Keynote studies in keynote books of the Bible

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CflpSRIGtlT BEPOSIK

Keynote Studies in
Keynote Books of the Bible

The James Sprunt Lectures delivered at
Union Theological Seminary in Virginia

Keynote Studies

in

Keynote Books of the Bible

By
C. ALPHONSO SMITH, Ph. D., LL. D,, L. H. D.

Head of the Department of English in the United States

Naval Acade?ny, Annapolis, Md., and Author of

" Studies in English Syntax" "Die Amerikanische

Literature " What Can Literature Do For

Me ? " "0. Henry Biography," etc.

New York Chicago

Fleming H. Revell Company

London and Edinburgh

Copyright, ioto, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

r13

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago : 1 7 North Wabash Ave.
London : 2 1 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh : 75 Princes Street

©CU515621

To the memory of
my father

y. Henry Smith, D. £).,

with a sense of indebtedness that
has grown with every passing year
this book is dedicated in affectionate
veneration

THE JAMES SPRUNT LECTURES

IN nineteen hundred and eleven Mr. James Sprunt
of Wilmington, North Carolina, gave to the Trustees
of Union Theological Seminary in Virginia the sum
of thirty thousand dollars, for the purpose of establishing a
perpetual lectureship, which would enable the institution
to secure from time to time the services of distinguished
ministers and authoritative scholars, outside the regular
Faculty, as special lecturers on subjects connected with
various departments of Christian thought and Christian
work. The lecturers are chosen by the Faculty of the
Seminary and a committee of the Board of Trustees, and
the lectures are published after their delivery in accord-
ance with a contract between the lecturer and these
representatives of the institution. The sixth series of
lectures on this foundation is presented in this volume.

W. W. MOORE.

President Union Theological
Seminary in Virginia.

Preface

THESE lectures are a part of a course
on the books of the Bible delivered
before the Laymen's League of the
Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, Vir-
ginia. They were revised for delivery on
the James Sprunt Foundation at the Union
Theological Seminary of Richmond, Vir-
ginia, in March, 1917, and have been further
revised for publication in book form. The
initial lecture, however, on The Keynote
Method, contains the plan and purpose to
which I have tried to be constant from first
to last. If in their present form these
lectures or any one of them shall aid in
bringing the Bible " home to men's business
and bosoms," I shall be deeply grateful.

C. A. S.
United States Naval Academy,

Annapolis, Md.

t

Contents

I.

The Keynote Method

ii

II.

Genesis

34

III.

Esther

60

IV.

Job

. 82

V.

Hosea

in

VI.

The Gospel of John

129

VII.

The Epistle to the Romans

. 148

VIII.

The Epistle to the Philippians

. 166

IX.

Revelation ....

, 180

Index

, 201

I

THE KEYNOTE METHOD

I

ONE of the most interesting passages
in Prescott's Conquest of Mexico is
that in which he describes the bat-
tle of Otumba. A mere handful of Spaniards
confronted two hundred thousand Aztecs.
Cortez thought, says Prescott, that his last
hour had come. But he was to win " one of
the most remarkable victories ever achieved
in the New World." His method was essen-
tially the method that we shall attempt to
follow in our study of eight books of the
Bible. Knowing that whatever stability or
cohesiveness the Aztec armies had was due
to the authority of their commanders, Cortez
ordered his men not to waste their strength
on the military underlings opposed to them
but to seek, find, and strike down the leaders.
One cacique was worth a thousand men.
Had this plan not been followed it is not
likely that a single Spaniard would have

ii

12 KEYNOTE STUDIES

survived to tell the story of the battle of
Otumba.

Does not every masterpiece of literature
whether of prose or verse contain some cen-
tral and commanding thought that gives
coherence and vitality to the whole? Is it
possible to understand the parts without
reference to their common contribution to a
common end? Can we talk intelligently
about the metre or rhythm or stanzaic
structure of a poem if we ignore or make
secondary the thought content to which
these are but ancillary? Can we discuss
understandingly the descriptive or narrative
or argumentative skill of a writer, the mould
of his paragraphs, the architecture of his
sentences, or any other question relating to
form, if we turn our eyes even for a moment
from the thought goal to which he is driv-
ing? And yet a well-known critic has said
that literature is that kind of writing in
which the form is of more importance than
the content. It would be hard to pack more
vacuity into an equal number of words.
The man who defined classical music as the
music that is better than it sounds was a
kinsman but wiser.

When Christ said, " Seek ye first the king-
dom of God and his righteousness; and all

THE KEYNOTE METHOD 13

these things shall be added unto you," He
suggested the final solution of all the vexing
problems that have gathered about the rela-
tion of form and content The Master was
not attempting to appraise the relative im-
portance of " The kingdom of God " and
" all these things." He was only telling
how " all these things " could be secured.
How? By attending to something else first.
The something else in literature is thought
content; "all these things" are the details )
of form. The question is not, Which is the j
more important? but Which comes first?/
Priority not primacy is the solution. Put)
first things first.

II
We are going to read and meditate to-
gether eight masterpieces of the world's
literature. They are Genesis, Esther, fob,
Hosea, John, Romans, Philippians, and Revela-
tion. We shall try to strike the keynote of
each, to find its taproot, to chart its central
current, to assimilate its pivotal thought, or,
as Cortez might have put it, to capture its
cacique. The task is difficult and I enter
upon it with many misgivings. Nor am I
sure that what may prove to be central in
my thinking will be central in yours, or that
what is central to you will be central to me.

U KEYNOTE STUDIES

I am heartened, however, in making the at-
tempt by the conviction that the time is
surely coming when all great literature will
be studied in just this way. A few voices
have already been raised in behalf of the
thought content of literature. " The highest
attribute of the poet,,, says C. F. Johnson,1
" is thought power in the broad sense, that
which coordinates multiform phenomena
and refers them to law." Rudolph Eucken2
expresses it still more strongly : " In our
opinion this setting aside of content con-
stitutes a danger for that very independence
of art in the interests of which it is de-
manded. To become independent of mate-
rial does not mean to attain pure independ-
ence. An art devoted preponderatingly to
form easily becomes a mere matter of pro-
fessional dexterity, the first concern of which
is to display (to itself if not to others) its
own skill. This gives rise to a predilection
for the eccentric, paradoxical, and exagger-
ated, and, in seeking after effects of this
kind, the promised freedom only too easily
becomes merely another kind of dependence,
a dependence of the artist upon others and
upon his own moods. Genuine independ-

1 " Elements of Literary Criticism."
8 " Main Currents of Modern Thought."

THE KEYNOTE METHOD 15

ence is to be found only when the creative
work proceeds solely from an inner necessity
of the artist's own nature. But this cannot
take place unless there is something to say,
nay, something to reveal. Mere virtuosity
knows no such necessity."

" So long as poetry is conceived as mere
imitation," says Richard Green Moulton,1
" the emphasis is shifted from the matter to
the manner of performance; more and more
the spirit of connoisseurship turns from
deeper things to delicate nuances of effect.
If poetry is creation, the subject-matter
takes the center of the field." A good sum-
mary is given by C. T. Winchester : " We
have a right to ask, then, of any work of
literary art, however emotional in purpose,
What does it mean? What truths does it
embody and enforce? We shall find there
is no eminence in literature without some-
thing high or serious in its thought; and
that, other things being equal, the value of
all literature increases with the breadth and
depth of the truth it contains."

That these views have not always been
held even by eminent critics is evidenced by
the following interesting extract from the

1 " The Modern Study of literature "

2 " Some Principles of Literary Criticism."

16 KEYNOTE STUDIES

Journal of Edward Gibbon. Under date of
October 3, 1762, he writes: "I was ac-
quainted only with two ways of criticising a
beautiful passage : the one, to show, by an
exact anatomy of it, the distinct beauties of
it, and whence they sprung; the other, an
idle exclamation, or a general encomium,
which leaves nothing behind it. Longinus
has shown me that there is a third. He tells
me his own feelings upon reading it; and
tells them with such energy that he com-
municates them." Is there not a fourth way
and should it not come first? Let us try
an illustration, beginning with Gibbon's
three ways and taking as our " beautiful
passage" Poe's lines:

The glory that was Greece

And the grandeur that was Rome.

(1) An "anatomy" of this passage
shows that its beauty is due in part to the
perfect parallelism maintained, " glory " in
the first line corresponding to " grandeur "
in the second, and " Greece " in the first to
" Rome " in the second. The contrast, too,
between the accented vowels, the long o and
e sounds and the short an sound, contributes
its quota of sonant beauty. Further analy-
sis reveals a distinctive appeal in the com-

THE KEYNOTE METHOD 17

plete identification of glory with Greece and
of grandeur with Rome. The poet had first
written

The beauty of fair Greece
And the grandeur of old Rome ;

but he vastly increased the effectiveness of
his lines when he replaced " beauty " with
" glory," and " of fair " and " of old " with
" that was," thus making glory the very
synonym of Greece and grandeur only an-
other name for Rome.

(2) This has always seemed to me one
of the most beautiful passages in American
literature. How satisfying, how haunting,
how magical is the phrasing ! "Two mighty
lines," says Edwin Markham, " that com-
press into a brief space all the rich, high
magnificence of dead centuries.', They are
" reserved for immortality," says the Eng-
lish critic, J. M. Robertson. They bear
" the seal of ultimate perfection," writes
C. L. Moore.

(3) Whenever I read these lines, Greece
in all her splendor and Rome in all her great-
ness seem summoned back. I feel like writ-
ing the first line in every Greek history that
I may hereafter read and the second in every
Roman history. They stimulate my imagina-

18 KEYNOTE STUDIES

tion by opening vast vistas of buried history
and by pointing out the best angles of vision.
(4) But these are mere bypaths of in-
terpretation, for Poe is not thinking pri-
marily of Greece or of Rome. He is trying
to express the effect upon himself of the
beauty of a friend whom he calls Helen.
Till he saw Helen, the story of Greece and
Rome had been only a tale that was told.
The incomparable art of the one and the
lofty achievement of the other, a blend of
ideal beauty and of ordered power, had
alike passed him by. Now it is different. A
new faculty has been released. Helen has
brought him home

To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.

When probed for their central meaning,
therefore, the lines make it clear that the
goal of Poe's thought was not Greece or
Rome. It was the interpretation of Helen's
beauty in terms of Greece and Rome. Till
this thought is made central and controlling,
all " ways of criticising " will be misdirected.
One has only to glance at some of the
laboriously introduced and minutely anno-
tated editions of literature that flood the
markets to-day to see that thought content

THE KEYNOTE METHOD 19

has not yet come into its own. Here is a
select edition of Sidney Lanier's poems with
introduction, notes, and bibliography. I
turn to that great sonnet, called The Mocking-
Bird:

Superb and sole, upon a plumed spray
That o'er the general leafage boldly grew,
He summ'd the woods in song ; or typic drew
The watch of hungry hawks, the lone dismay
Of languid doves when long their lovers stray
And all birds' passion-plays that sprinkle dew
At morn in brake or bosky avenue.
Whate'er birds did or dreamed, this bird could

say.
Then down he shot, bounced airily along
The sward, twitched in a grasshopper, made

song
Midflight, perched, prinked, and to his art

again.
Sweet Science, this large riddle read me plain :
How may the death of that dull insect be
The life of yon trim Shakespeare on the tree ?

What is the theme or core of this sonnet
as a whole? Plainly the thought launched
in the last three lines. Lanier was thinking
and wished to make us think of those myriad
alchemies of nature that transcend and defy
the chemistries of man. How is the insen-
sate clod transformed through fruit and

20 KEYNOTE STUDIES

grain and flesh into brain and thought and
joy? Or, to stage it differently, how is the
song of the most graceful and melodious of
birds vitalized by the carcass of the most
awkward and cacophonous of insects? Can
science tell? " Why may not imagination,"
says Hamlet, " trace the noble dust of Alex-
ander till he find it stopping a bung-hole?
. . . As thus : Alexander died, Alexander
was buried, Alexander returneth into dust;
the dust is earth ; of earth we make loam ;
and why of that loam, whereto he was con-
verted, might they not stop a beer-barrel? '
They might, but imagination finds little
profit in tracing downward. It is the up-
ward tracings that lead us out into the in-
finite. But how does our annotator make
clear the central thought of The Mocking-
Bird? He says nothing about it but he re-
fers us to books and encyclopedias on birds
in general, to English poems about the sky-
lark and nightingale, and to thirty- two Amer-
ican poems and prose selections about the
mocking-bird. Centrifugal criticism could
hardly go further. Indeed one is surprised
that in the four pages of notes no parallel
reading about the grasshopper was sug-
gested.

Let us take a still greater poem, probably

THE KEYNOTE METHOD 21

the greatest poem of equal length in all
literature. I mean Gray's Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard, Longfellow tells us of
the children who, coming home from school,
used to look in at the open door of the black-
smith's shop

And catch the burning sparks that fly-
Like chaff from a threshing floor.

They of course cared nothing for the shape
that was being forged : they were interested
only in the sparks. Does not Gray's Elegy
survive to-day chiefly in sparks, in frag-
mentary quotations? Here again the parallel
reading assigned in annotated editions is not
really parallel. It is essentially unrelated.
Parallel reading, if it means anything, means
reading that follows the same trajectory of
thought. It means reading that illuminates
and is illuminated by the masterpiece with
which we start. Does Milton's Lycidas or
Shelley's Adonais or Tennyson's In Memoriam,
great as they are, treat the theme treated
by Gray? I think not. The fact that all
are elegies is negligible. It was this con-
fusion of title and theme, of name and sub-
stance, that led the annotator of The Mock-
ing-Bird to class the poem as a study in
ornithology. Of course a reading of other

22 KEYNOTE STUDIES

great elegies will serve to bring out the con-
trast between them and Gray's work. But
so will the reading of poems that are not
elegies. Parallel reading, if it is not to be
sapless and unprocreant, if it is to do more
than merely satisfy a routine academic re-
quirement, must be suggested rather than
imposed, and suggested by the nature of the
thought that we are trying to assimilate.

What now is Gray's central plea in his
greatest poem? Notice that he did not call
his lines merely an elegy but an Elegy Written
in a Country Churchyard. No poet, certainly
not one of Gray's fastidiousness, would have
given his lines so long and detailed a title
without having in mind a definite purpose.
No other elegy tells in its title where it was
written. But in this elegy the place was
essential, for this elegy dares to pit the
neglected churchyard against Westminster
Abbey. It is the most democratic poem in
the English language. Its plea is not for the
living few who have not a fair chance but for
the unnumbered dead of all times and climes
who did not have a fair chance. These lines
strike the keynote:

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial
fire;

THE KEYNOTE METHOD 23

Hands that the rod of empire might have
sway'd,
Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er
unroll ;

Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of their soul.

Other elegies are individual; this is uni-
versal. Gray is championing the cause of
the potentially great against the actually
great. The difference, he says, is not in
native worth but in relative opportunity for
self-development, not in breed but in pas-
ture. Those who lie in Westminster Abbey
belonged to the privileged class. Given
equal opportunity those who lie beneath the
unlettered texts of Stoke Pogis or of any
other neglected churchyard might have been
sepulchred with equal acclaim and beneath
an equal glory of bronze and marble. In-
stead of parallel reading, go out and stand
in such a cemetery as Gray describes and
think the poet's thoughts after him. It will
temper your estimate of class distinctions;
it will widen and deepen your sympathies;
it may even dedicate you to the task of help-
ing potential greatness to become actual

24 KEYNOTE STUDIES

greatness. Such a poem sends a challenge to
every school and church and government in
the world. If parallel reading be insisted
on, let it not be other elegies. Let it rather
be such trumpet calls as Burns sounded in A
Man's a Man for a* That or Jefferson in The
Declaration of Independence or Gray himself in
The Alliance of Education and Government,

III

That the Bible surpasses in the value and
potency of its thought content all other
literature does not need to be reaffirmed. I
yield to no one in my admiration of the
classical literatures or of the modern litera-
tures or of the more technical literature of
scientific achievement. But in vividness and
intensity, in elevation of appeal, in the ex-
tent of her literary empire, and in the dura-
tion of her sovereignty, the Bible takes easy
and secure precedence. The most advanced
nations of the world are the children of her
fireside; the centuries themselves have been
but handmaidens in her service. There is
no modern literature worthy the name that
has not felt her influence. There is no
regnant people whose strivings she has not
shepherded.

But the individual books of the Bible are

THE KEYNOTE METHOD 25

not so well known as wholes as are other
masterpieces of far less significance. Ask
the average reader or student to give you
the central content of Hamlet, Evangeline,
Pippa Passes, Silas Marner, Peer Gynt, Mr.
Britling Sees It Through, and, if he has read
them, you will get better answers than if
you ask him about the distinctive content of
Ezra, Isaiah, Joel, Haggai, Colossians, Jude.
The reasons for this difference seem to me
many. In the first place, our sense of the
unique unity and authoritativeness of the
Bible as a whole has dwarfed our feeling for
the distinctive content of the sixty-six book
units. WfLforget that Jhe^ merL-wJaa^wrote
or compiled these books did so not because
they had to say something but because they
had something to^say^ We^think of the
Bible and read it not as a library but as a
book, though in derivation and in essential
content it is a collection of books rather than
one book. To search the Bible for favorite
verses, to listen Sunday after Sunday to the
exposition of select texts, to follow the Sun-
day School method of long jumps and short
pauses will undoubtedly store the mind with
vital truth. But this is not enough, and the
writers of the Bible would be the first to
protest. Every method of Bible study is in

26 KEYNOTE STUDIES

its very nature inadequate if it ignores the
larger and creative or superintending pur-
pose that gave beginning and ending and
distinctive message to each book.

Even when the Bible is read through once
a year or at shorter intervals, it is not read
with anything like the attention to its con-
stituent parts that we give to a like reading
of Shakespeare or Emerson or Ibsen. Have
you ever in reading the Bible paused after
each book and asked yourself: What does
this book say that no other book of the
sixty-six says or says so well? If this book
had not been written, how and where would
the Biblical structure be weakened? If this
were the only book of the Bible left to us,
how much of the rest could we reconstruct?
If nothing else were known about the author
except that he wrote this book, how much
of his personality could we gather from it?

But our familiarity or unfamiliarity with
the Bible is not due chiefly to methods of
reading it through. It comes to us, as has
been already said, by ways far more hostile
to thought content. The story is told of a
Scotch minister who used to take snuff so
habitually that he ignored the proprieties of
both time and place. " My text this morn-
ing," he once announced, " you will find in

THE KEYNOTE METHOD 27

these words : ' Here a little and there a
little/ ' each little being illustrated by a
corresponding pinch and inhalation. We
illustrate the text differently but none the
less habitually. The current method of
Bible study, if it may be called such, is a
hop-skip-and-jump method. No other book,
except a dictionary, a cook book, or a volume
of popular quotations, is used in the same
way.

The popular attitude toward the book of
Jonah will illustrate. You will not find in all
literature another so flagrant example of the
havoc wrought by nibbling, halting, piece-
meal interpretation. If Jonah had not been
one of the books of the Bible, its central
content may very well have been differently
interpreted by different readers, just as
Hauptmann's Sunken Bell or Maeterlinck's
Blue Bird is differently interpreted by dif-
ferent readers ; but the interpretation would
at least have been an honest attempt to ap-
praise the message of the work as a whole.
As it is, one incident has been wrested from
its setting and made to connote the meaning
and mission of the entire book. There are
times when the book of Jonah seems to me
the most uplifting book in the Old Testa-
ment. It is an epitome of history, world

28 KEYNOTE STUDIES

history and individual history. It is the age-
long conflict between the liberal God and
illiberal man. Nowhere else in the Old
Testament does God appear more godlike
or human nature more human. In no other
book is the writer's purpose clearer or more
modernly helpful. No other book is in more
exact accord with our highest imaginings of
God or with our sifted and ultimate knowl-
edge of man. But the popular interpreta-
tion stops abruptly with the appearance of
the " great fish." If parallel reading were
to be popularly assigned it would be a course
in ichthyology. There would be nothing
spiritual in it. And this attitude is due
chiefly to the current discontinuity and lack
of totality with which the Bible is read and
interpreted. I can find no analogy outside
of the Bible to this particular kind of mis-
interpretation.

Another influence at work is not popular
but scholarly. It is the so-called higher
criticism. This criticism is to-day still in
the fragmentary stage. It is making bricks
rather than building temples. The thrill of
supposed discovery induces in the higher
critic an over-valuation of the part as against
the balanced appraisal of the whole. Higher
criticism has achieved much and will, I hope,

THE KEYNOTE METHOD 29

achieve more. But at present it is stronger
in minutiae than in wholes, in finding than in
correlating, in the hurrah of exploitation
than in the hush of interpretation. Some-
times it is a word that derails the critical
judgment, sometimes an incident. Take the
word " holy." It is, as you know, one of
the distinctions of Isaiah that he is pre-
eminently " the prophet of holiness." One
does not have to be a Hebrew scholar to
know what Isaiah means by " holy." Its
orbit, like the orbit of other words, can be
traced accurately in its use. It bears its
credentials with it. Read Isaiah through
from beginning to end and you will have a
far better idea of what he means by " holy "
than will the philologist who knows the
original meaning of the word bujj&ha. is
wedded to. .the con vi£tioii4hat words neyer
throw ojff th^halo^or halter of their firjst
meanings.

The following paragraph is an illustra-
tion:1 "When we learn that the root-word
for 'holy* is the same throughout the
Semitic group of languages, and that in
Assyrian, for example, it is used in one form
to designate a ' prostitute ' or ' harlot/ we

*J. M. Powis Smith in "A Guide to the Study of the
Christian Religion " (1916), p. 140.

30 KEYNOTE STUDIES

get a new point of view for the interpreta-
tion of the Hebrew word." I think not. The
word " holy " in Hebrew, like " sacer " in
Latin and " hagios " in Greek and " taboo"
in Polynesian, meant originally " set apart
for a definite purpose." The purpose might
be good or bad. The word was ritualistic
rather than ethical. But in Hebrew the
ethical meaning soon dwarfed the ritualistic
and in Isaiah's use " holy " plainly includes
the whole circuit of moral and spiritual per-
fection. The knowledge of the original or
etymological meaning of Hebrew " holy ,!
does not give us " a new point of view for
the interpretation of the Hebrew word."
It is only another illustration of the well
known principle of semantics that the first
meaning of a word, while often interesting
and even prophetic, will prove a barrier to
interpretation if you carry it over into later
meanings. The first meaning is a .spring-
board, >not a h^rnes^.

Our word " devout " has followed the well
beaten highway of Hebrew " holy." It
meant originally " set apart, devoted or
vowed to," and the person or thing could be
vowed to Satan as well as to God. In fact
Sheldon * speaks of those who were not the
1 " Miracles of Antichrist " (1616).

THE KEYNOTE METHOD 31

ordinary followers of Antichrist " but his
special devouts." Suppose now that in an
obituary of some dear friend of yours the
writer had frequently used the word " de-
vout." What would you think of the man
who should whisper in your ear — " You will
get a new point of view for the interpreta-
tion of this word ' devout ' if you will re-
member that originally it could be applied
to devotees of the devil " ?

But the higher criticism, in its search for
proof-texts, misinterprets an incident as
often as a mere word. The reason is the
same in both cases : the part is exalted above
the whole. And the remedy is the same :
read the entire book and interpret the part
in the light of the whole, not the whole in,i
the light of the part. Difficulties of inter-
pretation, if soluble at all, will be found
soluble in the waters of the central current
rather than in the brackish pools along the
shore. A recent critic,1 for example, at-
tempts to prove that in the older Old Testa-
ment books " Jahveh is the God of Palestine
only, being more or less localized at Sanctu-
aries within its borders." His power, in
other words, was not supposed to extend be-

xSee "The Old Testament in the Light of To-
day," by William Frederic Bade, chapter III.

32 KEYNOTE STUDIES

yond the limits of the Holy Land. " The
fact/' he adds, " that Jahveh and his wor-
ship were popularly believed to be insepa-
rable from Palestine may be illustrated by a
number of interesting passages."

The incidents cited are three. In the first,
Cain is speaking: " Behold, thou hast driven
me out this day from the face of the ground ;
and from thy face shall I be hid ; and I shall
be a fugitive and a wanderer in the earth;
and it will come to pass, that whosoever
flndeth me will slay me " (Genesis 4 : 14). In
the second passage the Philistines are the
speakers: "And see; if it [the ark of the
Lord] goeth up by the way of its own bor-
der to Bethshemesh, then he hath done us
this great evil: but if not, then we shall
know that it is not his hand that smote
us; it was a chance that happened to us ,!
(1 Samuel 6:9). In the third passage David
speaks to Saul : " They have driven me out
this day that I should not cleave unto the
inheritance of Jehovah, saying, Go, serve
other gods. Now therefore, let not my
blood fall to the earth away from the pres-
ence of Jehovah " (1 Samuel 26 : 19-20).

It does not seem to me that these inci-
dents, though torn from their setting, prove
or even make plausible the author's conten-

THE KEYNOTE METHOD 33

tion. They illustrate not the Tightness of
his view but the wrongness of his method.
They but emphasize the need of standardiz-
ing our interpretation of particular incidents
by weighing them in the scales of the book
units as wholes. A reading of Genesis entire
and of 1 Samuel entire will not only make
the meaning of these incidents plain but will,
in our judgment, establish the exact reverse
of what the author seeks to prove. Synec-\
doche, or the use of a part for the whole, is
a figure of speech that belongs to rhetoric,
not to logic, certainly not to hermeneutics.

IV
Photographers tell us that the airplane
will soon inaugurate a new kind of photog-
raphy. The bird's-eye view, the view of the
lower from the realm of the higher, has
hitherto been the privilege of the bird alone.
It will soon be man's privilege. "VYe shall
see more because we shall see less. No book
offers so much to the View from the heights
as does the Bible; no writers have suffered
more from the partial view than the writers
of the books of the Bible; and no time has
called more loudly for the release of the
larger view than the time in which we live.

II

GENESIS

i

NO single chapter in the Old Testa-
ment so impresses me with its
inherent greatness as the first
chapter of Genesis. Some of the Psalms and
a few chapters in Isaiah strike a note of
higher rhapsody. In sheer intellectuality
the twentieth chapter of Bxodus goes beyond
it. But in its blend of beauty and power, in
the recurrent beat of its planetary rhythms,
in the consciousness of a great truth ade-
quately embodied at last, in a certain proud
disdain of all embellishment except that
which attends unsolicited upon great
thought greatly expressed, the first chapter
of Genesis seems to me alone and unap-
proached.

In the beginning God created the heaven
and the earth. And the earth was without
form, and void; and darkness was upon the
face of the deep. And the Spirit of God
moved upon the face of the waters. And
God said, Let there be light: and there was

34

GENESIS 35

light. And God saw the light, that it was
good: and God divided the light from the
darkness. And God called the light Day,
and the darkness he called Night. And the
evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in
the midst of the waters, and let it divide the
waters from the waters. And God made the
firmament and divided the waters which were
under the firmament from the waters which
were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven.
And the evening and the morning were the
second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the
heaven be gathered together unto one rjlace,
and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth ; and the
gathering together of the waters called he
Seas: and God saw that it was good. And
God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the
herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yield-
ing fruit after his kind, whose seed is in
itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And
the earth brought forth grass, and herb yield-
ing seed after his kind, and the tree yield-
ing fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his
kind: and God saw that it was good. And
the evening and the morning were the third
day.

And God said, Let there be lights in the

36 KEYNOTE STUDIES

firmament of the heaven to divide the day
from the night; and let them be for signs,
and for seasons, and for days, and years:
And let them be for lights in the firmament
of the heaven to give light upon the earth:
arid it was so. And God made two great
lights; the greater light to rule the day, and
the lesser light to rule the night : he made the
stars also. And God set them in the firma-
ment of the heaven to give light upon the
earth, and to rule over the day and over the
night, and to divide the light from the dark-
ness: and God saw that it was good. And
the evening and the morning were the fourth
day.

And God said, Let the waters bring forth
abundantly the moving creature that hath
life, and fowl that may fly above the earth
in the open firmament of heaven. And God
created great whales, and every living crea-
ture that moveth, which the waters brought
forth abundantly, after their kind, and every
winged fowl after his kind: and God saw
that it was good. And God blessed them,
saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the
waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in
the earth. And the evening and the morning
were the fifth day.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth
the living creature after his kind, cattle, and
creeping thing, and beast of the earth after

GENESIS 37

his kind : and it was so. And God made the
beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle
after their kind, and every thing that creep-
eth upon the earth after his kind: and God
saw that it was good. And God said, Let us
make man in our image, after our likeness:
and let them have dominion over the fish of
the sea^ and over the fowl of \he airland oVer
the cattle, and over all the earth, and over
every creeping thing that creepeth upon the
earth. So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God created he him; male
and female created he them. And God
blessed them, and God said unto them, Be
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the
earth, and subdue it : and have dominion over
the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the
air, and over every living thing that moveth
upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I
have given you every herb bearing seed,
which is upon the face of all the earth, and
every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree
yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
And to every beast of the earth, and to every
fowl of the air, and to every thing that
creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is
life, I have given every green herb for meat :
and it was so. And God saw every thing
that he had made, and, behold, it was very
good. And the evening and the morning
were the sixth day.

38 KEYNOTE STUDIES

This chapter abolished mythology
throughout the civilized world. There were
doubtless mythological germs among the
Hebrews themselves but this chapter steril-
ized them. Latin, Greek, Norse, and Ori-
ental mythology lived on for a while but the
warrant of dispossession had been served
and gods and goddesses, demigods and demi-
goddesses, naiads, dryads, and hamadryads,
all had to go. Some of them found refuge
in poetry and romance; some in the orna-
ment and compliment of oratory; some in
the metaphors and similes of rhetoric. But
in exact proportion as the first great thought
of the Bible had free circulation among races
and nations, the big gods and the little gods
were doomed. Mythology became a mere
toy of the mind. The preface to the Bible
had throned one God as maker and pre-
server of all. It served as a sort of cosmic
Monroe Doctrine, announcing to the old
deities that any attempt on their part to
extend their system to any portion of the
universe would henceforth be considered
dangerous to the well-being of mankind. It
had its effect. The dignity and authorita-
tiveness of the announcement, the splendor
of the vision that it unfolded, and the instant
appeal made to what we now call intuitional

GENESIS 39

probability marked the inauguration of a
new era in human thought.

There is in fact nothing finer in the Old
Testament than the way in which the author
of the first chapter of Genesis takes the ele-
mental timbers of the world and cleans them
of all the incrustations that had gathered
upon them. Earth, water, night, sun, moon,
stars, — read what Greek and Roman in-
tellects had done with these, how buried
they were beneath the sediment of bizarre
fancy and grotesque history. There is not
a verse of this chapter that does not by its
mere omissions register an altitude of spirit
immeasurably beyond all that had gone be-
fore. Matthew Arnold has drawn an elabo-
rate distinction between the Hebrew genius
or Hebraism and the Greek genius or
Hellenism. " The uppermost idea with
Hellenism, " he says,1 " is to see things as
they really are; the uppermost idea with
Hebraism is conduct and obedience." The
distinction has enough truth to float it but
it does not fit the first chapter of Genesis.

Read the great chapter once more and
weigh its findings against this summary of
classical mythology by John Fiske :2 " To

1 " Culture and Anarchy," chapter IV.
8 " Myths and Myth-Makers," p. 18.

40 KEYNOTE STUDIES

the ancients, the moon was not a lifeless
body of stones and clods ; it was the horned
huntress Artemis, coursing through the
upper ether, or bathing herself in the clear
lake; or it was Aphrodite, protectress of
lovers, born of the sea-foam in the East,
near Cyprus. The clouds were not bodies
of vaporized water; they were cows, with
swelling udders, driven to the milking by
Hermes, the summer wind; or great sheep
with moist fleeces, slain by the unerring
arrows of Bellerophon, the sun; or swan-
maidens, flitting across the firmament;
Valkyries hovering over the battle-field, to
receive the souls of falling heroes; or, again,
they were mighty mountains, piled one
above another, in whose cavernous recesses
the divining-wand of the storm-god Thor
revealed hidden treasures. The yellow-
haired sun Phoebus drove westerly all day
in his flaming chariot; or, perhaps, as
Meleager, retired for a while in disgust from
the sight of men; wedded at eventide the
violet light (CEnone, Iole) which he had
forsaken in the morning; sank as Hercules
upon a blazing funeral-pyre, or, like Aga-
memnon, perished in a blood-stained bath;
or, as the fish-god, Dagon, swam nightly
through the subterranean waters to appear

GENESIS 41

eastward again at daybreak. Sometimes
Phaethon, his rash, inexperienced son, would
take the reins and drive the solar chariot
too near the earth, causing the fruits to
perish, and the grass to wither, and the wells
to dry up."

Is not the passion for seeing things as
they really are more deeply wrought into
the first chapter of Genesis than into the
Greek conception? There is no doubt that
conduct and obedience were central and con-
trolling in Hebrew thought but they were
not isolated from things as they are. They
were built on them; they were supported
and vitalized by them ; they were a part of
a natural and necessary interdependence
that the Hebrew felt far more vividly than
the Greek. When Boeckh, perhaps the
greatest of Hellenists, came to sum up the
defects of the Greek genius, he used this
language : " While the Greeks saw each par-
ticular thing in its concrete shape, and in
all their work strove for supreme excellence,
the vision of all things in a universal inter-
dependence was denied them.,, But the
central achievement of the first chapter of
Genesis is just this " vision of all things in a »
universal interdependence."

The poets have sometimes attributed the

42 KEYNOTE STUDIES

passing of mythology to the revelations of
science. In his Sonnet to Science, Poe asks :

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car ?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star ?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree ?

It was not modern science, however, that
sent mythology to the discard. It was the
first chapter of Genesis. Mythology did not
live long enough to give modern science a
chance to get at it. And the death of myth-
ology, so far from injuring nature poetry,
helped it. These countless myths of crea-
tion not only kept men from a knowledge of
nature but made a genuine love of nature
impossible. They substituted for the laws
and charms of nature the capricious doings
of gods and goddesses. Lanier * sums up ad-
mirably the real reason why mythology
checked and postponed the spread of nature
poetry :

Much time is run, and man hath changed his

ways,
Since Nature, in the antique fable-days,
Was hid from man's true love by proxy fays,

1 " The Symphony."

GENESIS 43

False fauns and rascal gods that stole her

praise.
The nymphs, cold creatures of man's colder

brain,
Chilled Nature's streams till man's warm

heart was fain
Never to lave its love in them again.1

But the greatest achievement of the first
chapter of Genesis is that it announced unity,
order, and progression in nature. Compare
this chapter with any preceding account of
the creation of the world and it will be found
unique not only in dispossessing gods and
goddesses of their former holdings but in
staging the hitherto unrecognized qualities
of unity, order, and progression. The claim
is sometimes made that other and older ac-
counts of creation have been exhumed that
anticipate many of the details of the Hebrew
record. If this were true it would not in-
validate our thesis, for the Hebrew account
antiquated at one stroke all preceding ac-
counts and became alone the torch-bearer of
the new view. But the claim made for other
accounts is not true. Of course many of

1 Compare also Chateaubriand's fine saying in
" Le Genie du Christianisme ": "Libres de ce trou-
peau de dieux ridicules qui les bornaient de toutes
parts, les bois se sont remplis d'une divinite im-
mense."

44 KEYNOTE STUDIES

the created things mentioned in Genesis may
be found in other accounts, but there is no
unity, no order, no progression.

Take the famous Hymn to Creation from
The Veda.1 It ends :

How and from what has sprung this Uni-
verse? The gods

Themselves are subsequent to its development.

Who, then, can penetrate the secret of its
rise?

Whether 'twas framed or not, made or not
made, he only

Who in the highest sits, the omniscient Lord,

Assuredly knows all, or haply knows he not.

This is no account of creation. It is only a
dignified way of saying, " I know nothing
about it and doubt if God Himself knows."
Compare The Sumero-Babylonian Account of
the Creation of the World by Mardnk.2 The
order (or disorder) of creation in this inter-
esting fragment is (1) lands and cities,
(2) spirits of the earth, (3) mankind, (4) ani-
mals and the great rivers, (5) vegetation and
more animals, (6) beginnings of city civiliza-
tion. Whether written before or after Gene-

1 See " Old Sanskrit Texts," by J. Muir, p. 22.

2 See " Beginnings of Hebrew History," Appendix
III, by Charles Foster Kent.

GENESIS 45

sis the Sumero-Babylonian narrative can
serve only as a foil to the Hebrew account.
The other Babylonian accounts tell of the
long war between Marduk and Tiamat or
between Bel and Thamte. There are big
gods, little gods, middle-sized gods, mon-
sters, vipers, dragons, raging hounds, scor-
pion men, fish men, everything but unity and
system. There are contrasts, startling con-
trasts, to Genesis in these fantastic accounts
but, in the strict sense of the word, no
parallels. When we remember that the
Babylonian civilization was the elder, that it
environed the Hebrews from the very be-
ginning of their national career, and that it
soon became a part of the cult of the Pheni-
cians and Canaanites, we begin to realize
what an epoch in religious thought the first
chapter of Genesis marks.

It is to my mind one of the strangest
ironies of history that this chapter should
be singled out as distinctively unscientific.
It is the one chapter in the Bible that made
science possible. It is the magna charta of
science. There was no science and there
could be no science until men recognized
that unity, order, and progression are in-
herent in nature's processes. How were
men brought to this recognition? Two

46 KEYNOTE STUDIES

routes were possible. (1) They could ac-
cept the unity, order, and progression of
Genesis and on this pre-supposition proceed
to verification; (2) without knowledge of or
belief in Genesis they could experiment in-
dependently and thus arrive by induction at
a knowledge of the orderliness or potential
science inherent in nature. Now the his-
tory of science proves unmistakably that the
first method was that actually followed.
The founders of modern science, those on
whom the great nineteenth century scientists
built, were Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey,
and Newton. These men believed that
there was " mind/' " thought," "Almighty
power," " design," " intelligence," " an in-
telligent Agent " in nature. They believed
it not because they had proved it: proof
came later. They believed it because Gene-
sis affirmed it.

" I had rather believe," wrote Bacon, " all
the legends in the Talmud and the Alcoran
than that this universal frame is without a
mind." Kepler said : " In reading the se- \
crets of Nature I am thinking the thoughts
of God after Him." Kepler was moved to
his discoveries, says Benjamin Pierce,1 " by H
an exalted faith, anterior and superior to all j

1M Ideality in the Physical Sciences."

GENESIS 47

science, in the existence of intimate relations
between the constitution of man's mind and
that of God's firmament." Galileo believed
that his own discoveries would be recog-
nized not only as in harmony with Genesis
but " as the most transcendent displays of
Almighty power." Harvey told Robert
Boyle that he was led to discover the cir-
culation of the blood by observing that, in
the channels through which the blood flows,
one set of valves opens toward the heart
while another set opens in the opposite
direction, and that he could not help believ-
ing that " so prudent a cause as nature had
not placed so many valves without a de-
sign." Newton, in his first letter to Bent-
ley, declares that when he wrote the third
book of his Principia he " had an eye upon
such principles as might work, with con-
sidering men, for the belief of a Deity " and
he expresses his happiness that it has been
found useful for that purpose. In his second
letter to Bentley (January 17, 1692-3) he
writes : " I am compelled to ascribe the
frame of this system to an intelligent
Agent."

When Huxley says, therefore, that
u Science is the discovery of the rational
order that pervades the universe," he states

48 KEYNOTE STUDIES

clearly what might have been, what perhaps
would have been. In historic fact, how-
ever, the founders of science being them-
selves the judges, " the rational order that
pervades the universe " was not discovered.
It was revealed. The discoveries of science
made between the years 1600 and 1700 — and
these laid the foundations for all later sci-
ence— are, in their last analysis, only veri-
fications, combinations, illustrations, or,
better still, acceptations, of the rational
order proclaimed for the first time in the
first chapter of Genesis.

II

Perhaps we have dwelt too long upon a
single chapter but this chapter constitutes
one of the two divisions into which the book
of Genesis naturally falls. These divisions
we may call Creation and Probation.
There is no overlapping. The first chapter
is concerned wholly with creation, while the
remaining forty-nine chapters develop the
idea of probation. In the first chapter the
stage is built; in the second chapter the
drama begins. The first chapter presents
man neither as moral nor as immoral. He
is merely one of the animals created. Only
one command was laid upon him and it had

GENESIS 49

reference solely to his physical nature.
Conscience was neither invoked nor in-
volved. But in the second chapter God
lays upon man an ethical responsibility.
Man is not merely the supreme triumph of
physical creation. He is a moral being.
He can distinguish between good and evil.
He is on probation, and he knows it. Now
begins his effort to get in tune with the in-
finite, to establish an entente cordiale with his
Maker. There is not a suggestion of this
struggle or even of man's capacity for such
a struggle in the first chapter. It begins in
the second. It ends with the last chapter
of Revelation.

But every commentator on Genesis, so far
as my reading goes, divides the book, it is
true, into two divisions, but these divisions
run respectively from the beginning to the
call of Abraham and from the call of
Abraham to the close. The first division is
called, with many subdivisions, the Begin-
nings of Human History; the second is
called the Traditional Ancestors of the
Hebrews. But the distinctions overlap and
are confusing. Neither is central or or-
ganic. To call the first ten or eleven chap-
ters of Genesis the Beginnings of Human
History is to omit entirely the evenings and

50 KEYNOTE STUDIES

mornings of the first five days. It is to
ignore entirely the unity, order, and progres-
sion that make the first chapter of Genesis
incomparable in the world's literature. But,
if one is going to make this omission, why
not call the whole of Genesis the Beginnings
of Human History? Was it less human
when Abraham appeared? Or, with the
same omission, why not say that the whole
of Genesis is devoted to the Traditional
Ancestors of the Hebrews? Adam and
Eve, though as yet unnamed, appear in the
first chapter and they were traditional an-
cestors of the Hebrews.

That there are only two divisions in Gene-
sis and that these divisions include re-
spectively the first chapter and the remain-
ing forty-nine was certainly the belief of the
jwriter of the book of Hebrews, In fact Gene-
\sis is the only book of the Old Testament
that is analyzed and interpreted as a book
unit by a writer in the New Testament. In
Hebrews 11: 3 we read: " Through faith we
understand that the worlds were framed by
the word of God, so that things which are
seen were not made of things which do ap-
pear." Is not that a perfect interpretation
of the first chapter of Genesis? Then follows
the honor roll of those whose probation is-

GENESIS 51

sued victoriously in an unclouded faith. They
are Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sara, Isaac,
Jacob, and Joseph. "These all died in faith,
not having received the promises, but hav-
ing seen them afar off, and were persuaded
of them, and embraced them, and confessed
that they were strangers and pilgrims on the
earth" (Hebrews 11:13). Is not that a
perfect interpretation of the second division
of Genesis ? Had the author been making a
summary instead of an interpretation he
would have enumerated the six creative acts
in the first chapter of Genesis and he would
have mentioned Adam and Eve as examples
of those in whom probation wrought dis-
aster. He was dealing with principles, how-
ever, not details. But that he does not find
in the character or career of Abraham any-
thing elementally pivotal is noteworthy. It
at least differentiates the author of Hebrews
from other commentators on Genesis. Abra-
ham undoubtedly weighed more than any
one else in the list but the scales used were
the same for all. His influence was greater
but the source of his strength was the source
from which all drew. His faith differed in
degree but not in kind from the faith of
those who went before and those who came
immediately after him. His reaction to pro-

52 KEYNOTE STUDIES

bation was distinctively noble but it was not
distinctively different from the reaction of
others on the honor roll.

May we not say that, if the first chapter of
Genesis marks an epoch in its attitude to the
nature about us, the remaining chapters
register a still more significant advance in
their attitude to the nature within us?
What a group is here assembled! There
are no warriors, no poets, no scholars, no
demigods, no kings or queens, no men or
women famed merely for their looks or
physical prowess. Nobody is distinguished
merely by wealth or social position. They
are just ordinary men and women trying
to lift their eyes level to God's command.
But they were the world's most beneficent
pioneers. We say now confidently that "A
man's reach should exceed his grasp, " that
" One on God's side is a majority," that
" Right makes might," that

Howe'er it be, it seems to me,
'Tis only noble to be good,

that

I go to prove my soul!
I see my way as birds their trackless way.
I shall arrive ! what time, what circuit first,
I ask not : but unless God send his hail

GENESIS 53

Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow,
In some time, his good time, I shall arrive :
He guides me and the bird. In his good time !

These and a thousand other beacon thoughts
are commonplaces to-day. Civilization and
progress are built upon them. But the
heroes of Genesis were the first to leave their
footprints on the stretches of that lone way.
They were not philosophers: philosophy is
the theatre of the analytic intellect, not the
drama of man. Life was not a theory with
them. It was a faith, a conviction, a dedica-
tion. Their pathway is now become a
highway, but the highway, though broader
and less obstructed, still points the way that
was first pointed by the pathway. They
stumbled many a time, and fell. There were
no perfect men among them, but they knew
their own failings, knew them because of
the very vividness with which they had
glimpsed the unchanging ideal. If science
got its start in the first chapter of Genesis,
man's spiritual history harks back as surely
to the remaining chapters. If there are no
parallels in earlier records to the majestic
story of Creation, I need hardly remind you
that there is nothing approaching the spiri-
tualizing of Probation to which the major
part of Genesis is devoted.

54 KEYNOTE STUDIES

The reader will miss much of the charm
and challenge of Genesis if he fails to note
how clearly the leading characters in our
group are differentiated. Each is a type but
none the less an individual. Each reacted
to probation differently but characteristic-
ally. There was no surrender of person-
ality. If thrown into their company I be-
lieve I could identify most of them, provided
they talked freely and in propria persona. It
is interesting to observe that the role that
each was to play in the thought of the
world could not be determined till the com-
ing of Christ. The light of the Cross
streamed backward as well as forward, and
in that light much that was only translucent
in the Old Testament became transparent
in the New. Adam, for example, is hardly
more than mentioned in the Old Testament
outside of Genesis. But in the New Testa-
ment he is interpreted. He becomes a point
de repere, a contrasting type of Christ. The
most luminous sentence about him was that
of Paul : " For as in Adam all die, even so
in Christ shall all be made alive." Adam
was neither hero nor villain but only a half-
man. Lacking a childhood and youth he
lacked also the directive and steadying in-

*1 Corinthians 15:22.

GENESIS 55

fluences that come from normally slow de-
velopment. He and Cain reacted to proba-
tion in a way that proved the rule of faith
through disobedience to the rule. They
spoke a dialect that proclaimed by contrast
the existence of a standard speech. Abel
has been called a " a type of the countless
good people who are creatively good for
nothing, the respectable negatives who
might as well never have been born." But
this is more Shavian than Biblical. Abel is
rather the symbol of right overthrown by
might but still appealing. It is at least
worth noting that the first collection of
biographical sketches published in the Eng-
lish language was Thomas Fuller's Abel
Redevivus: or the Dead yet Speaking. It is said
of both Enoch and Noah that they " walked
with God." But Noah was evidently more
of a chance companion than a steady com-
rade of the Almighty's. Though many
pages are given to him he does not live more
securely in his four chapters than Enoch in
his one verse: "And Enoch walked with
God: and he was not; for God took him."
Is there in human speech a more beautiful
or satisfying biography?

2See "The Bible's Prose Epic of Eve and her
Sons," by Eric S. Robertson.

56 KEYNOTE STUDIES

But Abraham looms larger than any of
them. There was more driving force in
him than in Isaac, less habitual subtlety than
in Jacob, but also less lovableness than in
Joseph. Note the moral energy released
in him through the conviction that in him
his descendants would be blessed. Neither
Isaac, nor Jacob, nor Joseph seems to have
felt as acutely or as resiliently the repre-
sentative responsibility thus imposed. Abra-
ham became the present consciously condi-
tioning the future. Countless thousands
were to be made or marred by his loyalty or
disloyalty. He is modern society, for science
now joins hands with religion in making
one's descendants chant forever in one's
ears: " Be good for our sake." Others had
believed in one God before Abraham, and
others had gone forth as leaders and builders
of nations yet to be. But it is certain that
from Abraham the monotheistic belief has
been diffused and diffused unbrokenly. It
is certain, too, that never before had a
pioneer gone forth to build a nation with
faith in God as its foundation and super-
structure. Whenever to-day a great reform
is inaugurated not by power nor by might
but by a single soul in league with God, the
journey from Haran begins again. The real

GENESIS -57

wandering Jew is not Kartaphilos or Ahas-
uerus, wretched souls on whom the Master
was said to have pronounced a curse. It is
Abraham, the greatest of all pioneer ideal-
ists. He wanders not because he has been
cursed but because he has been blessed. He
does not seek to escape from his past but to
follow the beckonings of his future. His
reappearances are not in remote and deso-
late places but where the eyes of men
glimpse a height beyond the farthest height
and a glory beyond the utmost glory. "For
he looked for a city which hath foundations,
whose builder and maker is God."

As we study the individual reactions of
these pioneers the conviction comes with
new force that Hebrew monotheism was a
message to the individual, not to the de-
individualized group. Modern criticism in
its insistence on Hebrew collectivism or na-
tional solidarity has strangely perverted this
truth. In the pages of much Old Testament
criticism of to-day God seems to be little
more than the director of a privileged cor-
poration; there is no direct relationship be-
tween Him and the individual Hebrew; it
is the people as a distinct but collective unit
that He addresses. There is not a book in
the Old Testament which, if read as a whole,

58 KEYNOTE STUDIES

will not contradict authoritatively the ex-
cessive and impersonal nationalism which
many commentators seem determined to
read into special passages and separate in-
cidents. The ritualism of the Old Testa-
ment is, of course, collective; but the re-
ligion is individual. Thou and thee far out-
number ye and you. There is not a ye or you
in the ten commandments; and even when
the plural pronoun occurs in Leviticus or
Deuteronomy, or when the word people or na-
tion is employed, thou and thee usually follow
at once, so that the initial mass-appeal is
broken up and focussed directly and sepa-
rately upon the individual. Monotheism
did, it is true, develop an elaborate ritual
which at times threatened if it did not
throttle personal responsibility. But in
Genesis there is hardly a hint of ritualism.
Religion is personal. It is an umbrella, not
a roof. Back to Genesis, then, means not
only back to individualism but back to the
saving essence that religion had in its be-
ginning, an essence that the prophets vindi-
cated from generation to generation and
that the New Testament at last triumphantly
restored.

Ill
By way of summary, did you ever think

GENESIS 59

of Kant's great saying as an undesigned
tribute to Genesis? " Two things," he said
at the close of his Critique of Practical Reason,
" fill the mind with ever new and increasing
admiration and awe, the oftener and the
more steadily we reflect upon them : the
starry heavens above and the moral law
within." These were Kant's two admira-
tions, his two reverences, his two infinities,
as they are of every man who thinks reso-
lutely about them. Necessity is the law of
the first, said Kant, liberty of the second.
Is it not remarkable that the first book of
the Bible faces precisely the two mysteries
that moved the awe of the great philosopher,
Creation and Probation? The last word of
human philosophy is thus the first word of
the Bible. The two twin summits that have
challenged the climbers of all ages are the
starting-places of Genesis. But there is a
difference. To the modern philosopher
there were mists upon the summits; to the
author of Genesis there was sunlight. Two
infinities but one faith ! The synthesis is in
the first words of Genesis: " In the beginning,
God."

Ill

ESTHER

i

ESTHER has always seemed to me the
best told story in the Bible. Who-
ever wrote it was a master in the art
of omitting non-essentials and of concentrat-
ing attention upon what really counted. He
knew how to grip his reader's attention at
the start, how to mass or distribute his de-
tails in harmony with his main design, and
how to make each part of the narrative con-
tribute its quota to the larger or superin-
tending purpose. I do not forget the story
of Joseph, the idyllic charm of Ruth, or the
fragments of vivid epics found in Judges.
But Esther, more than any of these, seems to
me a sort of anticipation of an art that is
to-day considered almost distinctively Amer-
ican,— I mean the art of the modern short
story. The constitution of this latest of
literary genres was drawn up by Poe when he
wrote, in 1842, that the goal of the writer
should not be background, plot, or character

60

ESTHER 61

but the interweaving of these to produce a

definite and preconceived effect. " If his
very initial sentence," says Poe, " tend not
to the outbringing of this effect, then he
has failed in his first step. In the whole
composition there should be no word written
of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is
not to the one preestablished design."

Not only does Esther meet this require-
ment of the modern short story but it sur-
passes all short stories, ancient and modern,
in its annually recurrent service. A few days
ago I clipped the following announcement
from a New York daily paper :

The celebration of the feast of Purim will
commence this evening and will continue for
twenty- four hours. This is a festival of the
Jews celebrated on the fourteenth day of the
month of Adar and was ordained to com-
memorate the deliverance of the Jews from
national destruction by the Persians, as nar-
rated in the Book of Esther. The festival
of Purim is now a day of rejoicing, of ex-
changing of gifts among friends and giving
liberally to the poor. Its observance in the
synagogue is limited to the reading of the
Book of Esther, but in the homes of the
orthodox Jews the celebration is marked by
social parties, masquerades, and other enter-
tainments.

62 KEYNOTE STUDIES

Thus for more than two thousand years
Esther has been read aloud once a year in all
Jewish synagogues. The name of Haman
is still greeted with jeers, the name of Esther
with cheers. It is interesting to remember
that Christ Himself in early boyhood must
have joined in the acclaim rendered to
Esther at this festival, and, if He ever jeered
at any one, He jeered at the name of the
monster who sought her life and the life of
her people. Just as Dickens's Christmas
Carol revived and renationalized the waning
celebration of Christmas in England, so the
book of Esther revived and renationalized
the receding festival of Purim. Just as the
annual reading of our Declaration of Inde-
pendence recalls and rededicates to a wider
service our heroic past, so the annual read-
ing of Esther has made of a Jewish past
a continuous and continuing present. We
are not surprised when history tells us
of some great state paper, or national epic,
or patriotic song that has served for cen-
turies to band together a people. But for a
short story this is a new office. Esther, then,
is unique not only in its modern structure
but in its history and age-long service.

ESTHER 63

II

One of the distinctive excellencies of the
story lies in the handling of the background
and in making it subserve the underlying
purpose of the narrative. You remember
that Shakespeare begins Macbeth with the
appearance of the witches who chant

Fair is foul and foul is fair.

This is one of the great keynote scenes in
modern literature. Fair things were in fact
to prove foul, and foul things fair; friends
were to appear as enemies and enemies were
to be disguised as friends. The entire play
pivots around this chant of the witches.
With equal art Esther begins with Persian
bigness that was not greatness and pits con-
sistently against it Jewish greatness that j
was not bigness. The Persian king ruled 1
over one hundred and twenty-seven prov-
inces; the Persian banquet lasted one hun-
dred and eighty days and was topped off by
a luncheon of seven days; the gallows pre-
pared for Mordecai was eighty-three feet
high; the money to be wrested from the
Jews was eighteen million dollars. Against
this background we see only a captive Jew-
ish orphan, named Esther, and her cousin,

64 KEYNOTE STUDIES

named Mordecai. " Little is big and big
is little " is the unsung refrain that binds
together the diverse incidents of the story
as the witches' words bind together the
diverse incidents of Shakespeare's play.

Another element of the background that
intensifies the patriotic appeal is the foreign
locale. The plot takes place not in Jewish
Jerusalem but in Persian and pagan Shu-
shan. Joseph in Egypt, Livingstone in Cen-
tral Africa, Chinese Gordon in Nubia,
Franklin in Paris, Dewey in Manila, Gerard
in Berlin stir our patriotism far more than
if the same courage or loyalty had been
shown at home. The thought of Esther in
the far-away land, under alien skies and
alien institutions, denied the reassurance of
home faces and neighbor ways, beyond the
beckoning of the hills and streams that she
knew so well, this sends a challenge to our
interest and admiration impossible in the
case of a Judean locale.

Ill
The plot may be skeletonized as follows:

I. Vashti dethroned. Enter Queen

Esther (1:1-2:20).
II. Haman vs. Mordecai. Haman vic-
torious (2:21-3:15).

ESTHEE 65

III. " Who knoweth whether thou art

come to the kingdom for such a
time as this?" (4:1-5:8).

IV. Between banquets (5:9-6:14).
V. The second banquet (7 : 1-7 : 9).

VI. Victory (7:10-9:19).
VII. The Feast of Purim (9 : 20-9 : 32).
VIII. See for fuller details "The Chron-
icles of the Kings of Media and
Persia" (10:1-10:3).

The incidents move in a leisurely way
until Esther proposes a second banquet
(5:8). I do not know why she deferred
her petition from the first banquet to the
second, but I do know that the period " Be-
tween banquets (5:9-6:14)" is a bit of
narrative handling unsurpassed even in the
Bible. It stamps the author as one of the
great narrative artists. It marks the emer-
gence in Hebrew literature of a technique
that the critics had considered non-existent
till the advent of Poe, DeMaupassant, Kip-
ling, and O. Henry. The mere facts told in
the interim between the two banquets are
negligible as facts. If you are reading for
facts alone, for bald objective happenings,
you may omit this section entirely. The
verse that precedes the section and the verse
that follows it seem themselves unaware of
what lies between. Note how they blend

66 KEYNOTE STUDIES

into each other : " If I have found favor in
the sight of the king, and if it please the
king to grant my petition and to perform
my request, let the king and Haman come
to the banquet that I shall prepare for them,
and I will do to-morrow as the king hath
said. . . • So the king and Haman came
to banquet with Esther the queen." But
between those two verses there are inter-
posed twenty verses which, more than any
other twenty verses in the story, lift the
plot out of the category of routine chronicle
and give it a secure place among the master-
pieces of narrative literature.

These twenty verses seem commissioned
by the author to shadow Haman from ban-
quet to banquet. " Trail him," the order
would seem, " and report his words, his
deeds, his thoughts. He has hitherto been
a mere symbol, an impersonal embodiment
of cruelty and sycophancy. Show him to
us not on dress parade but at home with
wife and friends. The other characters in
the story have personality. Invest him with
it, too. Let him not only point a moral but
stand for all time as a deterrent type of
actual flesh and blood." The detective
verses play their part well. Let us follow
them :

ESTHEE 67

Haman hurries home from the first ban-
quet, calls for his wife and friends, tells
them exultingly of the honor shown him, and
hints still greater honor at the banquet set
for to-morrow. " Yet all this availeth me
nothing, so long as I see Mordecai the Jew
sitting at the king's gate." His wife and
friends suggest that a gallows be erected at
once for Mordecai and that at the forthcom-
ing banquet the king's consent be secured for
an immediate execution. The gallows is
erected during the night but " On that night
could not the king sleep." There is some-
thing ominous in the tread of the little mono-
syllables. The king's insomnia marks in fact
a crisis in the story ; but, before the tragedy
falls, there intervenes the most humorous
scene in the Bible. Like the knocking at the
gate in Macbeth it is a buffer scene thrust
between the tenseness that precedes and the
heightened tenseness that is to follow.
Haman arrives and learns that the king has
just asked for him. His majesty's much
banqueting, it seems, had dulled his memory
of current events. So, while he lies tossing
and while not a parasang away the finishing
touches are being put on the gallows, he asks
that some one read to him the record of
recent happenings. Learning that one named
Mordecai had saved his majesty's life a few
days before but had gone unrewarded, the

68 KEYNOTE STUDIES

king wakes to a sense of obligation rightly
incurred but strangely overlooked. " Who is
in the court ? " he asks. " Hainan." Haman,
knowing nothing of the reading, was at that
very moment conning his petition about
Mordecai and the gallows. As he enters
and salutes, the king asks yawningly : " What
shall be done unto the man whom the king
delighteth to honor ? " Haman had his an-
swer pat. The very elaborateness of it
shows that the question had long been antici-
pated and that the answer had probably been
formulated after a conference with his wife
and friends : " Let the royal apparel be
brought which the king useth to wear, and
the horse that the king rideth upon, and the
crown royal which is set upon his head.
And let this apparel and horse be delivered
to the hand of one of the king's most noble
princes, that they may array the man withal
whom the king delighteth to honor, and bring
him on horseback through the street of the
city, and proclaim before him, Thus shall it
be done to the man whom the king delight-
eth to honor/* Was there ever a better auto-
biography in miniature ?

Did the king smile as he answered, " Do
even so to Mordecai the Jew " ? I think not.
But I know that Jewish men and women and
boys and girls, peeping timidly from half
opened doors, smiled at that strange proces-

ESTHEE 69

sion as they had never smiled before. And
every year the procession is renewed at the
Feast of Purim. Down through the cen-
turies pedestrian Haman still solemnly stalks
leading the horse for equestrian Mordecai;
and the smiles break into laughter, for faith
is rekindled and old memories are stirred and
patriotism flames anew upon its oldest and
most sacred altars. Through what streets of
Shushan the procession wound we are not
told. Not many Jewish homes, I think, were
omitted; but the street that led by Hainan' s
home was not on the route. His wife and
friends knew nothing of it all till he " hasted
to his house mourning and having his head
covered" and told them what had befallen
him. He had but a moment to stay, for the
hour of the second banquet had come. His
wife and friends found time, however, to tell
him as he passed out of the door, " If Mor-
decai be of the seed of the Jews, before
whom thou hast begun to fall, thou shalt not
prevail against him, but shalt surely fall be-
fore him." There was no time to answer,
for " while they were yet talking with him,
came the king's chamberlains and hasted to
bring Haman unto the banquet that Esther
had prepared."

Our twenty verses flow back now into the
central current. Their metier has been to

70 KEYNOTE STUDIES

reveal the kind of man that Haman really
and inwardly was. When he swings at
nightfall from the gallows that he had
erected for Mordecai, our moral sense is
satisfied because our detective verses have
made the record clear against him, have
brought into sharp relief his essential and
ineradicable wolfishness, and thus rendered
his execution a necessity in the forward
march of mercy and righteousness.

IV
But the characters are to me more in-
teresting than the plot. The author of the
story had not only an unerring feeling for
background and incident but an equally sure
eye for character traits. Each character is
portrayed from within. A few deft strokes
and the controlling motives stand clearly
limned. In no other book of the Bible is
there a more effective use of conversation,
the direct words being given wherever
vividness is desired. Ahasuerus, Memucan,
Haman, Mordecai, and Esther all speak in
the first person and all speak self-reveal-
ingly. This use of direct discourse is pecul-
iarly a mark of the modern short story and
is thus another link binding the technique of
Esther to our own times. To feel the

ESTHER 71

superiority of the direct form of statement
here employed, recast some of the conversa-
tions and note the loss in force and appeal.
Instead of " Who knoweth whether thou art
come to the kingdom for such a time as
this?" suppose the form had been: " Mor-
decai asked Esther if she was acquainted
with any one who knew whether she was
come to the kingdom for such a time as
this." The skeleton remains, but the life
has gone.

As in Genesis, so in Esther, each character
is a type but also an individual. The two
terms are often confused. The writer of
Esther, like Shakespeare, probably had no
conscious thought of the distinction here
made between the individual and the type;
but both wrote from life and in life the dis-
tinction is writ large upon every page. An
individual character, whether in life or
literature, is a character that is sharply dif-
ferentiated from all other characters. The
differential may be physical or mental or
moral, an excellence or a defect, an asset or
a liability. Typical characters, on the con-
trary, embody some well-known virtue or
vice, some commonplace of philosophy,
some widely diffused principle of thought or
action, some everyday epidemic of behavior,

72 KEYNOTE STUDIES

and embody it so exclusively that the per-
son yields to the trait. The individual
character stands for one, the type character
for many. The individual character is
singular in form and function; the type
character is singular in form, but like our
collective nouns, crowd, congregation, army,
navy, plural in function. It is easy to see
and say that a character is individual but we
cannot pronounce a character typical until
our circuit of knowledge enables us to
classify him. The use of the term typical,
therefore, is measured wholly by the range
and variety of characters, real or fictive,
that we know. All characters are individual
to children but increasingly typical to their
parents. It is the type qualities that the
Bible writers chiefly stress and it is these in
Esther that I shall touch upon during the
remainder of the hour.

Ahasuerus is a tank that runs blood or
wine according to the hand that turns the
spigot. Though he was the source of all
executive power in the story he himself
originates nothing. The dethronement of
Vashti, the method of selecting her suc-
cessor, the proposed destruction of the
Jews, the counter decree, the honor to Mor-
decai, the execution of Haman, not one of

ESTHER 73

these was proposed by the king. He only
adopted them. Read the record again and
observe how accurately the author has
caught the note of majestic inertia that
characterizes the Oriental monarch. Among
the leading characters of the story he alone
is stationary, all the others passing from
high to low or low to high as the story ad-
vances. He remains at the end the same
vast and vacant stretch of immobility that
he was at the beginning. He, by the way,
is our old friend Xerxes, who, according to
Herodotus, ordered three hundred stripes
to be inflicted on the ocean because his
ships had been dashed to pieces and com-
manded that the Phenician mechanics who
built the ships should be put to death. If
you think these measures show a reach of
self-origination beyond the range of Xerxes
as he is pictured in Esther, turn again to
Herodotus and you will find that, true to
type, Xerxes is represented as proposing
neither penalty. Here again he merely
seconds and adopts. Perhaps an exception
should be made in the case of the many
banquets occurring in Esther. I am inclined
to think that his majesty was here the orig-
inal proponent. The word "banquet," it
may be added, occurs twenty times in Esther

74 KEYNOTE STUDIES

and only twenty times in the remaining
thirty-eight books of the Old Testament.
In other words, Ahasuerus and his trencher-
mates consumed as much in five days as had
been consumed by all the other Old Testa-
ment characters from Genesis to Malachi,
Ahasuerus was used for good in the story
but he deserves and receives no credit for
it. He is not so much a character, after all,
as a state of mind or, better still, a state of
body. No man ever missed a greater op-
portunity. He was brought face to face
with the two greatest world-civilizations in
history, Hebraism and Hellenism; but, un-
derstanding neither, he remains only a
muddy place in the road along which Greek
and Hebrew passed to world conquest.

Haman was a fit minister for his king.
Though a blend of vanity and cruelty and
cowardice he was not without some power
of initiative. But egotism had destroyed
all sense of proportion in him. A sense of
humor, that stabilizer of national and in-
dividual character, was thus impossible to
him. He begets laughter but was incapable
of sharing it. He lives in history as one
who, better than in Hamlet's immortal
phrase, was " hoist with his own petard,"
the petard in Hainan's case being a gallows

ESTHEE 75

eighty-three feet high. He typifies also the
just fate of the man who, spurred by the
hate of one, includes in his scheme of ex-
termination a whole people. "And he
thought scorn to lay hands on Mordecai
alone; for they had shewed him the people
of Mordecai: wherefore Haman sought to
destroy all the Jews that were throughout
the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus, even the
people of Mordecai." Collective vengeance
never received a better illustration nor a
more exemplary or lustrous punishment.

Mordecai is altogether admirable in re-
fusing to kowtow to Haman and in his un-
selfish devotion to his fair cousin. The
cause of the rooted enmity between him and
Haman has been differently explained. But
does it need explanation? It may have been
that Haman wore on his person some idol-
atrous symbol to which Mordecai would not
do obeisance; it may have been that Mor-
decai, a Benjamite, recognized in Haman,
the Amalekite, an ancestral foe (1 Samuel
15:33). But neither supposition is neces-
sary and both do discredit to the kind of
motivation employed by the author. Had
he intended either of these motives to be
central in the character of Mordecai he
would have hinted or plainly indicated as

76 KEYNOTE STUDIES

much. What he evidently meant us to see
as central and controlling in Mordecai's con-
duct was a simple loyalty to the faith of his
fathers that forbade the low and servile
salaam to arrogant and aggressive pagan-
ism. " But Mordecai bowed not, nor did
him reverence." Where he felt no rever-
ence, Mordecai would not flaunt the symbol
of reverence. He would not commission
his body to tell the lie that his spirit scorned
to tell.

But Esther is, of course, the central char-
acter. She is the only character in the story
and one of the few in the Bible whose per-
sonal appearance is described and described
unforgettably. Not only was she " fair and
beautiful " but she " obtained favor in the
sight of all them that looked upon her."
The words are peculiarly presentive and pic-
torial. Esther appears before us not only
as " fair " but as winning " favor." There
was something about her beauty that
evoked not only admiration but good will.
She was, I take it, a blend of Juliet and
Cordelia, of Homer's Helen and Dante's
Beatrice.

But it is not her beauty that has sent her
name down the ages. It is not her beauty
that makes her the central and centralizing

ESTHER 77

character in the story. It is her hospitality
to the great question put by Mordecai:
" Who knoweth whether thou art come to
the kingdom for such a time as this? " You
will miss the distinctive note of the whole
book if you do not weigh well the import of
this question, for Esther's instant reaction
to it marks the spiritual crisis of the book.
Imagine the vacant and bovine countenance
that would have been turned upon you if
you had asked Ahasuerus or any of his sub-
jects this penetrating question. But, if I
mistake not, the question was an habitual
one with Mordecai and Esther. It repre-
sents an attitude rather than a gesture, a bit
of Palestinian sky still visible from Persian
soil, a strain of Judean music still heard
amid the discords of pagan captivity. It is
the one question in the book that runs the
line of cleavage between heathen and
Hebrew thought. By it and its answer
we measure the altitude of the spiritual
levels on which the captive Jews were living.
They brought with them from Jerusalem
and still cherished in Shushan the conviction
that God had a purpose in each human life ;
that events were to be scrutinized for divine
beckonings ; that what was impenetrable to
unbelief, or merely translucent to hope, was

73 KEYNOTE STUDIES

transparent to faith ; that national tragedies,
like the captivity in Persia, had not only a
collective meaning for the Jewish people but
an individual meaning for each believing
Jew: that chance and accident and fate had
no place in the Jewish vocabulary; that a
change of locale did not mean a change of
morale; and that human life itself, though
crowned with queenship, was to be thrown
unhesitatingly into the scales if God's pur-
pose could thereby find fulfillment.

If Esther had been even tinctured by
Persian fatalism she would have met Mor-
decai's question by countering on the futil-
ity of attempting to stay the march of
things immutably ordered. Certainly it
seemed futile, for not only had the decree
of the king been sealed and sent but all
petitionary access to his person had been
denied. The Persian attitude to Mordecai's
query finds its perfect expression in the
later lines of one of Persia's greatest poets:

/ The moving finger writes and having writ
i Moves on, nor all your Piety nor Wit
/ Shall lure it back to cancel half a line
J Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.

Or, if Esther had not been tinctured by
Persian thought but had only grown lax

ESTHER 79

in her hold on Jewish thought, she would
at least have denied the applicability of
such a question to her. " Am I not
queen?" she might have said. "Why I
came to the land of Persia is no longer de-
batable. See my robes and my crown.
My queenship is the answer." Is there not
a lesson for us here? Is success, mere suc-
cess, ever an answer to the great " Who
knoweth whether?" that knocks sooner or
later at the door of each of us when we
front a crisis? "Prosperity," says Bacon,
"is the blessing of the Old Testament;
adversity is the blessing of the New." This
is not quite just to the Old Testament or
to the New. Esther, at any rate, looked on
her prosperity not as an end in itself but
as only a means to an end.

I have called this question with its answer
the crisis of the story, and so it is. It is
the result of all that has gone before and
the cause of all that follows; it is the fruit
of the past, the seed of the future. Back-
ground, plot, and characters would, without
this question and answer, be a shell without
a kernel, a storage battery without power,
a body without life, a wheel without an
axle. u If his very initial sentence," says
Poe, — read the lines again and see if first

80 KEYNOTE STUDIES

sentence and last sentence do not find in
this question their common goal and tryst-
ing-place.

But this victorious question and answer
control not only the structure but the
spiritual significance of the story. " As cer-
tain objects," says William James,1 " natu-
rally awaken love, anger, or cupidity, so cer-
tain ideas naturally awaken the energies of
loyalty, courage, endurance, or devotion.
When these ideas are effective in an indi-
vidual^ life, their effect is often very great
indeed. They may transfigure it, unlocking
innumerable powers which, but for the idea,
would never have come into play." Among
these " energy-releasing ideas " Professor
James mentions "Flag," "Union," "Monroe
Doctrine," " Truth," " Science," " Liberty."

Among energy-releasing questions I
should place first, " Who knoweth whether
thou art come to the kingdom for such a
time as this?" Not only did it unlock a
reservoir of latent power in Esther but since
her time men have gone to the stake, have
built and torn down principalities and
powers, have faced smiling a hostile world,
have moulded the opinion of centuries, and
transformed the conduct of ages on the
"'The Energies of Men."

ESTHEB 81

dynamic conviction that they had been sent
to the kingdom " for such a time as this."

Esther is more than a short story. It is a
bit of constructive idealism faultlessly con-
ceived and faultlessly embodied.

T

IV
JOB

I
f~ """^O feel the greatness of this book
and to estimate its unique contribu-
tion to Old Testament thought, let
me suggest that you consider this problem :
What would be the effect on the character
of a community if every man in it thought
that all adversity, whether of body, mind, or
estate, was caused by sin secretly com-
mitted and resolutely unconfessed. Your
neighbor has money in a supposedly sound
bank and wakes to find his hope of security
for old age and of competence for those de-
pendent upon him swept away in a night.
You, a representative of the thought of such
a community, could only say by way of com-
fort: " Confess your guilt and thus stay the
further impoverishment that will surely at-
tend upon sin knowingly committed but
publicly denied." The same neighbor loses
by some ravenous epidemic all of his sons

82

JOB 83

and daughters. " Villain and hypocrite,"
you must say to him, " have you no feeling
for those near and dear to you? Proclaim
your crime, keep back nothing, and thus
arrest if you cannot avert the just doom of
a righteous God upon the wider circle of
those whom you are supposed to love."
Your neighbor again wakes to find his body
caught in the grip of a prolonged and tor-
turing disease. Your prompt and consistent
diagnosis is : " Every pang that you suffer
is a penalty for divine law violated with full
knowledge but with a craft and cunning
that have hitherto evaded the scrutiny of
your friends. Tell us all about it and thus,
if you do not regain health, you may at
least escape an impending and retributive
death."

I cannot imagine a tyranny more merci-
less than the sovereignty of a philosophy like
that would impose. Weakness is wicked-
ness; all kinds and degrees of suffering be-
come but so many incitements to Pharisaical
denunciation; comfort, sympathy, kindness,
generosity, fellowship, — why, these would
be impossible and unthinkable in a com-
munity governed by so heartless a code.
But suppose that not only a community was
so infected but the very fiber of a nation's

84 KEYNOTE STUDIES

faith ; suppose, too, that this nation was the
nation from which the world's Saviour was
to come, and this faith the faith that in a
purer form was destined to alleviate and
consecrate the very sufferings which this
detestable philosophy stigmatized. Surely
some national corrective would be needed
and needed urgently. Such a corrective is
the book of Job.

If you are inclined to say, "Why, this
doctrine seems to me so pagan and ab-
horrent as not to deserve so elaborate a
refutation," let me remind you that the book
of Job not only refutes the old doctrine but
substitutes the doctrine of Christ in its
stead; that the patriarchal period of Jewish
history with its pictures of teeming families,
fields, and flocks, and with its advanced
hygienic code, undoubtedly predisposed the
nation to regard prosperity as inseparable
from piety; that Christ more than once had
to rebuke the same misinterpretation of cur-
rent disaster; that the doctrine survives
to-day in exact proportion as men believe
blindly in a superior power but are ignorant
of the existence of the laws of nature; that
disease and death are in most cases traceable
to violations of nature's laws, though these
laws are of course not moral, their violation

JOB 85

being due to ignorance, not to sin ; and that,
as Christ was Himself to be, like Job, " a
man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,"
the persistence of this doctrine without
canonical check would have rendered His
mission the more difficult and His character
the more problematical.

II
Of the three divisions into which Job
falls, —

I. Job Chosen for Testing (1-2),
II. Job and His Friends (3-37),
III. Job and God (38-42),

the first marks the central contribution of
the book to the problem discussed. In
these two chapters God is revealed as per-
mitting Job to suffer in body, mind, and
estate, not as a penalty but as a preroga-
tive; not to appease the divine nature but
to vindicate human nature; not to cast the
patriarch down but to build him up; not
because he was good and happy but because
he could be made better and happier; not to
fetter him in pain but to release in him those
spiritual powers and appetencies of whose
existence Job was himself ignorant till the

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days of testing came. That the level of
these two chapters was far above the level
of contemporary thought is proved by the
fact that not one of Job's friends even
hinted at such an explanation of his suffer-
ing.

These two chapters, though they have
little of the imagery and eloquence of the
succeeding chapters, mark one of the table-
lands of divine truth. It was a pivotal
moment in Hebrew history when the Maker
of men was self-revealed as viewing char-
acter not as protected innocence but as dis-
ciplined virtue ; as proclaiming that

Only the prism's obstruction shows aright
The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light
Into the jewelled bow from blankest white;

as bidding His followers in all after-ages to
see in affliction not the mailed fist but the
beckoning hand. The world had to wait
till Christ came before it was to receive a
revelation so energizing in its appeal or so
assuaging in its effect.

Like all great revelations in the Bible,
this revelation of the ministry of adversity
corresponded to an innate yearning of
humanity and has found instant and trium-
phant verification wherever men have risen

JOB 87

on " stepping-stones of their dead selves to
higher things." I need hardly remind you
that Goethe took the entire thought-process
of Faust from these two chapters or that
" the land of Uz " became at once not so
much a geographical expression as the chal-
lenge of a new faith and the psean of a new
hope. The real land of Uz is not on the
map. It is in the hearts of those who have
passed through night to light, through
storm to calm, through frost to spring,
through woe to weal; who have built
stepping-stones of stumbling-blocks; who
have found that the via cruets is but another1
name for the via lucis.

Ill

But can man meet the test? Has he
enough moral resilience to " find in loss a
gain to match "? If the first two chapters
are a revelation of the character of God, the
thirty-five chapters that follow contain a
corresponding revelation of the character of
man. As far as the book of Job may be
called a problem, these two divisions state
it and solve it. Had Job known the con-
tents of chapters one and two, had he been
told that God was with him in his trial and
permitted it only to educe the man in him

$8 KEYNOTE STUDIES

and to bless mankind through him, the
struggle would not have been so long or so
severe. If I estimate the character of Job
aright, it would hardly have been a struggle
at all. But Job did not know. He was
thrown back on the fundamentals of his
faith, on the bare essentials of his character.
He was chosen as a test case to prove
whether or not humanity could in the fire
of affliction consume its dross and refine its
gold. " The moral life of man," says
Froude, " is like the flight of a bird in the
air. He is sustained only by effort, and
when he ceases to exert himself he falls."
Carlyle and Browning have polarized the
same stimulant thought in a hundred ways.
But Job wrought out the great truth in the
forge of his own experience long before it
became a problem of psychology or a theme
of literature.

He did it too in solitariness that was in-
tensified by the presence of four counselors
who parroted the conventional common-
places of the day but whose amazing self-
righteousness put acid in Job's wounds
instead of oil. It is hardly worth while to
individualize these men. There were minor
differences, it is true, but they all revolved
around the conviction that Job had com-

JOB 89

mitted some monstrous crime and was too
cowardly to confess it. I have always felt
a measure of gratitude to them because they
made Job talk. Without them he would
probably have remained silent, and the re-
sult of his testing would have been summed
up for us at the end in a general and imper-
sonal way. The quartet deserve no credit
for it, but they compelled Job to self-
defense through self-expression and thus
made these chapters a sort of spiritual
autobiography.

But Job's replies reveal more than his
own nature. They reveal the possibilities
of language in the expression of soaring and
elusive thought. You will miss much of the
invigorating appeal of this book if you do
not see in Job one of the sovereigns of
speech. From his first word to his last he
holds us in a sort of spell not merely because
he speaks for us but because he is endowed
with a range and adequacy and wizardry of
utterance beyond the reach of any mortal
that ever traversed that dim region of half
lights and tried to tell what he saw. Pain,
grief, doubt, dejection, these usually inhibit
speech; but in this man they release and
illumine it. Coleridge once defined dejec-
tion as

90 KEYNOTE STUDIES

,A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear.

That may be your dejection or mine, but it
was not Job's. Dejection for him unlocked
the treasuries of thought and feeling, of
hope and will, of imagery and vision, and
gave to each its fitting form and investi-
ture.

I do not know whether Job's vocabulary
has ever been counted as they have counted
Milton's and Shakespeare's. The mere
number of words would not be large ; but in
the use of these words, in making concrete
terms like "day," "night," "stars," "twi-
light," "sea," "brook," "wind," "cloud,"
" mountain," " snow," " storm," throw their
changing splendors upon the arena of his
struggle, in turning the currents of experi-
ence into the central channel of expression,
Job remains the supreme Old Testament
model. Note the singing quality in him that
finds beauty where only blankness and
bleakness had been before. Most of us in
Job's first mood would have said, " I wish
I had never been born," and let it go at
that. But Job moves to the dark thought
in great spirals of sombre imagery : " Let

JOB 91

the day perish wherein I was born, and the
night in which it was said, There is a man
child conceived. Let that day be darkness ;
let not God regard it from above, neither
let the light shine upon it. Let darkness
and the shadow of death stain it ; let a cloud
dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day
terrify it. As for that night, let darkness
seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the
days of the year, let it not come into the
number of the months. Lo, let that night
be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein.
Let them curse it that curse the day, who
are ready to raise up their mourning. Let
the stars of the twilight thereof be dark;
let it look for light, but have none; neither
let it see the dawning of the day " (3 : 3-9).
He longs for the grave and the grave is
shot through with a strange and haunting
beauty: "There the wicked cease from
troubling; and there the weary be at rest.
There the prisoners rest together; they
hear not the voice of the oppressor. The
small and the great are there; and the serv-
ant is free from his master" (3:17-19).
He cries out for wisdom and understanding,
and in the very cry builds a palace for them
to dwell in : " Where shall wisdom be
found? and where is the place of under-

92 KEYNOTE STUDIES

standing? Man knoweth not the price
thereof; neither is it found in the land of
the living. The depth saith, It is not in me :
and the sea saith, It is not with me. It can-
not be gotten for gold, neither shall silver
be weighed for the price thereof. It cannot
be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the
precious onyx, or the sapphire. The gold
and the crystal cannot equal it : and the ex-
change of it shall not be for jewels of fine
gold. No mention shall be made of coral,
or of pearls : for the price of wisdom is above
rubies. The topaz of Ethiopia shall not
equal it, neither shall it be valued with pure
gold. Whence then cometh wisdom, and
where is the place of understanding, seeing
it is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept
close from the fowls of the air? Destruc-
tion and death say, We have heard the fame
thereof with our ears. God understandeth
the way thereof, and he knoweth the place
thereof; for he looketh to the ends of the
earth, and seeth under the whole heaven,
to make the weight for the winds; and he
weigheth the waters by measure. When
he made a decree for the rain, and a way for
the lightning of the thunder, then did he see
it and declare it; he prepared it, yea, and
searched it out. And unto man he said,

JOB 93

Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wis-
dom ; and to depart from evil is understand-
ing " (28:12-28).

But the resources of sudden and swift
condensation are his also : " No doubt but ye
are the people and wisdom shall die with
you" (12:2). Nothing can be added to
that; its victims are pilloried forever. The
whole sweep of God's creative energy he
curdles disdainfully in a sentence : " By his
spirit he hath garnished the heavens; his
hand hath formed the crooked serpent "
(26:13). His own wretchedness lives for-
ever in a phrase : " I am a brother to dra-
gons, and a companion to owls " (30 : 29).

Thomas Hughes says of Tom Brown's
new fishing-rod : " It had play enough to
throw a midge tied on a single hair against
the wind, and strength enough to hold a
grampus." The words are true of Job's
power of speech. He did not have to com-
pel words or ideas to do his bidding. They
came when he beckoned and gave him all
that they had of play and power, of sweep
and challenge, to make his message find
lodgment wherever in all the ages men
should toil up from half knowledge to fuller
knowledge or from voicelessness to articu-
lateness. He touches nothing that does not

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become less angular, less fragmentary, less
circumscribed. He thought not in parts
but in wholes, not in hemispheres but in
spheres, not in terms of here and now but of
everywhere and always. He muffles the
ache of the actual not by evasion or half
statement but by a presentation so large, so
representative, so luminous that his very
litany has become both guide and solace.
" The greatest thing a human soul ever
does," says Ruskin, "is to see something
and to tell what it saw. To see clearly
is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in
one."

Thus if Job had not fought his way out,
if he had remained in the valley, this part
of the book would still be a bond of com-
radeship in trial, because to be articulate is
the first step to self-recovery. He would at
least have probed the problem; he would
have let air and sunlight in even if he him-
self had not found a way out. The spokes-
man precedes the leader, and to be the
spokesman for those in the valley is at least
to hint the victor on the heights.

But Job is not merely the spokesman of
those in the valley; he is the spokesman of
those who climb from the valley to the
heights. He is not a stationary character.

JOB 95

This differentiates him at once from his
four friends. They make their exit from
the same plane as that on which they made
their entry. There is thought activity in
them but no more progress than that made
by a caged squirrel whirling the wheel of his
little prison. But Job battles his way up
and out. The world quotes him not only
as voice for the voiceless but as hope for the
hopeless. I need hardly remind you that,
in spite of the usual classification, Job was
never a sceptic. He had faith but wanted
knowledge. His friends substituted super-
ficial knowledge for fundamental faith and
thus contributed nothing to the controversy
except to intensify Job's sense of separa-
tion from God and to make us realize
how urgently the times called for a new
philosophy of human suffering.

The comparison of Job with Prometheus
is not fruitful. Prometheus took the side
of man against the Olympians whom he
knew to be unmitigated rascals. There is
no analogy here. In the case of GEdipus,
with whom comparison is so frequently
made, the central difference is that the
Greek hero knew that he had done a mon-
strous thing while the Hebrew knew that he
had not. This difference is so vital that

96 KEYNOTE STUDIES

comparison is only contrast. Little more
can be said of the parallel drawn between
Job and Tabu-utul-Bel, the so-called Baby-
lonian Job.1 The latter cries out in his
misery:

The diviner has not improved the condition

of my sickness ;
The duration of my illness the seer could not

state ;
The god helped me not, my hand he took not ;
The goddess pitied me not, she came not to

my side.

But a conjurer was found at last through
whose magic the sufferer gained a triune
blessing: he couldjtalk, swallow,. andUsgit :

The tongue, which had stiffened so that it

could not be raised-
He relieved its thickness, so its words could

be understood.
The gullet, which was compressed, stopped

as with a plug —
He healed its contraction, it worked like a flute.
My spittle which was stopped so that it was

not secreted —
He removed its fetter, he opened its lock.

1 See George A. Barton's " Archaeology and the
Bible" (1917), pp. 392-396; "Proceedings of the
Society of Biblical Archaeology," X, 478; and Sir
Henry C. Rawlinson's " Cuneiform Inscriptions," IV,
60.

JOB 97

Equally unfruitful will be the attempt to
weigh nicely the arguments of the five con-
testants as arguments, to appraise them in
terms of logical reply and counter-reply, to
grade their relevancy or irrelevancy to what
the preceding speaker has said. Argu-
mentation in our sense, argumentation as a
Burke or a Marshall or a Webster employed
it, was unknown to the Hebrew. His lan-
guage was not adapted to it. Connectives
and particles, those indicia of voice and ges-
ture on which all orderly and interrelated
argumentation is dependent, are lacking in
Hebrew though they swarm in Greek. The
speeches of Job and his friends are not argu-
ments; they are monologues, connected
sometimes at the beginning with what the
preceding speaker has said, but soaring free
at the first opportunity and becoming more
and more unrelated and self-originated as
each speaker dips deeper into his own view-
point.

The superior interest in the content of
Job's speeches does not lie, then, in their
argument as such. It lies in their tri-
umphant advance from seeming despair to
faith and hope. A great nature, shaken to
its center, is finding itself, not through the
counsel of friends but in spite of such coun-

98 KEYNOTE STUDIES

sel. The speeches of these friends are but
so many wheels revolving on the same axle.
But Job's speeches are not circular but pro-
gressive. They form a ladder with firm-set
and luminous rounds. To find these rounds,
to catch the radiance of the pinnacle mo-
ments that light the way up, to mount with
Job from strength to strength, this is the
offering of these chapters ; this it is that has
given them their immortality 'of service,
their energy-releasing influence upon their
readers. Perhaps no two of us would agree
in our count of these moments, but none of
us, I am sure, would omit such sayings as :

" Though he slay me, yet will I trust in \
him" (13:15).

" My witness is in heaven and my record
is on high" (16:19).

" I know that my redeemer liveth ,!
(19:25).

" When he hath tried me, I shall come
forth as gold" (23:10).

Each of these is a victory in itself and the
herald of a greater victory yet to be; each
marks an altitude won and not lost again;
each is a mile-stone for nations as well as for
individuals; each shows the essential one-
ness of heroes in the Old Testament and
those in the New; each shows the wisdom of

JOB 99

God in making probation the criterion of the
soul's worth, and the ability of the soul amid
all menaces to meet the test. Browning
might well have had Job in mind when he
wrote :

No, when the fight begins within himself,
A man's worth something. God stoops o'er

his head,
Satan looks up between his feet — both tug —
He's left, himself, i' the middle: the soul

wakes
And grows. Prolong that battle through his

life!
Never leave growing till the life to come !

One might indeed take these four sayings
of Job and by relating them one to the other
make of them a sort of system of faith
triumphant. I shall not attempt it but I
wish you to notice that when Job utters the
first of these sayings the book passes at once
from the category of the Greek drama, gov-
erned by remorseless fatality, to the plane
of the Shakespearean drama, where per-
sonal will and faith and hope have a chance
to win out over an imposed and implacable
doom. But more significant still is Job's
last quoted saying, " When he hath tried
me, I shall come forth as gold." Here he
rises level to the height of the first two

100 KEYNOTE STUDIES

chapters. He discovers and vindicates with-
out God's interposition the very principle
that was at issue in his trial. Is suffering
punitive or is it remedial? Or, if we think
it punitive at first, may we so accept and
assimilate it as to make it remedial? Satan,
who, as the world's prosecuting attorney,
ought to have known better, believed that
Job would interpret his affliction as un-
merited and intolerable punishment; that
he would not bear up under it; that, when
he found the traditional contract between
property and piety dissolved, he would blas-
pheme and disintegrate : " Doth Job f ear
God for naught? Hast thou not made an
hedge about him, and about his house, and
about all that he hath on every side? Thou
hast blessed the work of his hands, and his
substance is increased in the land. But put
forth thine hand now, and touch all that he
hath, and he will curse thee to thy face "
(1:9-11).

But Job has reached an altitude at which
blasphemy is forever impossible. His char-
acter instead of disintegrating crystallizes.
When he identifies his own trial with the
familiar process of the refiner refining his
gold, his feet are upon a rock. He has dis-
covered the spiritual law of gravitation and

JOB 101

has submitted himself to it. In exact pro-
portion as his affliction increases he knows
that there will be an increase of gold and a
decrease of dross. Had he merely remained
silent in his trial, had he merely not cursed
God, Satan would have lost but God and
humanity would not have won. When,
however, he does not curse but recognizes
remedial discipline in his chastisement, he
not only vanquishes Satan but vindicates
God and the human soul. He did more.
He made that ash heap in the Old Testa-
ment prophesy the Cross in the New.

IV
The third part of the book of Job, that
embracing chapters 38-42, has been more
diversely interpreted than any other equal
section of the Old Testament. It has been
said that it is the addition of a later and less
skilful hand, that it is irrelevant to the main
issue, and thus not a worthy or fitting con-
clusion to what has gone before. An un-
named writer in The Unpopular Reviezv * sum-
marizes as follows: "The friends of Job
argued that since he was unfortunate he
must be wicked. Job knew better. But the
author of the book had no solution. His
JSee issue for January-March, 1917.

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Jehovah, who should deliver the conclusion
of the whole matter and close the discussion,
delivers magnificent poetry, but throws no
light on the subject, save the glare of his
indignation that anything so insignificant as
man should have any opinion about it. Job
was silenced but not answered. The opin-
ion of the author would appear to be that
the problem was humanly insoluble."

Before considering this facile indictment
more in detail, let us read and reread the
concluding part of Job. The patriarch is
rebuked not for the things that he had said
wisely but for the things that he had said
unwisely. For the wise and brave things
that he had said he receives the Lord's ex-
press commendation. " For ye," says the
Lord, referring to Job's friends, " have not
spoken of me the thing that is right, as my
servant Job hath " (42 : 7). But a child can
see that Job had mingled mere glitter with
his gold, that he had said many things that
in a more tranquil mood he would regret
and did regret : " Therefore have I uttered
that I understood not; things too wonder-
ful for me, which I knew not " (42: 3). If
the author of the book had represented God
as approving all that Job had said, he would
have compromised the character of the In-

JOB 103

finite and made the conclusion of the book
a jarring anticlimax. Think what strange
inferences you would have to draw as to
the character of God if you were told that
He commended every complaint, every pro-
test, every half truth that Job uttered.
What He does approve and bountifully re-
ward is Job's conduct, his vindication of
suffering as discipline, his victorious nega-
tion of Satan's challenge to human nature.
Conduct, not talk, was the issue, and God's
reproof of Job's " words without wisdom "
was only to clear the way for a more unre-
served commendation of the words and
spiritual growth that merited no reproof.

But God passes at once from a momentary
consideration of Job's limitations to a re-
view of the majesty and mystery of nature.
Are these chapters (38-41) irrelevant?
Only to those who have formed an obdurate
preconception of how the book ought to end
and refuse to have their preconception
modified. Nowhere else in the Bible will
you find so detailed a panorama of nature's
ways or so eloquent a portrayal of her min-
istry for men. It is an inspired commentary
on the first chapter of Genesis. Genesis sums
up the orderly and sequent emergence of
nature at the command of God while these

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chapters show the wisdom and greatness of
God not in creating but in preserving and
sustaining the work of His hand. There is
hardly an object of nature or a natural
phenomenon of impressive import that is
not summoned to the pageant that is made
to defile before us. The purpose of it all is
very plain. It is to remind Job that in all
of his struggle he had missed a source of
reassurance on which he might have drawn
unfailingly. The very core of Job's afflic-
tion had been that he could not see God,
could not hear His voice, could not even
find His footprints in the lone path along
which he was journeying. He had talked
much of nature's mysteries, had even recog-
nized in them a certain law and order, but
instead of seeing a beneficent God in them
he saw only an absentee landlord who dis-
dained to associate with his servants or
tenants. His loneliness, his sense of utter
isolation from the power that orbed above
him or spread its glories around him, is well
voiced by Tennyson's outcast, who also felt
himself " exiled from eternal God " :

A spot of dull stagnation, without light
Or power of movement, seem'd my soul,

'Mid onward-sloping motions infinite
Making for one sure goal.

JOB 105

A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand,
Left on the shore ; that hears all night

The plunging seas draw backward from the
land
Their moon-led waters white.

A star that with the choral starry dance
Join'd not, but stood, and standing saw

The hollow orb of moving Circumstance
Roll'd round by one fix'd law.

Yet all the while nature was calling to
them both, was bidding them see not only
law but providence and divine comradeship
in all her manifestations. There is not a
great poet in all literature, so far as I know,
who has not found in nature at least a par-
tial antidote to the sense of being left out
and left behind from which Job was suffer-
ing. Even Byron claims and claims justly
the right to stand among those who find in
nature what Job did not find :

Some kinder casuists are pleased to say,
In nameless print, that I have no devotion ;
But set those persons down with me to pray,
And you shall see who has the properest

notion
Of getting into heaven the shortest way ;
My altars are the mountains and the ocean,

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Earth, air, stars, — all spring from the great

Whole,
Who hath produced, and will receive the soul.

Philosophy, says Henri Bergson, will
never become a serious matter till it does
away with dogmatic systems and arrives at
" the sense of not being alone in the world."
The Ancient Mariner lost God when he lost
fellowship with nature. He found God
when fellowship with nature was restored
through love and sympathy.

But it is not only to the comradeship of
nature that God calls Job ; it is to the mys-
tery of nature, a mystery so vast and en-
compassing that it offers healing for all
minor mysteries. Job could not understand,
could not find the mathematical formula for,
God's dealings with him. These chapters
ask him if he understands or can give the
mathematical formula for anything in na-
ture. Job asked for bread and got not a
loaf but a bakery; he asked for water and
got not a drop but a surf bath ; he asked for
light and got not a taper but the full glare
of the sun. " Study large maps," Lord
Salisbury once urged; by demanding more
than the section map, they yield more. The
larger view is always the more sanative.
The pool may rot but not the sea. It's

JOB 107

easier to swim in the ocean and there's less
danger of sinking than in the bounded com-
pass of the lake.

The ministry of nature is taught in many
passages in the Bible but it is never so
massed and summarized as here. Jonah,
sulking and whining because he could not
understand God's treatment of him, was
pointed not to the entire book of nature but
to a mere foot-note, a gourd: "Then said
the Lord, Thou hast had pity on the gourd,
for the which thou hast not labored, neither
madest it grow; which came up in a night,
and perished in a night. And should not I
spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are
more than sixscore thousand persons that
cannot discern between their right hand and
their left hand; and also much cattle? " As
Christ found it necessary to reenforce the
lesson taught in the preceding sections of
Job, that affliction is not penalty, so in the
Sermon on the Mount He reenforces the
lesson taught in the last section, that a con-
sideration of nature's ways is an antidote to
worry and a restorer of faith : " Behold the
fowls of the air; for they sow not, neither
do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet
your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are
ye not much better than they? Which of

108 KEYNOTE STUDIES

you by taking thought can add one cubit
unto his stature? And why take ye thought
for raiment? Consider the lilies of the
field, how they grow; they toil not, neither
do they spin. And yet I say unto you that
even Solomon in all his glory was not ar-
rayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God
so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day
is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall
he not much more clothe you, O ye of little
faith?"

Let us return now to the charge of inde-
cisiveness: " The author of the book had no
solution. His Jehovah, who should deliver
the conclusion of the whole matter/' etc.
The critic seems to have reasoned thus:
" Solutions ought to come last. But I find
no solution in God's speech to Job. There-
fore the book ends loosely and indecisively."
It hardly needs to be said that the problem
is stated and solved before God reappears.
In chapters 1-2 Satan wagers that Job will
see in suffering a whip ; God knows that he
will see in it a ladder; in chapters 3-37 Job
discerns the ladder and treads painfully but
victoriously its ascending rounds. As I
pass to the concluding chapters of the book
there is no feeling of suspense as in a puzzle
yet unsolved. There is eager interest to

JOB 109

know if, when judgment has been pro-
nounced, God will reveal a way by which
the sorely tried patriarch might have
reached his goal with equal discipline but
through less darkness. There is such a way
and God reveals it. The " magnificent
poetry " of the Lord's address to Job is not
meant as a solution of what had already
been solved but as a reminder that ail who
suffer from a sense of God's remoteness and
indifference may find in the greatness and
harmony of nature the balm of a healing
ministry, the assurance that in spite of mys-
tery upon mystery — nay, because of it —

God's in his heaven —
All's right with the world !

If the critic insists on irrelevancy here, he
must charge an equal irrelevancy when the
Master bade His perplexed and anxious fol-
lowers to behold the fowls of the air and to
consider the lilies of the field.

God, man, nature, these are the themes
of Job, the greatest themes then and the
greatest now. They are presented not as
the theologian or the psychologist or the
scientist would present them, for the appeal
is not to the analytic intellect of man but
to his suffering spirit that moves as in a

110 KEYNOTE STUDIES

world not realized, that finds mystery above,
mystery within, and mystery round about
The central problem of the book is not,
Why do the righteous suffer? but How may
all suffering, yours and mine and Job's, be
transmuted into the larger life here, and
become the pledge and herald of the un-
ending life hereafter?

v

HOSEA

it

I

OFTEN fancy," said Renan, " that I
have at the bottom of my heart a city
of Is, with its bells calling to prayer
a recalcitrant congregation/' Is, you re-
member, is the name of a submerged
legendary city near the coast of Brittany,
and the tradition is that during the roar
of a storm the bells of the sunken city can
still be heard. The figure is a fitting symbol
not so much of the character of an indi-
vidual as of the enduring service rendered
by the prophets of the Old Testament. In
periods of calm their voice is silent, but in
every crisis of Hebrew history, whether the
danger was from within or without, the
prophets sounded the trumpet call to re-
form and re-dedication. No other people
was ever so blessed in leaders of wide
horizon, who knew the right and knowing
dared maintain. No other leaders ever

in

112 KEYNOTE STUDIES

spoke in tones that rang clearer or carried
farther. These ancient oracles, says J. H.
Gardner,1 have " a rugged grandeur and
elevation which set them apart as almost the
highest peak in the writings of men."

As interesting as their work is, however,
as literature, it is far more interesting in
the content of its message. The more I
read them the more I am convinced that, in
spite of individual differences, one big
thought gives unity to them all. Some, it
is true, prophesied to the Northern King-
dom, others to the Southern; some were
educated, others were almost untutored;
some spoke before the long captivity in
Babylon, others during it, and still others
after it. But though different as the waves
they were one as the sea. And in their
unity, in their convergence to a central con-
viction, one finds a better starting point for
their study than in the most elaborate sum-
mary of their differences.

I know of no single word that expresses
this common denominator of the prophets,
but an illustration will help. Did you ever
see the Kentucky coffee tree? It still grows
in the Mississippi Valley but it is threatened
with extinction and for a very peculiar
%ti The Bible as English Literature " (1906), p. 215.

HOSEA 113

reason. It has a pod like that of the locust
tree but the beans inside the pod have a
shell so hard that the living germ in each
bean finds increasing difficulty in getting
out. If the hardening process continues, as
seems likely, the Kentucky coffee tree will
go the way that all chickens would go if the
little ones could not peck their way out.

This hardening of the shell at the expense
of the living germ within has played a much
wider role in human history than in nat-
ural history. And the Hebrew prophets,
above all men that ever lived, have stood
resolutely and unchangingly for the living
principle within, and have battled even to
the death against every encroachment of
shell or husk. Whether the question was
religious or social or political, whether it
concerned the one or the many, these are
the elect men in the Old Testament who
championed the cause of truth against the
changing forms of truth, who recognized
with unerring vision the abiding worth of
the inside and the comparative worthless-
ness of the outside, who in every obligation
looked for " the sprit that maketh alive "
and fought the menace of " the letter that
killeth."

It is a strange twist in human nature that

114 KEYNOTE STUDIES

predisposes it to substitute the means for
the end, to exalt the insignia above the
thing signified, to flaunt the symbol rather
than to practise the thing symbolized. It is
the same predisposition to the external that
confuses character with reputation, senti-
ment with sentimentality, the statesman with
the politician, the poet with the versifier.
When Christ said, " The sabbath was made
for man and not man for the sabbath," He
summed up incomparably what the prophets
had resolutely stood for. When He con-
trasted the " tithe of mint and anise and
cummin " with " judgment, mercy, and
faith," He was expanding the same theme.
When the President of the United States
declared on that memorable second of
April, that " the same standards of conduct
and responsibility for wrong done shall be
observed among nations and their govern-
ments that are observed among the indi-
vidual citizens of civilized states," he spoke
in the very tones of the Hebrew prophets.
There is, there can be, no surer test of a
great thinker than the ability to discern as
by intuition between the shell and what the
shell was meant to conserve; and there is,
there can be, no surer measure of heroism
than the courage to take the side of the

HOSEA 115

inward and spiritual though all the world
proclaim that the outward and visible is
better.

It is just this blended insight and fearless-
ness that gave the Hebrew prophets their
sovereignty over their own nation and has
made all other nations their debtors. Read
them again; mark the passages that, rising
above the limitations of time and place,
suggest how we of a more complex age may-
resist the encroachments of the outer upon
the inner. If you can assimilate from any
prophet or from any passage a new insight
into the permanency of principle and the
transiency of ceremony you will have gained
in mental and moral force along the whole
battle line of truth and error.

II
You will find no difficulty in selecting
from Hosea the great passage that pro-
claims his stand in the war between the
kernel and the shell : " For I desired mercy,
and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of
God rather than burnt offerings" (6:6).
You will search the Old Testament in vain
for a clearer or more resonant statement of
the problem that seemed always at issue.
The national temptation was to stress ritual-

116 KEYNOTE STUDIES

ism at the expense of the life-giving virtues
of which ritualism was but the outer form.
It is as if the nation had said, " We care not
so much for the water that we drink as for
the artistry of the cup that contains it"
Put thus the error seems very palpable, but
there is not one of us who does not need
hourly the eloquent reminder of the prophet.
There is not one of us who is not function-
ing below his maximum because he is seek-
ing for strength in externalities that have
none. There is not one of us who does not
at times suffer from a vague depression be-
cause, though regular in our church duties,
we are all the time living at the circumfer-
ence, not at the center. There are writers
to-day who pit themselves against the elder
masters and ask in all honesty : "Are not my
rimes and stanzas as regular as theirs?
Are not my stories more artistically con-
structed?" Yes, but what have you put
into them? Your "sacrifice" is patent
enough ; your " burnt-offerings " smoke
from every page. But weigh the masters
once more, not in the scales of manner or
mannerism but of the urge and sweep of
their message. Do not absorb what they
say as the sponge absorbs water but as the
leaf absorbs the rain. Do for your age

HOSEA 117

what they did for theirs. Relate your
message to a present need as they related
theirs to a past need that was then present.

" Mercy and the knowledge of God,
these," says Hosea, " are central." When-
ever sacrifices cease to quicken the springs
of mercy, whenever they do not relate them-
selves consciously and actively to the heart
within, whenever they fail to hint of a God
who is merciful and who will in His own
time by a supreme sacrifice show His in-
finite mercy, — they are worse than useless.
And whenever burnt-offerings are counted
merely by their number, whenever they do
not suggest sin purged away, whenever they
fail to lead the mind on to the knowledge of
a great High Priest who will yet take away
the sins of the world, — they become an end
in themselves and defeat the end for which
they were ordained. But more than this,
these great words of Hosea connote not
merely the relation between mercy and
sacrifice on the one hand and knowledge of
God and burnt-offerings on the other. They
connote the whole realm of duty that finds
expression through any type or form,
through any ceremony or symbol.

That I do not overstate the meaning of
Hosea's words let me remind you that

118 KEYNOTE STUDIES

Christ on two occasions in His life was re-
proached by the Pharisees for doing or per-
mitting what they considered unlawful.
The questions at issue had nothing to do
with sacrifices or burnt-offerings ; but in the
Master's mind the underlying principle was
exactly that which Hosea had stressed, and
in both cases He quotes Hosea and urges
His critics to seek the larger meaning of the
prophet's words. "And it came to pass, as
Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many
publicans and sinners came and sat down
with him and his disciples. And when the
Pharisees saw it, they said unto his dis-
ciples, Why eateth your master with pub-
licans and sinners?" (Matthew 9:10-11).
Does Jesus explain to them that the ques-
tion is merely the old one of the outside
versus the inside, of the shell versus the
kernel? No, His reply is: "Go ye and
learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy
and not sacrifice.,,

A little later His disciples began to pluck
and eat corn on the Sabbath day. " But
when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto
him, Behold, thy disciples do that which is
not lawful to do upon the Sabbath day "
(Matthew 12 : 2). There would seem at first
glance to be little relation between eating

HOSEA 119

corn and offering sacrifices. Nearly eight
centuries had passed and the day of sacri-
fices and burnt-offerings was drawing to its
close. But the relation between form and
substance, between letter and spirit, had not
changed, nor will it ever change. All this
is summed again in Christ's reply : " If ye
had known what this meaneth, I will have
mercy and not sacrifice, ye would not have
condemned the guiltless." I can imagine
no higher tribute to Hosea's words than
that Christ should quote them twice and
thus standardize them as the most compact
statement of the great principle that all the
prophets had proclaimed.

Ill
But every prophet in the Old Testament
has his distinctive message apart from the
general message of which he is only a co-
deliverer. We have spoken of the chorus
chanted in varying tones by all the prophets
whether major or minor, whether of Israel
or Judah. If Hosea's voice had greater
carrying power than the others, the refrain
itself was the same. Each prophet, how-
ever, has a distinguishing note, a spiritual
differential, that marks him off from all
others. In Hosea's case the differential not

120 KEYNOTE STUDIES

only gives color and form to his entire
message but has exerted an influence on
Bible thought out of all proportion to the
number of pages that contain it. The book
itself has but fourteen short chapters, the
last eleven prophesying the decline of Israel,
the first three narrating the domestic
tragedy that made Hosea and his message
unique in all literature.

That Hosea is to-day the most neglected
and the most obscure of the prophets is
due, I think, chiefly to one cause : a curious
use of the divine imperative. This is a
Hebrew characteristic but it culminates in
Hosea. Suppose you had sailed on the ill-
fated Titanic and, escaping with your life,
had realized in later years that the experi-
ence had broadened and enriched you, that,
like Job, you had come out of the depths to
dwell on the heights. You would tell it in
the order of its occurrence. You would
begin : "I embarked on a ship that I thought
unsinkable." Not so Hosea. So clearly
would he see in retrospect God's hand in all
that had befallen him that he would inter-
pret it and narrate it as the fulfillment of a
divine command. He would have begun:
" The Lord said to Hosea, Get thee into a
ship that shall surely sink." Every detail

HOSEA 121

which he did not then foresee but which on
reflection he found beneficent in result he
would have translated not in ordinary past
tenses, as you or I would have done, but in
the urgent tones of the imperative mood,
God Himself commanding.

" Surely there are in every man's life,"
says Sir Thomas Browne, " certain rubs,
doublings, and wrenches, which pass a while
under the effects of chance; but at the last,
well examined, prove the mere hand of
God." Hosea had his full share of " rubs,
doublings, and wrenches " but his rooted
conviction was that God had planned his
life as a whole and preordained every event
in accordance with wisdom and mercy. He
does not say, therefore, " I did this," but
" God commanded me to do this." The
goal becomes the starting place. He counts
his mile-stones accurately but, as we should
say, backward.

Even this would not greatly perplex us
provided the things done were not in them-
selves wrong. But suppose that Jean Val-
jean, the hero in Les Miser ables, who cer-
tainly passed to moral heroism via evil deeds,
had said in later years : " The Lord com-
manded me to steal a loaf of bread, to take
the silver plate from the Bishop, to snatch

122 KEYNOTE STUDIES

two francs from a child." We should have
thought him a man of strangely inverted
moral sense until we were told that this
was only his way of saying that, looking
back over his life, he believed that a divinity
had shaped his ends, rough-hew them how
he would. Autobiography thus written be-
comes a series of divine commands, the
author believing that God's permission is in
effect an order.

Turn now to the second and third verses
of Rosea: " The beginning of the word of
the Lord by Hosea. And the Lord said to
Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whore-
doms and children of whoredoms: for the
land hath committed great whoredom, de-
parting from the Lord. So he went and
took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim; which
conceived and bare him a son." Compare
the deterrent nature of this Introduction
with the matchless Introductions to Genesis,
Esther, and Job. But if translated so as to
make clear the thought that Gomer's un-
faithfulness came later and was only in
retrospect linked with a command of God,
the Introduction will take its place with any
that have gone before. It not only intro-
duces what is to follow but stamps Hosea
as a man whose faith in God's leading made

HOSEA 123

tragedy in the traditional sense impossi-
ble.

Turn also to the second crisis in Hosea's
life. Gomer had left him and sold herself
as a common wanton. But Hosea's love
for her knew no change. He buys her back,
restores her to his home, and encompasses
her with a love that was powerless to re-
form her but that transformed him by its
very purity and utter negation of self. As
he thought it over, the hand of God was
again as visible as in the marriage. Both
were stages in the discipline of Hosea from
which he issued the supreme laureate of love
in the Old Testament. When he recounts
it, the divine imperative comes again to the
fore : " Then said the Lord unto me, Go yet,
love a woman beloved of her friend, yet an
adulteress, according to the love of the Lord
toward the children of Israel, who look to
other gods, and love flagons of wine. So
I bought her to me for fifteen pieces of sil-
ver, and for an homer of barley, and an half
homer of barley : And I said unto her, Thou
shalt abide for me many days; thou shalt
not play the harlot, and thou shalt not be
for another man: so will I also be for
thee" (3:1-3).

The story is a strange and appealing one,

124 KEYNOTE STUDIES

not because of the faithlessness of a worth-
less woman but because of the effect on
Hosea. Had he put her away, or had she
and her betrayer been put to death (Deuter-
onomy 22:22), all legal requirements would
have been fulfilled. But instead of sub-
mitting himself to a formal code, Hosea fol-
lows the errant Gomer with a love and
tenderness so pure, so solicitous, so undevi-
ating that he was lifted to a realization of
God's love not vouchsafed to any other
prophet in the Old Testament. He had
found it hard to understand how God could
love an inconstant and unresponsive people.
Now he understands it, for he has learned
that love is not dependent on reward or re-
turn, that it does not measure its outgoing
by the prospect of a fixed income, that it
has an absolute value of its own, that it
emancipates the lover if not the loved,

That it all sordid baseness doth expel,
And the refined mind doth newly fashion
Unto a fairer form, which now doth dwell
In his high thoughts, that would itself excel.

Browning, you remember, makes the dying
St. John say :

For life, with all it yields of joy and woe,
And hope and fear, — believe the aged friend,—

HOSEA 125

Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love,
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is.

Hosea had learned it but learned it in a way
as unexpected by him as was the wreck of
his early hope. Edwin Markham has a few
lines, the central thought of which might
well be ascribed to Hosea:

He drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout ;
But Love and I had the wit to win —
We drew a circle that took him in.

But Hosea's circle not only took in the
offending Gomer; it compassed the whole
range of a new life ; its center had ceased to
be self and had become in turn another,
then love, then God.

I do not believe that literature furnishes a
parallel to the motif of the book of Hosea.
" It is characteristic of August Strindberg,,,
says Archibald Henderson,1 " that, in his
effort to portray the most vital, most in-
tense form of conflict, he should instinctively
find his dramatic theme in the torturing con-
flicts of his own family life." But Strind-
berg uses the conflicts of his family life only
as the means of venting an implacable hate.
1 " European Dramatists " (1913), p. 46.

126 KEYNOTE STUDIES

That a man could be made purer and
stronger by the power of a love that was
not returned, that was even trampled in the
mire, is a motif far beyond the ken of Strind-
berg. In Crime and Punishment by Dosto-
yevsky we have a murderer for the hero and
a prostitute for the heroine; but the final
regeneration of both is brought about in the
traditional way, by love, suffering, and serv-
ice, shared and ennobled. In the Scarlet
Letter Hawthorne inhibits all sympathy with
the wronged husband by making him the
very nemesis of unforgetting and unforgiv-
ing malignity. " The Hosea motif has in-
terested me also," writes Dr. R. A. TsanonV
" not as an object of research but as an
ethical problem and as a literary idea. I am
not aware of any modern Hosea. Is the
idea alien to us that it has not been utilized
in literary material more often? Do you
suppose that man has gone about the busi-
ness of saving his soul by the direct road?
We must be spiritually more selfish than we
imagine. ' Whoso would save his own life
must save that of another.' "

Men doubtless pointed the finger of scorn
at the prophet but the happiest man, the

1 Author of " The Problem of I<ife in the Russian
Novel" (1917),

HOSEA 127

freest man, the highest man in Israel was
Hosea, the son of Beeri, but not because he
did not visit legal punishment upon Gomer.
Nowhere is it intimated that his treatment
of Gomer should become the model for
similar cases. By no means. But the man
had found himself, had felt the slipping
away of narrowness and selfishness, had ex-
perienced an emotion so novel and yet so
abiding and blessed that he knew that the
finite within him had touched the infinite
above him. He did not stop to analyze it
all; it never occurred to him to seek to
justify himself by recourse to the law of the
land. No, he hastened to write down not
a new method with faithless wives but a
new conception of God. " Just as I," he
reasoned, " love Gomer in spite of her de-
fection, so does God, though in a vaster
way, love Israel in spite of its rebellious-
ness/' And from that moment the new con-
ception of God began to spread throughout
Israel and from Israel throughout Judah.
Religion became at once and has continued
less and less a matter of formal adherence
to an imposed code and more and more the
power of a full-orbed life that has love of
God at its center and glad service as its
expression.

128 KEYNOTE STUDIES

A Deity believed is joy begun,
A Deity adored is joy advanced,
A Deity beloved is joy matured.

Major and minor prophets catch the im-
port of the larger vision and chant its beauty
and its appeal to an ever widening circle of
listeners. When the book of Deuteronomy
was brought from its long seclusion a cen-
tury later and men heard once more the
words, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with all thine heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy might/' did not neighbor
exchange glances with neighbor and talk
again of the message of Hosea? Had not
this single prophet of Israel done more to
prepare both king and people for the recep-
tion of the new message than any prophet
who had lived in the long interim? The
last chapter of the last book of the Bible
returns again to the marriage figure first
employed by the first prophet. God is
wedded to the Church but the Church has
made itself worthy. Hosea does not say,
" God is love." That was reserved for him
who had seen the Christ and therefore
knew. But closest to St John among the
prophets, as St. John was closest to Christ
among the disciples, is the figure of Hosea,
husband of Gomer.

VI
THE GOSPEL OF JOHN

ii

D

O not regard the Gospels as biog-
raphies— they are only sketches."
This warning or its equivalent
one finds prominently posted in nearly every
Introduction to the New Testament or Life
of Christ or special edition of any one of the
four Gospels. The next few years, how-
ever, are going to witness a complete re-
versal of the current view and the Gospels
are going to be recognized not only as biog-
raphies but as the first biographies known
in literature. Stranger still, when the King
James translation of the Bible appeared in
1611 the English language had even then no
native biography to its credit. The four
Gospels were, therefore, the first biographies
to be put into English, and not until old Sir
Isaac Walton entered the field a generation
later was there an English biography that
could be even grouped with the four master-
pieces that usher in the New Testament.
The pivot on which the whole question

turns is the word or rather the concept per-

129

130 KEYNOTE STUDIES

sonality. " Biography," says Sir Sidney
Lee,1 " aims at satisfying the commemora-
tive instinct by exercise of its power to
transmit personality." Samuel Parr, who
had intended to write the life of Dr. Samuel
Johnson, said of his proposed work : " I had
read through three shelves of books to pre-
pare myself for it. It would have contained
a view of the literature of Europe. . . .
It would have been the third most learned
work that has ever appeared." But it would
not have been Johnson and would not, there-
fore, have merited the name of biography.
Boswell, whose Life of Johnson remains the
measure of biographic excellence in all lan-
guages, said of his work: " I am absolutely
sure that my mode of biography, which
gives not only a history of Johnson's visible
progress through the world . . . but a
view of his mind ... is the most per-
fect that can be conceived." It is not the
number of facts, or the orderly arrangement
of them, or the pains taken in securing them,
that makes a work a biography. There
must be the clear recognition of the per-
sonality of the man about whom you write,
and this recognition must control the choice,

1 See his " Principles of Biography," and Walter H.
Dunn's " English Biography " (1916).

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 131

the order, and the significance of the facts
presented. If your work does not transmit
personality, it may still be informing, but it
is not biography. If it does transmit per-
sonality, however few the facts and however
many the gaps, you have achieved a biog-
raphy.

Does not each of the four Gospels trans-
mit the personality of Christ? Is not this
their central theme? Not one of them at-
tempts to fill in each year or any one year of
Christ's life. But the incidents selected are
vitally significant; the sayings are steeped
in personality; the deeds speak as con-
vergently as the sayings; even the things)
omitted testify to unity of conception; ant
the harmony of the whole is itself a sort of
miniature biography. It was not the power
of Christ that drew His disciples to Him :
it was the magnetism of His personality.
It was this that held them, and it was this
that they tried to body forth in their teach-
ings and writings. Compare the Gospels
with any of the countless Lives of the
Saints. There is no selective genius in the
latter, no sensitiveness to the elements that
make for personality ^enumeration takes the
place of interpretation; gaps are fluently
filled witlTthe irrelevant and the non-essen-

132 KEYHOTE STUDIES

tial; «i&e^sis_everywhere usurps the func-
tion _of exegesis. To^niy^minlr nothing
speaks more eloqtrently of the divine per-
sonality of Christ than the unwillingness of
the Evangelists to obtrude their own com-
ments or to itemize the unrecorded years by
additions of their own. The gaps were as
evident to them as to us, but the personality
that moves through their pages had power
to impose silence as well as to compel
speech.

II

And yet, though the four Gospels are the
first four biographies, though they are one
in the common attempt to limn the most
marvellous personality that ever appeared
among men, John's method marks a dis-
tinct advance upon that of his predecessors.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke saw the person-
ality of Christ most clearly reflected in the
deeds that proclaimed Him the Son of God
and in the words that proclaimed Him the
supreme teacher of righteousness and salva-
tion. "What did He do? " "What did He
say about duty to God and man?" — these
questions furnish the clue to the first three
Gospels. But the clue to John's Gospel is
" Who is He? " This question is far deeper
in its reach and wider in its implications

THE GOSPEL OP JOHN 133

than the other questions. By answering it
John's Gospel not only supplements the
other Gospels; it underlies them. It is not
so much roof as foundation. Tell me who a
man is and I can tell you whether his deeds j
and doctrines are emanations from within
or additions from without. Matthew, Mark,
and Luke, for example, all record the
miracle of Christ's feeding the five thou-
sand. John alone adds that Christ said :
" I am the bread of life : He that cometh to
me shall not hunger; and he that believeth
on me shall never thirst" (6:35). This is
not a case of gathering up the fragments
that the other Evangelists had left: it is the
central and abiding part of the miracle.
The actual loaves were but fragments of the
creative " I am."

Artists talk of the Raphael touch. It is
the addition to a painting, whether in con-
ception or execution, that only Raphael
could give. The St. John touch is as clearly
marked among the biographers of Christ as
the Raphael touch among Renaissance
artists. Haunting beauty of phrase, a per-
vasive suggestiveness as of depth below
depth in the thought, perfect unity in tex-
ture and pattern, wide horizons beckoning
always, the divine so clearly envisaged that

134 KEYNOTE STUDIES

it seems the human and the human so
irradiated that it seems the divine — these
are evident at even a first reading. But be-
neath these, giving wholeness and sym-
metry to every part, is the quest for that
central font in Christ which we, veiling our
ignorance, call personality. Only the first
stages of this quest had been attained by
Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It was left for
John to recall and record those sayings of
• our Lord in which " I am," surpassing in
content both miracle and parable, proved at
last the most revealing miracle and the most
illuminating parable.

Try to think what a blank there would be
in the world's knowledge of Christ and in its
fellowship with Him if we did not know that
He said:

" I am the living bread which came down
from heaven : if any man eat of this bread,
he shall live forever" (6: 51).

" I am the light of the world : he that fol-
loweth me shall not walk in darkness, but
shall have the light of life " (8: 12).

" I am the door: by me if any man enter
in, he shall be saved " (10: 9).

" I am the good shepherd : the good shep-
herd giveth his life for the sheep " (10: 11).

" I am the resurrection and the life : he

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 135

that believeth in me, though he were dead,
yet shall he live" (11:25).

" I am the way, the truth, and the life : no
man cometh unto the Father, but by me "
(14:6).

" I am the true vine, and my Father is the
husbandman" (15:1).

" I am the vine, ye are the branches :
he that abideth in me, and I in him, the
same bringeth forth much fruit" (15: 5).

Note, too, that if Christ does not say " I
am love " in so many words, He says it in
passages of which " I am love " is only the
crystallization. "A new commandment I
give unto you, that ye love one another; as
I have loved you, that ye also love one an-
other " (13:34). It was not a new com-
mandment that they should love one an-
other, but it was new that they should love
one another as He had loved them, He who,
being life and light, was necessarily love.
When John says, therefore, in his First
Epistle, " God is love " (4: 8), he is but in-
terpreting and summarizing the passages
about love that he had already recorded in
his Gospel.

It is these great " I am " passages and the
passages that radiate from them that give
distinctive character and appeal to John's

136 KEYNOTE STUDIES

^ Gospel. Not one of these passages is found
in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. Matthew at
least must have heard Christ when He
uttered these words but Matthew's ear was
\ not as finely attuned to spiritual undertones
1 as John's. The best loved disciple, had he
Uvritten as early as Matthew or Mark or
I Luke, might have supplemented their
records merely with more miracles and
more parables. As the years passed, how-
ever, reflection taught him new values.
Autobiography is a kind of biography, but it
comes later. John's Gospel is in a sense
autobiography succeeding biography. But,
if the distinction may be made, it is a new
kind of autobiography, Christ revealing
Himself not merely in His own words, but
in those words that connote inner being
rather than outer action. The verb to be
takes precedence of the verb to do. To note
and record this kind of self-revelation de-
mands a sensitiveness to the meaning of
personalia, a delicacy of spiritual interpreta-
tion, a balance between observation and re-
action to observation, a faculty of recon-
structive thinking, a passion for ultimate
rather than mediate things that only a few
have had and not one in equal measure with
St. John.

THE GOSPEL OP JOHN 137

HI

It is often said that St. John's Gospel
shows the evidence of Jewish Alexandrian
philosophy, that it was written to offset cer-
tain speculative tendencies that had become
current since the appearance of the first Gos-
pels. The argument seems to me greatly
overworked. The speculative philosophy
of his day may have tinged St. John's
vocabulary here and there but there is no
need to invoke its aid further. The central
current of the Fourth Gospel finds its chan-
nel not in outside influences but in the char-
acter of St. John, in the limitations of the
Gospels already written, and in the crisis
through which Christianity was passing
when only one of the elect twelve was left
to testify of his Master. Let us note these
briefly in order.

Though we know little of St. John's life
outside of his writings, the character of the
man is self-portrayed in his Gospel, his three
Epistles, and the Book of Revelation. In
bulk Luke contributed more to the New
Testament than any one else, but in variety
John stands easily first. Luke excels in
pure narration, in the clear and orderly
sequence of events, the single event being
with him the narrative unit. But in casual

138 KEYNOTE STUDIES

connection, in atmosphere, in absolute har-
mony of tone, in mastery of all forms of ex-
pression that hint more than they say and
quicken to their full capacity all types of
receptive intelligence, John has no equal.
His unit is never the bare event, never the
mere deed. In his Gospel the unit is the
heart-beat of personality; in his Epistles it
is the note of fellowship with the Father,
from which the deed springs as flower from
seed ; in the Apocalypse it is the symbol that
foreshadows the event. The event flashes
and is gone ; the matrix from which it arose
abides. A man who felt as John felt, who
saw life from his angle, who was privileged
to be the intimate of Christ, who was known
preeminently as the disciple whom Jesus
loved, and who was commissioned by Jesus
from the cross to be son to Mary in His
stead, would not need to have his Gospel
shaped by current philosophies. It sprang
from a character naturally malleable to
spiritual pressures. It was the reaction of
an intense personality to the personality of
One who combined in Himself every height
that John had glimpsed in experience or
vision.

But the limitations of Matthew, Mark,
and Luke called for a Fourth Gospel as in-

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 139

sistently as did the native bent of John's
character. What they recorded they re-
corded in a form and spirit beyond the cen-
sure of even hostile criticism. What was
beyond their ken, what did not seem to
them central and organic in the Master's
life, they omitted. They never for a mo-
ment doubted that He was the Son of God
and the promised Messiah. Matthew's
Gospel is indeed a sort of Panama Canal
between the Old Testament and the New.
The supreme revelation of Christ's per-
sonality was in Matthew's mind that He was
the long-looked-for Messiah, that in Him
the tides of both dispensations met.
Matthew was eager to record every event
in Christ's life to which could be added,
" That it might be fulfilled." Mark cared
less for fulfillment and more for the achieve-
ments that heralded Christ as the Son of
God. Luke's Gospel is the synthesis of the
two, it being as he tells us a " treatise of all
that Jesus began both to do and to teach "
(Acts 1:1).

But men were constantly asking a ques-
tion which these Gospels did not adequately
answer. " Suppose He is the Messiah and
the Son of God. This is only His office, His
relationship. Tell us not what He is but

140 KEYNOTE STUDIES

who He is." This demand recurs again and
again in the first three Gospels. " Some
say that thou art John the Baptist: some,
Elias; and others Jeremias, or one of the
prophets" (Matthew 16 :14). "Is not this the
carpenter, the son of Mary?" (Mark 6:3).
"Is not this Joseph's son?" (Luke 4:22).
This question must have gathered momen-
tum as the Gospel was preached in distant
lands; it must have deepened in meaning in
proportion to the range of thought of those
that asked it. To say that Christ was the
Messiah or the Son of God or, as He called
Himself, the Son of Man, was not in itself
to link Him with universal human need, to
bring Him home to men's business and
bosoms, to make Him the comrade of all the
ages. Another answer was needed, an an-
swer less cryptic, and more soluble in the
daily wants of ordinary humanity. Christ
had Himself given the answer in many self'
revealing discourses but these had found no
place in the Gospels already extant. Life,
light, love, truth, the door, the way, the liv-
ing bread, — the identification of Christ with
these recurrent and elemental needs was to
prove not merely a vaster interpretation but
almost a rediscovery of the Saviour of men.
In addition, however, to the character of

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 141

St. John and to the lacunae in the Gospels
that preceded his, there is another con-
sideration that cannot be omitted in any
survey of the hinterland from which issued
the Fourth Gospel. Put yourself in the
place of the Evangelist. His fellow disciples
were dead and he alone survived of those
who had journeyed with Christ, conversed
with Him, and seen with their own eyes the
mastery that He exercised over nature, dis-
ease, and death. John could still convince
the doubters by saying, " I knew Him, I
heard Him, I saw Him heal the sick and
raise the dead." The argument from per-
sonal contact and personal observation must
have had the same force then as now.
Human nature at bottom has not changed.
But John lived on into an age in which the
thought must have come to him with in-
creasing force : " How will it be when I am
gone? When none is left to say ' I saw '? "
This crisis in the history of Christianity
John seems to me to have previsioned far
more vividly than any of his predecessors.
It was a crisis which Christ had not only
foreseen but provided for in discourses
which John alone was to record. Those
long centuries that were to heap themselves
upon the short years of Christ's ministry,

142 KEYNOTE STUDIES

the new nations and languages and civiliza-
tions that were to thrust themselves be-
tween, the vast abysm of time across which
men must look and listen to see the face and
to hear the voice of the Son of Man, the cry
that would go up so often from waiting
hearts, " Could I but see Him and touch the
hem of His garment " — this was a burden
which Christ bore in advance, a chasm which
He bridged so that all succeeding genera-
tions might pass securely over.

But the story of the miracles wrought in
the olden time would not alone avail for
these waiting centuries and St. John deals
more sparingly in miracles than any other
Evangelist. TJae^mir^cle jifter^all is only a
sort of first aid to the unbelieving. ~~r03fessed
are they/' says Jesus, " that have not seen,
and yet have believed" (20:29). Nor
would additional parables have met the
need. The parable is the unapproached
model of much in little but it shows Christ
as the matchless teacher rather than as the
companion whose personality will enrich all
personalities that come within its orbit.
What these waiting centuries wanted was/
not new evidence that Christ had lived and
had taught but that He was still living and
still teaching. The emphasis must now be

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 143

put on those qualities of Christ's personality
which each man, in whatever century he
lived, could test for himself, could apply to
his own spirit needs, could instantly vindi-
cate in his own experience. Men do not
argue about bread : they taste it.

John's faith was no longer dependent on
the miracles and wonders that he had seen
Christ do. These were but scaffolding;
their support was no longer needed. John
calls them signs, never miracles, — signs of
a continuing presence behind them that in-
finitely transcended in faith value any one
of them or all of them. External evidence,
the evidence of John's eye and ear, had
found internal warrant, the warrant of an
answering life. And this new stage in the
Apostle's faith forecast accurately the whole
future appeal of Christianity. The time had
come when the nature of the evidence for
the living Christ must be changed. Those
who are to hand the torch down the ages
must have more to say than, " Believe on
Him because of the wonderful works which
we can prove that He did, and the wonder-
ful doctrines which we can prove that He
taught." They must know those self-evi-
dencing qualities, those self-vindicating
virtues, those self-validating forces which

144 KEYNOTE STUDIES

stream from the personality of Christ and
which defy alike the corrosion of time that
has been and the menace of time yet to be.
They must say, " Christ is not a past his-
tory: He is an abiding life, not to be rea-
soned about but to be lived. Appropriation,
not argumentation, is the key-word." This
is how John's Gospel met the crisis of the
coming centuries.

IV
Among the radiant words about which
the Evangelist's thought loves to circle, is
it possible to select one that may rightly be
said to sound the keynote of the Fourth
Gospel? I think so. That word is life.
Light, love, truth, and all the rest are but
branches of this vine, though, like the
branches of the banyan tree, they may dip
down and become the roots of the new life
themselves. But

'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant,
Oh life, not death, for which we pant.

This Gospel says and suggests more of life,
of its potential beauty and power, of its
height and depth, of its reach and range and
possibility, of its beginning and growth and

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 145

culmination in Christ, than is said or sug-
gested in all the rest of the New Testament
combined.

It is life with which it starts. Mark had
begun his Gospel with the baptism of
Christ; Luke with the annunciation to
Mary; Matthew with "Jesus Christ, the son
of David, the son of Abraham." But John
begins by saying there is no such thing as
B. C. The life of Christ had no beginning.
All is A. D. And he closes his Gospel on
the same infinite note. If all the activities
of this life, even during its ministry of a
paltry three years, should be recorded, " I
suppose that even the world itself could not
contain the books that should be written.,,
This is not exaggeration. It is merely a
human attempt to express the infinite, to
bind in the radiations of a life that had no
beginning and can have no end.

It is life restored in whole or in part that
forms the theme of every miracle recorded
by John, every miracle, that is, that has to
do with men. " Thy son liveth," cry the
servants to the anxious nobleman. " So
the father knew that it was at the same
hour, in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy
son liveth " (4: 53). The impotent man at
the pool of Bethesda had waited thirty-eight

146 KEYNOTE STUDIES

years for some one to put him into the heal-
ing spring. " Jesus saith unto him, Rise,
take up thy bed, and walk. And immedi-
ately the man was made whole" (5:8-9).
To another He said, " Go, wash in the pool
of Siloam " (9:7), and the poor fragment
of life washed and was made whole. Before
the resurrection of Lazarus were the words :
" I am the resurrection and the life : he that
believeth in me, though he were dead, yet
shall he live" (11:25). This, rather than
" Lazarus, come forth," was the divine im-
perative to which death gave heed. And
the raising of Lazarus was but itself a
gesture of infinite personality, a mere inci-
dent in the dateless sovereignty of the Lord
both of life and of death.

Finally, it is life that in John's own words
gives the central purpose and import of his
Gospel. The ministry of this Gospel thus
confirms and encompasses the ministries of
the three Gospels that precede it; but John
adds as its ultimate ministry that the life of
One might flow through the sluice-gate of
faith into the life of all. "And many other
signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his
disciples, which are not written in this book.
But these are written that ye might believe
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God;

THE GOSPEL OP JOHN 147

and that believing ye might have life
through his name " (20: 30-31).

V
The older commentators used to make
much of symbols in their interpretation of
the Gospels. Matthew was represented by
a man, Mark by a lion, Luke by an ox, and
John by an eagle. As the eagle, scorning
the earth, loves to soar into the mysterious
blue, and to roam through skyey spaces
measureless to man, so John, it was thought,
loves to poise at dizzy heights, and to sweep
through realms impenetrable to eye or
mind. But the figure is not apt. No, not
the eagle is the fitting symbol of the Fourth
Gospel. If we are to find our symbol
among the inhabitants of those argent
spaces between earth and sky, let us choose
one that shall suggest neither aloofness nor
solitariness. Let it be one that seeks the
upper levels of air, seeks them daily, but
only that it may return and bring the rap-
ture of the heights into the humbler life of
the plain. Not the eagle shall be our sym-
bol but the skylark,

Type of the wise who soar, but never roam ;
True to the kindred points of Heaven and
Home.

VII

THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS

i

THE best way to know a great writer
is to approach him via his favorite
theme or themes. If I were going
to lecture on Matthew Arnold and had at
my disposal only two lecture periods I
should in the first hour say nothing about
Arnold himself but devote the time wholly
to the question of culture. If Carlyle were
the subject the approach would be by way
of shams. Tennyson and Browning would
be prefaced by a discussion of the two kinds
of progress: first, the slow, uniform, incre-
mental kind that a ball makes when it
moves in a leisurely way over a level floor;
second, the irregular and intermittent kind
that a tumbling box makes as it is kicked
from one point to another; Tennyson stands
for the first, Browning for the second. In
the case of Emerson, self-reliance would be
the keynote. O. Henry would require a

148

THE EPISTLE TO THE BOMANS 149

talk about the man down and out, his de-
sire to get back, his unwillingness to be per-
manently classed as bad or useless. Wood-
row Wilson would compel us first of all to
front the question whether we had not heard
too much about the rights of democracy and
too little about its duties.

To know St. Paul you must think as you
have never thought before about the limita-
tions of law. This is the theme that he
made peculiarly his own and by making it
his own made it also a part of the thought
of nineteen centuries. No one can read the
Epistle to the Romans or the Epistle to the
Galatians without seeing at once that the
great Apostle's mind had been revolving
about this problem long before he made his
journey to Damascus. From that journey
he returned a Christian but his growing con-
sciousness of the limitations of law not only
predisposed him to accept Christ instantly
but gave to his acceptance an intellectual
authoritativeness impossible before.

Of course by law Paul does not mean
what we to-day mean by natural law. The
law of gravitation, the laws of heat, of sound,
of light did not enter into the Apostle's
thinking. No one can speak of the limita-
tions of these laws because they are not

150 KEYNOTE STUDIES

limited. They are coextensive with the
sovereignty of nature : or, if they have their
limitations, God alone knows it, not we. It
was chiefly of natural law that Hooker was
thinking when he wrote the famous words :*
" Of law there can be no less acknowledged
than that her seat is the bosom of God, her
voice the harmony of the world; all things
in heaven and earth do her homage, the
very least as feeling her care, and the great-
est as not exempted from her power."
These words suggest St. John rather than
St. Paul.

Fortunately we are not left in doubt as to
the kind of law that St. Paul had in mind.
" I am verily a man," he said in his defense
at Jerusalem, " which am a Jew, born in
Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, yet brought up in
this city at the feet of Gamaliel, and taught
according to the perfect manner of the law
of the fathers " (Acts 22 : 3). You will find
" the law of the fathers " summarized in the
twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second, and
twenty-third chapters of Exodus. If these
chapters contain a few laws or "judgments"
that hardly seem to us worth the effort of
St. Paul to invalidate, let us remember that
they contain also the Ten Command-
1 " Ecclesiastical Polity," Book I, Chapter 16.

THE EPISTLE TO THE EOMANS 151

ments, — laws that have guided and shaped
the destiny of civilization in all lands. It
is no man of straw, then, that the Apostle
sets up. He is concerned with the very
concept of law itself, and what he says ap-
plies to Gentile as well as to Jew, to modern
society as well as to ancient. Moses is no
more truly the lawgiver of the old dispensa-
tion than Paul is the law interpreter of the
new.

II

The theme of Romans is usually said to be
justification by faith. But this is far too
narrow a view. It puts the emphasis, more-
over, on the wrong word. Faith is the
great word ; justification is one and only one
of its fruits. If you view the book other-
wise its center will not be in the middle.
Paul nowhere defines faith.1 He illustrates
it, illuminates it, contrasts it with law and
works, lets us feel the glow of it, but no-
where tries to circumscribe it with a defini-
tion. There's danger in definitions, danger
that we pigeonhole the thing defined in-

1 1 need hardly say that I do not consider Hebrews
the work of Paul. But, even so, the words, " Now
faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evi-
dence of things not seen " (Hebrews 11: 1), are not a
definition and were not so intended.

152 KEYNOTE STUDIES

stead of practicing it. Whatever faith may
be in its last analysis, if it remain only a
creed with us, it is not faith in the Pauline
sense. It must be a habit of mind, the very
air that we breathe, if we are to rise to the
height of the Apostle's argument. We may
have moments of doubt — as we gasp at
times for breath — but the sense of emptiness
and loss that these moments bring is but
added evidence that faith is native to our
nature.

Do you remember that fine thought in
William James's essay, Is Life Worth Living?
" That our whole physical life may lie soak-
ing in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of
Being that we at present have no organ for
apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by
the analogy of the life of our domestic
animals. Our dogs, for example, are in our
human life but not of it. They witness
hourly the outward body of events whose
inner meaning cannot, by any possible
operation, be revealed to their intelligence,
events in which they themselves often play
the cardinal part. My terrier bites a teasing
boy, for example, and the father demands
damages. The dog may be present at every
step of the negotiations, and see the money
paid without an inkling of what it all means,

THE EPISTLE TO THE EOMANS 153

without a suspicion that it has anything to
do with him. And he never can know in his
natural dog's life. Or take another case
which used greatly to impress me in my
medical-student days. Consider a poor dog
whom they are vivisecting in the laboratory.
He lies strapped on a board and shrieking at
his executioners, and to his own dark con-
sciousness is literally in a sort of hell. He
cannot see a single redeeming ray in the
whole business; and yet all these diabolical-
seeming events are usually controlled by
human intentions with which, if his poor,
benighted mind could only be made to catch
a glimpse of them, all that is heroic in him
would religiously acquiesce. Healing truth,
relief to future sufferings of beast and man
are to be bought by them. It is genuinely
a process of redemption. Lying on his back
on the board there he is performing a func-
tion incalculably higher than any prosper-
ous canine life admits of; and yet, of the
whole performance, this function is the one
portion that must remain absolutely beyond
his ken."

" In the dog's life," adds Professor
James, "we see the world invisible to him
because we live in both worlds. In human
life, although we only see our world, and his

154 KEYNOTE STUDIES

within it, yet encompassing both these
worlds a still wider world may be there as
unseen by us as our world is by him ; and to
believe in that world may be the most essen-
tial function that our lives in this world
have to perform.,, But the analogy of the
mole seems to me even more suggestive.
Does he know that above his sunless gal-
leries there is a world of avenued beauty to
which his dim pathways are but as acorn to
oak? All that he could say would be: "I
live in darkness and am thwarted in my
efforts to build and to move by great,
wide-spreading roots. These tend upward.
Whether they issue in beauty and symmetry
and service above, I do not know and can
never know. But they point upward, al-
ways upward." Is not that a sort of replica
of our life? We, too, live in darkness but
in every hard buffeting we seem to touch
things that point upward, always upward.
There is a surface beyond which we cannot
pass. But faith and hope and love, our
ministrants of widest vision, say: " There is,
there must be something completer beyond.
All here is beginning and fragment. Be-
yond the veil we catch glimpses of the end
which the beginning implies, gleams of the
whole which the fragment proclaims."

THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 155

III
But if Paul does not define faith he ex-
pounds it. " Ye shall know them by their
fruits," said Christ, of the false prophets.
And of faith Paul seems to say : " Ye shall
know it, too, by its fruits." The first fruit
was freedom from the bondage of law.
The law remained but it no longer chafed.
Paul willed what it willed. To its " Thou
shalt not " he could now reply ' I don't
want to." He had at last found in law not
repression but expression. From the servi-
tude of a slave hearkening to the command
of his master, he had passed to the freedom
of a son hearing the voice of his father.
Paul does not often repeat himself but this
new sense of filial freedom could not be dis-
missed in a single passage. In Galatians
(4 : 4-7) he had written : " But when the
fulness of the time was come, God, sent
forth his Son, made of a woman, made un-
der the law, to redeem them that were un-
der the law, that we might receive the adop-
tion of sons. And because ye are sons, God
hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into
your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Where-
fore thou art no more a servant, but a son ;
and if a son, then an heir of God through
Christ." In Romans (8:14-17) the same

156 KEYNOTE STUDIES

thought is touched with new beauty : " For
as many as are led by the Spirit of God,
they are the sons of God. For ye have not
received the spirit of bondage again to fear;
but ye have received the Spirit of adoption,
whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit
itself beareth witness with our spirit, that
we are the children of God: and if children,
then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs
with Christ ; if so be that we suffer with him,
that we may be also glorified together."

The weakness of the law was that it
weighed, but did not increase weight. It
was a mirror but not a magnet. It graded
the pupil but did not train him. A story
will illustrate: A colored man of the old
school had been sent by his employer to a
hospital to recover from fever. The experi-
ence was new to him but he was grateful
for every attention shown him and ascribed
good intentions even where he could see no
appreciable results. " Do they give you
enough to eat, Uncle Ned? " asked his em-
ployer, who called daily to inquire about the
patient's progress. " Not much, suh," was
the reply. " But I ain't complainm'. Dey
gives me a piece o' glass to suck three times
a day. I don't seem to git much satisfac-
tion out'n it but de doctor say I'm gittin'

THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 157

better." Paul had made the same mistake.
He had tried to find spiritual nourishment
in the law, whereas the law is more a ther-
mometer than a diet. It records mercilessly
our alternations of moral sickness and health
but it does not drive out sickness and sub-
stitute health. The Epistle to the Romans is
the protest of a man who had been holding
a thermometer in his mouth and thinking it
was food. Had the mistake been peculiar
to St. Paul, the protest would have availed
little. But it was not peculiar to him. The
nation, the age, the legal experts themselves,
those who obeyed and those who disobeyed
the law were suffering from the same con-
fusion of ideas. Not only so but the tend-
ency to the same kind of inversion can be
traced wherever laws are promulgated.
Why is the tendency less to-day than then?
Because the Epistle to the Romans was written
and written by Paul, trained in " the law of
the fathers " but emancipated by Christ.

Emerson touches on the principle at issue
in his lines about the chickadee. How
could this scrap of a bird defy the winter
cold while Emerson shivered in coat and
overcoat? The bird sings the answer :

And polar frost my frame defied,
Made of the air that blows outside.

158 KEYNOTE STUDIES

Neither man nor bird nor beast can be
chilled if the body be made of the air that
surrounds it. To suffer from cold is but to
proclaim a steep difference between the
temperature within and the temperature
without. Make the temperatures the same,
normalize them by the same standard, let
the body that suffers and the air that im-
poses the suffering be parts of one structural
whole, and you are equally protected from
polar cold and tropic heat. The donning or
doffing of clothes may mitigate the sense of
discomfort; it cannot expel it. When the
spirit of the law becomes the spirit of him
who strives to obey it, when " God hath sent
forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts/'
{freedom has been won. Emerson learned
the physical principle one snow-laden after-
noon " as I waded through the woods to my
grove." Paul learned the spiritual prin-
ciple as he journeyed to Damascus.

But with freedom from the bondage of
law faith bestowed also a sense of instant
acquittal. However fair his record had been
as a keeper of the law, Paul had drawn a
lengthening chain of self-condemnation.
He could not perfectly obey, but to fail by a
hairbreadth was to feel the full weight of
the law's violation. Nor was there any

THE EPISTLE TO THE KOMANS 159

escape. The law would not bend. Obedi-
ence heaped upon obedience left him still
conscious of a chasm that spelled guilt.
And not only he but all had sinned. "All,"
said Arnold, " is in some sense the govern-
ing word of the Epistle to the Romans.11 It is
the governing word only of that part of the
Epistle that affirms the universality of
conscious sin and the corresponding univer-
sality of the forgiveness that faith imparts.
"What then? Are we better than they?
No, in no wise : for we have before proved
both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all
under sin. As it is written, There is none
righteous, no, not one. There is none that
understandeth, there is none that seeketh
after God. They are all gone out of the
way" (3:9-12). "For there is no differ-
ence between the Jew and the Greek: for
the same Lord over all is rich unto all that
call upon him. For whosoever shall call
upon the name of the Lord shall be saved "
(10:12-13).

Gladstone deplored what he thought was
a waning sense of sin in modern life. I
cannot help doubting whether the sense of
sin is actually lessening. It is receding; it
is passing lower beneath the surface; it is
diving, I think, rather than diminishing.

160 KEYNOTE STUDIES

Every great crisis brings it to the front.
" Lest we forget " was the only note struck
at the great Jubilee that found instant and
universal response; it is the only note that
still echoes from the diapason of national
acclaim that closed the triumphs of sixty
years :

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,

All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

For frantic boast and foolish word —

Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord !

The World War has just drawn to an end
and right has triumphed gloriously. No one
can read the thrilling tidings that pour in
from the Allied Nations without being pro-
foundly moved by the absence of " frantic
boast and foolish word." No, when deep
calleth unto deep, whether in joy or sorrow,
the Apostle's appeal is vindicated. There
is in man a latent sense of guilt before his
Maker. Does not every great preacher,
whether Protestant, Jew, or Catholic, pre-
suppose it? Does he not strike for it and
find it? Is not every wide-reaching revival
built upon it? Does not every national
crisis lay it bare?

THE EPISTLE TO THE EOMANS 161

When Paul speaks, therefore, of justifica-
tion he is not appealing to a consciousness
of guilt felt only by the Jew, trained in a
system and ceremonial designed to keep
alive a racial sensitiveness to wrong-doing.
He is appealing to a consciousness co-
extensive with humanity. When he exalts
faith as the solvent of the sense of guilt, he
is not merely outlining a central doctrine
of the New Testament, nor is he recording
merely a personal experience. He is
epitomizing the whole history of Christi-
anity. " Therefore being justified by faith,
we have peace with God through our Lord
Jesus Christ : by whom also we have access
by faith into this grace wherein we stand,
and rejoice in hope of the glory of God "
(5:1-2).

"And not only so, but we glory in tribula-
tions also : knowing that tribulation worketh
patience; and patience, experience; and ex-
perience, hope; and hope maketh not
ashamed; because the love of God is shed
abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost
which is given unto us" (5:3-5). I have
separated this glowing passage into two
parts because each part proclaims a separate
victory of faith. Verses 1-2 are the final
summary of faith as instant acquittal;

162 KEYNOTE STUDIES

verses 3-5 pass from justification to sancti-
fication, from instant acquittal to increas-
ing attainment. The one offers pardon, the
other progress ; the one is the gift of grace,
the other the promise of growth; the one
says, " You are free from," the other, " You
are free to; " the one assures the remission
of sin, the other the remoulding of the
sinner. Christ had become the pinnacle of
the Apostle's effort. Instead of adding
painfully year by year this law and that law
to the number that he might fairly be said to
have obeyed, he finds himself counting his
spiritual progress not by increasing obedi-
ence to law but by increasing identification
with Christ. For addition from without
there was substituted growth from within.
The journey to Damascus not only rescued
Paul from drowning; it taught him how to
swim.

A man may be saved without sanctifica-
tion. The thief on the Cross was justified
into Paradise but he was barred by death
from the continuing process that we call
sanctification. Where there is life, how-
ever, there will be sanctification if justifica-
tion has preceded. Justification removes
the weight and gives play to the spiritual
forces that are already pushing upward.

THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 163

The great passage in which Paul combines
the functions of the two shows how closely
they were related in his own experience.
The history of Christianity has only con-
firmed this relationship. "And not only so "
remains now as then the brief reach from
the one to the other.

Coleridge, who called Romans " the pro-
foundest work in existence," seems to me to
have illustrated the twin processes of justi-
fication and sanctification in his Rime of the
Ancient Mariner. The mariner had com-
mitted a wanton sin in killing the innocent
albatross. As a symbol of his guilt the dead
bird is hung about his neck. When salva-
tion comes

/

The albatross fell of, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

That was justification. " Thou wilt cast all
their sins into the depths of the sea"
(Micah 7:19). Now comes the new life
with its steady climb to the new ideal. Love
is to be its pilot, prayer its staff :

Farewell, farewell ! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest !
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

164 KEYNOTE STUDIES

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small ;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

That is sanctification.

IV
Faith as seen in its three fruits, emanci-
pajion^ justification^ sanctification, — this is
the theme of the Epistle to the Romans. The
picture is sketched against the background
of the Mosaic law, and the colors are drawn
from the Apostle's own vivid and transform-
ing experience. Had there been no journey
to Damascus, there would have been no
Epistle to the Romans. Luke narrates the
journey as history {Acts 9:1-31), but to
Paul it was autobiography. The outer facts
are the units in Luke's story; the inner
transformations are the stages in Paul's
survey. Faith is a rare word in the Old
Testament. It is found in Romans more
often than in the Old Testament and the
four Gospels combined. But though the
word is rare before the coming of Christ,
the thing itself is wrought into the inmost
texture of God's dealings with man. The
first soul that found its way to God found
it by faith, and the last will find it where the

THE EPISTLE TO THE EOMANS 165

first found it. But it is to Paul that we owe
the new vision. It was he that made clear
to human intelligence the oneness of out-
look that links Abraham not only with the
spiritual heroes of the New Testament but
with your neighbor or mine who on yester-
day or to-day passed with a smile from home
or battle-field into the presence of his God.
The Epistle to the Romans has made the road
to Damascus the highway of Christendom.

VIII

THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS

i
^HIS brief letter stands in a class
by itself. Paul's other letters to
churches are doctrinal ; this is per-
sonal. If the Bpistle to the Romans is the ex-
pression of Paul's intellect at its highest
reach, the Epistle to the Philip plans is the ex-
pression of his temperament at its normal
level. It is the overflow of the Apostle's
heart to the first church that he founded in
Europe. There is no censure; there is only
praise for their steadfastness and gratitude
for their generosity. No dominant theme
compels the thought, for the Apostle's mood
is reflective, not argumentative. This letter
is Paul in study robe and slippers.
j / It is also by common consent the last
X/^f*trfi /^letter that Paul wrote. Death fronts him
or rather he fronts death. The prison walls
are about him but, though they shut in his

166

THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS 167

body, they seem only a challenge to his
spirit. His mind passes in review the inci-
dents of other days, the happy associations
that bind him to his fellow-workers, and the
seeming misfortunes that have all " fallen
out rather unto the furtherance of the Gos-
pel." Most interesting of all, however, and
most revealing, are the tested truths which
he is not now planting but harvesting.
Like Emerson's Terminus, Longfellow's
Morituri Salutamus, Browning's Epilogue to
Asolando, and Tennyson's Crossing the Bar,
this is Paul's valedictory, his swan song.
It is not formal and studied, its message
seeming to be overheard rather than heard.
He is reviewing and reappraising in quiet-
ness and serenity what before he advo-
cated or defended with Pauline ardor and
intensity.

Remember that this is the first time in the
history of the new faith that a follower of
the crucified Christ is permitted to view the
approach of death at close quarters and to
report calmly on the result. The first martyr
had said (Acts 7:56): "Behold, I see the
heavens opened and the Son of man stand-
ing on the right hand of God," and Paul
had doubtless heard him. But Stephen's
words are more a hail to the life beyond

168 KEYNOTE STUDIES

than a farewell to this. If the last hours of
other New Testament martyrs had been re-
corded for us, I do not doubt that we should
have had other testimonies to group with
the Epistle to the Philippians. But Paul's fare-
well alone remains, and this gives to Philip-
pians a kind of significance not shared by
any other book of the New Testament.

The words of men as they face into the
unknown have always been invested with a
peculiar authoritativeness. For my own
part the assertions of innocence that con-
demned men so often make just before the
end weigh more in my final estimate than
the most detailed arguments of the prosecu-
tion. Shakespeare makes the dying John of
Gaunt give the reason:

O, but they say the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention like deep harmony.
Where words are scarce, they're seldom spent

in vain,
For they breathe truth that breathe their

words in pain.
He that no more must say is listen'd more
Than they whom youth and ease have taught

to glose.
More are men's ends mark'd than their lives

before.

Poe in Tamerlane adds a further reason :

THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS 169

Father, I firmly do believe —

I know — for Death who comes for me

From regions of the blest afar,

Where there is nothing to deceive,

Hath left his iron gate ajar,

And rays of truth you cannot see

Are flashing through Eternity.

Montaigne believed that the only way to
judge a man's life was to review it from
death backward: "Wherefore at this last
action all the other actions of our life ought
to be tried and sifted. JTis the masterday ;
'tis the day that is judge of all the rest; 'tis
the day that ought to be judge of all my
foregoing years. ... In the judgment
I make of another man's life, I always ob-
serve how he carried himself at his death." *

II
We are not left in doubt as to how Paul
" carried himself." Though we do not see
him at the last moment we hear him say
just before the shadow falls : " For me to
live is Christ, and to die is gain. But if I
live in the flesh, this is the fruit of my labor :
yet what I shall choose I wot not. For I
am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire

1 See the essay entitled " That Men are not to
Judge of our Happiness till after Death."

170 KEYNOTE STUDIES

to depart, and to be with Christ; which is
far better. Nevertheless to abide in the flesh
is more needful for you " (1 : 21-24). Ham-
let was also " in a strait betwixt two " but
the question is settled in favor of life, not
that " to abide in the flesh is more needful "
for any one else,

But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

No, conscience does not make cowards of
us all. Death had been faced bravely, even
fearlessly, before the coming of Christ. In
pagan lands men and women have risen
superior to it, have even dared it. But
these were rare souls. All honor to them !
Christianity did not inaugurate fearlessness
of death but it made common stock of it
where before it was preferred stock. It
enabled your obscure neighbor and mine to
die with all the calmness of Socrates and
Marcus Aurelius and with twice the con-
fidence that all is well. It robbed death of
its tyranny of the vague. Death became
only going home. The ship was not ven-

THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS 171

turing into an unknown sea; it was only
anchoring in its destined harbor.

Death is not now viewed as the terrible
but inevitable engulfment of life. It is a
consummation innate in the larger view of
life. If life is probation, as the first book of
the Bible proclaims, if it is the race-track of
the developing spirit, death is coronation
and goal. The lines of life do not dip down
to death; they converge upward to it.
Christianity has changed our attitude to
death because it has changed our concep-
tion of life. Even where there is no open
or acknowledged faith in Christ, Christi-
anity has so diffused the larger view of life
and so enthroned the thought of an all-em-
bracing mercy that death has ceased to be
but another name for gruesome terror.
But, whether recognized or not, it is Christ
that took the sting from death and the vic-
tory from the grave. His revelation of life
made death a portal instead of a portent.
Paul sums up the twin thought when he
says : " For me to live is Christ, and to die
is gain." The Christ life not only dissolves
the fear of death; it crystallizes it into the
certainty of something better.

But Paul's thoughts are not all nor even
chiefly of death. The life that abolishes the

172 KEYNOTE STUDIES

fear of death is always primal in his think-
ing. Every epistle that he wrote traverses
somewhere the larger thought of life. But
I wish to consider now a quality in Paul's
writings which seems to have been over-
looked by his biographers but which is as
truly autobiographic as any event or doc-
trine associated with his name. I mean his
equal mastery of what we loosely call prose
and poetry. More accurately it is the
combination in his personality of two
powers, each the beneficiary of the other.
•Paul is usually thought of as a great logician,
one whose mind played quickly over wide
areas of truth, found unity in apparent
diversity, and summarized the results in
terms of cubic measure rather than in those
of linear or square measure. So he was;
but if one lobe of his brain was logic the
other was song. He can take a word like
charity and literally sing its content into
the consciousness of the world. If the
thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians alone re-
mained to us of his writings, I should have
said that at his death the greatest lyric poet
of his day passed from among men. There
is no hidden recess of charity that is not
sung out into the light as by one to whom
prose was an awkward tool and poetry the

THE EPISTLE TO THE PHIUPPIANS 173

native utterance. His singing robes are on
him again as he chants the separate glories
of bodies celestial and bodies terrestrial
(1 Corinthians 15:40-57).

But every passage that lingers in the
memory for the poetic beauty of its content
or robing might be expunged, and Paul's
mastery of thought and expression could be
solidly established on the basis of his rigid
reasoning and penetrating analysis. His
normal gait indeed is prose, not poetry.
The difference, it seems to me, is due to a
difference of direction. In his most closely
knit prose he moves downward, from the
greater to the less ; in the passages that be-
speak the poet he moves upward, from the
less to the greater. Read again the birth
chant of Christian charity ; note the pinnacle
ending: "And now abideth faith, hope,
charity, these three; but the greatest of
these is charity" (1 Corinthians 13:13).
Listen again to the solemn music of the
passage beginning: "There are also celestial
bodies, and bodies terrestrial : but the glory
of the celestial is one, and the glory of the
terrestrial is another " (1 Corinthians 15 :40) ;
note how the thought and the music bour-
geon out together in the final paean of vic-
tory: "O death, where is thy sting? O

174 KEYNOTE STUDIES

grave, where is thy victory? The sting of
death is sin; and the strength of sin is the
law. But thanks be to God which giveth us
the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

Read now the warrior passage in Ephe-
sians (6: 13-17). This is not poetry but it
is masterly prose. It begins with " the
whole armor of God " and ends with " the
sword of the Spirit." It passes downward
from an armory to a single piece of armor.
Had Paul begun with " the sword of the
Spirit " and moved upward and outward to
" the whole armor of God," his phrasing
would have been different. The same
weapons and the same functions might have
been mentioned but the characterizations
would have been cumulative in beauty and
vividness, for his poetic manner would have
replaced his prose manner.

Nowhere are the two movements more
clearly illustrated than in Philippians 2 : 5-11 :
" Let this mind be in you which was also
in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of
God, thought it not robbery to be equal
with God: but made himself of no reputa-
tion, and took upon him the form of a serv-
ant, and was made in the likeness of men :
and being found in fashion as a man, he
humbled himself and became obedient unto

THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS 175

death, even the death of the cross. Where-
fore God also hath highly exalted him, and
given him a name which is above every
name : that at the name of Jesus every knee
should bow, of things in heaven, and things
in earth, and things under the earth ; and that
every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ
is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." Be-
tween Christ " in the form of God " to Christ
suffering " the death of the cross " there is
compressed in logical and well ordered prose
the entire teaching of the New Testament.
It is a biography of Christ compressed into
a sentence, and into the biography is woven
the central teaching of Christ's life. The
movement is downward, and the thinker in
Paul predominates. But at " Wherefore "
the movement is upward from Christ on the
Cross to Christ on the throne of the uni-
verse, and the seer in Paul speaks.

Browning, too, was thinker and seer.
But in later years the prose manner of the
thinker so invaded the vision of the seer
that nearly one-half of his work, that written
after 1870, added little if anything to his
reputation. But Philippians shows that Paul
retained his dualism of endowment to the
end. The passage quoted not only sum-
marizes the Christ that was and the Christ

176 KEYNOTE STUDIES

that is to be ; it conjoins also the two Pauls.
To know this man you must not only enter
the doorways of his intellect; you must look
through the windows of his spirit. No
biography of him is worth while that
neglects to indicate this double endowment
or fails to trace the deepened inflow and
outflow of truth that resulted therefrom.

But Philippians shows still another angle
from which to view the personality of its
author. Consider for a moment the vast
significance of these words : " Brethren, I
count not myself to have apprehended : but
this one thing I do, forgetting those things
which are behind, and reaching forth unto
^those things which are before, I press toward
the mark for the prize of the high calling
of God in Christ Jesus " (3 : 13-14). That
passage seems to me to give vitality and
boundlessness to every doctrine that Paul
has championed. Had he reported differ-
ently, had he counted himself as having ap-
prehended, I for one should have felt that
power had gone forever from every page of
his writings. The man who feels that he
has caught up with his ideal compels me to
believe that his ideal was a very poor sort
of thing after all. I thought it was a ladder
with its summit in the skies. But he proves

THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS 177

that it was only a rocking-chair. Passage
after passage of St. Paul would have to be
reinterpreted and put on a lower plane of
appeal if he had proclaimed himself as
sitting astride the goal. Writings that I
had thought belonged to the literature of
power would now have to be classed as be-
longing only to the literature of knowledge ;
appeals that seemed to release limitless
energy of pursuit would have their push and
urge taken out of them; tracts of effort
where the " no fence law " seemed to hold
would now be revealed as divided and
hemmed in; waters that I thought had the
tang and challenge of the ocean would now
smack of the bounded lake or stagnant pool.
Paul must have known that his confession
might be used against him. I have no doubt
that it was. The finished and finite clods of
his day, the legalists whom he had fought
on this very issue, must have read in his
words a confession of defeat for himself and
of weakness for the system that he repre-
sented. But his frank admission needs no
defense now. Sir Joshua Reynolds defined
his own ideal thus : " The sight never be-
held it, nor has the hand expressed it; it is
an idea residing in the breast of the artist
which he is always laboring to impart and

178 KEYNOTE STUDIES

which he dies at last without imparting."
If this is true of the artist it is doubly true
of the man who is attempting to mould
character. Christianity is built on an un-
attainable ideal. When Paul said, " I count
not myself to have apprehended," he did
more than prove his own greatness of soul;
he touched with a certain endlessness every
letter that he had written. He made self-
gratulation and smug complacency forever
aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and
strangers from the covenants of promise.

Ill
Bruno Bauer found the Epistle to the Philip-
pians characterized by " a monotonous
repetition of what had already been said,
by a want of any deep and masterly con-
nection of ideas, and by a certain poverty
of thought." This is a kind of criticism of
which we are to hear far less in the future.
Strange that it has masqueraded so long as
scholarly and illuminating. Are good-bye
letters to be weighed in the same scales with
arguments and orations? Was Paul noth-
ing but a controversialist? After rearing the
pillars of the vast structure that we call
Christian thought, could he not sit for a
moment within its walls and review the

THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS 179

work of his hand? Had he no personality?
Is not his survey of what he had tried to be
and do of priceless value in appraising the
man that stood behind the disputant?

Let us put over against Bauer's inane
comment a recent cablegram from Paris:
" One gratefully appreciated service done
by the workers of the Y. M. C. A. in France
is to bring relatives to the bedsides of dying
or fatally wounded soldiers/' Paul was not
dying, nor was he fatally wounded. But he
was in the shadow of death and he knew it.
This letter and this letter alone is the pass-
port to his presence.

IX

REVELATION

I
O book of the Bible seems to me to
possess as much unreleased power
as the book of Revelation. Written
at a time when the struggling churches were
ringed around with enemies, when the
Roman Empire had leagued itself against
them, when the future seemed impenetrably
dark, this book sounds a note of confidence
so resonant and dauntless that the victory
seemed already half won. It is more than
a piece of writing; it belongs rather to the
realm of deed. It is not so much a trumpet
calling to battle for right as a sword un-
sheathed till right be won. Handicapped
though it has been by perverse interpreta-
tion it has done more than any other one
book to halt the old idea that the Golden
Age is behind us. When this book was
written all the great world literatures had
represented history as only a steep descent
from good through bad to worst. From

180

EEVELATION 181

Hesiod to Virgil there is hardly a Greek or
Roman poet who does not look longingly
back to the remote age of painlessness and
peace; there is hardly one who does not
bewail his own fate in being born into the
Iron Age of unrequited labor and unattain-
able hope. There was no forward view.
Virgil tried for a moment to check the
despair of his age by proclaiming a second
Golden Age. But by the time the sEneid
was written he too had succumbed to the
national depression and instead of another
Golden Age he can only hope for a reign of
comparative peace.

As long as the sun is in front of us the
shadows fall behind, but when the sun is
behind us the shadows loom before. It is
in the light of this truth that we must try to
evaluate the service of Revelation, It placed
a new heaven and a new earth far in front,
as something yet to be; it substituted pros-
pect for retrospect; it sent out a call to the
spiritual forces of the world to mobilize for
a vast constructive and reconstructive ef-
fort; it lifted men's minds to a vision of

That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

182 KEYNOTE STUDIES

But there is still unreleased power in the
book; it is still functioning below its maxi-
mum, because it has fallen upon a time when
men eddy around its minor obscurities in-
stead of moving with its great marching
current. Did you never make the height
bear the burden of the plane? Did you
never call upon the future to lift you over
the present? "What I do thou knowest
not now, but thou shalt know hereafter."
The Christian's hereafter has ever been
physician to his now.

Yesterday and to-day

Have been heavy with labor and sorrow,
I should faint if I did not see

The day that is after to-morrow.

Lieutenant Coningsby Dawson writes from
the horror of the trenches to his father, the
author of these lines, and adds: "There's
that last verse of your poem which prophe-
sied utterly the spirit in which we men at
the Front are fighting to-day." That last
verse is:

And for me, with spirit elate

The mire and the fog I press through,

For Heaven shines under the cloud
Of the day that is after to-morrow.

That is a glimpse of the height at which

EEVELATION 183

Revelation moves; it is a wafture from the
airs that one must breathe who essays to
traverse these uplands of St. John. Reve-
lation is the Christian epic of " the day that
is after to-morrow." In its pages one may
hear voices that will sound forever in his
ears and see far-moving lights that will play
forever about his feet as he presses pain-
fully, it may be, but confidently upward.

The commentators, however, view the
book otherwise. Its swift-flowing central
current has been so stayed and deflected by
them as to be hardly discernible in their
pages. Like the book of Jonah, the book of
Revelation has suffered much from piecemeal
interpretation. Take the words " a thou-
sand years " which occur in the first part of
the twentieth chapter. If the reader has
felt even for a moment the tense elevation
of mood at which these words were written
he will not be tempted to construe them as
meaning exactly ten hundred. When the
author of Daniel, lifted to an equal elevation,
cried out: "Ten thousand times ten thou-
sand stood before him " (7 : 10), no one feels
inclined to stop and calculate the exact
product indicated. When Peter asked Christ
whether he should forgive an offending
brother seven times, the reply was: "I say

184 KEYNOTE STUDIES

not unto thee, Until seven times : but, Until
seventy times seven" (Matthew 18:22).
But does any one contend that the Master
meant just four hundred and ninety? In
the book of Revelation, however, the " thou-
sand years " has divided critics into warring
camps ; it has thrust into our language such
strange words as " chiliasm " and " chiliast,"
"premillennialist " and "postmillennialism,"
not one of which has a right to be alive.
And, worse still, the disproportionate
amount of thought and space given to the
phrase leaves none for the larger dynamic
message that the book proclaims.

Now whatever else you bring to the won-
derful book that so fitly closes the canon of
Scripture — and none other could close it —
do not bring this kind of servile literalism.
It will seal every passage for you as with
the Apostle's own seven seals. Bring every
ounce of vision, of pictorial faculty, of in-
terpretative and constructive imagination
that you possess. The result will be a per-
manent addition to faith and hope as well as
to that exaltation of spirit in which both
faith and hope find their coronation.

II

Revelation shows peculiar care in its struc-

KEVELATION 185

tttral divisions. Let us call these the
Church Hesitant (chapters 1-3), the Church
Militant (chapters 4-20), and the Church
Triumphant (chapters 21-22). The seven
churches addressed in the first division —
Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira,
Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea — stand
of course for all of the churches then
founded that had Christ " in the midst "
(1:13). The number seven gave the He-
brew writer an instrument of peculiar
power. It enabled him to symbolize not
only completeness in number but complete-
ness in excellence. It means here not only
all the churches that had Christ in them but
also the best in each. Its connotation was
quantitative and qualitative, extensive and
intensive. The churches, however, are not
merely forewarned that a long period of
struggle is before them. These first three
chapters, in fact, contain but little warning
and but little formal announcement. They
constitute a commission. A new era in
world history is dawning, an era unlike any
that has gone before. The church is be-
ginning its organized career. Hitherto its
efforts have been scattered and unrelated.
Now they are to be massed and integrated.
Like seven golden candlesticks, the seven

186 KEYNOTE STUDIES

churches point upward and burn as with
one light. Above all, Christ is " in the
midst/' But the opposition is organized
also and on a far vaster scale than the
churches. No wonder there was hesitation
and even blank dismay.

But the churches are not to be spectators;
they are not to be merely one of the con-
testants for right. They are the only con-
testants for right. They constitute all of
one side in the conflict. The destiny of the
world is with them because with Christ " in
the midst " they are the sole commissioned
defenders of the things that Christ's pres-
ence confers. We speak of history as the
conflict of individualism and institutional-
ism, of democracy and autocracy, of ideal-
ism and materialism ; and the saying is true,
in a way. But, according to St. John, there
is a more elemental dualism than any of
these. See deep enough and you will see
right on one side and wrong on the other.

Lowell sums it up :

History's pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old

systems and the Word ;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong for-
ever on the throne, —

EEVELATION 187

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind

the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping

watch above His own.

" History is philosophy teaching by ex-
amples/' said Bolingbroke. " Not so,"
says St. John ; " history is now going to be
Christ in the church subduing the world
unto himself." The churches are to con-
stitute the sole partnership of right. They
are to make history by protecting it from
the forces that would unmake it. There is
a striking analogy between St. John's
thought and that of President Wilson in
his Manchester speech of December 30,
1918: "It is a fine correlation of the influ-
ence of duty and right," he said, " that right
is the equipoise and balance of society.
And so, when we analyze the present situa-
tion and the future that we now have to
mold and control, it seems to me that there
is no other thought than that that can guide
us." Both, you will notice, stood at the part-
ing of the ways; both were seeking what
was permanent and constructive; and both
found in right the sole clue to the maze that
encompassed them.

To regard this portion of Revelation as a
mere announcement to interested spectators

188 KEYNOTE STUDIES

is to miss the challenge of the whole book.
It is the church that is to do the fighting.
It is the fighting itself that is to constitute
the second and longest division of the book.
It is the ultimate victory issuing in a new
and redeemed world that is to form the
culminating vision with which the Bible
ends. The noise of battle can be already
heard in the solemn promises that are made
to each church. To the church in Ephesus :
' To him that overcometh will I give to eat
of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the
paradise of God" (2:7); to the church in
Smyrna : " He that overcometh shall not be
hurt of the second death" (2:11); to the
church in Pergamos : " To him that over-
cometh will I give to eat of the hidden
manna, and will give him a white stone, and
in the stone a new name written, which no
man knoweth saving he that receiveth it "
(2 : 17) ; to the church in Thyatira: "And he
that overcometh, and keepeth my words
unto the end, to him will I give power over
the nations " (2: 26) ; to the church in Sar-
dis : " He that overcometh, the same shall
be clothed in white raiment; and I will not
blot out his name out of the book of life,
but I will confess his name before my
Father, and before his angels " (3:5); to

REVELATION 189

the church in Philadelphia : " Him that over-
cometh will I make a pillar in the temple of
my God, and he shall go no more out : and I
will write upon him the name of my God,
and the name of the city of my God, which
is new Jerusalem, which cometh down out
of heaven from my God: and I will write
upon him my new name " (3 : 12) ; and to
the church in Laodicea : " To him that
overcometh will I grant to sit with me in
my throne, even as I also overcame, and
am set down with my Father in his throne ,!
(3:22).

Ill
"After this I looked, and, behold, a door
was opened in heaven: and the first voice
which I heard was as it were of a trumpet
talking with me; which said, Come up
hither, and I will shew thee things which
must be hereafter" (4:1). Thus begins
the vision of the Church Militant. The
battle is on now, and though we see through
a glass darkly, we at least see. Do we not
feel, too, and feel all the more vividly be-
cause of the semi-darkness that is about us?
The Apostle is sketching in broad and
dramatic outline the interim between his
time and that yet remote period when there

190 KEYNOTE STUDIES

shall emerge the new heaven and the new
earth, —

There where law, life, joy, impulse are one
thing.

The very predominance of the number
seven seems evidence to me that the seer
is not attempting to chronicle in advance
any definite historical facts in history, like
the rise of the Catholic Church, the invasion
of the Turks, the havoc of the French Revo-
lution, and what not. He is dealing with
types of events under which definite events
may be grouped, it is true, but as illustra-
tions rather than as foreseen fulfillments;
he is dealing with masses of fact fused by
vision into essential unity ; his eye is not on
the fact or event in itself but on the genus
that includes it; he is building compart-
ments into which facts, events, causes, and
processes may be fitted as the centuries
pass.

There are five of these major compart-
ments waiting to be occupied and illustrated
by the unfolding of time. Each compart-
ment may hold innumerable events, and one
great event or process may radiate its ef-
fects into each compartment. (1) The
seven seals (5: 1-8: 1) typify the revelation

EEVELATIOST 191

of vast secrets that the future holds in store ;
(2) the seven trumpets (8: 2-11: 19) herald
the announcement of world changes; (3) the
seven living things (12: 1-13: 18) are types
of character that on a titanic scale will prove
formative for good or evil; (4) the seven
vials of wrath (15:1-16:21) are plagues
that cause the extinction or modification of
races and nations; (5) the seven dooms
(17:1-20:15) are judgments of God cul-
minating in the final overthrow of evil.
These five factors do not correspond, it is
true, to the categories that modern his-
torians employ. Why should they? St.
John was not writing history. He was
glimpsing it. He was prefiguring its essen-
tial processes. If his method is not that of
a Macaulay or Stubbs it is strikingly like
that of a Carlyle or Hugo.

It is still more like that of the poets. Here
is Tennyson's Apocalypse. He longs —

To sleep through terms of mighty wars,

And wake on science grown to more,
On secrets of the brain, the stars,

As wild as aught of fairy lore ;
And all that else the years will show,

The Poet- forms of stronger hours,
The vast Republics that may grow,

The Federations and the Powers :

192 KEYNOTE STUDIES

Titanic forces taking birth
In divers seasons, divers climes ;

For we are ancients of the earth,
And in the morning of the times.

According to Tennyson the future is to
witness (1) wars, (2) a crescent science,
(3) new discoveries in psychology and
astronomy, (4) nobler forms of poetry, and
(5) a vast extension of democracy. These
are the five main compartments which, the
laureate thought, the coming ages would
fill, — had indeed already begun to fill before
he died. If you could congratulate Tenny-
son on his successful prophecy of the World
War and on his provision for its effects
in compartments 1 and 2 and 5, I think that
his reply would be : " I did not prophesy the
World War : I only built the compartments
in which you may house its multiform re-
sults." And a similar answer would be
made, I believe, by St. John, if you could
question him about any of the epochal
events that he is currently thought to have
foreseen and foretold even in minute detail.

Instead, then, of the "futurist" or the
" preterist " view of Revelation let us try the
type or compartment view. It alone, I be-
lieve, will save Revelation to us as a great for-

REVELATION 193

ward-looking and forward-propelling vision.
If John was describing in advance any of
the great events that we call history, why,
when you have established the identification
to your satisfaction, that part of the book
becomes for you extinct. You may blow
out the light, for it can serve you no longer ;
retrospect takes the place of prospect, but
retrospect has neither the urge nor the
pulse of prospect. On the other hand, if
John was describing only past or contempo-
rary events, he would be getting no nearer
to his goal at the end. The new heaven
and the new earth that close his vision would
have no avenues leading to them. The
mighty conflicts of the Church Militant
would be what Carlyle somewhere calls " all
action and no go." Do not the trumpet
words placed at the very beginning of this
section, " I will shew thee things which
must be hereafter," preclude the preterist
view?

And these things will always be " here-
after." John's symbols face future-ward,
not backward. Events pass through them
in the march from future to past, but the
symbols are not thereby exhausted. Mirrors
are not worn out by reflecting passing
pageants. Formulas do not age by use;

194 KEYNOTE STUDIES

they vindicate afresh their vitality and their
service whenever the elements combine in
right proportions; they, too, face forward,
ever forward. What was vision to John
should be vision to us. Make of his vision
a puzzle of the past and what was meant
to be a rising sun, rising till it blend with
the perfect day, becomes a setting sun,
heralding a deeper darkness.

" It is this sense of the coming day," says
Dr. Jowett, " which gives the soul power to
endure. It is this sense of the future which
we so much need. Our life is bigger than
the passing hour. We must relate to-day to
to-morrow. The sharp, destructive sweeps
of the plowshare, shearing to the roots of
ten thousand flowers, must be related to the
coming golden grain. We must link the
bare overturned clods with the harvest
home ! ' We are saved by hope/ Brave,
consecrated men and women, devoting their
strength to holy causes, are not moving in
blind and futile circles ; they are moving on
God's road to ever-brightening issues.
' The path of the just is as the shining light
that shineth more and more unto the per-
fect day.' It is our wisdom to live and
move and have our being in the power of
that glorious expectation."

EEVELATION 195

The comfort that this book brings and
has brought in increasing measure during
the heavy years that are just passed is due
to the completeness of the vision that it un-
folds. All other visions seem but rivulets
beside it. Beginning with the church as it
was in John's day, passing in quick review
the kinds of spiritual struggle that must be
expected, it ends with a victory so vividly
foreseen and so satisfyingly phrased that
the reader gains a new view of the meaning
of history and a new confidence in the un-
conquerableness of Christianity. However
vague or indeterminate the processes are
that lie between the Church Hesitant and
the Church Triumphant, God is in them and
over them. They are struggles between
essential right and essential wrong and
Christ is in the midst of His Church. No
one can read this battle of the symbols with-
out feeling the onrush of mighty forces con-
trolled to good and made convergent upon
one sure goal. The imagery may not be
Western, it may not be modern; but it is
universal in its revelation of God over all
and victory at the end. There is no mis-
caking it, unless one hold in leash every
prompting of devotion, every beckoning of
his spiritual imagination, and bring to

196 KEYNOTE STUDIES

bear only his analytical and puzzle-solving
faculties.

IV

Not the trumpets but the flutes play here,
for the Church Triumphant emerges in still-
ness, in peace, in joy as uncompassable in
words as it is unfathomable in depth. As
the aged Apostle pens the last verses of the
Bible, his thought turns back to the first
verse: " In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth." Now he writes:
"And I saw a new heaven and a new earth :
for the first heaven and the first earth were
passed away" (21:1). But the sea still
writhes around him on Patmos Isle and the
sea is the symbol of death, of suffering, of
diverse languages, of nations antagonized
by its dividing waves. The sea is not now
water to St. John; it is waste and discord:
"And there was no more sea " (21 : 1). The
age-long contests of Athens, Rome, and
Jerusalem are forever past but it was Jeru-
salem that embodied the immortal life :
"And I John saw the holy city, new Jeru-
salem, coming down from God out of
heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her
husband. And I heard a great voice out of
heaven saying, Behold the tabernacle of God
is with men, and they shall be his people,

EEVELATION 197

and God himself shall be with them, and be
their God. And God shall wipe away all
tears from their eyes; and there shall be no
more death, neither sorrow, nor crying,
neither shall there be any more pain : for the
former things are passed away" (21:2-4).
But the temple, — has it not been rebuilt and
restored? "And I saw no temple therein:
for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb
are the temple of it" (21:22).

Can the author of the Fourth Gospel re-
main long at this altitude without having
recourse to light and life, those great words
whose spiritual service he has almost pre-
empted? "And the city had no need of the
sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for
the glory of God did lighten it, and the
Lamb is the light thereof " (21 : 23). This
is the profoundest word on light that the
Bible contains; having served its ministry
it is regathered into the orbed splendor of
which it was but a pilgrim ray.

But life remains, life quickened, life in-
tensified, life glorified ; and with the flow of
the river of life, bordered by the tree of life,
the Apostle nears the close of his vision :
"And he shewed me a pure river of water
of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the
throne of God and of the Lamb. In the

198 KEYNOTE STUDIES

midst of the street of it, and on either side
of the river, was there the tree of life, which
bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded
her fruit every month ; and the leaves of the
tree were for the healing of the nations.
And there shall be no more curse: but the
throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in
it; and his servants shall serve him: and
they shall see his face ; and his name shall be
in their foreheads. And there shall be no
night there; and they need no candles,
neither light of the sun; for the Lord God
giveth them light : and they shall reign for-
ever and ever " (22 : 1-5).

With the passing of the sun, Genesis seems
again to recur. Its central truths were
creation and probation. But creation has
been recreated. Has probation also run its
appointed course? "He that is unjust, let
him be unjust still: and he which is filthy,
let him be filthy still: and he that is right-
eous, let him be righteous still : and he that
is holy, let him be holy still " (22 : 11). One
can almost hear the words, " Depart from
me," words as irrevocable as doom, words
that in themselves are doom. But no, there
is time yet. The doors are not closed.
They are thrown wide open and the vision
ends not with "Go" but with "Come":

REVELATION 199

"And the spirit and the bride say, Come.
And let him that heareth say, Come. And
let him that is athirst come. And whoso-
ever will, let him take the water of life
freely" (22:17). On this note the Bible
closes, closes with a promise and a prayer
by John himself: " He which testifieth these
things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen.
Even so, come, Lord Jesus. The grace of
our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.
Amen."

Index of Authors Other than Biblical

Arnold, M., 39, 148, 159

Bacon, 46, 79

Bade, W. F., 31

Barton, G. A., 96

Bauer, Bruno, 178

Bentley, Richard, 47

Bergson, Henri, 106

Boeckh, P. A., 41

Bolingbroke, Viscount, 187

Bos well, James, 130

Boyle, Robert, 47

Browne, Sir Thomas, 121

Browning, Robert, 88, 99, 124, Hesiod, 181

Galileo, 46, 47
Gardner, J. H., 112
Gibbon, Edward, 16
Gladstone, W. E., 159
Goethe, 87
Gray, Thomas, 21, 22, 24

Harvey, William, 46, 47
Hauptmann, G., 27
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 126
Henderson, Archibald, 125
Henry, O., 65, 148
Herodotus, 73

148, 167, 175
Burke, Edmund, 97
Burns, Robert, 24
Byron, Lord, 105

Carlyle, Thomas, 88, 148,

191, 193

Chateaubriand, 43
Coleridge, S. T., 89, 163

Dante, 76

Dawson, Coningsby, 182
De Maupassant, 65
Dickens, Charles, 62
Dostoyevsky, F. M., 126
Dunn, W. H., 130

Homer, 76
Hooker, Richard, 150
Hughes, Thomas, 93
Hugo, Victor, 191
Huxley, Thomas, 47

Ibsen, 26

James, William, 80, 152
Jefferson, Thomas, 24
Johnson, C. F., 14
Johnson, Samuel, 130
Jowett, J. H., 194

Kant, 59

Kent, C. F., 44

Kepler, 46
Emerson, R. W., 26, 148, 157, Kipling, Rudyard, 65, 160

158, 167
Eucken, Rudolph, 14 Lanier, Sidney, 19, 42

Lee, Sidney, 130
Fiske, John, 39 Longfellow, H. W., 21, 167

Franklin, Benjamin, 64 Lowell, J. R., 186

Froude, J. A., 88
Fuller, Thomas, 55 Macaulay, T. B., 191

201

202

Maeterlinck, M., 27
Markham, Edwin, 17, 125
Marshall, John, 97
Milton, John, 21, 90
Montaigne, 169
Moore, C. L., 17
Moulton, R. G., 15
Muir, J., 44

Newton, Sir Isaac, 46, 47

INDEX

Ruskin, John, 94

Salisbury, Lord, 106
Shakespeare, 26, 63, 71, 90,

168
Sheldon, Gilbert, 30
Shelley, P. B., 21
Smith, J. M. Powis, 29
Strindberg, August, 125
Stubbs, William, 191

Parr, Samuel, 130

Pierce, Benjamin, 46

roe, r,. a., 10, 10, 42, 00, 01, T ff R a ,2fi

65, 79, 168 >tt' K' A" '

Prescott, W. H., 1 1

Tennyson, Alfred, 21, 104,
148, 167, 191, 192

Rawlinson, Henry C, 96
Renan, J. E., ill
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 177
Robertson, Eric S., 55
Robertson, J. M., 17

Virgil, 181

Walton, Isaac, 129
Webster, Daniel, 97
Wilson, President, 114, 149, 187
Winchester, C. T., 15

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