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THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE
ON CIVILISATION

THE

INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE

ON CIVILISATION

ERNST VON DOBSCHUTZ

PROFESSOR OF THE NEW TESTAMENT IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
HALLE- WITTENBERG

27. *i»

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1914

Published April, 1914

PREFACE

One of the greatest questions of our day is how
modern civilisation and Christianity can go on in
harmony. One can approach this question by sev-
eral ways, but historical investigation has always
proved to be the surest. The author has in mind
to write in German a full "History of the Bible,"
when time will allow. Meanwhile this brief sketch
may prove useful. Readers who look for references
will find most of them in an article contributed by
the present writer to Dr. J. Hastings's Encyclo-
paedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. II, on "The
Bible in the Christian Church. "

The author wishes to express his thanks to his
friend, Professor J. H. Ropes, for kindly reading
the proofs for him, to Mr. W. J. Wilson and Mr.
H. A. Sherman, who helped him in improving the
diction, and to Professor Williston Walker for

vi PREFACE

valuable information regarding early American doc-
uments. If any reader should find fault with the
English style of this book, he must not blame any
translator — the author himself is responsible.

Ernst von Dobschutz.

Cambridge, Mass.
January, 1914.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Bible Makes Itself Indispensable for

the Church (to 325 a. d.) 3

II. The Bible Begins to Rule the Christian

Empire (325-600 a. d.) 28

III. The Bible Teaches the German Nations

(500-800 a. d.) 47

IV. The Bible Becomes One Basis of Mediaeval

Civilisation (800-1150 a. d.) 67

V. The Bible Stirs Non-Conformist Move-
ments (1150-1450) 94

VI. The Bible Trains Printers and Translators

(1450-1611) 117

VII. The Bible Rules Daily Life (1550-1850) . 138

VIII. The Bible Becomes Once More the Book

of Devotion 164

ILLUSTRATIONS

TO FACE

PLATE PAGE

I. Harvard Papyrus. Romans 1 : 1-7 .... 14

II. Origen's Hexapla 16

III. Codex Sinaiticus 28

IV. Roll and Book 30

V. Vienna Genesis 32

VI. Joshua Roll 38

VII. The Lord's Prayer on a Potsherd ... 46

VIII. Gothic Bible 50

IX. Alcuin's Bible 52

X. Theodulf's Bible 54

XL Lindisfarne Gospels 66

XII. Byzantine Miniature 70

XIII. English Miniature 82

XIV. Wycliffe's Bible 116

XV. Gutenberg's First Printed Bible .... 122

XVI. First Printed German Bible 126

THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE
ON CIVILISATION

THE INFLUENCE *OF THET"
BIBLE ON CIVILISATION

i:/r^- ***** ** ^^T^^ (f '

THE BIBLE MAKES ITSELF INDISPENSABLE
FOR THE CHURCH (UNTIL 325 A. D.)

There is a small book; one can put it in one's
pocket, and yet all the libraries of America, numer-
ous as they are, would hardly be large enough to
hold all the books which have been inspired by this
one little volume. The reader will know what I am
speaking of; it is the Bible, as we are used to call
it — the Book, the book of mankind, as it has prop-
erly been called. It has been commented upon,
treated in every way, but, curious to say, hardly
any one has attempted to trace its history through
the centuries and mark the influence which it ex-
erted upon our civilisation.

In order to do this we follow the traces of the
Bible through the different periods of human or,
to speak more accurately, of Christian civilisation.
In the first period of Christian history, the time of

4 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

persecutions during the first three centuries of our
era, there is not much to say about the Bible as
influencing civilisation. Christianity was but start-
ing on its way and fighting for its place in the world.
The Bible could not exert a civilising influence upon
a hostile world. But by impressing its value upon
the Christian mind it made itself indispensable for
the church and thereby laid the foundation for the
future development.

Christianity was a living religion. The first con-
gregations were dwelling in an atmosphere of enthu-
siasm. There was a general outpouring of the Holy
Spirit. The prophet's words seemed to be fulfilled :
"They shall teach no more every man his neigh-
bour and every man his brother, saying: know the
Lord; for they shall all know me." Christianity
was not a religion of a sacred book, whose dead let-
ter was to be artificially kept alive by learned men.
It was a religion of living experiences. Neverthe-
less, Christianity from the beginning had a sacred
book. Jesus and his disciples used the Bible of
their people, the Old Testament, and Saint Paul
carried it to the Christian communities of gentile
origin, which had not known of it before.

Christianity could not do without it. If it was
necessary to convince Jews that Jesus was the
Messiah, how could this be done without arguing

THE OLD TESTAMENT 5

from the Scriptures as proof? If the gospel was to
be announced to the heathen they, would give less
heed to the new tidings than to the statement that
it was really the most ancient form of religion as
attested by this sacred book, which was superior to
all the books of poets and philosophers and legisla-
tors by reason of its venerable age. Christianity
without any hesitation claimed the Old Testament
as its own book, its own Bible. Not only was Jesus
the content of this book, he was even believed to
be its author. It was the spirit of Jesus which
dwelt in the prophets and made them seek and
search concerning the salvation offered by Christ
(I Peter 1 : 10-11). "The prophets having their
grace from him, did prophesy unto him," we are
told in the so-called letter of Barnabas. So the Old
Testament seemed to be a Christian book both in
content and in origin, and it was easy enough to add
some properly Christian pamphlets, as Saint Paul's
letters and some gospels, the Acts and other letters,
and some books of revelation. It was as necessary
as it was easy; if Christianity was not to lose con-
tact with its proper origin.

The New Testament, as we have it now, was not
complete at the start. It was a collection of primi-
tive Christian writings, larger in some ways than
it is now; on the other hand lacking some of its

6 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

present elements. Its precise content did not be-
come finally established until a very late period, not
earlier than the end of the fourth century.

So also the size of the Old Testament was not
quite fixed. There were more books in the Greek
Bible of the Alexandrian Jews than in the Hebrew
Bible of the Palestinian rabbis. The Christian
church at first adopted the Greek Bible, but from
time to time some scholar pointed out the difference,
and many people thought they had better keep
to the Hebrew canon. This view, championed by
Saint Jerome, led to a partial rejection of the books
which nowadays we usually call the Old Testa-
ment Apocrypha, until in the sixteenth century the
churches accentuated their difference by a different
attitude toward these books, the Calvinists rejecting
them altogether, the Roman church including them
as an integral part of the Bible, and the Lutherans
giving them an intermediate position as books to
be read with safety but without canonical authority.
When,_in 1902, King Edward VII was to be crowned,
the British and Foreign Bible Society intended to pre-
sent to his Majesty the copy of the Bible on which
he was to take his oath. Then it was discovered
that according to the_olcL regulations the king of
England had to take his oath on a complete Bible,
that is a Bible containing the Apocrypha. The

THE ALEXANDRIAN CANON 7

British and Foreign Bible Society on its part, by its
statutes, was prevented from printing Bibles includ-
ing the Apocrypha; so they presented to the king
a most beautiful copy, but the king did not use it
for the coronation service. It is the difference be-
tween the Alexandrian and the Palestinian canon
which reappears in this little struggle and thereby is
seen surviving to our own time.

Unsettled as the size of the Old and of the New
Testament may have been, nevertheless the prin-
ciple was established at a very early date that
Christianity was to have a holy Scripture in two
parts, one taken over from Judaism, the other
added from its own stores.

Let us stop here for a moment and try to realise
what this meant. Mohammed, when founding his
new religion, acknowledged, it is true, the books of
the former religions, but for his own believers the
unique authority is the Koran, a book which origi-
nated within a single generation and therefore is
pervaded by one uniform spirit. Christianity ad-
hered to a Bible whose larger part originated in a
period much anterior to its own and in a religion
inferior to Christianity. The Bible covers a period
of over a thousand years. What a difference in
civilisation between the nomadic life of the patri-
archs and the time of Jesus! What a difference in

8 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

spirit between the sons of Jacob killing the whole
population of Sichem in order to avenge their sister
and Jesus' parable of the good Samaritan! or be-
tween the prophet Elijah killing four hundred and
fifty prophets of Baal and Jesus preaching the love
of one's enemies! In fact, it was possible to over-
come this difference only in an age which did not
read the Bible with historical notions. Even so,
the juxtaposition caused much difficulty. We shall
see the problem of the Law troubling the church
through all the centuries. We shall find the notions
of sacrifice and priesthood adapted to Christian in-
stitutions. Looking at Charlemagne or Calvin, we
realise that the Old Testament is ever introducing
its views into Christian minds, as authoritative as
any word of the gospel.

Now, at the beginning the influence was rather
the other way; the Old Testament was to be inter-
preted in the light of the New. And, in truth, much
light came from the life of Jesus to the history of
the ancient people and to the prophecies. We do
not wonder that Christian minds were excited by
all this fresh illumination, and we must not wonder
that sometimes they remodelled the tradition of the
life of Christ to accord with the Old Testament.

The harmony between the two Testaments soon
became a leading idea in Christian doctrine. Some

THE TWO TESTAMENTS 9

heretic^jinde^d^&ojJ^ the_01d Testa-

ment. Marcion maintained that it came from an
inferior god, while the supreme God, the father of
our Lord Jesus Christ, had revealed himself only
throjughjiis Son. He found a great many contrasts
between the Old and the New Testament, and this
criticism was supported by pagan philosophers, as,
for example. Porphyry. The church, therefore, was
most anxious to establish the harmony of the Testa-
ments by any means at its command. Taste varies
from century to century; the minute parallelism
constructed by some early Christian writers, and
evidently much admired by their contemporaries,
seems to us rather ridiculous and fanciful. On the
other hand, the church was right in maintaining the
harmony. The New Testament needs to be ex-
plained from the Old Testament; it is open to much
misunderstanding when taken apart. There was
almost no sense for historical development at that
time; the criticism of Ptolemseus, in his famous let-
ter to Flora, where he speaks of several strata of
revelation running through the Old and the New
Testament, is an exceptional one. For most of the
faithful the Christian doctrine was directly looked
for and found in the Old Testament; the gospel
was contained in every one of its books, from Gene-
sis to Malachi. Unity was conceived as uniformity.

10 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

This was the system which appealed most to the
average Christian mind. And the Bible was open
to all Christians, as Harnack has brilliantly demon-
strated in a recent publication. The ancient church
laid stress upon this publicity and never tried to
withdraw the Bible from the people. There was
no hidden mystery regarding the Bible. On the
contrary, all members of the church were anxiously
urged to make themselves as familiar with the Bible
as possible. They were supposed to have copies of
their own and to read them privately as well as in
the congregation. Even when the struggles about
the right doctrine began and the heretics sometimes
held to the Bible as their champion against the
doctrine of the church, the church did not remove
the Bible from public discussion. The ecclesiasti-
cal party maintained that the Bible was always in
favour of the true doctrine; one needs but to know
how to read it. Tertullian, it is true, once in the
heat of controversy declared that it was no use
arguing against heretics from the Bible, but he did
it, nevertheless, and so did the other fathers.

The Bible proved its spiritual value to the expe-
rience of every reader. A man familiar with the
Psalms has a treasure which cannot be lost; in any
situation he will find what is suitable for his needs.
If one looks for examples of faith, the author of the

NO PAGAN BOOKS 11

epistle to the Hebrews in his eleventh chapter gives
a splendid model for finding heroes of faith all
through the Bible. The book of Genesis, especially
its first chapters, was of particular interest for
most of the readers on account of the sublime
description there given of the beginnings of man-
kind. The creation story in Genesis implies much
more than even the finest of all Greek myths,
namely, the myth in Plato's Timaeus, with which it
was compared by the emperor Julian. The mighty
words, "In the beginning God created heaven and
earth," proved to be the one true answer to all the
cosmological questions of Greek philosophy, and be-
sides there was ample room for introducing what-
ever was wanted — such as the creation and the fall
of the angels — if only one knew how to read between
the lines.

In an old Christian book dealing with church
regulations and the rules for individual Christian
life we find the following admonition to use no
other book at all except the Bible, because, as the
author says, the Bible contains literature of every
kind. The passage runs:1

Stay at home and read in the Law and in the Book
of the Kings and in the Prophets and in the Gospel
(which is) the fulness of these things. Keep far away

1 Didascalia, ch. ii, p. 5 in Mrs. M. D. Gibson's translation.

12 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

from all the books of the heathen; for what hast thou
to do with foreign words or with false laws or prophe-
cies which also easily cause young people to wander
from the faith? What then is wanting to thee in the
Word of God, that thou throwest thyself upon these
myths of the heathen? If thou wishest to read the
tales of the fathers, thou hast the Book of the Kings;
or of wise men and philosophers, thou hast the Proph-
ets amongst whom thou wilt find more wisdom and
science than among the wise men and the philosophers,
because they are the words of God, of the one only wise
God. If thou desirest song, thou hast the Psalms of
David or if the beginning of the world, thou hast the
Genesis of great Moses; if law and commandments,
thou hast the book of Exodus of the Lord our God.
Therefore keep entirely away from all these foreign
things, which are contrary to them.

The Bible, in fact, pervaded the whole life of a
Christian. It was the Bible, its history, its com-
mandments, that he was taught as a child in his
parents' home. When the girls gathered in the
women's hall to spin, they would sing and talk
about God's revelations more eagerly than even
Sappho had praised her luxurious love — according
to an expression used by Tatian in his Apology.
The prayers, private as well as ecclesiastical, all
echoed Biblical phrases, and even at burials the
Christians sang joyful psalms.

So the Bible became familiar to the Christians
of that time. We are astonished to find how well

BIBLE READING 13

they knew it. The sermons of this period are full
of Biblical allusions, and evidently the preacher
could expect them to be understood.

This is the more remarkable as the circulating of
the Bible in this time met with the greatest difficul-
ties. There was, of course, a large amount of Bible
reading in the congregations. According to Justin's

description of early Christian worship about 150a. d.7 i^^^M^u
the service began with continuous reading of the
Bible through many chapters, as far as time would
allow. Then an officer, bishop or elder, would begin
to preach. The office of reading was esteemed so
highly that it was regarded as based on a special
spiritual gift; the anagnostes, i. e., the reader, in
the earliest time had his place among the prophets
and spirit-gifted teachers. And, in fact, if we look
at the earliest manuscripts of the Bible which have
come down to us, we shall almost think that super-
natural assistance was necessary for reading them:
no punctuation, no accent, no space between the
words, no breaking off at the end of a sentence.
The reader had to know his text almost entirely by
heart to do it well. From the "Shepherd of Her-
nias," a very interesting book written by a Roman
layman about 140 a. p., we learn that some peo-
ple gathered often, probably daily, for the spe-
cial purpose of common reading and learning. But

-t-V

14 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

even granted that the memory of these men was not
spoiled by too much reading, as is ours, so that by
hearing they were able to learn by heart — it is said
of some rabbis that they did not lose one word of
all their master had told them, and, in fact, the Tal-
mudic literature was transmitted orally for centuries
— nevertheless, we must assume that these Christians
had their private copies of the Bible at home. The
evidence from the allusions of preachers to private
reading is strong. Cyprian addresses a Christian:
"Your life should be one of assiduous prayer or
reading (of the Bible): now you speaking to God,
now God to you."

Here begins our difficulty: how did they get so
many copies? There was an organised book-trade
in the ancient world; publishers had their offices,
using (instead of printing-presses) slaves who were
trained in copying; they had shorthand writers, as
well as calligraphers to do the fine writing. But as
long as Christianity was still an oppressed religion
it is doubtful if the Bible was among the books
which publishers would care to take. The Chris-
tians were, most of them, poor people who could
not spend much money for procuring Bibles. Be-
sides, it was no easy thing to get a complete Bible.
At that time the books were still written on papy-
rus rolls, not in book form. Only one side of the

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BIBLE COPYING 15

papyrus could be used; the roll would become un-
wieldy if too long. So, in order to get all the books
of the Old and the New Testament, at least two
dozen rolls had to be written. Maybe a simple Chris-
tian copied for himself one gospel or some letters
or even one or more books from the Old Testament.
There are preserved on papyrus some unfinished at-
tempts which show what hard work it was (Plate I).
We can scarcely imagine a man going with this
heavy hand through all the books of the Bible.

We are told that wealthy Christians helped their
brethren by procuring copies for them. Origen, the
greatest Bible scholar of the ancient church, is said
to have been supported by a rich admirer, who put
at his disposal a number of slave copyists. With
their help he succeeded in creating one of the great-
est works which Bible criticism ever undertook, his
so-called Hexapla, which is a comparison of more
than six various Greek translations of the Old Testa-
ment. Scholars in the nineteenth century held that
scarcely more than one copy of this enormous work
had ever been written, but by recent discoveries we
know that it was copied several times (Plate II).
A later admirer of Origen, Pamphilus, is said always
to have carried with him several rolls in order to
provide poor brethren. Now that was the third
century. Christianity had already begun to spread

16 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

among the higher classes and to become a feature
in the world's life.

Devotional reading of the Bible was accompanied
by scholarly interpretation. We mentioned Origen
as the greatest Bible scholar of his time, if not of
all times. It may be worth while to insert here a
few words on his life. A native of Alexandria, he
saw as a boy his father dying as a martyr for his
Christian faith; he longed to become a martyr him-
self, and was only prevented from giving himself up
by a trick of his mother's, who concealed all his
clothes. He got a good training at the catechetical
school of Alexandria, not restricting himself to mere
Christian and Biblical studies, but reading the pagan
philosophers of his time as well as the Greek classics.
A youth of only eighteen years, he became the head
of the school, and his fame spread all over the em-
pire. He travelled to Rome, to Greece; he was
even asked by the Roman governor to come to
Arabia to settle certain questions. So zealous was
he to fulfil the commandments of the gospel that,
misunderstanding one of the Lord's sayings, he
made himself a eunuch for the kingdom of heav-
en's sake, which brought him into trouble in his
later life. When once on a journey through Pales-
tine he, being still a layman, had preached before
the bishop of Csesarea, he was summoned by his

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Plate II— ORIGEN'S HEXAPLA

Fragment found in the Cairo-Genizah and published by E. Taylor in 1900: parch-
ment, fifth century, with part of second, third, and fourth columns: Ps 22:
25-28; used later for copying Hebrew texts.

From "Hexapla of Origen," by E. Taylor, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons.

ORIGEN, THE BIBLE SCHOLAR 17

own bishop and ordered not to preach. Some years
afterward the bishop of Csesarea, who was among
his strongest admirers, ordained him a priest, which
caused his bishop to banish him from Alexandria.
He settled at Csesarea and lived there for twenty
years without ever aiming at any ecclesiastical posi-
tion, pursuing his study of the Bible and gather-
ing around his chair the best men from every part
of Christianity. So great was his fame that the
empress Julia Mammsea, being still a pagan, asked
him to see her when she was travelling in the East.
He was the one man to refute the vigorous attack
made against the truth of Christian doctrine by the
philosopher Celsus. When persecution began again
he wrote a tractate of comfort, "On Martyrdom/'
and another, "On Prayer." He himself suffered
imprisonment and torture, and died after his release,
as a result of these sufferings, at the age of sixty-
nine.

We can scarcely do honour enough to this man,
who three centuries after his death was proclaimed
to be one of the most dangerous heretics, the church,
however, using his learning in the form of extracts.
The vast amount of reading, the sagacity, and the
perspicuity of the man are alike admirable. He is
said to have commented upon nearly all the books
of the Bible, and this three times. He wrote short

18 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

annotations, he compiled large and learned commen-
taries, and he preached before the congregation.
Only a small part of his works has come down to us,
but this fills volumes. Origen's great merit is that he
brought Christian interpretation to a system which
enabled the church to retain the plain historical
sense alongside the so-called higher meaning.

For a long time gentile philosophers as well as
Jewish preachers had adopted the method of treat-
ing their sacred books allegorically. Homer, it was
assumed, in telling his stories of battles of gods and
heroes, meant quite another thing; otherwise he
would be guilty of irreligion. He meant that the
powers of nature and the energies of the human soul
came into struggle, and therefore virtues and vices
were fighting one with another. The same thing was
done by Philo for the Old Testament. There was no
real history; all was symbolical, allegory. Christi-
anity tried to follow in this path. The gnostics in-
dulged in the wildest form of allegory. But it was
not safe to give up the idea of historicity altogether.
Jesus and his gospel were historical facts, not mere
ideas; they were emptied of all meaning if turned
into allegory. And likewise the history of the Old
Testament could not simply be reduced to allegorical
metaphors. Origen saved the situation by assert-
ing that each of these two views had its proper place.

THEORY OF INTERPRETATION

His theory is that as man consists of body, soul, and
spirit, so the holy Scripture has a threefold nature, to
which corresponds a threefold interpretation. The
body stands for the plain historical meaning: Jesus
did cast out of the temple those that sold oxen
and sheep and doves and the changers of money.
There are some historical difficulties, Origen admits,
if we compare the different gospel narratives and if
we take account of the fact that a single man did
this; Origen explains that it was a miracle showing
the divine power in Jesus. But there are other as-
pects too. The soul represents the higher moral
view: Christ is always casting out of his church,
which belongs to the heavenly Jerusalem, the men
who are profaning it by their money-making.
And, lastly, there is the spirit, that is, the su-
preme mystical understanding. The spirit of Christ,
entering its temple, the man's soul, casts out of
it all earthly desires and makes it a house of
prayer. Now that is very ingenious. These three
strata of interpretation allow for a great variety
in explanation and adaptation. Origen succeeds
by this method in keeping the essential historical
basis and adding what in those days was thought
to be most significant. The Bible, being a divine
book, seemed to require a higher form of inter-
pretation; the Holy Ghost of God was supposed

20 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

to be a spirit of mysteries; it was assumed that
to interpret the Bible in a plain way was to think
of God meanly.

Of course, the Bible contained some allegories
which might seem to support this theory of allegor-
ical interpretation; for instance, the beautiful vision
of Ezekiel, told in the thirty-seventh chapter of his
book : he sees the valley full of dry bones, and at the
command of God he prophesies over them and they
begin to come together, and flesh came up and skin
covered them above and at last breath came into
them and they lived. It is a magnificent allegory
of the people of Israel, scattered in the exile and
brought to life again by the power of God. It
is irritating to see the fathers just at this point de-
clining to follow the path of allegorical interpreta-
tion. They insist upon the reality of the occurrence;
it is to be taken literally as resurrection of the dead
— so it has influenced all rnedieeval pictures of the
last judgment ! I need only add that the rabbis took
Ezekiel's description in the same way, as a real oc-
currence, arguing for the historicity by showing the
phylacteries which the risen persons had worn — and
one feels what a pity it is to treat allegory as his-
tory. But the opposite fault is still worse: the
spiritualising and allegorising of real history is the
greatest damage ever done to religion.

AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE 21

Theologians tried to establish the authority of the
Bible. This had already been done in some mea-
sure by the rabbis of the synagogue. In taking
over the Bible the Christians had only to accept
their estimate of it, but they were not quite satis-
fied with it. The rabbinical doctrine was a rather
mechanical one: God had used men, just as a man
uses a pencil to write with. The pencil does not
act consciously: so the Old Testament writers, ac-
cording to this theory, did not take any part in
what they were writing; it was to them as another
man's script. Commenting upon the last chapter
of Deuteronomy, where the death of Moses is de-
scribed, a rabbinical authority remarks : " Until this
passage God dictated and Moses wrote; henceforth
God dictated and Moses wrote weeping" — namely,
the account of his own death. There was so little
interest in the human author that he could be elimi-
nated altogether. We are told by an early Jewish
legend that all books of the Old Testament had been
destroyed at the time of Nebuchadnezzar, when the
temple was burned ; so God dictated them all to Ezra.
According to this theory Ezra would be the real
author of the whole Old Testament. This is the
most mechanical way of representing the equal in-
spiration of all parts of the Old Testament. The
Jews of the dispersion had a somewhat similar theory

22 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

about the inspiration of their Greek Bible; when
Ptolemy Philadelphia, king of Egypt, gathered at
Alexandria seventy elders of the Jews to make the
Greek translation of their law, he put each one of
them in a separate cell in order to avoid any com-
munication between them, so the legend runs. Then,
after working for seventy days, all at once they
shouted "Amen" from their cells, having accom-
plished their task, and when the seventy copies had
been compared they were found to agree even in the
smallest detail. Here we have again an attempt to
assert inspiration not only for the book itself but
also for its translation. It is as mechanical as the
former, all human co-operation being excluded.

Christians did not want this. In Jesus they had
experienced living revelation; they had prophets
among themselves. So, at least at the beginning,
they had a much higher view of inspiration. God
enters a man's soul and fills it with his spirit; now the
man acts and speaks in the power of this spirit, and
yet he is not unconscious of his own doing and speak-
ing. There are two ways of inspiration, we are told
by Clement of Alexandria: either God snatches up
the man's soul and conducts it to the unseen world
and shows to it whatever he wishes it to know —
this is ecstasy — or God enters the man and fills him
and makes him his organ. The latter, less striking

THEORIES OF INSPIRATION 23

though it appears, is nevertheless the higher and
more valuable concept. Therefore the fathers do
not so much use the metaphor of the pencil as the
similitude of a musical instrument, whether a flute
through which the Holy Spirit is playing, or a harp
which he touches with a plectrum.

Much as they appreciate the holy Scripture, the
early fathers usually talk about it in a very unpre-
tentious manner. They have not yet developed
those gorgeous formulas of quotation which are used
in later times. They quote simply: "Scripture
says," or "Paul says," not "the holy and glorious
apostle in his most excellent epistle to the Romans
says exceedingly well." They talk in simple words,
but they are prepared even to die for this Bible.

Eusebius, the first historian of the Christian
church, to whom we are indebted for so much in-
valuable information, tells us a moving story about
Marjnus, a young Christian officer in the Roman
army, at Caesarea, in Palestine. He had the con-
fidence of his superiors and was to be promoted to
the higher rank of captain. Then out of jealousy
one of his comrades denounced him as a Christian.
Summoned before his colonel, he was asked if this
was true, and when he confessed he was urged to
abjure his faith. The colonel gave him three hours'
time. So he went to the small Christian church,

24 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

where he found the venerable old bishop. The
bishop, hearing his story, took the Bible in one
hand and the soldier's sword in the other. "This
is your choice," he said. And the soldier, without
hesitating, grasped the Bible, went back, and de-
clared himself to be and to remain a Christian.
And instead of receiving military promotion he
became a martyr.

It is a significant little story. Indeed, after a hard
struggle, lasting through nearly three centuries, when
the Roman empire found it necessary to attempt the
final destruction of Christianity the attack was
mostly directed against the Bible. Diocletian, in
303 a. d., on the 24th of February, issued an edict
ordering all Christian churches to be destroyed and
all Bibles to be burned. He relied on the Roman
law, which forbids not only the exercise of magical
arts, but the science of magic, too, and therefore
condemns all books of magic to be burned. The
Christians were accused of employing magic, and
their Bible was treated as a magical book.

We have thrilling accounts of Christians try-
ing to conceal their treasured Bible rolls from the
eyes of the inquiring officials. They took them
from the church into their private homes, securing
the Bible in safety but many a time bringing per-
secution upon themselves. To the officials they

BIBLE PERSECUTION 25

surrendered books of various kinds in order to
escape from surrendering the Scriptures. Asked if
they had sacred books in their houses, many of
them would answer: "Yes, in our hearts." The en-
thusiasm was so great that they believed the story
of any miracle in support of the Bible. They main-
tained that copies of the Bible which had been
thrown into the fire by the heathen were not burned
or even touched by the flame.

Naturally there were others who were not strong
enough in their faith to resist, but these " surrender-
ee," as they were called, were cast out of the church
and never admitted again. During the fourth cen-
tury to bring against a clergyman the charge of
having surrendered sacred books at that period of
persecution was felt to be the most serious accusa-
tion possible. Even to be ordained by a bishop who
was under suspicion of having surrendered his
church's holy Scriptures was held a disgrace by a
large party of zealous Christians who demanded
that orders of this kind be invalidated. The records
of a trial held at Carthage in 329 A. D. dealing with
this question have come down to us. Here docu-
ments from 303 a. d. were introduced as evidence
against the clergy, and the whole forms one of the
most illuminating pages of church history.

Even to be found reading the Bible made a man

26 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

guilty of obstinate resistance to the emperor's law
and involved him in penalty. There was a deacon
at Catania in Sicily named Euplus. He was read-
ing the holy Scripture when the sheriff laid hold of
him. Brought before the judge he takes his copy of
the Gospel and reads from it (Matt. 5:10): " Blessed
are they that have been persecuted for right-
eousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven/'
and (Matt. 10 : 38): "And he that doth not take
his cross and follow after me, is not worthy of me."
The judge asks him: "Why did you not surrender
those volumes which the emperors forbade?" "Be-
cause," he replies, "I am a Christian and it was
not loyal to surrender. It is better to die than to
surrender." We do not need the addition made by a
late Byzantine hagiographer that the copy of the
Gospels was hung on his neck when he was con-
ducted to execution. It is clear enough that he
was suffering for his devotion toward the Bible and
that it was the gospel which inspired his boldness.

Euplus does not stand alone. I could mention a
dozen martyrs whose acts all give the same impres-
sion. Sometimes a gathering of men and women
is apprehended while reading the Bible, and the
whole company is forthwith carried away to the
most painful tortures.

These Christians knew what the Bible was to

BIBLE MARTYRS 27

them. All declamations of later theologians about
the inspiration and the authority of the Bible count
for nothing compared with this testimony.

After all, we do not wonder that the Bible became
a civilising power as soon as Christianity had won
its victory.

THE BIBLE BEGINS TO RULE THE CHRISTIAN
EMPIRE (325-600 A. D.)

After the persecution by Diocletian a new era
began. Constantine proclaimed tolerance, and by
and by Christianity became the religion of the em-
pire. The victory of Christianity was a victory
of the Bible as well. This finds its expression in
the remarkable fact that the first Christian emperor,
the immediate successor of those who persecuted the
Bible and tried to destroy it, ordered fifty splendid
copies of the Bible to be prepared at his expense
for the churches of the newly founded capital, Con-
stantinople. Some scholars have thought that one
or two of these copies still survive in the famous
manuscript discovered by Tischendorf in the Con-
vent of Mount Sinai (Plate III), or in the Codex
Vaticanus at Rome. I venture rather to think that
both copies belong to the period of Constantine's
sons. But the fact that the Bible, after a period of
destruction when most of the earlier copies were
burned, got a surprising circulation under official

direction accounts, I think, for a puzzling feature in

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BIBLE MANUSCRIPTS 29

the transmission of the text. From the Old Latin
and the Old Syriac, as well as from the testimony of
the fathers, we can infer that various forms of the
Greek text must once have been widely circulated,
which have now almost disappeared, whereas most
of our present Greek manuscripts give a text evi-
dently based on a late official recension. Look-
ing at Diocletian's attempt to destroy the Bible
altogether and at Constantine's official order to pro-
vide a large number of manuscripts, we easily un-
derstand the situation. The older forms of text
had been swept away; now there was room to sup-
ply their place with the learned attempts of later
scholars from the schools of Origen or Lucian who
endeavoured to bring in more critical texts.

Another change is to be mentioned at the same
time. The old form of papyrus rolls became obso-
lete and the parchment book took its place. The
use of this latter form seems to originate in the law
schools; the codex, or parchment book, is at first
the designation of a Roman law-book. But at
an early date the Christian church adopted this
form as the more convenient one and gave it its
circulation. We hardly say too much when we call
the Bible the means by which our present form of
book came into general use. Even if the Bible had
done nothing else for civilisation than to give man-

30 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

kind the shape of its books that would be a great
deal (Plate IV).

The form of a parchment book, or codex, would
admit of the copying of several books in one volume.
The great Bibles of the fourth and fifth centuries of
which we know contained all the books; they formed
one volume. So the internal unity running through
the Bible as a whole came to be represented even
in the outward form.

The copying of the Bible went on rapidly, monks
and noble Christian ladies undertaking it as a form
of ascetic work, providing a heavenly merit and
sometimes earning bread and butter, too. Instead
of the plain copies in an unskilled hand we now find
sumptuous books of the finest parchment with
purple colouring, in the most luxurious manuscripts
the sacred text being written in gold and silver, and
the margin sometimes being covered with beautiful
paintings. A copy of Genesis in Greek at the
Vienna library has forty-eight water-colours, one at
the bottom of each page, telling the same story as
the text. The manuscript when complete must have
had sixty folios: this gives one hundred and twenty
of such decorated pages for Genesis, and if it con-
tained the whole Pentateuch we may allow for five
hundred and ten illustrations (Plate V). And this
manuscript does not stand alone; it is but one of

Plate IV— ROLL AND BOOK

St. Luke the Evangelist copying from a roll into a hook (codex form): miniature

from a Greek manuscript at the Vatican lihrary (gr. 1158), eleventh century.

From "Vatikanische Miniaturen." Copyright by 15. Herder, Freiburg.

BOOK AND ROLL 31

a large group of illuminated manuscripts. This
sumptuous appearance may be taken as a sign of
the value attached to the Bible. Persecuted hitherto,
it became the ruler of the Christian empire, invested
with all the glory of royalty.

The place given to the Bible is best shown by the
fact that it presided over the great councils, a copy
of the Bible lying upon the presidential chair. It
was meant as a symbol for Christ himself taking the
place of honour and deciding the great questions of
faith. The same holds true for non-ecclesiastical
assemblies. In an ordinance of the emperor Theo-
dosius it is required that a copy of the Bible be
present in every court-room. The Bible, or rather
the Gospels, or to speak even more precisely the
most prominent page in them, the beginning of the
first chapter of St. John's Gospel, was used for tak-
ing an oath. The worn condition of this page in
many a manuscript still attests this use.

Presiding over the courts, the Bible began at once
to exercise its influence upon the Law. We can al-
ready trace this influence in the legislation of Con-
stantine himself: when he forbids to brand a crimi-
nal on his face, giving as reason that the image of
God ought not to be marred, it is the Biblical no-
tion of the man's face being the likeness of God which
underlies this law. When, in a law published in 334,

32 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

he insists that no man, whoever he is and whatever
rank he has, shall be admitted as a solitary witness
unless supported by another witness, it is the well-
known Biblical rule that at the mouth of two or
three witnesses every word shall be established.
When he makes divorce more difficult, denying the
right of remarriage to the man who repudiates his
wife without sufficient reason on her part, we feel
that it is the injunction of Jesus which is behind
this law. I would not say the same of all parts of
this legislation which various scholars have adduced
as proving Christian influence. Roman law from
the second century was influenced to a large extent
by the Stoa, all the famous lawyers such as Gaius
and Paulus belonging to this school and introducing
its ideas into the practice of the courts and into the
legislation of the magistrates, especially of the em-
peror. There is an evident development in the
Roman law toward a more humane conception of
slavery; this is due to the Stoa. The views on mar-
riage and divorce, the position of "natural chil-
dren," as the Roman law calls illegitimates, all this
is largely due to non-Christian influences. Never-
theless, there are unmistakable traces of a particu-
lar influence of the Bible upon the legislation of the
Christian emperors, and this influence increases from
decade to decade. Constantine gives a rather vague

Plate V— VIENNA GENESIS

The paradise: Adam and Eve appear three times: (1) under the tree of knowledge.
Gen. 3 : 6; (2) when discovering their nakedness, 3 : 7; (3) when hiding them-
selves from the Lord among the trees, 3 : 8. The divine voice, represented
by the hand from heaven, belongs to this third scene; it is put in the centre
merely for artistic reasons.

From "Die Wiener Genesis." F. Tempsky, Vienna.

ROMAN LAW 33

ordinance for keeping Sunday as a day on which
courts are not to be held. Theodosius is much
stricter; and the climax is reached with Justinian,
when Sunday has become a legal holiday.

Justinian, of course, codifies the Roman law, but
his Novelise, the laws issued by himself, show the
new spirit of a legislation ruled by the Bible. He
sometimes refers directly to the Bible as authority.
Still more is this spirit prevalent in some provincial
codes. One of these says that everything has to
be judged according to the ancient and to the mod-
ern law, i. e., the law of Moses, which antedates the
laws of all other nations, and the law of Christ, as
it is contained in the laws of the emperors Con-
stantine, Theodosius, and Leo. Lawyers of this pe-
riod indulge in comparisons between the Roman law
and the law of Moses.

The Roman empire was Latin in some respects,
Greek in others. Latin was the official language of
the court, of the law, of the army. But the popula-
tion spoke mostly Greek, though from the third
century on large parts used their native language,
Syriac and Coptic, as well. The Bible had been
translated into these languages during the former
period. Now the general political situation brings
the empire into contact with the Goths in the North,
with Armenians and Georgians in the East, with

34 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

Libyans and Ethiopians in the South. As soon as the
empire gains any influence among these neighbour-
ing peoples, the Christian mission tries to get hold
of them and we see the Bible translated into these
languages, which hitherto have had no writing. The
Bible marks for these peoples the beginning of a
national literature. Their alphabets were made
up from the Greek, thus showing that the read-
ing of the Bible with these nations began in con-
nection with their intercourse with the Roman
empire.

The Bible ruled even the Greek language of this
empire. There are many changes in the later Greek
which are surely due to familiarity with the Bible.
Words previously unknown in Greek or used in a
different sense became quite familiar; everybody
knows what is the meaning of Beelzebub, Messiah,
Paradise, Satan, and that an angel is not a mere
messenger, but is a messenger from God, a spiritual
being, and that the word demon always means an
unclean spirit.

Moreover, the Bible influenced the style of the
writers, especially of the great preachers. One may
distinguish three forms of influence in this depart-
ment: artificial imitation; naive use of Biblical
names and phrases (what is usually called in Ger-
many the language of Canaan) ; and, lastly, the un-

LANGUAGES AND STYLE 35

conscious influence which the style of any book ex-
erts upon a careful reader. I do not think that there
are many instances of artificial imitation in this pe-
riod. Sometimes a preacher skilfully composed his
whole sermon by adding Biblical quotation to quo-
tation; asked to preach a sermon on a saint's day,
he did nothing else than comment upon the saint's
life in Biblical phrases. The second type of influ-
ence is very common; the'present emperor is usually
spoken of as the new David; the story of a war is
always told as if David were fighting the Philistines;
each heretic is entitled to be called the new Judas
Iscariot who betrays his Lord. The most famous
example of this kind is the sermon attributed to
Chrysostom after his first return to Constantinople,
when he had fled from the wrath of the empress:
"Again Herodias is furious, again she flurries, again
she dances, again she desires the Baptist's head to
be cut off by Herod." The preacher's own Christian
name, of course, was John, and the empress was
trying to get rid of him for political reasons.

The most important influence, however, is the
unconscious influence simply from the use of the
Bible. The great power of Chrysostom's sermons
was partly due to his eminent rhetorical talent and
training. He knew how to gain his hearers' at-
tention; yet for the greater part his thorough ac-

36 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

quaintance with the Bible seems to be responsible.
Reading the sermons of those great Greek Christian
orators of the fourth century, we are often struck
by the embedded quotations from the Bible. In
the midst of this fluent Greek there is something
quite different, something stern, something austere,
something dignified and solemn, which immediately
appeals to the hearer. As a matter of fact, the
preachers themselves, proud as they were of their
classical training, had rather the opposite impres-
sion; they apologise for introducing barbarous lan-
guage. Chrysostom insists, in many a sermon, on
the idea that the apostles were fishermen, unskilled
in literary style, and that it is one of the proofs of
inspiration that those men could write at all. He
evidently is not aware of the fact, clear to us, that
it is just the vigour and strength of Biblical lan-
guage which gave to his own sermons their mag-
nificent effect. He was filled with Biblical phrase-
ology as was no other preacher of his time. He
himself did not realise it, nor did, I presume, the
greater part of his congregation, yet it was this
which so impressed them. If only the modern edi-
tors would note all the Biblical allusions in his works!
Yet they are hardly able even to recognise them.
We find preachers noted for their brilliancy in ex-
temporaneous speaking, and usually the remark is

CRAFTS AND ARTS 37

added, it was because the speaker knew the Scrip-
tures by heart.

In this way the people became accustomed to
Biblical phraseology, and we do not wonder that
at last the colloquial Greek also was influenced by
the Bible. We can trace its influence even in the
romances.

The Bible ruled the home and the daily life;
people had their furniture decorated with Biblical
symbols; lamps showed Noah's ark or Jonah's
whale, Jesus with his disciples in a ship or Jesus
treading upon the lion and adder, the serpent and
dragon (according to Psalm 91). At the Strassburg
Museum there is a beautiful engraved glass cup
made probably in a Roman manufactory in Cologne.
On one side is engraved Abraham sacrificing Isaac,
on the other side Moses striking water from the rock.
Rich people wore sumptuous garments embroidered
with representations of Biblical scenes. The preach-
ers complain that these people wear the miracles of
Christ on their coats instead of taking them to
their heart and conscience.

The great officials of the empire used to give to
their friends ivory tablets commemorating their
honours. In former times they had represented on
them the emperor, the empress, or their own por-
traits, and scenes from the circus; now they chose

38 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

Biblical subjects. People liked to have long rolls
exhibiting the wars and triumphs of an emperor in
a continuous series of drawings. Two gigantic rolls
of this kind may still be seen at Rome; I mean the
columns of Trajan and of Marcus Aurelius. Chris-
tian art produced rolls of the same kind, exhibiting
the story of Joshua's battles (Plate VI). Senators
and noble ladies vied with each other in arranging
the history of the Bible and especially the life of
Jesus in the form of poems, each word of which was
taken either from Homer or from Vergil. It is a
wonderful mixture of Bible and classical culture.

The Bible rules not only the public and the pri-
vate life, but also the church and its organisations.
At the beginning the Christians were afraid of
comparing the Old Testament rites with the ec-
clesiastical institutions. The Law of the Old Testa-
ment belonged to an earlier form of religion; it was
abolished by the New Testament. Christ, accord-
ing to Saint Paul, was the end of the Law. But by
and by the Old and the New Testament were brought
nearer together. An author of the first century
remarks that God by his commandments in the Old
Testament has shown himself to be a lover of order,
therefore in the Christian congregation, too, order
ought to rule. He does not call the Christian com-
munion a sacrifice, the Christian minister a priest;

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CHURCH SERVICE 39

but his parallelism comes very near to this, and a
century later the step is taken. It becomes usual
to speak of bishop, elders, and deacons as high-
priest, priests, and Levites. Later on, even the
minor degrees were taken back to Biblical models:
the subdeacon, lector, exorcist, acolyte, janitor were
found represented in the Old Testament. The
clergy formed a separate class as distinct from other
people as the tribe of Levi was among the tribes of
Israel. It was upon the authority of the Old Testa-
ment that they claimed rights and prerogatives to
be given and guaranteed by the empire. The
monks found their models in Elijah and Elisha;
common life was represented by the apostles; peni-
tents were Job, David, and the people of Nineveh;
widows (as ecclesiastical functionaries) had their
models in Naomi, Hannah, Tabitha, etc. The church
was the tabernacle of Moses and the temple of Sol-
omon, and each detail in the description of these
Biblical buildings was made to agree with a feature
in the Christian church by means of allegorical in-
terpretation. The feasts of the church correspond
to the feasts of the Old Testament; Easter is usu-
ally called Passover, and Whitsuntide Pentecost. At
a rather early date a festival of the dedication of the
individual church was introduced to correspond
with the festival of the dedication of the temple.

40 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

As the Jews kept two days in the week for fasting,
so did the Christians, choosing Wednesday and
Friday instead of Monday and Thursday; and in
doing so they remembered that it was on a Wednes-
day that Jesus was betrayed by Judas and on a
Friday that he died on the cross. Even the usual
hours for prayers were based on Old Testament au-
thority; David, saying in Psalm 141 : 2 "The lift-
ing up of my hands as the evening sacrifice," means
vespers, while in the 131st Psalm he is speaking of
compline, in the 63d of matins. The vigil was
observed as well as commanded by Christ himself
(Luke 6 : 12 and 12 : 37). The whole liturgy was
explained as being in every detail a representation
of the life of Christ. The sacraments, too, were
prefigured in the Old Testament. This symbolism
is very old and very commonly used; it has in-
fluenced Christian art. We see Noah's ark as a
symbol of baptism (<?/. I Peter 3 : 20) ; Abel's sacri-
fice, and Melchisedek offering bread and wine to
Abraham, as symbols of the holy eucharist. Abra-
ham entertaining at his home the three angels re-
veals the holy Trinity. All this is represented in
splendid mosaics on the walls of the churches, as
for instance in San Vitale at Ravenna.

To us this system of Biblical references for every-
thing in the Christian service seems strange. We

THE MONASTERY 41

feel that the worship of the Christian congregation
rests on other principles than the ritual of the Old
Testament and does not gain anything by such
hazardous comparisons. It looks like comparing
the stars in heaven with beasts on earth. But
the fathers thought that this was the highest
achievement at which they could arrive: to allego-
rise and spiritualise the Old Testament law in order
to deduce from it the Christian liturgy. That was
what they called worship in spirit and truth. It
is exactly opposite to the great idea which Jesus con-
veyed in those words; it is one of the greatest
confusions to which the juxtaposition of the Old
and the New Testament in one Bible was leading.
Nevertheless, it was of great influence upon civilisa-
tion for centuries.

The church and the laity were ruled by the Bible;
but the real Bible folk of this time were the monks.
There had been a tendency toward asceticism from
the very beginning of Christianity. At the moment
when the church came into power this tendency in-
creased rapidly. In Egypt as well as in Syria, wher-
ever there was a desert place hermits gathered and
monasteries were built. Now, in these monasteries
the life was really filled with the reading of the
Bible. Even the poorest monk would have a copy
of the Gospels to read. Some of the monks, of

42 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

course, were very simple, unlearned people. They
could not read, so they learned it all by heart. And
sometimes — we are told in the legendary tales of
the monks — it happened that a monk who never
before had learned to read was miraculously given
the art of reading, God granting it to him as a rec-
ompense for his zeal. The monks had their hours
for common worship and reading, but they were
supposed to read each by himself as much as pos-
sible. "The rising sun shall find the Bible in thy
hands," is one of the monastic rules, and legend
illustrates how the divine grace recompensed as-
siduous reading: filled with heavenly light all
through the night was the cell of a hermit as long
as he was reading the Bible. When visitors came
the talk was over questions raised by the Bible.
It was with quotations from the Bible that the cele-
brated anchorite entertained the people who called
upon him to ask for spiritual help.

Among all Biblical books the Psalter was the one
most favoured by the monks. They knew it by
heart, almost all of them, and they used to recite
it during their manual labour. The Psalter was
their spiritual weapon against the temptations of
the demons; the demon liked nothing so much as
to turn a monk from reciting his Psalter. But be-
sides the Psalter it was the Gospel which prevailed

PSALTER AND GOSPEL 43

over all other books in these ascetic circles. Many
of the hermits were induced to leave the world by
attending a Gospel lesson in their church at home.
" If thou wouldest be perfect, go, sell that thou hast
and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure
in heaven : and come follow me/' or " And every one
that hath left houses or brethren or sisters or father
or mother or children or lands for my name's sake
shall receive a hundredfold and shall inherit eternal
life." These are the words which occur again and
again in the lives of saints as the decisive ones for
their "conversion," that is for leaving the world
and going to the desert or entering a monastery.
The first saying quoted above is referred to in the
life of Saint Anthony, the greatest of all hermits, and
Saint Augustine had this in his mind when the time
came for him to change his life. The second say-
ing makes Saint Hypatius go away from home; his
biographer, however, is honest enough to add that
the saint, a youth of eighteen, had just received
punishment from his father. An actor living luxu-
riously with two concubines chances to enter a
church, and hears read from the Gospel, "Repent
ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand"; so he
repents and becomes a monk. I do not mean to
say that these tales of the monks are historical and
trustworthy in every point, but I venture to think

44 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

that this statement about the motives for conver-
sion is, after all, a correct one. The gospel is what
appeals to the human heart, in all centuries and in
all nations. And then the man will try to make
the gospel the rule of his life. I think it is remark-
able that whereas the church and the empire both
were ruled mainly by the Old Testament, these as-
cetic circles took the gospel as their main rule, that
is to say, the gospel as understood by the men of
that time. It was to them a new law, a law of
asceticism, of self-denial, and they kept to it as
strictly as possible. Even if for other Christians
it meant an almost inaccessible ideal, the monastery
ought to be the place to fulfil it literally.

Our picture would be inadequate, however, if we
should neglect the abuse of the Bible, the Bible show-
ing its importance and ruling force even by its influ-
ence upon the dark domain of human superstition.
The ancient world was full of magic. We remember
the story in Acts 19 of how Saint Paul overcame
some Jewish exorcists, with the result that "not
a few of them that practised curious arts brought
their books together and burned them in the sight
of all, and they counted the price of them and found
it fifty thousand pieces of silver." I suspect many
a scholar or librarian of to-day would like very much
to have those books among his treasures, but they

SUPERSTITION 45

were burned; and Christianity scored its first tri-
umph over superstition. Superstition, however, did
not give way at this first defeat; on the contrary,
it made a strenuous effort to draw over all the forces
of Christendom to its own side. There was the
name of Jesus, frightening the demons; black magic
took this name and converted it to its detestable
uses. There was the Gospel, representative of Jesus
himself in his heavenly power; superstition made it
a vehicle of its own magical rites. There was the
Bible, the book of divine oracles; human inquisi-
tiveness turned it into a book from which to read
the dark future. The heathen had done this with
the poems of Homer and Vergil. Turning over the
pages they suddenly stopped at a verse and then
tried to find in this verse the answer to their ques-
tion. The fathers of the early church detested this
method as something quite alien to a Christian mind,
but as early as the end of the fourth century people
came to feel that it was all right if only they used
the Bible for the same purpose. In the sixth century
even church officials kept to this practice. When a
bishop had to be elected they almost always con-
sulted the Psalter first on behalf of the man to be
elected. Bible verses written on parchment were
attached to easy chairs in order to keep away the
evil spirits. Gospels in the smallest form were hung

46 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

on the necks of the babies. It is astonishing to
see how great was the esteem in which the Bible was
held and how terribly contrary to the spirit of the
Bible this practice was, especially when the Bible was
used to do harm. Lead, by its dull lustre, always
has reminded mankind of the realm of death; so it
was used in black magic for bringing upon an enemy
a curse from the gods of the underworld. A rolled
sheet of lead, inscribed with a psalm and a dreadful
curse against any robber, has been found on one of
the JEgesLii Islands hidden in the ground of a vine-
yard. Evidently the psalm was supposed to be one
of the most effective spells. Even the Lord's Prayer
and other parts of the Gospels have been abused in
the same way (Plate VII). Nothing is so holy that
it cannot be turned into a crime by human sin.

It is a dark page of human civilisation. I am
afraid it is a large page, too. I could accumulate
instance upon instance. But however interesting
this might be, it would give a wrong impression.
The Bible was not primarily used as a magical means
in those centuries. It was acknowledged as some-
thing superhuman, bearing supernatural powers, and
therefore ruling everything. It ruled the empire
as well as the church. It influenced law, language,
art, habits, and even magic.

Plate VII— THE LORDS PRAYER

On a potsherd found at Megara, sixth century; used probably as a spell.

From "Mitteilungen des K. Deutschen Archaeologischen Instituts," Athen.
Published by G. Reimer, Berlin.

Ill

THE BIBLE TEACHES THE GERMAN NATIONS
(500-800 A. D.)

From the fourth century on the Germans, tribe by
tribe, crossed the Danube and the Rhine and en-
tered the boundaries of the Roman empire. Here
part of them settled near the frontier, part took
service in the Roman army. But the more numer-
ous they became, the more hostile they were. At
last the Roman empire in the West broke down,
German kingdoms taking its place. It is a long and
cruel history, this period of " Volkerwanderungen "
as it is usually called in German, the period of the
great migrations. And only after some centuries
did the new Roman empire of German nationality
come to be established by Charlemagne.

At first the Germans made a brilliant start in
taking over Roman civilisation. The Goths had
been Christianised and civilised at an early period.
While it is true that the Visigoths under Alaric cap-
tured Rome and did not refrain from plundering it,
the behaviour of the Vandals under Gaiseric was

even worse, so that for all time to come their name

48 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

is connected with the most brutal pillage. But the
noble tribe of the Ostrogoths under their celebrated
king Theodoric — called Dietrich von Bern in the
German songs — tried another plan; they adopted
Roman civilisation as far as possible and endeav-
oured to combine both nations under one dominion.
Theodoric had as his minister or secretary of state
a member of the Roman nobility, the most cul-
tivated man of letters of the time, Cassiodorus. We
have his collection of reports and letters, and we may
infer from them how much, aside from his training in
the Roman law school, he was influenced by his
Christian belief and Biblical reading. Later on,
when he retired into the monastery which he had
founded on his estates at Vivarium, all his devotion
was given to the study of the Bible. He is the man
who inculcated on Western monasticism that love for
spholarship wniph nas hppn, pypr sinpp a rWfl.rtgj-is-

tic of the Order_of Saint Benedict. Cassiodorus was
a Roman, of course, but we have ample evidence
that even among the Goths the Bible was read and
studied. There was a Gothic translation of the
Bible, which is supposed to have been made in the
fourth century by Ulfilas. In order not to encourage
the warlike spirit in his people he is said to have
omitted the books of the Kings, wherein so many
wars and battles are described. The educational

THE OSTROGOTHS 49

aspect of the Bible as teaching the German nations
comes out here distinctly. We are able to trace
the history of the Goths by their Bible, which, hav-
ing been translated in the East from Greek manu-
scripts, shows traces of a Latin influence, evidently
introduced when the Goths settled in Italy. There
still exist some copies, among them the famous Codex
Argenteus, now at Upsala, which in its silver writing
on purple ground, is a wonderful specimen of lux-
urious calligraphy, giving testimony to the degree of
civilisation which these Ostrogoths had taken over
from Rome (Plate VIII).

There was, however, one great difference between
the Germans and the Romans; the latter were Cath-
olics, the former Arians. This religious difference is
responsible for many troubles and persecutions
brought by the Germans upon the population of the
conquered land. The Germans had a church organ-
isation of their own; they had their own clergy, and
this clergy was well trained in Bible reading. We
find the remarkable fact that the German Arian
bishops show an even larger knowledge of the Bible
than their Roman Catholic colleagues. The com-
plaint was often heard that the watchwords of Ca-
tholicism, as, for example, homousios, had no Biblical
foundation, while, on the other hand, the Arians
were always ready to fill their creeds with Biblical

50 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

phrases. These Germans had a profound reverence
for the holy Scripture and bowed down to it. It
was only by Scriptural proofs that the Catholic
clergy of Spain succeeded in converting the Arian
king to their faith.

Theodoric built at Ravenna some churches which
still exist. Here we see mosaics exhibiting the life
of Jesus in a very simple way, but with that un-
mistakable touch of awe which is so characteristic
of German piety. How different are the pictures
which were added after Ravenna had become By-
zantine! They are highly ceremonial, representing,
among others, the emperor Justinian and the em-
press Theodora with all their suite.

These were the first centuries of German invasion.
The ancient civilisation, championed by the Roman
church, was still strong enough to impose itself upon
these invaders. Time went on and civilisation more
and more lost its energy. Especially in Gaul, in
the kingdom of the Merovingians, intellectual dark-
ness spread all over the country. There was no
layman who could read, hardly any member of the
clergy. We hear of great monasteries, which were
rich royal foundations, where no complete Bible was
to be found. We see the troubles of a missionary
like Boniface. In order to procure the necessary
books, he has to apply to his English lady friends,

in^MeiSNi&Mi£TMf»Y*h*N*h*

tyM*. t;Khl^N^MLISTHKNjirtK
NINSSTIKM-C*

Ti\ec;KhKir

&xkmu;*s- ^noe^MSinsiNC^s

■■■iiiiiiiyiiii'iiMi'lIfflTffi

ektf*s£ttzY»«^MSM,rl*M8U

txix#m j^h^M^si kh is.y^

Plate VIII— GOTHIC BIBLE

Codex Argenteus, now at Upsala. Sixth century, written on purple parchment in
silver and (some words) in gold. The figures at the bottom give Eusebius s
harmony of the Gospels: this particular scheme is found in Syrian manu-
scripts and in the Old Latin Codex Rehdigerianus at Breslau.

From "Deutsche Kulturgeschichte," by O. Henne am Rhyn. Grote, Berlin,

Germany.

THE MEROVINGIAN PERIOD 51

who send him copies of the books he wants, finely
written by their own delicate hands. It was a time
when a book, a Bible, was a treasure, and to own
one was a fact to be recorded by a biographer.
This enables us to trace the history of more than
one famous manuscript. We are surprised to find
what journeys they made. One was sent from
Naples to England, and then a century later again
removed to the German shore and finally treasured
among the rarities of the Fulda library. Another
manuscript, now at Florence, came originally from
the monastery of Cassiodorus in the extreme south
of Italy and found its way to the monastery of
Mount Amiata, near Florence, only by a round-
about route through the famous English monaster-
ies, where it was copied. The few scholars of that
period had to go a long way before they could get
a copy of the Bible worth their attention, and they
had to go a long way to find a monastery with
hands able to copy manuscripts.

A new epoch begins with Charlemagne, who has
a real right to the name of the Great. If one wants
to know a great man, one has only to see what atten-
tion he pays to minor things. It is simply wonder-
ful how this German king, who restored the old
notion of the Roman empire, whose dominion con-
tained France, Germany, Spain, Italy, was taking

52 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

care of the schoolboys and fixing his eyes on the
way in which the Bible was being copied in the
monasteries of his vast realm. In one of his ordi-
nances he complains that they use unskilled boys
for copying the most sacred book. It needs, he
says, grammar — nay, good grammar — to understand
what you are copying. It is no religion to pray to
God in ungrammatical language and to have his
holy Scriptures in a grammatically incorrect text.
From the fact that the monasteries in their letters
of application used a bad style he infers that Bible
reading here was being neglected. Therefore, Char-
lemagne tried, in the first place, to bring the schools
of his kingdom to a higher standard. Each mon-
astery had to have a well-conducted school for the
monks and for the young people who were sent there
for education (as they are now sent to public schools).
At his own court he had the Schola palatina and
the great emperor himself went there often and took
lessons together with the boys. But he did not stop
here. His intention was to secure a really good,
trustworthy text of the Bible. He therefore invited
scholars from everywhere; even some Orientals are
said to have shared in the work. The leading man,
the chairman of the Committee for the revision of
the Bible, as we should say at present, was Alcuin,
a monk from England, who by his great learning

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Plate IX— ALCUINS BIBLE
(Brit. Mus. add. 10546)

Written at Tours, soon after Alcuin's death: a very good example of 6ne Caro-
lingian minuscule. The lines are of equal length.

From F. G. Kenyon, "Fac-similes of Biblical Manuscripts." By permission of
the Trustees of the British Museum.

BIBLE REVISION 53

had won the confidence of Charlemagne and was

appointed by him abbot of the, famous monastery
of Tours. Here, at the school of Tours, most of
the work of revision was done (Plate IX) ; through
Alcuin's influence the revision was mainly based on
the text current in England. That this was the
best text available at that time is now generally
acknowledged by all competent scholars. This was
not so in Charlemagne's time; other scholars, Frank-
ish bishops, disapproved of Alcuin's work. They
thought the revision would have come out much
better if conducted according to the text prevailing
in Spain. So Theodulf, bishop of Orleans, issued
a version ofliis own (Plate X). It is always in-
structive to see how men were the same in former
times as they are now: scholars seldom agree one
with another. The result was that henceforth two
forms of the Latin Bible were used through the
next centuries — in the North, Alcuin's revision, in
the South, the revision made by Theodulf.

Charlemagne would not have cared so much for
the text of the Bible had he not esteemed the Bible
to be the one great text-book for his people. He
himself was filled with Biblical notions. In his pri-
vate circle, a club for promoting classical reading,
he was called David. And it was, indeed, the Old
Testament idea of the theocratic king which gov-

54 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

erned his mind. The king chosen by God and
elected by the people, the king a representative of
God and the head of the people, the king a valiant
warrior and a royal psalmist at the same time, this
was his ideal, in which old German notions were
combined with Old Testament views. While re-
vering the priest, he always felt himself superior
even to the bishop of Rome. He willingly accepted
the role of a defender, of a protector; he never would
have accepted his crown from the hand of a priest.
Nothing is so alien to Charlemagne as the later
mediaeval theory of the two swords, both given by
God to Saint Peter, the one spiritual, kept by him-
self and his successors, the other worldly, given by
them to the emperor. No, he had his sword from
God directly, and his royalty included the power and
the duty of looking after the church's affairs as well.
The Bible tells of a king of Judah, called Josiah, who,
on being informed that the book of the Law given
by Moses and hidden for a long time had been re-
discovered, forthwith ordered everything to be re-
formed and restored according to this law. That
served as the model for Charlemagne's own eccle-
siastical work. Being the king, he felt responsible
for the purity of worship and of doctrine. There-
fore, when the question arose in the East if wor-
ship was due to the pictures of Christ and the saints,

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Plate X— THEODULFS BIBLE
(Brit. Mus. add. 24142)

Written in three columns like many Spanish manuscripts, and in lines of various
length, "cata cola et commata," as St. Jerome says.

From "Fac-similes of Biblical Manuscripts." By permission of the Trustees of

the British Museum.

CHARLEMAGNE 55

and the bishop of Rome did not please him in his
answer, Charlemagne himself, assisted by Alcuin and
other theologians of his staff, wrote a treatise on the
subject, which he himself thought to be decisive,
the so-called Libri Carolini, a document of a rather
Puritan character, showing the austere spirit of
early Western theology. When in Spain a discus-
sion began about the divine nature of Christ, he
again interfered, sending his theologians to discuss
the matter according to the true teaching of the
Bible — as is said expressly in their instructions — and
after they had decided he even took political mea-
sures against those whom he believed to be heretics.
We can scarcely understand his attitude in those
cases without keeping in mind that he felt himself
a new David and a new Josiah.

Sometimes it is a true evangelical spirit which per-
vades his ordinances for the church. In a proclama-
tion of 811 he says: "We will ask the clergy them-
selves, those who are not only to read the holy
Scriptures by themselves but are to teach them to
others also : who are those to whom the apostle says,
Be my imitators? or who is the man of whom he says,
No soldier on service entangleth himself with the af-
fairs of this life? — or how to imitate the apostle and
how to do service to God? What is it to leave the
world? does it mean simply not to wear weapons and

56 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

not to be married publicly? does it mean to enlarge
one's property daily, oppress the poor and induce
men to perjury?" Charlemagne is particularly
strict about avoiding perjury, not only in the solemn
form of public oath, which is taken on the holy Gos-
pel or on the altar or on the relics of the saints, but
in common conversation as well. He tries to intro-
duce Matt. 5 : 16, "Even so let your light shine
before men that they may see your good works and
glorify your father which is in heaven," as the motto
for every Christian's life. That is quite evangelical.
But it is from the Old Testament that the tenor of
his laws comes. They all have a strong mark of se-
verity, in particular the so-called Saxon laws, which
were imposed upon the Saxon tribes when after a
very hard resistance they were finally defeated and
subdued. Through this law runs, like a bloody
thread, the frightful menace: morte moriatur, by
death shall he die. This sounds harsh, but it is noth-
ing else than the adaptation of a well-known Bib-
lical phrase (Ex. 19 : 12; 21 : 12: "He shall surely
be put to death," R. V.). That is an example of
Biblical phraseology. But the Bible influenced the
legislation of Charlemagne also in content. I choose
three instances: in all three cases the work of Charle-
magne was prepared for by church councils. Chris-
tianity had begun by voluntarily adopting Old

STATE LAW 57

Testament laws; then the church had made their
observance compulsory; now Charlemagne gives to
the ecclesiastical ordinances the sanction of the state
and inflicts penalty upon trespassers. The first in-
stance is Sunday; it was called the Lord's Day;
from the sixth century synods and councils had tried
to make the people keep this day in a more solemn
fashion. They did not refer to the Old Testament
commandment at first; they did not even demand
that all manual work should be stopped. The fre-
quent repetition of the decree seems to prove that
it was rather unsuccessful even in this limited form.
Now the government interferes, and its injunctions
secure at once to the Lord's Day the strictest obser-
vance. It is remarkable that Charlemagne expressly
refers to the Old Testament commandment. It is
according to the Bible that the dav was counted
from_sunset to sunset. This is the_beginning of the
Sabbatarian question jj fV Wpst, tWJVt preced-
ing theJWest, as we. have seenjJay-aboiit two cen-
turies.

Our second instance is the tithe; it was to be
paid, according to the Bible, by all the other tribes
to the tribe of Levi, who served at the temple. Now
Christians began to pay voluntarily a tithe to their
priests, accommodating themselves to the Old Testa-
ment rule; but by and by the clergy derived from

58 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

the Old Testament a right of asking for the tithe.
The farmer had to pay his tithe to his parish priest.
Charlemagne" prol^IalmeoTtnis as a law of his king-
dom, referring expressly to God's commandments.

The third instance is given in the prohibition
against taking interest. It is said in Deut. 23 : 19:
"Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother."
Ecclesiastical authorities took this as forbidding to
take any interest in lending money, and they tried
to impress this prohibition upon the minds of the
Christian people. Here, again, Charlemagne gave
his sanction to this ecclesiastical view and made the
prohibition against taking interest a part of the pub-
lic law. It is obvious that the economic life of the
nation was deeply influenced by this compulsory
adoption of Old Testament laws.

Justice, with the Germans, was to a large extent
exercised^ by means oT the ordeals. We scarcely
realise the importance these proceedings had at that
time. People believed in a divine power bringing
out guilt and innocence by means of these curious
trials. It was but natural that the Bible, represent-
ing the divine oracles, should be present at the cere-
mony, that both parties should revere and kiss it.
But people did more; they made the Bible itself a
means of deciding between guilty and innocent.
They had a particular kind of ordeal which they

BIBLE STUDIES 59

called determining by means of the Gospels, and
another which was called the ordeal of the Psalter,
a copy of the Psalter being swung over the head of
the suspected person.

I have referred to the palace school. This had
its continuation in a graduate school, if we may so
call a Bible circle among the theologians attending
the court. These theologians, headed by Alcuin
himself, were first-rate Bible scholars. They knew
great parts of the Bible by heart; they had read all
accessible commentaries of the fathers. They had
ideas of their own, too, but they were traditional-
ists to such an extent that they would not say any-
thing of their own unless it was said and supported
by the fathers. When asked to write brief com-
mentaries on Biblical books, because the patristic
commentaries were too large and comprehensive for
the students of this time, they simply gave extracts
from the fathers and carefully avoided adding any-
thing of their own. One went so far as to take
even the connecting words from the works of Saint
Augustine; another, whose mental energy was too
strong to keep him within the boundaries of pure
traditionalism, excuses himself whenever he intro-
duces an interpretation of his own.

In these studies the ladies and gentlemen of the
court took part. It is very interesting and often

60 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

amusing to see what kind of questions they bring
before Alcuin as the great oracle of learning. One
lady reading her Psalter was puzzled by the words
in Psalm 116, "All men are liars." How can babies
be liars before they begin to speak, or dumb men?
"The sun shall not smite thee by day nor the moon
by night" (Psalm 121:6) seemed to be incompat-
ible with the fact that the moon never burns. A
scholar who had come from Greece troubled the
court by putting the question: To whom was paid
the price with which we were bought according
to I Cor. 6:20; 7:23. Charlemagne himself has
other questions. He is troubled by finding that the
hymn sung by Christ and his disciples after the Last
Supper has not been recorded by any of the Gospels.
I wonder if he really was satisfied by Alcuin's answer.
After a very learned explanation of the term hymn,
Alcuin gives, first, three views of different inter-
preters: (1) That there was no special hymn, only
a general praisegiving; (2) that they had sung the
twenty-second Psalm; (3) that it was some Jewish
prayer. Then he proceeds to establish his own
solution: that it is, in fact, the prayer of Jesus, re-
corded in John 17, which was meant by the word
hymn here. Incidentally, he makes some important
remarks upon the harmony of the Gospels: "Al-
though we see in the Gospels some things told simi-

ALCUIN THE BIBLE SCHOLAR 61

larly, others in a different way, we nevertheless
believe that everything is true." That was the
leading idea for the criticism of the fathers, and it
was the same for nearly all the mediaeval centuries.
Historical criticism, directed upon the Gospels,
would have seemed to show intolerable lack of
piety or certain evidence of heretical views.

Theological thinking does not go beyond the lim-
its of Biblical doctrine. Scarcely one or two men
dare to think in their own way or speculate on
such problems as darkness and nothing (that is,
what was before the creation) or on the nature of
miracle. There was hardly any attempt at scien-
tific theories. And the best men, indeed, as, for
instance, Alcuin, were proud of basing their theology
entirely on Biblical ideas.

The one great event in the expansion of Chris-
tianity among the German nations is the mission of
Saint Augustine to England. When Pope Gregory
found some Anglo-Saxon youths at the slave market
of Rome and perceived that in the North there
was still a pagan nation to be baptised, he sent one
of his monks to England, and this monk, who was
Saint Augustine, took with him the Bible and intro-
duced it to the Anglo-Saxons, and one of his fol-
lowers brought with him from Rome pictures show-

62 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

ing the Biblical history, and decorated the walls of
the church in the monastery of Wearmouth. We
do not enter here into the difficult question of the
relations between this newly founded Anglo-Saxon
church and the old Iro-Scottish church. Differences
of Bible text had something to do with the pitiful
struggles which arose between the churches and
ended in the devastation of the older one. The one
point which interests us here is the fact that both
Iro-Scottish and Anglo-Saxon monks were driven
into missionary work by the Bible. When, in the
service, they heard read from the Old Testament or
from the epistle to the Hebrews that Abraham and
the patriarchs had all left their home, their parents,
their native country, and had gone to a foreign land
which they did not know, simply in order to please
God, then they felt bound to do the same. When at
the mass the Gospel was read, fAnd every one that
hath left houses or brethren or sisters or father or
mother or children or lands for my name's sake,
shall receive a hundredfold and shall inherit eternal
life," then they hurried away, not knowing where
to go, looking only for a far-distant and desert place.
It was this ascetic view of the Bible which drove
the Iro-Scottish monks over the sea to France, Italy,
Germany, which made them preach the gospel to
the Germans who had not yet heard of it. It was

ENGLAND AND GERMANY 63

this same motive which caused Willihrord and
Boniface to cross the North Sea and come to preach
among the Frisians and Saxons. Boniface is said
to have received the deadly stroke from a pagan
while holding his Bible over his head. They still
show the copy at Fulda.

Again, it was the Bible which determined Charle-
magne to use force against the Saxons in order to
bring them to baptism and Christian faith. Saint
Augustine had discovered the passage in the Lord's
parable of the great supper, where the servant is
told to go out into the highways and hedges and
"constrain" them to come in. This coge intrare,
he explained, might excuse the using of secular power
for the purpose of bringing heretics back to the
church or of causing pagans to join the church.
Charlemagne knew no better than to suppose that
this was the true meaning of the saying of our Lord,
and so he felt in conscience bound to use military
force and the full strength of the law in christianis-
ing the Saxons.

But it was the Bible itself and not Charlemagne's
sharp sword and his cruel law which brought over
the wild Saxon tribes into Christendom. They had
among themselves a poet who had the gift of sing-
ing the gospel into their hearts. Charlemagne him-
self was fond of the national songs; he loved his

64 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

German language as much as he esteemed Latin.
He was convinced that a man ought to pray to God
in his native tongue. There are not only three sa-
cred languages, he says, in which to pray and to
praise God — Hebrew, Greek, Latin — you may praise
him in your German as well. Therefore he ar-
ranged that a priest should transla££_-the Biblical
lessongahd tne sermon to the people who did not
understand Latin. He would probably have ap-
pro vedTTGefman translation of the Bible; but the
clergy were not prepared to do this. They took
Latin as the basis of civilisation, and only a few
of them had any regard for the uncultivated people.
There are preserved some few attempts at translating
parts of the Bible into German; they attest what
might have come out of this Carolingian movement
if the bigotry and narrowness of Charlemagne's son
Louis had not stopped it. Among the Saxons a
fresh and vigorous spirit was still alive. Having
been introduced to Christianity by brute force of
war, they embraced the gospel, trying to make it
their own by putting it into the form of their na-
tional song. We do not know the name of the poet;
he seems to have been a clergyman, instructed in
the best commentaries of his time, such as were
available at the monastery of Fulda. For the
framework he used a Gospel harmony which is con-

THE "HELIAND" 65

tained in the famous Codex Fuldensis of the Vulgate,
originating at Capua (in south Italy) and brought
probably by Boniface himself from England to
Fulda. This Gospel harmony he translated freely
into some six thousand Saxon verses. His poem is
one of the finest assimilations of the Gospel history
to national German feeling, to be compared only
with Durer's engravings and Eduard von Geb-
hardt's paintings. Christ is the heavenly king; the
apostles are his loyal kinsmen; he wanders with
them through the Saxon wood; he stops at a native
spring; all Oriental character has gone, but the
gospel has lost nothing. It is as fresh and as real
as it ever had been. The fact our author detests
most is Christ's betrayal by one of his own men;
nothing is so bad as this according to the German
mind. Christ on the cross is not suffering; he dies
as a victorious warrior. When he says, "I thirst,"
he expresses by this the fact that he is thirsting
after the souls of men, to bring them into paradise.
It is wonderful how the gospel has penetrated the
German soul in order to produce a harmony like
this.

This "Heliand" by the anonymous Saxon poet
we shall admire even more if we compare it with the
other attempt at bringing the life of Christ into
German poesy. It is by Otfried of Strassburg, whose

66 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

"Christ" is a very learned elaboration, partly in
German, partly in Latin, therefore undoubtedly
much preferred in the literary circles of that time,
but infinitely inferior to the "Heliand" in freshness
and popular quality.

It is remarkable that there is something sim-
ilar to the "Heliand" in the Anglo-Saxon poem,
the "Genesis." The theory has been successfully
started and proved by later discoveries that both
have the same origin. The Saxons of Germany and
the Saxons of England were not so far away one
from the other that they could not have intercourse
and exchange (Plate XI).

However this may be, it is evident that the Bible
had an influence in teaching the German nations
from the beginning, and that the new civilisation
which was to be built would have the Bible as one
of its foundations.

ttbftDLdl CCpCtUI TU&CXp

Twnarepbus anrnjdnn

no SeranoD&disapnlus

Saratdauurn TOisnahet .
»■«-' •*»* u«u«».

amis secmjdnmccaujd
leuivu conueRsasadpoe*
^0& euqurefjum nrraxIiaL _
SCRi6sii/u(taj&eD8iueo
Qucd etanern saade&enet-
t$»po ucan TBnoimi prun
apn luuocepKophfti ae-

OW^emtanacaslraionj

.Often

Sri

.jannniohainieF

^OTnTV^aEdxnaaBinnocfr

' Cam*icuuuuiuiu8tTni«g

—4 t .!■■!■

ITJapTtTxtiiT^rmeurcuTn -ps ■

paicaiTTi sed conpas dui
peaueROum druTn&uoas
curiTnccami nrrao enanqe
uca&pnaedicaxiouis os
XEudenerircxjmhcuc^fceir
Scme-anniroum caruns
ruefno ebKn adnanaras
naoTtaculirm de&a

* »pti»olomaen6nmcaia>

uous quoo racou8oacaia6:
pendTOCRatrruncnma-
danq:Opoifecao eaaurje&i
opasrutRanset&apasino
Cnn pRaedicancdfn tuoo

«*" '■**" **c****y

cms uoutaioRcamruonrai

tt*r>**w<*r ton m ,f*W

awn ramus quam rapra
otao: nraRcurdiceResed
TDaim rupnrmis pqposraopt-
desriza lenraium tramem
■ocnraracraem diccboa coo
gnftanontBi 6efaanam
etniTUTfceRTOTn puomtar-'
canrtoRnTn gcTu(timqit
uosadTtmUcpaiUumg^otc^

Plate XI— LINDISFARNE GOSPELS
(Brit. Mus. Cotton: Nero D IV.)

Written about 690 in honour of St. Cuthbert (f687), in English round style.
The interlinear version was added two hundred and fifty years later — remark
in the midst of the left-hand column the words: xpi (=Christi) evangelium
with Cristes godspell above it.

From "Fac-similes of Biblical Manuscripts." By permission of the Trustees of

the British Museum.

THE BIBLE BECOMES ONE BASIS OF MEDIAEVAL
CIVILISATION (800-1150 A. D.)

The Middle Ages, the dark Middle Ages, that is
what we are wont to call the period we now enter
in our journey through the centuries. Scholars of
the sixteenth century called it so, when they looked
back to the classical period, from which they drew
all their light and inspiration. The centuries be-
tween counted for nothing; they seemed to be bar-
barous, uneducated; the humanistic scholar would
simply drop them out of the world's history. Time
passed and men became enthusiastic about the
beauties of these Middle Ages. At the beginning
of the nineteenth century Europe was enchanted by
romanticism. Nothing was fashionable that was
not mediaeval in art, customs, manners. At pres-
ent we view these centuries more calmly in the
light of their own time; we see what was their
defect, and we see at the same time what was their
merit. It is true that civilisation had only begun
to recover from the shock which the great migra-
tions had given to it. If a chronicler thinks it worth

68 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

while to mention that the emperor Henry IV was
able to read to himself the petitions brought before
him, we must infer that the art of reading was not
wide-spread, even among the nobility. And the
famous poet Wolfram von Eschenbach tells us him-
self that he was no friend of this art. On the other
hand, I need only remind my readers of the beau-
tiful buildings we still admire at Cologne: the
massive old church of Saint Gereon in Romanesque
style and the light and airy cathedral, whose
Gothic arches and spires reach up toward heaven
— to mention only these two well-known examples —
in order to make them realise the power and the
splendour of this civilisation, which never will cease
to impress the human mind. We cannot drop this
period from our history; nor can Americans deny
that this mediseval civilisation is an element even
in their modern civilisation.

There is an ingenious theory that history always
repeats itself: the German migrations corresponded
to the migrations of the Greek tribes; the time of
chivalry was like the time of Homer's heroes; hu-
manism represents the age of Plato and Aristotle;
only the repetition always has the advantage of
using the results of the former cycle. But we must
not forget that from time to time new forces enter
those cycles and change their relation. At the end

REPETITION AND PROGRESS 69

of the classical period Christianity has come in and
now runs as a straight line through the parallel cy-
cles; therefore nothing in this parallelism is quite
exact.

It was the Christian church which served to keep
the old civilisation alive through all troubles and
dangers. When classical training had nearly van-
ished everywhere else, it was found in some remote
monasteries. Esteem of good style, love of ancient
poetry, some chance bits of philosophy had safely
weathered the storm. But it was only in combina-
tion with the Bible that those remains of classical
reading were allowed to persist. The mediaeval civ-
ilisation was Biblical at its base.

Saint Jerome, who was a great admirer of classical
eloquence but a stern defender of pure Christian-
ity, tells in a friendly letter to a certain lady a
sad experience of his own. He had read much of
Vergil and Cicero and other pagan books, when
one night he found himself suddenly summoned be-
fore the heavenly judge. "Who are you?" he was
questioned. "I am a Christian," he replied.
"Thou liest, thou art a Ciceronian," was the judge's
answer. And forthwith he was given over to cruel
constables, who beat him frightfully until he prom-
ised never to touch a pagan book again. When he
awoke in the morning he still felt the blows. The

70 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

story is mere fancy, and Saint Jerome never proves
so guilty of imitating his adored classical models
as in this very letter. He was an actor who knew
how to pose. But by this letter he has caused plenty
of people in later time to dream over again the
frightful experience he describes so suggestively.
Dozens of monks and nuns have felt blows struck
upon them by invisible hands for having given
themselves too much to the seduction of reading
classical books instead of the Bible. Again and
again the leaders of monastic institutions had to
insist upon the rule that the Bible must be read
and no pagan books. Hrotswitha of Gandersheim,
the nun who celebrated the great acts of the em-
peror Otto I, wrote some Biblical comedies^jn order
to prevent the nuns from enjoying the comedies
of Plautus and Terence.

On the other hand, all the great fathers of the
church insisted upon classical training; so did Saint
Jerome himself and Saint Augustine, not to speak of
the great classical scholars in Christian bishoprics in
the East (Plate XII) . And even in the later centu-
ries, when classical civilisation had gone and was only
kept up artificially by assiduous reading, it was the
church which maintained the right and the neces-
sity of a classical training for its clergy. Alcuin
was proud of the classical training he had had at

Ht^ ' V

Plate XII— BYZANTINE MINIATURE

(Psalter, Paris B. N. gr. 139)

David, playing harp while watching his sheep, looks like Orpheus in Greek art.
The female figure at the left represents Melody, while at the right-hand corner
Echo, also personified, is listening behind a pillar. The man in the cave to
the right is Mount Bethlehem.

From "Die Wiener Genesis." F. Tempsky, Vienna.

CLASSICAL TRAINING 71

home, at the famous monastic school of York under
the direction of Abbot ^Elbert. He enjoyed finding
kernels of truth in the writings of the heathen, and
he pointed out that Saint Paul had done the same.
There was a time when there was no reading at all
outside the clergy and the monasteries, but this
reading was a combination of classical and Biblical.
That is the great merit of the mediseval church.

Mediseval civilisation had various foundations,
but the Bible was one of them, and the most im-
portant one. That is what we find wherever we try
to analyse mediseval culture.

What was the aspect of the world at this period?
The world seemed to be an edifice of three floors.
Above was the heaven, a compact dome, in which
the stars were fixed, while the planets moved in their
own sphere; over the sky was the space where God
or, let us say, according to the usual expression of
that time, the holy Trinity dwells, surrounded and
adored by millions upon millions of angels, who keep
heaven and earth in continuous communication.
Besides, the heaven can be rent asunder; then the
angels look down to earth, and from time to time
a pious man is allowed to enter and see the heavenly
mysteries and the glory of the saints. The earth,
the abode of man, is a large round plane; its centre
Jerusalem, where, at the same place, Adam was bur-

72 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

ied and Christ was crucified, so that the blood of
the Saviour dropping down reached Adam's skull.
The earth was surrounded by the ocean. At its
boundaries all kinds of strange beings — men with
dogs' faces, giants, pygmies — were to be found.
There was still an earthly paradise — not to be con-
founded with the paradise in heaven, the goal of
human longing. This earthly paradise was un-
known and inaccessible to the greater part of men,
but from time to time a pious hermit or a favourite
of fortune reached it; the lucky man on his return
had exciting stories to tell about the wealth and the
bliss of this paradise, but he never could find the
way again. I have read an accurate description of
the way from paradise to Rome, giving the exact
number of days and months, but there was nothing
said about how to come from Rome to paradise !

Below the earth was the great dark cellar called
hell; here the devil was at home with his compan-
ions. But these demons did not like their abode;
they preferred to roam the earth and play jokes
on men and women. As the angels from above were
kind and helpful to man, so the devils were cunning
and malicious. But many a time the devil showed
himself stupid; a clever boy might easily cheat him.
The devil's aim was to capture the frivolous and
to seduce the pious in order to bring them all

THE VIEW OF THE WORLD 73

into hell. Here the various categories of sinners
had their separate compartments, where they were
punished according to the varying nature of their
sins. Mediaeval writers describe these various tor-
tures, and they know more about the geography of
hell than they usually know about the geography of
the earth.

Now, according to the view of that time this is all
Biblical. A modern reader would find difficulties
in looking for it in his Bible; but he will recognise
some of the motives as clearly Biblical. Further
investigation will show him that other notions are
brought in from the late classical philosophy, and
finally he will discover a large amount of folk-lore,
German folk-lore. All this mingled together made
a very curious combination, and the most curious
point was that this combination was regarded as
Biblical. It was upon the authority of the Bible
that the church accepted tins whole view of the
world and put it before the people, judging all
doubts and divergences from its teaching as in-

tolerable heresy. It is this naive way of reading
between the lines, this allegorical method of mak-
ing the Bible say what it does not say, which
we have already found in the Greek fathers of the
fourth century when, in commenting upon the hexa-
emeron, the six days' work of creation, they intro-

74 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

duced whatever they had read about the world and
nature in the works of Plato and Aristotle. In the
time of which we are speaking these great Greek
philosophers were known only indirectly, but never-
theless they exercised much influence through later
imitators. Boethius was the one great authority of
this time, besides the Bible.

The Bible's influence is still more evident if we
turn to the mediaeval view of history. What was
history? People at this time had few notions about
what was happening in the world; there were no
means of communication, nor had they a conception
of history as a coherent series of events in which
each link is the effect of what precedes as well as
the cause of what comes after. They simply regis-
tered the facts which chance made known to them.
The chronicle is the form of record which prevails
at this period. There was no history of the world;
what passed for such was the history of the Jewish
people as given in the Bible and the history of the
Christian church as recorded by certain chronicles.
Both together made up the history of mankind. The
first part, the history of the Old Testament, was not
regarded as the history of the Jews, but as the
history of the people of God; it was the history of
our fathers the patriarchs, the history of the first
covenant finding its direct continuation in the his-

THE VIEW OF HISTORY 75

tory of the new covenant and the Christian church.
There was only a very slight conception of chro-
nology; everything was arranged according to the
system of a week, the duration of the present world
corresponding to one week, whose days, according
to the 90th Psalm, each counted a thousand years.
The world was not expected to endure beyond
six thousand years, the seventh day being reserved
for the millennium. Into this history of the world
a few fragments of Greek and Roman history
found their way by means of an odd synchronism:
David was said to have been a contemporary of
the Trojan War, and a correspondence was in-
vented between the king of Troy and the king of
Israel, in which the latter excuses himself for not
coming to join the Trojan army. It was in the
beginning of the twelfth century that a famous
professor of the university of Paris called Petrus
Comestor wrote his Historia Scholastica, which for
all the Middle Ages served as the text-book of
Biblical history.

But, like the mediaeval aspect of the world, so
the history of the world was not purely Biblical.
The Bible always had to suffer the strong rivalry
of apocryphal and legendary fiction. Already the
Jews had invented a life of Adam, full of miraculous
events, which appealed to the taste of the average

76 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

man much more than the simple and severe story of
the Bible itself; the lives of Abraham, of Moses,
of Solomon were enriched in the same way.
Christianity continued this kind of fancy. The
story of the holy root was traced back into para-
dise; it was a branch from the tree of life, given
to Adam's son Seth and planted by him on his
father's tomb. It had been used as a bridge over
the Kidron until the queen of Sheba arrived at
Jerusalem. Being a prophetess, she worshipped this
holy root; consequently Solomon tried to use it in
his temple, but the carpenter did not succeed in
cutting it to the necessary length; therefore it lay
unused, "rejected by the builders," until the time
came when a tree was wanted to crucify Jesus; so
Jesus died — on the cross which was the tree of life
— a splendid symbolism, indeed, but set forth in a
strange legend. Or they investigated the earlier
history of the thirty pieces of silver given to Judas
Iscariot as the reward for the betrayal of his
master, tracing the money back as far as Abraham.
The life of Christ was surrounded by apocryphal
legends of all kinds: the story of his birth and of
his childhood; his stay in Egypt; how in their
flight lions and all kinds of wild beasts accom-
panied the holy family; how a palm-tree bowed
down before them in order to provide them with

HISTORY EMBELLISHED 77

its fruits; how at Jesus' arrival in Egypt all the
idols of the Egyptians fell down; how he helped
his father Joseph in his carpenter shop; and so on.
Again the miracles at his death, the descent to
hell, the resurrection and ascension, everything was
covered with an abundance of miraculous narratives,
partly enlargements, developments of the canonical
accounts, partly mere fiction. In addition to this
apocryphal life of Jesus there is the life of the
Virgin, giving a most curious description of her
birth and childhood and again of her death, making
every detail parallel to the life of Christ himself
and yet keeping hers subordinate. The mediaeval
life of Christ begins — one may say — with the birth
of Mary (or with the story of her parents, Joachim
and Anna) and ends with the death and assumption
of Mary. The history of the apostles as read in
this period is nearly all apocryphal except the few
data taken from the canonical book of Acts. Then
the history of Christianity is continued as the
history of the church according to the scheme of
Saint Augustine's De cimtate dei (the City of God) :
the church is the city of God and beside it is the
city of this age, the kingdom of this world, the one
spiritual, the other secular, with two parallel lines
of development. This is best shown by the mural
decoration in Charlemagne's palace at Ingelheim on

78 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

the Rhine, where two series of pictures, one giving
the Biblical history according to the Old and New
Testaments, the other tracing the profane history
from Ninus, king of Babylon, down to Charlemagne
himself, were painted on opposite walls. That is
the mediaeval view of history. We may add that,
according to this view, history begins in heaven
when the holy Trinity conceives the idea of creation,
and ends in heaven at the last judgment. Our view
of history is a different one, but we cannot help
agreeing that this is a magnificent conception and
that it is Biblical, too, in its main points.

It is partly built upon the Apocrypha, of course.
Regarding these Apocrypha the attitude of the
church changed a good deal during our period. The
early view is set forth in several utterances from
the Roman bishops of the fifth and sixth centuries,
and is represented in its sharpest form in the so-
called decree of Pope Gelasius, which condemns all
Apocrypha as heretical writings totally to be rejected
and detested and not to be used in any way by a
Catholic Christian. We found this Puritan view
prevailing in Charlemagne's Libri Carolini. It is
predominant among the theologians of the Caro-
lingian time. They scarcely use apocryphal books,
and when they do they always refer to them as to
doubtful books devoid of all authority. But gradu-

APOCRYPHA AND LEGENDS 79

ally the Apocrypha came into favour; they are used
freely alongside the canonical books. They are very
much of the same kind as the legends of the saints;
and those legends of the saints are favoured by the
people, too. At last, in the thirteenth century, even
theologians do not distinguish between canonical
and apocryphal books. They quote the Gospel of
Nicodemus alongside the Gospel of Matthew or of
John; they call it the fifth Gospel and have it
copied in their Bible manuscripts. So they have a
letter from Saint Paul to the Laodiceans and other
Apocrypha inserted in or attached to the Bible.
And the common people were fond of these Apocry-
pha and delighted to hear the preacher quote them
because the bizarre miracles appealed to their taste.
There was almost no science, no medicine in this
time; the world seemed to be full of miracles having
no rational connection with one another. There
was no causality, no law of nature. This was ex-
actly the same view that we have in most parts of
the Bible. Therefore people did not feel any dif-
ficulty in identifying their own notions about mir-
acle and nature with the Biblical ones. Nay, we
may say that many of the legendary miracle stories
are copied after Biblical patterns. Even the word-
ing is often modelled according to Biblical phra-
seology. "Healing all manner of disease and all

80 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

manner of sickness/' from Matt. 9 : 35, is repeated
in many a saint's life.

Bible history in the embellished form which we
have just now observed inspired mediaeval art. In
the first place, there were the inner walls of the
churches, usually painted from top to bottom. If
we remember that a Romanesque church had only
very small windows, we understand what a large
space was given to painting. Pictures are the text-
book for those who cannot read; so Pope Gregory
the Great had said, and this dictum was repeated
many a time. It is true, of course. These plain
mural paintings, awkward as they often are, make
a greater impression on a simple mind than even
the best written account could produce. The art is
nothing but illustration; the painter tries to bring
before the people who view his work the main
features of the Biblical text. One must, indeed,
know the text in order to understand the pictures.
Sometimes the spectator is helped by additional in-
scriptions. To the illiterates these may be read and
explained by the priest; and then even the simplest
peasant will understand and always remember the
story. Some churches were decorated in this way
twice or even oftener, the first painting being cov-
ered with lime and whitewashed and then another
painting being put upon it, according to the style

PAINTING AND SCULPTURE 81

of the later time. Here, again, we see the Biblical
history, pure and plain at the beginning, but by and
by combined with motives taken from the apoc-
ryphal sources and the lives of the saints. At the
annunciation the angel meets the Virgin Mary at
a well; it is to his mother Mary that the risen
Christ appears before he reveals himself to his dis-
ciples.

In the Gothic period sculpture is more favoured,
the walls being broken up into groups of columns
and large windows. This arrangement lent itself
more to the representation of individual figures of
saints; but even so Biblical personalities, and some-
times even Biblical scenes, were chosen, and the
large windows, with their stained glass, offered an-
other possibility for decoration based on Bible sto-
ries. Besides, the whole building is directed by a
scheme of Biblical symbolism difficult for us to un-
derstand but dear to the men of that period. They
loved symbolism. The cult of the Virgin Mary was
surrounded by it. She was the queen of heaven,
she was paradise, she was the tower, she was the
unicorn, she was the well, and so on, and all these
symbols were taken from or related to the Bible.

The growing wealth and the higher standard of
civilisation created a new demand for illuminated
manuscripts. The artists of this period did not fol-

82 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

low the classical scheme of filling the lower margin
with representations in water-colour; they put little
pictures, framed like those on the walls, into the
text itself, or they decorated the initials of each book
or chapter (Plate XIII). In turning over the pages
we admire the skill of these artists, their simplicity,
and sometimes their sense of humour. We seldom
recognise what an amount of reading and interpreta-
tion of the Bible is contained in these little pictures;
and how, on the other hand, they helped and stimu-
lated Bible reading. We are told of King Charles
V of France (1364-80), that he read the Bible all
through once a year during his reign. This means
a period of sixteen years. We are quite sure that
he had a beautifully illuminated copy, and we may
assume that the pictures helped him in performing
this religious exercise.

The art of painting is often accompanied by the
art of making verses, as I would rather call this
mediaeval poesy. And again it is the Bible or, to
speak more accurately, the Biblical history which
finds its expression in this art. Besides the inscrip-
tions added to the pictures and often given in versi-
fied form, there are a number of rhymed Bibles,
as these versifications of the Biblical history are
called. There are short verses giving the content
of each book or chapter of the Bible for mnemonic

Plate XIII— ENGLISH MINIATURE
(Latin Bible, Brit. Mus. Royal 1 D I)

Written in England, early thirteenth century. Initial I, Gen. 1:1, shows crea-
ation, fall, and redemption.

The three upper little compartments give each of them the work of two days:
Christ is the creator; the fourth brings the seventh day's rest: Chiist on the
throne; the next three compartments contain the story of Adam and Eve:
temptation, expulsion, and their working under the curse; the eighth com-
partment shows the Redemption as prophesied in Gen. 3 : 15.

The grotesque little figures are a beautiful illustration of medieval sense of
humour.

From "Fac-similes of Biblical Manuscripts." By permission of the Trustees of

the British Museum.

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Plate XIII -ENGLISH MINIATURE
(Latin Bible, Brit. Mus. Royal 1 D I)

From " Fac-similes of Biblical Manuscripts." By permission of the Trustees of

the British Museum.

POETRY 83

purposes. There are some real poems, too, dealing
with Biblical subjects.

The Bible and mediaeval art brings before us an-
other feature of civilisation, which is important, in-
deed, in our own time and which one would scarcely
think of as originating with the Bible. I mean the
theatre. The old classical drama and comedy had
entirely died out. Plautus and Terence were read
in the monasteries, not played, and so were the
Biblical comedies by Hrotswitha, of which we
have spoken, intended to be read only, not played.
There was nothing but jugglers, jesters, and dancers.
On festival days people amused themselves by
frivolous masquerades, which were looked upon by
the church authorities with suspicion and contempt
as survivals of heathen rites and therefore to be
frowned upon and abolished. Things took quite a
different turn when some of the clergy began at
Christmas and at Easter to present the sacred story
in acted form in order to illustrate the lesson. They
did it inside the church, directly before the altar.
It was nothing but a dialogue, developed out of the
lessons from the Scripture, the angel addressing
Mary, the shepherds coming to see the child, the
three Marys at the tomb and the angel speaking
to them, and so on, as simply and plainly as it

84 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

was told in the Bible and as it was usually painted
on the walls of the church. The people took delight
in these representations and they were soon en-
larged. They had to be removed from the choir
to the front of the church, the steps of the entrance
forming the stage. Soon more and more persons
appeared on the stage; the laity joined the per-
formers; the guilds (the trade-unions) undertook
the performance of the play, and out of these naive
little representations of the birth of Christ or his
passion and resurrection sprang gorgeous miracle-
plays which sometimes lasted four days and brought
the whole story from the creation to the last judg-
ment before the bewildered eyes of the spectators.
Nothing could make the Biblical history so familiar
to the people as these plays, in which hundreds took
part as performers and thousands attended as on-
lookers. There was but little art. They had no
scenery; the actors simply moved about in the
open space. But it was highly realistic. We are
told that they nearly killed the man who was act-
ing Judas Iscariot. It was also amusing. Medi-
aeval piety did not refrain from putting in just
before the crucifixion a sarcastic dialogue between
the blacksmith, who had to provide the nails,
and his wife, ending in a scuffle between them.
People liked to see this. It was on account of these

MIRACLE-PLAYS 85

undignified scenes, which kept increasing, that the
plays were abolished by secular and ecclesiastical
authorities in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies, when through humanism and the Reforma-
tion taste and piety had been refined. There are
still a few survivals, such as the Passion Play of
Oberammergau, which, however, has undergone a
thorough change. There is now a revival of these
popular plays, but I doubt if it will be successful.
Possibly the film will take the place, as it has
entered some churches already.

Men nearly always like to travel and the Germans
liked it exceedingly well. This tendency received
a special direction from the Bible; there were so
many sacred sites in Palestine which a Christian
wanted to see. So since the fourth century we
see many people from the West — from Gaul, Spain,
later on from Germany and England — travelling
to the Holy Land in order to visit all the places
connected with the sacred history of the Bible. At
the end of the eleventh century the pilgrims sud-
denly turned into crusaders, sailing by thousands,
fighting, settling down for a while, going back again.
Then after a period of nearly two centuries of vain
struggle for the possession of the Holy Land they
changed again into pilgrims. Meanwhile, the Holy
Land had changed also, and Christian piety, too.

86 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

They were now not so much interested in visiting
the sacred sites themselves as in gaining the indul-
gences which were granted in abundance to the vis-
itors to each of these places. We still possess a long
series of descriptions of these pilgrimages, increasing
from century to century not only in number but
also in size. The pilgrims did not rest until they
had fixed upon a certain location in Palestine for
every event in the Bible. Sometimes we seem to
catch the process of fixation. The hermit or monk
who served as guide had just told the company
everything he himself knew about the resurrection
of Lazarus. Then suddenly some one broke in with
the question, "And where was it that Jesus met
Martha?" and the poor hermit would be sure to
show him a rock or a doorway, of which he had
never thought before. They showed the pilgrims
the place where Abraham and Melchisedek met,
the tomb of Rachel, the monastery of Elijah on
Mount Carmel. They would show also the man-
tle Elijah left to Elisha or the widow's cruse of oil
which was always full. At Nazareth one could see
the rock from which the citizens tried to throw down
Jesus headlong, and one could see on the rock the
imprint of his body, which he left there — according
to a legendary addition to the story — when passing
through the crowd unhurt. On the Mount of Olives

PILGRIMAGES 87

was the Chapel of the Ascension. Here the pil-
grims could see and worship the footprints made
by Jesus when he leaped up toward heaven. Nay,
we are told that people used to carry away dust
from this place to use for charms, and yet the foot-
prints never disappeared. I am giving these ex-
amples in order to show how even here sacred
history and legend were mixed together. It is
obvious, however, from what I have said that the
pilgrimages contributed a great deal to make people
familiar with the Bible stories; for not only the pil-
grims themselves but all their people at home were
mightily interested in what they had seen and heard
in the Holy Land. We see them build churches
representing the Holy Sepulchre. In the later cen-
turies they make calvaries and stations on the way
to them, representing the main points on Jesus' way
to the cross, on the so-called Via Dolorosa at Jeru-
salem. There is even (as I have pointed out in my
book on Christusbilder) a mutual influence between
the pilgrimages and the passion plays, which ac-
counts for some changes in the order of scenes and
the fixing of places at Jerusalem.

The Bible continued to exercise its influence upon
the Law. As King Alfred of England when collect-
ing the laws of his people put the ten command-
ments at the beginning, so likewise the German col-

88 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

lections, Schwabenspiegel, Sacfoe?ispiegel, and so on,
have prefaces which present the national law as an
emanation from the law of God as contained in the
Old and New Testaments. Still more important
than these national laws was the so-called canon
law, the collection of ecclesiastical canons and de-
crees of the Roman bishops. It is remarkable that
this canon law, while incorporating naturally a good
deal of Biblical matter, such as the degrees of re-
lationship within which marriage is forbidden, does
not make so much use of Biblical authority as one
might expect. The decrees of the popes, it is true,
usually begin with a quotation from the Bible, but
that is more for the sake of appearances. The fact
that the law of the church, in spite of all references
to the Bible, was derived essentially from other
sources, and that the study and the knowledge of
this law were appreciated as the most important
attainment of a bishop or even a clergyman, is very
striking.

We have already noted the influence which the
Bible exerted upon social and commercial life.
The German notion of the king as representative
of the nation was easily combined with the theo-
cratic theory of the Old Testament. David's court,
with his mighty men (II Sam. 23), furnished a
good example for any royal court of this period.

LEGAL AND SOCIAL EFFECTS 89

Feudalism seemed to agree with the stories of the
patriarchs, as when Abraham led forth his trained
men, three hundred and eighteen in number, and
pursued the invaders who had taken captive his
brother's son Lot. Bondage, serfdom, even slavery,
seemed to be sanctioned by the Bible. The church
did not object to slavery provided the Christian
faith of the slave was respected; he was never to
be sold to a Jew or a pagan. The opposition against
slavery in the Middle Ages came from the monas-
teries. Here the ancient Stoic doctrine that all men
are equal and no man is to be treated as a brute
animal had been combined with the Christian view
of brotherhood that all are children of God, and
with the doctrine of the simple life. But this theory,
championed by the monasteries, spread only slowly.
It did not put an end to slavery in the northern
countries of Europe before the thirteenth century.
In the eastern and southern countries, where Chris-
tianity bordered on Mohammedanism, slavery did
not die out before the sixteenth century, and bond-
age remained everywhere until the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. The Bible defined the posi-
tion of the Jews, who as murderers of Jesus were
thought of as living under the divine punishment.
Whatever happened to them was regarded as a pen-
alty due to the crime of their fathers. So they were

90 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

exposed to all kinds of insults if they were not pro-
tected by the king, whose personal serfs they were
held to be. A large part of this general hatred of
the Jews was due to the fact that they were making
money out of their trade and their medical science,
being allowed by their own law to take usury from
the Christians. The law of Moses (in Deut. 23 : 20)
expressly says that a Jew may lend upon usury to a
foreigner, while he is forbidden to do so dealing
with a brother. Now, as we have already seen,
the Christian church adopted this law as forbidding
the Christians to lend at interest. The fatal result
was that trade on the basis of credit was made
almost impossible, and that the Jew was the only
one who could lend money at interest. As he
abused this opportunity by taking enormous usury,
it became evident that the one remedy to be used
from time to time was to take away from him by
force all the money he had made, thus restoring it
to its proper source. The Jew might be thankful
if he got off with his life. Among the many accusa-
tions brought against the Jews on such occasions,
one of the most effective was the indictment that
they had falsified their Bibles, putting in curses
against the Christians, or that they had insulted and
destroyed Christian Bibles. The criminal charge of
falsifying the holy Scriptures had been raised against

ARTIFICIAL BIBLICALITY 91

many heretics, too, and in most cases had been
proved to be untrue. It could be retorted that
the Christian church itself, during the first cen-
turies, had "improved" the Psalter in many a
place by slight Christian interpolations. Destroy-
ing books by fire was at this time one of the most
common means used by the church in fighting Jews
and heretics, and vice versa. The Bible recorded
not only the burning of the magical books at Ephesus
but also the burning of the holy Scriptures by Antio-
chus Epiphanes. So this also was " Bible tradition."

To sum up our survey of mediaeval civilisation
we find the Bible recognised as one, if not as the
one, foundation. Its influence was to be seen in
every department: the view of the world, the view
of history, arts and sciences, social life and com-
merce. It was to the Bible that people referred,
even if the thing had not been deduced from the
Bible; they made it appear Biblical, though it was
not so in itself, because they felt that it had to be
Biblical if it was to be recognised as an integral part
of Christian civilisation. That is what makes it so
difficult for us to define the real influence of the
Bible, there is so much artificial Biblicality.

The Bible was the leading norm, and it was recog-
nised as such. Never had the Bible had a higher
estimation or a more undisputed influence.

92 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

And yet the real influence of the Bible was a
limited one. It had not only to face the rivalry
of the classics on one side but of the Apocrypha,
legends, ecclesiastical traditions on the other. Its
real influence was mostly indirect. Biblical ideas
had been incorporated into the works on the world
and nature; Biblical history had been used for the
text-books of history, and now these books came
to be substitutes for the Bible. All read the His-
toria Scholastica of Peter Comestor; very few read
the Bible. And those few again read mostly the
historical parts of the Bible without caring for the
books of the prophets and the letters of the apostles.
A wide-spread substitute for the Bible was the
so-called Biblia Historialis, which gave the Biblical
history in a convenient not to say entertaining
and even amusing form. Another well-known sub-
stitute was the so-called Biblia Pauperum ("Bible
of the poor)," showing the most important fea-
tures of the life of Christ, together with typical
scenes from the Old Testament and some verses
from the Bible. By means of all these substitutes
the people became very familiar with Biblical his-
tory, but they knew nothing about doctrines. Theo-
logians, of course, did, but their eyes were blinded
by the tradition of the church, the doctrine of the
fathers. They interpreted the Bible according to

INFLUENCE LIMITED 93

tradition. That is the great demerit of this age;
the people had free access to the Bible, but the Bible
became alien to them by reason of its many substi-
tutes and its successful rivals. The reaction against
this will furnish the subject for our next chapter.

THE BIBLE STIRS NON-CONFORMIST MOVE-
MENTS (1150-1450)

Mediaeval civilisation has a twofold aspect. It
looks backward, to the old church and the old
Roman empire; so far it is Biblical and classical.
But it also looks forward, to the development of the
nations and later to the development of the indi-
vidual personality, as this has been realised in the
Renaissance; so far it is secular and, in a way,
modern. In the earlier part of the Middle Ages the
nations did not feel strong enough by themselves.
They were parts of the empire, and all children of
the one mother church. The church was training
them, and it fulfilled this task in an admirable way.
But the children grew up and the church lost its
power over them. They declared themselves of age
and independent at the very moment when the
church seemed to have the largest and most un-
doubted influence.

The church was training the nations by means of
the Bible, and now it is the Bible which stirs the

anti-ecclesiastical movements. The Bible had been

WITHDRAWN FROM PUBLIC USE 95

used by the church chiefly in an indirect way; parts
of the Bible or substitutes for it had taken its place.
Now the complete Bible made its appeal to the
people and gave directions which were exactly op-
posite to the training given by the church.

The Bible had originally been accessible to every-
body. In the first centuries the church itself had
insisted upon this publicity, as we have seen in
the first chapter. Then came a time when almost
no one could read and the clergy had the Bible
practically to themselves. They did not take away
the Bible from the hands of the laymen; the lay-
men themselves did not care for it because they
could not read it; they were totally dependent on
the clergy. But now civilisation had made a new
start; the art of reading became again popular.
And suddenly a desire for reading the Bible spread
among the people. The clergy were astonished to
find the laymen using their right of reading the
Bible themselves. That was something new, and
we see the clergy puzzled, we hear them complain.
They did not want people to read the Bible, for —
as they said — this would introduce them to heresy.
And so it proved.

The movement starts from the south of France.
As early as the eleventh century we hear of people
here who gather in order to hear the Bible read.

96 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

It is the cardinal Pietro Damiani, a friend of Greg-
ory VII, who complains of their presumption. They
are plain, simple folk, shopkeepers, farmers, wo-
men, having no theological education, and yet aim-
ing at understanding the Bible. The theologians
of this period treated the Bible as a book of secrets.
In order to understand it aright one had to be
initiated into the art of interpreting everything by
allegory according to the authority of the fathers.
They used to quote Saint Jerome, that the Bible
was a mysterious stream; one man can walk through
in safety while another would be drowned. They
therefore disapproved earnestly of this reading of
the Bible by unprepared tradesmen, women, and
children. But reading did not stop. The same
complaint occurs again and again during the next
decades. We hear of people in the diocese of Metz,
simple country folk, reading the Bible. The church
authorities already began to be alarmed and to take
a more severe attitude toward the offenders.

The main movement, to be mentioned here, is the
one connected with the name of Peter Waldo, a
merchant of Lyons, who was a zealous reader of the
Bible himself, and travelling about held frequent
meetings with people of the same sort. The story
of his "conversion," as given by the best authorities,
runs as follows. It was in 1176, the year of a great

PETER WALDO 97

famine, that one Sunday afternoon he listened to a
jongleur reciting the famous legend of Saint Alexis
the poor. He was struck by this heroism of poverty,
and the next day he asked a well-known master of
theology what was the surest way to God. The
master, following the best tradition of the mediaeval
church, told him to follow Christ's advice : " If thou
wouldst be perfect, go, sell whatsoever thou hast,
and give to the poor." So Peter separates himself
from wife and children and begins to live the life of
a poor man — a beggar. Others join him; two by
two, on foot, they go preaching the gospel. They
are not anxious for the morrow; they do not work;
they have faith that whatever they need will be
supplied to them. Thus they try to fulfil Christ's
commandments and to imitate his disciples. They
refuse to take an oath; they censure lying as a
deadly sin; they condemn all shedding of blood
either in war or in the execution of justice. The
fraternity called itself the Poor in Spirit. At the
beginning they thought themselves to be true mem-
bers of the church; only later, when the church
denied to them the right of preaching, did they form
a sect, Peter being ordained bishop and giving orders
to other members of the community.

Meanwhile a similar fraternity of poor men, or
humiliati as they were called here, had made their

98 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

appearance in the north of Italy. It was a kind of
workmen's union. So far as we know there was
no connection at the beginning between this move-
ment and the one at Lyons. Both started indepen-
dently, and it was only later that they came into con-
tact, without, however, amalgamating. The Italian
fraternity spread from Milan all through that region
and was rapidly extended into Germany, while from
Lyons the Poor went through France and even
through Spain. It was an enormous movement
among the laity, and it was stirred by the Bible.
Peter Waldo desired to have the Bible translated
into his own vernacular; and it was by reading the
Bible that these people got their enthusiasm and
their eagerness even to suffer persecution and death.
Many scholars in former days treated this
Waldensian movement as truly Protestant; they
used to call Peter Waldo and his followers re-
formers before the Reformation. The Protestant
church in Italy, calling itself Waldensian and grow-
ing in our own day more and more vigorously in
the spirit of Calvinistic Protestantism, seemed to
support this view. And yet it is wrong. The true
Protestantism of the Waldensians dates only from
the sixteenth century, when they came in contact
with Geneva, and then went over to Calvinism.
Before this they had been something quite different,

THE POOR OF LYONS AND MILAN 99

a purely mediaeval form of Christianity. The char-
acteristic point is that they take the gospel as a
law, exactly as the monks did. If the monks kept
to poverty, fasting, praying, and so on, in order
to fulfil the gospel's commands, these people did
the same; only they did not become monks and
enter a monastery; they continued to live in the
world, carrying on their ordinary business, because,
they said, the commands of the gospel were not
given to the monks only, but to every Christian.
They abolished the double standard of morality
which the church had established, the standard
of perfection, reached only by the clergy and monks,
and the standard of secular morality, kept by the
average Christian; but they abolished it in the
opposite way from the reformers, by making the
ascetic ideal the rule for every Christian. It was
from the Bible that they deduced this ideal and its
binding force for every Christian, but it was, of
course, the mediaeval understanding of the Bible
which they followed.

It is important to distinguish clearly this Wal-
densian movement from the so-called Albigensian
one. This also has to do with the Bible, and
sometimes seems closely akin to the former, but
is based on an entirely different principle. It goes
back to a very early time and originates outside

100 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

of Christianity. It was in the third century after
Christ in Persia, that a certain Mani tried to
reform the religion of Zoroaster by adding Gnostic
speculations. He failed, and was put to death to-
gether with some of his adherents. But the move-
ment spread and reached as far as Gaul and North
Africa in the West. Here this Gnostic doctrine of
Persian origin took the form of a Christian heresy.
Manicheism, as it was called, accepted the Christian
Bible, or at least some parts of it. It accepted still
more heartily the Christian Apocrypha, which
seemed to be written for the very purpose of sup-
porting its favourite doctrines. Saint Augustine,
having been for a long time an adherent of Man-
icheism, afterward spent a great deal of his energy
in arguing with this sect and refuting their theories
and their criticism. The leading idea was a strictly
dualistic conception of the world such as is char-
acteristic of Persian religion: there are two gods,
a good one and a bad one; in other words, God
and the devil are of the same rank. The devil
is the author of this bodily creation; whatsoever
is material comes from him; while God, the good
god, is purely spiritual and does not create any-
thing but spiritual beings. So man, who is of a
mixed nature, having a divine soul in a material
body, is bound to defy the devil by weakening the

MANICHEANS AND ALBIGENSIANS 101

material part of his being. He has to refrain from
meat and wine, from marriage, and from a number of
things which belong to the devil's dominion. This
highest degree of perfection only few could reach.
Therefore the Manicheans had several classes of
members: the lower classes living in the world had
to support the higher by their manual labour; the
higher class of the so-called "perfect" lived entirely
for prayer and spiritual exercises. It was a well-
organised body, extending over all the countries.
They had their own Pope, residing usually in the
East. They were persecuted in Persia, persecuted
in the Roman empire, persecuted later both by the
church and by the secular powers; but in spite of
all difficulties they kept on, living in secrecy and
trying to conform as much as possible in outward
appearance to the requirements for church members.
They went to the Catholic church, even attended
mass and took the holy communion — one charge
brought against them was that instead of eating the
consecrated bread they concealed it in their mouth
and spit it out afterward — but they had their own
clandestine congregations, often by night, often out-
side of the town. They appear here and there un-
der different names. They call themselves Cathari,
or the pure ones, from which is derived " Ketzer,"
the German word for heretics. In the East they

102 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

often are called Bogomils or Paulicians; in the West
the usual name given to them was Albigensians,
from a town, Albi, in the south of France, where
they had their headquarters.

The attitude of these Albigensians toward the
Bible was a somewhat divided one. They accepted
the New Testament and interpreted it according to
their dualistic theory as a law of asceticism, herein
corresponding to the church's interpretation. They
praised exceedingly the fourth Gospel, and used its
opening verses at their solemn initiation, the so-
called consolamentum, by which an adherent got the
degree of "perfect" and became a member of the
highest class. But they rejected the Old Testament,
either the whole of it or the greater part, some ad-
mitting that the Psalter, Job, the books of Solomon,
and the books of the prophets were inspired by the
good god or (as they used to say) were written in
heaven. The rest, they said, came from the devil,
and they criticised strongly the historical parts of
the Old Testament, in particular the account of
the creation given in Genesis. They took this and
all the other stories in a strictly literal sense, not
allowing for any allegorical interpretation. It was
in the discussions against the Manicheans that Saint
Augustine, and through him the Western church,
learned to value the allegorical method of interpre-

ALBIGENSIANS AND WALDENSIANS 103

tation. It was the easiest way of evading all the
difficulties which were raised by the criticism of the
Manicheans.

This Manichean or, to use the mediaeval expres-
sion, Albigensian heresy could hardly be defined as
a movement incited by the Bible. It was wholly
different from the Waldensian movement and its
allies. The Waldensians were at the beginning
loyal members of the Catholic church, and were
driven into opposition only by the resistance of the
clergy, not being allowed to read and to use their
Bible and being opposed and disturbed in their
harmless meetings; but after having been separated
from the church they kept aloof from it. The
Albigensians, on the other hand, were at heart op-
posed to everything in Christianity. They were, in
fact, adherents of another religion, pretending for the
sake of safety to be members of the Catholic church.
Yet just this attitude of the Albigensians was what
made it so difficult to distinguish between the two
movements, and has caused a curious confusion.
The Waldensians, with their frank and open opposi-
tion to certain institutions of the church, were taken
by many to be the more dangerous, and were there-
fore attacked and persecuted more severely than
the Albigensians, who knew how to conform them-
selves to the outward appearance of church life.

104 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

What was the attitude of the church toward these
non-conformist movements? According to the cur-
rent theory of the time there was no salvation out-
side the church; there was no room for various de-
nominations. A man belonged to the church by the
very fact that he was born in a Catholic commu-
nity and consequently was baptised. He had to
attend the church, which procured for him eternal
salvation, and if he neglected his duties, he was
compelled to perform them by the church authorities
perhaps with the help of the secular power. A man
had no right to try his own way to salvation; he
was forced to use the means provided for him by
the church. And if he did not submit he was to
be extinguished in order that his devilish spirit of
heresy might not infect others; possibly he himself
could be saved by being deprived of his sinful body
and godless life. This theory gave a legal sanction
for using all kinds of persuasion by force, for ap-
plying cruel tortures, and for inflicting death by
burning, hanging, beheading.

But the church found that the movements could
not be mastered in this way. In order to extirpate
the evil, the underlying cause had to be rooted out
or else its energy turned in another direction.

The first method was tried for the Bible. It
was the Bible which had stirred the Waldensian

BIBLE PROHIBITION FOR LAYMEN 105

and similar movements; so the Bible was to be kept
away from the people. When asked by the bishop
of Metz what he ought to do with regard to the
associations of Bible readers in his diocese, Pope
Innocent III replies (1199) that of course the study
of the Bible is to be encouraged among the clergy,
but that all laymen are to be kept from it, the
Bible being so profound in its mysteries that even
scholars sometimes get beyond their depth and are
drowned. At the end of his letter he refers to the
holiness of Mount Sinai as expressed in Ex. 19 : 12,
13: "Take heed to yourselves, that ye go not up
into the mount, or touch the border of it: whosoever
toucheth the mount shall be surely put to death:
no hand shall touch him, but he shall surely be
stoned, or shot through; whether it be beast or man,
it shall not live." Likewise, the Pope says, if a lay-
man touches the Bible he is guilty of sacrilege and
ought to be stoned or shot through. This amounts
to a general prohibition of Bible reading for the
laity. It was especially against the translations
of the Bible into the vernacular tongues that the
church's ordinances were directed. In the later
centuries of the Middle Ages the prohibitions against
Bible reading by the laity, against translating the
Bible, and against selling the Bible became more
frequent. But it is exactly this frequent repetition

106 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

which makes it evident that the prohibitions were
for the most part neglected. The best known is a
book ordinance, issued by Bishop Berthold of Mainz
in 1485-6, in which the bishop forbids the printing
and selling of Bibles unless they are annotated by
approved church theologians, the Bibles in the ver-
nacular language being forbidden altogether. We
know of a Strassburg printer who was at work
printing a German Bible at the very time this ordi-
nance was issued. He did not stop printing, he only
took care not to mention his name in the book.
Evidently he was sure that he could find a sale for
his book.

There was another way of overcoming these non-
conformist tendencies, and it proved to be more
successful; the church tried to direct them and put
them to its own service. A good example of this
method is given in the history of the movement
started by Saint Francis of Assisi. At the beginning
this was exactly like the Waldensian movement
that spread through the south of France and the
north of Italy, and may have received some influ-
ence from it; for we know that the family of Saint
Francis had French relations and that the busi-
ness of his father brought him into contact with
people from the North. But the conversion of Saint
Francis was independent, so far as we know. It

SAINT FRANCIS 107

again was caused by the Bible. Once at mass he
heard the lesson from the Gospel, and was struck by
the same words which had struck so many thought-
ful Christians before him: "If thou wouldest be
perfect, go, sell that which thou hast and give to
the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven;
and come follow me." He at once throws away stick,
bag, purse, shoes to become the true follower of the
poor Jesus and of his poor apostles, to be himself
the apostle of the gospel of poverty, the lover of his
good lady Poverty, as he likes to call her. When the
first two disciples had joined him he takes them at
daybreak to a small chapel, takes from the altar the
book of the Gospels, and (so the legend tells us),
opening it three times, every time comes upon the
words quoted above. Therefore they were made the
basis of Saint Francis' rule for his community, to-
gether with the instruction given to Christ's disciples
in Luke 9 : 1-6, and Matt. 16 : 24-27: " If any man
would come after me, let him deny himself and take
up his cross and follow me; for whosoever would
save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose
his life for my sake shall find it; for what shall a man
be profited if he shall gain the whole world and for-
feit his life, or what shall a man give in exchange for
his life?" It was the desire for martyrdom inspired
by this passage which caused Saint Francis to go to

108 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

Palestine and preach the gospel to the Moslems.
In his retreat at Mount Alverno he assiduously read
the history of the passion, until he became so deeply
impressed by it that it had a corporal effect upon
him. He became stigmatised, the five wounds of
Christ appeared on his body. Saint Francis com-
posed an interesting paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer,
and his famous hymn to the sun is nothing else
than a beautiful reproduction of the 148th Psalm.
When dying he asked for John 13 to be read to him.
Thus all his life is accompanied and profoundly af-
fected by the Bible. His preaching is an attempt
at bringing the pure gospel of poverty before the
people as simply and plainly as he found it in the
Gospels according to the ascetic understanding of
that time.

Now this would have turned into a non-conform-
ist movement, like that of the Poor of Lyons or the
Poor of Milan, had not the bishop from the beginning
protected Saint Francis from his father's wrath.
Then at a later period Cardinal Ugolino of Ostia,
known from his later life as Pope Gregory IX, be-
came a protector of Saint Francis and his frater-
nity and managed to make of it a regular order in
the service of the church. It was not Saint Francis
who founded the order of the Franciscans or Friars,
but some of his first pupils and friends, and certain

FRANCIS, ORDER AND THE CHURCH 109

high dignitaries of the church abused him for their
own purposes. They put upon Saint Francis and
his fraternity the whole machinery of a religious
body of the church. There was to be a general, and
numerous provincials, and an annual meeting of
delegates; there were monasteries ruled by abbots
or guardians, and later these monasteries received
endowments. Besides the monks and the nuns
who formed the first and second orders, there was
a third order of Saint Francis including those lay-
men who wished to belong to the order and enjoy
its religious benefits but were prevented by their
families from entering the monastery. This comes
very near to the ideal put forth by the Poor of
Lyons, but the organisation kept the whole body
always in touch with the church and its authority.
The non-conformist tendency of the movement had
been taken out and it had been turned into an in-
strument of ecclesiastical policy.

To be sure, the spirit of Saint Francis reacted
against this system, inspired, as it was, more by ec-
clesiastical shrewdness than by Christian piety. The
saint himself at the end of his life fell out with his
friends and especially with the cardinal protector.
He felt himself too much the gallant knight of his
lady Poverty to make himself a tool of ecclesiastical
policy. He detected a spirit of worldliness, and in

110 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

his last will he warned his monks not to yield them-
selves to it. Nevertheless, the cardinal when pro-
moted to be Pope ordered Saint Francis, two years
after his death, to be worshipped as a saint, in a
bull of canonisation very characteristic for the style
of this time, filled as it is with Biblical allusions.
"From this bull," says one of Saint Francis' recent
biographers, "you learn much more about the
history of David and the Philistines than about
the life of Saint Francis."

But the spirit of Saint Francis reacted even more
after his death. One part of his followers insisted
upon the strict rule of having no possessions at all;
they treated the other part, which permitted pos-
sessions in common, as a set of worldly apostates
from the master's ideals, far from the law of the
gospel. And as the church authorities decided in
favour of the less strict group, the spiritual party,
as they called themselves, openly rebelled against
the church, while the emperor, being on bad terms
with the Pope, granted them his protection. From
the book of Revelation they deduced that the offi-
cial church was the great Babylon and the Pope
the antichrist. So even this movement, started by
the Bible, ended partly as a non-conformist anti-
ecclesiastical undertaking.

But the main part of the Franciscans, or Friars,

THE FRIARS AT THE UNIVERSITIES 111

as they are called from the Italian frari (brothers),
kept to the straight line of ecclesiastical discipline,
and, together with the other order founded nearly at
the same time by Saint Dominic the Spaniard for
the special purpose of repelling heresy, they became
the powerful army of the church directed against all
non-conformist movements such as the Waldensians
and Albigensians. Both orders made themselves at
home at the universities — at this period Bologna and
Paris, later Oxford and Cambridge — and soon be-
came very influential. They had rich monasteries
and great libraries, and made Bible study their fa-
vourite subject. It is a remarkable contrast between
Saint Francis, who, having only one book, a New
Testament, gives this away in order to help a poor
widow, and the great stores of books in the convents
of Saint Francis' fraternity. The saint himself did
not wish his monks to possess, privately, anything,
not even a Psalter, and now they owned huge Bibles
and commentaries and read and studied like any
scholar of the secular clergy. Saint Francis did
not wish scholarship among his brethren; it was to
him something worldly, opposed to the true prin-
ciples of poverty. Now members of his order sat
in the chairs of the universities and were among the
leading teachers of the church.
It is due to the Friars that Bible study is again

112 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

favoured at the mediaeval universities. But even
these Friars were taken away from the Bible by
the current tendency toward scholasticism. Dog-
matics, systematics, dialectics were what everybody
wanted. The curriculum of a student of theology
required first a training in Biblical studies, then he
had to go to attend lectures on the Sententice, as they
called the text-book for systematics. Likewise the
professor was bound first for two or three years to
teach Biblical matters before he could touch upon
systematics. In a number of German universities
there still remain some traces of this mediaeval reg-
ulation. But we are told that both professors and
students hurried on to get rid of their Bible course
as quickly as possible in order to reach the higher
level of dialectics and systematics. The Bible among
these theologians was a text-book for the junior
classes, but not held in great esteem as compared
with the treasured text-book of the senior classes,
the Liber sententiarum.

It is no wonder that a reaction against this system
of scholasticism was stimulated by the Bible itself.
Two streams we may distinguish, both starting
within the boundaries of the church and of eccle-
siastical theology, both inclined to overflow these
boundaries, and both ending in non-conformist
movements.

MYSTICS 113

One stream is represented by the mystics. They
are pious people, led by high-church preachers,
Master Eckhard, Tauler, Suso, and others. These
preachers are given to thorough study of the Bible.
But their allegory turns out to be far different
from that traditional with the fathers. They care
for God and the soul, and for nothing else in the
world. Their favourite text-book is Canticles: the
Christian soul as the bride of God or of Christ.
This mysticism sometimes comes into collision with
the sacramental view of the church. Being in com-
plete spiritual union with God, the mystic wished
no outward sign; piety was love, not creed. The
church instinctively felt that where these ideas were
prevailing the whole ecclesiastical system was in
danger, and tried to stop the movement. But by
this very opposition the movement became more
anti-ecclesiastical than it had been before. The
mystic circles withdrew themselves from the super-
intendence of the church, they read the Bible, they
read the books of their spiritual fathers, and they
became more and more sure of their own mystical
theory as opposed to the doctrine of the church.

The second stream is still more important. Some
theologians reading the works of Saint Augustine
discovered that the present church doctrine was not
what it pretended to be, the true representation of

114 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

the doctrine of the fathers, that there was a large
difference between the real tradition of the old
church and the scholastic doctrines of their own
time. And, as they went on, they found that the
Bible, viewed according to the interpretation of the
fathers, did not support the theories of the modern
scholars. So they departed from scholasticism and
built their own systems on the basis of the Bible as
interpreted by Saint Augustine. It was a general
movement; men of this kind were found in many
places. It is difficult to say how far they were de-
pendent one upon another. Some were quiet men
of letters; some gained high positions, like John
Gerson, who was elected chancellor of the Univer-
sity of Paris; others were aggressive reformers.
Mixing in politics, these became leaders of an anti-
hierarchical and at last anti-ecclesiastical movement.
We are not concerned here with the political side
of the question, which sometimes seems to be pre-
dominant. Thus in England John Wycliffe stirred
up a long-lived struggle. Influenced by his writ-
ings John Huss in Bohemia entered on a cam-
paign for true Christianity which instead led to
a national Czech movement. In 1409 the German
students of the University of Prague left the city
and moved to Leipzig. After the martyrdom of their
hero at Constance in 1415 the Hussites became an

WYCLIFFE AND HUSS 115

aggressive national and militant party, constantly
invading and devastating Germany. It needed
shrewd politics and the united forces of the empire
to keep them back from the Silesian and Saxon
frontiers.

As so often happens in history, at the end it is
hard to recognise the causes which have led to
the result. In spite of all political appearances it is
true that it was really the Bible which stirred
up these two movements, the Wycliffite and the
Hussite. The proof is given in the fact that both
Wycliffe and Huss not only were fond of reading
the Bible, but both tried also to make their people
familiar with the Bible by procuring translations
into the vernacular. In this way they aimed to
provide the laity with the evidence of this one
true authority and so to protect them against the
adulteration of Christianity due to scholasticism
and hierarchy.

The circulation and influence of the English ver-
sion made by Wycliffe — or, as some scholars think,
at Wycliffe's instance — is shown by the fact that
in spite of persecution and destruction one hun-
dred and seventy copies are still preserved, one
hundred and forty of which belong to a second
revision, made by a younger friend of Wycliffe's,
John Purvey (Plate XIV). It was the first English

116 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

translation of the whole Bible, a good specimen of
English, but, like most mediaeval translations based
upon the Latin Vulgate, preserving the faults of
that version and adding others of its own. There
are numbers of Czech Bibles in existence, both in
manuscript and in print, but not yet thoroughly
studied. It is remarkable that in this Hussite Bible,
as well as in some German translations of the same
time, readings are found which go back to the very
earliest period of textual development. They be-
long to the southern branch of French tradition and
are supplied probably by Latin, French, or Italian
copies which came from Lyons or Milan. This is
clear evidence that it was through the Waldensians
that the Bible spread in the vernacular of Italy, Bo-
hemia, and Germany, and that the later movements,
while originating independently, were in close rela-
tion with the earlier ones. It is the Bible which
not only stirred all these movements but connected
them one with the other.

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Plate XI V— WYCLIFFE'S BIBLE
(Brit. Mus. Egerton, 617-8)

A beautiful copy in folio of the first edition; it is interesting to compare Eeerton,
1171, a small octavo copy of the second edition, written for private use.

From "Fac-similes of Biblical Manuscripts." By permission of the Trustees of

the British Museum.

THE BIBLE TRAINS PRINTERS AND TRANS-
LATORS (1450-1611)

We have been led in the last chapters far back into
the Middle Ages. Now we approach the great time
of discoveries. It is difficult to say who made the
most important discovery, Columbus crossing the
Atlantic to find a new world, in which a new civili-
sation was to arise, or Gutenberg inventing the art
of printing and thereby revolutionising the world
of intellectual life and consequently the history of
the Bible.

During the last centuries of the Middle Ages the
Bible had been much copied. At the University of
Paris booksellers, helped by some scholars, under-
took to issue a special edition for the benefit of the
students. This Paris edition, easily recognised by
its fine type of handwriting and its blue and red
decoration, became the standard Bible text for men
of learning. At the same time many a pious mem-
ber of the Fraternity of the Common Life, which was
founded by Gerhard de Groot at Zutphen (in Hol-
land), copied the Bible in his miserable cell with

117

118 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

great skill. The monasteries began to have large
collections of Bible editions. There were large copies
consisting of four or eight volumes in folio, for use
in chapel, and smaller ones, in one volume, for pri-
vate reading. We know of a regulation made for
all monasteries of the Order of Saint Augustine, that
in the catalogues of their libraries all Bibles should
be put under the letter A. There was no need for
such a regulation in the pre-Carolingian time, when
a monastery would scarcely have one complete Bible.
But now let us try to realise what it meant that
each copy should be made by itself, the writer paint-
ing (as we may say) letter by letter, and this through
hundreds and thousands of pages. The copyists
showed wonderful skill. Some of these manuscripts
look exactly like printed books; one letter is just
like the other; no slipping of the pen! Nevertheless
it was inevitable that the copyist should make mis-
takes from time to time. He dropped a letter, a
word, even a line; unconsciously he changed the
order of the words. He brought in something which
he happened to have in his mind. When he was
familiar with his Bible, some parallel confused him.
It is only natural that in copying a book of this size
even the best copyist should make some hun-
dreds of blunders; the next copyist would intro-
duce other hundreds, sometimes even by an un-

GROWING CIRCULATION 119

happy attempt at correcting the blunders of the
former. So it went on till in the end the text be-
came filled with mistakes. Of course, there was a
remedy. After having finished the copy the writer
himself or some one else was expected to compare
it carefully with the original and correct all the
blunders. But from personal experience in reading
proofs we know how easily a real blunder escapes
our attention. One ought to go over a proof-sheet
three times at least in order to avoid all mistakes.
So we cannot wonder that the Bibles copied by
hand contained errors, and considering all the dif-
ficulties it is surprising that the copies were most
of them so nearly correct.

It was Johann Gutenberg, a native of Mainz, re-
siding some time at Strassburg as a silversmith, then
again returning to Mainz, who made the great dis-
covery that several copies could be printed at once
by using letters cut out of wood or metal. People
had used woodcuts before his time. Engraving
large blocks of wood with pictures and letters, they
printed the so-called block-books, as a cheap sub-
stitute for illuminated manuscripts. Gutenberg's
great idea was that instead of using a woodcut block
for the page one might compose a page by using sep-
arate, movable letters, putting them together accord-

120 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

ing to the present need, then separating them and
using them again. We are not interested here in
the technical part of the work; imperfect as it was,
it was surely a great advance. Now one got a hun-
dred copies, two hundred, or even more without
any difference between them. When the proofs had
been corrected carefully the Bible was sure to have
as few mistakes as possible; and if the printer still
found some errors, he could easily correct them for
the whole edition by adding a printed list of errata,
or necessary corrections, at the end of the volume.
It was only by printing that uniformity of text
became possible.

The important fact for our present investigation is
that it was the Bible which Gutenberg chose to be the
first printed book. This fact illustrates the estima-
tion in which the Bible was held. It shows at the
same time the demand for Bible copies; the printer
felt sure that it would sell and pay. It was an enor-
mous enterprise to put the fresh, inexperienced art
of printing straightway at a task so big as this. It
took four years to print the first Bible, from 1453
to 1456. While working at it Gutenberg had to
try some smaller things which would bring him
money immediately, school-books, letters of indul-
gence, and so on, but his main care was given to
the Bible. It contained six hundred and forty-one

GUTENBERG'S NEW ART 121

leaves, with two columns on each page, and forty-
two lines in each column (Plate XV). The initials
were not printed, but were supposed to be illumi-
nated by hand; a small letter was printed in the
free space to indicate what kind of letter the illumi-
nator had to paint. Probably not more than one
hundred copies were printed, a third part of them
on parchment. Out of the thirty-one copies which
have been preserved, or, to speak more accurately,
are known as such, ten are luxuriously printed on
parchment and illuminated, each in a different way,
but all very fine and costly. It is obvious that
Gutenberg put into this printing not only a great
amount of labour but much money, too; and there
was no assurance that it would come in again
in a short time. Like many ingenious discoverers
and inventors, he was no business man; he was al-
ways in need of money. So when his first Bible was
not yet finished one of his creditors, John Fust, of
Mainz, took all his apparatus from him and, associat-
ing himself with an apprentice of Gutenberg's, Peter
Schoffer by name, brought the printing of the first
Bible to completion, thus depriving the inventor of
the financial success as well as of the glory. But
Gutenberg was not discouraged. He immediately
began, with a new set of letters, the printing of a
second Bible, containing thirty-six lines in each col-

122 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

umn and so amounting to eight hundred and eighty-
one leaves in size. He printed it in the years 1456
to 1458. Again his rivals, Fust and Schoffer, pub-
lished, in 1462, a third Bible, called sometimes the
Bible of Mainz. It has forty-eight lines in each
column.

Thus the printing of the Bible was inaugurated.
The new art quickly spread all over Germany,
and printing-presses were established at Strassburg,
Bamberg, Nuremberg, Basel, Cologne, Liibeck, and
many other places. The art entered France and
England with less success, the government in both
countries being partly opposed to it and partly
trying to make it a royal privilege. Good printers
worked at Paris and Lyons. The most splendid
presses were at Venice, where the Doge cham-
pioned the new art even against attacks from Rome.
Before the year 1500 ninety-two editions of the
Latin Bible were issued by these various presses,
according to Mr. Copinger, who possessed the larg-
est collection of printed Bibles. (He registers four
hundred and thirty-eight editions of the Latin Bible
during the sixteenth century.) In addition to these
we have a great number of printed Bibles in the ver-
nacular of Germany, France, Italy, Bohemia, and so
on. There was a sudden outpouring of Bibles. But
we must not overestimate the circulation. These

D t b rijrrio uo! urumtb QtiDLcu nour ■
rit rqui ulrn aD Duo purla-rutta to
irmouiB Duratatiitrijinounqm fira
piinrart fraortia a frptuarjinta tnttfc
prtribue no tnTraai at 2i tt ttganuo
Die n ftuDiofo tuiq; frnffe mr fame-
noambirjoniultoB forrqui urt inui=
Diaurlfiipttalra malmt tonmimrtc
tt mora pttdara quam Drftrrtrtt Dt
airbuJmra mams rum quani Dr pu
tiffnao fort nniact. e^•pllflrp>olog;',
.Itmpir iitrrhfncoii ««l (biiloqiMx-
Jfaruouir qui no
obijt in rofdm ira
piarurrtmuiapr
tarorumnoutnt:
tcincatbtorapfii'
_ lmrnotruit.^ to
inlrgt ffimininolutaomiBrimlrgf
ttna rattlirabif Dit ar nortt.€-ir ttu
tamif.iigiiu quoD platatum rB from
DituriiiB aquarii : qo' ftuctu fuu Dibit
in nxfuofcit fcbu nua no ttflatt : i
orama qurcucn fantt profprtabutur.
hQon fit imprj no ut : fro tanr|pui.
mo qulpraint utruo a taat mit Jt »
tjo no raurtrut irapi) f hiDirio : nnn
pitarorro in taftlio iuftocuX •■> uoni<
am noun ffirauiue uia into} : uttt
liarura pmbn\f>falmu$ Auuo
" uart ftrrnuttut grafl : tt Rifi rot'

Ditari Cunt inariia;Mratxtut

i ttgra trttt tt prinripra routnrcunt in
oral : anuma Duni i aDufurrnml 0*.
SG ^ruraranf owd'anm : i jinatn'
anomoiugu Uraij^mtebtratiav
baimulmroa^Dnsrubianabitnr.
C;uniloqurfaDto8inirarua:im
furort fuo toturbabit toe^ftro ni-
ton ramtuf fura tt| ab to Cuptr fron
monrtro fanrrurtf.pDime prtctptu
riuBjOororanB Dint aft rot filmo^

w\\

>ofc\

raniB ta to : rgo botsir grauite.it .)o«
Bula a rat tt oabo ribi grurre QtttDi-
tattui tua : « rnMi o nr tua iminoa
tttrc^ tgta roa i oinja fatta : :i ran
qj oae Erjuli tofaanto roa. Ht nut
rtgro intdugirc : truDiirani q mbita*
uatHraV* mntftjaoiriraon:ttf|
ultatr n rii rmnorc^ffrrbiiDirt Hi
Ihpliuom : nr quaoo itafratur lnrai>
mmprrranaDtuiaturla. urarr
arfttu in brtui ira riuo: btari omnta
qui tonftBuntm to .pfalmns tfiwd
Oim fugntt f.tnr in .rbfoion fill) fui
^Sjnmrnt qo mlnplitao Cunt qui
'■fc^rabular ratf mulriirtfurgut ao<
urturra mt,tl;uln oicur anirar turc :
notSfaluarpfiinDtonuB. G uaur
Dirt Fufrtpro! mr* ta : gloria nua * tt-
altaBtaput ratu.i^*0R rata oDDn
rrtrnu rlamaui : i rr au Diuit mtct ind •
tt farro fuo. 50 b:miui ^ fajnrar'
Jura : ■» ttfurrtti quia Drle fufttpit rat.
%-ionnmrbo raiiiapopui!tinu£an<
na rat : tturgt brlt faluii rat Eat Dtua
rnwa.iT ?uotuaraai ptuffifti orate
aoiifantto raubt fine raura : Dratte
ntratoTu tcmunBi/Ojrauu tft W :
ttutpttpopuul mum bmrtiiitionm,
liiminiiiiicimuiubuv pfalmiwO
rdp^runirarararfrfautriihtmttniB
Bfa/j rufiirit mtt : i rdbulanont Dil a
tarn raittri.; I > Httrtt rati : tt tpmoi o«
lanont rata>r(ilii tprainu uTrcquo
' tjtauitorcc:urquiD Dil'.ginBuarma.-
ttmttquttiriBnitDanurfl i*z\t ftitott
quoraa rainutauir Dna ritwrafml :
Una ttaumtt rat ru daraautto aa tu.
M'tautraini tt oolitt ptttact : qut Di=
tin e in totbibua DtQne in nib iubua
orflno fflrapunmmrm»S atnfitatt
famntiu iufitnt i fpratt in tflraino :
nrulri Ditunt qe oftramt nobie tqu^.

Jfi-

Plate XV-GUTENBERGS FIRST BIBLE
(42 lines, Mainz, 1453-1456)

Copy at Leipzig, on parchment, beautifully illuminated. The capitals are

painted by hand, but indicated by small printed letters.
From "Erfindung der Buchdruckerkunst." Published by Velhagen & Klasing,

Bielefeld, Germany.

BIBLE PRINTING 123

editions contained scarcely more than two hundred
copies each; they were most of them in large folio,
very unwieldy, and the price was enormous, though,
of course, not so high as it is now, when for one
copy of Gutenberg's first Bible $20,000 is paid.
The Bible was not available for the average man.
We know of scholars copying for themselves the
Bible or the New Testament from a printed Bible.
The clergy were rather opposed to this printing.
They did not in the least encourage the printers;
on the contrary, they tried to cause as many dif-
ficulties as possible. Therefore the circulation was
a limited one. Copies were bought by churches
for their services, by princes, and by very rich
merchants, as to-day a splendid work is bought
more as a luxury than as something for daily use.
One cannot say that at this period the Bible, even
by printing, acquired a circulation among the peo-
ple.

This was accomplished only through the Refor-
mation. It was Luther's German translation which
made the printed Bible popular and caused a num-
ber of similar translations. In order to make the
Bible what it was destined to be, the book of the
people, the printer and the translator had to work
together.

In former times many Protestants held the view

124 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

that Luther rediscovered the Bible, which had been
almost entirely forgotten. They thought that there
had been a meagre transmission of the Bible and
no translation into the vernacular at all. This
view, of course, is untenable. We have seen
what a circulation the Bible had in the last cen-
tury before the Reformation, and that it had been
translated into almost every vernacular. Never-
theless, Luther's version is a landmark in the his-
tory of translation; it marks a new period and rep-
resents the beginning of a new sort of translation.
In order to realise this, let us look back over the
former history of translations. In the first period
we found the Bible translated from the Greek into
Latin, Syriac, Coptic; in the next period Gothic,
Armenian, Georgian, Libyan, and Ethiopic were
added, not to mention the several revisions of the
former translations. About 600 a. d. the Bible was
known in eight languages; in each of them there had
been several attempts at translating. There were
different dialects, too; in Coptic no less than five.
The spread of Christianity in the next period is shown
by the fact that the Bible is translated — and this
again several times — into Arabic and Slavonic from
the Greek, and into German, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic,
and French from the Latin — rather, I should say,
parts of the Bible, for it was only parts which people

FORMER TRANSLATIONS 125

at this period tried to translate. We hear of a Gos-
pel, of a Psalter, of one or another book translated
into the vernacular. Only when stimulated by the
popular movements of the next period, as we have
seen in the fifth chapter, was the work of translating
into the vernacular prosecuted on a larger scale; from
the thirteenth century on we may speak of Bibles
in the vernacular. Beginning in the southeast of
France, the tendency spread over Italy and Germany.
We can still trace the influence of the French Wal-
densian Bible in the earliest Italian translations and
also in some of the German ones. Another circle
is defined by the northern French translation, which
influenced the Flemish and Dutch and possibly even
the Scandinavian. All these are based not so much
upon the Bible itself as on a rearrangement known
as the Historical Bible, telling the stories and omit-
ting the doctrinal portions. A new start was made
in England by Wycliffe, and this caused the Bo-
hemian translation into Czech, which was again in-
fluenced by the Waldensian Bible. It is like a net
thrown all over Europe. We may count more than
a dozen languages, many of them represented by
different dialects and by several separate renditions,
which were added to the eight languages of the
former periods. The culmination came in the fif-
teenth century, when everywhere fresh translations

126 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

were attempted. In Germany more than forty dif-
ferent types of translation can be counted, and
one of them, containing the whole Bible, was printed
fourteen times before the period of the Reformation
(Plate XVI). There was only one translation, how-
ever, with a value of its own, and that was the
Spanish, for this was made from the Hebrew Old
Testament by the help of some Spanish Jews. Both
the king of Spain and the high clergy showed at that
time a remarkable breadth of view in trying to get a
trustworthy translation. All other versions in the
West were based upon the Latin Vulgate as the
recognised Bible of the church, and they were made
with more devotion than knowledge. The trans-
lators usually did not know Latin well nor were
they masters of their own language. They trans-
lated word for word, and the result was sometimes
strange. It is of no great importance that, not
recognising in "Tertius" and "Quartus" proper
names, one of these translators said "the third" and
"the fourth." It was worse when another explained
"encsenia" in John 10 : 22, the feast of dedication,
as meaning "wedding," or declared the words in
Matt. 27 : 46, "Eli, Eli," to be Greek. Sometimes
the translation resulted in pure nonsense, and even
where it made sense, it was difficult and often far
from the true meaning. Now humanism insisted

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to Iron mtmo:irhrtt^t(tvB«g.> W ifttm of;
&n» gr»b:% tftwn hrUgli* «n i«n jantj miio got

Plate XVI-FIRST GERMAN BIBLE

Printed at Strassburg by G. Mentell in 1466: the progress in printing made in

these ten years is remarkable.

Entnommen aus W. Walthers "Deutsche BibelUbersetzung des Mittelalters."

Verlag von Hellmuth Wollermann in Braunschweig.

LUTHER'S TRANSLATION 127

upon going back to the original languages. Eras-
mus, in 1516, published the first edition of the
New Testament in Greek. We see how Luther,
at this time professor at the University of Witten-
berg, lecturing upon Romans when this edition
came into his hands, was impressed by this new
source of information. He eagerly set himself
to learn Greek with the help of his friend Melanch-
thon, and so he was prepared for the great task
of translating the New Testament directly out
of the Greek into German. It was during his
exile in the Wartburg that he found the neces-
sary time to make this translation. It appeared
in print in September, 1522, and it is astonish-
ing in how short a time this New Testament cir-
culated all through Germany. It was reprinted
everywhere, and often very carelessly, so that Lu-
ther had to complain against the printers as falsify-
ing his translation. He himself did not take any
payment for his work; he wanted the publishers to
sell it as cheaply as possible. And it was a master-
piece, not only for the beauty of the language, which
was the best and most popular German that had
ever been written but also in the way Luther
translated, giving not the single words but the
meaning of the sentences, not transferring from
one vocabulary to the other but transmuting (if one

128 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

may say so) the whole expression of thought from
Greek into German. The Bible became a German
book; one hardly feels that he is reading a trans-
lation. Luther had more trouble with the Old Tes-
tament. In order to master the Hebrew he had to
rely on friends; he even asked some Jewish rabbis
to join their meetings. He tells us that they often
had to look for a single word three or four weeks;
that in particular Job was so difficult that they
scarcely finished three lines in four days. The Pen-
tateuch was ready in the year 1523; then year after
year the work went on. The prophets were not
finished until 1532, and in 1534 the first complete
Bible was issued. The work was highly praised by
Luther's friends and unduly criticised by his an-
tagonists. He himself replied sharply to such
criticism, and he had a right to do so because the
attempts made by Eck and Emser, the champions of
Roman Catholicism, to translate the Bible them-
selves were feeble and betrayed much dependence
on Luther's translation, which they had so severely
criticised. Luther himself never felt satisfied with
his own work and always tried to improve it. At
two different periods he held meetings with his
friends for the purpose of revising the Bible. The
records of these meetings of the committee for the
revision of the Bible (if one may call it so) have

ITS INFLUENCE ON LITERATURE 129

come down to us, and it is highly interesting to see
how carefully they discussed every word and how
it is always Luther himself who at last finds the
most apt expression.

It is a great privilege of the German nation
that it received this excellent Bible at the very
beginning of the new era. The German language
is moulded by this Bible. In Luther's time the dia-
lects still prevailed. Luther's Bible had to be
translated into the dialect of lower Germany. The
south of Germany and Switzerland had quite an-
other dialect. The Zurich reformers, in 1529, pub-
lished a Bible in this dialect, translating from Luther's
Bible as far as it existed at this time and providing
for the rest a translation of their own. It is un-
questionably due to Luther's Bible that the Germans
have now one language for all literary purposes.
The German classic writers Herder, Wieland, Klop-
stock, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe were all trained from
their childhood by the language of this Bible. Even
now there is a remarkable difference in style be-
tween authors of Protestant and of Roman Catholic
origin in Germany. In the easy and fluent lan-
guage of the former we see the influence of Luther
and Goethe, whereas the latter often show a cer-
tain stiffness and a greater number of provincial-
isms. The attempts to translate the Bible inde-

130 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

pendently of Luther have never succeeded in
gaining any large circulation, although there have
been many such, not only from the Roman Cath-
olic side but also from Protestants. A famous
one is the so-called Berleburg Bible, by certain
mystics, published in 1726-42 in eight volumes. In
the nineteenth century scholars undertook to give
more scientific and more exact translations, but,
valuable as these may be for scholarly purposes, the
German people will never abandon its classic Bible.
It is difficult even to introduce a revision. There
was a revision some twenty years ago, but in this
Luther's text was retouched and altered only at
a very few points, most of the corrections intro-
duced by the revision committee being rather
restitutions of Luther's original renderings, which
had been badly "improved" by former printers.
It is remarkable that even the printed Bible never
stands still, but is always changing, the printers
acting as the copyists did in former times. The
copies of the revised text printed at Stuttgart differ
slightly from the copies printed at Halle and Ber-
lin, to mention three of the modern centres of Ger-
man Bible printing.

Luther's translation was the signal for a general
movement in this direction. It is not so much
translating the Bible into new languages — only a

OTHER GERMAN TRANSLATIONS 131

few which had no Bible before were added to the list
given above — as rather the making of new transla-
tions in all languages of the Christian world as far
as this was influenced by the Reformation. Of
course some of these translations were inspired by
humanism more than by the spirit of the Reforma-
tion. The humanists abhorred the vulgarity of the
monkish Latin, and they extended their aversion
to the official Bible of the church, the Vulgate of
Saint Jerome; therefore they tried to translate the
Bible into what they thought to be Ciceronian Latin,
and some of them translated this again into French
or German. But most of the translators were sim-
ply following Luther's model; nay, they used
Luther's translation even more than the original.
King Christian III of Denmark gave orders that
the translators should follow Luther's version as
closely as possible. In this way the Dutch, the
Danish, the Swedish, the Finnish, the Lettish, and
the Lithuanian Bibles were more or less influenced
by or even based upon Luther's.

It is different with the English and the French
Bible. Wycliffe's translation never had been printed.
William Tindale, a pupil of Erasmus, translated
the New Testament and parts of the Old during his
exile in Germany and Holland, whither he had gone
under Henry VIII because, as he says, there was

I?. THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

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134 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

revision of the Bible, consisting of about fifty
members, and divided into six groups, two of which
met at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge respec-
tively. They did excellent work, the result of which
was published in 1611 and is known as the Author-
ised Version. It is in this version that the En-
glish translation attained its highest excellence. It
is this form which gained the largest circulation and
the greatest popularity among all English-speaking
peoples. It still survives the recent attempt at re-
vision, which was made by an English and an Ameri-
can committee, both working on the same principles
and in constant communication with one another.
It is a well-known fact that the final corrections
were cabled from England to America in order to
procure a simultaneous publication on both sides of
the Atlantic. Here again, as in the German revi-
sion, the two issues are not identical. It marks,
however, a clear distinction between the German
and the English Bible that the former reached its
final form at its very beginning, whereas the latter
did not achieve this result until a hundred years
later. The Bible of Luther was creative of the
German language, as we have seen, while the En-
glish Bible is rather a product of the period of high-
est literary culture in England. Luther produced
Goethe. Shakespeare (d. April 23, 1616) is prac-

THE FRENCH BIBLE 135

tically contemporaneous with the Authorised Ver-
sion.

The development of the French Bible is still more
slow and varied. There was a pre-Reformation
translation, printed several times, at Lyons and at
Paris; but it was of a purely mediaeval character.
Then a humanist, Jacques Lefevres d'Etaples (Faber
Stapulensis, d. 1536), undertook a new French trans-
lation from the Vulgate. The first French Bible
translated from the original Hebrew and Greek was
published in 1535 by Peter Robert Olivetan, a cousin
of Calvin. The author himself, and Calvin, and
others corrected and improved it from time to time,
and nearly every twenty or thirty years a new
editor would try to revise it. In this series of revi-
sions one of the most successful was that of Fre-
deric Ostervald of Neuchatel, in 1744. But the
process is still going on, French and Swiss theologians
vying one with another in fair competition. More-
over, the Protestant translation found many rivals
in the work of Roman Catholics, especially in the
great period of French literature in the reign of
Louis XIV. Some of these translators, for example
Bossuet, aimed at making the style of their transla-
tion as elegant as possible, while others, under the
influence of Port Royal, paraphrased the text with
a view rather to clearness. None of these versions

136 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

had real success; none has become final. France still
suffers from the lack of a classic form for its Bible.

The attitude of a nation toward its Bible is largely
determined by the development of the translation.
It is obvious that the Germans hold to Luther's
Bible even more insistently than the English do to
their Authorised Version, and that in France there
is an open field for every fresh attempt at revising
and translating. The nation has not become united
with its Bible, and, as regards language, the famous
" Dictionnaire de l'Academie," aiming at a standard
of literary uniformity, is but a poor and artificial
substitute for the influence exercised in a living
and natural way by the Bible.

It is not our task here to trace the history of
translations in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary,
and elsewhere. It is to a large extent a history of
enthusiasm, devotion, and martyrdom, and at the
same time of failure and oppression. Wherever the
so-called Counter-Reformation, started by the Jes-
uits, gained hold of the people, the vernacular was
suppressed and the Bible kept from the laity. So
eager were the Jesuits to destroy the authority of
the Bible — the paper pope of the Protestants, as
they contemptuously called it — that they even did
not refrain from criticising its genuineness and his-
torical value.

OTHER TRANSLATIONS 137

To sum up : it was the Bible which trained printers
and translators and thereby made a noble contri-
bution to modern civilisation and literature; on the
other hand, it was printing and translating which
made it possible for the Bible to become the popu-
lar book that ruled daily life.

VII

THE BIBLE RULES DAILY LIFE (1550-1850)

The Reformation gave the Bible a new position —
not that there had been no Bible before, nor that
the Bible had had no influence. We have seen
that there were numbers of Bibles, in Latin as
well as in the vernacular, and that the Bible had
been one of the foundations of mediaeval civilisa-
tion, yet it was only by Luther's translation and
the other versions made on his model that the
Bible became a really popular book, and it was
only by the Reformation that the Bible was estab-
lished as the authority for daily life in a modern,
that is, non-ascetic, sense.

The two points insisted on by all the reformers
were, first, that the Bible is perspicuous, that is,
that every reader can by himself find out in his
Bible what is essential for salvation; and, sec-
ondly, that the Bible is sufficient. The Christian
does not need anything else; the Bible tells him
everything which he requires — of course in its own
domain, religion, or, to use the language of that

time, the "doctrine of salvation." By the Refor-

138

THE PROTESTANT VIEW 139

mation the Bible got rid of all its rivals, such as
tradition, Apocrypha, legend, canon law, and so on.
It is wonderful to see— and I doubt if modern Chris-
tianity has realised the fact in all its importance —
how by the preaching of the reformers all these
things, which hitherto had been thought of as inte-
gral parts of Christianity, simply fell away. No cult
of the saints, no adoration of their images, no leg-
ends, no fancy, no merriment connected with religion,
but the pure Bible and the stern doctrine of it and
the austere attitude of Puritanism corresponding
to it were now uppermost. Nay, the letter of
the Bible was binding in a stricter sense than it had
ever been before. Catholicism made it possible to
mitigate the strictness by allegorical interpretation;
Protestantism insisted upon taking the Bible in its
literal sense. There was now no way of escape; a
man had to take whatever the Bible said or refuse
the Bible altogether. In principle the mystery had
gone; the Bible was plain and made itself under-
stood.

It was the literal sense, as established by lexicon
and grammar, which was to be followed. This
caused the reformers to encourage and facilitate the
study of the original languages of the Bible. When
they tried to improve the grammar-schools and to
found as many new ones as possible, it was not so

140 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

much the humanistic delight in the classical lan-
guages as the desire to secure a sure knowledge of
Greek and Hebrew which might enable a boy to
read and to interpret the Bible. It is evident from
many utterances both of Luther and Calvin that
their aim in all their school work was to provide
good preachers of the true gospel, or good teachers
of the genuine doctrine of the Bible.

To be sure, there are differences of character, both
personal and national, between the two great re-
formers, which account for a somewhat different de-
velopment of their churches. In Luther's piety the
joyful experience of salvation brings in a happy note;
the children of God praise his love and grace.
In Calvin's devotion the feeling prevails that God's
majesty is above all creatures and that his holy will
is the supreme rule for our life. Religion with
Luther is bright and cheerful, whereas with Calvin
it has a darker tinge. But both are building on the
same foundation and with the same end in view:
from salvation to salvation, from grace to grace.
The difference is but one of attitude toward the
present life.

The difference finds its best expression in a
varying use of the phrase Word of God. Both, of
course, believed in an historical revelation of God
to mankind, and they were convinced that this rev-

LUTHER AND CALVIN 141

elation was to be found in the holy Scriptures. God
had spoken through his prophets; he had given his
promises to his people; he had sent his Son and had
fulfilled his promises through him. All this was to
be found in the Bible and only in the Bible. The
reformers refused the authority of tradition, just as
they declined to acknowledge the present individual
inspiration of enthusiasts, or " Schwarmgeister," as
Luther contemptuously called them. It was in the
Bible that Christianity had to look for all necessary
information about God and salvation. And yet
Luther, when using the expression Word of God,
scarcely thinks of the written book. It is the living
word as represented by the preaching of the prophets
and the apostles, and perpetuated by the preaching
of the ministers of the church. It is to him not a
formal authority but an energising inspiration. Not
everything in the Bible is authoritative, merely by
the fact that it stands in the Bible; only what wit-
nesses to Christ is authoritative and is to be taken
as the Word of God. On the other hand, Zwingli
and Calvin frequently use the term Word of God
when speaking of the holy Scriptures themselves.
It is characteristic that the reformed churches of
Switzerland felt it their duty to fix the exact num-
ber of writings included in this Word of God, just
as the Roman Catholic church did at the Council

142 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

of Trent, while no Lutheran creed ever defines the
exact content of the Bible. To the former it was a
book of law, to the latter a book of inspiration.

Luther, owing to his familiarity with Saint Paul,
understood that Christianity had nothing to do with
the Law; the whole notion of the Law had to be
dropped out from the field of religion. Law there
must be in the government of the state — it would
not be necessary even there, if all people were true
Christians — but for the wicked there must be a law
and there must be punishment. The Christian's life,
however, is not a slave's obedience to injunctions
but a child's glad doing of his father's will; he knows
what his father wants him to do and he does it
joyfully. Luther is especially interested in proving
that Jesus' teaching, in particular the Sermon on
the Mount, does not exhibit an ascetic law, but gives
principles for the moral life of every Christian. One
need not enter a monastery in order to fulfil Christ's
commandments. It is in the tasks of the daily life
that a Christian has to prove himself a true disciple
of Jesus. The Bible is to rule the daily life of the
Christian, but not in the sense of a law. When, in
1523, a preacher at Weimar aimed to introduce the
Mosaic law instead of the common law, Luther
treated him as a " Schwarmgeist," and, in fact, it
was that proposal which lay at the basis of all the

LUTHER AND CALVIN 143

"Schwarmgeisterei." Such experiments, aiming to
constitute a kingdom of the Saints on earth, as the
Anabaptists made at Miinster and elsewhere, always
failed, and made Luther and his friends suspicious
of any such attempt.

It is different with Calvin. He is interested in
realising the kingdom of God in the Christian con-
gregation, or, to put it more accurately, in the com-
monwealth of Geneva, which is to him identical with
the Christian congregation of that place. So it is
the commonwealth which is to be ruled by the Bible,
and the Bible in this role acts as a law to which
the whole community as well as the individual has to
submit. And again it is characteristic that Calvin
takes the Bible as a unit. It is the Old Testament
law as well as the gospel which is to be regarded as
the indispensable rule both of public and private
life. With the Calvinists the ten commandments
become an integral part of the regular Sunday service.

Of course there are many gradations between these
two positions. Zwingli, the Zurich reformer, was of
a different type from Calvin, while he was even more
opposed to Luther than was the Genevan. Luther's
rule was to abolish whatsoever was contrary to
the Bible. Zwingli would permit only what was
based upon or commanded by the Bible; he ob-
jected to the use of an organ, to the keeping of

144 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

festival days except Sunday, and so on. Luther
even tolerated pictures in the church. He was
sure that no one would adore them if pervaded
by the true spirit of the gospel, and he was con-
vinced that this spirit could be successfully incul-
cated by means of preaching. Zwingli and Calvin
both did away with all pictures in the churches.
They had the walls whitewashed and the ten com-
mandments and other passages from the Bible
painted on them. Nothing is so characteristic of
this difference between the Lutheran and the Cal-
vinistic feeling as the history of an epitaph in an
East Prussian church, the monument of the noble
family of the earls of Dohna. At the time of the
Reformation they joined the Grand Master, later
Duke, Albrecht of Brandenburg in taking Luther's
part. The epitaph, which was erected in the church
of Mohrungen on the death of Earl Peter in 1553,
was decorated with a picture showing the holy
Trinity adored by the family of the donor. At the
beginning of the seventeenth century the family
went over to Calvinism, and the painting was altered
by covering the image of the holy Trinity with
black varnish and putting over it some Bible verses
in gold letters.

The different attitude toward the Bible finds its
expression also in the fact that the Lutherans used

PSALMS AND HYMNS 145

hymns, whereas the Calvinists adhered to the Bibli-
cal Psalter. Of course the vigorous songs composed
by Luther are most of them based upon Psalms
and other Biblical passages, and so were the greater
number of hymns in the Lutheran church. On the
other hand, the Calvinists did not agree with the
English church in taking over the alternative recita-
tion of the Psalter from the mediaeval exercises of
the monasteries and large cathedral choirs. They
used the Psalter in a rhythmical paraphrase adapted
to modern singing, but keeping so near to the word-
ing of the Psalms that they even called it the Psalm-
book. The difference was, in fact, slight, but they
felt it to be essential. The Lutherans followed the
usage of the church, the Calvinists the very word
of the Bible. It is remarkable, however, that
hymns gradually gained more importance among
the Calvinists, especially since the time of the
eighteenth-century revivals, and that nowadays
the hymn-book, enriched by the contributions of
recent time from poets of all denominations, is in
favour with all Protestants and in some circles is even
in danger of becoming a substitute for the Bible.
In spite of all these differences, these two great
forms of Protestantism manifest almost the same at-
titude toward the Bible, and we see them changing
their attitude almost at the same time and in the

146 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

same direction. The theologians of the orthodox
period exaggerated the authority of the Bible to such
an extent that critics like Lessing could speak of Bib-
liolatry or Bible-worship. They extended the notion
of inspiration even to the smallest details in the
printed text which lay before them, with no regard
for the fact that those details were late additions,
sometimes even misprints, and that the various
editions did not agree in these details. True scholas-
tics as they were, they had no sense for facts but
an unlimited desire for theory; the facts had to
submit to the theory, and whoever would appeal
to the facts against the theory was denounced as a
heretic and driven out as a disreputable person.
This doctrinal attitude changed when, at the end of
the seventeenth century, Pietism in Germany and
Methodism in England once again turned religion
from ecclesiastical doctrine to personal devotion.
The estimation of the Bible is not diminished — quite
the contrary; yet it finds its expression not in stiff
formulas of dogmatics but in beautiful hymns.
Under the direction of P. J. Spener (d. 1705) peo-
ple once more gather in private circles to read
and to interpret the Bible; once more the students
are drawn away from dead scholasticism to the liv-
ing study of the Bible. To the theologia dogmatica
is opposed a theologia biblica. People begin to real-

PIETISM AND RATIONALISM 147

ise again what is the true use of the Bible, not as a
text-book for dogmatic competitions and controver-
sies, but as the divine word of comfort and exhorta-
tion, a guide to salvation, and an expression of sal-
vation already gained. There is a beautiful tract
written by A. H. Francke of Halle (d. 1727) and
very often printed as a preface to the Bible in Ger-
man, "A brief direction how to read the Bible for
edification." It sounds thoroughly modern, as it
deals not with questions of theology but entirely with
piety. This attitude was again changed by the so-
called rationalism. That movement, too, entered the
Protestantism of Germany as well as of England and
America in various forms and under various names
(deism, unitarianism), but with the same tendency.
It may be that it had an easier start and a wider
spread in the Lutheran church of Germany. We
shall speak of its influence in the next chapter. The
Bible was submitted to reason or explained accord-
ing to reason. The Bible was to be followed for
the sake of the precepts of reason contained in
it or else not at all. It was, however, the com-
mon conviction that the Bible gave the most rea-
sonable injunctions, and whereas orthodoxy had
been mostly intellectual and Pietism emotional,
rationalism by its moral strictness helped the Bible
to retain its influence on daily life.

148 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

This influence was due to the fact that since
Luther's time the Bible was in every house; it was
the centre of the regular morning and evening
prayers, the father reading and explaining to his
family some chapters of the Bible. What a knowl-
edge of the Bible had been gained by the laity soon
after the Reformation is shown by the prince elector
of Saxony Johann Friedrich, who at the important
meetings held at Augsburg in 1530 was able to
quote from memory all necessary passages of the
Bible.

In Lutheran countries the influence of the Bible
found expression in arts and crafts. Not only were
the walls of the churches decorated with pictures
taken from the Bible but also the walls of private
houses. The furniture of a farmhouse was painted
with Biblical stories, very awkward paintings,
indeed, but showing the spirit of simple and plain
devotion. It is otherwise when a rich lady's
dressing-table in baroque or rococo is decorated
with such scenes. We feel that they are out of place
there and that scenes taken from ancient mythology
would suit such a purpose much better. We should
consider it a little profane that, at a wedding dinner
in the sixteenth century, between the several courses
elaborate dishes were passed, representing Bib-
lical scenes. We cannot help remembering the re-

PAINTING AND MUSIC 149

mark of that preacher of the old church who ex-
claimed: "Oh, that they had these stories painted
in their hearts!"

Much more important is the art of music. Luther
was fond of it ; he would never have given up a choir
and an organ. He made it possible for the Lu-
theran church to produce the greatest masterpieces
that music has ever achieved — Bach's oratorios.
While the Roman church directed the work of its
great musicians toward the glorification of the mass,
and the Calvinistic church became rigorously op-
posed to the very art of music, the Lutheran com-
posers were inspired by the Bible itself. The
Biblical sonatas of Johann Kuhnau (d. 1722) seem
to us mere trifling. The real work was done by
Heinrich Schiitz (d. 1672) and Johann Sebastian
Bach, the cantor of Saint Thomas in Leipzig (d.
1750), who succeeded in giving to the Bible a
new voice, a voice which is still sounding and
entering circles where the printed Bible would
scarcely be read. The combination in Bach's
oratorios is very striking — the majestic church
hymns sung by the choir, the simple recitative
of Scripture, and, last but not least, the arias
giving the response of the pious individual to the
words of God in the Bible. This is the most char-
acteristic part of it. Protestant piety cannot be

150 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

without the personal expression of individual feel-
ing; it is thoroughly subjective in the highest sense.
As Luther in his catechism explains the Apostles'
Creed thus, "I believe that God has created me
. . . ; I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord,
who has saved me ... ; I believe that it is im-
possible for me to come to Jesus Christ without the
help of the Holy Ghost . . . ," so Protestant piety
gives to everything this subjective note. There is
a Greek manuscript of the Gospels from the four-
teenth century, written in several colours to dis-
tinguish the words of Jesus, of his apostles, of his
enemies, and of the evangelist. The narrative of
the evangelist is given in green ink, the words of the
Pharisees and other adversaries of Jesus in black,
the words of the disciples in blue, and the sayings
of Jesus himself are in red. It is a curious piece of
work, showing the tendency of the Greek church to
dramatise the sacred history of the Gospel. With
this Greek copy we may compare a Protestant fam-
ily Bible mentioned by a modern German preacher.
It is a plain old printed Bible, but the pious great-
grandfather has marked it all through with various
colours, which he explains in a note : " What touched
the sin of my heart : — Black. What inspired me to
good : — Blue. What comforted me in sorrow : — Red.
What promised me the grace of God in eternity: —

SUBJECTIVISM IN PIETY 151

Gold." The difference between objective facts and
subjective relation to them, between apprehension
and appreciation, is evident. This is the new spirit
which pervades the Protestant reader of the Bible,
and therefore the Bible is much more to him than it
had been to Christianity in former times.

Where the Bible was read in such a spirit it was
bound to gain an influence upon the daily life. We
must admit this even if we have no direct evidence.
The inward acting of the spirit in the individual is
inaccessible to scientific observation and statistics.

We are in a much better position regarding the
Calvinistic circles, for here the influence of the
Bible was a public one. The Bible here was recog-
nised as the only rule to be followed in public life as
well as in private. The most characteristic feature
is the attitude toward the Sabbath. Luther had
explained the third commandment (according to his
numeration, the fourth according to the Calvinists)
as meaning "den Feiertag heiligen," to use the
day, granted by God as a holiday, for going to
church and listening to the preaching of the gospel;
so the Lutherans, who never called it Sabbath, did
not insist upon avoiding all work, but upon attend-
ing the holy service; besides, human feeling led
them to relieve their servants and employees so far
as possible from their labour. The Calvinists kept

152 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

the Sabbath, as they said, exactly according to
the Old Testament commandment: "Thou shalt
not do any work." It reminds us sometimes of
the minuteness of rabbinical Sabbath controver-
sies when we see how carefully the Sabbath is kept
as a day for doing no work whatever; even the chil-
dren are forbidden to play with their toys. It is a
concession made to the gospel if works of piety, of
charity, or of necessity are permitted.

Another prominent feature is the use of Biblical
names. Among Lutherans and members of the En-
glish church the use of Christian names, mostly de-
rived from famous saints or kings, as Edward,
George, Richard, Robert, Thomas, William, con-
tinued; while the Calvinists preferred Biblical
names such as Abraham, Isaac, Moses, Joshua, Eli-
jah, Jeremiah, Nathaniel. They often chose the
names of obscure persons from the Bible, such as
Abia, Abiel, Ammi, Eliphalet, Jared, Jedidiah, Je-
rathmeel, Reuben, Uriah. It was not so much the
admiration for this or that hero in the Bible as the
simple demand for something Biblical which gave to
the children such unfamiliar names. Parents did not
care for the real character of the man to whom the
name first belonged provided he was mentioned in
the Bible; neither Delilah nor Archelaus had a repu-
tation which would make their names desirable; but,

BIBLICAL NAMES AND GAMES 153

nevertheless, they were given. Gamaliel was a
Pharisee, a scribe, very far from being a Christian,
but the name, being in the Bible, became a Chris-
tian name among the descendants of one of the
Pilgrim fathers. Biblical reminiscences also are to
be found in Christian names, such as Faithful,
Faintnot, Hopestill, Strong; Praise-God Barbone,
one of Cromwell's followers, is said to have had two
brothers, baptised with the Christian names of
Christ-came-into-the-world-to-save Barbone" and
" If -Christ-had - n ot-died - thou - hadst - been - damned
Barbone" respectively; but this is apocryphal, and
so is probably the American counterpart: "Through-
many-trials-and-tribulations-we-must-enter-into-the
kingdom-of-God " (Acts 15 : 22) as a Christian name.

One can hardly deny that this Biblicism some-
times became an abuse of the Bible. The Scrip-
tures were used for investigating the future. This
method, which we have already noted in the second
chapter, was made an official one in the Moravian
church. People used Bible verses in their games;
riddles were taken from the Bible. As the one and
only book the Bible had to serve as a whole library
and provide all kinds of entertainment. That is the
other side of the matter.

The influence of the Bible on public life in the
time of Puritanism is illustrated best by the records

154 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

of the first plantations in New England.1 When,
in June, 1639, "all the free planters" of the col-
ony of New Haven "assembled together in a gen-
eral meeting to consult about settling civil gov-
ernment according to God," the first question
laid before them by John Davenport was: " Whether
the Scriptures do hold forth a perfect rule for the
direction and government of all men in all duties
which they are to perform to God and men as well
in the government of families and commonwealth
as in matters of the church." "This was assented
unto by all, no man dissenting, as was expressed by
holding up of hands." The second question was
whether all do hold themselves bound by that
(plantation) covenant that "in all public offices,
etc., we would all of us be ordered by those rules
which the Scripture holds forth to us." This was
answered in the same way. Therefore it was voted
unanimously, "that the Word of God shall be the
only rule to be attended unto in ordering the affairs
of government in this plantation." Before they go
on to select officials from their number, the chapter on
the institution of the seventy elders (Ex. 18) is read,
together with Deut. 1 : 13 and 17 : 15 and I Cor.

1 Cf. C. T. Hoadly, Records of the Colony and Plantation of
New Haven from 1638 to 1649, Hartford, 1857, and Records
of the Colony or Jurisdiction of New Haven from May, 1653, to
the Union (1665), Hartford, 1858.

PURITAN LEGISLATION 155

6 : 1-7, and one of the planters declares that he had
felt scruples about it, but that these had been
removed by reading Deut. 17 : 15 at morning
prayers. When a difference arises between two
members of the colony they refer it for arbitration to
brethren, in accordance with I Cor. 6 : 1-7. A
prisoner is pressed to confess his crime by remind-
ing him of that passage of Scripture: "He that
hideth his sin shall not prosper, but he that con-
fesseth and forsaketh his sins shall find mercy"
(Prov. 28 : 13). When a murder has been com-
mitted they sentence the guilty to death " according
to the nature of the fact and the rule in that case,
He that sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood
be shed" (Gen. 9:6). They refer to Lev. 20 : 15
in a case of bestiality in order to justify the sen-
tence of death. When questions and scruples arise
between New Haven and Massachusetts about the
justice of an offensive war, New Haven refers to
the story of Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, "who
sinned and was rebuked by two prophets Jehu and
Eliezer for joining with and helping Ahab and
Ahaziah, kings of Israel" (II Chron. 17-20). From
this, they say, one might infer that even a defensive
war and all leagues are forbidden by the law of God.
On the other hand, they rely on the conquest of
Canaan and David's war against the Ammonites

156 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

(II Sam. 10) as examples for the justice of an offen-
sive war and even a vindictive war of revenge.

It is their fundamental agreement, not to be dis-
puted or questioned hereafter, "that the judicial
law of God given by Moses and expounded in other
parts of Scripture, so far as it is a hedge and a fence
to the moral law and neither ceremonial nor typical
nor had any reference to Canaan, has an everlasting
equity in it and should be the rule of their proceed-
ings." This fundamental law, as it is fixed in 1639
and reinforced in 1642 and 1644, shows clearly the
spirit of this legislation. At the same time we learn
from the many restrictions how difficult it was to
adapt the Old Testament law to the needs of this
Christian commonwealth.

The first records of the Massachusetts Bay Com-
pany1 show indeed a marked difference. They
are less Scriptural. In the royal charter given to
the company by Charles I in 1628 the Bible is not
mentioned; the aim of the colony is said to be "to
win and incite the natives of the country to the
knowledge and obedience of the only true God and
Saviour of mankind and the Christian faith." The
governor is bound by his oath " to do his best endeav-
our to draw on the natives of this country, called

1 Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts
Bay, edited by N. B. Shurtleff. Boston, 1853.

MASSACHUSETTS CHARTER 157

New England, to the knowledge of the true God
and to conserve the planters and others coming
hither in the same knowledge and fear of God," or,
according to another form of oath, to act accord-
ing to the law of God and for the advancement of
his Gospel, the laws of this land, and the good of this
plantation."

But in the laws framed by the colonists them-
selves, the Bible is constantly appealed to. Pass-
ing a law against drinking healths, in 1639, the
General Court declared this to be a mere useless
ceremony and also the occasion of many sins, " which
as they ought in all places and times to be prevented
carefully, so especially in plantations of churches
and commonwealths wherein the least known evils
are not to be tolerated by such as are bound by
solemn covenant to walk by the rule of God's word
in all their conversation." This statement is a
solemn one, and they put it into effect as far as
possible. When discussing in the General Court the
question whether a certain number of magistrates
should be chosen for life, a question which had a
good deal of importance for the future development
of the colony, they decided in favour of it, "for
that it was shown from the word of God, etc., that
the principal magistrates ought to be for life." Nay,
even a question of minor importance raised by

158 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

the Scriptures, whether women must wear veils,
was eagerly discussed, both parties relying on Scrip-
tural proofs.

When, in 1646, the General Court found it nec-
essary to convoke a public assembly of the elders,
they did so, protesting, however, that "their lawful
power by the word of God to assemble the churches
or their messengers upon occasion of counsel" is
not to be questioned, and therefore the said assem-
bly of elders, after having "discussed, disputed, and
cleared up by the word of God such questions of
church government and discipline ... as they shall
think needful and meet," is to report to the General
Court, " to the end that the same being found agree-
able to the word of God, it may receive from the said
General Court such approbation as is meet, that the
Lord being thus acknowledged by church and state
to be our Judge, our Lawgiver, and our King, he may
be graciously pleased still to save us as hitherto he
has done . . . and so the churches in New England
may be Jehovah's and he may be to us a God from
generation to generation." It is remarkable that
not only the church synod is to judge what is
"agreeable to the holy Scriptures" but the civil
government takes it as its own duty to make
sure that the resolutions of the synod are really in
accordance with the Scripture and only then to give

JOHN COTTON'S ABSTRACT 159

their approbation. It is the secular power which
feels bound to the Word of God and to superintend
its strict observance. But in fact state and church
are not to be distinguished in this period of New
England history.

In 1641 the Rev. John Cotton, "teacher of the
Boston church," published at London "An Abstract
or the Laws of New England as they are now es-
tablished." The first edition does not mention Cot-
ton's name; this was added only after his death in
a second edition, published in 1655 by his friend
William Aspinwall. This Abstract by John Cotton
does not represent, as its title seems to indicate, the
actual law; it is a proposed code of laws for New
England. But it has influenced to a great extent,
if not the legislation of Massachusetts, at any rate
the "Laws for Government, published for the use
of New Haven Colony" in 1656. The remarkable
feature is that Cotton gives marginal references to
the Bible for each one of his rules, for instance : " All
magistrates are to be chosen (1) by the free Bur-
gesses— Deut. 1 : 13; (2) out of the free Burgesses —
Deut. 17 : 15; (3) out of the ablest men and most
approved amongst them — Ex. 18 : 21; (4) out of the
rank of Noblemen or Gentlemen amongst them —
Eccles. 10:17, Jer. 30 : 21," and so on. It is ac-
cording to the Old Testament rule that the eldest

160 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

son ought to inherit twice as much as his broth-
ers; it is a true expression of the Old Testament
meaning when punishment is extended even to ani-
mals which kill a man (cp. Ex. 21 : 28). The spirit
of this legislation is almost as severe, not to say
cruel; as the spirit of Charlemagne's Saxon law.
Twenty-four kinds of trespassing are enumerated
which are to be punished with death. It is evi-
dently against the legislator's own view that an
exemption is made for simple fornication, "not to
be punished with death according to God's own
law," as he adds by way of apology. In the sec-
ond edition the Bible verses are printed at length
in the text itself, the margin being devoted to
learned remarks on different translations. The
motto which expresses the character of this abstract
is taken from Isaiah 33 : 22: "The Lord is our
Judge, the Lord is our Lawgiver, the Lord is our
King; He will save us."

The official Laws of Massachusetts, as established
in 1658 and printed in 1660, have no Bible refer-
ences in the margin; but in the restriction of flog-
ging to the effect that no more than forty stripes
should be applied, and in the requirement that
sentence of death may be imposed only when
two or three witnesses testify to the guilt, the
Biblical rules given in Deut. 25 : 5 and 19 : 15

DISCIPLINE AND EDUCATION 161

are seen to be at work. Sabbath-breaking is to
be punished with a fine of ten shillings, the penalty
being doubled in the second case. In 1630 a man
had been whipped for shooting on the Sabbath.

In 1647 the General Court passed a law ordering
that each township containing over fifty households
should appoint a schoolmaster, and if there were
more than a hundred families, a grammar-school
was to be supported. This care for education is in-
spired by the desire of securing a true interpreta-
tion of the Bible, as is proved by the following state-
ment of motives : " It being the chief project of that
old deluder Satan to keep men from the knowledge
of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them
in an unknown tongue, so in these latter times by
persuading from the use of tongues, that so at least
the true sense and meaning of the original might
be clouded by false glosses of saint-seeming deceiv-
ers; that learning may not be buried in the grave
of our fathers in the church and commonwealth,
therefore ordered," etc.

After the college had been founded in 1636, they
chose in 1643 for its seal a shield containing three
books with Ve-ri-tas written on them, two open and
one seen from the back. Oxford has between
three crowns one book with seven clasps. This book
evidently is the Bible; it has Dominus illuminatio

162 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

mea (Psalm 27 : 1) written on it. The seven clasps
are said to indicate the seven liberal arts and the
three crowns the three modes of philosophy. It is
characteristic of the Puritan spirit that their shield
had nothing but three Bibles. The meaning of Veri-
tas, of course, is not (as it has been taken in recent
times) that the aim of all research is truth. The
Puritan fathers were not concerned with research;
they believed in revelation, and it was by the
revelation laid down in the Bible that truth was
transmitted to mankind. The three Bibles may or
may not be a symbol of the holy Trinity; the
script on the front and on the back recalls the
book written within and on the back in Rev. 5:1.
They meant that the Bible was the fundamental
source of all knowledge. Harvard College was
founded to be a training-school for ministers, who
should know the truth and its source. Christo et
ecclesicB became the second motto of the college.
That it has developed into a university, containing,
besides a college and the divinity school, schools for
law, medicine, applied science, etc., is due to a total
change of public opinion at a much later time. The
Puritan use of the Bible has disappeared, but some-
thing of the Puritan spirit may still be seen in the
inscription on the front of the modern building of
the Harvard Law School, drawn from Ex. 18 : 20:

THE HARVARD SEAL 163

"Thou shalt teach them ordinances and laws and
shalt shew them the way wherein they must walk,
and the work that they must do."

VIII

THE BIBLE BECOMES ONCE MORE THE BOOK
OF DEVOTION

Having made our way through the centuries, we
now approach our own time, and at once we
remark two facts: Never before had the Bible
such a circulation as it has now gained. On the
other hand, it seems to have lost most of its influ-
ence. We must look at these two facts before
we raise the question what value the Bible has for
the civilisation of to-day.

Printing greatly facilitated the circulation of
the Bible and, as the result of the Reformation, it
had become the book of the Christian family. And
yet during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
the circulation of the Bible was rather limited.
The Bible might be a treasure of the household, but
not the personal property of the individual. The
first editions, as we have seen, scarcely exceeded one
or two hundred copies. In contrast, one of the most
assiduous and industrious promoters of Bible read-
ing, Baron von Canstein, who settled at Halle in

164

BIBLE SOCIETIES 165

A. H. Francke's institute, published during the last
nine years of his life (d. 1719) forty thousand Bibles
and one hundred thousand New Testaments. To-
day the British and Foreign Bible Society issues
more than five million copies — one million Bibles,
one and a half million New Testaments, and two
and a half million parts of the Bible — yearly. The
progress is due to the invention of the rotary press
and other improvements in printing machinery.

Besides, the circulation of the Bible has received
strong support through the foundation of Bible
societies. The story is well known how Thomas
Charles discovered the great desire for copies of the
Bible among his Welsh countrymen, how, when he
gathered some friends for the purpose of providing
them with Bibles, the Baptist preacher Thomas
Hughes put in the question, " And why not for other
peoples, too?" and how on his motion the Society
was started on March 7, 1804, as the British and
Foreign Bible Society. It is wonderful to hear of
the work done by this Society in the last hun-
dred years. If one visits the Bible House in Queen
Victoria Street in London he gets an impression
of the extent and the importance of the work done
there. The Society has its presses as well as
its translators all over the world; it has its agents
scattered through all the nations, and it has be-

166 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

gun to do not only a publishers' business proper
but scholarly work as well. A vast collection of
Bible editions from all times and in all tongues has
been gathered, and a valuable catalogue published
which is of great importance for bibliography in
general.

The greatest merit of the British and Foreign
Bible Society, however, is the fact that it stimulated
the foundation of other great Bible societies. There
were some small beginnings in Germany and
Switzerland. They suddenly became strong and
influential in consequence of the report made
concerning the British and Foreign Bible Society
by its secretary, Doctor Steinkopf, and Basel and
Stuttgart made a new start in 1804 and 1812.
After the Napoleonic War in 1814, Mr. Pinkerton
travelled through Germany with the result that
Bible societies were started at Berlin, Dresden, El-
berfeld, and Copenhagen, and in Holland, Norway,
and even Russia. In 1808 Philadelphia joined
the movement. The American Bible Society has
twice canvassed the entire United States, find-
ing that five hundred thousand families were with-
out any Bible, and selling sixty million Bibles.
It is remarkable that in the beginning Roman
Catholics joined the Bible societies enthusiasti-
cally. A Bible society was founded at Regens-

BIBLE CIRCULATION 167

burg in 1805, supported almost exclusively by
the Roman Catholic clergy. But as early as 1817,
soon after the restoration of the Jesuits by Pope
Pius VII, these Bible societies were dissolved; the
Roman Catholics were forbidden to be members
of the other Bible societies, and in the syllabus of
Pius IX, in 1864, the Bible societies are reckoned
among the dangers of our time, together with
Masonry and other secret societies.

By the help of the Bible societies it has become
possible that Bibles should really spread among the
people. In Germany each boy and girl who goes
to school has his own Bible. Bibles and New
Testaments are distributed among the soldiers.
Most churches make a present of a Bible to each
couple who are to be married. There is rather a
superabundance of Bibles, which contrasts sharply
with the estimation in which the Bible is held. As
Spurgeon, in his drastic way, said in one of his stimu-
lating sermons: "The Bible is in every house, but
in many the dust on it is so thick that you might
write on it: Damnation." It was a veteran Bible
agent who, after thirty years' experience, said: "It
is easy to give away dozens of Bibles, but only the
one which you sell will be valued."

The circulation has been greatly enlarged by num-
bers of translations. We remember that the first

168 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

translations of the Bible were connected with Chris-
tian missions; they were epoch-making for the lan-
guages, creating a written alphabet and a national
literature. The translations of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries were of a different character;
they were the result of a religious reformation; they
represented for the nation the culmination point
in language and a remarkable stage in literature.
Now again Christian missions revived, and started
on a wonderful career all over the world, and they
needed to have the Bible translated. The Bible
societies did their best to provide as many transla-
tions as possible. From the eight languages of
600 A. D. and some twenty-four in the sixteenth
century the number of languages into which the
Bible has been translated has grown up to four
hundred, and if we count the dialects separately
we have over six hundred. The whole Bible has
not been translated into all these languages and
dialects, but in every case parts of it, sometimes
the New Testament, sometimes only one Gospel,
have been translated, and other parts will fol-
low. It is interesting to hear the translators
speak of the difficulties they have to overcome.
One sees what influence the Bible has on civilisa-
tion. Often a language lacks some word which
is indispensable for the translator; he has to adapt

MORE BIBLE TRANSLATIONS 169

one or coin a new one. There is no idea more
frequent in the Bible than the idea of God. The
Chinese had no word which exactly corresponded,
the usual words indicating either spirits or the sun
or something of that sort. The Amshara lacks the
idea of righteousness, the Bantu the idea of holiness.
If the translator uses as an equivalent the word for
separateness, his reader will get rather the notion of
something split. Sometimes the translator will pre-
fer to keep the Greek word, as in the case of baptise,
but he must be careful, for batisa in Bantu means
"treat some one badly." So the language has to be
remodelled in order to become suitable for the pur-
pose of translating the Bible. The Bible once again
exercises a civilising influence on the languages of
many peoples. With very few exceptions, such as
a Malayan Bible of 1621 and a translation by John
Eliot into the Massachusetts Indian dialect pub-
lished in 1666, most of these translations originated
in the nineteenth century and are due to the present
missionary energy of Christianity. Here again it
is mortifying to see how the Bible is spread among
peoples who never had had civilisation before, while
among the Christian nations, who, to a large ex-
tent, owe their civilisation to this very Bible, it is
disregarded.

Besides the circulation we may also mention the

170 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

enormous amount of mental energy spent on Bible
studies by the scholars of this last century. Not
only students of theology but also classical and
Oriental scholars have joined to study the Bible, to
comment upon it, and make everything in it under-
stood. Specialisation in its inevitable course has
caused a separation of Old Testament and New Tes-
tament studies. In order to understand and explain
thoroughly the Old Testament one has to know
several Oriental languages and follow up the daily
increasing evidence for Oriental history, culture, and
religion, whereas the New Testament scholar is
bound to study the development of the Greek lan-
guage and the whole civilisation of the Hellenistic
period. Nay, even the Old and the New Testa-
ment departments are each specialising into the
textual and the higher criticism, the theology
or the religious history both of the Jewish people
and of primitive Christianity. One scholar studies
the life of Christ, another makes the apostolic age
the topic of his special research; one is commenting
upon the Gospels, another upon the letters of Saint
Paul. The literature in these different departments
has grown so rapidly that it is almost impossible to
follow it and to survey the whole field. Never-
theless, we need a comprehensive view, and a large
number of scientific journals, in German, English,

RECENT BIBLE STUDIES 171

French, some few also in other languages, are de-
voted to the summing up of results which have been
attained by special research. There are dozens of
dictionaries and encyclopedias dealing with Biblical
matters either separately or in connection with other
material. It is, indeed, wonderful what progress has
been and is being made. One is astonished to find
that every day brings new problems and new at-
tempts at solution, and one cannot help admiring
the energy and sagacity which are put into these
studies.

But in spite of this circulation never attained be-
fore, and in spite of this active work of research,
the fact remains indisputable that the Bible has
lost its former position. There was a time, in the
Middle Ages, when the Bible was at least one foun-
dation of Christian civilisation, not to say the one
foundation (as the men of that period would have
said). Then there was a time, during recent cen-
turies, when the Bible ruled daily life almost com-
pletely. Whether we regret the fact or approve of
it, it remains a fact, and we have to face it, that
those times are gone.

The Bible nowadays is one book among a thou-
sand others. It is still revered by the majority of
the people, but it is not so much read as it was in
the time when it was the one book the people pos-

172 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

sessed. The enormous statistics for Bible circula-
tion lose in effect if we compare the figures of the
book-trade in general, the number of books pub-
lished every year, and the numbers of editions and
copies which some of the notable successes have at-
tained.

The old problem, the Bible or the classics or a
combination of both, is revived in a new form.
There is a neopaganism in literature, and often it
seems incompatible to read both the Bible and
modern literature, and most people decide in favour
of the latter. Once again the Bible has its rivals
very numerous and strong.

The Bible in former times was held to be the
divinely inspired text-book for all human knowledge.
It was in the Bible that one had to look for infor-
mation not only about God and God's will and
everything connected with God, but also about phi-
losophy, natural science, history, and so on. Now a
secularisation of science has taken place by which
all these departments of human knowledge are with-
drawn from the ecclesiastical, theological, and Bib-
lical authority.

The mediaeval view of the world as taken from
the Bible, or at least believed to be taken from it,
had been utterly shattered by the great discoveries
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. When Co-

NEW DISCOVERIES 173

lumbus found the way to America and Vasco da
Gama sailed around the Cape to India, and later
others crossed the Pacific Ocean, the earth could no
longer be considered as a round plane, it was
proved to be a globe. Copernicus deciphered the
mystery of heaven, the movement of the earth
around the sun; Galileo Galilei followed in the same
studies, and Kepler reached the climax of proba-
bility for the new theory. The church did not follow
at once. It is remarkable that Copernicus did not
win the assent of Luther. The great reformer, crit-
ical as he was, felt bound in this question to the
authority of the Bible, and called the contradicting
Copernicus a fool. It is well known how the Roman
church by its inquisition treated Galileo until he
withdrew his theory — formally, still holding it in
his heart (e pur si muove, "and yet the earth does
move"). Johannes Kepler, himself a Protestant
and brought up with the fullest reverence for the
Bible, found his own way out of the difficulty by
distinguishing between the religious and the scien-
tific aspect of the Bible, an anticipation of the mod-
ern solution. And if one is willing to maintain
the modern scientific view of the universe as it has
been established by the three men just named, and
strengthened by their followers, he must renounce
the Bible as authority in matters of science. It is

174 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

a notable fact that even the Roman church, in 1817,
withdrew the verdict against Galileo's theory and
similar theses, thereby admitting that a Christian
may safely deny the Biblical assumption that the sun
moves round the earth.

The Bible in its first chapter tells us that the
world was created in six days; geology now speaks
of twenty million years and more. The Bible says
that man was created on the sixth day by a special
act of God; Darwin's theory is that the human
race is the result of an evolution which eliminated
numbers of former beings and developed ever higher
species. The Bible tells of many miracles which
can have no other meaning than that in certain
cases the law of gravitation and other laws of
nature are suspended; the scientist tells us that a
law loses all meaning if it admits of exceptions. Of
course, there are miracles and miracles : the healings
of Jesus we may accept as historical without any
hesitation, but the standing still of the sun in Josh.
10 : 12 is nothing but a poetical form of speech, and
the floating axe-head is as legendary in the story of
Elisha (II Kings 6 : 6) as it would be in any other
legend.

In former times scholars wrote large volumes on
the animals mentioned in the Bible and the flowers
and the stones and so on; this they called sacred

MODERN SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE 175

zoology and sacred botany and sacred mineralogy.
It was not for their amusement: it was a serious
study. The Bible was thought to be a text-book
for every science, and it seemed to be much more
valuable to get information of all kinds from the
Bible than to collect real animals, flowers, or stones.
Likewise the human body was dealt with in the same
scholastic way; it is a comparatively modern thing
for physicians to be allowed to study the body and
find out its real structure by dissection. Now-
adays it is universally agreed that science and med-
icine are autonomous and are not dependent on the
Bible.

The Bible was also the text-book for history, as
we have seen. The history of mankind, according
to this view, was limited to six thousand years. A
great amount of mental energy was spent upon the
question of Biblical chronology, which, however,
proved to be hopelessly confused by the fact that
various systems were used by the Biblical authors
themselves. History was the history of the Jew-
ish people, enriched by some glimpses of contem-
poraneous pagan history. Now, the discoveries in
Egypt and Babylon and the deciphering of the Ori-
ental inscriptions have illustrated the fact that the
Jewish people was only one among others and one
of the weakest of all these Oriental nations. Assyr-

176 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

ian kingdoms were established as early as 6000 b. c.
The famous code of Hammurabi is much older than
the Mosaic law. If we compare them, we find that
the former represents a high level of civilisation,
while the latter establishes rules for nomadic life,
a relation similar to that which exists between
the Roman law and the national laws of the Ger-
man tribes: though codified later, they represent,
nevertheless, an earlier stage. The occupation
of Canaan has come to be viewed in a new light
through the exploration of Palestine. The his-
tory of the kings of Judah and Israel is now seen
much more clearly than before to have been deter-
mined by politics; they are for ever steering between
the influence of Egypt and that of Babylon. The
accounts given in the Babylonian archives and the
Egyptian inscriptions are to be compared with the
Biblical account, and some may feel that the com-
parison is not always in favour of the latter. Even
the social and religious position of the prophets is
nowadays compared with contemporaneous facts in
Greece, Persia, and India. The life of Jesus and the
Acts of the Apostles have changed their aspect with
the possibility of literary comparison. It is not so
much the literary criticism of the Gospels and the
Acts by themselves as it is this facility of compar-
ison which contributes to shake the authority

A NEW HISTORICAL HORIZON 177

of the Bible. We find the same miracles told of
Jesus and of the emperor Vespasian; some say-
ings of Jesus can be compared with utterances of
Csesar and Pompey. Many of his words have paral-
lels in the Jewish literature as well as in the writings
of the Stoa. I feel sure that the originality of Jesus
will but gain by such comparison, but it is obvious
that originality must be taken in a higher sense
than is often the case; it is not the wording but the
meaning attached to it which is new and original.

In this way everything which loomed so large
when viewed standing by itself in the Bible has
been reduced to its natural size; the earth has lost
its central position; man is only one in a long line
of similar beings; the history of Israel enters the
large field of universal history; and even the per-
sonality of Jesus is subject to comparison and
analogy.

This reduction is the necessary complement of the
independence and autonomy attained for human sci-
ence as the result of a long development. Already
in the sixteenth century the humanists claimed for
science the right to follow its own rules without
being led and limited by the church's authoritative
doctrine. They aimed at a civilisation free from
ecclesiastical tutelage; going back to the classicism
of pre-Christian times, they did not want the guard-

178 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

ianship of the Christian church and its clergy. But
the time was not yet ripe for this view. Even the
reformers, Luther as well as Calvin, while they
broke with the authority of mediaeval scholasticism
and of the Roman church, were not prepared to ac-
knowledge the autonomy of science; they estab-
lished the primacy of the Bible in an even stricter
sense than it had borne in the Middle Ages. The
Bible was to rule everything, and it was the Bible
in its plain and simple meaning, without the mitiga-
tions which tradition and allegory had allowed in
former times. To be sure, Luther occasionally
granted some independence to secular science. He
was furious when Aristotle was quoted as an au-
thority in matters of religion, but would himself
introduce him as an authority for civil government
or for logic. He had a curious proof for this from
the Bible itself. It was on the advice of his father-
in-law, Jethro, a pagan, that Moses appointed the
seventy elders to help him judge the people.
Therefore for secular organisation one may take the
counsel of the heathen, of the philosophers. But
Luther was not consistent; as we have already seen,
against Copernicus he insisted upon the authority
of the Bible. He did not see that it was a question
of astronomy without any relation to religion. In
the seventeenth century the philosophers began to

SLOW PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 179

claim independence for the human reason, and soon
they established reason as the highest authority,
even in religious matters. It is very interesting to
see the effect of this claim at the beginning. Even
the most advanced liberals were so convinced of the
infallible authority of the Bible that they tried by
all means at their disposal to reconcile with the con-
tents of the Bible the principles which the rational
philosophy of Descartes or Spinoza had established.
They started a new method of interpretation in order
to make the Bible agree with reason. A long time
had to pass before it became obvious to all com-
petent minds that the Bible and reason were not
to be reconciled by means of a makeshift harmony.
It was only in the nineteenth century that the view
forced itself upon all scholars that the Bible has
to be understood in an historical way; that it does
not give inspired information upon natural science
and history, its revelation dealing with God and
religion only.

By recent discoveries it is proved that the crea-
tion story in Gen. 1 is by no means a unique and
original one; there is something similar in the Baby-
lonian mythology; it may have been taken from
there. The same holds true regarding the story of
the deluge and others. So there is no reason for
claiming for these stories the authority of revealed

180 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

science; the Biblical author simply shares the ideas
of his time. We are not bound to the scientific no-
tions of a period two thousand years before Christ
and four thousand years before our own time. And
yet there is something unique in this creation story,
as told in Gen. 1, for which one looks in vain in all the
alleged parallels in Babylonian and other religions;
it is the idea of the one God Almighty, who by his
supreme will creates heaven and earth. That is the
revelation conveyed to mankind by this chapter.
We must not trouble about the specific descrip-
tion of creation; that belongs to the historical
form. We cling with all our heart to the won-
derful idea of the one creating God, and we realise
that here revelation is given to us.

It is only by comparison that the real importance
of a thing comes out. On a map of America, made
on a small scale, the distances may seem short;
comparing a map of Europe on the same scale one
realises how long they are in fact. We are always
in danger of taking some accidental feature for the
main point. The frame does not make the worth
of the painting.

As the Bible has lost its exclusive authority in
the domain of science, so in the fine arts it has ceased
to be the single source of inspiration. Since the
Renaissance motifs taken from ancient mythology

SECULARISATION OF ART 181

and poetry have come into competition with the
Biblical scenes; the Dutch school cultivated the il-
lustration of the life of the people and presented even
the sacred story in this fashion — the mystery of
sacredness has gone; it is purely human, not to say
profane. The French liked landscapes and used Bib-
lical subjects only as accessories. Pictures of bat-
tles, triumphs, apotheoses filled the galleries. Art
to-day is anything but Biblical; modern painters
have, most of them, no sense for sacred art. I ven-
ture to think they do better to keep away from it.
For if a modern painter, when trying to illustrate
the parable of the prodigal son in a triptychon, puts
in the large middle field the man feeding the swine,
giving only the left-hand corner to the return to
the father, he has proved himself incapable of a
religious understanding of the story, however fin-
ished a work of art his painting may be.

By all this process of secularisation the Bible has
been drawn back from general civilisation and re-
stricted to its own proper domain, religion. We must
not insist on the fact that even here the Bible seems
to have lost somewhat of its infallible authority.
It is in the domain of theology as distinct from re-
ligion that this holds true. Strange as it may seem,
it is a fact that the Bible is no more the text-book
of theology. Theology, of course, can never do

182 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

without the Bible, but here also the Bible is the
source of historical information, not the authorita-
tive proof for doctrine. Already in the period when
the orthodox Protestants vied with one another in
asserting the inspiration of the Bible in the boldest
terms and relied on the Bible for answers to every
question, Samuel Werenfels (d. 1740), a professor
at Basel, wrote the distich:

" Hie liber est in quo quserit sua dogmata quisque,
Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua."

" This is the book where each man seeketh his own
ideas,
In it accordingly each findeth his own beliefs."

It was the support given by the Bible to every doc-
trine and every theory which made critical people
doubt the propriety of proving truth by adducing
proof -texts; and this not only for dogmatical ques-
tions but also for moral ones. It is well known how
both parties in the controversy over slavery appealed
to the authority of the Bible, and it would be diffi-
cult to say which party found the stronger support
in the letter of the text. The same holds true
regarding other questions of modern life; one
can argue from the Bible pro and con regarding
the use of wine. The Bible has been adduced in
the question of polygamy. It can be quoted on

THE BIBLE PRO AND CON 183

both sides with reference to woman suffrage. It is
indicative of the present attitude toward the Bible
that this is so seldom done. The use of the Bible for
the settling of modern social problems has brought
upon many Christian minds a pitiful confusion.
It has proved impossible to deduce from the Bible,
even from the teaching of Jesus, rules for modern
life. Times have changed and the conditions of
life have altered.

All this prepared the way for the historical view
of the Bible. Then the period of higher criticism
began. It was to many a hard lesson; but we had
to learn it. It was started — curious to say — by
Roman Catholic scholars in France. Having the
authority of the church behind them, they felt more
free as regards the Bible than the Protestants did.
Richard Simon made it evident that the transmis-
sion of the Bible excludes a mechanical view of in-
spiration. Astruc, a doctor, the physician of Louis
XIV, discovered that in the Pentateuch two differ-
ent sources were used. During the eighteenth cen-
tury the theories of literary criticism were applied
to all the books of the Old and the New Testament,
and the scholarship of the nineteenth century has
taken up the task, perfected the method, and reached
in some questions a general agreement. To-day
the principles of literary criticism in their appli-

184 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

cation to the Bible are generally acknowledged.
The books of the Bible are like other books; they
are not to be treated as divine Scriptures but as
human writings. One has to inquire in each in-
stance about the author, his methods of writing,
the sources of his information, his tendencies, and
so on.

Criticism did not stop here; it overstepped the
boundaries of purely literary criticism; it became
historical criticism, too. The historicity of the facts
reported in the Bible was called in question; recently
the historicity of Jesus has been denied; and where
his existence was admitted, still his teaching was
criticised. Some people found it too ascetic, to
others it was purely eschatological; in either case it
could not be adapted to our own time. So even in its
central points the Bible seemed to be attacked and
its authority shaken. Instead of being restricted to
the domain of religion, the Bible seemed to be denied
even to the uses of devotion. But the present
situation is not so desperate for the pious Bible
reader as it looks.

We have once more to face the two facts: the
circulation of the Bible has grown rapidly — im-
mensely— and the estimation of the Bible has been
reduced in nearly every field. Many a pious Chris-
tian, while rejoicing in the first fact, is greatly troub-

PRESENT DIFFICULTIES 185

led by the second. Has the Bible ceased to be au-
thoritative? Has it lost its infallibility? If the
Bible is not true from cover to cover, then it seems
to be not trustworthy at all. We had better put it
aside and leave it to deserved oblivion. That is an
argument frequently brought forward nowadays,
both by people who disbelieve in the authority of the
Bible and the truth of the Christian religion and
by those who eagerly try to assert the old authority
of the Bible as the inspired Word of God which re-
veals everything. They argue, and apparently not
without plausibility, that if you destroy the au-
thority of the Bible at any point, it is lost altogether;
there is no limit to the destructive energy of our time.
Therefore do not touch this question; leave the Bible
as it stands — the sacred book, undisturbed by pro-
fane hands. It is the book by which our fathers
were taught. Why should we disbelieve in it? Both
these positions seem to be logically consistent : every-
thing or nothing; infallible or no authority. But,
in fact, the truth is never on one side. Hard as
it may sound to our philosophers, the truth is
very seldom logical. What seems to be consis-
tency is, in fact, a confusion of two different aspects
which ought to be kept separate. The Bible is not
a text-book for any science — nay, not even for the
science of theology. It is the book for Christian

186 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

devotion. This was its original intention, and I
venture to think that it is not a loss but a gain if
the Bible is once more applied to its proper purpose.

As we have seen in the first chapter, the Bible
proved itself to be an inexhaustible source of com-
fort and strength, of exhortation and inspiration to
the Christians of the first period. They would not
leave this book for any consideration — nay, they
would even die for it. And so whenever the Bible
was read by a pious Christian a new stream of life
flowed through him and through the church. And
this new life has always caused a strong desire for
the Bible. There is a reciprocal influence between
Bible and piety; the Bible creates piety, and piety
demands the Bible. This is the experience of nine-
teen centuries; it is impossible that the twentieth
century should alter it. As long as a pious Christian
lives on earth, the Bible will exercise its influence
upon him, and as long as there is such thing as the
Bible there will be Christians. That is sure! It is
not always easy to measure this private influence
of the Bible on individual piety and devotion.
People who read the Bible for edification usually do
not talk much about it. In biographies it is not
mentioned, either because the biographer took it for
granted or because he did not care for it himself.

INFLUENCE ON INDIVIDUALS 187

Seldom do we have an opportunity, like the one
given in Bismarck's letters to his wife, where he
mentions frequently what Psalm or passage of the
Bible he read before going to bed and discusses some
points which have struck him. It is impossible to
say how many people read the Bible privately for
their own edification. Seeing how few know the
Bible thoroughly, we might suppose that very
few read it, but it is said that Bible reading among
the boys in the English public schools is again
increasing. And I feel sure that the time must
come, and will come, when private reading of the
Bible will again be a common practice among Chris-
tians.

But the Bible's task is not only to sustain indi-
vidual piety; it has a second duty to perform.
Christianity is not a mere aggregation of Christian
individuals but a community — a church, if you
will. It is necessary for any community to have
a standard, for any church to have a creed. It is
the Bible which has to supply this. Herein lies the
danger of aberration, as we have seen in the second
and the following chapters. The history of the
church and of its doctrine gives ample proof of the
fact that, taking the Bible as a rule for the church's
dogma, Christianity not only missed the right path
for the development of doctrine, but even lost the

188 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

right use of the Bible. It is only by aiming at an
historical orientation that the church can gain from
the Bible the right direction for the setting forth of
its doctrine. The doctrine of the church never can
be, and never has been, identical with the doctrine
of the Bible, because it is impossible to stop the
development of history; besides, there are as many
doctrines in the Bible itself as men who wrote the
several books of the Bible, or even more. Saint
Paul has not one doctrine of the atonement but
half a dozen theories about it. The church has
to formulate its own doctrine consistently with the
Bible; that means a doctrine which keeps to the main
line of religious development as testified to by the
Bible; or, rather, to do justice to the variety of
Biblical doctrines, permits a modern adaptation of
the several modes in which religious experience is
expressed. This seems vague, but it is the path
which Christianity is bound to follow; and it prom-
ises success.

The modern view is that it is the religious ex-
perience of men, as testified to in the Bible, from
which both the individual and the church take their
start. But Christians believe that through this hu-
man experience God himself is revealing his grace.
Therefore it is still, as our fathers said, God's
Word. And God will teach the church to formulate

SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE CHURCH 189

the common experience by the help of his Word.
That is the present position.

But now what of the influence of the Bible on
civilisation? Has it gone? It seems under present
conditions reduced to very small proportions, if
not made impossible altogether. I am prepared,
however, to declare that just the opposite is true.
The influence of the Bible on civilisation still con-
tinues, and it will grow greater the more the Bible
is used in the proper way, as an influence not on
outward form but in inward inspiration.

The results of the influence exerted by the Bible
in former centuries, when it was an outward rule of
life, still go on. We cannot imagine what would
have become of mankind if there had been no Bible.
We cannot drop the previous history out of our life.
We still speak the language which was modelled by
our Bible; we still quote many proverbs which orig-
inate in the Bible, even without knowing that they
come from the Bible. Our artists will go on choos-
ing motifs from the Bible. The civilised nations
will never give up Sunday, although not keeping it
as a Sabbath. They will continue to aim at a fuller
measure of legal and social equality, convinced as
many may be that it is impossible to create an out-
ward equality among men as long as there is no

190 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION

equal sense of responsibility and duty in all mem-
bers of the nation.

The influence of the Bible in its present position
as the book of devotion is of supreme impor-
tance for civilisation. Progress in civilisation is
guaranteed not by constitution nor by law but only
by the spirit which rules the individual and through
the individual the community. We need strong
characters who know the great truth of self-sacrifice.
Such characters are formed by the inward inspira-
tion given by devotional reading of the Bible.
Making men devout, it makes them strong and in-
fluential in the common effort to promote civilisa-
tion by removing everything which is contrary to
the welfare of others. That is the most important
influence which the Bible can have; and that in-
fluence it still exerts and ever will exert on civi-
lisation.

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