressed by himself.

E. C. WILDER,

President N. Y. S. S. Association.

CONTENTS

THE INSPIRA TION OF THE SCRIPTURES - page 5

REV. WM. M. TAYLOR, D. D.

THE LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE 37

REV. CHARLES A. BRIGG5, D. D.

THE UNITY AND THE VARIETY OF THE BIBLE 77

REV. R. S. STORRS, D, D.

ANCIENT HISTORY IN ITS CONNECTION WITH THE

OLD TESTAMENT 117

REV. HOWARD CROSBY, D. D.

THE ADAPTA TION OF THE BIBLE TO THE UNIVER-
SAL NEEDS OF THE SOUL, AND THE WITNESS OF
CHRISTIAN MEN TO ITS DIVINE A UTHORITY AND
POWER - 145

REV. ROBERT RUSSELL BOOTH, D. D.

MIRACLES AND PROPHECIES WHICH SHOW THE

BIBLE DIVINE - 169

REV. NOAH PORTER, D. D.

METHOD OF JESUS CHRIST AS TEACHER- 201

REV. GEO. D. BOARDMAN, D. D.

THE RIGHT AND RESPONSIBILITY OF THE CHRIS-
TIAN CONSCIENCE IN THE STUDY OF THE SCRIP-
TURES 221

REV. E. A. WASHBURN, D. D.

MAJESTY AND HOLINESS OF THE BIBLE 251

REV. M. SIMPSON, D. D.,LL.D.

THE

Inspiration of the Scriptures,

REV, WILLIAM M. TAYLOR, D. D.,

PASTOR OF THE BROADWAY TABERNACLE CHURCH, NEW YORK.

THE INSPIRATION

OF

THE SCRIPTURES

In entering upon the consideration of the inspiration
of the Scriptures, it is essential that we have first a clear
idea of the place which that subject holds in the order of
a logical investigation into the claims and characteristics
of the Old and New Testaments. The existence and
personality of God is the great postulate of the soul ; and
that being granted, it is at once seen to be both a possi-
ble and a probable thing that He should communicate in
some way with man in his state of conscious guilt and
spiritual helplessness. The Bible claims to be such a
communication ; and we can trace it up through the cen-
turies to the dates at which its several component parts
were written ; we can establish that its books were writ-
ten by the men whose names they bear ; and that in
their Greek and Hebrew forms they have come down to
us with wonderful accuracy, so that we have more cer-
tainty that we have Paul's epistles as he wrote them,
than we have that the letters of Cicero to his friend At-
ticus are preserved in their original form. All these
things are settled for the sacred books precisely as we

8 INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES.

settle the genuineness and authenticity of other ancient
writings ; and the next topic of inquiry is the credibility
of Scripture. Allowing that we have here genuine an-
cient books, and that they were written by the men
whose names are attached to them, may we believe their
statements ? Here we are met by the first serious an-
tagonism in the shape of a denial of the possibility of
the supernatural. It is alleged that miracles are impos-
sible, and therefore that the books containing the rec-
ords of them are incredible. So the whole subject of
the possibility, credibility, and evidential value of mira-
cles falls to be considered at this point ; and it is only
after the miracles have been proved to be real, and the
miracle-workers to be thus divinely attested and en-
dorsed, that we advance to the question of inspiration.

In the arrangements for this course of lectures, and
when I undertook to treat this very important and diffi-
cult subject, I expected that this order would have been
observed ; but as each lecturer had to be taken in the
week when he could be got, it was found to be impossi-
ble to carry out this design ; and so it is all the more
needful that I should point out to you the proper logical
sequence of the different themes that are to be discussed
before you. I shall have to take for granted that one
writer has proved to you the genuineness and authen-
ticity of the sacred books, and that another has estab-
lished to your satisfaction the truth of the miracles,
and the reality of the Deity of our Lord and the divin-
ity of the commission of the prophets and apostles. And

INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. 9

with these things held as settled, I am to inquire into the
subject of the inspiration of the Scriptures.

The term rendered in 2 Tim. 3 : 16, "given by inspi-
ration of God," signifies literally " God-breathed ;" and it
implies that the writings of the Old Testament, of which
Paul is there speaking, were the result of a certain influ-
ence exerted by God upon their authors, who, as Peter
has it, " spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost."
The word, then, may be held as intimating that the Holy
Ghost was especially and miraculously present with and
in the writers, revealing to them truths which they did
not know before, and guiding them alike in their record
of these truths, and of the transactions of which they
were eye and ear witnesses, so that they were enabled to
present them with substantial accuracy to the minds of
others.

The peculiarity of this definition lies in the word
" miraculously." Many would say all the rest, but would
falter over that. They conceive inspiration to be only a
higher degree of genius, and deny that there is anything
supernatural and peculiar in the case of the writers of
the Bible. But in opposition to that opinion we cite the
declarations of the men themselves, who stand before us
as men divinely endorsed by miracle, and who must be
held to be the best witnesses in the case. When David
said, " The Spirit of the Lord spake by me, and his word
was in my tongue," he meant something more than the
apostrophe to the muse with which the Iliad begins, or
even than the prayer to the Spirit which forms the gem

lo INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES.

of Paradise Lost. When Isaiah and his brethren said,
" Thus saith the Lord," they claimed something higher
than that they were speaking under the stirrings of po-
etic rapture ; and when Paul said to the Corinthians,
*' Which things we speak, not in the words which man's
wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth,"
he used language to which you will find no parallel in
the literature of- mere human genius. And no man of
candor or intelligence can pass from the writings even
of the unapproachable Shakespeare into the perusal of
the Bible without feeling that the difference between the
two is one not simply of degree, but of kind ; he has not
merely ascended to a loftier outlook in the same human
dwelling, but he has gone into a new region altogether.
There is what we may call a certain " unknown quality "
in this book which clearly distinguishes it from others ;
and if we may take its own explanation of the matter,
that unknown quality is divine inspiration.

Now it may clear away much of the obscurity which
has been thrown around this subject if we distinguish
between things that differ, and it may serve to render
our remarks more memorable if we group them under a
few appropriate headings.

I. In the first place, then, you will observe that Scrip-
ture is entirely silent as to the manner in which the divine
influence wrought upon the minds of the authors, or the
kind of agency of which they were the subjects. God never
answers the question " How .?" When in regard to the
new birth Nicodemus asked, "How can these things be T

INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. ii

he received for answer a reiteration of its necessity. And
when men ask into the "how" of gravitation or cohesion,
they are met with the same silence. So in regard to in-
spiration, we have no information whatever as to the
mode of its action ; we are pointed only to results. We
must not allow ourselves therefore to wander beyond the
record, and speculate with Dick, Doddridge, and others,
on degrees of inspiration, such as superintendence, ele-
vation, or suggestion, All such attempts are ensnaring,
and tend only to confuse us in regard to a subject which
is mysterious enough in itself.

2. In the second place, we must distinguish between
inspiration and revelation. The most cursory perusal of
the Bible will show that it consists of two different kinds
of records : first, those of truths directly and imme-
diately imparted to the mind of the writer by God, and
which he could have learned in no other manner ; and
second, those of events that occurred before the writer's
own observation, and of sayings that fell upon his own
ears. Thus Paul received the account of the institution
of the Lord's Supper " by revelation," and he went up to
Jerusalem " by revelation ;" but when he is narrating the
incidents connected with his interview with Peter at
Antioch, he is telling facts which were as well known to
others as they were to him. There is therefore a very
apparent distinction between these two things ; but in-
spiration touches the written accounts of them both, and
it is the same for them both. Its province is to secure
accuracy in the transmission of truth, whether that truth

12 INSPIRATION OF I HE SCRIPTURES.

be a revelation directly received from God, or the history
of something which has occurred before the eyes of men
on earth. Hence though the whole Scripture is inspired,
it does not stamp with divine authority every sentiment
which it reports as uttered by the men of whom it speaks,
or mark with the divine approval every action which is
related in it as performed by those whose biographies it
contains. In the Book of Job, for example, inspiration
gives with equal accuracy the language of Jehovah, the
words of Satan, and the speeches of Job and his three
friends ; but it does not therefore place them all on the
same level of authority. Each speaker is responsible for
his own utterances, and neither Job nor Bildad nor Zo-
phar nor Eliphaz nor Elihu spoke by inspiration of God.
They gave utterance to their own opinions, and all that
inspiration vouches for is that no one of them is misrep-
resented, but that each spoke the sentiments that are
here attributed to him. This may seem so evident as to
be a mere truism ; but even such a thinker as Coleridge
has charged the advocates of the verbal theory of inspi-
ration (and if his charge is true at all, it is equally so of
the plenary theory which we adopt) with the palpable
absurdity of making God responsible for all the half-
truths uttered by those ancient debaters ; and so it be-
comes us, holding as we do to the fact that inspiration
guarantees the accuracy of the report, to repudiate and
expose the ridiculous perversion of the truth which is
industriously attributed to us. Because a sentence of
Satan's is recorded in Job, and also in the history of our

INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. 13

Lord's temptation, and because I believe that Satan has
been in both instances correctly represented, it does not
follow that I must also believe that he spoke by inspiration.
And the same is true of every interlocutor introduced
into the sacred narratives. Claudius Lysias was not in-
spired to write his letter to Felix because that letter is
preserved in the book of the Acts ; but the inspiration
of Luke vouches for the accuracy of the representation
which he has given of the letter — that is all. So, again,
the fact that David's cruelty to the Ammonites is re-
corded in the Book of Kings does not imply that God
approved it. The inspiration of the book vouches only
for the accuracy of the record. Only when he who
speaks is speaking in God's name, and is a recognized
prophet or apostle, have we any right to regard his utter-
ances as of divine authority. This distinction between
revelation and inspiration must be clearly understood, for
some of the most plausible objections to the common
theory have arisen from the fact that by many it has
been either unrecognized or ignored.

3. In the third place, we must distinguish between
inspiration and verbal dictation. The Holy Spirit did
not employ the writers as copying machines. He used
the men themselves, and spoke through their individual-
ity to others. He wrought in and with and through
their spirits, so as to preserve their individuality, while
yet he transmitted his truth. The gold was his ; the
mould was theirs. If you ask me whether inspiration
affected the words, I must answer Yes, for it could not

14 INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES.

insure the correct transmission of thought, without in
some way affecting the words ; but it affected the words
not directly and immediately by dictating them in the
ears of the writers, but mediately, through working on
their minds, and producing there such vivid and clear
ideas of thoughts and facts, that the writers could easily
find words fitted to their purpose. The Spirit employed
the attention, the investigation, the memory, the educa-
tion, the fancy, the logic, in a word, all the characteristics
of the writer, and wrought through these. Hence we
find Luke, in his introduction to his Gospel, affirming
that he had made diligent investigation of all things from
the very beginning of Christ's ministry. Hence also, we
have peculiarities of style in the productions of each of the
sacred penmen. We can see a difference between the
manner of Moses and that of Matthew ; between the
songs of David and the epigrammatic proverbs of his
son ; between the mystic grandeur of Ezekiel and the
simple majesty of Isaiah ; between the intellectual
acuteness of Paul and the keen spiritual intuition of
John. We must conclude therefore, that while from the
divine side the Holy Spirit gave through men clearly
and faithfully that which he wished to communicate,
from the humam side that communication came forth
in language such as the men themselves would nat-
urally have chosen. I am aware that many would sneer
at this as an impossibility, and would allege that if
the words are affected by inspiration at all, there must
have been dictation. But the " must " is a " non seqjiitnry

INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. 15

It is admitt£d by all that God works out his own pur-
poses in the government of the world, through the ordi-
nary actions of men, while yet no violence is done to their
personal freedom. It is admitted, also, that God, through
the gracious operations of his Spirit, works in the hearts
of his people so as to develop the new man in each of
them, while yet the individuality of each is preserved,
and the type of piety is just as distinct in each Christian
as the style is in each of the sacred writers. 'These
cases are so nearly parallel to that before us, as to sug-
gest that all denials of the possibility of inspiration with-
out the destruction of individual characteristics, are as
unphilosophical as they are arrogant.

4. In the fourth place, I remark that, in the repro-
duction of discourses, inspiration is not verbatim re-
porting. This follows from what I have already said, for
reporting would have been a mere mechahical operation;
but the Spirit used the memories, the intuitions, the
judgments, and indeed, the idiosyncrasies of the writers,
so that while each gives that of the discourse which, as I
may so express it, adhered to himself, he was enabled to
give it with substantial accuracy. No one of the sacred
writers professes to give a complete account of every-
thing that Jesus said on any one occasion, for John is
careful to declare that if such a thing had been attempt-
ed, "the world itself could not contain the books that
should be written." But the Spirit so wrought in them,
and through them, that what they did write was in sub-
stance true. Thus, in the case of the title over the cross,

1 6 INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES.

each of the four evangehsts gives different words. In
Matthew it stands thus : " This is Jesus, the King of the
Jews." In Mark, thus : *' The King of the Jews." In
Luke, thus : " This is the King of the Jews." In John,
thus : " Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jesus." Now
if inspiration had been mere verbatim reporting, then
these four would have been alike; but since the Holy
Spirit used the memories of the evangelists, there are
verbal differences, while in the great matter which fas-
tened itself on the memory of each, namely, that Pilate
had acknowledged the royalty of Jesus, they are all alike.
That was the substance of the title, and in conveying
that, accuracy is secured. Now let it be observed that
by using the sacred penmen thus, the Holy Spirit has
let us see the Saviour's history from four different stand-
points, and by so much the more has increased our
knowledge of him. Hugh Miller, in one of the most in-
teresting of his writings,* has remarked, concerning the
imitative faculty, that he has seen it rendered valuable
by being set in the literary attainment of a newspaper
reporter, so that he has had to estimate at a different
value, the respective reports- of gentlemen of the press,
equal in their powers of memory and in general acquire-
ment, and unequal merely in the degree in which they
possessed the imitative faculty. In the reports of the
one class, he had found only the meaning of the speakers,
in those of the other, both the meaning and the speakers
too. Now this difference in men reproducing the sub-

* '• First Impressions of England," page 282. 4^

INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. 17

stance of what others have said in our own day, may en-
able us to understand how it is that through the eyes of
John's intuitional character we see in his Gospel so
much more of Christ's deeper nature, than we do through
Matthew's narrative ; and how in the Gospel of Mark
we are made so much better acquainted with the Lord's
looks and gestures, than we are in that of Luke. Each
took all that his own individuality, and the purpose
which he had in view in writing, attracted to him ; but
it is not professed that either one of them by himself, or
the whole of them put together, give a perfectly com-
plete account of every word the Saviour spoke on any
one occasion, far less of all the words he uttered in his
public ministry. Yet what each gives is, so far as it
goes, a correct representation of the Lord. If each had
given simply a full verbatim report of the discourses
which he heard, then whenever they came upon the same
address, they would have been only reproductions of each
other, like the several pages in a manifold writer, and it
would have been said at once that the fourfold testimony
was virtually only one. But as it is, not only have we
four views of Christ, taken from so many different
points, but we have four independent human witnesses,
by whose testimony the truth of the facts of the gospel
may be established.

5. I remark in the fifth place, that inspiration is not

sanctification. The possession of this gift was no proof

of the personal holiness of him who had it. Balaam was

jgjispired, and Saul prophesied with the students at Ramah,

1 8 INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES.

and so we must distinguish between the inspiration and the
holiness of the man. All gifts are not graces. Inspiration
is a gift, sanctification is a grace. The one is no guar-
antee of the other. Yet, obvious as this distinction is, it
has been often overlooked. Thus one of the most ingen-
ious of the modern opj)onents to the common view of in-
spiration has said, " We all know that Peter reasoned
very perversely about the circumcision, and that Paul at
once vanquished him in argument." But we know noth-
ing of the kind. What we do know is that Peter acted
in a manner inconsistent with his own avowed views.
Neither his teachings nor his reasonings were at fault.
It was his conduct that was blameworthy. Not his in-
spiration as a teacher, but his sanctification as a Chris-
tian, was defective.

6. Finally, the inspiration of Scripture does not in-
volve in it the infallible guidance of all the copyists and
translators of the sacred books. In the early Christian
centuries, and on till the period of the invention of print-
ing, copies could be multiplied only by transcription ;
and that must have caused many inaccuracies which only
a continuous miracle, such as we have no warrant to
expect, could have prevented. Again, the translation
from the original language into our own tongue and into
other tongues was a human work, and like everything
purely human is marred by imperfections. We must
therefore be on our guard against charging inspiration
with such mistakes as have arisen from either of these
causes ; while from the progress made in recent times

INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. 19

in the sciences of Biblical criticism and philology, we
may expect that we shall come nearer and nearer to the
sacred autographs and so minimize the difficulties that
have heretofore pressed on every theory which has been
advanced regarding inspiration.

But now, having attempted to show you what inspira-
tion is, by a process of differentiation which has made
manifest to you what it is not, I proceed to the proof
that the word of God is -authoritatively inspired. There
are many lines of induction on which we might travel to
that conclusion, but as it is impossible to take more than
one on an occasion like the present, I select the testi-
mony of the Lord Jesus himself. Remember, we have
on other grounds arrived at the conviction that he is to
be received as the Son of God, the Saviour of the world,
and so we are not reasoning in a circle when we call him
as a witness. Now on the very face of the Gospel nar-
ratives it appears that he was in the habit of appealing
to the Old Testament in such a way as implied that it
was of divine origin and authority. Of the law he
affirmed that not one jot or tittle should in any wise pass
from it till all was fulfilled. When he quoted from Da-
vid he affirmed that the psalmist "spake in the Spirit,"
or "by the Holy Ghost." He declared that "the Scrip-
tures must be fulfilled." He exhorted his hearers to
"search the Scriptures," and he made one of his argu-
ments turn on the declaration that " the Scripture cannot
be broken." And if we may take the words of those who
as apostles were his daily companions for years, or were

2 0 INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES.

specially instructed by himself, as representing his
views, then the manner in which Peter quoted from the
ancient Scripture on the day of Pentecost and the fact
that he declares that holy men of old spake as they
were moved by the Holy Ghost ; the assertion of Paul
that all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and
the method in which that apostle constantly treats the
Old Testament in his epistles ; the allegation of the
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, that God spoke
to the fathers by the prophets, and the formula by which
the same writer cites from the book of Psalms, saying,
"wherefore as the Holy Ghost saith," all indicate that
in the view of our Lord and his apostles the Old Testa-
ment was given by inspiration of God, and is of infalli-
ble authority. We cannot therefore give up the authori-
ty of the Old Testament, without compromising that of
the New; and in that fact you have the reason why so
many assailants of Christianity direct their first batteries
against Moses and the prophets. We hang the Old
Testament on the neck of the Saviour. It has the en-
dorsement and imprimatur of the Son of God, and we
receive it as inspired on his authority.

But what of that of the New } We reply that we
receive that also on the word of Christ, because of
the promises which he gave to his apostles, with refer-
ence to their public work in the organizing of the early
church, and the giving to it of the word of the truth
of the gospel. There are two classes of promises given
to the apostles, involving in them the assurance

INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES, 21

plenary inspiration. The first is to be found exclu-
sively in the three earliest gospels, and of these the
passage Matt. 10:19-20 may be taken as an example:
" When they deliver you up, take no thought how or
what ye shall speak : for it shall be given you in that
same hour what ye shall speak. For it is not ye that
speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh
in you." Now if these words mean anything at all they
imply, that on all public occasions on which the apostles
should be called to defend themselves, whether before
councils or synagogues, before governors and kings, they
would be infallibly guided by the Holy Ghost, as to what
and how they should speak. The second class of passa-
ges is to be found in the farewell discourse which John
has preserved for us in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and six-
teenth chapters of his Gospel, and which are as follows :
*'But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the
Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things,
and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I
have said unto you." " When the Comforter is come, whom
I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of
truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify
of me : and ye also shall bear witness, because ye have
been with me from the beginning." " Howbeit when he,
the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all
truth : for he shall not speak of himself ; but whatsoever
he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will show you
things to come. He shall glorify me : for he shall re-
ceive of mine, and shall show it unto you." Now that

2 2 INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES,

the apostles understood these words to mean both reve-
lation and inspiration is manifest from many statements
incidentally made in the Acts of the Apostles, and from
expressions employed by Peter and Paul in their epistles.
When the vision came to Peter on the housetop at Joppa,
he recognized it as a fulfilment of Christ's promise, and
said' regarding the truths then taught him, "The Lord
hath showed me/' So Paul, speaking of certain matters
which he narrates, says, " I have received of the Lord, that
which also I delivered unto you ;" and of a journey which
he took to Jerusalem he remarks, " I went up by revela-
tion." Again, in regard to his teaching, he says, " which
things we speak not in the words which man's wisdom
teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth." Again,
when he declares that the church is built upon the foun-
dation of the apostles and prophets, he asserts by impli-
cation, that the New Testament apostles occupy a coor-
dinate place with the Old Testament prophets, and as the
latter spoke by the Holy Ghost, so also must it have been
with the former; while Peter, in referring to Paul's
writings and classing them with the other Scriptures,
plainly implies that they also were given by inspiration
of God. I might here greatly enlarge and bring togeth-
er passages which have underlying them the claim on
the part of their authors to be received as inspired. But
I forbear. I wish to show you that as we receive the
Old Testament on the word of Christ's endorsement, so
we receive the New on the word of his promise to his
apostles. In- the one case he was looking back and

INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. 23

stamping with his authority what had been already
written ; in the other he was looking forward, and giving
his assurance that in producing all that was necessary
for the initiation and perpetuation of his church, his
apostles would be guided by infallible inspiration. Thus
on Christ's word we rest the whole Bible, and because
we believe in him, we accept it as divinely inbreathed.

But it may be well to look for a little at some of the
objections which have been raised against the plenary in-
spiration of the Scriptures. Of course it will be under-
stood that I cannot take up all the difficulties which have
been suggested. To do that would require, not a lecture,
but many volumes ; still, classifying them under three
heads, I may give you a few general principles bearing
upon each of them.

I. Take, then, the assertion that the view which we
have presented is inconsistent with the existence of
apparent discrepancies in the narratives which the sacred
writers give of the same occurrences. Now without
entering upon individual cases, it is pertinent to remind
you here of what I have already said, that inspiration
does not guarantee the infallibility of copyists, and it is
undeniable that many of these seeming inconsistencies
may be traced to the carelessness of scribes. Many of
the much-talked-of discrepancies between the books of
Kings and Chronicles, as well as a few of those presented
in the New Testament are at once accounted for in that
way ; for the slightest change in a letter or a word, such
as a weary transcriber after a long day's work would be

24 INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES,

very liable to make, accounts for the disagreement, ana
the emendation being made, harmony is at once restored.
This is especially the case in those statements in the Old
Testament which relate to numbers ; for as in the Hebrew
language there were no numerals, but the letters of the
alphabet were made to do duty for figures, and as some
of these letters differ from others only by the merest
hair-stroke, it is easy to see how in the process of trans-
cription errors have crept in ; but now that the science of
Biblical criticism is so far advanced, we may hope to get
nearer the original readings, and the more that hope is
realized, the fewer will such discrepancies become.

Again I would recall what I said regarding the differ-
ence between inspiration and verbatim reporting, and that
will help to remove much of the difficulty arising from
the existence of these apparent differences, while it leaves
the infallibility of the books intact. For the Spirit using
men, did not intend to give a complete account of all that
was said or done on any occasion. He helped each to
give what he saw or heard, so that he gave that correctly ;
and as no one man could see everything that was con-
nected with even one incident, or comprehend all that
was implied in even one saying of Christ, it could not
but be that differences should arise. You may take four
photographic views of one face which shall seem as in-
consistent with each other as the four gospels are, and
yet they shall be all correct, because they are taken
from different angles. The records are not exhaus-
tive; if they had been, they would have been too volu-

INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. 25

minous to be of service; but because they are not, we
must be content to accept them, with certain lacunae
which look like discrepancies, but which could be so fill-
ed as to remove all perplexity. Now in regard to these,
all that is needed is the suggestion of a probable solution.
The burden of proof lies here on the assailant, and he is
required to show, not only the appearance of inconsis-
tency, but also the impossibility of removing it, and that
I take it, will be impossible, for the hardest thing to do
is to prove a negative.

Further, we must not -forget, that in the process
of investigation, many of these difficulties have been
fully removed, and the fact, that every new discovery
among the monumental records of antiquity has tended
to corroborate the Scriptures, is not without its signifi-
cance in this regard. He would be a fool, who should
think of giving up the Bible as a divine book, because
he does not certainly know the unrecorded third fact,
that is needed to put the account of the suicide of Judas
in Matthew into harmony with the words used by Peter
in the first chapter of the Acts. Both accounts are in-
complete, yet both correct in what they state. If we could
have put either Matthew or Peter under cross-examina-
tion, the first question might have elicited the solution ;
but as that is now impossible, we may leave it as it is,
believing both are right, and remembering that an inspir-
ed record is one thing and an exhaustive history is quite
another, and is, in so many words disclaimed by the
author of the fourth gospel, for himself and brethren.

3

26 INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES.

II. Another class of objections is that which is
brought by those who allege that the sacred writers are
in some of their narratives inconsistent with ancient his-
torians. Now here it is pertinent to say, that inspiration
altogether apart, we have just as much reason to believe
in the accuracy of Luke or of the Chronicles of the
Kings, as we have to accept the statements of Joseph us
or Berosus. We cannot therefore condemn too severely
the conduct of these who when they find that Josephus
is silent on any matter, or says something regarding it,
which is different from the sacred books, therefore they
must be wrong and he must be right. As Alford has
said, " Josephus teems with inaccuracies," so we cannot
admit his infallibility, and let that be employed as an
engine against the Bible. Further, in some recent in-
stances the truth of the sacred narrative has been vindi-
cated in a remarkable manner. I need only refer to two,
namely, the discovery from the inscription on the great
Babylonian cylinder that the eldest son of Nabonnedus
was named Bel-shareser, and that he had been admitted
by his father to a share in the government, a key which
enables us to unlock the difficulty created by the frag-
ment of Berosus preserved by Josephus from which it
appeared that Nabonnedus the king fled to Borsippa and
there was captured by Cyrus. Thus both statements are
seen to be correct. Again the minute accuracy of Luke
which was apparently compromised by the fact that he
had called Sergius Paulus the avSi-Troroi-, or proconsul of
Cyprus, while it was alleged the proper title was procura-

INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. 27

tor, has been fully vindicated by the discovery of some
coins bearing the effigy of the Emperor Claudius, and in
the centre reverse occurs the word kvttpmv, of the Cypri-
ans, while the surrounding legend gives the title used by
Luke to a person who must have been the immediate
successor or predecessor of Sergius Paulus. Now with
these and many similar cases before us, we need not be
disturbed by the occasional appearance of discrepancy
between the sacred and profane historians. All we have
to do is to wait, and give a liberal assistance to those
who are diligently exploring Eastern lands, with the full
assurance that whatever " records leap to light," not only
will the glory of the Bible "not be shamed," but its
authority will be vindicated.

III. A third class of objections is connected with the
discoveries of modern science. It is alleged that its au-
thors could not have been inspired, because their state-
ments are declared to be inconsistent with the facts
which science has discovered. Now, in answer to this,
the following things have to be noted :

1. The Bible was not given to be a revelation of phys-
ical science ; and so whatever references it makes to
things in that department are incidental.

2. In these references its writers employ the language
of the common people of their age. They must have
done so, or they would have been unintelligible to those
to whom they spoke or wrote. A book which is to in-
struct men must employ their vocabulary. Hence, even
in speaking of God, the inspired writers refer to Him in

28 INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES.

terms which are fully appropriate only to men. Now on
the same principle as we account for the anthropomor-
phisms used by the prophets and apostles when speaking
of God, so we explain the use of common and current Ian-
guage by them on scientific subjects. There were no
other forms of speech then in use, and they had to ac-
commodate themselves to the vocabulary of the times,
just as in teaching your child you have to confine your-
self as nearly as possible to terms he understands. Had
they done otherwise, their words would have been reject-
ed by the men of their own age just for containing that
which our modern scientists complain that they omit.

3. Considering that these two things are so, the lan-
guage of the Scriptures on certain scientific facts is very
striking, and tends to the establishment of the fact that
the Bible, though never in advance of the science of any
age, is, when rightly interpreted, always abreast of sci-
ence. It has been so constructed as not to anticipate
modern discoveries by a divine revelation of the things
discovered ; and yet as science advances, the Bible is
found, on closer study, to be in harmony with it. In this
we have not only a successful reply to all objections, but
also a clear proof of the inspiration of Scripture along
another line ; for as one has acutely said, " Only one see-
ing the end from the beginning could so adjust the lan-
guage used as on the one hand to make it tell the men
of the existing generation no more than they otherwise
knew of astronomical or geological or any other natural
truth, and yet on the other to make it such that the men

INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. 29

of all future generations should be able, in the long run,
and without violence, to explain it satisfactorily in the
light of their clearer and fuller information and their
more advanced and accurate science."* In verifica-
tion of this take a few illustrations. In that part
of the Book of Job which is the direct utterance of Je-
hovah, (38:12,) we have the following passage: "Hast
thou commanded the morning since thy days ; and caus-
ed the dayspring to know his place ; that it might take
hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be
shaken out of it } It is turned as clay to the seal ; and
they stand as a garment." Now there is nothing here
to reveal to men the rotatory motion of the earth ; yet
that being discovered, how harmonious with it is the de-
scription, " It is turned as clay to the seal ;" for the mo-
tion of the clay on the cylinder as it takes the impres-
sion, like that of the modern printing-press, is precisely
analogous to that of the earth as it receives the day-
spring. Again, in Ecclesiastes i : 6, we read, " The wind
goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the
north ; it whirleth about continually ; and the wind re-
turneth again according to his circuits." This does not
indeed announce beforehand the rotatory law of storms ;
but the words are perfectly in harmony with that law,
and accurately describe the motion of cyclones, as that
has been discovered by recent meteorological observers.
In the same chapter (verse 7) we have words which, with-
out describing the process of evaporation, yet imply all

* "Reason and Revelation," by R. S. Candlish, D. D., pp. 80-82.

8*

30 INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES.

that we now mean by that phrase : " All the rivers run
into the sea ; yet the sea is not full ; unto the place from
whence the rivers come, thither they return again." And
Amos has employed language which clearly presupposes
that which modern investigations have ascertained
when he says, " Seek him that maketh the seven stars,
and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the
morning, and maketh the day dark with night ; that call-
eth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon
the face of the earth; the Lord is his name." (Amos
5 : 8.) So again, when the Lord Jesus, in defending him-
self (John 5:17) from the accusation of Sabbath-break-
ing, says, " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work," he
says nothing directly about the length of the days in the
Creation week ; but if the view which regards them as
long periods be accepted, see what force it gives to his
argument, as we amplify it thus : " We are living now in
the seventh day of the Creation week. This is the time
of Jehovah's rest. We have now no work of creation
going on ; no special additions have been made to the
various orders of plants and animals on the surface of
the earth since man appeared; and in that sense God
has been resting. But though he has not called any-
thing new into existence, he has been continuously at
work in upholding all that he has made, and he has put
forth special remedial efforts for the restoration of man
to the state in which he was formed at first, and from
which he fell by his own sin. If, therefore, during the
Sabbath of Creation's week, and while God is resting, he

INSFIRA2YON OF THE SCRIPTURES. 31

can yet put forth special exertions for the redemption
and education of men, I am only following in the same
line when, on the Sabbath of an ordinary week, and while
I am resting from labor in the ordinary sense of that
term, I put forth my energy in the restoration of an im-
potent man to health. My Father worketh hitherto, and
I work." If the Sabbath of Creation's week has lasted
for nearly six thousand years, and for anything we can
see may last for thousands of years to come, there is not
only no incongruity, but also perfect consistency, in sup-
posing that each of the other days was a period long
enough for all the requirements of modern science.

And, to take only one example more, when Paul in
his argument on the resurrection, says, (i Cor. 15:40,
41,) "There are also celestial bodies and bodies terres-
trial : but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory
of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the
sun, and another glory of the stars ; for one star differeth
from another star in glory," he is not referring to de-
grees of glory among the saints in heaven, but illustra-
ting the truth that the resurrection-body will be fitted
for the resurrection-life, even as the body of the fish is
for swimming, and that of the bird for flying, and as the
physical composition of each heavenly body is adapted
to its place in the universe. We had to take all that on
his word until recent times ; but now, by the invention
and application of the spectroscope, astronomical observ-
ers, by their analysis of the varying lines in the spectrum
of each, declare that it is indeed true that " one star dif-

32 INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES.

fereth from another star in glory." Thus the latest science
casts its light upon the words of Paul, whose writing
here is abreast of the revelations of the spectroscope,
but by no means an anticipation of them. These in-
stances must suffice, but are enough to reassure us, and
to make us feel that the word of God has everything to
hope and nothing to fear from the advance of science.

For the rest, it may do good service to point out where
precisely the alleged discrepancies between the Word of
God and science begin to emerge. " The scientific man
believes in the infallibility of nature ; the theologian be-
lieves in the infallibility of Scripture ; and the differ-
ences, of which so much is made in these days, lie not
between nature and revelation in themselves, but be-
tween human interpretations of them. The man of sci-
ence interprets his facts in a certain way, and makes cer-
tain deductions from them. These interpretations and
deductions, however, are not infallible ; they are not yet
unquestioningly received by scientific men themselves.
It is too soon, therefore, to speak and reason as if they
were absolutely correct.

"Again, the theologian's interpretations of Scripture
are by no means infallible. Many of them which were
accepted in past days, have been disproved, and others
substituted for them ; and of many more it must be said
that they are still unsettled. For instance, he would be
a rash man who should assert that he has discovered
with infallible accuracy, the meaning of the first chapter
of Genesis ; or should affirm that he can satisfactorily

INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. 33

unravel the chronology of the early chapters of that
book. These questions, and many others like them, are
still subjtcdice, and the wise course for all parties to this
modern misunderstanding is to wait, with mutual respect
for each other, until God, in his providence and by his
Spirit, shall lead to such interpretations of nature on the
one hand, and of Scripture on the other, as shall make
manifest their perfect harmony. Let the man of science
go on with perseverance, and let him not take any mis-
chievous delight in flinging his hypotheses at the Word
of God. Let the theologian also prosecute his inquiries
with diligence and devoutness, and let him give over
calling men of science by evil names. They seem often
to be working against each other; but they are in reality
working for each other and for the truth. In the forma-
tion of the tunnel though Mont Cenis, the workmen be-
gan at opposite ends, and approached each other with
drilling machines apparently directed against each other,
but met at length in the middle to congratulate each
other on the completion of their great undertaking, be-
cause they were working under the same supervision.
So it will be with our theologians and men of science.
God, the great architect of providence, is superintending
both ; and by-and-by, through the labors of both, the
mountain of difficulty will be tunnelled through, no more
to form a barrier in the inquirer's way.

" Much also may be done in this matter by calling at-
tention to such principles as these, namely, that the Bi-
ble was not designed to be a revelation of physical

34 INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES.

science ; that its references to all such subjects are
merely incidental, and made in popular language ; that,
if it had alluded to such subjects in other than popular
language, it would have been unintelligible to those to
whom it was first given, and would have been rejected by
them as containing that which some modern philosophers
complain that it does not contain ; that, considering the
fact that it refers only incidentally to these topics, its
language concerning some of them is occasionally very
striking, and fully in harmony with modern discoveries ;
and finally, that considering the course of things in the
past, and how what seemed at one time to be in hopeless
antagonism to God's Word is now held intelligently and
consistently with it, the wise course will be for both
sides to wait before the one tries to prove that there is
contradiction, or the other to enforce a harmony.

" Moreover, we should not allow it to be forgotten that,
all advances of modern, science notwithstanding, there
will ever be deep, solemn, all-important experiences in
the human soul which only God's gospel can meet ; and
if we dig down to these we shall go so much lower than
science, that the water which she has apparently drawn
from our well will return into our spring. There will
still be the poison of sin, which no earthly antidote can
neutralize, and which can be counteracted only by the
blood of the Redeemer's cross. There will still be the
sorrow of bereavement, to be solaced only by the vision
of the angel at the door of the sepulchre, and the hearing
of his soothing words, 'Why seek ye the living among

INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. 35

the dead ? He is not here ; he is risen as he said ; come
see the place where the Lord lay.' There will still be
the sense of lonesomeness stealing over the heart, even
amid the bustle, and business, and prosperity of the
world, to be dispelled only by the consciousness of the
Saviour's presence. There will still be the spirit-shud-
der at the thought of death, which only faith in Christ
can change into the desire to depart and to be with him,
which is far better. For these things science has no
remedy, and philosophy no solace, and, strong in its adap-
tation to these irrepressible necessities of the human
heart, the gospel of Christ will outlive all philosophical
attack, and survive every form of scientific unbelief.

" But though all that is true, I would not have you
speak of religion and science as if they were antagonists.
They are elder and younger sister in the same family ;
and though occasionally they may seem to be at vari-
ance, yet let but some deep grief enter into the home, or
some heavy calamity fall upon the dwelling, and all mis
understanding between them will disappear ; they will
lock themselves in each other's arms, and science will
find her resting-place on the bosom of religion. You can
afford, therefore, to bid science God-speed. Her tri-
umphs will in the end contribute to the gospel's advance-
ment. Is it not written, 'All things are yours '.^ And
you may rest assured that truth in one department can
never falsify that which, on its own evidence, has been
already ascertained to be true in another."*

* "The Ministry of the Word ;" W. M. Taylor, D. D., pp. 301-305.

36 INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES.

And now, beloved friends and fellow-laborers, if all
this be true, what new importance does it give to your
work as Sabbath-school teachers ! You are handling the
Word of God. See that you do not handle it deceitfully ;
but " as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God,
speak ye in Christ." Do not corrupt it by your own
additions, or explain it away by your own misinterpreta-
tions of its meaning, but let it be your ambition always
to let it speak for itself, for its power is in itself. " Is
not my word like as a fire .'* saith the Lord, and like a
hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces .''"

And remember also the responsibility which is con-
nected with the reading of it for yourselves. It is, in
one sense, a precious privilege to have the Bible, but its
possession involves also a fearful peril. Improved, it
may be the means of securing an entrance into glory.
Neglected, it may be the millstone round our necks to
sink us deeper in perdition. It is the glory of our age
that it has been produced at a price that puts it within
the reach of all ; but we may not forget the awful truth
which Michael Bruce has expressed in these lines, which
were found after his death on the fly-leaf of his copy of
the Scriptures :

" 'T is very vain of me to boast
How small a price this Bible cost;
The day of judgment will make clear
'Twas very cheap or very dear."

THE

Languages of the Bible,

REV. CHARLES A. BRIGGS, D, D,

PROFESSOR OF HEBREW AND COGNATE LANGUAGES, UNION THEOLOGICAL
SEMINARY, NEW YORK.

THE

Languages of the Bible

PART I.

INTRODUCTION, AND THE HEBREW LANGUAGE.

The languages of the Bible were prepared by Divine
Providence as the most suitable ones for declaring the
divine revelation to mankind. Belonging, as they do, to
the two great families of speech, the Shemitic and the
Indo-Germanic, which have been the bearers of civiliza-
tion, culture, and the noblest products of human thought
and emotion, they are themselves the highest and most
perfect developments of those families, presenting, it is
true, their contrasted features, but yet combining in a
higher unity on the principles of Pentecost, in order to
give us the complete divine revelation. Having accom-
plished this their highest purpose, they soon afterwards
became stereotyped in form, or, as they are commonly
called, dead languages, so that henceforth all successive
generations, and indeed all the families of earth, might
resort to them and find the common, divine revelation
in the same fixed and unalterable forms.

Language is the product of the human mind, as

40 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

thought and emotion are the products of man's -soul;
and therefore it depends upon the constitution of that
soul, the historical experiences of the family or race
speaking it, especially the internal experiences in culture,
civilization, morals, and religion. The connection be-
tween language and thought is not a loose one, but an
essential connection. Language is not merely a dress
that thought may put on or off at its pleasure ; it is the
body of which thought is the soul ; it is the flesh and
rounded form of which thought is the life and energy.
Hence it is that language is moulded by thought and
emotion, by experience and culture ; it is, as it were, the
speaking face of the race employing it, and it becomes
the historical mojiicment of the experience of that race ;
so that in many nations that have perished, and whose
early history is lost in primeval darkness, their language
gives us the key to their history and experience as truly
as the Parthenon tells us of the Greek mind, and the
Pyramids of the Egyptian. It is not a matter of indiffer-
ence, therefore, as to the languages that were to bear the
divine revelation ; for although the divine revelation was
designed for all races, and may be conveyed in all the
languages of earth, yet, inasmuch as it was delivered in
advancing historical development, certain particular lan-
guages must be employed as most suitable for the pur-
pose, and indeed those which could best become the
fountains for enriching the various languages of the earth.
Hence it is that we can confidently claim that there are
no languages — not even the English and the German,

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 41

which have drunk deepest from the classic springs of the
Hebrew and the Greek— that there are no languages that
could so adequately convey the divine revelation in its
simplicity, grandeur, fulness and variety, power and im-
pressiveness, as those selected by Divine Providence for
the purpose. Hence it is that no translation can ever
take the place of the original Scriptures ; for a transla-
tion is, at the best, the work of uninspired men, who,
though holy and faithful, and guided by the Spirit of
God, are yet unable to do more than give us their own
interpretation of the sacred oracles. They must enter
into the very spirit and atmosphere of the original text ;
they must think and feel with the original authors ; their
hearts must throb with the same emotion ; their minds
must move in the same lines of thinking ; they must
adapt themselves to the numerous types of character
coming from various and widely different periods of di-
vine revelation, in order to correctly apprehend the
thought and make it their own, and then reproduce it in
a foreign tongue. A mere external, grammatical, and
lexicographical translation is worthless. Unless the
spirit of the original has been not only apprehended, but
conveyed, it is no translation at all. Hence it is requi-
site that all-sided men should be chosen for this work,
or at least a body of men so selected as to embrace the
various types and phases of human experience and char-
acter. But even then the translation can only express
the theological, ethical, and practical conceptions of the

holiest and most learned men of the particular age ; and

4^

42 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

inasmuch as the divine revelation is an inspired revela-
tion, given through holy men who spake not only from
their own time and for their own time, but from and for
the timeless Spirit, the eternal ideas for all time, so the
advancing generations will ever need to understand the
word of God better than their fathers, and must, if they
are faithful, continually improve in their knowledge of the
original Scriptures, in their power of apprehending them,
of digesting them, and of reproducing them in speech
and life. How important, therefore, how essential it is,
if the church is to maintain a living connection with the
sacred Scriptures, and enter ever deeper into their spirit
and mysterious hidden life, that it should encourage a
considerable portion of its youth to pursue these studies,
and at all events insist that its ministry^ who are to train
it in the things of God, should have not merely a super-
ficial knowledge of the Bible, such as any i ay man may
readily attain, but a deep and thorough acquaintance
with the original perennial fountains of truth ; otherwise,
as church history has already sufficiently shown, these
uninspired versions will assume the place of the original
inspired word, and the interpretations of a particular
generation will become the stereotyped dogmas of many
generations, and the life of a Christian people will be cut
off from its only source of spiritual growth, and a barren
scholasticism, with its stereotyped dogmas, mechanical
institutions, and opera operata, jvill assume the place and
importance of the divine zvord and living communion
ivith God.

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 43

The languages of the Bible being the only adequate
means of conveying and perpetuating the divine revela-
tion, it is important that we should learn them not merely
from the outside, with grammar and lexicon, but also
from the inside, from a proper conception of the genius
and life of these tongues as employed by the ancient
saints, and especially of the historical genius of the lan-
guages as the sacred channels of the Spirit's thought
and life. For language is a living thmg, and has its
birth, its growth, its maturity, its decline, and its death.
Language is born, not as a system of roots or detached
words, that gradually come together by natural selection
into sentences ; for while plants may grow from roots
after they have been cut down, but do not have their
birth in roots, but in the seed-germ which contains the
plant in embryo ; so language, although it may be ana-
lyzed into roots, yet was not born in roots and never ex-
isted in roots, but came into being as sentences, (Sayce,
Principles of Comp. Philology, p. 136, seq., 2d ed., Lon-
don, 1875,) as thought is ever a sentence, and not a
word. Then as the mind develops, thought is developed
with its body, language, and thus the language grows
with the culture of a people. All languages that have
literary documents can be traced in their historical de-
velopment. Especially is this the case with the lan-
guages of the Bible ; they have a long history back of
them ; centuries of literary development were required
to produce them.

44 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE,

I. THE HEBREW LANGUAGE:

The Hebrew language was long supposed to be the
original language of mankind ; but this view can no lon-
ger be held by any philologist, for the Hebrew language,
as it appears to us in its earliest forms in the sacred
Scriptures, bears upon its face the traces of a long-pre-
vious hterary development. (Ewald, Gesch. des Volkes
Israel, 3te Ausg. Gott., 1864, s. 78, seq. Ewald, Ausf.
Lehrb. des Heb. Sprache, /te Ausg. Gott, 1863, s. 23.)
This is confirmed by comparing it with the other lan-
guages of the same family. Thus the Shemitic family
may be divided into four groups : i. The Southern
group — Arabic, Ethiopic, etc. 2. The Aramaic group —
Syriac, Chaldee, etc. 3. The Hebrew group — the Phoe-
nician, Hebrew, etc. 4. The Assyrian and Babylonian.
Now these languages are more closely related to one
another than those of the Indo-Germanic family, the peo-
ple speaking them having been confined to comparatively
narrow limits, and crowded on the north by the Indo-
Germanic tongues, and on the south by the Turanian.
Again, these languages have, for the most part, given us
a considerable literature ; they were spoken by cultivated
nations of the ancient world, mediating between the great
centres of primitive Turanian culture — the Euphrates
and the Nile. Everything seems to indicate that they
all emigrated from a common centre in the desert on the
south of Babylonia, (vide Schrader, Die Abstammun;;
dcr Chaldiier und die Ursitze der Semiten, Zeitschrift d.

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 45

Deutsch. M. G., 1873,) the Arabic group separating
first, next the Aramaic, th^n the Hebrew, while the
Babylonian gained ultimately the mastery of the original
Accadian of Babylonia, and the Assyrian founded the
great empire on the Tigris. Now the book of Genesis
(11 :3i) represents Abram as going forth from this cen-
tral seat of Ur of the Chaldees, going first northward
into Mesopotamia, and then emigrating to Canaan, just
as we learn from other sources the Canaanites had done
before him. The monuments of Ur reveal that about
this time, 2,000 b. c, it was the seat of a great literary
development, (The Chaldean Account of Genesis, etc., p.
29, seq. Geo. Smith, New York, 1876;) so that the old
objection that Abram and his children did not know how
to read and write has been for ever exploded. The father
of the faithful, whose origin was in that primitive seat of
culture, Ur, and who lived as a chieftain of military
prowess (Gen. 14) and exalted religious and moral char-
acter among the cultivated nations of Canaan, and who
was received at the court of Pharaoh — that other great
centre of primitive culture — on friendly terms, could not
but have, to some extent at least, made himself acquaint-
ed with their literature and culture. Still further, the
old and vexed question, whether Abraham adopted the
language of the Canaanites, or brought the Hebrew with
him from the East, must now be regarded as unimpor-
tant, for the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian are nearer
to the Hebrew and Phoenician than they are to the other
Shemitic families, (Sayce, Assyrian Grammar, p. i, seq.

45 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

London, 1872;) so that if the languages, as now pre
sented to us, differ less than the Romance languages — ■
the daughters of the Latin — in their earlier stages in the
time of Abraham, their difference could scarcely have
been more than dialectic. Now the ancient Phoenician,
the nearest akin to the Hebrew, was the language of
commerce and intercourse between the nations, as the
Aramaic, which took its place after the fall of Tyre, and
the Greek after the conquest of Alexander. Thus the
Hebrew language, as a dialect of the Canaanite and its
closely related Babylonian, had already a considerable
historical literary development prior to the entrance of
Abram into the Holy Land. Hence the old idea that
Egypt was the mother of Hebrew civilization and culture
has been utterly disproved ; for it is one of the most re-
markable facts of history that the Hebrews should remain
for so long a period in Egyptian bondage, and yet retain
their Eastern civilization, culture, and language, so that
at the Exodus they shook off at once all connection with
the Egyptian civilization and culture as utterly alien and
antagonistic to their own. For the very peculiarities of
the Hebrew language, literature, and civilization, are
those of the Babylonian. The biblical traditions of the
Creation, of the Deluge, of the Tower of Babel, are those
of the Assyrians and Babylonians. The sacred rest-day,
with the significance of the number seven, the months,
seasons, and years, the weights and measures, coins —
all are of the same origin. Still further, that most stri-
king feature of Hebrew poetry — the parallelism of mem-

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 47

bers — is already in the oldest Accadian hymns. Ves, the
very temptation of the Hebrews to the worship of Ash-
toreth and Baal, of Chemosh and Moloch, are those that
have ruined the other branches of their common race.
(Vide Schrader, Semitismus imd Babylonismus. Jahrb.
V. Prot. Theol, 1875.) How shall we account for these
things unless we suppose that they were brought with
him by Abram in his emigration to Canaan ? Fixing
our attention upon the single feature of the parallelism
of members, how could the Hebrews have retained it as
the essential feature of their poetry, if they had no poetic
treasures preserved among them, and the poetic spirit
had remained undeveloped with them ? Without ven-
turing upon an opinion with reference to the amount of
literature to be attributed to these early times, but taking
the Pentateuch as it is, we see therein a language admi-
rably adapted for its purpose, the product of previous
literary development. Whether Moses wrote the entire
Pentateuch or not, yet all will admit a considerable Mo-
saic nucleus. This being true, the principles of language
seem to require either that the ancient records have been
improved by later editors, or that there must have been
a large body of sacred literature to give the language
that stable character that marks it throughout the entire
sacred Scriptures ; for while there is certainly a develop-
ment in the Hebrew language of the Bible, and three
periods may be readily distinguished, yet the differences
between the earlier and the classic period are but slight,
the chief distinguishing features being in the later wri-

48 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

tings of the Chronicler, of Ecclesiastes, Daniel, and the
post-exile prophets, all showing a decline from the classic
models and an approximation to the Aramaic. Sacred
books give languages a permanence such as no other
literature can give them. This is evident not only from
the German Bible of Luther, and King James' English
version, which have kept these great languages compar-
atively stationary, but also from the Koran, which has
kept the Arabic so fixed to its classic style that it has
taken a thousand years for the vulgar Arabic to reach
that stage of linguistic development presented in the
earliest Hebrew of the Bible. Hence we contend that
unless the language of the writings of Moses has been
changed by later editors — an incredible supposition — at
least a considerable portion of the Pentateuch must be
assigned to his times. Moses is certainly the father of
the Hebrew language and literature, as Luther is of the
German. He moulded its fundamental types, and start-
ed it in those directions that it has ever since maintained.
As Abraham had gone forth from the culture of Babylo-
nia to enter upon the pilgrim life of believing communion
with El Skaddaty so Moses went forth from the culture
of Egypt to become the representative of yahveh, and
organize a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, a theocracy
the vital principles of which became reverential fear and
worship of the personal God of the covenant.

Thus the Hebrew language became, in its essential
spirit and genius, a religious language, the holy tongue
of the holy people of God, and Moses laid its foundations

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 49

in a literature of sacred history, poetry, and prophecy.
The history of the books' of Moses is the fountain of all
subsequent history. The grand hymn, Exod. 15, the
prayer, Psa. 90, the prophetic didactic poem, Deut. 32,
are the great boughs of lyric poetry upon which the
Psalter subsequently burst forth in all its glory ; and his
prophetic discourses in Deuteronomy are the sources, as
they give the key to all subsequent prophecy.

Looking now at the language as religious according
to its genius, and considering it in its fundamental types
and their historical development, we observe the follow-
ing as some of its most prominent characteristics.

I. It is remarkably simple and natzcral. This is in-
deed a common feature of the Shemitic family. As
compared with the Indo-Germanic, they represent an
earlier stage in the development of mankind, the child-
hood of the race. Theirs is an age of perception, con-
templation, and observation, not of conception, reflec-
tion, and reasoning. Things are apprehended accord-
ing to their appearance as phenomena, and not accord-
ing to their internal character as noiLmena. The form,
the features, the expressions of things are seen and
most nicely distinguished, but not their inward being;
the effects are observed, but these are not traced through
a series of causes, but only either to the immediate cause
or else by a leap to the ultimate cause. Hence the lan-
guage that expresses such thought is simple and natural.
We see this in its sounds, which are simple and mani-
fold, disliking diphthongs and compound letters ; in its

50 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

roots uniformly of three consonants, generally accompa-
nied by a vowel ; in its inflections, mainly by internal
modifications ; in its simple arrangement of clauses in
the sentence, with a limited number of conjunctions.
Thus the conjunction vav plays a more important part in
the language than all conjunctions combined, distinguish-
ing by a simple modification of vocalization, accentua-
tion, or position, between clauses coordinate, circumstan-
tial, or subordinate, and in the latter between those indi-
cating purpose or result. This is the most remarkable
feature of the language, without a parallel in any other
tongue. And so the poetry is constituted on the simple
principle of the parallelism of members, these being syn-
thetic, antithetic, or progressive ; and in the latter case
advancing, like the waves of the sea, in the most beauti-
ful and varied forms. The only other principle of He-
brew poetry is the play of the tone, the force of which
has not yet been sufficiently determined, but certainly
had striking effects in the living language. (Reuss, Heb.
Poesie, Herzog. Real. Encyk., V., s. 607.) Hence it is
that the Hebrew language is the easiest to render into a
foreign tongue, and that Hebrew poetry can readily be
made the common property of mankind.

2. We observe a striking correspondence of the lan-
guage to the tJiougJit. This rests upon a radical differ-
ence hetween the Shemitic and Indo-Germanic family in
their relative appreciation of the material and the form
of language. (Vid. Grill, liber d. Verhaltniss d. indogerm.
u. d. semit. Sprachwurzeln in the Zeitschrift f. d. m. G.

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 51

1873.) The form, the artistic expression, is to the He-
brew a very small affair. The idea, the thought, and
emotion, flow forth freely and embody themselves with-
out any external restraint in the speech. This is clear
from the method of inflection, which is mostly by inter-
nal changes in the root, expressing the passive by chan-
ging the clear vowel into the dull vowel, the intensive by
doubling the second radical, the pure idea of the root by
the extreme shortness of the infinitive and the segholate,
the causative and the reflexive by lengthening the stem
from without, and, as far as cases and moods exist, ex-
pressing them harmoniously by the three radical short
vowels.

How beautiful in form, as well as sense, is the ab-
stract plural of intensity by which Elohim expresses the
fulness of the idea of God conceived as the one to be
revered ; by which cJiayyim expresses the fulness of life,
and which is employed in such passages as Eccles. 5 : 8,
where the exaltation of God over all earthly judges would
be represented,

*' For high over high watcheth
The highest over them."

So in the dependence of the construct relation, and the
use of the suffixes. But perhaps this feature is most
striking in Hebrew poetry where the absence of an ar-
tistic form is most apparent. We see, with a general
harmony of lines and strophes, that without any rule, but
with the utmost freedom, the proportion in length and
number is frequently broken through. And though the

52 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

Hebrew poet uses the refrain, yet he likes to modify it,
as in the lament of David over Jonathan, 2 Sam. i : 19-
27, the 80th Psalm, and the magnificent prophecy, Isaiah
40-66. Again, though the Hebrew poet uses the alpha-
bet to give his lines or strophes a sort of regularity in
order, using it as so many stairs up which to climb in
praise, in pleading, in lamentation, and in advancing in-
struction, yet he by no means binds himself to an equal
number of lines, or even measure of length ; and, apparent-
ly without necessity at times, breaks through his alpha-
bet itself. Free as the ocean is the poet's emotion, rising
like the waves in majestic strivings, heaving as an agi-
tated sea, ebbing and flowing like the tide in solemn and
measured antithesis, sporting like the wavelets upon a
sandy beach.

3. The Hebrew language has a wonderful majesty and
sublimity. This arises partly from its original religious
genius, but chiefly from the sublime materials of its
thought. God, the only true God, Jahveh, the Holy Re-
deemer of his people, is the central theme of the Hebrew
language and literature, a God not apart from nature and
not involved in nature, no Pantheistic God, no mere De-
istic God, but a God who enters into sympathetic rela-
tions with his creatures, who is recognized and praised,
as well as ministered unto by the material creation.
Hence there is a realism in the Hebrew language that
can nowhere else be found to the same extent. The
Hebrew people were as realistic as the Greek were ideal-
istic. _ Their God is not a God thought out, reasoned out

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 53

as an ultimate cause, or chief of a Pantheon, but a per-
sonal God, known by them in his association with them
by a proper name, Jahveh. Hence the so-called anthropo-
morphisms and anthropopathisms of the Old Testament,
so alien to the Indo-Germanic mind that an Occidental
theology must explain them away, from an incapacity to
enter into that bold and sublime realism of the Hebrews.
Thus, again, man is presented to us in all his naked real-
ity, in his weakness and sins, in his depravity and wretch-
edness, as well as in his bravery and beauty, his holiness
and wisdom. In the Hebrew heroes we see men of like
passions with ourselves, and feel that their experience is
the key to the joys and sorrows of our life. So also in
their conception of nature. Nature is to the Hebrew
poet all aglow with the glory of God, and intimately asso-
ciated with man in his origin, history, and destiny. There
is no such thing as science ; that was for the Indo-Ger-
manic mind ; but. they give us that v/nich science never
gives, that which science is from its nature unable to
present us : namely, those concrete relations, those ^x-
^ro-ssivQ featin^es of nature that declare to man their Mas-
ter's mind and character, and claim human sympathy and
protection as they yearn with man for the Messianic fu-
ture. Now the Hebrew language manifests this realism
on its very face. Its richness in synonyms is remarkable.
It is said that the Hebrew language has, relatively to the
English, ten times as many roots and ten times fewer
words, (Grill, in 1. c. ;) and that while the Greek language
has 1,800 roots to 100,000 words, the Hebrew has 2,000

54 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE,

roots to 10,000 words. (Bottcher, Ausf. Lehrbuch d.
Heb. Sprache, I, s. 8. Leipzig, 1866.) This richness in
synonyms is appalling to the Indo-Germanic scholar who
comes to the Hebrew from the Latin and the Greek,
where the synonyms are more or less accurately defined.
But nothing of the kind has yet been done by any She-
mitic scholar, so far as I know. What will you do with
a language that has fifty-five words for destroy, sixty for
break, and seventy-four for takef (Girdlestone, Synonyms
of the Old Test., p. 15. London, 1871.) It is exceed-
ingly doubtful whether this richness of synonyms can be
reduced to a system and the terms sharply and clearly
defined ; the differences are like those of the peculiar
gutturals of the Shemitic tongues, so delicate and subtle
that they can hardly be mastered by the Western tongue
or ear. So these synonyms can hardly be apprehended
and conveyed into languages so poor when compared
with such wealth.

This richness of synonym is connected with a cor-
responding richness of expression in the synonymous
clauses that play such an important part in Hebrew
poetry, and indeed are the reason of its wonderful rich-
ness and majesty of thought. Thus the sacred poet and
prophet plays upon his theme as upon a many-stringed
instrument, bringing out a great variety of tone and mel-
ody, advancing in graceful steppings or stately march-
ings to the climax, or dwelling upon the theme with an
inexhaustible variety of expression and coloring. The
Hebrew language is like the rich and glorious verdure of

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 55

Lebanon, or as the lovely face of the Shunamite, dark as
the tents of Kedar, yet rich in color as the curtains of
Solomon, or her graceful form, which is so rapturously
described as she discloses its beauties in the dance of the
hosts. (Song of Songs 1:5; 7 : 1-7.) It is true that
Hebrew literature is not as extensive as the Greek ; it is
confined to history, lyric poetry, and prophecy; but in
these departments it presents the grandest productions of
the human soul. Its history gives us the origin and des-
tiny of our race, unfolds the story of redemption, dealing
now with the individual, then with the family and nation,
and at times widening so as to take into its field of repre-
sentation the most distant nations of earth ; it is a his-
tory in which God is the great actor, in which sin and
holiness are the chief factors. Its poetry stirs the heart
of mankind with hymns and prayers, with sentences of
wisdom; and in the heroic -struggles of a Job, and the
conquering virtue of a Shunamite, there is imparted
strength to the soul and vigor to the character of man
and woman transcending the influence of the godlike
Achilles or the chaste Lucretia ; while the second half
of Isaiah presents the sublimest aspirations of man.
Where shall we find such images of beauty, such wealth
of illustration, such grandeur of delineation, such majes-
tic representations .-* It seems as if the prophet grasped
in his tremendous soul the movements of the ages, and
saw the very future mirrored in the mind of God.

4. The Hebrew language is remarkable for its life
a.nd fcrjor. This is owuig to the emotional and hearty

56 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

character of the people. There is an artlessness, self-
abandonment, and whole-souledness in the Hebrew
tongue ; it is transparent as a glass, so that we see through
it as into the very souls of the people. There is none of
that reserve, that cool and calm deliberation, that self-
consciousness, that characterize the Greek. (Ewald,
s. 33 ; Bottcher, s. 9. Bertheau, in Herzog. Real. Ency-
clopadie, v. s. 613.) The Hebrew language is distin-
guished by the strength of its consonants and the weak-
ness of its vowels ; so that the consonants give the word
a stability of form in which the vowels have the greatest
freedom of movement. The vowels circulate in the
speech as the blood of the language. Hence the free-
dom in the varying expressions of the same root and the
fervor of its full-toned forms. And if we can trust the
Masoretic system of accentuation and vocalization, the
inflection of the language "depends upon the dislike of
the recurrence of two vowelless consonants, and hence
the vocal sheva and the half-open syllable ; and on the
power of the accent over the vocalization not only of the
accented syllable, but also of the entire word, and hence
the pretonic kametz. This gives the language a won-
derful flexibility and elasticity. In the Hebrew tongue
the emotions overpower the thoughts and carry them on
in the rushing stream to the expression. Hence their
literature has a power over the souls of mankind. The
language is as expressive of emotion as the face of a
modest and untutored child, and the literature is but the
speaking face of the heart of the Hebrew people. The

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 57

Psalms of David touch a chord in every soul, and inter-
pret the experience of all the world. The wise sentences
of Solomon come to us as the home-truths, as the social
and political maxims that sway our minds and direct our
Hves. The prophets present to us the objective omnipo-
tent truth, which, according to the beautiful story of Ze-
rubbabel, is the mightiest of all, flashing conviction like
the sun and cutting to the heart as by a sharp two-edged
sword. So with the history ; it presents to us the simple
facts of the lives of individuals and of nations in the light
of the Divine countenance, speaking to our hearts and
photographing upon us pictures of real life.

These are some of the most striking features of the
Hebrew language, which have made it the most suitable
of all to give to mankind the elementary religious truths
and facts of divine revelation. The great body of the
Bible, four-fifths of the sum total of God's word, is in this
tongue. It is no credit to a Christian people that the
Hebrew language has no place at all in the most of our
colleges and universities, so called ; that its study has
been confined, for the most part, to theological semina-
ries and the students for the ministry. It is not strange
that the Old Testament has been neglected in the pul-
pit, the Sabbath-school, and the family, so that many
minds, even of the ministry, have doubted whether it was
any longer to be regarded as the word of God. It is not
strange that Christian scholars, prejudiced by their train-
ing in the languages and literature of Greece and Rome,
should be unable to enter into the spirit and appreciate

58 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

the peculiar features of the Hebrew language and litera-
ture, and so fail to understand the elements of a divine
revelation. Separating the New Testament and the
words and work of Jesus and his apostles from their
foundation and their historical preparation, they have
not caught the true spirit of the gospel, nor apprehended
it in its unity and variety as the fulfilment of the law
and the prophets. But this is not all, for I shall now
attempt to show you that the other languages of the
Bible, the Aramaic and the Greek, have been moulded
and transformed by the theological conceptions and
moral ideas that had been developing in the Hebrew
Scriptures, and which, having been ripened under the
potent influence of the Divine Spirit, were about to burst
forth into bloom and eternal fruitfulness in these tongues
prepared by Divine Providence for the purpose. The
Hebrew language is, as we have seen, the language of
religion, and moulded entirely by religious and moral
ideas and emotions. The Greek and the Aramaic are of
an entirely different character ; they were not, as the
Hebrew, cradled and nursed, trained from infancy to
childhood, armed and equipped in their heroic youth with
divine revelation, but they were moulded outside of the
realm of divine revelation, and only subsequently adapt-
ed for the declaration of sacred truth. And first this
was the case with the Aramaic.

PART II.

THE ARAMAIC AND THE GREEK LANGUAGES,
AND CONCLUSION.

THE ARAMAIC LANGUAGE

Goes back in its history to the most primitive times.
It is the farthest developed of the Shemitic family,
showing a decline, a decrepitude in its poverty of forms
and vocalization, in its brevity and abruptness, in its
pleonasm and incorporation of a multitude of foreign
words. It was the language of those races of Syria and
Mesopotamia that warred with the Egyptians and Assyr-
ians, and perhaps, as Gladstone suggests, took part in
the Trojan war, (Gladstone's Homeric Synchronism, N.
Y. 1876, p. 173,) who, according to Sayce, (The Hama-
thite Inscriptions, Trans. Society of Bib. Archaeology,
London, 1876, p. 30,) used the earUest system of writing,
and were the agents through whom both the Hebrew and
the Greek alphabets were conveyed to those peoples. At
all events the Aramaic became the language of commerce
and intercourse between the nations during the Persian
period, taking the place of the Phoenician, as it was in
turn supplanted by the Greek. The children of Judah
having been carried into captivity and violently separated
from their sacred places and the scenes of their history,

6o LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

gradually acquired this commercial and common lan-
guage of intercourse, so that ere long it became the lan-
guage of the Hebrew people, the knowledge of the ancient
Hebrew being confined to the learned and the higher
ranks of society. Hence even in the books of Ezra and
Daniel, considerable portions were written in Aramaic.

This Aramaic is called the Biblical Chaldee, to dis-
tinguish it from the Chaldee of the Targums, but really
gives us an older type of the language. The Aramaic
continued to be the language of the Jews during the
Persian, Greek, and Roman periods, and was the com-
mon speech of Palestine in the times of our Lord,
(Schtirer Neutestament. Zeitgesch., s. 372, Leipzig, 1874,)
although it had long ceased to be the language of com-
merce and intercourse, the Greek having taken its
place, and gradually penetrated from the commercial
and official circles even to the lowest ranks of society.
Thus there was a mingling of a Greek population with
the Shemitic races, not only in the Greek colonies of
the Decapolis and the cities of the seacoast of Palestine,
but also in the great centres of Tiberias, Samaria, and
even in Jerusalem itself. Greek manners and customs
were, under the influence of the Herodians and the Saddu-
cees, pressing upon the older Aramaic and Hebrew, not
without the stout resistance of the Pharisees. The
language of our Saviour, however, in which he delivered
his discourses and instructions, was undoubtedly the
Aramaic, although we could hardly deny him the knowl-
edge and use of the Greek. For not only do the Ara-

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 61

maic terms that he used, which are retained at times by
the evangelists, and the proper names of his disciples,
but also the very structure and style of his discourses,
show the Aramaic characteristics. For our Saviour's
methods of delivery and style of instruction were essential-
ly the same as those of the Rabbins of his time. Hence we
should not think it strange, that from this Aramaic liter-
ature alone we can bring forward parallels to the wise
sentences and moral maxims of the Sermon on the
Mount, the rich and beautiful parables, by which he
illustrated his discourses, and the fiery zeal of his denun-
ciation of hypocrisy, together with the profound depths of
his esoteric instruction. Our Saviour used the Aramaic
language and methods, in order thereby to reach the
people of his times, and place in the prepared Aramaic
soil the precious seeds of heavenly truth. Now it is the
providential significance of the Aramaic language that it
thus prepared the body for the thought of our Saviour.
It is a language admirably adapted, by its simplicity, per-
spicuity, precision, and definiteness, with all its awk-
wardness, for the associations of every-day life. It is the
language for the lawyer and the scribe, the pedagogue
and the pupil ; indeed, the English language of the She--
mitic family. (Volck Herzog. Real Encyklopaedie, new
edition, i, 603.) Thus the earlier Aramaic of the Bible
gives us only official documents, letters, and decrees, or
else simple narrative. And as moulded by the Jewish
people after the return from exile, it was through the
giving of the sense of the original Hebrew Scriptures.

6- LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

(Neh. 8 :8.) The whole life of the Jewish people, subse-
quent to the exile, was in this giving the sense of the
Hebrew Scriptures, both in the Halacha, of the rabbini-
cal schools, and the Hagada of the synagogue and the
social circle. It is true that the Halacha was developed
in the rival schools of Shammai and Hillel into the most
subtle questions of casuistry, and our Saviour often se-
verely reproved the Pharisaic spirit for its subtlety and
scholasticism ; yet not unfrequently he employed their
methods, to the discomfiture of his opponents. (Weiz-
acker, Untersuchungen liber die ev. Geschichte, s. 358 seq.
Gotha, 1864,) as in Matt. 22 : 15-46, although his own
spirit was rather that of the old prophets than of the
scribes. The Hagada was developed by the rabbins into
a great variety of forms of ethical wisdom and legend.
This we see already in the apocryphal books of Wisdom,
in the stories of Zerubbabel, of Judith, of Susanna, and of
Tobith. (Zunz, die Gottesdienstlichen Vbrtrage, der
Juden, Berlin, 1832, s. 42 ; s. 100 ; s. 120 ; Etheridge, In-
troduction to Hebrew Literature, London, 1856, p. 102,^^^.)
This latter method was the favorite one of our Sav-
iour, as calculated for the common people, and to it we
may attribute the parables, and the sweet sentences of
the Sermon on the Mount, which, though after the man-
ner of the scribes, (Hausrath, Die Zeit Jesus, Heidel-
berg, 1868, s. 90,) have yet a clearness and transparency as
the atmosphere of the Holy Land itself, a richness and
simplicity as the scarlet flower of the fields he loved so
well, a calm majesty and profound mystery as the great

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 63

deep, for he was the expositor of the divine mind, heart,
and being, to mankind. (John i : 18.)

The office of the Aramaic language was still furthei
to mediate between the old world and the new — the He-
brew and the Greek ; for the Greek language was the
chosen one to set forth the divine revelation in its com-
pletion.

THE GREEK LANGUAGE

Was born and grew to full maturity outside of the sphere
of the divine revelation, and yet was predestined, to use
the words of my colleague, (Schaff, Hist, of the Apostolic
Church, p. 145, New York, 1859,) "^s the most beauti-
ful, rich, and harmonious language ever spoken or writ-
ten" "to form the pictures of silver in which the golden
apple of the gospel should be preserved for all genera-
tions."

For as Alexander the Great broke in pieces the Ori-
ental world-monarchies that fettered the kingdom of
God, and prepared a theatre for its world-wide expan-'
sion, so did the Greek language and literature that his
veterans carried with them prove more potent weapons
than their swords and spears for transforming the civili-
zation of the East and preparing a language for the uni-
versal gospel. The Greek language is the beautiful
flower, the elegant jewel, the most finished masterpiece
of Indo-Germanic thought In its early beginning we
see a number of dialects spoken by a brave and warlike
people, struggling with one another, as well as with ex-

64 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

ternal foes, maintaining themselves successfully against
the Oriental and African civilizations, w^hile at the same
time they appropriated those elements of culture which
they could incorporate into their own original thought
and life ; a race of heroes such as the earth has nowhere
else produced, fighting their way upward into light and
culture until they attained the towering summits of an
art, a literature, and a philosophy, that has even been
the admiration and wonder of mankind. As Pallas
sprang forth in full heroic stature from the head of her
father Zeus, so Greek literature sprang into historical
existence in the matchless Iliad. Its classic period was
constituted by the heroism and genius of the Athenian
republic, which worked even more mightily in language,
literature, and art, than in the fields of politics and war,
producing the histories of Thucydides and Xenophon,
the tragedies of an ^schylus and Sophocles, the philos-
ophy of a Socrates and Plato, the oratory of a Demos-
thenes and ^schines. Looking at the Greek language
before it became the world-language, and so the language
of a divine revelation, we observe that its characteristic
features are in strong contrast with those of the Hebrew
tongue,

I. The Greek language is complex and artistic. As
the Hebrew mind perceives and contemplates, the Greek
conceives and reflects. Hence the Greek etymology is
elaborate in its development of forms from a few roots,
in the declensions and cases of nouns, in the conjuga-
tions, tenses, and moods of the verb, giving the idea a

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 65

great variety of modifications. Hence the syntax is ex-
ceedingly complex in the varied use of the conjunctions
and particles, the intricate arrangement of the sentences
as they may be combined into grand periods, which re-
quire the closest attention of a practised mind to follow-
in their nice discriminations and adjustments of the
thought. (Curtius, Griech. Gesch., Berlin, 1868, 3d Aufl.
II. s. 19, 20.) Hence the complex and delicate rules of
prosody, with the great variety of metres and rhythms.
The Greek mind would wrestle with the external world,
would search out and explore the reason of things, not
being satisfied with \h.Q phenomena, but grasping for the
noiimena. Thus a rich and varied literature was devel-
oped, complex in character, the epos, the drama, the phi-
losophical treatise, and scientific discussion, which are
purely Greek, and could have little place among the
Hebrews. (Donaldson, The New Cratylus, 3d ed., p.

153)

2. The Greek language is characterized by its atten-
tion to the form or style of its speech, not to limit the
freedom of the movement of thought and emotion, but
to direct them in the channels of clear, definite, logical
sentences, and beautiful, elegant, and artistic rhetorical
figures. The Greek was a thorough artist ; and as the
palaces of his princes, the temples of his gods, the im^
ages of his worship, his clothing and his armor, must
be most perfect in form and exquisite in finished decora-
tion, so the language, as the palace, the dress of his
thought, must be symmetrical and elegant. (Curtius,

66 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

Griech. Gesch., L, p. 20, 21.) Hence there is no lan-
guage that has such laws of euphony, involving changes
in vocalization and the transposition and mutation of let-
ters ; for their words must be musical, their clauses harmo-
nious, their sentences and periods symmetrical. And so
they are combined in the most exquisite taste in the dia-
logues of the philosophers, the measures of the poet, the
stately periods of the historian and the orator. The sen-
tences, as Pres. Adams beautifully expresses it, (Charge,
on occasion of the induction of Dr. Shedd as Professor
of Bib. Literature; New York, 1864, p. 10,) "are intri-
cate, complex, involved like an ivory cabinet, till the dis-
covery of its nominative gives you the key for unlocking
the mechanism and admiring the ingenuity and beauty
of its rhetoric."

3. The Greek language is thus beautiful 2Si^ finished.
The Greek mind was essentially ideal, not accepting the
external world as its own, but transforming it to suit its
genius and its taste. This was owing to its original hiL-
ma7iizing genius and its central theme, man as the hejvic,
man as the ideally perfect. (Schaff, Apostolic Church, p.
145 ; Zezschwitz, Profangracitat und biblischer Sprachge-
ist. Leipzig, 1 869, p. 1 3.) As the language and literature of
the Hebrews was inspired to describe " the righteous acts
of yahveJis dominion in Israel and the victories of his holy
arm," (Judg. 5:11; Psa. 98 : i,) and thus was majestic
and sublime; so the language and literature of the
Greeks were inspired to sing the exploits of the gocjlike
Achilles, the crafty Ulysses, and the all-conquering Her-

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 6^

cules ; to paint the heroic struggles of the tribes at Ther
mopylse, Salamis, and Platea, to conceive a model repub-
lic and an ideal human world, and thus was beatUiftil,
s lately y and charming. Its gods are idealized virtues and
vices and powers of nature, and conceived after the fash-
ion of heroic men and women, arranged in a mythology
which is a marvel of taste and genius. Nature is ideal-
ized, and every plant and tree and fountain becomes a
living being. Indeed, everything that the Greek mind
touched it clothed with its own ideals of beauty. Hence
the drama is the most appropriate literature for such a
people, and the dialogue the proper method of its philos-
ophy. (Curtius, Griech. Gesch., III., s. 508.)

4. The Greek language has remarkable strength and
vigor. Its stems have been compressed, vowel and con-
sonant compacted together. Its words are complete in
themselves, ending only in vowels and the consonants ;/,
r, and s ; they have a singular independence, as the
Greek citizen and warrior, and are protected from muti-
lation and change. (Curtius, Griech. Gesch., L, s. 18.)
It is true it has a limited number of roots, yet it is capa-
ble of developing therefrom an infinite variety of words,
(Jelfs. Greek Gram., 4th ed., Oxford, 1864, p. 330;) so
that although it cannot approach the wealth of synonym
of the Hebrew, yet its words are trained as the athlete,
and capable of a great variety of movements and striking
effects. Its syntax is organized on the most perfect sys-
tem, all its parts compacted into a solid mass, in which
the individual is not lost, but gives his strength to impart

68 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

to the whole the weight and invincible push of \h^ pha-
Imix. Hence the Greek language is peculiarly the lan-
guage of oratory that would sway the mind and conquer
with invincible argument. It is the language of a De-
mosthenes, the model orator for the world. It wrestles
with the mind, it parries and thrusts, it conquers as an
armed host.

Such was the language with which Alexander went
forth to subdue the world, and which he made the com-
mon speech of the nations for many generations. It is
true that the Greek was required to forfeit somewhat of
its elegance and refinement in its collision with so many
barbarous tongues, but it lost none of its essential char-
acteristics when it was adopted by the Egyptian, the
Syrian, and the Jew. The Jews were scattered widely
in the earth, engaged in commercial pursuits that re-
quired them, above all others, to master the common
speech of the nations. Hence those of Europe, Asia
Minor, and Africa, easily adopted the Greek as their
vernacular, and it gradually became more and more the
language of Syria and Palestine. This was furthered by
the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into the Greek,
at Alexandria, the centre of the Greek culture of the
times, a translation which shows upon its face the diffi^
culties of rendering for the first time foreign conceptions
into a strange tongue, (Reuss, Hellenistisches Idiom, in
Herzog, Realencyklopadie, V., s. 709,) but which never-
theless became of incalculable importance in preparing
the way for the New Testament writers. The original

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE, 69

productions of the Jews of Alexandria and Palestine,
many of which are preserved in the apocryphal books of
the Old Testament, combined to produce the same re-
sult. Gradually the Jewish mind was modified by the
Greek thought and culture, and the Greek language was,
on the other hand, adapted to the expression of Hebrew
and Aramaic conceptions. The apostles of our Lord,
if they were to carry on a work and exert an influence
world-wide and enduring, were required, from the very
circumstances of the times, to use the Greek ; for the
Aramaic would have had but a narrow and ever-dimin-
ishing influence, even if their labors had been confined
to the synagogues of the dispersed Jews. Hence we are
not surprised that, without an exception, so far as we
know, the New Testament writers composed their works
in Greek, yes, even gave us the Aramaic discourses of
our Saviour in the Greek tongue. Nor was this without
its Providential purpose ; for though our Saviour deliv-
ered his discourses in Aramaic, yet they were not taken
down by the evangelists as they heard them in that
tongue, but were subsequently recalled to their minds by
the Holy Spirit, who, in accordance with the promise of
our Lord, brought all things to their remembrance ; so
that they recalled the ideas, rather than the language,
and gave the ideas therefore the Greek embodiment ; so
we have no translation of the words of Jesus, but the
words of Jesus as they pass through the Hellenistic con-
ception of the evangelists, colored by their minds and
human characteristics, (Winer, New. Test. Gr^.m. Thay-

70 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

er's edit, Andover, 1872, p. 27; Bleek's Einleit. in d. N.
T., 2d Aufl., Berlin, 1866, s. y6'^ for it was evidently the
design of God that the Saviour's words, as well as acts
and his glorious person, should be presented to the world
through those four typical evangelists, who appropriately
represent the four chief phases of human character and
experience.

The New Testament writers used the common Greek
of their time, yet as men who had been trained in the
Hebrew Scriptures and in the Aramaic methods of ex-
position, but above all as holy men who spoke as they
were moved by the Holy Ghost. Hence, as the Greek
language had now to perform a work for which it had
providentially been preparing, and yet one which it had
never yet attempted, namely, to convey the divine reve-
lation to mankind, so it must be remoulded and shaped
by the mind of the Spirit to express ideas that were new
both to the Greek and the Jew, but which had been de-
veloping in the languages and literature of both nations,
for each in its way prepared for the gospel of Christ.
(Schaff, Apostolic Church, p. 146.) Hence we are not
surprised that the Biblical Greek should be distinguish-
ed not only from the classic models, but also from the
literary Greek of the time, although it must be confessed
that, when compared with the Greek of the Septuagint
and the Apocrypha, it approximates more to the literary
Greek of the times, being, as Reiiss states it, " not the
slavish idiom of a translation, but a free, language-crea-
ting idiom, without, however, denying its cradle." (Reuss,

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 71

Hellenistisches Idiom, in Herzog, V., s. 710 ; Winer, New
Test. Gram., p. 39.) It is true that much of its elegance
and artistic finish has been lost, and the nicely-rounded
sentences and elaborate periods, with their delicately-
shaded conceptions, have disappeared, yet its distin-
guishing characteristics, especially its strength and beau-
ty, its perspicuity, and its logical and rhetorical power,
have been preserved, while to these have been added the
simplicity and richness, the ardor and glow of the Ara-
maic style ; but over and above all these, the language
has been employed by the Spirit of God, and transformed
and transfigured, yes, glorified, with a light and sacred-
ness that the classic literature has never possessed.

It is true that the writings of the New Testament are
not all on the same level of style and language. (Im-
mer, Hermeneutik des Neuen Testaments, Wittemberg,
1873, s. io5 f.) The gospels of Matthew and Mark, and
the epistles of Peter and James, together with the Apoc-
alypse, have stronger Aramaic coloring, which disturbs
the Greek lines of beauty, the Greek form being over-
powered by the life and glow of the Aramaic emotion ;
yet in the writings of Luke and John, but especially of
Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews, the strength and
excellence of the Greek unite with the peculiarities of the
Aramaic and the Hebrew in striving, under the potent
influence of the Holy Spirit, to convey the new religion
in the most adequate and appropriate language and
style.

Here the humanizinci and idealistic tendencies of the

72 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

Greek combine with the theological and realistic tende^i-
cies of the Hebrew and the Aramaic : for to these New
Testament writers the person of Christ assumes the
central and determining position and influence, as yah-
veh the one God did to the Old Testament writers.
Christ became the emperor of the Scriptures, to use
Luther's expression, and his person irradiated its lan-
guage and literature with his own light and glory. Thus
when the mind now strove to conceive no longer the
simple idea of the one God yahveh, but the complex
idea of the person of Christ and the Trinity therein in-
volved, the Hebrew language was entirely inadequate ;
and the Greek, as the most capable, must be strained
and tried to the utmost to convey the idea of the Logos,
who was in the beginning, was with God, and was God,
and yet became the Word incarnate, the QiQ^-man, the
interpreter in complete humanity of the fulness of the
Deity dwelling in him ; for notwithstanding the histori-
cal preparation for this conception in the theophanies of
the Hebrews, the nous of Plato, the logos of Philo, and
the wisdom of Solomon and Sirach, it was yet an entire-
ly new conception, which, notwithstanding the prepara-
tion of the Hebrew and the Greek, the world could not
appropriate without the transforming and enlightening
influence of the Spirit of God. (Dorner, Entiwickelungs-
geschichte der Lehre von der Person Christi. Stuttgart
1845, !•> s. 6 j. ; Schaff, in Lange's Com. on John, N. Y. p.
55.) So in its anthropology the apostle Paul combines
the Hebrew and Greek conceptions in order to produce a

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 73

new diud perfect conception. Taking the psychology of
the Greek as a system, he gave the central place to the
Hebrew niac/i or spirit, finding, to use the words of
Zezschwitz, its "undisturbed centralization in living
union with the Spirit of God." (Zezschwitz, Profangra-
citat, &c. s. 36, f.) He then brings out the strife of
the trapi or flesh, with the nvevfi^^ or spirit, and the false
position of the psychical nature ifjvxv over against the
spirit. So also for the first he gives to the world the
true conception of the conscience cwkdTjoc^ as "the remnant
of the spirit in the psychical man," " the divine voice," the
consciousness of which Socrates felt as the " summit of
the knowledge of the true wisdom by the Greek spirit."
(Zezschwitz, s. 55-57.) Hence the development of the
doctrine of sin with its technical terms, and of holiness
with its new ideas and language. How infinitely deeper and
higher than the Greek are these conceptions of the New
Testament language, as the Person of Christ, presented
by the Omnipotent Spirit convinces the world of sin, of
righteousness, and of judgment. (John 16:8.) Jesus, as
" the only-begotten of the Father full of grace and truth,"
assumes the place not only of the heroic ideal man of the
Greeks, but even of the unapproachable holy Jahveh of tb^
Hebrews. Hence the elevation of the graces of meekness,*
patience, long-suffering, self-sacrifice, and the dethrone-
ment of the Greek virtues of strength, beauty, bravery,
manhood. And so in all departments of Christian thought,
there was a corresponding elevation, and degradation
of terms and conceptions. We can only mention re-

74 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

generation, atonement, reconciliation, justification, sanc-
tification, life and death, heaven and hell, the church,
the kingdom of God, repentance, faith. Christian love,
baptism, the Lord's Supper, the Lord's day, the advent,
the judgment, the new Jerusalem, everlasting glory.
(Bleeks. Einleitung s. 71; Immer Hermeneutik, s. 105;
Cremer. Bib. theol. Worterbuch der Neu-testament.
GracitJit and Trench, New Testament synonyms, under
the respective words.) Truly a new world was disclosed by
the Greek language, and the literature of the New Testa-
ment, as the Hebrew and the Aramaic, and the Greek
combined their energies and capacities in the grasp of
the Divine creating and shaping Spirit, who transformed
the Greek language and created a new and holy Greek
literature, as the earth heaves and subsides into new
forms and shapes under the energy of the great forces
of its advancing epochs.

The especial literary development of the New Tes-
tament is in the sermon and the theological tract. We
trace these from the first beginning on the day of Pen-
tecost through the discourses of the Book of Acts, and
parallel therewith the epistles of Peter and Paul and
John. Looking at the sermons we observe that they
are no longer on the Aramaic model as are the dis-
courses of our Lord, but we see the Greek orator as well
as the Aramaic rabbin. So with the epistles, especially of
Paul, although he reminds us of the Rabbinical schools
in his use of the halacha and Jiagada methods, (Gal. 4 :22,
seq.; Rom. 3 : i seq., etc.,) yet they exhibit rather the dia-

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 75

lectic methods of the Greek philosopher. Thus the
Greek orator and philosopher prepared the language and
style of Paul the preacher and theologian no less than
the Hebrew prophet and wise man gave him the funda-
mental principles of his wisdom and experience. And
although the Greek literature of the New Testament has
no Demosthenes' " On the crown," or Plato's Republic, as
it has no Iliad or Prometheus ; yet it lays the foundation of
the sermon and the theological tract — those forms of
literature which, however little they may appeal to the
aesthetic taste, have yet been the literary means of a
world-transforming power as, from the pulpit and the
chair. Christian ministers have stirred the hearts and
minds of mankind, and lead the van of progress of
the Christian world — for the sermon combines the
prophetic message of the Hebrew, with the oratorical
force of the Greek; as it not only fires the heart, but
strives in the council chamber of the intellect and pleads
at the bar of the conscience, while the theological
treatise combines the sententious wisdom of the He-
brew with the dialectic philosophy of the Greek, in order
to mould and fashion the souls of men and of nations,
by great vital and comprehensive principles, that consti-
tute the invincible forces of Christian history, so that
theology reigns queen of the sciences never to be de-
throned by the timorous cries of baby Christians, or the
clamors of conceited philosophers and scientists, who
suppose that the discoveries of their minds are to over-
throw the verities ot the mind of God.

76 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

" Where is the wise ? Where is the scribe ? Where
is the disputer of this world ? Hath not God made
foolish the wisdom of this world ? For after that in the
wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it
pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them
that believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the
Greeks seek after wisdom : but we preach Christ cru-
cified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the
Greeks foolishness : but unto them which are called,
both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God, and
the wisdom of God." i Cor. i : 20-24.

THE UNITY

The Variety of the Bible,

SEV. Ji. S. STOURS, D. D.,

PASTOR OF THE CHURCH OF THE PILGRIMS, BROOKLYN, N. Y.

THE UNITY

AND

The Variety of the Bible.

Mr. President, Friends, and Fellow-workers : It is
a large and beautiful subject which we have before us
this evening ; and I am more than usually sensible of my
incompetence to treat it fitly, in the rapidity and imper-
fection of extemporaneous remark, within the limits of
the hour. Indeed, I was not aware, until the very close
of last week, of the importance and the prominence of
the service which I had rashly undertaken to perform
here.

I accept for myself, and echo with all my heart, the
tender and solemn words of the prayer just offered, with
its request that God would give me clearness of thought
and readiness of expression in exhibiting, as far as I may,
this vast and attractive theme.

Of course we cannot fix rules which Omniscience
shall follow in making a revelation of truth to the world.
We cannot tell beforehand what methods God will be
pleased in his wisdom to adojot in order to make that rev-

8o UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE.

elation most worthy of his mind, and most impressive in
its appeal to the minds and hearts of mankind. Edward
Irving says somewhere that for man to attempt to criti-
cise or prefigure the plans of Providence, is as if the
little blind mole, running his tiny galleries underground,
were to undertake to interpret the marchings and coun-
ter-marchings of mighty armies overhead. . It would be,
if possible, still more impossible, more absurd, for finite
intelligences to say how God shall make the revelation of
himself and of his will to the world which needs it, but
which mentally and morally is unsuited to receive it.
Yet there are some things which appear self-evident con-
cerning this, and which we may confidently affirm before-
hand in regard to such a revelation.

We may affirm, for example, with entire certainty,
that it will be an intelligible revelation ; such that a man
can, by suitable study, reflection, and thought, and by
bringing his own mind into spiritual sympathy with the
mind from which it comes, understand that which it de-
clares to him. Otherwise it would be no revelation at
all, but a mere vague thunder in the air, communicating
no articulate thought, exciting simple astonishment in
the hearer, which could be neither quickening nor puri-
fying to intellect or to heart.

We may affirm also, with equal certainty, that such a
revelation will be marked with holiness, in its discoveries
of God, and its requirements of man. Otherwise it will
not be consistent either with his character from whom
it comes, or with the welfare of the man to whom it is

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE. 8i

given. If we find in it, therefore, any tolerance of iniq-
uity, if it commands or if it allows slander, perjury, ly-
ing, lust, then, no matter by what extraordinary evidence
it appears to be attested, we should know beforehand
that it cannot be from Him whose mind searches evil in
its roots and relations, and whose heart is immutably
pure and true. Even miracles themselves could not force
us to attribute an impure, selfish, sensual rule of Hfe to
Him whose holiness is the glory and the guard of the
intelligent creation.

We may affirm, too, beforehand, that it will be in its
structure a majestic revelation. God will not bend and
part the heavens that he may bring to the world a story
or a song. He will not send into the earth, upon the
minds of those who are to testify for him, the supreme
power of his Divine Spirit, that he may give a mere argu-
ment or narrative, a maxim or a jest, to the thought of
mankind. It must be an intelligible and a holy revela-
tion ; it must be also a majestic revelation, which God
shall make of himself and his thought, whenever, and in
what special form soever, it shall seem best to his wis-
dom and love to give that to the world. We cannot be
mistaken in expecting these as chax^acteristics of any
book with which He shall condescend to teach, guide,
and inspire mankind.

And we may go further, and affirm that it must be a
revelation marked by unity within itself : containing a
statement of doctrine, continuous, progressive perhaps,
but essentially one, from beginning to end ; even as the

82 UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBIE.

mind of God is one, and cannot possibly be self-contra-
dictory. It will be, probably, we may say — though per-
haps without the same certain assurance with which we
afBrm the other propositions — a revelation manifold in
form, made through a great variety of instruments, since
this corresponds as well with the needs of man as with
the eternal opulence of the Divine mind. — In the con-
struction of the planet* God gives to us not merely the
soil on the surface, or the stone beneath it, or the gold
or the silver hidden in their veins, or the wood of the
forest, or the grasses and flowers ; he gives them all.
He gives not merely the air enveloping the earth, but
the light shining through it, and the lightnings which
pierce it, and the waters which rise as mists and roll as
rivers. He braids the light itself, in its apparent golden
simplicity, of a strand of colors, woven so intimately to-
gether that the separate hues are lost in the beauty of
the perfect beam. Everywhere his mind reveals itself
in his works in an abounding variety of means and forces.
We shall expect it so to reveal itself in any revelation
which he makes of his truth. All the more we shall ex-
pect it because by such ever-changing variety of instru-
ment and of method he will be able to accomplish most
perfectly, so far as we can conjecture or foresee, his work
upon the minds of those whom he addresses. Not a mon-
otone, but a harmony, in which different but agreeing
sounds conspire, is that which the soul of man craves
and answers.

Therefore we anticipate unity of truth in any re vela-

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBIE. 8

tion which God shall make, with variety of method and
manifold instruments. If we do not find these charac-
teristics in the word which purports to be his, we shall
surely be surprised. If we do find them, they will cer-
tainly seem harmonious with his mind, and with his works
as we elsewhere explore these. And if v/e find them ap-
pearing under circumstances which in themselves would
seem unfavorable to their presence, they will excite a
strong presumption, they will fairly justify it, that the
word is from God. Then, if they conspire with other
evidences of the same sublime and amazing proposition,
they will help to make that certain to us ; so certain, that
every argument against it becomes ineffectual, and shiv-
ers its force when it strikes the strength of our convic-
tion. The evidence of God's handiwork in the Bible,
derived from its own character and structure, will be to
us complete, and supremely inspiring.

Let us look, then, at the Bible before us this evening,
and ask ourselves whether it clearly presents these two
marks which I have last specified as proper marks of its
origin in God's mind : namely, Unity of doctrine, with
Variety in method, and a divine Manifoldness in the in-
struments employed.

First, consider it in regard to its Unity.

At first sight, certainly, the Bible appears to us as
little likely to possess a' true and positive interior unity
as any book which exists in the world. We have in it
sixty and more separate pamphlets, some of them longer
and some shorter, written by nearly forty different per-

84 UNITY AND VARIETY OF TBE BIBLE.

sons, in widely different stages of civilization and periods
of time ; some of them separated from each other by as
long an interval as that which separates us to-night from
the day of the Druids. We have these pamphlets writ-
ten in three different languages, in different lands, among
hostile peoples, and comprising the greatest possible dif-
ferences of literary style, and of general or special intel-
lectual culture. These pamphlets, stitched together by
the hand of the binder, appear at first sight to possess no
possible unity whatever, excej^t that which is purely me-
chanical, given them by the workman who has put them
into the same collection. They seem as diverse as any
books carelessly intermingled on library-shelves.

Yet, when we examine them, we are impressed by
the positive oneness of doctrine which is found perva-
ding them, from the beginning to the end, and really
manifest in every part.

It is a vast unity, of course ; as it must be to corre-
spond with the mind of God. It is the unity of a cathe-
dral, not of a hut ; of an immense mechanism, not of a
billet of wood, or of the walking-stick which one carries
in his hand ; the unity of a great book, crowded with
immense thoughts and precepts, not that of a song or
a particular argument. So, too, it is an organic and a
progressive unity, not to be wholly searched out or
comprehended until we have finished the entire volume
through which we have traced it.

And yet how positive a unity it is ! recognized by the
finest, the most careful, and most judicious of the minds

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE. 85

of the world which have given themselves to the study
of the Scriptures ; recognized by ourselves, and not suc-
cessfully opposed, to any one who has once discerned it,
by any argument of any skeptic. The ingenious un-
believer may find, or try to find, some apparent discrep-
ancies between Paul's doctrine of faith and James' doc-
trine of works ; between the narrative given by John and
the narratives given by the earlier evangelists. But even
these apparent and wholly superficial discrepancies turn
out, when examined, to be mere hooks wherewith to hold
the attention of the reader more closely to the books in
which they occur; so that study and examination, more
searching and more critical, may be given to these books,
and so that the ultimate harmony between them may be
made more plainly to appear. There is no line of con-
flict, which the most ingenious skeptic has discovered,
between prophet and psalmist, between evangelist and
lawgiver, between apostle and evangelist — no line of
cleavage, even, where unity is broken, and where a different
and a divergent doctrine comes in to succeed that which
had been announced. We trace but one doctrine, as I
have said, always onward from the beginning to the
transcendent end. Observe how clear its outlines are —
as the outline of a coast towering above the waves at its
foot, or as that of a range of mountains on the continent !
The book begins with the instant and clear revelation
of God : in his oneness, his personality, his holiness of
character; in his infinitude of power, wisdom, dominion ;
in his eternity, of underived and sovereign existence. It

86 UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE.

shows him as Creator, and shows all things dependent
for form and force on his supreme omnific will. It shows
further his moral government, exercised constantly over
men; with its law of perfect holiness; with its penalties
and its promises, each appropriate to the majesty and
purity of the law which is to be enforced, and in which
is the reflection of his character, as well as the utterance
of his will to mankind. Then, it declares man's revolt
against God, under the power and in the fierce habit of
sin ; his spiritual alienation from this holy intelligence
from whom his moral being comes, and by whom this
government is exercised over him. It gives illustration
of this rebellion, this central alienation of the human
will from God's will; not merely in flagrant, private
offences, but in great public procedures of iniquity ; in
the devastation of territories, the subjugation of nations,
the bloody destructions of public hope, the terrific idola-
tries overspreading the earth with their licentious and
ribald rites.

In contrast with these, it reveals God's purpose to
form a spiritual kingdom in the world, submissive to his
government, obedient to his law, and to gather the mem-
bers and the citizens of this kingdom out of all countries
and peoples of the earth — a conception that was not pos-
sible to either Greek or Egyptian, and that certainly was
not more possible to the Jew, except as he was enlight-
ened concerning it by that Divine mind which was opera-
ting upon him through its ministers and messages. It
reveals at length the Head of this kingdom, personal and

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE. 8}

transcendent, unique and supreme in both character and
power. At first, foreshadowed from the distance and
darkness of remote ages, he is more and more distinctly
brought to view, through continually increasing radiance
of prophecy; through the voices of psalmists, through
the solemn and significant ritual of the temple, through
the office of the priesthood, through the royal majesty
and supremacy of kings. More and more definite become
the prophecies concerning him. First, he is the seed of
the woman ; then he is of the seed of Abraham ; then he
is the descendant of Jacob ; then he is of the tribe of
Judah ; then he is the son of David ; until prophecy
begins to focus itself at last upon the very time when he
shall appear, as in Daniel, upon the very place where he
is to appear, as in Micah, upon the very office and char-
acter which he is to fulfil and to exhibit, as in Isaiah, in
those words of prophecy which have this evening been
read in our hearing ; till the Old Testament closes, with
the latest voice of its prophecy, through Malachi, predict-
ting the rising of this Sun of Righteousness, predicting
the sudden coming of this Lord, preceded by the prophet
who is to prepare the way before him. The long series
of prophecies closes here : and we are left, looking on to
the histories — if such there shall be — in which these
predictions shall be fulfilled.

Then comes a gap of time, but not an interruption in
the sequence of thought, extending over four hundred
years, and the New Testament takes up its office of
divine instruction. It presents to us this king, who has

88 UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBIE.

been foreshadowed from the beginning of human history,
in a constantly brightening clearness of prediction. He
now comes into the world, welcomed by the angelic song,
yet coming as a babe in Bethlehem ; growing then into
maturity ; accomplishing then his works of wonder,
scattering miracles around his path, speaking divinest
thoughts to men in human utterance, expressing before
them the absolute beauty of love in life, fulfilling at last
his office of priest through his sacrifice of himself, then
arising from the dead, and ascending into heaven, king
of the saints, predestined and glorious king of the world.

It shows the Spirit who comes afterward to represent
this king in the world, and to testify of him through all
ages. It conveys to us the instructions of the apostles,
inspired by that Spirit to testify of Christ ; instructions
in truth, and in practical duty, which are to continue the
law of the members of this spiritual kingdom, while they
and it continue to exist. And finally it gives us the
prophetic vision of the amazing closing book, the book of
the Revelation, in which is shown the consummation of
this kingdom, with the crash of conflict in air and earth,
the tumultuous collisions and overthrow of nations,
through which it marches to its ultimate assured univer-
saUty in the world.

This is the book. All these separate writings, as I
said, from different persons, lands, ages, are gathered in
the compass of this one volume; and when examined
they are found to be pervaded, from first to last, by this
extraordinary unity of doctrine. Law and story, prophecy

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE. 89

and psalm, point forward to and interlink with the narra-
tive and argument of the later Testament. The last
verse of the Bible, "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ
be with you all," and the first verse of the Bible, " In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth," are
just points in the perimeter of the golden ring within
which all the collected contents of this volume are com-
prised. It is one in its law, one in its doctrine, as God
is one. And you cannot parallel that phenomenon in
any literature of any people. Gather up so many wri-
tings as are here, from so many authors, disconnected by
such vast intervals of time, such differences of language,
such contrarieties of civilization, and put them together
into a volume, and you have a collection of teachings
discordant, divergent, and heterogeneous. Here the
unity of the teaching shows that it came, in the final
analysis, from a single mind. Why, even the Oratorio
requires the presence of one supreme and regulating mind,
so that harp and viol, flute and trumpet, the echoing
drum and the "terrible trombone," may all conspire in
the perfect ultimate musical harmony. Here the differ-
ent writers — whether consciously or not — were certainly
under the superintendence of one supreme mind, invisi-
ibly operating on each, and in him, bringing them into a
spiritual accord which they themselves may not have
anticipated, and could scarcely understand : in its final
result bringing from them all that great harmonious voice
of the Scripture, which is at length to fill the world.
The unity of the Scriptures is as evident as is the

8^

90 UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE.

unity of the planet. As I said, it is not the unity of a
garden, but that of a continent. It is as the unity of the
globe itself, with all these various and seemingly contra-
dictory elements compacted into its enduring organic
oneness. And when I believe that man has shaped the
planet which we live on, I may believe that man unaided
has shaped the Bible, and wrought into unity its many
complex and separated parts.

But then we are to go still further, and observe the
variety which constantly appears in connection with,
and as tributary to, this majestic, astonishing, and unpar-
alleled unity.

Observe at the outset the difficulties in the face of
which such variety is secured ; difficulties of language,
which must be overcome; difficulties in the minds of
the writers of the Book. The Hebrew language is no-
ble and energetic, but it is rugged, rigid, and narrow, not
fitted apparently for numerous distinct and delicate vari-
eties of literary form. The Greek of the New Testa-
ment is a distinct and noble coordinate dialect of the
incomparable Greek language, but it lacks the Ionic
grace, the Attic purity; it is not so transparent and
musical a medium of thought as is the language in which
Plato wrote, or in which Homer sang. Remember, too,
that the men who wrote, in these languages, the stories
and the letters which we have in the Scriptures, were
not for the most part highly educated men. They were
not cosmopolitan in training or culture. As a general
thing, especially in the Old Testament times, they were

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE. 91

men who dwelt apart from conversation with the world
outside of Judea, who knew nothing of its literature, who
had not been trained to variety, vivacity, flexibility of
mind, by its schools or its commerce, and who would
seem as unapt as any series of men to be found upon
the earth to adopt from others or produce for themselves
any great variety of literary form.

But, at the same time, observe how immense and in-
cessant that variety is !

What form of literature is most attractive, most in-
structive, to the larger part of mankind ? Undoubtedly
we should say, Narrative — narrative in the form of his-
tory, tracing great public procedures, or narrative in the
form of personal biography, giving portraits of character,
outlining the striking, tragic, or fortunate events which
have occurred in the career and experience of persons.
Such narrative, either in the more general form of his-
tory, or in the more vivid form of biography, is that
which first and most naturally attracts the attention of
men, and interests their minds. Then Poetry ; especially
as that poetry is simple and natural, and is not artificial
or elaborate in its form. It will then commend itself to
the mind of the child. It will be sung in the nursery, on
the street, in the fields. Those far out on the sea will
recall it ; those travelling by the wayside will find it still
haunting the memory, and stirring the heart. To the
man and the woman, of a sensitive nature, it will be
equally dear. The most mature will love it like the child.
It will prolong youth in the heart of the aged.

92 UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBIE,

Then, Law impresses men— the authoritative expres-
sion of moral truth and moral duty, commending itself
to the general conscience, grappling that conscience,
calling out responses from the moral sensibility which
is inherent, indestructible, in all men. Then, Proverbs ;
maxims of duty, maxims of prudence, which are so brief
that the memory holds them without an effort; which
we carry with us wherever we go, yet out of which, as
we reflect upon them, come ever larger and more lumin-
ous lessons, of practical duty, and of beauty in character.
Then, further on in the series, perhaps, fictitious litera-
ture has its place ; presenting truth under the guise of
incidents which may not actually have occurred, but
which are entirely probable in themselves, and which
might reasonably have been expected to occur in the
circumstances described in the allegory or the parable.

These are some of the species of literature with
which we are familiar, and by which we see that men
are impressed; and to them may be added argumenta-
tive discussion, the clear dialectical exhibition of truth,
with reasons that convince men, and an eloquence that
persuades them. All these are important literary forms
for conveying thought from one mind to others ; and
while we might not look to find them in untrained He-
brews, we may see how useful and desirable they would
be in any revelation made to the world by God its
author. We shall not expect arithmetical calculations
in such a revelation ; we shall not expect the minute
exactness and the severe finish of scientific statement;

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE. 93

nor any other of those special forms of literary work-
manship which are not intimately and naturally associa-
ted with the utterance of moral and spiritual truth. But
whatever may be thus associated, we have perhaps a
right to expect, certainly to desire, in a revelation which
comes, or which at least purports to come to us, from
God. We may anticipate beforehand that he will not
put a degrading discredit upon any form of literary
accomplishment which is natural to the mind, whose
powers he has designed and ordained. We may expect
that he will touch the soul in man by every force that
is apt for the purpose, when he seeks to instruct, to
exalt, to renew it.

Take up then the constitution of the Bible, and care-
fully observe it ! At least three-fourths of it are narra-
tive, that is the fact which strikes us first; narrative in
the form of a general historical story, which tells of the
public transactions of nations, of the intrigues, councils,
and wars of princes, the devastation of countries, the
establishment, the enlargement, or the overthrow of em-
pires, the rising of powers against each other, their
alliances, their conflicts, their commercial interactions,
with the results which followed from all to the kingdom
of God ; or narrative in the form of personal portraiture,
recording events, depicting characters, of which and of
whom we should know nothing except from it. In this
regard, this Bible of ours becomes a mirror of human
life, the value of which we cannot overstate, the perfec-
tion of which is utterly unique. What scores and hun-

94 UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE.

dreds of persons there are, brought to light by it, in the
most various circumstances possible, in the most various
exhibitions of character, who become in their names,
persons, figures, as familiar to us as if we had walked
and talked with them freely in our most impressible
years ! Abraham, Jacob, Esau, Joseph, Moses and
Aaron, Joshua and Samuel, Deborah and Ruth, David
and Solomon, Elijah and his more gentle successor,
Ahab and his superb and fierce Phenician queen : what
multitudes there are ! We cannot count them. A fig-
ure stands out from the dimness of the past, only for ?n
instant ; but there it stands before us for ever ! It is not
painted, as a portrait. It is photographed, on a plate from
which the impression can never be discharged, by the
smiting on it of a radiance from on high. One's casual
words, as of Isaac or Nehemiah, spoken upon the im-
pulse of a moment, are eternized in the record ; they will
continue to be repeated while the planet exists. An
eloquent writer has aptly said that the Scriptures are
full of life-like portraits which are " like intaglios — mas-
terpieces of artistic skill, on a field of microscopic dimen-
sions." So the truth is incarnated. So the law is illus-
trated, shown in the punishment which it inflicts, if not
in the fulfilment of its rules. And so, to all persons, the
Bible has a constant attraction, by reason of the narra-
tive which is in it so amply, of this personal portraiture
in which it so continually abounds.

Observe how utterly fearless it is ! It puts its inci-
dental historical narratives by the side of ancient records,

UNITY AND VARIETY OF T^HE BIBIE, 95

wherever these are found, on brick cylinders, graven in
rocks, traced upon the parchments, carved upon obelisks,
built into imperial structures ; and it challenges compari-
son ! No matter how other records have come to us, the
Scripture puts its record beside them, asserts this true,
and waits for centuries for its vindication. The ancient
historians tell us, for example, that the king of Babylon,
when that city was taken and destroyed by the Persians,
was not Belshazzar, but Nabonadius, or Labynetus, as the
names are given differently in different languages ; that he
was not captured in the city, or killed, but that he escaped
from it ; that he fought a battle, after the capture, outside
of the city ; that he was defeated, and was then taken
prisoner ; that he was made satrap under the conqueror;
that he lived for years afterwards, unmolested, lived in
abundance, and died in peace. Berosus and Abydenus
agree in most of this ; and history laughs at the story as
told in the book of Daniel. It is an unhistoric legend,
idle, worthless, because contrary to the facts. The book
of Daniel puts forward its record, and patiently waits.
Twenty years ago, there were dug up the cylinders from
the remains of the ancient Ur of the Chaldees, from the
mounds which mark the almost forgotten site of that
renowned city of the East, which explain at a glance the
seeming inconsistency. They show that Belshazzar was
the son of Nabonadius, and the Regent under him ; that
Daniel's record is therefore as true as was that probably
of Herodotus or Berosus. They were simply writing of
different persons.

96 UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE.

So the Scripture fearlessly challenges historians, and
puts its records alongside of theirs — a characteristic
which belongs to it only among the sacred books of the
world. There is no other which treats so fearlessly the
events of the past, and which faces such imminent con-
tinual risk of being demonstrated as untrue, if that is
possible. It tells its story, amid whatever din of con-
tradictions, and waits to be accepted, with a divine cour-
age, imperturbable as God.

But of course the Bible is not narrative only. Re-
member the marvellous poetry of it, at which all the world
wonders : so majestic, so pathetic, in contents so various,
in its mass so vast, in its spiritual beauty so unequalled !
It is poetry unshackled by the fetters of rhyme, where
the image becomes instinct with the spirit of song, where
the thoughts chime as words cannot. It sings itself, there-
fore, through the mind alike of child and man. It utters
itself in hymns and psalms, and spiritual songs, to which
it has given its impulse and meaning, in all languages of
the world. It becomes the source, and constant inspira-
tion, of the great historical liturgies of the church, of
which it has been computed that two-thirds are drawn
directly from the sacred volume ! It quickens the fancy,
stirs the imagination, soothes, solaces, or animates the
heart ; and though not forming so large a part, it forms
as important and as memorable a part, in the structure of
the Bible ; it contributes as much to its power and spir-
itual impression, as do narratives and history.

Then Law addresses men, with its precise authorita-

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE. 97

tive instruction, its disclosures of duty, its penalties and
its promises. It is inscribed on these pages in lines
almost as fiery as if it were written in lightnings on the
sky. It becomes almost as impressive, in its divine
authorization, as if God's signature, traced in lightnings,
were blazing in the heaven, beneath vast visible lines of
flame. Then proverbs come, such multitudes of them,
familiar to the thought of the educated world, wherever
the Bible has been read, each one containing the choice
treasures of practical wisdom. Argumentative discus-
sions are not wanting, like those of Paul, which the
most alert and studious mind, the most disciplined intel-
ligence, has to bring its utmost power to examine, that
it may understand their invincible force, that it may
develop their fair conclusions ; that it may brace and
invigorate itself by contact with the mind which has ut-
tered its thought in this majestic sweep of argument.
Great luminous discourses are here as well — like those
which flowed from the serene lips of the Son of God ;
discourses of time, and also of eternity, of life upon the
earth and life in the heavens, of the soul of man, of the
beauty of God, of the redemption by the cross, of the sanc-
tification by the Divine Spirit. No feature of the Bible
is so impressive as these interpreting and transcendent
discourses, which use no logic and require no argument,
, which impress themselves, as the sun on the sod which
it sprinkles with flowers, on the spiritual sense of every
one who attentively reads and inwardly ponders them.
Even fiction, you observe, is not overlooked in this as-

9

98 UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE.

tonishing literary apparatus employed in the Bible. The
parables give narratives, fictitious in form, but pre-
senting incidents that are probable in themselves, and
deriving lessons from those incidents which could not
be so distinctly illustrated, or so impressed upon the mind,
by any other mode of communicating thought.

In fact, it may truly be said that there is no species
of literary workmanship, which is appropriate to the rev-
elation of spiritual trnth, of which the finest examples
that we possess are not to be found in this ancient book.
All other books are narrow in comparison, and restricted
in range. They are books upon one key, and this upon
many. They are books which impress truth, so far as
they impress it, through one form of instrumentality,
and this through a multitude. We should anticipate the
oneness of the Bible, if it comes to us from God. We
should anticipate a certain abundant and charming vari-
ety in the forms of the Bible, if it be his. The suprem-
acy of his mind, the prodigal inexhaustible force of
his will, as well as his certain wish and purpose if he
should give a revelation at all to give it in a form to attract
wide attention, and impress powerfully the minds of
mankind — all these impel us to look for variety in its
structure. But that which we find well-nigh surpasses
our largest possible expectation !

Now, observe the important consequences of this
constant variety in the literary structure of the Bible.

It becomes, by reason of it, a universal book ; since
there is no tribe or nation that does not enjoy story.

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE. 99

song, parable, eloquence; that does not therefore wel-
come the Bible, as opening to it new realms of thought,
presenting that thought in the most engaging and fasci-
nating forms, and giving the mind intellectual gratifica-
tion, while tending all the time to irradiate and renew the
moral nature. There is almost no other Oriental book
which is valued and sought in the Western world. But
this is just as familiar to the Western mind, as congenial
to it, as if it had been prepared in Europe. There is no
other book, read studiously in Europe, which is read with
equal interest and gladness in the Society Islands, in In-
dia, China, and among the barbarians of South Africa,
just emerging from their dense darkness. But the Bible
goes to the African as to the European ; goes to the Isl-
ander of the sea, to the Chinaman and the Hindoo, to
the Indian and the Arab, as well as to the citizen trained
by schools, expert in business, in these United States.
There is, of course, a certain local color in it which makes
the missionary who reads it in the East, and who inter-
prets it into the Arabic — which makes the traveller, read-
ing it in the East, among the localities where its writings
first found their life and form — appreciate the beauty and
the wonder of it the more. But it is, beyond all others,
a universal book ; and largely by reason of this amazing
many-sidedness of its literary constitution.

Then it is, also, a comprehensive and commanding
book, as addressed to any individual student ; because it
appeals to each faculty of the mind, interests all, and
leaves none unchallenged. It appeals to men in all moods

loo UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE.

of their feeling. It appeals to them in all stages of their
life, from childhood onward, through maturity, until the
extremest limit of age. It appeals to them thus, not
merely by reason of the substance of the truth which it
communicates, but also of this variety of means by which
it conveys it — in song and story, in law and proverb, in
parable, argument, mighty vision. Every faculty of the
mind is therefore addressed by it, and is gratified by it.
We are sometimes in trouble because certain parts or
passages of the Bible are less interesting to us, at least
in certain moods of feeling, than they have been before ;
are not as interesting to us now as they were when we
were children ; or have lost the celestial glow which was
upon them when we read them with tears and with tri-
umph in our grief. But the Bible is intended to furnish
something for every mood, the most sorrowful and the
most cheerful, when the soul is sunken in grief, and when
it is rising in new-born ecstacy of strength and hope. It
has parts for the little child, and parts for the aged. It
is the only book in the world, because it is the only one
which has this marvellous completeness of constitution,
which the little child and the venerable grandparent will
gladly sit down and read together ; which is at home in
the Sunday-school, and equally at home in the highest
university ; which the most disciplined mind can never
exhaust, yet which the youngest and rfiost immature can
find full of attraction, instruction, inspiration. This, by
reason of the marvellous manifoldness of its literary
structure, as well as by reason of the grandeur and the

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE. loi

glory of that system of truth which is evermore contained
within it.

Observe, too, what an educating book it becomes, by
reason of this astonishing variety in its constitution. It
requires a man to match one part against another; to
read the poem in the light of the narrative ; to interpret
th*e argument by the light of that revelation of the Son
of God which is given in the four matchless, divine biog-
raphies of Him ; to interpret the primitive precept, even,
under the radiance of that final vision of Judgment which
dashes its startling splendor on us from the great white
throne ; to interpret Christ's declaration of forgiveness
by the miracles which he works, and the doctrine of sanc-
tification by the Spirit by the crystalline sheen of the
golden streets of the new Jerusalem. We are to analyze,
and combine, and reconcile parts, to bring one into a
close comparison with another, so that out of all we may
derive the ultimate truth which God would give us in the
Scripture. The flower and the oak, the forest and the
stream, the continent and the ocean, are alike parts in
this manifold whole ; and we cannot fully comprehend
one without considering all. So it comes to be a book
which educates the mind as no other can ; which tasks
every faculty in it ; which requires in its student a moral
state sympathetic with His from whom it comes, and
which requires our careful perusal, from end to end, in
order that we may wholly understand it.

I can understand a proposition, logically stated, wheth-
er I sympathize in temper or not with the man who de-

9*

I02 UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE.

dares it ; but I cannot understand such an outpouring as
this claims to be from the mind of the Most High, so va-
rious, so vast, so full of side-lights as it is, so covered
here and there with shadows, so delicate, so tender, so
majestic, so holy — I cannot understand it -until my soul
is also bathed in the effulgence of God's own light, until
I am in the spirit of my soul sympathetic with him. If
the Bible were intended only to give a scheme of intel-
lectual gymnastics, to thoughtful readers, it would be the
most wonderful book in the world. A perfect system of
physical gymnastics is that which develops and trains
each muscle, which quickens and educates every nerve,
which makes each limb and member act in perfect ac-
cord with every other, which gives its due proportion of
power to every part of this sensitive, organized human
frame. A true system of mental gymnastics is that
which touches, reaches, educates every faculty, every
sensibility. And the Bible does it, by reason of its man-
ifold and amazing constitution. At the same time, how-
ever, that it does this, it -makes the essential truth shine
from it, as the light of the diamond shines from each one
of its scores of facets.

Observe, also, that by reason of this it becomes the
great power which it is in civilization ; not merely by
reason of the truth which it contains — though by reason
of that primarily — but by reason also of the singular va-
riety of form through which that truth is declared to man-
kind. It touches the historical research which explores
the old world, at every point. It stimulates inquiry. It

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE. 103

invites comment It invites even criticism, expects it,
challenges it, offers it every possible opportunity, says
nothing in reply, but simply lets it die if it is persistent
and malicious. Therefore it is that the commentaries
written upon the Scripture form libraries of themselves,
so numerous they are, and so extensive. It touches art,
science, poetry, every department of human thought and
of intellectual achievement, by reason also of this variety
of its constitution. Of course we are familiar with this :
but it is really amazing to see how the poetry of the
world, for example, takes its themes and its impulses
from the Bible ; how sculpture and painting find* both
their, subjects and their inspiration in these ancient sto-
ries, and primitive songs ; how pencil, chisel, and the
skill of the architect, are made to carry the tidings and
the treasures of the life of the Lord to distant lands, and
through all time; how everywhere the thought of the
world is stimulated, its intelligence attracted, its power
educated, through its contact with this marvellous book
of God.

So it becomes the power which it is in civilization.
It works itself into the life of each people, and builds up
nations into order and greatness. See how it has built
up the English people out of Saxons and Danes : ta-
king our ancestors, who used to burn their captives of
war in wicker baskets, as a sacrifice to their gods, and
making of them the free enlightened nations which now
we find, on that side of the Atlantic and on this. Be-
cause of this variety, in what may be called the physical

104 UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE.

constitution of the Bible, it gets access to every nation
in the world, as it could not otherwise : and because of
this it blesses each nation as no book of narrower com-
pass could.

Thus too it becomes an inexhaustible book, because
not exhibiting thought alone, but action, character, human
life. Life in its nature is inexhaustible. One may follow
carefully a proposition in logic until he knows it altogeth-
er. It has no contents which he has not considered.
But one never searches out a human life, in personal
presence, or as presented in the vivid and life-like por-
traiture of the Bible, until he knows it as completely.
Always there are secrets hidden within it, unfathomable
recesses, shadowy tendencies, great abysses ; there are
passions, weaknesses, high aspirations, singular attain-
ments, which another cannot compass. The Bible be-
comes inexhaustible as the heavens, because there is so
much of personal life crowded into its thousand-fold
story ; while yet its whole spiritual lesson may be com-
pressed into a text, and a sentence may give the sub-
tance of revelation. So Micah gives us the complete
summing up of the ancient economy in his words : " What
doth God require of thee, O man, but to do justly, and to
love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God !" So in
the New Testament the whole Bible is put into that one
sentence, which a child can remember: "God so loved
the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that who-
soever believeth in him should not perish but have eter-
nal life." The origin of redemption, in the eternal love of

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE. 105

God ; the unique glory and place in the universe of the
Son of God, who came as Redeemer ; the one condition
of eternal life, in our faith in this Redeemer ; the miser}'-
and the peril on the one hand, the vital glory and felici-
ty on the other, which follow men's different relations to
Christ — all are here compacted into a sentence. If all
the rest of the Bible were lost, that sentence surviving
would perpetuate its substance.

It is one of the illustrations of the divine wisdom in
the surpassing constitution of the Scripture, that it is so
inexhaustible, and yet that in parts it is so transparently
and entirely simple. Compressed into a text, it fills a
volume with infinite variations on its one supreme theme.
So it enters into the life of nations. So it stimulates lit-
erature, quickens invention, fosters art. So it trains and
ennobles all faculties of the soul. So it revolutionizes
society peacefully, exalts it permanently, and sheds con-
tinuous force and blessing on every nation into whose
possession it has come.

Observe too, still further, how, through this remarka-
ble constitution of the Bible, it becomes really incapable
of being perverted, by the interpolation of texts, by the
extraction of texts which stand properly in their places,
so that the revelation shall be made to teach another
doctrine than that which it ought to bring from God.
We do not think of this, perhaps, as often as we should.

We hear so much said of this suspected text, and that
doubtful passage, of this probable interpolation from the
margin, and of the long quarrel which scholars have

rc6 UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE.

waged over that Greek letter, mark, or accent, that we
sometimes forget that God, in his constitution of the Bi-
ble has made it impossible to seriously pervert it. Of
course there will be erroneous transcriptions. The hand
of the scribe is not inspired. Of course, there may be
here and there insertions, of a marginal note, written into
the text. Of course there may be a word dropped out, or a
vowel omitted, in one passage or another. The eye of
the scribe will sometimes fail to discern distinctly what
it sees or what it omits ; and there must be of necessity
more or less liability to minute error in making copies of
so many writings. But the great course of doctrine can-
not be eliminated from the Scripture, except as you tear
the whole fabric into tatters. It is interwoven, every part
with every other — story, law, precept, proverb, the biogra-
phies of Christ by the evangelists, and the argument of
Christ by the apostles, and the vision of Christ in the
Apocalypse ; until, if you throw away one part, you must
equally throw away many others. You may get rid of
the story of Balaam ; though, if you do, you will miss one
of the most picturesque and impressive stories in all the
Old Testament. But what then will you do with the ref-
erences to him, in Micah, in Peter, and in the Revelation }
You may get rid, perhaps, of the miracle in the passage of
the Red sea, and suppose a mere shift of the wind when
Pharaoh's army was divinely destroyed. But what then
are you to do with the song of Moses and of Miriam .? and
what with the 76th psalm, and the io6th, and the 1 14th }
and what with the " song of Moses and the Lamb" in the

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE, 107

crowning book of the Apocalypse ? They are inter-
braided, like threads that have been woven so closely to-
gether that you cannot tear them apart except by de-
stroying the entire fabric. You cannot extract one and
leave the rest, with any ingenuity or by any force.

Thus it fares with the difficulties in the Biblical text,
of which skeptics have sometimes made so much. Ne^
cessarily, always, by the manifold constitution of the
Scripture, they must amount to very little. They are
like scratches on the stones of the Milan cathedral ; like
the breaking of a single pane of its pictured glass, or the
breaking off of a finger, or possibly a fore-arm,' from one
of its five thousand statues. The great structure stands
unimpaired, shining, imperial, in the serene Italian air.
The Bible stands, majestic, unfractured, in the same way.
You may take away a vowel here, or throw away an ac-
cent there ; you may pick up a word which has been
dropped, or throw out a word which has been added ; but
God in his wisdom has made it so multiform, so many-
sided and various in its parts, and has inwoven each part
so perfectly with all the others, that you cannot destroy
it, except by annihilating its whole structure. The Jewish
counting of words and letters insured extraordinary ac-
curacy to its copies. But no inaccuracy could touch its
life, unless it were repeated hundreds of times.

Observe, still further, how it holds the attention of the
world to itself, to its own text, by reason of this special
structure of it. It does not allow any equal paraphrase.
Erasmus, that beautiful scholar of the Reform ation-pe-

jo8 UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIB IE.

riod, wrote an eloquent paraphrase of the New Testa-
ment, which was early translated by Coverdale into Eng-
lish, a copy of which was ordered by the Government, I
think, to be placed in every parish church of England.
Who now ever reads it ? Who ever hears of it, except as
a famous curiosity of literature ? You may possibly find
it in some secondhand bookshop, or on the shelves of
some bibliomaniac ; but you scarcely ever, probably never,
see it used by one who is trying to ascertain the sense
of the Scripture. Doddridge, pastor, preacher, theolo-
gian:— pure, lovely, admirable, famous in all these offices —
wrote a paraphrase of the New Testament. Who reads
that to-day } Sometimes you may look at it for a pas-
sage, or a sentence, to see if you can get new light upon
a Scripture concerning which you are in darkness. But
who would undertake to read it through, leaving the text
of the New Testament, and going to this paraphrase of
even so eminent, so devout a man as Philip Doddridge,
the perfume of whose spirit would make any work fra-
grant which he undertook ?

No ! you cannot paraphrase the Bible, for the reason
that the multiform structure of it cannot be reproduced
by any one mind. You must take the forty minds that
made it, if you want to make another like it ; and then
you must have the superintending, inspiring force of the
one Divine Spirit to keep them in harmony, and to keep
them at that supreme exaltation of feeling and thought
in which they wrote. It is this alone which gives to
their words such perennial, fruitful power. If one man

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIB IE. 109

were at the same time all poet and all logician, all histo-
rian and all lawgiver, all prophet and all biographer, all
ethical philosopher and all maker of parables ; if he were
then filled to the full with the mind of God, and made
equal to the Son of God — he might make another Scrip-
ture. But until then, no possible paraphrase of the Bible
can ever satisfy the thought and the heart of the world.

The text of the Scripture holds the mind to itself,
and out of itself propels its own energy and beauty into
every treatise that would expound it, into every system
that is vitally derived from it. It keeps theology itself
from becoming as dry as the "ribbed sea-sand," and
makes it, as far as it adheres to the letter of God's word,
and is in harmony with its spirit, fresh and green, full of
force and full of grace. It is the one Scripture which
never grov/s old, with fountains sparkling amid its gran-
ite, and harebells wreathed around its cliffs.

And yet, by reason of this constitution, see also how
capable it is of being translated into each language ; not
only incapable of being destroyed by mutilation or addi-
tion, or of being supplanted by any paraphrase, but capa-
ble of being physically transferred into each foreign
tongue, as is no other book on the earth. Reading the
best translation of a foreign work is usually like looking
at the painted windows of the chapel or cathedral from
the outside. You see merely the general outline, per-
haps only vague and clashing blotches of color ; you do
not see the fine inestimable touches and traits, the har-
monious beauty of delicate lines, the glory of the golden

10

no UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE.

crown, the rich crimson and bkie of the robes. You see
them only darkly tinted, perhaps distorted. But the
Bible is capable of indefinite translation into all human
tongues, because each tongue has in it of necessity the
terms of narrative, of poetry, of law, of biography, and
of parable ; and these make up so much of the Scrip-
ture ! Then, if you find that there is a final poverty in
the language — which never has had the Scripture ideas
as yet expressed in it — a poverty of terms to express the
great facts of justification, regeneration, of redemption
by Christ, and of the disciples' inner experience, language
itself, when it has taken the Bible into it, becomes ex-
panded, ennobled, spiritualized. It enlarges itself to the
compass of the new treasure, it exalts itself to the height
of the recent acquisition. The language is regenerated,
as well as the spirit of the people who use it. It be-
comes heavenlier, as does their society. So it was that
Eliot could take this immense and magnificent book,
made by so many writers in so many ages, under the
superintendence of one supreme mind, and put it into
the sterile and narrow Algonquin tongue, that never be-
fore had held a conception of any one of all the facts, of
any one of all the elements of spiritual experience, which
the Scripture brings to light. So it is that it can go to-
day into the language of the Chinaman, of the Japanese,
the New-Zealander, the Esquimaux, the Tamil people or
the Tartars, or the Bushmen of South Africa. It can
go, as it has gone, into more than two hundred languages
of the earth. It can go into all, by reason of the fact

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIB IE. iii

that it is so carefully and variously made up, of story, song,
law, proverb. You cannot translate other books in like
manner, as I have said. The^act that this book can be
thus translated, as it indeed has been, and can be made
the property of the world — the fact that we have this
wonderful modern gift of tongues, through these transla-
tions of the Scripture into so many languages and dia-
lects of mankind — is owing to its marvellous literary con-
stitution. No language will fail to give some part of it
clearly and fully ; and each part by itself, when fully re-
ceived, will be found to be instinct with the life of the
whole.

But observe, yet further, that from that whole, so va-
rious, so vast, so complete as it is, we gather a final, total
impression of the truth which it brings, which is far more
sufficient and far more impressive than we otherwise
could have had ; because we see that truth at so many
angles, from so many points, and through the medium of
so many styles. The Bible is like a diamond that has
not one, but fifty faces, from each of which the radiance
flashes. It is like a great palace, not like a wall. Many
books are like walls, thin, perpendicular, alike on both
sides, which are only attractive when thoroughly masked
under trellis and vine. Here is a palace, with many
fronts, with hospitable doorways, storied roofs, far-reach-
ing outlooks ; its whole exterior broken into different
angles and gables, hanging balconies, oriel windows ; its
vast interior rich in saloons, music-halls, galleries, libra-
ries, the theatre, the throne-room, all the apartments for

112 UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE.

work and for rest, for study and for pleasure, for public
ceremonial, and for serene domestic joy. Such is the
Bible. And from this manifoldness of its structure we
get a final impression of its truth, which is richer and
more powerful than could possibly have been made if in
its constitution it had been narrower and more limited.

One of our American artists, wishing to perfect for
himself a portrait and a bust of Shakespeare, took the
death-mask from the face of the poet, and had twenty or
thirty photographs made, from every possible angle of
vision, that he might get the fullest light on every point
of face and head ; then came the portrait on the can-
vas, and then the stately head in marble. So we look
at the figure and face of Christ, as these are given us in
the Bible : from the earliest prophecy, from the law, from
the ritual, from the psalm and the song, from the evan-
gelical prophecies of Isaiah, from the story of Matthew,
and the other of Mark, and the other of Luke, and the
wonderful spiritual story of John, from the argument of
Paul, the exhortation of Peter, and the great vision at
last of the King in the heavens — when the garden, with
which the race began, has become the eternal city of
God, and when the babe-prince is the Lord of the saints —
we take all these, and from them all we get such a transcen-
dent image of the Son of God as no one writer could
have given. It takes forty writers, even under the inspi-
ration of God, to portray for us that sympathizing Sove-
reign, that bleeding Conqueror, that crucified King,
whom we are by-and-by to see, with the pierced hands

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE. 113

holding the sceptre, with the many diadems where was
of old the crown of thorns !

So it is, Friends and Fellow-workers, that this variety
in the structure of the Scripture vindicates the book in
which it is found as coming from God ; designed in his
wisdom, accomplished by the impulse and the influence
of his Spirit. It makes the book universal in its range,
adapted to all men. It makes it comprehensive in its
appeal to each individual student of it. It makes it the
most educating book in the world, to him who would mas-
ter all its contents ; makes it the grandest power in civil-
ization, by which inquiry is challenged and thought is
stirred, on every side, which becomes the germ of arts
and of sciences, of universities and libraries, of generous
literatures, social ameliorations, enlightened governments.
Because it is formed as it is, it is made impossible to
destroy its integrity, or to make it teach another doctrine
than that in which all its parts concur ; impossible to
paraphrase, yet easy to translate it, into every tongue.
Because it is framed as it is, we get from it such an ulti-
mate impression and conception of the truth, so complete
and» so powerful, as could not otherwise have been con-
veyed. And all the time it is one in its substance, in its
truth, in its law, in its clear revelation of God and his
government, of man and his needs, of Christ the Lord,
the King of the world, and of the Divine spiritual king-
dom in which he is the head, and into which all who
believe in him are thereby gathered. It has a vast, mul-
tiform oneness ; not like that of Paradise Lost, or of

10*

114 UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE,

Plato's Republic, or even of the Koran, which is one by
limitation, because the utterance of a single mind. This
is a oneness compacted out of all the varieties of experi-
ence, power, spiritual culture, in many separate and
widely scattered writers. It is a unity built of variety ;
and it makes the Bible the supreme phenomenon of the
literary world. It is like the earth. It is a book for the
earth, and, as I said before, it corresponds with it : one
planet, but with rivers, meadows, and mountain ranges,
assembled in it ; with seas and islands, the narrow isth-
mus, the outstretch of continents ; with monitory fires
underneath, and the great solemn stars above; with the
moon walking the sky, as to-night, in placid brightness,
and the sun shedding the splendor of day across the
lands that are glad in his coming. So is the Bible. It
has parable and psalm, brief story and vast legislation,
mighty argument, charming incident, curt admonition.
It too has its Sun of Righteousness ; its Old Testament
and its New, like answering hemispheres, what is latent
in the one being patent in the other. Before the threat of
its penalties the earth throbs. The unsearchable splen-
dor of its promises gilds the skies.

Assuredly it is the Book of God. When you can
prove to me that man has built the mountains of brick-
work, and has covered the earth with a mud which he has
manufactured for soil — when you can convince me that
he has adjusted the planet in its poise, and set the stars
upon their courses — then you may prove to me that the
Bible, with its oneness and its infinite variety, its produc-

UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE BIBLE. 115

tioii extending over fifteen hundred years, and with its
last verse answering to its first across the dreary drift of
ages, has come to us from man !

Let us study it, then, my friends, with eager reverence.
Let us consider it with such thoroughness of examina-
tion as is suitable to a book which comes to us from such
a source ! Let us count it our grandest privilege to
study it; our beautiful duty to teach its wondrous truths
to others, and to spread the knowledge of itself and its
contents around the world. What a mission it is to
make it known ! We sound again the harp of David,
and put to our modern lips the golden trumpet of Isaiah ;
we speak again with Paul in the jostling streets of Ephe-
sus or of Corinth, or under the matchless temples of the
Acropolis ; we speak with Moses, fresh from the thunder
and lightnings of the mount, and with his face yet shi-
ning with a gleam from the glory of God ; yea, reverently
we may say it, we speak again with the Lord himself, at
the well-side, at the supper, from the cross on which he
died, from the throne on which he reigns — when we send
this Bible around the world !

No other office is so grand. No other privilege,
supreme as this, can meet us until we reach the higher
levels of the universe which we dwell in, and enter the
felicities which wait for those who, having loved the Lord
on earth, as he is here revealed in his word, at last for
ever stand before him, and do his work, and see his glory,
face to face !

ANCIENT HISTORY

IN ITS CONNECTION

With the Old Testament.

REV. HOWARD CROSBY, D. D.,

PASTOR OF THE FOURTH AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, NEW YORK.

This Lecture of Dr. Crosby's ^A^as delivered ^?vith
constant reference to charts and maps, which v^rill
account for the -want of finish and apparent con-
nection in some of its parts. It is printed entirely
from the stenographer's notes.

ANCIENT HISTORY

IN ITS CONNECTION

With the Old Testament.

We have had of late a great many apologies for the
Bible from in/ertebrate Christians, and the form of the
apology has been, " The Bible was not intended to teach
us science !" Now, if the Bible is not to be trusted in
its science, it is not to be trusted in its religion. What
would you think of an inspired man who would come to
you and tell you that he came from God to teach you, and
should begin his address by informing you that when
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, George Washington
succeeded to the Presidential chair ? Would you have
any confidence in his inspiration ? Where the Bible
teaches cosmogony, it teaches the truth ; and where it
teaches history, it teaches the truth ; and Satan knows
well that if he can undermine the truth of the science
of the Scriptures, he can make all the Scriptures doubt-
ful. The first and tenth chapters of Genesis are chap-
ters of great similarity. The first chapter is a declara-

120 HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT.

tion from God concerning the palaeology, I may call it,
of the earth on which we live, and the second chapter is
just such a declaration of the palaeology of our race.
Neither of those chapters could have been written by
untutored man. There was no science in the Mosaic
age that could have been the guide of Moses in his nar-
rations in either of those chapters, and yet in that first
chapter we find a detailed order of creation which the
careful and searching geology of our own time has proved
to be the exact order, and the last link in the proof was
only obtained three years ago. The Mosaic account puts
the creation of plants before the creation of animals; but
Geology, four years ago, had found that animals came
first in the book of rocks, and plants were above them in
the carboniferous stratum ; so there was a varying, and
the Bible, you see, was wrong ; but " the Bible was not
meant to teach us science" — that was the answer four
years ago. But three years ago, down below the ani-
mals, was found an immense amount of graphite, or
plumbago, which is the result of the decomposition of
vegetable matter; and now the link is complete and the
stories are parallel — the one told by Moses, and the other
by geologists of to-day.

Let us be, therefore, a little careful of our readiness to
apologize for the mistakes of the Scripture by saying ** the
Scripture was not made to teach us science." The tenth
chapter of Genesis is a story told by Moses of the distri-
bution of the races of men. No ethnology in his period,
no history, no philology, could have taught that to Mo-

HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT. 121

ses ; but now the historian, helped by all the monuments
of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, and Palestine, and the phi-
lologist and the ethnologist all agree, after their marvel-
lous researches in this century, that the tenth chapter of
Genesis exactly describes the distribution of the race.
Where did Moses get these chapters from ? He did not
get them from science. He got them from God !

I purpose this evening, in the hour you give me,
briefly — but I hope as interestingly as a dry subject may
be treated — to put before you some of the illustrations
of the history of the Old Testament that have been
brought before our notice by the discoveries in the Mes-
opotamian Valley during the last twenty-five years, but
especially in the last ten years, and, indeed, some of
them within the last twelve months.

We all knew a great deal about Greece and Rome up
to twenty-five or thirty years ago, but we knew very little
indeed about Egypt, and still less about the great Meso-
potamian Valley. With regard to the latter we had a
few fragments of Greek writers, and some slight allu-
sions in the history of Herodotus, but beyond this we
were in the dark, only having the references that are
made in the Scripture, unsupported by any other evi-
dence. For example, what did we know of the old
Assyrian, Babylonian, and Chaldean empires ? They
»were all in confusion. The account of Ctesias, who
was the court physician of Artaxerxes Mnemon, was a
confused account. It left us in doubt both as to times

and places, and made us quite confident, when we got

11

122 HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT.

through the record, that we had been reading a romance.
Of the whole Assyrian empire of a thousand years, he
only mentions one or two royal personages, e. g., Ninus,
the founder, and Semiramis ; and one of these, Semira-
mis, builds cities everywhere, and all of them are a mile
high and one hundred miles square, and all filled with
about a million of people, and she scatters them all over
the country in a most remarkable, Aladdin-like way.
That is all the story we have of Assyria from the old
sources, nothing that we could believe in except that
there was a great queen, Semiramis. Now, the whole
story of the Mesopotamian Valley has been dug up out
of that valley, the excavations beginning thirty-three
years ago, when, in 1843, Mr. Botta, the son of the histo-
rian of the American. Revolution, and relative of my hon-
ored friend. Professor Botta of this city, first began the
explorations in the Mound of Koyunjik, opposite Mosul.
He was followed by Layard, who made still more remark-
able discoveries ; and since that we have had a number
who have engaged in this work of exploration, not only
of the locality, but of the language and the history of
that remarkable people. And now we have the history
of ancient Chaldea and its successor, Assyria, almost as
clearly put before us as the history of mediaeval Germany
and France. A library has been found in the piles at
Nineveh of one of the last princes of Assyria, who died
about 640 years b. c, and that library was discovered to
be full of books of all kinds — arithmetics, geographies,
histories, spelUng-books, dictionaries, and every st3de of

HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 123

work that the authors of those ancient days wrote. They
had been preserved by the falHng in of these brick build-
ings, carefully preserved by the destroyer, and now a
large quantity of the contents of this library have been
carried to the museums of Europe, the largest part, per-
haps, going to the British Museum. Men have been
enabled not only to find out the meaning of the remark-
able cuneiform character, but also to bring out from its
grave a language — ruay, two, three languages — that were
altogether dead, of which not one single word or syllable
was known to us before ; and now those languages have
their grammars and their dictionaries and their reading-
books, and we can study them in our homes as we can
study Hebrew or Greek. There is the Assyrian language
especially, of which there is now found an immense liter-
ature, the literature especially of the kings of .Assyria, a
language which is the old parent of the Hebrew — the
Sanscrit, so to speak, of the Semitic dialects ; and there
is the Akkad language, as it is called, or one of the Tu-
ranian stock, belonging to Southern Babylonia ; and
then, also, there is the Median language ; and these three
languages, that thirty years ago were not known to exist,
have now their full development in grammar and dic-
tionary.

In these remarkable remains have been found the
tablets written with the cuneiform character by kings
some of whom reigned 2,000 years before Christ, in the
time of Abraham and before him ; and in some of these
tablets we have long and particular records of all the

124 HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT.

events of their reigns; and it is interesting for us, in
examining these records, to find at times the mention of
Palestine and the kings with whose names we are so fa-
miliar in Holy Writ. If I take up the Bible, then, and
look through it in its order, the first thing that I would
call your attention to is the very name of the Southern
country ; and this leads me to a brief episode to explain
the rough map I have put upon the blackboard. Here I
have meant to portray the long straight range of the
Taurus Mountains that run along the northern side of
the Mediterranean Sea, north of Cilicia and Pamphylia,
and run eastward until they come to the neighborhood
of Mount Ararat in Armenia. Here is the Masius spur
of this range. Here is the Zagros range running along
east of the Tigris and Persian Gulf. This Mesopotamian
plain has an elevation, perhaps, at the highest of not
more than three hundred feet above the level of the sea ;
but when you get up these mountains, then the great
plateau of Media and Persia runs far into the desert in
Chinese territory, and instead of being only three hun-
dred feet at its highest, is three thousand feet above the
sea; so that a totally different climate and country is
found east of this broad range, or, rather, six ranges.

West of the Euphrates you come to the Arabian des-
ert, where but few can find subsistence ; but between the
Arabian desert and the Zagros Mountains you have the
rich Mesopotamian Valley, watered by the twin rivers,
the Euphrates and the Tigris, the first running westerly
from Ararat, and as if about to empty into the Mediter-

HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT. 125

ranean, then suddenly turning and coming east until it
is within twenty-five miles of the Tigris, and then pass-
ing out until it is one hundred miles away from the Ti-
gris again, and then joining the Tigris and entering with
it the Persian Gulf ; the Tigris, not so long by four or
five hundred miles, starting only six miles from the river
Euphrates, and then pursuing a southeasterly course and
then a southerly course, until it comes within twenty-five
miles of the Euphrates, then again is found one hundred
miles from it, joins it here and enters the Persian Gulf.
Though the Tigris is the narrower river and the shorter,
it carries double the amount of water into the joint riv-
ers that the Euphrates does, because the latter has hardly
any tributaries. There are two here, you see ; and besides
that, from the time the Chabour enters the Euphrates,
the river, so to speak, slops over and its water goes out
into the desert, so that there is much less water in the
desert down here than there is three hundred or four
hundred miles farther north. I have drawn a line here
to show that there is a difference between the countries
south and the countries north. The country south of
this line is rich alluvial. Three crops a year, each bear-
ing two or three hundred-fold, are obtained in that rich-
est of all countries on the face of the earth, even richer
than the Nile valley. Formerly, in historic periods, the
Persian Gulf came up one hundred and twenty miles far-
ther north than now, and the two rivers entered by dif-
ferent mouths. These one hundred and twenty miles

have been formed since historic periods, for Ur of the

11*

126 HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT

Chaldees, whence Abraham came, was a maritime city
on the Persian Gulf, and is now one hundred and twenty
miles away. Now that rich country we call Babylonia,
or Chaldea. The country north of it, which is a some-
what different formation and is slightly higher, is Assyria,
and the northern part of Assyria bears marks of volcanic
action. This natural division between Babylonia and
Assyria helps to account for some of the historic facts
connected with the two countries.

But what was the name of this lower country, as
given by the inhabitants themselves t It was not " Bab-
ylonia ;" it was not even " Chaldea," although one of the
tribes of men that lived down here was called in the old
inscriptions, " Chald ;" but the name of the country was
Gun-duni. When God placed Adam and Eve upon the
earth he placed them in a country that was called Gan-
Eden, and that is the Garden of Eden, as we translate it;
and Gan-Eden is nothing but this Gun-duni — this south-
ern part of the Euphrates and Tigris Valley. It was very
natural that the Semitic people, seeing the word " Eden,"
should liken it to their own word Eden, which meant
pleasure, and call it the " Garden of Pleasure." That is
the way all nations do with foreign words ; they make
them like their own. You know just north of London
there is a village called " Shotover." That is almost the
right name. The French, who called it so, spelt it " Cha-
teau-vert," which signifies the " Green-castle ;" but the
English called it " Shotover," which was as near as they
could get it. So with the Gun-duni of this country.

HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT. 127

which was an Akkad word. The Semitic people did not
know what Gtm-dtmi meant, and so they gave it the
name of the Garden of Pleasure, which was a very nice
name to give it. So we have from the very beginning
found among the old remains the name of the country
the Garden of Eden, and it puts an end to all the contest
as to where that garden was. It was not in Armenia,
nor in India, as some thought, but there it was — the
lower portion of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Now, in the tenth chapter one of the most remark-
able personages we find was Nimrod, who was a mighty
hunter before the Lord. Do you find anything about
Nimrod there 1 We find his very name existing right
here at Babylon. At ancient Borsippa there is a hill
bearing still the name of Nimrod. Up here, south of
Nineveh not many miles, where the Little Zab joins the
Tigris, there is a village which is named " Nim-rud." So
Nimrod's name continues there yet from those old times
shortly after the Deluge. More than that, we find that
the principal god among the ancient Babylonians was
Bel- (or lord) Nipru, or Merodach, for now they are be-
lieved to be the same god. Bel means the lord, or god,
and Nipru is nothing but what the Septuagint transla-
tors of the Bible called Nimrod. They write it this way:
" Nebroth." His other name is another transformation :
•' J/^r^^-ach."

We have, then, in the greatest god of Babylon — the
one who was above all others distinguished, the one that
through all its history stood really at the head of the

128 HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT,

Pantheon — Nimrod himself, the founder of the Babylo-
nian monarchy. And, what is very curious, Bel-Mero-
dach, or Bel-Nimrod, the great god of Babylon, is repre-
sented always as having four splendid hunting-dogs.
There is the " mighty hunter before the Lord." We are
told in that tenth chapter that the beginning of his king-
dom was Babel, or Babylon, Erech, Akkad, and Calneh,
and we find the ruins of all those four cities now ; and
after a careful examination we find that the very names
of some of Nimrod's successors of that old Nimrodian
dynasty are still upon the bricks of those old ruins. I
cannot stop to describe them. I have to pass rapidly
over them. Here is Babylon, with its wild ruins, upon
the river Euphrates ; here is Erech ; here is Akkad, or
Ur of the Chaldees, whence Abraham came ; and here
is Calneh, or Nipur, the same as Nipru, another Nimrod-
town found in Nimrod's old country. Out of that land —
out of Babylonia, out of Chaldea, out of Gan-eden — went
Ashur and built four cities : Nineveh, the city Rehoboth,
Calah, and Resen ; and we find now the ruins of Nine-
veh brought out to view by Botta. Twenty miles below
we find Calneh. We are not sure but that still farther
south, that which was known in the older periods by the
name of Ashur, is the city Rehoboth. Now, what is that
story } It is simply this, that Ashur — that is a Semitic
race, for Ashur was the child of Shem — was driven out
of this lower country by the Nimrodian race, and they
went north and settled up here in the northern part of
the Mesopotamian valley and laid the foundations of the

HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT. 129

Assyrian kingdom, which was a Semitic kingdom, while
the old Chaldean was not, but a Turanian kingdom.

Let me explain here, for the benefit of those who are
not thoroughly familiar with these ethnological terms,
that there are three, as philologists say, distinct races
upon the earth : the Aryan, to which we belong, and
which some would consider to be the descendants of
Japheth ; then the Semitic race, including the Hebrews
and the Arabs, the descendants of Shem ; and the Tura-
nian race, which may be the descendants of Ham or may
not be. But these Turanians — not the Aryans nor the
Semitic people, but the other branch of the races — occu-
pied the southern country ; and it was the driving out of
the Semitic people which is described in those few words.
Ashur went out and built those four cities at the north;
and just as we find Nimrod in the form of Bel-Nipru or
Bel-Merodach, the great god of Babylonia, we find Ashur
the great god of Assyria.

Another interesting fact : We find on all the ancient
remains of this southern country, away back 2,000 years
before Christ, that the kings are always called the kings
of Sumir and Akkad, and they embrace the people of the
plains and mountains. The latter were the people of the
mountains, and the former of the plains. But the name
of the people of the plain, as given in their own lan-
guage, for Sumir is a Semitic word, was Kengi. Now
Noah had a grandson whose name, if we wrote it in Eng-
lish exactly, would be Kenagan, or we call him Canaan,
but the guttural Ayin is in there which corresponds to

I30 HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT.

the "g" in Kenagan. It shows these people of the plain
were old Canaanites before, long before, this land was
occupied by them. They were the old descendants of
Ham, and that accounts for what Herodotus tells us, that
all these people here on the Mediterranean coast came
over from the Persian Gulf. So these Kenagan were
afterwards driven out by the Semitic people, and they
found their way over here to Canaan and became the
Canaanites there. The word Kenagan signifies "the
people of the plain," or " the low country," which would
not have been the name given to them if Palestine had
been their first habitation, which is a very high country.
So we see from these discoveries where our old friends
the Canaanites came from. We find also in these re-
mains long accounts of the fall of man with much detail,
and long accounts of the Deluge. The Deluge is called
the overflowing flood of Na, and there is Noah. In the
Deluge we read of the dove being sent out upon the sev-
enth day and its returning, and of the raven being sent
out and never coming back. We find also that the Sab-
bath was regularly observed. They were Sabbath peo-
ple in old Babylonia, Every seventh day was a holy day
before their gods. All these are interesting illustrations
of Scriptural truth.

Now, if we come down to Abraham's day, say 2,000
B. c, or about that, we find in the Bible a statement given
us of a very remarkable raid made upon the cities of the
plain by four confederate monarchs, one of whom was
Chcdorlaomer, and he had with him Amraphel, king of

HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT. 131

Shinar, and Arioch, king of Ellasar, and Tidal, king of
Nations (Goim). These were the four. Until these dis-
coveries we knew nothing about them except their names
but now we find it recorded that a dynasty, came down
from the mountains of Elam, conquered the whole plain
and made the kings of the plain subject to it. This was
the king of Elam, and here on the map you see Elam
lying here between the mountains and the sea. The
king of Shinar was the king of Northern Babylonia;
the king of Ellasar was the king of Southern Babylonia;
the king of Nations was the king of the wandering tribes
here on the skirts of the Arabian Desert. These kings
formed just the combination we should have expected at
that time to make that wonderful raid up there through
the Euphrates and down through Lebanon into Sodom.
Further we find Chedorlaomer, or rather, one of his fam-
ily, on the records. We find Lagamer quite frequently as
one of the gods of the nation and we find Kedor, in the
form of Kedor-mabuk, and whether it is the same as
Chedorlaomer we cannot tell ; but what is very strange
he calls himself Apda Mardu, or the Conqueror of the
West ; and so it may be that this very Kedor-mabuk is
the Chedorlaomer of whom we read in Genesis, We find
the name of Arioch, his confederate, or rather, an earlier
Arioch on the old clay tablets and the old bricks. Now
what is very interesting is this : that the first of these
Kedors brings to view a name which historians have
been searching for for centuries, and tells us something
which the world has been wanting to know for many

132 HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT.

generations. We find that the first of these Kedors that
came down from the mountains and conquered the whole
of the Babylonian territory sometime before the day of
Abraham, perhaps lOO years, had this name, "Kudur
Nakhunta." Now that is an Aryan word, and when it is
translated into the Semitic language, "Kudur" means
the seed or the child. "Nakhunta" is the name of the
goddess Ishtar or Venus. If we translate the first into
the Semitic, we have " Ziru," which means the seed, and
the second Ishtar ; so we have Ziru-Ishtar, which we gen-
erally write in English, " Zoroaster." And so the first of
those princes that came down into Babylonia was the old
Zoroaster, the founder of the Zoroastrian religion, which
was the religion of the Persians and Medes, who came
down 1,500 years later, and took possession of the Mes-
opotamian plain.

From this period we hear nothing more in the Bible
of this Mesopotamian country until 1,200 years later,
when the kings of Israel are brought into contact with
the later kings of Assyria ; but meanwhile we have men-
tion made of Egypt in the time of the Egyptian bond-
age. I will not dwell long on that Egyptian matter. I
will just say that there are some names on which much
light is shed by the knowledge we have lately obtained
from Egypt by logical research. For example, how often
we have wondered in our childhood, and perhaps when
we grew older, at that strange name that Pharaoh or the
people of Egypt gave to Joseph, which certainly was not
as musical or easy to pronounce as the name that Rach-

HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT, 133

el gave him — " Zaphnath paaneah ;" and yet, when you
come to translate that name, as we are now able to do
with perfect safety, see what a beautiful name they gave
him: " Zaf-nt-p-anch " is the name. "Zaf" meant
"bread;" "nt" meant "of;" "p" is the article "the,"
and the last, " anch," means life ; and so Joseph was
called " the bread of life." [Applause.]

Moses' name in the Hebrew is " Mosheh," but now
there is a Hebrew word " Mashah " of which " Mosheh "
is the active participle, which means to draw out ; and so
when we read in the Scriptures about the birth of Moses
and the name given to him by Pharaoh's daughter the
skeptics had a grand occasion to fand fault with the
science of the Bible. Thus it is : " And she called his name
Mosheh, and she said. Because I moshah him out of the
water " — that is, " I drew him out of the water," and they
say, "That is a made-up thing because mosheh is the
active participle and could not mean 'drawn out' but
'drawing out,' and is not the passive participle * drawn
out ' ? She would take the passive participle only and
not say mosheh. It is a clumsy affair altogether, and
shows how full of errors the Bible is."

Well we went to work, then, and said the Bible was
not meant to teach us science, but only religion. Since
then, however, we have learned something more. We
have discovered that the daughter of Pharaoh did not
give her son a Hebrew name at all. She very naturally
gave her son an Egyptian name, and we find an Egyptian
.word, the passive participle of which is "Mosu," and

12

134 HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAJ^ENT

that was the name given to Moses. Mosn means two
things — first, ' drawn out,' but it secondly means ' brought
forth' and is the name given to a child ; and so Pharaoh's
daughter, wanting to call this her child, although it was
not her own child and she could not designate it in the
sense of the word * brought forth,' could call it in the
other sense of the word 'drawn out' because it was drawn
out ; and she said, " I drew him out of the water and
have a right to call him that, although it is the common
name to give to one's own child." And so there was a sort
of pun in the thing, but the Egyptian language gives us
exactly the original name.

So with Moses' son, who was called "Ger-shom,"
"Ger" means "a stranger" and "shom" means "there,"
and " Gershom," which is " a stranger there," was a very
harsh compound and no Hebrew would have thought of
giving his child that name when the interpretation is " I
am a stranger in a strange land." He never would have
called him "a stranger there." But now we find that
Moses gave his son an Egyptian name, and " Ger " means
"stranger" and "shom" "a strange land;" and so it is
just what it is called in the Bible, "a stranger in a strange
land." One other of these words and I will go to the
later history of Assyria. When Joseph was made grand
vizier and the robes and grandeur of the vizier's office
were put upon him, one went before and called out to the
people as he rode through the streets of the city, as it is
in our version, " Bow the knee !" Now the Hebrew word
is " Abrech," and nobody knew exactly what it did mean,

HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT. 135

and some thought it was from the words meaning " ten-
der father," but the truth is, it is not a Hebrew word at
all, but it is the imperative of the Egyptian word " to re-
joice." So they went ahead of Joseph's chariot, crying^
" Rejoice ! Rejoice ! Here is the bread of life !"

What is a very remarkable thing is this, that from the
time of Moses to the time of Rehoboam, 500 years, or
from 1 47 1 to 971, we find that Egypt did not in any way
trouble the children of Israel, and yet, after the time of
Moses, some of the most powerful of Egypt's monarchs
were reigning. Now what is the reason of this, when
such remarkable monarchs as Thothmes 3d and Ame-
noph 2d, etc., were extending their sway all over the east-
ern world and making conquests even here in Assyria }
Why is it that little Palestine was not harmed, and that
we see nothing about that at all in the records of God's
holy people t The answer is found, in the first place, in
the fact that it was Assyria that was the great adversary
of Egypt, and it was against Assyria that they directed
all their energies when they came eastward ; and more
than this, we are let into the secret by a little passage in
I Chron. 4: 17, where we find that the son of Ezra mar-
ried Bithiah, the daughter of Pharaoh. So Pharaoh mar-
ried his daughter into that noble house of Caleb, the
Northumberland House of Palestine, and we find that
Amenoph the 3d, one of these magnificent monarchs
after the Exodus, married a Jewess. We see from these
facts, that there was a close amity between Egypt and
Palestine through all that period of Judges, and it was

136 HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT

good policy for Egypt to keep Palestine its friend as a
natural barrier to prevent any raids from the East down
into Egypt. Now, the last 200 years of that 500 years
it is interesting to find in the records of Egypt and As-
syria, (for Babylonia had been crushed and brought into
subjection to Assyria,) that very weak princes sat upon
the throne and those two empires were very much
depressed ; as if God had purposed it so, so that this
Israelitish Empire could rise under David and Solomon,
and under Solomon it was far superior in wealth, power,
and fame to those old monarchies of Assyria and of
Egypt. Now, the first notice we have of the successors
of David and Solomon upon the throne of Israel in these
Oriental records is the name of Ahab, that good husband
of the good Jezebel, and we find that Shalmaneser the
2d, in his story, tells us that Ahab, king of Israel*
joined with Benhadad the king of Damascus and four
others, and made a confederacy, and Shalmaneser went
over with his troops and crushed him. And further on in
these records we find the same Shalmaneser a few years
after coming over and making the monarch of Israel pay
him tribute. We find the monarch's name was Jehu, and
so we have Ahab and Jehu, and their story is told us by
the old records dug up at Nineveh. In the account in
the Kings of the reign of Amaziah it is said that his
kingdom was confirmed, which is a phrase only used
when a kingdom is tributary to another kingdom ; and
that shows that Amaziah, king of Judah, was under the
orders of the king of Assyria about that time.

HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT. 137

New a little later in the year 770, b. c. we find the first
Assyrian monarch mentioned by name. He comes as
Pal, and he fights against Menahem, and brings him into
tribute to Assyria. Now, Pul is identified with a monarch
whos2 name is found on the records very often, and his
name is Vul lush, and the most remarkable thing about
him in history is that his wife is the only woman whose
name is found in all these multitudinous records of As-
syria and Babylon. Wherever Vul lush's name is put,
this name of his wife is put with him, and her name was
Semiramis. Babylonia was a restless province, all the
while rebelling, and Pul married her and had her name
put with his on the public records. Then after Pul
come \ 1 ig lath Pileser, and he, you know, at the invitation
of Ahaz, comes over and conquers Syria. After him
comes Shalmanezer and fights against Hoshea, the last
king of Israel, and now we see that Shalmanezer besieged
Samaria and in the third year he took it. Shalmanezer
is not said to take it, but in the third year " the king of
Assyria " took it, and we find in that very year Shalma-
nezer was succeeded by a usurper called Sargon. And
that is the reason why the Bible is so exact and says not
Shalmanezer but the " king of Assyria" took it. We find
at the same time that Hoshea tried to get help from the
Egyptian king, and his name we find upon the Egyptian
records with all he did. Now a very curious thing is
found. When the people of Northern Palestine were
taken away by the Assyrian king and put away up
this river Chabor, he put a large number of people from

12*

138 HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT.

Babylonia in their place. Why did he take them from
Babylonia ? Simply because it was such a troublesome
province. It remembered that it was an empire long be-
fore Assyria was, and so there was a constant insurrec-
tion, almost, in Babylonia. He took, therefore, a large
number of people from Babylonia, those that were most
troublesome, and put them in the place of the Israelites
whom he placed over in Assyria. Many thousands, it
says, of the people of Babylon whom he put over there
worship a goddess whom they called Succoth-benoth.
These are two Hebrew names and mean the Booths of
the daughters. The goddess they worship was the great
goddess of Babylon, Zir-banit. They have written it
Succoth-benoth. We see how they made the second
mistake, but. how Zir became Succoth is more difficult to
comprehend. Zir means " lady " and Zar means " booths."
They thought it was Zar, and translated it " booths," while
the real name is " Lady Creator." She was the wife of
Nimrod, and her name was Zir-banit, or the deity which
these Babylonians worshipped in Palestine when the
kingdom of the north was destroyed.

Those names which occur at that time in the sacred
record are not names of individuals, but of offices. Tar-
tan was generalissimo ; Rab-saris was the first eunuch ;
Rab-shakeh was the chief cup-bearer ; Rab-mag was the
chief priest ; and so we are to translate those words.

Now, we come to Hezekiah's day. We find him, in
the first place, making favor with Merodach-baladan, the
king of Babvlon, and we find from the record of that day

HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 139

that Merodach Baladan rose up against the Assyrian pow-
er, threw off the yoke, called upon his countrymen in the
name of their old glory and reestablished the Babylonian
power. Hezekiah thinks now, " This is a nice thing for
me ; I will play Babylon against Assyria. I am threatened
by Sargon, the king of Assyria, and I will ally myself
with Merodach Baladan." So they engage in friendship ;
but it turns out a very poor speculation, for you know
soon after Sennacherib, Sargon's son, came and attacked
Hezekiah ; and the Bible says he took all the fenced
cities of Hezekiah and shut up Hezekiah himself and
made him pay a tribute of thirty talents of gold and three
hundred talents of silver. But hear Sennacherib's own
account. He says :

" In the course of my expedition I captured and sub-
dued the spoil of his cities. Hezekiah, king of Judah, did
not submit to my yoke. Forty-six of his cities, strong
fortresses, and cities of their territory which were with-
out number, I besieged, I captured and plundered as
spoil. Hezekiah himself I made as a caged bird in the
city of Jerusalem. In addition to previous taxes I im-
posed upon them a donation.

"The fear of the approach of my majesty overwhelmed
him and his own soldiers whom he had caused to enter
Jerusalem. He consented to the payment of tribute —
thirty talents of gold ; eight hundred talents of silver."

There is a difference there between 800 and 300, but
how remarkable this story is ! And then he goes on to
say how he overthrew Merodach Baladan, the friend of

140 HISTORY Al^D THE OLD TESTAMENT.

Hezekiah. Also on the second expedition when he was
down here at Libnah he sent Rabshakeh to shake his
fists at Hezekiah. You will remember the king of Ethio-
pia was coming against him, and he said, *' Tell Hezekiah
not to trust to these Egyptians." We find now two
Egyptian kings. So or Sabaco is mentioned by name and
Pharaoh. In the book of Isaiah these words of Sennach-
erib are written " Do n't you, Hezekiah, think Pharaoh
is going to do you any good. He is a broken reed that
will pierce the hand that leans upon it ;" and we find that
Pharaoh Sethos and others of that dynasty had a brol:en
rred as their emblem, so that you see what a beautiful
allusion that is, and what a remarkably neat historic
coincidence is presented by it. Sennacherib says : " This
Pharaoh has a broken reed as his emblem. He is noth-
ing but a broken reed, and you, Hezekiah, had better not
trust him." And what is very curious is that when
Rabshakeh begins to talk to them on the wall the Jews
cry out : " Do n't talk in the Jewish language. Talk in
the Syrian language !" Why Syrian } Why not Assy-
rian } Now we find, since the Assyrian language has
been disentombed and explained, that the Assyrian lan-
guage is the old Aramean. The Aramean language was
the old original language of Assyria. Another curious
thing occurred after that, when Manasseh was carried cap-
tive to Babylon. Manasseh was the son of Hezekiah and
it was a pity that when Hezekiah was advised of his own
coming death he should have obtained a respite and had
fifteen years added to his life by the Lord. He had bet-

HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 141

ter have died, for Manasseh was born in that fifteen
years and became a scourge, but when Manasseh was
carried captive to Babylon, what a mistake the sacred
writer made there ! The idea of the king of Assyria,
who reigned at Nineveh, carrying his captives to Baby-
lon ! It is absurd, and you will find fifty commentators
who will tell you it is absurd. The idea of an Assyrian
prince carrying his captives to Babylon ! He ought to
have carried them to Nineveh. Undoubtedly he ought.
Within the last few years we find the whole story of
Esar-haddon's life written by himself, and he tells us
that when his father Sennacherib died, Babylon was in
such a ferment that he felt it a necessity just to go down
there and live among them ; and so, besides his palace
at Nineveh he built a palace at Babylon and made it his
headquarters during all his reign. Now we see why
Manasseh was carried there. It was just for that reign,
not before and not afterwards, that the king was to be
found at Babylon.

I had a good many other allusions to make, but I will
rapidly close with mentioning two or three. We find the
son of Esar-haddon — Asshur-bani-pal, the original of the
name Sardanapalus — reigning forty years with wonderful
power in Assyria, although it was the flaming up of the
light in the socket, for his son only reigned one year, and
was the real one that was burned up in the palace with
his wife. Sardanapalus did not die that way, but it was
his son, whose tragic death is given in the story of Sar-
danapalus. Sardanapalus had a brother that he put in

T42 HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT.

his father, Esar-haddon's, place in Babylon. He did not
want Babylon out of the control of the royal family, so
he reigned in Nineveh, and let his brother, whose name
was Saul-mugina, reign in Babylon. Saul-mugina took
up the cause of the Babylonians and revolted against
his brother, and a fearful conflict took place, which re-
sulted in a victory for Sardanapalus. And what did he
do.'* He heated 2^ fiery furnace and burned his brother
up there. He put his chief generals into a den of lions ;
and there you have, one hundred years before the time
of Daniel, just those punishments, in vogue which you
find in the Book of Daniel, and against which infidels
have again and again turned their bitter scorn as incon-
sistent with true history.

In Nebuchadnezzar's day, when the Assyrian empire
was overthrown, and the Babylonish empire reinstated —
and it was a glorious reign of forty years — we find in the
record he gives of his own reign this remarkably entry.
After giving an account of the magnificent palaces he
built, and the hanging gardens and the walls — and no
wonder his nature was proud : there has never been a
monarch like him on the face of the earth — we find this
strange record. He suddenly says : " And now I took
no pleasure in building. I took no pleasure in the tem-
ples. I took no pleasure in walking or in riding. I took
no pleasure in anything for a term of years ;" and then
he goes on with what he did afterwards. What was that .'*
Why, it was the seven years when he was. like a beast
upon the earth and ate grass like an ox ; and that is the

HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT, 143

way Nebuchadnezzar refers to it in that rather delicate
manner in his own record.

Now after these empires — the old Babylonian lasting
until 1,300 years before Christ, and the Assyrian to about
625 before Christ, and then the new Babylonian of Neb-

juchadnezzar's, which only lasted eighty years — we come
down to the sixth century before Christ, and then we
find these mountaineers coming down from their moun-
tains and sweeping over the country and taking posses-
sion of all ; and Cyrus is their leader, or, rather, they
have two leaders. One is JDarius, and the other is Cy-
rus ; Darius, or Astyages, an old man, and Cyrus, a young
man. They come and sweep over that empire of 1,500
years' duration, and they find in the midst of it a people
by millions called Israel, They make them a grand ex-
ception to their work of extermination. They treat
them with favor and load them with riches and blessings.
They send back all of them that want to go to Jerusalem
with a grand army escort. Why all this honor upon the
poor captive Jews } These were the people that believed
in the old Zoroastrian creed — that there was but one
God. They hated polytheism ; they allowed no statues

. or pictures of gods. Only one God they worshipped.
These mountaineers came down to exterminate the pa-
gans, and they were charmed when they found in their
midst a people that, like them, worshipped one true God.
They were friends of the Jews. God raised up these peo-
ple to come down and send his people back to their own
land. These were the Persians. It is very true that

144 HISTORY AND THE OLD TESTAMENT

there was a ritualistic wing of the Persians that tried to
take away the old Zoroastrian creed, and did succeed a
little. For example : after Cyrus had died and his son
Cambyses had died, these ritualistic Medes gained the
throne, and as soon as they gained the throne they stop-
ped the building of Jerusalem. That we find recorded
in the Book of Ezra. They had not a love for the Jews
like the real true Persians ; but as soon as the Magians
were set aside, and after a civil war of some years, Darius
became a king of Persia, and he sent word to the Jews to
go on with the building of the city, and renewed his in-
terest in them that his great predecessor, Cyrus the
Great, had.

My friends, I have given you thus far a very desul-
tory story. I have tried to leave out details that would
be uninteresting except to those that are constantly
studying details ; and perhaps there has not been the
connection that there ought to have been in an historic
lecture, but I have thrown out such facts as may lead
you to further study, and confirm to your hearts the glo-
rious truth of the Scripture of God.

THE

Adaptation of the Bible,

TO THE

UNIVERSAL NEEDS OF THE SOUL,

AND THE

WITNESS OF CHRISTIAN MEN

TO ITS

DIVINE AUTHORITY AND POWER.

ROBERT RUSSELL BOOTH, D. D.,

PASTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY PLACE CHURCH, NEW YORK.

13

THE

Bible and Man's Needs;

Testimonies to its Power.

The subject proposed as our theme, at this point in
the course, is in importance second to no other, and in
some respects might well claim the precedence. After
we have established to our satisfaction the authority, the
inspiration, and the oneness of the Bible, as revealing
redemption ; after we have studied the languages in whicli
it is written, and have scrutinized the facts of ancient
history which correspond to its statements, the question
of its adaptation still remains to be tried. Is it a vol-
ume which meets man's necessities, and which can ac-
complish the work in him and for him, which a Divine
revelation must be presumed to intend.'* As a matter of
fact, it will generally be found true that there is more
conviction and power in this line of argument than in any
other. There are many questions which common minds
cannot find time to investigate, many lines of argument of
which they cannot remember the successive steps ; but
whenever the fact of an adaptation on the part of the

148 THE BIBLE AND MAN'S NEEDS;

Bible to personal need is brought home to the conscious-
ness, there is a sense of conviction which is established
on immovable ground, and which justifies one in saying,
concerning the Bible, what the blind man said of Christ
to the Pharisees : " Whether he be a sinner or no, I know
not ; one thing I know : that, whereas I was blind, now I
see." It may be fairly asked, therefore, whether the
highest kind of proof which can be adduced to support
the claims of God's word is not that which is derived
from its "adaptation to the universal needs of the soul."
When you find a key fitting exactly to the wards of an in-
tricate lock ; when you find the clew to an otherwise un-
solvable puzzle; when you find the lever which at a touch
starts the motions of some vast piece of machinery, you
have found enough to satisfy you that the connection in-
volves the clearest proof of design and intended adjust-
ment. Thus the truth of the Bible, to the inner sense of
the soul, the consciousness that it is the source of light, of
comfort and life, is a power against which the doubts of the
skeptic and the arguments of the infidel make no head-
way whatever. We may illustrate the value of this kind of
proof by that remarkable statement of the grounds of his
belief in Christianity which Mr. Coleridge has given in the
Biographia Literaria : " Its consistency with right reason
I consider as the outer court of the temple, the common
area within which it stands. The miracles with and
through which the religion was first revealed and attested
I regard as the steps, the vestibule and the portal of the
temple. The sense, the inward feeling in the soul of

TESTIMONIES TO ITS POWER. 149

each believer of its exceeding desirableness, the experi-
ence that he needs something, joined with the strong
foreboding that the redemption and the grace propound-
ed to us in Christ, are what he needs — this I hold to be
the true foundation of the spiritual edifice. But it is the
experiejice derived from a practical conformity to the
conditions of the gospel ; it is the opening eye, the dawn-
ing light, the terrors and the promises of spiritual growth,
the blessedness of loving God as God, the nascent sense
of sin hated as sin, and of the incapability of attaining
either without Christ ; it is the sorrow which still rises
up from beneath, and the consolation that meets it from
above ; in a word, it is the actual trial of the faith in
Christ, with its accompaniments and results, that must
form the arched roof, and faith itself is the completing
keystone."

Now it is precisely to this test of experience that we
are led when we consider the Bible in the light of its
adaptation to the universal needs of the soul. Does it
meet the demand made upon it by our complex nature }
Is it the source of truth for the mind, of peace for the
conscience, of light for the valley of the shadow of death }
Does it lay hold of man's fallen nature with power to lift
him out of the defilement of sin and raise him into the
presence of God } Does man find, when he comes to this
book in the attitude of an inquirer and learner, that it
answers his deepest questions, enlightens his darkest
hours, and puts a new joy into his heart.? If this is its
influence, if it is thus " adapted " to the needs of his soul,

13*

I50 THE BIBLE AND MAN'S NEEDS;

he has solid and unimpeachable ground for his conviction
that God is its author, and that in obeying its precepts he
is walking in a road which is the way of life everlasting.
To confirm you in that confidence, I am to place be-
fore you this evening the leading features of this adapta-
tion. And for the purpose of centralizing our thought on
this great theme, we may fix upon an expression found
in the Bible itself, an expression employed by St. Paul to
set forth the very point we are about to consider. In the
fourth verse of the fifteenth chapter of the Epistle to the
Romans he makes use of this phrase to declare the value
and power of the Old Testament Scriptures : "For what-
soever things were written aforetime were written for our
learning, that we through patience and comfort of the
Scriptures might have hope." Taking this inspired word
of the apostle as the equivalent of the subject before us,
let us consider those characteristics of the word of God
which enable it to become a comfort to the souls of men,
and thereby to impart the consolations of a hope which
maketh not ashamed. The fitness of this phase of the
apostle to our present theme becomes the more apparent
when we observe that, in the original, the teaching and
assistance of the Holy Spirit are essentially connected
with his meaning. He uses the genitive case of the word
paraklesis, which in New Testament Greek carries with
it, almost without exception, a reference to the agency
and presence of the blessed Comforter, "the Paraclete"
whose office-work it is to lead men into the knowledge
of the truth in Jesus. In this sense, then, " the comfort

TESTIMONIES TO ITS POWER. 151

of the Scriptures" is their adaptation, under the minis-
trations of the Holy Spirit, to the several faculties and
varied needs of • the soul, as the result of which the light
of hope shines bright and strong upon man's earthly-
pathway.

As a preliminary to the question thus stated, we should
naturally ask, *' What are the universal needs of the
soul ?■' Without covering a field so extensive as this, may
it not suffice for us to say that, first of all, the soul needs
to find, in any system or word which addresses it, the ev-
idence of authority, so that it can rest on its revelations
with confidence. Following this, it seems clear that the
soul needs to find in the revelation itself such substance
and point as shall provide for it a rescue from that curse
of sin which man in all ages has felt to be his sorest ca-
lamity. But it must also be recognized as a need of the
soul, that the revelation presented should be adapted to
individual men in their various phases of character and in
the manifold conditions of their earthly lot. And finally,
it should be able to afford a support and a light when
they pass, as all men must pass, from these scenes of
time into the presence of the eternal realities.

In the line of these widely-recognized needs of the
soul, let us seek the adaptation which may commend the
word of God to our souls.

First, the solid basis of " the comfort of the Scripticres "
is the clear and sujfficiejit evidence of their Divine author-
ity as the only and final revelation of the zvill of God to
man. " The word of the Lord is tried," wrote the Psalmist.

152 THE BIBLE AND MAN'S NEEDS;

In view of the careful scrutiny, the long-continued inves-
tigation, the accumulated experience, which has attended
the history of that word from David's time till ours, we
may connect our confident assertion with his inspired
testimony, and say with the deepest emphasis of an as-
sured conviction, "Yea, it is tried and proved." This
fact lies at the foundation of the comforting and hope-
inspiring influence of the Holy Scripture, for without
this they could not speak to man with the authority of
God. However valuable they might be as records of the
remotest history of the human race, however interesting
in their narratives of personal experience, however grand
and inspiring in their sublimity of sentiment and prom-
ise, the essential feature, " the one thing needful," would
be lacking, unless we could turn to them with the assu-
rance that they contain a special revelation from the God
that made us, and are " able to make us wise unto salva-
tion."

But what are the grounds of this assurance } Can
we forget that there are many eminent in scholarship,
exalted in position, affluent in attainments, who join issue
with us at this point, and while conceding antiquity,
sublimity, and moral power in an unusual degree, do still
refuse to unite in the confession that the Scriptures are
the special word of God to man } Certainly no one who
reads or listens in these days can be ignorant that the
old conflict is still carried on around this citadel of faith
and hope, and that peculiar and startling methods of as-
sault are used to overthrow it. But we remember, too,

TESTIMONIES TO ITS POWER. 153

the history of such assaults in former ages : what sieges
of criticism and scholastic opposition this Bible has en-
countered, what hurricanes of enmity and opposition it
has withstood, what new defences of evidence and moral
power it has acquired from age to age, and we abate "no
jot of heart or hope" amid the present conflicts of human
reason with the word of God. It stands before us, in
this present age, in an attitude so peculiar, so imposing,
so utterly unlike that of every other volume, that it car-
ries with it its own evidence, and commends itself to
every conscience in the sight of God.

The simplest test of origin or authorship in any work
is its accordance with the character or genius of him to
whom it is ascribed. By this test try the Bible. What
thing so Godlike does the world contain } He is the liv-
ing God. This is the living word, a transcript of his holi-
ness, an unfolding of his power, a demonstration of his
love. " Older than all human histories, it has come down
to us leaving a thousand fallen empires in its track. It
has foretold the ruin of Eg3^pt, Babylon, Persia, Greece,
and Rome, and yet it still survives. While nations, kings,
philosophies, systems, and institutions, have died away,
the Bible now engages men's attention, is studied by the
keenest intellects, is reverenced by the purest hearts,
keeps progress with the advancing civilization of the
world, originates the institutions of philanthropy, im-
parts ideas of law and liberty, reforms and elevates the
fallen, sustains the faith of those who rest upon it, and
utilizes every new invention and discovery to overrun the

154 THE BIBLE AND MAN'S NEEDS;

earth."* Thus it survives all changes, itself unchanged ;
it moves all minds, and yet is moved by none ; it sees all
things decay, and yet is incorruptible ; it sees myriads of
other books ingulfed in the stream of time, but it is borne
along triumphantly upon the wave. It is, in this grand
demonstration of vitality, its own sufficient evidence.
"A bad heart," said the Earl of Rochester to Bishop
Burnet, "is the great argument against this holy book."
It is the book of books for man. " It has God for its
author, eternity for its object, salvation for its end, and
truth, without any admixture of error, for its subject
matter."! " The word of the Lord is tried," and " the
word of the Lord endureth for ever." Thus by the abun-
dant evidence for its authority it is adapted to satisfy our
need of certainty as to the foundation upon which it
rests. But still more impressive is the proof which is
presented.

Secondly, By a consideration of the great theme zvhich
it presents to man's attention ; which is the tidings and offer
of redemption. One of the most learned and eminent of
English lawyers in the seventeenth century was John
Selden. Some days before his death he sent for Arch-
bishop Usher, and said to him, " I have surveyed most of
the learning that is among the sons of men, yet at this
moment I can recall nothing in them on which to rest
my soul, save one from the Sacred Scriptures, which
rises much on my mind. It is this : ' The grace of God
which bringeth salvation, hath appeared unto all men,

* An unknown author. t John Locke.

TESTIMONIES TO ITS POWER. 155

teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts,
we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this
present world, looking for that blessed hope and the
glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour
Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us that he might re-
deem us unto himself a peculiar people zealous of good
works.' "

In the same tone as this utterance of the English ju-
rist was the confession of one of the greatest of Ameri-
can theologians,* when lying on his deathbed in a neigh-
boring town. Few men of his profession or of his time
had been more deeply interested in the religious contro-
versies of the day, or had studied the Scriptures more
profoundly. But when one asked him, in that sunset of
his life, some question concerning one of the points of
doctrine which he had earnestly supported, he made this
memorable answer : " Here I find that all my theology is
reduced to this : ' Jesus Christ came into the world to save
sinners, of whom I am chief.' "

In these simple, earnest utterances of these eminent
and gifted men, we find that central theme of comfort
which the Bible offers to a fallen race, and by which it is
adapted to their deepest need. Manifold as is the method
of its revelation, the theme is always one. It is Christ
Jesus the Redeemer, " the way, the truth, and the life,"
the sinner's advocate and intercessor, the sacrifice by
which God's justice is reconciled with mercy, the ref-
uge of the soul when burdened by its sins or trembling

* Dr. Archibald Alexander of Princeton.

156 THE BIBLE AND MAN'S NEEDS;

in prospect of the judgment. From first to last the Bi-
ble is the history of His infinite fulness, of his ineffable
compassion, of his sufficient power to save. It holds his
person and his work envisaged on its myriad pages. His
presence shines through all its parts like a glorious sun giv-
ing light to the worlds that circle around it. Everything in
the Bible points to Christ, and helps to hold him up before
the world. Its revelation of redeeming 'love is like the
progressive shining of the day-dawn on the world which
slumbers in thick darkness — at first the faintest tint of
light thrown on the blackness of the sky, then the broad
belt of blue and gold encircling the mountain summits,
and then the radiance of the risen sun pouring down into
the valleys and filling all the firmament with light. Thus,
from page to page, progressively, the Bible is illuminated
with the glory of the cross. The single ray, which shone
in the first darkness of the fall, grows ever brighter to the
perfect day. The voice which whispered comfort to the
sinner flying from the Eden forfeited by sin, grows clear-
er, fuller, sweeter, as the ages pass, until from Calvary's
height the Son of God cries, " It is finished," and until
the message which that finished offering authorizes is
published to the world in the last of apocalyptic visions
by the ascended and triumphant Jesus : " Whosoever
will, let him come and take the water of life freely."
Now this specific declaration of God's love in Christ is
the deep fulness of " the comfort of the Scriptures."
This is their blessed adaptation to the burdened, guilty
soul of man. Until this thou2:ht of God's infinite and

TESTIMONIES TO ITS POWER. 157

all-embracing love in Christ is known, man lives in dark-
ness and in fear.

" Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
Because he knows some ghastly fiend

Doth still behind him tread." s. t. colkridge.

But with this revelation, the loneliness and gloom are
lifted from the soul. In Christ the mystery is solved.

*' God's thoughts are love ; and Jesus is
The loving voice they find.
His love lights up the vast abyss

Of the eternal mind." t. d. burns' vision of prophecy.

In him the promises of God are "yea." There is assu-
rance of redeeming love when we " behold the Lamb of
God." To read this tidings in the Bible is to understand
the book. To read it, and receive it as a personal expe-
rience, is to know " the peace of God which passeth under-
standing." In his old age William Wilberforce uttered
these words: "I never knew happiness till I found
Christ, as a Saviour. Read the Bible. Read the Bible !
Through all my perplexities and distresses I never read
any other book, I never knew the want of any other. It
has been my hourly study and all my knowledge of the
doctrines, all my acquaintance with the experience and
realities of religion, I have derived from the Bible only.
Books about rehgion are well enough, but will not do
instead." To this impressive testimony of the great
English philanthropist to the soul-sustaining influence
of the essential theme of the Bible, I may add that of
Arthur Hallam, the gifted young man to whom the poet

14

158 THE BIBLE AND MAN'S NEEDS;

laureate of England inscribes his " In Memoriam." " I
find," he writes, " in the doctrine of the cross a peculiar
and inexhaustible treasure for the affections, the idea of
the theanthropos, the God whose goings-forth have been
from everlasting, becoming visible to men for their re-
demption, as an earthly temporal creature ; living, acting
and suffering among themselves, and what is more im-
portant transferring to the unseen place of his spiritual
agency the same humanity he wore on earth, so that the
lapse of generations can in no way affect the conception
of his identity ; this is the most powerful thought that
ever addressed itself to the human imagination. It was
the TTou CTTu which alone was wanted to move the world."
And we may say in turning from this part of our subject,
it Jias moved the world as nothing else in the long course
of history has done. Addressing man through the affec-
tions, revealing unto him the Holy One " who for us men
and our salvation was incarnate and suffered on the
cross to atone for sin," bearing to all guilty, burdened
hearts the invitation of the Son of God — which none has
ever tested to be disappointed of its promise — " Come unto
me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest," — this book is the holy manna of the world : it
is the chart of a river in which whosoever washes is
healed of the leprosy of sin and made meet for the in-
heritance of the saints in light. Milton grandly describes
the archangel Uriel descending to the earth in a sunbeam.
The revelation of the Bible is a beam in which the High
and Lofty One who inhabiteth eternity descends to change

TESTIMONIES TO ITS POWER. 159

the night of nature into the daydawn of redemption and
to draw the nations to the brightness of its rising.

But third, when we look beyond the basis and the sub-
ject-matter of the word of God, we are at once impressed
zuiih that element of comfoj^t in the Scriptures which
springs from their adaptation to the varying individuality
of mankind. In constructing the Bible in its own pecuUar
form God has had special reference to the structure of
the mind of man. The all-important message of salvation
is commended to us and made especially attractive by
the mode in which it is presented. In the compositions
of human ingenuity and wisdom upon the subject of
religion, we find a narrowness of adaptation which makes
them interesting only to a single class of minds. The
treatise of Plato upon immortality is attractive to a
scholar, but obscure and dull to an unlettered man. The
Rig- Veda of the Hindoo contains some striking passages,
but as a whole it is unintelligible. The Koran is said to
be a sealed book to the great majority of those who
acknowledge its authority. Man-made books speak to
the thoughts of those who are in the intellectual sphere
of their composers. It is the characteristic of the highest
genius that it can reach the minds of diverse multitudes
and portray the passions which are stirring on that harp
of many strings, the soul of man. Homer, Dante, Shake-
speare, Virgil, Goethe, these were many-sided writers;
and yet how much of human life, and need, and destiny,
they left untouched. In contrast with all other books,
the Bible fills the whole circumference of man's endow-

i6o THE BIBLE AND MAN'S NEEDS;

ment. It touches every spring of thought and feeling
in this deep humanity. It is adapted to instruct the
savage, to inspire the sage, to interest and guide the lit-
tle child. It not only deals with all subjects which are
related to man's duty and destiny in time and in eternity ;
but it deals with them in such a manner that every style
of thought and feeling may find within its pages the nu-
triment or stimulus it needs. Some come to it for prac-
tical instruction : it gives them precepts of the most intense
directness, proverbs which condense the meaning of a
treatise into a single line. Some come to it with tran-
sient curiosity : it gives them narratives of thrilling interest
and opens up before them questions which arouse the
dullest minds. Some come to it with the cultivated taste
which seeks rhetorical and poetic beauty : it gives them
passages of the loftiest grandeur, conceptions of majesty
and sublime significance which rise above the common
range of human thought as the everlasting hills tower
high above the valleys. Some come to it with careworn
anxious, trembling hearts : it gives them messages of
sympathy and tenderness which greet them as a mother's
comfort soothes a timid child. In one word, not to extend
details of a subject so exhaustless, the Bible comes to
every one who will receive it, as a book which finds him
out, and meets his wants, and guides his thoughts to
duty and to God. And so, it has been said of it, " It is
the king's best copy, the magistrate's best rule, the house-
wife's best guide, the servant's best direction, the young-
man's best companion. It is the schoolboy's best story-

TESTIMONIES TO ITS POWER, i6i

book and the scholar's masterpiece. It contains a gram-
mar for the novice and a mystery for the sage." " I see,"
wrote Hallam, "that the Bible fits into every fold and
crevice of the human heart. I am a man ; and I believe
that this is God's book, because it is man's book." It is this
far-reaching adaptation to the complex being, man ; this
infinite variety in the alluring power with which it draws
the fallen creature to its central truth and promise, which
makes the Bible the book of God for all men everywhere
and gives it power to make its blessing known "far as
the curse is found."

Fourth, let tis add to this fact that other element of the
comfort of the Scriptures which is discovered in their
relation to all the changing conditions of maiis estate on
earth. Not only does the Bible meet the individuality of
man, with truth adapted to all special needs or tastes, it
also comes into direct connection with his circumstances
and understands them and helps him whatever they may
be to find through them a way to God. This is no less an
element of comfort than the facts already mentioned.
Diverse and startling as are the changes which pass over
human life in its progressive periods, there is a deep
necessity that God should spread his guiding and sus-
taining truth before mankind in comprehensive fulness,
so that in each event of life the mind may know his will,
and the heart may feel his consolation. This is the
marvellous adaptation of the word of God to man's estate,
whether it be one of trial or prosperity. "When thou
goest it shall lead thee, when thou sleepest it shall keep

14*

i62 THE BIBLE AND MAN'S NEEDS;

thee, when thou wakest it shall talk with thee; for the
commandment is a lamp and the law is light." In this
relation of " the comfort of the Scriptures," think how
they are adapted to the common duties and the great
emergencies of life. Here in this place to-night are
gathered hundreds of human souls in all the various ex-
perience of joy or sorrow, of poverty and wealth, of exul-
tation and depression, of burden-bearing and of ease.
What human word or work could possibly provide the
guidance or rebuke or consolation for so many diverse
wants } But God's word comes to each just as he needs
it. The all-fitting, all foreseeing truths of the Bible pro-
vide the antidote in temptation, the guide to duty, the
corrective in prosperity, the solace in affliction. In your
prosperity, it shows you how to use the gifts of God, so
that they may promote his glory and your spiritual wealth.
In your friendlessness, it tells you of "a friend that
sticketh closer than a brother." In your anxiety for
earthly goods, it teaches you that your Father knoweth
that you have need of all these things. In your sharp
conflicts with the world, it bids you be of good cheer for
Christ has "overcome the world." In your bereavement
it whispers, " For a little while I tried thee as a father his
child, for thy good ; yea, in faithfulness and love have I
stricken thee." Oh, it is marvellous what leaves innu-
merable hang on this "tree of life" for the healing of the
nations. No circumstances can surpass, no depth of
trial can exhaust " the comfort of the Scriptures." One
of the subjects often chosen by the great painters of the

TESTIMONIES TO ITS POWER. 163

middle ages was taken from the legend of Sebastian
standing against a rock pierced through and through
with arrows. The rock sustained him though the arrows
drank his blood. So stands the man who leans upon the
word of God. " When thou passeth through the waters
I will be with thee and through the rivers they shall not
overflow thee." " In all these things we are more than
conquerors." " The comfort of the Scriptures " suits each
event of life. " It is this universal applicability of the
Bible," says Robertson, "which has made its influence
universal. This book has held spell-bound the hearts of
nations in a way in which no other book has ever held men
before. States have been founded on its principles.
Kings rule by a contract based upon it. Men hold it in
their hands when they prepare to give solemn evidence
affecting life or death. Its prayers and its psalms are
the language which we use when we speak to God. If
there ever has been a prayer or a hymn enshrined in the
heart of a nation you are sure to find its basis in the
Bible." To the same effect is the assertion of Sir William
Jones, second in scholarship and learning to none who
has lived during the present century. ''The Scriptures
contain more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, more
pure morality, more important history, and finer strains of
poetry and eloquence, than could be collected from all
other books that were ever composed in any age or in
any idiom." In this vast affluence of power and beauty,
with principles and truth which embody the thoughts of
God, concerning all the diverse circumstances of his

1 64 THE BIBLE AND MAN'S NEEDS;

creatures, the Bible has the right to claim the recogni-
tion of the world as the true instrument of progress, cul-
ture, and reform. That scene which Robert Burns has
protrayed in his poem on "The Cotter's Saturday-
Night," is one which vindicates the influence of the
Bible in every house and every land where it is found :

" From scenes like this old Scotia's grandeur springs,
That makes her loved at home, revered abroad."

When a pagan ambassador asked Queen Victoria the
reason for the greatness of her realm, she gave him a
Bible saying, " That is the secret of the greatness of Eng-
land." And in that same strain was that sentence in
the centennial letter of the President of the United
States to the Sunday-schools of the land : *' Hold fast
to the Bible as the sheet-anchor of your liberties, write
its precepts in your heart, practise them in your lives.
To the influence of this book we are indebted for all the
progress made in true civilization, and to it we must look
as our guide in the future." On the basis of such an adap-
tation to the conditions of rrian our confidence in the
hold of the Bible on the generations to come may be
supreme. Kingdoms may be shaken, thrones pass away,
customs and languages change ; but so long as the earth
endures, the morality, the doctrines, the precepts and
promises of the Bible shall continue as the seed of the
world's life and the lamp of the world's light, until the full
harvest of the earth shall be reaped. It is hard to refrain
from comparing with all this fulness of achievement and
promise on the part of the Bible, the utter failure of

TESTIMONIES TO ITS POWER. 165

infidelity and skepticism in this field. In the language
of a recent writer* we may ask, "As for skepticism
what has it done ? What immoral man has it reformed ?
What savage has it reclaimed ? What barbarous tribe
has it civilized ? What wilderness has it transformed
into an Eden ? Over what continent has it poured out
its philanthropies to ameliorate the mass of the people ?
What has it accomplished by its questionings, its gloom,
its despair for the deliverance of our race from its sin
and misery ?" To ask the question is to answer it. " By
their fruits ye shall know them."

Fifth. A few words only may be uttered in closing,
concerning that great question which nature leaves well
7ii^h unsolved, a7id yet upon which all the interest's^ of our
bei7zg centre. I mean Xh^ future of existence and the support
which is demajided by the soul in passing from things
seen and temporal, to things unseen and eternal Do you
remember the story of the closing hours of Sir Walter
Scott } He asked his friend Lockhardt to read to him.
" What shall I read from .?" " There is but one book for
a man in my condition." Thus more and more clearly,
as one reflects upon the mystery of life and death, upon
the transient present and the great hereafter ; as he
desires assurance that in the rending and dissolving of
this earthly tabernacle there shall remain a "building
I of God," for his eternal home ; is he directed towards
" the comfort of the Scriptures," for his hope. I do not
say that nature does not tell us of a future life, but it is cer-

* Rev. William MacDill of Ireland.

i66 THE BIBLE AND MAN'S NEEDS;

tain that science, the so-called interpreter of nature, does
in these days seem to verge more and more towards a
denial of the soul and immortality. At any rate it is
only in the light of revelation that one can move with an
unfaltering trust towards the dark stream of death ; join-
ing in the song of the conquering saints of old : " O death,
where is thy sting ? O grave, where is thy victory ?" The
comfort of the Scriptures shines like a star of hope when
the last shadows of life's transient day are falling, and all
about that star extends the firmament of light and love,
in which the living God has opened worlds of life as
mansions for the soul.

Now here is an element of adaptation which is con-
spicuous and unparalleled. Familiar, and even trite, as
the subject of deathbed experience is, it is, after all, rec-
ognized on all hands as a fact that, when death comes, it
is " a test of the man and a test of his principles." And
that system or truth which affords support and consola-
tion to one who stands on that last low verge of earth,
is by that very fact commended to the confidence of the
race. " Go where you will throughout our dying world,
consult the saint, the savage, or the sage, and you will
find, from the experience of them all, that faith in the
word of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is himself ' the res-
urrection and the life,' is the only power that can take
the sting from death and from the grave its victory."
There is not a deathbed like that of Dudley Tyng or
Alfred Cookman in the whole world outside the Bible.
Compare the last end of Hume, Voltaire, Mirabeau,

TESTIMONIES TO ITS POWER. ■ 167

Aaron Burr, or Stuart Mill, with that of Rutherford, or
Payson, or Simeon Calhoun, or Henry B. Smith ! We
challenge the whole host of infidelity to show a single
instance, well authenticated, of an intelligent man who,
on infidel principles, has enjoyed real happiness in life
and peace in death. And on the other hand, no fact in
history is better attested than that individuals of every
people and nation, of every age and rank, of every grade
of intelligence and culture, of every period, from the
bloom of youth to the decrepitude of age, have, through
the faith of the Bible, enjoyed a happiness which the
world never gave and could not take away; and have
encountered death with a triumphant joy, which was a
prophecy and foretaste of "the joy of the home-life of
the better land" to which they knew that they were go-
ing. And thus at the supremest point of trial we find
the adaptation of the Bible to man's need complete, and
for the confirmation of our hope we hear the cadence
of innumerable voices crying, as they pass the bounda-
ries of this lower life, "Thanks be unto God which
giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."
Here is the book which has brought life and immortality
to light. This is the record that " God has given unto
us eternal life, and this life is in his Son."

But we have reached our limit, and with this partial
presentation of a theme so grand and so exhaustless, that
to do it justice would demand an angel's pen, we leave
it only summing up the matter now presented.

The adaptation of the Bible to the universal needs o^.

1 68 THE BIBLE AND MAN'S NEEDS.

the soul is evidenced when we consider its solid basis,
the authority of God ; its precious message, the tidings
of salvation by the love and blood of Jesus ; its marvel-
lous and varied diversity, which, makes it a voice to every
heart ; its comprehensive scope and range, which touches
life at all its points ; its soul-sustaining hope, which shines
upon the sepulchre and makes the grave " a pathway to
the skies." Here is the " comfort of the Scriptures,"
which fills the soul with hope. Oh that it might be made
a positive experience to all who hear me now, through the
teaching of the Holy Ghost ! Receiving the Bible, thus
adapted to your needs, it will become God's message of
salvation to your soul. The teaching of the Scriptures
will make you wise unto salvation. The comfort of the
Scriptures will go with you in every scene of toil and
trial. The God of the Bible will be your guide even unto
death.

" Oh grant us grace, almighty Lord,
To read and mark thy holy word,
Its truths with meekness to receive,
And by its holy precepts live."

Miracles and Prophecies

WHICH

SHOW THE BIBLE DIVINE.

REV. NOAH PORTER, D. D.,

PRESIDENT OF YALE COLLEGE, NEW HAVEN, CONN,

15

MIRACLES

AND

Modern Thought

That "the age of miracles is past" is one of the
tritest of commonplaces. That the age in which men
believe that miracles were ever wrought is fast passing
away, is the confident assertion of many who profess to
discern the tendencies of modern thinking and to predict
the end to which they lead. Many who assume to speak
for science say that the belief in miracles has become
thoroughly unscientific. Critics who believe in no other
inspiration or prophecy seem inspired to discern and pro-
phetically to declare that the moving narrations of the
Christian miracles will soon be read only for the gentle-
ness and pathos which they symbolize, but have parted
for ever with the sacredness of truth. Materialists will
of course believe in the reports of no miracles, except of
the sudden rushing of nebulous matter into a newly-cre-
ated star, or the burning out of some star into a cloud of
thickening mist. They will credit no stories of healing

172 MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT,

of the sick, except by some newly-discovered elixir of
life, and no raising of the dead, except through the evolu-
tion of unorganized matter into organic life. Spiritual-
ists will say they find miracles enough in " the blowing
clover" and "the falling rain," in the tenderness of
spring, the glory of summer, the sadness of autumn and
the sternness of winter, and in the ever-renewed revela-
tions of the spirit of the universe to the ever-interpret-
ing and ever-worshipping spirit of man. Men who know
the world, and claim to test the Christian story by men
as they find them, explain the belief in the miraculous,
partly by the warm imaginations and partly by the cre-
dulity of mystical and admiring believers. Men who
aspire to penetrate the secret of all great souls, venture
with bold analysis, if not with inimitable effrontery, to
explain the successive steps by which the greatest mira-
cle of all — that Being whose eyes of mingled majesty
and pity have hitherto searched the hearts of men like
a flame of fire — was mistaken as to his own Messiahship
and his divine right to save and to rule the sinning and
the lost. The time was when miracles were esteemed
the strongest defence of the Christian system. The
time is fast coming, it is said, when the miracles will be
a decisive objection against its claims to confidence as
supernatural.

All these classes of persons agree in rejecting the
Christian miracles as in their nature impossible, and
the Christian histories concerning them as therefore so
far incredible. Most of them agree that, did not these nar-

MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT. 173

ratives contain the record that Christ healed the sick and
raised the dead, and himself rose from the dead, they
would be as worthy of credence in every particular as
the life of Socrates ; in other respects, they are as well,
if not better, supported in every particular as any nar-
ratives whatever, as of Caesar or Napoleon. But still
they reason they cannot be true because they narrate
events which could not possibly have taken place as they
record them. Some of you will perhaps think that I
have forgotten that a certain class of writers question
whether the four Gospels, in the form in which we have
them, were written in the first century. For our argu-
ment, this point is of minor importance. For no man
questions that we have one document, namely, Paul's
First Epistle to the Corinthians, which was written in
the year 59, twenty-six years after Christ was cruci-
fied— only nine years longer than since Fort Sumter
was bombarded — and written by a man who affirms that
for more than twenty years previous he had believed
and preached that Christ was risen from the dead, and
was just the being in supernatural power and miracu-
lous works that these Gospels represent him to have
been. Moreover, he says that not only was Christ raised
from the dead twenty-six years before, but that nearly
five hundred men were then living who had seen him
after his resurrection. i Cor. 15 : 1-8. There is no
denying the fact that the stories of these miracles of
Christ were believed as early as one or two years after
Christ was put to death, by several hundreds and even

15*

1 7 4 MIR A CLES AND MODERN THO UGHT.

thousands of persons. This is not all. The ablest wri-
ter of the present century against the supernatural in
Christianity, F. C. Baur, gives this as his opinion :
" While historical criticism has nothing to do with the
inquiry what the resurrection was in fact, it must hold
fast to the assertion that in the belief of the first dis-
ciples it had become an established and incontroverti-
ble certainty. In this belief Christianity had gained a
firm ground for its historical development. What we
must assume as the necessary foundation for this history
is not the fact that Jesus rose from the dead, but the fact
that it was believed that he had risen. However we may
explain the faith, the resurrection had become to the first
Christians a fact of conviction, and had for them all the
reality of an historic fact."*

He might well say this. Yox it is notorious that just
at this time there arose such a change in the thoughts
and plans and faiths and affections of men in all the Ro-
man empire, as could be best accounted for by their faith
in just such miracles as are said to have been performed
by such a human being as Jesus of Nazareth. We
might add, that while we hold with this writer that the
Christian church can only be accounted for by its belief
.in this miracle of the Resurrection, we also hold that
the belief in the miracle itself can only be accounted for
by its having actually taken place. Why does not this
writer and all who agree with him adopt this explana-
tion } Because he is a Pantheist, and believes a miracle

* Baur's " History of the Christian Church."

MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT. 175

to be impossible. Those who are not Pantheists, but foi
other reasons reject miracles as impossible, are in the
same dilemma. They concede that the early Christian
church believed in miracles — that Christ must have be-
lieved himself to be the Messiah and endowed with su-
pernatural powers ; but must hold that both were mista-
ken. But how can this mistake of both be explained }
So far as Christ is concerned, it is neither easy nor pleas-
ant to attempt such an explanation ; very few make the
experiment ; of those who do, no two give the same the-
ory. So far as his disciples are concerned, they assert
that they could not discriminate between miracles and
extraordinary events ; that they had no fixed scientific
views such as we have attained in respect to the laws of
nature, and the clearly impossible and incredible; that
they were very imaginative, good, honest people enough,
very fond of their Master, who was a wonderful man for
piety and spiritual insight and enthusiasm ; in short, a
sort of man in regard to whom good sort of people might
believe anything, much as piously-disposed Mormons do
of their apostles.

That which gives plausibility to this theory is the
fact that the first disciples had not attained to any scien-
tific or fixed ideas in respect to the laws of nature, and
that some of them believed in magic and divination. We
do not question the assertion that the early Christians
believed that sorcerers could work very wonderful deeds.
But, on the other hand, it is just as clear from the nar-
rative that the miracles of Christ were recognized as im-

176 MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT,

measurably superior to any works of sorcery. The early
believers had common sense enough to say, as one is re-
ported to have said, "Rabbi, we know that thou art a
teacher come from God, for no man can do these \i. e.,
stic/i] miracles except God be with him." The people,
who were half convinced, inquired, " When Christ cometh,
will he do more miracles than these .?" The first disci-
ples were not scientific men indeed ; but it did not re-
quire much science to enable plain and even credulous
people to know that since the world began " was it not
heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was
born blind." They believed implicitly in divination ; and
they knew enough of it to be certain that a devil could
not open the eyes of the blind. They had abundant and
sad experience of the hopelessness of long-continued pa-
ralysis and leprosy, and were as well persuaded as Mr.
Huxley can be that the gates of the tomb had never
given back a single victim under natural laws. If we
read the narratives carefully, we shall find that not only
the enemies of Christ were critical in respect to the mir-
acles which they saw, but that his friends were also. It is
said that Christ or his disciples, one or both, were morally
great, but intellectually weak, and so one or both were
unconscious deceivers or innocently deceived. How,
then, can it be explained that forth from that generation
came the loftiest and the loveliest, the simplest, yet the
most complex ideal of a master, friend, example. Saviour
of human kind, that the world has ever conceived ; an
ideal that, since it was furnished to man in the record.

MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT. 177

has never been altered except for the worse ; a picture
that no genius can retouch except to mar; a gem that no
poUsher can try to cut except to break it ; able to guide
the oldest and to sooth the youngest of mankind ; to add
lustre to our brightest joys and to dispel our darkest
fears ? There must certainly have been intellectual power
somewhere in a generation which brought into definite
form the conception of Jesus, which, whether realized in
fact or regarded only as an ideal, is the greatest miracle
of all the ages.

Christ's person doubtless gave wondrous dignity and
character to the most trivial acts of healing, as well as to
the majestic scenes of the transfiguration and the raising
of Lazarus, and of the son of the widow of Nain. For
this reason alone these deeds of wonder were marvellously
superior to the tricks and jugglery and magic arts of the
hireling and filthy conjurors which everybody suspected
even when they dreaded them. Then the miracles of
Christ were inspired by such love and pity as to force
upon the stupid and ignorant the conviction that these
wonders were the power of God. After the great mira-
cle of the resurrection, the astounding visit of the Spirit
which transformed the one hundred and twenty disciples
into new men in insight and courage, and last but not
least, the destruction of Jerusalem, the curtain falls over
the scene and for two or three generations we have scanty
means of knowing whether miracles were wrought any
longer, or when or how they were withdrawn, for we have
little definite and trustworthy history upon this or any

178 MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT.

other question of facts. When we get sight of the church
again, we find no positive evidence that such miracles
were claimed to be wrought as had occurred in the days
of Christ and the apostles. So far as we can see they
would have done more harm than good. They were no
longer needed, any more than we need them at this mo-
ment. But we find proof enough of the inveterate longing
after magic and wonders, which lurks in the hearts of all
men. We find the church, then as now, more inclined to
ask for the last news from wonder-land rather than to live
the spiritual life which is hidden with Christ in God. It
was well that miracles proper had ceased. It is very
certain that the behef that they might occur, and now and
then were performed in fact, did not cease, and that
priests cherished and stimulated that belief, and that for
century after century, side by side with much simple trust
in Christ and humble imitation of his life, there was a
horrid admixture of pretended miracle-working, such as
makes us faint and sick to read of, and prepares us to
understand the reaction which set in against all belief
in the supernatural and miracles, when learning was re-
vived and science began to be developed and the Refor-
mation exalted Christ into the place which the church
and the priesthood had usurped. Even protestantism
retained not a few of old beliefs in respect to divination,
and the line was not yet sharply drawn between the
extraordinary and the miraculous. But as soon as physical
science began to look into the material universe, and to
test its theories by experiment, the separate forces of

MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT. 179

nature made themselves manifest, and the laws of these
forces were found to be capable of definite statement.
As one new discovery after another was made, and occur-
rences deemed the most extraordinary and marvellous
were explained by these forces and laws, men began to
ask themselves whether the works of magic that were
still practised and many of the so-called miracles of other
times could not be explained by these newly-discovered
agents and others like them. Bold men said Yes, and
with good reason. The next question could not be long
withheld, viz., whether the miracles of Christ and the
apostles could endure the scrutiny of the new sciences
of nature. With this suggestion began a formal attack
upon the possibility of these miracles and the competence
and honesty of those who reported them; These assaults
were repeated for more than a century on various grounds,
when David Hume first condensed the argument that
had been somewhat loosely stated before into a compact
and telling form, to which nothing new has been added
up to the present time. All that metaphysical philosophy
or physical science has been able to say in varied and
imposing forms till this very moment is contained in this
famous and oft-repeated argument. Briefly expressed it
is this: "It is contrary to all experience that a miracle
should be wrought. It is in accordance with all expe-
rience, or it is not contrary to all experience, that men
should lie or be imposed on. Therefore, when a miracle
is reported to me, or I am myself a witness of one, I
must strike the balance against the miracle." "But it

i8o MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT.

does not follow," Hume adds with a sneer, " that we are
forced to distrust the story of the Christian miracles, in-
asmuch as we have the supernatural grace of faith which
justifies us in making an exception in their favor." In
other words, a miracle is utterly incredible, and any
report of it must be regarded as untrue. This argument
gave a momentary shock to the Christian world. For a
century previous, the contest had been earnest between
the assailants and the defenders of the Christian faith,
but these two or three short and direct sentences of
Hume were a succession of stunning blows, which brought
its defenders to a sudden pause. The reason why they
were taken at a disadvantage and somewhat by surprise,
is that they had committed their cause to a single line
of defence. Instead of relying on the person of Christ,
his work, and his message as adapted to the wants of
man, the majesty of Christ's person, the superhuman
in his very ideal, the truthfulness of his words, and the
adaptation of himself, and his message to man as justi-
fying and requiring the supernatural as their fitting sign
and appropriate accompaniment, they considered the
abstract question of testimony within the sphere of ordi-
nary human intercourse and human history. Instead of
testing the miracle by the doctrine and justifying the
miracle by the doctrine, they lowered the Christian story
to a level with an ordinary narration, and left it there to
stand or fall by the number, the consistency, and the
apparent honesty of the narrators.

We contend that the argument of Hume was sound

MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT. i8i

and ought to stand, if tried by these tests. In ordi-
nary matters we apply it every day. Let a man tell
me or you that in Union Square he saw a man raise a
dead man to life, or heal a sick man by a word, I should
at once reply, "I do not believe that what you say is
true. I would not believe it on the testimony of a hun-
dred honest men." Why } Because it is contrary to ex-
perience— or, as we should say in these days, it is con-
trary to the known laws of nature that such an event
should take place. Why, then, it may be asked, do we
not apply this rule to similar stories, the scene of which
is Jerusalem or Bethany, and the time is some 1,850
years ago } Simply because there were reasons then
and there for the occurrence of events which violate the
laws of nature, such as cannot be urged here or now.
This is the answer which ought to have been given to
Hume. It was not overlooked by many, if not by the
most of the able men who replied to him, but it was not
put forth as the decisive element in the argument.
Thus Paley says, " Herein I remark a want of argu-
mentative justice that, in describing the importance of
miracles, he (Hume) suppresses all those circumstances
of extenuation which result from our knowledge of the
existence, power, and disposition of the Deity, his con-
cern in the creation, the end answered by the miracles,
the importance of that end, and its subserviency to the
plan pursued in the work of nature." " Evidences .-" In-
troduction.

It is the more singular that the opponents of Hume

16

i82 MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT,

should have failed to urge this decisive argument against
him, after Locke had, many years before, stated it in
words so clear and emphatic :

"Though the common experience and the ordinary
course of things have justly a mighty influence on the
minds of men to make them give or refuse credit to any-
thing proposed to their belief, yet there is one case
wherein the strangeness of the fact lessens not the as-
sent to a fair testimony given of it. For when such su-
pernatural events are suitable to ends aimed at by him
who has the power to change the course of nature, then
under such circumstances they may be the fitter to pro-
cure belief by how much the more they are beyond or
contrary to ordinary observation. This is the proper
case of miracles which, well attested, do not only find
credit themselves, but give it to other truths which need
such confirmation." Essay, b. 4, ch. i6, § 13.

For their failure to do this, the relation of the mirac-
ulous to experience has been exposed to more or less
misconstruction. The reply of Campbell to Hume is a
fair example of the way in which the force of his argu-
ment was evaded. To the assertion that all miracles
are contrary to experience, and therefore incapable of
proof by testimony, Campbell urged that what we call
experience is largely made up of human testimony, and
so far is as untrustworthy as testimony ; but in this he
overlooked the truth that in incorporating testimony into
experience, every man tests the credibility of testimony
by experience, as he throws out the testimony of one wit-

MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT. 183

ness and modifies that of another. Another point made
by Campbell was, that the argument of Hume against
the Christian miracles would hold just as strongly against
every narrative and all testimony concerning events that
were simply extraordinary or not conformable to our ex-
perience. For example, were the king of Siam informed
that in London the river Thames would, of a night, be-
come so solid as to support a train of vehicles and a pro-
cession of men, he ought, on Mr. Hume's principles, to
reject the testimony, having had, as was likely, very am-
ple experience that men were given to lying. But that
this position is not well taken is obvious to any man
who reflects that the turning of water into ice could
be explained as the result of a law of nature which the
king of Siam could be made to understand, and there-
fore is in no sense a miracle, but simply an unusual, and
it may be, a very surprising event, the like of which oc-
curs in the experience of every man.

If in the time of Hume, then, his argument was irre-
sistible as against all stories of miracles, except when a
good reason can be given for their occurrence, its force
has been increased a thousand-fold in modern times and
in the present century. Thinking men, and especially
men who have to do with physical science, have become
more and more profoundly impressed with the inviolabil-
ity of the laws of matter. Every time an eclipse occurs,
of the sun or the moon ; on the rarer occasions on which
Venus walks like a dark speck across the disk of the sun ;
at the thousand times every day in which the navigator

1 84 MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT.

finds his place on the limitless ocean by sextant and
chronometer, or comes into port according to his calcu-
lations, there is a new confirmation of the belief that the
forces of nature are as fresh and strong as at the first,
and are as true to the laws of nature as from the begin-
ning. More and more completely does the conviction
tgtke complete possession of the imagination that in ordi-
nary and material life an exception is never to be thought
of. Every day some fresh force Or new element is dis-
covered, or some unexpected application of familiar agen-
cies breaks out upon the eye of the astronomer as he
searches into the remotest regions of space, or is mani-
fested to the chemist as he unties the secret chains that
have hitherto held in closely-locked embrace elements
before unknown, or to the student of natural history as
he reads the records of long-past ages in the hitherto un-
interpreted hieroglyphics which nature has impressed or
imbedded in her rocky tablets. Even the secrets of the
weather, which till recently were hidden from all except
the village prophets whose predictions were conspicuous
for their failures, have now been almost mastered, and the
prophecies so curiously and yet so confidently or so cau-
tiously ventured, are made in an instant the property of
the world. Every morning bulletin issued from the sig-
nal-service, every cautionary signal that floats from head-
land or tower, reiterates the truth that the laws and
forces of nature remain unchanged.

Nor is it alone in the sphere of matter that the reign
of law extends itself more and more widely and asserts

MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT. 185

itself with more and more positive authority. It pushes
its way into spiritual phenomena as well, and asserts its
right to be applied to the sciences of politics, of wealth,
of manners, of culture, and of everything which we call
human progress. These discoveries contribute to deepen
the convictions of men in respect to the strength and
the universality of law in that sphere which we call na-
ture, including in nature spirit as truly as matter.

The second position of Hume, that m^n are both
credulous and false, especially in all matters that relate
to the supernatural or miraculous, is also more and more
confirmed by the experiences of modern life. Pretended
miracles are every day explained by natural agencies.
The new forms in which credulity and weakness bring out
their wonders are sooner or later seen through and ex-
posed. Men are more than ever disposed to scrutinize
and suspect every species of overstatement, especially by
persons in whom the aptitude for wonder is predomi-
nant. I do not say that credulity is not also rampant ;
nor that the boldest and the most unblushing of atheists
in matters of religion are not sometimes the most cred-
ulous in the matter of their private superstitions and
hidden mysticisms, but that the age is, on the whole,
characteristically and reasonably critical of all stories of
the miraculous.

The consequences of all these influences may be thus

summed up : Disbelief in the possibility of miracles

under any circumstances is now positively and openly

avowed by a greater number of persons who command

16*

i86 MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT.

respect in the name of science and philosophy, of criti-
cisni, of history and literature, and of the practical knowl-
edge of man, than at any previous period. On the other
hand, I believe it is true there was never a time in which
the belief in the Christian miracles was capable of being
so triumphantly defended, on grounds of science, history,
and criticism, as at the present moment It is my task
to show how a rational faith can justify itself by argu-
ment against the more and more confident disbelief of
the times.

Of this argument I propose to give only a brief out-
line. As a necessary preliminary^ to this argument, I must
define somewhat carefully the conception of the miracles
which Christianity proposes for our faith.

First, the Christian miracles are more than very won-
derful events or deeds. The word miracle means literally
any event so extraordinary or strange as to excite wonder
or astonishment. Every miracle is indeed worthy of
wonder, but not every wonderful occurrence is a miracle.
It follows that a miracle is more than a work of marvel-
lous physical power or intellectual skill. Miracles are
not infrequently called in the Scriptures mighty works or
works of power. It does not follow that all events are
miracles which illustrate the marvellous power or wisdom
of God in nature or in history. When the Menai bridge
was lifted to its place by half-hidden enginery, and depos-
ited on abutment and pier as quietly and gently as a moth-
er places her infant in its cradle, the wondering spectators
might very naturally have shouted, " This is a miracle of

MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT. 187

strength and skill." In other times, had the great engi-
neer kept his secret to himself, he would have been re-
garded as was Simon the Sorcerer, to whom a whole city
gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, " This
man is the great power of God." But in these times no
one would call this marvellous feat a miracle, because it
was known to be effected by scientific genius. When
the telegraphic wires were stretched from Baltimore to
Washington, the first message that was sent along the
lines was, What hath God wrought ! In these words the
truth was recognized that a wonderful work of genius
had been achieved by the agency of God in this extraor-
dinary feat of human sagacity, but no man supposes that
this Divine agency was miraculous. When the news of
the surrender of Gen. Lee was flashed along these same
lines to this city, the multitude of busy traffickers in
Wall street gathered in the street, and with heads bowed
and uncovered, acknowledged the hand of God in the sal-
vation of this people, but no one believed that God saved
this nation by a series of miracles because he wrought
in his providence through the forces of nature and the
minds of men. We may believe that God in some sense
inspired Abraham Lincoln — to his wise candor, his gen-
tle caution, his inflexible resolve and his faith in justice,
as also to his words of matchless eloquence; but we pause
before we assert that this inspiration was miraculous.
There is nothing necessarily supernatural or miraculous
in events like these.

Next, a miracle must have a definite import ; it must

1 88 MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT,

signify something to those for whom it is wrought. For
this reason miracles are so often called signs in the Scrip-
tures, whether they are false or true. Works that make
man wonder, or that indicate power and skill, indicate
something uncommon among men ; but a real miracle
indicates an agency that is superhuman. It must em-
phatically declare the presence and activity of a power
above the forces and laws of matter or spirit. It must
be an act which manifests a power that is superior to any
force whatever and unbound by any law. It must even
be more than an indisputable manifestation of power.
Should the stars^y from their courses, or the sun fail to
rise, and the universe be thrown into chaos, it would
manifest a presence mightier than nature, and so far be
a sign the import of which could not be misunderstood.
But the miracles with which we have to do have a per-
sonal and moral import. While they indicate and en-
force the fact of God's direct and supernatural agency,
they also convey some thought or feeling from God, and
enforce some response of act or feeling upon man. For
both these reasons they are preeminently signs or sig-
nificant acts. A wonderful event that does not signify
something is no miracle.

Every miracle properly so called is also a matter of pub-
lic concern, and therefore must be wrought in open day..
It is not impossible that an act in all other respects mi-
raculous should be performed in presence of a single
individual and should even be to him a sign of God's pow-
er or a vehicle of God's thoughts. But if the miracle

MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT. 189

makes any claims upon the public confidence, the act
must be openly performed. This was the case with most
of the Christian miracles. They challenged the criticism
of open day, and were invariably performed in the sight
of all the people. Whenever testimony, or the report of
others, was substituted for the direct witness of a looker-
on, reference was always made to bystanders, and the
veracity of the reporter was supported if required by
other miracles. When Paul told the story of how Jesus
met him near Damascus he was ready to enforce his own
veracity by miracles performed by himself in the name
of Christ.

I emphasize this point in order to distinguish the
Christian miracles from the miserable imitations of later
years, and from the more plausible counterfeits that gain
the confidence of trusting souls. When I am told
that Mormon elders can heal the sick and raise the
dead in Utah, I have a right to ask them to do the same
in New York, and when I am told that they can do
and have done similar works in New York in some very
private places and upon a person who is known to no
one, I not only have a right to reject the story, but I
am sacredly obliged to reject the story, because the act
lacks openness to public scrutiny. When I hear of private
manifestations of the Virgin Mary or of Christ himself to
this or that person, and of wonderful cures by the touch
of sacred persons and sacred garments, I say at once,
these events are not done in public, and so far as the pub-
lic faith in them or any endorsement of them is con-

190 MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT.

cerned, they should be treated as fables of imagination or
impositions. When, too, a person of undoubted honesty,
filled with the spirit of Christ, asserts that he or she was
healed of sickness or raised from the dead, by the direct
power of God in answer to prayer, I am not forced to
argue that perhaps he was mistaken, or that the event
lacked some of the other criteria of a true miracle. I
need not take time to argue that a wonder of healing is
not a miracle of healing. I might concede that as be-
tween himself and God the event was a miracle. But it
is nothing to other men, because it was not done in open
day. For this reason it is treasonable to the most sacred
truth and the holiest cause to report it in public as a
miracle. I go very much farther than many people in my
views of what may happen of good to the souls and bodies
of men in answer to prayer, but I protest in the name of
all common sense and in the name of Christ himself against
the insane desire manifested in some Christian people
to exalt to the rank of miracles, events that are in no sense
decisive of supernatural power and which lack the indis-
pensable criterion of being done in the open day, and before
the eyes of many lookers-on. I call the tendency insane,
however well meant it may be. Its effects are fearfully
pernicious in bringing into dishonor the most sacred and
separate of all of God's acts to men. The Christian cause
ought not to bear the burden of any of these reported
works of wonder and power that are done in a corner. It
follows that no action of the Holy Spirit upon the spirit
of man, when most direct and powerful, can be properly

MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT, 191

considered miraculous. Even if we allow that such ac-
tion is supernatural and involves an arrest of the forces
of nature, it lacks every one of the other elements of the
miraculous. It may be as surprising and show as much
or more of God, but it does not impart definite teaching
by a public and open deed.

Last and most essential of all, in every miraculous
act there must be a worthy and sufficient occasion, if the
act is to be accepted as miraculous. We cannot believe,
and we ought not to believe, that the laws of nature will
be broken, except for such a reason. Such a reason can
only be furnished in the attainment of some end, which
the observance of these laws cannot reach. I would not
say that the only end conceivable is to accredit a messen-
ger or a message from God. If a work of superhuman
power is required to impress men vividly and effectively
with the nearness of God, or the love of God, or the ten-
derness of God to man, such a necessity, when made
manifest, might justify the miraculous interposition of
God, and my faith in such an interposition in fact. But
I must believe that God will respect the forces of nature
which he has made, and will conform to the laws of nature
which he has imposed upon these forces, unless I discern
some reason which requires him to show that he is great-
er than these forces, and the master of these laws. This
is so obvious a truth, that it seems surprising that it
should ever have been overlooked. Even the aesthetic
sense of propriety taught a pagan poet to say, who
might be supposed to have no special respect for the

192 MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT.

gods of the ancient mythology, that a god should
never be introduced upon the stage in a play, unless
there was an occasion that required and justified his
presence. How much more must this be true of the
living God, in whom we have a rational faith, and of
whom our conceptions are ever more and more grand
and reverential, the more we bring him home to our
thoughts.

Our definition of a miracle will have prepared us to ap-
preciate the reasons for believing in the Christian mira-
cles. First of all, such miracles 2cc^ possible. Every man
who believes in God must believe that he can suspend or
override the forces which he upholds, and set aside the
laws under which he causes them to act. The Atheist
and the Pantheist alone can deny that a miracle is possi-
ble ; the Atheist because there is no God, and the Pan-
theist because his God is only another phrase for the
finite forces and laws which make up the universe.

There are Theists who object to the assumption that
God can suspend or interrupt the laws of nature. They
are so deeply possessed of the idea that law can never be
broken, and that God is bound by his own prescdptions,
that they explain the supernatural miracles by the dis-
placement of one force by another, as when gravitation
is overcome by muscular effort, or mental force acts
against and overrules bodily tendencies. In like man-
ner, they reason, God may have some unknown force or
law in reserve, by which he brings to pass the most
wonderful effects and signs. Others have gone farther.

MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT. 193

and contended that there may be some provision in na-
ture from the first, by which at the precise moment the
hidden force required should come into action, as a
clock might be supposed to play a tune once in thirty
days, or a calculating machine to bring out a peculiar
series of numbers at the millionth turn of a wheel. It
is far more rational to say that the God who created the
forces and laws of nature, never ceases to uphold its forces
and enforce its laws. In this regard he is nearer to na-
ture than the soul of man is to his body, He can there-
fore override every force by a higher force ; but this high-
er force is no created energy, but his creative fiat — his
will — whose function is to suspend every other force,
and to control every law.

Every disturbance that might occur in consequence
he can avoid by the same energy by which he suspends
any natural force. Should he arrest a planet in its or-
bit, he could provide all the compensations that might be
required to avert or check or turn aside the results that
might otherwise ensue. His hand is not only on the
driving lever that starts and stops and regulates the en-
gine, but his presence and spirit are in all the wheels,
and pulsate in that vast organization which we call the
universe of matter and spirit. For God to suspend a
force or break a law, is, however, never a lawless or an
unreasonable act. Every miracle is performed for some
reason. No force of nature is ever suspended, no law is
broken, except to reveal a present and personal God, and
to enforce a sense of his presence which is yet above

17

194 MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT.

nature, by some manifestation through nature, in order
that some impressive moral or spiritual lesson may be
conveyed.

It follows that a story of a miracle is credible when-
ever a sufificient reason for its occurrence can be given
or supposed. We believe that the laws of nature may
and ought to be broken for the same reason that in
ordinary cases we believe that they stand fast. This
may sound like a paradox, but it is nevertheless true.
The question is not put to the scientists of our time
half so often as it should be, nor pressed with half the
urgency which is warranted. What are the grounds on
which you assume that the laws of nature are unbroken,
or, in the language of Hume, that a miracle is contrary to
experience.-* Hume himself confesses that he cannot an-
swer this question. I give his own language : " If we ask
what is the foundation of all conclusions from experience,
this implies a new question which may be of more diffi-
cult solution." The solution he gives in another passage,
" experimental reasoning itself which we possess in com-
mon with beasts, is nothing but a species of instinct or
mechanical power that acts in us, unknown to ourselves."
The atheist can give no answer than that these laws
•never in fact have been broken. The materialistic evo-
lutionist is in a worse plight, for on his particular theory
he must assume an unbroken regularity of laws for bill-
ions of ages, during which he asserts a great many
things have taken place which are entirely contradicted
by the experience of the post-historic period, which are

MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT. 195

marvels if they are not miracles, and would scarcely
stand the test of Hume's argument. The theist alone
has a solution for his faith in the order of nature and the
fixedness of law. That explanation is the absolute neces-
sity of both for the harmony of the universe and the well-
being of its sentient creatures, and for the possibility of
science itself. Without such order we could neither eat
nor sleep with any confidence ; we could neither light a
fire nor provide our food ; we could gather no wisdom
from the past and provide no stores for the future; we
could exercise no prudence and achieve no philosophy.
It is not because we have found by experience that these
forces remain and these laws are unbroken that we rest
in the conclusion that the order of nature is permanent,
but it is because we believe that such order ought to
be observed in a universe of reason and goodness. We
do indeed find that what we know ought to be is actually
realized in our verified experience ; but it is because of
the reason why, rather than because of the fact observed^
that we believe this permanent order under which our ri-
sing and our rest, our business and our pleasure, so
confidently proceed.

I venture the remark by way of digression, that in
point of fact this faith in law and order is the product of
those conceptions of nature as related to God, which the
Jewish and Christian theism have enforced upon the faith
of the world by miracles. I find this doctrine in an old
book: " For ever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven.
Thy faithfulness is unto all generations, thou hast estab-

196 MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT.

lished the earth and it abideth. They continue this day
according to thine ordinances, for all are thy servants." I
find also that the great physicists who developed and
fixed our modern notions of the forces and laws of nature,
and wrought out the theory of deduction on which modern
science has been reared, were every one of them positive
and even devout theists. Such were Bacon, Descartes,
Leibnitz, Newton, and Locke. Very earnest efforts have
been made of late to persuade the confiding if not the
credulous public that Christian theology has always been
the natural and persistent foe of science. It would be easy
to show that the accepted theory of modern scientific
research was the indirect result of that view of nature
which theism implies, viz.^ the conception of a universe
which was pervaded by order and law. In othor words,
the theory of experimental physics was born of Christian
theism.

We return to our argument. We believe that a
miracle is credible whenever it is required for any worthy
end which God may propose, for the same reason that we
believe in the unbroken reign of law in the ordinary
routine of nature, because of the ends which this dominion
of law will subserve. We believe that the laws of nature
may be broken when the occasion requires, for the same
reason that we believe them to be unbroken in the ordi-
nary routine of life.

Not only is a miracle credible, but it becomes prob-
able, when the occasion justifies it. The end proposed
in a miracle may not only justify our reason in believing

MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT. 197

it, it may even require this faith of both reason and con-
science.

The occasion for the Christian miracles was to call
attention to Christ's claims as the manifestation of God
to man, and to enforce these claims by deeds and events
that made them good. The attention of men must first
be aroused and held fast. Belief must ensue, in order that
Christ's words and life and death might gain man's obe-
dience and love. If this is so, the one and only question
which we need to ask is this. Has man any such occa-
sion for a Being like Christ, as would justify His being
introduced to man's dwelling-place and his history by
events clearly supernatural.'* To every man who asks
this question I would answer, Think of what man was
without Christ and think of what he has become through
faith in Christ, man as a community and man singly.
Look squarely in the face the fact that man is a
sinner and as such is self-condemned, and needs the assu-
rance as clear as Christ's words and life and death can
make it, that God is willing to forgive him — that man is
weak and needs Christ's help and sympathy — that he is
going into an unknown land, where nothing is definite but
the darkness made visible by the wandering ghosts of his
own sins waiting to shame and torment him, and that for
these needs Christ is all — but no more than all — that he
wants. Think what Christ has done for all honest be-
lievers who have in good faith taken him to be the ruler
and joy of their being. If man needs him so much

and Christ is to man what his life and words declare him to

17*

198 MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT.

be, and what the simple belief in Christ, whether he be a
fiction or a fact, tends to make of every man, then not only
is it credible that he wrought the miracles that are re-
ported, but the story of such a Christ would be incredi-
ble without miracles. Once admit that man is in this
need, and that Christ is, and brings this help, and the
miracles in the history make the history itself more
credible. They strengthen the story immensely. The
Christian story without the miracles ought to be rejected
as untrue. Should we lower man's need to a mere inci-
dental ignorance or want of culture in morals and civili-
zation, and Christ's mission to a desirable but not indis-
pensable supplement to these wants, we ought to reject
the miraculous in the history, embarrassing and impossi-
ble as it confessedly is to give any rational explanation of
how such a story came to be written or believed if it is
false.

We are brought, then, to this issue. Is what is usu-
ally called nature the whole of the universe .^ Or if you
enlarge the conception of nature, so as to take into it
spiritual beings who are immortal, are all their interests
limited to power, wealth, enjoyment, to social affection,
culture, art, and civilization, and even to character — if
you leave out of character responsibility to one's self and
to God, with its results of confirmed sin or confirmed
holiness — are these all that man should cai'e for, or all
that God does care for t If there is more, this out-
weighs all the rest. If man is responsible, then he is
guilty and weak, and needs forgiveness and help. He

MIRACLES AND MODERN THOUGHT. 199

also needs the assurance of both in such form that he
cannot doubt the reality and cannot help being moved by
the love. In one word, he needs the supernatural and
the miraculous Christ, just the Christ of the gospel story,
and he needs him more than anything and everything
besides. If there is a living and loving God, shall he
not supply this want ? If, in order to supply it, he must
meet man with such miraculous works as break through
the order of nature in order to manifest his presence, shall
we believe the story the less or the more because it re-
cords supernatural deeds ? Well might Coleridge say,
** Evidences of Christianity ! I am weary of the phrase —
make a man feel his need of Christianity, and give him
right conceptions of what Christianity is, and he cannot
but believe it to be from God, and this by a most natural
and rational judgment."

And here I leave the argument, with a single word of
application to those who teach in Sunday-schools or Bible-
classes. If you would relieve the difficulties which any
members of your classes may feel concerning the subject
of miracles, you can only do this by making them under-
stand that they need Christ and that Christ can be some-
thing to them. This conviction, this feeling of need,
must be the background to every one of your arguments
concerning the truth of the Christian story. To make
these truths fresh and vivid to your pupils they must be
always fresh and vivid to yourselves. Strive after this,
for your own sake as well as for theirs.

Method of Jesus Christ

AS

TEACHER

REV. GEORGE DANA BOARDMAN, D, JD.,

PASTOR OF THE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA, PA.

Method

OF

JESUS CHRIST AS TEACHER,

" And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the peo-
were astonished at his doctrine : for he taught them as one having au-
thority, and not as the scribes." Matthew 7 : 28, 29.

JESUS CHRIST A TEACHER.

Such are the words with which the sacred chronicler
closes his report of that group of matchless sayings
to which the Christian world has given the title, " The
Sermon on the Mount." And yet this title is almost a
misnomer. This group of sayings is not a discourse : it
is neither an oration, nor an argumentation, nor an ex-
postulation : it is strictly an instruction. " Seeing the
multitudes, he went up into the mountain : and when he
had sat down, [and sitting was the usual posture of the
Jewish teacher,] he opened his mouth and taught them,
saying," " And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended
these sayings, the multitude were astonished at his doc-
trine, i. e. teaching, for he taught them as one having
authority, and not as the scribes."

204 yESUS CHRIST AS TEACHER,

Nor is this the only occasion on which Jesus Christ is
set before us as a teacher. Forty-four other times in the
Gospels is the verb teach applied to him : ten other
times are his sayings spoken of as a doctrine, i. e., teach-
ing : forty times is he mentioned as master, i. e., teacher :
two hundred and twenty times are his followers called
disciples, i. e., learners. A meaningful fact surely, fairly
challenging study. May the Spirit of truth then espe-
cially help us as we ponder the following theme :

THEME : THE METHOD OF JESUS CHRIST AS TEACHER.
THE TREATMENT PROPOSED.

In treating this topic we probably cannot do better
than to follow the order suggested by the text, treating
it first negatively and then affirmatively.

I. HOW JESUS CHRIST DID NOT TEACH,

And first, negatively, the way in which Jesus Christ
did not teach.

HE DID NOT TEACH RABBINICALLY.

Let the text itself suggest our first point : he did not
teach rabbinically, /. e., as the scribes.

The scribes, you hardly need be reminded, were the
authorized teachers of the land. Their principal business
was to interpret the Sacred Scriptures, particularly the
Law of Moses. Springing up as a separate order about
the time of the return from the Babylonian captivity,
when the Hebrew speech was losing itself in the Ara-

y^ESUS CHRIST AS TEACHER. 205

mean, they were originally a noble class of men, doing
a noble service. But in the time of our Lord, they had
become fearfully degenerate. In their idolatry of the
letter they had lost sight of the spirit. Their interpre-
tation had become superficial, technical, trivial, hollow,
heartless. The religion of Abraham and Moses and
David and Isaiah and Malachi, they had smothered be-
neath the lumber of traditions and the dead weight of
precedents. They had become wretched casuists, rais-
ing questions ridiculously puerile, such, e. g., as this : '' If
a man should be born with two heads, on which forehead
must he wear the phylactery .?" Thus they were for ever
vexing the consciences of men by binding on their
shoulders heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, subtly
discriminating between swearing by the temple and by
the gold of the temple, tithing mint and rue and anise
and cummin and all manner of herbs, but passing over
the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, faith,
and the love of God, straining out gnats, but swallow-
ing camels, rejecting the commandment of God and
making his word of none effect, that they might keep
their own tradition. In short, beneath the teaching of
these scribes, who had taken the seat of Moses, all had
become formal, artificial, rigid, technical, arbitrary, pe-
dantic, microscopic, rotative, slavish, hollow, icy : every
duty duly labelled and pigeon-holed.

Not so did Jesus Christ teach. No teaching was ever
fresher or more vitalizing than his. So far was he from

idolizing the letter that in his quotations from law or

18

2o6 JESUS CHRIST AS TEACHER.

prophet he was generally content with quoting the
thought rather than the word. He did not load down
the memory of his pupils with citations of traditions
from Hillel the Looser, or of precedents from Shammai
the Binder. Nor did he oppress their consciences with
numerous and tiny regulations, or vex them with gos-
samer distinctions and phantom conceits : he did not
turn religion into a rubric or character into a mummy.
In short, he did not teach as the scribes.

NOR SYSTEMATICALLY.

Again : Jesus Christ did not teach systematically ;
that is to say, according to what we would call a scien-
tific method. In his instructions there is no appearance
of elaboration, no show of logic. Look at this Instruc-
tion of the Mount. It is the most formal and elaborate
of his teachings, for it is his pronunciamento as the new
King. And yet nothing could be simpler, or more free
from all signs of study. It has no firstlies, secondlies,
thirdlies. It does not suggest Aristotle's Dialectics, or
Calvin's Syllogisms, or Buckle's Statistics. In fact, it is
so informal as to baffle any natural analysis. And so
with all his teachings. Not that there is no plan in
them, or no philosophy in his religion. He is profound-
ly systematic. But his system is the natural meander-
ing of the river, not the artificial course of the canal.
To the student of nature there is more method in a cedar
of Lebanon than in the Temple of Solomon.

y£SC/S CHRIST AS TEACHER. 207

NOR RHETORICALLY.

Once more : Jesus Christ did not teach rhetorically.
The thought does not seem to have occurred to him of
substituting aesthetics for religion, literature for dogma,
culture for righteousness. Look at his instructions. In
vain shall you search for finely-turned sentences, ornate
amplifications, brilliant flights, elegant allusions, learned
quotations from the hermeneutics of Hillel, or the theol-
ogy of Zoroaster, or the metaphysics of Plato, or the poe-
try of Virgil. His language is the language of the com-
mon people. And yet unstudied and homely as it is, it
involves the lore of the eternities.

II. HOW JESUS CHRIST DID TEACH.

And so we pass to consider, secondly and affirma-
tively, the way in which Jesus Christ did teach.

HE TAUGHT AUTHORITATIVELY.

One word summarizes it: it is the word atUhority.
" When Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were
astonished at his teaching : for he taught them as one
having authority, and not as the scribes."

AUTHORITY OF CONSCIOUS AUTHORITY.

And, first : Jesus Christ taught with the authority of
one who was conscious of authority.

Look at this Instruction on the Mount. How in-
tense the personality which pervades it. Six times does

2o8 y^£SC/S CHRIST AS TEACHER.

this untitled Rabbi from Nazareth plant himself in open
opposition to the scribes, joining issue, be it observed,
not with Moses, but with the authorized interpreters of
Moses, boldly overturning the misinterpretations of cen-
turies : " Ye have heard that it was said to them of old
time But I say to you." Or look at his other in-
structions. How sublime their egotism ! Yes, look at
this very word 'Eyw : "I am the bread of life;" "I am
the light of the world ;" " Before Abraham was, I am ;■"
" I am the resurrection and the life ;" " I am the way,
the truth, and the life ;" "I am the Alpha and the Ome-
ga, the first and the last, the beginning and the end."
How imperial the sovereignty which is stamped on every
saying of his. From first to last it is a very king who
speaks, conjugating all life in the imperative mood. His
very sayings are decisive of destinies. Dogmatic he was
not, and yet he was dogmatic. Listen : " Whosoever hear-
eth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken
him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock :
and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the
winds blew, and beat upon that house ; and it fell not,
for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that
heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall
be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon
the sand : and the rain descended, and the floods came,
and the winds blew and beat upon that house ; and it
fell : and great was the fall of it." Listen again : " He
that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life : and he
that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the

yESUS CHRIST AS TEACHER. 209

wrath of God abideth on him." Listen once more : " Go
ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every
creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be
saved ; but he that believeth not shall be damned." If
this is not authority, what is authority .-^

AUTHORITY OF ELEMENTALS.

Again : Jesus Christ taught with the authority- of one
who dealt in elementals.

• For observe the precise purpose for which Jesus
Christ came into the world as teacher. He came not to
instruct men in secular matters. He came not to teach
astronomy or geology or physiology or metaphysics or
economics or arts. True, he might have taught all this.
The Lord of nature might have anticipated the discover-
ies of a Copernicus, a Columbus, a Harvey, a Faraday.
But he knew that all such discoveries belong to the inci-
dental and mortal part of our being, and could sooner or
later be wrought out by man's own powers, and so he
left all such things to follow the law of unfolding. What
he came to teach was what man could not learn without
supernatural disclosure. What he came to teach was
not incidentals, but essentials ; not ephemerals, but eter-
nals ; not facts, but truths. " To this end was I born,
and for this cause came I into the world, that I should
bear witness unto the truth." Yes, Jesus Christ came
into the world to attest the existence of unseen, elemen-
tal, eternal realities.

And how profound and radical his teachings ! How

18*

2IO yESUS CHRIST AS TEACHER.

utterly free from all pettiness of details — from all that is
merely incidental and transient! e.g., the Lord does not
tell us how often to pray, or how much to give, or when
to go to church, or what to do and what not to do on the
Sabbath-day. And yet many persons imagine that if
they could know such things as these, they would master
the chief problems of the Christian life. It is a pro-
found misconception of the teaching of Jesus Christ.
No martinet disciplinarian is he, turning life into a mi-
nute and perennial drill, where all is

"Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null."

No, he does not tell us what to do so much as what to
be ; for if we are what we ought to be, he knows that we
will do what we ought to do. He does not purify the
stream of life by undertaking to purify each separate
drop as it rushes along ; he purifies life at its fountain.
He grapples with living, immortal, transcendent issues,
even the issue of a Godlike character : " Be ye perfect,
even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."

But let us take some particular specimen of the
depth of Christ's method. Observe, e, g., how he in-
terprets the law of murder: "Ye have heard that it
was said by them of old time. Thou shalt not kill ; and
whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment :
but I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his
brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judg-
ment : and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca,
[worthless fellow,] shall be in danger of the council : but

yESUS CHRIST AS TEACHER. 211

whosoever shall say, Mareh, [fool,] shall be in danger of
hell fire." According to the Mountain Teacher, then,
murder is not an act, but a thought; not a question of
standing in the eyes of the community, but of charac-
ter in the eyes of the All-seeing. No murder was ever
committed which did not begin in the heart : " Out of
the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, for-
nications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies." The mur-
der is not in the pistol or the bludgeon or the arsenic,
nor yet in the hand that wields them, nor even in the
volition that wields the hand : the murder is in the angry
feeling that originates the volition. All life, good and
bad, starts from germs. Thus radical is the Great Teach-
er's method. His teaching is more than elementary ; it
is elemental : his school the world's true and everlasting
Seminary. Precepts he transfigures into principles, stat-
utes into character, rules into life. Himself the true
Lawgiver on the true Sinai, he transcribes the Ten Com-
mandments from tablets of stone, writing them on tablets
of heart. And so he rears an internal Sinai, whose qua-
kings shall shake the very foundations of the soul, start-
ling the dullest conscience and preluding the thunder-
peals of the Judgment-day.

AUTHORITY OF NATURE.

Again : Jesus Christ taught with the authority of one
who appeals to nature.

Were I asked to describe, in the briefest expression
possible, the method of Jesus Christ a-s teacher, I would

212 y^S^S CHRIST AS TEACHER.

answer: He was a parable speaker. That this is a just
description will be evident from a simple enumeration of
some of his parables, thus : The Sower, The Tares, The
Seed growing secretly. The Mustard Seed, The Leaven,
The Unsought Treasure, The Sought Pearl, The Drawn
Net, The Two Debtors, The Merciless Servant, The
Good Samaritan, The Rich Fool, The King's Marriage
Feast, The Fig-tree, The Great Supper, The Recovered
Sheep, The Recovered Coin, The Recovered Son, The
Dishonest Steward, Dives and Lazarus, The Unjust
Judge, The Pharisee and the Publican, The Two Sons,
The Vineyard Laborers, The Pounds, The Talents, The
Wicked Husbandman, The Ten Virgins, The Sheep and
the Goats. These are but specimens of the Great
Teacher's recorded parables. And the evangelists hint
that he uttered very many parables which they did not
record : " All these things spake Jesus in parables to the
multitudes, and without a parable he spake nothing to
them ; that it might be fulfilled which was spoken through
the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables,
I will utter things which have been kept secret from the
foundation of the world." In fact, erase from the records
of Christ's sayings all he has said in form of parable, and
figure, and metaphor, leaving only what he taught in
distinct statements, and how comparatively meagre the
residue !

And there are immense advantages in the parable
method of instruction. In the first place, there is a deep
foundation for the parable method in the very nature of

JESUS CHRIST AS TEACHER, 213

things ; that is to say, in the correspondence which exists
between things spiritual and things natural. "All
things," says the son of Sirach, "are double, the one
against the other." It is a profound saying. The bless-
ed truth is, there are two Bibles, both issuing from the
same Divine Author ; the one, (Psa. 19 : 1-6,) the Bible
of the Unwritten Word, or the Lex non Scripta : the
other, (Psa. 19: 7-1 1,) the Bible of the Written Word, or
the Lex Scripta : or rather, the one Bible is in two vol-
umes, the volume of Scripture and the volume of Nature,
and the volume of Nature is the volume of Scripture il-
lustrated. Yes, there is a deep foundation for the para-
ble method in the nature all around us. Again : the
visible world supplies us with the aptest and most effec-
tive illustrations of the invisible. The mass of mankind
find it difficult to grasp an abstraction ; but they easily
grasp a picture. For every one man who can understand
a truth put in the form of an abstract proposition, there
are a hundred men who will instantly understand it
when sketched in a story. And the natural world fur-
nishes us with the truest pictures of the spiritual. When,
therefore, the Divine Teacher, in introducing a parable,
uses his favorite formula, saying, " The kingdom of
heaven is like this," " The kingdom of heaven is like
that," every one instantly catches his meaning, and
feels that he speaks truly. Again ; these illustrations
are themselves arguments. It is often said : " The
Scripture parables prove nothing." Whereas they are
in fact specimens of logic in its highest forms. If

214 7ESUS CHRIST AS TEACHER.

things on earth are shadows, as I believe they are, of
things in heaven, then there are things in heaven, for
the shadows prove it, just as a shadow does prove the
existence of the substance that casts it. This is why
the Lord's parables are such peerless instances of argu-
mentation. E. g., In this Instruction on the Mount, the
Great Teacher wishes to convince his disciples that the
Heavenly Father will take care of all who put their
trust in him. How does he undertake to do this "i By
an oracular statement to that effect } No ! By evolving
an elaborate process of ratiocination } No ! By an
analogy from nature 1 Yes ! " Behold the birds of the
air ! They are not God's children ; and yet your
Heavenly Father feedeth them. Consider the lilies of
the field. They are not God's children ; and yet your
Heavenly Father clotheth them. In those birds is my
argument, in these lilies is my proof. Ye are God's
children ; most certainly then will your Heavenly Father
feed and clothe you." What ingenuous soul can resist
the logic of such an appeal 'i Again : parables open
channels for the unperceived entrance of unpalatable
truth. Like sugar-coated pills, or like the little scroll
of the angel's hand, which in the mouth was sweet as
honey, but which, when swallowed, was bitter, parables
may convey distasteful truths, as it were, in disguise.
How often did the Great Teacher graciously ensnare
his adversaries in this artlessly artful way ! Once
more : parables have a wonderful self-adjusting power,
letting into the heart just so much truth as the heart

yESUS CHRIST AS TEACHER. 215

will allow to come in. It is not so with a syllogism, or
a theorem in geometry : these you either understand
wholly, or you do not understand them at all : the demon-
stration is an indivisible thing, and you take in all of it,
or none of it. How different the parables of our Lord !
They have the property of an indefinite elasticity, ex-
panding and contracting, adjusting themselves with a
marvellous accuracy, not so much to our powers of un-
derstanding as to our moral susceptibility. They let into
our hearts just so much light as our hearts will let in ; no
more, no less.

No wonder then that the Lord of nature and teacher of
men was wont to speak in parables. They furnished him
with the most telling illustrations and confirmations of
the truth he came to disclose. They secured for him an
audience which abstract statements might have repelled*.
They planted the responsibility for character, or absorp-
tion of spiritual truth, at the most merciful and at the
same time the most decisive point — the point of free-will,
or moral sympathy. And all this because parables have
a deep and solid foundation in the profound connection
between the realm of matter and the realm of spirit : so
that we may discern in the one the meaning and the
proof of the other.

And herein, brethren, we have a hint for ourselves as
teachers. Nature is our great storehouse of illustration
and demonstration. Instead then of eying "science"
askance, let us boldly court her alliance. Her office,
as in the days of magian astronomy, is still to bring her

2i6 yESUS CHRIST AS TEACHER.

treasures of gold and frankincense and myrrh, and lay
them at the feet of the ever-unfolding Christ. By thus
constantly appealing, as did the heavenly teacher himself,
to the great nature around us, our teachings will ever-
more be fresh and fertilizing.

AUTHORITY OF INTUITION.

Again : Jesus Christ taught with the authority of one
who appeals to our intuitions.

Look again at this mountain instruction. On the
surface it is utterly wanting in every sign of formal logic,
and yet it is profoundly logical, But it is the logic of
instinct, the argument of insight, the demonstration of
intuition. Listen to one of these demonstrations — the
appeal to one of the radical elements of human society —
the sense of fatherhood and sonhood : " What man is there
of you, who, if his son ask bread, will he give him a
stone? Or, if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent }
If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto
your children, how much more shall your Father which
is in heaven give good gifts to them that ask him V Can
you' conceive an argument more resistless } Thus did
Jesus Christ speak to that which is deepest and most
central in man. He appealed to something higher than
sensibility, higher than intellect, higher than will. He
appealed to that which in man is the least human and the
most divine — the bar of the moral sense, the bench of
conscience. Therefore did he teach with an authority to
which the scribes were strangers. They cited authority--

yES us CHRIST AS TEA CHER. 2 1 7

the authorities without; he appealed to authority — the
authority within.

AUTHORITY OF CHARACTER.

Once more : Jesus Christ taught with the authority of
one whose character was itself the supreme authority.

How marvellous the authority of the Galilean carpen-
ter over the ages ! How he dominates men's intellects,
and affections, and consciences ! At the mention of his
name how many millions bow and confess that he is
Lord of lords ! The civilized world, in spite of the sneer
of the skeptic and the wrath of the reprobate, reckons its
dates from the year of his birth, heading their documents
with the august words. Anno Domini. The word Chris-
tendom itself — what is it but Christ dominion.^ And
whence came this man's authority } Not from wealth,
for he had not where to lay his head. Not from social
influence : for his own brothers did not believe in him,
his own townsmen rejected him, his own countrymen
crucified him. Not from scholarship : for he was only a
Nazarene mechanic, without academic training; "How
knoweth this man letters, having never learned.''" i. e.,
having never been trained as a Rabbi. And yet, never
man spake like this man. Whence then comes this man's
authority .? From the majesty of personal character, from
, the omnipotence of daily life. Men can fight other
things : they can fight wealth, rank, force, brain : but
they cannot fight character. And this man's heavenly

teachings were matched, buttressed, made imperial by his

19

2i8 JESUS CHRIST AS TEACHER.

heavenly life. Therefore never man spake like this man —
never teacher taught with this teacher's authority. As
Augustine says: "Whose life is lightning, his words are
thunder."*

"And so the Word had breath, and wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds,
In loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought :

" Which he may read that binds the sheaf,
Or builds the house, or digs the grave.
And those wild eyes that watch the wave
In roarings round the coral reef."

Such is an attempt to set forth, in part at least,
Christ's method as Teacher : in part, I say : for the field
is immense, and we have been able to scan but a section
of it. May it not be in vain that we have scanned that
section ! And now a few words in way of conclusion.

THE CHURCH CHRIST's SUCCESSOR AS TEACHER.

And first : Jesus Christ in ascending dropped his
mantle as instructor on his church. From that hour the
church of the living God has been the world's great
teacher. Listen : " All power is given unto me in heaven
and in earth: Go ye therefore and teach all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the
Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all
things whatsoever I have commanded you : and lo, I am
with you alway, even unto the end of the world." Do not
imagine that these words were meant only for ministers.

* Cujus vita est fulgur, ejus verba tonitrua.

yESUS CHRIST AS TEACHER. 219

The classification of the church into clergy and laity is
not a division in fact; it is only a distinction in form.
In the sight of God ye are teachers not less than we on
whose heads have been laid the ordaining hands of the
presbytery. And very majestic is your office as teacher.
The world's great imperial men are not those who are its
millionaires, or its monarchs ; they who rule the world
are they who teach it. Alexander was called the Great,
because he was a conqueror: but his greatness died with
himself. Plato the teacher was greater, and is still Plato
the Great, for he is swaying Christendom to-day. The
masters of the world are those who are its masters ; and
master, being interpreted, is teacher. Do we not at this
very day call the school-teacher master }

INTIMACY WITH CHRIST THE SECRET OF AUTHORITY.

Would you, O teacher, like the great Master himself,
teach with authority } You will not gain it from the
books. Commentaries, maps, blackboards, teachers'
meetings, Sunday-school magazines and lectures and
conventions are good. They give a certain kind of au-
thority, but it is only the authority of the scribes. Would
you have a real, conquering authority.? Then, like the
great Master, live in sympathy with nature, and the forces
of the universe. Occupy your thoughts with the elemen-
tal, and transcendent, and immortal. Above all things,
live in communion with eternal God himself. Be closeted
with him in the intimacies of a celestial friendship. Like
the divine man of Nazareth, have a godlike character.

220 y^ESUS CHRIST AS TEACHER,

Then shall men acknowledge that your doctrine, like
Christ's, is not yours, but his who sent you. Then shall
you teach with authority indeed. Yes, thy method, O
teacher, will be the method of Jesus Christ.

CHURCH OF THE DISCIPLES.

Finally : May God give you and me grace to keep us
evermore studying in the school of the Lord from heav-
en : for so shall we in very truth belong to the church
of the disciples. Thus sitting at his feet and listening
to his word, we shall grow up into him in all things, who
is the head, even Christ.

THE

Right and Responsibility

CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE

IN THE

STUDY OF THE SCRIPTURES,

REV, E. A. WASHBURN, D. D.,

RECTOR OF CALVARY CHURCH, NEW YORK.

19«

THE

Christian Conscience

AND THE

STUDY OF THE SCRIPTURES.

It is an old question I bring before you, as old as the
first day of the Reformation, when the translation of the
Bible was the leader of intellectual as well religious free-
dom ; yet as new, and perhaps more weighty, in its
connections with modern thought. What is the right,
and what the law of the Christian conscience in the study
of the Scriptures ? The subject meets us in many rela-
tions, which demand our earnest inquiry. It forces itself
on the friends of public education, who must inquire to-
day whether the Bible shall be excluded from the school.
It meets the thoughtful believer in the grave riddles
opened by the growth of Biblical criticism, and the fresh
researches of science. We hear on one side the denier
of any divine revelation, who claims that he is the only
true champion of Protestant principle. Nor can we doubt,
on the other, that the secret of most of the perversions
to the church of Rome lies, as one of its best apologists

224 THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE AND

holds, in the uneasy fear which finds its refuge in the
name of infallibility. Where do we stand? Is there
any agreement between Protestant freedom and unity in
Christian truth ? What is the Protestant principle ?

I wish to answer this question with an honest clear-
ness. I believe with the fullest conviction, that the
ground of the Reformation is the true and the only true
one on which we can rest. Yet it is not so easy, as some
think, to be stated ; and it involves some points in which
I shall doubtless differ from the popular view. But
if I can so meet them, as to convince you that our
growth in Christian knowledge is one with an unshaken
faith, I shall fulfil my purpose. Nor do I speak only or
chiefly to scholars : for although I shall touch on lines
of thought which any students in theology who hear me
may follow into deep waters, my earnest wish is to meet
the wants of all thoughtful Christian men, to give them
in a day of chaotic opinions that abiding truth, which to
know is eternal life.

We must begin our inquiry with a clear statement of
our Protestant position, and the argument urged against
it by the ablest opponents. The doctrines of a justifying
faith in Christ, and of the supremacy of Holy Scripture
as containing all necessary truth, are the ground of the
Reformation. Both are sides of one principle. It is
the claim of the Protestant that no traditions of men
and no outward sacramental systems can come between
the personal conscience and God ; and therefore the
word of God alone can be the rule of faith. But it is

THE STUDY OF THE SCRIPTURES. 225

the position of the Roman church, that such a principle
is the claim only of the most lawless freedom. Although
all may profess to hold one Bible, yet as the right to
examine and settle its truth belongs to every conscience ;
as many questions of doctrine as well as order are involv-
ed in such study, which need Christian learning ; and
as few have either the intellect or training for this, the
Protestant claim is the source of unbelief or fanaticism.
To talk of the inspiration of such a Book is a misnomer.
If it can be interpreted by any sect or any man, it is no
longer the word of God. None can state the reasoning
better than a stern Protestant satirist of former days.'

" What is the Bible ? The book where each man seeks his own dogmas;
Yes, and the book where each man certainly finds what he seeks."

If there be unity of faith, then, it can only be possible
when we admit the supreme authority of the church as
interpreter ; and tradition, so far from being contrary to
Scripture, is thus necessary to it. Protestantism has
been, says the Romanist, its own fearful commentary on
this fact ; for since the day of Luther it has overturned
not merely the system of the church, but the Scriptures
whose authority it boasts ; and to-day its Bible means any-
thing from Strauss to the latest unbelief. Nor is it only
or chiefly as the destroyer of a sound learning that it is
to be feared ; it is the destroyer of the simple religion of
the people, the parent of all doubt and all impiety. Such
has been the argument, from the "Variations" of Bossuet
to the latest of these divines. I cannot give it in more

226 THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE AND

eloquent strength than in the discourse of the greatest of
modern French preachers, Lacordaire, and I am anxious
to do full justice to his reasoning : '' Take from the heav-
enly order the force Newton has consecrated under the
name of attraction, and at once the globes peopling the
ether would fly in contrary paths, precipitated by that
other force which is the schismatic power of nature.
There must be a principle of unity superior to the ele-
ments of discord which it nurses in its bosom, and this
principle, it has a name : it is sovereignty. And as there
is no civil society without sovereignty, there is no society
of minds without an intellectual sovereignty. Should
Protestants carry their doctrine over the world, what
then t They would have sown the Bible, and with it
some ideas it contains; but they would not have estab-
lished a divine order, for they have none." This is the
logic of the Roman-catholic system in a word : Unity of
faith is impossible with Protestant freedom in the study
of the Scriptures.

We are, then, fairly to test this question. If my pur-
pose were merely to answer the Romish doctrine, it
would be enough to say that its objection comes from
an utter misstatement of the Protestant principle. The
aim of the Reformers, in claiming the supremacy of
Scripture, was not at all to deny a due authority in
the Christian church to interpret the Scripture, but
to deny any authority to impose as of faith any dogmas
** not proven by warranty of Scripture." Nor is the
abuse of freedom in its interpretation any argument

THE STUDY OF THE SCRIPTURES. 227

against its right use. We hear quoted, often with a
sneer, the old watchword, " The Bible is the religion of
Protestants;" but the sense in which that phrase was
first uttered by Chillingworth, the most clear-headed of
thinkers, was not that the Protestant faith meant what-
ever any self-willed theorist or ignorant enthusiast might
force on the Bible, but simply that it contained all neces-
sary truth. But I do not wish merely to answer blow by
blow. I wish fairly to meet all the difficulties of the case
as they are felt by every thinking mind among Protes-
tants themselves. Let us hear them honestly. Are
there not, it is asked, many questions of science and crit-
icism utterly beyond the range of any save learned
men, which are yet claimed as necessary to the faith in
revelation } Is there any real difference between a Prot-
estant confession, which demands this, and a Romish
infallibility .-* Is not the notion of free inquiry in such a
case a mockery } I cannot doubt that such questions
are hard to reconcile with some of our prevailing ideas
of Scripture, and the systems of doctrine identified with
it. I cannot doubt that the dilemma has led many
to the denial of all positive belief, and driven others
into a church which rids them of a painful responsibility.
And therefore I wish to consider this whole subject of
the right of the conscience and the true authority it rec-
ognizes. It will lead us to that view of Scripture which
makes it in the noblest sense a sure word of truth, and
that view of the church which makes it a living fellow-
ship.

228 THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE AND

Let us, then, study the principle, which was the start-
ing-point of Protestant thought. I have said that the
doctrines of a justifying faith in Christ and the su-
premacy of Holy Scripture are parts of one truth.
What was this idea of justifying faith, which created
a new life not only in theology, but . in all thinking
minds from a Luther to the plain Christian man } Was
it another scholastic proposition to take the place of
the reigning system } Surely no. It was the very con-
trary. It was the good tidings that Christianity was no
system of scholastic notions to be received by a blind
assent, but the gospel which could only be known by
the living knowledge of Christ. Such a principle up-
rooted at once the theory on which was built the sacra-
mental fabric of Rome. It opened that ethical and spir-
itual path which has distinguished Protestant thought
ever since from the traditionary religion of the past.
And if the doctrine of justification has sometimes since
been changed into a metaphysical notion as hard as those
of the schools, it was in its original idea this restoration
of a living, simple Christianity. The gospel of Christ is
given for one only purpose — to reveal redemption from
sin, our sonship with the Father, and a life of real holi-
ness, as the way of the life eternal. This is its substance.
It is clear, therefore, that such a revelation must come
to every man as a personal being endowed with thought
and conscience, and must demand the personal exercise
of those powers to receive its truth. Jesus Christ, the
giver of pardon, grace, life, the personal revealer of the

THE STUDY OF THE SCRIPTURES. 229

Father, is the object of knowledge. Such a knowledge,
then, must be in its essential character different to any
such assent as we give to mere authority in questions of
science or of history. It begins with the recognition
of our moral relation to God as his children, of his
law of holiness and our sin, of the love of God as it
meets this want in the incarnate grace of his Son. It
is a knowledge, therefore, not only intellectual, but knit
with the renewed affections, and through it we receive
the truth of Christ as we are made one with his own
spirit of holiness. His revelation becomes to us not
only a doctrine, but a life of real growth in his fellow-
ship, of daily duty to God and men. But if this be in-
deed our conception of Christianity as a personal faith,
it is clear, again, that it is no individual opinion, no sub-
jective religion. It rests on the one common truth of
the incarnate Son of God, whose revelation is the same
for all men, because all have in their consciences the
same fact of their relation to God, the same sense of
sin, the same need of redemption. This was the Protes-
tant principle ; and it is plain in this view that it was
and was meant to be, not a new Christianity, but the old,
positive, historic faith, as it was embodied in the Apos-
tles' Creed, which Luther and all the Reformers held ;
that faith, not in later dogmatic systems, but in the
Gospel of the New Testament, which spoke at once to
the mind of each personal believer, yet is the ground of
fellowship for all who are members of the great house-
hold of God. 20

230 THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE AND

We have here, then, the just and the only just view
of this principle, as it bears on the doctrine of the
supremacy and sufficiency of the Scriptures. The in-
carnate Christ is the object of our faith. It is in
this volume alone we have the original, pure record of
the truth and grace he has bestowed ; and all the sys-
tems of men can add nothing to it. We are, then, to
interpret it in accordance with the law of its divine
unity. It is given in the form of history; a history
which teaches us the education of the world through its
growing childhood to the birth of Him who was the fulness
of times. That history, in its very structure, is mingled
with many critical questions as to the creation, the an-
nals of the early race, the development of Hebrew life,
and the formation of the new Christian society. But its
one essential purpose, so far as it concerns our belief as
followers of Christ, is the knowledge of our redemption.
Christ is the key of the Scriptures. It is " through the
faith that is in Christ Jesus," the apostle says, in that
much-misconceived verse of his epistle, we learn that
"all Scriptures are given by divine inspiration." The
spirit of his Gospel alone opens them. It gives us the
knowledge that is not a scientific guess-work, but
"profitable for teaching, for instruction in righteousness."
If we have learned his truth, these pages from begin-
ning to end have a living unity. The Old Testament
reveals the one personal God, the creator of the world ;
the origin of man as a son in his moral likeness ; the en-
trance of sin bv the free act of transgression ; the contin-

THE STUDY OF THE SCRIPTURES. 231

uance of a divine grace in the long, preparatory training
of -the Hebrew past ; the holy law, which stands alone,
like Smai, in the moral desert of history. The New
Testament reveals the perfect truth and grace of God in
the person, the life, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. AH
these parts of the sacred volume have thus their mutual
connections, and all must be interpreted by their one
divine purpose

Such, then, must be the clear principle which guides
us in our study. Whatever belongs to these foundation
truths is the divine, infallible faith of Christian men.
Whatever does not touch these lies within the outer cir-
cle of scientific inquiry. I do not here dwell on the
theory of verbal or plenary inspiration. If the view I
have given you be clear, it will be seen that such a theo-
ry, whatever the reverence of Scripture that prompts it,
leaves the deepest difficulties of the subject unanswered.
For if the Bible be indeed a book which only presents to
us a vast number of critical riddles, to be received as
part of essential revelation, yet in their very nature
beyond the decision of any save the most critical scholar,
and always open to fresh controversy, then it must de-
mand, as the Romanist asks, an infallible interpreter.
Our faith, then, needs a surer ground. It rests on the
knowledge of Him who is the life of the written Word.
It is our deeper reverence for its mspired truth, our faith
in its real unity, which point us to the principle I have
laid down. Such a knowledge will teach us the right
point of view, from which we shall learn the worth of

232 THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE AND

the Hebrew history, its worship, its social polity, its he-
roes and its saints, yet understand the far higher charac-
ter of the Christian Gospel, and the Christian holiness.
It will show us the due relation of all its parts, chronicle
or psalm or prophecy, to the central design. It will show
us the natural variety in the style of the writers, the
tone of their thought, yet their true harmony. There will
be no self-willed reason in this study, for it is to follow
the reason of the Word itself. There will be no vague
opinion, for we " hold the head, even Christ." We shall
not fear the assaults of a false neology, because we
shall be assured that all the results of earlier or later
criticisms can no more shake the foundatfons than the
removing of a few loose stones can shake the walls of the
cathedral. Much will interest us as Christian scholars,
which will not touch our Christian faith. Science will
decide at last, as it did with the heresy of Copernicus^
the questions of our time as to the Mosaic cosmogony,
or the age of the world ; yet its verdict will not disturb
us, if the design of revelation be not to teach geology
or astronomy, or the details of secular history, but to
give us the knowledge of redemption. And as this is the
plain rule for the scholar, so the simple believer will
read this word without needless questions concerning that
which has no bearing whatever on his faith or holiness.
If we have not this knowledge of Christ's gospel, al-
though we have sounded all the depths and shoals of criti-
cism, we have not the aljDhabet of the truth ; if we have
this, the sacred volume is one, one in its historic and

THE STUDY OF THE SCRIPTURES, 233

its spiritual meaning, one for the wise and the unlettered,
one for the intellect, the heart, and the life.

In such a light we pass clearly to the next weighty
side of our subject, the authority of the church as the
interpreter of the Scriptures. It is the claim of the
Romanist and of others who deny the Protestant prin-
ciple, that there must be unity of faith in regard to
the truths of revelation. We grant this, nay, we affirm
this unity as the very bond of fellowship. To deny it
would be to make revelation a mockery. A religion or a
church, which came out of no positive truth whatever,
would be as like that of the New Testament, as the uni-
verse of Prof. Haeckel out of a lifeless cell is like that of
the Divine Maker. But the question on which hinges
the real difference is as to the nature of this unity. What
is it.-* We have already given the answer in the conclu-
sion we reached as to the character of the Scripture
itself. The truth of the Word of God has in itself, as we
sought to show, an intrinsic unity ; it is the one revela-
tion of Jesus Christ, of the sonship and fellowship of
believers in him. There need be, then, no contradic-
tion whatever, and no perplexity as to the superior
claim of Bible or of church. It is said that the church
existed before the Scripture, and that the canon itself
rests on its authority. Undoubtedly. It is said that the
Scripture is above the church. Undoubtedly. But the
view which we have given, reconciles them. Jesus Christ,
the living Word, is before and above both. The Incar-
nation is the key of the Bible ; without it there remains

20*

234 THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE AND

a dead letter. The Incarnation is the basis of our or-
ganic fellowship ; without it creed and sacrament are dead.
Scripture and the church, then, bear witness to one and
the selfsame essential truth. The written word remains
always the original, supreme and sufficing record of
him, nor can any authority of human councils add any-
thing as of necessary belief to what he has given. It is
the function of the church to keep this truth in its sim-
plicity, to embody in its creed the clear meaning of
revelation, to expound it through its authorized teachers,
its devout worship, and its methods of practical educa-
tion.

A Christian creed is thus the growth of Christian
thought. It was necessary that the truth of the Incar-
nate Christ should be defined in its more doctrinal form,
when our religion had passed beyond the plain belief of
apostolic days, and many speculative theories had be-
clouded its simplicity. The great doctrines of sin, atone-
ment, grace, have been the successive expositions of the
one revealed fact of God in Christ, as age after age they
have employed the mind of the church. But while this
is true, the unity of the faith is not the unity of a theolo-
gical system. Creeds and confessions have^ their needful
use as a bulwark against speculative errors, but they are
not the living truth itself. We have in the science of
' astronomy the noblest work of the human mind in reckon-
ing the orbit of the sun and the varied motion of
the planets, yet the sun, not the treatise of astronomy,
gives light and heat. And even so it is the personal

THE STUD V OF THE SCRIPTURES. 235

power of Christ's truth which gives life. The belief
in his Incarnation did not rest on the vote of an assem-
bly of bishops in the Nicene age ; the common faith
of believers uttered itself in the creed, and this is the
truth speaking in the New Testament now and always
in the divine sinless grace of his person, of which the
symbol is only the scientific expression. Thus it is with
each doctrine. Augustin may expound the meaning of
sin, Anselm may give us a theory of the atonement,
Calvin may reason of the riddle of grace and will ; but
it is the fact of sin in the conscience of each, the truth of
redemption as it speaks in the heartfelt revelation of the
Saviour, which makes believers one. And hence the
chief duty of the church is, while it guards against
ignorant interpretation, to keep "the healthy teaching"
which St. Paul so often urges, by an appeal to the open
word of Scripture. Here alone in the primitive, fresh
gospel we have the touchstone by which to try the dross
of all traditions ; here we all, scholars or simple, have
one common birthright.

Now this clear principle we are to distinguish from
the false view of the church as the interpreter of the
word. It is the claim of the Romanist that Scripture
is the record of divine truth ; but its interpretation is
given to one class of teachers alone, and a Christian faith
is an unquestioning assent to its decrees. Let us not
mistake the difference. This claim is not only to the
authority of a wise teaching, consistent with the open
knowledge of the word of God, but to infallibility. And

236 THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE AND

I beg you again, to observe the ground of the claim. It
is that false conception of the Scriptures which I have
endeavored to expose. It is the assumption of the Ro-
manist, that the Christian revelation is a system of ab-
stract dogmas, of scientific riddles, which must therefore
be a sealed book to all, save a few authorized expounders.
I turn to one of the most subtle of modern defences*
the Grammar of Assent, by Mr. Newman, for the clear
statement of the doctrine. " It stands to reason that all,
learned and unlearned, are bound to believe the whole
revealed doctrine in all its parts and all it implies ; it
stands also to reason, that a doctrine so deep and various,
as the revealed deposiUmt of faith, cannot be brought
home to us and made our own all at once." " The difficulty
is removed by the dogma of the church's infallibility and
of the consequent duty of implicit faith in her word. It
stands in the place of all abstruse propositions in a
Catholic mind, for to believe in her word is virtually to
believe in them all. Even what he cannot understand,
he can believe to be true, and he believes it to be true,
because he believes in the church." Examine now the
logic. If the word of God be such a riddle, "deep and
various/' and if essential faith be in this riddle, then
in very deed many Protestant minds would cry, " Let
us give up our torturing responsibility, and rest in the
Nirvana of the infallible church. But if it be not this,
if it be a revelation indeed for the mind and heart,
such a claim is the most astounding of absurdities. We
lay bare here the root of the sophistry. Such a faith

THE STUDY OF THE SCRIPTURES. 237

is not the acceptance of the truth of Christ as it meets
our personal thought or affection ; it is the assent of the
bUnd mind to a sum of abstruse propositions which we
cannot know at all, but believe because we are told to
believe them. If this be Christianity, then it is no reve-
lation. The word of God is a mockery, for it can convey
no light even through the glasses of its pretended inter-
preters. This mental assent is such as the man of
science would demand, should he say, ** You cannot see
the stars with the naked eye ; put out your eyes and then
look through my telescope." If this again be Catholic
unity, then the truths of our salvation are a deposit of
esoteric dogma in the hands of an irresponsible priest-
hood. If this be Catholic certainty, then the meaning of
the Scripture is not surer than when left at the mercy of
a hundred sects, for we have absolutely no test left to
judge between its truth and every tradition. Who does
not see, that out of this root has sprung the harvest of
falsehoods } The church declares as Christ's word, " this
is my body," and, therefore, a bit of bread is Christ, al-
though sense, reason, and Scripture, deny it; and for the
communion that asks your intelligent faith, you must hold
a senseless and soulless marvel on peril of salvation. Yet
we have devout men to-day, who for fear of unbelief will
choose this theory and call it the unity of faith. Strange
insanity ! It will make a hundredfold more unbelievers
than the most destructive criticism. But let us not
merely recognize here the error of a Roman-catholic
system. It may lurk and does too often lurk in Protes-

238 THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE AND

tant disguise. If instead of the simple truth of the
gospel of Christ, we make it an abstruse theology or
a volume of scientific riddles, we shall reach a like con-
clusion. Whether it be Trent, or Dort, or Westmin-
ster, whether Anglo-catholic or any other, to mistake
the authority of theological confessions for the unity of
the faith, is the principle of infallibility. Our Chris-
tianity becomes a gospel of notions, not a living word

And if, then, we so understand the rightful relation
of Scripture to the church, we can at once apply our rea-
soning to the conclusion before us — our right and our
responsibility in this study. The law which binds our
conscience, and the freedom we must maintain in the
pursuit of the truth, are not contrary to each other, but
one. I shall take up each of these points in its order.
We have the true idea of law : not the surrender of our
Christian right to any arbitrary power, but our intelligent,
willing unity in the body of Christ. We recognize in
our relation to the church the same organic fact we ac-
cept in all our growth. Each of us has his education from
youth to manhood in this social atmosphere ; and each
must find this training in science or letters, under the
care of the best teachers, in the studies suited to his
powers, that he may gain the self-discipline for his call-
ing. Nor is it less so with our Christian nurture. There
are few, unless they have been bred in the thin air of
free religion, who sit down in youth to construct a belief ;
and if, like Mr. Mill, any has been guarded from all reli-
gious bias, he will only accept Atheism by faith in his

THE STUDY OF THE SCRIPTURES. 239

father's infallibility. None ever reads the Bible "■ without
note or comment." We receive the current ideas of doc-
trine from home-teaching, book, Sunday-school, pulpit ; we
catch many opinions, to be corrected by riper thought.
But such authority is not arbitrary ; it is the same defer-
ence to superior learning we pay in questions of law or
natural science. I have indeed no faith in the cloistered
training which keeps the young mind in the ignorance
of all criticism, or in the mechanical study of the Bible,
for such a mistake too often whets doubt ; but I have as
little in the slipshod religion that forgets the need of
mental and moral discipline. We can only gain in the
instruction of the Christian household the reverent rea-
son which can enable us to pass beyond the school. If
we have learned the simple truths of a Father, a Re-
deemer, a Sanctifier, the law of a pure conscience, the
affections that bind us with Christ and men, the habits
of a growing holiness, the modesty of true knowledge,
we have the heart of wisdom ; and whatever the mental
struggles or even the doubt of after years, we shall sel-
dom fall into a shallow or a mocking unbelief.

Such is the authority we recognize as that which
binds us in the communion of Christ. It is the au-
thority of learning. It is the authority of holiness.
It is the authority of a common faith. We do not,
because we hold the Protestant faith and accept the
Bible as the oracle of truth, therefore make a new
Christianity ; but rather, we claim our share in all the
wisdom that has studied its divine pages. The history

240 THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE AND

of the church is not a mere wrangle of theological opin-
ions. The essential truths of Christ, his doctrine and
sacraments, are unchanged in their real influence ; nor
do we confound with any systems of any teachers the
faith that abides always, everywhere, and for all. It is a
far truer view of catholicity which our Protestant belief
gives us than that which I have cited from Lacordaire.
The unity of the church, in his idea, is like the power of
the sun, which masters the " schismatic force " that tends
to draw the planets from the centre. But let us study
this magnificent figure. If there were no centrifugal
power to balance the attraction, the planets would be
drawn into the scorching bosom of the sun. That is
the unity of Rome. It is not there we find the attractive
power that keeps the life of Christianity. Unity in the
church, as in nature, combines authority and moral free-
dom. Where is this abiding religion.-* It is just where
it was in the apostolic or Nicene age. It lives in the
Word of God and in the fellowship of Christian men.
All the controversies of the schools, all the questions
that concern the critic, do not materially affect it. It is
not probable that the habit of Christian prayer will die
out because Mr. Tyndall has proposed his prayer gauge,
or that a thousand theories will disturb the life of reli-
gion. The purpose of the gospel of Christ is for gui-
dance in the way of daily duty, and therefore it can never
lose its power. It teaches the same Father, Redeemer,
and Sanctifier; it heals the conscience in its struggles
with sin, ministers to rich or poor, lettered or simple.

THE STUDY OF THE SCRIPTURES. 241

one law of social duty, one comfort in trial, holds up the
cross of Christ, and opens the gates of life eternal. And
it is the truest mark of the divinity of our religion, that
it has this adaptation to the mind and heart of all men.
There is a science for the scholar, and a sufficing wis-
dom for the less-gifted believer. Few can master the
Hebrew or Greek Scriptures ; tew can decide the nice
questions of Christian evidence ; but he that hath the
Son of God hath the witness in himself. A Laplace can
map the heavens by his Mecanique Celeste ; but the sea-
man, with a simpler knowledge, shall guide his vessel by
the same stars through the dangers of the ocean ; and
even so a Christian man, if he be not able to meet all the
speculative riddles of the time, to settle the facts of geol-
ogy or the law of evolution, may walk in the light of a
positive truth with a faith as reasonable as it is heartfelt.
Is it a blind assent to the voice of an infallible church
which gives this unity } No. It is that the foundation
truths of the Christian revelation are one for the con-
science and the life. When I turn to Augustin, as he
reasons of the loftiest problems of the providence of God
and the nature of the soul, I hear him say at last, " In
Cicero and Plato I meet with many things acutely spo-
ken, but in them all I find not this : ' Come unto me, ye
weary and heavyladen, and I will give you rest ;' " and if
I go to the humblest disciple, who has learned this faith
in the Son of God amid the trials of daily life, I have the
centre and sum of a Christian theology.

We may thus pass to the point which completes
21

242 THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE AND

our view — the freedom of inquiry in the study of the
Scriptures. If the truth of revelation, as I have
shown, is one and unchanging, because it lives in its
original record and in the fellowship of all believers,
yet the exposition of the book is human, and therefore
capable of clearer and clearer knowledge. There must
be always in the church of Christ a spirit of healthful
growth. We are never to confound with the abiding
faith the methods of Biblical interpretation. The criti-
cism of the Word of God must, in its very nature, change
with our closer study of language, the light thrown on
Hebrew or Christian history from all sources of later
learning, and the correction of past errors. It is impos-
sible to find in any science, in the advance of astronomy
from the rude chart of the heavens to the laws of New-
ton, or of anatomy from Galen to our times, a riper
growth than from the allegorical methods of the early
fathers to the historic criticism of our day. We love the
spiritual insight of Augustin, but his fanciful interpreta-
tion of the days of creation would be thought to-day
strange absurdity. This mystical exposition has been
consecrated in the Latin church. But Protestantism,
while it has from the first been truer to the Scripture, has
only by degrees freed itself from the same methods. It
has too often interpreted the Scripture by its theological
systems, instead of its systems by Scripture. The Old
Testament has been turned into a riddle, and the epistles
of St. Paul read through our controversial glasses. We
have too many to-day who follow the canon of Cocceius,

THE STUDY OF T^HE SCRIPTURES. 243

that the Bible should have all the occult meanings they
can find in it. Yet each step has brought us nearer and
nearer to the true method. And it is the glory of our
Protestant faith that, as it claims above all to find truth
in the Word of God, it has, in spite of its partial sys-
tems, encouraged that free, yet reverent study which
is sure at last to correct its own errors, and lead to
a living knowledge. The only condition of a healthy
life, intellectual or spiritual, is in this ceaseless growth.
Let there be an authority that frowns on all culture, ste-
reotypes all belief by its theological confessions, and calls
all reasonable thought rationalism, and it will end in stag-
nation ; nay, it will always create rationalism in its own
bosom. It is passing strange that readers of history,
Protestant as well as Romish, so often mistake this
principle. The dogmatism of one generation reacts in
the heresy of the next. The pent-up reason finds its
only freedom in a wild explosion. What can give us
so sure a lesson as the church which boasts infallibility !
No communion has held within its bosom more war-
ring elements : Jansenist and Jesuit ; rationalists like
Abelard who tore up school theology by the roots, Pan-
theists who grafted Averroes on the stock of Catholic
faith, materialists, in the age before the Reformation, who
denied soul and immortality ; yet all its efforts to burn
out thought by the fagot, or its modern anathemas against
science, have ended in an unbelief among educated minds
far deadlier than any of Protestant growth. Yet we have
too often forgotten the lesson. It cannot be doubted, as

244 THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE AND

Dorner has clearly shown in his history of the reformed
doctrine, that the earlier neology of Germany, was the
natural child of the formal theology. Where then, is
the security of the faith against false science? It
lies in the growth of true science. The church must
keep its simple creed, its reverent training; but it
must have such trust in the divine power of truth,
that it can encourage a wise freedom. When I hear
some of our modern dogmatists say that the Protestant
principle leads to rationalism, I smile as I should at one
who forbade pure water, because it holds an inflammable
gas. That spirit is at bottom indifference to truth. The
real secret of the power which an infallible church has
over many minds, is that it satisfies their sloth and rids
them of the responsibility of thought. It was well said
by John Locke, that if infallibility had been best, it had
been better that God should make each man infallible,
since mistake would then be impossible; yet he has not
done so. Christian truth is given to the church for its
growth. It must keep the open word of God ; it must
win its victories over error by a sounder learning.

But perhaps I cannot better close this argument
than by taking as my example the lesson, which the his-
tory of Biblical criticism furnishes at this day. I have no
space for more than a sketch ; but enough, if it teach us
what I have striven to enforce, that our best Christian
learning is the fruit of our struggles. We look with
natural alarm at the unbelief which seeks to undermine
the very ground of a divine revelation ; yet if wc will

THE STUDY OF THE SCRIPTURES, 245

study its steps, we shall have no unwise fears of the
result. I have said already, that the neology, which had
its birth in the church of Luther, came from the decay of
theology itself, which had hid the living truth of Scrip-
ture under its formal system. There was no true study
of its historic structure or its unity of design. It was
an easy work for the critic to sweep away the rubbish of
former interpreters, to explain the miracles by ingenious
natural theory ; and for a time it seerned that every part
of the Old and New Testaments would be destroyed by this
piecemeal process. But it was another task when the old
earthworks were demolished, and the rationalist came face
to face with the central truths of revelation. A new gen-
eration of thinkers like Strauss followed the negative
critics. This was the positive question they had to
meet, what should explain that greatest of all miracles,
the person of Christ, the central fact of both revela-
tion and human history.? And here, then, the Word
of God called out the new learning of its defenders. It
awoke a deeper study of the Scriptures. It has ended
to-day in the noblest results. Undoubtedly our older
methods of interpretation have been changed in many
points ; but we have gained a larger and surer ground.
The Old Testament has been studied in the light of
history ; and the divine features, in which it stands
above all records, its truths of one God, its stately law,
its unity of design, its work in the education of the race,
remain its unshaken evidence. But the result of this

study is nobler yet in the New Testament. Neology has

21*

246 THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE AND

centred its strength in the effort to explain away the
historic miracle of Christ. It has sought to make him a
myth; it has sought again to give a later origin to the
Gospels ; but each attempt has ended in clearer evidence
of fact. The contest is not over. It may even seem to
many in this day of a gross atheism to be fiercer than
before. But it is precisely here we find the best promise
of the end. For it is no longer a pretended Christianity
with which we have to strive ; it is an unbelief, which
confesses that there is no standing ground between an
unknowable God and the revelation of Jesus Christ.
And more than this, it is clear that the long struggle has
ended in the sounder learning, the more living faith of
the Christian church. We have gained not only a truer
knowledge of the Scriptures, but through this of the char-
acter of revelation itself. It is the aim of our best
thought to turn away from the unreal strifes of our
theological schools, and to come back to the sources ;
to measure systems of doctrine and church parties by
the one simple truth of Christ, not Christ by them ; and
this will bring at last the only unity. A theology of the
New Testament, a church of .the New Testament is what
we need. This is the result, this is the noble witness of
a Christian learning. We may mourn over the strifes of
error, but we are false to the cause of Christ, false to
the whole history of the past, false to all the labors of
the wise, false to the best hopes of the future, if we have
not this unshaken faith in the victory of truth.

And thus, my friends, I may gather these thoughts

THE STUDY OF THE SCRIPTURES. 247

into their plain conclusion. I have shown you the rela-
tion of the Christian conscience to the gospel of Christ.
I have shown you the unity of the truth given in the writ-
ten word, and the method of its study : its right harmo-
ny with the doctrinal authority of the church, the abiding
character of Christian belief, yet its growth in true knowl-
edge. If my reasoning be clear, I need but a few words
to enforce it on all who have an interest in the inquiries,
that busy thoughtful men of our own time. I hope that
my view, however imperfect, will give you such guiding
principles as may keep you, in a day of many teachers
and many creeds, true to the one divine Master. It is
not an easy task to keep this harmony of a free conscience
with authority. It is a path between the rock of tradi-
tion and the quicksand of unbelief. But if you have
learned aright the living character of that truth, revealed
in the New Testament, it will direct you in its study.
You will not mistake for a sound reason the mind
which examines it without any knowledge of its spir-
itual purpose, or with a merely critical keenness to dis-
sect the letter. Such study will end only in a shallow
misinterpretation. It is the book which teaches the
history of God's dealing with men, the life of the Re-
deemer, and the law of duty ; and if that be its de-
sign, it must demand of us that we approach it with a
reverent heart. Such a spirit will not check the love of
honest inquiry : it will inspire it. We shall, if we be
scholars, whose work it is to explore this mine, carry
with us the safety lamp of a devout wisdom. We shall be

248 THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE AND

able to distinguish between the essential truth it reveals,
and the questions that are open to a scientific criticism ;
we shall welcome every true result of learning, without
being carried away by the brilliant, but unproved theorie-s
of our time. We shall hold fast the truth we know, and
keep a calm trust in it amidst the changes of opinion. This
is the reasonable freedom of a Christian mind. It has no
kindred with the free religion, which thinks it possesses
truth because it has renounced all positive creed. There
is no Christian freedom save in the truth. And it is as far
on the other side from the spirit, which accepts the tradi-
tions of men instead of an intelligent and honest knowl-
edge. Let us never be of those whom Hooker describes
as minds that "use reason only to disgrace reason."
There may be a rationalism, which weaves its theories,
and calls them revelation — a rationalism as fatal to the
simplicity of Christ as unbelief. Whatever its name,
whether of infallible Pontiff or Protestant system, it
must never usurp the authority we can only give to our
divine Master, Let us gladly promote all sound knowl-
edge. Let us hail without fear that noblest work of our
time, which will give the church a faithful revision of the
Scriptures, assured that it will reveal more truly the
mind of its Author. Let us defend the faith always with
the weapons of fair argument, of manly learning ; for we
know that " we can do nothing against the truth, but for
the truth."

This is our right and responsibility in the study of
the Holy Scripture. It is the gift of God. The Word

THE STUDY OF THE SCRIPTURES. 249

is not bound ; it is free as the mind of Christ : it fears
no criticism ; it asks no earthworks of false defence ; it is
strong enough to conquer the traditions and the unbeUef of
men ; it lay buried for centuries, alive in its charmed sleep,
within the sarcophagus of a Latin superstition, and it
came forth, like its Lord, to the better resurrection ; it
has led the march of all knowledge, all civilization, and
opens to-day in fuller light the mind of Him in whom are
hid all treasures of wisdom. But it is a gift which links
our freedom with our obedience ; and as we use or abuse
it, we shall answer to its Giver. If we obscure, if we dis-
tort, if we despise or neglect it, we can make the light
darkness ; if we read, know, follow it, in his spirit who
inspired its truth, we shall gain the knowledge which is
eternal life.

Majesty and Holiness

OF

THE BIBLE.

REV. MATTHEW SIMPSON, D. D., LL.D.,

BISHOP OF THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH.

MAJESTY

AND

HOLINESS OF THE BIBLE

Unlike other books, the Bible has neither preface
nor introduction. Nor has it definitions, postulates,
axioms or elementary theorems on which to build its
science of theology, or to prepare its students for its
higher revelations or developments. Its first words
bring us face to face with eternity and divinity, and solve
the perplexing problem of the origin of matter. Terse
as are its utterances, however, and suddenly as they
come upon us, there is a sublimity and grandeur in its
representations of the divine character which no other
writings contain. In the words of the Psalmist, " He is
clothed with majesty."

The Scriptures never attempt to prove the existence
of God. To the Jew in the time of Moses, that was un-
, necessary. Had he not beheld the wonderful series of
miracles which astonished and finally overwhelmed the
mind of Pharaoh } Had he not known of the . destruc-
tive tempests, and fearful darkness, and of the avenging

22

254 MAJESTY AND HOLINESS

angel ? Had he not walked through the Red sea, and
joined in the triumphant song of deliverance, when the
Egyptian hosts perished in the recurrent waves? Had
not the pillar of fire shined on his pathway, and had
he not heard the voice as of a trumpet, which, from
Sinai's fiery summit, proclaimed the eternal law ? He
knew there was a God. Nor do the Scriptures propose
to prove the attributes of God. They shine forth in
his wonderful actions, which were to his ancient people
familiar throughout their history. But, ever and anon,
referring to these great facts, the inspired penman utters
the most beautiful and enrapturing views of the divine
character and government.

The majesty of these Biblical representations may be
referred, chiefly to the names given to the Deity, the
ACTIONS which he performed, and the language and
SYMBOLS employed in delineating his attributes and
government.

The NAMES by which he is revealed fill us with
thoughts of his wonderful greatness and glory : and yet
these terms so imperfectly reveal him, that a fearful
mystery environs his character. " Clouds and darkness
are round about him, righteousness and judgment are
the habitation of his throne." He is " In the beginning,
God :" the " EloJiim',' the strong and " mighty one."
Yet mystery is here. *' Elohim " is plural ; yet as he
creates, the verb is singular. He is more than one, as
in his soleness, from the depth of eternity, his rays of
brightness burst on human vision. He is but one, as the

OF THE BIBLE. 255

universe issues from the fiat of his almighty power. He
is el, the mighty, shaddai^ the almighty, the all-sufficient ;
he is adonai, t^ie governor, the king, the judge.

But a thousand years have passed away, and God's
promises remain unfulfilled. The seed of Abraham
were to be as the stars of heaven and as the sand on the
seashore for multitude. They were to possess the land
of Canaan. Kings were to be of his lineage. Yet his
posterity are still in bondage in Egypt. They are slaves
to taskmasters: they groan under the lash; their male
children are inhumanly destroyed. Moses, who sought
to help, has fled to the desert. Forty years has he been
a shepherd ; and now, an old man, he is ready to de-
spair. God comes in the burning bush ; it is not an
exhibition of power for which Moses yearned, it is to
know that God will fulfil his word — that his purposes
have not changed. He receives a commission to deliver
the Israelites — a looking, longing, suffering people, who
are crying for help and hope for a Saviour. But what
shall Moses say } How beautifully simple is the narra-
tive : " And Moses said unto God [Elohim], Behold, when
I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto
them. The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you,
and they shall say to me. What is his name .'* what shall
I say unto them t And God [Elohim], said unto Moses, I
AM THAT I AM ; and thus shalt thou say unto the children
of Israel, I am hath sent me unto you."

This name, yehovah or yahveh, I am that I ant, sig-
nifies self existence, perpetual existence, immutability.

256 MAJESTY AND HOLINESS

He remembered his covenant with Abraham, and he
came to fulfil it. Four hundred and thirty years had the
patriarch's posterity been in a strange land, and now
about to show that,

" What his mouth in^truth had said,
His own ahnighty arm would do."

He declares his perpetual sameness. " He is the same yes-
terday, to-day and for ever." To confirm Moses more fully,
he said again, " I am Jehovah. I appeared unto Abraham,
unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God almigh-
ty, but by my name Jehovah was I not known to them ;
and I have also established my covenant with them to
give them the land of Canaan, the land of their pil-
grimage wherein they were strangers. And I have also
heard the groanings of the children of Israel, whom the
Egyptians keep in bondage, and I have remembered my
covenant, and I will bring you in unto the land, concern-
ing the which I did swear to give it to Abraham, to
Isaac, and to Jacob."

These two elements, almightiness to do and un-
changing and unchangeable purpose to accomplish, give
to humanity all possible assurance. The whole line of
providences recorded in the Bible but illustrates these
great attributes, and teaches us to become followers of
themx who through faith and patience inherit the promi-
ses. Such a wonderful impression did the revelation of
God, as the / am^ make upon the Jew, that he utters
not that word, but substitutes for it Adonaiy or Shaddai.

OF THE BIBLE, 257

It represents an ever-present God, an eye never slumber-
ing, a promise ever borne in mind, a memory which can-
not forget, a purpose that will not change, an ever-watch-
ful Jehovah, who listens to every cry, counts every tear,
fathoms the depths of every sorrow, and in due time will
appear as the almighty deliverer.

This God of power and of self-existence appears '^ In
the beginningr When was that beginning ? It was before
creation, for he created the heavens and the earth. And
in his psalm, Moses exclaims, "Before the mountains
were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth
and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou
art God." And of Christ, the apostle says, " He is
before all things, and by him all things consist." " All
things were made by him, and for him, and without him
was not anything made that was made." If the question
is repeated, when was that beginning } I answer, I can-
not tell. The human intellect cannot estimate distances
either in space or time, but by intermediate measures or
periods. Moses looks away back through the vista of
time, and as he passes unnumbered periods by the way,
on and on, he beholds a beginning. God is there, sole,
underived, almighty. Those of you who have seen the
diorama of Paris, either in that city or at our Centennial,
know how almost impossible it is to distinguish distances
by the unaided eye. So, as we gaze at the heavens on a
cloudless night, the moon, the planets, and the fixed
stars, shine on us as in the same vast expanse, and seem
about equidistant. Yet, when we have reached that

22*

2S8 MAJESTY AND HOLINESS

moon, we have taken only a step towards the sun. Saturn,
which shines so near in the western sky, is five times
as distant as the sun himself ; and that comet, just
'starting on its distant journey, so distant as to be five
hundred years beyond our sight till it return again — in
that flight shall not reach even the neighborhood of those
fixed stars. If we refer to what was a hundred years ago
the general opinion, creation was supposed to be some
six thousand years old. That period is vastly distant.
You step in Westminster Abbey, among the dead of a
thousand years. It seems like an eternity past. You
visit the pyramids of Egypt, where Napoleon saw forty
centuries looking down on his troops, and still the begin-
ning lies far beyond. Refer then to geological specula-
tion. Read the record of vast changes — of beds of fire
solidifying in ages past into granitic rocks ; deposits of
limestone and coal and sandstones, for long centuries,
from the overflowing sea ; wide-reaching beds of rock
formed of shells so small the microscope alone can show
their form — and the beginning retrocedes thousands, if
not millions of years. Still we see " In the beginning,
God." Go to the astronomer, especially of the evolution
school, and he tells you of fire-mist, and of its condensa-
tion into suns, planets, and worlds, long myriads of years
before earth had her form. He fancies stars so far away,
that their light would require more than five hundred
thousand years to reach our earth. Be it so, yet we have
*' In the beginning, God." Far as the geological period
antedates the old era, far as the astronomical era pre-

OF THE BIBLE. 259

cedes that, so far, nay a million times farther, antedate
the time, yet both reason and revelation cry out, " In
the beginning, God." " He is the high and lofty one
that inhabiteth eternity." " Thy throne is established of
old, and thou art from everlasting to everlasting." We
join with the apostle and with the innumerable hosts of
heaven, in saying, " To the king eternal, immortal, invis-
ible, the only wise God, be honor and glory for ever and
ever."

The Bible represents God, not only as eternal, but
as the creator of all things. How different is this from
the fancies of ancient mythology. Jupiter, "the father
of gods and men," "the omnipotent father," as he is
sometimes called, was the son of Saturn, who had de-
throned his father. They were born upon the earth ;
but matter was eternal. The heavenly court was on and
above Olympus. Gods were, as Geiger well says, " a tur-
bulent aristocracy : one mightier than the rest but not
almighty." Juno, the wife of Jupiter, succeeded in put-
ting him to sleep during a battle of the Greeks before
Troy. So angry was he with her, for raising a storm to
impede Hercules, that he suspended her from heaven by
a chain, with anvils tied to her feet ; and when her son
Vulcan attempted to interfere, he hurled him headlong to
the isle of Lemnos. Among the Hindoos the ancient
Veda shows that the gods they worshipped were the
elements, which were thus in being before their gods.
The later philosophical speculations speak of a first
cause, respecting which they utter some beautiful expres-

26o MAJESTY AND HOLINESS

sions. Yet this first cause wakes and sleeps, has days and
nights — long nights of twelve million years. He creates
lower deities which form the earth and preside over the
elements, himself absorbed in profound contemplation ;
and of these deities which control the earth, some are pa-
trons of evil.

The Scriptures rise infinitely beyond and above all
such descriptions. Pure and holy in his majesty — the
only Creator, " He spake and it was done : He commanded
and it stood fast." " By the word of the Lord were the
heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of
his mouth." In the Greek mythology, starry Uranus
was the offspring of the earth. The earth was the grand
centre around which the heavens moved. But while the
ancient prophets knew not the true system of the uni-
verse, yet by them, God declares, " Heaven is my throne,
and the earth is my footstool." Indeed, it is one of the
surprising facts, that the discoveries of science and the
extension of knowledge give increasing sublimity and
grandeur to the Biblical representations of God ; while
they completely expose the puerility and falsehood of
the ancient mythology, and of other systems of error.
According to the Bible, not only was the earth created,
but the sun, moon, and stars, and all the " hosts of
heaven." Neither Moses nor David probably knew much
about these hosts. For many long centuries they were
not comprehended by science. No telescope had been
formed to gather and concentrate their distant rays.
To-day that host is innumerable. The distant nebulae

OF THE BIBLE. 261

have been resolved, and all those worlds which appear,
where light just trembles on the verge of shade, are a
part of these hosts which Elohim created. How full and
comprehensive is the declaration of Nehemiah, " Thou
hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their
hosts, the earth and all things that are therein ; the seas
and all that is therein, and thou preservest them all, and
the host of heaven worshippeth thee." The patriarch
Job exclaims, " Which alone spreadeth out the heavens,
and treadeth upon the waves of the sea ; which maketh
Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades, and the chambers of the
south."

The shepherd company, with Moses in the wilder-
ness, knew little of the vastness of the universe. Possi-
bly we ourselves have only yet seen the beginning of
the pathway that leads to the throne. The language of
Scripture, however, suits all stages of knowledge, all de-
grees of development. God is alike the creator, whether
there be few worlds or myriads. Let us think for a mo-
ment what is involved in creation. Our whole visible
sky may be but as a little island in the heavens, beyond
whose surrounding seas lie grander islands, or stretch
out vast continents of systems, full of their Creator's
glory. In our visible sky, our solar system occupies but
a little space. In our system, the earth is- scarcely visi-
ble to many of its sister planets. Yet on that earth,
what forms of life — what myriads of living beings walk,
or fly, or creep upon the earth. The little branches of
moss that scarcely tinge with color the surface of the

262 MAJESTY AND HOLINESS

rock, afford shelter and sustenance for millions of animal-
culae. The sea is full of life. Every drop of water teems
with being. Yon phosphorescent glow on the ocean's sur-
face is from multitudes beyond number. The air is full of
living germs. Tyndall, in a recent lecture, states that in
his experiments they would pass through the pressed
cotton wadding in his tubes, and boiling oil did not de-
stroy their life.

In creation, as revealed in the Scriptures, we have
eternity of being. God appears uncreated, underived,
sole, self-existing. He conceives creation. He thinks
of matter, and chooses its properties ; determines mag-
liitudes, distances, motions, and constituents of all worlds ;
conceives all forms of being in heaven, earth, air, or sky —
their sizes, organs, functions, appetites, instincts, desires,
perpetuation — their inner structure, their food, growth,
period of life, and decay. Not only all existing forms,
but all possible forms lie open to his inspection. Then
there is consciousness of creating power ; and he wills
that his thoughts shall take form. At his will, all worlds,
all forms of matter, all degrees of life, from the animal-
cule and the worm, to the angel and seraph, spring into
being, and are simply his thoughts made visible or so-
lidified. From himself alone the matter of all worlds has
issued ; and yet, undiminished in power and grandeur, he
is the same great and glorious Jehovah, dwelling in light,
whom no man hath seen or can see. He is God over all,
blessed for evermore.

A moment's consideration will show that in creation.

OF THE BIBLE. 263

omniscience is involved, as well as omnipotence. God
must know all that he has made ; must know them not
only in their existences, but in their possibilities; not
only to-day, but in their future ; not only in the individ-
ual's form, but in all to issue from them. Such a knowl-
edge— how vast ! He hath said, " No man can see my
face and live." If this referred simply to comprehending
God, in his knowledge alone, it would be literally true.
No human intellect could bear one hour's grasp of God's
knowledge. Fancy that to-night you were lifted above
this great city, with its million of inhabitants — the roof
taken from every abode — before your inspection lies open
every act of every being at every moment, all which
you must see. Every word reaches you^r ear, and you
must listen to all ; every form of sorrow, every cry of
agony. Not only visible acts, but every secret plan of
purity or vice, of virtue or wickedness, every scheme of
benevolence, and every purpose of riot, theft, licentious-
ness, robbery, and murder ; every pang of the agonizing
wife, mother, or child ; the anxieties of the rich, and the
distresses of the poor. Multiply these by a thousand —
for a thousand millions of such beings people our earth.
Hold in your memory — nay, ever-present before you — all
the acts of these millions in the moments past, while the
present moment unfolds its vastness, and add to that a
foreknowledge of the interminable future. Under such
a pressure every nervous system must be prostrate, every
brain must reel. God alone knows, sees, understands all ;
and he is never weary, he never slumbereth or sleepeth.

264 MAJESTY AND HOLINESS

So, also, omnipresence is an essential attribute. God
must be where he places his works. He must fill heaven
and earth. He is there by his power to constitute and
uphold — by his wisdom to guide, by his own essential
presence to give life and breath to all that exist. For
" our breath is in his hand, and his are all our ways ;" "it
is in him we live, and move, and have our being." The
Psalmist well exclaims, " O Lord, thou hast searched me
and known me ; thou knowest my downsitting and my
uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou
compassest my path, and my lying down, and art ac-
quainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in
my tongue, but lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.
Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thy hand
upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me : it is
high, I cannot attain to it. Whither shall I go from thy
Spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence } If I
ascend up into heaven, thou art there ; if I make my bed
in hell, behold thou art there. If I take the wings of the
morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there shall thy hand lead me and thy right hand
shall hold me."

The figure of the wings of the morning is another
illustration of the expansion which science gives to the
symbols of the Bible. David stood on Mount Zion, or
the Mount of Olives, and saw the morning coming up
over the distant hills of Moab. The gentle breeze came
from the Mediterranean to meet the rising sun. Far
north and south the growing light spread out over the

OF THE BIBLE. 265

horizon, and on and on the morning, with its outspread
wings, gently moved upward and westward till it reached
the Mediterranean Sea; still on it moved over its length-
ened expanse until it passed the Pillars of Hercules and
reached the uttermost sea. Away in 'that vast ocean,
the sky alone encircling and on every side kissing the
boundless deep, he sat in fancy, as the lone seabird rests
upon the waves. Even there God held him by his right
hand. David knew nothing of this vast continent that
lay beyond that uttermost sea ; nor how God in the ages
to come would hold in his hand the Pilgrim Fathers, and
keep them in safety as they crossed that vast ocean ; nor
how he would give them this great land for the founding
of a great nation, across whose wide breast the psalms of
David should be read by every child. Nor did he know
of that other sea beyond, which should give up its multi-
tudinous islands to the service of Christ. Nor did he
know how swiftly those wings of the morning moved, as
so gently and silently they advanced, and scarcely seem-
ed to move at all. Yet we now know that more swiftly
than the locomotive at its utmost speed, more swiftly than
the tempest in its fiercest fury, these wings of the morn-
ing have sped onward more than a thousand miles per
hour ever since creation's dawn ; but they have never
preceded God ! Were we to note a tithe of the passages
that vividly portray the doings and attributes of God, the
evening hour would find our work but fairly begun. He
is mighty beyond description ; he looks, and the earth
trembles ; he touches the hills, and they smoke ; he holds

23

266 MAJESTY AND HOLINESS

the winds in his fists, and the sea in the hollow of his
hand ; he bows the heavens and comes down ; he rides
upon a cherub and flies on the wings of the wind ; " he
hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the
clouds are the dust of his feet."

Among the ancients, and in all heathen countries,
there were gods many and lords many, but the Scrip-
tures proclaim, " The Lord our God is one Lord, there is
none else." Diverse elements of nature, distinctions in
territory and in nations and distant worlds, gave color to
the idea of a divided jurisdiction, and different heathen
gods reigned like kings or emperors over their separate
territory. But nature, with every advance of science,
proclaims the unity of God. The earth is shaped by one
hand ; its different sections are composed of the same
elements ; currents commingle the waters of the tropics
and the poles, and the streams of air are constantly pass-
ing from north to south, and returning again. Men are
of one great family ; multitudinous dialects and lan-
guages spring from common roots. Gravitation not only
binds our earth, but sweeps the heavens. One law of
motion, one power of attraction, encircles the universe.
The spectroscope reveals the fact that the sun and the
stars have in them many of the same substances which
our earth contains. The most advanced evolutionists of
our day have no trouble in resolving, by simple laws, the
original fire-mist into all the various worlds. Their only
trouble is in originating the fire-mist and the laws, with-
out a Creator. Moreover, such are the traces of affinity in

OF THE BIBLE. 267

all classes of animals, that they can evolve them from a
protoplasm or a cell, through all the infinitude of animal
being. God has written his oneness in all nature : man
is liable to impute that oneness to nature's self. Sci-
ence, reason, and revelation, not only unite in singing,
with Addison's orbs,

*' The hand that made us is divine,"

but also that we have but one Creator, the only true God.

This Jehovah of the Bible, the eternal, omnipotent,
omniscient, omnipresent creator and upholder, is not only
presented as the one governor and director of the uni-
verse, but also as a being of boundless wisdom, justice,
goodness, and love. Traces of his wisdom are every-
where seen ; the fitness of things reaches us at every
turn, and we can well say, " O Lord, how manifold are
thy works : in wisdom hast thou made them all." So,
too, he cares for, protects, and loves what his hands have
made. " His tender mercies are over all his works."
"The eyes of all wait upon thee, and thou givest them
their meat in due season. Thou openest thy hand and
satisfiest the desire of every living thing." Language
can go no farther in describing the wond-erful watchful-
ness and care of Divine providence. Every individual,
of every class of animated being, turns its eyes to God.
He hears its cry, he opens his hand and supplies every
want.

The majesty of God is grandly shown in his tender-
ness and love. That love is boundless in its subjects,

268 MAJESTY AND HOLINESS

reaching in some of its forms to all creation. He is the
God of the suffering, of the fatherless, and of the widow.
His eye is on the minute as well as the vast ; not a spar-
row falls to the ground without his notice ; the very hairs
of our head are all numbered. This love is boundless in
its resources. He gives not as the world gives. He hath
infinite treasures, and is ready to bestow them upon man.
This love led him to give his own Son to die for rebel-
lious man. Such is its boundlessness, that the whole
character of God, with all his glorious attributes, has its
grand summation in the expression, " God is love."

To all other characteristics is to be added immutabil-
ity. This has already been noticed in the name of Jeho-
vah, the everlasting I Am, the Alpha and the Omega,
the first and the last. Everywhere else we meet with
change : the grass springs up and withers ; flowers bloom
and fade ; trees grow and decay. Man in the pride of
his glory is swept away. The seasons change, the moun-
tains crumble, the very heavens grow old. The best of
men forget their promises, or change their purposes. But
God is unchangeable. Compared with creation, the in-
spired penman says, " They shall perish, but thou shall
endure ; yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment :
as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be
changed; but thou art the same, and thy years shall
have no end." Men have thought to assail our faith in
God and his word, by attempting to prove the wonderful
age of our earth and of the heavens. So far from weak-
ening our faith, if true, it would but confirm it. Has it

OF THE BIBLE. 269

been untold millions of years since God formed this earth
for human habitation, or since he laid its foundation ?
" Known unto God are all his works from the beginning
of the world !" Nay, he hath chosen us in Christ " be-
fore the foundation of the world," Have his thoughts
been on us for millions of years ? Did he purpose to
give his Son to die that we might be saved ? Did that
Son, in his omniscience, gaze on Calvary for thousands
of years, and ever moi ing towards it, send his voice
through the ages, saying, " Lo, I come " ? Then why
should we fear for the future ? Heart and flesh may
fail, but God will be the strength and portion of our
heart for ever.

The majesty of the Scriptures also appears in the
representation of the plans of God in his universal gov-
ernment. Scarcely had sin entered into the world and
triumphed over man, than the purpose was announced to
overthrow evil by one of Eve's descendants. To the ser-
pent it was said, " And I will put enmity between thee
and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed : it
shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel."
To Eve it was a consoling promise, though she little
knew the time that must elapse. With God, in carrying
out his great plans, "one day is as a thousand years, and
a thousand years as one day." At one period centuries
pass, and scarcely a change occurs ; then in rapid, un-
broken succession follow events so strange and startling,
as if centuries were condensed into a day. After the

promise to Eve, ages passed, and the results of sin cov-

23*

2 70 MAJESTY AND HOLINESS

ered the earth with crime. Centuries pass again, and a
patriarch is sent to Canaan. To him the promise is re-
newed. Four hundred and thirty years elapse, and his
seed have no inheritance ; yet a sceptre of power ulti-
mately rises in Judah, and a king of might in Jerusalem.
Again centuries pass, and a captive people weep by the
rivers of Babylon and hang their harps on the willows.
Restored again just as the last feature of nationality was
to pass away, and Judah was to be enrolled for taxation,
Shiloh, the promised deliverer, came, and the song of the
prophet was fulfilled : " Unto us a child is born, unto us
a son is given, . . . and his name shall be called Wonder-
ful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father,
The Prince of Peace." In all these changes God reigned
as a king: he subdued and scattered nations; he gov-
erned the elements ; he was the triumphant conqueror.
He used nations as his scourges, and then hurled them
back to oblivion. Changes of every kind were made sub-
servient to his plans, and the powers of earth bowed be-
fore him. He is represented as sitting on a throne ; that
throne is high and lifted up, and his train filled the tem-
ple. A sajDphire firmament is under his feet, a fiery
stream issues from before him. His agents are power-
ful and innumerable. Thousands of thousands minister
unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stand
before him. The kings of the earth rise against him,
but "he that sitteth in the circle of the heavens shall
laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision." After all
these majestic prophecies and announcements, when

OF THE BIBLE. 271

Christ came, he was the babe of Bethlehem, the man of
sorrows, and acquainted with grief ; he was crucified,
dead, and buried. Then his glorious triumphs visibly
began. His church was founded, his truth spread, his
kingdom enlarged, and he is sitting on the throne of gov-
ernment expecting until his enemies shall be made his
footstool.

Jesus on earth reminds his disciples of the power and
immutability of the great " I am!' To fulfil his covenant
with Abraham, God in the burning bush announced that
name to Moses. To fulfil an older promise, made in
Eden, long before the time of Abraham, Jesus came to
earth, and he said, " Before Abraham was I am." God
to fulfil the one, appeared in fire ; Jesus to fulfil the other,
appeared in flesh: in his resurrection from the grave,
with its wonderful precedent and accompanying phenom-
ena— in his ascension to heaven, while the angels sang,
" Lift up your heads, ye everlasting doors, and the King
of Glory shall come in" — his sacrifice was accepted,
his mission was crowned with glory, and the Spirit has
been sent to enlighten and to strengthen his followers.
He is himself represented as caring for his churches,
walking amidst the golden candlesticks, and holding the
stars in his right hand.

His great plan for the overthrow of evil involves
in itself all minor plans. Here and there glimpses of
his work are given. Men gather in the plain of Shinar,
to build a tower which shall reach up to heaven, lest
they be scattered abroad. Does God crumble it by an

272 MAJESTY AND HOLINESS

earthquake, or destroy it by lightning ? He simply
touches their lips, and they give a slightly different vi-
bration to the air which they exhale. Their languages
are confounded, and by his breath they are scattered over
the face of the earth. Again one hundred and eighty
thousand men surround the capital of his people, and ex-
pect an easy victory ; but the air is changed, probably
noxious vapors ascend, and in the morning the magnifi-
cent host lie dead upon the plain. With him it is easy
to work " by many or by few."

The years through which we have just passed are
years of his power. The unification of nations, the prog-
ress of invention, art, and science, the diffusion of knowl-
edge, communication by steamers, railroads and tele-
graphs, emancipation of slaves, the downfall of despot-
ism, the overthrow of the papal temporal power, the ten-
dency to dissever church and state — all point to the tri-
umph of Messiah's kingdom. The present war will be
no exception. England may join with the Turk — the
cross may be carried into the conflict to support the cres-
cent, but though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not
go unpunished. Sooner or later Mohammedanism shall
pass away, Paganism shall vanish, and the kingdoms of
this world shall be the kingdoms of our Lord and his

Christ.

In the consummation of his plans the Scriptures tell

us that Christ shall judge the world. Sublimely grand

is the prophetic view given by the revelator : " And I

saw a great white throne and Him that sat on it, from

OF THE BIBLE. 273

whose face the earth and the heavens fled away, and
there was found no place for them. And I saw the
dead, small and great, stand before God ; and the books
were opened, and another book which is the book of life :
and the dead were judged out of those things which
were written in the books, according to their work. And
the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and
hell delivered up the dead which were in them, and they
were judged every man according to their work ; and
death and hell were cast into the lake of fire." Can any
description be more majestically grand than those of a
general resurrection and general judgment, to be suc-
ceeded by new heavens and a new earth }

Amid these descriptions of God's majesty and govern-
ment we are to remember that his holiness stands pre-
eminent. In its aspect, as simple purity or freedom from
stain, we are commanded to seek for its attainment. The
precept is written, " Be ye holy, for I am holy ;" and in
the life of Christ we have that holiness illustrated and
exemplified. But holiness may be considered as the sum-
mation of all the attributes of God in their glorious per-
fection. In this we cannot be like him here. But we
shall approximate that likeness,, and hereafter shall see
him as he is. A third aspect of holiness is frequently
presented. It is the purity and goodness and benevo-
lence of God made manifest in the working out of his
plans, and in the grand triumph of everlasting righteous-
ness. When we see with Isaiah the cherubim crying,
*' Holy, holy, holy Lord God of hosts !" and when with the

274 MAJESTY AND HOLINESS

revelator we hear the response of hosts of redeemed join-
ing in the same glad song, we cannot suppose that they
refer simply to the purity of God. That they have known
before ; it is involved in the very primary conceptions
of the character of God : " He is of purer eyes than to
behold evil." Nor can we suppose that it was simply a
clearer view of the Divine character in itself. But such
exclamations follow a revelation of God's great plans for
the destruction of evil and the exaltation of righteous-
ness. As in some great battle, when we have seen scat-
tered forces converging to one point ; when we see the
skill of the general displayed in massing at the proper
moment, and in the proper place, just such forces as
shall win the victory, we praise the grandeur of his con-
ceptions and the triumphs of his genius; so when God
arranges all agencies to discomfit the wicked, to sanction
the right, to punish his enemies, and to reward his fol-
lowers, and especially when we behold those grand results
attained by self-sacrifice on the part of his Son and by
the wonderful manifestations of heavenly love, we are
prepared to join with the unnumbered hosts in saying,
*' Holy, holy, holy Lord God of Hosts !" This holiness is
active as well as passive, and Jesus seems to refer to it
when he says, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your
Father in heaven is perfect." But that perfection of the
Father to which he alludes was that " he maketh his sun
to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on
the just and on the unjust. The duty enjoined was not
to love our brethren only, but to love our enemies, and

OF THE BIBLE. 275

to pray for them who persecute us. Then we become
the children of God ; then we share not only passive holi-
ness in freedom from sinful stains, but also active, God-
like holiness, imitating the great Father in benevolence
and love, and the blessed Saviour in the sacrifice of him-
self, and in .going about always doing good.

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